RAMP WORLD
Tim Payne is on vacation this month building a mammoth cycloid bowl ramp with fifteen hips, twelve spines, thirty-two extensions, five
escalators and a chorus of dancing girls. In his stead, special correspondent Vaj Potenza has contributed a human interest feature of fact-
filled suggestions to keep the sessions small. Keep those cards and letters coming for Payne, though; he'll need something to do after he
finishes all that work. Write to Tim Payne, Ramp World, c/o Thrasher Magazine, P.O. Box 884570, San Francisco, CA 94188-4570.
101 Cheap And Cheesy Ways To Keep Them Off Your Ramp
It's true that there is a bond among skaters, a
brother and sisterhood that cannot be denied. Most
skaters would gladly let someone partake in their
backyard creations if asked in a cool way. But, if
you're one of those exceptional types who enjoys
being a stingy toad, if you delight in pretending that
you're superior to others as they grovel at your feet,
if you're insecure about looking stupid in front of a
bunch of rulers because you can't skate your own
ramp, if the miser's life is the life for you, then
here's what you've been waiting for: a list of handy
excuses and ways to keep the scum from dirtying up
that precious ramp that daddy built for you. Hit 'em
with one of these when you answer the door:
1. "I have typho-malarial, cancerous, eximatic, cornification
of the nose and it's highly deadly and contagious.
2. "Do you have a note from your parents?" (This one is
especially effective with people over 18.)
3. "It's wet."
4. "The coping's broken." (Don't say this if you have metal
caping.)
5. "Twenty dollars, please
6. Live with a family of cannibals
7. Hire a steam shovel to dump a ton of dirt on anyone who
shows up
8. Surround the ramp with asps and poison-tipped spikes.
9. Build your ramp directly beside the gateway to hell
10. "My parents said no." (Make sure you still have
parents.)
11. Put trans-dimensional doors in the flat bottom that suck
people into another plane of existence.
12. Mine the roll-out decks.
13. Answer the door with tinfoil on your head, holding a
loaded gue, wearing maple leaves and yaling "WHAT!"
14. Tell them there is a mandatory McTwist requirement.
15. "In order to skate, you must bite the head off the
sacrificial poocle."
16. Tell them the ramp is now for BMX only.
17. Don't speak to them in the native tongue.
18. "Sure, go ahead and skatel First I want you to meet Fifi
my angry pet alligator
19. "You may skate in exchange for your first born."
20. Keep a troll under the roll-out deck. (Dad might work)
21. Offer a lunch of tofu-stuffed Rocky Mountain oysters.
22. "You can skate if nothing you own has stickers on it."
23. Park your car on the flatbottom
24. Require everyone to wear elbow pads, knee pads, a
helmet and a blindfold
25. "No chain walets."
26. "No goofy knit caps."
27. "No head gaskets."
28 "No clothes."
29. "Wrong haircut
30 Keep changing the subject.
31. Wear florescent clothes and ask if they want to cruise
the mall instead.
32. When your visitors aren't looking, knock them out with
chloroform and ship them to Zimbabwe. Do this often
enough and they'll get sick of it and stop coming over.
33. "God told me to tell you NO!"
24 THE MACAZE
34. Build an indoor ramp in the same room as a herd of
smelly animals.
35. Make them drop their pants and tell them to turn their
heads and cough
36. Be a fascist, Nobody likes a fascist except other fascists.
and it they come over, be a socialist.
37. "Sure you can skate...if you marry my sister!" (Make
sure your sister is ugly. This excuse works especially
well on female skaters)
38. Live with a mad scientist who needs subjects for his
experiments
39. Keep a bucket of highly corrosive acid balanced over
your door so it'll fall on any unwanted visitors.
40. Contract rabies and bite people.
41. Answer the door with a chainsaw covered in blood.
42. Begin babbling insanely about how duck-billed platy-
puses are taking over the world and how we should all
build our platypus shelters before it's too late.
43. "Only if you guys never skate again after today."
44. Build a ramp with lots of splinters and insist everyone
skate barefoot.
45. As you're explaining why you don't let people skate, wet
your pants and smile.
46. Live on a planet with an oxygen-poor samosphere.
47. "We're not skating in honor of National Lethargy Week!"
48. "Are you someone famous? No? Beat in
49. "Nope, sorry, you're too purk. You might scare my
mom.
50 "Nope, sorry, you're not punk enough. You might scare
my mom."
51. Answer the door without wearing your skin.
52. Scream "Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh..." and
keep screaming until they get bored and walk away.
53. Build your ramp out of balsa wood
54. Place bear traps in the yard and trip wires that set off
explosions to scare people away
55. Live underwater so only skaters with submarines can
come to your house.
56. Elevate your ramp to about three thousand feet so only
skaters with helicopters and small planes can come to
your house.
57. Keep losing the key to the chain.
58. "You may skate in exchange for a pint of lung tissue"
59 Light it on fire every time people begin to skate.
60. Build in close proximity to a nuclear waste disposal site.
61. Hire an army of zombies to guard the ramp.
62. Insist everyone ride with small clay wheels while you
throw small square pebbles on the transitions.
63. Dress up in a chicken suit and run around the flatbottom
making clucking noises before anyone has a chance to
drop in
64. Nal the plies from underneath so the nail tips stick out
of the ramp
65. "Street skating is where it's at these days."
66. Plant several big trees in every transition
67. Build a piranha-filled moat around your ramp.
68. Hire aliens to abduct any unwanted visitors and perform
cruel experiments on them.
69. Put a dart board on one side of the fatbottom and throw
darts while they ride.
70. Cover the surface in Spam so it's real slippery and
smells bad.
71. "You can skate if nothing you own has duct tape on it."
72. Sing songs about brotherly love in an off-key voice and
throw flowers al people while they skate. While some
people might sing along, this is sure to annoy others.
73. Play Barry Manilow tunes extra loud at all times.
74. Snake visitors and then do fakies without ever hitting
the ip. If this doesn't work, throw snakes.
75 "Not today. Mommy's coming home from the asylum."
76. Layer the Masonite with cobblestones.
77. Raise killer boes under the decks
78 Build near an open sewer.
79 "What ramp? Who is this? Is this some sick joke?"
80. Make your ramp invisible so nobody even thinks you
have one.
81. "I'm sleeping
82. Every time somebody gouges themselves, run up and
put salt in their wounds.
83. Build your ramp out of metal and keep it in a giant
freezer so people stick to it whan they touch it
84. Make fake maps that actually lead people to a major
highway
85. Make sure that both roll-out decks are in direct line of
a major highway
86. "Sorry, no skating while the Earth is orbing the Sun"
87. Live with bored, out of work rent-a-cops who will
harass visitors.
88. Lease the property to a nude sinbathers association as
a sun deck
89. Answer the door, holding two electrodes in your hand
with electricity coursing through them and scream,
Can't you see I'm busy!"
90. Get a pet dinosaur to eat any unwanted company.
91. Answer the door dressed like barber with a human
head in one hand, scissors in the other, and say.
"Next!"
92 Springload certain pieces of ply so they'll eject people
forty-three feet into the air at the touch of a switch.
93. "The only true ramp is in your mind."
94. Tell them the ramp is now a homeless shelter and the
occupants are sleeping
95. Build a ramp with 90-degree transitions.
96. Crisscross deadly, invisible laser beams over the cope
97. "You'll need to sweep some of that uranium dust off
the flatbottom. Here's a broom"
98. Tll need signed and dated references from the owners
of the last ten things you've skated."
99. Build it someplace where humans don't exist.
100. Build your ramp on the train tracks
101. Don't build a ramp at al
Note: Some of these techniques may make ramp upkeep
rather expensive. Others will render it virtually unskateable.
However, if you use these excuses, you probably don't skate
anyway. If someone is able to deal with all this and still wants
to skate, you should let them. They're probably hard-core
enough to skate anything.
-Val Potenza
RATE
St
GEORGE WATANABE
Z Products, PO Box 5397. Sonto Monica, CA 90409 (213) 476-4857
DEVASTATION
SKATEBOARD FILM