There’s a Marginal Way benefit on Thursday night in Seattle. Marginal Way has the best PR agency out there. It seems like there’s a benefit for MW at least once a month. This one is courtesy of Sleestak.

Jay Meer bought me a beer last night at the premier of Why wouldn’t you?, the new video from Dave Hupp. I don’t know if Meer was fully cognizant of the fact that he bought me a beer or not, but thanks all the same. Now go visit Jay’s web site so he gets his money’s worth. How was the video? In a word, great! Full review coming as soon as the DVD’s are produced, which is supposed to be before the end of April. Look for it. Jay said he’s hosting a premier in Seattle at on an as yet nailed down date. If anyone else is looking for kickbacks, I like brown ales. [Photos: DLH Productions.]

I told Sullivan I’d get these pictures up today, not that he seemed to care much. I went to Lincoln City to check out the snake run, but it wasn’t yesterday because that was when I was at home sick from work. For the first part of the day our three man crew had the park almost completely to ourselves. After a late lunch we came back for a little more and I snapped these pictures of Sullivan as we were leaving.

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.