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…

So this was going to start as a post about a New York Times article titled Out From the Cold, Snowboarder Tries to Duplicate Success that was basically about how Shaun may be a superstar on the snow, but he’s been a failure on the ramp, at least in terms of his struggle to win the X-Games vert event and be taken seriously as a skateboarder. [Source] That’s a bit of an overstatement really. Does not winning the X-Games makes you a failure? Not in my book, but apparently you’re not even a real skateboarder until you win the X-Games. In ‘Flying Tomato’ now a champ for all seasons, the Boston Herald Quotes Shaun after finally winning one this weekend: “This means the world to me,” choking back tears after his run. “I’ve always wanted to be a skateboarder. I’m finally doing my thing.” Uh yeah. I guess it was emotional for him. We can cut him some slack since he’s doesn’t appear to be nearly as big of a douche bag as the Sheckler, and he’s already paying a penance by not having any control over being constantly referred to as the Flying Tomato. Links to a couple more…

Australia’s Herald Sun has an article titled Skaters shun parks for concrete jungle that talks about how kids still don’t want to be confined to skateparks. While Melbourne is upping it’s skateboard deterrent budget to $50,000 a year, the city of Boroondara has an annual budget of $100,000 a year for skatepark development. 100k Australian is only about $86,000 in US dollars, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at. One of the popular street skating spots that kids keep barging is called Docklands, which near as I can tell is a redeveloped waterfront plaza that used to be, well, docks. The article mentions YouTube videos of Docklands, so I did a cursory search. There appears to be a nicely finished pedestrian park as well as a bunch of more industrial areas that appear to be abandoned or in disuse. You can watch a couple vids after the jump.

I don’t watch the X-Games, even if I come across them by accident. I know, it’s hard to believe. When I came into work this morning a coworker in his 40’s who doesn’t skate had already emailed me about Jake Browns’s slam to flat on the mega ramp. It’s every vert rider’s worse nightmare, multiplied by 10. That’s right, he fell almost to flat from 15 feet above the coping. How tall are those mega ramps? 20, 30ft? Unofficial word is that he fell about 45-50 ft. It’s sickening to watch, but he actually walked off under his own power 20 minutes later. Jake Brown is the luckiest skateboarder alive on this day. Cringe through the vid after the jump. [Update: Added an alternate, extra gnarly camera angle.] [Update: That was fast! The New York Times has article about Jake’s slam and the inherent dangers of the Mega Ramp. Requires free registration – or read it here]