Here’s a bit of the file called Novel Pix (illustrations for my novels);
A Peek Inside the Portfolio
Filed under artwork, illustrations, Paffooney
Dolly Pics
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
The Girl With the Red Bird
This is a Paffooney I have had in my portfolio for many years. Is it a miracle that it looks so much like my daughter the Princess? Yes! Most definitely. I drew this before I got married, more than twenty years ago. Yet, it looks so much like the Princess that my flabber is completely gasted.
August 13, 2023 · 1:46 am
My Mother’s Dolls
Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer
You may already know about my doll-collecting mania. You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves. But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.
In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California. It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either. We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come. Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls. Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own. So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.
The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother. She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine. I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.
Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands. My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead. He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in. He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.
The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to. She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.
These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians. I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children. (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)
Filed under doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies
Foopty-Hoodooloo
I’m a Mickey, yes, indeedy…
Foopty-Hoopty-Hoodilly-Hoo!
Chicken-ninja throwing stars,
Hit their targets thrown from Mars…
Foopty-Hoodilly-Hee
And when the pandas drive their cars,
Their tire treads are candy bars!
Take that truth from me!
Foopty-Hoopty-Fiddly-Ho!
Being a Mickey is a rabbity thing…
As if it were Bugs who taught us to sing,
And unmusical music we all start to bring…
Because we use only the words that we know!
Foopty-Hoodilly-Fling-a-ding-Ding!
Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Mickey, Paffooney, Paffooney cartoony, poetry, rabbit people
When the Old Mind Wanders…
When the old mind wanders…
They tell you you’re just too slow.
But thoughts like mine drift everywhere,
And the edges of the universe… are a place to go.
Maybe I should write in red.
And argue with the voices
That rhyme inside my head.
And break the rhyme scheme
Here and there
Because of what they said.
Or maybe I should write in blue
Because I’ve been thinking in the nude
And laying all my secrets bare
Which really might be rude.
But the old mind wanders…
In the form of a poem,
And breaks and squanders
Tallest waves in mere foam.
Filed under artwork, clowns, goofy thoughts, humor, nudes, Paffooney, poem, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Dragon Paffoonies
Part of the joy I find in the family Dungeons and Dragons game is in making Paffoonies, the story-based pictures that illustrate and elucidate the characters and other things that enter spontaneously into the game.
I don’t invent every part of the image and concept myself. Some inspiration comes from the game books and published adventures, while others come directly from the players and the way their imaginations shape characters and events.
Many of the Dungeons and Dragons Paffoonies began life as character sheets. That’s why there are numbers, strength numbers, intelligence numbers, character levels, dexterity, skill sets, and magic items listed all around the character image. They more or less morphed over time into illustrations done in colored pencil on colored paper.
I enjoy drawing wizards and apprentices, warriors in action, castles, and dragons. I have used the game as an extended excuse to draw vast quantities of them. And now I have a resource to mine for Paffoonies to lace my blog with. They provide a sort of sugary spice that I love the taste of, and I will continue to share them until the end, even if they disagree with you and give you reading indigestion.
I am working on a new piece that is D & D Paffooney- related. I will keep you apprised of the the progress here until it is finished or until you get fed up with it. Whichever comes first.
Paffoonies are my own thing… pictures and stories melted together… loony, cartoony, balloony, pink baboon buffoons brewed together in a big pot. And I will continue to use them for acts of Dungeons and Dragons nonsense.
Filed under artwork, Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney
Books That Make You Hurt
Yes, I read this book. Yes, it scared the poop out of me. Yes, it made me cry. This is a uniquely horrific horror story that is so realistic that you know that it has actually happened in real life somewhere, sometime. Only the names of the characters would be different.
I have a deep abiding respect for Richard Peck as a writer. He earned that with his books A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago. Those books made me laugh so hard it blew chocolate milk out of my nose. And, yes, I was drinking chocolate milk at the time. They are so realistic because the people in those stories are real people. I know those people personally. Of course, they have different names in real life.
But Are You In the House Alone? is a very different book from those other two masterpieces. It tears your heart out and eats your liver because it is a first person narrative in the voice of a high school girl being stalked by a sexual predator. Everything that happens to Gail in the high school, at home, and at the house where she babysits is hyper-real with horror movie levels of attention to detail. I don’t wish to be a spoiler for this well-written book, but the narrator does not die in the book and it definitely does not have a happy ending. For anyone who has the amount of empathy I do, and in many ways becomes the narrator-character by reading, reading a book like this can physically hurt. A teacher like me has lived through horrible things like this happening to students before, it even happened to me as a boy, and it adds the slings and arrows of those things being re-lived as you read.
This is not the only book that has ever done this sort of damage to my heart strings. I remember the pain from the conclusion of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. You root for Little Nell and boo Daniel Quilp. But the bad guy wins. No happy ending can linger in the harp-strings of your memory-feeling song as long as a tragic outcome does. I was there with Scout in that ridiculous costume in the dark when Bob Ewell was attacking her brother Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. That story was filled with wise and laughable things, but the stark horror of that climactic moment nearly wiped all the good feelings away, if not for the heroics of ghostly Boo Radley whose timely intervention brings it all back before the novel ends. It horrifies me to admit it, but I was there, too, in the moment when the boys all turn on Simon on the beach with their sharpened sticks in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. They mistook him for the monster. I still haven’t fully recovered from that reading trauma.
The thing about books that hurt to read which makes it essential that I never try to avoid them, is that they can add more depth and resonance to your soul than any light and fluffy piece ever could. Life is much more like Lord of the Flies than it is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I am sadder but wiser for having read Are You In the House Alone? I am recommending it to other readers like me who don’t so much live to read as they read in order to live. Not because it is easy and good to read, but because it is hard and essential to read. It will hurt you. But it will leave you like it leaves its narrator, damaged, but both alive and purely resolved to carry on.
Filed under book reports, book review, horror writing, insight, inspiration, irony, old books, reading
Uncle Michael, Why Is There Tinfoil On Your Head?
The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was decisive for me.
Why-ever would a relatively rational and aware intellectual embrace the idea that human society is based on lies and the truth lies buried out there? In my case, I would claim it is because I am relatively goofy and prone to believing things because I am wholly deceived by a core belief that all human beings are by nature good, and have to be taught to be evil.
But while I have a misguided misconception about the goodness of people, I also have a dark side… a faith in my own ability to dig into facts and controversies and make sense of them with powers of reason. My world changed forever in 1963, when I was seven years old. I have never forgotten how wrenching the assassination was to my Iowan family and Iowegian friends. I remember how the world can be turned upside down and feelings of love and security can be totally usurped by fear and irrational feelings. You have an innate desire to believe the grownups will put things right again and the world can go on as before. Accept what the authorities say, and all will be just as it was.
I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar and CIA dirty-tricks operator confessed to the part the government played in the death of JFK. He died shortly there-after. About the only benefits he could get from telling this story was a conscience that would have been about one per cent less black and horrible as he died. There are numerous ways to cast doubt on this deathbed confession, but as you follow and research each line of evidence about what Hunt says, you find that far more of these details are accurate than there are details that seem slightly questionable. I know that in the conspiracy world that “if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably an ostrich”. But the one thing conspiracy theorists say that gives support to their position is, “You can do the research for yourself.”
So why, if it is so clear that the CIA, FBI, and LBJ got together to kill Kennedy for a variety of nefarious reasons, is the information not common knowledge and plastered all over the headlines in every major newspaper? Well, the Inquirer and its ilk are a big part of the reason. Sensationalist journalism is not above making stuff up and distorting what is real. It leads my relatives and friends to think I am so convinced about the guilt of the CIA, FBI, and LBJ only because those letters keep coming up on my word tray during Scrabble games. I do actually cross-reference things and look for books and articles that have verifiable footnotes. I am always more convinced by things stated by writers who source their details.
Jim Marrs, the author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, offers detailed notations on his research and interviews numerous sources on YouTube.
This red-faced bozo only offers the research of others, and often distorts it when he uses it.
So, when you look at these things with a rational and thoroughly inquisitive mind, you begin to find a number of things about Roswell, 9/11, and Elvis faking his death that are quite unnerving and threaten your cherished worldview. I continue to put tinfoil on my head to protect me from alien mind-reading powers because… Dang! Some of that crap is TRUE!
Filed under conspiracy theory, humor, pessimism
Catch a Falling Star 
As If It Weren’t Enough…
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