Mr. Nubbie

pic by Cpt. Dick

"This looks bad, but it still looks better than Scott's thumb". Quote by Cpt. Dick

We showed up at Little Egypt Off-Road (LEOR) to ride theAHRMA two-day Trials late Friday night. A part of our crew had preceeded us and this was left on their grill to greet us. Matter of fact, it was left there all week-end, until late Sunday afternoon, kind of like some whacked-out high-school science experiment gone bad. After 2 days of sweltering sun and temps near the century mark, not even the critters that roam at night wanted this poor cheese-burger and the twin bratwurst that accompanied it.

Our buddy Scott had the roughest week-end of us all, with a slight tip-over at about a mle-an-hour in a fairly difficult section, he stuck his hand out on the way to the ground and placed it on a rock and the left handlebar caught his thumb between rock and handlebar end and severed off the tip of his thumb. Can you say ouch?

Bob say's "Here's wishing Mr. Nubbie all the best with one-and-one-half thumbs up!"

Baby Deer

pic by pwa

Boy, aren't these little guys gorgeous. Trust me, they don't even look real. Although their nose looks like a dogs, it's not leathery at all, but more like velvet. They have eyelashes a supermodel would claw your eyes out for. I'd love to tell you where they are, but then I'd have to kill you, as I've been sworn to secrecy.

There's a couple that I know that spends a great part of their waking time rehabilitating animals back to health for release to their natural habitat. The animals have either been injured in some way or perhaps abandoned by their mothers, for various reasons. They hold the proper credentials for this type of work. Currently the guest list includes a screech owl, a corn snake, a kestrel, three racoons, and these guys here, among many others, that's just all that sticks in my mind at this minute........There are also various cats and dogs that get rehabilitated and then are available for adoption. I've got a feline that came from there that was found in a McDonalds dumpster, although most times he's just a squirrel........

These particular deer, who we'll call "girl deer" and "boy deer", since that's what we call them, were birthed when their mom had an altercation with an S.U.V., which needless to say, she didn't survive. So, now they're a few weeks old and are consuming baby formula at the rate of $13 a day, to be released in a little over three months, hopefully. These folks do this pretty much out of a passion, and recieve no formal monetary compensation.

Here's where the telethon starts. If anyone out there would like to throw a ten or a fiver their way, or give 'em a bag of Purina Cat Chow, drop me a line and I'll be sure they get it. It would be mucho appreciado and you would be doing yourself a bit of a karma dance.........L8R

Ray

The skate Quiver continues here, in absolutely no chronological order at all.

This is Bulldog Skates Design Ray Flores # 1. It's # 1 for a couple or three reasons. Reason #1is that it is really skate numero uno in the quiver. I love this sonofabitch. It will skate any terrain. It's a short board, a pool cue, a ditch board, it'll slalom, it's a long-board, and it'll cruise around town (with a wheel change). I'm so comfortable on it that it's scary and it will make me try stoopid shit.

Reason #2 is that is that it was the first Flores that I acquired from Rich at BDS. I've got three of 'em, another one that is a working skate, and one that is my only wall-hanger skate-as-art, and it is signed by Ray Flores his own self. It's pretty cool, but I'm really not much on that skate-as-art shit, I've got a couple skates that are signed by the Bulldog, but they're still just working skates in the quiver. Maybe the only reason the Ray that's hanging up is special is because I've already got 2 others to bash.

Stop reading here if you don't want all the techno mumbo-jumbo and click on the "Next Blog" at the top right of the screen here.......

Number 1 Ray here has obviously been chopped and channeled to my personal specs and there is a plethora of truck mounting options. A stock Flores from BDS was 33-1/3" by 11-1/3" with a 19" wheelbase. This puppy has had an inch & a third removed from the tail so it's now a tad over 32" in length, but the wheelbase has been altered enough to remain the same at this point. We're running Independent 215's (ain't nothing else, is there?) with a vintage set of Clouds bushings. The wheels are BDS Cow Skulls that are 62mm and 98 durometer, with Rockin' Ron's bearings. The risers are old school angled risers along with a rubber 1/8" rubber riser for shock type support. The tail skid is a custon Pee Wee jobee made of clear lexan to protect the Ray and the vintage Indy Cross and Skateboardrer Magazine round stickiees. The nose protector is an O.G. Powell-Peralta vintage Nose Bone in the mondo desireable robin's egg blue.......The grip-tape is the original BDS Sperm design and the stain designs on the top are Pee Wee contributed Type-O from a three inch coping inspired scar at the right shin. The lip-slider device is an original Clyde-Slyde from thirty years ago.

Just talkin' about all that shit just makes me want to go skate.....................Skate hard.........

Dick

Thanks to Jereme Smithey for the images

My buddy Dick rode his first Trials event at Ginders Ranch in Sylvia Tennessee a few weeks ago, put on by B&J Racing. Here we see him negotiating a creek section down in the bottom of Big Barton's Creek, and avoiding a rock the size of your trash compactor. Some guys (Scott Hale, for instance) would just as soon use this particular rock as a sort of a berm.

Our Dick rode well and finished the day with a total of 43 points. He hadn't ridden a motorbike competively since he moto-crossed a Husky 175CR in 1977 outside Des Moines Iowa.

The last pic is of his grand-son Ryan trying to give our Dick some moral support. Anyone with any Trials riding experience wll see the subtle humor in Ryan's signage. A 22 oz. Lion Stout to the first e-mail to me or comment to the blog with the correct answer to the riddle of the inuendo...........

First Skate.....

image by PWA

All right then. We may as well start the skate Quiver here. This would be skate stick numeor uno. A weird looking piece of fibreglass made by Dyno called appropriately, the "Fiber-Flexi". It had trucks with hangers about an inch-and-a-half in width, with for-real ball bearing wheels. What those O.G. guys talk about in the Z-boys movies is true, you'd lose a wheel and then be scrambling around on the deck looking for all those little ball bearings, after getting over the pain of the beef, of course. It's every bit of 23" long with a monster wheelbase of about 12". At least it did have urethane wheels, of a sort.

One of it's most redeeming factors was the graphic on it's slick as glass top surface of a beach scene with a babe in a sky-blue bikini frolicking in the surf. You'll have to look really close in this pic to see her, but she's there. As is a waterfall that's totally out of place.........

This stick came from the Woolco (remember those?) department store over in East Nashville on Dickerson Road in early 1972. Me and my major buddy Jamie Whitefield both bought our first ever sticks that day, if'n I remember correctly.

Looking back now I realize that it was a mondo important day for me and my psyche. The skate thing is something that you really can't explain to anyone. Even now I can't believe that I'm almost freaking fifty years of age and I have gotten the opportunity to skate again. It always made me walk a little taller with a different stride to my step. Some things never change..........Thank God.

Skate hard.

Tele

image by PWA

I am a definite advocate of the quiver theory. Whether it be motorbikes or skates or axes. Always have been. There is always one special tool required for the job at hand. The trick is having access to those tools, and then using them to their fullest when they are called upon. Over the next few months we're gonna' see some from all of the afore-mentioned categories.

Today we start the axe quiver with my absolute favorite guitar on the planet. It's a chump-ass Mexican Fender Telecaster that probably has a lineage of 1999 or so. The ash-tray bridge is from a Nashville Power Tele. The guitar was initially owned by my major bud Brian Kelly who purchased it and then sent it to Jason Lollar @ Lollar Guitars to have the electronics replaced to Lollar's specs and just get an over-all cool set-up, and it was supposed to be a jazz axe , ala Mike Stern. I hand rolled the edges on the neck for a more "vintage feel". Course, I guess I shoulda' known that if a Tele was okay with Kefe, then all was good on the planet........

I avoided Fender instruments for freaking decades because I thought they were toys, instead going for the Gibson type of instruments, you know, double humbuckers, stop type tail-pieces, set-necks. WRONG!. Great quote from Jeff Beck that I am para-phrasing, "A Gibson is an instrument, a Fender is a weapon". That pretty much says it all..........oh yes.

This mutha' rocks and has the sweetest tones on the planet. It stays in tune all damn night and is just a joy to hang around your shoulders. Every time Brian plays it he laments letting me get it off of him, but it's way more of a rock axe than a jazz box. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you black-on-black-on-black Tele with maple neck and the Lollar spec P-90 at the neck position.

Rock on indeed........

Bummer

photo by PWA


I'm sure in everyone's world there are a million definitions of the word "bummer". Here's the official Merriam-Webster take .........

Today's definition at Skate Truck is of being at the park and intermittent rain interrupting the proceedings. It'd rain for a while, then there'd be a break in the clouds and the wind would pick up and the bowls would start to dry, then the rain would tune back up and the whole process would start all over again.....there's not too many things more frustrating as being at a skate spot with time to skate and then having to stare at wet terrain.

I've had my gear with me on two different occasions when in Louisville, with a couple hour window set aside for skate time, and both times we were thwarted by rain. Oh well, that just means that lush702 and Ginder and I will have to have another road trip........You can check out the Louisville Park here and here......

Happy Sunday.

New to this shit........

After much musing and hemming and hawing, and the pitcherlady trying to talk me out of this because of total consumption by the blog, we have arrived here......

It's been an interesting week, highlighted with a great show by Cheap Trick. They rocked far harder than any fifty-somethings have any right to. There was a constant parade of guitars and slung guitar picks. Here we see the man with the checker-board in-ear monitors, Rick Neilsen with one of his custom Hamer axes aptly named "Uncle Dick". Rock on........


photo kindly provided by Susan Adcock