Kei Kamara, former DP of Columbus Crew and recent high profile / scandalous signee to The New England Revolution taking his longboard with him on a flight to Boston. That’s right soccer/skateboarding fans…. more breaking MLS action here on Skate and Annoy. I never thought there would be another S&A crossover post that didn’t involve the best team in MLS, the mighty Portland Timbers, but here you have it. This is from Kei’s Twitter feed. You know, I actually felt a little bit sorry for Kei last year.

Check out these two designs from Swampco combing a cool late 50’s early 60’s aesthetic with some 80’s and 70’s style skateboard action. This is a fun collaboration with Mike Guerrero. A couple of the designs are available as t-shirts, and the complete series is available as a screen printed poster. Not shown are Ollie and Wall Ride.

I found a seller on eBay with a lot of well-done bootlegs for sale. They are all from the same brand ‘Choke’ and the quality of the graphics is pretty good. From left to right we have a fake Santa Cruz Jason Jessee,  S.M.A. Mike Conroy, Vision ‘Street Ghost’, S.M.A. Eric Tuma and a World Industries Jesse Martinez. I contacted the seller and he seemed to be a very friendly reader of S&A and a collector of bootleg decks! So here goes his story on Choke according to Omar: ‘Choke was a brand of skateboards sold in a department store in Spain called ” EL CORTE INGLES. ”  They were sold between 1986 and 1991 approximately . There were 3 different prices and 3 different qualities . They came complete with trucks and wheels,  bad axles and plastic wheels in cheaper models, and bootleg trucks of the Gullwing Super Pro and PU wheels (with a lot of sizes and designs) in the “best” models. Over the years I discovered that most of his designs table were copies of brands such as Vision , SMA, World Industries …’ Check out more details of the graphics after the jump. Some of the boards are still for…

What’s a Rich Eisen? He’s a guy with a sports talk show who got a skateboarding lesson from a man who needs no introduction. Shortly after this clip was uploaded, an intern was fired for forgetting to turn on the deinterlace option.

Here’s an excellent time capsule of skateboard harassment from a local Springfield Illinois news channel concerning a proposed ban on skateboarding downtown. Local business and civic leaders speak out against “skateboard terrorists” in advance of the ban, which ultimately passed. The video was digitized from a decrepit old VHS tape, so there are tracking issues and the sound doesn’t always sync right, but it’s still a good watch. One of the skateboarders makes a reasonable request for a public skatepark to serve the needs of the population, and they did get one after only 25 years. – Thanks to Nick Rudd for the tip.

Check out Dan Bourqui’s Downhill Disco edit: The Downhill Disco is an yearly San Diego event which mixes disco music with longboarding, downhill skating, jump ramps and even a smaller megaramp like gap. It also features a mini ramp jam, disco night and Sunday races that are not showcased in this video clip. The entire event feels more like a weekend festival than a contest.

The Video Toaster was an Amiga computer-based video effects editing system. A hardware and software combo, it was pretty much the first consumer desktop computer system available for video editing. The first one came out in 1987. I can vividly remember going to a computer store to watch the demo tape and gape at the the computer on several occasions, convinced I would do great things if I could afford one. The stills above are from the Video Toaster 4000 which came out around 1993, and features Tonyy Hawk in some recycled Bones Brigade video footage. Of course this predates Tony’s appearances for Apple Computer on behalf of Final Cut Pro. The demo reel is cheesy as hell, and therefore well worth watching. I assumed that the Video Toaster products were purely a 90’s phenomenon, but they were actually being marketed until 2010. – Thanks to Stephen B for the tip.

What’s the difference between needlepoint and cross stitch? Yes, I actually want to buy this California Rasin on a skateboard.

Northeast Bend, Oregon skaters are stoked to get a new skatepark in Rockridge park, but not too stoked on the proposed Evergreen design, described as a “lunar landscape.” Here’s the thing, they just want a regular skatepark, and not a throwback to some terrain not really seen since the 70’s. I remember similar pushback to the modern snake run that was supposed to happen in Gabriel Park. In the end the design changed on the fly during construction and we got the best of neither worlds. However, Gabriel Park is still a fun park with a lot to offer. The Rockridge park design is unique, and would probably be a lot of fun to ride, but it won’t offer the typical skatepark experience. Northwest skatepark building companies have traditionally been on the forefront of unique designs and features, but there will always be those that just prefer predictable reliability. How do we balance the risk? Will locals adapt and enjoy? We won’t know for sure until it gets built. Would I want this if it was the only skatepark in my area? It probably wouldn’t be my first choice. In addition to an existing skatepark this lunar landscape, Bend is…

The detritus of spring on windy day in the Bingen, Washington skatepark. A small tree blew down while we were there.