I like taking pictures of my doll collection. Those pictures are then qualified for Art Day posting. So, here are random pictures of dolls, most of which are from the doll shelf in my bedroom.
Not all of my dolls are on the doll shelf.
Chilly Willy here is a carnival prize that was probably won in a basketball-toss game at Six Flags and purchased by me for five dollars in a garage sale. He is technically not a doll. He is a stuffed animal.
So, let’s get back to dolls.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, Disney, doll collecting, humor, Paffooney, photo paffoonies
This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house. It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.
As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television. During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening. But he was ten and he hated girls. He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.
She was also ten, and in his class at school. She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys. But she didn’t know why. She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts. And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts. He was athletic and often won games in PE.
After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown. In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell. He liked that smell.
She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore. He actually said, “Hi” in public. And she liked his smile, even when he got braces. He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat. She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.
He said that if she liked him, he liked her. But if she didn’t, he didn’t either. “Like” her, he meant. Which he did because she did.
After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened. And it was about time too. Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too. One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery. And that danged dog wizzled everywhere. The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.
But the very next year brought disaster. He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened. The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb. She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team. And she got mad. How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?
In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep. The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby. It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.
But the story has a happy ending. She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college. Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t. They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other. They had three kids. And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that. Because it was a loveseat. You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?
When I was in Iowa last, and had a chance to see the younger of my two sisters, Mary Ann, she told me flat out that she really liked my most recent blog posts and that I should give up all together on my gloomy pessimistic ones. This, of course, was confusing to me because all my blog posts are relentlessly gloomy and never make anyone smile, so I did not know for certain what she was responding to.
As I have shared on more than one occasion, I suffer from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I don’t plan on living more than decade further at my most optimistic, and I told you recently that I am a confirmed pessimist. At worst, I could be dropping dead from stroke or heart attack as soon as I post this silly sour old post. I will be absolutely delighted to live long enough to finish another novel or two and maybe even see them published. I keep close track of my remaining hours because each one is rare and precious to me, even the ones that are quite painful and hard. So gloomy is as gloomy does. I am constantly celebrating that I have lived this long already. How depressing is that? … the celebrating every day thing, I mean?
And of all the people who suspect I might be a fish sticks and custard sort of person, Mary Ann is not one of them. She watches Doctor Who and knows that that is exactly what I am. I am goofy and scatter-brained and a barely contained barrel of weird energy and misplaced enthusiasm. I do stuff like fill my bedroom Barbie shelf with bizarre and kitschy little 12-inch people.
I appreciate melancholy and being blue, because the hollows of the valleys of depression make you appreciate the giddy heights so much more. And I do realize that I am stringing big words and goopy metaphors together to sound all literary and brooding… but that’s what real geniuses whom I am trying to emulate do to reach the highest heights. They run down through the valley at the fastest possible pace to build up enough speed to shoot up the side of the mountain on the other side. It is a Wiley Coyote trick for using cartoon physics in your own favor. It is the reason I am still tending the flower wagon, trying to coax zinnias into blossoming during the depressingly renewed Texas drought. It is the reason I keep adding to my collection of sunrises. The dark blue pieces of the puzzle of life provide the contrast that help you define the puzzle picture of the brightest sunshine and light.
Filed under battling depression, humor, Paffooney
Why did Batman have Robin the Boy Wonder? Not only that, but why Bucky and Captain America? Green Arrow and Speedy? Aquaman and Aqualad? Superman and Krypto the Super Dog? Fredric Wertham, the Seduction of the Innocents and the Comics Code guy, would have you believe that they were there to make young boys turn gay and violent. But that was nonsense, wasn’t it? Better change Krypto for photographer Jimmy Olsen just in case.
But if that was merely nonsense, why was it such a part of the formula?
As a D & D dungeon master, I have my own theory about sidekicks and their function in story-telling.
Young sidekicks were an important part of the stories I told as a game master because the players in my games were mostly adolescent boys themselves. It was the same as the primary readers of Batman comics in the 1950’s of Wertham’s Comics Code. The young hero or adventurer character, most often in the form of a non-player character, was someone they could relate to because of age. They had more in common with the sidekick than the lead hero. It helped to draw them into the story and make it relevant.
As a storytelling device, you often find the young apprentice character in novels written for younger audiences. Think of David Eddings’ Belgariad, or Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, or Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The characters of Garion the youngster in the Belgariad, Taran the young protagonist of Prydain, and certainly Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island.
So, with that realization, I incorporated youthful characters, both boys and girls, as apprentices and student-adventurers.
Initially it proved to be a hard thing. Wizards and sorcerers, according to D & D rules, can take an apprentice once they reach level three. But first-level characters as apprentices are vulnerable because damage done by third level monsters wipes out the meager hit point reserves of a beginner character. After several traumatic deaths of beloved sidekicks, the player characters begin to take steps to protect them better in combat, or quickly learn where to find priests with resurrection spells who work really cheap.
Of course, these characters are useful for more than just creating combat complications. They are really useful for comic relief. The missteps, mistakes, and total botch-jobs that these inexperienced younger characters create can make us laugh, make us sweat a little to correct it, and move the plot forward in interesting ways that I, as the game master, wouldn’t have otherwise planned.
So, hopefully, Mr. Wertham’s ghost isn’t hovering over my D & D game thinking it is all a plot to create a generation of violent, gay youths. Hopefully he can see that it is all a part of a well-established story-telling literary device that actually helps to educate and deepen the understanding of youths. But it is swiftly becoming irrelevant what Wertham’s ghost thinks anyway. I haven’t played D & D for a while now. My sons and daughter now have their own groups of friends, playing under different dungeon masters with different dice. But hopefully, the need for youthful sidekicks will remain.
I told you before that I make a lousy movie critic because I watch anything and everything and like most of it. You don’t believe me? You can look it up through this link; The Uncritical Critic
I hate to tell you this, but it is almost exactly the same for books too.
The Paffooney is an illustration for a proposed collaboration on a children’s book. My friend and fellow author Stuart R. West (Stuart’s Blogspot about Aliens) had a story about three kids taking a balloon ride when they accidentally gave the goldfish bubble gum to chew ignoring their mother’s warning that dire consequences would follow. He decided the project was too ridiculous to follow through on, or at least my Paffooney power wasn’t up to making sense of his brilliant literature, and the book did not happen. And I am sorry about that because I couldn’t wait to find out how it turns out. I love weird and wild stories of all kinds. And, unfortunately, I love them uncritically.
So, what kind of books would a goofy uncritical critic actually recommend? Let me lay some bookishness on ya then.
Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads on Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
I have always felt, since the day I first picked up a copy of Mort by Terry Pratchett, that he was an absolute genius at humor-and-satire style fantasy fiction. In fact, he is a genius compared to any author in any genre. He has a mind that belongs up there with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner… or down there as the case may well be. This book is one of his best, though that is a list that includes most of his Discworld novels.
Amazing Maurice is a magically enhanced cat with multiple magically enhanced mice for minions. And the cat has stumbled on a sure fire money-making scheme that completely encompasses the myth of Pied Piper of Hamlin. In fact, it puts the myth in a blender, turns it on high, and even forgets to secure the lid. It is funny, heartwarming, and changes the way you look at mice and evil cats.
This is a book to be read more than once and laughed at for the rest of your life.
You see what I mean? I uncritically praise books that make me laugh and think deeply about things at the same time. It is as if I don’t have any standards at all if something is brilliantly written and makes a deep and influential impression on me.
Here’s another book that I love so much I can’t be properly critical when I reread it. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I cannot help but be taken in by the unrequited love the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton had for the beautiful refugee from the French Revolution, Lucy Manette. Tragic love stories melt my old heart. And I can’t help but root for Charles Darnay as well, even though I know what’s going to happen in Paris at the Bastille because I have read this book three times and seen the Ronald Coleman movie five times. I also love the comical side characters like Jerry Cruncher the grave-robber and hired man as well as Miss Pross, the undefeatable champion of Miss Lucy and key opposer to mad Madam Defarge.
I simply cannot be talked out of praising the books I read… and especially the books I love. I am totally uncritical as a reader, foolishly only looking for things I like about a book. Real critics are supposed to read a book and make faces that remind you of look on my little brother’s face when I had to help him use an outhouse for the first time. (Oh, what a lovely smell that was!) (And I mean that sarcastically!) Real critics are supposed to tell you what they hated about the book and what was done in such a juvenile and unprofessional way that it spoiled all other books forever. That’s right isn’t it? Real critics are supposed to do that? Maybe I am glad I’m not a real critic.
Filed under book review, humor, Paffooney
So, how do you follow up a thing like starting a new religion like Quackatoonity? Should you follow it up?
I mean, this is Art Day. And I need a theme for Art Day. How about, “Art with no ducks in it?” Well, Ducks are always watching from somewhere. So, I guess that’s a no-go.
Of course, I could always try to prove the “toon” part is real. I am a cartoonist. I do do cartoons. (Haha! He said, “doodoo!” Shows you the level of humor he will sink to.)
This cartoon is a bit creepy and definitely surreal. This was done more than a decade before I even met my wife. But the two boys seem to be four years apart in age, just like my real-life sons. They do not, however, have visible horns on their heads. This is supposed to be surreal, not photographic.
So, there’s a weird cartoon story for today’s Art Day post on a New Day. And nowhere in sight will you find a duck in it… OH, NO! THERE’S A DUCK IN IT!!! How does Donald do that?
Filed under artwork, cartoons, colored pencil, humor, Paffooney
This is artwork from this blog in 2015, a year after I retired from teaching.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, oil painting, Paffooney, pen and ink
My title for today has at least a double meaning, if not a triple or fourple one.
“Fourple?” you say.
Yes, four plus the color purple. Purple, after all is the dominant color used in the video game “The Legend of Hoodwink“.
And, of course, the video game is not real. It is the virtual reality video game used in the story as the secret land that the orphans and their mother’s friend flee the authorities to live in after the deaths of the Brown family’s parents.
So, I have been living in the world of Glammis, the imaginary game world inside a mainframe supercomputer. I started this story back in the 1980’s, inspired just a little bit by the Disney movie Tron. Of course there are all kinds of more current technological details to employ to make the story more up to date. The story has been reset to 1999. (I don’t write stories set in the 21st Century. I just don’t. Mark Twain never set one in the 20th.) And one of the ways to create the game-world of the story is to draw pictures of it that I can use as illustrations in the book.
Hoodwink and Babbles (the horse-headed Kelpie) are both game characters that play key roles in the story. They transform from game characters following the script to real people fighting for their lives and honor in the course of the story.
A key setting is the candle-castle called Candlemere, for obvious reasons. The wizard, Milt Morgan, lives there, though he is a real person from Iowa living in Texas as a game designer.
These are the three orphans that Milt Morgan has rescued after the car crash. Mortie Brown, Daisy Brown, and Johnny Brown now live in Glammis after the deaths of their parents, Brom and Stacy Brown.
The three orphans are being pursued in the real world by an FBI agent, a relentless tracker and pursuer named Agent Brent Clarke. What the kids don’t know is that Agent Clarke is trying to find them for their grandparents that they don’t realize are still alive. And Clarke is also their uncle, their mother’s older brother.
In the video game, they are pursued by the evil Daniel Quilp, who is in the video game playing the wicked King Murdstone of the Chelsrod’s Spire. He is not a relative. He is secretly the enemy of their parents and the wizard Milt Morgan.
The servant of Murdstone in the game is Errol of the Devylkind. He is more than he appears to be as well. He is another player character who is also very much acquainted with Daisy in the real world, and has a huge crush on her.
But, at present, I haven’t yet reached that part of the story, the latter half of Act One. Instead, I am today establishing setting further by narrating the visit to BrooglieTown, the home of the chocolate dwarves (literally made of chocolate and not a racist faux pas by any means.)
So, in the middle of writing a novel, I am describing the world-building I have been doing… and drawing… while pretty much living in this made-up game world due to the ongoing pandemic and intense heat of Texas in July. It is a better place to be living for now, though it is soon to heat up too as the plot gets churning and the Devylkind, rather hot-blooded fantasy characters, get further involved.
Filed under novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
The Case for the Clown
The criminal was led into the courtroom in chains and forced to sit in a box made of metal bars so his influence would not reach out and harm anyone by drawing their sympathy in.
“Mr. Prosecutor,” said the learned judge, “what terrible crime has the perpetrator been charged with?”
“The alleged perpetrator!” objected the defense attorney, a mousy old man who looked like a cross between Santa Clause and Robert E.Lee because of his white beard, stern face, and a twinkle in his eye.
“Shut up please, Mr. Badweather. You will have your turn to speak.” The judge banged his gavel smartly to emphasize the shut-up-ness of his overruling.
“Your honor,” said the prosecutor, “Mister Pennysnatcher Goodlaughs stands accused of being a clown.”
“The people of the State of Texas, home of the free, land of the brave, and place where cowboys can hang their hat on the antlers of a moose they shot in Canada, will prove that Mr. Goodlaughs did willfully, and with malice of forethought, commit acts of supposed humor in order to make people laugh. And we will further prove that in a time of very serious things, he intentionally made light of very serious matters and the very serious men who try to turn those serious things to their exclusive… err, sorry, I mean… everyone’s benefit.”
“Your honor,” said the defense attorney, looking like a cross between Mark Twain and Colonel Sanders, “I would like to request a new venue for this trial. My client will not get a fair trial here.”
“Sir, your stupid request is rejected on the grounds that Mr. Goodlaughs cannot get a fair trial anywhere. We are all conservatives, and are therefore incapable of having a sense of humor. Continue, Mr. Prosecutor.”
“We will show numerous instances of Mr. Goodlaughs putting paint on his face to hide his true features or assume the identity of a character not his own. He has repeatedly used false noses, large shoes, and floppy hats to exaggerate his flaws and scare young children. He repeatedly wears polka-dotted clothing to simulate terrible taste and ridiculous lack of fashion-sense. He employs pratfalls and slapstick humor in his performances, things that, if any school-age child would imitate the behavior, might lead to serious injury or even death. And he has even dared to make fun of our glorious leaders, implying that they make mistakes and may even have hurt people. That they act without thinking about anything but their own pocketbooks. In other words, this clown has knowingly made jokes in order to get people to not take things seriously.”
“Your honor, I object to this jury. I object to the fact that it is made up of fifty percent rednecks and fifty percent kangaroos! My client demands a new, more impartial jury!” cried the defense attorney, looking like a cross between Captain Kangaroo and Ronald Reagan.
“Has anybody noticed?” asked the judge, “that this attorney looks like he could influence this jury unfairly? He looks like two people who could lead the two halves of this jury to the wrong conclusion. Bailiff! Take the defense attorney out back and execute him by firing squad.”
After the entire courtroom heard the gunshots go off, the judge then turned to the prisoner.
“It seems, Mr. Goodlaughs, that the defense’s opening statement is now entirely up to you. Do you have anything to say in your own defense?
“I do, your honor. Ladies and gentlemen, kangaroos and Reagan Republicans of the jury, I submit to you that I have never actually been a circus clown, or wore face paint. Not that I wouldn’t if the opportunity presented itself. I merely claim the right to laugh at anything I think is funny… or can be made funny. Whether I am being what you call a clown, a humorist, a cartoonist, a comedian, a fool, a village idiot, or a witty fellow, I believe I have the right to make light of anything. Life is always better when you can laugh. Especially if you can laugh at yourself.”
“I’ve heard enough,” said the judge. “What say you, jury?”
“Guilty!”
“Yes. And I preemptively waive the prisoner’s right to appeal. Sir, you are guilty, and you shall be executed immediately.”
Everyone in the courtroom breathed a long-awaited sigh of relief.
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Filed under clowns, comedians, commentary, foolishness, humor, insight, Paffooney, pessimism
Tagged as books, clowns, fiction, horror, horror-movies, humor, short story, writing