mermaid playing a ukelele

This is a hand-painted fishing lure by awesome artist Wednesday Kirwan. This little mermaid plays a red ukelele and lives in a white shadowbox complete with painted undersea backdrop.

The cord she is suspended from has a seashell knob that allows you to rotate the lure to view all sides. (Knob not shown).

There are real sea shells and pearls strewn about the sea floor. You can almost hear her sweet voice singing to you from the deep.

See an entire gallery of painted lures at finkbuilt.com!

insect mosquito

Seattle's Insect Skateboards is now shipping their newest longboard, the menacing "Mosquito", shown here sporting Seismic's orange Blastwaves wheels.

The Mosquito is proving to be one of Insect's most popular boards, and scores of them have already hatched and flown away from the hive to all points of the globe this year seeking hosts. Hopefully they won't succeed in drawing blood, but it's not out of the question with this shredder.

Despite the fun name and futuristic design, this skateboard is no toy. The Mosquito is the longboarding equivalent of a Formula 1 race car. This skateboard is effectively a state-of-the-art cruise missile you stand on, and you will not be running at the back of the pack on this machine if you have the guts to stay on it long enough to harness it's potential.

"Insect longboards are proven race winners. Fast, precisely built and state-of-the-art."

Most Insect skateboards are constructed of springy, renewable, vertically-laminated Bamboo cores clad in Multiaxial Fiberglass. This "composite construction" system offers incredible flex, permanent memory retention and strength. That flex is a critical, subtle and often overlooked suspension characteristic that sets these boards apart from the average maple plank.

Flex eats up surface imperfections and minimizes dreaded "speed wobble" when correctly used. It resists breaking and cracking but it also allows the rider to "pump" the board, using rythmic sidewinding motions and the energy returned by the flexible platform to accelerate and maintain speeds of 15mph or more.

The Mosquito does handle speed, and combines it with g-force inducing turning abilities. You can get away with both speed and high maneuverability because the Mosquito deck is custom made for every rider's weight, with just enough stiffness underfoot to be stable at speed, and a healthy amount of concave to hold your feet firmly in place.

One more feature the Mosquito has that allows it to corner as aggressively as it does are the full wheel cutouts at both ends. These voids in the deck allow the trucks to turn in a very tight radius, eliminating any need for risers, allowing gargantuan wheels, and guaranteeing absolutely no chance of cursed wheelbite.

To put the rider down low, Insect cut out the truck mounts to allow "drop-through" mounting of the truck hardware. This makes pushing easier, and significantly lowers the center of gravity for those times you need to cinch down the kingpin and hit 50mph.

And the Mosquito will gladly oblige. It's every bit as comfortable humming along at 15 mph on a sunny suburban sidewalk as it is scorching the blacktop at a mindbending rate, or zig-zagging the cones.

The Mosquito has all the essential elements of a fast, highly maneuverable, do-anything longboard plucked out of the future. With flexy, supple camber, progressive concave, and stealthy handling that lets you whip through obstacles like a jet fighter, fly through garages silently, or swoop the corner market for a cold six-pack faster than you've ever gone before.

What it all boils down to is all that juicy camber, concave and flex. The Mosquito runs away from everything else where handling is concerned, and also has the street-fighter styling, downhill performance, and durability that sets this longboard deck apart from anything else on four wheels.

www.insectskateboards.com

who would kenofseattle vote for?

92% Dennis Kucinich
89% Mike Gravel
82% Joe Biden
79% John Edwards
77% Barack Obama
73% Hillary Clinton
72% Chris Dodd
68% Bill Richardson
35% Rudy Giuliani
25% John McCain
20% Ron Paul
19% Mike Huckabee
17% Mitt Romney
13% Tom Tancredo
10% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz