Check out the fancy video camera that guy is holding at the edge of the pipe. Who needs expensive prosumer electronics gear when a point and shoot still camera can give you glorious 160 x 120 pixel imagery at 15 fps? Not our friend Troy Sliter. Check out his moving picture footage of Rune Glifberg going over the mouse hole at Portland’s Pier Park during the 2007 Oregon Trifecta after the jump.

[Update: More reader video added in comments]

Jacob Marcinek of Tranny Whiskers is one of those guys with too much free time on his hands. Sounds like a college student to me. Fortunately for the hard core skateboarding gamer, he has created the BEST SKATEBOARDING VIDEO GAME, EVER. Forget everything you’ve heard about Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds and EA’s Skate, because Radical Mathematical blows them all out of the water. What could be more fun than using your grade school knowledge of math to navigate through three totally awesome levels of skateboarding? Nothing, obviously. As you can see, even the graphics have eclipsed the cutting edge. I would go so far as to say that Radical Mathematical is so advanced that it is more of an extremely accurate high tech simulation than simply a video game. What are you doing still reading this? Check out Radical Mathematical.

A couple of months ago we posted about blind skateboarder Jennifer Tissot, and now we have another. The Chicago Sun Times has an article with a title straight from Cliché Headlines 101 about another blind skateboarder. What else, but “Skater’s blind ambition.” Duh! The article is pretty straight forward and short. 14 year old Tommy Carroll who lives in the suburbs of Chicago, went blind in both eyes at the age of two. He enjoys other sports like cross country running, and is on a local skate team, Agent Skateboards. Check out the team. If that is the Jerret Barry (Jarret Berry?) then Agent has the lock on Extreme™! minority team members. One of the more interesting notes (besides Tommy, the blind skateboarder) is that his parents are the ones who “helped steer him into skateboarding, figuring it was something he could master.” That’s a pretty progressive attitude, considering a lot of parents of seeing children don’t want their kids skating. The best part of the article is the video link that actually shows Tommy carving around, doing a nose pivot on the coping and even catching air.

Thanks to Mike Timble for the tip. [Photos and video capture: Chicago Sun Times]

I was on the fence about a short post on this reality show on TLC called L.A. Ink where a hot gal runs her own tattoo parlor. She’s got a (nonfunctional) skateboard ramp in her shop and a boyfriend that skates, or something like that. Now that Mike Vallely has shown up on an episode the skateboarding link is less tenuous. There’s a split second of skate footage and band footage. Mike looks like a crazy old biker. Highlights include Mive V’s quote:

There’s all these people who talk about ‘keeping it real.’ Keeping it real is joke! Keeping it real is keeping it real mediocre.

Also interesting to nobody but me is the the fact that I went to high school with one of the tattoo artists on the show, Hannah Aitchison, who, if she remembers me at all, will likely think of me as the annoying kid who thought he was punk rock. She dropped out a year early to go be an adult, something I’ve only just gotten around to doing.

There are other tattoo parlors with skateboard ramps. Portland’s own Urban Soul had a ramp and a skateshop, but soon found that all the annoying groms that just wanted to hang out and ask to see boards and not buy anything put a serious damper on their real livelihood, tattoos. – Thanks to Eric Cherry for the video.

The saga of Caz’s ramp continues. When assembled, The ramp is 75 feet long and ten and a half feet deep in the deep end. It’s half shallow, half deep with a connecting hip section. You can see pictures and video of the ramp in it’s various states on Antigravity Press, and supposedly on the Plywood Benders site. I never skated this thing but heard about it every now and again. It was a private operation in a barn somewhere, then it was supposed to be some sort of a skate camp type operation that never got off the ground, and lastly it was being assembled in an indoor skatepark in Troutdale Oregon that never opened due to permitting problems. Now it can be yours if you have an extra $10,000 and a really, really large garage. The pictures form the Craig’s List post makes it look like a Noah’s Ark episode of In Search Of. In fact, isn’t that Bigfoot in the upper right hand shot? Let’s hope that thing get’s sold before the rain hits. Thanks to Joe Martin for the tip.

Yeah that’s the legendary Natas Kaupas hawking those incredibly crappy looking plastic sunglasses. Head on over to the Skateboard Archives and check out the, uh, print media archives. It’s a very loose collection of old skateboard magazine covers and assorted pages within those magazines. The real treasure is the funky old advertisements for long defunct or soon to be huge companies. There are lots of shots of pro skaters in questionable poses, a ton of vert riding with pads and helmets, obscure hard goods manufacturers (Rannalli Trucks anyone?) and all kinds of good stuff mostly centered on the 80’s and early 90’s. Also interesting are all the mail order shops with completes going for $99 and up. On the downside, the archives are not well organized or very consistent. The detail pages are not quite big enough to read everything, but it’s still a fascinating trip in the Way Back machine. Right, Sherman? Check out The Skateboard Archives.

We need more shots for Shot of the Week – that little picture that appears on the front page on the right side. Check out other shots to get an idea of the info we need. I’ve got one more shot lined up (by J. Grant Brittain, no less!) and my wife is about to have a baby so I won’t have time to track more down. Even though you’ll be side by side with Brittain, the shots don’t have to be AWESOME (at least not yet!), just pretty good, or unsusual, or interesting, or not by me! Although Grover is more embarassed of the shirt he is wearing than his maneuver, Benihana flyouts will not be accepted. This job pays absolutely nothing, but a web link to the site of your choice. Don’t nominate someone else’s shot either, I need direct permission from the photographer. Send small thumbnails of potential S.O.T.W.s to editor@ this fine web site.

I have no big statements to make this month. Just an apology for being late with this. Weekends are always super busy, especially now that the weather is decent in Chicago. Saturday is skating, and Sunday is doing stuff with my daughter. So this gets pushed back. And back. And back. Oh well.

This month is brought to you by “Secondhand Daylight” by Magazine. iTunes has the entire Magazine collection, a lot of it remastered. I’d forgotten how good their early stuff was.

Check out: eBay Watch: July 2007

Sure, you could buy some riser pads that light up for $17 a piece (!) , or you could go to Instructables for the details on how to bust open some bicycle safety lights and wire them up so it looks like your wheels are glowing. This way you won’t be violating any patents.

Glen Friedmans has a bunch of videos of punk rock and Z-Boys era skateboarding on Burning Flags. Black Flag TV appearances, Dogtown skaters, there’s even video of Ian McKaye and Jeff Nelson skateboarding at the Kenter Canyon banks. Mostly crappy quality video but some cool old footage.