Just cause the park opens this weekend doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels or ass, for that matter. Head on over to Skaters for Portland Skateboards and buy a Pier Park commemorative shirt, silkscreened poster, or a skateboard to help raise money to put a roof over the damn thing. It is in Portland you know. Hello… Oregon? Winter rain? Did that ever cross your mind?

Because a day without a post is lame. So here are some mediocre shots I took in 2004 at a sparsely attended non-test at Burnside.

This is 2004 picture of everyone’s favorite ex-Donald local turned neo-Rastafarian, Donavan. Looks like he’s doing some sort of layback rock and roll, but then again I can’t remember what tricks are called these days, or other days for that matter. He’s at Newberg Ore on top of a good 10 feet or so of concrete.

Since it’s not actually finished or open yet, you’ll have to make do with this artist’s rendition of as sight that I’m sure Pier Park locals will get sick of seeing after a few months. Can you tell that I am getting antsy waiting for Pier Park? I mean there’s got to be better things to do with my time besides pushing pixels around.

This is what it will look like. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Sha-na-na-na. Sha-na-na-na-na-na. Get a job. Sha-na-na-na. Sha-na-na-na-na-na. Dip dip dip dip dip dip… Awww, you get the point. Thanks to Danimal for the tip and the scan which looks like it’s already been Xeroxed. Find out who’s hiring after the jump.

Council meeting begins, ends with skateboard issues seems innocuous right? Well, some business owners in Bradford County Florida are butting heads with local skateboarders, with one incident culminating in a fake barfing display. Ahh… what a gold mine. First off, there is the obvious comedy value in fake vomit, reminiscent of the scene in Repo Man where the old lady yells at Otto to pick up the trash can he just drove into. You pick it up! Could this just be civil disobedience in the face of the quagmire of red tape bogging down the local skatepark planning process? We can only hope so. Slightly more disturbing is nuisance tax proposed by the offended businesses who want to legislate the wearing of helmet and pads so that more fines could be levied against skaters. Read how an unruly teenager put the Annoy in Skate and Annoy after the jump, plus more fake vomit than you ever knew existed.

But it’s not his fault. I’ve always wanted to do one of those sequence in one frame shots that mimic strobe photography at night. So here it is. It’s not Mike Poor’s fault that this isn’t much to look at. It’s one heck of a long railslide though. I had to shoot it several times because my Nikon D70 is only semi-pro, limiting the number of frames per second as well as the buffer of frames it can hold in one sequence. In any case, At least Mike had the presence of mind to add a little something to make it more fun. It’s something I didn’t notice until I looked at them later. This here is the teaser to make up for the delay in posting the Illinois road trip pics. This the same skate park in Champaign that I posted earlier.

And Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still dead. Hold on. I just had a terrible thought. The Tony Hawk Foundation did actually donate $1000 to Skaters For Public Skateparks in Portland. If that’s a typo, and the money actually went to the original acronym owners Skaters For Portland Skateparks, then we are in trouble. In any case. The squashed design above will be available (un-squashed) on T-shirts and possibly skateboards on opening day, October 14th, 2006. MC made it. He’s also got some more good pics of the park progress as does the original SPS.

Rounding out three gratuitous Tony Hawk posts in a row is this chronologically challenged bit on his appearance at the grand opening of the Missoula Montana skate park. Now that we’ve got an insider or two (Photo Credits: Top left – Bryan Southard Bottom – Chris Swan AKA Bone Man), I don’t have to poach pics from the newspaper web sites, but I will anyway. More pics and links, including The Grind That Never Was after the jump.