In spite of the fact that it was pissing down with rain in Portland Saturday morning; MC, Rich Burton and Shawn Reinert hit the road for the Irrigon Skatepark Grand Opening. Smay was right behind us with Lance Leisher and Brogan Robinson and Chris Stevens. The new Grindline creation was packed, 200 people or more watching and skating. The park was as unique as we had hoped but just crazy crowded. The grass hasn’t grown back yet so the crowd tracked a lot of sand into the park and everything was smaller and tighter than I expected but it’s a really fun skatepark.

Tim Kulas is a man of few words. At least on the Interweb™ he is. He built a large wooden bowl (I’m sure he had help) in the back yard of a house he was renting in Orlando Florida, completely out of scrap wood. Renting, you say? Sure, why not. It’s the old fish pond argument we’ve seen before. A landlord would have to be very hands-off, absentee, or just plain naive to fall for that one. The bowl even has had some cement coping custom fitted (see pic above) and poured in long sections. Then there’s the save a tree ride. That’s Tim saving a tree in the shot above, left. There are a bunch of pictures and videos on the Bowl Surgeon blog. The only words you’ll find are the post titles, which are always to the point, as in “More Skateboarding in yard.” or “clicky dippy hippy fo viddy…” Don’t go looking for this spot because it’s already been torn down. Tim is moving to other parts of Florida and has already started documenting the next project. The tag line at the bottom of the page says it all: “Thanks for checkin’ it, now go find a dumpster with some wood in it and build something!”

Update: I decided to embed Mac’s video link. Check it out after the jump.

Troy Sliter sent this link to an old clip about a Ffej demo in Canada. Some pretty great skating but the standouts are the banal commentary about boards with wheels and the general cluelessness of the news guys. Oh and Kurt Stoodley -although he’s certainly no Gary Lumpkin.

Current TV is a “Network” made up of short video segments produced by their own resources as well as those in their community of viewers. I put network in quotes because I’ve never seen the channel or any of it’s shows. It sounds like something you’d read about in Wired magazine. A kind of a hybrid and hopefully higher quality YouTube with quality assurance department. You can even get paid if your content gets aired on TV. What does this grand experiment mean to you? Toyota is sponsoring a channel of “pods” (I wonder what “pods” refers to?) called Current Edge. Right now there are some good skateboarding segments up there, most notably the Texas Sized Ramps which covers the Death Star and Banana Farm, which you may have seen in the likes of Thrasher or some other mainstream rag. The Renegade Concrete pod on Marginal Way in Seattle is just OK, and the one on the Dublin Skate Scene seems a little generic, at least the first 20 seconds do because it craps out abruptly. [Source: Too Old To Skate]

I bumped this back up to the top to remind you. The show should be good. Smay from Rebel Skates is running a raffle to benefit SPS. We’re going to get something covered to skate if it kills us. Buy a raffle ticket. He’ll have a board or two, hats, shirts, and some stuff from Thrasher.

Check out the band’s website
You can hear some of their music here.

It must be ladies night at Skate and Annoy. Either that or Canada days. I stumbled across a site called Skirtboarders. There’s nothing there yet, but the corresponding MySpace page has photos and video of this crew of gals from Montreal. I’ve actually seen a girl ride a skateboard in a skirt before. It was a bit odd at first, but it didn’t seem to cause her any problems and soon it was a non-issue. The Skirtboarders are working on a video. You can watch a pretty smooth trailer after the jump. It’s always good to see a fresh viewpoint of skateboarding, even if we are a little slanted in perspective around here.