This is not a computer rendering, nor is it the Streetdome dressed up for Halloween. It is in fact an actual skatepark in Terahn, Iran. You can find some construction pictures of the precast concrete park at this website, which I can’t even begin to tell you the name of. I can’t imagine who else would have made this besides Spohn Ranch, but it’s not listed on their site. Maybe they are ARC fabrications. In the interest of better relations between our two fine countries, I’m including the song “Ayatollah” by Steve Dahl & Teenage Radiation. It’s Weird Al style song parody dating back to the thick of the Iran Hostage crisis way back in 1979. Just look at how far we’ve come…

[Photo: Streetboarder]

The Chris Rock hosted episode of Saturday Night Live was mostly not very funny with a few exceptions, one of them being this fake commercial for The GoPro colonoscopy edition, AKA the Go Probe. It targets an extreme audience of a certain age, and I’m sure I don’t know what this is about. You can see a few stills here, but old man Michaels doesn’t believe in embedding, so you have to check out the NBC web site to watch the video.

Rain did not slow down the first pour of the newest skatepark in Portland. Billy Tavita Jasper and others on the Evergreen crew were hard at work. Please appreciate the new R.E.I. skatepark tent tarp which can not be deployed without a backhoe. G.V.K. out

It’s got big airs, lip tricks, flip tricks, and circus tricks. Tony’s new video part titled “Perched” has some amazing footage as well as an interesting remix of the Dead Kennedys song Police Truck.

I can honestly say that I haven’t worked on a skate video this hard since The End. I never want to do some of these tricks again, but I am proud to have completed them and hope that you enjoy the outcome. And thanks to Z-Trip for resurrecting two classic songs from THPS… I love my job. -Tony Hawk

I especially like some of the traveling foot plants, not really traveling in the conventional sense of a vert trick, more like sliding. Just watch the video, you won’t regret it. Old man Hawk still has it.

[Source: Ride via Kingpin]

Hoverboards are real, or at least more real now. We’ve seen hoaxes, models, and experiments, but this latest incarnation of the dream of the future is the closest thing to a Back to the Future reality. Before you get too excited, it costs $10,000 (!) and it requires a special surface to ride on in order for the magnetic field to keep the board floating 1 inch off the ground. That, and lots of extra batteries, because where the technology stands today, the ride only lasts a few minutes. That 10K price tag is ridiculous, but they aren’t really marketing it as a consumer product. They just want to generate money and interest to further develop the technology, and not just specifically for hoverboarding. Hovering stuff? That’s cool, but everybody recognizes the hoverboard as the modern equivalent of the Jetsons flying car, in terms of where is my ____ of the future? It was an inspired decision to build a miniramp, however slight the transition.

[Source: Sploid – New York Times]

– Thanks to Jack H. for the tip.

This Free Former skateboarding helmet that Grover picked up at Goodwill somewhere in Western Oregon has to go down as the find of the year or maybe even the decade, considering he only paid $2.50 for it and it’s essentially mint. It may look like a hockey helmet that was made in Canada and sold for skateboarding purposes… well, because it is. Aside from the Free Former logo, these helmets appeared with the Cooper hockey logo as well as the Hobie logo. It’s amazing what passed for safety equipment back in the 70’s. These things are basically a bunch of folded over plastic stitched together with some padded envelopes.

I was out of town last week in an area with zero phone/internet access, and thus there were no posts. And now I’m back, and miracles of all miracles, I skated an honest to god vert ramp in Portland over the weekend. It’s 40 foot wide with 9.5 foot transitions and 1.5 feet of vert. Instead of kickass skate photos, I took a few of an uncooperative goat that calls this ramp home.

Dave England performs a public service in this video by RossAngeles.

– Thanks to Matthijs for the tip