The Sidewalk Shop is an excellent place if you’ve got a fetish for pre-urethane wheeled skateboards and/or crows. I only wish they’d credit the source of the old photos and let you enlarge the images of the old boards. Definitely worth spending your time there.

From the Onion, truly America’s greatest news source. I heard a piece about the Onion on NPR’s This American Life. As interesting as it was, it kind of sucked the joy out of it a little. Reminded me of a science fiction story I read where scientists analyzed humor and discovered the actual cause of what made people laugh, at which point nothing was funny to anyone, anywhere, anymore. What was the name of that story? Anyone? [Source: Westway]

I’ve got a couple milk crates worth of old urethane skateboard wheels that I’m not sure why I saved, or what I thought I was going to do with them. I have used about 12 sets of them to stack screens freshly coated with emulsion for screen printing, but that got annoying so I built a drying rack. I have I’ve often wondered about all the wads of inert urethane buried in landfill. Sure, you can grind them up and mix them with fresh urethane or make earrings out of them, but it’s plastic, and eventually it just gets harder and harder, and the wold only needs a finite amount of lunch trays. Surprisingly, a species of mushroom has been discovered in the rain forests of Ecuador that can and will survive on polyurethane in landfill conditions, so you know, go ahead and enjoy your unalienable right to use urethane as you want. Hell, build a pipeline from Canada to pump wheels directly to your country. Good news, actually, but where are we going to build the urethane eating farms, and what the hell are we going to do with all those mushrooms? Also, if you haven’t already noticed, I’m…

I was checking out a 7″ cover of the 720 soundtrack released by a band called Metronome the City, trying to track down an original that wasn’t on eBay, and of course I stumbled on a bunch of other time wasting distractions. Ahh… Interwebs™. Let me count the ways that I love you.

Outsider trade magazine articles on skateboarding and skateparks can usually be summed up by one or more of the following generalizations: uninformed, boring, misleading, or a steaming pile of excrement. When they aren’t it’s always because they were written by someone in the know, in this case, Portland skateboarding fixture Ben Wixon, who aside from being a teacher is also involved with Skaters for Public Skateparks and something called Drop Into Skateboarding, an organization formed by a few other names you might recognize. Aside from having a stimulating title, Recreation Management published an article titled The Evolution of Public Skateparks, written by Ben. You can read it online, or look for the cover at a very boring and/or thorough newsstand near you. What’s the takeaway? Two things. The push for more integrated spaces as opposed to an isolated facility in the middle of nowhere, and: The experts surveyed unanimously agreed that concrete surfaces have overwhelmingly become the material of choice for skateboarding performance and durability. It’s not a fascinating read, but you have to think of the target audience. The only beef I have is that it looks like they used a picture of a Skatepark in Indiana and label…

The same guys that brought you the Board of Awesome, an electric skateboard controlled by a Microsoft’s Kinect hack, are back with the Board of Imagination which uses brainpower instead of body gestures to make the skateboard go. Both are interesting exercises. You might think the second one was much more of a scientific leap, but you can buy brain powered toys at Target and whatnot. If you’re going to power your skateboard with electricity, you might as well wear headgear instead of carrying the remote. I almost ran over a guy on an electric skateboard a couple weeks ago. He was moving kinda fast and was unexpected. But then again, it might have had something to do with my California stop. – Thanks to everyone who sent them both in.

Smiths for everyone! Smith’s? This week’s pun of the week is a Gage Thompson picture of Brodie Penrod taken in Rose Park, Utah.

New Hopeless Old Men On Skateboards collection available.