Tag Archives: goofiness

December 15, 2016 · 4:24 pm

Crazy Head-Bashing List-Making

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Sometimes I have to stop and think where ideas for posts come from.  Yes, and that is usually the point at which my head is empty and I am out of ideas.  I spent years teaching the writing process and I advocated many different pre-writing idea-generating strategies.  I should be able to come up with something to write about without resorting to bashing my right temple with a hand-held blunt object.  After all, those ideas come out kinda wobbly and full of strangely-colored stars.  So, let me find a broom in the upstairs broom closet in the empty hallways of my mind and sweep together all the possible ideas I have in one pile to look at, grimace, and compare.

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There is a letter with a Martian stamp on it.  Inside it proposes I hold an aliens-only poetry writing contest and put the worst possible results into a post.  That could be worth a few chuckles, and possible a gazorpingwallow or two.  At least, that’s what the letter suggests.  It is from some Ixcanixian from the spinward edge of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way.  20160508_113700

 

I have several ongoing cartoon projects.  I could be adding another page to the Hidden Kingdom graphic novel I have been working on for thirty years.  I could also do more action-figure comics to rationalize all the time I spend playing with dolls.  And I like to do novel illustrations to go along with the many bizarre and mentally warped novels I have created.

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Of course we have recently received the kind of political Christmas gift that most of us would like to track Santa down to his lair for and return back inside the reindeer butt that it came out of.  Insulting the new orangutan king is an easy source of insult-based humor that I don’t have to work too hard at or feel too guilty about.  But too much of that is like getting drunk on cough syrup.  You intended to cure the problem, but you have only managed to add new problems and a hangover headache to top it all off.blue-and-mike-in-color

I still have to fix the cracked and leaky swimming pool before next spring, so that should yield some cementing-your-feet-into-the-pool-wall stories later on.  And there are the numerous frustrations of living life with six incurable diseases to write about.  I can probably make the flaking off of all the skin on the back of my neck from psoriasis sound pretty funny if I try hard enough.  The family dog is still producing dog poop at Guiness-Book-of-World-Records rates… and, oh, yeah, I am still a long way from being done telling you about the bad jokes from more than a quarter of a century of classroom cut-ups.

You know, I think the way to deal with the problem is to simply make a list of ideas.  I can throw darts at the list if I still can’s decide.

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December 5, 2016 · 4:12 pm

The Use of Magic Words

Eli Tragedy

Okay, Mickey, you have said you have confidence in science to the point of not believing in God… at least not the Christian imaginary sky-friend with the white beard and bad temper.  But your use of magic words then makes you a hypocrite.

What?  Magic words, you say?

You heard me.  You use words that give you special powers.  And you believe in them like some kind of anti-science religious zealot.

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                                                                                                  Thank you, Bruce Rydberg, for giving me this useful meme.

Okay, you caught me.  There are certain words that do have super powers.  I know because I have used them.  (And Science is not the opposite of faith.   Just ask Heisenberg.)

I first suspected that magic words really existed back in college.  I read the book Dune by Frank Herbert.  (Followed by every other book he wrote.  I became a Dune-dream believer.)  Remember the part where Paul uses the Bene Gesserit fear chant to get through the psychological test given to him by the Bene Gesserit witch?  You don’t?  You haven’t read it?  I sometimes forget other people aren’t hopeless Trekkies and Sci-fi nerds too.  I do know, at least in my head, that most people have real lives outside of their own heads.  But I did develop a magic word to deal with times of stress and fear.

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Really, Mickey?  You chant this out loud when you’re nervous?

I say it in my head over and over to focus my spirit on what is truly important.  Never out loud.  I used this word to get through my wedding day in 1995 when a blizzard in Iowa prevented all of my non-Texas family at the time from attending.  I used it the day my first son was born when the delivery had to be accomplished by c-section due to heartbeat irregularities.  I used it the day an irate student came down the hallway towards me with metal ninja throwing stars, saying he was going to kill a specific student that was hiding in the History teacher’s classroom.  Yes, it helped me think and act appropriately during some rather intense times.  Sometimes a bit of nonsense injected into the middle of a tense situation makes all the difference in the world.

But that isn’t the only magic word that you made up, is it?

No, there’s the word “Paffooney” which you may have seen before in this blog.  It stands for a picture of my own design put together with words I have actually written myself.  Remember this?

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It still works.  I tested it myself this morning.  It gives you a look at my artwork posted on this blog without risking the danger of going back through all my old posts and accidentally reading something that makes your head melt.

But, really, are your magic words only words you made up yourself?

No.  I think the word “Truth” is a magic word.  It can be used or misused for both good and evil.

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This is very likely the magic word we need to defeat the orange-faced monkey we elected president.  There are lots of words that have immense power.  And all you have to do is believe in it a little bit… and use it intelligently.

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December 2, 2016 · 12:48 pm

Lizard Politicians

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This scary-faced man is the nutball known as David Icke.  My essay today is not about him, but about his amazing conspiracy theory that puts to rest once and for all the notion that intelligent life exists on the planet Earth.  His theory clearly shows that the correct answer to the notion is, “No, there is absolutely no intelligent life on the planet Earth.”

Seriously… this man believes there is a race of reptilian aliens living in the center of the planet Earth which is apparently hollow.  But not content to live in the center of the Earth and kidnap people to eat, they morph into human form and replace world leaders and important humans with cold-blooded reptilian aliens.  Queen Elizabeth of England is one.  Both Presidents Bush are also aliens.  He offers as proof that sometimes they begin to let their disguises drop and photos have been taken that reveal the true nature of these disguised individuals.  Particularly if they are photographed or videoed poorly.

Or, you know, maybe the photos were altered slightly to bring out the change.

And you know that this theory must be true.  David Icke has all those years as a soccer commentator to back up the validity of his analysis.

Anyway… I believe he is right.  At least, metaphorically speaking.  Many of the bad guys that keep winning  against the odds and the interests of the American people are obviously cold-blooded lizards underneath.  Especially Republicans.

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Notice the simpering lizard grin.  The self-satisfied smile of a blood-drinker who has recently slaked his thirst on the blood of other immigrants.  He is elected by a State that is is largely made up of Hispanic immigrants, yet his idea of immigration reform centers around deportation and cruelty to people who nominally share the same cultural background as he does.  He loves to eat machine-gun bacon, cooked on the hot barrel of an assault weapon that it is his sacred second-amendment right to own and to open carry.  He is ever ready to stand his ground and shoot down anyone whom he might perceive as a threat, including, no doubt food-stamp-fed grandmothers and their children… or rather “Abuelas y nietos”.  It is not hard to believe in his cold-bloodedness.  And since he is obviously the darling of the Koch Brothers and other scions of the greedy right, it is easy to believe that he eats little children for breakfast.  Or at least wants to take public assistance  monies away from them to give it out in tax breaks to the wealthy corporate elites.tea-party-idiots-ryan

Senator Tedhkruzh

Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

These lizard politicians have sympathy for no one but the wealthy and the powerful, most of which are also presumably lizard people.  And now that the Trumpasaurus Rex has taken over the White House, the lizard people are going to feast, stripping the bones of the poor and the helpless, along with the ground meat from the withering middle class.

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Does all of this nonsense about lizards scare you?  If it doesn’t, it probably should.  But none of it is my fault.  If you have to blame someone… it’s David Icke’s conspiracy theory.

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Filed under aliens, angry rant, horror writing, humor, monsters, Paffooney, politics, satire

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November 14, 2016 · 12:37 pm

Art Projects That Mickey Doo

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Mickey is suffering from too much politixity and angriefied argumentery to sleep well and eat well .   He has been eating , sleeping , and breathing polytix to the point that he can’t even spell properly any more .  Besides , pollertix doesn’t taste so good when you have to eat it after an election that went wrong . c360_2016-11-13-14-44-44-313

So Mickey started doing what Mickey always doo .   He started to draw.  First with pencil , then with black ink .   And then he started to color it in with colored pencil.  The spelling started to get better .  And not just because Mickey stopped having fist fights with the spell check . 20161113_202548

Other art projects helped too.  Like photographing Trolls in the Cardboard Castle . 20161113_202051

So, if the things that Mickey do help to save the brain , then he better doo before it all becomes doo doo.

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November 12, 2016 · 5:44 pm

Healing From A Fatal Wound

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The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for desert.  And as far as I can see, the war is over.  We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth.  The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.

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I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well.  You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die.  I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to.  I got that one right.  I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on.  If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed.  3f96a6e4e030fa8fa38c97da9d206240

“Jeez, Mickey!  You don’t call that humor, do you?”

Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you.  We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts.  The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest.  And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop.  Never mind that we will also be buried.  They brought it on themselves by the choices they made.  Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.

I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay.  I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today.  With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want.  We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one.  But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well.  I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.

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Thanks for sharing, Cousin Will.

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October 23, 2016 · 4:31 pm

FrightFest in the West

One of the results of the loss of the patriarch of my wife’s family is that all the sisters in this country got together to mourn, and all bought season passes for their families to Six Flags Over Texas, the poor man’s Disney World.  I, being of sound mind and decrepit body, didn’t get a vote, as I wasn’t there when they bought tickets on this extended-family plan.  In fact, marching around a theme park on my arthritic legs and cane trying to breathe Texas air full of all the pollen and pollutants that have been killing me, didn’t seem like such a good thing.  Yesterday I finally got talked into going and activating my already-purchased season pass.

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My wife and daughter at the burger restaurant

“We will just go to use our food pass,” my wife said.  “We can have dinner there at the park and get some use out of all that money I paid.”

That seemed almost reasonable.

“And if we can’t help but get on a ride or two, you can sit on a bench and watch all the weird and stupid people go by.”

Well, that sold it.  So we went.  We did notice, however, that the line for food was long and getting longer.  Some of the people waiting seemed to have been waiting a very long time.

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We finally got to the front of the line and got to pick gourmet cheeseburgers and chili fries because I don’t already have enough heart-clogging cholesterol in my system and needed a lot of greasy saturated fat for a high price.  Ah, the joys of eating at a theme park.  Long lines, rude people, bad food, and everybody’s patient and happy for the most part because they paid big bucks to get there.

And then, after we had our meal, we soon discovered why the theme park was full of skeletons and being pumped full of noxious chemical artificial fog.

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Yes, the Snickers Bars were bigger and scarier than ever.

Now, FrightFest and other celebrations of Halloween probably aren’t the best thing for people who have been associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses for twenty years, but it definitely provided a ton of stuff to see as we fled through the Old West section of the park to avoid zombie jump scares and other holiday nonsense.

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Giant spiders were everywhere, just like skeletons.

The toxic artificial smog with spooky lighting made it difficult to get a picture of the giant spiders who seemed to be hanging from every tree and possibly explaining the multitude of skeletons.  I didn’t get any pictures of zombies who were actually very young-looking employees in red and gray greasepaint.  We were too busy avoiding getting a “gotcha!” which seemed to be the sole purpose of the zombies.

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But it was still a theme park.  We wound our way through the crowd and made our way out.  It was a terrible mistake.  But we had fun.

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October 22, 2016 · 3:46 pm

Making Portraits

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My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist.  I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person.  Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about.  This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher.  That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.

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My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.

My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end.  I tried to immortalize her with a work of art.  I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her.  All my relatives were amazed at the picture.  They loved it immensely.  I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter.  And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse.  It made my grandma too sad to look at every day.  So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.

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There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher.  But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids.  Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones.  I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.

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When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist.  I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional.  Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.

But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera.  The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head.  That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities.  Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself.  So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.

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Yeah, that’s me at 10… so what?

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October 21, 2016 · 3:38 pm

Spokes-Dog

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At breakfast I cooked smokies, small-sized fried sausages.  Jade, our family dog got up to the table with the rest of us.

“I can eat twenty of those!” Jade said.

“No you can’t,” I said.  “You are a dog and eat from a bowl on the floor.  I didn’t even set a plate on the table for you.  This is not dog food.”

“Dad?  Did you see these coupons for Taco Bell on the table?” said the Princess.

“Oh, you mean, the Taco Bueno ads?  Remember what the last trip to that other place gave us?”

“Oh, yeah.  That was a horrible day spent in the bathroom,” she answered.

“The next time you go to Taco Bell, take me! ” said the dog.  “I loved the taco meat I found on the table last time you made the mistake of leaving some there.”

“Well, I do know that Taco Bell is universally loved by dogs.”

“How do you know that?” asked the Princess.

“Don’t you remember the Taco Bell dog?  Or were you too young when he was popular?”

“I think I was too young.”

“Look him up on the internet.”

“Oh, yeah!  I kinda remember that.  He was a talking dog, just like Jade.”

“Yes, but I think he mostly spoke Spanish.”

“He’s handsome!” said Jade.  “But look, he’s on television with very short fur… he’s naked!  That would be very embarrassing.”

“Yeah, when it comes to TV spokes-dogs, you’d probably prefer Spuds Mackenzie.  He had more style.”

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“I never heard of him,” said the Princess.

“Well, he was before you were born.  He was the Budweiser spokes-dog.”

“Did he talk too?”

“Just party language.  He was always chilling by the pool with beautiful human girls.”

“Let me see more of him!” demanded Jade.

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“Wow!” said Jade.  “A dog who drinks beer and plays guitar!  I think I’m in love!”

“That was so long ago, though,” I said.  “He is probably dead by now.  The average life span of a dog is only about ten years at the most.”

“Oh, now I am depressed,” said Jade.  “And you know the only cure for that is to give me some of the breakfast sausages!”

So, as I gave a dog a sausage, I was deeply regretting the whole talking dog thing.

 

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October 14, 2016 · 3:51 pm

The Car Radio Keeps Me Alive

Today I had to deliver my daughter, the Princess, to her high school in the rain.  It is hard enough make the circuitous trip to the west in order to go south and then east again through all the construction and roadwork going on with stupid people who are somehow allowed to drive a car and carry a gun in Texas even though they don’t know what a turn signal is for or that a speed limit sign shows the maximum rather than the minimum speed you should go at every red stoplight and corner without there being rain to obscure vision and make the mangled pavement slick.  You have to be able to concentrate and perform like a virtuoso while driving to make it there alive.  I would simply not be able to do it without the car radio.

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Driving the family car in Texas

The radio keeps me calm and gives my brain the power it needs to overcome obstacles.  The jump across the river with the man-eating fish in it alone requires an energized brain and a cool head.  I listen to oldies on the radio with KLUV in the mornings.  It is how my children have come to love Don Henley and the Eagles as much as I do.

For the last seven years of my teaching career, I had to learn the hard way that music is critical to driving well, and driving well is the only way to stay alive on the mean streets of Dallas.  I had a morning commute of 40 minutes, 30 miles, and 45 stoplights one way to my teaching job in Garland.  I drove it starting at six in the morning to avoid traffic.  But after school, I often had to labor for three hours through rush hour traffic on the way back home.  I learned to switch the station to 101.1, the classical music station.  Listening to Mozart and Beethoven not only makes you smarter, it makes you calmer.  Calm enough not to get out of your car at the stop light and beat the guy in the car ahead of you with the detached bumper of your car that he knocked off while cutting in front of you because he was in the wrong lane to make the turn he needed to make and didn’t realize until 15 minutes into the wait for the red light to change enough times that our cars actually had a chance to make it through the intersection.  Yes, that is a run-on sentence about road rage.  And road rage is real.  But in real life I didn’t beat him to death because of Mendelssohn playing on the car radio.  It only played out that way in my head while the radio soothed my brain and prevented my hair from catching fire.

I owe my life and sanity to the car radio many times over.  And I am resigned to the notion that I will probably need it many times more before the curtain closes the last time.

 

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September 17, 2016 · 7:09 pm

The Pinterest Problem

I suddenly find myself back on Pinterest for the first time since the Spring of 2014.  It is not that I have been forgiven by the powers behind Pinterest, rather that I have created a new email account which apparently wipes the slate clean of accusation and animosity.  But I have to explain what the problem is between me and Pinterest.

First, here are the good things;

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  • Pinterest is a way to make use of my insane hoarding-disorder urge to collect internet images of all kinds.
  • Pinterest is another place to promote my artwork and I can link covers of my books back to Amazon or I-Universe where crazy people might just be goofy enough to buy one.
  • I am hoping that in three months I will have another book to put on Pinterest.  Page Publishing was goofy enough to offer to publish Magical Miss Morgan, as long as I pay my way.
  • Pinterest allows me to organize my collections into “boards” which are actually free-flowing collages made up of the pictures I have collected.
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  • The Down-Side;
  • I was blocked from Pinterest back in 2014 for being a pornographer.  They had a lot of sexual content running rampant in their social media site in 2014, which, being a site created for women to share favorite recipes, they didn’t really know how to handle.
  • I am not shy about liking nudes and boobs in artwork.  I was not aware that some of the nude photography I was liking and even sometimes sharing had been added to Pinterest from porn sites.  My bad!
  • After being warned, I stopped liking and re-pinning nudes.  I even tried to remove what boobage I had on my boards.  (They were popular boards, and some of the bad stuff was among the most popular and re-pinned.)
  • I got kicked off for copying an artful nude off my list of recommended pins to my computer instead of any of the Pinterest boards.  I think it was a Waterhouse oil from the 1800’s, but I don’t know for sure what the problem item actually was.  Pinterest for a while was extremely sensitive to depictions of female breasts.

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But getting kicked off of Pinterest was a good thing for me.  Though embarrassing… at least a little bit… it did help me cure the problem I was having with Pinterest filling all my hours that should have been used for writing.  It also helped me self-censor a bit more effectively.  The last thing I want to do on social media is give offense.  I do not wish to promote my brand in any way similar to how Donald Trump does it on Twitter.  And it allows me to bring my artwork, with the appropriate link to WordPress to old ladies collecting recipes and Disney cartoons everywhere.  I am happy to back on Pinterest.  (And please don’t tell the Pinterest administrators how I did it.  I promise to behave.)

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