This week’s Shot of the Week is an old photo from around 2000 or 2001. It’s Eugene Lardizabal at the now defunct vert ramp in Beaverton, Oregon. He was all about the vert ramp man. He was a driving force behind a group effort to rent a warehouse in Portland and build a private vert ramp. The project went as far as meeting realtors and looking at potential spaces, but it ultimately went nowhere. Recently I’ve heard unrelated parties with minor rumblings about building a vert ramp in Portland. Eugene moved to Kansas just when things were getting interesting around here. He might have gone back to Canada by now. Oh yeah, this is not a bail. Fingerflip lien to tail. Wahoo! Check it out.

Worst Elvis song ever. Andre’ Corbin sent in some pics of Ghetto Skateboards rider Chris Lehman. They are out of Zephyrhills, Florida, which is about an hour and a half south of where I’ll be in about three days. I don’t think I’ll make up there, though I do want to hit the Bro Bowl in Tampa. I’m going to try to hit Dunedin as well. I say “try” because you how it is with family vacations at the in-laws. If you don’t, let’s just say they can be trying times. Right. See what the kid in the lower right is gawking at after the jump.

Some things once glorious, fade into tragedy or treachery. Danimal testifies: Hass and I stopped by the River’s Inn last sunday and it looks like shit. We also barged the park in the evening on Easter Sunday On the left, the tragedy of a permission pool neglected. On the right, the treachery of a public skatepark betrayed by the very people entrusted to serve the public. OK, I have to assume it’s a betrayal if the situation with the Klamath Falls skatepark is still as bad off as I had heard. Greatly reduced operating hours subject to the whim of a local business entity (without roots in skateboarding) that gets paid to act as the park pad nanny when the whole thing used to be unsupervised and free. K-Falls must be the one town in Oregon that doesn’t get it. Click to enlarge.

Skate Daily noticed that although Rick McCrank is active in Peta print ads and product giveaways, he’s still got a suede shoe model, unlike another Peta collaborator, Ed Templeton. Also in this month’s Print Magazine is a half a page on design variations in Nick Hornby’s book Slam, the one that features a protagonist that regularly converses with Tony Hawk in head, the same way Clarence Worley talks to Elvis, I mean “Mentor.”

You don’t have to be Robin Gibb to recognize that one man’s tragedy is another man’s golden opportunity. It times of natural disaster it is customary wait an undisclosed but appropriately respectful period of time before skating the spoils. But what about financial disaster? Billy Runaway is taking advantage of that housing mortgage crisis that’s all over news lately. Pools are in abundance in certain areas. He suggests going out and getting your own. Did you know there is a heavy metal Bee Gee’s tribute band called Tragedy?

The weather was iffy all weekend. I ventured over to Glenhaven. MC called me as I was leaving and told me to bring a squeegee as it had just hailed and some spots needed drying out. Half an hour later it was mostly dry, but every 10 minutes or so it would start sprinkling for a minute or so. Everyone was hitting it while they could, there were some great personal motifs going between guys that looked like anarcho pirates, kids in pajama bottoms and one guy with a mustache so big and bushy we could have used it to sweep out the bowl. I was just about to start snapping the local wildlife when another dainty but steady barrage of hail closed out the session for good, or at least another half hour or so., but I left. I should have used the time to read the manual on my flash, cause I kept blowing out the exposures instead of getting a little extra contrast on a gray day like I had hoped.

Some parents buy kits to assemble swing sets and sandboxes for their kids. Things in Oregon are a little different. I was at a BBQ this weekend where the dad had built a small mini ramp and a rock climbing wall on the outside of his wife’s studio almost entirely made from salvage lumber. This was a “Welcome Spring” BBQ in Oregon, so of course it rained, but dad had the possibility of bad weather covered. Alternate picture after the jump.

If you’ve ever said to yourself “I wonder what Steve Caballero is up to,” wonder no more. Just go check out his blog Have you seen him? The “him” isn’t capitalized, so I assume it’s a reference to Animal Chin and not the Him. The first real skateboard I ever had was a Steve Caballero dragon on the bearing pig. I also saw The Faction play a show in a garage in suburban Illinois. There was a small half pipe in an adjacent field. Most people were there for the punk rock, but there were some skaters as well. Caballero was very accommodating and encouraging to those who weren’t in his league. It was amazing seeing him at a crappy little ramp in the Midwest. I don’t remember much from that day and I think he only took a handful of runs, but I have a recollection of looking up at him on the deck and thinking what a nice guy he was. He was one of the biggest names in skateboarding at that time, and he showed up with no attitude or sense of entitlement whatsoever. It was like anyone else dropping by for a session, except, well, he…

I heard the President of my country on the radio lying this morning. He must have been lying because he was talking. Anyway, mentioned something about the recent escalation in violence in Iraq, which is a great excuse to post this retread of a retread story about skateboarding during the time of operation Desert Storm. The story has resurfaced on a sketchy website called Skateboarding Magazine. I say sketchy because it is brand new and is mostly populated with generic articles that seem like they are more designed to drive traffic for Google Ad Words than they are to actually express a point of view about something. Kind of like what you might hire a room full of monkeys for. Originally this story was associated with a web property called sk8shop.com, and was circulated in an email from Louie Bar. I got two of them back in ’03 and ’04. Right now sk8shop.com is dedicated to selling you photos of pro skaters taken at different public events. It’s Louie Baur’s story, so maybe he’s behind the Skateboarding Magazine. It’s titled “Skateboarding in Desert Storm” but that’s actually a little misleading since all the skateboarding action takes place in Turkey, well…

Sometimes when digging starts on a construction project, assorted archeological artifacts are uncovered that demand shutting down the site while experts in academia and tribal leaders argue it out to determine the historical significance and rightful “owners” of human remains. Archeologists in Oregon recently puzzled over a ceremonial structure uncovered while expanding community services at a city with a rich variety of taxonomy in skatepark terrain. At issue is what sort of tribe would find it necessary to erect a parallel ritualistic structures when existing structures were already culturally advanced. There are some, however, that hypothesize this as a burial place for the last website editor who blew out a spot. Scientists at the EPM Institute have documented the excavation.