You don’t have to be Robin Gibb to recognize that one man’s tragedy is another man’s golden opportunity. It times of natural disaster it is customary wait an undisclosed but appropriately respectful period of time before skating the spoils. But what about financial disaster? Billy Runaway is taking advantage of that housing mortgage crisis that’s all over news lately. Pools are in abundance in certain areas. He suggests going out and getting your own. Did you know there is a heavy metal Bee Gee’s tribute band called Tragedy?

The weather was iffy all weekend. I ventured over to Glenhaven. MC called me as I was leaving and told me to bring a squeegee as it had just hailed and some spots needed drying out. Half an hour later it was mostly dry, but every 10 minutes or so it would start sprinkling for a minute or so. Everyone was hitting it while they could, there were some great personal motifs going between guys that looked like anarcho pirates, kids in pajama bottoms and one guy with a mustache so big and bushy we could have used it to sweep out the bowl. I was just about to start snapping the local wildlife when another dainty but steady barrage of hail closed out the session for good, or at least another half hour or so., but I left. I should have used the time to read the manual on my flash, cause I kept blowing out the exposures instead of getting a little extra contrast on a gray day like I had hoped.

Thank god the internet is there to help me make lifestyle decisions. California skate supply has a skater-dater quiz. Meanwhile, Rosemary Graham offers a skate-relationship title that must be pretty racy, It has a waterproof-cover! Maybe all you Shecky-boppers can check these out and leave us alone.

Some parents buy kits to assemble swing sets and sandboxes for their kids. Things in Oregon are a little different. I was at a BBQ this weekend where the dad had built a small mini ramp and a rock climbing wall on the outside of his wife’s studio almost entirely made from salvage lumber. This was a “Welcome Spring” BBQ in Oregon, so of course it rained, but dad had the possibility of bad weather covered. Alternate picture after the jump.

Our web host is moving their data center this weekend. Starting at midnight on Friday we may be down for 24-48 hours. With the track record of our host company, I’m predicting it will be more towards the latter, if not more. Of course I haven’t gotten moved over to a new company yet, but at least I’ve picked the winner.

If you’ve ever said to yourself “I wonder what Steve Caballero is up to,” wonder no more. Just go check out his blog Have you seen him? The “him” isn’t capitalized, so I assume it’s a reference to Animal Chin and not the Him. The first real skateboard I ever had was a Steve Caballero dragon on the bearing pig. I also saw The Faction play a show in a garage in suburban Illinois. There was a small half pipe in an adjacent field. Most people were there for the punk rock, but there were some skaters as well. Caballero was very accommodating and encouraging to those who weren’t in his league. It was amazing seeing him at a crappy little ramp in the Midwest. I don’t remember much from that day and I think he only took a handful of runs, but I have a recollection of looking up at him on the deck and thinking what a nice guy he was. He was one of the biggest names in skateboarding at that time, and he showed up with no attitude or sense of entitlement whatsoever. It was like anyone else dropping by for a session, except, well, he…

I heard the President of my country on the radio lying this morning. He must have been lying because he was talking. Anyway, mentioned something about the recent escalation in violence in Iraq, which is a great excuse to post this retread of a retread story about skateboarding during the time of operation Desert Storm. The story has resurfaced on a sketchy website called Skateboarding Magazine. I say sketchy because it is brand new and is mostly populated with generic articles that seem like they are more designed to drive traffic for Google Ad Words than they are to actually express a point of view about something. Kind of like what you might hire a room full of monkeys for. Originally this story was associated with a web property called sk8shop.com, and was circulated in an email from Louie Bar. I got two of them back in ’03 and ’04. Right now sk8shop.com is dedicated to selling you photos of pro skaters taken at different public events. It’s Louie Baur’s story, so maybe he’s behind the Skateboarding Magazine. It’s titled “Skateboarding in Desert Storm” but that’s actually a little misleading since all the skateboarding action takes place in Turkey, well…

Sometimes when digging starts on a construction project, assorted archeological artifacts are uncovered that demand shutting down the site while experts in academia and tribal leaders argue it out to determine the historical significance and rightful “owners” of human remains. Archeologists in Oregon recently puzzled over a ceremonial structure uncovered while expanding community services at a city with a rich variety of taxonomy in skatepark terrain. At issue is what sort of tribe would find it necessary to erect a parallel ritualistic structures when existing structures were already culturally advanced. There are some, however, that hypothesize this as a burial place for the last website editor who blew out a spot. Scientists at the EPM Institute have documented the excavation.