
This is actually almost two weeks old, but it’s still well worth mentioning. Hats off to the Tony Hawk Foundation, who has introduced a new requirement for skatepark grants; No more prefab wooden parks. Read the press release titled “If Not Concrete, Then Why?”

I can’t even find the original source for this image. Let this be a lesson to whoever gave birth to this very droll illustration. Next time don’t forget to put your name on it.
- Thanks to Colin for the tip.

Another Tony Hawk refernce in a comic, this time in a strip called xkcd, which I wrote off based on this one strip, but is actually a pretty good comic with pretty bad art.
- Thanks to Stephen B for the tip.

If only there was a video about the making of the video of the process of turing a skateboard video game controller into a real skateboard. Ripped from the comments of Skate and Annoy, The Tony Hawk Ride controller set up as a real skateboard. I’ve heard a lot of people have problems with the controller on this game. I saw Tony give a demo on a talk show.They had a random kid come out of the audience and try it, seemed like it worked well. Who knows, maybe there was a Wizard of Oz type character behind the curtains with a hand controller. People grouse about the cost of the controller too, but as the folks at Game-TV.com have shown, if you get tired of playing the game, you can always actually, you know, err, uh, ride it. I wish I had a budget at S&A to do thid sort of thing. Maybe they are saving the good video for something else, but it seems like they didn’t make the most of this opportunity.
- Thanks to Cory for the tip.
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Webcomic Penny Arcade did a strip about Tony Hawk Ride. It’s not about skateboarding though, it’s about buying and reviewing video games. Post-modern self-reference is so last decade. The guy did, in fact, hate it. I couldn’t really tell from the strip.

OK, I know this sort of falls outside of the scope of this website, at least I think it does, but I’m not sure anymore. So maybe this is the first and last time I post a commercial for Tony Hawk’s Huckjam bikes, unless there’s skateboarding in the future ones. Listen for his celebrity voiceover at the end. That almost looks like Tony as the mad scientist. It’ll be hard to tell from the Russian YouTube video quality. I can’t figure out how to delete an RuTube video, much less make it higher quality. My four year old loves riding his bike, and he knows who Tony Hawk is, sort of. He got really excited about this commercial. As he emphatically relayed it to his mom, “Tony Hawk makes bicycles. They’re for boys like me. They’re my size. They don’t have training wheels. They’re just for boys like me.” Come on product review!
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Tony Hawk interviewed on another skateboarding web site? Nope. Try Digg.com‘s Digg Dialogues. He’s still famous. Tony is interviewed with questions from the Digg community by the site’s founder. Conahan once suggested that I forego “Gratuitous Tony Hawk” references for Sheckler, but Tony’s in the media more, still. Watch it after the jump.
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Steve Jobs is the most respected and admired entrepreneur amongst the teenagers in U.S. according to a survey conducted by Junior Achievement. He beat out other celebrity entrepreneurs, most notably (in our case), Tony Hawk. Don’t feel bad for Tony. The folks at Honda motors admired him enough to use him in a film talking about competition and drive, designed to promote their new FCX Clarity fuel cell powered electric vehicle. You can watch the seven minute Race against Time after the jump. Plus, it’s not as if Tony hasn’t already appeared in several advertisements for Apple.
[Source: CNet]
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This year’s Stand up For Skateparks benefit for the Tony Hawk Foundations saw skate action from Bucky Lasek, Pierre-Luc Gagnon, Andy Macdonald, Lincoln Ueda, and Kevin Staab. Old man Hawk even landed a 900 himself. The event raised a total of 775,000 dollars to support the Tony Hawk Foundation, including $43,500 in pledges for a skatepark project in the Watts district of Los Angeles. There were many celebrities present, both skateboarding and mainstream, including Erik Estrada, who is a celebrity in both worlds. If you have a soft spot in your heart for Watts,you can donate $5 to the project by texting the word RIDE to 90999. Do it before the end of Tuesday, October 20 if you want the cash to specifically benefit the Watts Towers Skatepark project.
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This goes back to September 5th. I completely missed this because I don’t get the paper, no matter how many times the Oregonian calls my house and tries to give it away. Then again I could have read it on Tony Hawk’s Twiiter account like the guys at Boardistan did, nerds…. I kid, I poach from Boardistan and vice versa. If I knew who the hell they were we could be interwebs friends. Getting back to the comic, big deal… Tony will really be famous when he gets mentioned in Andy Cap. These old comics are weird, the way they have new artists take over after the original one retires or dies. 20 years from now in an anthology someone will look at this and think “Who the hell is Tony Hawk?” nIt woiuld make about as much sense as a Barney Oldfield reference today. Because the newspaper comic archives disappear after a while, enlarge-o-rama.