Scotto's Wall Scrawls

Originally published at The Scotto Grotto. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at The Scotto Grotto. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at The Scotto Grotto. You can comment here or there.

Found a few digital images that I thought were lost forever. Before I discovered Flickr, I used a few different resources to remotely host pictures to my LiveJournal. Printroom.com was one of them, but it disappeared rather suddenly, along with remote links to the photos. Archive.org wasn’t as helpful back then so I assumed anything I didn’t have elsewhere was lost. However, while perusing my blog here I ran a link check and discovered it was back, albeit in a different format. A quick login after I inexplicably recalled a long-abandoned password got me access to a few items from January-April of 2002.

So, I’ll slowly upload them up to my server for future review. Most are photos of Newton (of course), my walkabouts in Fort Lauderdale, Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach, Florida.

Below is from the day after my 33rd birthday – Feb 3, 2002. (Blog entry here) Probably the best day out with my brother, ever.  He and I roamed around downtown fort Lauderdale, and it was Superbowl Sunday (XXXVI – Patriots first win) Since neither bro or I were terribly interested in the game, we went to the local art museum instead of going to see a movie because the museum was free to visit.  (It was the Museum Fart where I went with Danny oh so long ago. Apparently now, it’s the NSU Art Museum ) So much for future fart gags.

Bro and me as Bluntman and Chronic

Bro waiting at the station for the route 55 – we just got though an altercation with a homeless guy begging for money. Derek had never seen me verbally explode at someone before – the guy started to tell me off when I honestly had no money to give and I flipped out.

the stars and stripes! I love me some airships.

After seeing the thumbprint portrait (it’s about 4-feet square) we just cracked each other up creating scenarios of what the artist must’ve been like… They may be a perfectly normal, vanilla person, but we had him (maybe really a female, but we had it in our head as a he) dressed in nothing but a leather apron and goggles, speaking with a stereotypical German mad scientist accent bragging about how they’d never catch him because each thumbprint was from the hands of a different victim… and he had another portrait made from nose prints and a third from nipples.

Also in that locked archive were these things – there was a project back in the day (approximately March 2002 -July 2002 -13 years ago as of this writing) called Poemtag. Sadly, the robots.txt blocked archive.org from scraping it before it was lost.

To the best of my recollection the gist was a sort of modern-day haiku, putting on a nametag-sized sticker a short bit of poetry.

Maybe a baker’s dozen years is long enough to bring it back. Here are the ones I had written or put in storage because they somehow caught my fancy at the time. Before the poems, I’ll put a blank here, maybe it’ll entice someone to make one (or more?) of their own.

Originally published at The Scotto Grotto. You can comment here or there.

• Pictures taken - PF Changs, Curious George, Weapons of Mass Destruction

50 things you've done meme continues at 43 - I...

43.'was a sergeant in the safety patrol in elementary school. The big trip to Washington DC was no big whoop to me back then, as I was living in Richmond or Alexandria, VA at the time. I'm back in that boat now that I'm living in Maryland... but I don't have the cool reflective orange belt and shoulder sash with a badge anymore.. I had to turn it in at the end of the school year. My duties were to assist the crossing guard with kids in front of the school.. .holding the stop sign and making sure that everyone made it over OK. The guard was a soccer mom, and gave me my first taste of coffee that I liked. I think that she put 3x sugar and 3x cream in it. I got her a Santa coffee mug for Christmas that year, and she gave me some cupcakes with red and green sprinkles on 'em. I don't remember her name, but she had a cool van... all earth tones of brown and tan... could probably tote 12 people comfortably. I can proudly say that there were no accidents on my watch, despite some nutty drivers.

1 year ago - back mending, bhk cold fading, mission impossible squirrel video, blogger death threats, larry and tigger vet trip picture

2 years ago - V movie, political ramble / revolution, boca/popular comics, pictures from walkabout, newt playing fetch pics

3 years ago - Easter, Deadbolt, Danny recap, K, piccies, personality test, heard from everway gamers, kitties video, walking octopus, waterbus

4 years ago - Procrastination, Henchman, search warrants/LA, booger eaters, vacuum cleaners, Brian Blessed, heroclix, zombie pinups

5 years ago - jkg, TAG, souls, Bahá'í, soul & body, leaving FMM

6 years ago - dream, dented the door with my mitt, sleepy and grumpy, how I sleep w/newt, small hands=rude, army men, Dan Bfast, lab grown meat, dali museum, secret fun spot, 2 dead celebs

7 years ago - lj bump, baby newt pic, one ring, mush, thebot, palm art, John Denver

A learned person gently comes, steps carefully.

– Shimizu Hiam

Set in the indeterminate but not too distant future, JAMESTOWN chronicles a group of "settlers" (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building mysteriously collapses, heading down what's left of I-95 in an armor-plated vehicle that's half-schoolbus, half-Millenium Falcon. They are going to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, look for oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area.

The story is of course based on the actual accounts of the first ten years of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to the death of Pocahontas in 1617. Set against a cataclysmic backdrop, the book features the historical characters—John Smith, Pocahontas, her father Powhatan, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and John Rolf—but in an act of wild re-imagination, akin to Baz Luhrman's re-interpretations of Shakespeare (the great playwright of the Jamesown era!), Powhaton is half-Falstaff, half-Henry V (with a psychiatrist consigliere, Sidney Feingold); John Martin gradually loses body parts in a series of violent encounters, while John Smith is a ruthless and pragmatic redhead continually undermining the aristocratic leadership; and Rolf's and Pocahontas's romance is conducted by text-messaging, IM-ing, and ultimately telepathy.

Despite the grim sounding circumstances and large quantity of spilled blood, it's a romantic book, a meditation on history and interpretation, told in language that is endlessly delightful—the jokes, the rhymes, and the rimshot dialogue throw the story's bleak underside into brilliant relief. It's a big book—a cross between the terrific maximalist novels of Barth and Safran Foer and the minimalist magical satire of George Saunders.