Category Archives: grumpiness

They’re Despicable!!!

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I had promised myself to put the whole political outrage stew in the freezer for a while, and stop picking at the meat and potatoes of it before it completely poisons me.  But President Pumpkinhead is imploding so fast I may miss out before incoming Russian and North Korean and even possibly Australian missiles begin nuking the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area.  I guess I simply have to boil it a little bit more right now.

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If I were going to script it as a psycho-consensual farce and put it on the stage, I couldn’t have written it any funnier.  It seems a couple of evil geniuses have been manipulating the pumpkin-headed guy so they could achieve their own personal ends.  They are selling him invisible clothing again.  And they will get away with it, too, because they are doing it in the context of the Republican Party.  The GOP, of course, is the party that cheats in order to win.  They gerrymander voting districts.  They suppress voters that are more likely to vote for Democrats.  And they maintain a lock-grip on the House where more people nationwide actually voted for Democrats, but that comes through the voting system as a Republican majority victory.  They are, as Sylvester says so juicily, DESPICABLE!!!  (Yes, I know, the triple exclamation point thing again.)

Tweedle-not-so-dumb and his twin brother, Tweedle-evil.

It appears that now that Hatchet-face Flynn, the Dick-Tracy villain who was in charge of National Security, committed treason by promising the Russians that Obama’s sanctions for hacking the American election would be overturned as soon as Trump took over the job as big cheese in chief.  And it not only appears that Trump knew about this (or is that gnu about this?), but even said after Flynn was fired that he would’ve approved of it if he had known… even though he didn’t know… (or gnu).

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Immediately thereafter, Football-head and Bowling-ball-head on the Congressional Oversight Committee (You know, Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz who brought you the Endless Benghazi Hearings Follies and Republican Musical Review) went about the business of completely overlooking any possible wrong doing by the Pumpkinhead Administration.

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A Republican friend of mine once told me that he knew that all the crooks weren’t exclusively in the Democratic Party, but that’s the only place he really wanted to look for them.  It helped him sleep better at night.

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I spent a good share of last evening being lectured over Facebook by a conservative friend about not getting behind the Trumpkin bandwagon and scooping up the horse poop so they could continue their parade of doing Republican good things for the country (where “Republican good things” is a phrase that means destroying public education, taking away my healthcare since I have six pre-existing conditions, and dumping coal pollutants into rivers and oil pollutants into the air).  Apparently my writing stuff about Pumpkinhead Tinyhands that isn’t positive is a protest which constitutes terrorism, and I need to go to some other country like Canada where the commie-ISIS dictator is a libtard idiot just like me.  I don’t  have a right to stay here if I protest the elected government and the so-called humor in my blog and Facebook posts are unacceptably un-patriotic.  Apparently you can only call black presidents Hitler without being hooted out of the country by REAL AMERICANS.

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Apparently I am wrong about this man.  I am told he does not have a bowling ball for a head.

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Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness, humor, memes, pessimism, politics, satire, self pity

Truly Terrible Trump Tricks

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Yep, I have tried thinking about the many uses for barbed wire and dead cats rather than have to think about what Trump has been doing, and it just isn’t working.  After looking up the tensile strength of various common barbed wires from different barbed wire companies, I could not find one appropriate for a cat-a-pult, and it turned out that the whole idea was a joke anyway.  But he just keeps getting worse.

Here is John Green, an author I love and listen to, explaining the Immigration Boobilly Boo-Boo;

The Trumpinator has gotten the idea that he can hammer the world into a shape he likes using mallet-like executive orders.  But no amount of hammering is going to turn the globe into a giant banana.  His executive orders are not put through a review process, and so, are often nonsensical, inappropriate, and even dangerous.

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The fact that you had to take a moment to decide if you needed to ask me if this photo was real or not tells you a lot about what you already know about Trump.  He is petulant.  He is childish.  He throws tantrums at the drop of a hat, or the smirk of an underling, or the comments of a celebrity… I wonder if he throws tantrums about barbed wire and dead cats?

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“Oh, no!  Thinking about Trump made me accidentally strangle Mr. Tinkles.”

And even worse are some of the detestable deplorables that he has working for him.  A man like Steve Bannon with his Breitbart background and his white supremacist crossword puzzles of racism, antisemitism, and nihilism would never have gotten power in the first place if it hadn’t been for Trump.  And now he is at least the second most powerful man on Earth.  Arguably, he’s the first, depending on how much his Wormtongue skills are affecting the baby mind of President Babyhands.

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So, here is my pitiful attempt at mocking the evil Steve, Darklord Bannon;

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I know, the angry eyebrows are simply not enough.  Let me try again;

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Okay, I know it’s not good enough.  I promise you, if I can find a cartoon way to harpoon the great white whale, Moby Steve, I will, and then post it for all to see.  I would like to be able to make a single cartoon so snarky that Bannon’s pet snake would drop over dead at the shockwaves from little old Republican ladies laughing at it and changing their opinion of Trump forever.  Of course, I know, better cartoonists than I have tried and failed.  That doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort.

You have probably discerned by now that I did not vote for Trump.  And I have given him more than enough chance to prove what he will do for this country.  I will never call him President using his proper name.  He is not my president.  And I do not want to live in Trump’s idea of America.  This I will probably achieve sooner than expected because what he is doing to Obamacare will undoubtedly kill me.

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Filed under angry rant, commentary, grumpiness, humor, Liberal ideas, memes, politics

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

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…Except it ain’t zactly funny. Somehow we let the orangutan take over the zoo.

I did tell you the world would end because the Cubs won the series.  Now we have to pay for our excesses and mistakes.

No more Obamacare.  The monkey vowed to repeal it.  And I have six pre-existing conditions, four of which may cost me any and all health insurance.

No more Paris climate agreement.  The monkey likes to burn coal and pollute the air with carbons because it makes money and his monkey friends like it.  Global warming turns the Earth into Venus.

No more nuclear agreement with Iran.  The monkey promised to tear it up.  He hates Iran’s particular flavor of invisible sky-friend.  He believes it gives him the right to kill them, kill their families, and take their stuff.  He is an aggressive and thoughtless monkey.

And I saw this all coming.  My Bubba friends all kinda like this monkey because he says all the things they want to say and get away with… even in polite company.  There are a lot of Bubba friends in this country.  Some of them are not even angry all the time.  Some of them are not even white.

And now that the dust has settled from massive monkey tricks, voter suppression in southern states, lies from Fox News, and Comey’s “Oh-one-more-reminder-about-emails”, the White House will become the Monkey House.  I doubt this essay will get me thrown in prison.  The monkey doesn’t read… except for Twitter.  And he doesn’t understand metaphors.  And I never used his real name in this post.

But everything that’s bad in life gets worse… and then you die.  So I have a little while yet to live and love and make the best of life.  But the monkey wins in the end.

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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness, humor, monsters, Paffooney, politics, rants, red States, self pity

Stop What You’re Doing and Fix It!

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The gate leading to the pool was broken.

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The pool itself was broken.  See all the cracks?

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So the city inspector said, “Fix it or else!”

I had some old boards from the fence I took down.  And as an Iowa farm boy, I have skills.

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So I fixed it.  For less than $20 .  New hinges and corner brackets, but I used old nails.

Now, to repair the danged pool my own little self.

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Filed under cleaning genii, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness, homely art, humor, new projects, photo paffoonies, work in progress

The Car Radio Keeps Me Alive

Today I had to deliver my daughter, the Princess, to her high school in the rain.  It is hard enough make the circuitous trip to the west in order to go south and then east again through all the construction and roadwork going on with stupid people who are somehow allowed to drive a car and carry a gun in Texas even though they don’t know what a turn signal is for or that a speed limit sign shows the maximum rather than the minimum speed you should go at every red stoplight and corner without there being rain to obscure vision and make the mangled pavement slick.  You have to be able to concentrate and perform like a virtuoso while driving to make it there alive.  I would simply not be able to do it without the car radio.

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Driving the family car in Texas

The radio keeps me calm and gives my brain the power it needs to overcome obstacles.  The jump across the river with the man-eating fish in it alone requires an energized brain and a cool head.  I listen to oldies on the radio with KLUV in the mornings.  It is how my children have come to love Don Henley and the Eagles as much as I do.

For the last seven years of my teaching career, I had to learn the hard way that music is critical to driving well, and driving well is the only way to stay alive on the mean streets of Dallas.  I had a morning commute of 40 minutes, 30 miles, and 45 stoplights one way to my teaching job in Garland.  I drove it starting at six in the morning to avoid traffic.  But after school, I often had to labor for three hours through rush hour traffic on the way back home.  I learned to switch the station to 101.1, the classical music station.  Listening to Mozart and Beethoven not only makes you smarter, it makes you calmer.  Calm enough not to get out of your car at the stop light and beat the guy in the car ahead of you with the detached bumper of your car that he knocked off while cutting in front of you because he was in the wrong lane to make the turn he needed to make and didn’t realize until 15 minutes into the wait for the red light to change enough times that our cars actually had a chance to make it through the intersection.  Yes, that is a run-on sentence about road rage.  And road rage is real.  But in real life I didn’t beat him to death because of Mendelssohn playing on the car radio.  It only played out that way in my head while the radio soothed my brain and prevented my hair from catching fire.

I owe my life and sanity to the car radio many times over.  And I am resigned to the notion that I will probably need it many times more before the curtain closes the last time.

 

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Filed under angry rant, classical music, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness, humor, mental health, Paffooney

Morning With Grumpy

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I have not been having good days lately.  Things go wrong constantly.  Things that cost money that I don’t have.  I’m a writer, after all.  I don’t even have a waving acquaintance with money.

Fire ants bit me on Tuesday.  My hands and feet are still plagued with painful, itchy bumps.  At the same time the city is telling me how the yard has to be done and the trees have to be trimmed and the pool has to be repaired.  If I don’t complete the work and get the pool running again, in spite of the fact I don’t have any money, I face a two-thousand dollar fine, which would be cheaper than fixing the pool, but it would recur every month until I got the pool fixed.  Well, welcome back to Debt Town.  At least I will have a swimming pool again this winter.  And the drive this morning to take the Princess to school was an epic battle with high-speed morons in Bubba-trucks.  I made a wrong turn downtown in the rat’s maze that the I-35 construction project has created right next to downtown Carrollton.  I had to dodge between people in cars that don’t know how to drive, but drive too fast, kids on foot on that have their heads plugged in, so they don’t hear you coming when they step out in front of you without looking because their eyes are fixed on their phones.  We got there five minutes before the tardy bell.

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Some mornings I just need a chance to complain.  Thanks for listening.

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Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, grumpiness, humor, photo paffoonies, soliloquy, strange and wonderful ideas about life

My Post for Today

My computer is wearing out.  It blew up the WordPress posting sight on my screen to where the letters in the title are once again an inch tall.  The chances that it will suddenly wipe out everything I have typed and save a blank post over the whole thing almost instantly is making me tired.  To combat the problem, I must constantly keep a back-up copy on Microsoft Word which may also grow or shrink for no apparent reason.  It gets frustrating, and I am old, ill, and quite tired.  But I am also only a month away from two entire years of posting every single day, a feat I am not ready to fail at this close to the end.  So let me show something from my cartoon collections stolen from the internet at large.

From the Lola Bunny file;

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From Movie Art;

From Hanna-Barbera Toons;

And these are all things I could’ve written a 500-word post about with unique and possibly yawn-inducing Mickian insights, but today I would rather not.  Today I take the “picture is worth a thousand words” thing and give you 17,000 thousand words worth of not having to listen to me.

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Filed under blog posting, cartoons, collage, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness

Flubtastical Floundering

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Seeds of despair have been growing and blooming into black orchids of depression.  Doubt creeps in.  It is true that the publisher I just signed a contract with is the kind of publisher that squeezes their money out of the authors rather than readers.  That seems to be a dominating trend in the publishing world now.  You don’t make as much money as a publisher by investing in advertising, editing services, and printing services at your own expense, even paying advances to authors for the rights to their works.  The old way is dead.  One way or another, to compete in the modern market you have to squeeze more and more profit out of your workers.  More productivity for less money in wages puts more money into the hands of the owners, the corporations, and the CEO’s where it obviously belongs.  I suppose, as one of those little guys at the base of the poo-poo volcano of American business, I have a right to feel cheated and abused.  My hard work is taken supreme advantage of by others.

Lots of stuff has been going wrong lately.  The yard has gone untended for too long and is now overgrown and wild.  The dog got hold of number two son’s $350 retainer again.  Both of my kids at home are groaning under the strains of work and school.  My health continues to slide down the old hill.  They are even cancelling one of my favorite Facebook games.

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I must now say goodbye to Avengers Alliance on Facebook.

But despair is not really in my nature.  I knew going in that publishing my book this way was going to cost me money I will probably never make back in my lifetime.  But it will be available in print.  It will even have my own artwork on it.  And if I have to publish the other novels as digital Kindle copies only, at least I will actually have three books in print.

The yard looks unkempt, but there are blossoms everywhere, and our plants are at least processing carbon dioxide and putting oxygen back in the air.

The dog got hold of the retainer, but this time apparently realized how much trouble she was in.  She doesn’t appear to have bitten or chewed on it at all.

Broken spirits and weariness are the intended products of the modern American school system, so we are doing that right, at least.

And not being able to afford to go to the doctor any more has made my wallet a lot healthier.  I have the money… er, credit… to spend for the first time in ten years.

Maybe the orchids are not so black as I thought.

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Filed under battling depression, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness, humor

Point by Point

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I was enumerating yesterday all the bad things that make my life exactly the way I expect it to be as a total pessimist.  Of course, I left out that I am fully expecting Donald Trump to be the next president of this country.  Yes, I expect the worst to happen.  Hillary Clinton will not beat Trump either because of her toxic unfavorability or because the email thing will bring down an indictment to nullify her eligibility to be president.  And all my conservative friends who love Trump will continue to dance happy dances and sing about me being a hopeless “lib-tard” who doesn’t really know anything about anything as Trump continues to rob them and make their lives more miserable with the help of the government he will control from the inside.

Yes, one of the biggest downers about being too smart for your own good is, you see past the lies everyone tells themselves, and perceive the darkest of the truths that lurk behind them.

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I got this meme from a high school friend who served in the Navy and became a firefighter… an honorable public servant no matter how you look at it.

In the meme to the right, I am characterized as a self-centered numb-noggin who thinks his opinion is more important than the realities of this person’s life.  It makes me sad that my childhood friend believes this is true about my political beliefs.  But I am not claiming to be oppressed.  Well, maybe by Trump once he does away with the healthcare law that guarantees insurance companies will cover me despite six pre-existing conditions.  This is a straw man argument that sets up liberals as unreasonable norks that want the law to dictate that everything should be the way liberals want them to be.  That is not the way I see being a liberal.

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I choose rather to look at what people are saying on all sides and make decisions based on my hopefully broad and enlightened mind.  I would never advise someone to have an abortion.  But I do care what happens to children once they are born.  Are we limiting their suffering when they are not wanted by anyone?  When they are born into poverty?  When they drink lead-contaminated water and are subjected to brain damage and death because the conservative government decided saving money was worth the risk?  I believe all people are deserving of respect and all people have value.  I have gay friends and former students.  Their existence in this world enriches it, and I am not ashamed to know them.  I would never ask one of my conservative friends to marry another man… or marry anybody.  I have a wife who is from a foreign country and her road to citizenship is still not traversed.  Could we be making that road harder than it needs to be?

I am a liberal.  But I would not call myself a tax-and-spend liberal.  I would rather see the money we already pay in taxes go for better public schools, better roads and bridges and public works, less expensive, or even FREE college education for my struggling children, rather than tax breaks and corporate wellfare for GE, Pfizer, and Exxon.  Is it too much to ask that our taxes be spent on us rather than enhancing corporate profit margins?  And couldn’t millionaires and billionaires afford to pay the same percentage of taxes that I do?  Maybe even more because they have more?  Why does believing these things make me evil?  Or stupid?  Or any of the other things that my conservative friends tell me that I am because I am a liberal?  I would rather reason things out than simply insult others, something the other side of this argument doesn’t make a habit of doing.

I have no problem saying, “Black lives matter.”  They do matter.  And they have not been treated fairly.  Not Trayvon Martin.  Not Michael Brown.  Especially not Tamir Rice, the twelve year old shot to death for having a toy gun.  These are children who are not to blame for their own deaths.  So I am not burdened to add “…All lives matter” because it goes without saying.  White and Asian lives have not been snuffed out in Walmart’s toy section for handling an air rifle.  I guess I must be a reverse-racist for saying this like I have been told on Facebook.

I am a liberal.  So shoot me.  Er… rather, don’t shoot me.  But be patient with my fact-heavy and logic-heavy arguments.  If you are a Christian, then weigh my arguments against what you know in your heart Jesus actually would do.  I know scripture.  I have read the entire Bible more than once.  I am confident my wanting government to do what helps the greatest number and harms no one will stand the test.  And I am preparing to deal with a President Donald Trump who probably won’t see it that way.

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Filed under angry rant, grumpiness, humor, Liberal ideas, pessimism, politics, Uncategorized

A Little Note of Blues From a Cardinals’ Fan

Yep, we did it again.  We had a great season, better than we’ve ever had (since we were the Chicago Cardinals before I was born).  But, just like last year, the Carolina Panthers put a wooden stake through the heart of our dreams.  We are still a team that has never won a Superbowl.  And I wish the best to you, Carolina, who has also never won a Superbowl (the “best” here means that the Denver Broncos’ defense turns the Panthers’ offense into hamburger, and keeps you on the list just as the Steelers did to us in ’08).

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Wait til next year!  Oh, and there are still the St. Louis Blues in hockey who have yet to win the Stanley Cup!

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