Feeling stressed? Grab your bath salts and some candles, drag you subwoofer into the bathroom and enjoy a soothing bubble bath while watching this latest (actually old) fashion look book from Koch shot at a very lovely skatepark. No more frontside grinds, release your aggression. Let it go… UPDATE: Added some retina-relaxing images.

At about 11:40 in the Chris Rock episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee you can watch Jerry profess his unsolicited admiration for skateboarders. Weird. I first saw this via Jeff Hedges on Facebook. Not that weird. There’s no embedded video so you’ll need to click through. I’ve watched a handful of these and overall they are pretty good. Some that you’d think would be funnier aren’t, but some that you’d expect to be less amusing are surprising. Jerry, I gotta take issue with your comment on the 1971 Porsche 911 Carrera (See the Seth Myers episode) . I believe the distinction of the first aerodynamic spoiler to be sold on a stock consumer car belongs instead to the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona, which was literally a race car they had to sell to the public in order to qualify for Nascar. It was such a game changer that Nascar changed the rules to get rid of them. In fact, the Plymouth Superbird designed at the behest of Richard Petty (to keep him from leaving the team) came out with an almost identical spoiler in 1970, so that Porsche would actually be the third consumer care to have an aerodynamic…

My dad is such a loser by youtube user Marcus Johns. Almost too short! – Thanks to Kathleen Conahan for the tip.

Not to be confused with Pizza Grip, (Man that stuff is gnarly), here are two skateboards in the shape of a slice of Pizza. The first is a graphic for an 2012 book signing event with Christian Hosoi at Pizzanista, which it turns out is partially owned by Salman Agah. On the right, an actual production board called the Slicer, this one from a NYC clothing company called The Good Company. My source for the Slicer was Pee Wee Herman’s Facebook feed.

Above Coping is seeking skateboarding themed art for a benefit show at Commonwealth Skateboarding on August 30th. See the flyer for details. What is Above Coping? “Above Coping is a non-profit that brings skateboarding to youth with chronic health conditions and life threatening illnesses. AC has two major programs: “Skating Through It” art clinics where children paint their own blank skateboard deck, and “Getting Over It” skate clinics where children paint decks and we set up complete skateboards while teaching the basics of riding them. The programs are conducted in partnership with hospitals (Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Shriner’s Hospital for Children) and child serving non-profits in Portland, OR (Children’s Cancer Association, Children’s Healing Art Project, Hands and Voices, etc.).”

Future Envy, by Nathan W. Pyle, available on Threadless.

Gold Cup Skateboards comes to you from the mind of Lance Mountain. The boards are all made in U.S.A. and distributed by NHS. The product looks fully flushed out, right down to the “Power Slider” tail blocks. It’s not all retro nostalgia. Well maybe it is actually, but they do seem to be built with functionality in mind, as long as you are OK with a bizarro Streets of Fire ( Note “of” not “on” fire ) scenario where the technology of the future is wildly available in the past. It’s as if somebody forked a parallel universe on GitHub where certain niche technologies and fashions remained the same while the rest of the world advanced. Maybe they can get a young William Dafoe on the team. It’s a strange but interesting time in skateboarding. You can basically buy skateboard technology form any past generation right now. I can’t think of a similar scenario in any other sport. Imagine a football team where everyone decided to wear the old leather style helmets. I suppose you can still buy a basic wooden tennis racket. Maybe it’s just that skateboard styles and technology are more distinct through the ages.

Lorem Ipsum is nonsense text that looks vaguely latin. It’s used by designers and publishers to fill in some content in order to flush out a design or layout. Whenever I need it for web design, I’ve always used an online generator at Lipsum.com. That was before I found Skate Ipsum, which unlike traditional Lorem ipsum, it uses real words from a tome of common skateboaring terms, enabling such excellent paragraphs as: Santa Monica Airlines kickturn nose slide lip sponsored nosepicker casper slide. Body varial Burnside durometer masonite steps slappy locals. Crail grab hurricane helipop hard flip backside blunt. Coper fastplant heel flip boned out nose-bump transition. Cab flip transition hurricane judo air goofy footed ollie. Skate or die skater birdie nollie frigid air shoveit. Hospital flip kick-nose H-Street pivot pump flypaper frontside. Crailtap regular footed Arto Saari yeah camel back bail flail. Freestyle crail slide street vert boneless manual. Kevin Jarvis freestyle lien air durometer manual soul skate speed wobbles. Baseplate betty ollie slam fakie opposite footed. There are all kinds of Lorem Ipsum generators, a close second favorite of mine is the Samuel L. Jackson inspired SLipsum, which deviates even more from the standard by using actual quotes…

Tesseract from Loaded Boards. Laminated to the bottom of the board is a layer of cork which provides vibration damping and (as we learned to our surprise during testing) a significant level of durability. The granular, non-directional structure of the cork helps prevent abrasive damage from propagating (in contrast to a traditional wood or bamboo veneer with long, oriented fibers). I’ve got cork floors in my kitchen, which ended up being a very poor choice. It’s just not durable to abrasion or water. I can’t imagine why Loaded added cork in the first place, and how they quantify the accidentally discovery of damage resistant properties, but I am highly skeptical. (Big surprise, right?) It seems like the first curb you bottom out on is going to shred the bottom of that thing. There’s also going to be a lot of tear and pinch potential where the trucks mount. I hope Loaded did more thorough testing with cork than Powell did with Bonite™ construction. Aesthetically though, it looks sharp, like something out of Metropolis magazine.

The last frame of the Cheetos triptych, where Chester Cheetah is sharing his ride with a minion from Despicable Me 2