Category Archives: photo paffoonies

As If It Weren’t Enough…

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THE WISDOM OF THE LITTLE FOOL

A fool can’t really sum up all of life in a sentence.

But a fool tries.

A fool can’t really say something in immortal words.

Because a fool dies.

A fool can’t really do the job of the wise.

But never-the-less, the fool applies.

But a fool can write a really dumb poem,

And let it sit to draw some flies.

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Filed under commentary, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, inspiration, photo paffoonies, poem, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Updates in Downtown Toonerville

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Toonerville is really all about creating art with my HO model railroad toys.  So, here’s a picture of the newest arrangement of the downtown as it now sits in my bedroom/studio.

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The buildings are a combination of models I put together and plaster buildings that I bought unpainted and then painted them.

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The Ghost Busters van in front of Mike’s Farmer’s Market was recently bought for less than a dollar and added to collection.  Just in time too.  There is apparently a ghost in Mike’s clock tower.

The two Thomas the Tank Engine toys were recently added after they were recovered from a junk pile in the garage.

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Here’s a shot of the Toonerville Trolley that was the first trolley added to my HO train layout back in the early 70’s.

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So, this is a small bit of insight into the workings of a toy collector and artist with excessive amounts of hoarding disorder.  And I am sharing with you the most recent pictures I have made of the things in my collection.

 

 

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Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies, Toonerville, Trains

Dows, Iowa

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Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood.  You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are.  Dows is not the town where I grew up.  But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them.  It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

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You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives.  My cousin and her second husband were there.  Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there.  We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!)  The experience taught me a simple lesson.  We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

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You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives.  So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

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The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us.  We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe.  We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead.  It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

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There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us.  Nothing lasts forever.  Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing.  A simple word for that is “farming”.  Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after.  But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond.  And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

 

 

 

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Filed under autobiography, family, farm boy, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Iowa, photo paffoonies

Spotted Trains

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I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains.  Where did that come from?  It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.

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Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.

My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid.  And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout.   I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way.  I have to explain all of that somewhere down line.  But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains.  They are a link to our past.  They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.

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When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.

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This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.

Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me.  When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.

When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces.  Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof.  This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender).  I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth.  I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks.  And I can’t help being a total train nut.  Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut.  But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.

 

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Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

The Magic of Pez

In 1927 in the mythical land of Austria, where they seem to know how to make candy… a condensed form of peppermint was created in a lozenge form and then placed into a plastic toy dispenser.  The spells that were cast to make this magical item probably had nothing to do with toad warts and bat wings and eye of newt.  It has more to do with Mickey Mouse, then Katzenjammer Kids, and Marvel Super Heroes.  I have been caught under the spells of a PEZ fixation since childhood.  I remember begging for a Bugs Bunny dispenser in Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines when I was probably six years old.  My parents wisely said no hundreds of times when I was a kid.  Who wanted to spend a nickel on a penny’s worth of candy?  Just for a Pez dispenser.  If they ever caved to my begging, even once, I don’t still have the dispenser.  But now I am supposedly a responsible adult.  I have money.  Well, I used to have money before I spent it on collecting PEZ dispensers.  I can’t even eat the the stupid candy.  I have diabetes.  So I feed the candy to my kids and risk giving them diabetes.

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Here, my minion Stuart is showing off my Avengers collection.  It took him nearly thirty minutes to line these six dispensers up so that they were all standing at once.  The Hulk kept falling on him repeatedly.

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I am proud of my Toy Story collection.  I had to go to some lengths to find some of these (particularly Slinky Dog and Rex).

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Disney Princesses were easy.  Both at Walmart and Toys R Us they were all grouped together on the Disney hooks.

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The Muppets were also grouped together with the Disney Pez.

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Winnie the Pooh is Disney, too.  I got some of these on discount at Toys R Us.  I still need Piglet and Owl… and Christopher Robin.  I don’t have an unbroken Minnie Mouse either.  I had small children when I first started collecting these, and now I have fat children and a lot of empty Pez dispensers.

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My Star Wars collection seems to be evil Pez dispensers and Yoda.

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And poor Stuart is getting tired of standing up Pez dispensers, so I will end here without having shown you all of my PEZ dispensers.  Besides, I have reason to keep the newest dispensers a secret from my minion.

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Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

Cooking More Futzbatter

minions6“What’s this with the made up words thing?  You can’t just make up words!”

“Why not?  I’m an English teacher.  Who better to make up words?”

“But you are making up nonsense words, and using them to make fun of Iowegians!  That’s, like, racist or something!”

“Iowegians is a made up word.  It is a play on Norway, Ioway, and Norwegian… and because a lot of white people in Iowa are of Scandahoovian descent.”

“See what I mean?  Racist!  Scandahoovian makes fun of people of Norse descent.  That is totally unacceptable!”

“I don’t see it that way.  I think we Iowegians should own it.   You know, like the way Texas rednecks are proud to be called rednecks.  I think that’s far more racist than saying Iowegian or Scandahoovian.”

“Why are we even talking about this?  Why couldn’t you have just posted more about your goofy flowers?  You have a lot more flower pictures you could use.”

“Yesterday was just a scrapbook sort of entry.  I wanted to post a variety of different things to fill space and waste time.  My writing goals were already completed for the day yesterday.  My novel is at 39,565 words right now.”

“But why did you have to make up gibberish words?  Don’t you know enough real words?”

“My Uncle Everett used to use Foobah when he was around the womenfolk so he didn’t say the word he was really thinking and offend Grandma Beyer.  That kinda makes it a real word.  And you’ve heard me say Futzbatter before.  It is a word like Paffooney… something I have used enough that you know what it means without even asking.”

“But what gives you the right to make up words?”

“What gave William Shakespeare the right?  Or Lewis Carroll?  Remember Jabberwocky?”

“But they were famous writers.  They probably earned that right.”

“I’m a writer too.  Are you saying I shouldn’t do what great writers do?”

“But your not a great…  Republican… yes, I meant to say Republican.”

“I’m not a Republican at all.  I’m an independent liberal.  I’m a progressive.  I believe we need to change things to make the world a better place for all of us.  Using new words and changing the language can’t be that bad a thing, can it?”

“We aren’t talking about politics!  We’re talking about you making up weird-sounding goofus-doofus words and using them like they actually mean something!  You can’t love the language and change it at the same time!”

“Why not?  You just did.”

“I did?  How?”

“What does goofus-doofus mean?”

“OH!  Darn it!  Don’t you see what you are doing to me with all your nonsense?  You’re making me talk funny too!”

“Speaking of funny talking, do you want to see the new Minions movie with me this afternoon?  It is playing at 3:25 at the Webb-Chapel Cinemark 17.  There’s a lot of funny talking in that.”

“Dang it!  You just posted the time and place you are planning to be.  What if that lunatic Winchuk boy decides he wants to use the information to get even with you for his entire seventh-grade year?”

“No chance of that.  He can’t read… or tell time.  He had me for a teacher.”

At that point the logical left side of my brain doubled up both of his fists and belted the creative right side of my brain in the chin as hard as he could.  Of course, that didn’t hurt at all, because both of his fists are metaphorical.  What a futzing foobah!

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, wordplay

Spitzen Sparkin’ Daze

My old laptop is not happy…

It’s seen much better days,

It growls and grumbles, snorts and fumbles…

And gets revenge in many ways.

Now it thinks a tiny font…

Is funny next to this

And zooms the screen five-hundred percent

To make the next rhyme miss!

And hopefully, I can afford//#%& a new c om pu ter soon

Because this one is veery weiiird

And totally out of tune.

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Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies, poetry

The Words Unwinding

Venus Flytrap, my Monster High doll decorated with carniverous flowers, is the perfect pandemic mascot, as she guards the Vapo-Rub.

Stuck in the house all day with no outside activities to distract me, and limited socialization with the other denizens imprisoned in the house with me is more-or-less the perfect thing for a fiction writer with cancer of the imagination glands.

I have plenty of people to talk to, since , in this situation, imaginary people count too. And there is no end to the things I can talk about since ideas keep welling up in my head, even if many of them are totally silly ideas, and the rest are probably evil.

It helps to have a talking dog. Though my kids would argue that Jade isn’t really talking, that I am, instead, merely interpreting things I think she should be saying as if it were real speech. She does talk an awful lot about different kinds of meat and the moral imperatives of allowing your dog to eat people food. But I think it is only proper to commit to writing those things she says when we’re alone together, because, after all… a possible talking dog?

Everybody has a purple dragonette on the doll shelf that loves to play with dolls, don’t they?

But imagination is one of those things that sets people… I mean, human people, apart from all other life forms that we know. Imagination makes the man. What would we have made of ourselves and our world if we didn’t have it? Would we have invented the wheel? Fire? Term life insurance? I think not.

Peter Pan offers Alice a ride in his Skull-and-Bones Lowrider as ninjas attack Main Street Toonerville.

I may, in fact, be going a little stir crazy in the old hovel while trying like heck to avoid death by Coronavirus. I am easily as frayed around the edges as any hopeless hobo, with even my beard-trimming growing wildly erratic. Soon I may have to tell the imaginary people who surround me and question everything about me that it is not a beard any more. Rather, it is either a crocheted hippie neck-warmer rather than a beard, or maybe it has become a furred, frilly collar on my shirt like Shakespeare probably wore for the premiere of King Lear.

No, I am not going stir-crazy, or even a little bit insane. I am just letting the words unwind as they fill me up and demand to be unreeled in order to prevent an explosion in the brain.

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Filed under being alone, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies, surrealism

Return of the Train Man

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I was an aficionado of HO model trains as a kid.  I continued that horrendous fixation with 1/78th scale worlds long into my extended juvenile immaturity (I was an unmarried teacher of middle school students until 1995.)    Even after I was married, my wife allowed me, to a very limited degree, to continue to be a train man.

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I spent a good deal of time over the years building building plastic model kits of buildings, painting and repainting plaster model buildings, and collecting engines, rolling stock, and trackside details.  Painting little 1/78th scale people is definitely an exercise for steady hands and a zen-like, highly focused mind.

But that all reached an impasse when we moved to the Dallas area.  I had to tear down my train layout, box up my trains, and put everything on hold until I had another place to build and create my HO model-train world.  So, while it was all boxed up and transported to first, a house that we rented from my brother-in-law, and then a house that we bought, it got shifted around and stacked inappropriately, and grandma put some really heavy items on top to crush and mangle my treasures.  It also spent a night outside in the rain when my brother-in-law’s water heater had to be replaced in the garage where everything was stored.  I was not a happy camper for a while.

Now, a decade later, I am still taking the tiny items and trying to glue the pieces back together.  I have basically given up trying to get the trains to run again.  But I can use the bits and pieces of Toonerville to make pictures like these.  It makes the art-parts of my psyche and soul a little happier.

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Old number 99 had to have the front part where the headlamp is located reattached and restored.  It gave me something to do this weekend while I was down with a bad back and breathing difficulties.  It would be neat to put the train table back together and get things set up once again, but there is no space, and no unlimited funds, and less and less time.  So for now, the train man comes back to me to rebuild in photographs and in my imagination.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

Setting the Scene

As a rabid Dungeons and Dragons player, I have labored for years to build up my collection of miniature figures.  Now, like the action figures and the dolls, the collection is growing so fast it may eat the house.  So, in order to play with them and get some use out of them, I built a cardboard castle, complete with grid for playing D & D.  It is a scene that can be used to play the game, but it is also a place to display my collection.

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Toy companies have recently started putting out collectible miniatures in an almost D & D scale.  They only cost about a dollar apiece.  That makes them cheaper than candy bars.  And I am diabetic, so I can’t buy candy bars.

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I like to position them in my D & D background and take pictures of them, even though DC Superheroes are not D & D figures.  I can work them into the story of the next RPG sessions.  Batman is a paladin.  Aquaman is a sea-based druid.  Wonder Woman is an Amazon.

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Adam West Batman is really, really cool.  Wham!  Pow!  Sock!

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Killing a dragon is a big event in a D & D campaign.  And I can do that now with miniatures.

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The Flash can rescue Jessica Rabbit from a mad goblin in the Skull Plaza.

So, I reached a point in setting the scene for the game that it has become almost cinematic.  And I like taking pictures of it as I continue to play with all  of it.  Forgive me.  I will forever be twelve years old in my head.

 

 

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, illustrations, making cardboard castles, photo paffoonies