Catch a Falling Star

July 6, 2024 · 1:19 am

Trouble at the Troll House

You can control who lives in a doll house pretty easily. The behavior of Trolls and Wishniks and My Pretty Ponies is rather placid and easy to manage. They are all mere lumps of cold plastic given shape by Mattel, Hasbro, Marx, or some other toy factory corporation.

Jade, the family dog, originally supposed to write this post for me, has passed away. Of course, she would’ve pressed the keys with her tongue, so the laptop is grateful that I am doing this post tonight. The dog left me alone in the house on a weekend when I should’ve been able to go with the rest of the family to Florida to see my son’s graduation ceremony from his Air Force special training course. I can’t tell you what he trained in because he is not allowed to tell his family. Probably secrets about aliens and spies from outer space and some junk.

It is possible that Rarity Pony murdered that fallen Troll as baby Cookie Monster and Claypants Troll looked on. Well, it could happen… if somebody had been playing with them.

The fact remains, however, that I had to stay home alone like some kind of over-aged Macaulay Culkin to be near the hospital I want to be admitted to if the no-peeing problem I had earlier this week in the middle of the night suddenly gets worse. It is painful to have a full bladder you can’t empty for some unknown reason. And it is potentially life-threatening. Something similar killed Jim Henson. And Florida hospitals are not the place to be when we have a perfectly good ER that we’ve used before when I feared I might be dying only a few blocks up the street.

So, the only badness I had to deal with turned out to be a bit of loneliness… the blues. The no-peeing problem did not haunt me again on either of the last two nights. I usually like being alone, but not when I am missing out on an important family moment.

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July 6, 2024 · 12:30 am

Magnificent Maisey on the Mound

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Okay, I am taking over this danged silly old blog today to talk about something important! Baseball!!! Yeah, and even more important, I wanna talk about how girls can be good at baseball.

My name is Maisey Moira Morgan. I am a left-handed pitcher for the Carrollton Cardinals. That’s a boys’ Little League team, in case ya didn’t know. I ain’t the only girl in boys’ Little League, but I am the only girl on the Cardinals’ team. The only girl pitcher. The only WINNING girl pitcher. I woulda been an undefeated winning girl pitcher if Tyree Suggs hadn’t dropped that fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning out in right field two weeks ago. I ended my season at 3 wins and 1 loss.

You see, the thing is, I know the secret to striking out boys at the plate. First of all, I am a left-handed pitcher. Those danged boys are all used to seeing the ball flung at ’em from the right side. Ninety-nine and two-tenths per cent of all pitchers in our league are right-handed. So are most of the batters. So that futzes them up right there. And on top of that, Uncle Milt taught me to throw a knuckle-ball two years ago. That is one amazingly hard pitch to hit square if you do it right. You curl your fingers on the ball and give a little sorta push-out with your fingertips as you let it go. And you try really hard to make the ball not spin as you push it towards the batter. It can do amazing things after it leaves my hand. Uncle Milt swears that he saw one of my pitches double-dip and then corkscrew as it went across the plate low in the strike zone. A mere boy can’t really get a good swing at a pitch if it flutters around like a crazy bug with butterfly wings.

But that ain’t even the real secret to my baseball success. You see, them danged boys all think they can step up to the plate and put their bat on any ball thrown at ’em by a mere girl. They are not afraid of me, even the third time they get up to bat after striking out twice before. My uniform is not exactly sexy, but all I really have to do is wiggle my behind a little and smile at them, and they don’t even seem to be thinking about hitting the ball any more. I get an even bigger smile on my sweet little face when strike three flutters past ’em. I always take ’em by surprise.

I expect to be the first woman pitcher in the major leagues one day. Remember my name. Maisey Moira Morgan. Future Hall of Famer.

(Disclaimer; Maisey might actually have a hard time claiming her place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not because the major leagues don’t have any women in them, but because she is an entirely fictional human being, only existing in Mickey’s stupid little head.)

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Filed under baseball, baseball fan, characters, humor, kids, Paffooney, pen and ink

Tagged as artwork, baseball, baseball bragging, characters, crazy baseball fan stuff, humor, little-league, mlb, pen and ink, pitching, sports

July 5, 2024 · 12:22 am

Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain. You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_n Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain. You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before. (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature? Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters? What’s a typewriter, you say? Danged millennials!)

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I really can’t help it, you know. I was a middle school teacher for 24 years. That sort of thing has mental health consequences. And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there. Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain? There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

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I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post. But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be. Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath. Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page. (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”. Danged millennials!)

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And so, this is my doodle-bop! Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is. I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind… Honest! I did not lose it. It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment. It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

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Tagged as art, artwork, drawing, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

July 4, 2024 · 2:25 am

Dows, Iowa

Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood. You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are. Dows is not the town where I grew up. But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them. It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives. My cousin and her second husband were there. Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there. We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!) The experience taught me a simple lesson. We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives. So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us. We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe. We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead. It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us. Nothing lasts forever. Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing. A simple word for that is “farming”. Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after. But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond. And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

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Filed under autobiography, family, farm boy, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Iowa, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Dows, family, humor, Iowa, photography, photos, travel

July 3, 2024 · 12:57 am

Spotted Trains

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I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.

Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.

My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.

When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.

This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.

Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.

When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

Tagged as amtrak, art, books, food, HO model train, humor, Iowa, paffooney, photo Paffooney, train station, Trains

July 2, 2024 · 3:38 am

Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons

The First Sighting

Cissy had changed the name of the family starship. Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck was now Heart Moon’s Happy Luck. Of course, it was only changed on the log book. On the ship’s hull outside, the ship’s name still read Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck FT-645-00-X5015-A606. But in creepy Imperium-style letters. She carefully copied Crocodile Guy’s heading coordinates into the log book of the Happy Luck.

“Captain Cissy, scanners are picking up a large group of objects just coming into scanner range.” The glowing holographic form of Steve Irwin, Crocodile Guy, stood beside the Captain’s Chair with a concerned look on his face. He was basically an AI education program, but his AI addiction to absorbing new knowledge had changed him into the far-trader starship’s science officer, engineer, translator, and all-around indispensible right-hand man for Captain Cissy. He even stood in for the ship’s computer, David, who became deceased in the escape from the Stardog pirates.

“Are they hostile? Do you think?” Cissy looked up at the viewing screen. Little red blips were swarming in the upper right corner of the screen.

“Dey maybee bee Pie-rats! Maybee dem Stardogs again!” said the terrified voice of little Friday, the Lupin child that had become more like a little sister to twelve-year-old Cissy than the family dog she distinctly resembled. Friday was out of sight at that moment, hiding behind Cissy’s Captain’s Chair.

“What course do I set, Captain?” asked Suki, the blue-skinned Nebulon pilot.

“They are currently in a position where, if they are indeed starships, they can scan us just as clearly as we can scan them. If they are are space buccaneers, they will make for us any moment now.” Crocodile Guy sounded more calm than any of the rest of the crew. Of course, being a hologram AI program, he was also not as easily killed as the rest of the crew.

“Well, if they are coming to get us, we are way outnumbered. We might as well meet them head on and see for ourselves what they are going to do.” Cissy’s expression was one of stiff-lipped defiance.

“Well, they could be space debris or a group of deep-space asteroids going nowhere,” said Suki. setting the controls on an intercept-course heading. Cissy marveled again at how fast Suki had picked up Galactic English from Crocodile Guy’s tutorials. She sounded like a spacer from the Imperium now. No trace of a Nebulonin accent remained.

The Happy Luck closed the distance rapidly. The red dots did seem to be headed towards them as well.

“I can put the image on screen now,” said Suki. “Do you want to see them now, Captain?”

“Yes, please.”

Friday peered out at the screen from behind Cissy. “Wowz! They iz space fishes! Reelie big space fishes,” said Friday.

“Yes, they are big. In fact, five hundred to a thousand meters in length each. Those are space whales.” Suki was grinning as if she were immensely pleased. “And not just any space whales. Clan Vorannac space whales. My clan.”

“Those are what your people use as starships?” Cissy gasped. They were easily as immense as Imperial dreadnoughts.

“Yes. Those big space fish are hollow and contain entire ecosystems inside them… entire worlds.”

“So, they are friendly?” Cissy hoped aloud.

“If we are lucky and have found a good warlord… rather than a bad one.”

“We iz aboutta fine out,” declared Friday. Her canine eyes grew larger as the looming space whales came towards them, swimming stately and regally amongst the stars.

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Tagged as books, novel writing, sci-fi, science fiction, writing process

July 2, 2024 · 1:18 am

Islands of Identity

Who am I?

Why do I do the things that I do?

No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.

When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.

You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.

But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.

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Tagged as artwork, fiction, Gilligan's Island, humor, island girls, paffooney, relationships, teaching, the search for identity

July 1, 2024 · 12:04 am

What Do Martians Look Like?

As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post. Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk. The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post. Cleaning the computer screen took too long. I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures. The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;

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I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky. While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up. And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research. But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.

Malevolent Martians;

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Martians Who Make the Mistake of Liking Us;

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Inexplicably Goofy Martians;

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Cartoon alien rendered on white background. 3D model licensed from DAZ3D.

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Probably the only REAL Martians… from the future;

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Tagged as alien invasions, aliens, artwork, humor, Martians, paffooney, pirated pictures, science fiction

June 30, 2024 · 12:10 am

What in the Dickens?

Life is full of crazy characters with silly sounding names.

Pumblechook and Magwitch, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher, Sydney Carton. Little Nell and Dick Swiveller. Uriah Heep and Mr. Murdstone. Bill Sykes. Little Dorrit, Pip, and Tiny Tim. Bob Cratchit, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, Peggotty, and Oliver Twist. Wilkins Micawber.

Sydney Carton quote; “I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it.” …Said to Lucy Manet before he takes the place of her beloved in the line to the guillotine.

Wilkins Micawber quotes; “I have no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be more beforehand with the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if—in short, anything turns up.” …Said to David Copperfield to explain his current poverty and difficulties.

The world, in so many words, is a complex and difficult world to understand. But with comedy and tragedy and irony and sweet understanding, Charles Dickens always made sense of it for me.

Did you ever read a Dickens’ book? I know they are long and wordy and more than a hundred years old. But anywhere you start, I guarantee it is worth it. It will pull you in. Oliver Twist, Great Expectation, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, a Christmas Carol… You have to read at least one. Start anywhere. Like me, you may never get enough.