September 14, 2016 · 3:39 pm

900!

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I have reached 900 followers.  Who knew there were 900 people in the blogosphere goofy enough to follow a cartoony former school teacher who collects dolls because of raging hoarding disorder?  I am a loony conspiracy theory lover (though only a believer of a select few).  I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983.  I am a writer goofy enough to believe I can write stuff that people want to read, and some of the comments seem to indicate that they really do.

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Here’s this morning’s dawn.  Every one of these I can photograph is something of a miracle.

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The day before yesterday I got sick from Texas heat and diabetes while driving to pick up my son from school.  I had to stop and dash into Toys-R-Us to throw up in their restroom.  Yeck!  Why did I have to talk about something as disgusting as that?  Well, I feel guilty about having to do that in a business’s public restroom.  So I felt compelled to buy something.  Wow!  PEZ dispensers!  And I found Rainbow Dash!  Um, yeah… every dark cloud has its own form of silver lining.

So, there is my goofy, disorganized post about 900.

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September 13, 2016 · 2:47 pm

Stardusters… Canto 12

Galtorr Primex 1

Canto Twelve – The Alien Space Station, Site of the Tadpole Crash

One might expect a tadpole like George Jetson to be a little bit cooled on the subject of space exploration after having crashed and wrecked the very first Golden Wing he had ever flown.  Alden remembered crashing his father’s Pontiac the first time he drove by himself.  It had made him into more of a foot-bound youth than ever until he was a senior in high school and had to drive to get groceries when his dad had that broken leg.  But George was special.  George was also a rather slow learner.  George walked around the hole and laughed about it.

“We are so lucky!” George said.  “There is a hole in the side of the space station that should have catastrophically depressurized and maybe exploded it.  There is also a hole in the front of the Golden Wing that should have killed us all.  But the two holes match up like we intended to do it!”

“George, we can still die if this thing splits apart from our ship,” reminded Davalon.  Dav, unlike most of these tadpole brat-types was clear-thinking and resourceful.

“Do we have any way to weld them together to keep them from splitting apart?” Alden offered as a possible solution.

“Yes, but then we can’t separate and fly away,” said George.  His stupid grin finally faded.

“True,” said Davalon, “but we can’t fly away without dying in the process as it is.  We can use skortch pistols on heat mode to melt the metals together.  That would make a fairly strong seal against the vacuum.”

Tanith and Gracie were also looking at the holes and hopefully thinking about everything that was being said.  “Why don’t you boys fix that, and we girls will explore the station,” suggested Tanith.

“Isn’t that too dangerous for a girl to do?” asked Alden.  He could tell by the dark look on Gracie’s face that this was the absolutely worst thing he could’ve possibly said at that moment.  “Um… yeah.  You girls take care of that and we’ll do the repair work here.”  Maybe that saved both his twelve-year-old neck and his supposedly grown-up and forward-thinking dignity.

“Take skortch rays,” said Davalon.  “But remember, burning holes in things is a bad thing to do in the vacuum of space.  If you find anyone you have to skortch… don’t miss.”

Tanith smiled winningly.  “Don’t worry.  I was programmed in the egg to be the best shot with a skortch ray that Tellerons have ever seen.”

“Very reassuring,” said George frowning, “and hilariously funny.”

“I thought so,” said Tanith.

“Brekka, Menolly,” called Gracie, “bring skortch rays.  We are going exploring.”

An Earth year ago, Alden would never have believed that such an adventure would be possible, especially when you considered that this really was a life and death situation.

*****

george-jetson

George Jetson, Telleron Tadpole

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September 12, 2016 · 3:18 pm

Opinions Are Like Onions

The REAL Sarah

“Why does something always smell bad when I am talking?”

Opinions are like Onions.

All you have to do is subtract 3.141592 and they are exactly the same.

The people that like the way they taste like theirs a lot.

They want you to try them.

And if you don’t like the taste, then you just don’t know what’s good for you.

Onions are good for you.  They make you fart and they clear out the bad gasses made up of methane and other toxic waste from your colon and digestive tract.

Opinions are good for you too.  They make you fart out of the mouth, clearing bad gasses made up of stupidity and toxic ideas out of your little old brain.  You should not be holding that stuff in.  It is poisonous and it could potentially explode.  Not something you want to happen in either the colon or the brain.  Only stupid people hang on to them in the face of contradictory evidence.  (It makes me nervous that I don’t see people exploding more often, because I hold the opinion that there really are a lot of stupid people out there.  I, too, am probably in danger of exploding at some point.)

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And see, that’s the important point here.  Opinions are only as valuable as fart gas.  For the all-important progress of ideas to really happen, opinions have to be tested.  And I don’t mean opinions like whether or not you like the taste of onions.  I am talking about opinions that lead to policy.  Politics are crammed full of opinions.  (I got that right, didn’t I?  I didn’t say “onions” when I actually meant “opinions”, right?)

Hillary Clinton is apologizing now for the opinion-based fart-gas of saying that “half of Donald Trump’s supporters are deplorable people”.  The facts are that the KKK has voiced support for Trump, as have a number of immigrant-hating racists like Ann Coulter who will tell you in detail about all her onions concerning Mexicans and brown people.  People at Trump’s rallies have physically assaulted black people and protesters of any variety.  And to “deplore” someone is to speak out against their ideas or actions.  So the critical word that is not a fact, but rather an onion, must be “half”.  This is the word where Hillary went wrong.  I am sure that “half” is an under-estimation.

And Mr. Trump, as a connoisseur of truly stinky onions has said that Clinton and Obama are literally the founders of ISIS.  And in his onion, Vladimir Putin is a stronger leader than President (of this country) Obama.  One wonders why no one has really sliced and diced these particular onions.  One imagines that if Hillary were the chef serving these onions, no one would be willing to have them in the dining room, let alone eat them.  Onions need be tested for flavor and rightness long before they are served.

So, to close up this onion-smelling essay before it makes me fart again, let me just say, we need to not get stuck in the onion patch and mistakenly convince ourselves we are smelling roses.  Roses shouldn’t make you cry.

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September 11, 2016 · 3:41 pm

Flubtastical Floundering

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Seeds of despair have been growing and blooming into black orchids of depression.  Doubt creeps in.  It is true that the publisher I just signed a contract with is the kind of publisher that squeezes their money out of the authors rather than readers.  That seems to be a dominating trend in the publishing world now.  You don’t make as much money as a publisher by investing in advertising, editing services, and printing services at your own expense, even paying advances to authors for the rights to their works.  The old way is dead.  One way or another, to compete in the modern market you have to squeeze more and more profit out of your workers.  More productivity for less money in wages puts more money into the hands of the owners, the corporations, and the CEO’s where it obviously belongs.  I suppose, as one of those little guys at the base of the poo-poo volcano of American business, I have a right to feel cheated and abused.  My hard work is taken supreme advantage of by others.

Lots of stuff has been going wrong lately.  The yard has gone untended for too long and is now overgrown and wild.  The dog got hold of number two son’s $350 retainer again.  Both of my kids at home are groaning under the strains of work and school.  My health continues to slide down the old hill.  They are even cancelling one of my favorite Facebook games.

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I must now say goodbye to Avengers Alliance on Facebook.

But despair is not really in my nature.  I knew going in that publishing my book this way was going to cost me money I will probably never make back in my lifetime.  But it will be available in print.  It will even have my own artwork on it.  And if I have to publish the other novels as digital Kindle copies only, at least I will actually have three books in print.

The yard looks unkempt, but there are blossoms everywhere, and our plants are at least processing carbon dioxide and putting oxygen back in the air.

The dog got hold of the retainer, but this time apparently realized how much trouble she was in.  She doesn’t appear to have bitten or chewed on it at all.

Broken spirits and weariness are the intended products of the modern American school system, so we are doing that right, at least.

And not being able to afford to go to the doctor any more has made my wallet a lot healthier.  I have the money… er, credit… to spend for the first time in ten years.

Maybe the orchids are not so black as I thought.

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September 10, 2016 · 3:47 pm

Spitzen Sparken Compu-BOOM!

Yesterday I had to start a post over again that my computer wiped out completely just as I was finishing it.  I had intended to rewrite the post today, but found key parts of it that I really liked were gone from my diabetic old memory.  Life is like that.  We get old and we get all futzed up, and no… the computer did not malfunction and save me from using a bad word there.  I meant to say “futzed”.

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It is a Yiddish sort of word… so I guess you could argue it is not a real word.  Yiddish, after all is a language intended by God to provide Jewish comedians with words that sound like insults but really aren’t… and words that don’t sound like insults that really are.  (Have you ever looked up what “putz” actually means?)

But that is what the Mickian computer has been up to.  It mashes, mangles, impedes, and implodes my writing.  If it wasn’t so handy for coming up with a funny post about fighting with a computer, I might actually become aggravated enough to throw this old computer out the upstairs window and into the sickly, green, unused swimming pool below.

I have used my computer daily and put it through all sorts of contortions and convolutions in the past three years of ill health and bed-ridden retirement.  It is probably no wonder it is wearing out.  I not only write and turn drawings into jpegs on it, I use it to mess with photography, play Facebook games, and keep up with the international clown show that other people generally refer to as politics.  I shed beard hair on my keyboard.  I drop popcorn on it when I am trying to jam too much in my mouth at once.  And I occasionally baptize it with a juicy sneeze or projectile cough.  I confess that I probably deserve the revenge it wreaks upon me.

Besides randomly deleting my posts and instantly saving the changes, it will also shrink the view of the entire page so that I can’t even read what I type with a magnifying glass.  The only way to correct the problem is shift to a different browser for a while until Firefox or Chrome stops hating me long enough to reset.  I have also had problems with the computer blowing things up.  One time I was trying to write on WordPress when only three huge letters at a time would fit on the screen.  That can make it quite hard to pull the old train of thought out of the darker parts of the tunnel of stupid ideas.  (I also just now had to re-type the part in italics when the computer deleted it.  I am making a back-up copy on Microsoft Word, but sometimes I can’t copy and paste fast enough.)

Truthfully, something is seriously wrong with this laptop.  The mouse pad malfunctions and the control key sticks.  I may have to buy a new computer soon.  But this one has given me numerous goofy smiles, and I will miss it when it joins the pile of old dead computers in the garage.

If you haven’t quite figured it out, these are some of the numerous goofy smiles.

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September 9, 2016 · 2:49 pm

Novel News

Cool School Blue

I was going to tell you a lot about my novel Magical Miss Morgan today.  My computer had other ideas.  I was almost done with the post and working on the final edits when the computer suddenly burped and wiped it all out.  Nothing was saved but the title.  Well, I signed a contract for the novel.  I will tell you more about that  as time goes on.  The computer doesn’t want me to do more today.

class Miss Mcover

 

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September 8, 2016 · 6:25 pm

Translating Texican

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I came to Texas from Iowa.  I was well-versed in how to speak Iowegian.  (I was, don’t-ya-know, and spoke it fluently, you-betcha.)

Then I arrived, fresh-faced and ready to change the world as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and began working in a mostly Hispanic middle school in deep South Texas.  Dang!  Whut language do they speak?  (Yes, I know… Spanish.  But my students straight from Mexico couldn’t understand the local lingo either. South Texas Spanish and Castilian Spanish from Mexico are not the same language.)  I couldn’t talk to the white kids either.   It is possible to communicate with Texicans, but it took me years to learn the language.  It takes more than mere usage of “ya’ll” and “howdy”.

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You can probably see what I mean when you look at these fake quotes based on the things real Texicans actually once said to me.  Of course, I can be accused of being a racist by interpreting things this way.  Texicans are concerned that you understand that they are not racists.  They merely rebel against being “politically correct”.  Apparently the political-correctness police give them all sorts of unfair harassment about speaking their minds the way they always have.  I should note, however, that I had to use a quote from Bubba rather than Dave Winchuk.  Dave is so anti-political-correctness concerned that he regularly said to me things with so much racial heat in them that they would even melt the faces off white people.  Face-melting is bad.  If you don’t believe me, re-watch the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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And to speak Texican, you must actually learn a thing or two about guns.  Yes, Texas is an open-carry State.  Apparently second amendment rights are the most important rights in the constitution.  My two sons grew up in Texas, and the oldest is a Marine.  Guns are important to them.  I have those same arguments with former students, too.  I have learned to say the right things so that they will tolerate my unholy  pacifist ideas about how the world might be safer if everybody didn’t have five guns in the waistbands of their underpants.  So gun-stuff ends up as a part of the Texican language I have learned to speak.

The point of it all is, language is a fascinating thing that grows and changes and warps and regresses.  I love it.  I try to master it.  And the mistakes I make usually sound purty funny.

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September 7, 2016 · 3:02 pm

“Unfortunately, you are a Writer,” He Said.

I have made up my mind to risk investing more money in getting another book published.  Being an author, especially an unknown Indie author, is really just an expensive hobby.  Even investing in professional editorial services and print-on-demand publishers can’t help you make any money at it, even if you are talented and good at story-telling.  The best I can really hope for is to get my books in print and pray that people will discover them and like them after I die, beaten to death for a crust of bread in debtor’s prison.

So, why would anyone in their right mind want to be a writer?

It is entirely possible that I was simply born that way.  I have been drawing cartoons and telling stories since I was about five years old.  Maybe even before that.  I don’t have many clear memories of my pre-school years.  It is possible that I was lost in a library once… or dropped on my head… or in a library and having a book dropped on my head… something set it off if it wasn’t simply in my genes.

I am planning to publish Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing.  They are a pay-to-print publisher who are slightly more affordable than I-Universe that I used to get Catch a Falling Star into print.  I feel like I have to get it published before I die because it is the distillation of my entire life as a classroom teacher.  Books like this are important to me.  In the Bible, there are prophets and holy men who are filled with the Word of God, men like Jeremiah, that claim the Word is burning within them, and will burn its way out of them if they don’t speak it.  My stories that I am working at turning into books are like that.  They are consuming me from the inside out.  I have to get them written and printed if I possibly can.

I have recently tried and failed to get novels like Snow Babies, Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken published with publishers that don’t charge for their services.   I got several rejections and one contract that came to nothing because of the economic failings of the publisher.  I have tried being infinitely patient.  It doesn’t work.

Cool School Blue

I will try to bargain for the most affordable deal I can to get Magical Miss Morgan into print.  They will apparently let me input artwork into the final cover.  I understand that successful writers tend to starve for at least fifteen years before they see any success and profit.  At best, I have six more years of that to go.  But this, after all, is my life now.  I need to write books and I need to get them published.  I am, unfortunately, a Writer.

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September 6, 2016 · 2:22 pm

Stardusters… Canto 11

You may be wondering why it’s “Canto 11” rather than “Chapter 11”.  Well, my novels are supposed to be like long poems, divided into lyrically composed pieces of verbal music.  Rather conceited, right?  But that isn’t what “literary conceit” has always meant.

Galtorr Primex 1

Canto Eleven – In Golden Wing One at the Initial Landing Site

Farbick set his Golden Wing down gracefully in the garbage-filled lot next to the large, un-destroyed structure.  His ability, unlike that of most Tellerons, came from practice rather than egg-inserted programming from the nurturing computers.

“Oh!  I can see why there were so few life signs from the city,” said Starbright.  “This plaza is full of skeletons.  There must be hundreds of them.”

“Can you tell what they died of?” asked Commander Biznap.

“The air is filled with toxins and pollutants,” said one of the nameless cadets.  “It’s why we will have to wear our protective suits and breath masks to disembark.”

“Could it be that that killed them?” asked Biznap.

“Probably not,” said the other nameless cadet.

“It looks like, because all of the skeletons are intact, that they died of some kind of virulent disease,” said Starbright.  “We can’t tell for sure without further examination, though.”

“We will take every precaution, then,” ordered Commander Biznap.  Farbick thought the order probably reflected the fact that Biznap’s mission on Earth had failed due lack of proper planning and fore-seeing of the unforeseeable.

“Hostile environment suits and skortch pistols?” asked Farbick.  He hated skortch pistols.  They were actually molecular disintegrator rays, and they dissolved you completely, molecule by molecule.  He had himself survived being shot on Earth because Earthers used slug-throwers to shoot lead projectiles into you.  Bad enough, but they gave a slim chance of surviving.  What he thought might be out there, though, made him suggest skortch pistols.  Those icky evil things didn’t need a survivability opportunity if they were really going to attack.

“Yes.  Get dressed and ready quickly.  We need to find them before they find us.”

The team was suited up quickly in heavy-duty Danger Suits, sealed environmental suits with built in A-I intelligence computers and nano-robotic fabric that could repair itself and even treat small wounds.  Each Telleron was handed a lethal, humming skortch pistol, fully charged and ready to burn things into dust and smoke in seconds.  Farbick hoped he was handing them to Tellerons more capable than poor Corebait, a fellow Sindalusian Fmoog who had accidentally skortched himself back on Earth by shooting into an unfortunately positioned mirror.

“Perhaps Cadet Starbright should stay and guard the ship,” Farbick suggested.

“We could easily guard the ship if we stayed too,” said both of the other cadets.

“No,” said Biznap.  “I may need my full available fire-power out there.”

“I couldn’t stay behind and have to worry about the safety of all of the rest of you anyway,” said Starbright bravely.

“Move out,” commanded the Commander.  The team of five moved through the air lock and out into the corpse-filled plaza.

“Turn on your cloaking fields,” Biznap commanded.  One by one, the Telleron commandos winked out of sight behind their invisibility cloaks.  The ship also shivered and disappeared.  “Be ready for anything,” warned Biznap’s voice.

*****

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September 5, 2016 · 4:06 pm

Making Hay

I call this post “Making Hay” as a goofy farmer reference.  I spent an hour this morning weed-whacking the yard that hasn’t had any attention for the month of August.  I know… lazy me… lazy arthritic, diabetic, lung-diseased me.  At the end of the hour I had a quarter of the yard weed-whacked and a great pile of hay lying in the middle of the sidewalk where it has no right to be according to the city.  And, of course, I did not have any energy left to rake it up.

So I came inside to re-learn how to breathe, to stop losing fifty percent of my body weight in sweat, and to rest my aching bones.  And while I was recovering, or possibly re-animating myself, I decided to try re-photographing an old work of art.  My portrait of Prinz Flute, the wizard-prince of Tellosia, is difficult to photograph because the colored pencil has a developed a sheen to it over time that reflects glare every time I try to photograph it.  The result isn’t that great.  But hey, I’m tired from making hay.

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