Tag Archives: humor

July 26, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Lazy Sunday with Disney

Mickey

So, today I am lazy…  I chose this old picture to re-post and bore you with for today’s Paffooney because I intend to take my kids to see Tomorrowland at the dollar movie theater in Plano.  (For those radical rednecks following my blog in order to get the necessary logistical information to assassinate me for the dual crimes of talking negatively about the Confederate flag and being a liberal, how do you know I didn’t change the name of the theater to protect the innocent the way I do with people?  And now might not be the best time to be exercising your open carry rights in a local movie theater either.) I have already seen the movie, and even reviewed it for my blog (Tomorrowland Review), but I wanted my kids to see it because I love it.  And they were in Florida vacationing on the beaches when I went to it.  I am passionate about sharing Disney movies I love with the people I love.  And while I am not passionate about giving more money to the Evil Corporate Empire headed by a famous talking mouse, I am still devoted to the original Fantasy Kingdom of Uncle Walt himself.  Sundays were always the day that we would make the 50 mile trek to Mason City to eat dinner with Grandma Beyer and watch The Wonderful World of Disney at 6:00 on her color TV.  That was a major thing in the 1960’s when there were no computer games or internet… no I-phones or Androids… just our imaginations and the fuel from Disney broadcasts “in living color” on NBC.

I have always had a full-color imagination, but Disney fueled so many of my childhood games and dreams and drawings that I can’t even begin to give it a proper acknowledgement.  So I posted a Disney episode here so that you can see what I am talking about in a full-color way… even though I know that Disney Corporation will soon be pulling this video from YouTube because they are as jealous of their intellectual property rights as Scrooge McDuck is jealous of his very first dime.  You may not know this, but Disney sued schools who used their copyrighted characters to decorate classrooms for learning, and sued teachers for using Disney films on movie day in the classroom.  They love every dime they can make with their products with an all-consuming, suffocating love.  Sharing is not a lesson you learn from modern Disney.

But that movie we are going to see is full of hope for the future in the face of all the greed, corruption, and disjointedness of the present.  Black and white days may well be straight ahead, but for this particular Sunday I am making the lazy choice of Disney and bright color.

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July 25, 2015 · 1:56 pm

Life is Surreal

I have told you before that I am a seriously committed surrealist.  Not in the sense of “committed to an institution” sort of committed, but seriously committed.  All cartoonists are by nature surrealists.  Bill Watterson created Calvin and Hobbes around the idea that a toy tiger can come to life in the evil imagination of a child.  Jim Davis created Garfield around a seriously self-absorbed and greedy talking cat.  Elsie Segar created Popeye about a one-eyed sailor who drank from a magic pool to gain invincibility and maintains it with iron-fortified cans of spinach.  To be a surrealist, you must put unlikely things together to make something fantastically super-real… so unreal it seems flawlessly real… er, how do you actually define surrealism without resorting to the dictionary definition about “juxtaposing severely mismatched items created with photo-realism”?

flying car

Surrealism is actually more real than realism.  If you simply take a photograph of your picture idea, a picture of a birthday cake or a picture of a clown or a picture of your favorite bicycle’s back wheel, you are not showing the reality of life.  You are only taking a photograph of a thing.  You cannot get more than the physical, objective reality of that thing captured on photographic paper… or in a digital image (I am learning not to be a dinosaur even though I am old).  Reality is so much more than that.  It is the feeling, the evocation, the nuance, the… stuffy stuff-ness of stuff… and an infinity of other things that make reality seem real.

Take for a moment the whole notion of flying cars.  I am trying to create a hero-worship colored-pencil Paffooney about Astroboy riding in a flying car.  I am still puzzling out how I am going to make this scene look like the car is flying by juxtaposing something.  (By “juxtaposing something”, I, of course, simply mean putting one thing next to another thing… but it is important for artists to use hundred-dollar art words wherever possible to prove that they are serious artists) (I, of course, am actually making fun of my own stuffy stuff-ness in that last parenthetic expression.) (Maybe juxtaposing parenthetic expressions with the phrase “I, of course,” in all three of them is a kind of surrealism?)

So, why am I taking on this silly topic right now?  Right now I am a working artist in the midst of making art.  I am not just a cartoonist… I also write novels… silly young adult novels about voodoo men and snow babies and incompetent alien invasions and fairies successfully invading a middle school in Iowa.   I am suffering from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor… so I could drop dead of a heart attack or stroke any second… I may not finish most of the artwork I am now working on… and I am blogging…   I need a lot more silly topics like this to fill 500 words a day for every day of 2015.  I am writing this down in a published blog on WordPress because I need to put all my thinking down in a crystallized form to preserve it in case the opportunity to do so suddenly ceases.  And all of that muddle of meaning is so surreal it hurts.  I could do a better job than this of summing up and pulling it all together in a tighter package, but it is all about the messy business of surrealism, after all… another way of saying… “It’s about life.” 

Voodoo Val cover7snowbabiesAGaltorr PrimexvxDonner n Silkie

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July 24, 2015 · 1:36 pm

How to Be a Farm Boy Without Really Trying (or Wanting To)

Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.

Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.

I was born in Mason City, Iowa (the original River City of Meredith Wilson’s Broadway musical, the Music Man).  But my parents didn’t hold with no big-city Ioway sort of life, so we eventually moved to my mother’s home town, Rowan, Iowa.  It was roughly about 275 people (if you count the squirrels… which a lot of the townsfolk were… qualified squirrels).  My two maternal uncles and my grand parents were busy maintaining the family farm there, and though I lived in town because Dad was an accountant for a seed corn company instead of the farmer he grew up as… I got more than my fair share of farming-type opportunity.  You know the stuff… shoveling pig poo… cow poo too…   I got to help feed the chickens (and get chased by roosters, and get pecked by hens when we checked their nests for eggs, and watch the rooster rodeos as revenge for all the chasings… because roosters don’t lay eggs and the only thing they are really good for in an egg farming setting is lopping their heads off, and watching them flop around like rodeo bulls with no heads for fifteen minutes until they finally figured out they were dead, then plucking ’em and watching Grandma Aldrich cook ’em).  I got to drive a tractor, although they didn’t trust me to do more than the simplest of tractor-driving jobs like pulling the hay rake.  I got to shovel chicken poo out of the hen house and out of the brooder house.  (Notice how a lot of the world of the lowly farm boy centers somehow on poo?)  It was a rustic rural life reminiscent of Norman Rockwell… although he depicted mostly town life and not as much of the fields and animal pens (and poo) that are central to Iowegian farm culture.

Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories... but also one of my farm boy friends.

Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories… but also one of my farm boy friends.

Growing up a farm boy has a few advantages to go along with the many drawbacks.  First off, you learn young where babies come from.  Piglets and calves and puppies and kittens are not born in secret.  And it doesn’t take much spying out on farm life to learn how those baby animals are made either.  There is ample opportunity to learn what you are not supposed to learn at a young age from farm girls too… but we were gentlemen… and extremely embarrassed by the fact that baby people are made in the same grisly, awful way that baby animals are out in the barn.

You also learn to be somewhat self-sufficient.  I learned how to tend a garden.  I learned how to fix a flat.  I learned how to repair a roof and build a rabbit pen.  Hammer, pliers, screwdriver, saw… I learned to use them all and make stuff.  Crude stuff, sure… smashed-finger-with-hammer-stuff too.  I made a bookshelf in shop class that had a bit of Michael blood built into it.  But I learned things that boys should know, and really don’t any more.

So, I guess I am claiming that because I am an Iowa boy… a farm boy… and despite my many short-comings and short-changings my life has been good and worthwhile… being a farm boy is good.  And one of the greatest shames of the modern world is this… there just aren’t many farm boys any more.

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July 23, 2015 · 10:29 pm

Coloring Part 3 (Mickey Watches TV and Colors)

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So, here is what it looks like now after watching The West Wing.  I love that show.  They do such a wonderful job of weaving story, theme, and relevant political issues together into a compelling series.  It is like the very best and most poetic of the novel series.  I have read two books of John Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga, and I think the TV show is better.  Of course, I realize the novels are quite old and fusty in temperment.

I now have all three main characters colored in.  Dr. Elefun on the left in his pinstripe shirt, Astro in the middle, and Mr. Pompous on the right in the back seat.  I have most of the cockpit of the flying car done, and must start pondering how to make it fly in this drawing.  I put a piece of cardboard under the drawing and that gives it a funky ribbed effect with the colored pencil rubbed over large areas.  I am enjoying this homemade coloring-book art project.  I have also added 173 words.

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July 23, 2015 · 6:36 pm

Coloring Part 2 (Mickey and His Crayons)

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Here’s coloring step #1.  I was watching Supernatural, the one where Sam and Dean go to Folsom Prison to fight an old ghost who is killing prisoners.  I could’ve done more, but the episode was good and drew my attention.  I had to do less than I planned because arthritis can make my coloring-knuckles hurt.  I also needed to write a much shorter post today because I had to spend considerable time taking people to the airport and to doctors’ offices.  Yes, it was my family and my in-laws… and yes, I did it gladly without complaint.  And though I did not get to put the usual purple-paisley spin on today’s paragraphs, and I only got a little over 100 words… I did get a post for today, and my post-for-every-day-of-2015 goal is still intact.

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July 22, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Coloring

This post is about Mickey and his crayons.  Little Mickey always loved to color.  He always had a cigar box full of Crayola crayons that he treasured and kept where he could always reach them whenever the art urge struck.  (Well, except for that one time on the drive home from Mason City, Iowa when he left them in the back window of the 1960 Ford Fairlane and the sunshine melted the entire box… tears there for about a week.)

coloring page

But Mickey has grown up and graduated to colored pencils.  Radical change, huh?  The need to color stuff is still there.  So, what do I do about it now that Mickey is a rational, responsible adult?  Well, you know there is a surge in the publishing industry of adult coloring books.  I think that means that Mickey is not alone in the fevered fetish to put crayons… er… colored pencils… er, some kind of color to black and white pictures with plenty of white space to fill in.  This is something I do while watching television.  Other adults do it during meetings, at school functions… during sex…  It is something that occupies your hands and a tiny portion of your brain and fills in all the blank spaces with color.  And Mickey has the added advantage of not having to buy adult coloring books because he can make his own black and white pictures to color.

So, the crayons are out… er, the colored pencils, anyway.  Mickey has this new picture he drew that honors his childhood cartoon hero, Astroboy.  He is going to fill it in with colors and patterns and two-or-three color blends and have a whee of a time while watching Supernatural or The West Wing or Dr. Who on Netflix.  It is a hoot.

And you may be wondering why the narrator of this silly Paffooney post always refers to himself in the third person as Mickey when talking about his art?  Well, no one actually calls me Mickey in real life.  Mickey is the cartoon character who lives within me and controls the part of my brain and personality that paffoonies out all kinds of art.  It is not complicated.  Mickey is definitely me.  But not everything I am is Mickey.  Mickey will always be that little boy with the cigar box of crayons coloring an original picture of lions eating that bully in third grade who called him a sissy for liking coloring books.

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July 21, 2015 · 3:15 pm

The Unique Joy of Having Redneck Friends

redneck friends

Yes, I live in Texas… And yes, I know a redneck or two… or 600.  But it is a unique joy that almost has to be shared to be believed.  They do not think like I do.  To them, I am just a commie, liberal, tree-huggin’ atheist with very bad hippie-hair.  But not all of them are automatically unkind to me for who I am… in fact, some of them are my friends.

Now, I have to say that, being a Texan is not an advantage for making friends with rednecks.  The home-grown brand of Texas Mexican-hating, gun-loving redneck are suspicious of me because I was a gol’ dang Texas edjumacator for so many years.  You gotta be suspicious of anybody who teaches, cuz they want to make our children smarter than us.  That’s a gol’ dang liberal trick from way-back-when.  Who knows what kind of communist liberal ideas a communist liberal college edjumacated idiot wants to plant in the heads of our kids?  Oh, and people who are smarter than us are all idiots, because they have all them new-fangled ideas and facts and some-such, but we got common sense.  That makes us better’n them no matter how gol’ dang smart they are… gol’ dang ’em!  (I can’t even write these words without hearing that South-Texas Winchuk-family-from-the-Brush-Country accent in my head.)  Texas rednecks are hard to warm up to unless they’ve already reached the stage of wanting to grill your ass on the Winchuk family barbecue pit.  Then it is entirely the wrong part of you that gets warmed up because they don’t accept that the word “ass” is the Biblical word for donkey.

The majority of my redneck friends are actually from Iowa.  They are the people that I grew up with who knew me as a boy.  They know I am intelligent all the way to insane levels of intelligence.  And while they also believe their common sense trumps my intelligence, they have a soft spot in their hearts for the old egghead Superchicken they used to know in high school.  They mistakenly believe I am still a Republican by nature and probably support Ted Cruz for President, because he seems like a good Christian conservative fellow.  They argue with me about why they have a right to keep their guns and refuse all background checks or gun registration or licensing of guns because, sure you have to have a license to drive a car and get married because those are seriously important and potentially dangerous things, but we are talking about guns here.  They argue about why I should not be offended by their Confederate flags and why I really ought to listen to Fox News because they don’t lie to you like the rest of the liberal media.  And how did they get to be so sunburned on their backs of their necks and all over their political ideologies?  There was a time I voted for Charles Grassley.  But Republican Iowa… the Iowa of Republican Governor Robert Ray in the 70’s and President Eisenhower supporters in the 50’s… has changed right along with the entire Republican party.  They are now goose-stepping along to the conservative beat of drums worthy of Hitler and Goebbels politically.  But they don’t identify with fascism.  They believe conservative means good and liberal means bad… so Hitler was a liberal, right?  They vote in a way that allows racist-fascists like Iowa Congressman Steve King to goosestep all around the country saying ignorant and destructive things, and think that General Eisenhower wouldn’t shoot King as if the Iowa Congressman were one of the enemy were he to hear some of King’s rants in favor of the military industrial complex that Ike himself warned us against.  You can’t convince them that they’re wrong.  They are louder than you, and that makes them right.  But I love them.  I grew up with them.  And I know they are too Iowa-stubborn to ever change their Iowegian minds in a direction that might actually make their lives better.  So bless them and take care of them for me, Lord, because they have common sense… which makes them better than me.

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July 20, 2015 · 12:44 pm

The Magic of Pez

In 1927 in the mythical land of Austria, where they seem to know how to make candy… a condensed form of peppermint was created in a lozenge form and then placed into a plastic toy dispenser.  The spells that were cast to make this magical item probably had nothing to do with toad warts and bat wings and eye of newt.  It has more to do with Mickey Mouse, then Katzenjammer Kids, and Marvel Super Heroes.  I have been caught under the spells of a PEZ fixation since childhood.  I remember begging for a Bugs Bunny dispenser in Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines when I was probably six years old.  My parents wisely said no hundreds of times when I was a kid.  Who wanted to spend a nickel on a penny’s worth of candy?  Just for a Pez dispenser.  If they ever caved to my begging, even once, I don’t still have the dispenser.  But now I am supposedly a responsible adult.  I have money.  Well, I used to have money before I spent it on collecting PEZ dispensers.  I can’t even eat the the stupid candy.  I have diabetes.  So I feed the candy to my kids and risk giving them diabetes.

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Here, my minion Stuart is showing off my Avengers collection.  It took him nearly thirty minutes to line these six dispensers up so that they were all standing at once.  The Hulk kept falling on him repeatedly.

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I am proud of my Toy Story collection.  I had to go to some lengths to find some of these (particularly Slinky Dog and Rex).

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Disney Princesses were easy.  Both at Walmart and Toys R Us they were all grouped together on the Disney hooks.

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The Muppets were also grouped together with the Disney Pez.

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Winnie the Pooh is Disney, too.  I got some of these on discount at Toys R Us.  I still need Piglet and Owl… and Christopher Robin.  I don’t have an unbroken Minnie Mouse either.  I had small children when I first started collecting these, and now I have fat children and a lot of empty Pez dispensers.

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My Star Wars collection seems to be evil Pez dispensers and Yoda.

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And poor Stuart is getting tired of standing up Pez dispensers, so I will end here without having shown you all of my PEZ dispensers.  Besides, I have reason to keep the newest dispensers a secret from my minion.

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July 19, 2015 · 2:24 pm

700!

I know this is incredibly hard to believe, but there are now 700 people who are computer literate enough to follow a blogger on WordPress who actually made the mistake of following my goofy little blog and failing to figure out how to un-follow someone.

Cool School Blue news

I believe, based on evidence in the comments I have received, that some people go beyond looking at my happy little Bob-Ross-and-Disney-crossbred-clone-artworks and actually read my posts.  And further, they seem to enjoy and be mostly amused by my witless attempts at humor and wit… at least the non-political and non-kook-apple-conspiracy-buff stuff.  How I ever managed to thoroughly snow and deceive that many literate people… I will probably never figure out.  But if you have waded through this lazy-post paragraph of purple paisley prose about own-horn tooting… thank you so much for reading my words.

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July 18, 2015 · 3:53 pm

My Own Minions

You know by now, if you have been reading my posts and not just looking at the pictures, that I am a doll… er, action figure… er, toy collector with a raging case of hoarding disorder.  So, after finishing the My Little Pony/ Equestria Girl collection, I went on to work on a Monster High collection.  I still need at least Draculaura to complete that set.  But I stumbled into Minions.  I couldn’t resist.  “Oh toot jour, Pappagaina!” Stuart said from the shelf.  So I had to buy him.

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You know how dangerous it is to have Minions.  Just look in the background at what happened to the Red Baron when I bought Stuart.  Minions can have a bad effect, as well as a funny effect, on the outcome of an evil genius’ evil plots for doing evil-ness.  So I started thinking of the dangers.  The Minions only cost $8.85 apiece… but of the three main movie Minions, Stuart, Kevin, and Bob… there were already at least three different versions of each.  Besides the “bored silly” set, there was a pirate set and a beachwear set.  And what if they start issuing all the other minions?  You know, Dave and Charlie and all the boys?   I could be financially doomed by my need to collect.

And what am I investing in?  Here is a close-up of Stuart after taking him out of his mint-in-box to play with him, posing in the cardboard castle atop Mount Blue Blankie where I have built my secret evil genius’ lair.  Please don’t tell any would-be heroes or rival despicable villains that my lair is located in my bedroom.

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And it turns out that Stuart is fully pose-able.   That is going to be even harder to resist.  Let me prove he is pose-able.

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And after I made the horrific mistake of buying fully pose-able Stuart, I discovered he was not my only Minion.  I also found out today that my novel Snow Babies has been assigned to an editor finally.  Jessie Cornwell of PDMI LLC was assigned to edit my novel back on June 28th.  Of course, I didn’t know about it until today because the email informing me went straight to the spam folder in typical Minion fashion.  So now I feel fully ready to face the evil world and try to steal the moon, while actually accomplishing something completely different that I don’t expect.   That’s what having Minions means.

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