Congratulation to friend of the site Stephanie Murdock, who was just was named a Baltimore Community Fellow, an award that comes with a hefty grant that she plans on using to help raise more money for Skatepark of Baltimore. This is an interesting twist on skatepark fundraising, based on her plans to develop a new skatepark as a place to positively influence at-risk youth through facilitating positive interactions and mentoring at a new skatepark-based community. At least that’s how I understand it, you can read more at the Baltimore Sun. BTW – The congratulations are for being a friend of the site, not for winning an award… [Photo: Jed Kirschbaum, Baltimore Sun]

You might have noticed something missing lately. After lengthy contract negotiations we are pleased to announce that Callin’ on Colin will be coming directly to Skate and Annoy. What does this mean to you the listener? The biggest change is that it’s not going to be broadcast live. Ultimately, this was the main reason he jumped ship in the first place. Getting people into the studio at the same time every week was a pain in the ass. This way he gets to record it whenever and wherever he wants. The second big change is that he’s thinking about making it a video production, but It’s going to be low tech, no post production to speak of. Thus begins phase two of Skate and Annoy’s media expansion empire, gunning for the Berrics. One miniscule step at a time. First episode of Callin’ on Colin 2.0 is a week from tomorrow and the guest is… undecided.

Thanks to everyone who’s written in about this addition to the Yo Gabba Gabba Vans shoes videos. This one features Christian Hosoi and Buckey Lasek hamming it up with Plex in a tribute to Devo’s “Freedom of Choice.” Unbelievably, Devo apparently doesn’t get either, because they’ve disabled embedding as well, so you’ll have to head on over to YouTube if you want to watch the original.

Alright, I finally had time to get this worked out. We’re giving away two skateboards courtesy of Weirdo Skateboards. The first one goes to whoever gets the most votes. The second one goes to the editor’s choice. Read the stories and vote at the bottom of the page. You can vote more than once, but there is a mystery amount of time (hours, not minutes.) you have to wait in between voting. Voting ends at midnight on Tuesday, November 16th. Skateboards will ship directly from Weirdo. VOTE AND DESTROY!

I asked my wife if she knew about some shi shi company named Hermes and she had no idea what I was talking about, but that was because I was pronouncing it like “her-mees” instead of the proper French pronunciation, something more akin to “err-mez.” These guys sell insanely ridiculously priced accoutrements. It looks like they hired the best fingerboard video director Alexis Milant to produce a segment for their web site. Alexis is the guy who does the Opus series of videos that we’ve featured before. There are no credits, but it sure as hell looks like his work, except the props are insanely expensive. – Thanks to Seth Levy for the tip. [Source: Trendland]

The first is From a band called the Explosion who has the msfortune of being signed to Capitol Records, a company that still just doesn’t fucking get it. For some reason they feel like it’s in the best interest of the band to not allow embedding. Good luck with that one boys, maybe you’ll be one of the few that makes it. So check out the video for Here I Am exclusively on YouTube. After the jump, there’s a video for a Les Savy Five tune called Let’s Get Out Of Here. It’s basically a concept we’ve seen before, video of a skateboarder projected from a moving vehicle. – Thanks to Ryan Mann and Damien C for the tip.

Team Pean just got the bid on what looks like a massive new skatepark in Arvada, Colorado. Construction on the 40,000 square foot park is expected to start “as soon as the snow melts in spring of 2011.”

I saw via Grant Brittain on Facebook that ASR is calling it quits due to… I’ll give you one guess, a weak economy. You can read the whole rigmarole on the ASR Facebook page. So ASR was no longer fiscally attractive huh? Maybe you didn’t need to do it twice a year. You’d think that idea would have occurred to them, but instead they got the idea to increase action sports presence in the Outdoor Retailer trade shows in Salt Lake City with the rest of the, you know, kayaks, backpacks and uh, snow shoes or whatever. San Diego is bummed, as the ASR show had 22 million dollar impact, as reported in SIgn On San Diego. ASR has the best interests of the industry in mind, right? The parent company is Nielsen Expositions, and they have no real connections to your lifestyle in any way outside of trying to capitalize on any given demographic. It’s what they do. Silver lining? Fuck ’em. The industry should sponsor their own trade show. Seize the day. Thanks to OMA for the image, it’s from a 2007 ASR write up.