I found Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons at a school book fair. It’s published by HarperCollins. Pete was created by Kimberly & James Dean, but this book was written by Eric Litwin. It turns out Pete has been skating since his appearance on the cover of Pete the Cat: Valentine’s Day Is Cool.

The first half of the 1960s were the hey-days for Surf Music with a high percentage of bands being from California. Many of those bands also wrote songs about Skateboarding or what then was known as “Sidewalk Surfing” (I counted about 30 releases so far from that era, including bands from other genres). But there were also bands from such “exotic” places like Texas.

Dan Dengler makes skateboards from cross sections of trees, among other things. We’ve seen it before, but not at this scale. They are gigantic, and immense, hence Gimmense.

Sometimes I get PR for industry events, and sometimes I take them up on their offer to attend the event under the guise of “covering it,” which usually means I get in free with my kids, and we all enjoy it for the most part. It’s fun, but I’m not paying for it, and I can take it or leave it each time. Sometimes I feel guilty, not for the big corporation, but for the freelance PR agent that gave me the press credentials and got essentially nothing from it. I hope that doesn’t affect your job performance review. To make up for it, here are some photos from the San Francisco stop of the Dew Tour. Thanks to Lorrie Palmos for sending these in. You might remember her from her long standing “Shot of the Week” that’s been up since June. It might be time to retire that part of the web site. (The SOTW curator spot is open!)

Blowing It starts off with a moving eight minute tribute fallen crew member Keita Farnsworth who died in 2012. The rest is dedicated to three years of good friends and good sessions. It’s amazing how many spots there are in the Oregon area. Watch Jake Arciniega Doug Weaver’s Blowing It after the jump.

Skateboards made from recycled aluminum. There’s no guarantee it was a beer can in a past life, but Beercan Boards sound better than “Diet Pepsi can Boards.” They’ve taken the old aluminum death plank board of yesteryear and upgraded it with a channel beam which I assumed was to give it stiffness, but it turns out that’s also part of the “TruckTrax” system that allows you to micromanage your wheelbase to your OCD heart’s content. Who needs that? Downhill guys, of course. The boards aren’t even expensive compared to their wooden brethren. Right now, the corporate site only features downhill boards, but Keystone Skate Supply also has some more traditional shapes. I don’t know if those are also traditionally priced because Keystone’s web site is kind of jacked. To help preserve the ends, Beercan boards have “bottle caps” made from 100% recycled milk jugs. In the event that you do wear it out, you can recycle your recycled board and get a new one for $40. I’ve never seen one or ridden one, but the concept seems pretty solid, especially given the target audience. If I had a beef it would be that those concaves look a little clunky. It’s all made from extruded aluminum, so the concaves seem to have a very defined bend point even though the side profiles can look more organic. Replacement tips are $20 a set, which seems steep, but they are custom to each board design and I haven’t priced out the machining cost of the molds. Of course there was a Kickstarter campaign, somehow we missed that one. The video is pretty flat. Interesting that they are trying to diversify a business that makes custom auto parts. I’m not getting a vibe that these guys actually skate. For instance, there’s no pictures of anybody actually skating on these things.

Here’s another video about the Detroit’s Ride It sculpture park, this one from the Tony Hawk Foundation, that just raised another 25k for the project. Portland’s own Evergreen Skateparks is there working on it.

I bought this Australian stamp from 1990 on Catawiki for $1. It’s actually a postcard with a stamp and a postmark of Stanwell park. I guess the guy could be Billy Ruff, since he is riding a G@S ‘Clown puppet’ bootleg deck from 1987! The clown on the stamp doesn’t hold a puppet and  there are no names or brands, but still …

That’s Skreech on the cover of the latest Confusion zine. Apparently he’s turning over a new leaf after evaluating his life via Dragonslayer, so he’s going by Joshua instead of Josh. He didn’t ditch the “Skreech” moniker though. He’s no dummy when it comes to marketing. In addition to the Skreech interview, this shot of Elias Assmuth on a skateboard made out of a fingerboarding ramp got my attention. Radness! Those guys at Blackriver Ramps take their skateboarding every bit as seriously as their fingerboarding, or vice versa.