Category Archives: humor

July 11, 2024 · 12:23 am

Barbie’s Little Sister is Inspired by Webb

Barbie’s little sister, Stacy, is an incredible nerd (for a plastic doll from Mickey’s doll collection.) She is constantly using one of the laptops to keep up with the latest news in Science. Lately, she has been thrilled to see pictures start rolling in from the James Webb Space Telescope, the superior imaging system to its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

You may have noticed that Stacy surfs the internet in the nude. She is not a porn-obsessed pervert or anything. She simply found research online that indicated that nudists are happier in many ways than people who are addicted to always wearing clothes. She joined the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation,) found a local landed nudist club to join and discovered how lovely it is to play in the sunshiny air totally bare.

If you knew Stacy the way I know Stacy, you would realize she now has a real dilemma. She is very intelligent… but her head is made of plastic, and so it stubbornly resists compromises once an idea has found its way inside.

This is called internal conflict. But never fear. Stacy is highly intelligent, smarter than Skipper, and even smarter than her oldest sister Barbie. This is why she is the only sister so dedicated to nudism.

So, Barbie pointed out to Stacy that, being made of plastic, exposure to outer space will simply freeze her solid. And as long as she avoids getting dropped by a doofus while she’s frozen and brittle, and she gets thawed out slowly enough at the end of the journey, she should be fine. Now, all she has to do is convince Mickey to sell her to an astronaut who is not a doofus but is just goofy enough to take a doll into outer space. So, now Stacy is researching non-doofus goofy astronauts online, further preventing Mickey from writing something dumb.

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Filed under Barbie and Ken, doll collecting, humor, imagination, photo paffoonies, satire, science fiction

Tagged as Barbie, dolls, News, nudist, toys

July 9, 2024 · 1:19 am

Dragons

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Dragons in the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games are the central monsters of the story. In our Eberron campaign they not only rule an entire mysterious continent, but they are credited with the very creation of the world and everything. Not only monsters, but also gods, is a pretty big order for a character to fill.

Skye, the Blue Dragon to the left above is a dragon who believes that human people are the most important part of fulfilling the Dragon Prophecy. Therefore the characters can rely on him as an ally, and sometimes even a patron. He is a blue chromatic dragon with lightning breath, and the Blue Dragon Aureon, his great great grandfather, is an important leader of the god-dragons worshiped as the Sovereign Host.

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Phaeros, the great crested red dragon, is a servant of chaos who actively opposes all that is good. He works with orcish dictators and priests of the Dark Six to accomplish vast swaths of damage, destruction, and war.

He is a big bad villain that has to come at the end of a campaign, because dragons are not only powerful fire-breathers with monstrous monster-damage capability, they also know far more magic than even the wisest of wizards. My players have not crossed him yet, but if they start finding the missing dragon eggs, that will happen soon.

You may notice that my dragon pictures are mostly coloring-book pictures repeated with different colors, but in many ways dragons are like that. They all have the cookie-cutter qualities of a dragon, but with different-colored personalities and powers and ideas of good and evil.

Penny Dragon

Pennie is a copper dragon with divided loyalties and the soul of a clown. She never takes the adventure at hand too seriously. But if she decides to help the player characters find the missing dragon eggs, no ally will prove stronger and more helpful than her. And she knows things that the players need to learn from her to find the missing eggs.

So dragons come in many forms and personalities.

In fact, the search for the missing dragon eggs will be critically affected by the fact that the eggs have all five hatched and dragons instinctively protect themselves when young by using their polymorph self magic to become some other creature. And someone has implanted the idea of using human form as the default even though the wormlings have never actually seen a human being in real life.

This is a double portrait of Calcryx, both as a white dragon wormling and a young girl.

So, playing games with dragons is fun and archetypal story-telling, and I will continue to do it, even if it means getting burned now and again.

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as dnd, dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy, humor, role-playing games

July 8, 2024 · 12:59 am

Holding Patterns

Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.

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The problem is that the pirates from Bank of America finally came through with their offer to settle my debt. (This is a repost from 2017) Sixty percent of $T13,000 in four payments over the next four months. I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with my lawyer about bankruptcy. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.

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Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 60-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.

Eden

So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.

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Filed under angry rant, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney

July 6, 2024 · 12:30 am

Magnificent Maisey on the Mound

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Okay, I am taking over this danged silly old blog today to talk about something important! Baseball!!! Yeah, and even more important, I wanna talk about how girls can be good at baseball.

My name is Maisey Moira Morgan. I am a left-handed pitcher for the Carrollton Cardinals. That’s a boys’ Little League team, in case ya didn’t know. I ain’t the only girl in boys’ Little League, but I am the only girl on the Cardinals’ team. The only girl pitcher. The only WINNING girl pitcher. I woulda been an undefeated winning girl pitcher if Tyree Suggs hadn’t dropped that fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning out in right field two weeks ago. I ended my season at 3 wins and 1 loss.

You see, the thing is, I know the secret to striking out boys at the plate. First of all, I am a left-handed pitcher. Those danged boys are all used to seeing the ball flung at ’em from the right side. Ninety-nine and two-tenths per cent of all pitchers in our league are right-handed. So are most of the batters. So that futzes them up right there. And on top of that, Uncle Milt taught me to throw a knuckle-ball two years ago. That is one amazingly hard pitch to hit square if you do it right. You curl your fingers on the ball and give a little sorta push-out with your fingertips as you let it go. And you try really hard to make the ball not spin as you push it towards the batter. It can do amazing things after it leaves my hand. Uncle Milt swears that he saw one of my pitches double-dip and then corkscrew as it went across the plate low in the strike zone. A mere boy can’t really get a good swing at a pitch if it flutters around like a crazy bug with butterfly wings.

But that ain’t even the real secret to my baseball success. You see, them danged boys all think they can step up to the plate and put their bat on any ball thrown at ’em by a mere girl. They are not afraid of me, even the third time they get up to bat after striking out twice before. My uniform is not exactly sexy, but all I really have to do is wiggle my behind a little and smile at them, and they don’t even seem to be thinking about hitting the ball any more. I get an even bigger smile on my sweet little face when strike three flutters past ’em. I always take ’em by surprise.

I expect to be the first woman pitcher in the major leagues one day. Remember my name. Maisey Moira Morgan. Future Hall of Famer.

(Disclaimer; Maisey might actually have a hard time claiming her place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not because the major leagues don’t have any women in them, but because she is an entirely fictional human being, only existing in Mickey’s stupid little head.)

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Filed under baseball, baseball fan, characters, humor, kids, Paffooney, pen and ink

Tagged as artwork, baseball, baseball bragging, characters, crazy baseball fan stuff, humor, little-league, mlb, pen and ink, pitching, sports

July 5, 2024 · 12:22 am

Doodle-Bop!

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

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_n Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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

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

Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

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

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

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

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

4th Dimension

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

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

Tagged as art, artwork, drawing, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

July 4, 2024 · 2:25 am

Dows, Iowa

Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood. You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are. Dows is not the town where I grew up. But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them. It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives. My cousin and her second husband were there. Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there. We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!) The experience taught me a simple lesson. We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives. So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us. We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe. We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead. It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us. Nothing lasts forever. Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing. A simple word for that is “farming”. Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after. But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond. And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

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Filed under autobiography, family, farm boy, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Iowa, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Dows, family, humor, Iowa, photography, photos, travel

July 3, 2024 · 12:57 am

Spotted Trains

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I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.

Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.

My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.

When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.

This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.

Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.

When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

Tagged as amtrak, art, books, food, HO model train, humor, Iowa, paffooney, photo Paffooney, train station, Trains

July 2, 2024 · 1:18 am

Islands of Identity

Who am I?

Why do I do the things that I do?

No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.

When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.

You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.

But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.

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Filed under artwork, being alone, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, humor, insight, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as artwork, fiction, Gilligan's Island, humor, island girls, paffooney, relationships, teaching, the search for identity

July 1, 2024 · 12:04 am

What Do Martians Look Like?

As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post. Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk. The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post. Cleaning the computer screen took too long. I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures. The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;

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I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky. While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up. And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research. But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.

Malevolent Martians;