Adam needs your help…

Willits Bowl, A.K.A. Adam’s Bowl is a super sick DIY in Northern CA. The deck around the bowl is only half finished… The forms are set for the second section of deck, which will include a corner hip off the big quarter pipe and a Derby style berm. Now we just need a little help to pay for the mud. Many have come to shred, Few have donated to the cause. Let’s get it poured!!!

Anybody who donates is of course welcome to come out. If you don’t know where it is, I guess you’ll have to be content with watching it in videos.

Adam Shomsky has a Youtube channel filled with high frame rate slow motion videos of skateboarding and “other random stuff that looks cool in slow mo, like fire.” A writer over at Wired used an open source physics video analysis tool called Tracker (Insert Tracker vs. Indy joke here.) to break down the forces at work in an ollie. The resulting animated gifs are vaguely interesting and sort of hypnotic, especially if you like looking at lots of vectors and symbols overlaid on skateboard videos. Check out The Physics of Doing an Ollie on a Skateboard, or, the Science of Why I Can’t Skate.

Learn to skate with Sportskool, just don’t try to learn how to spell. Instructional books and videos for learning how to skate are nothing new. The only reason I paid attention to this one is because I happened to catch a video shot with Omar Hassan at Pier Park, here in Portland. (There’s another one with Omar skating in West Linn Oregon too.) Sportskool has videos and DVD’s for the whole gamut, including Extreme!™ sports and even fishing, but sadly, no curling that I could see. Some of the videos are available for free via Youtube channel, but others require a subscription fee. Choose your discipline, street, bowls or vert. Who are your instructors? Omar Hassan, Mike Vallely, and Andy McDonald. Did you know Mike V. wrote a book? Would it surprise you to learn that it appears to be about a fight he was in? (FISTFIGHT VOLUME 1: THE CKY3 FIGHT EXPLAINED) It’s important to note, as every Sportskool video will remind you, Sportskool is not liable for any injury or accident “befalling” any viewers of their programs. The large image above is from “How to Skateboard a Small Bowl with Omar Hassan.” Unfortunately, it’s all general skateboarding instruction, and it doesn’t actually teach you how to get ahold of Omar and skate a small bowl with him.

[Source: EPM]

This ‘Thrill Seeker’ is your typicall, cheap 80’s skateboard and it’s also a bootleg. The top design is some Jaws-like creature (I think), but the other side is definitely stolen from the Keith Meek ‘Slasher’ graphic. Found it on eBay a while ago.

Adobe and Girl Skateboards have teamed up for a contest of sorts. Enter your skateboard designs and you could win one of 4 internships at Girl. 2 of them are on site, 2 are remote. To Adobe’s credit, winners also receive $500 (total) for their designs. To enter, you must be a student, and you must use Adobe Creative Cloud in the design process. Then you have to post your work on Adobe’s Behance network with some poorly chosen tags, #madethis and #girl. Make sure you search for both tags, as the singular tag #girl leads to some NSFW content. Contest ends October 13 for the US and October 20 for international students. Details at Adobe.

I was riding my bike home from work the other day and sped by the usual detritus in the street, but my brain recognized a brief glimpse of something archetypal, so I doubled back to check on it. It was a children’s book titled Albert’s Gift for Grandma, and there was a skateboard on the back. On the pages inside, Homer does some scary tricks.

“Look at me!” Shouted Homer. “I’m doing scary tricks!”
“Oh my!” wailed Grandma.
“Your tricks are too scary!” shouted Albert.

Selected page from the 2006 publication of Albert’s Gift for Grandma, by Barbara Williams, illustrated by Doug Cushman, after the jump.

Thrasher t-shirt spotted in the stands during yesterday’s broadcast of the Portland Timbers at the San Jose Earthquakes. Soccer! Rodney Wallace!

Yet another student design project turned into a Kickstarter. Bjorn van den Hout’s Chargeboard uses two dynamos in the rear axle to generate electricity and store it in the battery box attached to the bottom of the board. The battery box doubles as an iPhone dock with speakers, while the usb port can be used to charge a phone or other device. Goofy lifestyle shots aside, I actually think this is a good idea for those who use their skateboards primarily for transportation, campus cruisers, even campers and the like. However, there are two glaring problems with this. Chargeboard could use removable covers for the speakers, or the first pebble that kicks up or pudddle you run through is going to wreak havoc. Also, How to account for different size phones without a janky adapter that would be prone to rattling loose? I’d really like to see this concept adapted to a bike, although I’m sure it has been already.

[Source: Daily Mail]

When my kids were of a certain age, I watched a metric tonne of Yo Gabba Gabba, but somehow we missed this 2009 Story Time episode of Seymour the Skateboard, a little skateboard who didn’t know any tricks and had to go to skate school to learn them from an old school teacher. Seymour had a good posse, all encouragement an no heckling. Animation by Jake Armstrong.

– Thanks to David Leclerc for the tip.

The Atlantic asks “What Happens When We All Live to 100?” in the cover story of the September, 2014 issue dedicated to the science of aging.

– Thanks to Old Man Burly Caps for the tip.