The Skater of the Year issue is out starring Silas Baxter-Neal, the first red-headed and hyphenated SOTY in the history of ‘boardin.’ Congratulations, Silas.

During the final “crunch” week for this issue, I spent a couple good days fielding calls from alternately outraged and overjoyed people who had heard the news that my boss, Jake Phelps, had been fired - a myth spread, for reasons known only to him, by Jake himself. Lance Mountain even heard that Jake had died. There’s something slightly disheartening about running around crazy, trying to get a big project done, while your boss is spending his day crying wolf on the World Wide Web. Regardless, pretty good issue. There’s a fun Marc Johnson interview, a Tony Hawk handplant feature, which I bet nobody saw coming, as well as the T-Eddy Awards and that article where Jake traces the source material of all the hand-drawn pictures sent to us by children and/or the incarcerated. I give this mag a B+, easily.