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...