In honor of all the years I spent playing dungeon master on Saturday afternoons, I am posting pictures to keep the posting of D&D stuff on Saturdays as a tradition. I really am a bit too achy and ill to post any old orc and ogre stories today.
Bil Baird, Master of Marionettes
He was born William Britton “Bil” Baird in Nebraska during the Summer of 1904, but he was raised as a boy in Mason City, Iowa, the same city I was born in during the 1950s. So, he, like me, was an Iowa boy. You probably know his work if you’ve ever seen “The Sound of Music” musical movie starring Julie Andrews. The puppets above were featured in that movie during the “Lonely Goatherd” song.
Bil became puppet-crazy at the age of 8 when his father built him his first marionette. The string puppets pictured above are from a Bil Baird production of “The Wizard of Oz.” The growing television industry was a boon to Bil. I remember most vividly his TV production of “Peter and the Wolf.”
Many of Baird’s puppets were made specifically for his work in TV advertisements and educational TV.
Baird’s distinctive style of marionettes was a common feature on TV, in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and in Educational Films throughout the ’50s and ’60s, the height of his popularity. And he continued to perform in World’s Fairs, theme parks, and special engagements until his death in 1987. Most of his puppets were sold at auction in 1988, that is how these puppets found their way into his hometown art museum. His son Peter continued working the puppet troupe with new puppets until his own death in 2004.
I owe a debt to Bil Baird, inspiring my own creativity and artwork. And I suspect the creators of the Muppets, Pixar movies, and puppeteers everywhere can say the same.
Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, artwork, nostalgia
Bill Baird’s Puppets
These are puppets by Bill Baird as they are displayed in the Hanford MacNider Museum in Mason City, Iowa.
I will do more with this topic when I am back in Texas.
Filed under Uncategorized
Dragons
Dragons in the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games are the central monsters of the story. In our Eberron campaign they not only rule an entire mysterious continent, but they are credited with the very creation of the world and everything. Not only monsters, but also gods, is a pretty big order for a character to fill.
Skye, the Blue Dragon to the left above is a dragon who believes that human people are the most important part of fulfilling the Dragon Prophecy. Therefore the characters can rely on him as an ally, and sometimes even a patron. He is a blue chromatic dragon with lightning breath, and the Blue Dragon Aureon, his great great grandfather, is an important leader of the god-dragons worshiped as the Sovereign Host.
Phaeros, the great crested red dragon, is a servant of chaos who actively opposes all that is good. He works with orcish dictators and priests of the Dark Six to accomplish vast swaths of damage, destruction, and war.
He is a big bad villain that has to come at the end of a campaign, because dragons are not only powerful fire-breathers with monstrous monster-damage capability, they also know far more magic than even the wisest of wizards. My players have not crossed him yet, but if they start finding the missing dragon eggs, that will happen soon.
You may notice that my dragon pictures are mostly coloring-book pictures repeated with different colors, but in many ways dragons are like that. They all have the cookie-cutter qualities of a dragon, but with different-colored personalities and powers and ideas of good and evil.
Pennie is a copper dragon with divided loyalties and the soul of a clown. She never takes the adventure at hand too seriously. But if she decides to help the player characters find the missing dragon eggs, no ally will prove stronger and more helpful than her. And she knows things that the players need to learn from her to find the missing eggs.
So dragons come in many forms and personalities.
In fact, the search for the missing dragon eggs will be critically affected by the fact that the eggs have all five hatched and dragons instinctively protect themselves when young by using their polymorph self magic to become some other creature. And someone has implanted the idea of using human form as the default even though the wormlings have never actually seen a human being in real life.
This is a double portrait of Calcryx, both as a white dragon wormling and a young girl.
So, playing games with dragons is fun and archetypal story-telling, and I will continue to do it, even if it means getting burned now and again.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney
PoppenSparkle’s Second Hiatus
Once again I have no chapter ready for this Tuesday. I will get caught up, but this week is vacation. Vacation, not writers’ block.
Filed under Uncategorized
502
This post is on the 502nd consecutive day in a row that I have posted at least one thing. It is a streak worth continuing.
But what’ve I really done since arriving in Iowa for my yearly visit? Well, I was haunted by the spirits of grandparents long gone as well as the more recently departed spirits of my parents. The old farmhouse and town are saturated with memories, dreams, and… worst of all, regrets.
But I did visit Ames, where I attended college for the first four years. I bought a good book there. I watched movie musicals with my sister.
Maybe it is enough. I invested my time and money in pursuing memories. And there are worse ways to invest those things.
Filed under announcement, autobiography
How to Be a Wizard
On Cartoon Network’s Looney Tunes show, Daffy Duck has decided he wants to be a wizard. He even had business cards printed to be one.
Being a wizard is almost as easy as that. But becoming one is not what Daffy thinks it is.
wizard (n.) early 15th century., “philosopher, sage,” from Middle English wys “wise” (see wise (adj.)) + -ard. Compare Lithuanian zynyste “magic,” zynys “sorcerer,” zyne “witch,” all from zinoti “to know.” The ground sense is perhaps “to know the future.” The meaning “one with magical power, one proficient in the occult sciences” did not emerge distinctly until c. 1550, the distinction between philosophy and magic being blurred in the Middle Ages. As a slang word meaning “excellent” it is recorded from 1922. http://www.etymonline.com
The word comes from wisdom. Being one requires wisdom. Being one requires you to look to the future and use your hard-won experience to predict how the future will unfold, and what you can do about it to benefit yourself and others. You know, “magic”.
But to become a wise-one, a wizard, requires hard experience. It is possible that Daffy has acquired some over time. He’s certainly been subjected to all sorts of slapstick cartoon injuries and insults over time.
Remember this one? Daffy swallows dynamite, drinks gasoline, this bottle of nitroglycerin, and then throws a match down his throat. The results are spectacular, but Daffy has to admit that he can only do the act once.
So maybe he hasn’t become a wizard yet. To be a wizard, you have to learn from your hard experience. You have to gain knowledge in order to work spells and do magic.
For instance, my struggles to breathe from COPD have taught me to use magic potions like ginger tea and French onion soup to open my air passages wider and make breathing easier. When the siding on the back of the house deteriorated to the point that the city wouldn’t tolerate it any more, and I couldn’t afford to pay a contractor to fix it, I googled spells for siding repair on the internet, using articles and YouTube videos to magically fix the damage myself. I also consulted other wizards at Lowe’s and Home Depot, where they are happy to give you advice if you buy supplies from them.
Unlike Daffy, I think I do qualify as a wizard. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I taught in a public school for 31 years. I taught middle school children. I lived through the years of the Kennedy assassination, landing men on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement, Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and 9-11. I lived through the Cubs winning a World Series. And all those events and hard experiences have given me more wisdom than, perhaps, any sane person would want. Of course, I’m not sure in all my years I have ever actually met a totally sane person.
You may notice that I had to get a new magic hat. My old black Walt Whitman hat flew out the window on Interstate 35 the other day. This one is a fedora made of woven straw, a grandpa hat. Who knows? I am not a grandpa yet technically, but maybe one day before I curl up my toes and go for a long dirt nap… and grandpas count as wizards too, don’t they?
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
Being Prosaic
I admit it. I am prosaic. I think in sentences. I speak in paragraphs. I write in 5-paragraph essays. I should stop with the repetition of forms and the parallel structures, because that could easily be seen as poetic and defeat my argument in this post. I write prose. Simple. Direct. Declarative. But those last three are sentence fragments. Does that fit the model of prose? How about asking a question in the middle of a paragraph full of statements? Is that all simple enough to be truly prosaic?
Prose is focused on the everyday tasks of writing. It seems like the world thinks that the mechanical delivery of information in words and sentences should be boring, should be functional, should be simple and easy to understand.
I don’t mean to be pulling your reader’s mind in two directions at once, however. I need to stop confusing you with my onslaught of sentences full of contradictory and complex ideas. I should be more clear, more direct, and more to the point.
So here is my thesis, finally clearly stated; The magic of writing prose, it turns out, makes you the opposite of prosaic.
Simply stated; I am a writer of prose. I am too dumb about what makes something poetry to really write anything but prose. But I do know how to make a word-pile like this one that might just accidentally make you think a little more deeply about your writing… that is, if you didn’t give up on reading this three paragraphs ago. I find it useful to examine in writing how I go about writing and what I can do with it. I try to push the boundaries in directions they haven’t been pushed before. And hopefully, I learn something from every new essay I write. What I learned here is that I am prosaic. And that is not always a bad thing.
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Filed under commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, irony, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor
Tagged as prose writing