As a followup to our earlier coverage of the Jacksonville Beach, Florida skatepark, here’s some more info on Spohn Ranch and their prefab concrete option. Aaron Spohn got his professional start building ramps for the X Games in 1992. According to their official correspondence, Spohn Ranch has some sort of ongoing partnership agreement with Pillar Design Studios as well as an organization called the Action Park Alliance whom they bill as “skatepark operations professionals.” (Uuuugh! That’s a topic for a different post altogether.) Spohn Ranch also builds metal, wood and alternative surface prefab ramps, but I’ve highlighted the concrete offerings. (Updated)

Yes folks, it’s the same people that bring you modern day cannibals, a woman who had 69 babies and the 200 pound tumor. The 9th wonder of the world appears to be something known as the “Urban Jib Park.” Witness the wonder and the horror of The Ripley’s Urban Rail Park – an urban rider’s dream, according to the folks at Polson Pier in Toronto, where it is located. Although open since December 21st, pictures of the actual park appear to be as rare as ostrich-footed Africans. Apparently, they built some rails at the bottom of a pile of snow for the snowboarders and put up a big heated tent with some ramps for the skaters. Things must be bleak in Toronto, because you can even buy a season pass for all this awesomeness: 20ft wide 4 foot mini-ramp 4 stair with hand rail 60 ft wide bank with grind box at the top 5 ft ¼ pipe 6 ft ¼ pipe Fun box with rail They will have unspecified rock concerts, pro demos and contests. I predict that this park sucks – BELIEVE IT OR NOT!! [Source: PR-Inside]

We’re not into X Games coverage, but I though this was interesting. You know a sport is really saturating the mainstream when female coverage picks up. Remember the WNBA? Ok nobody else does either, but About.com has a gallery of X Games 13 images, and almost a full third of them are of women. Well, at least 20 out of, er… 69 total. You can sift through all six pages complete with annoying interstitial ads from the begining, or if you are just interested in the ladies, check out pages four, five and six. Hey, is that a McTwist attempt by Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins on the bottom left? Are there any ladies out there landing this? Lyn-Z better shorten her name if she wants to have a shot at marketing herself like Tony Hawk. Hmmmm. Lyn-Z Hawkins, the female Tony Hawk You read it here first! Get used to hearing it on TV. Update: Added video of women’s street after the jump. ESPN Images photos, clockwise from the top right: Women’s vert winners by Matt Morning, Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins , Marisa Dal Santo, Vanessa Torres and Lyn-Z again by Eric Lars Bakke.

Jake Brown was on the Today Show (yesterday) and the unholy corporate alliance of NBC and Microsoft has a transcript and a video excerpt on the official Today web site. Why was he on mainstream TV again? Because he recently returned to competition (at the X Games in Dubai – No, really!) again after taking the world’s most famous slam, which of course gave them a good excuse to show it again. In the video clip you can hear Meredith Vieira’s uncomfortable noises as she watches the slam, and afterwards, for a brief few sentences Matt Lauer asks Jake if he’s OK, but the tone of his voice is like mine after my two year old takes a particularly hard spill. It’s kind of creepy. Jake returned to competition on the vert ramp, but decided to avoid the mega ramp for his maiden voyage. Wise man. Check it out. Got a Mac? The video still works even though they redirect you to a page that says your browser is unsupported. You have to click through a few extra times. I wonder why Microsoft would do that?

I hope Biker got his royalty money advanced up front from Tech Deck when he signed off on Biker Sherlock’s Extreme Challenge. Do you remember back in 1999 when luge was all the rage on the Extreme!™ sports circuit? I think the “extreme challenge” in this toy was trying to justify the $35 purchase price. I don’t think they had many production runs of these.

With all the recent posts about Jake Brown and those parents in Medford being idiots indicted, this helmet safety video from Danger Rangers couldn’t have come at a better time. Danger Rangers is horribly cheesy cartoon designed to teach kids about safety. How cheesy? It looks like they spent more money on animating their web site than they do on an entire season of the cartoon. This particular episode’s theme was helmet safety for skateboarding, and it centered around the “Go Games” extreme sports contest. A lot of the cartoons that have skateboarding episodes tend to have X-Games knock-offs as a plot device. I’ve pulled a few highlights, including the awesome music video for “Wear Your Helmet” after the jump.

Wired 15.11 reveals how you too can survive a 40 foot fall in the XGames.

Does that background graphic look familiar? The article is an interview with a well-known fly-fishing personality. I wonder if he has a dark history – he does suggest he might have to kill the interviewer if forced to reveal his fishing plans. thisisfly.com is a web ‘zine targeted at dudes who like to get radical with a flyrod. I am told that the east coast saltwater scene is a more thrill oriented than the freshwater scene. I wonder if these guys are into the PBR rather than the single-malt scotch and briar pipes.

When I first got a copy of Wire’s Pink Flag album I was hypnotized. The music was unlike any of their punk contemporaries, but it still made perfect sense to a kid in the suburbs of Chicago in the mid-80’s. It was kind of like the missing link for me. Minimal, but incredibly rich at the same time. Catchy but abrupt and confrontational. Discovering music used to be a much more sensual experience. It required considerably more effort than it does today. After buying a record I would usually pour over every minute detail of the artwork while listening to the turntable. It was an experience that deserved my full attention. When you were in a cultural desert like the suburban Midwest was, you savored every morsel you got. The back cover of Pink Flag has fake biological data about the band, and one of the things I couldn’t get past was the drummer’s name, Robert Gotobed. Everyone else had regular enough sounding names, so was Gotobed a goof or what? Anyway, it fascinated me. I desperately wanted to meet him – remember, cultural desert… Others have waxed on about Wire much more articulately than I am apparently capable of,…

Everybody sing! Who can take a sunrise Sprinkle it in dew Cover it in chocolate and a miracle or two? The candyman Handstand man! The Handstand man can The Handstand man can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good! I’m not going to begrudge anyone from trying to make an extra buck off of a web site, but the Handstand Man is really, uh, pushing it. He’s got one claim to fame, and it’s a burly one to be sure, he’s ridden a handstand down the infamous Signal Hill. That’s gnarly, but he won’t show it to you unless you pay $14 for the DVD. He has some still photos for sale, but has graciously provided a few “free” pics for downloading as well as a couple of video clips you can watch for free, as if that is some kind of rarity. Let’s see, anything else? Most of the pics don’t show his face and he performs most of his stunts in track pants, sometimes even white sweatpants! The whole site is a trip: “The ballsiest skateboarding action sequence I have ever filmed!!” As quoted by James, the video cameraman who filmed the stunt.…