Category Archives: blog posting

September 15, 2016 · 4:01 pm

Twits and Wits Tweet on Twitter

Unlike Donald Trump, Twitter is a complete mystery to me. I was told by a publisher that to sell my writing, I need to create a writer’s platform.  And  to do that I had to blog and create a presence on Twitter.  So somehow, goofy little Mickey needs to learn how to tweet.

“Like a bird?”, asked Mickey innocently.

“No, you feeb!  Like a true Tweet-Wit like Ricky Gervais!”

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So I gave it a try.

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Basically I spend my Twitter-tweets on tweeting my blog posts.  It makes me happy, though I don’t notice any affect on the flow of the Twitterverse.

I get lots of followers like this one who appears a little over-friendly.

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I’m not sure what to make of tweeting twits on Twitter.  They all seem to want something from me, and I have no idea what it is… unless they want money… which I have none of…

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Disney cartoon characters trick you into following them because they seem to be cute little Disney things, but they only tweet stuff about sex and women with big baby-feeders.  What is up with that sort of mixed-hormonal nightmare?

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The political stuff all seems to be conservative in nature.  Twitter, just like Facebook, wants me to vote Republican and forswear my wicked communist-democratic leanings that make me think terrible un-American thoughts, like “maybe Colin Kaepernick is not entirely wrong-headed about his protest.”

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Some of them just want to gross me out.

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A lot of it, however, looks amazingly like Facebook stuff.  And if you look hard enough, there are funny and insightful things too.

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So, I will try harder to Tweet like a tweet-wit, and make a mark on Twitter that is not hopelessly twit-like.

 

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September 10, 2016 · 3:47 pm

Spitzen Sparken Compu-BOOM!

Yesterday I had to start a post over again that my computer wiped out completely just as I was finishing it.  I had intended to rewrite the post today, but found key parts of it that I really liked were gone from my diabetic old memory.  Life is like that.  We get old and we get all futzed up, and no… the computer did not malfunction and save me from using a bad word there.  I meant to say “futzed”.

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It is a Yiddish sort of word… so I guess you could argue it is not a real word.  Yiddish, after all is a language intended by God to provide Jewish comedians with words that sound like insults but really aren’t… and words that don’t sound like insults that really are.  (Have you ever looked up what “putz” actually means?)

But that is what the Mickian computer has been up to.  It mashes, mangles, impedes, and implodes my writing.  If it wasn’t so handy for coming up with a funny post about fighting with a computer, I might actually become aggravated enough to throw this old computer out the upstairs window and into the sickly, green, unused swimming pool below.

I have used my computer daily and put it through all sorts of contortions and convolutions in the past three years of ill health and bed-ridden retirement.  It is probably no wonder it is wearing out.  I not only write and turn drawings into jpegs on it, I use it to mess with photography, play Facebook games, and keep up with the international clown show that other people generally refer to as politics.  I shed beard hair on my keyboard.  I drop popcorn on it when I am trying to jam too much in my mouth at once.  And I occasionally baptize it with a juicy sneeze or projectile cough.  I confess that I probably deserve the revenge it wreaks upon me.

Besides randomly deleting my posts and instantly saving the changes, it will also shrink the view of the entire page so that I can’t even read what I type with a magnifying glass.  The only way to correct the problem is shift to a different browser for a while until Firefox or Chrome stops hating me long enough to reset.  I have also had problems with the computer blowing things up.  One time I was trying to write on WordPress when only three huge letters at a time would fit on the screen.  That can make it quite hard to pull the old train of thought out of the darker parts of the tunnel of stupid ideas.  (I also just now had to re-type the part in italics when the computer deleted it.  I am making a back-up copy on Microsoft Word, but sometimes I can’t copy and paste fast enough.)

Truthfully, something is seriously wrong with this laptop.  The mouse pad malfunctions and the control key sticks.  I may have to buy a new computer soon.  But this one has given me numerous goofy smiles, and I will miss it when it joins the pile of old dead computers in the garage.

If you haven’t quite figured it out, these are some of the numerous goofy smiles.

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Filed under angry rant, blog posting, feeling sorry for myself, goofiness, humor, Paffooney, self pity

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September 1, 2016 · 3:30 pm

Spitzen Sparkin Time Again

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Today I need to take some deep breaths.  My computer betrayed me just now.  I had been working on today’s intended post for a week with pictures and posing dolls and writing dialogue.  Then, as I was one more panel from the end, the computer pulled another one of its malfunctioning fits.  In a matter of two seconds it highlighted everything I had written on the WordPress writer, deleted it, and saved the changes.  This is now the seventh time the computer has done this.  And I have gotten used to it enough that I have bits and pieces of the work saved.  I can re-construct the piece for tomorrow.  But I was almost angry enough to dash the stupid word-munching machine against the far wall.  So I need calming thoughts.

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Here is a recent picture of a visitor to the park across the street.  A snowy egret… well, in Texas, more properly called a cattle egret.  I snapped this picture while walking the dog.  Jade the dog did not even spook the thing, since she is littler than it is and timid of birds with glaring yellow eyes.  I didn’t realize I had a use for this picture until now.

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Calming thoughts are doubly necessary today.  While I was composing my post, and ignorantly being unaware that my computer was about to eat it, I got a phone call from Page Publishing.  They have looked over the manuscript for Magical Miss Morgan, and have approved it for publication.  Of course, this is not only not a publisher that pays anything up front, they also require the author to invest money in the book’s production.  But they did tell me they do consider using the author’s own artwork for the cover.  And I do have credit again for the first time in three years, at least until Bank of America bankrupts me with their lawsuit.  The dawn photos I put into this post are particularly appropriate.  Calming thoughts with a bit of turbulence in the background.  And the computer tried twice to delete this while I wrote it.  But I foiled it each time.

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August 20, 2016 · 6:49 pm

Tenfold…

Once again my computer betrayed me and wiped out three paragraphs in this article, instantly saving the changes so that I had to start over with nothing but the title and a lower case letter “u”.  Soon the danged machine will probably explode scattering my words all around the bedroom and getting random punctuation in my chicken soup.

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I was trying to write a post about the difficulties of becoming an “author” when my computer decided to ironically make it harder.  And this goofy notion that I know anything at all about the topic came about because of a random WordPress comment that appeared on one of my old posts.  I was told by the commentator that I had several posts that were good enough to go viral, and that if I wanted to make that happen and improve my “brand”, then all I had to do was Google “Jemensso’s tricks”.

Challenge accepted.  I know how to Google stuff.  I learned by being a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nutcase.  (Did you know that you can not only find numerous well-argued sources that indicate we never actually went to the moon, and only faked the moon landings in Hollywood, but also visual confirmation that we actually did land with high resolution photos of the various landing sites taken from space telescopes this month?  And those photos even show the tracks where the moon buggies traveled through the sands of the moon.)  So, I first discovered that my blog is not the only blog that got this message.  I found a plethora of them, some in the exact same words.  And then I located this informative page HERE.

It would seem to indicate that any benefits you can get will cost you at least some money.  And that is the biggest irony of being a writer who foolishly imagines that he can become something called an “author”.   You end up having to pay money instead of earning it.  Each of my two published novels were done with different publishers.  The first was a squirrelly print-on-demand company that doesn’t charge you to print your novel.  They don’t employ any editors or marketers either.  It is a good way to get student work into book form, and parents will gleefully shell out the money for a copy of their darlings’ writing in book form, but it is no way to get a novel published.  I could have sent them a 200 page manuscript of monkey-typing, and they would have put it in book form.

The second book, Catch a Falling Star, was done with I-Universe, a publisher that is now a branch of Penguin Books.  But it is basically an Indie publisher.  I had to invest my own money in the creation of the book.  I had to pay the editors, proofreaders, and marketers that I got to work with.  I ended up with a product that made me proud, but that I really couldn’t sell.  I am still more than $6,500 short of recouping my investment.  I do not recommend that path, unless, like me, you really crave the experience of working with competent, professional editors.  It was worth it to me to do it once.

But now I am out of money and out of options.  I led with a banner that shows I have four complete and unpublished manuscripts that I want to do something with.  I am busy with three more that are past the 15,000-word threshold… where you have to consider the work for completion because it is, at that point, almost half done.  Where will I go with them?  What will I do with them?  The answers will, I hope, eventually appear here in this goofy blog.  And I am sure they will probably surprise us both.

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Filed under autobiography, blog posting, dreaming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, work in progress, writing

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August 19, 2016 · 3:38 pm

Running In Place

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Sometimes, when you have been writing up a storm, you have to linger for a moment and rest in the storm’s eye.  That’s what today’s post is.  It includes a goofy metaphor that is basically all wet.  It has a picture of my hoarding disorder collection of Monster High dolls… and some of my countless videos… I’m a movie collector and hoarder too.  And there is not a lot of research or hard new thinking in this post.  It is basically a random warble to fill a daily post, since I have posted every day now for a year and nine months.  At 60 and in poor health, I probably don’t have a lot of time left to get the words out.  But I have a lot of words still inside me.  You may have to put up with a few days of babbling here and there.  But I promise, the babbling will be quirky and excessively goofy, so it won’t be totally boring.  Running in place doesn’t get you anywhere, but it is still good exercise.

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August 7, 2016 · 3:29 pm

Growing the Gallery

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My bedroom walls serve as a gallery of my Paffooney artwork.

I have been collecting pieces of colored-pencil Paffoonery for a very long time now.  I am a life-long scribbler and doodler.  You are bound to build up an ocean of old drawings that you could easily drown in if you live that way long enough.  I recently found a few more in an old scrapbook I had squirreled away in the library between cartoon books.

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These are all drawings I did for my three kids when they were little.  I suppose that gives them sentimental value.  They are all imitations of copyrighted characters.  But I am not selling them.  I haven’t actually stolen anybody’s intellectual property yet.  But it makes a good filler post as I continue to rest and work on other things.

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July 18, 2016 · 4:23 pm

Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain.  You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_nSometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!…  To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain.  You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before.  (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature?  Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters?  What’s a typewriter, you say?  Danged millennials!)

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I really can’t help it, you know.  I was a middle school teacher for 24 years.  That sort of thing has mental health consequences.  And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

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Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there.  Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain?  There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

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I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post.  But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

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The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be.  Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath.  Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page.  (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”.  Danged millennials!)

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And so, this is my doodle-bop!  Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is.  I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind…  Honest!  I did not lose it.  It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment.  It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

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Filed under blog posting, cartoony Paffooney, goofy thoughts, humor, imagination, irony, mental health, metaphor, Paffooney cartoony, pen and ink, pen and ink paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wordplay

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July 16, 2016 · 3:57 pm

Lovely Internet Weirdness

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One of the difficulties of being a humorist and trying to connect to people by being funny is that you have to compete for attention.  Cartoonists have an advantage in that they can put something together with pictures and just a few words that you can get easily and quickly and then you laugh.  So the internet is a nightmare maze of short-quick funnies with exceptional levels of weirdness.  I keep track of the weirdness by keeping a weirdo file on my computer and copying things in it that make me go “Whaaaa?”  and then laugh.  Let me share a little of that with you.

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The miracle that is Don Bluth.

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So, therein lies the challenge I face daily.  How do you compete with Muppet cupcakes?

 

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July 14, 2016 · 8:46 pm

Idea Fertilizer

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Picture borrowed from the North American Manure Expo’s Facebook page

This morning as I was going to QT for my daily dose of wake-up juice with caffeine in it, Jody Dean and the Morning Team on KLUV radio station were making fun of the North American Manure Expo taking place in London, Ohio this week.  Jody Dean, the radio talk-show host, was suggesting that the Expo would’ve been a natural thing to host in Fort Worth because, well, Texas and cow poop just naturally go together.  But it occurs to me, that this is fortuitously a part of Ohio this month because the GOP convention is taking place shortly in Cleveland, and the bull dookie won’t have to be shipped as far for that.  Besides, having grown up as an Iowan, I have a farm-boy awareness of the intrinsic need for poo-poo conventions where the latest distribution technology is on display.  After all, cow poo is fertilizer… it makes stuff grow.

Yesterday I was unable to write the post I had planned about the tragic police shooting in Dallas.  There was a lot to write about.  It was a terrible thing that affected me deeply and did considerable damage to the fight for human rights in this country and preserving the respect and dignity we owe to the men in blue who too often give their lives to keep us safe.  It also gave our Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick a chance to actually put both feet in his mouth at the same time, and for Dallas resident and former rodeo clown turned president George W. Bush to do a goofy smiley-faced dance during the playing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic while the memorial to the fallen Dallas policemen was in the middle of a rather somber occasion.  Poop makes stuff grow, and that post would’ve been epic.

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A project I was working on yesterday while sulking.

You see, yesterday I didn’t have the usual amount of time for writing because I had to install an air conditioner for my hot wife.  It was difficult to install because the bedroom I installed it in has no regular windows.  Only a window/door onto the patio.  And I had to do the installing because my wife wanted to take a sledge hammer to the bedroom wall and knock out enough bricks to make a vent hole for the air conditioner.  I did not want my determined little wife taking up the hammer herself, so I carefully mapped out a plan and bought supplies to cut a hole in the drywall and then jury-rig a makeshift air duct to a pre-existing hole in the brickwork.  I got the hole cut in the drywall and then ran into a snag when I exposed a support beam in the way of my plan.  Well, this led to a discussion of the details executed rather loudly and I believe I was compared to a donkey at least three times.  We then reached a compromise (by which I mean what husbands usually mean when they use the word “compromise” which is that we did things the way my wife wanted them done.  Or, rather, my wife picked up the hammer and crowbar, and I retreated to my room to sulk like a proper adult.  The air conditioner is now humming.  It is blowing half of the exhaust out through the space left by the two bricks she knocked out rather neatly, and the other half up through the wall into the attic.  Oh, well, it works and she is happy with it.  Hopefully no building inspectors read this post.

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Another piece of alien art done while sulking.

The point is, cow poop happens.  And cow poop is fertilizer.  It makes things grow.  Including ideas for posts on my blog.  I was able to illustrate the Telleron alien kids from two of my novels while I was busy sulking and feeling sorry for myself.  In fact, the novel Catch a Falling Star probably only exists because of Iowa and cow poop.  Yes, life in farmville is resoundingly boring and uneventful, so my fertile imagination couldn’t help but make up an alien invasion of a small Iowan farming community.  And my imagination was probably fertile due to so much exposure to cow poop on my grandfather’s and my two uncles’ farms.  So now you know.

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July 3, 2016 · 6:41 pm

Butts and Nolts

“Don’t you actually mean nuts and bolts?” someone is surely going to say.  Oh, yes, I misspelled that little item on purpose.  This is another inane post about the writing process and trying to improve my “brand” with my blog.  It is something I have no earthly idea how it works or how to go about it.  So I often have to go back and think about the nuts and bolts of how you put this stuff together and try like heck to figure out what I am doing wrong.

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Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.

So, the problem is, while the blog as a whole has been gaining momentum, my blog traffic is down for this month.  People are not viewing and reading my actual stuff and nonsense as much as they were in the other months besides February.  So I have to look again at what works and why it works.

A lot of my work generates interest from the real world outside of my stupid little head because of the artwork.  I am really probably better at drawing colored pencil Paffooneys than I am at the constant yadda-yadda-yadda of trying to write humor.  Pictures like Mr. Fuddbugg here draw people in better than anything else I can post.  Of course, the artwork I post from my favorite cartoonists and comic artists of the past, like Wally Wood and Rumiko Takahashi draw far more views than my own artwork does.  This is due to the undeniable fact that they are better known and better at it than I am.

And both of those artists are well known for the “butts” that are in their works.  Yes, nudes and naked pictures increase your blog traffic.  Two of my top ten posts of the past two years are Be Naked More (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/12/20/be-naked-more/) and Naked and Nude (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/03/04/naked-and-nude/).  (Sorry for the poor link quality, but my computer is still having brain farts and keeps shrinking stuff and blowing stuff up at random, so I cannot, for the moment, make proper links.)  So, I can probably boost my blog traffic by posting another nude I have never posted before, even though it may make it impossible to share this on Facebook.

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This picture is actually a very complicated thing to post.  I have issues with things like sexuality and nudity because I was assaulted as a child.  And some of my nude drawings involve real-life models whose privacy I don’t want to invade.  (Yes, I had a real Gryphon pose nude for this picture.)  But this picture is old, having been created during my wild days as a grad-school college nerd.  Adding the “nude” tag to this post will undoubtedly draw in viewers.  (There really do seem to be a lot of people out there who want to look at naked Gryphons.)  And I am not ashamed at having drawn this pencil-piece.  It brings back lots of grand and glorious memories, though probably not the ones you think I mean.

Finally, I may need to get more aggressively insulting.  It seems to be the thing to do to create political humor with the impending Presidential Election coming up between the Wicked Witch of Wall Street and the Racist Orange King.

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The Orange King is very, very HYUGE! but his hands are small.

But there are difficulties in pulling that one off.  I mean, I spent a lifetime learning how to love the unlovable in the classroom because all students are able to learn and we owe them all, as teachers, the best education we can give them.  (Believe me, you will have a better life because I spent my teaching career trying to iron out the stupid from the laundry basket of Texas education.)  So I will have to settle for a more serene and gentle sort of political wit (if I may be allowed one last oxymoron).  Because I agree with Neal Gaiman on the subject of Political Correctness.

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There’s my two cents, such as it is.  Four cents after inflation.  I have had my say about the Butts and Nolts of this essay.  And if that’s not enough to explain it, then feel free to call me names in the comments and look at some of my other recent posts that nobody is reading so you can see how terrible those are too.  And thank you for actually reading the whole post.

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