The Sidewalk Shop is an excellent place if you’ve got a fetish for pre-urethane wheeled skateboards and/or crows. I only wish they’d credit the source of the old photos and let you enlarge the images of the old boards. Definitely worth spending your time there.

I’ve got a couple milk crates worth of old urethane skateboard wheels that I’m not sure why I saved, or what I thought I was going to do with them. I have used about 12 sets of them to stack screens freshly coated with emulsion for screen printing, but that got annoying so I built a drying rack. I have I’ve often wondered about all the wads of inert urethane buried in landfill. Sure, you can grind them up and mix them with fresh urethane or make earrings out of them, but it’s plastic, and eventually it just gets harder and harder, and the wold only needs a finite amount of lunch trays. Surprisingly, a species of mushroom has been discovered in the rain forests of Ecuador that can and will survive on polyurethane in landfill conditions, so you know, go ahead and enjoy your unalienable right to use urethane as you want. Hell, build a pipeline from Canada to pump wheels directly to your country. Good news, actually, but where are we going to build the urethane eating farms, and what the hell are we going to do with all those mushrooms? Also, if you haven’t already noticed, I’m…

Outsider trade magazine articles on skateboarding and skateparks can usually be summed up by one or more of the following generalizations: uninformed, boring, misleading, or a steaming pile of excrement. When they aren’t it’s always because they were written by someone in the know, in this case, Portland skateboarding fixture Ben Wixon, who aside from being a teacher is also involved with Skaters for Public Skateparks and something called Drop Into Skateboarding, an organization formed by a few other names you might recognize. Aside from having a stimulating title, Recreation Management published an article titled The Evolution of Public Skateparks, written by Ben. You can read it online, or look for the cover at a very boring and/or thorough newsstand near you. What’s the takeaway? Two things. The push for more integrated spaces as opposed to an isolated facility in the middle of nowhere, and: The experts surveyed unanimously agreed that concrete surfaces have overwhelmingly become the material of choice for skateboarding performance and durability. It’s not a fascinating read, but you have to think of the target audience. The only beef I have is that it looks like they used a picture of a Skatepark in Indiana and label…

Smiths for everyone! Smith’s? This week’s pun of the week is a Gage Thompson picture of Brodie Penrod taken in Rose Park, Utah.

A very disturbing, depraved, lewd an lascivious photograph after the jump. Concrete can be inherently sensuous, but Spohn Ranch may just be the Larry Flint of skatepark companies. Shield your eyes to protect your delicate sensibilities after the jump.

The magic of the Interwebs™ allows us to reach out to people all over the world and not be able to understand what they want. I got an email with a flyer and text in a character set that I couldn’t read. It looks vaguely like Hebrew to me. There’s a skate art exhibit, but who know where or when? It did come with a web link to Thrash Addiction.

The news of the lawsuit against ARC seemed almost to good to be true, and maybe it is. The American Ramp Company has responded to the lawsuit online, and some of the details are about as sketchy as… well, an ARC ramp setup.

Riizoli New York is publishing a book containing every cover from the first 30 years of Thrasher Magazine called Maximum Rad: The Iconic Covers of Thrasher Magazine, with an introduction written by Craig Stecyk. There are 250 pages of covers, some full page, some are quarter page. It’s being released on February 21st, and Skate and Annoy has a copy for one lucky S&A reader. Just leave a comment in the post, deadline is February 21st at midnight. Don’t bother trying to butter up the editor, it’s random.

Here’s some pics of a soon to open Team Pain park in Brandon, Florida, on the outskirts of Tampa. Brandon is home to a few names you might have heard of, like Mike Frazier, and Anthony Furlong. None of these guys are in the pictures though. Ha. Despite the typical Florida high water table issue, they managed to get what looks like a really nice bowl (9″9′ Deep, 6″ shallow) in addition to the more street plaza-esque terrain. There’s colored concrete and a public arts grant to add some more color at a later date. The park is on track for a soft opening in March, so these guys must be doing some quality control.