Category Archives: satire

May 3, 2017 · 3:00 pm

The Art of Being Stupid

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My title today may prompt you to think, “Apparently, when Mickey does art it is stupid art.” If my title didn’t make you think that, then my first sentence certainly did. I am literally putting stupid ideas into your head. And this is a problem because the people currently at the top of the people pile that is our modern society are shoveling great smelly heaps of stupidity directly into our brains.

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I know stupid. I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years. No one survives the mine-field of stupid bombs in the classroom without being able to recognize the incoming booby-head missiles. Years worth of lame homework excuses have made stupidity easily recognizable. Being stupid is easy. Countering it is hard.

So how does one be stupid? I nearly found out yesterday as I was driving on an access road for I-35. I was going the 40-mile-per-hour speed limit and got a phone call on my cell phone. All I did was look at my phone to see who was calling in case another school child was calling because pollen season was killing them again and they wanted to come home from school… again. My son shouted a warning of imminent death and I looked back at the road in time to see the car dealer had left a car-carrier trailer in the road with the ramp down. Wow! That was almost an epic Evel Knievel stunt.

But being epically stupid is simply a matter of not paying attention well enough. It is easy to achieve. Note how often President Cheeto-head achieves it.

I have also found it to be a remarkably easy thing to be stupid on Facebook and Twitter. All you have to do is post and repost stuff, or tweet and retweet stuff, that speaks to your own prejudices and ignores what is factual and what is not. I have seen very elaborate anti-climate change graphs that seem to show a correlation between sun activity and periods of warming and cooling climate. The biggest problem with this frequently debunked “take-that-and-stuff-it!” evidence is that it was created by a pair of propagandists with oil-company ties who were only masquerading as climate scientists.

When you vet that source and introduce evidence to your conservative Facebook friend you will get back a horrified speculation about the depths of your own stupidity for believing that Snopes.com is not also propaganda and you can’t believe everything NASA says because their funding is at stake. And I end up having to admit I do say similar things about their cherished sources like Infowars, Breitbart, and Fox News. Truth is apparently more the product of faith than it is the province of science.

Besides not knowing what facts are, it is fairly easy to be monumentally stupid by having no empathy at all. Iowegians who would bend over backwards and feed their own liver to a hungry Iowan, will routinely cry about the dangers of Sharia law and talk about wall building at the sight of Syrian widows and orphans. And don’t even get me started about shoot-first Texans. Not after they just shot and killed another unarmed black teenager in Balch Springs.

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So how do you make an Art out of Stupid?

Well, the CBS Morning News has started running down the key events in the news with snippets quoted from late-night TV hosts and comedians like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and James Corden. You defeat stupidity by aping it, imitating it, and making people laugh at it. It is really defeated when you make someone laugh about their own stupidity, like the story about me and the I-35 launch ramp. Comedians seem to be the only ones effectively reporting on the current Presidential situation, and even CNN and MSNBC news anchors have begun making jokes in their reporting. I have become a lover of political cartoons like never before.

download You may not be able to rescue other people’s minds from being stupid. But what you can do and be artful about is… make them laugh.

Stardusters… Canto 44

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Canto Forty-Four – In the Bio-Dome

Alden and Gracie stood before the row of cloning jars, staring at the gently floating and twitching forms. Sizzahl gently adjusted the nutrient feeds to the artificial placentas.

“They look so… so human,” said Gracie. “Their little bodies are so perfect, and so big!”

“We will have them developed to birth size by morning,” said Sizzahl. “The cloning jars use electro-magnetic chronol-enhancement to make the gestation occur in a fraction of the time.”

“Really?” Alden was aghast, “We will have ten babies to take care of by morning?”

“Oh, yes. They will grow fast for a while. They will be toddlers in less than a week. And about your other comment, Gracie… they are precisely fifty per cent human. Half me, half Alden… half Galtorrian…”

“…Half human,” said Alden. It was stunning. He and Gracie had talked about having kids, in fact, tried hard to have kids for years… and now, suddenly, they would have a family of ten children and three parents who, no matter how mentally old and wise they might be, were physically only between ten and twelve.

“I want to be a mother so badly it hurts,” said Gracie. “But why so many? How will we manage ten babies all at once?”

Sizzahl put a hand on Gracie’s bare shoulder. “There is very little romance in what we have to do. We have to raise up a workforce of these new fusion-race babies, possibly even an army. We really don’t have a choice if we are not going to simply let this entire planet die.”

Suddenly a black-clad figure appeared above the tanks. It was humanoid in form, but had a tail like a Galtorrian. It wore a black mask like a ninja.

“Ah! Scabby!” cried Alden, pointing.

“He moves too much like a lizard with no diseases,” said Sizzahl, a firm hand on the shoulder of each of the Morrells. “In fact… he seems awfully familiar.”

“Sizzahl! I thought Gohmurt had killed the whole family!”

“Senator Makkhain?” asked Sizzahl.

The lizard-man pulled off the mask. “Yes, little one, I have survived. The Cooperative managed to kill Emperor Rekhpahree in the last battle over Spidercrawl Fortress. I came to tell your father and recruit him to our cause… um, forgetting that Gohmurt killed him, I guess… but it seems the Bio-Dome is wrecked and everyone else is dead.”

“I am not dead,” said Sizzahl, mistress of the obvious. “And the Bio-Dome is not wrecked. I have the atmosphere scrubbers working at full capacity, and I am trying to solve the blighted food supply problem.”

“Clever girl. How did you survive the scabbies with nothing more than your little naked self?” Makkhain pulled off his mask. For a lizard-man, he had a very gentle face with wise bluish snake eyes.

“I’m not alone here. Father’s robots are set to kill anything wearing clothes or carrying equipment. How is it that you survived them?”

“I’m sorry. Three of your father’s toys attacked me, and I had to break them quietly with this…” He brandished a silver blade weapon with a hook on the end that was smeared with oil.

“Erm… I guess I will have to fix them, then. They have been protecting us very effectively.”

“Who is this man, Makkhain?” asked Gracie. “Should we be trusting him?”

“Oh,” said Makkhain, “your naked Skoog Monkeys talk?”

“We are not Skoog Monkeys,” said Alden. “We are humans from Earth.”

“Of course you are,” said Makkhain. “But apparently really scrawny ones.”

Alden was boiling at the insult. Still, the lizard-man had a sword and Alden was naked and trapped in a mere boy’s body.

“Makkhain is my uncle,” said Sizzahl at last, “my mother’s brother. He is one of the good guys.”

“That is good,” said Gracie. “We need more good guys.”

“What are you doing cooking tailless Skoog Monkeys in the cloning pots?”

“These are fusions,” said Sizzahl proudly. “They are half Earther and half Galtorrian. They will be our new work force, hopefully with the best qualities of each race combined into one being.”

“Ah, girl, you always were the smart one in the family… a real dreamer. But do you really need these things now that I am here?”

“Yes, uncle. They are superior to the lizard-people who have destroyed this planet. They will be a more worthy successor race than we were as an original race.”

Makkhain dropped down onto the floor of the cloning chamber and lowered the sword. He quietly put an arm around his naked niece. She hugged him fiercely and began to cry.

Alden felt awkward. He was glad that Sizzahl had a family again. He was also glad for an adult-sized ally. But something about Makkhain rubbed him the wrong way. Things just didn’t feel right in Alden’s farmer weather-bones.

*****

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Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as humor, novel, post apocalyptic sci-fi, Stardusters and Space Lizards, Tellerons

April 24, 2017 · 2:38 pm

The Ixcanixian Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge

A while back I transmitted a weird alien poetry contest through this blog to the people of Earth. It was a contest for bad poetry. And obviously we only write good poetry on this planet as no entries from the native clothes-wearing primates of this planet were submitted. If you are unclear about the contest of which I speak, here is the link;

The Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge

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While no Earth primate entries were actually submitted (Magilla Gorilla’s entry was disqualified as he is a cartoon character and copyrighted by Hanna Barbera) we did get some entries from illegal aliens. Their contest entries are submitted here for your perusal. However, it is bad poetry. By definition, if you don’t have your Galaxian bad-poetry-reading glasses handy, you should proceed with extreme caution.

This first entry is from a random Space Goon. It is exceptionally bad poetry, and apparently the Goon who wrote it has no individual name. He appears to be one of many dumped on this planet by interstellar authorities in order to prevent them from doing any real damage to planets that matter.

Goon Verse

Goon-goon-goon

Goon is good

Goon will come

And live in your house

Goon will come

And eat your mouse

Goon-goon-goon

Why you no like Goon?

The second entry I intend to inflict on you is a very weird entry I got in container that was apparently filled with radio-active foof gas. While foof gas is apparently a deadly poison in most of the Milky Way, it is non-toxic to humans from Earth. The perpetrator of this poem would only identify himself (or herself… or itself) as Bing-bing the Laser Guy.

I Will Kill You

Bing-bing is hiding on Earth!

How can you not understand this?

If you publish my writings,

And allow the authorities to discover my presence,

I will come to your house and evaporate your head!

The rhythm of that poem is very poor, and the rhyme scheme is non-existent. But it is supposed to be bad poetry, after all. So I suppose it has just as much chance of winning as the rest of them.

The Mookian Space Elf submitted not only a bad poem, but 8 X 10 glossies of himself. He watches endless hours of PBS kid shows, educational cartoons, and inexplicable Boo Bahs and Teletubbies. I think he’s convinced himself that this contest is somehow an audition for a kids’ show. He claims to be able to sing and dance, as well as be funny, educational, and relentlessly cute.

Hire Me!!!

Ain’t I cute?

Ain’t I sweet?

I’ll give you diabetes so bad,

It will surely eat your feet!

Love me!

Dove me!

And give me so much money

That I’ll laugh so hard I pee!

Yes, if that is poetry, it is really bad poetry.

The final entry is from Ralph the Inexplicable. This amazing being has been on Earth since before there were dinosaurs, so it is possible he is more of an Earthling than we are. He is reputed to be incredibly wise, but his poetry was also hard to translate into English since it was all in ones and zeros. And I don’t speak binary code. So my translation may be less of a bad poem by Ralph and more of a bad poem made up by me.

Song of Slortcherill

Mee tok funni

Mee tok sloe

Leesen two mee

Ann emjoiy da show

Wheen Slortcherill sings

Da winners all brayk

Da kidoinks all screem

Anna moofins all bayk

I was warned that if I translated that poem with proper English spelling, it would fill your head with so much “wisdom”, your brain would melt. So I present it here according to Ralph’s specifications. I did read two of the lines with proper English spellings and felt my head grow distinctly hotter. So I wouldn’t risk thinking too hard about what the proper spellings are if I were you.

None of these entries will probably win the contest. They are all certainly bad poetry. But I am fairly certain that given the competition from this part of the Milky Way Galaxy worse does, in fact, exist out there… somewhere. And may you never be unfortunate enough to find it.

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Filed under aliens, foolishness, humor, irony, Paffooney, pen and ink, poem, poetry, satire, science fiction

Tagged as aliens, bad poetry, goofy aliens, humor, poetry

April 14, 2017 · 3:04 pm

May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose!

I was planning to write a piece about insult humor for a while, and then Don Rickles had to up and die… that danged old hockey puck!’ Don-Rickles-tribute

So the master of insults is gone, and it will be even harder to explain why calling someone a proud and prissy poo-poo head is not a bad thing to do. Because, really… strong language is not really strength and it takes intelligence to be a mean little picky-wit. (No pun intended… because no pun was used, Duh! How slow are you compared to molasses around Christmas time?)

You may have heard me say that I don’t like hurtful humor. I don’t believe bad words are required to make something funny. I don’t think humor should be weaponized. Jokes that make you die laughing are too much like murder, and people who have no sense of humor can’t be hurt by them anyway.

It is true that some people can’t be touched with insult humor. Republicans and conservatives generally never get the joke. Unfortunately for them you have to be at least a little bit smart to even know when you are being made fun of.

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I have heard that Kim Jong Un and President Orangutan in a Bad Wig recently attempted to assassinate each other. Trump had a specially trained batch of a dozen Easter chicks sent to Kim Jong Un. They were trained as mini-ninja assassins specializing in the death-peck attack. Kim had a dozen plump Korean beauties dressed up in bikinis and poisoned lipstick sent to Trump with orders to make him fall in love. Shortly thereafter Kim sent a thank you note to Trump for the delicious chickens. He had kept one as a pet and you can still see it sitting on top of his head if you look carefully enough. (It hasn’t killed him because it mistaked his head for an egg, adopted it, and is trying desperately to hatch it.) Trump, in turn, re-gifted the bikini babes to Mike Pence, and it is likely they will die of cold and exposure while waiting in his outer office.

Stupid people are immune to insults, karma, and consequences.

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So you don’t insult people as a form of humor to hurt anyone physically… or even psychologically. You only do it metaphorically to pay them the compliment of thinking them worthy enough to bestow the gems of your wit upon.

And if you believe any of that bull-puckie, I may know of a Bridge in Brooklyn I’d be willing to part with cheaply.

So, there you have it. Cheap laughs at the expense of doody-heads. And calling into question the self-importance and the ridiculous-but-strongly-held political beliefs of others… especially the dumb ones can be a public service… of sorts.

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Tagged as Don Rickles, humor, insult humor

March 30, 2017 · 3:59 pm

The Bitter Black Hearts of the GOP

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Yes, this is another pitiful attempt by Mickey to be a political cartoonist fighting the good fight by slaying the bad guys with really weak and awful satire. But I can’t help it. Just as Popeye had a powerful urge to sock goons in the puss with his spinach-fueled twister-sock, I have to throw some derfy toonage at the vile and heartless members of the GOP (Greedy Old Perpetrators).

After all, they are easy to make fun of. Republican job applications all start with the question, “Which cartoon Dick Tracy villain or comic book Batman villain are you most like?”

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They do things like organizing an Oversight Committee for the sole purpose of spending millions of dollars to point fingers at Hillary and shout the name of a North-African town where diplomats died basically because of budget cuts to security ( a Republican budget) and shout it loudly until people begin to think Hillary must have had something to do with it because men with heads shaped like sports equipment are shouting it so much.

And Republicans are able to do this stuff because they know how to win elections and control the government.

Basically what I am saying is that Republicans cheat. They get to rule even though they generate fewer votes in the country.

And what do they do with that power once they have it in their tiny, tiny hands? They use it to make more money. The rise of the billionaire class in the last thirty years is evidence that they are insanely good at it. Do they use that money and power to help their neighbors and better the lives of everyone? Of course not! Why would you think that?

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Republican priorities are obvious when you look at the first things on their agenda. They want to roll back environmental protections and pour more pollutants into rivers and into the air. They want to do away with Obamacare to eliminate the extra taxes that wealthy people have to pay. They want to prevent people from immigrating from lands where people don’t have white skin, because the only part of a Republican that can be black with the full approval of their party, is the heart. Yes, that part can be jet black and rancid.

Take that, evil Republicans! Wait, why are you laughing? Didn’t my satire slay you?

Oh, well, another day, another cartoon.

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Oopsie! Wasn’t that heart supposed to be black?

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Filed under angry rant, cartoons, commentary, humor, pessimism, politics, satire

Tagged as cartoons, cheating, gerrymandering, Jason Chaffetz, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, political humor, rants, Trey Gowdy

March 15, 2017 · 3:21 pm

Cartoonists Trying to Save the World

Back in the 1870’s (you remember it as well as I do, don’t you?) a cartoonist named Thomas Nast basically invented the political cartoon. Back then, a bloated New York politician and his gang of criminals were busy getting wealthy through corrupt business and government relationships. Nast used his gift for scribbly-art satire to lampoon the buffoons and make the public laugh at the evil he exposed. Of course, they knew about the corruption of Boss Tweed before they laughed at the cartoons, but the focus on the problem created by Nast’s magnifying glass focusing the rays of sunlight on the problem is often credited with helping to burn up the scandal.

Cartoonists had power back then. Power over public opinion. The power to help fairly uncomplicated (and sometimes stupid) folk to recognize the absurdity of the situation and the need for changing it.

So why haven’t cartoonists fried the Make-America-Great-Again orangutan running the country now with his brand of corpulent corruption already? Believe me, they are trying.

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They have already highlighted the way the Bozo Administration manipulates the focus of the mainstream media. Every time media coverage begins to converge on one scandal, he creates another big, smelly media poop of a controversy to redirect their focus.

And while he is doing his big shoe dance on the tables in the spotlight, congress is doing his rich friends’ evil will in the back rooms.

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The end result of this malevolent dog-and-pony show is patently obvious.

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Unfortunately, in the 1870’s, the stupid people that Thomas Nast was enlightening had not yet achieved the profound levels of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupidity that Trump supporters have now mastered. Poor and middle-class Republicans, Texans, and other dim folk continue to take the Great Pumpkinhead at his word and believe every utterance of his mouth to be sacred gospel truth. I have had conservative friends arguing themselves into pretzel-knots to defend his policies and dastardly deeds.

But if cartoonists can’t succeed in shining sunlight on the bloodsucking vampiric old moneybags and kill him soon, his reign will become immortal and we are all gonna die.

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Seriously. We stand at the end of a long chain of greedy b*st*rds raping and pillaging the environment for profit and not caring about the impact of their actions. We are dooming the planet to environmental collapse because the orange-faced name-stamper cares more about short-term profits for himself and his friends than he does about whether or no his own grandchildren will have water to drink, air to breath, and a place to live cool enough that metal doesn’t melt in the sunshine.

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So, I hate to be a double-trouble downer about the whole thing, but the truth is if we are depending on cartoonists and humorists to save the world, we are in trouble. It is not working the way it did in Nast’s day. Cartoonists are doing their lampooning and doing it well. But more is needed. And if we don’t get that something more soon, then (to incorrectly paraphrase and misquote T.S. Eliot), “This is the way the world ends… Not with a whimper but a bang!”

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Tagged as cartoonists, end of the world, goofiness, political cartoons, political humor, Thomas Nast

March 4, 2017 · 5:07 pm

Making Fun

So I made a funny picture of the Keebler elf we put in charge of the Attorney General’s Office of the United States. This is my homage to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the elf who invented the best-selling cookie in the South, the Keebler Kluxie Cookie. But, of course, if I call the man a racist, angry Trumpkins are going to immediately tell me that I am the real racist. I admit it, though, I am prejudiced against people who hate others based on skin color, religion, or other factors that allow them to feel they are inherently better than the group that they hate. And I don’t apologize for making fun of the people I am prejudiced against. I have, after all, a good reason for making fun. I am a cartoonist at heart, if not a professional. And making fun of the things that I hate and fear makes me fear them less. I feel it is a much better response than to build more bombs and give the police more freedom to murder those I hate and fear. Laughing at the darkness is, I think, better than filling my own heart with the darkness and allowing it to snuff out my light.

For example, here is a vicious real-life Boris Badenov who really scares me. He is a very angry man who wants to punish people for being immigrants. He also hates Jewish people and is on record blaming them for the world’s troubles in a way that sounds frustratingly retro-Nazi-fascist in tone.

This is, of course, the same kind of fun-making that Jay Ward unleashed on the Russian threat that had American school children learning how to “duck and cover” in response to fears of imminent nuclear first-strikes back in the 60’s when I was a small boy. Rocky and Bullwinkle made us laugh and made it better. In this picture I have stolen you see Steve Bannon using a cane to threaten the All-American Moose. And you know that however dastardly the plan, there is every reason to believe the Moose will magically survive and we will get a good laugh at the bad guy’s expense.

And making fun of these cartoon villains (there is no member of Trump’s basket of villains who is not a human cartoon character) is not a matter of actually hating the people. I don’t personally hate any of these individuals. I make fun of them because it makes me feel better. It may also make some of you who I share these things with feel better too. I do hate many of the things they have said and done. And I feel I have a right to make fun of these things and thus make fun of the cartoon villains who said and did them.

I identify as a liberal for these reasons, and do not apologize for it, so make cartoons of me too if you feel the need.

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Filed under cartoons, commentary, humor, Liberal ideas, Paffooney, politics, satire

February 20, 2017 · 12:08 pm

They’re Despicable!!!

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I had promised myself to put the whole political outrage stew in the freezer for a while, and stop picking at the meat and potatoes of it before it completely poisons me. But President Pumpkinhead is imploding so fast I may miss out before incoming Russian and North Korean and even possibly Australian missiles begin nuking the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. I guess I simply have to boil it a little bit more right now.

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If I were going to script it as a psycho-consensual farce and put it on the stage, I couldn’t have written it any funnier. It seems a couple of evil geniuses have been manipulating the pumpkin-headed guy so they could achieve their own personal ends. They are selling him invisible clothing again. And they will get away with it, too, because they are doing it in the context of the Republican Party. The GOP, of course, is the party that cheats in order to win. They gerrymander voting districts. They suppress voters that are more likely to vote for Democrats. And they maintain a lock-grip on the House where more people nationwide actually voted for Democrats, but that comes through the voting system as a Republican majority victory. They are, as Sylvester says so juicily, DESPICABLE!!! (Yes, I know, the triple exclamation point thing again.)

Tweedle-not-so-dumb and his twin brother, Tweedle-evil.

It appears that now that Hatchet-face Flynn, the Dick-Tracy villain who was in charge of National Security, committed treason by promising the Russians that Obama’s sanctions for hacking the American election would be overturned as soon as Trump took over the job as big cheese in chief. And it not only appears that Trump knew about this (or is that gnu about this?), but even said after Flynn was fired that he would’ve approved of it if he had known… even though he didn’t know… (or gnu).

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Immediately thereafter, Football-head and Bowling-ball-head on the Congressional Oversight Committee (You know, Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz who brought you the Endless Benghazi Hearings Follies and Republican Musical Review) went about the business of completely overlooking any possible wrong doing by the Pumpkinhead Administration.

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A Republican friend of mine once told me that he knew that all the crooks weren’t exclusively in the Democratic Party, but that’s the only place he really wanted to look for them. It helped him sleep better at night.

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I spent a good share of last evening being lectured over Facebook by a conservative friend about not getting behind the Trumpkin bandwagon and scooping up the horse poop so they could continue their parade of doing Republican good things for the country (where “Republican good things” is a phrase that means destroying public education, taking away my healthcare since I have six pre-existing conditions, and dumping coal pollutants into rivers and oil pollutants into the air). Apparently my writing stuff about Pumpkinhead Tinyhands that isn’t positive is a protest which constitutes terrorism, and I need to go to some other country like Canada where the commie-ISIS dictator is a libtard idiot just like me. I don’t have a right to stay here if I protest the elected government and the so-called humor in my blog and Facebook posts are unacceptably un-patriotic. Apparently you can only call black presidents Hitler without being hooted out of the country by REAL AMERICANS.

Apparently I am wrong about this man. I am told he does not have a bowling ball for a head.

The View From My Little Town

An aerial view of Toonerville in Winter

As immigration officers round up school children and their families blocks from a school in North Carolina, Trump minion Flynn is being accused of violating the Logan Act over discussions with the Russians before Trump took office, and DeVos is being chased away from a Washington middle school by angry protesters who don’t want her sucking the intelligence out the students, I am reminded there are quieter places to go and get away from all the insane noise that is trying to kill us. Thus I head back to Toonerville, my HO scale model train town that has been packed away since we moved to Dallas in 2004. I have laid the downtown and part of the residential area out on a snowfield on the spare bed in my bedroom.

I am reminded, as I revisit Toonerville (with the Toonerville Trolley waiting down front from the train station), that I am a humor writer that writes about small town experiences and the teaching of children. I am imaginative and creative, and I have working strategies for dealing with the stress and insanity caused by all the political baboons doing the politically-charged things that political baboons do baboonishly every baboon day. There are places to go to get away from the Trump Circus’s endless monkey-house of horror.

In Toonerville, none of the clocks keep the correct time and none of them agree what time it is. Certain things are timeless. The village works together to solve its problems. What the wits and twits who chew Red Man tobacco down at Al’s General Store think about politics never leaves the checkerboards in front of the fire place. Mayor Moosewinkle at City Hall has no plans to run for State or Federal office. (Thank God for that, he’s a nut.) And officer Billy Bob Wortle, formerly from Texas, has never shot anybody of any color. The County Sheriff doesn’t even trust him to own bullets for that big old gun of his. As far as executive orders from Washington go, we mostly don’t give a damn.

Down at the Post Office, Mr. Murdoch the postman has never “gone postal” and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He loves to gossip, though. And Mr. Santucci, the hot-headed Italian owner-operator of the Farmer’s Market (who looks just like Santa Claus in the Coke ads, but is one very foul-mouthed Santa at Christmas time) secretly believes that it is the many differences between the various residents of town that keep life interesting. And old Ben Johnson, the town’s only black man, is his very best friend.

It’s a truly good feeling to live in a small town where all the people bicker and throw fits, but no one would every want to throw anyone out of town. People belong together, working for the common good. And it is a rather sad thing if the only place such a town can exist is inside my goofy old head. But if we bicker a little less and throw fits less often on the inside, won’t we be better people on the outside too?