“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”
“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.
(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)
Doofy Fuddbugg
“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”
“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.
“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”
“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”
“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.
“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).
“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”
“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”
At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?
And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.
I do, in fact, realize that this is bad poetry written by a pretty poor poet. But, as you can plainly see, I am not very pretty… and not poor now that my bankruptcy is paid off. (Having nothing, but not being in debt makes me richer than Trump.) But life in 2022 is no more poetic written in putrid prose either.
This is not going to be your usual yearbook picture day, is it?.Unusual choice for what to wear on picture dayBetter dressed, but… You mean to tell me this is a teacher?Cute smile, Blueberry.Which second grade class are you in, Ronny? Who’s your teacher?Were these yearbook photos actually taken in the school cafeteria?So, you must be the Science Teacher, eh, Mr. Purrdy?Tim, it would be nice if you could smile before the photographer takes the picture.So, Wally, you must be in Mrs. Nelson’s Art Class this period, right?
Now, that’s a picture done right, Ruben. Good job!
What subject do you teach, Mr. Enstein? Frank, take the cancer stick out of your mouth.
Is that a teacher pose, Mr. Beyer?
Why do so many teachers want to be pictured smoking in the yearbook, Mr. Dogg?Don’t we already have your yearbook picture, Michael?Rita, that’s an interesting t-shirt, but it feels like it is staring at me.Um, are you smiling yet, Murky?I honestly don’t want to take pictures for this yearbook again next year.
Everything in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area is shut down today by ice and the threat of ice. Texans don’t like to drive on ice. You can’t drive friendly… and fast… on ice. And Texans don’t like to be cold. 100 straight days of 100-plus heat is okay for Texans. Three days of freezing weather is the end of the world.
A year ago the world was frozen like this in DFW. The electric grid failed and people froze to death. Emperor Greg Abbott blamed the windmills because they froze and stopped turning. But in Iowa they go through the same thing every year and the windmills are properly winterized. Only the really stupid people and the spectacularly unlucky people freeze to death in Iowa. Mostly when they are stuck on the highway. Some froze to death in their bedrooms in Texas. But in Texas the real problem was the natural gas lines freezing and breaking down. Those can be properly winterized too. But Emperor Abbott doesn’t know that… or doesn’t want to know that. He still hasn’t winterized anything… or forced corporations to spend money to do so.
My wife’s religion actually makes her hope that Armageddon will come soon. They think the end of the world is the only way to get to paradise. Now that Russia is invading the Ukraine, Armageddon may be about to happen. All that Gog and Magog crap has been going on throughout the twentieth century. So far we’ve managed to avoid it actually happening, by war, by nuclear war, by nuclear winter. We have been feeling that the world is in danger of ending since long before I was born in the middle of the 20th century. The Bible says the 1st Century Christians would still be alive when the Day of Judgement would come.
They were wrong about that. Maybe they are still wrong now.
If the world is not going to end in fire and ice in the next week or two, we have to realize that things need to change. We can’t be frozen in place. In politics it is basically a matter of choosing to be progressive and not be stuck in the ice of being conservative. We need to change, not stay the same. We need to determine that world maps change by diplomacy and compromise, not by combat and killing civilians. And we need to convince Russia of that. We also need to change the way we treat the environment and the economy. We need to invest in technology and changes to the consumption of practically every product. Production needs to occur without polluting. We need to spend more, a lot more, on clean energy like solar power, wind power, thermal energy from the under-earth, and we need to stop spending so much of our capital on tax breaks for billionaires and corporations. And we need to convince millionaires, billionaires, and corporate executives of that.
We could even change schools to give Louisa her wish and create naturist classrooms in school, letting kids learn in natural environments, and having the school uniform be nakedness. And we would have to convince parents and teachers of that… Of course, that last one is a joke, and even Louisa might not really want that. Especially since it is really, really cold today.
But if you were serious about changing education to provide nude classrooms or even nude schools, you would have to change it slowly. You would start small. Kindergarten and first grade would go first, and only with kids who would actually choose to be nude in school (probably a lot more of them than parents think would choose that.) Then you would move them up a grade every year until you reached high school. Of course, you would have to be flexible. Some students would not thrive and have to be moved to textile classrooms. And nude classrooms would have to be expandable as textile students begin to see the changes in their nude friends and want to be transferred into the experiment.
Of course, I know that joke idea is still just a joke and always will be. But the point is, the Diplomacy/War question and the Save the Planet/Profits over People question would have to be answered the same way. The younger ones make the actual changes and the gas-and-oil, pro-war dinosaurs would be responsible for going extinct themselves or taking everybody else with them.
So, I am basically confined to my bedroom today with considerable arthritis pain and trapped in the middle of a frozen world. And as I have nothing better to do than solve all the world’s problems today, even Louisa’s… I am still faced with the fact that solving these problems involves changing people’s minds. Especially conservative minds who will likely have a gun and want to kill me if I try to change their minds. So, there it is, a simply-stated theme… and now I need to look at bullet-proof vests on Amazon.
Can Bugs Bunny sue me over this picture? Does it represent a copyright violation?
First of all, the Bugs-Bunny look-alike above is clearly labeled “Rugs Rabbity.” You can make satirical references to copyrighted characters if it is clearly satirical. The Rabbity’s speech balloon is clearly not saying, “What’s up, Doc?” Instead he’s using a beer-commercial reference addressed to a wooden structure intended for tying up your boat at the shore. Sure, it’s clearly meaningless without the context of the Warner Brothers’ favorite attack rabbit. (He is well-known for getting black ducks blasted by Elmers during Wabbit Season.) But it is referential using clearly altered forms of the copyrighted character. And clearly, no cartoon rabbit has ever won a lawsuit in human court.
Yes, I know Superman won his lawsuit against Captain Marvel (err… make that Shazzam because of Marvel’s Captain Marvel.) But that was actually DC Comics ruthlessly taking down the competition, and the result was that DC ended up owning the character they proved was a rip-off copy.
But what’s the actual topic of this post anyway?
In other words, “What’s up, Doc?”
Um, as a kid I used to think updock was a weed like burdock. And I assumed that Rugs Rabbity said that all the time because he liked to smoke it. Or brew it so he could drink it and dip his carrots in it.
See, I got you to grimace at that joke without being sued yet again.
But, really, this post is about yesterday. 22/02/2022!
Yes, yesterday was a screwy -number day. You can write the number out forwards or backwards, depending on how you initially write it down, and have it be exactly the same. In other words, not numbers, a palindrome. In other numbers, 2/22/22. The last time a number like that happened was in the 17th Century. (I haven’t double-checked that fact myself, but Stephen Colbert said it was so.)
And Minnie Mouse can’t sue me either, since we paid for our Disneyland tickets and she posed for the photo with my daughter as part of what we paid for. Scraggles the Cat surely won’t sue me because I created him with my own colored pencils, and cartoon cats can’t sue in human courts either.
Today’s post is basically a picture post. Every metal (or Plasticine) figure displayed in this post was painted by me with Testor’s enamel. Most of the figures were painted back in the 1980’s. Most of them were sculpted by Citadel Miniatures Co. The Indian boy I repainted as a young storm giant was made of an inferior quality Plasticine that melted a bit with the paint’s more caustic ingredients. That’s why looking at him closely makes him appear like a burn victim.
Not all of the figures are from Dungeons and Dragons games. These are figures I used in the Traveller RPG. I also owned the Indiana Jones role-playing game, but the figure was used as a Travellerhero.
These figures were used to play Call of Cthulu as well as Traveller. Cerebus the Aardvark made appearances in both the Dungeons and Dragons game and Traveller, which was fairly true to the character as he appeared in Dave Sim’s underground comic.
I am proud that my arthritic hands once allowed me to paint the tiny details on these miniature sculptures. But the red dragon I wanted to display in this post, that I have pictured before in this blog, is missing for the moment. I spent most of the morning trying to find him. Oh, well… I still got to show off my mini-painting skills.
Since shortly after her twelfth birthday Valerie had lived with her mother in the house on the northeastern corner of Main Street and Whitten Avenue. It was a house they moved into after Daddy Kyle lost the family farm to the bank and he… well… he stopped sitting at the dinner table in the evenings. In fact, he never sat at that particular dinner table in that particular house. Ever.
“Valerie, help me set the table,” her mother said to her.
“Maybe you could ask Tim to do it. He’s growing up too, you know.”
“He’s a guest in our house this evening.”
“I’d be happy to help,” said Aunt Jen.
“We welcome the company, but you’re a guest too this evening. Valerie used to love doing this. Remember when she was ten and would sing Disney songs as she placed the spoons, knives, and forks?”
“I’ll set the table, Mom, but I don’t sing anymore.”
“That’s a real shame. You have a beautiful singing voice, girl,” said Aunt Jen.
“Valerie doesn’t do a lot of the things she used to do, Jen. Did you know she is giving up cheerleading in her senior year?”
“What? Why, Val? You have always been the best one out there. I thought you were the head cheerleader this year.”
“No. Charlotte Robbins is head cheerleader. But I didn’t want the job anymore anyway. I don’t have the pep in my step anymore to do that whole bouncy, smiley thing.”
Valerie rounded the table plopping down five forks next to the five plates. Then she picked up five spoons and rounded the table again, listlessly plopping down one for Uncle Rance, one for Terrible Tim, one for Aunt Jen, one for Mom, and then one for herself. Aunt Jen was Daddy Kyle’s sister, and her family came to visit every Tuesday like clockwork, because Aunt Jen was relentlessly trying to help her niece and sister-in-law every single week since… since Daddy Kyle stopped sitting at the dinner table. Five butter knives finished the ritual, and Valerie plopped down in her place.
Aunt Jen raised an eyebrow as she surveyed Valerie up and down. “I really thought you loved cheerleading. Is there something more wrong than usual that you need to tell us about?”
“No, I promise, there is not. I’m sorry if I’m a bit out of sorts.”
“Valerie says the cheerleading squad has gotten too shallow and petty for her. She seems to have some sort of grudge against about three of the girls.”
“Oh? Did they do something mean to you, hon?”
“No, Aunt Jen. It’s just that Dottie, Charlotte, and Lupe have all been making fun of the fact that I’ve gone most of the way through high school without a boyfriend. They’ve all got one.”
“All three of those girls?”
“All seven of them besides me. Even Patty the mascot has a boyfriend now.”
“But that is no reason to give up on something you love to do.”
“That’s just it… I don’t love to do it. Not since the end of eighth grade.”
At that moment Uncle Rance and Tim the Termite both walked into the dining room.
“What don’t you love anymore?” Uncle Rance asked.
“Boys,” Tim the Twit had to answer for her. He was the closest thing in the world she had to an actual brother, and he fulfilled that role tremendously terribly.
“Tim, dear, remember our discussion about respecting members of your own family,” Aunt Jen warned.
“But it’s not a secret,” Tim explained. “You remember that French boy that came to live with the Martins, don’t you?”
“Francois? The one who wore the clown paint and sang so beautifully in the Martins’ family bar and grille?”
“Yes,” Valerie answered with an almost-shaky voice. “I was in love with him. And suddenly he was dead and gone.” She looked down at the tablecloth and couldn’t look up again.
The adults were silent, looking… well, stunned.
“Oh, I do remember. That was so sad,” Aunt Jen said.
“But in school you are always hanging around with Ricky Porter and Billy Martin. And you and Danny Murphy were inseparable before he graduated and found that Carla Bates.” Uncle Rance was an English teacher at the high school, and he had seen practically everything she had ever done at Belle City High.
“Yeah, well, that’s because they were all Norwall Pirates and my good friends. Not my boyfriends.”
“We’re sorry for your loss, Val,” Tim said, in a voice that was at the very least an excellent imitation of sincerity. “I know how much you loved him and how long you were hurting after he was gone.”
Valerie almost said something mean to him. But she looked at his innocent little devil-face and knew he wasn’t about to say something to hurt her in this moment. She did love him… in a way… like the way you love a brother whom you want to bop on the head with your closed fist… and maybe even bop him really, really hard. But he was undergoing changes in his life too, wasn’t he?”
“Did Tim tell you about his big date this weekend?” Val blurted out. Even she wasn’t expecting the secret to spill like that.
“Oh? He hasn’t told us anything about it yet,” Aunt Jen said, looking at Tim.
“But I’ll bet it’s Miss Murphy,” said his father.
Tim blushed deeply. “Yes, it’s Dilsey.”
“What are you planning to do?” Aunt Jen asked.
“The Robin Williams movie is playing in Belle City at the theater.”
“Oh, that should be good.” Uncle Rance gave Tim a knowing wink.
Tim looked at Val and gave her a pained smile. “How did you find out before I told anybody?”
“Dilsey asked me to babysit for her on Saturday, and I made her explain why. Of course, you and her used to have some pretty epic arguments about who was more accurately described as a pig and who was a baboon. So, she asked me how terrible I thought you would be to her.”
“Valerie!” Her Mom interjected reproachfully.
“So, did you say nice things about me? Or did you tell her the truth?” Tim said with a wicked grin.
“Tim!” Aunt Jen said with even more vehemence than Mom had used on her.
“I told her that even though you are kinda stinky on the outside, deep inside you’re basically a pretty good guy… well, really deep inside.”
Tim laughed. Everybody else at least smirked, even disapproving parents.
“You know, Tim, we approve of Dilsey Murphy even more than we do of her brother Mike, your best friend,” said Uncle Rance.
“She’s very sweet and well-mannered young lady,” added Aunt Jen. “Not that we don’t find Mike to be charming too… at least sometimes.” Aunt Jen was laughing by that time.
“And, Timothy Allen Kellogg, you better not do anything to upset her in any way,” Valerie warned. “If you do, I will make sure you are wearing your underwear as a hat with your butt still inside it.”
“When you finish med-school, Cuz, you will learn that you can’t actually do that in the real world.” Tim was entirely his usual self again.
“Don’t you try to tell me what I can’t do if I really put my mind to it! One day, no single part of your anatomy will be safe from my surgical skills. I’ll give up my dreams of studying architecture and study medicine just to prove it to you.” After that, the adults fell into their usual conversations. Normally Valerie and Tim would use the time to talk about TV shows and comic books, and what monsters the Norwall Pirates were currently chasing. But it had been a while since Val had last felt like actually talking about stuff. So, instead, the two of them just looked at each other in uncomfortably awkward silence.
I spent a good deal of my time as a game master for the Star Wars role-playing game in creating alien characters that fit the movies, the books I read in the Star Wars series, and the game materials. In this post, I will give you a mini-gallery of the aliens I drew for the game.
Chee Mobok was a space trader who had a problem with his own ego. He believed that he was a genius at language and could speak any language he had heard a handful of words from.
The Galactic Common speakers were always laughing at the things he said.
Huttese speakers like Jabba the Hutt were always trying to kill him for saying precisely the wrong thing.
Hethiss was the Jedi Master when my son’s Jedi character was still a padawan learner.
He was wise, but unable to keep his student from doing things in violent ways when a diplomatic solution was called for.
Merv was a potential terrorist and a suspect in a series of murders on a water planet. He was, however, the good badguy character. You know, the villain who has a heart of gold and whose actions redeem him in the end… As opposed to a bad goodguy who seems to be a hero and ends up betraying everyone.
Fisonna was a street kid from the same planet and same race as Hethiss the Jedi master. He had the potential to become a padawan learner. But he also used his Force skills to pull pranks on serious adults.
Odo-Ki was a Gotal with the ultra-sensitive cones on his head. He had a limited ability to see behind walls and predict the near future.
Nadin Paal was an actual pirate and terrorist with no redeeming qualities at all. The best thing about him was, that when the time came, he blew up really nicely. A colorful fireball.
Kehlor was a Herglic, one of the whale people who required specially built extra-large space ships and accommodations. He was also a gifted pilot. You can see that he wears the uniform of the Trade Authority.
And finally, Klis Joo was a Duro and a Jedi, a gray alien with considerable Force powers.
There were many more drawings like this as well. But these are some of the best ones.
My current free-book promotion is doing better than any I have done before. And not only have I given away more free copies than ever before, it has already yielded one five-star review.
But you have to pour a little cold water on your head whenever you get too happy about being an author who has readers. It ain’t all bluebirds and sunshiny days.
The Pubby review exchange thingy is continuing to operate worse and worse. I am not subjecting the new book to any of that pain and squirrel poop. You break your head to read a book in only four days and write a review to earn the points you need to get your own books reviewed. And a lot of books on Pubby seeking review are written by… um, not really genius-level writers. They don’t know how to craft a scene with a beginning, middle, and end that fulfills an actual story-crafting purpose. You know, advancing the plot, building a character with depth and complexity, establishing a setting, or advancing a theme. Instead, they flood the page with adjectives and adverbs, excessive but irrelevant details, going around the scene telling you what eye color each character has, repeated cliches, and other dumb stuff. But it makes you feel mean and petty to point out in your review what specific dumb stuff made you give their work of not-really-genius only a three-star review.
And when you submit your own precious book potentially full of irritating dumb stuff, they don’t bother to actually read it before reviewing it. They write their review based on what other reviewers have said about it. And sometimes they give you a bad review because somebody else gave you a bad review with a dire dyspeptic rant about all your irritating dumb stuff. And they have no right to somebody else’s dire dyspeptic opinion if they didn’t read those things in your book for themselves to be certain the other viewer’s opinion is not based on something their dire and dyspeptic imagination saw in your story that wasn’t really there. And how do I know they didn’t read the book? Well, Pubby allows you with extra points charged to request a verified-purchase review. So, if their review isn’t labeled a verified purchase, they did not even have a copy of the book to write a review from. Pubby simply refunds the extra points you spent when the verified purchase label is not present.
Honestly, the only thing you know about the people who read your books are what comes through feedback. And you get remarkably little of that. The most important part of that is when somebody you know in real life reads your book, liked it, and tells you so. Sometimes readers will connect with your book in a way that makes them want to write a detailed review and implore others to read and like your book too. I have had a handful of those along the way, whether from aspiring fellow authors who know what the things are that you have actually done well, Twitter nudists who are literate and hungry for stories that use the word “naked” a lot without being an erotic or a pornographic writer, or fellow teachers who appreciate the many ironic, humorous, and empathetic details you have applied from your own teaching career.
I will continue to write and write and write some more. That means life to me. And I will continue to do some of the things authors do to pursue readers, because feedback grows that life. But I am old and in poor health and will not be doing this forever. If writers ever become immortal, it is not because they ever found the philosopher’s stone. At some point even Shakespeare, Dickens, and Poe had to stop writing.
Catch a Falling Star 