Loaded up the Family for a 2hour plane ride to the land of the sun. Saw some fish some sun and some skateparks. Overall the california skaters were a lot nicer than I thought they were going to be. Thanks guys. It was nice to see the sun. Gloomy Grover out.

Paul Fujita over at Cal Skate was telling me about a kid in the shop who wanted to buy the “Mr D” board up on the wall. Turns out he was talking about the Merde board. This is technically the first “feature” I’ve posted for 2010, considering the last one was just leftover pictures from the 2009 Trifecta. Some things that used to be “features” now end up as blog posts, but then again I haven’t been doing a lot of the more in depth stuff this past year. On top of that, none of what I’m typing right now is very interesting. I think the only reason Egbert submitted this was because he heard me call out everyone out who professes a serious interest to contribute and then disappears after a month. Don’t let that stop you from checking out the Merde Summer 2010 roadtrip story.

I want to start off this month by addressing something that’s been on my mind for some time, and it might piss some people off, but it needs to be said. I want to look at two of the “older generation” skateboard magazines, Concrete Wave and Juice. I’ve been getting both for years and years, and boasted for a long time that I had every issue of Concrete Wave ever printed, (including when it used to be called International Longboarder). But the product has gotten so stale that I stopped getting it about 6 months ago, and really haven’t missed it at all.

Ha ha! No excuses this month because this one should be right on time! Midway through the following month is right when you should start looking for Baywatch, and I pretty much made it! Some months are a chore to write, and it feels like pulling teeth, but some months just flow easily, and that was true of March. I think there’s a really good selection of stuff this month, with some high priced items but balanced out by some interesting but cheaper decks too. But enjoy this one because April is looking absolutely terrible so far. I can’t remember a month with so few high priced decks and so many uninteresting mid priced decks! Really, it’s a barren wasteland out there so far this month! And it’s funny because I just had an argument with a guy on skullandbones who asked why there are so few good NOS decks on eBay these days. I argued that he just wasn’t looking hard enough, which was probably true in March, but judging by April he is right. I hope that this worrying trend ends quickly, because this is going to be a damned dull column going forward if things continue at…

I’m sorry that this is a couple of weeks late everybody. I could make excuses about how busy the Christmas season is and other shit that’s going on in my life, but truth be told there wasn’t much that went off in December on eBay that got me fired up. When I have lots of exciting stuff to cover I get fired up and this shit types itself. But when it’s an average month with tons of the same old same old to sort through, it gets difficult to get motivated to look for the unusual and type for hours on end. So it was in December. There was some interesting stuff, but very little that got me really excited. Now, looking forward to January I already have some good stuff stored, so that is looking a lot more promising! Anyway, that being said I hope you enjoy this months edition because I worked really hard on it, and tried not to give you the same old Hawks and Gators etc.

I want to start off this month with a couple of rants, so forgive me please. First up, to all people selling decks on eBay, stop using terms like “Vintage” and “NOS” when you are selling a fucking reissue!! Using the word vintage implies that the deck is 20 years old or more. Your shitty reissue was made 3 years ago. The only thing vintage is probably the crappy PC that you used to type up the shitty sales pitch! The same goes with the term NOS. It stands for “New Old Stock”, meaning it’s an old deck that is as new, and has never been set up. When using this term, the inference is that it’s an old deck, not one that I could walk into a store and buy today. Are the sellers being unscrupulous and trying to fool ignorant buyers? Probably, yes. By inserting the word “vintage” you are making a claim that isn’t true. So stop. Also, while I’m on the subject of sellers that piss me off, stop listing the same deck week after week, month after month with the same inflated price! Look, it’s not rocket science. If your deck isn’t selling at $399…

So October 2009 was a big one. If this was anything to go by, then we can say that the downtown is over, at least in regards to the pocketbooks of serious skate collectors! Lots of stuff went for over $1000, and some went far higher than that. What do some of our big spenders do for a living I wonder? And are they even skaters? Or do we have art collectors out there who are starting to expand into old skateboards? Or do we have famous/rich folk who used to skate and who know want to recapture a piece of their youth and they don’t care what it costs to reclaim it? And just who the fuck has $5,000 discretionary income burning a hole in their pocket these days anyway? Just some interesting thoughts to ponder. Check out eBay Watch: October 2009

OK, first of all let me apologize for this being so late. I went to a family wedding in England and was gone for 2 weeks mid-August, and that’s thrown everything completely off for July and August. I was thinking about combining them, but I have so many decks that I didn’t think that would be fair and it wouldn’t make sense. So here’s July, and August should follow in a couple of weeks, but be aware that I missed 2 weeks of auctions, so I don’t have as many auctions as usual for August. SO if you won anything for big dollars, or if you got a huge bargain in August, let me know and send me the eBay link and I’ll include it in August. There will be no music review this month because I’m so behind. Sorry about that. I was going to review Disposable 2, but I may not do that at all because I found it fundamentally flawed on many levels, but I’m sure it was a ton of work, so I’m going to leave it be.

So I heard another kid broke an arm at Tigard. His name is Kieth Baldassere, and that’s him above. I missed that whole exchange. Check out page two of Tigard photos. I tried to mix them up some, so there will be new faces on page two.

Something odd happened this month. I was sorting through the images of the decks, putting them in categories, when I noticed something odd: I didn’t have any 90s decks. That has never happened before, and I could have gone back through and looked for 90s decks, but that would have been forcing it. I normally go with whatever catches my eye, and either there were no interesting (to me) 90s decks this month, or there were some but the pictures just sucked so I didn’t consider them. That happens a lot actually. A blurry, postage stamp sized image of the deck on a crappy background. If I can’t see the deck, then you can’t see the deck, and I’m basically describing it blind. The best ones are where they actually put a huge blow up of the deck in the auction. That is the image I grab, scaling it down for the main display, but if you click on it you see it full sized. You all knew that, right? That if you click on the deck image you see it the size it was originally displayed. So, no 90s section this month, but there’s a very long 80s section…