Tag Archives: humor

June 26, 2015 · 2:52 pm

The Flower Wagon

My life has more-or-less become an exercise in making the best out of a bad situation.  Believe me, I know yours is probably the same and I am bemoaning the common condition of us all, but we do what we do and it doesn’t get easier just because we do it daily.  So today’s post is about the flower wagon.

20150531_193228Now, if you are truly fool enough to read a lot of my purple paisley prose in this basically boring blog, you may have seen references to the flower wagon before this.

Last year, doing yard work, I had an inordinate amount of crushed live-oak acorns from the street near where we park our cars.  Our oaks were excessively reproductive that year because, I guess they found the weather unusually sexy or something.  So I had copious amounts of crushed acorn.  In fact, before I got it all scooped up, a little bit of rain had turned it into the acorn-equivalent of peanut butter… goopy, sticky, and unpleasant to touch.  Most of it went into the compost bin, but the last little-red-wagon load got left in the little red wagon to get snowed on, frozen solid, and snowed on again.

We love that little red wagon.  When the kids were small, we used it to pull them around SeaWorld in San Antonio and AstroWorld in Houston.  It went all over the country with us on summer vacation, and was the Princess’ personal coach and four (provided she allowed the cooler full of ice for water, soda, and fruit to share the ride).

So, the neglected little red wagon turned into a rust-bucket lawn ornament this spring, and it was busy growing a bumper crop of weeds in all that acorn peanut butter… fertile stuff, acorn peanut butter.  So I decided to plant flowers.  I got some Walmart zinnias and some wildflowers, spending about a dollar fifty all told, pulled the weeds by hand, and sprinkled flower seeds all over it.  We are all sad to see the lonely little wagon deteriorating and being demoted to lawn ornament status, but it seemed like we had a possibility of new life within reach.

This spring, with the monsoon rains Texas apparently borrowed from Asia and the Philippines, I did not even have to bother myself with watering.  If anything, there was too much water… flash-flood-warning-daily sort of too much water.  So I have been patient… watching and weeding.  And then…

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20150626_084717The first blossom bloomed and turned color yesterday while we were picking up number one son from the airport.  Old things can produce new things.  Decay and age lead to blossoming new life.  There has to be a balance between happy and sad.  I am trying like heck to be a humorist, but I have learned the lesson that you can’t be laughing all the time.  But here is proof that after the rains come the flowers.  And I am laughing now.

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June 25, 2015 · 1:36 pm

Texas Airport Adventures

20150625_114933Ah, Love Field, the scent of baking asphalt heavy in the air… even indoors where it is nominally air-conditioned (the word nominally here meaning “in name only”), people rushing about like lemmings and hamsters (though not the cool hamster-people of the recent car commercials), and air-port workers moving at the speed of airport business transactions (slower than molasses outdoors at Christmas during a blizzard).

Number One Son, the Marine home on leave, gave me the heads-up when he texted me at 7:45 am that he would be arriving “around 11:00”.  I knew he would be flying in… but it didn’t occur to him to give me any details.  What is the flight number?  What airline are you on?  What airport?  Remember, there are two big ones in the DFW area.  So, like all men who don’t know which end their own heads are attached to, I asked my wife.  “Love Field” was all she said.

Now, this is partially good news.  Love Field is small… compared to DFW.   I could most probably catch him at the cattle-gate where all the passengers come out of the concourse through the same door.  If you look carefully at the picture, you may spot the reflection of my be-hatted old head forlornly watching the ramp up to the cattle-gate.

20150411_130035My number-two son, Henry, and my daughter, the Princess, were both waiting with me.  While we were waiting, they were bickering again.

“Jeez, Princess, if you bathed more often, you would smell a lot better than you do now!”

“I don’t stink any worse than you do, Henry!” she retorted, “And I bathe as often as you do.”

“I just had a shower last night!”

“Well, so did I.  I took a shower right after you!”

Before the blows and the beatings began I said in a grouchy voice, “Can we not have a stink-fight right now, please?”  The air-conditioner in the car only works poorly and part of the time… We also had to park out in the sun on the deck of the airport parking garage.  And it was a long walk in the sunshine of hot-old Texas to get where we were at that moment.  All of that pretty much was the reason for verbal combat and aroma follies.

“Where is he, Dad?” asked the Princess who complains right up to my patience-capacity red-line.  “Shouldn’t he be here already?”

“I texted him, but I don’t think that Houston flight at 11:00 was actually the one that he is on.”

Suddenly I got the “Where are you?” text from number one son.

“We’re at the exit waiting.”

“At DFW?”

“Oh, gawd no!” I said.  I started to hustle the two stink-warriors back towards the distant car.  “We’re at loVe FIeld.”  I hate when my finger is too big to hit the right key while texting and not simultaneously hit another key as well.

“Oh, hang on.”

I held my breath.

“That may be the one I’m at,” said the next text.

So, I halted the rushed exodus towards the $6 parking fee and the mad rush across the metroplex to the other airport.  I was still holding my breath a bit… and turning slightly purple when…  There he was with his guitar case, Marine backpack, and a rather silly grin on his face.

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June 24, 2015 · 2:06 pm

Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain

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

CAB38

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

CABx39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CABx46

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June 23, 2015 · 3:26 pm

Writing in My Head

Okay, I am justifying and vilifying today because yesterday I didn’t write 500 words… the first time in 2015… not in my blog, not in my novels, not even counting text messages.   I had extenuating circumstances.  I went to a movie, Disney’s Inside Out which made me laugh and made me cry like any good Disney/Pixar movie always does.  Then I got a message that one of my children went into the hospital in Florida.  And I have been down and out with a bad back, so I missed the Florida trip all together… (the child is fine, by the way, thanks for asking that in your head while reading this).  But all of that stuff and nonsense is really just an excuse for a dastardly act of cowardice.  I didn’t write a full 500 words.  How dare I?   This writing thing has now become my sacred mission from God.  After all, I retired from the first sacred mission because poor health was God’s way of telling me, “MICKEY, IT IS TIME TO BE A WRITER.”  Really!  He talks to me in all capital letters just like that.

girl n bird

And you have probably noticed already that I am doing stream-of-consciousness writing for today’s post, a useful form of pre-writing that is known for producing lots of garbage to go along with the gemstones-in-the-rough.  My mind is still boiling with emotional turmoil and upset and less-than-critical thinking…  The reasons for that are understandable… I am guessing. …  But I think the point is (if points are possible in this no-win game I am playing, and losing, called Old Age) that I am never really not writing.  I have two novels in rough drafting at the same time.  Both When the Captain Came Calling and Stardusters and Space Lizards are both on my task bar at this very moment.  I add new inspirations for the next canto every time a new light bulb clicks on over my little furry head.

20150216_152544 Happy Doodle
swallowtail

So the ideas are already there for several pieces of writing that I simply have to sit down and knock out on the keyboard.  Potentially I have way more than a mere 500 words waiting to blossom and unfold like flowers into paragraphs of purple paisley prose.  (Since this is as close as a writer can come to showing how he actually thinks, I guess I have also answered a question that many who try to read my writing have been wondering about… I really do think in loopty-loops with streamers attached and a knot in the tail.)  Writing is not something I can ever be accused of not doing because writing and thinking are the same thing… the only difference between the 500 per day and the leventie-leven trillion in my head is your access to it in a form that is written down and edited (well, at least re-read for typos… I kinda like leaving the stuff and nonsense… and moldy bananas… in the final product because I can pass that particular form of goofiness off as humor).  (And, yes, it just helped me pass 500 for today.)

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June 22, 2015 · 3:04 pm

Another Dadgum Post About Pirates

This one isn’t about Bank of America or Aetna… specifically.  It is just me adding to my cartoon vault and the story of the pirates in Fantastica.20141211_153054

This is the second panel of the story that can be found at The Pirate Vault

BT

And panels three and four are all I have gotten done on this comic so far.

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This nonsense will all be continued in upcoming days, and the whole thing is in my cartoon vault.

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June 21, 2015 · 3:14 pm

Googling for Paffoonies

Now that I have alienated so many of my conservative friends by doing the horrible political act of posting a post yesterday in which I took the terrifyingly earth-shaking step of coming out against racism, I must take it back down a notch and just be silly again.  I discovered yesterday that most of my family members whose opinions I take seriously, agree with me.  In fact, some of them are more radically liberal than I am.  (Of course that goes without saying… I did, after all, defend Richard Nixon as being a good president in 1973… just before he resigned in Watergate disgrace.  My political insights are always so keen.)  There are also people whose intelligence I respect who don’t quite want to condemn what happened in South Carolina as racial terrorism  They want to call it a failure of mental health care, the way Jeb Bush did on the campaign trail.  Or they want to think of it as an “accident” that is being seized on by lib-tards to take away people’s God-given second amendment rights the way Rick Perry did (the only candidate for President on record for declaring that he is running while under an indictment for abuse of power as a governor of Texas).  And I suppose it is their right to have their own opinions and feel the way they want to feel about it.  Maybe they really don’t know any racist people anywhere… because they don’t read minds… not because they’re afraid to admit that racism exists.  But I argued yesterday that everyone should love everyone else no matter what language they spoke or what color their skin was.  Apparently that idea is too liberal for some of the people I know.

goopafootootoo

But that was yesterday.  Today I am in recovery from political thinking and the philosophical brain-bruising I always seem to take whenever I make any of my disgustingly liberal lunatic statements.  Today I just want to celebrate the fact that I have published a lot of artwork on the internet where a lot of people seem to like it.

If you try “Googling Paffooney” you want to do the thing suggested in my Paffooney ad for all Paffoonies (pictured above) and specify that you are looking for “Beyer Paffooney”.  Google-tastic algorithms help Google figure out what the heck you actually mean by googling a silly, made-up word like “Paffooney” when you add my last name to it.  Somehow that clarifies that you don’t want the pictures from Facebook posts belonging to women named Valerie, teacher websites that may be only vaguely connected to the fact that I am a former school teacher, and foolish enough to be honest about it in my posts, and artwork by any and all painters and cartoonists on the web.  Adding my name somehow clears up for Google the fact that the artwork that I continually label and categorize as “Paffooney” is not that weird variety of other things.  I am, after all, the only idiot on the web using that silly magic made-up word… at least that I know of.  So I hope you give a look and try to like my Paffoonies, even though they are probably just as goofy and mixed-up as my politics.  Here is a link to make it entirely too easy for you to do this weird thing;

Google Paffooney Now

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June 19, 2015 · 4:43 pm

Tomorrowland

I am compelled to review this movie precisely because it has been a box-office disappointment and has been criticized for not being the best work director Brad Bird is capable of.  Other reviewers have said the set-up for the trip to the other dimension was wasted time and the plot is too slow…. they didn’t make enough use of the marvelous “other world” that they labored so intensively to create.  I think the main reason people are disappointed in this movie, which I saw for the first time by my lonesome self at the metroplex in Lewisville, Texas, is that people have either forgotten how to watch intelligent movies, or they have simply never learned.

Movie character poster

Movie character poster

The thing I loved most about this beautiful, inspirational movie, is its basic intelligence and the wonderful way Disney/Pixar’s Brad Bird weaves complex themes of past, present, and future together into a carefully patterned web of everything that’s right about good science fiction.  Good science fiction tells you, through basic scientific understanding, what the possibilities are.   It scares you with horrible possible futures that make all too much sense with things like climate change, nuclear warfare, and a society that embraces stupidity and entrenched habits that can lead us like lambs to the slaughter.  It also shows you how technology and the willingness to risk it all on good ideas can possibly solve problems, even those problems that technology itself creates.  This movie introduces us to complexly-layered characters.  The male lead character is played by George Clooney, yet his bright-eyed, inventive, little-boy self is also a critical part of the whole mix.  The female lead, Britt Robertson, is a dreamer who carries the theme with her based on the old Native American proverb that asks, “which wolf will win a battle between a dark wolf full of negativity and a white wolf full of positivity and light?”  The answer, of course, is the wolf you feed.  The character is relentlessly positive in the face of a horrific future that the film brings out which humanity probably deserves.  And the catalyst character, the little-girl robot played by Raffey Cassidy, is a brilliant performance by an amazing young actress that brings to the front and center one of the most powerful of all science-fiction questions, “what does it actually mean to be human?”

tomorrowland-movie-poster-2015-space-mountainfreebeacondotcom-wallpaperTomrrowland_2002

I believe this movie brings out the best of Brad Bird’s skills as a story-teller.  Like some of his most brilliant work in the past, like the cartoon movie Iron Giant or the Pixar movie The Incredibles, this movie pushes the magic nostalgia buttons from a fondly-remembered simpler time.  I remember going to Walt Disney World in Orlando back in the 1970’s and being so enthralled by the two most must-see parts of the park, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland.  Tomorrowland was the culmination of my childhood astronaut dreams born of watching the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969 on our old black-and-white Motorola TV and all those other Gemini, and even Mercury missions that I followed with all-consuming interest.  It’s that feeling of a better world waiting up ahead, in the future, just around the corner.  The anticipation that something wonderful is going to happen… and then when it doesn’t happen, or, at least, doesn’t happen in the bright shiny way I was expecting… I can start over with the conviction that I can make it happen… that dreams really do come true.

Brad Bird's body of directorial work is, in my humble opinion, the equal of some of the greatest cinematic artists of all time.

Brad Bird’s body of directorial work is, in my humble opinion, the equal of some of the greatest cinematic artists of all time.

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June 18, 2015 · 2:33 pm

More Nuts n’ Bolts… This Time Mostly Bolts

Okay, this is another filler piece to allow me to post every day of 2015.  But it does give me a chance to write down a few things I have been thinking about…  And I do realize allowing me to think nowadays is a completely risky proposition.  But when you talk about Nuts and Bolts, you are talking about how things are put together.  The nut keeps the attachment from sliding apart and failing to do its job, but the real work of bonding things together is done by the bolt.  So, to keep mangling the metaphor until it is either as tightly bolted as it will go, or it bursts from the torque and stress, let me talk about some bolts in my cartooning endeavors.

pie-ricks

This most recent pen and ink Paffooney is a cartoon panel about Pirates from the imaginary dream world of Fantastica.  In the cartoon environment I am working on now, Pirates take your gold and valuables basically by being bankers and compounding your interest…  mostly by compounding really, really hard… like with hammers and heavy swords.   So here is one of the bolts holding my posts together.   I am financially troubled right now (right now meaning the last twenty years) by trouble with credit card debt and banks.  I fight that kind of trouble with swords of satire.  You find me complaining a lot about this particular topic by mostly metaphorical means.

And that leads to another bolt that is a common rivet in the girders of my purple paisley prose.  I use metaphors and drawings in a way that can be characterized by the artistic term (or is that autistic term?) surrealism.  Yes, I am an out-of-the-closet surrealist like Salvador Dali, Juan Miro, and Rene Magritte.  I would like to argue that I am also a surrealist in the manner of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts, and Dan Piraro, creator of Bizzaro, but cartoonists in general don’t tend to be out of the closet, willing to admit that they juxtapose disjointed images with realist elements in them to make a comic point or raise an emotional response.  That is something most cartoonists are unwilling to let their parents understand about them… that, or they simply don’t know what big words like juxtapose mean… because cartoonist are generally unwilling to look things up in the dictionary.  I hope this paragraph doesn’t make your brain hurt.  But if it does… well, that’s why most of us surrealists try really hard to keep it secret and end up living a double life.

I think you can also tell by today’s post that I need to revisit this idea of examining bolts.  I am swiftly coming to the end of today’s 500 words, and I have only covered two working bolts.  What kind of structure can stand up to high winds with only two bolts in the entire thing?  But hopefully it won’t all suddenly collapse before I have a chance to come back and place a few more bolts.  And on that note, I am at 514.

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June 17, 2015 · 3:29 pm

The Mother of all Vacations

Dead pool

Well, vacation is a complicated idea around here any more.  I sit here blogging while my family is on vacation in Florida with the camper.  They went to see my son in the Marine Corps graduate from his MOS class, and they are staying for the beaches.  I got left behind because, for me, breathing and camping no longer seem to be something I can do both at the same time.  So, I opted to stay at home alone with the dog and the air conditioner to continually walk the dog, pick up dog poop in the park, and practice breathing.  Breathing is hard with COPD.   Chronic Obstructed Pulmonary Disorder basically means I have far too much lutefisk residue clogging up the storage sheds in my lungs.  (For those of you who don’t know about the horrors of living as an Iowegian… lutefisk is a dish made by Scandahoovians from Norway out of white fish soaked in lye soap until it turns into a kind of bad-tasting poisonous Jello.  Iowegians eat it constantly, and claim to love it, though I have it on good authority that eating it builds up your immunity to death… because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  And the funny thing is, I don’t even eat lutefisk.  Lutefisk in the air back in my youth has managed to encrust my lungs with lutefisk residue.  That, or the toxic chemicals we used to spray on the soybean fields… Naw, I’m pretty sure it is the lutefisk.)  (That last parenthetic expression just squeezed into third place all time on my longest parenthetic expression list.)  (But only by two words.)

mickey in powder

So, I chose this lonely vacation from vacationing because I kinda like breathing, and I am definitely not ready to risk finding out if the lutefisk in my lungs has actually made me immune to death in the Iowegian tradition.  And so, what happens while I am staying home alone with the dog?  Bill came to visit.  Bill is a tropical storm.  After the record setting water-soaked Texas month of May he is not a welcome visitor.  Take a look again at my family’s swimming pool.  That pool has about thirty cracks on the bottom perfect for making it act more like a sieve than a pool.  It has only held a few cup-fulls of rancid mosquito-water for the past three swimming seasons.  I had fallen far enough behind sticking chewing gum in the cracks that it does not hold water.  It was finally beginning to empty before Bill showed up and added six inches just today.  And rain is so good for COPD in the most sarcastic way I can possibly write those particular words.  I did not need Bill to visit.  I find I am forced to live with his visit, and he is not even a relative.

So I have been stuck in bed, drawing cartoons about Pirates who rob people by being bankers and throwing me into the powder room as their prisoner, practicing hard on my breathing, and feeling very depressed about missing vacation.  But, it occurs to me that, since I am now retired from teaching… for an entire school year already… and too ill most of the time to try to make extra money as a Walmart greeter, smiling and saying hello to ugly fat people in warm-up sweatpants, like I had planned and claimed I was looking forward to doing…  I am actually on the longest vacation of my life.  Longer even than the two jobless years of substitute teaching the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley sentenced me to.  I may actually be on vacation now for the rest of my life.  Whoa, baby!  Bring on the babes in bikinis… the non-alcoholic Margaritas… there is already water in the pool!

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June 16, 2015 · 2:50 pm

Cartoon Nuts n’ Bolts… Mostly Nuts

I am setting out to make a web comic that I can post piece by piece on my blog and then build into a graphic novel in my vault.  But that is a harder task than you might realize.  The stories exist in rough draft form, very, very rough, but will have to be re-drawn to turn into something publishable.  Naked cartoons are a problem for me.  Not only do I draw them while I am naked because I have considerable discomfort from moderate plaque psoriasis and sitting in the nude is less painful, but I have a tendency to use naked ideas and even draw naked toons…which all need to be toned down to be publishable.  I do believe that naked is funny… but I don’t hold with naked and crude or naked and gross.  So I am going to rebuild these stories element by element and put some clothes on them.  Unfortunately, I don’t have enough money to buy the equipment I need to draw directly on computer.  I also don’t have any real practice at that.  So, I am stuck with drawing on paper with pen and ink and colored pencil, and then digitizing the result with a camera and photo-shop.  So here are some cartoon elements that I will now start whittling into shape.  I will try to show you my process here as much as it is possible to do.

Here’s some nuts;fantcartoon1

Raygun Ronny

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And here’s a bolt;

fantcartoon2

And if you can figure out how it all fits together already, then you are definitely smarter than I am.  I will be busy in the next few days trying to figure out how to insert Tab A into Slot C without giving that phrase any unfortunate double meanings… and I will do my best to keep you posted and show you the results.

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