This commercial for Babybel Cheese has a lot of incidental skating in the background, designed to make you think the location is a skatepark. In the enlarged stills it’s very apparent that it’s just a public plaza with a few ramps thrown in to enhance the illusion. The dead giveaway is the full loop track at the top of the steps.

Thrasher Magazine was hacked this weekend by a group or individual called Indonesian Hacker, who first apologized and then really gave those right wing imperialistic fascist heathens at Thrasher a piece of his mind. Yeah, makes no sense to me either. Anyway, the site is back up. Antigravity Press got hacked last week. I’m going to back up Skate and Annoy tonight. – Thanks to Rayn Hass for the tip.

Really, this still image of Mr Orange (?) is about all you need to see from the M&M’s commercial that is still airing, unless you are wondering what Paul Weller would look like if he was a candy coated chocolate that came to life. And it’s vintage The The in the soundtrack. Speaking of the Jam, did you know Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler are touring without Weller as the appropriately titled From the Jam? Now that’s brutal honesty for you! I don’t know where/what/when Weller replacement Russell Hastings is from, but he looks the part and the reviews are good. Coming to North America and Japan in 2008.

I found this magazine online a year or so ago and tried to get them to send me a copy but never heard back from them. The whole thing had a sort of fishy, half baked feeling to it, as if they maybe made one issue as a test and were trying to see if it was a viable money making concept. The Pastor Tom cover made me chuckle because of the 8-wheeler on the cover and the tag line “Why every community could use a Tom Fain.” Really? Every community could use a guy who is seemingly completely out of touch with skateboarding culture?

Latest trailer for a proposed Portland skateboarding documentary series by Rick Coyle and Milan Spasic. That’s Jay Smay as the Feral Kid and me in the red shirt.

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.

I was cleaning out the hard drive and I found this picture of a Maxwell House billboard taken in July of 2000. I guess they are implying that adults could lead a more fulfilling life if they did a little downhill on a longboard. Dress respectfully, of course, then click to enlarge.

In 1981 Duane Peters, Steve and Micke Alba appeared on a local TV program called Eye on L.A.. The segment was excerpted on one of those pool skating DVD’s (Chlorine?) a few years ago, but Scot Starr dumped it to Youtube. Starr’s got a national treasure trove of old skate footage from the straight media. I don’t know how he got it all. The segment has hip music for the time, Duran Duran and the Stray Cats, plus where else can you hear Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey followed by Frank Sinatra? Duane is going through his New Romantic phase or something. It’s amusing to hear him talk about getting his act together and not being a bad element at the ripe age of 21. Relapse must have been right around the corner. Both he and Salba try to distance themselves from Punk Rock, which is ironic in these days, but it was L.A. in the early 80’s and classic punk had pretty much fizzled out. I’m not talking about hardcore either. Yeah, it’s easy in hind sight to make fun of the fashion choices and words from someone’s youth. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

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?

According to Info Link, some sportos in Australia were bugged by the apparent loudness emanating from an adjacent skating facility in a sports complex.

The noise problem tackled by Pyrotek was caused not only by 100A durometer hard wheels dropping from a great height onto toughened floor and ramps but also by the loud music enjoyed by the young patrons using the 1000 square metre street course and several vertical ramps of international competition standard…

So what type of traditionally quiet sports were they impeding? Golf, tennis or maybe even billiards? Nope. Turns out they were annoying the soccer and volley ball players. Really? Too loud for soccer and volleyball? King Missle has a great song that applies to this situation.