Skippy

Woah, sun? Yeah!
Spent the day filling a skip with my bro yesterday- we were getting rid of a couple of decades worth of collective dung from my parents place. Fisherprice garage, good clean fun.












I had a stack of old boards, felt bad chuckin' em, but you've got to me ruthless when filling a skip. there's a few notable memories on the grip there- "men wirreh gee" came from an infamous Barcelona trip where a man with a tuppence was spotted on the cover of a blue tinted motion picture- man, they display the most heinous dvds on the street in Bareclona.
"Jim Evans 4 life" refers to a wrestler- you know when you're a kid and you cling to anything spectacular about your name- well the best we could find was one of those Wrestlers who was just there to get nailed by a bad guy, a filler, a dummy, or a "jobber" as its known in the biz, poor Jim Evans never stood a chance.

"Kiss me flaps" is an old tale from Bray that i best not repeat in order not to incriminate anyone.

I couldn't throw out my first "real" board- A Santa Cruz Jeff Hedges, got it second hand, swapped for a stratt guitar and a few quid. It had rat bone wheels, risers, one red indy truck and a pre grooved gullwing I think. The big emphasis from the seller was that his mate worked at an airport and gave him bearing from an airplane- and he would be pissed off if I didn't look after them.


Here's what remains of my first actual board,a "Rad rat-a-tat-tttt"- I only would push around on me knees- I think the truck snapped after a day- plastic shite.

Tube ridin'

2 clips from the depths of hell were brought to my attention by two fine young cannibals, I just can't decide which is best, both are so cutting edge. I publish a pole on the blog to see what the masses think, but considering only Denis Lynn and the cat from the second clip are reading, I feel the results might be inconclusive.









Regardless of which clip is "better" I think two important questions need to be answered, what were the lads looking for when they found these? Question #2- judging by the content of these clips has society peaked?

Brayzil.

My brother once played for a team called Brayzil, in fact, his housemate still manages them, so it comes as no surprise that I should find an image of myself being beamed onto South American tubes through MTV Brazil?!
Follow the link and go to 2:10 and laugh at my knackery head. If my Portuguese is as good as I think it is, when my image comes up she's says something like "I seen that guy puking outside Henry n' Rose chippers, pure Bray scum right there, head'on him n all, soft boy" Yeah, she's says all that in Portuguese in half a second, its a deeply complex language, I should know with my UCD degree, raa raa.

Human Pyramids be growin'!

Nick Jensen in London- The Scrum Tilly Lush

Here's the light footed Nick Jensen's section from the Scrum Tilly Lush with a little extra blurb on it over there.

Nick Jensen in London- The Scrum Tilly Lush from Philip Evans on Vimeo.

New Zealand, why not?

Or so the fake prop tourist board poster in Flight of The Conchords says, why not indeed. I was anticipating Melbourne so heavily that I'd kind of neglected to give New Zealand a lot of thought, so when we left Aus for their very sparsely populated neighbours, all I had expected were nice folk as the majority of kiwis I've encountered have been real nice people.



Anyroad, we flew over, and even upon flying over the place looked so epic and unspoiled, which was to be a running theme of this journey. The scenery and climate reminded me of home, except 10 time more epic. We didn't have a lot of time there so we were restricted to the south island, but we so much to see we didn't spend much time doing nothing- case and point right here demonstrated by Cris posing for a picture AND standing on a log at the same time, way to maximise your potential and exploit your multi-tasking predisposition C-dogg.

Was I speaking office? Sorry, its from being stuck on a bus full of retired sharks! We took a coach trip around the south island which turned out to be mainly populated by retired American tourists and the odd Japanese tourist, all of whom were equally weighed down with camera gear and khaki pants that went up far too high. With either you had to be quick off the mark with the aul soul catcher- look at this fugger, poachin' some scenic gold like its no one's business, oh golly.

Along the way we were luckily to encounter some designated leisure roll areas, man, 2 of the best parks ever- the top is in Christchurch- it has 3 inter-linking mini ramps that'll give even the most hardened street vet a good time, and the lower one is in Queenstown, which is devoid of any traditional tranny but instead has Jersey barriers and quirky bank configurations to beat the band, highly original and a provider of endless good clean fun. Swell.

Ireland's national feast day happened to fall while we were in Queenstown and the locals really took to it, even if they weren't that sure what it was about, apart from getting plastered.

We celebrating by jumping off a bridge with giant elastic bands attached to our feet. Upon booking the bungee an imminent feeling of cringe halted me from requesting a discount for being Oirish and jumping on Paddy's day- but after I'd paid it turns out there was a discount for that exact situation- jokes on you paddy, sheeeed!

Being conscious of racking up some mad exxtreme points we went jet boating through a gorge. The boat could go over very shallow parts of the river and the pilot did his best effort of pretending to kill us, much to the delight of a Japanese pensioner sitting in front of me, rarely seen a human so stoked in all my lifetime!

Zoooom!

We capped off out Paddy's day extremities by getting a chair lift up a mountain and coming back down on these luges, basically glorified go-karts, lame helmeted fun was had.

Then back to the park for a few wallies, possibly one of the the funnest feeling tricks- up there flat bar front boards and fs 5.0s on tranny.

Man, this guy, I christened him Bill due to his resemblance to the Microsoft peddler, straight outta middle America and ready to educate the world on stuff he's never encountered. At every coach/boat stop he loudly dictate to his daughter and wife the workings of this mysterious land. At one point on a cruise though an epic fjord he noticed small aircraft flying overhead- part of a tourist service to get a birds eye view. Bill felt the need to give their overpass through the fjord's valley a nice commentary. "See that, loogadat!He's gonna swing left lookadat!" Plane swings right. "He's gonna swing right, see" His powers of observation did not end there as the plane's climbed to pass over the near-by mountain peaks "lookadat" Again, louder this time so the whole boat can hear "Look at that, see that, he's headed straight for that mountain, lookadat!!" Cue plane manoeuvring away from mountain "HOLY BUCKETS, you see that?!!" Yeah!! Right on!

Lookadat

OK

See that? Yee shall not pass! Lots of the stuff we seen was featured in Lord of The Rings, wonder if Bill was the locations guy.

We passed a town that honoured the sheep dog, jaypers tenite!

We encountered several breath-taking and genuinely unspoiled scenes like this (mainly due to low low population) Would be a nice place to live.

Lemon and Lime bitters, the bundaberg ol' time soft drink people just keep churnin' em out. Neato.

Lookadat, that's nice.

Holy buckets!

Outdoor kitchen

Ever worked on a teen cookery show out in the backlands of Wicklow? Me neither! I thought it was true enough to my core skate roots so I was down.


















Didn't expect to get so much sun either- the nice day brought a few small aircraft around the picturesque area which played havoc with the sound, who'da thunk it?

Mishing

I founded a load of photos from Oz I thought had gone missing, but no, here they is.