CBSC does not embroil itself in the China vs. USA or Europe manufacturing debate. Simply we are American Skaters living in China, for almost a decade, that have pain-stakingly established quality manufacturing supply channels that allow us to 100% always control quality on-site.

From the regular stream of business opportunities that come to our inbox. Cali Board Sports sure sounds and looks like an American operation, down to the soundtrack on the website. Draw your own conclusions. Skateboard quality? Who knows, but they make great babies. Congrats to occasional SnA contributor Egbert on his extremely recent adoption from the mainland, Mercy.

This week’s Shot of the Week is one from Nathan Gray. He took it last year in Bangalore India. If Nathan’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he is involved in the Sour video project we covered recently that documented a historical cultural skate session with skaters from Jordan and Israel that was filmed during the Israeli, Lebanon war/incursion/police action/violation of sovereignty, or whatever you want to call it, of 2006.

See the full size version.

Just because Tony Hawk has financial stake in ShredorDie.com doesn’t mean he has turn over every embarrassing bit of memorabilia, but it looks like he has to some extent.

I was sent to Japan to be on a show called “Incredible Kids” (or something like that) when I was 14. They asked me to demonstrate tricks, but to change some of the names to be “Japanese friendly.” I was just excited to be overseas on my own, so I went along with it.

Tony says he was 14 at the time but he looks more like a 12 year old Macaulay Culkin in some of these shots. It’s pretty entertaining stuff. Part of the show has Tony attempting a few launch ramp gap jumps over an increasingly large number of audience members. No, the distance doesn’t get any greater, they just stuff more people in between. It’s pretty crazy how young he looks. It’s even crazier that these people think helmets will help them if Tony comes up short. Tony even grabs for the jumps. Nowadays he’d ollie it or 360 air over it. Check out the takeoff ramp. It looks like one of those old Firestone metal frame and plexiglass covered ramps laying back and propped up a little. Two part video after the jump. Please excuse the lame post title, but you should listen to the Vapors anyway.

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Dear Sir,

We surf on your web site and find out you sell the skateboard and skateboard accessory. Our company also export these product over the world for more than 12 years. We can provide the best product and service to your company. I can offer the best price to you. You also can surf our web site. There are many product on our web site.

Yes there are, and if I ever need a Foldable Sledge I’ll know where to look.

Dear Sirs We are one exporter of landwing in Shandong,China. The landwing is new wind sport way. It can help the player of ln-line skating and snow skating to move by wind power on the land. We have two size Landwing as follow: Effective Area Size 2.8m2 297cm*140cm 3.9m2 340cm*155cm If you are interest this products. Please contact us freely. We can send some pictures for your reference. Hope your early reply. Best Regards Jinsheng Qu Weifang Ruifeng Artex Co.,Ltd.
Weifang,Shandong,China

Turns out by “snowskating” they mean skiing. Sure, the product is called “landwing” but the web site is Landsail.com.cn. It’s all in Chinese and I can’t read it anyway. Sometimes I feel sorry for these guys. This gentleman emailed me a bunch of rollerblade pictures unsolicited, and then took the trouble to send skateboarding shots when I asked if he had any. All for naught.

Thrasher Magazine was hacked this weekend by a group or individual called Indonesian Hacker, who first apologized and then really gave those right wing imperialistic fascist heathens at Thrasher a piece of his mind. Yeah, makes no sense to me either. Anyway, the site is back up. Antigravity Press got hacked last week. I’m going to back up Skate and Annoy tonight. - Thanks to Rayn Hass for the tip.

Korea.net has an article titled “Financial crisis knocked Koreans down, lifted them.” One of the featured success stories is Kang Sin-ki, who is now the CEO of Slovie, Inc, and the guy who actually invented those wacky toy skateboards:

Homeless, he slept near Seoul Station and picked up day labor when he could get it, sending any extra money back to his family. In his free time, Kang thought about a way to escape his lot and came up with a great idea — a wholly new skateboard. Mastering the design was less difficult than securing the means to produce, promote and sell the product. He pitched his idea everywhere looking for venture capital. Finally, through a whopping 1.5 billion won government-backed KIBO Technology Fund loan, Kang was back in business.

1.5 billion won loan? Talk about a government bail-out. But how much is a won worth and how much money could he be making on such a piece of crap? The article says he’s sold 10 billion won worth of Essboards in the US and Europe, which as of this writing, translates to $10.8 million.

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One of the things on my long list of “eventuallys” for this site is a gallery of dead skateboard magazines. I have a milk crate in my basement with some old skate rags, and I thought I had a few gems that would surprise people. Well I don’t have anything compared to Vintage Skateboard Magazines. It’s a work in progress without a lot of bells and whistles. What it does have are covers of skateboarding magazines from the 60’s to the 80’s from the US, UK, France, Australia and Japan. Some of the UK issues have scans of inside pages as well. There’s a lot of interesting documentation there, my only beef is that the scans aren’t larger. If it were up to me, every page would be available, but then again maybe it’s a good thing it isn’t up to me since our gallery isn’t even up yet. Check out the varied and often wacky past of skateboard magazine publishing at Vintage Skateboard Magazines.

This is the new skate video directed by Wes Anderson, starring Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson. A day of skateboarding around the city of Bangalore, India. Video by Maxwell Scott and Paul Mathews. As far as skate videos go, it’s not spectacular, but it is a very well executed piece of editing. Highly pleasing, in fact. Of course they skate in India, they’re doing in Armenia for the love of Hosoi. Now name the band, song, and album: “India….. I’m American. Ha ha ha.” Or watch the video after the jump.

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OK, it’s a bit of a stretch, but from India comes the movie Kranti that features an action scene with very Back-to-the-Future-esque stunt skateboarding. You can watch a clip of a policeman using a skateboard to capture a criminal on the run over at Nanarland. Best pause it and let it all download before playing.

[Source: Boyington on Flickr]