dedleg.com

One of the hallmarks of segueing into crusty-old-dude-skater status is when you can’t keep track of all the new up-and-comers anymore until they have a monumental video part about to drop and the hype consumes the entire industry. Guys like Cory Kennedy and Shane O’Neill, due to their sponsorships and bonkers trick-selection, are pretty hard to ignore. But guys like Think’s latest addition, Lee Yankou, often fly under the radar, and to all of our detriment. The dude’s been crawling up the ranks from the frozen depths of Canada for a couple years now. And he might not be doing Gandalf Flips or whatever the latest craze is, but this guy still goes big in his own, much more literal, way.

Hey Lee, if you like wallrides so much, why don’t you just fucking marry one already?

Annnd YouTube never fails to entertain:

Damn right. Sure beats the go-to, good-vibes, iPod-commercial soundtrack choices of late, at the very least.

Another day, another skull.

Oooh, imagery evoking mysticism, the occult, and space monsters and shit? Man, I’ve got this “cool” shit down to a science.

Yeah… hard science. Like, literally, it’s hard work. Does that mean I’m doing it wrong?

This world map of cannabis legality is pretty interesting. To me, anyway. To non-stoners and xXxDRUGxFREExXx losers… probably not so much.

What I wanna know is WHAT ABOUT ANTARCTICA? Do penguins smoke? Lol

Welcome to Chicago’s famed prison of eternal sadness — the Lincoln Park Zoo!

Their diverse collection includes the cutest animal mankind has ever discovered. Although I’m pretty sure if you gave it the chance, it would slash you in the jugular and lap up your blood while you still struggled for breath.

Meanwhile, this fucking giraffe was all “No more pictures!” Diva.

Dude seems a little depressed. Don’t worry little guy, Lindsey will be out soon.

My final conclusion based on my trip to the zoo? Penguins are hard to shoot.

Of course I got to thinking… wouldn’t it be weird if our planet was really just a giant zoo for alien tourists to observe with kryptonite-lens binoculars on a galactic safari? Consider this: animals in zoos often display repetitive behavior. For example, I watched in silent agony as an armadillo ran in a circle for 10 minutes straight, which is as long as I could muster before tearing myself away from the grim spectacle. Now, on a cosmic level, wouldn’t your routine look a bit like you running around in a circle all day, every day? Anyway, it’s best not to dwell on that too much, dumpling, just eat your food pellets. 

Veteran Blockhead rider and filmmaker Laban Pheidias came together with Lowcard’s Rob Collinson to make this short film for the 2007 Underskatement Film Festival. And it’s no underskatement that this video is funny — and I mean that both as “humorous” and “rather strange.” 

Nonetheless, it’s really hard to go wrong with a combination of beer and jump ramps. Even the most unproductive of sessions are still practically destined to be a good time… unless someone ends up in the hospital. But that’s a condition that can be tacked onto the end of pretty much anything good to spoil the fun, kind of like “Yes, you can see the movie, but your parents have to come along and sit behind you the entire time.”

It’s rare for me to actually want rain, but after weeks of 90-degree weather an epic summer monsoon is sounding like a great relief from the brain-scrambling heat.

Feelin’ the heat this week? According the the nerds over at NASA, 2010 is, so far, the hottest year since 1880. Granted, on a geological-history-of-the-Earth scale, that’s kind of like saying “It’s hotter than it’s been in the past 5 seconds” so… I’m not saying the earth’s crust is about to boil (yet). But in any case, it’s hotter than it’s been in a fucking while for us humans. Not like I needed to tell you that, though.

Anyway, there was a time, not so long ago, when Earth was a raging fireball besieged by meteors and volcanoes and shit. In light of that, 93 degrees and humid as balls is sounding pretty comfortable to me.

Super Mario Bros. is eternal — an icon woven into the fabric of pop culture, or perhaps etched into its sidewalk anyway. Though at times it almost becomes a cliche, particularly due to the YouTube nation, there are still some clever, and maniacally hard-working, people out there applying Super Mario in really fucking amazing ways.

Andreas Heikaus made this video for his bachelor thesis at the University of Applied Science and Art Hannover. He used some incredible… things… I don’t understand to cast a nearly flawless run through the game on a city sidewalk covered in graffiti scrawls. Without the bounds of a television screen, the levels stretch on down the curb, and basically it’s super fucking cool.

In Andreas’ words:

I stitched the entire level together that I got a huge panorama… after this I made the animation with the original sprites from the game for the whole thing in the areas you normally won’t see… 

He’s German. Anyway, fuck all that nerdy shit anyway — he completed the game in six minutes, sick!

The sting of getting home at 4 AM on a Monday morning after a 10-hour, trauma-inducing bus ride can only be eased with a sunrise like this one. Sunsets tend to be more dramatic, like the teenage daughter who insists on painting her fingernails black and shaving only one side of her head, while sunrises are the quieter, more demure sibling. They’re less of an attention-starved showoff, but when they get dressed up everybody’s still all like, “Damn… sunrises are hot.”

Another successful BKFST:

For those that didn’t pick it up — that line is a reference to Wet Hot American Summer, surely the greatest summer camp film ever crafted. Three years ago, when my pot-smoking became, how you say, “extremely regular”, that movie was basically my Bible. Like Virgil’s Aeneid, I could jump to any point in the film and find answers to the problems that had plagued my day. Tough problems — like what to do when you’re hurtling down Moose River with a bunch of young campers and are about to be pitched into the rapids. And Wet Hot American Summer never let me down.

Also, this bit of trivia was unknown to me 15 minutes ago and is awesome:

The owners of Camp Towanda (where the movie was filmed) were told that this was going to be a family comedy. They were mortified when they saw the final cut of the film. 

And just for good measure…

The behind-the-scenes photos on IMDb are also fucking incredible. Check ‘em out after the jump if you can appreciate what this movie really is — a treasure. Read More

Wowzers. This wasn’t a quick job.

Thought I’d contribute to the local area epileptic seizure warning level today. We’re on high alert over here.

This is a pretty fucking awesome short video featuring local SF skaters, filmed and edited by Bobby Brown. The black and white footage is a nice touch, which simultaneously compliments the street skating as well as the soundtrack. But who wants to analyze skate videos? Let’s just watch them instead.

Make special note of the hill bomb at 1:50. Allow me to explain: FUCKIN CRAZY. Recovering from those speed wobbles with an incredibly clutch powerslide… well done, sir.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve alluded to the day Megabus fell several times. Well, today is their day of reckoning. And while it is true that the day Megabus fell was probably some time long, long ago — like maybe a day or two after their maiden voyage in 2006 — getting in a crash at 11:30 PM while lost in Milwaukee, in the middle of a scheduled eight hour trip, quickly deserves the adjective “apocalyptic” in my mind. Perhaps the driver sensed my approaching insanity, after the three U-turns and nausea-inducing, leaden-foot approach to hours of stop-and-go traffic, and merely created a hole in my window to accommodate me with a quick escape. There’s that famous Megabus service and professionalism, for you!

Ironically, they claim to offer “the highest level of comfort and safety”, and if that’s true, I’m genuinely frightened for the rest of our nation’s commuters. Granted, random stabbings are actually listed as an included service on the Fung Wah bus in New York, so maybe my standards are just a little off. Maybe the driver plowing through a traffic light, while attempting an impossible turn and going in the wrong direction of a one-way street, despite the panicked cries of the passengers, is just part of that “great experience and overall satisfaction” Megabus is so gosh-darned committed to providing.

Our seats were covered in glass, which we were then yelled at about by the frazzled driver, who may or may not have ever been behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle before. The hours of Cruisin’ USA experience Megabus integrates into their training courses were, apparently, not quite enough practice.

Don’t let these pictures fool you — the cops were only there to escort us to a grocery store so the crew could buy enough duct tape to adhere a cardboard box to the gaping hole in the side of the bus. Fleeing the scene of an accident and reversing over a landscaped island in the process? Not a ticketable offense in Milwaukee.

90 miles to Chicago. God help us all.