Although we here at daltongn.com strive to be hip, with-it, contemporary, cutting-edge, au courant, tres chic and too cool for school, we recognize that we but stand on the shoulders of our founder, Palisades Thorncastle IV.  Palisades, (we like to think that if we would have known him, we would be on a first name basis) left us a legacy of striving to shatter the banal, the trite, the shop worn, the cliché, and the oh-so-fifteen minutes ago.  We derive our mission of pursuing the eclectic, the eccentric, ecstatic, the electrifying and the enduring from Pal (we would like to think that had he but known us, we would have been included in his inner circle, so much so that we could have addressed him by his pun of a nickname).  The drawing you see above was discovered during the renovation of the downtown Albany, NY home of daltongn.com CEO Mark Dalton, which dates back to 1871.  On the back of this self portrait, in tortured handwriting that makes the penmanship of Eugene O’Neill seem like the work of a 12th century monastic illuminator, reads Pal’s charge to us: “Do whatever the hell you want.”  Alas, Palisades Thorncastle IV has been lost to the vicissitudes of History.  Even the renowned novelist and guardian of Albany lore, William Kennedy, could not trace the Thorncastlian footsteps back to the wellspring that spewed forth, geyser-like, the inspiration for daltongn.com.  It is a heavy burden, the mantle bequeathed by the enigmatic Palisades Thorncastle IV, but it is a burden we shoulder happily, as we trudge forward, one weary step after weary step, pushing Thorncastle’s boulder up the hill like Sisyphus, hoping that one glorious day, we will finally wrestle that imponderable rock over the summit, and experience the joy of watching it careening downward, and smashing into the home or car of some sucker who truly deserved it.