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.