About Josh

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Toilet Around the Campfire

Skating Photos

There’s been a recent change in the neighborhood. My neighbor has had a toilet sitting near his fire pit the entire time I’ve lived here. The other day, to my surprise, I saw him carefully hitting it with a hammer and putting the pieces in a bag. Word is still out whether or not this helps our hurts my property value. I’ll report back when the city sends me my yearly property assessment.

Nick “Sleepy” Mistele with a layback wallie on this Harley orange barrier. He had never done this before, but I think the power of the Harley Hog, bald eagles, and America powered him enough to pump over this Boban relation. Technically, I’d say a concrete Jersey barrier might be a cousin to the Boban, but not a direct relation. Same genus, different species. We call the plastic orange barriers Bobans because that’s all classic wiskate patron Boban would skate while working at the skate park. Mini ramp? Nope, Boban. Pyramid? Nope, Boban. Got it?

Hi-8 evidence of the Boban connection. It’s real. It’s true. Circa 2001. 17 years of calling Bobans Bobans. Mark it down. Update your dictionary. I wish I could recapture all of these old Hi-8 tapes, I really don’t know how I lost the files. If someone has a digital 8 camera they’d lend me, slide into my DMs.

Max lived here. Not exactly here, not on a backside smith on the ramp. That’d be something. Imagine sitting there, just stuck in a smith. All day and night. “Help!” You’d have to call Uber Eats to receive nutrition. “Yeah, come on in. The door is open. I’ll be here, I’m stuck in this smith.”

Max has always wanted to be able to frontside flip on transition like John Rattray or Daniel Stemper. This night was his night. Several melt downs, several liters of sweat lost. It was his, he endured, victorious!

I made poor Vince do this smith grind tail grab scores of times. He never complained. I kept failing. He kept doing it. What a guy.

A long dog with a long dog. Sleepy, but cool. Imagine having a pillow that looked like your own species. There actually is such a thing. I guess this is Francois’ “Waifu Pillow”! Although there is no sexual angle to this relationship. Pure, innocent, like freshly fallen snow. Is it possible for an ex pro athlete to be that innocent? You might have a point. He had to have the killer instinct. “No Fear!”. 6 wins to his name. Look it up! BGR Crush. I bet he’s had a groupie or two in his time.

Matt Nordness <3 Fritsche

Serious Art, Skating Videos

For five years Matt (BMAN) had an ongoing love affair with this over the rail into the bank. The run up is terrible. After you land, if you can’t ride it out to the right, you run into a fence. She’s a harsh mistress. But BMAN loved her anyway. She gave, she took, she treated him wrong. True poetry, true love. Fritsche.

Matt Nordness <3 Fritsche - 2010-2015.

Portraiture by Jeremy Pettis.

“I Already Used That Song 15 Years Ago, Guy”

Serious Art, Skating Photos

America’s birthday! Nothing says “USA!” like dogs, Odouls, and Zima.
Brothas from different mothas! Pizz and Chase twinned it up at this years BBQ. “No time for slippin’!” It’s unknown if they communicated the wardrobe situation before hand or not, but Pizzy did take up smoking for the rest of his life to pose for this picture.

Newcomer on the scene, Francois, was pretty leery of all the celebration, but he did manage to make a few appearances and meet a few dogs. Did you know the French were some of the greatest contributors to our winning the Revolutionary War against those tyrants, the English?? Viva La France!

Is NA beer patriotic? Who am I to say? Who are you to say? Patriotism lives in the heart and soul of man. On the way to work the other day I saw a sticker on a car that said “GOD, GUNS, BEARDS”. Is that patriotism? Would god like guns? I suppose he can be pretty vengeful. Though, I suppose it depends if you’re asking Old Testament or New Testament god. Beards, obviously, that goes without saying. But do these things actually have anything to do with America? Some might say yes. Some might say no.

The last time I tasted Zima was probably 1994, Allison A’s party in the subdivision near the grade school. Probably threw back 1.5 of those babies and was feelin’ fine! It was great to relive those times gone by. Pre internet. Pre juuling. My keyboard still does not have a working “j” key, so I had to google “uuling” and use the copy and paste feature of my computer.

After all of that celebrating, I suppose it was time to skate.

Have I retired from filming? Is it possible? I think sometimes it would be nice. I retired from filming for this week at least. Here’s some photos instead!
Max was on a tear. He had already been doing scores of frontside crooked grinds before I arrived. He continued doing them for photos, like the one shown above. About two hours later he decided he’d film a line starting with a frontside crook. He couldn’t do it anymore. The moral of the story is, save your frontside crooks like you might save quarters your grandma sends you on your birthday. You might never know when you will need them.

Is this a reflection of the state of our society? Can a skate photo be ART? I think it’s probably only a picture of Max doing a backside noseblunt near some rubble. It’s pretty neat he was able to do this, as you might have noticed, you have to ollie onto that slab first, thus making the trick much more difficult.

Sleepy was recently featured on Instagram looking particularly GQ. Does he have a future as a male model?

Sleepy was taking this backside 180 nosegrind coast to coast, and then to everyones surprise, added a 180 out. I had to get super close for my attempt at a Slap style photo, and it made me very scared. But everything worked out in the end, and my safety remained intact.

Here’s a picture from a far away camera of the same trick. I’ve been using this really old 85mm manual focus Nikon lens, and its quite enjoyable. The contrast is really low, probably due to the crappy lens coating of the era, but it looks pretty nice.

If I had been in Slap position during this naughty flat line, I’d be writing this from my grave. My S/O would be rich from my life insurance pay out. My dog could afford college.

Hanley Juke arrived and wasted no time doing several of these nollie backside flips. He wasn’t impressed with himself though, “that’s my go-to”. I told him it’s a nice go-to. Then we hugged.

Rick Nasty did a little work on this backside flip. He wanted to give up a few times, but he persevered and in the end felt success. Now that is the American Dream. Literal boot strap pulling.

Finally, Brick was sitting off to the side, unsure of himself. I think maybe he had some low “T”. He must have visited New Male, because he busted a nice no comply and everyone was happy. The end.

Dining at the Wendys in the airport in Bahrain

Skating Videos

Estabrook, June 2018. Quick hits only. w/ Max Murphy, Rory Morgan, Danny Stemper, Al Stoops, and Nick Mistele.

Maybe this can be like a classic wiskate.com post.  This is what happened this week:

Grilling season is in full swing. That means at least once, maybe twice, maybe thrice a week, the crew gets in the backyard with some briquets and goes for it. Lately there’s been a lot of hamburgers, which is odd, because usually this is a sausage sort of household. I’m still not quite sure how to feel about it all.

These days there is a new homie in the equation: Francois. Francois is retired racing greyhound we’ve adopted about six months ago. His original name was BGR Crush, and during his time as a pro dog athlete he won six races. If you feel so inclined, if you google his original name you can find some videos of him racing. You’ll also learn he has almost 700 brothers and sisters. It’s taking some time for him to learn how to be a pet, but he’s come a long way. He loves to BBQ with all of his new friends.

This is Max. Max is really proud of his hamburger concoction. He’s got some sort of cheese/jalapeno bagel that he picked up from the store standing in as a bun. We don’t require strict adherence to grilling standards in the backyard. Experimentation is applauded (within reason).

Parkour is a sport(?) invented in France that involves running around to dubstep music. Generally Parkour would be frowned upon, but in this case there was no harm in a little “Jack be Nimble”, and a little M4M high five leap with ‘ol Pizz. (Not pictured: Pizz’s brat fell onto the charcoal and got all dirty. I sprayed his brat off with a hose. Pizzy requires a clean brat. He ate it and proclaimed it was the best brat he’d ever had. Was there some sort of chemical reaction when the brat got hosed down? More research is needed.)

Three men survey the results of the Parkour session. The phone pictured uses Republic Wireless, which is a budget cell phone provider. You should get Republic Wireless if you’re interested in having all of your incoming calls go straight to voicemail, and half of your texts never being delivered. It’s worth it to save the money.

Jacob and John. It’s a problem writing about these guys because on the computer I’m using the “J” key does not work. I always have to search for a file with a “J” in the filename that I can copy and paste. My go-to area to look is the “Completed Videos” folder. Sometimes I’ll Google “ohn McGuire” if I’m having trouble finding a capitalized version. Maybe I should get a new keyboard. I’ve put it off because, names excluded, you don’t actually need to use the letter very much.

Somebody had found some new ledges this weekend, wax was in a short supply. Gabe had this tiny satchel of crack rocks, and that was about it. The ledge really had to be seasoned in a well thought out manner, otherwise the tiny supply would be wasted.

Max didn’t have much trouble with the wax situation on this nosegrind. I find this to be a pretty forgiving maneuver when it comes to the wax required to get it to grind.

On the other hand, a backside smith is defcon 5 when it comes to required wax coverage. Those nuggets of wax were doled sparingly in an extremely calculated fashion, akin to how one might move his queen in a tense game of chess. After many tries with the kingpin brake being applied, one finally grinded, and Max rode away triumphantly.

Jabob with a wallride nollie. He did between 16 and 70 of these. It’s kind of a hard trick to time a photo of. He also almost murdered me with his skateboard while I took this photo. Once, about 15 years ago, I was filming Pizzy at those dumb green tennis courts at Marquette. Pizzy was going for it, with speed and intent, and somehow I didn’t notice a giant stick (I imagine it more like a tree trunk this many years on) directly in my path. When you’re falling while holding an expensive camera, somehow your instincts for self preservation go right out the window and your main instinct is to try to save the camera. It’s crazy how 1000s of years of evolution can be ignored to try to protect some consumer electronics (more research needed). While saving the camera I hyper extended my arm really bad, and I had to film switch the rest of that summer. The shoulder sometimes still bothers me to this day.

Finally, we must say goodbye to a wiskate OG, Elliott. If you peruse the archives, you’ll see he’s been around and featured on the site forever. You might get the wrong idea that his primary use was to appear in weird photographs. He actually in reality was a normal cat most of the time. He was really getting up there in age, and had been quite sick the last few months. Pour out some of your squirreled away original recipe Sparks for the dude. He deserves it. He’s also the reason this keyboard doesn’t have a working “J” key, he knocked some crap off a shelf onto it. So maybe I won’t ever fix it, an annoying keepsake from a cool dude.

Mini Video 90 – Nai Laila

Skating Videos

Compiled footage from several insta clips. Is that cheating? Is it allowable? It’s 2018, we get 1% of the traffic we got in 2003. I don’t think it matters.

This was all filmed April, May, June 2018.

w/ Max Murphy, Eric Risser, Pat Forster, Nick Mistele, Drew Rickaby, Chris Botsch, Gabe Chan, Sean Hanley, Taylor Lalk, and Mikey Al Wathiqui.

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