What more needs to be said? “band [sic] from X games for being to ‘X'”

I dropped the ball on this one, but this weekend the Smithsonian has got a lot going on in conjunction with Go Skate day. It’s called Innoskate, a public festival hosted by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center and IASC, celebrates skate culture’s widespread innovative spirit. June 21 and 22 at the National Museum of American History on the National Mall. Lots of incredible stuff will be donated into the permanent collection of the National Museum of American History. Tony Hawk’s first deck is grabbing the headlines, but other stuff from OG skater gals Laura Thornhill, Patti McGee, Robin Logan and Cindy Whitehead will be given as well as some pretty high-level skatedecks from the collection of Nick Halkias. Chris Pastras and Ryan Clements will be on the mike and demo skaters include DC and Baltimore locals as well as Chris Haslam, Kyle Berard, Brian Andersen. The session conversations will be really interesting (the one between Tony and Rodney should be one for the history books) and the skating demos will be strong—all in all I think this is a great debut for the Smithsonian If you can’t make the event, they will be broadcasting Innoskate live on Saturday from 10:30 a.m.…

Lays Deep Ridge potato chips has a commercial running in the Netherlands featuring an ant dropping into some spud vert, attempting some sort of body varial (it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on) and then bailing with a parachute à la Bob Burnquist in the Grand Canyon. (Should that be “à le” for a masculine Bob Burnquist?) – Thanks to Matthijs for the tip. (He says he still can’t get S&A to come up where he lives… Anyone in the Netherlands reading this?)

The shot in the top frame of a newly completed skatepark in the UK looked pretty clean and made me want to find out more about the spot. In the course of looking it up I saw that the builder Four One Four Skateparks, are using the CNC process to cut transitions and horizontal some supports, especially on bowl corners. It’s interesting that they use a stepped completely horizontal approach in those bowl corners. Notice that where the surface meets the back braces are not perpendicular. Instead they rest on two adjacent corners. I’m not sure if that makes in difference in the longevity of the bowl, but it’s got to make the design and assembly process a hell of a lot faster. I’ve always held wooden bowl builders in high esteem, and this approach means any monkey could assemble it. It’s a case of nostalgia vs. progress, but I can’t imagine there are that many ramp builders out there with access to big enough CNC machinery. Some of the shots on the site make it look like the surface isn’t included in the CNC process though, so there’s still room for John Henry on the ramp building floor. This…

Avril Lavigne skateboards in a Chinese advertisement for Nong Fu Spring iced tea. [Source: Slate.com] – Thanks to Eric Pitt for the tip.

You may remember the Element series of skateboard flavored iPhone cases. Well it turns out that Element (no relation) sort of lost interest in the project, so the original developers, including Billy Ruff, Stuf mag founder Skot Werner-Longo decided to go off and do it on their own. The result is the Ruff Case. The really nice but exorbitantly priced machined aluminum version has been replaced with a more moderately priced composite version. The back plate graphics are reversible these days, and way more reasonably priced than they were with Element. Also interesting, Jim Gray’s inkgenda is involved in printing some of these back plates, so this whole arrangement can’t get much skatier. Yes that is a word. Skatier. I am declaring it now. Jim must be really, really busy making those back plates, because he’s M.I.A. here on S&A. So what about Billy Ruff? There’s a short piece on him in Huck magazine that ends as it starts to get good. I don’t know what he’s been up to, but with a name like Ruff Case, it’s a safe bet he’s bankrolling a good chunk of this. Billy, where are you? Right now you’ll need an iPhone 5 to…