With all the recent posts about Jake Brown and those parents in Medford being idiots indicted, this helmet safety video from Danger Rangers couldn’t have come at a better time. Danger Rangers is horribly cheesy cartoon designed to teach kids about safety. How cheesy? It looks like they spent more money on animating their web site than they do on an entire season of the cartoon. This particular episode’s theme was helmet safety for skateboarding, and it centered around the “Go Games” extreme sports contest. A lot of the cartoons that have skateboarding episodes tend to have X-Games knock-offs as a plot device. I’ve pulled a few highlights, including the awesome music video for “Wear Your Helmet” after the jump.

Wired 15.11 reveals how you too can survive a 40 foot fall in the XGames.

The Oregonian reports that a couple in Medford is facing charges of child endangerment. The six-year-old and his 9-year-old brother off at the park for a few hours so he could work. The six-year-old suffered a skull fracture at the skatepark when he fell and his unstrapped helmet came off. Someone called for emergency assistance after 30 minutes.

These articles about old guys who are still skating are still being generated. The latest one from the San Francisco Chronicle it titled “Shredding Again: In which we chronicle midlife skateboarders and their return, to be schooled by 6-year-olds.” It’s a fairly lengthy article, and includes the now obligatory video piece and photo gallery, except this time they managed to get a decent action shot. See above – “Joey Vela, 38, pulls a giant backside air out of one of the giant bowls at Pacifica Skatepark. Chronicle photo by Mike Kepka.” OK, they call it a backside air instead of a frontside, but it’s still an above average photo for one of these pieces, and not bad in it’s own right. Highlights of the article/video include a 45 year old relating the story of being taught how to drop in by a 9 year old kid. Also amusing are the quotes from the young kids whose turf has been invaded by the old dudes: From the kids’ perspective, the old-schoolers are a welcomed addition to the parks. “They rock!” said Colin Dallara, 11, from Lagunitas. “They remind me of the Z-Boys; they’re really good at axle stalls.” Yes, axle stalls.…

Wes Humpston and Kat Von D got together to design a skateboard on Kat’s tv show LA Ink. Supposedly they are going to have a whole line of boards, although it seems more like something that was cooked up just for TV. The first hand drawn original board is being auctioned on eBay to benefit the Tony Hawk Foundation. My DVR didn’t pick up that episode, but someone else’s did. In the beginning of the design process there’s a funny bit where Kat says, “What should we put in the inside?” and Wes responds with “I like to do skulls and stuff.” Didn’t see that one coming. You can see the board in detail and watch the episode after the jump. It hasn’t been edited to show only Wes’ bits (get your mind out of the gutter), but hey, I didn’t have to do anything. The auction ends Friday, November 16 at 6 PM (PST). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Kat is slightly more photogenic than Wes.

Tony Hawk appears on “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” tonight at 8pm (7 central). You can watch a few clips on the official Fox web site. Must be a celebrity edition for charity. Tony might be fond of game shows with question marks, as he was also on “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Is he smarter than a 5th grader? Who knows, but one thing is for certain, chances are he’s richer than your dad. Headlines like “Tony Hawk: The “Bird Man” with Hawk-like Vision” have got to make him cringe whether or not the web sites is “dedicated to redefining success.”

The Back Athlete Sports Network (Yeah, I’m a subscriber) has an article titled Extreme Sportsman Carving His Own Way Through Life. I love the title “Extreme Sportsman.” It makes him sound so gentlemanly and brings to mind some old English guy dressed up for a safari with a pith helmet, pipe and Elephant gun. Blacula, I mean Blaxtreme sportsman Christopher “Crib” Butler’s interview is not very extreme. We do learn that in the 80’s his black friends accused him of trying to be white by skateboarding. Flying in the faces of stereotypes, he actually had to go to the ghetto to buy his first real skateboard! What was it? A Vision Kele Rosecrans. That makes him even more of a minority! Oh stop it, you’re killing me! Crib still skates, surfs and snowboards. Since 2007 he’s been shaping some nicely crafted longboards reminiscent of old surfboards under the name Malu Longoboards. For a brief time in the early nineties some of my friends and I thought we were “______.” I leave that term blank because “Extreme Sports” hadn’t been coined in 1992. We were skateboarding, bungie jumping, mountain biking, skydiving and motorcycle riding, etc. We called it “Live by the…

Intercooler is either a heat exchange device used on turbocharged internal combustion engines to improve their volumetric efficiency, or an Australian band. Take your pick. This music video (or is it a commercial for Element?) for Intercooler’s You’re Not Gonna Hurt Us Again features two people I’ve never heard of: Australian pro skateboarder Corbin Harris and director Michael Ebner. That’s OK, I don’t live in Australia, but I’m making up for it with Australia day on SnA. The production company that made this video is also shooting “Bondi 3000: The Making Of.” which covers “the schizoid, snail-paced production of a futuristic English epic, about how in the year 3000 the British will reclaim Bondi from Australia.” It must be skatepark envy. And yes, Lorem Ipsum is my favorite perfume. What am I talking about? Watch the video, a heartbreaking story of a hot chick who dumps her boyfriend because he won’t stop skating a miniature mashed potato half pipe with his sausage. I kid you not. (Insert fingerboard joke here.)

Does that background graphic look familiar? The article is an interview with a well-known fly-fishing personality. I wonder if he has a dark history – he does suggest he might have to kill the interviewer if forced to reveal his fishing plans. thisisfly.com is a web ‘zine targeted at dudes who like to get radical with a flyrod. I am told that the east coast saltwater scene is a more thrill oriented than the freshwater scene. I wonder if these guys are into the PBR rather than the single-malt scotch and briar pipes.

No, not Mike Tyson the ear-biting tattoo-faced psychopath, but Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog. He’s going to be on Oprah on November 6th, and Harpo has posted a schlocky preview of it on YouTube. Oprah’s got a tight lockdown on the way her image is portrayed, right down to denying others the ability to embed the videos, so you’ll have to leave the friendly confines of Skate and Annoy to watch it directly on YouTube. She does have her finger on pulse of popular culture though. After this very timely TV appearance of the popular phenomenon known as Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog, I hear she’s going to have exclusive animation of that dancing baby from 1997.