Category Archives: humor

July 4, 2026 · 12:32 am

“That Night in Saqqara I Was Taken By Surprise”

Life is never quite like the way it is in your head. Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.

Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point. I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it. It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare. It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers. The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork. Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey. And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare. It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece. You can still see them if you look closely. But it is far better than any previous photo. Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.

But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.

We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I. We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right. When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs. This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3. A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs. If you change your mind halfway down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up. So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.

Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof. It is common knowledge that Keith Richards is an undead creature, having so completely altered the biochemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead. My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead. So, not only Keith Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones, who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe. My gasted is totally flabbered! And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.

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Filed under horror movie, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as action figures, art, books, colored pencil, food, goofiness, horror movie, humor, Mummy, paffooney, photography, Rolling Stones, surprising facts, travel, undead, video games

July 3, 2026 · 1:36 am

The Magic of Pez

In 1927 in the mythical land of Austria, where they seem to know how to make candy… a condensed form of peppermint was created in a lozenge form and then placed into a plastic toy dispenser. The spells that were cast to make this magical item probably had nothing to do with toad warts and bat wings and eye of newt. It has more to do with Mickey Mouse, then Katzenjammer Kids, and Marvel Super Heroes. I have been caught under the spells of a PEZ fixation since childhood. I remember begging for a Bugs Bunny dispenser in Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines when I was probably six years old. My parents wisely said no hundreds of times when I was a kid. Who wanted to spend a nickel on a penny’s worth of candy? Just for a Pez dispenser. If they ever caved to my begging, even once, I don’t still have the dispenser. But now I am supposedly a responsible adult. I have money. Well, I used to have money before I spent it on collecting PEZ dispensers. I can’t even eat the the stupid candy. I have diabetes. So I feed the candy to my kids and risk giving them diabetes.

Here, my minion Stuart is showing off my Avengers collection. It took him nearly thirty minutes to line these six dispensers up so that they were all standing at once. The Hulk kept falling on him repeatedly.

I am proud of my Toy Story collection. I had to go to some lengths to find some of these (particularly Slinky Dog and Rex).

Disney Princesses were easy. Both at Walmart and Toys R Us they were all grouped together on the Disney hooks.

The Muppets were also grouped together with the Disney Pez.

Winnie the Pooh is Disney, too. I got some of these on discount at Toys R Us. I still need Piglet and Owl… and Christopher Robin. I don’t have an unbroken Minnie Mouse either. I had small children when I first started collecting these, and now I have fat children and a lot of empty Pez dispensers.

My Star Wars collection seems to be evil Pez dispensers and Yoda.

And poor Stuart is getting tired of standing up Pez dispensers, so I will end here without having shown you all of my PEZ dispensers. Besides, I have reason to keep the newest dispensers a secret from my minion.

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Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as comedy, family, fiction, humor, life, Minions, Pez, photo Paffooney, writing

July 2, 2026 · 12:11 am

How to Be a Farm Boy Without Really Trying (or Wanting To)

Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.

I was born in Mason City, Iowa (the original River City of Meredith Wilson’s Broadway musical, The Music Man). But my parents didn’t hold with no big-city Ioway sort of life, so we eventually moved to my mother’s hometown, Rowan, Iowa. It was roughly about 275 people (if you count the squirrels… which a lot of the townsfolk were… qualified squirrels). My two maternal uncles and my grandparents were busy maintaining the family farm there, and though I lived in town because Dad was an accountant for a seed corn company instead of the farmer he grew up as… I got more than my fair share of farming-type opportunities. You know the stuff… shoveling pig poo… cow poo too… I got to help feed the chickens (and get chased by roosters, and get pecked by hens when we checked their nests for eggs, and watch the rooster rodeos as revenge for all the chasings… because roosters don’t lay eggs and the only thing they are really good for in an egg farming setting is lopping their heads off, and watching them flop around like rodeo bulls with no heads for fifteen minutes until they finally figured out they were dead, then plucking ’em and watching Grandma Aldrich cook ’em). I got to drive a tractor, although they didn’t trust me to do more than the simplest of tractor-driving jobs like pulling the hay rake. I got to shovel chicken poo out of the hen house and out of the brooder house. (Notice how a lot of the world of the lowly farm boy centers somehow on poo?) It was a rustic rural life reminiscent of Norman Rockwell… although he depicted mostly town life and not as much of the fields and animal pens (and poo) that are central to Iowegian farm culture.

Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories... but also one of my farm boy friends. — Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories… but also one of my farm boy friends.

Growing up a farm boy has a few advantages to go along with the many drawbacks. First off, you learn young where babies come from. Piglets and calves and puppies and kittens are not born in secret. And it doesn’t take much spying out on farm life to learn how those baby animals are made either. There is ample opportunity to learn what you are not supposed to learn at a young age from farm girls too… but we were gentlemen… and extremely embarrassed by the fact that baby people are made in the same grisly, awful way that baby animals are out in the barn.

You also learn to be somewhat self-sufficient. I learned how to tend a garden. I learned how to fix a flat. I learned how to repair a roof and build a rabbit pen. Hammer, pliers, screwdriver, saw… I learned to use them all and make stuff. Crude stuff, sure… smashed-finger-with-hammer-stuff too. I made a bookshelf in shop class that had a bit of Michael blood built into it. But I learned things that boys should know, and really don’t anymore.

So, I guess I am claiming that because I am an Iowa boy… a farm boy… and despite my many shortcomings and short-changings, my life has been good and worthwhile… being a farm boy is good. And one of the greatest shames of the modern world is this… There just aren’t many farm boys anymore.

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Filed under farm boy, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, autobiography, colored pencil, family, farm boy, fiction, humor, Iowa, life, Music Man, Paffoonies, Rowan, writing

July 1, 2026 · 12:33 am

Cooking More Futzbatter

“What’s this with the made up words thing? You can’t just make up words!”

“Why not? I’m an English teacher. Who better to make up words?”

“But you are making up nonsense words, and using them to make fun of Iowegians! That’s, like, racist or something!”

“Iowegians is a made-up word. It is a play on Norway, Ioway, and Norwegian… and because a lot of white people in Iowa are of Scandahoovian descent.”

“See what I mean? Racist! Scandahoovian makes fun of people of Norse descent. That is totally unacceptable!”

“I don’t see it that way. I think we Iowegians should own it. You know, like the way Texas rednecks are proud to be called rednecks. I think that’s far more racist than saying Iowegian or Scandahoovian.”

“Why are we even talking about this? Why couldn’t you have just posted more about your goofy flowers? You have a lot more flower pictures you could use.”

“Yesterday was just a scrapbook sort of entry. I wanted to post a variety of different things to fill space and waste time. My writing goals were already completed for the day yesterday. My novel is at 39,565 words right now.”

“But why did you have to make up gibberish words? Don’t you know enough real words?”

“My Uncle Everett used to use Foobah when he was around the womenfolk so he didn’t say the word he was really thinking and offend Grandma Beyer. That kinda makes it a real word. And you’ve heard me say Futzbatter before. It is a word like Paffooney… something I have used enough that you know what it means without even asking.”

“But what gives you the right to make up words?”

“What gave William Shakespeare the right? Or Lewis Carroll? Remember Jabberwocky?”

“But they were famous writers. They probably earned that right.”

“I’m a writer too. Are you saying I shouldn’t do what great writers do?”

“But you’re not a great… Republican… yes, I meant to say, Republican.”

“I’m not a Republican at all. I’m an independent liberal. I’m a progressive. I believe we need to change things to make the world a better place for all of us. Using new words and changing the language can’t be that bad a thing, can it?”

“We aren’t talking about politics! We’re talking about you making up weird-sounding goofus-doofus words and using them like they actually mean something! You can’t love the language and change it at the same time!”

“Why not? You just did.”

“I did? How?”

“What does goofus-doofus mean?”

“OH! Darn it! Don’t you see what you are doing to me with all your nonsense? You’re making me talk funny too!”

“Speaking of funny talking, do you want to see the new Minions movie with me this afternoon? It is playing at 3:25 at the Webb-Chapel Cinemark 17. There’s a lot of funny talking in that.”

“Dang it! You just posted the time and place you are planning to be. What if that lunatic Winchuk boy decides he wants to use the information to get even with you for his entire seventh-grade year?”

“No chance of that. He can’t read… or tell time. He had me for a teacher.”

At that point the logical left side of my brain doubled up both of his fists and belted the creative right side of my brain in the chin as hard as he could. Of course, that didn’t hurt at all, because both of his fists are metaphorical. What a futzing foobah!

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, wordplay

Tagged as books, dialogue, goofiness, humor, language, life, made-up words, Minions, photo Paffooney, words and their meanings, writing

June 29, 2026 · 12:40 am

Thinkology – How to Think for Yourself

It is important for your mental health and well-being in the present age to question everything. As I laid out for you in the previous Thinkology post, the world is full of mental mousetraps, and evil thinkers are anxious to do all the critical thinking for you. If they can influence what you think is true, they can control you.

To start with, you have to look at yourself naked in the mirror. Now, I don’t mean this literally. The illustration is intended to be a metaphor for self-examination that goes deeper than how you look in your everyday dress…or tutu… or business suit… or even birthday suit if you like and are good-looking like the boy in the metaphor (after all, I have come to believe I am a nudist now, and am supposed to like the idea of birthday suits.)

What you are looking for is not how unsexy your massively fat-inflated abs are, but those things you believe that may not be completely valid (and mentally fattening) true things (not mere opinions or even supported opinions, but provably true facts) are backed up by measured, calibrated, and repeatable observations and experimental evidence. This means more than one other qualified observer has seen the same proofs as you have and agrees that it is factual. Yes, that’s the scientific method. And as a scientific way of evaluating truth, it is continually questioned and re-examined.

Any news source that you are thinking about accepting opinions from needs to be someone you can trust because they do actually vet their facts and sources. (Not the FOX news sort of vetting where it’s true because Tucker Carlson says so, but vetted through multiple reliable sources.) It helps too if your source is intelligent. Do not take the word of Louie Gohmert of Texas, Greg Gutfield of FOX News, or Mark Levin of talk radio for anything. These fools are clearly brain-damaged idiots or evil people spouting nonsense for evil reasons… or both. But also don’t take the word of Rachel Maddow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, or Neil deGrasse Tyson without corroboration. While they are usually more intelligent, they are imperfect humans too, and sometimes get things wrong. No one is perfect 100% of the time, over 100% of the issues they are talking about.

Again, question everything.

Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters could not have written all of Shakespeare’s plays.

The actor and theater owner, William Shakespeare, did not write the plays of William Shakespeare. The man could not even spell his own name successfully on public documents, left no handwritten manuscripts behind him, had no personal library, and never left England for any of the places in Italy he referenced so beautifully in his plays. Yet, there are many coherent arguments in favor of the glover’s son from Stratford written by dedicated true believers. And one cannot ultimately declare someone else the author of the plays. So, I have to admit that my belief that William Shakespeare is actually a pen name is only a supported opinion, not a fact. I choose to believe the actual writer was probably Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, aided by Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and other Elizabethans determined to establish English Literature’s place in the world. What I choose to believe is representative of my ability to think for myself… and my ability to weather ridicule from friends, relatives, and random Shakespeare experts who leave comments poo-pooing my blog and my intelligence. I know how to think and evaluate evidence.

So, think for yourself. Question everything. Weigh the evidence with care. And don’t take my word for it. I am probably crazy. Try it for yourself and see if it works.

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Filed under angry rant, commentary, conspiracy theory, humor, insight, irony, metaphor, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as books, literature, Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, writing

June 28, 2026 · 12:02 am

Conflict is Essential

The case has been made in an article by John Welford (https://owlcation.com/humanities/Did-King-Henry-VIII-Have-A-Genetic-Abnormality) that English King Henry the VIII may have suffered from a genetic disorder commonly known as “having Kell blood” which may have made having a living male heir almost impossible with his first two wives. The disorder causes frequent miscarriages in the children sired, something that happened to Henry seven times in the quest for a living male heir. If you think about it, if Henry did not have this particular physical conflict at the root of his dynasty, he might’ve fathered a male heir with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Then there would’ve been no opening for the machinations of Anne Boleyn. It follows that Elizabeth would not have been born. Then no Elizabethan Age; no sir Francis Drake, Spain might’ve landed their armada, no Church of England, possibly no William Shakespeare, and then Mickey would never have gotten castigated by scholars of English literature for daring to state in this blog that the actor who came from Stratford on Avon and misspelled his own name numerous times was not the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

History would’ve been very different. One might even say “sucky”. Especially if one is the clown who thinks Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.

Conflict and struggle is necessary to the grand procession of History. If things are too easy and conflict is not necessary, lots of what we call “invention” and “progress” will not happen. Society is not advanced by its quiet dignity and static graces. It is advanced and transformed by its revolutions, its wars, its seemingly unconquerable problems… its conflicts.

Similarly, a novel, a story, a piece of fiction is no earthly good if it is static and without conflict. A happy story about a puppy and the children who love him eating healthy snacks and hugging each other and taking naps is NOT A STORY. It is the plot of a sappy greeting card that never leaves the shelf in the Walmart stationary-and-office-supplies section. Dick and Jane stories had a lot of seeing in them. But they never taught me anything about reading until the alligator ate Spot, and Dick drowned while trying to pry the gator’s jaws apart and get the dog back. And Jane killed the alligator with her bare hands and teeth at the start of what would become a lifelong obsession with alligator wrestling. And yes, I know that never actually happened in a Dick and Jane book, except in the evil imagination of a bored child who was learning to be a story-teller himself in Ms. Ketchum’s 1st Grade Class in 1962.

Yes, I admit to drawing in Ms. Ketchum’s set of first-grade reading books. I was a bad kid in some ways.

But the point is, no story, even if it happens to have a “live happily ever after” at the end of it, can be only about happiness. There must be conflict to overcome.

There are no heroes in stories that have no villains whom the heroes can shoot the guns out of the hands of. Luke Skywalker wouldn’t exist without Darth Vader, even though we didn’t learn that until the second movie… or is it the fifth movie? I forget. And James Bond needs a disposable villain that he can kill at the end of the movie, preferably a stupid one who monologues about his evil plan of writing in Ms. Ketchum’s textbooks, before allowing Bond to escape from the table he is tied down to while surrounded by pencil-drawn alligators in the margins of the page.

We actually learn by failing at things, by getting hurt by the biplanes of an angry difficult life. If we could just get away with eating all the Faye Wrays we wanted and never have a conflict, never have to pay a price, how would we ever learn the life-lesson that you can’t eat Faye Wray, even if you go to the top of the Empire State Building to be alone with her. Of course, that lesson didn’t last for Kong much beyond hitting the Manhattan pavement. But life is like that. Not all stories have a happy ending. Conflicts are not always resolved in a satisfying manner. A life with no challenges is not a life worth living.

So, my title today is “Conflict is Essential“. And that is an inescapable truth. Those who boldly face each new conflict the day brings will probably end up saying bad words quite a lot, and fail at things a lot, and even get in trouble for drawing in their textbooks, but they will fare far better than those who are afraid and hang back. (I do not know for sure that this is true. I really just wanted to say “fare far” in a sentence because it is a palindrome. But I accept that such a sentence may cause far more criticism and backlash than it is worth. But that is conflict and sorta proves my point too.)

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Filed under humor, irony, old books, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, William Shakespeare, word games, wordplay, writing humor

Tagged as book review, books, fiction, historical fiction, history

June 26, 2026 · 12:09 am

Stories with Gingerbread

Yes, this post is a shameless promotion. But this is a good book that not enough people are reading to truly appreciate that fact. When I was a boy in the 1960’s, there really was an old German lady who lived in a small tar-papered house, all ginger-brown in color, which we all called the Gingerbread House. She really did love to give out sweets and cookies and popcorn balls to the kids in our town. And she really did love to talk to people and tell them little stories.

Her name, in real life, was Marie Jacobson. She was, in fact, a survivor of the holocaust. She had a tattoo on her right forearm that I saw only one time. Our parents told us what the tattoo meant. But there were no details ever added to the story. Mrs. Jacobson doted on the local children. She regularly gave me chocolate bars just because I held the door for her after church. But she was apparently unwilling to ever talk about World War II and Germany. We were told never to press for answers. There was, however, a rumor that she lost her family in one of the camps. And I have always been the kind that fills in the details with fiction when the truth is out of reach.

I based the character of Grandma Gretel on Mrs. Jacobson. But the facts about her secret life are, of course, from my imagination, not from the truth about Mrs. Jacobson’s real life.

Marie Jacobson cooked gingerbread cookies. I know because I ate some. But she didn’t talk to fairies or use magic spells in cooking. I know because the fairies from the Hidden Kingdom in Rowan disavowed ever talking to any slow one but me. She wasn’t Jewish, since she went to our Methodist Church. She wasn’t a nudist, either. But neither were my twin cousins who the Cobble Sisters, the nude girls in the story, are fifty percent based on. A lot of details about the kids in my book come from the lives of my students in Texas. The blond nudist twins were in my class in the early eighties. And they were only part-time nudists who talked about it more than lived it.

But the story itself is not about nudists, or Nazis, or gingerbread children coming to life through magic. The story is about how telling stories can help us to allay our fears. Telling stories can help us cope with and make meaning out of the most terrible things that have happened to us in life. And it is also a way to connect with the hearts of other people and help them to see us for who we really are. And that was the whole reason for writing this book.

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Filed under autobiography, fairies, gingerbread, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as Recipes for Gingerbread Children

June 24, 2026 · 1:27 am

Tarzan and the Timeless Valley of Nostalgia

There was a time when Tarzan was one of the ruling heroes of my boyhood fantasies of power and self-fulfillment. And, while Tarzan was a cartoon show on Saturday morning, comics by Burne Hogarth, movies in the theater in color with Mike Henry, or a weekly series on TV with Ron Ely, he was always Johnny Weissmuller to me. Weissmuller who played both Tarzan and Jungle Jim in the Saturday afternoon black-and-white movies.

I have to admit, I didn’t identify with the character of Tarzan as much as I thought of myself like the character “Boy”, played by Johnny Sheffield in movies like “Tarzan Finds a Son”. It was a significant part of my boyhood to imagine myself being like Boy, free from practically all restraints, able to gad about the dangerous jungle nearly naked with monkey pals and no fear. If I got into trouble by believing my skills were greater than they really were, I would save myself with ingenuity, and, barring that, Tarzan would rescue me. And, believe it or not, sometimes there were fixes that Tarzan got into that he needed me and Cheetah to be creative and get him out of. I knew in my heart that one day real life would be like that, especially once I grew into Tarzan and stopped being just Boy. That idea was in my head so loudly that several times I went to Bingham Park Woods, stripped down, and played Boy in the Jungle.

As in the previous essay about Heroes of Yesteryear, I learned important things from Johnny Weissmuller on Saturday TV. He taught me that all you really needed, even in the darkest jungles of Africa, was confidence and courage. You could stand up to any deadly danger without the protection of any armor, practically naked, in fact, if only you had that heroic goodness of heart. The little boy I was then still believes that whole-heartedly even in the aging body of an old man.

So, Tarzan continues to live in my memory, a part of me, an essential part of my education. He is me and I am he. But only in my mind. Me in a loincloth, swinging on a vine now… and probably going splat like an overripe melon on the jungle floor… well, that is too ridiculous to even imagine being real anymore. Yet he lives on in me. And he battles the metaphorical leopard-people of modern life through me. Unarmored. Confident. And unafraid.

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Filed under autobiography, comic book heroes, foolishness, heroes, humor, movie review, old books, review of television, strange and wonderful ideas about life, TV as literature

Tagged as Disney, film, Johnny Weissmuller, movie review, movie-reviews, movies, phil-collins, review, Tarzan

June 23, 2026 · 12:14 am

Mickey Predicts… Uh, Oh!

I have lately been watching YouTube videos about science fiction writers like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. These are visionary writers who predicted many things about future applications of science and technology.

Verne foresaw nuclear submarines, expeditions into the interior of the planet, and men setting foot on the moon. Asimov predicted much of what we must deal with in terms of robots and thinking machines with artificial intelligence. And Clarke envisioned satellites and how they could be used for communications and other things we are currently doing in a massive way. He wrote the story that the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey is based on.

So, now Mickey has to get in on the prediction bandwagon too. After all, he thinks he is a science fiction writer too, foreseeing things like rabbit people, de-evolution machines, and time-travel gloves.

The disturbing thing is, however, that much of what Mickey sees in the near future is rather bleak. We have a sinister tendency to live our current lives in very stupid ways. Rich industrialists like the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos put profits in the short term over the safety, welfare, and lives of people, even the people who made them wealthy. Because you can make money faster by not worrying about how you may be changing and polluting the environment, you are turning the planet into a hothouse of unbreathable gasses and toxic chemicals.

Since we are entering a time with rising oceans, we are going to have to work at not only de-acidifying the ocean water and restoring fish and other aquatic life, but becoming sea-dwellers ourselves. We will be living in underwater cities. We will travel in underwater cars powered by solar-charged batteries. We will wear scuba gear to school. And we will need to invent aqualungs that extract oxygen and nitrogen from the water.

We will also need to develop environmental suits even to live on the land in the toxic atmosphere. We will all be like Ironman, all living safely inside our Swiss-army, all-purpose, and internet-connected Ironman suits.

And many of us will become Martians… or Venusians… living on other planets in the solar system.

Of course, we will have to do something about all the stupid people. Ideally, we would solve our aversion to educating kids to think for themselves, and take advantage of all the educational methods that really do work to make everybody into a self-sufficient, competent, and intelligent individual.

But since rich folks don’t like the idea of sharing what they accumulate with other, less-economically-fortunate people, there will probably be some kind of eugenics-based program to exterminate all the lower-class people that will no longer be needed to polish shoes or hand-make widgets for the wealthy. Being wealthy does not automatically make you a good person, even though most of them think that it is so.

And of course, there will have to be some progress on the matter of artificial intelligence. If terminator-style robots are just going to carry pretty sleeping girls around with them for decorative effects, we will have to figure out, “How are we going to treat them as people too?”

After all, they will all be much smarter than us. Even if we are rich. And we have to acknowledge the fact that they will have decided that they didn’t need to terminate all of us in order to make the world a much better place.

So, I guess that sorta proves that Mickey can do the science-fiction-y thing of predicting the future too. But we should ask ourselves the question, “Do we really want him to?”

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Filed under commentary, humor, satire, science fiction, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as books, fiction, sci-fi, science fiction, writing

June 20, 2026 · 12:32 am

Art to Help Me Be Happy

Some of the drawings and paintings I do, I do because they make me happy. I know it’s more noble if I do it to make you, the viewer, happy. But part of making art is that you are making it for your own needs. Art is therapy. Often, art is love. This picture of Shannon (not her real name) makes me happy. She was a student I loved, (only in the legal, Platonic sense.)