The Pump Cage is the mini skate park under the Mancunian Way to which skateboarders where exiled a few years ago because they dared to use the city centre for interesting things other than spending money. It sounds like it’s been more successful than I expected and now it’s won funding for lights and a power supply for the on site office.
I still think skating facilities should have been provided closer to the centre, but good for them anyway.
Illegal petrol powered roller skates are “flooding” into the UK, apparently. They have a 25cc engine and one litre fuel tank on the right boot, whilst the left freewheels. I have visions of poorly balancced people (like me) doing high speed pirouettes around the left boot. They’re illegal pretty much everywhere as well, so I don’t know where people could go to play with their black market skates.
It’s very hard to take action shots with my phone. I don’t understand how people can be interested in a sport as static and dull as football when there’s stuff like this around. Even when there are no competition runs on people are pulling stunts just to keep their legs warmed up. The street course is buzzing with plank pushers skating for the simple joy of it.
The skate vert competition is being led by chris gentry as we enter the final round.
Posted to Spinneyworld 22/10/05 by Ian
Technorati tag: moblog, Nokia 3230
Next Thursday is Go Skateboarding Day. SkateMCR have plans.
Vert skateboarding could be one of the new sports at the 2012 Olympics. It’s almost good enough news to make you forget how dire the logo is.
News worth going out and burning down a Tesco over.
Planning permission has been granted on the building that houses Jillys/ Rockworld that could see it becoming yet another bloody supermarket.
One of the commenters on the LiveJournal thread dug up some online information about the application–
Change of use of ground floor and basement nightclub to offices, retail unit for use as Class A1 (shop) or Class A2 (financial and professional services), B1 (business) and car parking for 28 cars
Others are certain it’s just a ploy to increase the value of the property and that there is no way a landmark like Jilly’s is going away. I’d like to believe that as awell, but I’m not so confident. The applicants, Bruntwood, seem to be all about turning a profit making the city centre a nice safe place for bland people to live and that’s a prime piece of Oxford Road for a developer.
I can imagine getting the planning permission was quite easy as well. There’s a part of Manchester council that doesn’t like youth and alternative culture. These are the people who last year drove skate boarders from an open, busy area where they could mingle safely with their non-plank pushing friends by threatening to fine them a grand if they didn’t start using a dark and isolated cage under the Mancunian Way. No matter that there’s already a Sainsburys less than two hundred yards away, these people would happily see a Mancunian icon shut down if they could replace it with the sort of cookie cutter capitalism they can more easily understand.
I shall see if I can find out more about this in the next few days and report back.
Previously-
Psychodiscography, including Music Box and Rockworld
Technorati tag: Manchester, Jillys, Rockworld, Clubbing, Tesco
This looks nice. It’s an indoor mountain bike park, with very North Shore style loops and curves. Sort of like a skate park for boys with bigger toys.
I’m sure there must be some abandoned mill somewhere in Manchester where they could do this……
Technorati tag: Mountain Bike
I’ve mentioned that I’m using the Indy radio programme to download and rate music. I think I’ve found my first Must Buys- A B C Teens. From their page at Vitaminic-
Hello!! We are 3 very sexy Yorkshire girls. Amanda (16) Becci (17) and Charlotte (16) and we know what boys like, so COME AND LISTEN!!
Got to love the cartoony home page as well. Download their songs from here.
Hardcore Boy Porn (MP3, 2.7mB)
Technorati tag: Music, Skate Punk
By all rights Tony Hawk Underground 2 should be crap. It’s the sixth Tony Hawk skating game from Neversoft. It should be an unoriginal attempt to get a licensed product on the shelves for Christmas. But it’s not. This time you’re a noob skater following Tony and Bam on the World Destruction Tour, an illegal stake/prank contest. It basically plays like Jackass: The Video Game with more a skate bias. They also added a classic mode that lets you play all the levels in the old THPS3 style. The sound track is up to the usual standards (Holy Calamity, the hip hop track from the tank rampage in Buffalo Soldiers, is current my fav). Neversoft must have sold their souls in order to pull off a sixth game and not fall into the pattern of tired annual re-treads (insert your own list of EA titles as examples here).
My opinion of the Manchester City Centre Management Company and the Council sinks lower. Not content with fining skateboarders a grand for making Cathedral Gardens look like a fun place to be, it turns out they’re charging kids to use the pokey little skate park they’ve built as an alternative.
Edit I started writing a comment in reply to Ian J’s, but it stretched out, and rather than risk spreading it over several boxes, I thought I’d put it in here-
Ah, you’ve fallen for the lie. I bet MCCMC would be hard pressed to find any instances of collisions between boarders and pedestrians that have resulted in injuries. They’re just trying to create a fear of these “tearaway youths”. It’s not as heinous as their earlier lie- that they were doing this to protect the kids from drug dealers. (By moving them from an open, easily policed area where they had strength in numbers and lots of passing traffic to a dark little cage far away from watchful eyes. Right.)
These people have a blinkered, commercial view of what should go on in the city centre. It’s just another example of the recurring problems Manchester’s councils have had with youth culture, the worst example of which being the destruction of a thriving nightlife in the 60s when the abomination that is Arndale was dropped on top of the most popular venues. This was achieved by, amongst other things, the planting of news stories about the prevalence of drugs amongst this subculture and its implied danger to the children of good families. There was also an appeal to parents’ racism, you can’t have a good smear campaign with out a bit of xenophobia. (Potted version, a more complete telling of the tale can be found in Shake, Rattle and Rain.)
It’s a bit harder to play the race card in a debate about skate boarding, but I think they may have gone for a more contemporary bogeyman. Notice in the first report the reference to older boarders leading the youngsters astray. Older boarders, hmmmmm. What interest could they have in hanging around with children? There’s no way it could possibly be a love of the sport- must be kiddy fiddlers in baggy clothing.
I’m not a skateboarder (though I admit, if I had a BMX I’d want to play on the street furniture) so I can’t really explain why this makes me so angry.
Manchester City Centre Management Company are planning �1000 fines for skateboarders. Somehow, and I can- just- see the link, this is supposed to crack down on teenage drinking and drug dealing. Perhaps they’d be better off targetting the drug dealers and the shops that sell alcohol to the underage?
Skateboarding is banned in the city centre, but there have been no facilities provided as alternative locations. MCCMC’s rather pathetic argument is that there is a skate park under the Mancunian Way, which would hold more water if they didn’t immediately add that it hasn’t even opened yet. They should at least stop being twats and run this campaign when there’s somewhere else for the kids to go. I’d be all for lifting the skateboard ban in some small part of the city centre as well, possibly with a curfew.
Ancoats is one of the most important world sites when it comes to the history of the Industrial Revolution. So, if it’s done properly, it’s good to hear there’s a �65million redevelopment plan for three mills.
I scour Ancoats every few months, but I still can’t find the Bridge 5 Mill green centre. There used to be a skate park, but it has now closed. And the authorities wonder why the kids have to take to the streets.
I’ve been in a wierd mood all day. The realisation that I’m three days away from being unemployed again struck me this morning and, along with some other stuff (lots of little things, which is the way it works with me) brought me down.
Hopefully I can get some writing done soon. Heavensent is on sporadic updates and I’ve had an idea for something a bit more biographical (in fact it’ll be stealing and then fictionalising some stuff I’ve blogged.)
The Friday Five never appealed to me, but this long list of questions has been doing the email rounds recently so I think I’ll share my answers-
1. What time is it? 21:44
2. Name as it appears on your birth certificate? Ian Pattinson
3. Nickname: None that I know of
4. Parents name/s: Jen & Ron
5. Number of candles that appeared on your last birthday cake: 33
6. Favourite food : Food
7.Date that you regularly blow them out? 11 Jan
8. Eye colour: blue
9. Hair colour: black/ dark brown
10. Piercing: no
11. Tattoos: no
12. How much do you love your job? My job loves me so much it has set me free. If I come back then it was meant to be (Hah!)
13. Favourite colour: blue
14. Hometown: Born in Bridgend, but family home is in Cumbria
15. Current residence: Victoria Park, manchester UK
17. Been to Africa? no
18. Been toilet papering? no
19. Loved somebody so much it made you cry? yes
20. Been in a car accident? yes. They weren’t all my fault.
22. Sprite or 7UP? sprite
23. Favourite movie? The Italian Job
24. Favourite holiday: Chamonix last year
25.Favourite day of the week: Saturday
26. Favourite word or phrase: Arse! (or Buttocks if I’m being polite)
28. Favourite restaurant: Haven’t gone to enough to really decide/ Yo Sushi, cause that’s where I went last.
29. Favourite flowers: Daffodils
30. Favourite drink : Alcoholic- Jennings Sneck Lifter, non Alcoholic- Fresh ground coffee
31. Favourite sport to watch: skate boarding
32. Favourite ice-cream: vanilla- with my own insane concoction of chocolatey bits and sauces slathered on the top
33. Favourite Sesame Street character: cookie monster
34. Disney or Warner Bros.? Warner Brothers
35. Favourite fast food restaurant: Lahore
36. When was your last hospital visit? I work in one, so Thursday. For real, Christmas ’99 after being hit by a car.
37. What colour is your bedroom carpet? green
38. How many times did you fail your drivers test? none
39. Who is the last person you got e-mail from before this? Feed back to my blog, the New York Times and lots of spam offering me mortgages, septic tanks and porn.
41. Which single store would you choose to max your credit card? Forbidden Planet
42. What do you do most often when you are bored? surf and blog
43. Name the person that you are friends with that lives the farthest away? My sister in Val d’Isere
44. Most annoying thing people ask me? When are you going to ask her out?
45. Bedtime? 11pm-1am
46. Who will respond the quickest? Dunno
47. Who is the person you sent this to that is least likely to respond? Jenny, Brian and Emma, because this is a reply to the ones they sent me.
48. Favourite all time TV show: Buffy
49. Last person you went out to dinner with? Jenny, Brian, Damian, Elke, Daz and Emily, or, if you extend it to mean any meal, my parents today.
That makes two of us, as I have taken the day off as well. My momentum for work this morning was non-existent. I thought I’d do something constructive, but Office XP won’t install, so now I have to remove the old version (it kept crashing whilst trying to remove old components), defrag the disk and try again.
Somebody has decided to install some skate stuff in Victoria Park, a short detour from my commute route. There are a pair of quarter pipes, a jump box, spine and a couple of grind rails. Now I need a BMX, and a time to go there when there aren’t any kids around to laugh at the inept old guy.
I don’t know if I can keep up work posing for much longer.
I checked out the new Selfridges store in town today. There’s a great food hall, and I now know where to get my badger hair shaving brush. But there is definitely something wrong with buying skate style T shirts in a shop for the rich and wannabe posh.
Seeds–
The final guidance signal had come on when promised and they had been bearing down it ever since. A white scar on the grey of the ocean had eventually appeared on the horizon and slid toward them. Closer to, it was an irregular shape very low in the water, with two ships moored to the south and another to the west. �Half Time base to Wasp flight. Receiving?�
�Receiving. This is Wasp flight leader. Request permission to land.�
�Permission granted. Your only other option is to turn that thing into a boat. Approach from the west. Light crosswind from the northeast.�
�Okay flight. The Cicciles should land first. They will be closer to empty.�
There was an average length runway cut into the rock, more than long enough for the Wasps, laid with a hexagonally patterned rubberised matting. The fighters landed close together and were bustled off the runway to refuelling spots where their pilots were helped from the cockpits and walked with a cramped hobble to a feeding and flushing tent.
The Wasps landed in reverse order, until Four landed hard. The right wheel collapsed and the plane pirouetted off the runway toward the nearest ship. It came to rest with one wing crumpled against the hull. The pilot and navigator jumped out and ran the best they could for cover, but there was no fire. Two, and Reed, approached the runway more carefully.
As they taxied into the rest area, Reed noticed the fuel hoses and drop tanks around the other planes. He climbed down to be greeted by an officer in naval whites. With no understanding of Navy rankings he saluted, just in case. �Wing commander Reed, I am Captain Browdy, commander of Half Time field.�
�Pleased to be here sir.�
�Come this way and I shall see you are fed and flushed. Our mechanics will want to talk to you about the state of your plane.�
�You are planning a fast turn around?�
�Half Time is tidal. We have about twenty thousand counts until the island is under five spans of water. There is only stowage space for a few planes on our ships, and one of those has been taken by your number four.�
�I do not think any of my flight are ready for another trip just yet.�
�Never fear. We have new crews for all your planes.� By now they were within the tent. At the far end sat plane crews in fresh gear, all ready for take off. Reed�s flight eyed them suspiciously, between huge mouthfuls of fish stew. �You shall be billeted here for a few days, until the next flight arrives, then you shall take over from them.�
Flushed, and with a bowl of stew each, Reed and Jay stood outside the tent watching the refuelling. On the far side of the runway, the wreck of Four was having inflatable pontoon strapped to it and filled. As the tide rose, so it would be lifted and could be moved to the crane that hung over the ship�s side.
�Horse told me something big was happening. I think this is even bigger than he suspected.�
Now that all the faux patriotism is out of the way, I really want to get the Union Jack pisspot helmet I saw in Exit, and the pair of Etnies Lo-Cuts with the UJ in the E logo.