Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

Good Words We Never Use

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My attempt to draw “synesthesia”

Xanthophobia (from Greek xanthos, “yellow”) is fear of the color yellow. In China the color yellow was feared, specifically receiving the yellow scarf, which was an imperial order to commit suicide.

http://phobia.wikia.com/wiki/Xanthophobia

Yes, “xanthophobia” is a word I have never used in my life before now.  I have no doubt that I will never need that word again in my life.  You, dear reader, will probably never need that word either.  But the derfy space-ranger part of my brain thinks it is neat that I was able to correctly answer a trivia question about the meaning of “xanthophobia”simply because my background as an artist who has shopped for exotic oil colors in artist supply stores helped me to recognize that the “xantho” part of the word meant yellow.

Are there other totally useless words that my space-ranger brain thinks are cool to know?  Of course there are!  How can you ask such a silly question?

Ouzel may refer to:

hobbledehoy

noun hob·ble·de·hoy \ˈhä-bəl-di-ˌhȯi\
Popularity: Bottom 30% of words

Definition of hobbledehoy

  1. :  an awkward gawky youth

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hobbledehoy

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So, what is the actual use of knowing so many words that you can never functionally use?  Besides as a topic of a goofy post like this?

They become like the pebbles and rocks at the bottom of the briskly rushing stream of my mind.  They are not moving with the water, but they are affecting the ripples and splashes on the surface above them.  They cause eddies and backwashes and undercurrents in the complex flow of my space-ranger brain.  They make life more interesting on the surface.

And besides, knowing useless words can make me sound smarter than the fool with a derfy space-ranger brain that I truly am.

a phrase that you can tell some one when they are being so perfect. since you don’t feel like using the whole word “perfect” you use this phrase.

can also describe a human being/inanimate object and can replace someone’s name.

i just ate a thousand candy bars.
omygod. that’s so perfy derfy.

hey looks it’s perfy derfy!
where?!?!
over there! by the perfy derfy mailbox.
wow. such a perfy derfy.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom, word games, wordplay

Fix Coulrophobia… Now!

I love clowns.  I always have.  When I was five I wanted to be a clown.  Red Skelton is my personal hero and role model, the reason I became a teacher, to use my clown skills for good rather than evil.  But sinister folks who think they are joking are seriously jeopardizing all of that.

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In 1988 I did watch and enjoy the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  It was funny.  And I liked Stephen King’s “It” as a horror movie.  It was definitely scary.  But 2016 has become the year of the creepy clown.  Why would any idiot want to dress up in an expensive horror-clown mask and clown suit to wave at somebody’s security camera at two in the morning?  And, Mr. Idiot, did you at least try to figure out if the homeowner was a gun owner in an open carry State?  One of the recent clowns to be arrested turned out to be a teenage boy… you know, the ultimate planner and thinker-ahead-er.

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I would like to propose that we prosecute a case or two of creepy clowns in the woods at night with a mandatory “How to Love a Clown” class.  After all, clowns are a worthy thing.  How many clowns over how many years have handed out candy to kids and brought a smile to small faces during a Fourth of July parade?  How many circus clowns like the Great Emmett Kelly made us laugh with a pantomime routine?  How many Shrine Circus clowns helped entertain us and raise money to fight childhood disease and cancer?  Bob Keeshan who was Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody helped raise me and make me the person I am now as Captain Kangaroo.  The real creepy clown crime is that they are taking the image of a clown, which is a very good thing and turning it into something bleak and horrifying.  My purpose for this post is to remind you of the good things about the people under the face paint.  I want you to remember a few of these.

 

 

 

 

 

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The World is Ending, the Cubs are Winning

The Cubs, those lovable losers from Wrigley who haven’t won the world series in a century, came from behind in the 9th inning and closed out the hated Giants.  They are going to the National League Championship.  If they win the World Series, the world will end.  And I have to say, in spite of being a Cardinals’ fan and wanting the world to survive, I am rooting for them to do it.

For the record, two critical Cubs are actually Cardinals in Cub suits.  John Lackey and Jason Heyward were both part of the Cardinals’ 100-win season last season.  In my heart, they will always be Cardinals.  If they can’t win the series with St. Louis, at least they deserve to win it with the team that stole them.  And, of course, the Cardinals themselves didn’t make the playoffs, and the Texas Rangers were blasted out of the playoffs by Toronto.  I can’t root for any of the other teams that remain.

So I end up rooting for the world to end.  The goat’s curse will be broken.  Donald Trump will be president.  And solar winds from the sun will strip the biosphere off the planet.  Why would I want such a thing?  Because it is baseball… and baseball is a life.

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Think Big, Think a Little…

When I feel like I am losing my battle with six incurable diseases, I often fight back against the depression by doing some big-picture thinking.  How does one little insignificant speck of carbon-based lifeform living on an apparently doomed planet fit into the vast over-all thing that is the universe?  Well, I can shift my point of view from the macro to the micro.  To the tiny little liver cell that just split off an older cell, the great big organism that is me is rather a big deal.  To the tiny germinating thought in my brain that will evolve into this essay, the collection of thoughts and experiences that is my mind and soul are a matter of life and death.  What does it all mean, anyway?  What value does it all have?

I have been a public school teacher who touched more than 2000 lives in my time.  I invented moose bowling.  I have written and published more than one novel.  I have somehow managed to reproduce and father three beautiful children in spite of my many flaws and geek-o-riffic tendencies.  I have achieved success in so many ways.  Even if it all ends in the next hour, it will be okay.  I will continue to resonate through this little world in one way or another for quite some time.  I have affected this world for both good and ill, but mostly for good, and that affects the solar system too because I have been a part of it… and the Orion Spur of the Saggitarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy too because I have been a part of it… and the local cluster of galaxies… and probably even the realms beyond that.

To paraphrase The Desiderata ; “I am a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, I have a right to be here.”

gingeyhouse1n

Yes, some days when I don’t feel well, I live here… my house and my neighborhood.

So, Lord, this is not about regret or guilt or longing or pain.  This is about celebration.  It is good to exist.  Thank you for every day of life I have ever had.

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Morning With Grumpy

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I have not been having good days lately.  Things go wrong constantly.  Things that cost money that I don’t have.  I’m a writer, after all.  I don’t even have a waving acquaintance with money.

Fire ants bit me on Tuesday.  My hands and feet are still plagued with painful, itchy bumps.  At the same time the city is telling me how the yard has to be done and the trees have to be trimmed and the pool has to be repaired.  If I don’t complete the work and get the pool running again, in spite of the fact I don’t have any money, I face a two-thousand dollar fine, which would be cheaper than fixing the pool, but it would recur every month until I got the pool fixed.  Well, welcome back to Debt Town.  At least I will have a swimming pool again this winter.  And the drive this morning to take the Princess to school was an epic battle with high-speed morons in Bubba-trucks.  I made a wrong turn downtown in the rat’s maze that the I-35 construction project has created right next to downtown Carrollton.  I had to dodge between people in cars that don’t know how to drive, but drive too fast, kids on foot on that have their heads plugged in, so they don’t hear you coming when they step out in front of you without looking because their eyes are fixed on their phones.  We got there five minutes before the tardy bell.

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Some mornings I just need a chance to complain.  Thanks for listening.

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K.I.S.S.

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When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

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Kerpopple That Dinglebunny!

I have always loved using weird, wild, and goofy words to describe things when I am trying to be funny.  But recently I was saddened to learn that a word I have liked using in the past, “dingleberry”, is actually a poo-poo word.  I am very much on the Red Skelton side of the question of using bad words.   I mean, I don’t find direct use of obscene language and harsh Anglo-Saxon swear words to be very funny.  Shock humor and gross-out humor do not appeal to me the way more whimsical word-play does.

Betelgeuse is a funny word because it is the name of an actual red-giant Star in the Milky Way Galaxy, while at the same time sounding like juice made from beetles.  And, of course, there is the little matter of a hilarious Tim Burton movie about a gross-out ghost with an evil agenda.  The parts of a word can make or break the comic gravity of the word.  As much as I previously liked “dingleberry” as a goofy insult word, the “dingle” part is giving me pause.  I have discovered that a “dingle” is not only the v-cleft in a valley between two mountains, it is also derived from “dung”.   A “dingleberry” describes a dangling “berry” of poop like the ones sometimes found on the fur of my dog’s behind.  Yetch!  I can’t even use a label like that on a detestable buffoon like Donald Trump.  It bothers me that it suggests the color brown rather than the proper orange.  Trump requires a word that translates to something more like “flaming orange Kool-aid man”.

hkam

So, I guess I need to focus on other weird, wild, and goofy words as I continue to try to be funny.  The dinglebunnies of my comic fantasies need to be “kerpoppled”… the act of “poppling”, to move in a tumbling, irregular manner, as in boiling water.  Do away with poo-poo humor, Mickey, old lad!  You need some new goofy words.

 

 

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Front Porch Life

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How do you make sense out of a crazy world where if you are black and your car breaks down on the highway, the police might shoot you dead, but, at the same time, if you are orange and you cheat people out of millions of dollars with a fake university and a bogus charity, they might make you president?

Well, I remember how sitting on the front porch and just talking could solve all the problems the world had.  Of course music didn’t hurt.  The front porch of the house was once the family’s contact point with the outside world.  It was the place where you stop for a moment and think about things before you go out to face the world.  It was where on Sunday afternoons in the 1960’s I sat and listened to Harmon Killebrew and the Minnesota Twins play baseball on the radio with my Great Grandpa Raymond.  And practically every dad was the kind of dad Andy Taylor was to Opie, because they talked to you for a minute on the porch.

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So, what is the best advice I can give you with my limited wisdom?  Turn off the TV, the computer, and the I-phone… for a while.  And come to the front porch.  Take the wicker chair by the door.  Put your feet up.  Sit a spell.  And lets talk a while.

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Cheating at Reading

Three years ago I read 100 books during the school year.  I was a reading teacher.  I had piles of classroom books at all reading levels.  I wanted to record the feat on Goodreads, but I hadn’t figured out how to record things properly on the Goodreads website.  I have no record of those books to look back on.

So this year, 2016, I determined that I would read at least thirty books and record that reading on Goodreads.   Unfortunately I reached the beginning of September 17 books behind schedule.

So, I decided to cheat.  I gathered up a bunch of popcorn books… easy reads, books I set aside after reading half or more of the books, and books about drawing.

I also have a few books by comedians that are easy to buzz through because of the unique way that people like George Carlin and Lewis Black think… unfortunately rather close to the demented way I think.

I also read cartoon books and comic books quickly.

So, I have been cheating right along, finishing at least a book a day.  I am now at only 3 books behind schedule.  It probably is not a good thing for a former reading teacher to cheat at reading.  But I am filling up my reading shelf.  I enjoy the books.  And the way Donald Trump manages his businesses and does charity work, I don’t feel the least bit guilty.

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Planting Some Onions

I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions.  Consuming them is good for you.  It cleans out the system.  It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them.  Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end.  And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane.  So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.

herriman2b

It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.

  • Donald Trump is going to be our next President.  I am not saying I want that to happen.  I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President either.  But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season.  Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for twenty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
  • Human civilization is doomed.  We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!) and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive.  We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way.  And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway.  I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
  • The Roswell incident was real and there are aliens living on planet Earth.  They will not save us from ourselves, however.  President Trump won’t allow that.  After all, they are immigrants.

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  • Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us.  It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way, and make us see things from a different point of view.  Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally.   Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
  • Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese.  Onions get the gas out.  Cheese makes you constipated.  The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better.  Cheese by any other name still can stink like limburger.
    “Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor and particularly foot odor.”
  • So I have just now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden.  In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin.  Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate.  You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.

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