When I was in high school, I tried to saw a surfboard in half and turn the pieces into bookshelves to impress a girl. What I didn’t know was that A) sawing a surfboard in half is freaking ridiculously hard without the right saw and 2) I was a moron and girls hated me. So I was left with two worthless, jagged halves of a surfboard and a newfound burden of poor taste for kitschy decorating that has stuck with me today. What’s that? Hell yeah that original Peaches Records crate would look awesome in my living room!

The other day I was doing my random web surfery when I came across a post on Environmental Graffiti that brought me back to that awkward day in my garage with that rusty saw blade and 47% chance of ripping my ring finger to pieces. It seems there are actually other people out there who know what they’re doing when it comes to salvaging surfboards, skis, snowboards, bikes and even bowling balls and making something useful and creative out of them.

God help me if these images of genuine creativity reignite my desire to turn crap into treasure, resulting in a trip to the emergency room. After all, a man can’t write d*ck jokes with 9 fingers.

(Image via Flickr/Dave Williams)

(Image via Flickr/Sandy Su)

(Image via Kelly Ludwig)

(Image via Flickr/Jan Meng)

(Image via Rebecca Palumbo)

(Image via Flickr/AMPion Photography)

(Image via Flickr/Todd Lappin)

(Image via Flickr/Lena Vilseskogen)

(Image via Flickr/Jane Wagner)

(Image via Flickr/Chris Symonds)

(Image via Flickr/Matt Murphy)

(Image via Flickr/BnG Photos)

Seriously, I walked by that thing and suddenly knew how to use tools.

Burnsy and Danger Guerrero have been handling things for me while I’ve been Nike Fuelin’ it around Austin for SXSW, but I’m back today, so expect a lot of things that have nothing to do with sports people enjoy. I’ve got a lot of South By shows to recap, but I don’t have to actually go anywhere today, so Skyrim With Leather promptness, here I come!

- Follow us on Twitter @withleather
- Follow me personally @MrBrandonStroud and Burnsy @MayorBurnsy
- Like us on Facebook.

Links

Funny, Sexy, And Austin Cosplay of The Week: SXSW Screenburn Arcade - It’s not exactly “watch a singer-songwriter play in a church”, but I got to take pictures of nearly naked guys dressed like Zangief, so read that. [Gamma Squad]

SXSW Screenburn Arcade Spotlight: The Unexpected Genius Of Minicore Studios - Imagine if Angry Birds had a crazy backstory where the yellow bird has schizophrenia. That’s these guys. [Gamma Squad]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Skateboarding And Dodgeball At The Nike Fuel Lot - Sports also happened! If I hadn’t had strict “go see Ingrid Michaelson” orders that I gave myself I would’ve taken pictures of the Livestrong run, too. [With Leather]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Quiet Company At The Main - This is one of those bands that can bang a wooden spoon against a Speak & Spell and make it sound beautiful. [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: TeenGirl Fantasy And Star Slinger Pitchfork Showcase At The Mohawk - Wherein I share the building where I watch Anarchy Championship Wrestling with 200 people who read Pitchfork. The word “sonic” is used 75 times. [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: David Liebe Hart Band At The Jr - This is the show recap the Corinnians read again and again. [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Skrew At The Jr - I still feel weird typing that headline. One day I hope they put “influential industrial metal” on my tombstone. [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Fiona Apple At Stubb’s - Not ashamed to say I waited in line like 2 1/2 hours to be front row for Fiona Apple. Now if only The Cardigans would show up at South By, I’d have my two favorite almost cool female singers from the 90s in one place. [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Action Bronson And DaVinci At Lustre Pearl - Aside from maybe The Black Belles, this is the guy I left SXSW wanting to see again the most. More rap songs about Barry Horowitz, please. [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Andrew WK And Screaming Females At Bar 96 - Set list spoiler: he played a bunch of songs about partying. You knew I’d end up at the vegan-something party, didn’t you? [UPROXX]

UPROXX @ SXSW: Motion City Soundtrack At Clive Bar - Pretty sure either “Brick” or “Mortar” left me a negative comment on this one. In response to his question, I’m not really qualified to be doing anything. [UPROXX]

Burnsy and Danger Guerrero have been holding down the fort while I’ve been wandering around Austin looking for Mark Henry covering the sights and sounds for UPROXX and Gamma Squad, but I finally stumbled onto something sports related: the impromptu Nike Fuel Lot in the middle of downtown, wherein you can play sports, watch people take pictures of people playing sports and get a free t-shirt.

The lot has been a meeting point for Livestrong running groups all week, but I managed to get down there on Wednesday to earn my girlfriend’s shirt with 100 Fuel points of activity. See, Nike’s new Fuel Band doesn’t just measure running, like the old Nike Plus … it measures EVERYTHING, from basketball, push-ups and jumping jacks to skateboarding and dancing around like an idiot. Anything athletic, except for swimming, and as I’ve learned the hard way, doing your dishes.

I earned something like 4,000 Fuel points trying to get from one concert to the other (and not wanting to pay the bike rickshaws twenty bucks to take me 10 blocks), but my favorite 100 earned were here. Check out a few of the pictures, and stay for the technicolor freakout at the end.

Note: I am the only person here taking normal photos. Everyone else is either using huge, wedding-photo-quality art school cameras or just Instagramming everything.

Austin’s Frost Bank Tower. It looks like an owl, if you look at it right. This becomes important later.

Skateboarding with “Nike Skateboard Pros”, which I guess means “people who work for us and can skateboard”.

Not every attempt was successful. I’m not sure who my favorite disinterested bystander is … the guy with his shirt over his nose, the smiling guy in cheap Wayfarers or the bored girl between the skateboarder’s legs?

I’m sure this would look cooler with a few Instagram filters thrown over it. Look, he’s skateboarding in my polaroid from 1982!

Yes, that place is literally a warehouse that is full of spaghetti.

If you look in the background you can see the bin of free t-shirts. You earned a shirt by getting 100 Fuel points on your band, and the volunteers would keep track of it on a clipboard. A wonderful juxtaposition of technology, and also you can fart or throw your band down the steps and get 100 Fuel points.

Also happening here for some reason: HACKEY-SACK. Other than the guy on Red River who chucked a half-full beer into a tree, these are my least favorite people in Austin right now.

Thankfully the Nike volunteer/employees went “oh god no, not hackeysack” and started tossing basketballs at people.

The most important thing to happen at the Nike Fuel lot: DODGEBALL.

GO GO GO GO GO

If you hit them hard enough with the ball, they turn into angels and ascend to Heaven.

Photo credit: Lightwave International

And the very coolest part — at night, Nike lights up the Frost Bank Tower to look like the meter on the Fuel band. That’s so cool. Jogging to the top of it should make your band explode.

Chad Muska seems like a fairly average, affable guy. He’s a pro skateboarder, and he’s the type who goes out to a Coffee Bean at 2 in the morning, spraypaints “MUSKA KILLS” on their windows, then calls the security guards the N-word until someone arrests him on felony charges.

From TMZ, the leader in opportune sports coverage:

Muska was first detained by security at the Roosevelt Hotel around 2AM. Law enforcement sources tell us Muska was seen spray painting his name on a nearby Coffee Bean.

While security guards waited for LAPD officers to arrive — Muska demanded the guards let him go, and called them “ni**as” several times … including one instance in which he said, “Fu** all these ni**as right here.”

LAPD eventually showed up and arrested and booked Muska for felony vandalism — and our sources say Muska had tagging materials on him when he was arrested.

You’d think “skateboarder acts tough defacing a coffee shop, then is racist nutbag” would be the best part of the story, but nope: Element Skateboards, one of Muska’s pro sponsors, is defending him using the oldest and worst white people excuse ever.

A rep for Element Skateboards — Muska’s sponsor since 2006 — tells TMZ, “There is a major difference between n**ga and n***** and it’s totally obvious he is not being racial at all.”

The rep then added “black people can say it to each other and it’s fine, but when I say it it’s racist?” as well as “if you threw a White Pride Parade people would get upset!” before disappearing into the darkness to draw grim reapers and Fear Factory logos all over his sh:tty racist skateboards.

[h/t and insert picture via Off the Bench]

Ever since skateboarding went mainstream, we’ve become accustomed to guys like Tony Hawk, Bucky Lasek, Bob Burnquist and whoever else I can remember from the first three Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games being the faces of events like the X-Games and the Dew Tour, and the scariest thing about the sport has been those no good punks on the local church steps making their own skate videos.

Alas, all was not as simple in 1986, and there was a much darker force at play – witchcraft. Enter the Skate Witches, a trio of mean babes who won’t put up with anyone standing in their way. They’ve got rats, skateboards and magical powers. Except one of the girls who doesn’t need a skateboard because she’ll just steal yours. And if you find yourself out strolling the cemeteries at midnight and you hear some grinding and wicked kick flips, that’s the Queen Witch. You should know better than to mess with her.

In conclusion, the 80s were f*cked up, dude.

Video after the jump…

It has been a busy day on the tips line, and this gem came to us that way via Travis, who, like many of us, enjoy seeing visual evidence of skateboarders being unable to reproduce. Sure, skateboarding may not be a crime, but it’s murder on the groin. You might want to grab a snack before you settle into this collection of clips, because it checks in at a delightful five minutes and 48 seconds. I’ve already watched this video twice and I’m pretty sure that it made me sterile. Whatever. I hate wearing condoms anyway.

Hit the next page for the video, and don’t try any of these at home, unless you happen to be a total douchebag.

* – probably not all from 2010.

There’s not a lot of things that are more satisfying than watching some hipster, skateboarder asshat take a shot right to the balls while trying to nail a rail. While the world’s largest skateboard crashing certainly isn’t as satisfying as that, it’s still pretty badass.

Not even Shaquille O’Neal, if he knew the slightest thing about skateboarding, could handle the world’s largest skateboard by himself.

The over-sized but otherwise realistic contraption is 36 feet 7 inches long, nearly nine feet wide and weighs 3,800 pounds.

It requires a group of people to successfully ride and even then it’s usually a short and precarious journey that results in a highly comical wipeout.

So it was predictable that when California Skateparks owner and board co-designer Joe Ciaglia recently tried to give the WLS a solo-whirl down a grassy knoll, he was forced to bail from and nearly trampled by an out-of-control unit that flipped in a wild crash farther down the hill. –Grind TV

There’s video after the jump, and the bail looks surprisingly dangerous. Potential for broken vertebrae aside, charging a hill on that thing looks awesome. You could throw a pretty awesome party on that skateboard if you had a big enough hill. So many hot babes would want to party with you if you were rolling down a hill at 40 mph. “Who wants to do a keg stand? Ladies?”

I stopped skateboarding when I was 14 and I realized that I’d never be any good at it. Plus all the work of constantly pushing with your foot seemed too much like running to me. This unnamed youngster will quit for two reasons. One, because his skateboard is about to be snapped in half, and two, because…well, you’ll just have to see it. And if you’re watching this at work, this would be a good time to put on some headphones. We have ourselves a screamer. Thanks, UU.

This could have been a four-star faceplant clip if the guy that posted this realized that this was a skateboarding video and not a Japanese game show. STOP TRYING TO CLOSE-CAPTION YOUR WHOLE DAMN VIDEO. That said, this is a brutal fall, and therefore an excellent one. Good buildup, good protagonist, and the cinematography is well above average. I hope that guy’s okay; I feel like this camera operator can only get better with experience.

Most retail establishments only accept deliveries between 10 and 2, so these guys made sure to get their tricks in while the gittin’ was good. And this faceplant isn’t exactly spectacular as much as it just sort of sneaks up on everyone. It’s as if he tried to bail on his move too late. You can’t ride that bull halfway, son. You either buck up or buck out. I suppose you could buck sideways, but I’d need the manual to explain how that works.