I just got home from the Dew Tour and I turn on the TV to this, I want to send out my deepest sympathy to the family of Joseph Madison. By KATU Web Staff VANCOUVER, Wash. – A 16-year-old Vancouver boy was killed Sunday after falling from his skateboard while hanging onto a moving vehicle, police said. The Clark County Sheriff’s Office identified the teen as Joseph Stefano Madison of Vancouver, Wash. According to the sheriff’s office, Madison was being pulled by a vehicle driven by another 16-year-old when the incident happened about 4 p.m. at the intersection of Northeast 29th Avenue and Northeast 139th Street – just down the street from Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital. The sheriff’s office said Madison was holding the rear driver’s side window and was being pulled down a road when the vehicle suddenly hit a dip in the street and Madison lost his grip on the window. The teen then fell to the ground and hit his head on the pavement. Madison was declared dead at the scene. Authorities did not say how fast they believe the car was traveling when the teen fell. No one else was injured. There were two other 16-year-old…

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? Sort of. It turns out they all aren’t wife-beating child-haters. Portland has had at least one Police officer firmly entrenched in helping skateboarders move forward with the now completed plan to revamp Pier Park. (Name MC?) There’s also an officer in the Cayman Islands who lets kids skate on his backyard mini ramp, and there is also an outreach program in Lee-On-The-Solent or Hampshire ( I know! It’s a UK town or district, I can’t tell with all the wacky names they have) where Bobbies attend skate clinics with kids at local skateparks to reinforce positive interaction with police and kids. [Photo: Left and bottom – Solent News Photo. Top – Brent Fuller for the Cayman Compass ]

…and the Skate and Annoy servers are being braced for an onslaught of teenage girls posting “why all the hating? UR just jealous!” comments. Ryan Sheckler has a show on MTV called Life of Ryan. And now, my life is complete. The programming geniuses nay, wizards at MTV are really on a roll here, recycling yet another another skateboarder reality show, this time even managing to rip off Monty Python in the process. Head on over to the web site for lots of Tiger Beat style pinup photos of Ryan and his cast of friends and family, which apparently involve 55 gallon drums of hair product. How can we say he has an out of control ego? [Source: Skate Daily via Skateboarding Sucks]

When Mark Conahan isn’t busy getting heckled for wearing pads or drawing comics, he’s appearing in magazines like Portland Monthly, where the richsters pretend to be hipsters. It’s not clear how Steve Grover got in past security, but he makes an appearance as well in the August Best of 07 issue that chose Pier Park as the city’s best skatepark. They try to imply that Pier Park is “gnarlier” than Burnside because it’s bowl is deeper, but that’s a pretty uninformed comparison. Who writes these articles? I mean seriously, your average Portland Monthly reader isn’t about to hop in the BMW and drive to the local skatepark, unless they are bringing their little kid. I’m sure a lot of them are going to drop in on the best place to get a tattoo as well. Yeah, I’m just jealous because we didn’t get chosen for Best Local and International Skate Coverage, even though that wasn’t one of the categories.

EA’s upcoming skateboarding video game called Skate (Duh!) is being heralded as a Tony Hawk killer. Not the actual Tony Hawk, but his video game franchise… The idea that it will kill the franchise is slim to none. It could easily be better than the latest version of the Hawk-named game, but they’ll still milk make a few more because It’s firmly entrenched by now. This seems like a good a time as any to bring up Thrasher’s Skate and Destroy game, that unexpectedly fizzled. I mean, what a perfect product tie-in. The game was a good one too. It took a different approach from an art direction standpoint, going for a more stylized look than trying to emulate realism. They had a decent development studio behind it too. Maybe they were a little bit too early. Oh well, I guess everything Fausto touched couldn’t turn to gold. I had kind of stopped collecting and chronicling current skateboarding video game commercials. They are just too prevalent now. This new one for Skate is pretty good though. It’s funny and features some name skaters acting on camera, and doing a good job of it too. The gist of it is that…

When I went to college (the first time…) we had a nickname for the mindless goons and frat boys thugs that used to clog up the campus. We called them Joey Neckchains after the gold chains that were inevitably peaking out of their Izod shirts with the collar flipped up. Now, I suspect we’d have to change that to Joey Williams. There were protests and such after he was reinstated to his job on the police force after being cleared of wrong doing, in spite of being caught on tape acting like a bully instead of a police man. I’m of the position that just because someone acts like an idiot, a policeman’s job is to not act like an even bigger jackass. Surely his skin is thick enough and he possesses enough self control to not let a teenager get the better of him. I guess not. Scary thing is, that guy has a gun. Awesome. Anyway, I need to stop Jason Waite from littering the comments on Skate and Annoy with his petition spam, so check out the movement to get the Hot Springs, Arkansas Police Department to reopen the investigation. Yeah… Good luck with that. Tell you…

While browsing through coverage of The Mags We Read from the previous post, I noticed a skateboard on the cover of an old French “gentleman’s magazine” called Lui that, err, uhm, intrigued me. A little research on the internet pulled down not one, but two covers of Lui from 1977 and 1978 that featured skateboards as props.

Skateboard Fieber had another Made for Skate shoe exhibition, this time in London. More interesting that that, however, is The Mags We Read exhibit on skateboarding magazine. The top image above from the flyer is appropriated from an old Transworld Skateboarding Magazine subscription card. The guy in the car is Per Welinder, and I swear the kid in the nut huggers standing with the totally awesome girls is Anthony Michael Hall. The Mags We Read looks like an interesting exhibit. One cool thing is that they have color copies of some of the old magazines on display so you can flip through them. There are a lot of the usual suspects as well as some of the obscure Europe only publications from days gone by. Poweredge is noticeably absent from the photos of the exhibit. If you guys needed one all you had to do was ask… Then again maybe it just wasn’t shown in the pictures. I wish these exhibits would come to the states. Check out Faux Ami’s coverage of The Mags We Read.

If you need to look in the Yellow Pages for tips on impressing your kids, you’ve already lost the battle. This skateboarding lingo primer comes from the Bellingham Washington Yellow Pages, courtesy of John Aguilar. It’s real. You can look at the whole layout after the jump, but there’s nothing to see really.

Veterinary Economics magazine has a feature called You do what else? where they interview wacky veterinarians about their outside interests. Dr. Brad Krohn (who has been bugging me to post this since it came out, be careful what you ask for!) was featured in the March 2007 issue, talking about his love of skateboarding. I’m going to heckle him here because I resent the indirect inference as one of his “group of aging friends” and I can’t remember the last time, if ever, that one of us has “longboarded around campus.” Ironically, they say he’s a sidewalk surfer, but nowadays the only actual sidewalks he skates are the ones that run up to the entrance of a skatepark. They used a somewhat weak three year old photo that I took of Dr. Brad at his suggestion, probably because it’s one of the few that didn’t have some old punk band graphics or other questionable logo that he would have had to explain countless times to his respected colleagues. The press at large is a little bit infatuated with old skate punks that grew up, got jobs, but still skate. You can read the profile on Veterinary Economics or see it…