Xanthophobia (from Greek xanthos, “yellow”) is fear of the color yellow. In China the color yellow was feared, specifically receiving the yellow scarf, which was an imperial order to commit suicide.
Yes, “xanthophobia” is a word I have never used in my life before now. I have no doubt that I will never need that word again in my life. You, dear reader, will probably never need that word either. But the derfy space-ranger part of my brain thinks it is neat that I was able to correctly answer a trivia question about the meaning of “xanthophobia”simply because my background as an artist who has shopped for exotic oil colors in artist supply stores helped me to recognize that the “xantho” part of the word meant yellow.
Are there other totally useless words that my space-ranger brain thinks are cool to know? Of course there are! How can you ask such a silly question?
Ouzel may refer to:
Common blackbird or ouzel, a species of thrush, all-black in the male
Lord Howe thrush or ouzel, an extinct subspecies of the island thrush
River Ouzel, a river in England, a tributary of the Great Ousel
So, what is the actual use of knowing so many words that you can never functionally use? Besides as a topic of a goofy post like this?
They become like the pebbles and rocks at the bottom of the briskly rushing stream of my mind. They are not moving with the water, but they are affecting the ripples and splashes on the surface above them. They cause eddies and backwashes and undercurrents in the complex flow of my space-ranger brain. They make life more interesting on the surface.
And besides, knowing useless words can make me sound smarter than the fool with a derfy space-ranger brain that I truly am.
***Warning*** There are no real nude public schools that openly do any of what is being suggested here, tongue-in-cheek. This is a humor blog, so of course I’m totally serious!!!
The answer to the question, “Could you ever run a public middle school as an all-nude school?” is definitely NO! The reasons are extensive, but not complex. The culture we have created is so sexually repressed and prudish that the Gordian Knot it is tied up in will never be loosened, cut, or untied. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is an evil idea that would only create chaos and bad outcomes. I know you may think of me as a pervert for even thinking about this topic. But my experience as both a victim of sexual assault and a veteran teacher of both middle schoolers and high schoolers gives me some insight about how a nudist/naturist lifestyle could be beneficial to adolescent learners.
We start by acknowledging that public schools throughout the civilized world rely on dress codes in public schools. Going against that standard can violate the law and will certainly cause backlash from religious groups and the moral outrage of the average Fox News consumer. That is far more dangerous than the benefits would be worth. So, if a school was to be started with a clothing-optional dress code, or a mandatory nudity dress code, it could only be done in an experimental framework with participation from families dedicated to nudism and naturist ideals. I may be lurching into strange idea territory here, but some things are not only true but funny.
The problems that an experimental nudist school would address include the need for open and honest sex education, a better understanding of societal needs for consent and approval, improving individuals’ basic body self-image, and a social acceptance of individual differences and perceptions of beauty and attractiveness.
Of course, you realize this is a humor blog and a topic that is not entirely serious. However, it is humor based on the idea that surprisingly revealed truths can be funny.
Adolescents, especially the middle-school variety, are obsessed with beauty and attractiveness. And if in any modern American middle school the principal suddenly held an assembly and declared that the whole school was going with an all-nude dress code the next morning, many of the students, especially boys, would die on the spot of embarrassment. Comparisons to each other would not be nearly as embarrassing as the inevitable comparisons with what they are used to seeing on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and the porn that the adults all lie to themselves about porn not being available to students in grade school through high school graduation.
Middle school boys all see each other naked in public schools because of physical education classes with their mandatory after-class showers. And girls are pretty much the same. The only barrier is that boys and girls do not see each other naked because of unisex shower facilities. Any sneaking into the other side’s shower rooms is treated as a monstrous criminal act. Of course, parents don’t want mixing in that area because they believe it would all turn into a massive heterosexual orgy. They don’t worry about same-sex orgies because those shower rooms are supervised by a same-sex coach who is rarely showering with students. So, boys all imagine how beautiful the girls’ shower room must look while noting all the bulgy-body doughboys and toothpick-thin skinny guys mixed into their shower room. The girls all picture Greek godlings in the boys’ shower room while sneering at all the dumpy dames and skinny Minnies mixed in their own shower room.
So here’s the idea that may get me arrested in Texas. All students naked in the classroom would be a good thing. Kids would see the truth about both sexes. They would not only be able to find the beauty in all sorts of nude bodies, but they would also feel like they could normalize their own self image against the whole rainbow of nude body types. They would be able to accept all the differences and become desensitized to the constant sexualization of nude bodies that our repressive society is prone to.
And get this, teachers of both sexes might be better off dressed in teacher costumes to separate themselves from the hormone Olympics so they might better be able to negotiate the perception problems that kids have about each other even when they are not nude.
Middle school kids are already always metaphorically naked when they are in school. They are not mature enough to know how to conceal private things. This is a real problem for gay boys and girls who are just beginning to realize who they are. So, rather than learning to conceal and hide things, naked kids have to really learn who they and all their friends are underneath it all. The unvarnished naked truth.
My imaginary grandson attends his imaginary nude science class. Yeah… will never happen.
So, there will probably never be an all-nude public middle school. But here’s the first reason it is worth exploring experimentally, maybe in a private school. A nude school would help students fighting to make their way through adolescence to gain a deeper self-awareness than they could get while wearing clothes.
Something to think about while you are lighting the torches and sharpening the tines of your pitchforks to visit my house after midnight. And if I survive this night, there will be other essays on this blog like this that deal with the other possible benefits I listed above.
My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist. I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person. Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about. This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher. That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.
My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.
My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end. I tried to immortalize her with a work of art. I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her. All my relatives were amazed at the picture. They loved it immensely. I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter. And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse. It made my grandma too sad to look at every day. So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.
There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher. But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids. Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones. I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.
When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist. I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional. Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.
But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera. The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head. That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities. Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself. So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.
As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane. But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your 68th birthday is just around the corner. (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 68, but can you believe that that Mickey is going to be 96 on the day after I turn 68?) Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years. Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.” But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.
You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking. You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together. After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school as an English teacher?
And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post. You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.
And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post. You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time, and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly. And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit. Take a nap. Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.
And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.
Yep, I read about being an “erronort” traveling in a balloon while sitting in a parking lot in my car.
Believe it or not, I read this entire 100+-year-old book in my car while waiting for my daughter and my son in school parking lots. What a perfectly ironic way to read a soaring imaginary adventure written by Mark Twain, which has been mostly forgotten by the American reading public.
My copy of this old book is a 1965 edition published for school libraries of a book written in 1894. It tells the story of how Tom and Huck and Jim steal a ride on a balloon at a town fair from a somewhat mentally unhinged professor of aeronautical science. The balloon, which has space-age travel capabilities due to the professor’s insane genius, takes them on an accidental voyage to Africa.
Of course, the insane professor intends to kill them all, because that’s what insane geniuses do after they prove how genius-y they really are. But as he tries to throw Tom into the Atlantic, he only manages to plunge himself through the sky and down to an unseen fate. The result being a great adventure for the three friends in the sands of the Sahara. They face man-eating lions, mummy-making sandstorms, and a chance to land on the head of the Sphinx.
The entire purpose of this book is to demonstrate Twain’s ability to be a satirical stretcher of the truth, telling jokes and lies through the unreliable narrator’s voice of Huck Finn.
Here is a quoted passage from the book to fill up this review with words and maybe explain just a bit what Twain is really doing with this book;
Notice how I doubled my word count there without typing any of the words myself? Isn’t the modern age wonderful?
But there you have it. This book is about escaping every-day newspaper worries. In a time of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, global warming, and renewed threats of thermonuclear boo-boos with Russia, this proved to be the perfect book to float away with on an imaginary balloon to Africa. And the book ends in a flash when Aunt Polly back in Hannibal wants Tom back in time for breakfast. I really needed to read this book when I picked it up to read it.
In the beginning, God made men naked and helpless. He made women naked and in charge. And then he tossed an apple to the women and said, “let there be evil and monsters and such.” So, naked people began to huddle together in caves to get out of the storm. They began to kill and eat other animals that didn’t eat them. They began to wear the fur of whatever they killed and ate. And then because Cain had a you-like-him-better-than-me fit, they began to kill (and hopefully not eat) each other.
So, the need for government came about as a matter of survival. Cavemen put their thick heads together and decided that some guys were bigger and tougher and got more girls than the rest. And some guys knew how to use their heads for something more than a place to keep their animal-skin hats. So, when all the heads were put together, the smartest ones realized that if they made weapons for the big guys to kill other guys with more efficiently, then the big guys could protect all of “us” and kill all of “them” and we would all be safer and live better lives. Of course, the big strong guys wanted to keep all the better girls and all the stuff they took from others, and they expected everyone they protected to give them more stuff. Thus, taxes were born. And when you had to count stuff and plan stuff and figure stuff out (like managing taxes and keeping track of who you need to hit because they haven’t paid) that task went to the scrawny guys with the big heads. And so, Kings were born. And queens were mostly the kings’ sisters, because, after all, the big guys still got all the best girls. And as time went on, we had kings and their big guys and all the other “common” people. But you couldn’t just kill (and hopefully not eat) all the “common” people, because they were useful too. You could put them to work so they could pay more taxes and make more stuff for you and it made your life better if you had a lot of them working for you. But some old king named Louie discovered you had to make the “common” people a little bit happy too because they outnumber you by a lot. Unfortunately for Louie, he didn’t discover this until they cut his head off… some argument about eating cake or something. So, some other smart guys with big heads got together and decided to make a new government. It was really still the old government. They just had the brilliant idea of re-naming everything and lying to the people. Now, instead of kings and their big guys who got all the good girls, you had “elected representatives” who were actually the kings of old. They just figured out how to lie to people and make them believe they worked for the “common man”. And the big guys were re-named the “Military Industrial Complex”, or maybe it’s the Illuminati. I’m not sure. And then there’s a Pope, and possibly some alien beings from Roswell, and… okay, maybe I need to save the rest for the Tinfoil Hat Club when we meet every Wednesday evening and plot how we are going to “wake up, sheeple” and take over the world. (Dues are fifty cents. We are meeting again on Sunday because we think the world ends next Tuesday… or something.)
I have told you repeatedly (if you are foolish enough to read more of my blog than is probably healthy for normal people) that I am a pessimist. Like Benjamin Franklin, I believe it is best to always prepare for the worst that can happen and actually expect it. With current gun laws in this nation, and the way corrupt politicians and businessmen continue to profit off the suffering of the rest of us, and people’s basic selfishness and cruelty to others in word, thought, and deed, we rarely get a glimpse of anything but the worst of human nature. We are never disappointed when we expect the worst to happen. And yet, since I am never taken by surprise by bad things, only by unexpected good things, all that is surprising is wonderful and made up of very good things. Human beings are capable of amazing goodness and works of wonder, not in spite of their many failings, but because of them. The miracle of life is how the lowly worm turns into a beautiful butterfly. How the tiny brown seed becomes the brightly colored blossom in a vast field of other flowers.
When I tell others that I believe that people are basically good and that I believe all students can learn, I often get an argument. Mass shooters like we had last week and wars and terrorists crop up by the multitudes in order to refute my belief. People who think I am an atheist tell me i’m being a hypocrite to think we should operate our lives around facts and proof and then hold a difficult-to-prove belief like this. Maybe it is an act of faith… but an act of faith that my theocratic friends call a belief in humanism, which they prefer to see as something from Satan. Well, I do believe in God. I just don’t believe in a god who waves a magic wand and intervenes. I believe that God Jehovah (or possibly Allah or the godhead or whatever you want to name Him) made us like the flower seed, meant to grow and transform, and to be winnowed like grain by the winds and rains of life experience. Not all flowers blossom. But more of them do when you water and weed and nurture them. And what is true for flowers is true for men and women. What can I say more about human beings to convince you that I am not wrong to be in awe of them… even the weedy ones? Probably nothing. If you are not open to such ideas, you haven’t read this far. But whether you read this far or not, I am fascinated by you, and will always want to know more. And I am not going to start a new church or something. I am merely going to continue to watch and to wonder.
I gave you fair warning. Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now. So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD! You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.
Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios. If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist. In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him. He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics. He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.
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Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic
Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own. It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.
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Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most. He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.
And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.
As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me. If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies. There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.
So what more can I say about Walt Kelly? I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words. And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.
Yes, there is very definitely a possibility that there is more than one me.
If you look carefully at the colored pencil drawing above, you will see that it is titled “The Wizard of Edo” and signed by someone called Leah Cim Reyeb. A sinister sounding Asian name, you think? I told college friends that my research uncovered the fact that he was an Etruscan artist who started his art career more than two thousand years ago in a cave in France. But, of course, if you are clever enough to read the name backward, you get, “beyeR miC haeL”. So, that stupid Etruscan cave artist is actually me.
It turns out that it is a conceit about signing my name as an artist that I stole from an old episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and have used for well over two decades through college and my teaching career.
And of course, the cartoonist me is Mickey. Mickey also writes this blog. Mickey is the humorist identity that I use to write all my published novels and blog posts since I published the novel Catch a Falling Star.
Michael Beyer is the truest form of my secret identity. That was my teacher name. It was often simplified by students to simply “Mr. B”. I was known by that secret identity for 31 years.
Even more sinister are my various fictional identities occurring in my art and my fiction. You see one of them in this Paffooney. The name Dr. Seabreez appears in Catch a Falling Star as the Engineer who makes a steam engine train fly into space in the 1890’s with alien technology. He appears again in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius as a time-traveler.
The young writer in the novel Superchicken, Branch Macmillan, is also me. As is the English teacher Lawrance “Rance” Kellogg used in multiple novels.
So, disturbing as it may be to realize, there is more than one name and identity that signifies me. But if you are a writer of fiction, a cartoonist, an artist, or a poet, you will probably understand this idea better. And you may even have more than one you too.
Catch a Falling Star 