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…

(Cue the Devo Corporate Anthem) Hey all you Rad Daddy Warbucks, TheStreet.com has some pros and cons on investing in Zumiez stock. I confess to getting a kick out of analyst reports describing Zumiez customers as “antimainstream kids” and referring to the company’s focus on the “action sports teen lifestyle.” Before going over all the positives, let’s get one thing straight — Zumiez is very much in the mainstream. It’s not some bastion of coolness or a hush-hush hangout where the skaters go. Rather, it’s a chain of stores in the mall where kids go to spend their allowances… …The fact that Zumiez is pulling customers in while the competition loses them is a pretty obvious indicator of who has the right stuff in their stores. There are a number of forces at work here. First, Zumiez has identified what’s cool and, more important, captured the attitude necessary to convince customers that even though they’re shopping in a corporate chain located in a mall, it’s still cool. Yes, teenage tastes are fickle, but Zumiez has staked out an attractive niche between the more vulnerable one-brand clothiers (such as American Eagle and Abercrombie (ANF – Cramer’s Take – Stockpickr)) and “old…

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]

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…

Dan Hughes has a bunch of shots of the new Dreamland addition to the Bellingham skatepark. It’s an addition to the old park, so I suggested that Dan do a color overlay to show the old part vs the new. He sent the above image of the old section. The new stuff is the bowl on the right (top photo) and the ditch on the left (hence all the construction shots of same). The old stuff isn’t that old, it’s just CRAP! Kinked like you wouldn’t believe, dead ends and rough. However, kids in Bellingham Rip like noone’s business. The new stuff is Dreamland smooth and lots of nice flowing lines. I like that bowl better than Glenhaven, but not better than Pier. Reminds me of this but worse if possible, look at that kinked transition!

I was on the fence about a short post on this reality show on TLC called L.A. Ink where a hot gal runs her own tattoo parlor. She’s got a (nonfunctional) skateboard ramp in her shop and a boyfriend that skates, or something like that. Now that Mike Vallely has shown up on an episode the skateboarding link is less tenuous. There’s a split second of skate footage and band footage. Mike looks like a crazy old biker. Highlights include Mive V’s quote: There’s all these people who talk about ‘keeping it real.’ Keeping it real is joke! Keeping it real is keeping it real mediocre. Also interesting to nobody but me is the the fact that I went to high school with one of the tattoo artists on the show, Hannah Aitchison, who, if she remembers me at all, will likely think of me as the annoying kid who thought he was punk rock. She dropped out a year early to go be an adult, something I’ve only just gotten around to doing. There are other tattoo parlors with skateboard ramps. Portland’s own Urban Soul had a ramp and a skateshop, but soon found that all the annoying groms…

Yeah that’s the legendary Natas Kaupas hawking those incredibly crappy looking plastic sunglasses. Head on over to the Skateboard Archives and check out the, uh, print media archives. It’s a very loose collection of old skateboard magazine covers and assorted pages within those magazines. The real treasure is the funky old advertisements for long defunct or soon to be huge companies. There are lots of shots of pro skaters in questionable poses, a ton of vert riding with pads and helmets, obscure hard goods manufacturers (Rannalli Trucks anyone?) and all kinds of good stuff mostly centered on the 80’s and early 90’s. Also interesting are all the mail order shops with completes going for $99 and up. On the downside, the archives are not well organized or very consistent. The detail pages are not quite big enough to read everything, but it’s still a fascinating trip in the Way Back machine. Right, Sherman? Check out The Skateboard Archives.

One of the best WTF marketing crossovers, Zenetti, a company that makes tacky fancy rims for shallow people obsessed with automobiles and the bling lifestyle, now has a skateboarding team. Zenetti the automotive leader in wheel design has teamed up with Dominic DeLuca of the world famous skate shop & streetwear boutique; Brooklyn Projects; to form the wheel industries first ever official skate team. This is not your typical sponsorship scenario, where a company just giving a skateboarder a set of wheels, poses for a picture and you never hear about them again. This is an official skate team with a complete partnership, including magazine features, show appearances and advertising campaign. We have some of the top skate professionals in the world representing our brand and feel that our partnership will help elevate the industry and spark a new trend. These athletes were hand picked by Dominic and Zenetti for their trendsetting style as well as the fact that they embody what Zenetti stands for as a brand; superior performance, cutting edge style, and class. They hope the team will “help elevate the industry and spark a new trend.” Which industry? Who knows? Is the new trend to use demographic…

Earth Patrol Media shows us what happens when second (and third) string skateboard company moguls get in to the Dew Tour. Unfortunately, they were unable to abscond with the effigy of Ryan Sheckler, or burn it. Can you believe they want to sell you Dew Tour skateboards for $80? These are not completes mind you, just the deck. It’s ironic that the graphic on the deck is a bunch of robots. Maybe they’ll make one with lemmings next time. Check it out.

This skateboarding cow is from a series of advertisements for McDonald’s in China that features exercising cows. A few advertising blogs have spotlighted it, but they don’t appear to know anything about it (other than who made it) and never seem to point back to the source of the image. It took me a few days to find someone who reproduced it larger. Check it out after the jump.