Tag Archives: action figures

July 30, 2015 · 3:25 pm

Updating Futzbatter and Foohbah Recipes

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Having already written well over a thousand words today on a different writing project, I don’t really have to worry about length on this one.  But it is intended to be a scrapbook piece anyway.  Thing #1 is the completion of a mini-collection.  I now have all three of the main Minions from the new Minions movie.  From left to right are Kevin, Stuart, and Bob posing for their picture with their fully pose-able arms in the middle of Cardboard Castle.  There are still many many many Minions left to collect, but the first three are the most important bit… I think.

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I have now reached the climax of the plot in my Sci-fi novel Stardusters and Space Lizards.  I am at that moment in the story when characters, even the most important main characters, may die.  I know, in fact, because of the ending that already exists that some of the main characters will die.  I am not entirely certain that I know which ones yet.  The three I have portrayed here are (left to right again because I am an English speaker/reader and horribly addicted to the same-old same-old) George Jetson, Davalon, and Sizzahl the Lizard Girl.  At least one of them has to die for the plot to work out.  But which one?  I am deeply in love with all three.

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My experimental flower wagon has been producing blossoms, but only one at a time.  Each one blooms, I take a picture of it, and then the hot Texas sun burns the poor thing to blazes, and I have to wait for the next one to appear.

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And finally, I think I need to define the two Mock-Iowegian words in my title today.  Mock-Iowegian (as I am sure you are bright enough to already realize) is a made-up language spoken by Iowan farm folks in Mickian fiction where the object is to capture their eccentricities and mock them ferociously because I love them.  Futzbatter… noun, meaning things that are fudged or made up on the spur of the moment and mixed together into the overall plan (or impending disaster… depending on the situation).  Foohbah… noun, meaning something you tell a fool and expect him to believe, as in a honking-big-fish story, and nobody else will contradict for fear the fool the speaker is trying pull a foohbah on is the hearer, and they don’t want to let on that the foohbah-teller laying the big, fat, hairy foohbah on the group is talking about them, and they are only feebly trying to stop him.

So, there you have it… almost 500 words in spite of myself.

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July 17, 2015 · 2:07 pm

“That Night in Saqqara I Was Taken By Surprise”

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Life is never quite like the way it is in your head.  Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.

Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point.  I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it.  It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare.  It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers.  The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork.  Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey.  And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare.  It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece.  You can still see them if you look closely.  But it is far better than any previous photo.  Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.

But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.

We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I.  We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right.  When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs.  This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3.  A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs.  If you change your mind half way down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up.  So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.

Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof.  It is common knowledge that Kieth Richards is an un-dead creature, having so completely altered the bio-chemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead.  My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead.  So, not only Kieth Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe.  My gasted is totally flabbered!  And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.

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June 24, 2015 · 2:06 pm

Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain

Last time, after months of me waiting to play with my X-Box Baseball ’04, Captain Carl Action and the Action Super-hero-guy Team had actually found where in the Library Dr. Evil and his minions had been hiding.

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It took an unbelievably long time for my Library to be liberated, but finally liberation was just around the corner…

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So Dr. Evil threw a monkey wrench into the liberation plans with a carefully timed real-identity mix-up ploy.

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Captain Carl had to stop and think for a moment… something that he only did when forced to do it,,, because, well, thinking is something that hurts quit a bit when you have a hollow plastic head with only a plastic armature for a brain.

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Max Steele, the most practical member of the Hero-Guy Action Team, put Dr. Evil/Ming the Merciless down on the Dr. Evil mint-in-box box and began to saw with his Captain Action Lightning Blade.

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Max sawed and whacked and hacked and smacked, and nothing seemed to even put a dent in the non-removable brain of Dr. Evil/Ming the Merciless.

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Soon the Action Hero-Guy Team had to give up.  The dumb plastic brain was all one piece with the rest of the plastic head and was not coming out.  Dr. Evil/Ming the Merciless was simply NOT the answer.

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Captain Carl was fed up.  He couldn’t take any more of this thinking… There was only one thing left to do.

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So Dr. Evil removed his removable brain and handed it to Carl, allowing me to repeat enough silly phrases and stupid words to get to the 500 mark for today.

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May 23, 2015 · 1:43 pm

Another Link to My Vault

Like a lazy idiot I have been posting stuff I’ve already created to Mickey’s House of Fiction and pretending that it means I am actually getting writing work done.   Today’s cartoon story, Expelling Evil, the Series, attempts to exploit my constant playing with dolls to make a humorous adventure cartoon strip.  I realize that it is still incomplete and most probably a spectacular failure (at least, as much of a failure as is possible without destroying the internet or making your computer explode).  But it makes me laugh, and I have been wanting to put it all together in one place.  So, here is the link;

https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/expelling-evil-the-series/

Here is a photo Paffooney from the story to help you remember how much you want to avoid reading it all again.

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I do promise to add on to the end of it in Mickey’s House of Fiction every time I bore you with another episode and nearly make your head implode from reading it.  The purpose of that plan being to allow to find all of it in one place and thoroughly ignore everything in one go.

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May 19, 2015 · 12:17 pm

Expelling Evil (Part Three)

When last we left the Captain Action Hero Team, they were busy trying to rescue Mickey’s beloved X-Box with the EA Sports Baseball ’04 game that Mickey loves.  The Evil Doctor Evil had taken over the library and turned it into an evil lair for his evil minions of Evil.  But Captain Carl Action had led his team into the fray and clobbered the Agent in Red with a kiss and the Grammar Nazis with bad grammar.  Dr. Evil was feeling foiled.

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The pretty Barbie doll (whose name was really City-Style Christie) was captured and at the mercy of Evil Doctor Evil.

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Dr. Mindbender had an evil talent for bending minds.  He possessed considerable talents of ESP (which here stands for Extremely Stupid Puddlebrains).  The poor captive doll was bent to Dr. Evil’s evil will.

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Suddenly Mickey’s blog stood on the verge of losing its PG rating (which was already on shaky ground anyway).  Then, faithful Max Steele pulled an answer out of his…  thin air…  urm, yes, that was what I intended to say.

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The day appeared to be saved by a good old bop on the bean.  It was Captain Carl’s favorite problem-solving solution, as it is for practically all action heroes… definitely the ones with the hollow plastic heads in Mickey’s Action Figure Collection.  But one important task still remained un-done.

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Tune in next time for the only “Fight of the Century” in which Manny Pacquiao can’t possibly disappoint you!

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May 2, 2015 · 12:15 pm

Welcome to Animal Town

Animal Town

This is Wildcat Street in AnimalTown.  It is a cartoon setting where some of my stranger dreamy-time cartoon stories take place.  One of my magical tomes is a self-created cartoon dreamworld where the plot is my life story told through the cartoon interpretations of my dreams.  AnimalTown is only one of the many settings from that long and graphically goofy tale.  There is also ClownTown, the Pirates’ Nest, Monster Mansion, Toon City, Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, and the Toonworld Space Port, along with other weird and wacky corners of my imagination’s geography.  I am thinking of expanding my blog to include web cartoons in story form… and if I do, I have a few wowser-oonie stories to share set here in AnimalTown.  It is a place run mostly by the prominent Moosewinkle family, headed by Mayor Moosewinkle, Judge Roy Moosewinkle, and prominent and incompetent attorney Woolbinkle J. Moosewinkle.  (There is obviously no connection what-so-ever with the cartoons I watched as a kid.  Surely those could not affect my dreams.)  The various stores and businesses in downtown AnimalTown all have to try to stay in business with stiff competition from Walrusmart, which is rumored to be secretly controlled by pirates.

mANDYHere is AnimalTown resident and sometime teenage know-it-all, Mandy Panda the panda-girl with panda-child Henry Panda, they are both immigrants from the distant Pandalore Islands where they originally spoke the Pandalog language.

I actually teach here in AnimalTown (in my dreams, I mean), and I do it in my rabbit incarnation, Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

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So here is a classroom scene with me doing my wonderful teaching with my gigantic magical pencil.  (I sometimes refer to the magical pencil as Larry… but everybody knows only crazy people name their pencils.)

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So, let us see what happens when a crazy person dreams cartoon dreams and draws them down to blog on his blog with repetitive repetition of the same tired jokes and jolly paffoonery.

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February 22, 2015 · 5:49 pm

A Toonerville Trolley Special Delivery

In honor of the unexpected snow day, and to mourn the death of the stupid daffodils, here’s an episode of Toonerville Trolley that I just had to share.   I need me a laughin’ place right about now, and Toonerville has always been that place.

Maybe tomorrow she will shout, “You no worry!  Katrinka fix!” just for me.

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February 1, 2015 · 3:37 pm

Clean Gene the Cleaning Genii

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Yes, I am a mess… an unmitigated, ten-year-old-tuna-salad-sandwich-on-the-floor sort of mess.  Cleaning is difficult.  I have arthritis which makes movement difficult.  I have diabetes which saps my energy and makes me constantly ill.  I have four other incurable diseases as well, hypertension, BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia), psoriasis, and COPD (chronic obstructed pulmonary disorder). I can’t move.  I can’t breathe.  And there are long periods of time when I can’t even think.  I do have a great deal of free time, however, because I was forced to retire from teaching for physical reasons, and having 31 years of experience in the books gives me a full pension negotiated back in the eighties when teachers weren’t universally reviled as money-sponge parasites the way they are now.  (Texas Education has always run on the philosophy that teachers can achieve way more for far less money if you are properly mean to them and bully them and make them worry about being fired for low test scores enough that they won’t stop to think and possibly remember that they also have rights as a human being).  So my bedroom art-and-writing studio is total chaos.  And I am beginning to believe that I must clean it before some part of the biomass absorbs enough magical energy to become sentient and eats me in the night.

I made a resolution to clean it.   Of course, wifey won’t help me.  She unreasonably points out that since I can no longer share a room because of my chronic pain and numerous ailments, the mess is all made by me and she has no guilt or shame coming to her from not cleaning it for me.  She has her own mess and her own ailments to worry about.  And I live with two of my three children still in the house, but both, unfortunately teenagers now, and both making twice or three times the mess that I do.  They too unreasonably refuse to clean up any messes they didn’t specifically (and provably) make themselves.  The dog actually helped with the old tuna sandwich thingy.  I think she killed it and ate it while it was contemplating growing legs.  But she has been little use to me for putting books back on shelves, picking up smelly socks (without eating them), and folding clean laundry.

So, it all boils down to me getting up the stiff resolve to do ten or fifteen minutes of cleaning at a time as many times a day as I can manage and cleaning it myself.  Of course, I found a mysterious old bottle with some kind of imp in it.  I have been rubbing it really, really hard and trying to make a genii appear.  I can wish the room clean…  right after the wish for a bazillion dollars and a brand-new teenage body…  um, how many wishes do I get?  I might like to turn wifey into a Jessica Alba clone.  And I could use a new car…  I need to keep looking under the bed.   Maybe there are TWO bottles like that!

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Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing what my inner sanctum looks like at the moment.  Yes, that might be a huge mistake.  But I am old and ill and nothing much really seems that big a deal any more.  And, besides, I am looking forward to posting post-cleaning-frenzy pictures to impress you with how much everything has changed.  (Yeah, that will happen.)

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January 24, 2015 · 2:33 pm

Expelling Evil (and his Grammar Nazis) Part One

Do you remember when Dr. Evil took over Mickey’s Library with his evil minions and Grammar Nazi’s?  No?  Well, the Action-Hero-Guy team charged with protecting the library didn’t either… until finally today one of the Barbies complained that Dr. Evil was totally monopolizing the X-Box.  So now, incensed by Dr. Evil’s audacity… and unwillingness to share…the Captain Action Alliance of Action-Hero-Guys are taking action.

Here’s a link to help you remember what this is supposed to be about; https://catchafallingstarbook.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/dr-evil-invades-mickeys-library/

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So, lead by Captain Carl P.M. Action, the heroes sneak inside the library door ready for action.

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It did not take the heroes long to realize that they were not alone.

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You know that given a choice, true action heroes always choose action like bopping someone on the head (assuming they are not allowed to kill them with big explosions and lots of blood, thus leading to an R-rating so the kids who are your target audience will officially have to stay away, yet come to your movie in record numbers).

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It is fortunate Captain Carl was careful and did not cut off her gun hand with his wonderous Lightning Sword of Captain Action Power.  That would’ve gotten him an R-rating.  And he was also lucky that the Agent in Red did not try to shoot him in the brain by tipping the gun forward just a tad.  (Of course, it is possible it was the Agent in Red who was lucky she did not think of that.  It is probable that shooting Captain Carl in the brain will only make him mad.  And it is hard to actually hit something that tiny anyway.)

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So, now that she won’t tell him anything, how will Captain Carl defeat Dr. Evil and liberate the X-Box?  Oh, no!  No more X-Box Baseball ’04!  How will I survive it?  To find out what happens next, tune in next time at the same Batty time to the same Batty channel!

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Oh, Nooooooooooo!

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January 17, 2015 · 3:40 pm

Sanctuary

This is my library, the place where I keep my books.  It is also a place for my doll collection and the Dungeons and Dragons game that I’ve been playing with my kids for more than a decade.  It is a place to read and think and… oh, yeah, there’s an X-Box also.  Well, that’s one way to get the kids to spend time there too.

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I do realize what a jumbled mess it is.  The shelves are all cheap Walmart kits that I built myself.  Some have been damaged over time and travel.  I have rebuilt them, restocked them, and rearranged them time and again.

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This reading nook is currently being used to display parts of my Captain Action collection.  The Captain America costume on the left is my original property from Christmas 1967.  The Steve Canyon costume next to it is an E-bay purchase and a rare find from a decade ago.  Aquaman is a combination.  The mask, trident,conch horn, and swim fins are from my original set from Christmas 1966.  The suit itself had to be replaced from E-Bay because I played with it until it was no more than a mass of frayed thread.  The gloves come from a innovative toy company called Classic Plastick run by Wes McCue.  http://classicplastick.proboards.com/  You may notice cups and junk left by kids in my library.  Cheetos wrappers from food that my daughter the Princess loves are often found crammed in between the books.

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This alcove is where I store my customized Star Wars’ Twi’leck Barbie which I made myself with acrylic paint, Sculpey plasticine, exacto-knife, and Crazy Glue.  It also is where I store my antique book collection, some of which are a hundred years old or more.  (I have books from my Grandparents’ libraries as well as some from my own childhood.)

Let me show you the Star Wars shelf.  (It is not big enough for all my twelve-inch Star Wars action figures, but… oh, well.

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Here is the back side of the shelf.  (How did topless Mermaid Barbie get in there?)20150110_134644

I also have a corner for the X-Box and the TV it is attached to.  (But Dr. Evil is holding it hostage at this writing.)

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And finally, let me bore you with the fact that the small upstairs bedroom that is now the library does not have enough room to contain all my books.  The library also fills up the upstairs hall and large portion of my bedroom/studio.

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It has been said that my library is as cluttered as my mind is.  But don’t you believe it.  My inner world makes this manifestation in the outer world look Spartan by comparison.

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