Axl Rose. Get it? Get it? Ha ha ahw haw, har hardee har har. I’m watching Glee right now. Kind of phoning this one in. Is this really Axel Rose? I mean it’s implied that it is, but I’ll be damned if I can reconcile this picture with my hazy memory of the late 80’s and early 90’s. I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about my friend Don Gerard. Picture this: It’s 1987 and there’s a house in a college town that is half filled with students, half filled with dropouts. It’s called “Ten Shitty Guys,” but there are about 14 people living there. My roommate Don walks up to our front porch, where a few of us are sitting next to one of those giant console stereos from the 60’s. We had one on our front porch. It’s where we rocked out. Fresh off of work, Don strolled up and started to slide some vinyl out of a paper bag as he walked up the steps. “Check this out you guys. These guys are going to be HUGE.” And then he slaps Appetite for Destruction on the turntable. And this is early, because these guys are still unknown outside of LA, and it’s the original cover with the controversial Robert Williams painting. At first we were like ” Are you kidding? This is heavy metal bullshit. Nobody is going to give a shit about these guys.” But within a week it was regularly featured on the playlist of the radio station that was our front porch. Don was right about these guys. They did become huge about six months later. As right as he was about Guns and Roses, he was just as wrong about R.E.M.. He was a huge fan, and I was giving him a hard time because at the time it seemed like they were releasing an album every eight months. He replied “These guys have to strike while the iron is hot. An indy band like this is never going to be popular for very long.” OK. Maybe he didn’t actually say “strike while the iron is hot,” but uh, if I had my druthers…. Yeah, so. Axel Rose and a Mike McGill skateboard, plus an official licensed Guns and Roses skateboard that is disappointing, like most licensed band boards. At this point in my rambling I’d liek to mention that Rich from EPM used to actually skate with Axl in Indiana when he (Axl) was known as William.

Man, I can’t remember how I found this, but here it is. It’s actually Dog Powered Scooter, but they also cater to skateboards and recumbent bikes, excuse me, trikes. $250 gets you one harness mount. Pictures and a scooter vid with inspirational soundtrack after the jump.

You don’t have to go all the way to… Wal-Mart to buy… Chinese skateboards straight from your skate shop to… Aw hell. I can’t figure out how to spin this. Chip Atkins went on vacation to Nicaragua. I only know one other person who has done that, hail GVK! While in a supermarket in Managua, Chip found a real nice skateboard. That’s not dollars, hombre, thats’s Cordoba. This board costs about $12. And no, the title of this post is not me trying to get a date with Chip, I’m quoting Midwest punk rock circa 1985. Name that band for a noprize. Void where prohibited. Residents of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan are disqualified.

Thanks to Chip Atkins for the tip. Hey, he works at a bike shop. In the spirit of the holiday season everyone jump all over him and give him a hard time.

Born Ugly Magazine is still chugging along. Issue #4 just came out. You can download it online at BornUglyMag.com or if your are fast enough you can pick up a hard copy in some skate shops around the country. No joke, even in the opposite end of the country here in Portland, Oregon at such fine establishments as Cal Skates and Shrunken Head. Born Ugly is in a unique position to become teh heir apparent to Concussion, albeit with a different vibe. I hope they do, but I have to take issue with the review of the cult classic Surf Punks album. If your friends don’t like to listen to My Beach, then it’s time to get new friends! Issue #4 has a spotlight on the old friend of the site Bill Daniel. You may remember him from such stellar appearances as the Texas Skatepunk Scrapbook, Bill’s old site hosted here on Skate and Annoy.

I hate martinis, actually. Except on one occasion I had some chocolate martinis that were good. Real good. I like liquor in the form of girlie drinks. Cosmos, lemon drops, anything sweet. I wish I could say I had a few in me when I bought this “vintage” cocktail napkin off eBay. It was staring at me. Mocking me. If iwas in AA it would be mocktail-ing me. Still, it was a $2 “buy it now.” Right now there’s an unopened pack of 16 for $13. It says right in the damn listing that “This package of napkins is very collectible.” So it has to be. I mean, I collected one, so they aren’t exactly lying. I’d like to think this vintage napkin was of the vintage from when the office Christmas party was a punchline for a gag involving some poor schmuck with a lampshade over his head, and that would mean 60’s or 70’s if I had my druthers. Coincidentally, that was about the last time someone used the phrase “if I had my druthers.”

For some reason that translation made me chuckle. What work? What translation? Some German speaking guy was supposed be visiting Nepal for two years, so he made himself a miniramp. He was going to keep in his back yard until he opted for a more altruistic approach and decided to build it at a local athletic club so other people could use it. Since he was in Nepal, he couldn’t just “go to the DIY store and buy a suitable timber.” Something in the following German language sentence actually translates to “the DIY store.”

Hier in Nepal kann ich leider nicht einfach in den Baumarkt gehen und mir das passende Holz kaufen.

He made the structure out of bamboo and mango wood. I’m not sure what the top ply is though. He got an online skate shop called All You Can Skate to donate some boards for the local kids. Success! he got to skate it for a two weeks and then had to leave Nepal for some reason, he doesn’t go into the details. And it’s a slow comical process translating the web page 300 characters at a time through iGoogle. Interesting construction methods.I wish he’d gone into more detail. Just goes to prove that if you want to skate bad enough, you can figure out a way to build without letting something as simple as a lack of plywood stop your project before it gets started.

Check out the Nepal minirampe.

– Thanks to Danslash for the tip

Wheelhouse Media publishes Carlsbad Magazine and Encinitas Magazine, two free publications serving the needs of their respective communities. Communities, it turns out, that have identical needs in some cases. They both published essentially the same feature on Tony Hawk, until you get to the last couple of paragraphs where they explore what Tony loves about Carlsbad, his long time haunt, or Encinitas his relatively new digs. Some cool photos from Grant Brittain, check out that tweaked air. You can read them online or view them in their original layouts. Don’t bother to download the “offline edition.” For some annoying reason they have chosen a proprietary flash reader with assorted clumsy files. Ever heard of a PDF? Also, you”ll need an email address to read the pretty versions. Seriously guys? Could the whole thing be any more intrusive? They don’t even tell you what they are going to do with the email. At least they gave each magazine a separate layout.

Skatepark of Baltimore is selling a “Girls of Skateboarding” calendar to benefit the Skatepark of Baltimore. You can pick yours up here, and no, it’s not that kind of calendar.

There are a few of us internet skateboard nerds that have been online for a while. In my “research” I used to regularly cross paths with Hung Chang AKA Sk8Norcal and his Wackyboard site. I think it used to be a Geo Cities site, that’s how long he’s been at it. He’s contributed some tips here on S&A over the years as well. With the demise of Geo Cities, he’s moved on to a new home at Blogger.com. This is the Surf Rodz carveboard, More of a stick than a board really. This may or may not be connected to a company called Surf Rodz. Hung doesn’t usually provide a lot of extraneous information, just the damaging evidence in the form of a picture or video. Head on over to Wackyboards to get an eyeful of kooky inventions.

UPDATE: Added a video of the stickboard, courtesy of Mr. Wackyboard himself.