This week’s installment of Saturday Starrs is a 1977 Today Show piece on the new and booming skatepark industry. The report was filed by Irving R. Levine, and is about as dry sounding as it gets. It’s funny to hear about the owners of Skatopia expecting to take in twice the cost of building the park ($300k) in the first year. It mentions the first skatepark in the world being built in Florida, but it doesn’t say what the name is. The guy who built it Charles Cromie, says a skatepark operator can expect to recoup a $175K investment and own the land in 18 months. Levine said 50 skateparks were built in the first year, and at the time there were 100 more planned or in construction. What he doesn’t mention is that 125 will be gone in two years. It’s full of excellent terminology like “radical” and “water surfing.” For now it’s an industry going full speed ahead, and not at all worried that it might be headed (wait for it..) for a financial tumble. Good stuff.

Ladies, get your skateboard thong from the London France Underpants Company, who have been “Sewing panties for the Las Vegas Showgirls for YEARS! And…Now sewing panties for The Bunnies at The World’s Only Playboy Club!” This sort of thing would be a huge hit at Union Jack’s. And no, I don’t have a picture of anyone modeling them. You make think these are ridiculous, but rumor has it that other skate thongs exist.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I don’t want diluted by the mere presence of a bunch of skateboard comics. It’s a Beetlejuice Magic Slate with a picture of Beeltejuice on a skateboard. What, no coffin shape? Looks like he’s riding switch. It can be yours for a mere $58 ?!?! You can see the whole thing after the jump, but it’s actually smaller than the shot above.

Back in 2005 I saved this image to my hard drive. Where did it come from? Right, this is Gizmodo shot of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. I shrunk and doubled it up to save some space. It’s full size on the Giz, and it’s R-R-Radical!

Peggy Sue is a painting by David Mann who used to do a lot of work for Easy Riders until shortly before his death in 2004. His first gig was illustrating posters for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s Choppers magazine. I poached this from Max Schaaf’s 4Q Conditioning. There’s a gallery of David Mann paintings online but this particular image is a bit larger. Wikipedia says his centerfolds started appearing in Easy Riders in 1973, so I’d date this picture from the mid to late 70’s.

Here’s two, one from the 80’s and one that would have been at home in the 80’s but just came out. On the left is a new Concrete Wave patch with Jim Phillips artwork that originally appeared on a Pocket Pistols deck, but has also recently appeared as a poster and cover of Concrete Wave magazine, not to mention a magnet as well. On the right is a patch from Monster Skateboard Magazine of Germany, from back in the late 80’s. I originally go this from a skateboarding friendof mine (Ray Johnson) who was in the Air Force who got stationed in West Germany. Yes, by all means, we are accepting scans of skate patches for a future gallery.

Or at least the character he played as an actor. I’ll spill the beans after the jump.

OK, I’m on thin ice as far as relevance goes here, but this concept car design looks like a skateboard, at least until you fold the rumble seats up. It’s not the first concept car to do so. [Source: Jalopnik]

I like to geek out on multiple levels. The SkateDrive allows me to (over)spend money on two of my favorite areas of interest at once, computers and skateboarding. These are USB memory drives that come in the shape of skateboards with Santa Cruz logos. So you can put a bunch of skate rock MP3s on the drive and use it as a fingerboard when it’s not plugged in. Of course, you’ll pay a premium price for dual use “functionality.” In fact, it will cost you more than if you were to buy a 2GB memory stick and a fingerboard packaged separately, which hardly seems right. They must have done their market research on this one. I am a skateboarder who is smart enough to know how to use a computer, but dumb enough to pay an absurd amount of money for a skateboard shaped flash drive. – Thanks to Dr Brad for the tip.

If you think Tony Hawk has the market cornered on skateboarding birthday paraphernalia, well, he does. but there’s always room at the top… of the cake. Har, har. Shoot me.