This is why I just love skateboarding and photography - you will never reach a point in time when you can say, that’s all folks. I’ve seen it all. The mega ramp is one of those topics in life which just help me remember why being alive is so much fun.

Here’s a picture which floated into my email box a couple of days ago and after finally opening it up I got this great picture of 13 year old Pedro Silva Barros doing a massive backside air on the Mega Ramp in Sao Paolo - yeah, the same ramp which took out Danny Way. 13 seems to be the number right now, my son is turning 13 tomorrow and I started skating vert at the age of 13…umhhh, 23 years ago…

Big companies sponsoring big contests - that’s the name of the game since big business has discovered just how lucrative skateboarding can be to push the interest in products. This weekend will see a lot of big names in skateboarding landing in Berlin, Germany for the T-Mobile Extreme Playgrounds contest (along with some top BMX riders who do some really messed up stuff in the vert ramp!) so if you happen to be in Berlin, get up there to watch the show and some bands as well if you like stuff like the Offspring…cough cough.

Here’s the schedule for Sunday, November 30th as you can watch it right here thanks to the great guys from freecaster.tv:

* 12:00 - 13:00 Skateboard & BMX - Free Practice
* 13:00 - 13:45 Skateboard Street - 2nd Round - START LIVE WEBCAST
* 13:45 - 14:00 Skateboard Street - Semi Final
* 14:00 - 14:30 Signing Session: Skateboard Rider
* 14:00 - 14:45 BMX Street - 2nd Round
* 14:45 - 15:00 BMX Street - Semi Final
* 15:00 - 15:30 Signing Session: BMX Rider
* 15:15 - 15:45 Skateboard Street - 3rd Place & Final
* 15:45 - 16:15 BMX Street - 3rd Place & Final
* 16:15 - 16:30 BMX Street - Xbox 360 Contest
* 16:30 - 16:45 Skateboard Street - Xbox 360 Contest
* 16:45 - 17:15 BMX Vert - 2nd Round
* 17:15 - 17:30 BMX Vert - Semi Final
* 17:30 - 18:15 LIVE: Sugarplum Fairy
* 18:00 - 18:30 Signing Session: The t-mobile-playgrounds
* 18:30 - 19:00 Skateboard Vert - 2nd Round
* 19:00 - 19:15 Skateboard Vert - Semi Final
* 19:15 - 20:00 LIVE: No Fun At All
* 20:00 - 20:30 Skateboard Vert - 3rd Place & Final
* 20:30 - 21:00 BMX Vert - 3rd Place & Final
* 20:45 - 22:00 LIVE: The Offspring

Seems to be the season to say goodbye to some print magazines. The German “Boardstein” mag will have to stop the press soon and we all have been following what will be taking place with SLAP Magazine.

Well, the final print issue is out now and the people behind the scenes are working hard on getting the website ready for the beginning of December. It is definitely a strange development which is taking place - magazines which have been read, traded, flipped through while taking a dump (that’s where most of my magazines land when they arrive at my house!) or whatever will disappear in the form that we got to know them. I just hope this development works out…here’s what the SLAP editors have to say about what’s in the final issue:

“It’s a full-on rager, featuring cover boy Heath Kirchart destroying while bedecked in all white; an all-sequences Leo Romero interview; the continuing adventures of Big Blue (our beloved SLAP van) with Arto Saari, Omar Salazar, Tyler Bledsoe, Jason Dill, Keegan Sauder and more; the return of the Tiltmode Army and all their shredding and good-times antics on the eve of their third video; a peek at our annual One In A Million contest road trip with all the unsponsored rippers going from Seattle from Los Angeles under the watchful eye Caswell Berry and SLAP staffers; the SLAP forum Pals putting the Q&A heat to Bobby Puleo; an intriguing interview with Metal legend and NASCAR fan King Diamond; an amazing f/s bigspin heelflip bluntslide for Curtains via young buck Jordan Hoffart; 13 SLAP Pal pros and their favorite SLAP covers of all time; a collage of every SLAP cover ever; and tons more! This is one issue you definitely don’t want to miss!!!”

And don’t forget to keep supporting SLAP, visit their site!

The Nike Skateboarding team is getting a lot of media push in the last couple of weeks with plenty of good videos popping up on the Nike SB site. The following video features Grant Taylor, Justin Brock, Shane O’Neil, David Clark and Nike SB flow rider Dan Plunkett taking Atlanta apart and then hitting a bowl somewhere in Alabama.

Cliche Skateboards has grown in the past couple of years into one of the most influential skate teams out there. Period. And December 5th, 2008, the latest video effort “Cle” will have it’s premiere in Lyon, France starring skaters like Joey Brezinski, Lucas Puig, JB Gillet, Ricardo Fonseca and many more amazing skaters….watch the trailer and be ready for a lot more I guess!

Bigger, faster, wider - yet again, whatever one thinks about Ryan Sheckler and the direction he is taking skateboarding, the guy knows how to skate. With the quite obvious support of Red Bull, he’s got a private skatepark now which has several obstacles which are insanely large and yet another park which has almost uncountable possibilities…

Yes, we are allowed to be jealous even though I don’t even know how much I would be able to do in this park…have a look right here.

As I was up to other things in my life other than skateboarding for a few weeks (how dare you?!) I didn’t keep you out there up to date with the reoccurring explosion coming out of the video central called Epicly Later’d.

This time the focus is on Lakai Footwear and there are a bunch of new videos presenting behind the scenes impressions and more… including Phelps, Miko Mo, Eric Koston and Alex Olson - wait for a day with bad weather as this is going to have you tied down for a while!

Vert skating is still going very strong in Scandinavia and this past weekend another episode of the Quiksilver Vert Invitational was held at the Stockholm Skatepark with a solid backing of good skaters. Hope to get up there next year as the whole concept just looks like a lot of fun and less competition!

Special thanks to the photographer Denis Sopovic and Tackyworld.com

There’s some video footage as well so click here to get around 30 minutes of the action!

Final Results
1. Jussi Korhonen
2. Pontus Björn
3. Stephen White
4. Bob Joosten
5. Macki Chounouzidis
6. Oscar Gydell
7. Mika Löfgren
8. Peter Linell/Jon Harald Aspheim
10. Simon Karlsson
11. Miko Kottilla
12. Andre Böhlin
13. Daniel Chettle

…drum roll, Silas Baxter-Neal! Thousands of votes later he was chosen among many others to carry this prestigious award (at least among skaters…) and December 12th, 2008 will see a bunch of pro skaters getting together to celebrate this talented guy. Have a look below at the speech made by Phelps and some of the great skating Silas lays done. He’s got the style, tricks and speed, no doubt about that!

Daewon skates a duck, Jeron frontslide flips a house and MJ slides a cat. Marty Murawski, Mike Anderson and Torey Pudwill are also part of the fun in the latest Matix Clothing commercial series “Progress Tangram” which will be airing on FUEL tv. The whole idea behind these simple looking commercials is based on the concept of tangrams which are dissection puzzles. They consist of seven pieces, called tans, which fit together to form a shape of some sort. The objective is to form a specific shape with seven pieces. The shape has to contain all the pieces, which may not overlap.

Have a look below at the two videos which show the behind-the-scenes of the making of the commercials.