I was geeking out over at Gizmodo when I noticed a skateboard in a web advert for the Toyota Matrix. There’s a scene at an imaginary extreme!™ sports complex that you are invited to shake up with your mouse. If you do, everything goes haywire but the car stays glued to the road. After a bit of time everything gets shaken off screen and the ad tells you to stick to the road with available all wheel drive. Then it says “get in touch with your dark side,” which near as I can judge form the advert, must mean if there is an earthquake you should ditch your skateboard and ride BMX bikes on a half pipe.

Threadless is a t-shirt site that has visitors vote on what designs they will sell. My brother spotted this one and sent it my way, I couldn’t find it when I went to the site. I would have voted for it.

Concrete Wave looks like it’s going to try and tackle 411, in a round about way. Evolutions Video On Line is going to be the, err… online companion to the annual DVD freebie Evolutions. Where Evolutions is essentially a series of adverts from different entities, the preview of On Line looks to be formatted the same way that 411 is, but with a different content type. As with the printed mag, the tagline is 100% Skateboarding (as long as it isn’t street and rails, actually.) Looks like a lot of downhill, slalom, “freeride cruising”, some bowl/park riding and yes, even a little freestyle, which apparently has been renamed “flatland.” Seriously, what’s with all the renaming? Downhill is now called Speedboarding, Freestyle is Flatland… what’s next? How about coping bumping? I wonder if Rodney Mullen pees his pants with hysterical laughter when he sees that 1- People are still practicing traditional freestyle (sorry, flatland), and 2- Traditional freestyle skating hasn’t progressed any since he dominated it (to death) in the 80’s. The first installment of Evolutions Video On Line is set to hit this summer. You can watch a preview after the jump.

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He’s not included on this poll of favorite heartthrob skaters from madmoiselle at Team Sugar. Who is this (platinum) user Madmoiselle? She’s got almost 8,000 sugar points, so she must be able to buy a lot of virtual gifts. (This one is for landpiratemafia! Meme! Meme! Meme! Meme! Meme! Hawt!) Oh yeah, I need to mention Tony Hawk so I can add this post to the category.

Nau clothing company (not just another outdoor company) is using skateboarding on the entry page to their web site, as well as some banner ads in rotation elsewhere. They’ve got sustainable design philosophies, partnerships, and a code of conduct all designed to get you to spend $148 on pair of jeans. They are Portland based, and they’ve done a good job of making the images as non-location specific as possible, but it looks like Pier Park to me. Wouldn’t be the first time. Actually, before I got kicked off Youtube, I was preparing to upload a razor scooter commercial shot at Newberg! Visit the Nau web site to buy expensive skateboarding jeans, archived for posterity after the jump.

- Thanks to Ben T for the tip.

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Ran across this 1989 article (oops, not 1979) by Daniel Gesmer, who we have featured before, on the Seismic Skate website while researching for another post.

Gesmer has a site called Geo Skate that sells Seismic and Bottega Montana skateboards.

Skatepunk.net has some cool old skateboarding photos too. Morris Wainright sent me the farm ramp picture and a search turned up the site.

This was at the end of a series of back and forth edits of a photo of Barry Obama on a web aggregator called Reddit

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Are you trying to watch any of the skateboarding commercials and other media flotsam and jetsam that we posted? My user account has been unceremoniously and permanently disabled. The only notice I got was something about the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation complaining about the clip I had posted titled T Bag gets hit with a skateboard. It was about 15 seconds of the character T Bag from the Show Prison Break, getting hit in the head with a skateboard. I can understand how Fox or anyone else wouldn’t want entire episodes of their intellectual property put online where people can watch it for free and Fox doesn’t get the ad revenue. However, short clips? Why not? It doesn’t cost them any lost revenue, and it generates publicity for the show. I suspect that particular offense had less to do with copyright infringement and “the suits not getting it” than it did with the fact that Fox owns the YouTube competitor MySpaceTV.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I think I only had one other incident where a video was removed, and it was for reposting our appearance on Attack of the Show. They must have actually looked at the rest of the commercials and out takes I had uploaded. Users with suspended or terminated accounts are prohibited from creating new accounts so I guess my double secret probation is over. What I need is a good video hosting solution out in Sweden or wherever it is that they don’t get bent out of shape about this, a Pirate Bay equivalent of YouTube. Am I a hypocrite? By the strictest interpretations, yes. But I never posted entire episodes of anything, and I don’t think it’s the same thing to use it editorially. Of course, doesn’t matter what I think. GVK’s are unaffected as Grover posted them under his account.

Worn Free will sell you a reproduction of t-shirts worn by famous rock ‘n’ roll personalities including this rad shirt worn by Joey Ramone The website has notes for each of the shirts which make interesting reading if you are into punk rock trivia. Some of the shirts are cool but forty bucks seems kind of steep. I’m tempted to make my own personal bootleg transfer.