Here is a tap-dance made of photographs to musically and terpsichorially depict my old home town.
Hollyhocks photographed by Belinda Buchanan.
Tag Archives: humor
The Amazing, Magical Miss Morgan
Okay, the thing is, I was a teacher for 31 years. I need to use that for something. If I had any choice, I’d still be teaching, but since I can’t do that, I intend to create a story that uses my teaching experience, knowledge, and talent. I finally came up with the right idea, and the prewriting has begun to flow. Francis Morgan is an unmarried teacher lady with a very Mary Poppins-like quality, but the magic is all in the teaching methods. I am pitting the hero of this little tale against the most appropriate educational villain I could think of, a principal who used to be a coach. Issues of teacher-creativity versus wrong-headed notions of school discipline will provide the conflict and the fireworks. And I intend to write it with a double layer of goopy purple comedy, because if she is going to be a sixth grade English teacher it either has to be a comedy or a complete horror story. I am too much of a coward to write anything that scary. If you are interested at all in how such a goofy little project is progressing, by all means check back in the future.
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Norman Rockwell
When I was a boy in the 1960’s I looked forward to Grandma Aldrich’s Saturday Evening Post arriving at the end of her farm lane in the mailbox. We were at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm north of town almost every day. I often went to get the mail. This one magazine was supremely important to me, not because I liked to read the articles, that was too much like school, but because of the wonderful pictures on the cover. Norman Rockwell had established himself by that time as THE cover artist. He wasn’t on every single issue, but he was on most. And the world inside his paintings was filled with the kind of gentle humor, beautiful color, and wisdom tempered by love that I wanted to imitate. I wanted to paint just like that… and if I couldn’t, then I would find a way to tell stories in words the same way I saw them in his oils. I could gush more about the humble painter from New England, but I think it would serve my love of his work more just to show you what I mean;
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Space Cowboys, the Kid Variety
Here are two more deadly mutant kid ninjas from Aeroquest. When the Pan Galactican Union fell to the mysterious space invaders known as the Scondians, these two mutant boys were among the flood of refugees who escaped to the Human Imperium. Gyro son of Jor is a Nebulon. That means he is a member of an inter-stellar race whose humanity is in question. His skin is blue and highly radiation resistant. On top of his Nebulon qualities, he is a Psion Trans-muter who can mentally alter molecules, sometimes even fusing simple atoms into more complex ones. He is also very inventive. He can change a simple computer into a mini-attack-bot, a computer into a video game machine, or a vehicle into video game machine… well, he’s a teenager, so virtually anything can become a video game machine. He laughs easily, even at things that aren’t funny, and doesn’t mind when others call him a Space Smurf, because he doesn’t know what that means. Billy Iowa is his best friend and fellow survivor. If Gyro’s family hadn’t rescued Billy from Scondian captivity, he would’ve remained on Pan Galactica as a laboratory test subject. Unlike many of the Pan Galactican Space Cowboys, he is not prejudiced against Nebulons. In fact, as an orphan, he looks at them more as family than as an inferior race. His Psion power is Clairvoyance, allowing him to see times and places where he is not present, even to the extent that he can accurately predict the future. He’s a better karate and kung fu student than Gyro, but as student ninjas go, all the rest of his dojo can beat the crap out of him. So, these two Space Cowboys, both boys, provide a lot of the comedy relief in the Aero Dojo. They are of course, not nearly as dangerous as the girls are, but don’t insult them never-the-less. Billy can tell you how you will die, and Gyro will make unbelievably corny jokes about it.
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Mark Twain
Mark Twain, real name Samuel Clemens, is my hero. He lived a long and difficult life, but he lived it with grace and humor… most of the time…well, some of the time. I would very much like to be just like him… ‘cept I ain’t dead yet and have no plans on that score… but I would like to also be like him in having something important to say that can be said to somebody who isn’t even born yet, a hundred years or more from now, the way that Mark Twain spoke to me.
June 27, 2014 · 3:35 pm
Taffy King, Deadly Mutant Teenage Lizard-Girl Ninja From Outer Space
I told you about Mai Ling the other day. This is her classmate, her BFF, and her fellow student ninja from the planet Gaijin in the 53rd Century. Unlike Mai, Taffy is royalty. She is a former princess of the planet Mingo, her family being supplanted and exiled by the Nefarious Emperor Mong. Like all Mingoans, she is a member of the Fusion Race. They are people scientifically engineered to be half Earth human and half Galtorrian reptilian humanoid. She has lovely green eyes, vertically slitted, with the look of a cobra about them. She is just as deadly as her eyes make her seem. Her Psion power is basically telekinesis, the same as Mai Ling’s power, but she uses it in a very different fashion. Taffy likes to move and manipulate tiny objects in mass. She shapes things out of sand, water droplets, smoke, living wasps, or bees. She can trap you withing a sarcophagus made of sand with no breathing holes. She can dress you in a suit of stinging wasps. On top of that, she has ninja skills that allow her to slice and dice you with blades or even kill you with her bare hands. She’s not actually vain, but you should never tell her that her hair is mussed or that her clothing isn’t perfectly in style. She has killed bozos like us for less.
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Celebrity Endorsements
It is difficult to get a book noticed by the book-buying (and hopefully book-reading) public. If you have a good book, especially if you have gone the independent publishing route, promotion and advertisement cost far more than you are likely to make on the book. No one notices. No one reads. The ones who do read don’t review it. So you have to be creative. Or maybe creatively evil. If you are going to get somebody with some pull to recommend your book, you may have to trick them. I got Batgirl here to endorse my book by promising to give her information about the location of the Joker’s lair. I tricked her into waiting in front of my book while I secretly snapped this picture with my concealed bow-tie camera. You can’t actually tell from the picture, but she conked me on the head with that titanium batarang once the flash went off in her face. But I got the endorsement for free. Of course, now I’m on a most-wanted list from the Justice League for marketing fraud.
June 25, 2014 · 4:24 pm
Mai Ling, Deadly Mutant Little Girl Ninja From Outer Space
One must always be careful of the most deadly creatures to be found in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. That’s why it is good to note that one of the most deadly creatures, which is also one of the most necessary to avoid, is the teenage girl just entering the mixed blessings of puberty. Mai Ling, pictured in this Aeroquest Science Fiction Public Service Warning Poster, is a particularly lethal specimen of just such a creature. At about thirteen years of age, she is possessed of not only deadly ninja skills, trained to fatal perfection, but also telekinetic Psion mutant skills. She can use her telekinesis to propel weapons in ways that weapons were never meant to be propelled at speeds of up to GOLLY GEE WOO-WOO WOW THAT WAS FAST!!! If she shoots at you with the slug-thrower pistol she often carries, you are not only merely dead, but literally most sincerely dead because even if she misses you, she can redirect the bullet into whichever vital organ she wishes, and being the age she is, that probably means something in the highly sensitive and highly embarrassing personal middle area. She can also bang you dead pretty effectively with any stone she decides to pick up and fling. Her left arm is sheathed in accelerating electro-magnetic Gauss-effect armor that will turn a stone into faster-than-the-speed-of-sound projectile capable of blasting its way through the walls of the boys’ shower room. You dare not cross her. Don’t challenge her authority. And, for goodness sake, don’t make comments on handsome young members of boy bands, because you never ever can anticipate which one she will be in love with this week… er… today… er… this minute.
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KidZart
Here’s a piece of pottery created by the Princess. Ceramic cuteness fired and glazed.
June 19, 2014 · 5:40 pm
Collectible Dolls… err, Action Figures
These two 12″ ACTION FIGURES are Luke Skywalker and Princess Leiah. They are rare 1978 dolls that are hard to find because they are in a size much larger than other Star Wars figures, and they are from a toy company that no longer exists. When I bought Luke on E-Bay, he only had the pants and the boots. I had to buy Leiah stark naked. The doll didn’t have any clothes on either. I was able to cobble together some clothing with the help of Barbie and G.I. Joe. I had to re-braid Leiah’s hair, and, of course, I had no idea how to re-create the Cinnabun ear-muffs Leiah is supposed to wear, so I left it looking as you see it. I am proud of my ability to find and acquire two such rare dolls, but I am well aware that they are not presently worth diddly-squoot compared to a mint conditioned pair.
And, Dang it! I didn’t edit the words “doll” and “dolls” in favor of “action figures”, but I am much too lazy to go back and fix that.
June 18, 2014 · 6:42 pm
Catch a Falling Star 