The Art of the Faery Tale
Filed under artwork, fairies, gingerbread, Hidden Kingdom, humor, illustrations, Paffooney
Elf Art
Old re-posts galore.
Much of my colored pencil ability came from drawing Dungeons and Dragons characters. I created this as a logo for my sister’s archery club, but it owes more to D & D and LOTR than to any commercial art. The tricky part was getting the bow and the elf’s form right. Movie elves are for the most part not real archers. So I tried very hard to get this elf to shoot the bow correctly in front of a green moon.
June 5, 2020 · 6:51 pm
The Black Wizard
So, dragons and black wizards… yeah. That’s a thing.
Admit it, you’ve been expecting a post about the Black Wizard. Haven’t you? Or is it just crazy old Mickey thinking he represents the other shoe that needs to drop? Well, I do get kinda goofy talking about Dungeons and Dragons, don’t I?
The Black Wizard had a name that the player characters eventually learned… but I have stupidly forgotten what it was. So, I merely refer to him by the name they knew him by for most of the game. He was a personal nemesis to two of the player character wizards. He is shown here kidnapping Balin, the young son of the wizard LeRoy, my brother’s fifteenth level wizard. He also faced off against Asduel, the Sorcerer played by young Fernie the flunkie who was in my eighth grade English class for two consecutive years. Neither one could defeat him by themselves, and they never played in the…
View original post 374 more words
Filed under Uncategorized
…In the Eye of the Beholder
I needed a re-post today, and this was a first thought, a bad thought, but the girl is pretty… at least on the outside.
Meet Xandu, the Beholder… I can’t say he’s a bad guy, but only because he’s a giant floating head full of eyes, and doesn’t have the proper parts to be considered a guy.
Those of us who were nutty about playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980’s hear the phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder” and we’re automatically thinking weird thoughts about Xandu, and maybe even questioning, “Which eye do you mean?”
Beholders have one big eye, and a lot of little ones equipped with death lasers, gazes of perpetual sleep, nausea looks, and fear-eyes that make you run away in terror. With that kind of surreal right-brain crapola going on in my stupid old dungeon master’s head, it’s no wonder I might go into this discussion of the Beholder with monsters on the brain when I really intended to talk all along about this particular beholder;
View original post 457 more words
June 5, 2020 · 6:44 pm
All That Really Matters
I was not able to post yesterday for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is the turmoil caused by this nation trying to come to terms with those sins of the past that come back to haunt us and hunt us in the present.
I am an old white man. I suffer from “white privilege” in ways I can’t explain to some of my white friends back in Iowa, a State that was almost entirely white when I was growing up there. (And I pray that I grew UP, not just old.)
I learned yesterday that it matters how you put in order the things that you can say on matters of race. You can’t just say, “Black lives matter” to some white people. They will angrily insist that “All lives matter.” They will then proceed to tell you that you are being a racist when you suggest that black people are somehow more important than white people. I learned that you should say instead, “All lives matter, which means black lives certainly matter too. And the debate now is about a few recent black lives that were treated like they didn’t matter, and so, their lives ended in being murdered.” You can’t give white people a reasonable-sounding way to get out of admitting that, or they will. (See, I can be a bit racist too. I sometimes have a hard time believing all white people have positive human feelings in them somewhere.)
It has often, in my teaching career, been a disadvantage to be a white male. Black kids don’t believe you can see them as a good person. If you have to call them down for misbehavior, the worst ones will automatically assume it is about their race and not their behavior. A good teacher needs to listen more than they talk. You have to get them to open up about what happens in their lives that makes them behave the way that they do. You have to make them understand that you actually care about them and want to help. You have to earn their trust to get their best learning behavior. And being white makes that all so much harder. Not just with Afro Americans. Hispanic kids too. Vietnamese kids too. And I promise you, if you take the time to really get to know a kid… from any race or culture… you will discover that underneath it all, there are no bad kids. You stand a very good chance of learning to love them… no matter their racial or cultural differences from you.
And as an old white man, I suffer the disadvantage of never being able to truly understand what it feels like to have to worry that, at any moment, the police might kill you with a gun, or press the life out of you with a knee on your neck… just because of the color of your skin. That is in no way a fair thing that black men, black women, and black kids have to worry about that.
I am saddened and frustrated too that I can’t do any more to correct this terrible injustice than I am doing. I can’t attend protests because of my poor health and the pandemic that will probably kill me anyway. I am too old and crippled and broke to do any more than write this essay and post things on social media that make some of my old white friends angry and ready to argue.
I feel bad. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and too many more diminish me, make me hurt in my heart. And all I can do about it is tell you that there needs to be more love in this world, and less hate. And I hope maybe you have a little more of it to add to the world. After all, that’s all that really matters.
AeroQuest 3… Canto 91
Canto 91 – Ruins in the Jungle (the Green Thread)
The building itself was one of the strangest constructs King Killer had ever seen. It was like a disintegrating pyramid, but, impossibly, it defied gravity and hung above the jungle floor in an upside down position. The stone it was made of looked sandy and crumbly, but was cold and metallic to the touch.
Ookah pointed upwards at what appeared to be an upside-down doorway with a vaulted roof. It didn’t take Slythinus’ expertise to understand what he meant. All the many monkey-people quivered with fear as they stared upward at the opening.
“Up there?” moaned King. They want me to get up there?”
“The Lemurians can do it,” offered Hooey helpfully.
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a tail to swing by.” King’s face darkened as he felt ready to bop the old Time Knight on the nose.
Wicked Wanda was grinning at King. Her green eyes were full of satire and insults as she laughingly got King’s attention. He would’ve hit her instead of Hooey, except he suddenly noticed how beautiful and shapely she was. Why did women do this to him? He hadn’t recovered yet from the loss of Sheherazade.
“I’m wearing the answer,” said Wanda.
“Oh?”
“Yes. You’ve heard of grav boots, haven’t you?”
“You mean you’ve been wearing grav boots all this time and never told us?”
“Well, not exactly. It’s the same anti-gravity technology, but it’s in my brassiere.”
“What?!”
“You know… When a woman reaches a certain age, she needs a bit of extra support in strategic ways.”
“So how does your anti-gravity bra help us?”
“Oh, it has an intensity control.”
Hooey began to laugh. “I get it! If she turns the thing up high enough, she can fly!”
“That isn’t the funniest part,” said Wanda. “In order to get us all up there, I’m going to have to take it off and throw it back down to you. Each of you has to wear it in order to get up there.”
Hooey rolled on the undergrowth, howling with laughter.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” said King, frowning.
“Ahh,” moaned the eyeless Emperor, “there are times when I really regret losing my eyes.”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Polly Ticks
Politics are complicated. Our economic and quality-of-life issues are basically killing us during this pandemic. And you cannot blame it all on the Simian in Chief. Or even on his Mean Monkey Party (GOP stands for Greedy Old Primates). They get a lot more of the justified blame than they are willing to accept without a lot of monkey howls and poop throwing. But not all the greedy evil people are Monkey Party People. There are definite problems with the black spots on the armor of the white knights we were depending on to slay the dragons.
The problems with Herr Twitler, the Chaos Clown have only gotten worse. We failed to hold him responsible for any of the many crimes he has committed. Impeached, but turning impeachment into peachy pie, Trumpalumpa the Oompaloompa is now able to do anything his manic monkey mind can conjure up for him to use against us. We suffer for the crimes of being poor, or a minority, or an immigrant. No matter what he does to us, he will get away with it, and then take away the whistle-blowers’ whistles and turn all Inspectors General into blind-folded privates.
And if I die from Covid 19, the terrible Trumpinator will not exactly be convicted of murder. But he is directly responsible. After Ebola there was an extensive pandemic playbook and procedures and protocols in place for the next health crisis. But because the Trumptastic Trumpaloo detected Obama-cooties on it, he threw it all away and fired the special task force and pandemic office.
And it is not even fun to make fun of him anymore. Nothing that used to be funny can still create even a wan smile. And how much of this is my fault?
I voted all Democrats in the last election. I have called most of my Republican, Trumpatater-loving friends doody-heads enough to alienate all of them (though admittedly I used a number of big words so that they don’t know what they mean). I have explained the problems with Trumpapalama and his minions like Devos and Barr on social media until I’m blue in the face, and purple on the inside. But none of that gets rid of the pumpkin-headed Cheeto-man.
I even need to get some of these dividers for the family dinner table. I am beginning to prefer lyme-disease ticks over Polly Ticks. I have had way too much of my blood sucked out these last four years.
Filed under angry rant, cartoon review, cartoons, clowns, foolishness, humor, politics
Dealing With It… With Grace
Yesterday the Princess graduated from Turner High School. Her time as a Turner Lion has come to an end… in the middle of a Coronavirus pandemic.
The last two-and-a-half years of her senior year were lost in a miasma of a mismanaged world health crisis. We have been in quarantine. Both of her parents are diabetics with blood-pressure issues. And we live in Red-State Texas where shutting down the State to keep poor people alive was a step taken grudgingly only at the last minute.
Senior celebrations and time with senior friends during graduation season simply could not happen.
But graduation happened in spite of the virus. It was an unusual sort of ceremony. It happened at Texas Motor Speedway, a NASCAR-and-redneck sort of place. The families were on the race-track infield in their cars, with a separate area for guests and extended families to park their cars. We all watched the graduation on the big video monitor where they normally show violent car-crashes in slow motion. Students were seated on the race track itself, their chairs all distanced six feet from each other. The graduates wore masks except for those brief times when pictures were taken. And some even wore masks during the pictures. (High School Staff was there to hand out masks to anyone who forgot to bring one, and to yell at anyone stupid enough to take them off at the wrong moment. Something that only happens with 25% of seniors… the ones eligible to graduate.)
I have only the greatest respect and appreciation for the staff and principals of R.L. Turner High School. As a former teacher, I know how extra-hard it must be to pull off something like this in the middle of something like we all faced this particular year. In 1975, during my graduation, a thunderstorm struck just as we were starting the processional to “Pomp and Circumstance” for our outdoor ceremony. We literally ran for the gym, and ended up crossing the stage in the auditorium while friends and family who couldn’t squeeze in watched on a tiny closed-circuit TV in the library. Everybody was water-spotted and smelling like wet farm animals. This year was a much bigger adjustment with a lot less weather problems. We sat in our cars as if we were in a drive-in movie and watched our daughter graduate on a huge outdoor screen. And her brother in Oklahoma and her grandmother in Iowa got to watch what we watched through a link on their mobile devices.
So, for all the regrets this year has brought already, at least this graduation ceremony was carried out with style, and will one day make a great story to tell future children.
Filed under autobiography, humor, kids
What the Heck is Wrong with Me on Art Day?
There are probably too many things on my mind today. My daughter is graduating from High School today at the Texas Motor Speedway. A graduation in cars going around a circle because of the Coronavirus pandemic.
My daughter the Princess is graduating today. That is probably what has my head swirling.
Catch a Falling Star 
Because I Should Be…
I should be writing more, because 15 books is not enough to contain all of me to leave behind when I die.
I should be exercising more, because I am diabetic and arthritic, and the more I lounge and laze, the more I am not fighting back against implacable enemies.
I should be laughing more, because laughter heals the soul of the many horrendous wounds of every day.
I should be loving more, because people all around me are hurting as much as I am, and they need more of it in their lives, as do I.
I should be caring and doing more,
because the world is sick with Covid and burning from racially motivated injustices and murder. And I feel helpless in the wake of it.
I should be doing many things,
That I am not doing because my power is gone. But I try anyway. And I write bad poetry about it…
…Because I should be.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, autobiography, clowns, commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, healing, Paffooney, poetry