Whoo boy! So I’ve been busy in my free time since the winter holidays, working on the redesign of Skate And Annoy. It’s not quite done yet, but I’m getting sick of turning it on “maintenance mode” at night and weekends while I work on this. There are definitely a few bugs and some things that are not working too well, like the top navigation drop downs, which looks about as nice as a Nash Executioner. I’m embarrassed about them right now, actually. Also, for those of you on iPads and iPhones, I haven’t gotten to the responsive design layout yet, but it is definitely a priority. The biggest chunk of the work was in the back end, consolidating 4 themes, stylesheets and templates that were often redundant and were getting a little bit out of control. Speaking of css style sheets, don’t look at this one yet… At some point I got tired of managing it during development so I just started tacking things on at the end. It will be cleaned up and minified for faster downloads. What, doesn’t everyone who reads this site write their own php/html/css? So love it or not, it’s here to stay for…

S&A reader Raddam sent some scouting photos of skateable spots in Instanbul, Turkey. He didn’t see a lot of transition there, but he did spot some worthy street spots.

Bob Casale, AKA Bob 2 from Devo died yesterday of heart failure at 62 according to brother Gerald, the source in various media outlets. Devo’s last album “Something for Everybody” is quite good, if you haven’t heard it. Photos of Bob 2 alone are hard to come by, and many obituary postings on the web are incorrectly showing Bob Mothersbaugh. This picture of Bob 2 comes courtesy of Raymond Ahner who photographed Devo in June, 2013 at a San Francisco music festival.

Says Pete the cat, on his skateboard built for two. (Dang it, I posted this last year too.)

I had a summer job before I went to college working at a Papermate Pens factory on the packaging line. During down time they had us opening up thousands of unsold disposable mechanical pencils that were packaged with promotional Q-bert erasers. I worked there with a friend, and most of the staff were temp workers. That factory was moving to Mexico at the end of the summer, so we were definitely short-timers who didn’t care about job security. The factory floor was really big, but no corner was safe from the arial bombardment of orange rubber Q-berts that my friend and I unleashed upon each other. One of the neighborhood kid’s dad worked for Gotlieb or Bally, and they had a Q-bert game in their basement, which was like unfathomable as a teenager. Decades later, here’s a vintage Q-bert on a skateboard. That’s pretty heavy 80’s action right there. Even so, someone shelled out $23 for this, and I thought it would have to be re-listed. So someone has a bigger problem than I do, and that’s all I have to say about that.

At the 1:37 mark in this CNN video covering a sniper attack on a power relay station, there’s a shot of a reporter with an awkwardly placed skateboard on his desk featuring a CNN Silicon Valley graphic. Looks like a plant to me, but now the documentation has been documented.

Err…. uh. Casely Hayford and H by Harris. Somewhere this makes sense to somebody. Wasn’t that guy in Fun Boy 3? [Source: Trendland]

A: We Are The Wiener Dogs. The song “We Are The Wiener Dogs” from the Curious George cartoon series. Watch these guys “hot dog” it after the jump. (Ouch.) – Thanks to Concretins Nick for the tip.

A hydraulic press and a cement mixer massively discounted at Harbor Freight. If only I could think of something skateboard-related to do with machines like this…

I know it’s highly unusual for Mike V. to be involved with any sort of…drama, but after he kicked Ron Reyes out of the reformed Black Flag while on stage in Australia, and Reyes predicted that Mike V would replace him… two months later Mike V is officially the new singer of Black Flag. Vallely is still managing and speaking for the band, with his usual Mike V / Minisitry of Truth newspeak. Meanwhile Ginn is suing members of Flag as well as Henry Rollins over trademark of the word “Flag” and the Black Flag logo. I seem to recall an interview where Raymond Pettibon claimed he never got paid for any of his artwork that Black Flag used, but I can’t verify that. The new Black Flag has plans to record a new album in 2014, while Flag will likely continue to play the music of Black Flag without all the drama, or worrying about proving they can “be a stronger, more cohesive, tighter band.” [Source: Dying Scene – Photo: SST]