I don’t know if Portland Thorns midfielder Tobin Heath is actually a skateboarder or not. These illustrations come from a collaboration with Dark Horse comics and the Thorns front office designed to sell some t-shirts, scarves, and patches. I suspect it was just an easy way for Dark Horse to conjure a loose (or lazy) association with the Silver Surfer in The illusions and energy manipulation of Tobin. I do know that Tobin has mad soccer skills, and plays for the best women’s team in the world. Both of them, actually. Women’s World Cup is coming this summer.

These are stills from a Sweetarts commercial featuring the the old archetype of the skateboarding ballerina, right? The simple message is “Grace & Grit. Sweet & Tart. Be both.” The ballerina in question appears to be doing her own stunts, and I should be able to recognize who she is, but I’m an old sexist bastard, so I don’t. Or just possibly, I don’t actually follow professional skateboarding anymore, at least not the skateboarding part of it. Oh I make sense….

Steve Caballero is appearing in Kawasaki ads for the “Good Times” sales event. Makes sense, as he sort of concentrated more on motocross riding at the expense of skateboarding for a while sometime after the new millennium. I can’t recall if he had a factory sponsorship with Kawasaki or not, but he did turn up here in the Pacific Northwest, Hood River area, talking with the locals about his love of motocross and the fact that he wasn’t skating much. The best part of this commercial is the legal disclaimer shown while Cab ollies out of the transition over a motorcycle. “SKATE LEGENDS ONLY,   DO NOT ATTEMPT.” If you can ID the skatepark, please do so in the comments. Why don’t they license “Let the Good times Roll” from the Cars? Should I have titled this post “Cabasaki?” Curse you SEO best practices for foiling my dad joke.

There was a time, oh, say anything before the year 2000 when this would have seemed inconceivable.  Cross marketing between a mainstream commercial brand and a core skateboarding brand? Not a big deal anymore. No, I don’t know how a “Zine Rolltop Lunch Bag” differs from a regular rollmop lunch bag. It must be more hardcore. Check out the Igloo x Independent Collection. I think the “X” is for eXtreme!

I’m surprised there isn’t a trick called an Obvious Plant. Sounds like something Neil Blender or Lance Mountain would have made up. Wait? Is there an obvious plant? Well, there’s Obvious Plant, the fake company run by Jeff Wysaski. He makes fake products in packaging and plants them in retail locations. It’s very good stuff, and there are 2 gratuitous Tony Hawk references in the collection.

Thisis exactly the kind of hard-hitting skateboarding Journalism you can expect from Skate and Annoy. CNN posted leaked surveillance video obtained by Spanish newspaper El Pais, including a a short clip of a very pale looking Assange learning to ride a skateboard. We’re talking Draco Malfoy pale. He looks a little like Butch Vig. [Source: CNN]

Tip – Tony Cave via FB

Well it’s that time of the decade again… What time is it, you ask? It’s time for another site redesign. The old one served pretty well for a long time, but wasn’t really mobile proof and was not very efficient on the server side. Blah blah blah…

Time for a stripped down version. It’s a work in progress, not all functionality is present, and there are bound to be some bugs. Features, Reviews, and Galleries are still on the old templates, but should be chaining over in the very near future. Working on this fairly massive, and mostly under the hood change has taken precedent over new posts, but it won’t be long before regular updates are thing again.  The rest of the Skate and Annoy “network” is going to require a little tinkering before the old framework is abandoned, so bear with me.

These are stills from a 1998 Time Life/BBC documentary on Erwin Rommel’s death titled “What Really Happened to Rommel – Secrets That Won WWII.” This footage shows Rommel with friends and family riding what appears to be some sort of homemade roller coaster track on a cart that resembles a skateboard. There is no explanation for this event in the voiceover.If the video plays from the beginning, go ahead and skip to the 32 minute mark.

– Thanks to Caveman for the tip.

It’s impossible to tell if there is any validity to this story in We Are The Mighty. Their mission is “Capturing, empowering, and celebrating the voice of today’s military community,” but I’m skeptical. It seems more likely their mission is generating click-bait revenue from the military community, but I could be wrong. There’s almost no additional information in the post, other than to say they didn’t adopt them. Check out the story The Marine Corps tested a skateboard unit in the 1990s if you dare. If you leave the window open long enough, it will eventually crash.

Another skateboard appearance in the Bizarro strip. I have no idea when the original publication date is. This image showed up in a facebook feed.

– Thanks to Jim Ferrell for the tip.