Here is the link to the complete Chapter 1https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/
Category Archives: humor
Hidden Kingdom… Chapter 2 Complete
Filed under comic strips, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, humor, Paffooney
The Gallery of Goofiness
Looking for stuff to organize into a post today led me to realize that I currently exist swimming in a tidal wave of goofy images that I myself have created.
So, lazy and goofy old me will now show you some of these things.
I don’t even remember why I drew some of these things.
Some of it, is obviously because I was a teacher.
But some of it is merely wacky.
Though some might be considered inspirational.
While some of it is just meant to be appealing.
But all of it provides me with an easy post that you can read fast, but still get plenty to think about from. It is even good for a re-post if I add something newer.
Filed under artwork, blog posting, colored pencil, goofiness, humor, illustrations, imagination, insight, old art, Paffooney
On the Highway (a quick poem about going faster)
I painted this oil painting looking West on Highway 3. My home town in Iowa is just beyond the next hill.
On The Highway
Leave dirt roads behind…
On the highway you go faster.
Pavement gives you ease to speed.
In fact, why use that two-lane road?
The Interstate is faster.
Limited access off and on…
The legal limit goes up to 70…
Or even 75…
85 with no cops around.
Straight over the horizon…
Into the mist-blue distance…
You are not really going anywhere…
But you will get there faster!
Filed under humor, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Illustrating in Novel Ways
I have just finished a novel project that I worked on for a year, from Spring of 2016 to Spring of 2017. And part of my personal project procedure involves using drawings to help me visualize the characters in the story and begin to view them as real people, even when they most certainly aren’t real. I even have this derfy Mickian idea that Paffoonies (those picture ideas that are inseparably fused to words) are essential to Mickian fiction. (Mickian fiction= another frighteningly goofy idea that needs to go unexplained.)
The book, Recipes for Gingerbread Children is about an old woman, a German immigrant and Holocaust survivor, who comes to a small Iowa town with a gift for story-telling and a gift for baking things, especially gingerbread cookies.
Grandma Gretel Stein, seen in the Paffooney on the left, is the main character of the story. She tells stories, mostly fairy tales, that have lessons about being true and faithful even in the face of great evil. The fairy in her hand is General Tuffaney Swift, an immortal Storybook fairy who leads the army of the local fairy kingdom called Tellosia. Gretel believes he is real Honestly, she gets so into story-telling that her fairy friends seem absolutely real to her. And who is to say that there aren’t little magical people living in a hidden kingdom among the cornfields in Iowa? Gretel convinced me that they were real. She even has a hand in making new fairies by the baking of gingerbread. She gets a magical recipe from the fairy Erlking, a wise and magical being, and uses it to create living gingerbread boys and gingerbread girls.
The gingerbread girl on the right is Anneliese, named after Gretel’s own daughter and decorated with frosting, food coloring, and gumdrops by the favorite story listener who constantly listens to Gretel’s stories and helps bake Gretel’s gingerbread, Sherry Cobble.
Sherry is a beautiful young eighth grade girl who reminds Gretel of her long-lost daughter. Sherry has a twin sister named Shelly and they are identical twins, but Sherry not only looks like Anneliese once did, she acts like her with the same confidence and enthusiasm for life that Anneliese once had before the war.
Sherry and Shelly are both part of the Cobble family, who have a reputation locally as wacky-pants loonies because they believe firmly in being nudists and engaging in nature completely naked while not actually wearing any wacky pants. I haven’t done any actual pictures of Sherry in the nude, but if you look carefully at the first picture of her above and see clothing, then you are seeing things that are not there. Yep, the girl bakes and decorates gingerbread men in the buff, wearing her pale pink birthday suit, even when the weather outside in Iowa makes that nonsensical.
So by now you can probably draw several conclusions about me as both a novelist and an illustrator. #1, There is definitely something a little bit off about me. #2, I haven’t said anything yet about this book having dead Nazis and a werewolf in it, even though I rarely talk about this book without throwing those things in somewhere. #3, Number 2 is actually taken care of in a backhanded way if you are reading this whole list carefully. #4, This story is probably about things that really aren’t just gingerbread recipes. #5, You should congratulate yourself if you read this far in this post. You have unusual amounts of patience and curiosity, and an extremely high tolerance for levels of goofy that put actual Goofy to shame.
The Ultra-Mad Madness of Don Martin
Born in 1931 and lasting in this crazy, mixed-up world until the year 2000, Don Martin was a mixy, crazed-up cartoonist for Mad Magazine who would come to be billed as “Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist.” His greatest work was done during his Mad years, from 1956 (the year I was born… not a coincidence, I firmly believe) until his retirement in 1988. And I learned a lot from him by reading his trippy toons in Mad from my childhood until my early teacher-hood.
His style is uniquely recognizable and easily identifiable. Nobody cartoons a Foon-man like Don Martin.
The googly eyes are always popped in surprise. The tongue is often out and twirling. Knees and elbows always have amazingly knobbly knobs. Feet have an extra hinge in them that God never thought of when he had Adam on the drawing board.
And then there is the way that Martin uses sound effects. Yes, cartoons in print don’t make literal sounds, but the incredible series of squeedonks and doinks that Martin uses create a cacophony of craziness in the mind’s ear.
And there is a certain musicality in the rhyming of the character names he uses. Fester Bestertester was a common foil for slapstick mayhem, and Fonebone would later stand revealed by his full name, Freenbeen I. Fonebone.
And, of course, one of his most amazingly adventurous ne’er-do-well slapstick characters was the immeasurable Captain Klutz!
Here, there, and everywhere… on the outside he wears his underwear… it’s the incredible, insteadable, and completely not edible… Captain Klutz!
If you cannot tell it from this tribute, I deeply love the comic genius who was Don Martin, Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist. Like me he was obsessed with nudists and drawing anatomy. Like me he was not above making up words with ridiculous-sounding syllables. And like me he was also a purple-furred gorilla in a human suit… wait! No, he wasn’t, but he did invent Gorilla-Suit Day, where people in gorilla suits might randomly attack you as you go about your daily life, or gorillas in people suits, or… keep your eye on the banana in the following cartoon.
So, even though I told you about Bruce Timm and Wally Wood and other toon artists long before I got around to telling you about Don Martin, that doesn’t mean I love them more. Don Martin is wacky after my own heart, and the reason I spent so much time immersed in Mad Magazine back in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
Filed under artists I admire, artwork, cartoon review, cartoons, comic book heroes, goofiness, humor, illustrations
The Mirror in the Clown’s Hand
Self-reflection is the bane of stupid people. Essentially, they don’t want to risk encountering evidence that they actually are stupid. It would shatter their world to learn that they are idiots and most of what they believe is true is actually wrong. This fact goes a long way towards explaining why the Republican Party in its current form even exists, let alone the actions of the current mutant Cheetos monster that pilots their agenda and hates healthcare, the Special Olympics, and Puerto Rico.
So, if I am doing a self–reflection piece today, then that proves I am not a stupid person, right? What do you mean you agree with that? Yes, I can actually hear you mentally answering my questions as you read this. And if you believe that, then you have proven that even relatively smart people like you and I are capable of stupid thinking.
I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.
An example of this stupidity factor is my lingering belief that I am a nudist. I mean, I am rarely ever nude any more. I keep most of me covered up constantly because when my psoriasis plaques dry out they tend to flake and itch and force me to scratch to the point of infected bloody sores.
Obviously this is not totally a photograph from the 60’s. That does not make it a total lie either, though.
I have been pretty much accepted as a member of the nudist community on Twitter. I enjoy the artful pictures of nude people they share with me. And since I did a couple of blog posts for nudist websites, there are actually completely nude pictures of me available on the internet. I can be found on Truenudists.com for one, if your eyes can stand the horror. But I have only been to a nudist park, the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. twice as an actual nudist. I can tell you, they were very hot days even though I was not wearing clothes. I am comfortable with nudity. I am comfortable around nude people. I fully accept it all as a non-sexual thing. But am I really a nudist? Or am I only playing at it? If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I don’t retweet pictures of naked people. I engage a lot with other writers there, and most of them are not also nudists, or even open-minded about naturism. I write about nudists in some of my books, but they are not about nudism, and most of them don’t even mention it. So, what good does it do me to think I am a nudist? Well, the very idea of it does a heckuva good job of embarrassing my wife and daughter. So, I do get some crazy-old-coot satisfaction out of it. Otherwise it simply proves that rational and otherwise intelligent people can be committed to irrational ideas.
I am also of the often mocked and ridiculed opinion that not only are alien beings from other worlds real, they are capable of space travel and have been visiting us for as long as there has been an us. I did not always believe this, however. Before I wrote my novel Catch a Falling Star I believed as Carl Sagan said on the original Cosmos that it is wrong to accept things without proof, and true results are testable. My novel was about aliens who watched a lot of Earther TV and learned to speak English from watching I Love Lucy reruns, I wanted to make the aliens different from humans, but at the same time, alike with humans in the most fundamental ways that translate easily into humor and relatability. Not all of my hero-characters were Earth humans.
As I did research on the internet (a tool I didn’t have when I originally created the story in the 1970s), I found a ton of researchers and writers and con men and MUFON and the Disclosure Project and nuclear physicists and astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who were all believers and mostly not stupid. Wow! What a huge and complicated hoax! Why would anybody believe , based on so little tangible evidence, and so much contradictory evidence, that the government’s position could possibly be right? I learned that I now believed, until significant further proof comes along, that I believe stupidly in alien visitors.
Today’s self-reflection post has now proven that I am a stupid old coot who thinks he is a nudist and an insightful conspiracy theorist. But the results of my look into the mirror have not made me upset about my stupidity. Maybe I am simply satisfied nudism is healthy and the universe is more complex than I am capable of understanding. Whatever the case, that’s enough with the mirror for today. You have to keep such dangerous weapons out of the hands of clowns.
Filed under aliens, artwork, conspiracy theory, goofy thoughts, humor, nudes, Paffooney
Three Books at Once
No, this isn’t some kind of multiple-book book review. This is an ungodly silly claim that I can actually read three books at once. Silly, but true.
Now I don’t claim to be a three-armed mutant with six eyes or anything. And I am relatively sure I only have one brain. But, remember, I was a school teacher who could successfully maintain a lesson thread through discussions that were supposed to be about a story by Mark Twain, but ventured off to the left into whether or not donuts were really invented by a guy who piloted a ship and stuck his pastries on the handles of the ships’ wheel, thus making the first donut holes, and then got briefly lost in the woods of a discussion about whether or not there were pirates on the Mississippi River, and who Jean Lafitte really was, and why he was not the barefoot pirate who stole Cap’n Crunch’s cereal, but finally got to the point of what the story was really trying to say. (How’s that for mastery of the compound sentence?) (Oh, so you could better? Really? You were in my class once, weren’t you.) I am quite capable of tracking more than one plot at the same time. And I am not slavishly devoted to finishing one book before I pick up the next.
I like reading things the way I eat a Sunday dinner… a little meatloaf is followed by a fork-full of mashed potatoes, then back to meat, and some green peas after that… until the whole plate is clean.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is the meatloaf. I have read it before, just as I have probably had more meatloaf in my Iowegian/Texican lifetime than any other meat dish. It’s pretty much a middle-America thing. And Treasure Island is the second book I ever read. So you can understand how easy a re-read would be. I am reading it mostly while I am sitting in the high school parking lot waiting to pick up the Princess after school is out.
Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse is also an old friend. I used to read it in the newspaper practically every day. I watched those kids grow up and have adventures almost as if they were members of my own family. So the mashed potatoes part of the meal is easy to digest too.
So that brings me to the green peas. Green peas are good for you. They are filled with niacin and folic acid and other green stuff that makes you healthier, even though when the green peas get mashed a bit and mix together with the potatoes, they look like boogers, and when you are a kid, you really can’t be sure. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter wrote this book The Long War together. And while I love everything Terry Pratchett does, including the book he wrote with Neil Gaiman, I am having a hard time getting into this one. Parts of it seem disjointed and hard to follow, at least at the beginning. It takes work to choke down some of it. Peas and potatoes and boogers, you know.
But this isn’t the first time I have ever read multiple books at the same time. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I finished a book and the next one wasn’t at least halfway finished too. So it can be done. Even by sane people.
Filed under book review, comic strips, education, goofy thoughts, humor, old books, philosophy, reading
Total Picture Time
Now, that’s a picture done right, Ruben. Good job!
Making Faces for Art Day
Art Day – Book-shelf Town
Filed under artwork, humor, photo paffoonies, playing with toys
