My daughter started complaining of feeling ill yesterday afternoon. Her fever hit a high point of 100.3. But the doctor says it is merely a cold. A viral infection. So today’s post is short and to the point… a rare thing for me… because lives are disrupted and we have to follow a trail to recovery.
Filed under autobiography, illness, Uncategorized
It was a simple plan, really. I paid a review company to review my book and post the result on their website. It was affordable, and research showed that their services were not a mere waste of money. How could anything go wrong?
Well, it’s me, of course. The fact is, my book is not the only book with that same title. I sent them the link to my book on Amazon. They had all the right info to pick the right book. They, of course, picked the wrong book to read and review.
Naturally, they can’t tell the difference between my YA science fiction novel about an abandoned alien boy being adopted by a childless Earth couple and a Hollywood romance between sun-soaked beautiful people.
Oh, well, it would be funny if I weren’t running out of time for making waves with my novel and getting some notice. I can’t seem to get another novel published and everyone is ignoring my little bookie thingy. Serves me right for thinking I have a good reason to write stuff and nonsense.
And of course, it is not my only unique and novel problem. I am currently trying to get essential yard work done before the leaves kill the grass on our yard.
I raked for half an hour with a bad back stinging me constantly, and all I got accomplished was one bag of leaves!
I really need trees that are more housebroken than this. If I drop dead doing yard work, I will die an unknown novelist that nobody ever reads. I am sure several people who have read my work would think that’s actually a good thing, but I’m inclined to disagree with them.
And leaf and novel problems have exacerbated my doll-collecting mania. The third day of April and I have already bought two more dolls after vowing to quit the habit cold turkey. But these are Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck dolls. How can any doll collector with hoarding disorder resist? At least, two dolls (and their horse) completes the collection…. until they get around to making more of these sweet little things.
So, I have different problems than most people do. But they are still problems. I need to get busy and come up with some novel solutions.
Filed under collecting, humor, NOVEL WRITING, pessimism, photo paffoonies, work in progress, writing humor
Here are images from the Monster Movie collection I keep as an obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder style of thing. I thought I would present them as a collage since I am lazy today and want to save words for my novel project.
The scary thing is that people like me obsess about such nonsense, and collect so many silly, fantastic pictures of stuff and nonsense.
Filed under artwork, collage, collecting, humor, monsters, science fiction, Uncategorized
Some days I feel loony… April first comes to mind
And I can be quite cartoony… It really helps to unwind
So I’ll make some Paffooney… and draw it while blind
And grow really prunie… old wrinkles unwind
And magic up some moony… to leave all worry behind.
April Fools! from an old fool.
Filed under foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney, poetry, Uncategorized
I am fascinated by the darker alleyways in the city of human thought. I love monster movies, those love-story tragedies where the monster is us with one or more of our basic flaws pumped up to the absolute maximum. We are all capable of becoming a monster. There are consequences to every hurtful thing we have ever thought or ever said to other people, especially the people we love.
The monster movies I love most are the old black and whites from Universal Studios. But I can also seriously enjoy the monsters of Hammer Films, and even the more recent remakes of Frankenstein, The Mummy, and their silly sequels. I am fascinated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon because it is the story of a total outsider who is so different he can’t really communicate with the others he meets. All he can do is grab the one that attracts him and strike out at those who cause him pain. It occurs to me that I am him when having an argument with my wife. Sometimes I am too intelligent and culturally different to talk to her and be understood. She gets mad at me and lashes out at me because when I am trying to make peace she thinks I am somehow making fun of her. How do you convince someone of anything if they always think your heartfelt apology is actually sarcasm? How do you share what’s in your heart if they are always looking for double meaning in everything you say?
But other people can change into monsters too. I am not the only one. People who are bitter about how their life seems to have turned out can strike out at others like the Mummy. Wrapped in restrictive wrappings of what they think should have been, and denied the eternal rest of satisfaction over the way the past treated them, they attack with intent to injure, even just with hurtful words, because their past sins have animated them with a need to change the past, though the time is long past when they should’ve let their bitterness simply die away.
And we might all of us fall into the trap of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, who never asked to be made. He finds life to be an unmanageable nightmare with others constantly assaulting him with the pitchforks and torches of their fear and rejection.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
A bust of Herman Munster
Filed under autobiography, humor, monsters, satire, surrealism, Uncategorized
I continue to believe bankers, health insurance companies, and corporate leaders are all pirates. The gentleman of the sea dressed all in red in this picture is Black Timothy, bombastic and barely comprehensible leader of the pirates of Fantastica.
The truth is I am a bit of a cartoonist. Don’t worry. It is not a completely horrible and detestable thing to be. Not like being a pirate… or a banker… or worse, a pirate banker. It leads me to do cartoons like you will find in my vault, here…
The Atlas of Fantastica, Chapter 1
It is a basically incurable disease, and yet… I can live with it. It will not kill me like some of my other incurable diseases eventually will.
So today’s post, keeping alive an unbroken string of daily posts that now goes back 16 months, is a picture post. I hope you like it, but if you don’t, another one will come along soon enough.
Filed under artwork, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, Paffooney, Pirates, Uncategorized
Signs, by their very nature, are powerful. They give you direction. They tell you what to do… and what not to do. They control you and control others.
Richard and Victor Martin were sitting at the table in front of the stage they had just finished constructing at the center of Martin’s Bar and Grille. It had turned into something of a gift from heaven to have the young cousin from France living with them. When he put the clown paint on his face and sang karaoke, people came from several counties away to hear it. They also brought their money and their thirst with them. The brothers had labored for two days to build the stage and make better use of the unexpected gift that came with taking in their uncle’s orphaned son.
“Have a beer, brother. You have earned it,” said Richard to his older brother.
“Generous of you. Especially since it is my bar and my beer to begin with.”
At that moment they both noticed the balding young man standing at the bar with his zebra hand puppet on his right arm.
“We’re not open for business yet,” Victor said. “The bar is still closed.”
“You are going to have give the dummy here a Kewpie Cola,” said the zebra puppet. “We can’t do anything but stand here and look at the sign until you give him one. He does have enough money to pay for it.”
“What? What are you talking about?” asked Victor. He looked at the young man, Murray Dawes, standing and looking up at the antique Kewpie Cola sign that Victor had hung as a decoration over the bar.
“It says, Drink a Kewpie Cola Today!” the puppet said. Victor did not see the young man’s mouth moving, but he had heard the boy had a gift for ventriloquism even though he was autistic and hardly ever spoke. “Murray always does everything signs tell him to. His mother told him signs tell us to do things for our own good.”
“So if he reads it on a sign he has to do it?” asked Richard.
“Yes,” said the zebra puppet. “You wouldn’t believe how long we have to stand and wait in front of that stop sign on the west end of Main Street. Every time we pass it he has to do what it says until he feels safe.”
Both men laughed.
“The fool’s mother constantly puts a sign on his bedroom door that says, Clean your room! So he has to do it every day before he can do anything else. One day he decided he didn’t want to clean his room that day, and he made a sign himself. It said, Don’t put any signs on this door! He put it on his bedroom door. But then he read what it said and had to take it down again.”
“That’s pretty funny,” said Richard.
“Yeah,” said Victor. “Do you think you could do that ventriloquist thing on stage? We’d pay you to do it for our customers.”
“You have to understand,” said the zebra puppet, “that Murray is very shy. He won’t be very talkative on stage. I would have to do all of the talking.”
“If you can do it and be that funny, I think it will work,” said Victor.
“You have a deal. But every time we get on the stage, you will have to put a sign on the wall for Murray to read.”
“What would the sign have to say? Break a leg or something?”
“Not unless you want him to fall down and hurt himself. It should only say, Believe in yourself… and be funny!”
Filed under humor, Paffooney, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life
The flowers have begun to bloom in Texas. The leaves are budding on all the trees who aren’t live oaks. The live oaks are shedding their winter coats, and there-in lies my divided feelings about the end of winter. I am allergic to tree pollen, mold spores, and the grungy green gungus that goes with re-awakening life. This weekend I raked live oak leaves and cut the grass in the yard. So today, I am paying the price. I have an arthritic back-ache. I have an allergic-reaction headache. I hurt a lot and I can’t breathe. But I got to see the fresh blooms of another growing season. A little pain… and then renewal.
Filed under autobiography, feeling sorry for myself, humor, illness, photo paffoonies
Buckminster Fuller is an intellectual hero of mine. As he said in the video, if you bothered to watch it, “I was told I had to get a job and make money, but would you rather be making money, or making sense?” Bucky was always a little bit to the left of center, and basically in the farthest corner of the outfield. That’s why we depend so much on him in times like these when the ball is being hit to the warning track. (I know the world doesn’t really work on baseball metaphors any more, but my life has always been about metaphors from 1964 with the St. Louis Cardinals playing and beating the New York Yankees. Mantle was on their side, but Maris was playing for us.) You have to live in the world that fits into your own mental map of reality. And if you’ve been whacked on the side of the head one too many times… it changes the way you think. You begin to think differently.
If you don’t know who Bucky is, as you probably don’t because he revolutionized the world in the 60’s and died in the 1980’s, Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. He is credited with the invention of the Geodesic Dome. But he was so much more than that. He wanted to build things that made better sense, in a practical sort of way, than the way we actually do them. He built geodesic homes because he felt a home should maximize space and use of materials and minimize costs and amounts of materials as well as environmental impacts. He is the one who popularized the notion of “Spaceship Earth”. He wrote and published more than thirty books, and gave us a variety of truly wise insights. He promoted the concept of synergy. He said, “Don’t fight forces, use them.” He also pointed out, “Ninety per cent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” He was a man full of quotes useful for internet memes.
So, lets consider an example from the mixed up mind of Mickey;
Here are three dolls from the Planet of the Apes part of my doll collection. (Two different movies are represented here, the 1968 original, and the Tim Burton 2001 remake.)
The world we now live in is increasingly like the movie, The Planet of the Apes. In that film the world the astronauts set down upon is ruled by talking apes. The human beings in that film are relegated to the fields and forests where they are no more than speechless animals. Much like the Republican Party and the wealthy ruling elite of this day and age, the apes control everything and, led by Dr. Zaius (seen on the far right) reject science and evidence as a way to explain things. They rely on the rules set down by the Lawgiver in much the same way that modern day Republicans swear by the U.S. Constitution to determine the truth of all things.
Here we see the apes capturing and enslaving Marky Mark… er… Mark Wahlberg rather than Chuck Heston from the original movie.
In the original set of movies, Charleton Heston, playing the astronaut Taylor, discovers that through hatred and warring, the human beings of Earth have bombed themselves back into the stone age and enabled the evolved apes to take over. How does Mr. Heston deal with that problem? He discovers an old doomsday device and blows up the world. Chuck Heston has always approved Second Amendment solutions to modern problems, so it is no wonder that he lays waste to everything, the good and the bad. I think we can see that old orangutan-man, Donald Trump doing exactly the same things now as he runs for President, or Great Ape, or whatever…
In both the previous series, and the current remake, salvation from the rule of the monkey people comes in the form of a leader among the apes. Caesar, whether he be played by Roddy MacDowell or by Andy Serkis, is able to solve the problems of apes and men by reaching out to those of the other species, assigning them value, and ultimately doing what helps everyone to survive and live together. Diversity is power and provides a workable solution through cooperation. The forces of hatred and fear are the things that must be overcome and threaten the existence of everyone. Donald Trump needs to learn from the lesson of The Planet of the Apes, and be less like General Ursus. We need Bernie Sanders to embrace the role of Caesar and show us how we can get along with our Muslim brothers… after all, they are more like us than the apes are, and Caesar builds bridges between apes and men.
So, there you have it, my attempt to build a new model based on an old movie… or on the remake… whichever you prefer. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always…
I miss being a teacher. But even if I was suddenly healthy enough again to return to the classroom, I would have to think twice… or three times… or twelve times about it. I know excellent teachers who are being driven out of the education field by the demands of the job in the current educational whirlpool of death and depression. My own children are very bright and capable, but they face State of Texas mandated tests this next couple of weeks because that’s what we do in Texas, test kids and test kids and test them some more. If we don’t stress them out and make them fail on the first round of testing, there will be at least two more to get the job done. And believe me, the real reason for all the testing is to make kids fail. It sounds harsh, and like one of my loony conspiracy theories, but the Republican legislature of this State has discussed in earnest how test results prove our schools are failing, and how we must certainly need to fund more private schools and schools for profit, and stop teaching kids on the taxpayer’s dime (although they don’t really care about my dimes, only the dimes of millionaires and billionaires which we have more of in Texas than we have ever had before). Of course, these private schools they speak of will be for the children of well-to-do families, particularly white Anglo-Saxon protestant families. Public schools will be okay for everyone else, preferably built next to for-profit prisons where the public-school kids will move after graduation.
Arts and humanities-type class offerings are becoming increasingly rare. We don’t teach them to be creative any more. We have to focus on core subjects, Reading, Writing, History, Science, and Math. And not the high-level stuff in any of those areas, either. We test them on the minimum competency stuff. But we make it harder every year. Back in the 80’s it started when Governor Mark White let H. Ross Perot spearhead a school-reform drive that began with idiot-tests for teachers. The Mad Dwarf of Dallas was convinced that the biggest problem with Texas Education was incompetent teachers. But we didn’t test them on classroom management skills, or skill at motivating young learners. We took basic English tests where the teachers weeded out were mostly black and Hispanic. I helped one very gifted Science teacher pass the test which she nearly failed three times (the limit before contract non-renewal) since she was taking her teacher test in her second language, not her first. When they finally got it through their heads they were only weeding out the good teachers with test anxiety, they changed the tests to make them harder. They stopped giving life-time teaching certificates and made you prove that you were not an idiot every five years.
It was Governor George W. Bush (a Forest Gump clone with DNA mixed in from Bullwinkle the Moose and Elmer Fudd) who decided that teachers needed to be weeded by demanding that their students perform to a certain level on standardized State tests. If you watched the John Oliver video, you have a clear idea already of the value of that. We worked hard for a number of years to do better on the alphabet tests. The TAAS test became passable by most of the State, including the poorer districts, and so they replaced it with the TAKS test, a criterion-referenced test that they could provide all new and harder questions for every single year. I sat on a test review board for two years as the representative of the Cotulla District in South Texas. I got to see some of the horrendously difficult question before they were asked. There were very real cultural discriminations among those questions. Why should a Hispanic child in South Texas be required to know what “galoshes” are? And when teachers began teaching to the tests well enough to get a majority of students passing, Emperor Rick Perry, the permanent Governor of Texas after Bush, decreed we needed STAAR Tests that students had to pass in order to graduate to the next grade level. And, of course, we had to make them harder.
When I started teaching exclusively ESL kids in high school (English as a Second Language) that special population was mostly exempt from taking the alphabet tests. After all, it takes at least five years to gain proficiency in a second language even for the brightest among us, and all of those students had less than five years of practice speaking English or they weren’t qualified for the program. But scores on the TAKS and then STAAR tests were generally too high. So ESL and Special Education Students were required to take them too. And, although the passing standards were lower for ESL students than they were for regular students, the passing standards were ratcheted up every single year. And we eventually did worse than the expectation. Our ESL Department got a lot of the blame for Naaman Forest High School in Garland, Texas losing its perennial recognized school status. (We got the blame even though our scores were high enough to be rated exemplary on the sliding scale… it was actually the low socio-economic students in Math that lost us our yearly recognition… just so you know.) The paperwork nightmares I had to fill out for our ESL Department were one of the reasons my health got so bad I had to retire. Healthy teachers can’t take it any more either. We are looking at a crisis in Education in Texas. Teacher shortages in Math and Science are already apocalyptic. We are intentionally doing away with Art, Band, Chorus, and other artsy-craftsy things… things that are good for the brain and the self-esteem and the creative problem-solving abilities of students. Teaching has become a nightmare.
I hope you will take me seriously over my conspiracy-theories and lunatic teacher complaints. I have been told too often that you can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at it (though I do not remember the time they speak of when money was actually flying through the air). I have been told too often that teaching isn’t a real job. You just sit around all day and talk to kids and you have the summers off. How hard can that be? And I have been told too many times that Johnny can’t read, and it is apparently my fault as a Reading teacher… it can’t be anything politicians have done, right? It certainly isn’t anything that politicians have done right!
God help me, in spite of all that, I really miss being a teacher.
