ESPN (or EXPN, make up your mind guys) has a short article called Skate Rock Refined that talks about the musical projects of some pro skaters. It leads off with Danny Way and Bob Burnquist’s band Escalera, and eventually gets around to Tommy Guerrero, Ray Barbee, Matt Rodriguez and Chuck Treece. Did you know that Barbee got his first guitar from Stacy Peralta? Check it out.

Speaking of rock and roll, Linda Stein was found murdered in her apartment. Who was she? Among other things, a former Ramones manager and ex wife of Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records, the Ramones record label for 11 of their 14 full length studio recordings.

The Portland weekly free paper Willamette Week, or W Week as it’s now called, has picked up on the issue of the City of Tigard’s skatepark rule that would seem to be contrary to the U.S. Constitution. This week’s Rogue of the Week is the City of Tigard. Way down at the bottom of the article they mention yours (ours?) truly…

At skateandannoy.com, bloggers have posted rants and cartoons mocking the rule, and a plea for $5 donations to make stickers opposing it. Our check’s in the mail.

I hate being referred to as a blogger, but if it helps get more donations then that’s OK. Currently we collected $35, which is about a third of what we’d like to be at. And actually, most of the donations are from distant geographical areas, so let’s step it up Oregonians! We’ll let you know if the WWeek follows through on their promise to donate. Thanks to D.T. for the plant and many others for the tip off.

We love to tease About.com’s skateboarding section. Usually it’s good natured, but this time I have to resort to outright heckling. Steve Cave has published Indy Grab – Learn how to Indy Grab – skateboarding trick tips. OK not a bad idea, except for the fact that at no single point does he mention that an Indy air MUST BE BACKSIDE or else it’s just a regular frontside or stinkbug. If you are going to help kids learn about skateboarding, stop propagating inaccuracies. As defined in About.com’s skateboard dictionary:

Definition: Indy describes a specific type of grab, where the skater or snowboarder reaches his or her back hand down and grabs the toe side of the skateboard or snowboard between the rider’s feet. The Indy is the most common type of grab in skateboarding and snowboarding. When describing grabs, the word Grab is often dropped from the name. For example, performing an Indy grab while spinning 360 degrees frontside is called an Frontside Indy 360.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! There is no such thing as a frontside indy. Oh wait, I have a box of them next to the left handed smoke benders from my snipe hunting days.

Ok, we all know the original skateboarding skeleton t-shirt is from Powell. Retailers will seize anything popular to make an extra buck with holiday tie ins, which leads us to these two skeleton skateboarding shirts I bought for my two year old son. On top of that, he didn’t need to get out the white paint like GSD to get a pair of skeleton pants. These came from Babies-R-Us. Yes he wears them year round. They were $10 for a set of pants and hooded sweats, so I bought three sets in consecutive sizes so he won’t grow out of them for a year or maybe two. Hell, if they made them in my size I’d buy them for me. You can see that freestyle skateboarding is living (dead) after the jump.

Here’s the latest news from the windy, and very cold Columbia River Gorge skate scene. A backhoe broke ground one week ago on the new bowl. Mark and Graham are both diligently getting it done by working the landscape into submission and laying out the design.

Now for those of you that need to see it from the horses mouth you can watch a video of Graham explaining it after the jump.

An Australian man got a ticket for drunken skateboarding:

Australia: 22-year-old Carey Mitchell Symes has been fined $300 after pleading guilty to drink-driving. Symes had been weaving across lanes at speed and going through traffic lights on a skateboard while holding a can of rum. When police stopped him his blood-alcohol content was .095. He reportedly told officers he was riding a skateboard because he was too drunk to drive. The magistrate recorded a conviction but did not suspend his licence.

If this had happened in the states, I would have used Barney Gumble to illustrate it, but as it happened in Australia, Andy Capp was the closest geographical lovable drunk figure I could come up with. You may have seen his pub snacks too. While searching for an appropriately buzzed picture of Andy, I came across a Vitners Chips bag with a skateboarding mascot. Visible after the jump.

[Source: Short News]

These French longboarders are a wacky crew. They have a photo set on Flickr called “Girls allowed in this area” comprised of photos that range from pinup style to “look at the silly things my girlfriend will put up with from me” to “these are my daughters.” Did I mention that every shot has a skateboard? Did I mention that one of the girls is a dude?

[Source: Longskate Paris]

MAD Magazine and skateboarding. Two pleasures of my youth, one of which I eventually grew out of. I don’t think I’ve actually seen a recent copy of MAD Magazine in 10 years. Are they still in print? (I guess so.) Actually, I’m assuming this is from MAD, maybe it’s from Cracked… In any case I pilfered it from Concretins who are mum on the details. Click to enlarge.

In addition to the other hassles of running a semi popular web site, some lowlife is taking content wholesale from Skate and Annoy and reposting it without credit in order to populate a web site with skateboard related Google ads and dupe people into helping him/her make money. It’s a blog template that hasn’t been updated and still has “Company Name” and “Company slogan” as placeholders. It’s kind of flattering to find out some dirtbag thinks your content will help him make money. They are using our RSS feed and randomly sticking in the words “skate”, “video” or “DVD” to get search engine hits from people looking for skate videos. Now there are other scumbags that pull RSS content and pretend it’s theirs as well, but most of them pull bits and pieces from a multitude of sites instead of just copying everything from one site. So I apologize to our RSS feed readers (apparently, there are some legit ones) for the general funkiness of our feed in the last few days. I’ve been trying to combat the content thieves. If you are so inclined, you can find out how after the jump.

This clip of Tony Hawk skating in the desert somewhere is pretty amazing. I’m guessing (and pulling it out of my ass, really) that this is from the new Birdhouse video The Beginning maybe? As for the skating spectacle and cinematography, it’s great regardless of your personal feelings on Tony. And really, let’s talk about our feelings. Are you ashamed that you have personal feelings about Tony Hawk? Do you wear a hat made out of tin foil to keep him from discovering them via telepathy? I’m going to be really bummed out if I find out those dust storms are computer generated. Also of interest is Jeep product placement, which I’m sure he got paid for. Who knows, maybe it’s for an upcoming Jeep commercial. As for the web site it resides on, Shred or Die, don’t get Mark started on the name. As far as the site goes, it looks like another crossover action sports social networking attempt, and Hawk is all over that place. I’ll say one thing for them, they did a good job on the video controller compared to the rest of them, YouTube included. They have an instant replay feature and the holy grail for skate video internerds, the frame advance. No more monkeying around with the clumsy slider to get to that critical frame. Thanks to Nik for the tip.