Is Louie Vito a Dwarf? And some other things we learned from Google Instant

A few years back Google Instant was launched, the feature that tries to anticipate what you're trying to search for while you type. When it launched the Google marketeers promoted it with three key benefits; faster searches, smarter predictions and instant results. What they didn't mention is that it also has some downsides; 1. if you write a blog called Illicit Snowboarding you'll spend the next few years being exposed to some of the most heinous shit on the internet every time you start searching for the site, and 2. it consistently feeds you unwanted insights into the squalid mind of the internet. This week we used Google Instant to find the questions that the internet is asking about snowboarding and here's what we learned...

Bringing Sexy Back – What we can learn from vintage snowmobile fashion

I was just reading the last magazine of the season from those part-timers at Whitelines and in it there was an article by Chris Moran about the current state of snowboarding fashion. At the end he asked; “If anyone has any ideas as to how to make snowboarding irresistibly sexy again, please write”. Well Chris, funnily enough, we have the answer…

Snowboarding is not a spectator sport, but it could be?

A few weeks ago I went out to the Burton European Open and somehow managed to avoid mentioning the actual competition in any of the coverage. I didn't do that purely because I'm a contrary git; when I agreed to go on the trip I fully intended to find some way of writing something interesting about it, but I just couldn't find any angle. I didn't just struggle to find something to write, I struggled to even have the patience to watch the event, and judging by the coverage of the bloggers that went to the US Open last week I'm not the only one to hit this problem. The main thing my trip confirmed is that snowboarding is a horrible sport for spectators. In fact along with the day I once wasted at a cricket match and some hours spent watching my life tick past at a major league baseball game, attending the BEO is now in my top three worst spectator experiences of all time...