Category Archives: Paffooney

Recovery

My son has recovered. His COVID test came back negative. He is feeling much better, and he plans to go back to work tonight.

I wish getting back to normal was as easy for those of us who are old, tired, weak, and still devastated. There are a number of long-term things that have to recover.

The climate is the biggest thing. In twelve years we have to go from degrading our atmosphere at record levels of toxic crap expellations and Western States going up in flames to helping the the biosphere heal itself.

It may already be too late. We may have already irreversibly exterminated all life on Earth.

But there is reason to believe that human creativity will invent drastic solutions that we can actually be forced to implement, those of us who don’t lose our lives before that spark of genius becomes a wildfire.

But we also have to recover from a world where selfishness and hatred have grown to a point that many of us can no longer function as a part of the world. The economy is broken. Almost all of the wealth in this world flows into the pocketbooks of less than one percent of the entire world’s population. And they don’t use their wealth to benefit the rest of us, like they were forced to do back in the Eisenhower administration. They become more and more hate-filled and more greedy. They hoard their wealth, pouring it into stock buy-backs and further acquisitions, puffing up their bank accounts. And then they blame the working poor for being too lazy to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (a magic trick that defies gravity, and I have never seen actually working.) People label each other as “the other” and begin seriously hating each other on the basis of skin color, religion, or party affiliation. If all of mankind shared only one body, it would be severely infected and probably terminally ill. Its critical organs fight against each other.

We will not save ourselves from climate change without first solving the “Me-first!” crisis.

I illustrated today’s rant with an oil painting I did with peacefulness in mind. The Native American child and the stag on a starry night are supposed to symbolize peace, harmony, spirituality, and hope, all of which we desperately need to heal ourselves. There is not enough of that going around in the non-oil-paint world.

So, my family is recovering from the darkness where we’ve recently been. But we will never be recovered until, as a world, we all help in the recovery.

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Filed under angry rant, Paffooney

Promises Unbroken

Life is a Merry-Go-Round…

Up and Down,

Round and Round,

A Merry-Go-Round.

And if you can’t handle

The horse you are riding

Tame and gentle as he is,

Then take a quick shift

To the horse right behind you

As the circle continues to whiz.

I promised I wasn’t going to talk about him anymore. He befouls my dreams and makes my life harder, but noticing him, even with a heart full of scorn, is what he wants me to do. Even negative attention gives his little black Grinch-heart joy.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. His life and his works are complete. But he is still with me, the creator’s eyes and ears are still here.

Salvador Dali is dead. His life and his works are complete. But he is still with me. Clocks still melt to his timetable.

;;;

Judy Garland is dead. Her life and her works are complete. But she is definitely still with me as I sing her signature song to myself, wishing to be beyond the rainbow.

Michael Beyer is not dead. His life and his works not yet complete. But he is still working, and writing, and more, And the sugar in his heart is still sweet.

Yes, I am quite unhappy with the world the way it is. He has done terrible things, and yet they let him stay where he is. There is no excuse for it. The evidence is there for anyone not looking with their eyes closed.

But even though his promises are lies, I shall keep mine. Notice, I have not mentioned his name. But you still know who I mean and what he has done.

And I have never spoken of him as the “P-word” of the United States. So, my promises are unbroken, even though I can’t ignore him. I will vote against him, if God allows me to live that much longer.

He no longer makes me upset.

Now he just makes me poetic.

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Filed under artwork, Paffooney, poetry

Silly Names

Meet Harker Dawes. He’s a ne’er-do-well businessman, a fool, a bungler, a clown, and his job is comedy relief as a support player in multiple novels of my Hometown Novels Series. I would contend that he is the kind of character I can’t write a good story without. And why does he have a name like Harker? Well, it’s Charles Dickens’ fault.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you’ve never read a novel by Charles Dickens… Why the heck not? I mean seriously… A Tale of Two Cities is one of the best novels ever written by anyone. The history, themes, and tightly woven plot threads of that novel… pale in comparison to some of the funny names Dickens uses to tell that tale. Jerry Cruncher, porter for Tellson’s Bank, is also a grave-robber in his spare nights. He is constantly losing his temper with Mrs. Cruncher for “flopping against him” (which is how he characterizes how she prays for him). He is an essential clown in that narrative. Prim and proper Miss Pross is Lucie Manette’s hand maiden who is so fiercely loyal she ends up taking out the vengeful villain of the tale, Madame Defarge, for threatening her precious Miss Lucie.

And that notation is just the beginning of the long list of silly names used for critical supporting characters in his books. There is a wealth of them in every book you pick up; Uncle Pumblechook, Herbert Pocket, Abel Magwitch, and Joe Gargery in Great Expectations… certainly not leaving out Philip Pirrip (Pip) the narrator and main character of the tale.

Wackford Squeers is the perfect name for the abusive headmaster of Dotheboy’s Hall in Nicholas Nickleby.

A Christmas Carol not only contains Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim Cratchit, but also Old Fezziwig, a former boss who loves to dance at the Christmas parties he throws.

David Copperfield has wonderful character names like Edward Murdstone the evil stepfather, Wilkins Micawber the ne’er-do-well surrogate father figure (based on Dickens’s real father), jovial Mr. Dick, and the slimy, villainous Uriah Heep.

The multi-syllabic names he uses are not only comical or sinister or both, but uniquely descriptive of the characters themselves, defining for us in nonsense syllables what those characters seem to be all about.

So, that is why his name is Harker Dawes. It stands in for, “Hark, there will be guffaws.” The perfect moniker for a very imperfect man.

In the same book as Harker, you can find heroic Agnes Brikkleputti the social worker who chases four orphan runaways from Chicago to Norwall, Iowa and risks death in a blizzard to bring the orphans their medications. She is the putty that holds those four bricks together.

So, you should not be surprised if you read something Mickey has written and you run across a silly name. It is evidence that he might be Dickens reincarnated.

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Filed under characters, clowns, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

AeroQuest 4… Scherzo 11

Scherzo 11 – Breaking News with Fiona

I found this report in the Don’t Go Here Dino-News and decided, since I am more than a little bit lazy, I would quote it wholly to take the place of this part of the history you are now reading.

  • Googal Marrou
Your beloved reporter; Fiona Arbuckle

Fionna Arbuckle here, your favorite cub reporter with all the gossip that anybody who is remotely anybody listens to and commits to heart to be able to repeat word for word to everybody in the town square of beautiful Bedrock City, for Dino-News’s gossip pages.

The breaking news this reporter was turned on to by the stealthy revelations of moderately leaky New Star League Fleet security personnel, has to do with a certain handsome new Grand Admiral and his Second-in-Command, inexplicably named after a two-winged insect and a color known in the Classical Worlds as “noire,” who were seen together in the lifeboat after having escaped a kidnapping of their new fleet flagship and accidentally turning broadcast cameras on with a stray limb in such a state of intimate compromise that they are now needing to get married at the point of a shotgun…

And yes, I do actually need to take a breath after a run-on sentence delivered at a high rate of speed in order to deliver every bit of juicy information possible in the time available due to the short attention spans of our supposed cave-man audience-members… whooo…

And here comes the couple now.  We shall see if we can get a word with them.

“Grand Admiral Cloudstalker, is it true that you and Commander Black Fly are seriously on the brink of tying a knot that you may or may not regret for the rest of your natural life?”

“Um… no.  No, it is not true that members of the radical White Spider Cult are at this moment taking our captured flagship full of traitors straight to Admiral Tang.”

“Wait, there’s a White Spider Cult?  A cult that lives by the credo set forth in the Prophecy of Shan?”

“What…?  No…. I mean, yes, that cult…. But not the ones who actually follow the teachings of the interstellar White Spider Ged Aero.  Rather, a splinter group following the so-called Bishop of the White Spider and her insane interpretation of the Prophecy of …?  What was it again, honey?”

“I think it was the Prophecy of Xan.  But it is possible that all of the versions of the Prophecy speak of the betrayal from the acolytes of the Grand One.”

“The Grand One?  Does that refer to… me? The Grand Admiral?”

“Possibly…”

“Anyway… we will not be deterred from our intentions to repel invaders when they come to attack the worlds of the New Star League.  And we will get the flagship back before the battle takes place, I promise you that.”

“Actually, the Admiral doesn’t promise that.  He will not be able to retrieve that ship at all, in all likelihood.”

“Oh, you have just heard from cute little munchkin Commander ADaB from Djinnistan.  He and Commander PiP in all probability will also be getting married in a shotgun wedding arrangement judging by the accidentally switched-on cameras in their escape pod.”

“We will not, Miss Arbuckle.  I have seven wives already to think about.  We will just be having a torrid love affair.  And we are called Peris… definitely NOT munchkins!”

“Admiral?  You never actually answered that question when it was put to you and Commander Black Fly.  Can you tell us now?”

“Fionna, I wish you were better at hearing what is not being said and figuring out why.  Yes, we will be getting married.  You specifically are being invited.  And if wedding ceremonies on Black Fly’s planet include ritual human sacrifice, that honor will be entirely yours.”

“Oh, why thank you for that, Admiral.  I only hope it is not a bloody sort of ritual.  I cannot stomach the sight of blood.”

“He was joking, my dear Fiona.”

“Thank goodness… erm, I mean thank you for sharing, Miss Fly.  And um… was it the wedding part that was the joke?”

“No, we are definitely getting married.  We talked about it on the way back to base.”

“You heard it here first, folks.  There is going to be a Grand Admiral’s wedding between the planet Don’t Go Here’s most notable power couple.  And you heard it from cub reporter Fiona Arbuckle, representing the Don’t Go Here Dino-News.”

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Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction

The Uncritical Critic Rides Sidesaddle

One difficulty with doing the whole book-review-on-Pubby.com thing is that to get a book reviewed you have to give a book review or two.

This comes into conflict with my uncritical critic philosophy. You see, up until now I have done book reviews only at my pleasure, only reviewing books I know I am going to enjoy. I am used to giving five-star book reviews because the books I choose to read are really that good.

But now, on this book-review forum that I paid an expensive membership to join, I am definitely running into books written by authors who only think they are writing the Great American Novel. Some of them have a lot to learn about how to tell a good story, let alone the ones who don’t even know some of the basics about how to write in English.

I recently came across a book that had a number of four and five stars in each review. But I could only give it a two-star review. Bummer. Why is it up to me to bring the hammer down? Some of the reviewers who weren’t mostly incoherent in what they said about the book were obviously being overly kind because it was this person’s first novel. How do you deflate someone’s balloon without breaking their heart while they are holding tightly to the string?

And is it fair to give someone a balloon-inflating five-star review if they haven’t earned it?

As a writing teacher, you have to begin every review of an assignment with the positives you find in the work. The suggestions for improvement that come after may far outweigh the two good things you found in the piece to get them re-started.

I recently read a “novel” by an author who had only written about 8,000 words and was calling this the beginning of an epic series. There was practically no dialogue. The actions were brief and as simplistic as a fairy-tale adventure with demonic possession in another dimension where time-travel was common could possibly be. It makes me cringe about my own unpublished first attempts a whole lot less than before. So, I had to give a two-star review that began with the sentence, “You certainly are an enthusiastic young writer.”

I worry too about all of my own reviews so far being pure five-star reviews. Some of those reviews seem to reveal that the reader actually read the book and identified some of the strengths it has that I believe are there myself. But some of them could too easily be from reading what other reviewers have said, parroting it, and giving me a review based on their assumption that the other reviewers are right. I need to see some of that criticism and argument about what I have done that indicates a thoughtful reading of the book and really disliking it for a valid reason. I am not a perfect writer. Even the guy who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems had some flaws, prejudices, and foibles.

And since we are reviewing each other’s novels, how soon before someone gives me a one-star review out of a lust for vengeance? We are probably not all doing this in order to make each other better writers.

Ah, the book-reviewing life! Can you name even one reviewer you think is right more than they are wrong? I can’t. In fact, who besides me ever reads book reviews? I do not know that answer well enough to even guess.

But I paid the money. And someone is actually reading and reviewing honestly, even if it is only me. I mounted the old unicorn of book reading an writing tutorials sidesaddle. That way I’m not likely to get hit where it really, really hurts.

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Filed under art criticism, book review, humor, Paffooney, writing teacher

Another Saturday Gallery Peek

The thing about being an artist that I can’t seem to really explain, if I even am one, is “Why?” I mean why am I an artist? I am not a camera. You look at my imperfect drawings, and you can see it is a drawing. Even if I did photo-realistic drawings, I would still have to wonder “Why?” Why go to all that work if we have cameras for that?

And if we draw something that never was, but might have been… if only we were made like gods and could control everything around us completely… why is that worth doing? Just to see things through my eyes? I have weird eyes. They see skateboards with flaming Bart Simpsons on them saying, “Eat my shorts!” What is the value of that?

Perhaps this sort of “Seeing through someone else’s eyes” gives us a perspective that we could get no other way. I know I love art museums, art books, and art collections even more than I like looking at my own art. I love looking at the world as other people see it.

Maybe artwork, in one form or another is the closest we can come to truly sharing what’s inside us with other human beings, mind to mind, heart to heart, liver of blood-curdling revelation to liver of blood-curdling revelation… wait, you mean not everyone has a liver like that?

So, not everyone lives life the way I do, or knows what I know, or remembers the sweet, sad things I remember, or sees things the way I see them. Is that, then, the reason why for being an artist? Or cartoonist if you believe that I am not a real artist?

If I truly am an artist… and I am not convinced that I truly am, then I don’t answer the why questions. It is the job of the scientist to do that. I only ask the questions. And I do it by drawing the next inexplicable thing.

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Filed under artwork, commentary, humor, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

AeroQuest 4… Nocturne 9

Nocturne 9 – It’s Sighing Time Again

Ham had a bit of time in jump space to relax and worry about nothing.  Worm holes are strange and mysterious things to travel through.  Because of the fickle nature of relativity, traveling one parsec of space took about the same amount of time as traveling six parsecs of space.  Jump space, because it was outside the physical boundaries of normal space, was riddled with quantum unpredictability and constants such as the speed of light.  It meant that you had to traverse both time and space.  So, it would be at least a week before he and the crew of the Leaping Shadowcat had to deal with the terrors and the politics that awaited them on the planet Coventry.

The Madonna had made their mutual cabin aboard the Leaping Shadowcat starship into a very comfortable and homey place.  She decorated it in that strange, amorphous way that Nebulons have of making everything look like the inside of an egg, all organic and squishy-like.  The foam furniture she had made with the material synthesizer was all blobby, colorful, and very soft to the touch.  Jarring to the eye at first, Ham had come to find it quite restful and lovely.

“How are you feeling today, Honey?” Ham said to the bustling little blue woman.

“You is no help, Hamfast.  You going nowhere and laying on my home, making me perfect witch in making of home.”

“Love, I have no idea what you just said, but why are you so angry?”  Ham tried to make sympathetic eyes towards his small, blue wife.

“You is no knowing!  You is big, stupid-fat with no good in your bottoms.”

Ham was mystified.  She had always been so affectionate and loving.  Why was she now in such a rage?

He wondered how he might help her.  He pushed the button on the shipboard intercom.  “Sahleck?  I think I might need your help with a little cleaning in our cabin.”

“Sure, boss,” came the reply in a child-like voice.

Sure, he had solved the problem and made it up to the little blue woman, Ham turned back to her with a silly grin.  “Are you okay now?”

“Not okay!  Hokey smoke!  You is big, big dumbhead!”

Again, Ham was confused and flustered.  His little blue wife was blowing steam out of her nostrils for no apparent reason.  She rearranged mushroom-shaped divans with all the elegance of a raging wolverine in a henhouse.  Small bits of fluff and foam flew everywhere.

“Is it something I did?”

“You no is talking to me.  I still love you, but not kissing you am I ever again!”

“Why?  What is the matter?”

“Oh!  Grrr I says!”  A large green foam cushion came flying at Ham’s head.  It bounced off of him with enough force to drive him to his knees.  “Dumb!  Dumb dumb dumb, I say!”

A large sofa-sized foam pillow whirled over Ham’s head and smashed into the young Lupin boy, Sahleck Kim, as he tried to enter the cabin with an armload of vacuum cleaner attachments and dust bins.  It sent the boy flying backwards into the hall, banging his head against the bulkhead.

“Sahleck!”  Ham leaped to the rescue.  He had come to be quite fond of the puppy-like boy.  Fonder even than he was of the more adult-like Sinbadh.  He reached the crumpled child in a flash, and tenderly picked him up from the hall floor.  “Oh, Sahleck, I am so sorry!”

Sahleck’s furry head was bleeding just a touch, but the boy quickly came back to his senses.  “What did I do?” he asked, seeming slightly stricken.

Ham looked at the Madonna, standing in the middle of the cabin with a horrified look on her blue face.  She began to weep.

“Everything is fine, boy,” Ham said.  “You are all right and no one is mad at you.  It was an accident.”

The Madonna looked at Ham and the dog-boy with stricken eyes.  “You are good father-man, no?” she asked the air in general.

“I don’t know,” said Ham.  “Why?”

“You are going to need be one,” she said.  “You will be a daddy soon.  You and me, we will have a three.”

A child?  Ham couldn’t believe it.  He was both shocked and filled with joy.  How could this have happened?  No, he knew how.  It was wonderful.  In all his days of traveling and hunting through the stars, he never dreamed that one day he would find both happiness and a family.

 “Madonna, my love, I love you!”

The blue-skinned beauty stared at him.  It was obvious that if a Nebulon could blush, she would be glowing red.

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Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction

Today in Rabbit-People News

Okay, big miscalculation here. My old eyes can’t read the rabbit-talk in this cartoon. So, let me do something about it.

Nope. I can read it now. But that’s the problem. Not only is it not funny, but it’s also sorta racist. But wolves do eat rabbits. Still…

News in the RabbitTown Gazette includes the fact that my son is nearing recovery from COVID 19, and nobody in the house has caught it from him. He gets tested on Saturday so he can return to work if the test is negative.

Of course, the nation-wide news is not so great. This is 2020 after all, even in RabbitTown. The price of carrots is still within reach. But rabbit people are continuing to get sick from the pandemic which will be with us well into 2021.

And the weasel in the really bad weasel-wig that somehow got elected Prexydon’t is still favoring wolf-people, even when they kill an unarmed rabbit. And he blames the rabbits for being mad about how the wolves seemed to get away with murder. He twists the facts to suggest that exercising your right to peaceful protest is the cause of the chaos.

Yes, I am basically a rabbit too.

According to the featured editorial in the RabbitTown Gazette, you should be able to say, “Rabbit lives matter!” without having wolves answer back, “You mean ALL lives matter!”

After all, if you can’t admit out loud that “Rabbit lives matter,” then you really mean the opposite when you are saying, “ALL lives matter.”

Rabbits, whether they are black, white, brown, or red, have unique rabbit qualities, and they all have a basic worth. And I don’t mean as food for wolves.

The paper seems to have only bad news about the economy when you look at it from a rabbit perspective. Sure, the wolves are doing great right now on Wall Street, but that doesn’t help those of us who are not invested in the stalk market. We regular rabbits, and especially poor rabbits, are struggling to keep carrots on the table.

So, it is time for all good rabbits to do whatever a rabbit can. And that’s the way it was today in Rabbit News.

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Filed under angry rant, artwork, cartoons, commentary, humor, Paffooney, rabbit people, racial profiling, satire, surrealism

Mickey Plays with Pictures and Paint

Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.

But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?

So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.

,,,

,,,

This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.

Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.

Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.

”’

Here is an older pen and ink.

This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.

But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.

So, color needs to be added.

,,,

I had this one actually already painted in…

But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.

Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.

But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.

The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.

Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?

Or even Annette Funicello?

Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?

And how surreal is that?

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Filed under artwork, coloring, drawing, goofiness, humor, Paffooney, surrealism

The Return of Muck Man

Since I have so far miraculously survived the 2020 pandemic, I have nothing better to do then to relate the whiff-a-typical story of the world’s smelliest superhero as he makes his semi-triumphant return to the public eye… like a horrific mud-ball to the face.

If you recall the newspaper accounts of mild-mannered reporter Dark Bent, or even if you don’t, we recall that Muck Man was put into a community-imposed exile until such time as he would actually take a bath with soap and water. Being unable to find soap and water that was even willing to get within a quarter mile of him, MM started with sand baths in Death Valley until he was finally able to sand-blast away the outer hard crust of his personal odor.

You need to remember too at this point that MM’s super power is olfactory based. He alone among heroes had a personal stench so powerful that criminals would swoon into a coma at the mere mention of his name.

But after significant sand-baths, and once that horrific outer layer was gone, the water spirits were unable to determine who MM really was, and so allowed him to bathe in Lake Michigan where the water’s own funkiness managed to partly hide MM’s rancid smell. His super-scent finally hidden in the folds of Lake Michigan’s highly-polluted, almost water-like contents, MM’s country-encompassing foulness no longer was detectable to MM’s arch-nemesis.

The Monkey King, Dumbold J. Trumpaloo.

Meanwhile the nefarious villain known as the absolute pinnacle of oleaginous corruption, the Monkey King, had hidden his swamp-monstery monsterness in the swamps of Washington D. C. where they were barely discernible in the midst of swamp gas and elephant ideas. His plan to take over the USA was going swimmingly. The Pachyderm Party was uniformly aligned behind him ready to blanket the countryside with toxic elephant poo. And, believing that if they could hold onto power long enough for elephant poo to fossilize into stone, they planned to dominate everything forever.

So, in secret, in his newly smell-reduced Muck Lair, Muck Man began planning the greatest stink-assault ever launched.

“But wait just a second, Dad!” cried Muck Lad. “You will be defeated again if you don’t come to the realization that your super-power and his super-villain’s power are really the same power. You can’t fight stink with stink.”

“Well, then, how do you defeat a super-evil super-villain with super-stink power coming out of his mouth directly from his very good brain?”

“Well…” said Muck Woman (who insists she is Muck Woman, NOT Muck Girl, even though she’s MM’s daughter) “You don’t fight fire with fire… you have to use water. So, get almost-squeaky-clean Uncle Joe B. to hold a convention before his about how the next president should help the country come out of the pandemic with fewer additional deaths and help the economy to recover by taxing the people who can afford to fix the problems, and let the American public compare it to the Monkey King’s elephant-poo festival. That way the villain can practically defeat himself.”

And so, according to mild-mannered reporter Dark Bent, that’s what Muck Man did to defeat the super-villain again. This time without generating a super-stench. And hopefully that will lead to a less-smelly world.

“But…” complained Muck Man, I was left holding on to the the world’s largest weaponized super-fart. And it exploded in my pants. Now, I have to live with consequences.”

” At least we can take comfort in the fact that Mickey is somehow still alive. And a cleaner world is better for all of us.” proclaimed Muck Woman.

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