Category Archives: Paffooney

Aliens Among Us

Now, in older age, I am beginning to understand the life and work of Stephen Hawking better than ever before. I mean, he ended his life completely unable to move by his own muscle power, but his mind traveled light years and saw things that most of us can’t even begin to understand. My own muscle power is decreasing. Arthritis is confining me more and more to sitting on my bed with my laptop being my means of exploring the universe. That and the power of my imagination (a puny little thing compared to Hawking’s massive one.)

Artist’s interpretation of the Epsilon Eridani System.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/epsilon-eridani-system-04831.html

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/system-of-super-earths-discovered-around-a-nearby-star

The truth is, one of my irrational religious beliefs is that we are not alone in the universe. First of all, there are definitely planets of earth-like composition, size, and position around two neighboring sun-like stars. The two articles I linked to above give you some insight about what we currently know about Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti.

Now, information like that goes automatically into my mental salad bowl of imagination where it gets mixed with vegetables of prior learning and gets covered by the salad dressing of fiction-generating speculation (which tastes like spicy Italian.)

So, here’s some prior learning salted with speculations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001

Yes, you probably recognize it. There was a Martian meteor found in the Arctic that had in it structures that look amazingly like fossilized bacteria. I know that you can say with some conviction that it hasn’t been generally accepted by science that these are indeed fossilized lifeforms from Mars. But it also has not been proven that are ordinary geological formations, and scientists do generally agree that the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite is actually blasted off the surface of Mars in the distant past. I can’t summarize easily the geological proof of that fact, but you can certainly do the research online yourself.

So the syllogism goes like this;

  1. Life is not only possible but probable elsewhere in the universe.
  2. Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti are both places where there are probable places conducive to evolving life.
  3. Therefore those two planetary neighbors in our galactic neighborhood are highly likely to have life. And if they have life, they may also have intelligent life like us.

Because of what the former Israeli space security chief said about a Galactic Federation of aliens recently, I searched out and watched a video by Linda Moulton Howe (the formerly award-winning ecological journalist who is now labelled a “kook” because she turned her attention to UFOs after doing a documentary about cattle mutilations in the Southwest.) In this video, an Anonymous video that I could not share here for the usual reasons, Howe went over a transcript of a briefing Ronald Reagan got from CIA chief William Casey in which they discussed what Majestic 12 knew about alien visitors. They were explicit about the EBEs we made contact with as a result of the two Roswell crashes of 1947. They come from a twin-sun system called Zeta Reticuli. And they acquainted us with at least three other extraterrestrial peoples who are now and long-time have been visiting Earth. One of those is a potentially hostile race believed to be from Epsilon Eridani.

Now, of course, like any religious belief, I can’t prove anything except by faith. Although, based on a large number of events, investigations, and anomalous artifacts, there is probably more proof of my beliefs than there are that Jesus was real. But, consider this, they always point out that if the government was trying to keep this secret from us… well, the government is really bad at keeping secrets. So, where are the aliens?

Well, Nixon showed them to Jackie Gleason in the 1970s.

The government hasn’t kept any secrets very well. Not the U-2, not the SR-71 Blackbird, not the Stealth Fighter… not even the Manhattan Project which the Russians duplicated within a decade. The Roswell crash, the Travis Walton abduction, Eisenhower’s 1950s meeting with aliens at Holliman Air Force Base, all of these things are documented and witnessed to by enough journalists, physicists, soldiers, government officials, deathbed confessions, and whistle-blowers to not be easy to dismiss as lunacy.

So, I say again, I am convinced we are not alone in the universe. I also think they are here already and the government knows that. I have seen UFOs more times than I have fingers, though I know most of them belong to our government. I live in Texas, the home of military air-bases and more nuclear plants than is comfortable. I am not saying I can prove anything. If I could, it would already probably be censored by now and you wouldn’t be reading this. Lying to the public is one thing the government is really good at.

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Phantasms of Phoniness

Some of us believe mildly stupid things, and all of us get a multitude of things wrong.

But there are many of us who know that most of what we see and hear is not true, and some of that is propaganda, lies, and manipulation intended to exploit us and cause us to lose something for the benefit of others.

Our fearless, if not overly-blessed-with-brains, crew.

We are trying to set the sails of our ship of State again, and sail onward toward a better future. But after four years under a mad captain seeking white whales of ego, we still haven’t finished throwing the foam-at-the-mouth Ahab overboard. He’s got 18 boatswains from red-sailed ships to petition the harbormaster to throw our newly-chosen captain into the sea and let him sail us back out into the typhoon. Enough, already! Our mutiny was justified to try to save the whole ship.

The red ships all firmly believe the lie that we are better off under elephantine officers, and apparently, they have the right to tell us who our captain should be, even after we decided that ourselves.

Here are a few of the things too many of us believe because the red captains say so;

  1. Money belongs in the hands of the few who have already been in charge for generations. They know how to use it best for the good of all. That is; pay any price for their own comfort and benefit, and that of their families who will make the same decisions after they are gone. And the rest of us, if we don’t make them increasing profits for decreasing wages, deserve to be homeless, get sick, and die.
  2. Anything can be justified, as long it profits the business owners and corporate investors. Only the already wealthy deserve to have money.
  3. If we pooled all the world’s wealth, and then we distributed if fairly according to need, all the billions currently alive on Earth could have decent, comfortable lives. We could also battle the climate-change crisis and restore the planet. And rich people could still keep more than they need to survive. But those who control the money now are allowed to choose not to do that.

I have grown a little tired of stupid people telling me how stupid I am because I don’t believe what it is apparently comfortable for them to believe… and they want me to stop being stupid and believe what they believe.

But I know I am stupid most of the time and take steps to try to be a little less stupid a little more often. And I wish they would give it a try too.

Okay. I am done yelling now. Nobody heard me anyway.

But we should tie an anchor around foaming Ahab’s neck and toss him into the sea.

And I don’t believe I am the Emperor of Stupid for saying so.

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Filed under angry rant, grumpiness, humor, irony, Paffooney

So Little Time

This picture of my two sons was drawn in 1981, almost fifteen years before the oldest boy was born. How did I know that I would have two boys before I ever met or even heard of my wife? How did I get it right that the older boy would be almost exactly four years older than the younger one? Pure coincidence, if your cherished religious beliefs allow you to believe in that. Personally I think that the dream that inspired this picture was proof of the ability of a dreamer to dream outside the boundaries of physical time. After all, time is merely a measure of matter traveling through space, is it not? If you nullify the effects of distance, all time becomes one time. You know, timey-wimey stuff.

Amazingly, this photo was taken fifteen years ago. From left to right, ages 3, 6, and 10. The Princess, Henry, and Dorin (though not their real names, their fictional names.)

Hard to believe it is now 18, 21, and 25.

Where does time go?

When did I get so old?

In 1965, the year I recently rewrote my Christmas list for, I was nine.

The world was all black and white back then. At least, that’s what all the photos taken with the old Browning box camera showed.

My mother and father were married in January of 1956. My parents were both children during World War II.

My maternal grandfather, Grandpa Aldrich, was born in 1911. The farm he lived his whole life on was established in Wright County Iowa in the 1880s.

A lot of good water has flowed under the metaphorical bridge in my 64 years of life. But where has it gone? To shores far away? Or is it still there even if the river has dried up?

Time, by its very nature, is a mystery and quite unknowable. And who is to say that all time is not one time? And all things are therefore one thing. Would my Great-Great Grandpa recognize me, and know me by name? I’ll have to ask him when I see him.

(WordPress should not have given me all these new features to wear out if they really didn’t want me to play with them. Aren’t you doing the same thing with yours?)

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Filed under family, goofy thoughts, humor, irony, nostalgia, Paffooney

AeroQuest 4… Canto 119

Canto 119 – The Debate on the Bridge

The control panel on the bridge of the Super Rooster was made up mostly of the remnants of Dr. Naylund Smith’s old space ship, the one he had crashed and eventually junked a mere two hundred twelve years before.  But it was like riding a bicycle to sit in front of the familiar controls.  That, Naylund supposed was why Ged had asked him to be the pilot, taking over the role that Ged would’ve much preferred had gone to his brother Ham, but he would not take for himself.

“Thank you for organizing this mission, Naylund-sensei.  I am not used to doing the job of a space captain myself.”

“It is nothing, Ged-dono.  Sitting in front of these controls is a little like arriving home again.  And this is the first time in the history of Gaijin that the planet can mount a response to an incoming possible threat.”

“Have we learned anything more from the scanners?”

“Not much.  It is coming up on the viewscreen now.  It is still 5,000 miles away.  Computer, enhance viewscreen 500 percent.”

The image enlarged in the holo-digital viewscreen.

“That looks like a big piece of driftwood with a flower on its side,” said Sara, looking over her father’s shoulder.

“The sensors indicate the whole thing is alive,” said Junior Aero, sitting behind Ged.  “It functions as a space ship, though.  It maneuvers.  And it orients itself to the gravity well of the planet like an incoming spaceship.  It has to be something like the living space-whale ships of my people.”

Junior was born a Nebulon, blue-skinned and red-cheeked, and later adopted by the Aero Brothers.

Naylund looked at the plant-like thing and squinted.  Hoping to see… what exactly?

“I don’t think it’s connected to your terrorist, Ged.  It’s like some sort of seed pod.”

Ged looked at Naylund skeptically.  “It seems almost impossible that it would be a coincidence, Naylund.”

But Jai Chang, the ninja under the Avenger helmet, was a native-born Gaijinese who had never been off planet and never known to have any off-world contacts.  If there was a connection, it was not an obvious one.

“Sara, can you tell anything about it with your telepathy?” he asked his daughter.

“I hear voices, but it’s confusing,” she answered.  “Could the whole thing be a disguise?  I can read alien minds there… but it’s all garbled.  I can usually understand anything the mind I read understands.”

Junior suddenly also looked quite confused.  “I can’t read any computers on board, A-I or otherwise.  How can they navigate?”

“They can’t.  No starship we know of can operate without a computerized brain of some sort.  Anything less than Tech-level Nine wouldn’t be able to find its way through jump space.”  Naylund could only guess at the weird alien technology behind this interstellar seed-pod.

“There is a breathable oxygen-nitrogen-carbon dioxide atmosphere inside,” said Ged, reading the latest sensor scan.  “We will have to go inside.  Time to use your antique vacc suits, Naylund.”

“Be my guest.  I will fly the Super Rooster and wait for your return in the ship.”

“You and the robot-boy, Tiki Astro.  That should be enough problem-solving help to leave on this end.  I will take Sara, Junior, Billy, and Gyro with me.  We have five usable suits.”

“Don’t take any unnecessary risks, Ged-dono.  I am trusting you with my daughter, after all.  Something I would only do with the one true White Spider.” “I promise, Naylund-sensei.  On my life, I promise.”

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The Sickening…

Today I am totally bloogelbombardoed. Seriously, there is not a better word for how I feel at the moment. I have a viral infection with no fever. Just body aches, a bad case of the blahs, and sinuses that won’t let me rest, or even stop leaking out the nose for more than fifteen seconds at a time. My trash is full of used Kleenex and toilet tissue that took over when the Kleenex box ran out.

I have to seriously worrywarticize the whole problem because my wife and daughter have returned from the Florida Disney World Reunion of the Filipino Sisters during the Thanksgiving Week, which they technically should have canceled due to Covid Crisisism.

I am staying warm, trying unsuccessfully to rest in bed, and drinking lots and lots of Mickenlooney Go-Juice (the Mickian words for Diet Dr. Pepper.) Fortified and warmalized by frequent cups of sugar-free hot chocolate. Carefully monitoring how close or how far I am away from deathualization.

But here’s why it shouldn’t actually be Covid 19. No fever. Good sense of smell. No vomiting. No breathing problems that weren’t there already before I got sick.

Still, my plan is to get tested if I am still sick after Friday (the seventh day after exposure and the fifth day of feeling bloogelbombardoed.) My wife will be mad at me for it, because it will put her on homebound quarantine again from school and her classroom. But, I figure that is a fair enough thing, because if I am Convidinated, either she or my daughter, the Princess, brought it home to me. Just because you may be asymptomatic, that doesn’t make you virus free.

If it is the pandemic virus, then so far my body is handling it rather well, underlying conditions and all. I know that could change quickly, and this post may be my swansong singy-thingy, my goobye-seeyalater to the world. But I hope not.

Did you learn any Mickian words from this blog-posty-thingy? If you did, I hope you never try to use them. It’s not that I hold a copyright or anything, but these words are generally frowned upon by the society we live in. And I have it on good authority that factory warranties of these words have all expired, so they might break down, blow up, or just generally make English teachers and editors mad. Oh, and Kleenex is not emboldicized because it is NOT a Mickian word. Some stupifyingly stupid corporation is guilty of that wildly Mickianesque weird spelling. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

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Filed under health, humor, illness, Paffooney, word games, wordplay

AeroQuest 4… Canto 118

Canto 118 – The Mission Aboard the Super Rooster

“What do we know about the unknown ship?” Ged asked Naylund.

“Very little.  Scanners don’t get normal life-form readings.  We can’t identify the craft by its design or visible features.  It is a mystery apparently come from deep space in the unknown.”

“Monsters from outer space?” asked Sara with an ironic smile.

“Possibly.  You and Junior should go with Naylund and I to look it over  out there.”  Ged put a hand on her shoulder.  “Who else among the students would prove useful?”

“Billy Iowa’s clairvoyance can help us anticipate dangers and see beyond walls.  And he probably won’t go without Gyro.  But Gyro’s molecular transmutations could come in handy too maybe.”

“You have become quite an insightful leader,” said Naylund.  “You make me proud.”

“Thank you, Daddy.  But part of what we have been learning is how to rely on multiple leaders who can shift responsibilities as needed on the spur of the moment.”

“Go find Junior, Billy, and Gyro and give them the orders,” Ged commanded Sara.

“Yes, Sensei.  By your command.”  She scampered off towards the Akito House.

“Do you know where we can get workable vacuum suits?” Ged asked Naylund.

“Yes.  There a little bit steam punk and a little bit old-fashioned, but they are serviceable Tech Level Nine.  They are actually from my old starship that brought me here over a century ago.”

“Okay…  Then I imagined they are thoroughly broken in.”

“Yes, but hopefully not too broken.  Space travel has not been a common thing on this planet for over a thousand years.”

“Something we probably should’ve thought of when we borrowed the Ancient Hammer to build our space port.”

“You are probably right.”

The walking and talking ended in front of the Super Rooster on the old-fashioned launch gantry that Junior, Gyro, and Taffy King had created for it.  It was a strange-looking craft that made Ged long for even the Megadeath to look at it.  It had none of the elegance of the Leaping Shadowcat.

Gyro met them in front of the launch gantry.  He was also all smiles, but with none of the irony Ged had detected in Sara’s grin.

“I built this thing, Sensei,” Gyro said proudly.

“I know you did.  But you built it for Shen-Ming-sama, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I better ask him to borrow it.”

“You know it is the only other spaceship besides the Red Dragon that we have available, and that Ancient thing could be way too dangerous to use for this mission,” reminded Naylund.

“You go on ahead.  I need to ask…”

Ged turned back towards the Palace of a Thousand Years and focused his signal on Shen’s Tower to avoid the message being intercepted.

“What is it, my son?” Shen Ming asked when Ged keyed the commo-dot on his.   neck.

“I need to borrow the car keys, Dad.”

“The keys to the Rooster, you mean.  By all means.  But drink no gargleblasters and wreck it not.  Until the new ones are designed and built, it is the only car we really have.”

“I promise.  Not a scratch or a dent.”

“Go with my blessing, then.”

Ged turned back to where Gyro was watching for his return.

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Contradictions

You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.

What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.

The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.

“You are wrong, Mickey!”

“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”

“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”

The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.

But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority

Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”

One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.

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Thinking About Thinking with a Thought-free Thinker

Yes, today is another in a long, tepid series of Art-Day posts, but it is also about metacognitive thinking. Specifically thinking about thinking using pictures to think with. (Maybe that title should say, “Free-Thought Thinker” rather than, “Thought-Free.”)

To start with, what does a person actually see when they close their eyes? My brain does not color everything on the inside of my eyelids black. Even in the dark of night with no nightlight so that nothing shines through my eyelids, my brain interprets the dark as shapes, patterns, and colors. Hence the inspiration for this picture.

But my brain is never satisfied with raw shapes, colors, and patterns. It has to interpret ideas into them. The mass of yellow and black resolves into a butterfly, or a sunflower, or an etude by J.S. Bach. The pink mass becomes a blond girl playing the music in my head…. a girl from piano-lesson days in the early 70’s. But naked. The way I always thought about her while sitting and waiting for my piano lesson and listening to hers. How else does a boy think about a pretty girl when he is fourteen?

And as the items in the picture take shape, they do also begin to tell a story. Who is this Dr. Seabreez? Is he a shaman of the Republic of Lakotah People? Is he a white man? Seabreez is not a Native American name. The naked boy by the tent flap has a crutch, and there is a mouse silhouetted nearby. Does that make him a medical doctor? A veterinarian? A professor of Native-American Studies? The mind begins to piece together a script.

But here we see that Dr. Seabreez has set up a new practice in Japan. Again the boy near the door has a crutch and there is a silhouetted mouse near him. But now the other boy has horns on his forehead. Why horns? And pointed ears? Is he a Doctor of Magic and Wizardry? Demonology perhaps? And what is an anthropomorphized panda doing in Japan? That’s clearly a Japanese castle in the distance. The collar Kanji is definitely Japanese in character.

And now there are horns again. Three of them by my count. And another naked character. But a Grecian background. The mind is here making connections between the pictures, noticing patterns. Appreciating colors. And turning every detail over in the mind’s eye, evaluating and analyzing.

Art, especially on Saturdays, totally engages the mind. That is one of the reasons we keep art around to look at again and again. It is the purpose of art to make us see something. And not just once, superfluously. We must see it in depth, looking beyond the surface.

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Islands of Identity

Island Girl2z

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.

Gilligans Island

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.

20160730_061115

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

The Autobiography of Mickey (and NOT Mickey Mouse)

Oh, yes. It is almost complete… but for the final edit. It will hopefully be published very soon. It is filled with essays written for my blog, Catch a Falling Star. And, hopefully, I have chosen only the good ones.

But the book is not a stand-alone. It is a sequel to Laughing Blue, published earlier this year. I actually hope to reach 20 books published by early in 2021. Of course, it still requires that I don’t die too soon from the pandemic, or from any of my other problems that the Covid problem could interfere with getting medical treatment for.

Laughing Blue has five Five-Star Reviews.

Both of these books are essay collections, but the majority of the stories and explanations and comedy in each are based on my thirty-one years of experience as a Texas public school teacher, my nearly forty year association with nudists (though I can’t honestly claim to be one). my silly attempts at writing seriously bad poetry, my belief in flying saucers, and nearly ten years of being a wacky wizard. How’s that for a sentence that violates every run-on-sentence rule I ever taught any young writer?

Book number 18 is still pretty new too.

Anyway, now that you know, I better get started on that final edit. A writer has to keep his promises to himself. And maybe to the rest of you too.

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