Nobody has been able to successfully incorporate skateboarding into a fictional movie as a major plot device without making it corny. The 1978 movie Skateboard was probably the first attempt. It stars teen heartthrob Leif Garret in his pre coke binge and DUI days and also features Tony Alva as Tony Bluetile. Here’s a short clip of the archetypal sketchy outsider trying to hustle some teenage kids to form a skateboard team and make a quick buck. It’s very amusing, more so if you imagine our own Grover from GVK as the lead. The last time he tried to talk some teenagers into his van to go skateboarding he had to register his name with the neighborhood as an “offender.” Watch the clip after the jump.

In January we mentioned Grant Britain on some obscure educational network TV program. He’s back on the air again with “A lecture by renowned skateboarding photographer Grant Brittain about his life and work.” I’m not sure if this is the same thing as the last one, but I sure would like to see this. After all, he is our current SOTW. 1958 RCA Deluxe picture from Eric’s Vintage Television Sets

Eco Skateboards has an project placed on iFreelance.com titled Hip looking website for an environmentally friendly skateboarding company: I need a cool looking flash website design done for an environmentally friendly skateboard company. To give you a little background on our company, we are a skateboard producer located in Canada called Eco Skateboards. The philosophy behind the company is really organic and natural, we love bright colours and happy looking designs! We are looking for something with our logo integrated into it. What is their budget for a hip website developed in Flash no less? Between $250 and $499 with two weeks to deliver. I don’t know if the skateboards are made in China, but at that price the web site will have to be made in India.

Joesf Heffner (AKA nweyesk8 in our comments) sent in these pics of a mobile skate shop he’s seen traveling around to skateparks in the central part of western Oregon. It’s less than ample stock is being hauled around in the back of large RV style trailer. That’s an awful lot of hardgoods they need to sell just to cover gas. The skateshop-out-of-the-back-of-my-car is not a new phenomenon, but at this level it’s a big slap in the face to the local skate shops. There’s always the chance that Grinders is servicing a bigger geographic area that doesn’t have local shops, but it’s a pretty safe bet that’s not the case. If it is, then good luck with that operating model. Your first order of business ought to be selling the huge trailer for a small used panel van that runs on home brew biodiesel. You might have a fighting chance then.

Insert joke about shitty bowls here. Oops! Shoulda made this photo of the Kent Washington skatepark a Shot of the Week. [Photo: Tony Davies via Sleestak]

Ready for another online zine? Tweaker appears to be a UK based skate zine and not a Midwest USA zine for meth heads. Tweaker is one big Flash application that mimics a real magazine, but with a few multimedia tweaks, if you will. The traditional folded over letter-sized paper aspect ratio is preserved, and corners peel up when you mouse over them. Some of the photos can bring up an overlaying sequence, some pages have video embedded and some pages can scroll. I’m not a fan of Flash-based simualtions of printed magazines, but in this case I think it might work. It’s more immersive because it not only looks like a printed zine, but it has the ability to do things print can’t do, or at least not until they get digital paper perfected and available cheaply. One example is embedded video out takes from Winstan Whitter’s “Rollin’ Through The Decades” documentary in an article about a famous street spot. Tweaker is in beta right now so it’s a little buggy and slow. For instance, you can flip a page with the video playing and it will continue to play even after the page turning effect is over. It looks…

OMG! UR SO HOT! The blogosphere is on fire with hottest skateboards on the web this week – the Dead Rappers series from Jeremy Fish and a soon to be released Wii controller-looking board from Black Market, a company that seems to be doing a second rate impersonation of World Industries circa 91. Actually, this Wii deck is BM’s best work to date. A bunch of gaming sites are tittering all over it. Speaking of tittering, I just said BM! [Source: Wii – Kotaku Dead Rappers – everyone]

Check out the fancy video camera that guy is holding at the edge of the pipe. Who needs expensive prosumer electronics gear when a point and shoot still camera can give you glorious 160 x 120 pixel imagery at 15 fps? Not our friend Troy Sliter. Check out his moving picture footage of Rune Glifberg going over the mouse hole at Portland’s Pier Park during the 2007 Oregon Trifecta after the jump. [Update: More reader video added in comments]

Jacob Marcinek of Tranny Whiskers is one of those guys with too much free time on his hands. Sounds like a college student to me. Fortunately for the hard core skateboarding gamer, he has created the BEST SKATEBOARDING VIDEO GAME, EVER. Forget everything you’ve heard about Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds and EA’s Skate, because Radical Mathematical blows them all out of the water. What could be more fun than using your grade school knowledge of math to navigate through three totally awesome levels of skateboarding? Nothing, obviously. As you can see, even the graphics have eclipsed the cutting edge. I would go so far as to say that Radical Mathematical is so advanced that it is more of an extremely accurate high tech simulation than simply a video game. What are you doing still reading this? Check out Radical Mathematical.

A couple of months ago we posted about blind skateboarder Jennifer Tissot, and now we have another. The Chicago Sun Times has an article with a title straight from Cliché Headlines 101 about another blind skateboarder. What else, but “Skater’s blind ambition.” Duh! The article is pretty straight forward and short. 14 year old Tommy Carroll who lives in the suburbs of Chicago, went blind in both eyes at the age of two. He enjoys other sports like cross country running, and is on a local skate team, Agent Skateboards. Check out the team. If that is the Jerret Barry (Jarret Berry?) then Agent has the lock on Extreme™! minority team members. One of the more interesting notes (besides Tommy, the blind skateboarder) is that his parents are the ones who “helped steer him into skateboarding, figuring it was something he could master.” That’s a pretty progressive attitude, considering a lot of parents of seeing children don’t want their kids skating. The best part of the article is the video link that actually shows Tommy carving around, doing a nose pivot on the coping and even catching air. Thanks to Mike Timble for the tip. [Photos and video capture: Chicago…