I found some bad skateboarding clip art on the interwebs and this is all I could think of. Glob, I’m bored.

A lot like 70’s era Dogtown, if you try to drop in on one of Portland’s Central Eastside bike lanes, the locals will throw kale at you… Errr.. Yeah, sorry. That’s all I got. I didn’t even know Portland had a “Central Eastside” district, but I’m obviously not upwardly mobile so that might explain it. The Central Eastside Industrial Council “is a business association focused solely on the Central Eastside Industrial District’s economic success, vitality, and livability.” CEIC includes Burnside and as such, they are not shy of including Burnside and skateboard graphics in their marketing materials. – Thanks to Chad Balcom for the tip.

Wendy the Good Little Witch #96 was published in 1990 and features skateboarding on the cover, including a “broomboard.” Unfortunately, there are no storylines inside that feature skateboarding.

Skunks, old men, children, rats, raccoons, and automobiles… Those are all things we’re accustomed to seeing in the Venn diagram of “things that get stuck in skateparks.” Now we can add moose to the list too. This moose calf was rescued by Colorado Parks and Wildlife at the Breckenridge Skatepark. Apparently the mother was nearby and calmly waited for her calf to be rescued, which is lucky because Moose are not an animal you want to mess with. Just ask Natasha and Boris. Source: Team Pain Skateparks.

The year is maybe 1976 and I am just getting into skateboarding because my dad bought my mom a yellow plastic Roller Derby skateboard at the Sears Catalog Store. If your town wasn’t big enough to have a full-fledged Sears, you got a small shop with a handful of tables of merchandise and a counter where you could place orders from the catalog and it would be delivered. My small town happened to be Midland Michigan, a mere 20 minutes or so away from Bay City Michigan, the town that was nearest to where the dart landed on the map on the band named The Bay City Rollers. I was a huge fan of Rock and Roll Love Letter, and of course Saturday Night. Cut to 2009 when Neil covers a Bay City Roller skateboard in Ebay Watch, proclaiming I must be kicking myself for not winning that, and he was correct. I did some digging and kept my eyes peeled for this board, but I didn’t see one again until 2025. UPDATE: Added a picture of the band actually rolling as well as a second color way!

There was a time when a skateboard selling for $6,000 at auction would raise eyebrows. I’m not sure what to make of this insanity. The Tony Hawk’s 900 Collection bids closed at Julien’s Auction and some skateboards and related paraphernalia sold for some truly astounding numbers. So astounding that it makes you wonder if Julien’s is a real thing or not, but it is. The deck Tony Hawk landed his first 900 on sold for $1,152,000. That cannot be right. Is it right? How about 57k for a pair of sweaty kneepads? Some of this might make sense conceding the proceeds are going towards Tony’s charity, The Skatepark Project. My first thought was that somebody or some corporation bought these items at knowingly inflated prices with an eye towards deductions, but you can only deduct the amount you overpaid for the items, and the IRS bases this off the items value listed the auction catalog. In the case of the the 900 board, the estimated value was between $500,00-$700,000. That deduction could be worth less than half of what they paid. It’s also worth noting that the auction listings state that “a portion of the proceeds” will go to the…

SBA actually stands for, wait for it… Skate Board Association. Despite an incredibly pedestrian name, the idea behind it is somewhat interesting. It’s another skateboarding league with a couple differences. Coed teams compete against each other, and everybody gets paid something, even if they don’t make the podium. Now I have to admit, I assume these are differences, because I pay zero attention to the ins and outs of the other skateboarding competitions. Seeing a coed team of skateboarders compete against other coed teams is something I’d watch least once. Who is paying for this and what are their motives? Some investors, including Professional basketball player and former skateboarder Gary Payton II. – Thanks to Will Powers for the tip.

Reposting this because I can relate to the story of starting a skateboard company out of a garage. I can relate to all of it, except the part where the company is successful… From Blockhead Dave: Wow! Has it really been 40 years since I screen-printed my very first batch of skateboards in my parents’ garage?  It was late spring 1985, I was fresh from a screen printing class at Sierra College, and had never printed more than 1 or 2 of anything.  I had 60 red Streetstyle boards manufactured by Uncle Wiggley and I was nervous as hell, but no choice but to just go for it. I pulled the squeegee over and over again, honing my skills as I went along, then I laid each board in the driveway to dry, since I hadn’t built any racks yet. Well, I made it happen, and there were 60 skateboards with my art and my company name on them and just like that I was in business!  You can get on elf the limited Streetstyles in old school or the new school hole patterns starting Wednesday (9/24) at noon PST

It’s time for another installment of crap Commodore 64 skateboarding games, and this time I’m showing Skatin’ USA, a 1990 release by Atlantis Software, a UK company that would go out of business in 1992 after an 8 year stint. It looks like the premise of the game is an American kid on a skateboard battling English Punks. Seems like those two parties ought be be natural allies and not enemies!

The Thrasher edition is undeniably the coolest Polaroid camera I’ve seen. This is no easy feat as their cameras already had an appealing, iconic design. No two are exactly the same because the graphics are manually applied through hydro dipping. Despite that hand touch they are priced the same as their standard Gen 3 cameras. You might be thinking that you can’t really take skate photos with a Polaroid camera, but there’s sort of a workaround for that.