The roastbeef is a type of skateboarding/snowboarding grab that is relatively advanced, and can leave you looking mighty stupid if you don't do it right.

To do a roast beef grab, you can use a half-pipe, quarter-pipe, kicker, launch, or other aid to get plenty of air. When in the air, you simply reach toward the heelside of your board with your leading hand, and grab it. Simple.

"But wait," you may say. "Isn't that just a melon grab? What's so special about that?" Well, I did neglect one minor detail. When you reach for the edge of your board, instead of dropping your hand behind your back, you reach between your legs! Isn't that exciting? Then tweak it a little, and everything looks cool.

The risky part is, dropping your hand between your legs can be a risky proposition, especially when you are on a skateboard. This is because you can knock your skateboard away with a poorly timed grab. Also, taking your hand out from between your legs must be done smoothly. Failing to do so may leave you with a fairly mangled paw that resembles, well, the sandwich meat this grab is named for.

Roast Beef is the name of a character in the online comic strip Achewood, drawn by Chris Onstad.

His place in the Achewood world is of the depressed tech support guy, reduced to making cries for help with crappy chimichangas and buying t-shirts with slogans such as "It is IMPOSSIBLE to have a good day," though he never wears thems.

Roast Beef, like the rest of the Achewood cast, is a stuffed animal-in his case, a cat. He has an older sibling named Ray (a party animal/swinger personality) whose hobby is to "get his bone on", and a younger sibling, simply named "little nephew." Since he is the middle cat, he was introduced as such, with the phrase

"Roast Beef, the middle cat"
"Not Ray and not Pat."

A derogatory term used by citizens of France to describe people from the United Kingdom. The term “Les rosbifs” (the roast beefs, if you couldn’t tell), came about as a reference to the British way of cooking beef in the 17th century. The dish became heavily identified with the people from across the English Channel (La Manche or the Sleeve). British-French relations have always been somewhat shaky, since the 1700’s, when the two nations fought over trade agreements, through modern day conflicts over politics and European Union treaties. The insult became antiquated until the late 1990’s, when an argument between the UK and France over importing English beef during the Mad Cow scare resurrected the insult. Today, it largely remains the equivalent of the “frog” insult, a somewhat offensive, though mostly facetious term.

With credit due to a BBC programme on the subject I heard in March 2003 during the "freedom fries" incident in the US.

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