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 an assortment of skateboard assault links including another pedophile, a Jesus abduction and fat Canadians in the news after the jump.

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

As you may have already noticed, we’re adding some new voices to Skate and Annoy, and Mark Conahan is the latest addition. You may know him from his Antigravity Press blog, which Skate And Annoy is going to assimilate wholesale like the Borg. It’s part of our plan to dominate the web browsers of everyone, or at least everyone we know. Half of our links were to each other anyway. Mark used to illustrate for Thrasher and publish the Bodyslam zine. He’s the man who draws the H.O.M.O.S. comics now, and he’s active in SPS. Big plans, man, we’ve got ’em. Now when I say “we,” it actually means more than just me. There’s a site re-design and more coming. Stay tuned. In the meantime you can check out Mark’s profile. The pics above were shot in Hailey ID summer of 2006.

California Community Colleges Satellite Network (CCCSAT ) has some sort of series called Grant Britain Skateboarding Photographer that you can watch on satellite TV or view via webcast for free, provided you are a student of California Community Colleges. Education without boundaries, my ass! It aired already, but it airs again on 1/29 at 10:29am, 1/31 at 8:30pm, on 2/2 at 4:30pm, and on 2/3 at 8:32pm. See if you can figure it out. The CCCSAT web site is confusing as all heck. Supposedly this is Episode #124 – Typography. I find it hard to believe that Grant’s had 123 other episodes. Someone figure out how to watch this, then record it and post it on YouTube for the rest of us. Maybe Grant has more info in his blog over at the Skateboard Mag, which is where I poached that picture from, and where you’ll find recurring great shots he pulls from his extensive body of work.