With all the recent posts about Jake Brown and those parents in Medford being idiots indicted, this helmet safety video from Danger Rangers couldn’t have come at a better time. Danger Rangers is horribly cheesy cartoon designed to teach kids about safety. How cheesy? It looks like they spent more money on animating their web site than they do on an entire season of the cartoon. This particular episode’s theme was helmet safety for skateboarding, and it centered around the “Go Games” extreme sports contest. A lot of the cartoons that have skateboarding episodes tend to have X-Games knock-offs as a plot device. I’ve pulled a few highlights, including the awesome music video for “Wear Your Helmet” after the jump.

Wes Humpston and Kat Von D got together to design a skateboard on Kat’s tv show LA Ink. Supposedly they are going to have a whole line of boards, although it seems more like something that was cooked up just for TV. The first hand drawn original board is being auctioned on eBay to benefit the Tony Hawk Foundation. My DVR didn’t pick up that episode, but someone else’s did. In the beginning of the design process there’s a funny bit where Kat says, “What should we put in the inside?” and Wes responds with “I like to do skulls and stuff.” Didn’t see that one coming. You can see the board in detail and watch the episode after the jump. It hasn’t been edited to show only Wes’ bits (get your mind out of the gutter), but hey, I didn’t have to do anything. The auction ends Friday, November 16 at 6 PM (PST). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Kat is slightly more photogenic than Wes.

Steve Howell actually thanked us for correcting him, but I suspect he’s a lot more polite than we are. He’s updated the skateboard dictionary entry for the term “Indy” on About.com. The Indy can be a sticky trick to name – a lot of skaters use the term Indy for any grab where the back hand is holding the board between the toes, but technically, this is only true in snowboarding. In skateboarding, traditionally the term Indy refers to the same grab, but it implies it is backside. No matter what snowboarders may call it, the move was invented skateboarding, and has a specific definition. Technically, it’s a backside air, trailing hand grab between your legs. Frontside and backside are the same on both boards. It shouldn’t matter what you are riding. Then again, rollerbladers have all kinds of goofy names for their moves too. OK. It’s not perfect but we’ll take it. We’re making a difference here at Skate and Annoy.

Ok, we all know the original skateboarding skeleton t-shirt is from Powell. Retailers will seize anything popular to make an extra buck with holiday tie ins, which leads us to these two skeleton skateboarding shirts I bought for my two year old son. On top of that, he didn’t need to get out the white paint like GSD to get a pair of skeleton pants. These came from Babies-R-Us. Yes he wears them year round. They were $10 for a set of pants and hooded sweats, so I bought three sets in consecutive sizes so he won’t grow out of them for a year or maybe two. Hell, if they made them in my size I’d buy them for me. You can see that freestyle skateboarding is living (dead) after the jump.

We are now accepting donations for the “Know your rights” outreach program for the users of the new Tigard Skate park, whose posted rules state that anybody that remains in the skatepark consents to having their personal belongings searched. This money will go towards having stickers printed up that will be given away to riders entering the Tigard Skate Park. The more money we collect, the more stickers (or larger stickers) we can make. If you’re up for helping, the suggested donation is $5. Details after the jump. UPDATE: RESCINDED! They took rule#3 off the sign!!!!! DETAILS

MAD Magazine and skateboarding. Two pleasures of my youth, one of which I eventually grew out of. I don’t think I’ve actually seen a recent copy of MAD Magazine in 10 years. Are they still in print? (I guess so.) Actually, I’m assuming this is from MAD, maybe it’s from Cracked… In any case I pilfered it from Concretins who are mum on the details. Click to enlarge.

As useful as a website is, there’s no real substitute for a well planned out book. The Public Skatepark Development Guide is a collection of everything on Skaters for Public Skateparks site (minus the bitching in the forums) that if you are serious, will help you on your quest to get a public skatepark built in your town. The nicely illustrated 128 page guide is published by three organizations; The Tony Hawk Foundation, the International Association of Skateboard Manufacturers – IASC, and SPS, although you’d be hard pressed to find it on their web site. I just got mine and it seems to be well worth the price, which is “free” but you pay the shipping. I think I paid about $6 for mine. It was a while ago when I ordered it. Why did I order it? For the kids, of course! Get yours.

KATU News reports (Via Associated Press) that the father of a boy who fractured his skull at a skatepark is being charged with child neglect and criminal mistreatment. It seems dad left the six year old boy at the skatepark for a couple of hours. That’s the actual Medford skatepark in the background. We are going to milk this police officer stock photo for all it’s worth. [Medford photo: Troy Sliter]

When I first got a copy of Wire’s Pink Flag album I was hypnotized. The music was unlike any of their punk contemporaries, but it still made perfect sense to a kid in the suburbs of Chicago in the mid-80’s. It was kind of like the missing link for me. Minimal, but incredibly rich at the same time. Catchy but abrupt and confrontational. Discovering music used to be a much more sensual experience. It required considerably more effort than it does today. After buying a record I would usually pour over every minute detail of the artwork while listening to the turntable. It was an experience that deserved my full attention. When you were in a cultural desert like the suburban Midwest was, you savored every morsel you got. The back cover of Pink Flag has fake biological data about the band, and one of the things I couldn’t get past was the drummer’s name, Robert Gotobed. Everyone else had regular enough sounding names, so was Gotobed a goof or what? Anyway, it fascinated me. I desperately wanted to meet him – remember, cultural desert… Others have waxed on about Wire much more articulately than I am apparently capable of,…

Windell’s Snowboard Camp has evolved over the years. They had a bunch of outdoor ramps including a crazy spine bowl and various street and mini combinations, then they built a crazy indoor bowl setup and then later the indoor Bobcomplex with a 75 foot miniramp. The latest and greatest seems to be concrete. Old School Skateboarding had a party there last Sunday.