Tag Archives: goofiness

August 2, 2015 · 2:28 pm

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

I am the man from the Setting Sun,

Come to the future to deliver the past.

What does that even mean, that silly little two-line poem I wrote twenty years ago? Am I not old enough to know better than to create a snippet loaded with goofy contradictions? Apparently not. But I am old enough to deliver the past. I have been around long enough that I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated. I saw Neil Armstrong take that “small step for man” on the surface of the moon. I have learned a number of lessons from the past. And as a writer, I can deliver those lessons in the form of stories. I was born in a different century. I have been around for more than half of one… approaching two thirds. I have collected all kinds of wonderful things in my goofy old brain. And make no doubt about it, with six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983, my Sun is about the set. So, I have a mission, to open the eyes of people who are too foolish to avoid listening to what I have to say, or to read what I have written.

I saw The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews in the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa in 1965 when I was not yet ten years old. I heard the song My Favorite Things for the very first time on the old black and white Motorola TV set in the clip I posted at the start of this post. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show I never missed on Saturdays if I could help it. In a world before video games and computers and even color TV, kids still had priorities. And my world was definitely a world of imagination.

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

So, what kind of knucklehead must I be to think younger folks would want to know about any of this stuff from the time of dinosaurs and black-and-white TV? I write books that are basically genre-breakers and about way too many different things to make sense to adults. As a result, I classify myself as a Young Adult novelist, a writer for children… but not the beginning reader kind, or the early chapter-book kind… the kind like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in the Forest, or Dicey’s Song. I write books about what it was like to be a kid in the past… the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s… last century. And I have some knowledge and expertise in this area because I was one of those teachers during that time period that got to know the kids in my classes. I made the horrifying mistake of actually talking to kids, asking them about their lives, and listening to their answers. I talked about all manner of things with all manner of kids… brilliant things and stupid things… with dumb kids, smart kids, smelly kids, charming kids, and the kids everybody else hated. You know… I did all the stupid mistakes that teachers who have no earthly idea how to do discipline would do, and got those kids to learn to behave at least halfway like human beings by being somebody they trusted and respected and… on rare occasions… believed. Right now I am working on Snow Babies. It is set in 1984. And I hope to be good enough of a Sunset Man to be able to deliver it to the future.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, oldies

Tagged as 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, good old days, goofiness, humor, imagination, life as a kid, novel writing, oldies

July 31, 2015 · 3:28 pm

Cooking More Futzbatter

“What’s this with the made up words thing? You can’t just make up words!”

“Why not? I’m an English teacher. Who better to make up words?”

“But you are making up nonsense words, and using them to make fun of Iowegians! That’s, like, racist or something!”

“Iowegians is a made up word. It is a play on Norway, Ioway, and Norwegian… and because a lot of white people in Iowa are of Scandahoovian descent.”

“See what I mean? Racist! Scandahoovian makes fun of people of Norse descent. That is totally unacceptable!”

“I don’t see it that way. I think we Iowegians should own it. You know, like the way Texas rednecks are proud to be called rednecks. I think that’s far more racist than saying Iowegian or Scandahoovian.”

“Why are we even talking about this? Why couldn’t you have just posted more about your goofy flowers? You have a lot more flower pictures you could use.”

“Yesterday was just a scrapbook sort of entry. I wanted to post a variety of different things to fill space and waste time. My writing goals were already completed for the day yesterday. My novel is at 39,565 words right now.”

“But why did you have to make up gibberish words? Don’t you know enough real words?”

“My Uncle Everett used to use Foobah when he was around the womenfolk so he didn’t say the word he was really thinking and offend Grandma Beyer. That kinda makes it a real word. And you’ve heard me say Futzbatter before. It is a word like Paffooney… something I have used enough that you know what it means without even asking.”

“But what gives you the right to make up words?”

“What gave William Shakespeare the right? Or Lewis Carroll? Remember Jabberwocky?”

“But they were famous writers. They probably earned that right.”

“I’m a writer too. Are you saying I shouldn’t do what great writers do?”

“But your not a great… Republican… yes, I meant to say Republican.”

“I’m not a Republican at all. I’m an independent liberal. I’m a progressive. I believe we need to change things to make the world a better place for all of us. Using new words and changing the language can’t be that bad a thing, can it?”

“We aren’t talking about politics! We’re talking about you making up weird-sounding goofus-doofus words and using them like they actually mean something! You can’t love the language and change it at the same time!”

“Why not? You just did.”

“I did? How?”

“What does goofus-doofus mean?”

“OH! Darn it! Don’t you see what you are doing to me with all your nonsense? You’re making me talk funny too!”

“Speaking of funny talking, do you want to see the new Minions movie with me this afternoon? It is playing at 3:25 at the Webb-Chapel Cinemark 17. There’s a lot of funny talking in that.”

“Dang it! You just posted the time and place you are planning to be. What if that lunatic Winchuk boy decides he wants to use the information to get even with you for his entire seventh-grade year?”

“No chance of that. He can’t read… or tell time. He had me for a teacher.”

At that point the logical left side of my brain doubled up both of his fists and belted the creative right side of my brain in the chin as hard as he could. Of course, that didn’t hurt at all, because both of his fists are metaphorical. What a futzing foobah!

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, wordplay

Tagged as dialogue, goofiness, humor, language, made-up words, Minions, photo Paffooney, words and their meanings

July 30, 2015 · 3:25 pm

Updating Futzbatter and Foohbah Recipes

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.

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.

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.

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.

“That Night in Saqqara I Was Taken By Surprise”

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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Filed under horror movie, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as action figures, colored pencil, goofiness, horror movie, humor, Mummy, paffooney, Rolling Stones, surprising facts, undead, video games

July 13, 2015 · 3:07 pm

Have No Fear, Mickey is Here

I have recently had more run-ins with my old nemesis… Fear. He is a vicious animal that makes my heart race and muddles my thinking (which is ironically very hard to do considering the muddlesome nature of my brain to begin with.)

I posted a political post a couple of days ago suggesting you should shoot yourself in the foot. Fear tells me he likes shooting. He is a card-carrying member of the NRA. Second Amendment rights are more important to him than the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Sixth, and definitely the 15th. He agrees with Donald Trump about Mexicans. We have to seal the border, and if they come across to commit crimes, steal our stuff, and mess up our lovely whitebread world, we oughtta be able to shoot them. Fear likes conservatives in politics. He knows they don’t really mean it when they ask us to give up stuff and give them more money in return for protecting us from all those scary “other people”, but he likes the notion of guns and military to “protect us”. Those “other people”, they are scary. and icky, and awful. We hate them. Let’s kill them. Fear really does say this to me, and I am fairly sure that he says it to other people too. But I have decided I don’t really want to listen.

In fact, I want to stand up to him. I am tired of listening to people whom I care about repeat fear-fueled talking points from Fox News about why white cops who killed black youths without giving them their right to a trial… especially un-armed black youths… were probably justified and were rightfully afraid for their own gun-fortified life. I was mortified when the white cop in McKinney, Texas threw the black girl in the bikini to the ground and put a knee on her back. That was a girl like so many of the ones I have taught in Texas. Sure, she may have said bad words to him… because she was afraid. But she had more reason to be afraid than he did. So, I need to use Mickian magical powers to punch Fear in the nose. This monster will not beat me, even though I am naked and unarmed. I am not afraid.

And here’s the reason why… I love people. I don’t hate them. I don’t fear them. I particularly love some of the people that friends and relatives routinely tell me that they fear. I have had black, Hispanic, and Muslim students that I would die to protect without hesitation. When I stood between a Hispanic boy with a sharp metal throwing star with which he intended to commit a murder, and the boy inside my classroom he was threatening, I was ready to die. He was not entering my classroom while I lived to block the doorway. Fortunately for my stupid, brave self, an even braver History teacher prevented him from getting to me and got him to drop the weapon and run away. Later that day I cried several gallons of tears and thanked God I did not wet my pants on the spot, but that is not the only time in my teaching career that I stepped between two combatants in order to protect them both and end the fight. The secret to those victories was never having a gun or weapon to fight back with. All I had to do to win the battle was overcome Fear… to beat him down and not let him be a factor. You can always talk your way out of any terrible situation. If the person you are talking to knows you are not showing fear, and you bother to tell him or her that you care about not letting them get hurt, even by their own actions… even the most wicked-hearted people are still people and still have a heart. If they don’t, a gun isn’t going to save you anyway. It would’ve helped Ninja-star-boy to have someone supply him with a gun. So I say this without fear. “Fear, you do not have a say in my life! I do not give you any power over my faith, my politics, my daily life, or my loves.”

Now, I am not made of bricks or steel, and I am definitely not bullet-proof. But I am not afraid to say, I am a liberal in my politics. I believe in helping people, not hurting them in the name of Fear. And so, if you Klansmen and white supremacists are offended by that fact and believe you need to punish me for my commie-liberal-sinner crimes, I am ready to tell you that I respect you as a human being, and disrespect every hurtful thing you stand for. I will gladly give you your Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights, and do everything in my power to prevent you from exercising your Second Amendment rights on my poor little (Biblical-word-for-Donkey used as a euphemism).

Oh, and I am not about to tell you where I live. I may be stupid and brave, but nobody is that stupid.

The 40-Year Class Reunion

This Goodwill rescue Barbie is stamped 1966, but an irate collector once pointed out to me that is no indication of when this doll was actually made and sold.

One of the main reasons that I went to Iowa this Summer at the time that I did was because the Belmond High School Class of 1975 was having a reunion dinner for the 40th anniversary of the high school getting rid of all of our dumb behinds all at once, an entire class full of mooks and monkey-heads and minions. I desperately wanted to see them again… for possibly the last time in our lives. It has been 40 years. Seven of us are gone (more than 10% of a small, rural Iowegian high school class). And now I want to tell stories about them and relentlessly make fun of them… though I will change the names to protect the innocent… and the ones I like… which is all of them.

We had the hootenanny at the Belmond Country-Club and Golf Course (and no, we were not eating golf balls… the most favorite of all Belmond restaurants had been destroyed by a tornado not long ago, and is now re-opened at the Country-Club grounds). I was really hoping to see my best friend there, Dr. Bilbo Bonaduce… the mook in the lobster shirt in high school that always got my jokes in Mr. Salcomb’s English classes, but never laughed… because he always needed to top them. (That goof-ball was willing to say out loud in front of everyone the kind of jokes I could only whisper to him behind my hand… needless to say, I only basked in the laughs second-hand.) Unfortunately, he was not there. He suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and may not even still be among the living. It has been a decade since I last saw or heard from him. Gee, this part of the story is not nearly as funny and uplifting as I had planned. But, then, time and fortune are not universally kind.

I did get to see the boy I fell in love with in Junior High. Now, that is not exactly what it sounds like. Neither of us were ever gay, and both have children by the one and only wives that we each married. I loved him because he was magical. He relied on my big brain to help him in Math and History, and I relied on him as we played together, side by side, in football, basketball, and track. As a teammate, he always made me better at what I was doing. I tackled harder and shot the ball more accurately and ran faster because he was always there encouraging me. I was actually the better athlete of the two of us (in my unbiased opinion), but he lettered in three sports when I did not letter in any. He dated the girl I had the hugest crush of my life upon… for a while… and got all the glory. But I shared in it because he was my friend and the “shiny” rubbed off on me. He grew up to be the only farmer in our class who is still actually farming. Still living the life we once knew. God, Roger, I never envied you more, and I love you still.

This is a picture of Brent Clarke, not Roger Williams. Character and inspiration? Maybe.

I spent the most time talking to three people I had not talked to much in 40 years… Rachel McMichaels was one of the organizers of the dinner. She was the brainiest girl in our class and the Valedictorian in high school. The scuttlebutt was that if I courted and married Rachel, all our children would have frizzy white hair and mustaches like Albert Einstein. She was as warm and caring as ever. She asked all about my family and told me one or two things about hers. There was never a flicker of romance between us in high school… probably because of all the teasing… but I do realize what a good thing was always there to be missed out on entirely.

Daniel Mastermill was there too. We sat beside each other in the front row of the infamous Miss Rubelmacher’s seventh-grade Science class. The terrifying Miss R sat us there together in her seating chart because of size. Daniel, in seventh grade, was even shorter and scrawnier than I was. At the reunion, he was telling me the story (which I had never heard before) of his family’s buried treasure. It seems that his parents buried a treasure on their family farm, and told the children that it was there, but never gave them a treasure map, or told them what was in the treasure. The old folks apparently died without telling where it was buried, and the children spent weeks digging up everything they dared to dig up looking for it before the farm was sold. The treasure is apparently still there.

And I sat next to Reggie Simmery all during the meal. Everybody talks to Reggie. He was the class clown. We were sitting across the table from Angela Oberkfell, the classmate who was also the Junior High School Principal’s daughter, and listened to a recounting of several times Reg was subjected to paddlings, stern lectures, and even a couple of suspensions. Reggie could never resist the temptation to say or do the most ridiculous, stupid, and pointless things his little peanut-butter-powered brain could think of. And he always laughed about everything, even when Angela’s dad whacked him on the behind with a board of education.

The reunion was a disappointment because I didn’t see all the people I wanted to see. Even the girl I had the greatest crush of my life upon was not there. (Clever of her to avoid me.) But I saw people I needed to see, and felt the things I needed to feel, about a time and place so long ago now, and my heart is full… re-filled to the brim.

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Filed under high school, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as class reunion, goofiness, high school, humor, nostalgia, old friends, paffooney

July 8, 2015 · 2:20 pm

Monster Collecting

Okay, it has been a while since I bought a new doll and was going through a bit of hoarding-disorder withdrawal. Plus a little windfall of cash finally came through. So, I added to the Monster High collection. Here is the new purchase still in the package; (Mint in package- can I resist the urge to take it out and play with it? Probably not.)

This is Lorna McNessie, daughter of the Loch Ness Monster. I am not sure how an aquatic plesiosaur who has managed to live from the Jurassic until the present by hiding in a lake and apparently only eating people no one would ever miss can father a daughter that looks like a scaly blue human girl with a big head, but apparently he did it. Here is a picture of Dad so you can compare and figure it out for yourself.

http://www.dinosaurjungle.com/prehistoric_animals_plesiosaurs.php

This purchase is within the rules of collecting. At $19.95 she comes in at a nickel under the maximum allowable price. She is also the first and only collectible purchased in July. So now I am closer to my goal of collecting all the daughters of famous movie monsters who fill the bizarro surrealist realm know as Monster High cartoons. Here is a look at where the collection now stands (or sits… displayed on the corner of my bedroom dresser next to the drawing table with all the Barbie parts and Goodwill reclamation dolls.);

As you have probably noticed, I have added Frankie Stein as well in the recent past, the daughter of Frankenstein’s Monster. She has surgical seams on arms and legs and neck, along with neck bolts, so one has to question why she is technically the daughter of the Frankenstein’s Monster if she is made of dead girl-parts, sewn together in a laboratory, and re-animated. Wouldn’t that indicate she’s Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster? Oh, well.

I still hope to acquire Dracula’s daughter, Draculaura, and possibly Venus McFlytrap, the daughter of the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. I am also pretty sure there is a daughter of some ghost-guy or other and the daughter of an evil genii. I don’t know what all is pertinent to this collection. They are somewhat oddball in nature, and I have not watched the animated cartoon (nor am I sure I can stomach it… there is no guarantee it will be a pleasant surprise like My Little Pony).

Here is what they look like naked. This is not intended to prove I am a pervert when I play with my dolls, but this does show the problems I face if I buy Goodwill rescue dolls that need repair or clothing (as most Goodwill dolls do) because their limbs and torsos are unique. You have to have character-specific replacement arms and legs, or be willing to paint the parts. The bean-shaped torsos are a bugbear for making your own clothing. Standard Barbie patterns don’t even come close to fitting, and you have to accommodate things like tails and fins and neck bolts. I may have to buy cheap ones so I can take their dresses apart for patterns. This is why I have never been tempted to collect Bratz dolls. Oh, well, the troubles unique to doll collectors, you know… And besides… I am well past 500 words for today.

Winning Easy

Now that Captain Action finally liberated my X-Box from the evil Dr. Evil who was holding it for ransom and not letting me play EA Sports Baseball ’04, I have been able to play Baseball ’04 again. (It happened in this blog; Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain) I have been playing this video game now with a passion, as you can plainly see. You are probably aware that the St. Louis Cardinals are my very favorite team in any and all sports. Notice, please that I have just pitched Matt Morris’ 30th victory against no defeats over stinky old steroid-fueled Roger Clemens. It was also his 9th shut out of the season. This is the first 30-game-winning season since Denny McLain in Detroit, in the 1968 season. I only had to replay the entire 2004 season 4 times to get there. Oh, and Albert Pujols has hit 114 home runs and Scott Rolen hit his 70th and 71st in this game. You are certainly smart enough to figure out by now that I have left the difficulty level of this game permanently set at the Rookie level. Hey, I’m old. I like easy wins.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon’s first bloom.

This is true in so many areas of my life. The flower wagon that I posted about on Friday is another evidence of my dedication to the philosophy of the easy win. It was a victory over many things… depression, tragedy, Texas gully-washers that keep on coming, the tragedy of an old toy that no longer gets played with… things where my decrepit old self with six incurable diseases needs desperately to win.

Flowers in our yard in general are a victory of sorts. This is Texas. A couple of summers back we were in a severe drought with like 99 days in a row of high temperatures of 100-plus. Flowers in June in Texas are a bit of a miracle. Good flower pictures recently taken are another miracle. My cell phone camera takes so much better pictures with all its automatic settings than my digital camera which cost twice as much, that it makes me wonder why I ever bothered with it.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Of course, this is pictures the easy way because I am not trying to adjust the color balance (in spite of partial color-blindness), or the brightness compensation, all by my own little self with my modest-to-insignificant photography skills. (I am just skilled enough at photography to recognize a great work of art photographed by someone else, not skilled enough to take one myself.)

I am retired now. I have had a long hard career as a public school teacher, and I am working hard at being a good writer (professional or not) in retirement. I figure I deserve the odd easy win. Using my writing skills to tackle toxic ideas like prejudice and politics recently I was able to score some real points with some of my very conservative friends. I discovered by concentrating on the things they believe which I agree are very good things, I was able to make them consider a more liberal point of view, and not cling to Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts. I can even get them to laugh at things like saying “Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts” because it sounds funny even if you are only reading it silently in your head. It is an example of arguing towards an Easy Win, and I have become an addict.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as autobiography, goofiness, humor, philosophy, photo Paffooney, politics, sports

June 27, 2015 · 1:48 pm

Goofball Conspiracy and Nuthouse Nonsense

If you read my blog more than just taking the passing flyby notice of the odd Paffooney picture, you may have noticed the fact that I have many unfortunate mental quirks basted in a flavorful sauce of vivid imagination and fatally high intelligence. I am too smart to live, most of the time, and so my mental quirk about constantly searching conspiracy information is probably a self-destructive attempt to get hold of seriously secret information that will probably get me killed. But conspiracy theories are dangerous in more than just the paranoid delusional way that somebody like Alex Jones always perceives it.

Since I already mentioned the Infowars rage-clown, let me talk a little bit about how Alex Jones is a truly dangerous force crying about sinister suppositories of conspiracy constantly… I do not follow the man. His website takes all kinds of conspiracy-type information and puts it through the grinder of his manic-orangutan persona and turns it all into a giant salad of poop and nuts covered in puree of mystery meat. The truth is sometimes in there, but all mangled and bunged-up. For instance, he claims that the Sandy Hook shooting of all those innocent children and heroic teachers was a false-flag operation by the government. He claims that no children were actually killed… the event was staged… The government is simply trying to turn public opinion against gun owners and wants to threaten Second Amendment rights. Gene Rosen, one of the people who heroically helped students fleeing from the Newtown shooting, was harassed by phone calls calling him a “government stooge”. Jones’ true believers are not smart enough to leave things like this alone. They take it upon themselves to press the matter and rub salt in the wounds. In fact, some Alex-Jones-true-believer criminal types stole the memorial for Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski, two seven-year-olds who died at Sandy Hook Elementary, because they didn’t actually exist… they weren’t actual children… and then they phoned those children’s parents to taunt them… all in the name of Infowars’ version of the truth.

Here is the article I used as the source for my information; Why Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Harmless Fun

These facts about conspiracy theories and the people involved in them make me physically ill over the fact that I am also a believer in some very prominent conspiracy theories. But unlike Alex Jones, I don’t pull things out of a Pandora’s box of paranoia and mental cesspools. I try very hard to site my sources and choose them critically. I believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, not by a lone gunman, and probably not by Lee Harvey Oswald at all. There was a massive conspiracy. I have dug into the roots of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. I know who Jim Garrison is… who Guy Bannister and Cord Meyer are… I know about the mysterious history of questionable deaths of witnesses to the shooting and where the efforts at cover-up become apparent enough to know that somebody powerful was behind the whole thing. But, although I think I know who and why… there is not enough evidence to name names and try to prosecute anyone. Kennedy’s death was an important blow to the architecture of my childhood. It combined with other terrible things to take away any chance I may have had to grow up innocent and happy. Pursuing the truth will haunt me for the rest of my days.

And there are other places where I want to believe. How about aliens? I wrote a comic novel or two about that. There is a source of endless comedy and clowns.

But I am a believer here also. The thing about Roswell and the numerous flying saucer incidents that have grown into an entire conspiracy subculture is that so much of it can be traced back to ingenuous and credible witnesses. Many of them not only had nothing to gain from lying, many of them lost their reputations, their careers, and sometimes even their lives because they tried to tell us truthfully what they witnessed.

I promised to back that sort of assertion up, so one of the sources of my belief is the astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. Here is a video readily available on YouTube to let you hear it in his own words.

I apologize for dumping my strange obsessions on you simply to feed monsters lurking in my silly, questioning head. I have to make sense of the world for myself, and I do it here in writing. I pulled you in with the promise of humor, and while I may have salted this essay with a bit of that, I have basically tried to convince you of my pet conspiracies. Forgive me. For as long as I keep blogging (especially when I am trying to do it every day and need things to talk about) I will continue to try these same tricks. Watch me carefully. Hold me to a standard of truth that makes me better than Alex Jones.

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Filed under aliens, conspiracy theory, humor

Tagged as Alex Jones, aliens, belief, conspiracy theory, Edgar Mitchell, goofiness, humor, JFK, Nut house thinking

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

3 Comments

Filed under action figures, cartoons, humor

Tagged as action figures, adventure, Captain Action, cartoon, goofiness, humor, photo Paffooney, playing with dolls

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Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain

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