The age old tale… The session looks good, the concrete has dried and cured but the park is closed until the landscape architects are done with the finishing touches. Enjoy some over-the-fence pics that I took after leaving the soft opening of Parklane a month to the day from today. Is it open now? Head over to Berrydale park in NE Portland and find out. Those are giant sacks filled with something heavy to keep people from skating it. Is it rocks or sand? I don’t know because I stayed behind the fence like a good boy. That bowl looks fun to me, not very deep. Public skateparks are popping up like weeds in Portland.

There are a few overpriced “natural” grocery stores in my hood. Someone at this New Seasons keeps putting the Thrasher Magazines up front by the register. The only thing more surprising than the realization that this is still ongoing is the fact that Thrasher is on the shelves here in the first place. What’s next? Alternative music in the aisles?

I’ve been listing to the Hard-ons from afar for decades, ever since I picked up their US debut EP on Bigtime in 1987, purely because the cover had a skateboard on it. I’ve never been able to see these guys live, and the only thing I know about them as humans comes through looking at their artwork and listening to their music. Aside from the skateboard on the cover, the racial makeup of the band portrayed in that crude illustration definitely had an appeal to me. It was unlike anything I was seeing in punk a the time. I assumed they were punk because, you know, 80’s DIY art and a skateboard. The style of the some of the music threw me for a loop at the time as my tiny brain recoiled at anything vaguely-heavy metal. However, their spirit really stuck with me, and I loved the underdog nature of an ethically diverse non-mainstream band from Australia. I kept buying their albums and they really grew on me. Terrible Happy Talks has a long interview with bassist and founding member Ray Ahn. You can listen on THT or wherever else you might find podcasts. This is an atypical band…

Summerboard, the board with extra caster wheels, skyhooks, motors, and batteries! The only thing missing is a speaker! ( I’ll stick with my Soundboard, thanks. ) I know you’re thinking “This thing probably weighs a ton. I hope it costs a lot.” Don’t worry, they have models starting at $899 and $1699! Oh no, those base models don’t come with skyhooks, “Freshies” or “Launch Pads.” Thankfully, they’ve got packages that range from $1799 to $1899, as well as financing. Success!

From Surfin’ Turf to Bell E. Buttons, to The Turf, to buried, to resurrected and buried again, to dug up and re-poured. The Turf is now open again! This areal shot is from drone footage circulated by the Mayor of Greenfield Wisconsin, Michael Neitzke, who was instrumental in making this momentous occasion move from just a dream to a reality. Midwesterners of the 80’s and skaters of today, rejoice!

Skateboarder flipping off the man after walking through a barrage of crowd control munitions at an ICE protest. As seen on reddit.

Well maybe… They are pro-diversity, Trump be damned. As for the skateboarding on campus, well It’s an assumption based on this interactive display in the University of Oregon welcome center. It’s a heavy duty book affixed to the counter with heavy vinyl-like pages that are coded to trigger the overhead display to show different images and animation on specific pages. The page for racial and ethnic diversity features a skateboarder on a local (Tactics) shop deck no less. Ironically, if you zoom into those benches they appear to have skate-stoppers built in.

Skateboards pop up in unexpected places like this recurring BBC news segment called “Tech Now.” In this episode they are highlighting a robotic hull scrubber (and sea urchin killer) called Hullbot. About 6 minutes in they show a tech working on one of the robots, and in the background there’s a Natas deck hanging up.

I went to the soft opening of a brand new Parklane skatepark in Portland Oregon with a bunch of old men, all of them better skaters than me, one of them probably better than you.

Dutch Bros Coffee is a chain of coffee stands mostly based on the west coast., Apparently they give away stickers once a month or who knows how often. They’ve had a handful fo skateboarding themed designs over the years. I believe these are all legit, and I’ve omitted some that I’ve seen on those print-on-demand shops like Redbubble that appear to be unofficial. I dunno, you tell me. – Thanks to Don Tidwell for the tip.