Kevin Connolly was born without legs. While you’re staring at Kevin Connolly, rolling down the street on his skateboard, he may be staring back at you through the lens of his camera. He’s got a body of photos called The Rolling Exhibition that consist of the photos he’s taken in 15 countries while rolling around on a skateboard, all shot from his low point of vantage. He’s been at it for a while, obviously. I’m late with this post because I couldn’t decide whether or not it was skateboard-related enough. Now I’m feeling negligent because the story is popping up all over, so here it is. Kevin’s photos are mostly about people staring at him, a legless man on a skateboard:

Everyone tries to create a story in their heads to explain the things that baffle them. For the same reason we want to know how a magic trick works, or how mystery novel ends, we want to know how someone different, strange, or disfigured came to be as they are. Everyone does it. It’s natural. It’s curiosity…

…But before any of us can ponder or speculate – we react. We stare. Whether it is a glance or a neck twisting ogle, we look at that which does not seem to fit in our day to day lives. It is that one instant of unabashed curiosity – more reflex than conscious action – that makes us who we are and has been one of my goals to capture over the past year.

Check out Kevin’s captured stares at The Rolling Exhibition. There’s a 2007 feature on Kevin in both the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and the Billings Gazette.

Just because Tony Hawk has financial stake in ShredorDie.com doesn’t mean he has turn over every embarrassing bit of memorabilia, but it looks like he has to some extent.

I was sent to Japan to be on a show called “Incredible Kids” (or something like that) when I was 14. They asked me to demonstrate tricks, but to change some of the names to be “Japanese friendly.” I was just excited to be overseas on my own, so I went along with it.

Tony says he was 14 at the time but he looks more like a 12 year old Macaulay Culkin in some of these shots. It’s pretty entertaining stuff. Part of the show has Tony attempting a few launch ramp gap jumps over an increasingly large number of audience members. No, the distance doesn’t get any greater, they just stuff more people in between. It’s pretty crazy how young he looks. It’s even crazier that these people think helmets will help them if Tony comes up short. Tony even grabs for the jumps. Nowadays he’d ollie it or 360 air over it. Check out the takeoff ramp. It looks like one of those old Firestone metal frame and plexiglass covered ramps laying back and propped up a little. Two part video after the jump. Please excuse the lame post title, but you should listen to the Vapors anyway.

Once again, if you can buy it, you can DIY it. Intstuctables.com user Jerbearisapimp9 (apparently there were eight other “jerbearisapimps”) has seven pages of instructions on how to make your own foldable skateboard. His method involves scavenging something called a BOA lace system from some snowboard boots (or golf shoes). The BOA system replaces shoelaces with a loop of stainless steel wire and a locking pulley in a plastic housing. Basically, you spin a dial to tighten your shoes. It’s incremented so you can theoretically achieve the same settings all the time if you don’t take into account the shoe stretching out. Jerbearisapimp9‘s foldable skateboard uses the BOA system leveraged against the trucks to to keep the board tips on tight. It’s a creative but not very elegant solution that seems like it would be very time consuming since there is threading involved every time you want to disassemble or reassemble the board. But hey, he did it himself, and so can you if you want to. Surprisingly, the ready made alternative Port-a-board is actually still in business though.

Jerbearisapimp9 makes excuses for his ghetto briefcase, but it adds a certain amount of sophistication to his setup. Everyone should show up at a session with a briefcase if they mean business. Check out the Foldable skateboard, BOA.

I’ve been watching Fuel TV more and more lately. I have the DVR set up to pick up “skateboard” in the title and descriptions, that way I don’t have to sift through all the extraneous wakeboarding, motocross, BMX and snowboard programing. I’ve blown it off for a couple years because I figured it would all be watered down X-Games drivel that I just don’t want to sit through. There is still a little bit of that in their skateboard programming, but for the most part it seems like they are in tune or at least sympathetic with the “lifestyle,” as if someone in programing actually skates. It’s mostly street oriented but they do throw in the tranny and vert occasionally. In general they have a respect for the history of skateboarding, meaning they don’t offhandedly dismiss everything that happened over two years ago. It’s not perfect by any means though, but surely acceptable for a daily dose of skateboarding on your TV. Of course, these are probably the “good old days” of Fuel TV, akin to when MTV started and used to actually play music videos. In five years Fuel TV could end up being a hugely popular channel full of reality based crap aimed at teenagers, 24-7 that years’ Ryan Sheckler and his posse shows.

Right. So this an entertaining clip called Switchstance that examines the perils of choosing a life of skateboarding. Originally pointed out by someone as a comment in an unrelated post, it turns out by someone who gets paid in some capacity by Fuel TV. Whether it was comment spam or not is irrelevant because it’s a good clip, and I was trying to figure out a meaningful way to talk about skateboarding on Fuel TV anyway. Check it out after the jump.

Dan Hughes has posted up a story about a recent skate everything tour some of our Seattle area brothers attempted. It was inspired by the Buy Nothing – Skate Everything Day adventure.

I saw half of a 40 spots in 40 hours attempt on Fuel TV last night.

There’s a DIY solution for LED skateboards, but with these types of projects, it’s usually faster to pay someone else to do it for you. Enter Photon Light Boards. You may need to get out your Tron suit for these.

[Source: Gizmodo]

Thanks to Ryan Hass for these shots of the progress on the Lincoln City snake run.