Tag Archives: humor

July 12, 2015 · 2:03 pm

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 11, 2015 · 1:04 pm

Why You Should Shoot Yourself in the Foot Rather Than Vote for Donald Trump

I confess. I am subject to the annoying liberal belief that if I check my facts and make properly reasonable arguments, I can save the world from all the political idiots and partisan clowns that are filling the American scene with horse poop. Of course, I just got back home to Texas from a week-long visit to Iowa, and in both places there are people that I respect and love that feel that everything conservatives and even Tea Party Republicans say on Fox News makes sense. How deluded can you be? It almost makes a loony liberal communist anti-Christ like me start using the other word for poop.

The problem, I believe, lies in the -ists and the -isms. For example, racists and racism or anti-Zionists and anti-Zionism (words that I believe Hitler chose to describe how he felt about ants who were from Zion… or something) are -ists and -isms. The kind of -ists and -isms that makes people from Iowa argue that the Confederate flag represents culture not hatred, even though that particular flag killed a large number of Iowans in the “Hornet’s Nest” at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 in Missouri. Iowa was on the Union side. That war, by the way, was a war of rebellion by the South who wanted to be a separate nation so they could keep buying and selling people like they were pet hamsters and working them like they were mules. (See what I mean… loony liberals let facts get in the way of all the really cool ideas?)

My children and I had a discussion of -ists and -isms at the Burger King today, because the Princess didn’t want to sit next to her brother, because… well, brothers are stinky and bother you and she would just end up being unfairly in trouble for pouring her medium soft drink over his head. We talked about how people are prone to let prejudices control their behavior instead of using civil, loving, Christian values. The Princess was being a seat-ist and subject to seat-ism. And then we noted that if she hopped from seat to seat, she would be a repeat-ist seat-ist. And if she took a real disliking to the seat, she might turn into a seat-ist beat-ist. And if she obsessively tried to clean the seat of big-brother cooties, she was being a neat-ist seat-ist. And we got a good laugh at the expense of seat-ists everywhere.

animal.kukuchew.com

And taking Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate this last week is the same stupid thing. The man opened his mouth during his announcement speech and proceeded to spew horse poop about Mexicans being rapists and drug-dealers and other criminals coming across our borders to take our stuff and rape our women and do all kinds of evil horse poop… because he was reading from a carefully researched speech foot-noted with crime statistics… or possibly because The Donald would never just speak boat-loads of horse poop hatefully off the top of his head. (Notice I resisted the temptation to use the other word for poop three whole times! I am a slave to political correctness and need to be called out for it.)

I learned a few things about immigration over the last decade of being an ESL teacher (English for non-English speakers). If you come from a properly white-skinned country like, say, Finland, you have a relatively easy time immigrating to the U.S. If you come from a brown or black country, you face a barb-wire-shrouded mine field in the form of a legal immigration process, and once you make it legally to this country, any little slip-up or typo… even those you don’t make yourself… can get you re-classified as illegal and deported. Parents are deported away from their children. Children get deported even though they were born in this country and speak only English. My own Filipino wife is still not a citizen after twenty years of marriage. And most of those “illegal immigrants” that so disturb The Donald (and Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry. and the rest of the Republican Clown Alley) do important jobs that employers have a hard time filling otherwise. If they are actually illegal, they pay into the system in the form of income tax and are unable to claim any benefits because they risk discovery and deportation. Thinking these hard-working, under-loved people are all criminals is horse poop.

But enough with the horse-poop discussion. I hate when my posts end up full of poop. Donald Trump is the worst kind of -ist and full of the most terrible kinds of -isms. If you shoot yourself in the foot, it will heal, at most, in a couple of months. If you vote for Donald Trump, you may end up having to live in a horse-poop factory for four years. Do you really like man-made horse poop? It is a lot more toxic than the organic stuff. (Dang! Even loony-liberal political correctness doesn’t keep the danged poop from piling up!)

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, politics

Tagged as clowns, Donald Trump, humor, immigration, orangutan people, political humor, politics, sarcasm, satire

July 10, 2015 · 3:36 pm

Bits and Pieces

Having written 1000 words again for no apparently good reason yesterday, I figure I am entitled to a shorter, pithier, sissier, saucier, sillier post today (the kind where I use long strings of adjectives in order to fill up the paper… a trick learned from little darlings in English class that figured I would be happy with a page full of words, and that it didn’t matter if it made the least bit of sense). Writing is, after all, piecing together the puzzle that is my noisy noodle, full of imaginings, weird images, and all sorts of listy-type things that I could list here to fill up more space if I weren’t so danged lazy today. I found a good article about being a writer while my noodle was simmering and trying to cook up today’s post. It gives insight into the tumultuous brain-scape that I am struggling with at the moment because I am (sadly) a writer.

Here’s the article from AuthorsPublish

I am trying to noodle out a cartoon that I am trying to compose from a rough draft that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese has bad smells. I suppose you could call that cartoonoodling (but would never actually call it that because you’re not as dippy as I am). The drawings of that composition come first. So, here, at least, they are!

I know you can’t possibly know what sort of sense to make out of these because I haven’t put the words and dialogue balloons into these pen and ink and red drawings. (Remember, Clown Noire is a new cartoon genre I am trying to develop like black-and-white Film Noire movies, only in black-white-and-red pen-and-ink cartoons.) So, foolishness aside, these are only raw work-in-progress Paffoonies. Or maybe not foolishness aside, since foolishness tends to be the whole point.

I am also trying to advance through the struggles of two novels at once. I am still trying to progress through the middle of Stardusters and Space Lizards, where I have to bring the totally evil villain, Senator Tedhkruhz the lizard-man (no relation to the real life Senator I am obviously trying to make fun of), together with his well-deserved comeuppance. I know how the novel ends, but not how the middle-middle and the later-middle connect to that end.

And I am trying to finish the beginning of the novel When the Captain Came Calling. I have to come up with a way for the evil mermaid that sinks the Captain’s ship to reach that condition of being righteously indignant about the wrong done to her enough for her to use her fishy mermaid powers to swamp and wreck the ship.

But rather than bore you with the details of my inner swordfights with the weapons master of the Pirate crew that runs my brain when I’m writing, I will leave it here… after all, I promised I was going to write less words today, and I am already at 494.

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Filed under cartoons, humor, NOVEL WRITING

Tagged as cartoons, connections, humor, novel writing, paffooney cartoony, Paffoonies, word games

July 9, 2015 · 2:38 pm

More Texas Airport Follies

I would post a picture of my son the Marine in his uniform, but I have promised him never to use his real name, or pictures of him in his military persona, or even reveal destinations where he was going for the armed forces. He is not going on secret missions, but he likes to play like it is so, and is capable of getting very, very mad about it. So you will have to be satisfied with the harrowing tale of delivering him to the airport, putting him on a plane to… somewhere… and finding out first hand what the term SNAFU is all about as it relates to the military and deployment.

You may remember that I posted about collecting him from Love Field and what a wondrous, lovely adventure that was, at the start of his leave for the holiday. (Texas Airport Adventures) Well, unfortunately, we didn’t have the same easy time of it on the butt end of his journey home. We had to go to DFW… The Texas-Sized airport that makes you appreciate how loud and braggart-y and smug and foul-tempered Texas is as a whole. Practically nothing went as planned.

I used this scene to represent the airport and blurred it on purpose (yeah, right!) to protect the identities of the random airport denizens I was photographing because I obtained a release from no one and no faces can be actually visible. (I also thought the pretty little Asian girl dressed in blue was particularly cute, but wanted no part in taking some sort of weird stalker photo.) To use this photo to imagine what the airport is really like, you have to realize that this is one of thirty-five-something waiting areas in only one of the Terminals A, B, C, D, and E that litter this monster airport. You have to take this particular photo times one-hundred-seventy-five-something to get an idea of how labyrinthine and utterly foul and soul-munching this cesspit of Texan humanity and lurking random monsters truly is. And we didn’t even have the misfortune of finding the Minotaur in the middle of the maze.

We started our quest at Terminal C, not quite sure which of the many, many American Airlines spots we were supposed to find out of all the x-marks-the-spots x-es that were to be found on the GPS and Google Maps. We checked his bags and asked about boarding, and if we could get passes to eat dinner at one of the terminal restaurants with our boy before he winged off somewhere into the military world far, far away. Helpful little lady in the official red jacket said we had to go to Terminal B to the USO office and get passes because he was military and that was a USO responsibility. Then she said we should hustle onward to Terminal A to catch his plane. So we went to terminal B. The nice lady at the USO said she had no earthly idea what red-jacket-supposedly-expert lady was talking about. We needed to get our passes from security at the Terminal where we were actually putting him on the plane. So by now, we didn’t trust anything that red-jacket-lady had told us and checked the ticket to see if she had given us the wrong terminal as well. Sure enough, the ticket said we were to put him on a plane at gate D20. There is, of course, no such gate in Terminal A. So we went to Terminal D. There we tried to get passes. The ticket agent that was helping us said we had to go to the special customer services desk at the other end of the free-world side of Terminal D. So, armed with my cane and two aching knees (from arthritis pressed into walking too far already) we stumped and slogged and slithered down to the far end of Terminal D. On the way (during one of my frequent puffing and panting and gasping stops) I checked the departure board for number one son’s flight and saw, to my shock and dismay, that his flight was leaving not out of Terminal D, but out of Terminal A, from gate A11.

The red-jacket-supposedly-expert lady from the far end of Terminal D apologized profusely that we had been misdirected by red-jacket-but-know-nothing lady and recommended that we get our passes from the special customer services desk that was now within fifty feet of where we stood. We went there and lucked out with a quietly competent special-customer-services guy who quietly and competently issued us each of the four passes we sought. (The poor Asian gentleman arguing with the next ticket agent over had already missed his plane because he had been waiting in long airport lines through boarding and take-off. I was so glad not to be in his shoes that I overlooked the fact that smoke was already rolling out of the soles of my shuffling shoes.) From that point on, we got what we wanted. We went to Terminal A and got in through security without being strip-searched… completely (only my feet were actually bare). We found a nice, expensive airport restaurant and consumed enough carbohydrates that it should have killed diabetic little me. The waitress was even a bit smitten with number one son, although the boy did not even notice her big brown calf’s eyes. And then we got him on his plane. And he was gone. Of course, the SNAFU (Situation Normal, All-French-worded-Up) was not completely done with number one son. He reached the place where he was supposed to go from American Airlines to the military transport flight, and was promptly grounded for a couple of days as there was a huge, nasty weather event across the ocean at his destination.

So, there you have it… the abridged to less than one-thousand-one-hundred-words version, anyway. More airport follies to tickle your glee-and-giggles center in your brain. And I may live long enough to go through similar stuff a number of times more. Such is the life of a military parent. But when we got home, just like the last time, the flower wagon had another surprise for us… just before the thunderstorm.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as airports, autobiography, humor, metaphor, military travel, photo Paffooney, Texas

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.

Mason City in Pictures

We went to Mason City, Iowa on July 6th to see the new statues in the downtown business area. This is a post shortened by the need for travel, but because a picture is worth a thousand words, this must be a nine thousand-word essay.

Beloved Books

While visiting home in Iowa, I re-connected with an old family friend. It was in the farmhouse upstairs bedroom where I was being quartered as a visitor. It was an it, not a him… a book, not a man. It was a very old book, published in 1938.

Yes, the Ittle Red H is a child’s picture-book. Of course the first time I saw it, it was titled The Little Red Hen . It was in much better shape then. I was a beginning reader back then. My mother and my two uncles were the first beginning readers who began reading this book. It was in very good shape after it passed on to my generation at grandpa and grandma’s house. Does that mean it was my fault that it got all child-chewed and doggedy-eared? There was, after all, my cousins’ kids, and my cousins’ grandkids in between there looking at the book and possibly eating it too.

Members of my family learned valuable lessons from this old book. We learned that you can tape pages back together as long as you retrieve the page-parts from the child’s mouth before they actually get swallowed and digested. We also learned that a Red Hen can still bake bread even though the top of her head has been removed.

Alternating pages were printed in black and white and pink ink. I can remember studying these pages for a long time and wondering why sometimes the duck and the goose were pink, and other times yellow, and other times black and white. I think that may have taught me that color doesn’t matter… it’s the character of the character that can be recognized in spite of pink ink. A very profound realization I do believe.

I also learned that ducks and geese are richer than chickens, as determined by the fine clothing and the fact that their noses are held high in the air. Monocles in duck’s eyes mean that ducks are supposed to be smarter than chickens too. Apparently if you are smart and rich, you don’t do any of the actual work, yet expect that you are going to get to eat the bread anyway when it it is baked.

You can tell by the many tools and the grouchy face on the Red Hen that she is a chicken and expected to do all the work, even though she has kids to support and is the same pink color as the duck and goose sometimes appear.

When the Red Hen is in full color, she’s kinda brown in color. That is certainly telling too.

I love the comical comics in the illustrations of this book. I traced them and copied them many times in my misspent youth.

Perhaps I have blathered on a bit too much. Maybe I should just shut up and show you the rest of this precious old book.

As I go back and edit and re-read, I am just guessing, but it may be easily apparent that I was watching the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup while writing this loopy post. But it is, after all, mainly about using my meager photography skills to preserve this beloved old book.

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Filed under humor, old books, photo paffoonies

Tagged as antique things, humor, illustrations, old art, old books, photo Paffooney

July 5, 2015 · 1:27 pm

One True Thing

Sometimes I wonder why I write and what purpose it serves. And the fact that it is impossible to know the answer to things like that doesn’t even slow me down. The speculation-and-imagination machine chugs on, churning out all sorts of clever platitudes and sophomoric sayings that the editorial glands in my brain sometimes make me choke on. Purple paisley prose rolls out of my pen and curls and swirls across the page being more about the silly sounds and internal rhymes and alliterations than about the actual ideas. And I enjoy the process far more than you do.

Making connections is probably the most important process of the whole endeavor. Having returned home to Iowa for a week in July, I can testify that connecting your childhood to your recent past and your promising present is essential to determining both who you are and who you are supposed to be. The boy I was in the 60’s and 70’s is a key to understanding why I write what I do. I was smarter than a kid is supposed to be. A nerd is a target for verbal and physical abuse based on a shared feeling among those not as cerebral that it is somehow unfair to be smarter than ordinary folks. I learned to defend myself with wit and superior planning. I found it is possible to create an indispensable role for myself in practically any situation. I learned to be a good listener. I absorbed all the fascinating little nuances of personality and possibility that other people unintentionally exude. I learned to organize and prioritize and use all the other ize-es that help you structure reality to your liking. And I learned that it is possible, as a teacher, to pass the secrets of life and love and laughter on to others. Here is one true thing… The point of learning anything is to pass it on to others.

If you get nothing else at all out of this silly, meandering post of purple paisley prose, I hope it is that previous sentence. I delude myself into believing that all the experiences I have had and all the things I have learned can be wrapped up into pretty packages and given as gifts to coming generations. I strive to write with quality and make the ideas engaging and powerful. I am always experimenting with style. For example, this post is based on free-writing and associative thinking. I intended to create a “boneless” structure of gelatinous prose centered around one true thing. And I intentionally wrote it to resemble a blobby pile of mud in which the reader must dig for that nugget of gold. And I think I have succeeded in making it thoroughly muddy with random big words, loose connections that risk bursting the paragraph’s seams, and word eddies that could potentially explode the flow. If you have waded this far through the mess, then let me reward you with one more pointless Paffooney, re-posted like a pirate.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom

Tagged as humor, Paffoonies, wisdom, writing

July 3, 2015 · 1:44 pm

The Politics of Clowns

It is almost not fair to make fun of presidential candidates. They are making it so easy. If you can’t take anything but cheap shots at certain folks, then what value is in your words? Still, it is a temptation hard to resist.

So, I have spared no expense in hiring a couple of KlownTown’s finest to watch my every word, and keep me honest.

It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.

1. Candidate Hair– The field of candidates on both sides of the divide is filled with marvelous examples of clown hair. I am left wondering how they achieve such effects. Assuming Rand Paul is not wearing a bad toupee, how does he get his hair to look like a squirrel who fell into a vat of yellow wood-stain shellac and then crawled out and died on his head? I think his father proved before him that too much Libertarian political purity has a profoundly pickling effect upon your head, and leads to making what hair you have growing out funny. Donald Trump obviously takes his hair off every morning and steam presses it on wrought-iron ironing boards in a thoroughly Republican flat-tax flattening sort of arm motion. It’s too bad he is in the habit of taking his hair off at the neck, because the ritual flattening is having a bad effect on the “maybe-I-shouldn’t-say-that-out-loud” centers in his brain. The Democrats are not immune to the clown-hair scourge either Bernie Sanders obviously uses my grandfather’s bald-guy low-maintenance approach to hair-styling. Step out of the shower, rub a towel across the top of your head, and you are ready to roll with that straight-talking brand of no-nonsense socialism that you can get by with because everyone is looking at how the towel Bozo-ed up your hair and distracts them from listening to your actual words. (Okay, the Klown Kops caught me. Bozo is not a legal verb.)

I bet you didn’t know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.

2. Candidate Words– Yes, the greater part of the clown-offences committed by candidates have to do with words. Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have a marvelous glibness that defies understanding. Cruz can go on talk shows and talk with two different tongues at the same moment. He is smart and Ivy-League-educated, but when he denies climate change he says he is not a scientist (which absolves him of using scientific reasoning in his arguments) but he says the science is not yet settled (which he routinely backs up with facts and statistics that are not true). Here is a noble statesman who is of Cuban descent and speaks no Spanish. He was born in Canada but renounced his Canadian citizenship so it wouldn’t interfere with his presidential aspirations. So, where the heck is he from, and why did we elect him in Texas? Even Republican Senator John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” for his combative Me-against-the-world political maneuverings. Who would possibly make a better president? At least, he is certainly capable of keeping the cartoonists and satirists happy. (The KlownTown Kops are reminding me that I have already passed 500 words and too much politics on the internet is a very bad thing… so maybe I must leave the rest of this topic for another day.)

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Filed under clowns, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as clowns, humor, paffooney, politicians, politics

July 2, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Homely Art, Mom-Style

I am assuming, probably incorrectly, that you have seen enough of my art work to come to the conclusion that I am a bit of an artist. Amateur, of course. You have to make money at it to be professional. I used a great deal of my artistic abilities in the classroom as a teacher, and while you come eventually to an appreciation for that small sacrifice, you can’t really call that making money at it. And I am good enough at drawing to know where the mistakes are… the flubs and the flaws and the not-so-happy little accidents (I truly appreciate the genius of Bob Ross, and I know I am not Picasso or Da Vinci… but I can draw better than he ever could.) I know my artistic junk is kitschy junk in so many, many ways. But I believe that some of the best art is homely art… the art you keep in your house… not gallery quality, but irreplaceable to you yourself. And the point of this article (dreamed up while spending some alone time in my octagenarian mother’s house due to illness) is that I got my love of homely art from my mother’s house, the house I grew up in.

These two goofy dinos are an example of what I am talking about. These two revered family art objects were bought as greenware porcelain from a mold at an Austin pottery-art store. Mother fired them in her kiln. I painted them in acrylic. They are now living happy lives in my Mother’s dining room. Oh, and they are made to be displayed together like this;

Most of mother’s art gallery-like house is filled with items just like this. No value to the history of art. Not museum quality. No more important than any other item of homemade functions-more-as-a-token-of-love-for-the-person-who-gave-it artwork.

Let me show you more of the many wonderful grandma-treasures that fill my mother’s house.

This was our Grandma Beyer’s glass doo-dad cabinet that for many years held sacred glass gewgaws and thingamajigs from the the thirties and forties. Mom inherited it and put all new grandma-treasures in it.

The cabinet holds all manner of precious vacation souvenirs, graduation photos of my sisters and brother and I, weird animal salt-and-pepper shakers, candle holders, souvenir plates, Precious Moments figurines, Hummels, pictures of long-gone relatives, and a variety of other things that each has a story behind it, a long and lovely story of years and tears and fears and more years. It is a cabinet full of memories and celebrations. Collectibles and corny joke items. There is no price that ever could be put on it, and one day it will all be given away.

Mom has collections of stuff everywhere. Christmas stuff, Thanksgiving stuff, and stuff on display just because Mom likes it sort of stuff. Much of it is antique simply because the people are old and have kept this stuff long enough to make it antique. It is displayed in every available nook and cranny and corner of the house.

And, of course, what every visitor to Mom’s house most wants to see are the dolls.