Google run the internet and they watch and record every single thing you do online, which is bad for things like personal privacy, but great for producing interesting snowboarding statistics.  They've just released the Google Zeitgeist which is a list of the most searched terms in 2010. Snowboarding clearly doesn't have the same significant global impact as the earthquake in Haiti, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or Justin Beiber, but we did find a few interesting things and while we were at it we took a look at some of the other snowboarding related stats we could ply from Google’s cold electric soul. In this article we find out lots of exciting snowboard facts including:

• Which country loves snowboarding the most
• What the kick-ass Boy Scouts were wearing in 1983, and...
• Is Shaun White bigger than snowboarding?

Today it was reported that Charlie Sheen died in a snowboarding accident. Here's the Global Associated News article

Fortunately this was not true and he got better. See

These are just a few things that Charlie Sheen would have been remembered for:

• Shooting his fiancée in the arm
• Screwing some of Heidi Fleiss' stable of prostitutes
• Overdosing on cocaine
• Threating to beat his pregnant wife
• Being convicted of beating a different wife
• Starring in Two and a Half Men where he currently gets paid a reported $1.88 million per episode

A couple of weeks ago while doing one of our in-depth consumer advice articles on the new Willy Finder one-piece suit range we made a passing prediction that the monoski might make a return next season. We were confident that this wasn’t going to happen because clearly monoskiing took the worst bit of skiing (the hard boots) and teamed it with the worst bit of snowboarding (going uphill) to create an incredibly freaky and pointless sport that no one in their right mind would want to do. E.g. 

Unfortunately fellow blogosphereist, Misplaced Person got in touch afterwards to break the bad news that monoskiing is somehow still alive. So we decided to brave it and take a look at what’s been going down in the world of monosking...

The last two years have seen an unprecedented increase in space exploration themed marketing campaigns for snowboard companies. I've no idea why, but all of a sudden everyone’s at it.

According to some of the latest surveys about 25% of people in the UK and US don’t believe that man has landed on the moon. That’s a frightening quantity of mentals. I imagine they might also be a bit sceptical that snowboarders have now conquered space, but we have gathered together some photographic and video evidence that will blow their tiny little minds...

In 490BC the Greek army defeated the Persian army at the Battle of Marathon. A solider called Pheidippides was chosen to convey the happy news back to Athens, which he did in some style, by running the whole way before giving the news to a grateful public and promptly keeling over and dying. For no obvious reason this appealed to some people the sport of marathon running was invented...

Last week we wrote an uplifting article recognising some of the fine upstanding snowboarders who go to great lengths to give back to the community and help improve the world around us. This week we look at a lad who is a complete wanker...

Digital artist Henning Ludvigsen is the man who illustrated the pin-up girls on this year's Burton Restricted Love series. He's written a good article on his blog showing how the design developed from the initial sketches to the final version. It's worth a read. 


This was the nurse design, progressing from skier, through slutty to the finished illustration. 

Here's the end result...

Related Article...

Two seasons ago the Burton Love boards kicked up a big old fuss with the Playboy model graphics. This is why there'll be no slutty nurses this season... Relive the moment.

A few weeks ago someone called Bergerler posted this on the Yobeat site…

“From ads to interviews the values of snowboarders equate fun with smoking weed, drinking beer, and dropping out of school. I know this isn't true for most snowboaders out there, but then why is it so rare to read about snowboarders who are using their snowboarding in a positive way, or combining education and snowboarding? In most ads, you see white males wearing chains next to girls in binkinis.

Show me something different. Show me snowboarders who are living the dream and making a positive impact in their community instead of perpetuating the wrongful stereotypes about snowboarding.”

As self-proclaimed experts in snowboarding stereotypes we decided that Bergerler’s cry for help was a call to action. So this week we decided to find Bergerler some snowboarders who are fighting his stereotypes and making a positive impact on our sport...

The Relentless Freeze Festival marked the second consecutive weekend of snowboarding events in London and also the end of England’s brief snowboarding season. 

Over the last ten years I’ve been to various forms of London based snowboard competitions, but this was the first time I’d been to this most recent FIS World Cup incarnation. Here are a few things I noticed...

After spending the last few weeks in China where snowboard blogs are forbidden, I arrived in London this weekend and suffering from a hefty dose of jet lag I headed over to the always strangely disappointing Ski & Snowboard Show. The Ski & Snowboard Show claim that they are ‘the largest consumer winter sports show in the world set in the heart of London’, which is a bit like me claiming that I’m the greatest snowboarder on earth sitting on my sofa. 

In amongst the crowd of shopportunists I found a few things of interest. If for some reason you didn’t make it to the biggest show in the London W14 8UX post code this weekend here are the top three products that will be rocking your snowboard world this season...

This season Burton have jazzed up the rider profiles of some of their top pros by building some interactive autobiographical timelines. They obviously got their inspiration from our snowboard history timeline. It’s a good way to display the history of each snowboarder and its worth a look at some point. What we that we found interesting though, was that it gave us a quick way to compare the development of each snowboarder to see if there were any interesting trends. Fortunately for this article there were plenty of interesting trends and we’ve even managed scrape enough together to produce a handy infographic. Read on if you are:

• A snowboarder wondering when you are going to get that huge Burton contract, or more likely, at what point you missed the gravy train.
• Interested in seeing what kind of genetic monster you would produce if you mixed all the super-pros together to produce an average.
• Planning to turn the fruit of your loins into the next Shaun White. Think of this as a how-to guide to producing your very own snowboarding superstar/retirement fund…

A couple of months ago we took a look at 10 actresses you might spot snowboarding this season. Here's the long-anticipated follow-up - an internet stalk of eleven famous snowboarding actors and one ex-famous snowboarding actor...

Tom Sims was one of the founders of our sport and he is undoubtedly a snowboarding legend. Today we take a look back at his other great contribution to the sport – his awesome fashion sense...

The Achilles heel of snowboards is that they are absolutely no use for going uphill, as a result we are forced to use one of the following options:

• Hiking – Always worth avoiding
• Chairlifts – Practical, but dull
• Helicopters – Awesome, but you do need a tame pilot and they’re always tricky to find

But there is another option, and we’re busy trying to find a way to afford one right now...

This was in the back of this seasons's Transworld Snowboarding Gear Guide. How many Photoshop mistakes can you spot?

Also its a bit strange that the lad in the sunscreen commercial has no exposed skin at all. Headhunter don't seem to have much confidence in their product. Piz Buin on the other hand show how it should be done...

Snowboard Porn – Yup, we’ve gone there.

Last year we wrote an article on snowboarding tattoos and that article has become by far the most read part of our site. It’s so popular that the article now accounts for more than 25% of all the visitors who have ever come to the site. 

But since last year the internet has continued to fill up with more snowboarding inspired tattoos so it’s time for Snowboarding Tattoos 2 or I guess Snowboarding Tattwo. Because the first article ended up bringing so many readers to our site I image that this one will probably put us up somewhere in the Google/Facebook range…

Last week this website disappeared and our internet connection broke, which made fixing the site very tricky. After hitting a lot of buttons and studying the art of waiting, the Illicit Snowboarding is back. While things were broken I took the off-line time to make the site look different. Kind of going for a snowboard top sheet with stickers look for the new season.

Normal service will resume shortly.

This is a movie that was released in 2002 and I’m amazed that I’d never heard of it until recently - It is epic. Set in the brilliantly named Karawanken Range in Austria and featuring Pete Sampras’ wife, normally reliable actor Rufus Sewell, and some bloke who used to be in EastEnders, it’s a budget version of Cliffhanger with going-down-mountains replacing the going-up-mountains format. The working tile was “The Extremists” but due to other events at the time that had to be dropped rapidly...

Other then the Olympics the only time that skiing and snowboarding really makes the news is when someone dies. The amount of press coverage is determined by a complex equation using variables such as; how old the people were, how famous they were, and more recently an obsession with whether they were wearing a helmet or not. But the factor that has by far the biggest impact and guarantees a veritable press frenzy is when a large number of people are killed or injured, and the most consistent and successful mass killer of skiers and snowboarders is the ski lift. Today we take a look at over sixty years of ski lift accidents using a couple of infographics…

The snowterbike has a history spanning back over 70 years and yet you’ve probably never come across one. In this article we take a look at the history, present and future of the snowterbike, and like any good internet story, we start with the Nazis…

Previously in the Last Resorts articles we’ve taken a look at some snowboard destinations that you aren’t likely to get a chance to try because they’re a bit too warm, too remote or too warlike. This week’s resort however is lovely, it’s easy to get to, beautifully maintained and there are no lift queues, the only drawback is the price…It costs a cool $250,000 to join. Welcome to the Yellowstone Club…

This was Darren’s career plan…

1.       Master the most dangerous element of snowboarding

2.       Set a world record that won’t been beaten for over 10 years

3.       Sit back and let the fame start and the money roll in

Unfortunately for Darren, things didn’t quite work out according to plan. He managed to do the hard work and achieve points 1 & 2, however point 3 has been a significantly more evasive. In 1999 he became the fastest man to ever strap on a snowboard, but over ten years later pretty much no one has ever heard of the guy. Here’s the reason why…

1. Paris Hilton

Famous for being in: The Simple Life, House of Wax, a sex tape, jail.

aka: Judging a book by its cover III

It’s our third book review and we’ve now used the weak ‘Judging a book by its cover’ pun two more times than we hoped to, but if there’s one thing we’ve found out about snowboard books it’s that the key to them is in the cover. And ‘The Way of the Snowboarder’ by Rob Reed doesn’t disappoint because this book has the shiniest cover I’ve ever seen. Its mesmerising sheen is simply awesome. If you want the most reflective coffee book possible on the subject of snowboarding then read no further because here it is…

Shaun White is the first real celebrity snowboarder. Sure there have been, and are now, plenty of other well-known snowboarders, but they are only really recognized by other snowboarders. Shaun White on the other hand has a profile that reaches far outside of our little sporting world. There are many benefits to being a celebrity, $9million a year being the most obvious, but there are also drawbacks and one of those drawbacks is a pretty frightening bunch of fans and their need to produce pictures of Shaun White. Shaun White fan art seems to split into four categories: good, bad, cartoons and a nice bit of old fashioned stalking. Thankfully that first category has so few examples we can miss it entirely and concentrate on the freaky ones...

91 Words for Snow is still one of the best snowboard DVDs out there. It’s a movie that looks at the wide variety of disciplines that the sport of snowboarding includes and the title comes from the story that the Eskimos have 91 different words for snow. Unfortunately that story is an urban legend, because in reality the Eskimo language have about the same number of words for snow as English has. It got us wondering though, how many words for snowboard are there? As there is clearly only one word for that in English, and that would be an extremely short and miserable blog post, we decided to find out what the word for snowboard was in the other languages of the world…

There are only four things to do in Finland: snowboarding, drinking, racing cars, or killing Russians.

The season is over and unless you have the money to fly to a different hemisphere, or you have a local snowdome, your snowboarding days are temporally over. At least that’s the traditional perception, because it doesn’t need to be the way, you could always try snowboarding on a different surface.

This week we take a scientific look at the alternative off-season snowboarding surfaces to help you select the one that’s right for you. We’ve used a rigorous scoring system to determine which alternative surface is the most viable by tracking the two most important factors; usability and danger. Here's how the scoring works…

Surface Usability Factor

1 = It’s like riding a carpet through a Velcro factory

10 = It’s just like snowboarding

Surface Danger Factor

1 = As dangerous as snowboarding on a fluffy combination of cushions, feathers and kittens

10 = You will die

Half of the fun of art is what the artist’s say about themselves and their work. The artists that produce snowboard sculptures are a particularly good example of the breed.

Dean Lauze 

Medium – Orcas

What the artist says…

Dean is a classically trained, professional multimedia artist. He has been operating a successful Arts company, D’Arts, since 1987. He has extensive experience with large and small-scale murals, most drawing and painting mediums, printmaking, sculpture and graphic design

Reality…

Seems like a nice enough chap… until you find out that he painted this mural in school gym.

Fucking hell!

Computer simulators have been used for years to train jet pilots, astronauts and carjackers. Today this same technology is being used by the snowless and mountain-free kingdom of Great Britain to train small children to snowboard.

The fascinating medical history of the most smiling man in snowbusiness

I've only reviewed one book on this site before and despite that book’s promising cover the actual ready bit was a bit disappointing. Thankfully Chris Klug’s ‘To the Edge and Back’ is the opposite; it’s a book with a bad cover that turns out to be a surprisingly good read...

Last Resort No.4 - Cyprus
It’s a Last Resort because you can no longer find it on the Internet.

When you think of holidays in Cyprus it usually conjures up visions of fat English holidaymakers drinking too much and toasting themselves crimson on the beaches of Ayia Napa, but Cyprus does have a winter holiday option.

Before we start the story of Mr Koch’s quest to snowboard down the seven highest summits on each of the seven continents, it’s worth pointing out that Stephen Koch has a funny name. Throughout his life Koch constantly and deliberately mispronounces his own name so that Koch rhymes with ‘crotch’, however Koch is a German name and if you actually say it correctly its pronounced ‘cock’.

It’s also worth pointing out that the story of the seven summits snowboarding quest has a bit of a strange reoccurring theme. So without further ado let’s take a looks at the story of Koch, Dick, Bonar and Tackle...

There’s rarely any specific Valentine’s Day coverage in the world of snowboarding news, and if there was any at all this year it was swamped by the tsunami of Olympic coverage. Snowboarding blogs are not the only ones that apparently gave Valentine’s a miss this year, for example the florist that was supposed to deliver flowers to my girlfriend decided not to bother, so I spent the following week in a world of trouble. Having narrowly survived death yet again I think it’s time someone gave the world of snowboarding romance a bit of coverage, so today we take a look at snowboarding themed wedding advice...

For your average punter, understanding snowboarding tricks is a thankless task and now that the tricks are getting ever more complicated it’s becoming difficult for even seasoned snowboarders to understand what is happening. Sean White’s recently unveiled visual assault of swirls and flips, the Double McTwist 1260, is just the latest example. During the Olympics a few of news organisations had a stab at explaining these tricks by creating a variety of visuals. Today we take a look at these attempts and to top things off we give out some virtual medals...

This amazingly bad movie poster just appeared on Photoshop Disasters. 

Favourite user comment… “The more I look, the more it feels like I injected vinegar behind my eyes.”

Good news for us is that amongst all the visual mess there is some snowboarding to look forward to, although it would appear the guy is snowboarding on a shag-pile carpet. Here’s the trailer which sadly has similar production values to the poster and features a logo plagiarised from Indiana Jones...

If there’s one thing that 50% of the population will remember about this year’s Olympic snowboarding, it will be Shaun White’s gold medal winning halfpipe run. For the other 50% the defining moment was when Hannah Teter and Clair ‘her surname sounds like a ceramic bum washing device’ Bidez, featured in the 2010 Sports Illustrated swimwear edition. 

As a result the defining moments of the Oympics according to a large number of snowboard blogs and forums have been; Hannah Teter’s bum, Clair Bidez’s weird belly button, the impressive amount of Photoshoping involved and definitive proof that it is not possible to look sexy in rubber boots...

So the Olympic snowboarding is as good as over for another four year, and now the news coverage can get back to the war in Afghanistan and that’s exactly what we are going to do. This week illicit takes a look at a snowboarding destination that’s not on most snowboarder’s travel plans due to the constant danger of war-induced death.

Last Resort No. 3 - Snowboarding Afghanistan

People have been warring in Afghanistan since the duel inventions of Afghanistan and people. There are very few places on earth that have seen so many and such varied people, come to practice the art of running amok. Just a few of the notable exponents, so far, include; Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British (4 times and counting), the Russian Empire, the USSR and most recent bandwagon jumpers - the USA.

Notorious Snowboarders #2: Melo “Mellow“ Imai

In the next few days as the Vancouver Olympics kicks off a select few snowboarders from around the world will compete for Olympic glory. For a few weeks these previously relatively unknown athletes will be thrust into the spotlight and carry the hopes of their nations on their shoulders. A very small number will succeed and become household names, but most will not, and after the Olympics they will quietly go back to relative obscurity. This is the tale of one snowboarder who was a Japanese medal hope in the 2006 Olympics before a crash and the results of a difficult upbringing took her, not only back to obscurity, but into infamy...

In the lead up to the impending Vancouver Winter Olympics it looked like one of the big snowboarding stories was going to be the first appearance by a Bahamian snowboarder - Korath Wright.

Shaun White has his own private halfpipe, DC have their Mountain Lab and Illicit has our very own private resort and ice palace. 

Photographic proof that we do. Wear it corporates.

White House : DC Mountain : The Glorious Kingdom of Illicit

This week Illicit has a crack at the very topical art of Infographics and we take a look at which faceless corporations lie behind the snowboard brand names that we all know and love.

The Big Corporations That Run Snowboarding Map

The idea for this came from the forum on Yobeat and some lad called Andrew Nagel, aka ‘GnarBuckets’ who reposted a post from back in 2006 on Snowboard Mag’s site, by a very angry man who went by the name of ‘The Public Advisor’. The Public Advisor lad posted quite often at that time about the corporations behind the brands and he really was not a happy bunny. He didn’t like any company that was any bigger than just some punter in a garage, good news for illicit then because he could be a fan of ours. Unfortunately it seems that The, which I assume is his Christian name, disappeared from the Interweb recently, probably due to becoming so incensed by capitalism that he combusted.

Anyway this article answers GnarBuckets question “I was wondering if any one could update it and add other companies that are now in snowboarding and what not and just every one give there 2 cents on this.”

And to answer the first part of Mr Buckets question here is something we just drew up and are going to call a ‘Piste Map’, showing which corporations own the brands in 2010.

It’s worth taking a look at the map in full size version which you can do by clicking on the picture. In our shiny new Flickr account you can also experience a version with interactive brand names.