I'm flying off to cover the Burton European Open (otherwise known as the BEO - pronounced BeeYeow!) at the start of February courtesy of some fine fellows at Nokia. There you go readers, proof that all you have to do is write a blog for 5 years, and put in approximately 1,600 hour's (the equivalent of 200 working days) of work and things will start happening for you. Before you all rush off to start your own blog though, there's a much shorter-term opportunity to get an even better deal for just a few days of effort you might be interested in...

If you've come up with a cunning plan to create the greatest snowboard company ever seen, the first thing you'll need is money. Traditionally your options were limited to breaking open your piggy bank, borrowing money from your friends or family, prostrating yourself in front of your bank manager, taking up some sort of  criminal endeavour, or being publicly humiliated on Dragon's Den/Shark Tank. Nowadays though there's a new option for any poor-orphaned-friendless-pround-honest-shy people out there: crowd funding. 

Take your brilliant idea, stick it on a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and sit back while billions of potential investors throw cash at you. So far 43 snowboarding ideas have gone through this approach and here's our 10 favourite doomed attempts...

It's amazing humanity survived the early part of the last century  When they weren't busy filling their time with intermittent bouts of genocide, all-encompassing global conflicts and inventing weapons that could kill the planet, here's how people relaxed...

It's another in our hard-hitting investigative series in which we out celebrity snowboarders - This week we track down our top 10 pop songstresses...

Can you guess which snowboard video this describes?

• It starts with musical intro and a roll of the sponsor’s logos.
• After the opening credits it launches into the first segment featuring one snowboarder riding for the length of a song, it will be the second best snowboard section of the movie.
• Then there’s a short and mildly amusing candid interlude captured at some point during the filming process.
• The film then progresses into a series of sections, with an assortment of snowboarders, riding to a variety of tracks, with a few more short interludes.
• Then there’s a bit more of the same but a switch to Japan or the Southern Hemisphere.
• Next up it’s the slam section.
• Finally it all ends with the best snowboard section of the movie by the stand-out rider, which includes the biggest single trick.

Sound familiar? It should do because it roughly describes almost every single snowboard movie ever created. It’s what, for the purposes of this article we are going to call ‘the format’. ‘The format’ has been the dominant type of snowboard movie for over twenty years, and it’s been copied and rehashed to a point well past it’s sell by date. We've reached a situation where there’s now a whole generation of snowboarders that don’t know anything else but ‘the format’ and because of that it’s become even more pervasive. Is ‘the format’ something all snowboard movies are doomed to repeat forever or is there another way?

This week we review every single pro snowboarder autobiography ever written…

It's sometimes said that puns are the lowest form of humour, but for years I've argued that the dubious honour should actually go to the likes of anagrams, pranks, mother-in-law jokes, slapstick and Garfield. At least that's what I believed before I picked up the October edition of Snowboarder Magazine on my last trip to the US. Here are the ten lowest points, in a new low point, for the now proven lowest form of humour...

Illicit went to the Ski and Snowboard Show and had a go at live tweeting the experience. For those of you that missed it, here's how it went...

Over the last few weeks ESPN have been releasing some great articles on the effects of avalanches in the US. They’re now mid-way through a run of six articles and they’re also mid-way to scaring me into never snowboarding off-piste again. It’s time to take a look at the stats and see just how close to a horrible avalanchy death we really are…

In the last article we wanted to test the hypothesis that the only two things people read about were tits and Shaun White. To test it we combined the two topics into one composite article and bloody hell was that theory proved correct. So far 9,382 people have read the article, 1,272 people shared it on the Facebook, 893 people hit the Like button and 4 people took time out of their busy schedules to complain  Based on the evidence we've learned that we should either just focus on Shaun White and tits from now on, or focus on testing scientific theories. We've chose the second option, so this week we test another theory:

It's said that if there were an infinite amount of monkeys hitting keys at random on typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare. To test this theory we constructed YouTube. Let's see how close we've got to producing reams of great literature...