Tag Archives: goofiness

January 9, 2015 · 5:30 pm

Humor Me (Humor? Me?)

I am wondering now if it is appropriate to call what I do in my writing and my cartooning humor. I tell stories. As a school teacher in both junior high and high school, I told stories in class and made kids laugh. (Okay, I admit, kids that age mixed with hormones, experiments with sex and alcohol, and under-developed frontal lobes in their brains will laugh at practically anything. I know a teacher who crosses her eyes when talking to kids about their mistakes, and she has them rolling on the floor with giggle-fits. This is now my fourth longest parenthetic expression, also known as an aside. They would probably laugh about that.) But is it fair to call that humor?

I write stories filled with feel-good crap. I’m as likely to make you cry as I am to make you laugh. (At least, that is my intention. You may laugh at things I intend to make the reader sad, and be sad or nauseated by the things I think are funny.) How does that fit with the definition of humor on the internet? I get a big kick out of some humor blogs I found on WordPress. http://https://irtfyblog.wordpress.com/ I Refuse to Follow Your Blog is a master complainer. He disses and crabs and totally kicks butt about a number of things. (Though I must admit I used his list of un-funny humor blogs to follow a few more that give me chuckles… What can I say? I’m a contrarian at times. How can you teach seventh graders and not be?) http://https://buffalotompeabodyblog.wordpress.com/ Buffalo Tom Peabody not only rocks my rib-cage with his wonderful photo-shopped self-cat-portraits, he makes a really guffaw-inducing set of videos on YouTube. http://http://bensbitterblog.com/ Ben’s Bitter Blog is blithely bitter and better at bitter than any bitter blogger blogging bitterly that I have ever found. Ben blogs bitter better than other bitter bloggers who blog with bitter butter… (All right! I know. Alliteration by itself isn’t funny. It took me tons of tempestuous years teaching to learn that.) http://http://dougdoeslife.com/ Doug Does Life does a blog with a monkey that you have to see to believe. They all make me laugh and they all seem to know better than I how to do the humor shtick. So how dare I call what I write humor?

After the Charlie Hebdo incident, (which you may have noticed has seriously bruised my cartoony little heart) I have to take humor and comedy in a whole new, more serious light. Ralph Bakshi, a master cartoonist whom I adore, says that if your cartoons don’t piss somebody off and make some enemies, then you’re doing it wrong, and you have to stop calling yourself a cartoonist. He says you are just an illustrator… in my case a children’s illustrator. Do I need to be insulted by that? Am I not a humorist? Am I not funny? I will tag this lunatic post as humor even though it’s not funny… well, not funny funny… just funny odd. Will I get in trouble with the cartoon gods for doing it? (Wait a minute… cartoon gods? Are they gonna zap me with a cartoon fun-bolt or hit me in the face with a pie or something? If they send terrorists, it may elevate my status.) So I am asking a whole lot of questions and not answering them myself like usual. After all, who decides if this is humor? Not I.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as action figures, drawing, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pencil drawing, philosophy, self-reflection

January 5, 2015 · 11:31 pm

Nutsy Noodle is Playing with Dolls Again

Today, while buying food for the dog, I bought another toy. I was going through the bargain shelves at Wal-Mart where the toys that didn’t fully survive the Christmas rush were being sold off at bargain prices. Barbie dolls and girly stuff get opened and trashed far more often than action figures, so that’s exactly what I found. (Okay, not exactly… but it is girly stuff… and it’s enough Barbie-like that I can buy it for the Barbie shelf… unless I have to start calling myself a Brony… oh, shudder… not that!)

Confession time: It is Rainbow Dash, an Equestria Girl doll. (I know, I know… Mutant My Little Pony critters that have been somehow radioactively transformed into a junior-high-type girl-thing/mutant horror. Complete with radioactively enhanced cuteness genes.) And it was not mint in package (the sacred goal of collectors), it was trash that Wal-Mart sold to me instead of throwing her in the garbage. There was damage to the box as some goofy little girl (or even more worrisome, little boy) had tried to pull out pieces to steal. Unlike Pinkie Pie, though, Rainbow still had all her limbs and accessories. Here she is with a relatively unscathed back of the package.

The second picture is for dramatic lighting effects.

She also has all three attachable/detachable pony tails… but no actual way to attach them to her derriere like a proper pony.

I realize I haven’t yet solved for you the real mystery; “Why did Nutsy Noodle spend money on a garbage-pail, throwaway toy that his beloved daughter, the Princess, is now too old to play with and doesn’t even want?” Well, I collect dolls, you see, and a very valuable part of this purchase was the salvage that laymen (a term that here means “sane people” that don’t buy unwanted toys) don’t realize are valuable.

These little clear-plastic bands can be used in a multitude of ways when displaying the “action figure” in question. They hold plastic phasers in otherwise klunky doll hands. Accessories are held in place. My forty-year-old Captain Action Superman needs them to hold the split in his red, blue, and gold tights together, thus saving his privates (which here means exposed joints) from freezing off. To buy these things separately would cost more than Rainbow Dash cost to rescue from the trash. I salvaged ten of them from her package.

Besides. I had a strange urge to play with her.

No! No! No! It’s not what you are thinking. Besides, you can clearly see that her body is molded with built-in underwear! It’s just that, um, with dolls like this (even G.I. Joe’s when you’re talking twelve-inch), part of the fun is changing their wardrobe. I had to see if I was wrong about the clothing from Skipper and Stacie (Barbie’s Sisters) fitting. And they do.

Isn’t that precious? She flew over to sit on my hat. Of course, Stacie’s friend, Janet, didn’t think so. She is mad and threatens to beat the crap out of Rainbow if she doesn’t get her clothes back. No way will she ever trade for that horrible rainbow-stew-thing of a dress that RD came in. And besides, that dress is only two pieces, and easily copied in some color far less vomit-inducing. Of course, my sewing machine is still quite broken.

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Filed under doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as action figures, Brony-ness, collectibles, doll collecting, goofiness, humor, it better be humor!, photo Paffooney

January 5, 2015 · 2:25 am

Dippy Duck Dreams

The hardest dream-to-reality connection to make is my duck nightmare. I know I bummed the world out yesterday with unfunny dream deliberations. But in this post I explore the lighter side of nightmares. It all began when I was about four years old and we went to the Deer Park Zoo in Mason City, Iowa.

Truthfully, when you look at it from the proper point of view, at four you are small and all animals look like monsters. The three ostriches they had in a chicken-wire pen were at least several hundred feet tall. The deer were huge with giant Bambi-eyes. I was little and still very much in a touchy-feely stage of life. And the goose-pen had a large hole in the front, just large enough for a goose head and neck to fit through at high speed. That is exactly what happened when one wide-eyed nerd-child wandered close enough to give a gander a premium chance at a beak-first goosing. Whether my pants had to be changed immediately afterwards is something I have yet to work up the courage to ask my parents about. No rush. They are only in their eighties now.

Anyway, I was left with a recurring nightmare, always involving a duck or very similar waterfowl with big, massive, white dentures. Yes, you heard right, a duck with teeth. It’s all right for you to laugh now, but I woke up in cold sweat every single time I had that nightmare. Right from the moment when I realize that the evil little duck-mind has fixed its wishes on taking a nice, big bite, to the split second where the toothy duck-head zips towards me, I am gripped with total existential terror. And it wakes me up.

So what does this doozy of a dream mean? Do dreams have to have a meaning? All two-hundred-plus times? (I lost count, so sue me.) I do believe, however that it must be some kind of anxiety dream. And the last occurrence was now four years ago, so the possibility of duck-dream remission is very real to me.

If my last post chilled your innards, then hopefully this one lit them up with laughing gas.

This closing Paffooney from yesterday is entitled “The Leap of Faith”. I’m not sure why that is important to know, but it is.

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Filed under dreaming, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, colored marker, dreams, Go ahead! Laugh at me already!, goofiness, humor, nightmares, paffooney

January 3, 2015 · 5:17 pm

An Overdose of Cheerios

I was trying to think what I would post today, and coming up blank. I have a pathological need to keep posting here, especially since my brain is currently switched to editing mode for my novel The Magical Miss Morgan. One can’t keep a sacred oath to write every day if there is no writing going on other than editing (which doesn’t count because no new creative thoughts are being generated and the fertile spore-producing areas of my mental storage shed may grow sterile for want of fresh garbage being piled there). So I went looking through my file of photo Paffoonies to find something I haven’t already inflicted on potential readers to the point of making them gag and doing something sensible like shutting off their computer for a while. Unfortunately all I found was this potential gag-inducing library photo of the time the Mighty Thor got drunk on overripe Cheerios and milk and decided to commit cave-man love on beautiful topless mermaid Barbie. (I know… topless and in the possession of a fifty-eight-year-old man… kinda creepy… but honest, I am intending to make a shell bra with real sea shells and just haven’t gotten around to it yet, though I have the shells selected and the material cut. My sewing machine is broken. Yeah, that’s my story… and I’m sticking to it). (Goodness! That last parenthetic expression is the fifteenth longest one I have ever written!)

The picture was taken moments before the hammer came down to bonk her lightly on the brain. Fortunately, this is Barbie we are talking about, and the excess air inside her plastic head probably saved her from fatal brain damage. She was one of a half dozen naked Barbie dolls I rescued from Goodwill. She is grateful for any attention she gets nowadays and responded to Thor’s drunken love tap by falling madly in love with him. She chased the god of thunder all around the library that day to give him a big, fat mermaid smooch on the lips (or is that “big, fat, mermaid smooch on the lips”? …because she’s not a fat mermaid). She would have caught him too, but the mermaid fin-dress that I also found in a resale bargain store caused her to have to hop, and my messy library has so many un-filed books on the floor that she kept tripping and falling flat on her… face (yes, the face would’ve obviously hit the floor first, right?).

A week later I caught him obviously thinking about doing it again.

She likes to sunbathe in front of the Cheerios box that holds up one of the shelves on a nearby book case where the nails are coming loose. (I have fixed it since the picture was taken and used the Cheerios box full of sand to hold up something else entirely.)

I bought a mind-reading app for my digital camera and applied it to this photo because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he might be thinking about doing it again. I threw the moldy old discarded bowl of Cheerios away because… well, you know that spoiled milk smell, right? So, it couldn’t be that again. Anyway, here’s the processed picture because this is the end of this daily post. I have passed 550 words already.

6 Comments

Filed under Barbie and Ken, doll collecting, humor, messy library, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Barbie mermaid, drawing a blank, goofiness, humor, photo Paffooney, Thor

December 26, 2014 · 4:07 pm

Toy Tiger

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright!

I see thee holy in the night,

This for that, and that for this,

Shoot the gun,

And never miss!

A sillier poem there will never be,

And Tyger! Tyger! this poem’s for thee.

The first stuffed toy I ever owned was a tiger. It was almost as big as me the first time I remember it. I got it from Mom and Dad sometime before I started remembering things in my life.

When my oldest son was born I bought him a stuffed toy tiger. It was bigger than he was at the start. I don’t know why, but now that my son is a Marine in dress blues, looking spiffy and military trained… It just seemed important to remember a toy tiger.

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Filed under goofiness, humor, Paffooney, poetry

Tagged as drawing, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pen and ink, really old memories from a really old goof, silly poem, tiger

December 22, 2014 · 4:34 am

How to Rip Your Own Heart Out in Three Easy Steps

Okay, I do admit that the title is entirely misleading and wholly inaccurate, but it got you wondering… Didn’t it? I have apparently developed tachycardia, a condition where the heart races and beats like a jackhammer plugged into a nuclear reactor. It is not fatal in itself, though it may lead to heart attack or stroke which are definitely in the fatal category. Yesterday I did two things about that little heart condition, one which hopefully helped, and another which definitely hurt. So, let me tell you a fairy tale.

No kidding. It is a fairy tale about novel writing, feeling like a murderer, and cardiologists.

Step one… I went to the cardiologist in Plano, Texas. I have had a heart monitor taped to my chest for three weeks. I have to push the record button three or four times every night. The tachycardia is a night-stalker, hitting me while I’m asleep. Then it shakes me awake, makes me sweat and fret and try to decide if I need to go to the emergency room or not. I lie awake worrying just long enough that when I awake in the morning I am a sleepless, colorless zombie that feels the need to stay in bed all day, but can’t for fear the heart problem will attack again at any moment. The heart monitor itself likes to complain and make a nasty beeping noise to irritate my sleep-deprived brain, and the places where the electrodes are taped to my chest are so itchy from three weeks of sticky plastic thingies stuck to them that I want to claw my own skin off.

At the cardiologists office, I had a sonogram done. They used sound waves to map out what my beating heart looked like and how the blood was flowing through it in daylight. The objective was to make certain that there were no holes or lumps or discarded candy wrappers in there that would require surgery. So I got probed with a hot sonogram beeper offset with cold contact gel, and wouldn’t you know it… I didn’t even get to take the heart monitor off for the procedure. No rest for wicked, itchy chests. But on the up side, I did not at any point notice the technician shaking her head sadly or calling for an ambulance. There were no immediate negative results to the testing. So now I get to fight tachycardia some more without knowing anything more about my condition until the doctor explains on December 30th.

Step Two… I am using my down time to continue writing my NaNoWriMo novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, which I didn’t finish in November. It is a story about a sixth grade English teacher based on personal experience, when I taught sixth graders myself and was a woman… wait, that can’t be right. Is it possible that tachycardia effects the brain after a while? The novel has a number of characters who are fairies. (I did say this was based on real life experiences, didn’t I?) The fairies get involved with an irate parent, trying to help the teacher who has befriended them, and I am at the critical part of the plot where a crisis point is reached and a murder is about to take place. (The usual for parent-teacher conferences.) Anyway the conflict comes to a boil, and though the murder is prevented, a fairy is killed in the prevention of it. And it isn’t just any fairy. It is my favorite among all the foofy little buggers. I wrote that part on Monday and edit it into permanence yesterday.

Step Three… I spent half an hour crying my eyes out. I know it is not normal to be so affected by the unexpected death of a beloved character, but I can blame it on the tachycardia. It kept me awake so much, and I am such a sleep-deprived zombie-writer that it is possible that I dreamed the whole thing. I may discover when I reread it for a fourth time that the fairy character didn’t die after all. Except… no, wait… that’s not what it says. I need to finish this up now so that I can go on another half-hour crying jag. I have no one to blame except myself. And I can’t even write the character back to life (though I may try) because the scene is just too good the way it is. Oh, well… hopefully soon the cardiologist can give me a magic pill to make everything all better.

Bird is the Word

Birds are always talking,

And birds are always squawking,

And they are using bird-words,

These are the words I heard.

Twitter-pated – this word comes from the owl in Bambi and means not being able to think straight because you’re in love.

Aviary – is a great big bird house, big enough to fly around in

Feather-dusted – to you and me it means clean, to a bird it means the feathers are dirty

Bird-brained – don’t be insulted if a bird calls you this. It is a compliment.

Fume-fluttered – you gotta fly and get away from that bad smell.

Wing-walking – it’s how you get from here to there if you’re a bird… Duh!

Wakka wakka – it’s those dang ducks again, always telling jokes!

Egg-zactly – as precise and perfect as an egg.

Coo-coo-karoo – that stupid rooster wants us to get up again at daybreak. It’s like a bird can never sleep in!

Clucker butter – Can you believe that KFC place? Butter on improperly cremated dead chickens (ah, well, they were only chickens after all).

Now that you have less than one per cent of the bird vocabulary, please don’t try to tell me what they are saying. I really don’t want to know!

For the Birds

If you have looked carefully at my blog and tried to make sense of it, you have probably noticed that sense is hard to make. It certainly makes no cents. Though, I am told by my writer and publisher friends that a blog is critical to marketing books, I really and truly have not figured out how. I am guessing here, but successful authors must do what they love in their blogs and hope that leads people to think seriously about buying a book with their name on it. But will people ever want the frabjous daylight that makes them say “caloo calay!” from my burbling books filled with nonsense and purple paisley prose?

Maybe I need to clarify what I write about. Hmm, how do I do that? I end up with such a plethora of scattered categories… err cattered scattergories… err, no… right the first time, that no one can make a mental framework that accurately describes my work… including me. But I have to try… even if it kills me… but if it wants to kill me, I already have six incurable diseases (maybe seven) and am a cancer survivor, so it will have to take a number and get in line.

The bird-word post I did yesterday is what I call humor. It is pun-ish if not punny, but possibly pun-ishable. I like word play and word pictures and rhymes and alliteration, all the stuff that my serious writer friends warn me against. Mark Twain, whom I actually deeply respect, says “When considering the adjective, cut it out!” But I find myself unable to do that. I have to spread the adjectives on two or three layers thick like butter, jam, and peanut butter. I never use one word for something when I can use seven. So part of the style that is mine is excessively goopy phraseology. I guess I write like I talk and, since it’s humor, I actively try to talk funny.

What else can I say is characteristic of what I do? Well I was a teacher for three hundred and ten years (possibly divisible by ten). That may have impacted the way I write and what I write about. I am pigeon-holed in the Young Adult novel genre because I write mainly about school age, particularly junior-high-aged, kids… Their problems with corresponding creative solutions, and the kind of things that make them laugh (there’s a lot of pigeons in that hole!). Education issues are important to me. That is probably the key reason that the novel I am working on today, The Magical Miss Morgan, is about a classroom teacher. I hope that doesn’t limit me to an entirely kid-audience, because adults have the book-buying money, and not every adult gives in to a kid whining about wanting to buy a book (because most kids don’t and there are adults who don’t have kids). (Besides, says another aside, kids is really little goats who eat books before they read them).

Finally, I am a student of art. I search for it, chew on it, digest it, rearrange it in my heart and guts, and spit it back out with colored pencils (Dang! I must be a kid too, at least at heart). In my blog I have written about and shared with you Norman Rockwell, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Frederick Remington. I know of a few more like George Herriman, Cliff Sterrit, and E.C, Segar that I am compelled to write about too. Oh, and N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Milt Caniff. Uh-oh, better stop before another list comes on. So, in conclusion, this whole mess will never really be concluded and since it’s convoluted, it will get all mangled up and end up back where it began. I have tried to make sense out of everything, but instead I’ve just made soup… or if I take out the broth… stew!

Magical Moments

There comes a time, a moment of truth, in which a decision has to be made, a problem has to be solved. In the teaching business those moments can occur once per hour, or fifty times in the space of two minutes. You can bat 900, hit nine out of every ten out of the park, and still come out on the losing end. More often than not, you lose. You continue to get it wrong, and you feel totally defeated at the end of the day. No World Series of education for you. Sorry about that. But once in a while, you do not fail. You say the perfect thing to diffuse the situation. You think of the perfect example that, once explained, turns on every light bulb in every head in the room. That is magic. That is the reason you teach.

I am writing a novel right now, The Magical Miss Morgan, about a teacher. Without making a mystery about it, the teacher in the story, Miss Francis Morgan, is really me. I am basing this story on things that actually happened to me. Now, before the yelling and the accusations start, I will confess that I realize I am a male teacher and the main character is female, and there are things a female teacher does all the time, like hugging a student, that a male teacher can never do. And I must also confess that this teacher I am writing about loves all her students, even the ugly and stupid ones, and that is probably only true for teachers who really are magical. I further realize that the fairies in the story, just like the ones in Peter Pan, are not real outside of the story being told. I’m not insane… well, okay, I’m a teacher… a middle school teacher… so let’s just say I am not completely insane.

But there is real magic. It happens in that moment when you desperately need that perfect solution to pop out of the magic hat like a white rabbit and say, “Howdy!” Because if you have the courage to reach into that hat and pull the rabbit out, more often than not, it is there. And it doesn’t end when the teaching ends. I hit the wall with this novel at about 30,000 words. I wrote myself into a corner with no way out. But then I realized that I already had the answer. I am basing this story on what really happened. So, all I have to do is turn me into her and sprinkle some fairy dust, and voila! the rest of the novel is already plotted and as good as written. Everything fell into place in only a moment.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as colored pencil, goofiness, humor, magic, novel writing, Paffoonies, teaching, YOUNG ADULT WRITING

December 8, 2014 · 9:10 pm

The Rest of the Star Trek Collection

I am guilty of owning more dolls in my Star Trek collection. Here is the Next Generation set.

You may notice that I still have work to do. No Commander Data… No Geordy La Forge… No Wesley Crusher (if such a doll even exists)… These figures are all dressed for a TNG movie that practically nobody liked.

I also have two Star Trek Voyager dolls, Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine.

It is probable that no other figures from this series exist in twelve inches.

Captain Sisko is the only figure I have ever seen for Deep Space Nine, though I have a suspicion that more exist, at least the female crew members, and maybe that wonderfully devious Ferengi Quark.

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Filed under collecting, doll collecting, goofiness, humor

Tagged as action figures, collectibles, doll collecting, geekiness, goofiness, humor, obsession, photo Paffooney, Star Trek

Tag Archives: goofiness

Humor Me (Humor? Me?)

Nutsy Noodle is Playing with Dolls Again

Dippy Duck Dreams

An Overdose of Cheerios

Toy Tiger

How to Rip Your Own Heart Out in Three Easy Steps

Bird is the Word

For the Birds

Magical Moments

The Rest of the Star Trek Collection

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