Scrotoss

Scrotoss... well in hand!

2007-01-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

Hi, Tossers. Check it owwt -- scrotoss.org is back. Expect great things tossin' into 2007, plus a nostalgic look back at scrotal events of 2006. I know it's been a while, but Scrotoss isn't yet accepted as a winter pastime. Maybe once the rumoured SnoScrot gets off the drawing board...

image: authentic doubleball equipage, from these folks

Scrotal dateup

2006-09-08T21:08:00.000-06:00

So I made a real scrote for myself last weekend. Up until then I'd been relying on what one of my weekend-novel-writing friends called "the manky scrototype," the original four socks filled with sand and tied together with nylon rope that was constructed at North Country Fair. That scrote served me well, but the rope was starting to fray and get scratchy, and squeak unpleasantly on the wooden shaft, and it was time for something new.

I made a couple of attempts to find leather but eventually settled on denim in the form of some stout $5 jeans. I bought two types of twine and then went to a store called "Stitches" (where I had previously failed to get leather) to see about getting a large-eyed needle. An embroidery needle! Of course! Except whoops. They don't have any. I get the largest needle I can, unwind the twine into separate threads, feed each thread separately through the eye of the needle, manage to pull it through, and start "sewing." Of course, I couldn't pull the thick twin through two layers of denim with my fingers, so I had to bite down on the needle and haul it through with my teeth for each. And. Every. Stitch.

My stitching is atrocious, it goes back and forth between round-n-round and serpentine, it's got shitty knots in it and the interior socks (or "nads") are filled with dirt, not sand. That last bit isn't really about the stitching, but still. This scrote is not pretty. I would go so far as to say it is ugly. But it sure is a jump from the scrototype. Its soft "fap!" when you make a good catch, its elegant tumbling arc through the air, its sheer scrotality. Most satisfying.

I suppose I should cross-post this to Scrotoss.org but I don't want to do that until I get some photos to go with it. Might be able to accomplish that this weekend if I can manage to get some pants on. We'll see.

* * *

Seems I have.

Early Scroting

2006-09-04T13:22:00.000-06:00

I got a quick note from a prototosser that I thought I'd pass on to you folks...

I just thought I'd pass along another scrotoss idea to you, since I don't have a blog account. I played scrotoss way back in the day at a native culture camp in Whitehorse, Yukon. We had about 20 people, so the elders had us play a handball/lacross hybrid, where you couldn't move while carrying the scrote, and the goals were tripods of limned trees about 10ft high. To score, you had to make the scrote hang up on the goal. Very fun. Might take a little more rulemaking to work with adults instead of grade nine students, but I thought I'd pass it along.

Have fun scrotossing, and keep up the great work!

Geoff

Not a bad Scrotoss-the-sport suggestion. What I want to see is two teams of two racing to get ten catches. I got a feeling it'd be pretty tense.

Scroton!

Steve

Hempfest Scrotoss Report

2006-08-24T23:14:00.000-06:00

Last week on my web site I mentioned that I was going to attempt to spread the Scrotoss word at this year's Seattle Hempfest. Attempt I did, though with only qualified success.

A few things worked against me from the start. I'd hoped to get there by early afternoon but delays prevented me from arriving until close to 5, so the evangel didn't get as much time as it deserved. Once there I discovered that Myrtle Edwards Park is a long and extremely narrow strip of land. This plus the fact that the place was packed solid with hempers meant that it was tricky indeed to find a spot where even the most intimate game of Scrotoss could be played.

Still, tossing did occur. I and my Scrotoss companion of the day managed to get a good hour in at least, and during the course of the play we were able to draw in a fella named Cal, who took to it immediately, as well as a younger dude who jumped in for a few tosses before ambling off to catch up with his friends.

Not exactly a resounding victory for the forces of Scrotoss, but a start. Next time I'll be better prepared, I'll have a nicer scrote, I'll get there earlier and I'll push it harder, because I still believe this city is ripe for the game.

NEW WAVE AT BVJ

2006-08-11T14:53:00.000-06:00

THE RECYCLE OF LIFE CONTINUES

Two fresh scrotoss faces emerged from their creative placentae at Big Valley Jamboree last weekend, both wired together with superior sinew.

The one with wooden beads is filled with pebbles and has a comfortable weight. It's possibly the best one yet.

The smaller, moosehide number - already muddy by this point - is filled with painful pennies. We named him S.C.R.O.D.O.K due to his vicious temperment and keen sense of honing in on sunglasses and fragile elbows, not to mention the "nether regions."

Other highlights of the weekend included various drunks proving that women are inherently better at the game at first, and me crushing a thread-hole punch to shards with my bare hands. GRAW! But most importantly, after a minor newspaper mention, a stranger drove by our RV campsite and asked the dangerous question: "Is that the thing called scrotoss?"

You better believe it, dood. The word is spreading. Next stop: Nihon!

Scrotoss spreading!

2006-07-15T12:02:00.000-06:00

I have to admit I'm a little jealous at commenter Adam's awesome elkskin scrots, pictured. Adam, please more pics and details! My own scrotmaking has been kinda stalled, but I've found a supplier for wicked thick moosehide and sinew lacing... I like the look (and ease of execution) of an outside stitch, and this cheapass hemp twine just isn't cutting it.

Tossers, keep 'em coming!

Way more Scrotoss pics!

2006-06-30T09:16:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Fish Griwkowsky, who took my first beaded scrot along with his lovely lady to Banff last weekend. Popcorn-filled nads = squirrelbait!

Something ain't right with my Scrotoss flickr set, but this tag search works. Get tossing, people!

How to Make a Scrote

2006-06-23T14:11:00.000-06:00

It doesn't take much tossing to win folks over to scrotoss, and once won the most immediate concern is the creation of one's very own scrote. Luckily, scrotes can be quickly made with easily available household items.

Basic scrote:

You need:
two pairs of socks
sand
12 inches of rope or cord
scissors

Instructions:
Pretty simple. Fill 2 of the 4 socks with equal handfulls of sand. Tie them off and cut off the extra sock material beyond the knots. Place a sand-filled sock into each of the two remaining socks. Use the cord to tie them together. Cut off the remaining sock material. Presto! You're done.

Now, if you want to get fancy, you can make a "regulation" scrote.

Reg Scrote:

You need:
a sheet of leather or suede about a foot on a side (a cheapo jacket from Value Village can work)
scissors, leather snips, whatever -- something to cut with
a leather awl would hurt, either
2 socks
sand
twine

Instructions:
Cut two identical 12-inch-long dumbell-shaped pieces from the leather/suede. Use the twine to sew around the edges, leaving room to insert the testes. As with the basic scrote, fill 2 socks with sand, tie them off and cut off the remaining sock. Stick the socks in the dumbell pouch you've made and seal off the rest of the pouch with the twine. Presto again! You're done again! B-Bam!

Of course, these are early designs. Committed tossers are encouraged to use their imaginations to come up with new designs or improvements on the old. Good luck! Scroton!

2006-06-20T22:59:00.000-06:00

Scrotoss Parade!

"Throw that scrotum, it's Father's Day!"

Scrotoss debuts at North Country Fair

2006-06-20T19:21:00.000-06:00

Every year I go, I make the same mistake of overpacking when I cram my gear together for North Country Fair. It’s not just the volume of jeans, gonch, t-shirts and sweaters I bag up – ridiculous when I know I’ll be in the same gonch and jeans for three or four days – but the volume of useless crap I haul. I pack like an eight-year-old running away from home, stuffing my pockets at the last minute with a junk-drawer collection of flimsy twine, dull scissors, questionable batteries, old comic books, cheap novels, action figures, fresh notepads … and video games.

Nothing’s as useless at NCF as entertainment products. They are unnecessary. If you bring a Game Boy – hell, if you even bring a book – and you actually get around to using it, you’re doing things wrong. NCF is about itself. On the physical plane, there’s the music, the people, the music, the woods, the partying and the people. On the spiritual plane, there’s… more. Drugs may figure into this. On your second and subsequent journeys North – even on the New Land, it is and will be the Fair – the air is crowded with memory, all your previous visits twining into and out of each other: the rainstorm when your buddies almost monoxided themselves, that transcendent moment beside the stream, the terrifying encounter with the Vulture Children… the picture-perfect love affair that died hard on exposure to City psychology and bled regret all over two years of your life… for what the fuck do you need Tetris or Fight Club, here?

That’s not to say North Country is nothing but watching rainy bands, swilling warm beer and wrestling with desperate demons. There is recreation – there’s gaming, even, if for the purposes of maintaining a column’s theme you use a broad definition of the word. That’s right; as predicted in this space two weeks ago, many hippies and hosers at North Country Fair were captivated by the magic that is Scrotoss.

For those of you just joining us, Scrotoss is a pastime based loosely around an old Cree game some friends and I discovered at Fort Edmonton a while back, basically tossing a double-lobed beanbag back and forth with sticks. The historical accuracy of modern Scrotoss begins and ends with the word “Cree”: starting with our awesome but mistaken notion that the dumbbell-like ball was originally a buffalo scrotum, tanned and stuffed, the culture of today’s game is cut completely from whole cloth (specifically, an old suede blazer), created ex tempore by its players, transmitted orally.

It was fun to watch it happen, to see the joy of Scrotoss spread from camp to camp, to hear its vocabulary build as more and more players came up with more and more schoolyard-hilarious terms for the game and its equipage. By the time I had the leather bag sewn -- I stitched it while listening to the Oilers game -- those playing with the temporary scrototype (two sand-stuffed socks tied with nylon tent rope) had a whole giggling glossary underway:

shaft: a scrotoss stick
scro-motion: the act of replaying a good catch in your mind, slowly
teabagging: getting a scrot to the face
tossers: those who play Scrotoss
blue balls: the scrot fails to leave the shaft on a toss
undescended testicle: the scrot is stuck in a tree

… and so on. Was it the pot, the shrooms, the booze, the spirit of the place? Whatever it was, I’ve never been first-hand for such a quick, spontaneous emergence of folk culture. It seriously blew my mind. Hippies, hosers, men, women, little kids and Englishmen, at least a hundred people over the course of the weekend, laughing, tossing the scrot, coining ribald lingo on the fly. And when North Country’s traditional march of children paraded past with their parachutes and started chanting “Throw that scrotum! It’s Father’s Day! Throw that scrotum!”… well. You can just imagine.

Fun to play, fun to talk about… and it never stops being fun to play and fun to talk about. As I mentioned above, North Country magic sometimes has a heartbreaking time in making it home from the Fair, but I think this one’ll stick. Maybe. I mean, who knows? I've got a line on a friend of a friend who works in a saddlery, but... with every electrical day in the steel city, the dream of rolling around the fair circuit evangelizing Scrotoss and selling handmade scrots out of the back of a Westfalia seems more and more unreal…

This post originally appeared as an "Infinite Lives" column in Vue Weekly
Image: Stephen "Dr. Scrot" Notley shows his pair, D. Martineau photo. More pics here!

Scrotoss!

2006-06-20T18:52:00.000-06:00

Polygon counts, processor speeds, motion-sensing, hard discs, custom chipsets, online capabilities, media formats… you know what’s missing from the ongoing/upcoming videogame wars? Buffalo testicles. Portable, cordless buffalo testicles – or at least a rawhide facsimile thereof. Electric society has left us screen-staring, thumb-twiddling, deathmatching and PictoChatting, dumping our disposable dollars into an unending series of gizmos and gizmotic paraphernalia with boredom always minutes away… and all along, all we needed was to reach back to the wisdom of our fur-trapping past for the entertainment miracle that is a tanned, sand-stuffed scrotum and a couple of sticks…

A blindingly brilliant, hotter-than-hell summer day with money in pocket and nowhere to be – even the hardest-dying of videogame addicts can’t argue against all that good gravity pulling them out of unventilated basements and into the bright world of our city’s many cheap-as-free summertime activities. The history and mystery of this place has been much on our minds lately, and so it was that we packed a bowl, a water-bottle and a Honda Civic and rolled on down to that timbered treasure of the river valley, Fort Edmonton park.

We didn’t expect our history-park adventure to turn into a gaming day, but there it was, right off: a two-lobed leather beanbag and a couple of trimmed birch branches, leaning against a wall in the corner of the courtyard of the Fort proper. I don’t even know how we knew those items comprised a playset; Fort Edmonton doesn’t have all kinds of ugly illusion-breaking explanatory signs everywhere, and the costumed interpreter I think was on testicle-stick duty was busy demoing Native beadwork for a workshopful of cooing women. It just seemed right, somehow; we picked up the sticks, and nothing will ever be the same.

Friends, this game with the nutsack and the twigs – it no doubt has an official, historical name but we just call it Scrotoss – is the new frisbee. It’s even easier to learn than Frisbee, if you can believe it, and the minute you start flipping that two-lobed sack back and forth its potential for slick moves and trickshooting – the pick-n-flip, the backhander, the blueball, the teabag tornado -- is wonderfully apparent. I think we must have spent at least half an hour in the courtyard, hogging the scrot. We all got excited when one of our companions found the mother of all scrot-sticks, a beautifully finished hardwood pole with a gently tapering point and an attractive carved handle… and were crushed when an elderly gentleman shouted “That’s mine!” Guy wouldn’t even let us borrow it for a while, but we could imagine how that cane would have handled.

Scrotoss isn’t the only attraction Fort Edmonton holds for game fans. There is, of course, the Tom Thumb mini-golf across the street from the Selkirk Hotel, a non-motorized, non-fibreglass eight-hole layout rife with frustrating fuck-you features... keep your cool on the hole known as “Crazy Dogleg", and watch out for wild-swinging spoiled brats! Further back there’s the old penny arcade which features two rooms, one with a shooting gallery and the other with old dime peep-show film-reel machines. The arcade wasn’t in operation while we were there, but I’ll certainly be back to sample this precursor to modern mainstream videogaming: gun violence and soft-core titillation under one roof! And then there’s the old-timey midway, currently under construction and set to open on Canada Day, with its selection of period carnival games…

But that’s a story for another day, another paycheque. Today, I’m here to spread the gospel of Scrotoss. As I write, I’m looking at this ratty old buckskin coat I have, wondering if I ought to cannibalize it for its leather, make myself my own set of bull hangers. The jacket cost me sixty bucks, but my need to get back to flipping the scrot is almost too great to wait until I can pick up another piece of hide. North Country Fair is this weekend, and if there was ever a game (other than sweet bocce) designed for stoners, hosers and grubby hippies, it’s Scrotoss – yesterday’s game, tomorrow!

Image: D. Martineau's lens captures the animal grace of Bob the Angry Flower creator Steve Notley's Scrotoss style
This post originally appeared in Vue Weekly and on Liverquest