Category Archives: humor

Collecting Disney Princesses

 

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Collecting dolls and action figures can overwhelm someone like me with hoarding disorder (and a Grandmother and Great Aunt who hardly had room to walk around their homes because of piles of collected stuff that they simply could not part with).  There have to be rules and limits to save me from myself.  I try hard to keep Disney Princesses from flooding my home and drowning me in a sea of plastic.  The toymakers are constantly updating and modifying their designs to entice fools like me to keep buying.

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A round of new designs with glittered-up clothes and new faces. Can I resist buying them all? Well, not the first four times.

I have to stop and take stock of where I’m at.  I rounded up all the Disney dolls I have that are not mint in boxes for collecting purposes and potential resale in the collectibles market.  Here they are;

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There are several ways that I can go about trying to limit and prune this massive obsession.  First and foremost, I can break this gigantic feeding frenzy up into smaller bites and pick and choose how long I chew.  This part of my collection, is based on the Tinkerbell movies and is limited to only one edition of these dolls.  It took over a year to buy all four;

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There are just four dolls in this set.  I chose only the size consistent with the 12-inch figures I always choose.  No little ones.  No second editions.  No doll costing more than $20.

Some of the dolls are rescue dolls, either bought naked at Goodwill or another thrift store, taken home to be cleaned, repaired, restored, and dressed (like the Ariel doll I posted first in this post).  These are probably my most valuable acquisitions, because they are previously loved and played with.  (The Jasmine doll in the middle belonged to my daughter, who had a tendency to mangle and experiment on dolls as well as strip them permanently naked.  This doll’s survival is a minor miracle.)

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The rescued dolls include two Snow Whites, a Jasmine that belonged to my daughter, and Mulan… mostly dressed in Barbie clothes.

The remainder of these collected dolls are recent edition Disney Princesses that I waited for some time to acquire so that they would come down in price.  A couple of these, like Tiana and Repunzel, and all the Frozen Dolls are not also represented in my collection by mint in box dolls.  I do have Belle and Aurora and even Tarzan’s Jane, but boxed only, so they are not pictured here.

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So you can see what a trippy-type trial it has become to keep a collection like this from taking over the house.  I have to impose limits on myself so I don’t become a weird old man living in cardboard box under a bridge with hundreds of dolls and action figures.

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Filed under collecting, doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

The Pirates’ Nest

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Yesterday I completed a drawing that I have been working on for 3 days.  This is a background drawing of The Pirates’ Nest on the northern coast of Fantastica.  It is where the pirates live and do their banker jobs and sell health insurance.  You know, acts of pure evil.

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I intend to use it to cheat when making cartoons.  I can draw characters and then place them in the scene with photo-shop.  I can put pirates like Black Timothy (seen here all in red) and his pal Scruffy Bill (with two wooden legs, two wooden arms, and a wooden head) into the scene.  Or, I could insert some of the pirate leaders like Pirate King Ronny Ray-gun into the scene.

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So, today’s post is one of those lazy posts where I just post something I drew and write some snarky humor-like stuff.  But I am thinking I am doing something right.  I have set all-time highs for views and visits on this blog in the last seven days, with two days over 100.  It is possible that it is just the NSA looking at my conspiracy theory posts, or even the international banking conspiracy watching for me posting stuff like this that calls them pirates and reveals their ultimate evil.  But it could also be that some of you actually like the stuff I post while pretending to be an actual author and competent writer.  Who knows?

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, humor, Paffooney, Pirates

Amazing Days

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One never knows how things are going to turn out.  My car, which was nearly paid off, gets destroyed by a passing motorist as it was parked in front of my house.  I endured two weeks of driving the rented Chibi Clown Car from Enterprise, I endured a financial set-back for an accident that was completely not my fault, but it resulted in being able to buy an updated version of the same make and model from Enterprise, lowering my monthly car payments and now owning a car that is superior to the one I lost.  Of course, I got a letter in the mail yesterday from a bank that is denying me credit for buying a car.  Every wave is followed by a trough and then another wave.  That is just how life works.

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I pitched a no-hitter yesterday in EA Sports Baseball ’04 on my X-box.   Of course this game and game machine are more than 12 years old, so I have had time to practice, a lot!  And the game is still set on rookie level.  But, what the heck, I deserve a little bit of easy victory now and then.

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My writing goals took a few shots in the last two months.  My publisher has experienced a financial hardship and slow-down before my novel actually gets into print.  My novel sales for Catch a Falling Star have tanked and I have the publicist from that publisher calling me, asking me to invest lots of money in a new publicity campaign.  Like I want to invest $4,000 in a campaign that may only yield another 16 dollars in a year’s time.  But I found a much cheaper way to get reviewed and promoted by Serious Reading ( http://seriousreading.com/ ).   They promise the same or better results for $3,950 less.  And I also learned from my publisher that they are making a come-back.  So, it is even possible that I can get further novels published through PDMI.

I remain a pessimist.  I will never be disappointed by unrealistic expectations.  I anticipate nothing but disaster and misfortune.  But as long as the house is still standing and Armaggedon is not happening as fast as the Jehovah’s Witnesses anticipate, there are still good things to be found and to have happen.  And since I wasn’t expecting any good things, they are all pleasant surprises.

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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, fairies, humor, Paffooney, pessimism

Wally Wood

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A self-portrait by Wallace Wood.

I am a bit of a cartoonist for a reason.  I started drawing cartoons at the age of five.  I read everything in the Sunday funny pages, not just for the jokes.  I poured over the drawings and copied some.  I drew Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie.  I drew Lil’ Abner and Charlie Brown and Pogo.  Cartoonists were heroes to me.

But my parents wanted to protect me from the evils of comic books.  Superheroes were off limits most of the time.  Things that are associated with evil were out of the question.  So Daredevil was beyond reach.  And Mad Magazine was full of socialist ideas and led kids down the dark path of satire.  So the truth is, I didn’t discover Wally Wood until I was in college.  His corrupting influence didn’t take hold of me until I was older and full of hormones.  Ah, youth and the propensity for sin!  Wally taught me that cartoons could be real.

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Wally Wood was one of the original artists working for EC comics who formed Mad Magazine with it’s spoofs and irreverent humor.  Wood worked together with the Great Will Eisner on the Spirit.  He went on to work for Marvel on the comic book Daredevil where he innovated the red suit and double-D logo, as well as doing the primary story-telling that brought that comic book from the bottom of the Marvel stack to almost the very top.  His work on Daredevil resonates even until today where there is now a big controversy that the popular show on Netflix does not list Wood among the creators of Daredevil in their credits.  I must remember to complain about that later.

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But the thing that drew me to Wood more than anything was the realistic style that he brought to the unreal realm of cartoons.  The man could draw!  He did marvelous detail work and was a leader in the development of dynamic composition in an artistic industry that tolerated and even often encouraged really poor-quality drawing.  He took the comic book from the age of the glorified stick figure to an age of cinematic scope and know-how.  Here it is revealed in his classic break-down of innovative comic-book panels;

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But it is also important to realize that the more power you put into art, the more it can blow up and hurt people.  Wood had a dark side that went a bit darker as he went along.  He had an issue with the kind of false front comics had to throw up in front after the anti-comics crusade of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of Innocents.  He is probably the artist behind the cartoon poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy.  He started his own cartoon studio that produced increasingly erotic and pornographic comics like Sally Forth, Cannon, and Gangbang.  He became increasingly ill, lost the sight in one eye, suffered severe headaches, and eventually committed suicide in 1981.  With great power comes great responsibility, and we are not all superheroes in the end.  But I will always admire and emulate the work of this great artist… and selfishly wish he could’ve lived to create more of the wonderful art he gave us.

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Filed under artwork, cartoon review, cartoons, humor, illustrations

World Building

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As a novelist I am very aware of the importance of setting.  It is an essential part of of telling a story, to be able to set the stage upon which the characters will act out the plot.  The setting pictured here is one created for my family’s on-going D&D Role-playing set in the campaign world of Eberron, here on the continent of Xendrick which was long ago ruled by magical giants.  It is built around details.  There are in this picture three elements that are actually aquarium decorations (the two jewel-eyed skulls and the Egyptian ruin construct in the background).  The silver skull and the Princess Jasmine figure come from gumball vending machines (Jasmine comes from a vending machine in the hotel lobby in Anaheim when we took the kids to Disneyland).  The thatch-roofed house in the background is from my manic urge to create cardboard castles.  The skeleton-faced statue came out of a box of cheap plastic toys from Dollar Tree that Grandpa bought for my eldest son back in 1998.  If there is any kind of point to this paragraph, it is that this detail-rich setting photo is created with unusual parts, parts that lots of people would not think to include in the world-building process.

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If I have any claim at all to a talent for creating a good setting, it comes from my creative juxtaposition of widely disparate objects.  (In English, it means I like to stick weird stuff together in the same place.)  That, of course, is the very definition of surrealism.  Making the bizarre seem natural and right.  It is how you create a science fiction setting, a fantasy novel setting, and even a setting for a hometown novel set in the little Iowa town I grew up in during the 60’s and 70’s.  (You might not fully believe me yet, as I have not published more than one of my hometown novels, but I do have a hometown setting made of a hidden fairy kingdom, a haunted house, a mad scientist’s laboratory, a witch’s hovel, a mysterious sea captain’s house, a house haunted by rumors of werewolves, and a connection to the dream lands that often lets other-worldly clowns wander our streets.)  (That last now holds the record as the second-longest parenthetic expression I have ever used in my writing.)

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Of course, setting by itself is meaningless.  It must be interactive with the characters that inhabit it.  As the dragon crashes through the castle wall behind them, Princess Aurora and her little mechanical body guard, Clockwerky, are not even facing it.  Are they ignoring it because they are actually quite stupid?  Or since it seems to be heading out of the scene to stage left, are they simply assuming it has to be somebody else’s problem?  Either way the setting and the characters don’t mesh in a way that furthers the actual story… at least, not without a lot of additional explanation.

So, can I explain in any sort of a simple fashion how this 500 word treatise on setting is to be understood?  Yes.  Very simply, settings are built of details… lots of details.  And settings and characters have to work together.  Here endeth the lesson.

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Mervin the Minotaur and Barrabas the Half-Ogre each roll a natural 20 to double-slay the dire elephant that was threatening princess Jasmine, while in the background, Oneorb the Cyclops rolls a 1 and bashes himself in the head.

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, playing with toys, setting, surrealism

Cowboy Dolls

Cleaning in the library led me to rediscover an old project.  Roy Rogers and Trigger had been sitting next to the TV in the library.  I found them both on the floor between the TV and a book stack.  Time to pick them up and put them back in shape.

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The doll is a random military action figure rescued naked from a thrift store.  I thought the face looked enough like Roy Rogers to turn him into that particular hero.  The horse is from Mattel, and probably is part of a Barbie play-set. It was given to me by a relative.  I dressed Roy in a Lone Ranger Captain Action uniform with a Tonto gun belt, both created by Playing Mantis Toy Company in the late 1990’s.  The hat is actually from a Cowgirl Barbie because I wanted a Roy Rogers-style almost-white hat.  The Lone Ranger hat is too flat-brimmed to look right and way too large to fit on Roy’s smaller head, and the only other cowboy hat I have for it is a Johnny West hat from Marx Toys in the 1960’s, and that is dark brown.

Everything Johnny West that I still have was salvaged from the house where I grew up back in the 1980’s.  They belonged to my little brother, but ended up in my collection because he outgrew dolls and action figures long before I did.  I wish I still had the doll himself, but I think Dabney blew him up with a firecracker when he was a teenager.

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So, I have to be happy with only having Roy and Cowgirl Barbie to play with.

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Filed under action figures, Barbie and Ken, doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized

Happiness

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It took a while.  I started this blog in 2013.  But I have built it up gradually.  And now I have reached the point that my publisher’s publicity expert said I should reach in a few months.  My novel is not doing nearly as well.  My high-priced consultants (high-priced for me because I have no money) want me to spend more money to try again to get the novel noticed.  What I have actually noticed is that they are making a helluva lot more money than I am.  I am resolved now to do it on my own.  I will find my own way in marketing, or fail on my own.  I don’t need to be paying anybody to help me fail.  I am doing that quite well on my own.  And I have reason to think this blog might be succeeding.  The I-Universe marketing team cannot legitimately claim to have anything at all to do with that.  I thank them for what they have taught me about the business.  They taught me that no one really wants to help me but me myself.  They are in it for the money.  And like unsuccessful authors everywhere, I have begun telling myself, it is not about the money… especially not money for them.

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Filed under announcement, humor, Paffooney

Spring Break Colored Blue

This week has been Spring Break for our little family.  But as Spring Breaks go, this one leaves a lot to be desired.  Rain.  Thunderstorms and tornadoes did damage to the north of us in The Colony and Frisco, Texas.  More rain.  Gray skies, flood warnings, tornado watches… the sun is supposed to come out on Sunday, the last day of Spring Break.  I want a do-over.

But it is all about the focus.  We have done some house cleaning.  My son took the water-damaged carpet out of his bedroom with a carpet knife and discovered an old linoleum floor under it, complete with a sincerely ugly 1960’s style pattern.  And my daughter and I baked cookies.

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The bedroom with its mustard yellow linoleum with brown snowflakes in the pattern.

The cookies were Halloween candy-corn cookies bought for a sale price at Aldi’s in an after-Christmas sale.  (I think I paid less than a dollar for them.)  We mixed the two colors of dough up with butter and tried to make cookies with a swirl design as described on the box.  It didn’t work.  We made spectacular splashes of red and yellow all over the cookies.  The cookies looked radioactive as they baked.  No wonder they were cheap.

But they were delicious.  Probably more because we made them together and laughed about the goofy outcomes.  I ate my two cookies (the limit reasonably suited to proper blood sugar levels) with a tall glass of Diet Coke and milk.

So, Spring Break has been a bit of a bummer.  But misfortune does not rule our lives unless we let it.  Sometimes you have to simply reject the glooms and just be happy.

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Filed under humor, inspiration, philosophy, photo paffoonies

The Survivor

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I am trying to bounce back.  Yesterday I survived the possible end of the world.  No heart attack.  No asteroid hitting the Earth.  But also no writing contest win.  A huge delay in the publication of my novel.  My writing world is in danger of expiring because my life is winding down to its finale, and I’m running out of time.  I can still do it, though.  I have come back from down and out before.

In 1983 I had a mole removed from my face.  It wasn’t a vanity-type thing.  Removing it wasn’t going to cure ugliness or anything.  But it had gotten larger and had a strange color change.  So, my ancient and doddering Czechoslovakian  doctor removed it just to be sure.  As with any such removal, the excised tissue was sent to the lab for analysis.  Malignant melanoma in the very first stages.  At the time, the survival rate for such a cancer in Texas was less than fifty per cent.  But most cases were not discovered so early in the crisis.  I went back in for more surgery.  They ended up cutting a hole through my right cheek and stitching it back together again.  The new tissue underwent very close scrutiny and it was determined that all the dangerous cells had been removed during the very first surgery.  No evidence anywhere of creeping metastasizing cancer death.  It was decided that chemo-therapy would only do harm and would not help anything.  So I got to keep my hair.  It did eventually mean the removal of two more moles and three lumps, but they were all benign.  Cancer was fought off and beaten 33 years ago this month.  I am a cancer survivor.

I often marvel at the fact that I am still alive and still able to write.  I have had innumerable near misses.  Car accidents that didn’t happen by a matter of inches.  The skidding truck on the icy street in Iowa City missed the front tire of my bicycle by about three inches.  Facing down irrationally angry youths with weapons intending to strike out in anger, and somehow having the right words to calm them and prevent the tragedy.  One of them told me it was because he looked me in the eye and saw no fear there that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t strike me down.  By rights, I should be dead.  It is a supreme irony of life that an almost-atheist like me believes in guardian angels.

I don’t know what the ultimate goal is.  I don’t expect to be a wealthy published novelist like Stephen King.  I don’t know if it is even important that I break through the bookstore barriers and get my work on the shelves for a few paltry dollars.  It is really only important that I write.  This blog has become important to me because I have developed a small readership that actually reads and provides feedback.  I do occasionally reach the heart of people I don’t actually even know.  And I have made friends and relatives a little bit misty.  I have written 849 posts, posting every single day of 2015, and every single day of fifteen months in a row.  I have written six complete novels and gotten two actually into print with an ISBN number and everything.  My writing, like me myself, exists, and it will survive.  I am a survivor.

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Filed under autobiography, healing, health, humor, novel plans, writing

The Beasts of Armeggedon

Today may very well be the last day on Earth.  I laugh when I write that, but it could literally be true.  There is an asteroid approaching the earth and it is supposed to pass within 11,000 miles of Earth.  That is close enough for a minor math oops to fool us into not panicking about an extinction event.  The Dallas Fort-Worth area is being soaked in thunderstorms and potential high winds as I write this in a house that has foundation cracks made worse by a high number of fracking-induced earthquakes the last couple of years.  I woke up with chest pains this morning, and I have a family history of heart trouble.  (Although the last time I panicked and had the chest pains checked it was apparently arthritis in my rib cage… and the weather does make my arthritis worse.)  So, in very many ways, this really could be the last day.  And as I reminded everybody yesterday, I am a pessimist in all things.

So, I am girding up in armor as a pessimist always does, preparing for the worst.  If I am not going to be here tomorrow, then I need to prepare by counting my blessings today.  Number one, I have completed a successful 31-year career as a teacher.  I touched over 2,000 lives, made a difference in a lot of them, and screwed up only a handful of them.  I taught some kids to read, and I taught a lot of kids to write.  I was a good writing teacher.  I know how to build a theme and I can teach others to do the same.  I have lived a life of service, and though I have not been made money-rich by my efforts, I have wealth greater than Croesus (I know you don’t really know who that is, but I didn’t want that sentiment spoiled by using a name like Trump or the Walmart heirs.)

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Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

Number two, I am a survivor who has seen an amazing amount of history roll past without ever being crushed under its wheels.  I was alive for John Kennedy’s Presidency and assassination.  I watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.  I taught the day the Challenger exploded with the first teacher in space on board.  I also taught the day the twin towers fell on 9-11.  I have seen how the world was changed, and I, like most people, experienced the changes necessary to adapting to a new world.  As a pessimist, I am already planning for life under President Ted Cruz.  It will be the worst possible outcome for our nation of the election of 2016.  We really should not elect a Reptilian as our leader.  But I survived the Ronny Ray-Gun revolution, and eight long years under the Cowboy of Very Little Brain, so if I live to see it, I will adapt.  And so will you.  We have only rarely ever been truly free and prosperous, but in our minds, no one, no matter how tyrannical, can ever truly deprive us of our freedom.

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So, if these are the last words I ever write, then know that I am at peace with the world.  If the big space rock does us all in today, then at least we have to consolation that humankind has had its chance to live and love and laugh, and we didn’t do everything wrong.

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Filed under humor, insight, Paffooney, philosophy, teaching, wisdom