Wigwam blog

I was looking for pictures of the Thamesmead estate which was featured in “A clock work orange” when I stumbled across this cool BMX blog which had some nice pictures of skate spots. I’m now on a quest to find them…..

I stumbled across this advert on the back of Kingdom Mag and being the overgrown grom that I am, I couldn’t help but notice how impossibly wrong the caption is! The Conference are probably the biggest company in our industry and I think it’s pretty shabby that they get things like this so wrong.

How the hell did Colin manage to do a fakie zero-spin alley-oop fishbrain?! He must be amazing! First things first, it’s obviously not topside. Secondly, alley-oop is a direction of spin, so I ask myself how did he actually manage to “zero-spin” onto it? Sorry for stating the obvious but surely “zero spin” means that no spinning was involved in getting on the trick. Thirdly, you shouldn’t use fakie and zero-spin in the same caption. For example, if there was a picture of someone doing a kind grind down a rail and the caption says kind grind then you can assume it’s a standard kind-grind. If the caption says fakie kindgrind, then you can assume that the skater has skated fakie up to the rail and done a kindgrind with no spinning involved. It is not necessary to include zero-spin as we know that a kindgrind is an alley-oop or truspin trick and seeing as the caption doesn’t mention any spins being involved we know that its zero-spin. If the caption said zero-spin kindgrind then we know the skater would have had to roll fakie up to the trick, so in this case you would not have use “fakie” in the caption. So, to summaries, a “fakie” kindgrind and a “zero-spin” kindgrind are exactly the same thing. The first simply refers to the direction you approach the trick and second refers to the lack of spin used in the trick. It’s not necessary to use both terms in a caption. A trick like kindgrind does not need to be prefixed with “Alley-oop” as a kindgrind is always alley-oop. (you can also call it an alley-opp topside mizou, but we won’t get into that now) The same does not apply for fishbrain. This because a fishbrain is always going forward and there isn’t a name for it when it’s alley-oop. So you simply prefix it with alley-oop to let you know that the skater has skated forward towards the obstacle and jumped 180 in an alley-oop direction and onto a fishbrain, I have know idea why some tricks have more than one name and others don’t. In theory a kindgrind could be called an alley-oop sweatstance, but for some reason someone gave it name.

To help explain this better remember this:

Truspin & Alley-oop are both directions of spin.
Zero-Spin simply means no spin.
Fakie means to go backwards, or rolling backwards.

If anyone cares enough to add anything to this please do. Abusive responses are warmly welcome. One more thing… can we please start calling topside-mistrals OVERPUSS again.