Hey look, someone ran over a squirrel. It’s kind of flat, but maybe I can use it for taxidermy practice. Hmmm. It’s not really cooperating with me. How can I make this look more natural? I know. I’ll make it look like he was riding a skateboard and just wiped out! My work is awesome! I wonder why nobody bid on it? – Thanks to BPA for the tip.

Two Keith Meek Slasher graphic ripoffs in one week. I just couldn’t resist the title, sorry. I don’t think this is is officially licensed by Warner Brothers, as I couldn’t find it anywhere except on Ebay. – Thanks to BPA for the tip.

Adam Shomsky has a Youtube channel filled with high frame rate slow motion videos of skateboarding and “other random stuff that looks cool in slow mo, like fire.” A writer over at Wired used an open source physics video analysis tool called Tracker (Insert Tracker vs. Indy joke here.) to break down the forces at work in an ollie. The resulting animated gifs are vaguely interesting and sort of hypnotic, especially if you like looking at lots of vectors and symbols overlaid on skateboard videos. Check out The Physics of Doing an Ollie on a Skateboard, or, the Science of Why I Can’t Skate.

Adobe and Girl Skateboards have teamed up for a contest of sorts. Enter your skateboard designs and you could win one of 4 internships at Girl. 2 of them are on site, 2 are remote. To Adobe’s credit, winners also receive $500 (total) for their designs. To enter, you must be a student, and you must use Adobe Creative Cloud in the design process. Then you have to post your work on Adobe’s Behance network with some poorly chosen tags, #madethis and #girl. Make sure you search for both tags, as the singular tag #girl leads to some NSFW content. Contest ends October 13 for the US and October 20 for international students. Details at Adobe.

I was riding my bike home from work the other day and sped by the usual detritus in the street, but my brain recognized a brief glimpse of something archetypal, so I doubled back to check on it. It was a children’s book titled Albert’s Gift for Grandma, and there was a skateboard on the back. On the pages inside, Homer does some scary tricks. “Look at me!” Shouted Homer. “I’m doing scary tricks!” “Oh my!” wailed Grandma. “Your tricks are too scary!” shouted Albert. Selected page from the 2006 publication of Albert’s Gift for Grandma, by Barbara Williams, illustrated by Doug Cushman, after the jump.

Thrasher t-shirt spotted in the stands during yesterday’s broadcast of the Portland Timbers at the San Jose Earthquakes. Soccer! Rodney Wallace!

Yet another student design project turned into a Kickstarter. Bjorn van den Hout’s Chargeboard uses two dynamos in the rear axle to generate electricity and store it in the battery box attached to the bottom of the board. The battery box doubles as an iPhone dock with speakers, while the usb port can be used to charge a phone or other device. Goofy lifestyle shots aside, I actually think this is a good idea for those who use their skateboards primarily for transportation, campus cruisers, even campers and the like. However, there are two glaring problems with this. Chargeboard could use removable covers for the speakers, or the first pebble that kicks up or pudddle you run through is going to wreak havoc. Also, How to account for different size phones without a janky adapter that would be prone to rattling loose? I’d really like to see this concept adapted to a bike, although I’m sure it has been already. [Source: Daily Mail]

When my kids were of a certain age, I watched a metric tonne of Yo Gabba Gabba, but somehow we missed this 2009 Story Time episode of Seymour the Skateboard, a little skateboard who didn’t know any tricks and had to go to skate school to learn them from an old school teacher. Seymour had a good posse, all encouragement an no heckling. Animation by Jake Armstrong. – Thanks to David Leclerc for the tip.

The Atlantic asks “What Happens When We All Live to 100?” in the cover story of the September, 2014 issue dedicated to the science of aging. – Thanks to Old Man Burly Caps for the tip.

If you like skateboarding, then you just might be ready for an Evinrude boat motor, later on in life, when you grow up. You know Evinrude owners are born, not made. Right? It’s not like a choice. When you get to college, it’s OK if you experiment a little. Nobody is going to judge you if you try riding a Razor scooter. If you’re worried, just keep it on the DL. 1989 advertisement for Evinrude motors, complete with Gonz skateboard after the jump.