July 9, 2023 · 1:27 am

Polyticks

political insanity

People are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue too long.

My friend is a “Can” from the Republic of Cans,

Who says all the poor people are just bad hu-mans.

And he really believes it, even though he’s not dumb,

‘Cuz he thinks climbing ladders using one of his thumbs,

Is how all people manage to be worthy and good,

And lazy bad people choose to fail like soft wood.

And though he’s not seen that old ladder of mine,

Or the ladders of people with one rung in nine,

He’s thoroughly convinced that all ladders are fair,

And it’s all their own fault if they fall through the air.

Yes, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee member Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asserts an objection to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a Democratic sponsor of the long-stalled Keystone XL pipeline bill, as the committee met to advance the controversial project, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Sanders, who sits with the Democrats, wanted an amendment to put Congress on the record about their beliefs on climates change and whether they agree with the international scientific community that climate change is real or not. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

I have a good friend who’ll do Demos of Crats,

And screech about equity like an army of cats.

He thinks we should pay for all college and school,

And use our tax money as a leveling tool.

He thinks we can make the rich pay for our dreams

And make life all breakfast of sugars and creams.

And maybe he can and maybe he can’t…

Make sense of the subject of his long, drawn-out rant,

But they’ll never pay it and he will get Berned,

Because they never part with what they think they have earned.

But, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

In conclusion I think the thinks that I think

Are carefully measured and really don’t stink,

But don’t take good thinking to toss in dump,

Or sooner or later… it’s President Trump!

12809656_10156504388795648_2724443888029407729_n

Leave a comment

Filed under clowns, collage, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, pessimism, poetry, politics

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

July 8, 2023 · 2:08 am

Dancing in the Rain (an embarrassing blank verse)

Skinny dipping, taking a shower outside in the summer rain, water fights with the garden hose,

These are things that allow the child to get naked, run free and unencumbered.

Who knows who may be lurking, watching, possibly thinking dark and dangerous things?

But, innocent child, you don’t think about it for a moment.

Not when there is water to play in, dancing in the rain…

Never thinking about consequences… What if Mother sees? Or Aunt Annabel sees and tells her?

Being too old to spank is not excuse. There will be hot words to endure.

But is it worth it?

Could they possibly understand?

Tracy went to the art museum. A huge painting on the wall, an oil on canvas, showed naked boys jumping and playing in a river. Some had penises clearly visible.

Are art museums evil?

Or is being naked in the sun and rain really about being human? And alive?

Yes, playing in the water. Dancing in the rain.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

July 8, 2023 · 1:27 am

Magnificent Maisey on the Mound

20160710_084848

Okay, I am taking over this danged silly old blog today to talk about something important!  Baseball!!!  Yeah, and even more important, I wanna talk about how girls can be good at baseball.

My name is Maisey Moira Morgan.  I am a left-handed pitcher for the Carrollton Cardinals.  That’s a boys’ Little League team, in case ya didn’t know.  I ain’t the only girl in boys’ Little League, but I am the only girl on the Cardinals’ team.  The only girl pitcher.  The only WINNING girl pitcher.  I woulda been an undefeated winning girl pitcher if Tyree Suggs hadn’t dropped that fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning out in right field two weeks ago.  I ended my season at 3 wins and 1 loss.

You see, the thing is, I know the secret to striking out boys at the plate.  First of all, I am a left-handed pitcher.  Those danged boys are all used to seeing the ball flung at ’em from the right side.  Ninety-nine and two-tenths per cent of all pitchers in our league are right-handed.  So are most of the batters.  So that futzes them up right there.  And on top of that, Uncle Milt taught me to throw a knuckle-ball two years ago.  That is one amazingly hard pitch to hit square if you do it right.  You curl your fingers on the ball and give a little sorta push-out with your fingertips as you let it go.  And you try really hard to make the ball not spin as you push it towards the batter.  It can do amazing things after it leaves my hand.  Uncle Milt swears that he saw one of my pitches double-dip and then corkscrew as it went across the plate low in the strike zone.  A mere boy can’t really get a good swing at a pitch if it flutters around like a crazy bug with butterfly wings.

But that ain’t even the real secret to my baseball success.  You see, them danged boys all think they can step up to the plate and put their bat on any ball thrown at ’em by a mere girl.  They are not afraid of me, even the third time they get up to bat after striking out twice before.  My uniform is not exactly sexy, but all I really have to do is wiggle my behind a little and smile at them, and they don’t even seem to be thinking about hitting the ball any more.  I get an even bigger smile on my sweet little face when strike three flutters past ’em.  I always take ’em by surprise.

I expect to be the first woman pitcher in the major leagues one day.  Remember my name.  Maisey Moira Morgan.  Future Hall of Famer.

(Disclaimer; Maisey might actually have a hard time claiming her place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not because the major leagues don’t have any women in them, but because she is an entirely fictional human being, only existing in Mickey’s stupid little head.)

Leave a comment

Filed under baseball, baseball fan, characters, humor, kids, Paffooney, pen and ink

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 7, 2023 · 1:29 am

Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain.  You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_nSometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!…  To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

Cody 1

You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain.  You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before.  (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature?  Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters?  What’s a typewriter, you say?  Danged millennials!)

20160127_205542

I really can’t help it, you know.  I was a middle school teacher for 24 years.  That sort of thing has mental health consequences.  And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

20151028_092135

Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there.  Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain?  There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

toon1

I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post.  But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

Wild Ride

The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be.  Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath.  Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page.  (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”.  Danged millennials!)

4th Dimension

And so, this is my doodle-bop!  Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is.  I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind…  Honest!  I did not lose it.  It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment.  It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

2 Comments

Filed under blog posting, cartoony Paffooney, goofy thoughts, humor, imagination, irony, mental health, metaphor, Paffooney cartoony, pen and ink, pen and ink paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wordplay

Tagged as , , , ,

July 7, 2023 · 1:26 am

Dows, Iowa

20160720_172732

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.

20160720_191750

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.

20160720_191034

You don’t order Coke here.

20160720_190953

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.

20160720_192259

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.

20160720_191434

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.

 

 

 

Leave a comment

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

Tagged as , , , ,

July 6, 2023 · 2:28 am

Spotted Trains

20150928_143708

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.

1383847_610320455678476_1290974342_n

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.

20160720_192151

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

20160720_192327

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.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 5, 2023 · 1:41 am

AI and Digital Tackle Mickey’s Drawing Board

I don’t know if you have noticed, but I have. My artwork is going down hill due to arthritis in my fingers.

So, I have been trying to do something about it. I now own a computer stylus and a Chromebook with a touch screen. My daughter downloaded a digital drawing program for me and showed me how it works. And shortly after that, my Chromebook shorted out or something and now needs expensive repair. I am typing on my HP laptop now in order to continue writing. But for the art I had to go with an interim digital art program that employs AI to redraw your colored pencil and pen-and-ink drawings digitally mimicking what it sees and trying to copy your basic style.

The program does its darndest to get it right, and it got close. But my one-of-a-kind toucan threw it off. The best version of it is an owl with a deformed branch curling over its head. The AI also guessed an owl with a cell phone over its head. Here’s another guess;

In this earlier version, somebody was apparently throwing a wallet at the owl’s head.

This is one of my better works, done back when I could draw better. It’s an Island Girl picture inspired by my wife and one of my sons. (Neither of them actually look like the picture of them.)

This one is close.

This one is closer. You have to do it over until you get what you want.

This is what I settled for, appropriately cropped and focused.

So, the journey has begun. I will do what I can with what I have.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

July 5, 2023 · 12:52 am

What Do Martians Look Like?

k9

As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post.  Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk.  The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post.  Cleaning the computer screen took too long.  I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures.  The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;

I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky.  While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up.  And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research.  But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.

Malevolent Martians;

monsters-martians3

tumblr_o85su8JRDA1sk0xezo1_500

war of the world goliath martians

Martians Who Make the Mistake of Liking Us;

737021

tumblr_m4qdrnjYqB1rx8pp5o2_1280

Inexplicably Goofy Martians;

butt_ugly_martians_by_sb99stuff-d9jl8v3

Cartoon alien rendered on white background. 3D model licensed from DAZ3D.

Santa-Claus-Conquers-the-Martians-1964-HD.mp4_snapshot_00.07.53_2014.12.19_12.41.51

Probably the only REAL Martians… from the future;

MV5BMTc2MTQ3MDA1Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODA3OTI4NjE@._V1_UY1200_CR90,0,630,1200_AL_

Leave a comment

Filed under aliens, cartoons, collage, comic book heroes, foolishness, humor, illustrations, science fiction

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 4, 2023 · 3:02 am

Have No Fear, Mickey is Here

Beauty and Beast

I have recently had more run-ins with my old nemesis… Fear.  He is a vicious animal that makes my heart race and muddles my thinking (which is ironically very hard to do considering the muddlesome nature of my brain to begin with.)

I posted a political post a couple of days ago suggesting you should shoot yourself in the foot.  Fear tells me he likes shooting.  He is a card-carrying member of the NRA.  Second Amendment rights are more important to him than the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Sixth, and definitely the 15th.  He agrees with Donald Trump about Mexicans.  We have to seal the border, and if they come across to commit crimes, steal our stuff, and mess up our lovely whitebread world, we oughtta be able to shoot them.  Fear likes conservatives in politics.  He knows they don’t really mean it when they ask us to give up stuff and give them more money in return for protecting us from all those scary “other people”, but he likes the notion of guns and military to “protect us”.  Those “other people”, they are scary. and icky, and awful.  We hate them.  Let’s kill them.  Fear really does say this to me, and I am fairly sure that he says it to other people too.  But I have decided I don’t really want to listen.

superchick2Superman 2In fact, I want to stand up to him.  I am tired of listening to people whom I care about repeat fear-fueled talking points from Fox News about why white cops who killed black youths without giving them their right to a trial… especially un-armed black youths… were probably justified and were rightfully afraid for their own gun-fortified life.  I was mortified when the white cop in McKinney, Texas threw the black girl in the bikini to the ground and put a knee on her back.  That was a girl like so many of the ones I have taught in Texas.  Sure, she may have said bad words to him… because she was afraid.  But she had more reason to be afraid than he did.  So, I need to use Mickian magical powers to punch Fear in the nose.  This monster will not beat me, even though I am naked and unarmed.  I am not afraid.

minotaur

And here’s the reason why…  I love people.  I don’t hate them.  I don’t fear them.  I particularly love some of the people that friends and relatives routinely tell me that they fear.  I have had black, Hispanic, and Muslim students that I would die to protect without hesitation.  When I stood between a Hispanic boy with a sharp metal throwing star with which he intended to commit a murder, and the boy inside my classroom he was threatening, I was ready to die.  He was not entering my classroom while I lived to block the doorway.  Fortunately for my stupid, brave self, an even braver History teacher prevented him from getting to me and got him to drop the weapon and run away.  Later that day I cried several gallons of tears and thanked God I did not wet my pants on the spot, but that is not the only time in my teaching career that I stepped between two combatants in order to protect them both and end the fight.  The secret to those victories was never having a gun or weapon to fight back with.  All I had to do to win the battle was overcome Fear… to beat him down and not let him be a factor.  You can always talk your way out of any terrible situation.  If the person you are talking to knows you are not showing fear, and you bother to tell him or her that you care about not letting them get hurt, even by their own actions… even the most wicked-hearted people are still people and still have a heart.  If they don’t, a gun isn’t going to save you anyway.  It would’ve helped Ninja-star-boy to have someone supply him with a gun.  So I say this without fear.  “Fear, you do not have a say in my life!  I do not give you any power over my faith, my politics, my daily life, or my loves.”

Now, I am not made of bricks or steel, and I am definitely not bullet-proof.  But I am not afraid to say, I am a liberal in my politics.  I believe in helping people, not hurting them in the name of Fear.  And so, if you Klansmen and white supremacists are offended by that fact and believe you need to punish me for my commie-liberal-sinner crimes, I am ready to tell you that I respect you as a human being, and disrespect every hurtful thing you stand for.  I will gladly give you your Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights, and do everything in my power to prevent you from exercising your Second Amendment rights on my poor little (Biblical-word-for-Donkey used as a euphemism).

Oh, and I am not about to tell you where I live.  I may be stupid and brave, but nobody is that stupid.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, Paffooney, politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

July 4, 2023 · 2:53 am

“That Night in Saqqara I Was Taken By Surprise”

That Night in Saqqara 1

Life is never quite like the way it is in your head.  Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.

Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point.  I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it.  It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare.  It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers.  The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork.  Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey.  And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare.  It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece.  You can still see them if you look closely.  But it is far better than any previous photo.  Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.

But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.

We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I.  We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right.  When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs.  This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3.  A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs.  If you change your mind half way down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up.  So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.

Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof.  It is common knowledge that Keith Richards is an un-dead creature, having so completely altered the bio-chemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead.  My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead.  So, not only Keith Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe.  My gasted is totally flabbered!  And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.

Leave a comment

Filed under horror movie, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,