Small Shelly Fauna

Weathorr, originally uploaded by TeraLemur.

No, I won't let it go. Bismillah, I will not let it go.

Since my scariest baby left me
I ain't got naught but bad news
Oh, I got them low-down
Low-down scav-endin' blues

I'm trying to drown my sorrows in recollection, as scavtime slips away
like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

First off, I would like to recognize Judges Joe and Sebastian for
coming in from Rhode Island and FRICKIN' CHINA (respectively) for the
Hunt. A more stand-up and scav-loving pair of dudes you may never
meet. The Hunt would have been much the worse for their absence. Joe
is, of course, a geosci homey from way back, and the only fellow I
would trust to judge Fraggle thin sections and state fossils in my
absence. Sebastian: what can I say? He makes a party into a
par-tay. He is also one of very few people who can match me
punch for punch in obscure pop culture references. I hope to see some
amount of Scav participation from these guys for years to come.

Thinking back to some more individual items: I am pleased that at
least one team (Snell-Hitchcock) did the Katamari Damacy item right,
with one of the Prince of All Cosmos' cousins (they
went with Foomin, nice choice) and an appropriate katamari.

As I've mentioned before, road trip went well. I was very happy with
all the Hodag calls, and associated Rhinelander items (major props to
the Vegans for getting a recording of Judy describing her necklace).
Now that Scav is over, I can mention something about the Judge
roadtrip, being that it was creepy as hell. There wasn't a single
period where we weren't primed for launch into a horror movie-style
situation. We even came up with the rough script for a movie,
Hodag!, based on our experiences running out of gas at
various spooky old barns and institutes for the criminally insane.
(Colin died first, by the way).

In my last post I talked about some of my favorite item
interpretations (e.g. F.I.S.T.'s Weathorr, shown above), but I should
take the time to note that several teams did well on these items. I
really dug all the very disparate takes on Weathorr, from bizarre
mutant creature to cosmic being to demonic entity to dualistic deity.
One team just had a scary hobo. That kind of came out of nowhere. If
Weathorr was a scary hobo, he would have looked like that, though.
Other teams that had good Guitar Wolves: BJ (with this wicked melted
metal blade), and Snell-Hitchcock, which lacked a real sword-guitar
but had the style in spades (including the guitar pick of the man
himself!)

I took some 520-odd pictures during Scav covering all of the major
events, and I hope to get them up on the website at some point in the
(near?) future. Information on that as it becomes available.