On a Hot 4th of July…

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On this patriotic holiday in Texas, I am stuck at home with my daughter in the triple-digit Texas heat.  Of the four room air conditioners in the house, one is shut down as my wife is in Alaska and doesn’t need to run hers.  That saves me money, so that is a good thing.  But the large one that is supposed to cool both the kitchen and the living room which have no wall separating them keeps drawing so much power that it trips the circuit breakers and now will not run without serious cool-down time.  We are trapped in bedrooms where we can survive.

We may attempt to go to an air-conditioned movie theater later on this holiday.  But right now, we are merely surviving the heat the best we can.  And so this metaphorical situation we find ourselves in, clinging to small areas of coolness to survive a hot world, is basically how we have been forced to live since the pumpkinhead became our king and since I’ve been bankrupted by ill health, age, and a patently unfair economy.

By the way, the picture is not a drawing of me and my daughter.  I am much older, hairier, and beat-up looking than that guy.  My daughter is older than Valerie in the picture too.  These are fictional characters.  Kyle Clarke and his daughter Valerie from the novel I have not yet finished, When the Captain Came Calling.

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Aeroquest… Canto 30

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Canto 27 – Worlds of the White Spider

      It is said that life in space exists on a spider’s web of invisible star lanes.  A photon drive can propel a starship only through certain well-defined mathematical probability arrays to a new location in geometrically-and-gravitically-folded space.  They work basically by popping in and out of reality, though you can only precisely describe the physics of it in mathematical terms.  So, of course, there are those who claim that if space is filled with spider webs, then God himself must be the Great Spider who spins it all.

The Megadeath roared into orbit around the bright blue planet that filled the life zone of a star listed on the charts as The Old Yellow Man.  It had been identified as a habitable system before, but no one had dared to come this far beyond the Imperial Borders to colonize before.  At least, no one these spacers knew about.

“This is a spectacular world,” said Vince Niell.

“Yeah, man,” said Nikki Sixx.  “Like a toatally gnarly hammertime world!”

“Wha…?” answered Cold Death.

Ged chuckled at the verbal density of his crew.  You have to be happy with the pick of the litter if the dog pound only has mutts.

“What do your sensors pick up, Cold?” Tkriashav asked Cold Death.

“Wha…?” the white-skinned bone man responded.

“Your instrument panel, you thick…” grumbled Ged.

“Oh,” Death said.  “Signal from the third moon of the big gas planet, man.  Like, ancient dudes put a scout base there.  Dead zone, dude.  No life.”

“Other signs of civilization?” asked Tkriashav.

“Stellar observatory in the third orbit.  Also dead zone.  One moon around this planet.  None around the planet in the first orbit.  Also dead zones, dude.”

“What about the planet below us?” asked Ged, beginning to grow impatient with the brain-dead zombie stoner at the sensor panel.  “Are there people or signs of civilization on this planet?”

“Whoa… Like two billion people.  Not human, man.  Humanoid, but definitely not human.”  Cold death shook his green Mohawk hair-do like a horse shakes flies off its mane.  He was definitely not human either.

“Vince?  Do you think you can land safely?” asked Ged.

“Yeah, boss man.  I can put her down on a dime.  I’ve never had such a sweet girl under my control before.  Yeah, baby!”

Ged ground a frustrated fist into his temple.  He knew there was something important about this mission because of Tkriashav’s damnable clairvoyance, but he felt he needed to know what.  Was it something for his own good?  Or something for the greater good that would mean sacrificing his own life?  He wanted to be able to make those choices himself.

“Cold Death?  I’m gonna hate myself for having to ask this, but do you find any signs of a starport down there?”

“Wha…?”

“A landing field!  A flat patch!  A place to put down where we don’t go CRASH!  BOOM! And blow up!”

“Oh, yeah, man.  Major city with walls, flat all around, dude.  Gnarly!”

“You see it, Vince?” asked Ged.

“I’m swoopin’, Daddy-o!”

“Ugh!  What does that mean?”

Ged looked at Xavier Tkriashav.  Tkriashav merely shrugged.

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{Old Photographs}

I love old photos. Especially family photos. Let me share these once again.

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One of Facebook’s gifts that I actually appreciate is the connection it has given me to old photos.  Being connected to family members and old high school friends that live far away and I haven’t met face to face for a very, very long time gives me access to shared photos that have existed for a very long time.  I never would have gotten access to them if somebody hadn’t posted it on Facebook.  Example number one is a photo of Son Number One who is now a Marine stationed in (No the government did not remove this portion.  That is paranoid old me.)  The picture shows Dorin as a ring-bearer at a family wedding in the Philippines when he was not yet two.  I was teaching at the time and couldn’t go with them, so, though I have seen copies of this Photo in relatives’ houses, I never had…

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Raw Photos

Sometimes with balky equipment, you must find work-arounds. My phone camera refuses to talk to my laptop, so these are unedited photos I hope to use in a future post.

So I published these as unchanged, unedited photos which I successfully pointed and clicked on to copy them to my laptop for photo editing.

 

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Animal Town in Daylight

Here’s a cartoon re-blog to both amuse and horrify you. Animals aren’t really like that… but people are.

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This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams.  It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons.  It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.

Animal Town Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.

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Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town.  In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands.  She is also the cartoon version of my wife.

20160429_202559 Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.

It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town.  Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system.  He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.

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In Praise of Louis L’Amour

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This man was my Grandpa Aldrich’s favorite author.  Grandpa had ridden the range in the Dakotas in the 1920’s and early 30’s.  He was basically an Iowa farmer for his whole life, but he rode horseback on the plains just long enough to become addicted vicariously to the life L’Amour so vividly describes in his many western novels.

Grandpa read every Louis L’Amour book the Rowan library had.  He read a few more besides.  And I have no idea how many he read twice, three times, or more.  For the last decade of his life, he did very little sleeping, being used to two hours of actual sleep a night, and spending the rest of the time reading westerns while he rested.

This reading addiction is not only one that I understand, but share.  I, too, love the westerns, the heroes, the manly and poetic prose, and the sheer story-telling ability of Louis L’Amour.  I have not yet read every single book he wrote while he was alive.  But I am working on it.

Recently I reread the book The Daybreakers, a critical cog in the story-cycle of the Sackett family.  Here is my review from Goodreads of the third time I read this book.

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The Daybreakers 
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Michael Beyer‘s review

Jul 01, 2018  ·  edit
it was amazing


This book is as much a hero’s journey as Star Wars. In some ways it is more complex. And in many ways it is a better story.
Louis L’Amour is a master storyteller. He created the narrator hero, Tyrel Sackett, as a young Luke Skywalker. His natural Force abilities are those qualities which make him a competent Westerner and a powerful gunfighter. His brother Orrin Sackett takes the Han Solo role from rogue pilot to New Mexico Sheriff and eventual congressman. Jonathan Pritts is the evil Emperor. He wants to take over the Mexican land grant belonging to the Alvarado family (Princess Leiah’s family on Alderaan). (Drusilla Alvarado is the Princess Leiah character). Ironically, Tom Sunday is a reverse Darth Vader. He befriends Tye, teaches him to read and how to be a good cattleman. And then he later turns on the Sackett family because of a wrong he feels from Orrin. The confrontation between Tye and his dark-side father figure is inevitable.
The writer abilities I see in the author deserve a much more detailed analysis than I can write here, but I loved this great American novel and strongly recommend it.

We have lost Louis L’Amour.  He will never write another book.  Which gives me a chance to read everything he wrote.  But he writes so well, and is such an important part of American literature, that is only the smallest of consolations.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, book reports, book review, cowboys, good books

The Truth About the Bard – Part Two

Can’t have part one without part two, now can we? So here is part two. I hope you weren’t holding your breath.

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William Shakespeare was not William Shakespeare.  An odd truth to speak, I know, but true never-the-less.  I didn’t really believe it until the second time I read my favorite play, The Tempest.  He says it himself in the Epilogue;

Prospero.
Now my charms are all overthrown, 
And what strength I have’s mine own, 
Which is most faint: now, ’tis true, 
I must be here confined by you, 
Or sent to Naples. Let me not, 
Since I have my dukedom got 
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell 
In this bare island by your spell; 
But release me from my bands (10)
With the help of your good hands: 
Gentle breath of yours my sails 
Must fill, or else my project fails, 
Which was to please. Now I want 
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, 
And my ending is despair, 
Unless I be relieved by prayer, 
Which pierces so that it assaults 
Mercy…

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The Truth About the Bard – Part One

If you didn’t have enough to think about with Trump and Russia, then here’s a neat little conspiracy problem that I love to play with.

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I came to believe that William Shakespeare was a made-up character pretty much by the same means as the world first noticed the inconsistencies.    In 1848, a young religious scholar named Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, put forward a parody of arguments against the physical existence of a historical Jesus Christ.  The fact that no written works by Jesus own hand had ever been seen or discussed in historical documents was used to claim that Jesus was very possibly a made up character created by the Apostles Paul, Peter, and John.  No physical evidence of his existence remained that wasn’t tainted by the fervor for relics, even fabricated ones, that ruled the Middle Ages.  He posited, as a joke, that in the same way Shakespeare hadn’t written his own plays.   After all, here was an unlikely person, an actor who had never been far from the city of his birth who…

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Singing Rock and Soul

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Yes, this is a picture of a rock.  But it is no ordinary rock.  Okay, that’s not precisely true.  It is a gray metamorphic rock roughly square in shape with numerous flecks of white and a white strip along the top.  As rocks go, it probably couldn’t be more ordinary, more rocky in its soul.  But, as with all things in this life, the importance and true meaning lies in the context.  This is a pocket rock.  It spent a quarter of a century riding around in my pants pocket.  I have held it in my hand millions of times.

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The Rowan Community Center, seen in this picture I used for the cover of Magical Miss Morgan, is the last part of the old Rowan school still standing.

In 1980, my Great Grandma Hinckley died.  That was also the year my folks had to move to Texas because of the transfer my Dad’s seedcorn company gave him to its cotton seed division.  It was one year before I got my teaching degree.  And it was the year they tore down the building where I went to school for grades 1 through 6.  That summer, as I walked around the demolition site, I found the homely gray rock that was nearly as square as I was, and because I was already feeling homesick before I actually left home, I picked it up  and stuck it in my pocket.  It was a little square piece of home.

That rock went with me to college.  It went with me to both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida.  It has been to Washington D.C.  It has been in the depths of caves in Kentucky and Missouri and Texas.  It has been high in the sky in my pocket in an airplane.  It has been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the U.S.  It has visited both Mexico and Canada.  It his been to Las Vegas.  And it even rode in the subways of New York City.

And possibly the most interesting part of this pocket rock’s career happened in Texas schools.  It was with me in my pocket constantly from 1980 to 2004.  I finally took it out of my pocket and placed it in an old cigar box that once belonged to my grandfather and I have kept keepsakes in since I was a kid.

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And I have thought a lot about this ordinary rock that isn’t really ordinary on closer inspection.  At one point or another I thought about using it as a skipping stone at both the Atlantic and the Pacific.  In 2004 when I was considering the pocket watch broken by it and the car key accidentally bent against it, it almost wound up in Lake Superior.  I put in my cigar box and it has remained exiled there since.  Will I have it buried with me, in my pocket?  No, probably not.  My wife plans to have me cremated.  Hopefully, though, not until I am already dead.  This rock has pretty much been a symbol of my soul, travelling with me, teaching with me, jingling the pocket change when I walk…  And it will continue to exist when the thinking and writing parts of Mickey are gone.

But even rocks are not immortal.  Sometime in the future something will happen to it.  It will end up someplace unexpected or changed by grinding, melting, or chemical reaction into some other form.  But no matter what happens to it ultimately, the meaning of it, the context, the places it has been and the things that it has done will still be true, still have happened to it.  And, ultimately, it will still be just like me.

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Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Here is a re-blog intended to help keep precious old art alive.

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Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself.  You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake.   He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting.  If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post;   Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell.  His name…

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