Our friend Rich Burton shot some opening day photos for Skaters for Portland Skateparks. Above: Mark Conahan and Molly Quan hanging out by the Peanut.

I can’t find much about Simon Woodstock on the web. There are a couple of reviews of his religious tract disguised as a zine, but other than that, just this video clip, Skim the Fat doesn’t have a single listing of him, even if IMDB lists him as appearing in Boob. STF lists 154 skaters in that video, but no Simon Woodstock. It’s like he’s been blacklisted. Simon was in the limelight at a time when I wasn’t following the industry rags, not that I am now, but through the Interweb™ I sometimes find out about things whether I want to or not. I remember reading about some legendary shenanigans and talented skating in the past tense. What I get from this video is a heavy CKY vibe. Just as some people can’t stand Bam, there are lot of Woodstock bashers out there. You’d have to be blind to say he had no talent. Watch him ride both a skimboard and snowboard set up as skateboards while wearing appropriate attire and shredding as effortlessly as if he was riding a short board. Then there’s the clown suit. Funny stuff, but I can imagine it wears thin after a while. So someone fill in the blanks. Who did he ride for and what video is this from? Watch the vid and more after the jump.

Last Friday, Glenhaven finally opened. Several hundred people came out to see the ribbon cutting and skate the new Dreamland park. I haven’t heard any complaints yet. The street/bricks/ditch is getting heavy use as is the mid bowl. The 8.5 foot deep Peanut bowl is great. It rides a lot like an insanely good backyard pool. Okay, first complaint. I would have liked to see tile in there. It’s just about perfect though. Portland is on a roll.

More pics at Earth Patrol, Old School and Dan Hughes’ photos from Saturday

Everyone was worried that the pool coping at Pier would get trashed by bike use so for a while people were always giving bike guys a hard time about pegs. seven months later this showed up in the big bowl at Pier. I haven’t said anything in a while and things seem to be pretty mellow. I asked a bike guy aqbout the pasteup and he said it was a joke from the peg-enthusiast faction. It was pretty funny that they dug up a photo of Rick James. What? Is he the patron saint of BMX?

I took two of them down during the Pier Park cleanup over the weekend – which is my excuse for not posting more by the way. I put in about 8 hours on the cleanup not counting driving over there twice. Today I skated.

The rest of the, err, staff seems to be on strike while I’m on vacation. So this is the best I can come up with. If you hear “Blondie” and “skateboarding” in the same sentence, you’re probably more apt to think of the band. The rest of today’s Blondie had nothing to do with skateboarding, and wasn’t funny anyway. What can you expect from a 77 year old comic strip? Click to enlarge.

I was going to title this post “It’s reigning Jesus” or “It’s raining (religious) men” but instead I used a quote from an article in the Anchorage Press titled “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” It’s a heartwarming tale of an 18 year old kid in Anchorage who is fighting the Alaskan weather and racial prejudice on journey to become a professional skateboarder. Sounds like a Hallmark movie. Oh yeah, the whole point of this post is Stephen Baldwin in Russia (!?!) holding a religious-themed skateboard [Source: Perez Hilton] and even better, (Is that possible?) a series of Jesus action figures engaged in Extreme!™ sports, not to mention panhandling (?!) , bull-riding, and in army fatigues(!!?!?!). All this plus a Jesus in skateboarding roundup, or hoedown, if you will, after the jump.

Portland designer Maple (not affiliated with Maple skateboards) makes earrings, bracelets, rings and purses from used skateboards. Sure, that’s been done before, but this is a slightly different take. It’s mostly geared towards gals, but I could see the bracelets going over well in some circles of skateboarding, like the Ipath crowd. The hexgaon shaped one looks cool. Is there a macho word for “bracelet?” Maple is at the mercy of finding used decks with dyed plies to make her craft more interesting. Extra bonus, part of the proceeds from some sales go to a skateboarding charity to be determined. Both owners of the SPS acronym ( 1 and 2 ) were being considered. Maybe Maple can fill in the blank. Check it out.

Oops. Too late. Our civilization is doomed if these are our future leaders. The video is called “mitch hittin himself wid a skateboard” [sic] and is described as “mitch tryin 2 be like jonny knoxville off jackass.” Oh wobble94, I don’t know where to start. Let’s hang out together.