Category Archives: Paffooney

March 29, 2021 · 7:09 pm

In Defense of Corny Jokes

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It will probably be clear that I am writing this post because I am currently reading 1941 daily strips from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.

But I am definitely going to talk about corny jokes, not cheesy jokes, because I grew up in Iowa, not Wisconsin.

And, yes, that is example number one.

There is a certain way of telling a joke or tall tale that is unique to the farmyard.   And it does not contain chicken poop, but rather, corn.

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Of course, as you can see by this corn-colored definition of what corny means according to Collins Online Dictionary, the word is supposed to be an insult to corniness in jokery.  That doesn’t sit well with the people of Iowa, where the tall corn grows.  We are also obvious, sentimental, and not at all original.  And we are proud of it.  Corny360_2017-06-19-17-17-44-339

To tell a corny joke right, you have to set a simple scene, and make it clear what happened, and give the audience a simple cue for when to laugh.

For instance, there was the time that Cudgel Murphy had a cat problem with his car, the 1954 Austin Hereford that he has driven since dinosaurs walked the earth.  It seems there was this time in 1988 when he kept having engine trouble.  The engine would sputter and cough and die, and when Cudgel opened it, he would find a half-eaten dead pigeon or other random bird carcass gumming up the works.  He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how dead birds were getting into his car engine.  But his grandson Danny happened to see the neighbor’s big tabby tomcat carrying a pigeon he had killed under the front of Grampy’s car, apparently enjoying a fowl meal in the dark with a nice warm engine to lay the food on.  Sure enough, when they checked the engine later, there was the half-eaten dead bird laying across one end of the fan belt.

So Cudgel set up a vigil, assigning times for himself, Danny, and his younger grandson Mike to watch for signs of that damned cat taking another bird under the hood of the Austin. With only two day’s worth of watching under their belts, Mike came running into the Murphy kitchen with the news.

“Grampy!  I seen that damned cat taking a dead bird under your car!  He’s in there right now!”

So Cudgel rushed out, turned the engine on, and stomped on the gas.

cudgels car

There were some worrisome thumps and bangs under the hood, and then the cat shot out from under the front of the car spewing howls and cat curses all the way up the nearest tree.

Cudgel laughed hard and finally caught his breath to say, “How about that, Mike?  I’ll bet James Bond doesn’t have a car that can shoot angry cats out the front!”

Now, before you chastise me for enjoying cruelty to cats, I hope you will remember that Cudgel Murphy is a fictional character, and I am merely illustrating the idea behind corny jokes.  And, besides, that cat really had it coming to him.

 

 

 

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March 28, 2021 · 7:27 pm

Fairy Tales and Wishing Wells

If you are on a writer’s journey like I am, you have my sympathy. I am not saying it is not worth it. But if it is going painlessly easy for you, you are not doing it right.

If you are doing it right, you are dredging your soul deeply with a huge jagged-edged bucket to find those small gemstones of truth and life and meaning, and then trying to arrange it all into patterns and genres and stories that are artful enough not to just look like a pile of random rocks. If you do it for a lifetime, you may be lucky enough to create a masterpiece or two, a finely-crafted jeweled creation that dazzles the eye and captures the heart of the reader.

I have always been cursed with high intelligence and a vividly over-active imagination. So, in some sense, I was always destined to be some kind of a fantasy writer with dragons, unicorns, wizards, and such crap dancing in my head, and polluting it by farting rainbows too often. Fiction-writing, by its very nature has to tell a lot of lies to get to the truth. It also has to be, in large parts, autobiographical in nature to be any good. You have to write about what you actually know. Because making stuff up without real-world references will only produce crap that you yourself (meaning you, the writer-you) can only see as mud-brown dhrek.

Therefore, my stories have to be the thing that I label as Surrealism. Many experts would call it that too. It is expressed in highly metaphorical imagery, as in a boy moving in with his father and step-family at a nudist park where everybody is naked most of the time, and the boy sees practically everyone as a faun from Greek myths. (A Field Guide to Fauns) ‘Where a boy loses his whole family in a car accident in France and must rebuild himself in the US with family he has never even met before and he does it by putting on clown paint and singing sad songs, and visiting a dream world inhabited by clowns who might actually be angels. (Sing Sad Songs) Or a girl recovering from the grief of her father’s suicide during a once-in-a-lifetime blizzard where she is saved from snow-ghosts by a magical hobo and runaway orphans from a stranded Trailways bus. (Snow Babies) The reality of these stories depends on a willing suspension of disbelief challenged by a myriad of disparate things thrown together into a kaleidoscope narrative.

I have been thinking deeply about the nature of my own writing experience as I spent most of a year working to promote my books through an online author-review exchange called Pubby during a pandemic unlike anything seen in a century.

The author-review exchange thing has been a very mixed blessing. More than half of the reviews I have gotten on my work are done by authors seeking to earn points for their own books to be reviewed by cheating. They don’t actually try to read the books. Instead, they look at other existing reviews and try to cobble together some lies that don’t show any original thinking and merely parrot what other reviewers have said.

And while some reviews come from reviewers like me who work hard at reading and understanding the book and giving honest reactions that delight me by pointing out the things they actually connected with and understood in my books, other reviewers react with unexplained horror at something they found offensive to their own world view in my books, painting them in harsh terms, in one case even calling the book child-pornography and ridiculing the authors of the good reviews as someone who didn’t understand what they were reading.

But even the bad reviews are a blessing, in that they prove that someone has actually read my books. I cannot explain why that is so important, but it is.

So, hopefully you see now why I am talking about fairy tales. A writer’s journey is hard. It burns your very soul. And you are not very likely to see any rewards but the intangible ones. If you are a fellow writer on your own writer’s journey, well, I sympathize. And I can only wish you well.

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March 27, 2021 · 6:10 pm

Artwork You Haven’t Seen in a While

Yesterday, I went to the NASCAR race track at Petty Place in Fort Worth. There I was one of several thousand to sit in our cars in long lines and receive a dose of the Pfizer vaccine. And today I feel really punked out (not referring to the music, of course, because today I can’t sing.) So, I reached back in time for this Saturday Art Day post. All of these pictures have not been posted in a long time.

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March 23, 2021 · 4:46 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 133

Canto 133 – Pink Space Cadillacs

The Super Rooster’s docking bay was filled with all the air/rafts, grav speeders, and small vehicles that Shen Ming had been able to muster from the city of Kiro and surrounding areas on the planet.  They were not exactly the most up-to-date technology in space, but they would do.

Four of the grav speeders were designed by an old interstellar vehicle company called Space Cadillacs.  Two of those were gray and white, while the other two were pink and white.

Shu Kwai was busy lifting boxes of equipment with his telekinesis and placing them into the cargo spaces of the speeders. 

Hassan Parker was busy watching and “supervising.”

Gyro looked at the pink Cadillacs with considerable curiosity.  “These things have a cockpit open to space.  How do we ride in something like that?”

“In our space suits, Smurf,” said Billy.  “The ones you altered to fit us.”

“Oh, sure.  I hope we don’t get swallowed by blossoms again.”

“That was actually a spaceship’s air lock, Gyro.”

“Oh, yeah.  But it was certainly icky.”

“Ha, where did you get a word like icky?”

“Some of you guys are real nerds, Billy.  You use lots of weird words like that.  And the Galactic English was put directly in my brain by Sara’s telepathy.”

“These pink Cadillacko thingies, Billy…  I kinda like the look of them.  Do we get to drive them?”

“Well, I might.  You would just crash one, Gyro.  You can’t drive to save your life.  Remember that grav-bike on Pan Galactica Five during the War?”

“It’s not fair to bring that up.  We crashed because it took too long to figure out what you were saying to me.”

“Yeah, it’s much easier to talk to you now.  It’s like you were born speaking Galactic English.”

“And that stupid bike thingy wouldn’t fly when I gave it a command.”

“That’s because you have to turn it on and use the proper controls in the proper way.”

“Nebulonin kanjeriey are so much easier to use.  You just tell them what you want to do or where you want to go and they fly there.”

“Those are the space-bird things that Nebulons use to get from the space-whale cruisers to the planet, right?”

“Or anywhere else you want to go.  They are much smarter than your Cadillackos.”

“It’s pronounced Cadillacs, Gyro.  And your space-birds are alive, aren’t they?”

“Very much so.  Born on gas planets, they fly in space, or they fly in atmosphere.  They carry their own oxygen-nitrogen fields with them.  Hassan could ride one through space totally naked and be fine, protected from the vacuum of space.”

“Yeah.  I don’t understand Classical Worlders either.  Why would anybody prefer to be naked all the time?”

“You remember we almost had to live like that back at Dr. Crushcracker’s school?  It was a boarding school for Classical Worlds kids.  They wanted you to go to school naked.”

“My worst nightmare.  I’m glad your dad got us out of there.  It was just too weird.”

“Yeah, well… we had to leave there because of our skin color.  We were hated for it.”

“Really?  Because of my brown skin?”

“Not really.  Because of my family’s blue skin.  We were hostile aliens to them.  They wanted to treat us as no better than the faceless ones.”

“I’m sorry about that.  It’s just stupid to think you and Jor and your Mom are not like the rest of us just because your skin is blue.”

“Well, and you and I are different too because of our Psion heads.  That’s what the Zaranians wanted to hang us for.”

“Yeah.  Thank the gods for Shan’s Prophecy and the Zaranian who saved us with it.”

“Anyway… Billy?  Would you teach me to drive one of those cool Cadillackos if I could make it have an energy-field and an atmosphere just like a space-bird?”

“You can do that?”

“I can now that Ged-sensei has trained us to get everything we possibly can out of our Psion powers.  It should be easy to make a field-generator that mimics the field-gland of a Nebulonin kanjeriey… um, space-bird.”

“In that case, I can teach you drive anything.  Especially a pink Cadillac.  I’ll have you driving it even better and with more style than Elvis the Cruel.”

“That famous pirate pilot?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Thank ya, thank ya very much!”

“Oh, stop it!  You didn’t do that right.” As the driver’s training plan ended, Shu Kwai nearly dropped a crate on Hassan’s head, not because he couldn’t control it, but because the boy who was supervising was simply insufferable.

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March 22, 2021 · 7:00 pm

From the Darkness Comes the Light

It is a rule, I think,

From the Start of Everything.

Darkness always must come first

Before the Stars can Sing.

No matter how Black

The bad thing really feels,

It cannot go from bad to Worse

Without Goodness on its heels.

And from our many foibles

And Monumental Blunders,

We must learn valid lessons

To discover Any Wonders.

But Dark the road ahead now seems,

And the Light We See is far away.

But steadily we trek towards the dawn,

And Bright Lights of another Day.

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***** I really had in mind another long and laborious complaining post today. But somehow it only morphed into doggerel verse. Sorry about that. Bad poets can’t help but inflict the stupid thoughts in their poet-guts on the unsuspecting sometimes. While I’m at it, I haven’t yet shared with you the FREE BOOK PROMOTION for March. This book, celebrating its first birthday, is free from this moment until midnight tomorrow night, 3/23/21.

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March 20, 2021 · 6:42 pm

Art of the Ages

This is art from the 1970’s.

Today’s post is a look at artwork from various times in my life.

I will try to find some of my work in the media library for this blog that is even older than this first one. But I am combing the archive randomly, so that I need to date each one.

The first one is from around 1979, possibly ’78 or “80.

This was from before I became a teacher, but just after my arthritis helped me decide not to pursue cartooning as a career.

I was still in my 20’s when I drew this.

This next one is helpfully dated 1983. It is a portrait of my favorite kid in the first year I taught. He was in my class in the 1981-82 school year.

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This one is from 1977, my junior year at Iowa State University, You can see that I was overly relying on profile views for faces on cartoon characters. An odd little weakness.

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This one is from about 1992 when Jorge and his brothers, some real working caballeros, were in my classes.

This came from 1984.

This one 1978.

This picture was submitted to the adult division of the Art Contest at the Wright County Fair in 1978. I drew it on the front porch of the old house in Rowan, Iowa. It won the purple ribbon.

This was drawn in the Winter of 1980 when I had to read David Copperfield as one of the works responded to on the 1981 English Masters’ Ecam.

If I searched longer I could probably find the pictures I previously posted on this blog from when I was twelve years old. Those are about the oldest artworks I still possess. But what would it show anyway? You can see my work got a little better over time, but not much, and lately arthritis took away some of my skills.

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March 19, 2021 · 7:29 pm

Friday Funnies… um, Yeah?

I have been trying for a while to develop a weekly blog routine to make thinking up something new and creative for a daily post easier… even simple. Tuesday is novel-work where I share a freshly made chapter of a work in progress.

Saturday is art day where I am supposed to share artwork I have done in a new and interesting way.

Sunday is devotional day… which is weird for an atheist who believes in God. I have a tendency to share things I am devoted to, which is far more than just religion. I have included on this blog day such things I keep sacred as Disney movies, Dr. Seuss, and being a nudist.

And Friday is supposed to be the day to be funny. Cartoons and jokes and satire and things to make you laugh.

The thing is, though I am a cartoonist, I am not that kind of cartoonist. I don’t do gag cartoons. I am more of an ironic twister of tales and tails and puns. My cartoon shared at the start here is not funny at all. Sometimes my humor novels get downright maudlin and sad. I doubt I have ever yet busted someone’s gut with laughter. I would not want to be guilty of murder by cartoon. What do you legally call that? Gag-a-cide? I put in the hyphens to make sure you didn’t think I was talking about killing Lady Gaga.

I have pretty much mastered the art of drawing cartoons. I can do eyes like Walt Kelly (the creator of Pogo) and Harvey Comics‘ noses (like the one in the Hot Stuff Devil picture) and women with huge jugs… of moonshine like Al Capp (the creator of Lil’ Abner… and you knew I meant jugs of Kickapoo Joy Juice, right? Surely you did think…)

Ah, but telling funny jokes is not what I do. Still, I believe I can lay claim to being a humorist based on this blog. I make people smirk a lot when I talk, which I take as visual confirmation that I am funny. Unless people are smirking at me for other reasons? Do I have another daddy longlegs spider dancing on my head because at least two of his long legs are tangled in my hair? Really? For the third time already?

But, regardless, I have reason to believe this post and others like it on Friday qualify for the notion of Friday Funnies. I can make myself smirk, guffaw, and sometimes giggle without looking in a mirror to see the spider. But you are welcome to dispute my funniness in the comments if you prefer it to admitting that I can sometimes make you laugh. If you do, then you will be supporting the arguments of the book reviewer who reviewed my book Mickey’s Rememberries and said, “He could be a great writer if only he were more serious/” I took that as a compliment. Irony, don’t ya know.

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March 18, 2021 · 8:28 pm

Totally Huggable

Tax time has always been about worry, raising money at the last moment, and horror when I finally see the bottom line and how much I owe to the IRS. (I have to withhold more money each month with each new tax year because the taxable percentages keep going up on my pension, apparently not stopping until I run out of pension or die, whichever comes first. And the Texas Teacher Retirement System has told me they can’t interpret the tax tables correctly, so I have to guess on withholding amounts.)

Last year I owed $750. Trump’s 2017 Tax Bill, the gift that keeps on giving… like a reverse Robin Hood, taking money away from retired pensioners like me to give away to wealthy fire-truckers (pardon my almost-French) in large tax cuts.

Fortunately, after borrowing money to pay off the tax bill, rather than having to beg the government for a payoff plan like I did the previous two years, we got a stimulus check from the government. It covered my debt, and I had enough left over to pay off my $580 tax bill for this year.

So, today, my daughter came to me and told me the new stimulus checks have come. $1,400 dollars! And I don’t owe any of it over tax bills this time. That, of course, explains the title for today. Yes, I give hugs when I’m happy.

But, to be honest, I haven’t always been huggable.

I was traumatized for years by the sexual assault I endured and kept secret from the age of ten. I underwent PTSD-like panics whenever someone tried to hug me. It interfered with my first three girlfriends, and even, at times, my parents and grandparents.

How, then, did I ever achieve huggableness? Well, it was a long road.

It began with my little second cousin, I won’t name him here because he may read this blog, and I have no intention to ever embarrass him. I did, however, name one of the characters in The Baby Werewolf after him. He was an essential part of my life when he was in the third grade and I was in my Senior year of high school, twice his age. I befriended him one Fall morning while waiting for the school bus. He was being picked on by one of the older boys, driven to tears, actually. I bullied the bully who was only in Jr. High and much smaller than me. He had run off behind the firehouse and was apparently planning to miss the bus and run home after it left. I talked him into getting on the bus, and I let him sit with me to keep the bully from retaliating.

After that, I had made a friend. He was constantly seeking me out and talking to me after that. He was a real cuddle-bug too. He would sit in my lap or ask me to carry him around on my back. And to my surprise, the touching I couldn’t stand from anybody else did not bother me a bit with him. He would play Monopoly with me and his brother and some other kids. And he would cheat. But he told me not to tell on him, so I didn’t. He laughed at my jokes. He told me who his secret crush was in school. He told me what he knew about sex from watching animals on the farm. (And he probably knew way more than I did.) And he was the first person I was able to hug in eight long years.

Of course, I would eventually figure out that because he was smaller than me, and a boy… there was no sexual tension between us to trigger my PTSD-like reaction.

So, the healing really began with him in 1974. He’s grown now. Wife and family… boys of his own. I’ve seen him briefly, but repeatedly at family reunions. But, unless he’s reading this now, he probably never knew how important his friendship was to me. I can hug my daughter now, totally huggable, because of him.

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March 17, 2021 · 7:32 pm

A Second Broken Spring Break

Spring Break, a year ago, was the start of the pandemic for me and proved to be the end of my limited time as a substitute teacher. We went into lockdown and my bedroom became my bunker for the duration of the Covid War.

My family went on a jaunt to Colorado for part of that week, as Texas was not yet a seriously infected land. But knowing how much my health issues made me a risk of contracting death by the disease, I stayed home with the dog and number two son. In 2021, my family went for three days to visit relatives in San Antonio. I was alone at home with the dog once again. There are odd parallels between that Spring Break and this one.

I hadn’t used the gingerbread house kit that I had bought for Christmas 2019. So, we broke that out, put it together (my daughter and I after she got back from Colorado) and ate it.

It so happens I now have a gingerbread castle that wasn’t used during Christmas 2020, so I have vowed it will get made, photographed, and eaten this coming weekend.

I had finished a manuscript for a new novel in February, and I edited it during the Spring Break 2020.

It was my novel about a nudist family called A Field Guide to Fauns. It was published in March of 2020.

I don’t have another novel ready to be published this Spring Break, but I will do a free promotion of the Field Guide this coming weekend.

The pandemic brought an end to my teaching career as I will never again have the physical strength or freedom from arthritis pain that it takes to stand in front of a classroom all day. Being confined to the bunker all day every day has worsened all my health conditions.

All my plans for visiting nudist parks went pretty much the same way. My psoriasis has worsened and made me more susceptible to the ravages of hot sunlight. Even though I know more nudists now than I ever had before, most of the ones I know live in England, France, and California. So, no one will be able to go with me to a nudist camp as my family won’t even contemplate the idea. I have relatives who are quite happy that the pandemic probably ended that part of my life as well. No more Mickey the Nudist.

But the big difference between last Spring Break and this one is the fact that I am now on the waiting list for a vaccination. It is just possible that the whole horrible ordeal will both begin and end with Spring Break.

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March 16, 2021 · 5:49 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 132

Canto 132 – Comeuppance

 Phoenix dissipated his fire-sword and turned towards the Black Spider leaders and their fire-fighting crew.  There was an ironic smile on his face.

“You may have noticed that this entire place is now on fire.  We, the three of us have decimated your ranks already.  And we did not come alone.  We brought Jai Chang and the army of Shen Ming.  Jai-sensei needed a chance to prove himself faithful to the White Spider.”

Instantly Jai Chaing swooped down from the rafters, shooting his arrows as he leapt.  Fangwoman, still wearing the helmet, took the first one through the heart.  Three more fell to his arrows before the other warriors took their first shots.

Reacting as quickly as he could, the Green Phantom dropped himself through a trap door in the stage floor.

“Now you must kill me.  I was your sensei, and I deserve an honorable death at your hands.  Let the student now become the master.”  Bone Daddy lowered his head, ready for the final blow.

“What is that?  Some kind of old movie reference?  You may not like it, but I choose to honor you with love and forgiveness.  We will take you as our guest in a lead-lined cell.  We will heal you, and give you the chance to redeem yourself among the White Spiders.”

“Phoenix, no.  You dishonor me.”

“I do not.  You just don’t understand… yet.”

Bone Daddy slumped unconscious to the floor.  Fortunately, a wraith cannot phase while unconscious.

“I have the boy Freddy,” said Jai Chang, holding the unconscious child in his arms.  Of the three White Spider commandoes, he was the only one that needed attention from a healer.

Rocket, Jackie, and Alec were all roused and led safely out of the burning building.  Two soldiers carried the limp form of Bone Daddy out too.

Shen Ming himself retrieved the Avenger Helmet.

“Ah, I must be careful with this thing now.”

“Am I right in thinking you are the reason the Avenger helmet turned up on Jai Chang’s head, Shen Ming-sensei?” Phoenix asked.

“What?  Me, guilty?  Although I am admitting that it all worked out rather nicely for our worst enemies.  Fangwoman is discovering new dimensions.  Bone Daddy is now our permanent guest.  And Green Phantom is now in hiding, needing to recruit many new evil ninjas to his stupid way of thinking. 

“And, ah, so… we have cleaned out the Black Spider Organization in Kiro pretty well.” Shen Ming’s crooked smirk told Phoenix it was all true, but he was not unhappy about it.

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