I caught DEVO in Seattle this weekend. It was a great show because it ended at 8pm and I didn’t have to stay up past midnight. And oh yeah, it was also a great show! They played for around an hour and a half or more, including a couple of quick costume changes. Aside from a couple songs in the first third of the set where it seems to drag a little, the rest of the night was very high energy. They opened with “Don’t Shoot (I’m A Man)” off Something For Everyone, and the rest was a mix of songs from Are We Not Men, Oh, No! It’s Devo, Freedom Of Choice, and Duty Now For The Future before closing with a guest appearance from Booji Boy singing “Beautiful World” off New Traditionalists. I found myself with a big stupid grin involuntarily plastered on my face the whole time, and Booji nearly brought me to tears with no alcohol or drugs involved! I highly recommend seeing them live if you can. Skateboarding? During “Freedom Of Choice” they showed some of the original music video footage shot at Marina del Rey skatepark on the big screen. We’re all DEVO.

Consummate wrestling showman and lousy, racist human being Hulk Hogan died on July 24, 2025. In 1991 he made the movie Suburban Commando which has a few skateboarding scenes in it and features a skateboard in the poster art. The Hulk starred as an intergalactic warrior who had to take some down time on earth. He has a run in with kids on skateboards and he Wilsons it pretty comically. Somehow he becomes an expert skateboarder at some point in the plot after acquiring a 6 wheel battle skateboard. I’ve only seen a few clips from the movie so I don’t know how prominently it features, but the stunts are over the top, with lots of cut scenes showing a double doing crazy flips in the air, and shots from the knees down only. This movie seems like it would fall into he “so-bad-it’s-good” category. Notice the generic Powell Peralta board in the stills.

Don’t Bite the Pavement is clone of another mechanical game from Tony called Kongman. Game play vaguely resembles the video game Kong I suppose, but it’s all mechanical. There are buttons to punch activate pinball-like levers, and a battery that runs some of the steppers and the swinging guy on the top. You have to maneuver a metal ball through various stages all the way up to the top. Earlier on there are opportunities to get the timing wrong and have the ball return all the way to the beginning of the puzzle, but it seems like once you get past a certain point you’re pretty safe. If you do get to the end, the ball is returned to the star anyway. Kongman came out in 1982, but I’m not sure about Don’t Bite the Pavement. My guess is a little later because they were probably figuring out what to do with unsold stock. – Thanks to Wesley for the pics

There are so many hybrid bike skate scooter thingies these days. The Dryft Board positions itself as snowboarding simulator if you can believe that. It’s more or less a backwards Skate Bike with a caster wheel. And instead of a single axle, the back truck is hinged. Oh, and it’s electric too, because why not? Comes with brake lights and a switch to make the caster wheel stable. I’d bet there’s a fistful of overlapping patents on this $2000 toy. At least they ship it for free. I totally forgot about Bikeboards and Strullers. I’ll bet you did too.

Well folks… welcome to government sanctioned skate harassment, in fact government sanctioned pedestrian, if not citizen harassment. Read all about the sad state of the USA at Wired. Apparently they (DHS) are more concerned about skateboarders acting as scouts and surveillance for protest organizers than they are with skateboarders using skateboards as a weapon. The threat bulletin came in advance of the No Kings protests and warns that more Americans are likely to turn against ICE, like maybe… this guy. Senior ACLU staff attorney Vera Eidelman to the rescue: “Exercising those rights shouldn’t be justification for adverse action or suspicion by the government,” Eidelman says. Labeling something as harmless as skateboarding at a protest as a violent threat is “disturbing and dangerous,” she adds, and could “easily lead to excessive force against people who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.” – Thanks to Dustin Michel and Rich at EPM for the tip.

Which of these are names of tricks typically used in skateboarding? I once broke my ankle on a switch swizzle. – Thanks to Troy Sliter for the tip.

There are a few overpriced “natural” grocery stores in my hood. Someone at this New Seasons keeps putting the Thrasher Magazines up front by the register. The only thing more surprising than the realization that this is still ongoing is the fact that Thrasher is on the shelves here in the first place. What’s next? Alternative music in the aisles?

I’ve been listing to the Hard-ons from afar for decades, ever since I picked up their US debut EP on Bigtime in 1987, purely because the cover had a skateboard on it. I’ve never been able to see these guys live, and the only thing I know about them as humans comes through looking at their artwork and listening to their music. Aside from the skateboard on the cover, the racial makeup of the band portrayed in that crude illustration definitely had an appeal to me. It was unlike anything I was seeing in punk a the time. I assumed they were punk because, you know, 80’s DIY art and a skateboard. The style of the some of the music threw me for a loop at the time as my tiny brain recoiled at anything vaguely-heavy metal. However, their spirit really stuck with me, and I loved the underdog nature of an ethically diverse non-mainstream band from Australia. I kept buying their albums and they really grew on me. Terrible Happy Talks has a long interview with bassist and founding member Ray Ahn. You can listen on THT or wherever else you might find podcasts. This is an atypical band…

Skateboarder flipping off the man after walking through a barrage of crowd control munitions at an ICE protest. As seen on reddit.

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 ethnic 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.