It’s about this time of year we should be writing about summer camps and where you should spend all of your awesome money to ski.  Assuming you are old (late 20’s) like us and would never get in an airplane to go ride park (other than Big Bear), you should definitely go ski powder in Argentina this summer with Garrett Russell and have a totally rad time scoring fresh lines for days on end and then drinking really cheap, great wine and red meat.

But now that I’m done giving a nod to my former employer, I’m here to present the first ever BroBomb Signature Session at Windells.  Tailored not to the mobs of rich children who sweat bullets for FlexFit hats from their favorite ski company but for the aging everyman skier who totally sucks at park skiing now but feels entitled to stay in the scene because they saw 13 on VHS.  This Signature Session is not so much to improve your skiing but to master your sarcasm and bitter outlook on life while being associated with skiing.  Here are the 10 principal activities of the Windells/BroBomb Collabo Totally Signature Session for the (assumed 25+) Cool Kids Only:

1)   Maintaining your “over-it-ness” in the face of hundreds of children and their unadultered joy and enthusiasm for skiing.

2)   Walking away for a solo smoke break when all the kids are clambering over each other to secure a brand new sticker.

3)   Napping or reading The Economist until the kids crash from 9 hours of non-stop activity and then practicing backflips in the foam pit while no one is watching.

4)   Watching ski edits together long enough to get you pumped for the next day, but not long enough to make it seem like you’re actually entertained by other people skiing.

5)   Casually meeting the pro coaches while acting like you have no idea who they are.

6)   Afternoon sessions trying to prove to the children campers why their heroes are idiots.

7)   History classes explaining why the history of African-American culture is actually very much separate from that of modern-day skiing.

8)   Very sporadic sessions on the hill working on straight airs in the halfpipe, 360 grabs, and maybe a backflip.  BroBomb campers will have a separate lunch-time barbeque spot where the cool coaches will come to escape from the campers and the BroBomb campers can drink beers and complain about being in the presence of children.

9)   As the most important quality of an aging action sports participant is to “get it,” lift rides will be spent talking shit about the one dude in the group who doesn’t get it.

10) Dressing in mad tall tee’s, skiing in the back seat, then signing totally stoked kids’ foreheads with a Sharpie claiming you’re Tom Wallisch.

The first annual BroBomb Signature Session at Windells is taking place between the Nevergonnahappenteenth of July and the Inyourdreamsteenth of August.  Sign up never!

It’s not that he’s mad at a guy like Joe Biden who is always “out over his skis.” I mean, he only “gently chided” him. But he probably just feels that Backseat Bob should have the same rights as Frontseat Fred. We don’t really get into politics here on BroBomb, but this is a pretty big deal for us. Where we live, most people on skis could probably be described as backseat-curious, if you will.

So this should come as a relief to park rats, weekend warriors, and closet backseaters everywhere. It’s finally OK to ski the way you were born to ski, without being ashamed.

Now is there the possibility that this is just some political stunt? Of course. I mean, this is bound to be popular in places like Breck and Big Boulder, as CO and PA are swing states. But let’s just enjoy the moment. OK, you cynical bastards?

Tanner is still a few years away from being skiing’s loveable old-man-yelling-at-clouds Gary Busey-esque mascot (but it will happen). And as long as media outlets like HBO are holding him up as the embodiment of our sport every time he opens his mouth will continue to be a cringeworthy event. But how could we stay mad at a face like that?

Even if he causes everyone in the world without an NS account to collectively roll their eyes in unison. And even though he seems oblivious to the notion that they do, in fact, stop boxing matches before people die. And that neither NASCAR nor Indycar is an unregulated steel cage match of automobile induced death…the dude does want to land on Mars. And don’t we all share that dream in common? Somewhere deep down in the core of our collective human psyche?

To Mars, Tanner. To Mars!

In this days of economics inequality, corporate greed, and stalled opportunity, populism is back in fashion.  This is no different on the slopes, where many people are now “keeping it real,” unable to afford the condos, season passes, and newfangled rockered skis that make skiing so much fun these days.  The scavengers of the skiing underbelly are now the persuaders of popular opinion, as evidenced by the popular outrage over the flaunting of weapons, expensive cosmetic dental surgery, planes and Subarus in a recent edit.  So now that you’re no doubt filming your every move with a GoPro and a GoPro on a pole, here are some keys to keeping yourself legit in the public eyes by using some simple rules to guide your edit-making endeavors. 

1)   No Foreign Cars

The only acceptable foreign form of transportation to the hill.

With all the wangsters bangin’ it up to Stowe in mom’s BMW with studded snow tires, the real American skiers who can’t afford a camera to film their friends are fed up.  They’re driving to the hill in a beat-up 1988 Ford Ranger with three of their buddies clinging for life in the truck bed that has no rear hatch and three doughnut tires.  As they smoke up the highway doing 15 up hill, ripping butts with the gas tank in the passenger seat, you swoop by on cruise control with heated seats and the Black Eyed Peas playing on your iPhone like a bitch.  Do you want to be the subject of populist scorn on Ski Gabber when we bomb Iran and xenophobia kicks in, and you’re the asshole with a Mercedes in the driveway?  Don’t think so.

2)   No Bought Food

Now, prepare the tongue..

Your populist edit can include casual lifestyle scenes of your crew drinking warm PBRs on the trunk of your LeBaron and chowing down on soup crackers and cold 7/11 corn dogs from the morning before.  However, eating outrageously expensive lodge burgers and hydrating with cafeteria-bought Gatorade or Sierra Nevada is a sure way to get yourself pigeon-holed as an elite.  If you’ve already shot this, recover by filming your friend licking bread bowls from the trash.

3)   Mis-Matched Gear

In the outrageously over-priced hard goods market, and with a bunch of broke lazy assholes in Greece threatening to sink our whole economy again, who has the spare cash to buy two entire skis?  Only rich assholes do.  Prove your coreness by rocking only one new powder ski, alongside your other, much shorter ski with the inside edge blown out.  The only ski poles acceptable for core use must be stolen from two different gapers in the ski school.  The golden ticket to popular acceptance in this category is rocking either a snowshoe or a snowboard binding on one ski, claiming you were too broke to fix the other one when the toepiece blew out.

4)   The One Shitty Friend Rule

No real shredder’s crew is complete without the guy who sucks.  Maybe the freaks won’t let into your private day school, but here in the real world, everybody has a buddy in their crew who totally sucks and follows you around the park on his snowblades, eats shit onto his chinstrap, and gives high school girls aggresive high fives and offers them Natty Ice.  We know not everyone from your neighborhood shred mafia lands his two-sev on, pretzel 630 out on the bolts; accept who you(r shitty friends) are.

5)   Look Fucking Haggard

Timmy Phillips, subject of a future Keepin’ It Real profile, keepin’ it real.

Everyone assumes everyone else and their little brother is rocking I/O’s with interchangeable lenses.  However, some of us grew up on the fucking streets (of our quiet suburban town)!  Harness the poverty within and rock gear so fucking haggard people wonder where the hell you were able to find it.  Whether it’s rear-entry boots, foam-core skis from ten years ago, or that horrible creation of the 90’s, the “wind pant,” prove how core your are by scavenging for gear that took so much effort to find you could have more easily gotten a job and afforded regular shit.  Commit to the cause!

6)   VHS All Day

One rule is still the same: if it’s not on film, it didn’t happen!

All this hyper-digital shit sounds pretty expensive.  But since you don’t make enough money in one year to get Travis Rice’s heli off the ground for one minute, there’s no way a $3,000 DSLR kit with lenses and a stabilizer is fitting into the Keeping It Real budget.  Remember, you are so broke you have to heat your Ramen noodles with the sun and tin foil.  You can’t even afford the free microwave in the lodge.  But with all that spare time being unemployed, you were able to find a VHS camcorder and some family vacation tapes to film over in the dumpster of a vacation home remodeling.  Blow the wanna-be George Lucas’s with their RED camera miracle machines and poach the private park jump follow-camming your buddy in a one-piece with a 17-pound Panasonic AG-450.

7)   Stay in the Dark

Remember, in these days of 4G cell phone service and… satellites, communication and information is money.  Acquiesce to none of it.  Throw your phone in a river, delete your e-mail account and Facebook, and receive mail only through your food stamp coordinator’s mailbox.  Be a dark ninja of the woods, living in a van, who only surfaces when the pow is good and the step-overs are huge.  Or the pizza crusts are in the dumpster.  Still, get it all on film, and get it on Newschoolers.  Good luck identity-confused skiers of the present!

Remember last year when we so innocently expected Craig Coker’s “War of Rails” to have a little something to do with…well…rails?

We wouldn’t be taken in so easily this year. So we sent (and by “sent,” I mean that they attended with no help from us) the Hot Possie to be our eyewitnesses to skiing’s ongoing love affair with spinning on, around, and above rails. They have dubbed the trip “Hesher’s Holiday” and promise to produce an edit that reports their findings.

For now we are left with a pretty sweet teaser (above), and the official event edit (after the jump) as an assault on your good taste and desire to be entertained.

Oh loooooook, Newschoolers is getting in on that super cutting edge “reality” trend. Damn, skiing is always at least two steps ahead of the culture at large.

So apparently the guys who were really pissy over being named the #2 comedy site in skiing are giving Tom Wallisch’s chauffeur, cook, butler, and assorted hypemen an “unedited and raw” show. There’s no chance that could be unintentionally, unselfawarely funny. None.

The 4bi9ers assure us that they are so “strange” and “weird” that their lives will make for an interesting watch. In fact, Steve Stepp isn’t even sure you’re ready for how krayzee they’re gonna get: “Everyone should be prepared to be weirded out. I’m not sure the public is ready to experience how weird my friends are.”

Prediction : These guys aren’t “weird” whatsoever, unless your social group doesn’t extend beyond white, upper-middle-class, post-college, skier twenty-somethings.

But, of course, I could be wrong, I mean: “Expect Dale to be Dale, Bryan to be really strange, and Black Steve to make a brief appearance.”

I stand corrected. That sounds fascinating.

“Ooooooooh I’m so sick of these!” Shut up, there’s room for one more.

Editor’s note: For the uninitiated, this (below) is what Cody really really does

Last week we posted a self-congratulatory item when we discovered that one of the chief authors of the ESPN Freeskiing blog, the curiously anonymous ESPN Freeskiing (Megan Michelson?), posted a web story doling out awards to their favorite freeski websites.  Newschoolers, one of freeskiing’s two most robust online communities (along with the TGR forums for bitter crusty old dudes), was not mentioned for its strength of content or community, but rather was awarded a measly second place for “Best Humor Site” behind yours truly, BroBomb.com.

“And BroBomb won ye the crown, and yea, there was much rejoicing in Germantown, Philadelphia.”

Newschoolers’s Doug Bishop (who seemed to miss that his site had won SECOND place) was extraordinarily pissed at this miffing of one of skiing’s great home-grown web successes, and his life’s work.  Mr. Bishop, as he is known widely across the industry, then made his feelings known both on his own website as well as ESPN Freeskiing’s comment field, hinting at some possible censorship by ESPN, saying “….OK, my comment keeps not getting posted.”

Humbug, I say!

And to top it off, who won the award for “Best Freeskiing News Site”?  If you wouldn’t have guessed it would be Freeskier.com, you’re apparently not alone.  The Newschoolers community, which I can only imagine to be the majority of Freeskier’s subscription base anyway, had nothing but contempt for the assumed illegitimate champion of the web.  Yelsel$, a veteran of NS’s forums with a karma score of 60084 and over 9,600 posts, had only this to say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”  CasiusClay put it more delicately: “Not a big issue. If Newschoolers ran awards like this, the only thing Freeskier would win is generally having shitty ski reviews….”

 Yea, give the gentleman from Freeskier a tarring and a new asshole, I say!

Freeskier and ESPN are not alone in the village stocks, as the mob hurled tomatoes and moldy onions at Jon Olsson for his win in the Best Athlete Blog category and at the X Games for scoring Shaun White a perfect 100.  However, several members expressed more light-hearted feelings about the matter:

And, of course, skiing’s unavoidable population of nerds had to weigh in on an unrelated issue:

With emotions already charged given the trying ski season, we expect the flurry of ridicule and public gallowing to continue through the month.  What say, ye readers, ’bout this struggle of the bloggings?

Us too. So we asked MOMENT VP Luke Jacobsen about it. His answer makes some sense, and makes us sad:

“No snow for urban is tough. We didn’t want to make a bunch of park edits. We hoped to have more episodes but shit happens. Another one is in the works. A week or two out I think…”

So there’s hope.

What we need is our very own Jeremy Lin. Not a 6’3” Taiwanese-Chinese-American exactly, but that could work, too. What I’m saying is that we need a safely packaged (read: Christian) but racially unexpected hero to emerge. An evangelical-Inuit Tom Wallisch, perhaps?

On this one, I agree completely with Floyd Mayweather. Jeremy Lin is (Asian) unexpected (and Christian) and is therefore a media darling, and we need some of that magic in skiing.

So to wrap this up, if skiing is ever going to get top billing at the X-Games or waaaaaaaay more importantly, the Olympics, we’re going to need a little unlikely racial flavor. So somebody get down to Argentina, or post up at Ski Dubai, or just find the next Nicky Adams. (I don’t know Nicky’s religious affiliation, but just imagine a black-Canadian-Christian!) Nobody wants to see a white kid do more flippies than the white kid before him anymore.

Someone get this man a John 3:16 diecut

For those of you who can still stomach NS…does anybody come to mind? Is there some racially unexpected up-and-comer posting edits that are “ill” and “fresh” and “posi-vibes” and all?

So now that I’ve boosted BroBomb’s Baidu ratings. Have a nice day.