Here are the holiday hours for the month of December:

Monday through Friday: 12 (noon) - 7pm
Saturday: 10am - 7pm
Sunday: 12 (noon) - 5pm

If you haven’t already noticed, there’s a new link up top that says “Columbia.” That link will bring you to the official Columbia Missouri section of the website… it’s actually a website on its own. I’ll be helping run it for a little while, but Shane (the godfather of the skate scene over there) will be taking over as soon as I show him how to use the blogging software we use here.

Anyway, I want to say WELCOME to all of our new family members… be sure to join the forums and talk some smack with us.

w000t!

Here’s the deal… click on the image above (or the link to the right that says *your Christmas Wish List*) and fill out the form… you have to fill out everything or we won’t get the list! Basically, tell us what you want for Christmas, and we’ll do our best to make sure your parent or guardian (or Santa) comes by the shop to hook it up for you!

A friend of the shop and veteran skater named Mike hooked us up with two big photo albums full of skating from the 70’s and 80’s, featuring some insane backyard ramps, Kona, and Stone Edge skateparks. When I get big batches of photos, I have a few choices… I can either take them out of the album sleeves and scan them (which was out of the question for these, since I risked damaging them), or I could scan the album sleeves themselves and cut them up in Photoshop. I decided not to cut these up and upload them individually for two reasons… reason one: Mike sent us so many photos, it would take a few days for me to process them individually, and two: the pics make more sense when you look at them as a group. Check out Mike’s gallery here and you’ll see what I mean:

I really recommend that you go through each photo in the gallery… if you’re a skater, you’ll see that even though the boards, clothes, tricks and ramps are different, the heart of skating is exactly the same. I got the same notion from Phantom Dave’s pics a while back; the feeling we get from skating with our friends is the same feeling skaters from the 70’s had… we get the same adrenaline rush, the same close calls, the same excitement from landing a new trick, and the same bruises from not-quite-landing-right (aka busting our asses). There is no old school… there may be old skateboarders, but as long as we ride, we’re all getting educated.

…and yeah, Mike still skates.

…or skatesgiving? I dunno. Get off of the computer!

Some of you Louisiana locals may or may not know that there’s a second Small Time Skates located in Columbia Missouri… the place is DOPE… it’s just like the Hammond shop in the sense that it’s 100% skateboarding (skater owned and operated, anything fake gets kicked in the grill).

It’s run by my friend Shane, who some of you may have met (he’s usually carrying around a camera or three). Anyway, if I can everything to work out right, they should have a full-on website up and running by this weekend. All of our friends in MO will be able to open up their own homepage and see what’s going down in the area, just like we do right here. I’m really excited to see this happening… there’s a good scene over there, and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a few of the MO locals via MySpace (we now have well over 500 friends… don’t forget to add us).

In the meantime, check out these pics that Shane sent me…

…this is Alex “Animal” Vestal throwing himself down a drop that would break me in half. So sick… I can say with 100% honesty that you will never catch my old carcass doing anything like this, haha.

Now check this beautiful monster:

How sweet is this? I really need to go to Missouri… this thing is making me drool like a bloodhound with a hambone.

Anyway, get ready Columbia… you’re about to have a new home on the web. Much love.

False alarm… it wasn’t Consolidated after all… it was some of the guys from Dreamland.

I felt compelled to post the news alert after recieving about a million phone calls, but hey, we can’t all be right 100% of the time, right? Anyway, gald everyone had a killer session!

As I write this, some pros from Consolidated Skateboards are at the park.

Yes, right now. Go.

Word has it that a certain “action sports” store here in Hammond decided to film a commercial at the park early this morning. The shop’s owner (if you haven’t guessed) is pictured here:

Ok, maybe it’s just a photo of a leech, but there’s really no difference, is there? Word has it that the leech decided to film a commercial at our park at 6 o’clock this morning… why so early? Because the leech is afraid of most of the skaters in this city. He knows that if he attempted to film a commercial during a regular day (at normal hours), he’d be forced to run away like a wounded dog with his tail between his legs. It’s the same reason that he doesn’t walk over to the park on any other day… he’s just doing what he always does, he’s using our park to make money, nothing more. I mean, it’s not as if he cares about skateboarding… he doesn’t even understand it… all he knows is that skateboarders=customers, and he can milk a buck off of the occasional skater that doesn’t know any better.Well we know better. We know why you’re here, and we know why you need to stay in Mandeville.
A personal message to the leech himself: You suck at life. Seriously… you’re a bottom feeding scumbag. You don’t give a damn about any one of the skaters that walks into your store… you may pretend to, but you know the truth. While we’re actually doing things for the scene here, what are you doing for skateboarding in Mandeville or Slidell? Nothing. You can’t name one single thing that you’ve done for the skate scene that hasn’t involved you making a quick buck. I’d call you a scam artist, but that might imply that you’re clever in some way… and I don’t want to do that… you’re just really good at being lame. Please, take that personally… because it is.

Question: Why do half of the locals here have “Gary don’t skate” written on their boards?
Answer: Because it summarizes one of the many things wrong with biggest parasite that Hammond skaters have ever seen.

I almost feel bad about comparing you to a leech… I mean, I feel bad for the leeches.

>Neal

Josh Ew Uhh got me hooked on Linerider when he introduced it to some of us in the forum here… it’s not skateboard related by any means, but you can make ramps and stuff. So addictive! I made this last night: