Artist @suzushiro333 has a series of Manga/Anime style illustrations called Maid to Skate that features… well, maids in formal attire skateboarding. While all of them exhibit a certain amount of humor, some of them are quite beautiful and you can tell the artist either skates or has at the very minimum done a really good job of studying. If you appreciate it, there is some merch available.

It’s a Pink Panther jumbo post! – Thanks to Cool Steve for 99% of this.

Do you want to see a guy in a samurai costume exhibiting professional levels of skills in surfing, soccer and other pastimes, like say… skateboarding? Bowl and street skills, no less. If so, look no further than this Nissan foods commercial for Samurai Noodles.

Hard drive cleaning time:  Freeing makes PVC anime figures and accessories, mostly scantily clad stuff in the vein of your typical Hook-Ups graphic. Even when they aren’t scantily clad, they still look like Sorayama robots. These must sell like gangbusters. I mean, who wouldn’t want a highly posable figure of a sensuous, big breasted mannequin riding a skateboard or a scooter? The skateboards all come with snowboard bindings, which is unfortunate. I’m not sure what the purpose of these is. It’s possible they are the plastic anime-centric equivalent of those small wooden manikins used for figure drawing.

Michael J. Fox made some commercials in Japan for the Honda Integra in the late 80’s and early 90’s that were essentially designed to remind you that Fox was in Back to the Future without having to pay Robert Zemeckis and and Bob Gale. This is a print piece that looks like it was probably a magazine feature and not an advertisement. The Chris Miller deck dates to 1988 according to Art of Skateboarding, but the print piece appears to be from 1989. Because I first saw it on FB, it’s nearly impossible to trace to it’s original Internet source, but it might be this Michael J. Fox fan Tumblr. Unfortunately, there’s no real information about what it says or what it’s from. It’s likely related to the commercials because although none of the 5 versions I saw contain any skateboarding, a few contain scenes with the red guitar shown in this print piece. UPDATE: Added a vague translation.

To me, no matter how cool (or skateable) this house looks on the inside, I would not be able to get over the wasted space and awkward appearance from the street. Takeshi Hosaka Architects. [Source; Dezeen] – Thanks to MC for the tip.

Pursuitist.com profiles a house in Tokyo, Japan with a cement bowl of sorts that looks like it was added after the fact. I can appreciate the thought, but not so much the execution. – Thanks to Danimal for the tip.

Haroshi makes lots of cool sculptures out of used skateboards, including this forthcoming electric guitar collaboration with Deluxe and HUF. Pretty damned cool, although what does Deluxe need to be involved for, other than to provide pre-recycled skateboards? Maybe they are seconds. Rock on.

Not because it’s breaking news, but because I keep getting tips out the wazoo. It’s popular demand. I love these videos, one of the few where the soundscape is an important part of the video, an equal with the and the skating instead of just filling the run time with some rad skating. It’s a sequence with Gou Miyagi (2009 SLAP interview) from Daisuke Takahashi’s “Subspecies.” A little bit parkour heavy, but still good fun, no matter what Carl says.

Ending 2010 on a classy note here with this pinup poster of the Japanese pop group called AKB48, which near as I can tell from the web site has something to do with the fact that there is apparently at least 48 girls in the group at any given time. I ‘m not even kidding. It’s crazy, it looks like they have different shifts of girls. Sometimes there are like five girls in a video, sometimes fifteen. They have team rosters. Maybe it’s a competition, or whatever it is, I think my failure to comprehend goes deeper than just not understanding Japanese. There are 48 girls in the group. A lot of them have bikinis, but only six of them have skateboards. [Source: 76ers]