News flash! Skateboarding: A Popular Sport for Today’s Teens! Jessica Mousseau wrote this article. You can view her tiny, saucy picture here, or see Einstein writing your words on a chalkboard here.

If you don’t take control of your culture, those who only care about the gold and platinum will. That’s the message of this video series called Instant Def, which is a Snickers viral marketing web site. The story line focuses on hip hop being taken over by money-hungry industry types. Ironically, they cast the Black Eyed Peas, a group that will whore itself out to anything from TV commercials to supermarket grand openings. The production design is sharp, but the story, music and most of the performances are weak. On the plus side, Bootsy Collins shows up in episode 2 and again in episode 5. Speaking of taking control of your culture, they use a dog on a flying skateboard and a couple evil midgets little persons, one of them on a skateboard too. Ahh, the delicious irony. Delicious? I love Snickers, but they sure wasted a bunch of money for something lame. I’m not sure about their connection with the hip hop community, but I’m sure the Peas massive street cred will help. Skip ahead to the finale, which has the skateboard action and is also the most entertaining. More screen caps after the jump. [Source: Media Mindfulness]

More overpriced skateboard based furniture, but don’t take our word for it: Skede-tuoli on saatavana nahkapäällysteisenä tai pelkistetyn teräksisenä. Tuolissa käytetään harjattua, ruostumatonta terästä. Se on saatavana yksivärisenä beigenä ja mustana. Tikkauksissa vaihtoehtoina ovat beige-beige, musta-musta, musta-beige ja musta-pink. Uh, yeah. Available from Tunto Designs for 800 – 1050 € which is about in the $1000-$1400 range according to GoCurrency. If that’s not already too expensive for you Mr Warbucks, don’t forget you’ve got to pay for shipping from Finland. You can get it in plain steel, leather upholstered or without the skateboard even. Although, if you are going to go to Finland to get a chair, you might as well get the deck from the Finnish company Control as well. Looks a little forced and not-so-elegant to me. A couple more pics after the jump. [Source: PadStyle ]

We’re getting wider here. Tweaking style sheets, prepping for a redesign. It might get a little mongo around here for every once and a while. There will be some rough edges in the next month or so, but bear with us please.

The last time I had to swing a skateboard in self-defense, it wasn’t against a rapist, murderer, pedophile and escaped convict like Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell. It was against a group of asshole jocks that jumped me and a friend once while skating down a street. It was 6 on 2, and they ended up letting us be. I was in high school at the time. This young man looks like he’s junior high age at best. He clocks T-Bag pretty hard in the side of the head, but T-Bag is like pit bull, he just keeps coming. You have to kill him to stop him. Seriously, he’s not that big, and he’s had his hand cut off, sewn back on by a vet with no anesthesia, and then had to pull it off by hand again, all in the space of a couple of weeks. He should be dead or dying from gangrene by now. I don’t know, maybe my judgement is clouded since I should have better things to do than digitizing a 5 second clips of a guy getting hit on the head with a skateboard on the TV show Prison Break. Watch the video and and follow…

You knew it was out there. I didn’t even have to look very hard. Well now I know why those weird ledges are there. To prop up your ass while watching your friends just take that manual pad apart! Now let me take a moment to reminisce about the old girl. I was at a gymnastics meet with my kids near the ramp one weekend. Those gymnastics meets can last four hours and you are usually spectating from crappy surplus folding chairs or some sadistic bleachers that some dad in the booster club cobbled together by adapting plans for tiered feed sack shelving. Your kid actually performs for maybe three and a half minutes total. I have two kids doing gymnastics at different levels sometimes we are there for two sessions. Naturally I ducked out for a quick few runs on the handy vert ramp. Watch the video and read more after the jump.

I hadn’t been out to the Beaverton skatepark since we tore the old vert ramp (image at top left for reference.) down. I decided to drop by the other day and I felt physical pain when I saw the crap they put where the ramp was. Well, my sides hurt from laughing. I’m sure that’s just what all the kids wanted too. It would be really hard to descride the funky-ass ledge configuration and ledge-and-bank around the perimeter of the park. I hope some kid post up some footage on YouTube so I can see what the hell you are supposed to do with it. The centerpiece of the new section is a big intersecting-squares-two-level manual-pad thing. A couple of those low rails that the kids like so much rounds out the experience. Judging from the quality of the concrete work I’d guess the maintenance guys built it themselves or the THPRD had a Come Play in the Mud Day! Congratulations on your new facility Beaverton!

Video Days from Blind Skateboards, circa 1991. One of my all-time favorite videos. Spike Jonze was the director for this video and he definitely set the bar when it comes to filming/editing. Blind was started by Mark Gonzales in 1991. The company name is an intentional jab at his former team, Vision. This was a time when Street Skating was developing at an insane rate. Although the video is mainly street oriented; there is some vert featuring the Gonz and Jordan Richter. There’s some really good music on here as well, including Black Flag, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr, and much more. Blind now offers this video on DVD by combining it with What If?. Featured Skaters: Mark Gonzales, Rudy Johnson, Jason Lee, Guy Mariano, and Jordan Richter run time: 24 min 0 sec – Check it Out