Not to be confused with Pizza Grip, (Man that stuff is gnarly), here are two skateboards in the shape of a slice of Pizza. The first is a graphic for an 2012 book signing event with Christian Hosoi at Pizzanista, which it turns out is partially owned by Salman Agah. On the right, an actual production board called the Slicer, this one from a NYC clothing company called The Good Company. My source for the Slicer was Pee Wee Herman’s Facebook feed.

Above Coping is seeking skateboarding themed art for a benefit show at Commonwealth Skateboarding on August 30th. See the flyer for details. What is Above Coping?

“Above Coping is a non-profit that brings skateboarding to youth with chronic health conditions and life threatening illnesses. AC has two major programs: “Skating Through It” art clinics where children paint their own blank skateboard deck, and “Getting Over It” skate clinics where children paint decks and we set up complete skateboards while teaching the basics of riding them. The programs are conducted in partnership with hospitals (Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Shriner’s Hospital for Children) and child serving non-profits in Portland, OR (Children’s Cancer Association, Children’s Healing Art Project, Hands and Voices, etc.).”

In this edition of counterfeits we have 2 fake Sims decks. The blue one on the left is an almost exact copy of the Kevin Staab ‘Mad Scientist’ model from 1986, designed by John Lucero. The ‘Pirate’ model on the right was based on a Staab pro deck from 1987, designed by Lance Welborn. The pink complete says ‘Aims’ instead of ‘Sims’ and ‘Ataab’ instead of ‘Staab’, very clever …

Thanks to Matt Bass for the tip.

Future Envy, by Nathan W. Pyle, available on Threadless.

Gold Cup Skateboards comes to you from the mind of Lance Mountain. The boards are all made in U.S.A. and distributed by NHS. The product looks fully flushed out, right down to the “Power Slider” tail blocks. It’s not all retro nostalgia. Well maybe it is actually, but they do seem to be built with functionality in mind, as long as you are OK with a bizarro Streets of Fire ( Note “of” not “on” fire ) scenario where the technology of the future is wildly available in the past. It’s as if somebody forked a parallel universe on GitHub where certain niche technologies and fashions remained the same while the rest of the world advanced. Maybe they can get a young William Dafoe on the team. It’s a strange but interesting time in skateboarding. You can basically buy skateboard technology form any past generation right now. I can’t think of a similar scenario in any other sport. Imagine a football team where everyone decided to wear the old leather style helmets. I suppose you can still buy a basic wooden tennis racket. Maybe it’s just that skateboard styles and technology are more distinct through the ages.

Lorem Ipsum is nonsense text that looks vaguely latin. It’s used by designers and publishers to fill in some content in order to flush out a design or layout. Whenever I need it for web design, I’ve always used an online generator at Lipsum.com. That was before I found Skate Ipsum, which unlike traditional Lorem ipsum, it uses real words from a tome of common skateboaring terms, enabling such excellent paragraphs as:

Santa Monica Airlines kickturn nose slide lip sponsored nosepicker casper slide. Body varial Burnside durometer masonite steps slappy locals. Crail grab hurricane helipop hard flip backside blunt. Coper fastplant heel flip boned out nose-bump transition. Cab flip transition hurricane judo air goofy footed ollie. Skate or die skater birdie nollie frigid air shoveit. Hospital flip kick-nose H-Street pivot pump flypaper frontside. Crailtap regular footed Arto Saari yeah camel back bail flail. Freestyle crail slide street vert boneless manual. Kevin Jarvis freestyle lien air durometer manual soul skate speed wobbles. Baseplate betty ollie slam fakie opposite footed.

There are all kinds of Lorem Ipsum generators, a close second favorite of mine is the Samuel L. Jackson inspired SLipsum, which deviates even more from the standard by using actual quotes from Mr. Jackson’s more memorable movie appearances. It’s not really the content, but more the manner in which you choose your options that makes it entertaining. I hear him in my head every time I read it. Check out all the Lorem Ipsum flavors at Meet the Ipsums. In the meantime, I think I’m going to see if I can use Skate Ipsum to generate a week’s worth of posts. They’ve got an API for Hosoi’s sake!

[Clipart source: Russ Howell (Yes, the Russ Howell)]

Tesseract from Loaded Boards.

Laminated to the bottom of the board is a layer of cork which provides vibration damping and (as we learned to our surprise during testing) a significant level of durability. The granular, non-directional structure of the cork helps prevent abrasive damage from propagating (in contrast to a traditional wood or bamboo veneer with long, oriented fibers).

I’ve got cork floors in my kitchen, which ended up being a very poor choice. It’s just not durable to abrasion or water. I can’t imagine why Loaded added cork in the first place, and how they quantify the accidentally discovery of damage resistant properties, but I am highly skeptical. (Big surprise, right?) It seems like the first curb you bottom out on is going to shred the bottom of that thing. There’s also going to be a lot of tear and pinch potential where the trucks mount. I hope Loaded did more thorough testing with cork than Powell did with Bonite™ construction. Aesthetically though, it looks sharp, like something out of Metropolis magazine.

The last frame of the Cheetos triptych, where Chester Cheetah is sharing his ride with a minion from Despicable Me 2

UPDATE: This post dates back 2013 and a lot of the content and comments have to to with Skatemaster Tate (Gerry Hurtado) who didn’t really have an internet presence at the time. Gerry did eventually surface in the online skating world through social media (actually commenting on this site too) as well as having a skateboard released through Flood Control and a flexi-disc release in an issue of Pure Fun. Sadly, within a week of being diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer, he passed away on October 13th, 2015.

I’ve been sitting on some recorded rebroadcasts of SK8 TV from around the turn of the millennium. I’ve been hesitant to post them online because I figured between Viacom and Stacy Peralta, I wasn’t in a hurry to get kicked off of Youtube again. In my head, these belong to the 80’s but according to IMDB, the first air date was in 1990. SrArcade has a channel and blog mostly dedicated to restoring and playing old video arcade games, but he’s also uploaded a healthy chunk of the old Nickelodeon show. There are 51 uploads to date, each a segment instead of a whole episode, but all of them are included in one playlist for easy viewing. It looks like his masters are a lot cleaner than my VHS dubs – dubbed to digital 8, and then again to mini DV – that’s how long I’ve been sitting on them! Nickelodeon has made some of their vintage shows available for download in the iTunes store, but SK8 TV wasn’t one of them. I wonder if Stacy was shrewd enough to be able to retain the copyright on these episodes. If not, why they aren’t being rebroadcast or sold as a DVD set? That show was corny as heck, but it had it’s moments, and nostalgia sells. I’d look forward to watching the hell out of SK8 TV on the couch with my kids on a Saturday morning. SrArcade has had some of these up for a year, so maybe they’ll last. If not there’s another guy selling individual episodes as a download. Say hello to Matthew Lillard and Skatemaster Tate.

On a recent east coast sweat safari,the GVK’s had a 6 hour layover at Reagan International in D.C., so we hopped the Metro and headed to see the sights. As we exited the Metro station Jack spotted a rad little skate spot with a federal government-sized skate stop. This did not deter him from trying to skate it, even though it was really close to the guard tower. One of the guards actually said, “He’s pretty good. How old is he?” I’m always surprised with what Jack gets away with from airport terminals to the Holocaust museum. If you and I tried to ride the places he rode, House Speaker John Boehner would have us thrown into Git-mo. Barge and Destroy – GVK