People started showing up for the Oregon Trifecta at the beginning of the week. I ran into Salba (figuratively this time) and Glen Charnoski at Pier Park this afternoon. Damn.

Bringing you the finest in in-depth skate journalism, do I getting a freaking pretend Pulitzer Prize in skateboarding for this or what? No, that’s not another one of MC’s experiments in photoshop, it’s an actual picture of the new world’s biggest skateboard. No, it’s not official yet, but it’s in the bag. Swank’s board is 12 feet long, and Grant Hick’s is 20. This creation of the Bay College CAD class weighs in at 31 feet long by 8 feet wide. A one inch equals one foot scaled up model of a skateboard that is by far the most realistic of the three contenders. You can read a couple of regurgitated stories from the Michigan press or follow the link for more real information, including construction pictures and a video that looks like one of those “UFO” sightings.

Check out the Skate and Annoy feature: New World’s Biggest Skateboard?

If you need to look in the Yellow Pages for tips on impressing your kids, you’ve already lost the battle. This skateboarding lingo primer comes from the Bellingham Washington Yellow Pages, courtesy of John Aguilar. It’s real. You can look at the whole layout after the jump, but there’s nothing to see really.

The Extreme Sports Park at Pacific Community Park (Vancouver Washington) Will open in a couple of weeks, without a general announcement about a specific date until the day it opens. Keep checking Clark Parks to see if today is the day. Until then, you can forget about barging because they’ve gone ahead and hired a security guard to prevent trespassing and combat the graffiti problem. From the Clark County Parks Communications Specialist:

SECURITY GUARD NOW ON DUTY Because of the increasing problem with people riding the park illegally, we found a way to go ahead and hire a security guard to sit on the park every weeknight after the contractor leaves for the day, and on the weekends until the park officially opens. Their first day on the job was last Friday.

Apparently, the guard has already been offered bribes and was tricked into letting someone in the park one night because “I helped build the park and am allowed to ride it.” The guard has since been informed that NO ONE is allowed in the park, period. The guard will call the sheriff if anyone gives him any trouble.

Yep. You have to get up pretty late in the afternoon to fool a security guard. The photo above is a still of a certain someone transferring from the deep to the shallow via a disaster to boardslide. If you recognize him you can watch the clip on the web site of the company he rides for. Hint: It’s a rough cut.

Veterinary Economics magazine has a feature called You do what else? where they interview wacky veterinarians about their outside interests. Dr. Brad Krohn (who has been bugging me to post this since it came out, be careful what you ask for!) was featured in the March 2007 issue, talking about his love of skateboarding. I’m going to heckle him here because I resent the indirect inference as one of his “group of aging friends” and I can’t remember the last time, if ever, that one of us has “longboarded around campus.” Ironically, they say he’s a sidewalk surfer, but nowadays the only actual sidewalks he skates are the ones that run up to the entrance of a skatepark. They used a somewhat weak three year old photo that I took of Dr. Brad at his suggestion, probably because it’s one of the few that didn’t have some old punk band graphics or other questionable logo that he would have had to explain countless times to his respected colleagues. The press at large is a little bit infatuated with old skate punks that grew up, got jobs, but still skate. You can read the profile on Veterinary Economics or see it here after the jump, because I’m not taking the scan of the page down until those deadbeats pay me for the photo usage. Dr Brad also made a recent appearance in GVK#18. We’ve been friends a long, long time. I kid him because I love him!

So this was going to start as a post about a New York Times article titled Out From the Cold, Snowboarder Tries to Duplicate Success that was basically about how Shaun may be a superstar on the snow, but he’s been a failure on the ramp, at least in terms of his struggle to win the X-Games vert event and be taken seriously as a skateboarder. [Source] That’s a bit of an overstatement really. Does not winning the X-Games makes you a failure? Not in my book, but apparently you’re not even a real skateboarder until you win the X-Games. In ‘Flying Tomato’ now a champ for all seasons, the Boston Herald Quotes Shaun after finally winning one this weekend:

“This means the world to me,” choking back tears after his run. “I’ve always wanted to be a skateboarder. I’m finally doing my thing.”

Uh yeah. I guess it was emotional for him. We can cut him some slack since he’s doesn’t appear to be nearly as big of a douche bag as the Sheckler, and he’s already paying a penance by not having any control over being constantly referred to as the Flying Tomato.

Links to a couple more articles about Shaun’s vert title win and a video of Sheckler getting the world’s most ego-centric tattoo after the jump. [Photos: Left – AP / Ryan Pearson from The Denver Post. Right – Buzz Photo from Perez Hilton Hey Perez, it’s Shaun, not Shawn. This is the second time I’ve swiped a photo from Perez.]

If you want to avoid the crowds at the Trifecta this year, but still want a little bit of commotion during your NW Oregon skatepark experience this weekend, consider heading over to Seaside this Saturday for the 3rd annual Skate ‘n Ride Summer JAM. It’s for a good cause.