Well maybe… They are pro-diversity, Trump be damned. As for the skateboarding on campus, well It’s an assumption based on this interactive display in the University of Oregon welcome center. It’s a heavy duty book affixed to the counter with heavy vinyl-like pages that are coded to trigger the overhead display to show different images and animation on specific pages. The page for racial and ethic diversity features a skateboarder on a local (Tactics) shop deck no less. Ironically, if you zoom into those benches they appear to have skate-stoppers built in.
Skateboards pop up in unexpected places like this recurring BBC news segment called “Tech Now.” In this episode they are highlighting a robotic hull scrubber (and sea urchin killer) called Hullbot. About 6 minutes in they show a tech working on one of the robots, and in the background there’s a Natas deck hanging up.
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I went to the soft opening of a brand new Parklane skatepark in Portland Oregon with a bunch of old men, all of them better skaters than me, one of them probably better than you.
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Dutch Bros Coffee is a chain of coffee stands mostly based on the west coast., Apparently they give away stickers once a month or who knows how often. They’ve had a handful fo skateboarding themed designs over the years. I believe these are all legit, and I’ve omitted some that I’ve seen on those print-on-demand shops like Redbubble that appear to be unofficial. I dunno, you tell me.
– Thanks to Don Tidwell for the tip.
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Every time one of my suitcase starts to go wonky it’s usually the wheels stop spinning or are otherwise somehow damaged. I’ve often thought to myself why doesn’t someone make these things with skateboard wheels? Well, at long last, Floyd to the rescue. This isn’t a coincidence, the skateboard wheel look is intentional, and they lean into it heavily in the marketing.
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Are these bootleg Vision Street Wear shoes selling for less than $14 a pair on Temu? Does it even matter? Established (err… uhm… Make that “Fstablished…”) 1985.
Insert tariff joke.
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I thought I’d seen every option of the Skatewing until I saw a post with this Turbo II branded abomination called the “Scorpy.” One thing you’ll notice right away is that the Turbo II version has rounded casters on the wings instead of the single, fixed skateboard wheels. Turbo II was a toy store brand skateboard popular in the UK. Digging around on the internet shows that they like to approximate some popular designs to evoke those designs without violating copyright. Maybe the caster wheels were the same kind of attempt to avoid a patent dispute, although it’s hard to imagine that the Skating was ever popular enough to make someone think it would be a good idea to copy it.
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A non-skateboarding friend sent me a link to an online auction for the Ital Board, and I couldn’t find out anything about it on the interwebs, except for another auction of a slightly different version. It looks late 70’s to me, although possibly from the early 80’s.
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There was a brief time in skateboarding when it was considered the height of hipness to have a full, color coordinated safety gear set. These days you can still buy a full set of decorative safety gear, but it’s’ all for little kids. These pics come courtesy of Butch Olivier who picked up this near-mint gear a swap sale. California Free Former – Made in Canada! I guess Canada Free Former doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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