OK get ready for it, this is a long one. I found a catalog for Athena International Corp in that magical place you’ve all heard me refer to: a box in the darkest depths of my basement. 8 pages of amazing crap in glorious color! Lot’s of bootleg stuff in there too… they even bootlegged the Nash logo! The styles are split between the 70’s and 80’s so it’s difficult to say exactly when this was printed, although there are a couple clues. I have no idea where/when I acquired this, I might have bought it off Ebay or a reader might have sent it to me. ( Was it you? Let me know! ) Enjoy!

This is part 2 of the Nash catalog dump. Part one focused on Joe Cool/Snoopy and Mad Magazine. This is the rest of the 1988 wholesale catalog from 1988. The cover, back cover, and inside cover are all glossy color. There’s a glossy insert for another brand called Freesport, a couple glossy black and white inserts, including the legendary “Jam’n Sound Board” and DOZ’R locker boards, plus an assortment of color photocopied price sheets.

I had a brief not-very-real skateshop that I ran out of my bedroom in the late 80’s. I sent out a bunch of requests for wholesale catalogs and tried to open some accounts. I put together an order based on requests from locals and what I could get ahold of, I ordered some staples like mounting hardware and a roll of grip tape, etc… One of things I got was a Nash catalog. Why get a Nash catalog when the product was so poor? For shits and giggles! It’s one of the few things I kept during the great purge of 1999. Yes, I deeply regret throwing out the rest of it. Joe Cool and Mad could have been their own separate posts, but some of the products appeared on the same page, so click through if you want to see more of Snoopy and Alfred E. Neuman.

It’s spring now, right? This is one of those toys that comes in those Kinder Eggs. Doc Skaterock tagged me in a post circa 2022 and when it popped up in a memory I realized I never posted it on Skate and Annoy. So here it is. It’s impossible (for me at least) to see anything with a small, cute sheep and not think of Shaun the Sheep. I wish this was Shaun the Sheep.

I haven’t been to the Cannon Beach skatepark in don’t know… has it really been 18 years? That’s the when the rebuild opened and the last time I posted about this park. I got out of the habit of going to Cannon Beach and have been going to Pacific City instead, but I finally made it back. After a day of hanging out at the beach we hit up the park and found it to be next to impossible to ride on standard wheels because the surface was so rough and slow. That got me thinking about the old park again…

You’re looking at Sharky, Volume 1 #4 published by Image Comics isn 1998. You’d think with a skateboard featured prominently on this glorious cover that one would show up again on the inside pages. Alas, this is not the case. This is puzzling, but the whole comic book is puzzling. It’ shard to read, hard to follow, and feature a zombified (and evil) Captain America and Vampirella. Apparently Vampirella was on loan from another imprint. I’m not sure a how they got around Marvel with the Captain America zombie.

It’s a two-for from Twonks and Goob. Good stuff.

Tony Hawk as a spokesperson for Cancerguard is gratuitous Tony Hawk that I can get behind, especially since Tony lost his father to cancer. Cancer sucks. My only complaint is that I live in country that claims to be the leader of the free world and yet we don’t have universal healthcare. Health insurance and hospital bills can be impossible to navigate here in the USA. You have to double, and triple check everything because they gouge you wherever they can. What I can’t get behind is the fact that this test costs $689! (!!!) which is insane. Also, these two videos have embedding turned off… so this company sucks. Yeah they have to make money for the investors, but in the immortal words of Laszlo Cravensworth, “Get fucked.”

While digging around looking for Lucky Charms images a couple days ago, I spied this Hot Wheels Skate Tony Hawk Cereal Skate Bowl fingerboard set. I ignored it initially, but it did trigger a memory something I had flagged when scanning vintage skateboard magazine ads. Volume 2, number 5 of Skateboarder Magazine had a photo a near the end showing a fiberglass wave that Skitch Hitchcock had built and was carrying around in the back of a rental truck.

TLDR: high powered magnets and some posts in bearings to keep the two platforms aligned and provide friction for turning. There have been at least two real-ish hoverboards already, the Hendo version from 2014, and the Lexus version in 2021, three if you count an independent French version from 2011 that Lexus basically made look fancy. That’s probably s far as the technolgy is going to go because of, you know, the laws of physics. That hasn’t stopped Colin Furze from trying to replicate the feeling for mere mortals, or those who don’t have a car company or university to fund them. Well… closer to mere mortal wallet capacity but still expensive I’m sure. Bonus: Colin is not just some kook, he actually skates. – Thanks to old timey friend of the site and contributor to the original 80’s print zine Karl Kingery for the tip!