Okay, I need to keep my string of daily posts going. So today, I will show you Pennie. She is a copper dragon. She’s been too shy to meet you until now. But better meet than eat you.
Tag Archives: humor
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.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, teaching
Me, Myself, and It
I think it is provably true that any time an artist creates a work of art, it is actually a self-portrait. Did you see the works of Thomas Kinkade and Paul Detlafsen in my recent posts? Can I not effectively argue that those paintings give you a glimpse of the real person behind the paintbrush? Was Norman Rockwell not the man portrayed in all those lovely down-home, truly American oils he did? Was Theodor Giesel not also Dr. Seuss? Then I look back at some of the goofy pictures that I have created through the years and think, “Oh no! What have I done?” I sometimes think I don’t have to post nude selfies of myself for people to see me naked. Should I really have done that…? …Of course, I should! And that means I have seen William Shakespeare naked too! Good Golly! I have to quit thinking these goofy thoughts!
Filed under cartoons, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney
My Own Race of Aliens
In Catch a Falling Star, the only good novel I have actually in print so far, I have a race of aliens called the Tellerons. They are an unusual sort of green men from Mars. They are green,and they have a base on Mars, but they are from a distant star system in the local group and the swampy world called Telleri that orbits that far star. The ones in my book come from the space station their empire established in the Barnard’s Star system, where the characters in my stories were all born. They are also not men. They are amphibianoid beings, frog people. They have never set foot on the home planet. Here are two aliens who are crucial characters in Catch a Falling Star.
These two are Farbick the Navigator and young Davalon the tadpole. Farbick is a very wise and loving male Telleron who gets foully treated for his racial differences. I know you and I can’t really tell by looking, but his race is Sindalusian Fmoog. You can tell by the yellowish cast to his amphibian face. Oh, and there’s something funny with his ears. Davalon is the son of the Telleron captain, Xiar. He loves Farbick who has been more of a father figure to him than Xiar has. Dav is unusually bright for a Telleron, just as Farbick is recognizably more competent than others of the Fmoogish race. You might actually think, if they were the only two Tellerons you ever met, that their people are highly inquisitive, intelligent, and have no racial prejudices at all. Of course you would be highly incorrect and most sincerely wrong.
I have started work on a sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I am calling it Stardusters and Lizard Men. It follows the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s Base Ship in their adventures following the invasion of Earth. They accidentally fix the on-board computer systems by correcting a math error in navigation that had been present for more than 100 years of star travel in the Telleron Empire. Of course this means that all of their space coordinates for every destination they know are wrong. And so, without hope of ever returning anywhere else in the universe, they arrive at Galtorr Prime, the planet of the infamous carnivorous reptile people. They will have to colonize or die. And the Galtorrians are just like Earthers, except, they have a society that is even more corrupt, greedy, prejudiced, and hateful (if such a thing is even possible). I hope to show in this story what human society may become on the path we are currently following, so it will be a kind of post-apocalyptic bit of science fiction set on a world that is not Earth.
These two female Telleron tadpoles are Brekka and Menolly. They are dancing to Mickey Mouse Club music because Tellerons, quite naturally, have been totally corrupted by Earther television shows. Galactic English, the language all Tellerons speak, is based on the language of old I Love Lucy television episodes, the favorite show on the home-worlds of the entire empire.
Meet George Jetson. He is named after one of his father’s favorite shows from the 1960’s. He is one of the Telleron tadpoles that will take the lead in exploring the dark and dangerous planet of the lizard-guys.
Fog in the City (a melancholy poem)
It doesn’t come in on cat feet.
That’s probably Chicago you’re thinking of.
It comes in on the sound of screeching tires…
and ambulance sirens…
because of all the idiot drivers…
in their silver-gray WASP rockets…
that don’t know how to slow down…
or turn on their low beams…
for safety in the big, cold city of Dallas…
where the air is yellow…
except in the fog…
and rush, rush, rush…
business never waits…
for a foggy day.
Final Star Trek Confessions
I am sorry, but today’s post will probably bore you unless you are a doll-collecting, obsessive-compulsive bag of mixed nuts like I am. These are the kinds of details that only interest the true collect-a-holic. You see in the picture my mint in-the-box Star Trek Barbie and Ken, 1996 30th Anniversary Edition. It was a difficult track-down. Now, you Google it and you can get one for 25 dollars on e-Bay without breaking a sweat. When I got hold of this in 1998, however, it was a bit tougher to find. It started with a trip to Goodwill. My wife loves the bargain clothing and especially the shoes. (She’s from the Philippines and has a touch of Imelda Marcos Footwear Disease.) While there, with my young son in tow, in the toy section… I discovered two loose Barbie and Ken dolls that actually weren’t naked. Barbie’s head was severely damaged, and she had lost a leg. Ken was in practically un-loved, un-played-with condition. Both had uniforms. The Star Trek uniforms you see here on the two figures in front. (Ken was missing the shoes, phaser, and communicator, but the original accessories were pretty small and pitiful anyway. Barbie had no fishnet stockings and no shoes, along with no working head.) Of course I had to buy these wonderful items. They cost me 25 cents apiece. Gonga! I hadn’t known that such a 12″ action figure existed! (Okay, really a doll, but, you know…) I immediately began a search of toy stores and junk shops in South Texas. At the time we had relatives in Dallas. So I went prowling there too. You wouldn’t believe the looks I used to get from parents wondering what a forty-something old man by himself wanted in the Barbie section of KayBee Toys. Now they see my gray hair and figure, ah yes, shopping for his granddaughter (of which I have none, but I digress.) Finally I found the rare item in a San Antonio flea market stall. And it only set me back fifteen dollars. Wotta find! It made my goofy old collector’s heart glad for a couple of months afterwards… heck, that’s not true either! Sixteen years later it still makes me giddy.
Filed under Barbie and Ken, doll collecting, goofiness, irony, toystore quests
My Tinfoil Hat for UFO’s
I have been a conspiracy-theory nut for some time. Back in the 1970’s, my father and I went to a movie called Chariots of the Gods. It presented the insane theories of Erich von Daniken as if they were fact. It mentioned the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, and other ancient wonders and seemed to show depictions of ancient aliens in the art of those cultures. My father and I were convinced by his arguments and thought there really must be something to it. I went to college with a real hunger to learn more.
I was disappointed to learn later that the man was a completely unprofessional, untrained archeologist, and that he may have actually stolen his main thesis for the Chariots book from Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii in their book, Intelligent Life in the Universe. Sagan would go on to say;
“That writing as careless as von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken.”
—Carl Sagan, Foreword to The Space Gods Revealed (quote and citation borrowed from Wikipedia)
So I went through a number of Sagan-influenced years of my life saying that there was no sound reason to believe that out of an infinity of places to visit, interstellar tourists would want to come and visit here. Does a normal, sane tourist want to go to an island full of cannibals? Our movies, after all, always depict us killing, dissecting, or taking advantage of alien visitors.
But then I discovered the whole story of the Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947. Convinced at one point that the crash really was a Project Mogul weather balloon, I began to discover the work of another alien-visitor-obsessed gentleman by the name of Stanton Friedman. This man is much harder to dismiss. He has a master’s degree in physics and spent fourteen years as a nuclear physicist “for such companies as General Electric (1956–1959), Aerojet General Nucleonics (1959–1963), General Motors (1963–1966), Westinghouse (1966–1968), TRW Systems (1969–1970), and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications.[2] Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the radon-detection industry. Friedman’s professional affiliations have included the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and AFTRA.” (quoted from Wikipedia… I know, I know… but this is all verifiable information, not made up or imaginary like von Däniken’s.) He is also the first civilian to investigate the Roswell crash. He began by interviewing the air-base’s intelligence officer during the incident, Major Jesse Marcel.
More and more I became interested in the phenomenon and the people who research it. I have a pretty good list of liars and clowns who talk about aliens, and I will use some of that in a future post. There is comedy gold in that topic.
But I do believe that aliens are real and have visited our planet. I began researching the topic again for my novel, Catch a Falling Star, because it centers on an alien invasion and a clash between incompetent space travelers and single-minded Midwesterners who can’t possibly believe. There are just too many people surfacing with stories to tell about alien encounters, UFO sightings, and government cover-ups. People like Nick Pope, a former Minister from the British government, Paul Hellyer , a former Defense Minister from Canada, Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo astronaut, and numerous technicians and inventors from McDonnell-Douglas and other aircraft manufacturers are coming forward in legions to testify that things like this are very real.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, Paffooney, tinfoil hats
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.
Filed under collecting, doll collecting, goofiness, humor
The Rules for Collecting
Oh, no… My secret is out. I am a doll collector. (Wait, wasn’t I supposed to claim they are “action figures” so that I can get away with being a man who, at the age of nearly 60, still plays with dolls?”) I got started down this dark path back in 1965 when my parents bought me a G.I. Joe sailor for my ninth birthday. It was the beginning of an addiction that has dogged me even down to this very day.
There are some things that just aren’t easy to admit to, like being gay, or being a socialist, or being a werewolf. Well, I am not gay and I am not a socialist, so don’t worry about that. Those are not really terrible things to be when it comes right down to it. I have friends that are gay, friends that are socialists, and friends that are… um… well, enough about those things. I am writing about the terrible scourge of doll collecting. In order to control such a rare and debilitating disease, I had to come up with a set of rules that would keep me from becoming a penniless hobo living in a cardboard refrigerator box in an alley with thousands of Barbie dolls. So let me explain the sacred rules that have kept me at least partially sane for almost fifty years.
Rule #1; Thou shalt only collect and obsess over twelve-inch dolls and action figures. That allows for literally thousands of choices to pursue, and rules out the many size variations like the three-inch G.I. Joe’s and the three-inch Star Wars figures and all the Mego eight-inch superheroes who were everywhere in the Seventies and Eighties, but now are rare and expensive.
Rule #2; Thou shalt not collect and obsess over dolls and figures that cost more than twenty dollars. This is the poverty prevention rule that keeps an obsession from breaking the bank and wreaking havoc throughout the rest of my life. I have only broken this rule on rare occasions for hard to acquire dolls or figures, and most of those were actually presents paid for by somebody else. I can blame the exceptions mostly on people who know about my weakness and exploit it for their own personal reasons… hopefully because they just like to make me happy.
Rule #3; Thou must seeketh the lost and forlorn doll and redeem it from destruction. Whenever I can, I look for dolls at Goodwill stores and yard sales. I have bought a ton of naked and sometimes broken Action Man, Barbie, Max Steel, Ken, and G.I. Joe dolls. I then try to find or make clothes for them. My daughter went through her Barbie period in a most destructive manner. She didn’t merely discard dolls and Disney princesses, she beheaded, dismembered, disrobed, and chewed them. I have rescued and repaired many of them, but only after securing her promise that she doesn’t want to play with them or eat them any longer. I should note, though, that I no longer acquire dolls in this way, now that she is middle school aged and wouldn’t be caught dead with a doll.
Rule #4; Thou shalt not let your daughter be the the only one who has fun pulling them apart, but you will put them back together again in ways that make them into something new.
So, these are the sacred rules of collecting which shall not be violated in the pursuit of this weird religion, the bringing together of a multitude of dolls.
That is my “Enterprise Collection” above. Specifically the “Original Series Enterprise Collection”. Look more closely.
Spock is holding a Vulcan harp-thingy (whose name I won’t quote here because I don’t want to seem too much like a Trekkie… and besides, I forgot what it is called and am too lazy to look it up again… What can I say? I’m old.) Kirk is wearing a Wrath of Khan movie uniform.
This green Barbie doll is a Goodwill rescue turned into a green Orion dancing girl with paint, sequins, material from a quilting project, and a hot glue gun. 
Uhura was the hardest member of the team to track down and acquire. After Kaybee Toys went out of business, I had to turn to the internet to get hold of this beauty. I also had to pay $24.
You may also have noticed that Sulu is missing from my Original Series set. Well, I’m still working on that one. But I do owe a debt to J.J. Abrams for making a new movie version of Star Trek and inspiring a new set of twelve inch dolls.
And let me not forget Rule #5, the most important rule… Thou shalt play with the dolls you collect.
Filed under collecting, doll collecting, goofiness, humor, Paffooney
Happy Doodle… Now in Color!
Here is what it looks like in color. I fussed it up with markers because I like the bright colors. It helps it say “happy”.
