This is an old 1980 Paffooney. I had no particular reason for creating it. I just did it on a whim. It is very Disney inspired and simply silly.
Tag Archives: humor
Why do they love karaoke in the Philippines?
This is cartoon that I actually got published in a comic book from Ben Dunn’s Ninja High School comic book series. You could look it up. Nobody paid me anything, but maybe it will be a collector’s item some day.
I have been married to a beautiful Filipina for nineteen years now. We have two handsome sons and a beautiful little girl. I am going so far in learning a new culture that I have chosen to learn how to speak that gawd-awful language Tagalog. Salamat. If you gave a chicken monkey-lips and set him to caterwauling, you’d have some idea how Tagalog sounds to a jaded old English ear like mine. I love it. “Flowers” would be “mga blklk” in Tagalog. How beautiful is that? I don’t have to worry about having a sense of humor. They will laugh at me just for my pronunciation.
I am quickly learning also to take part in the most important ritual in Filipino culture. Karaoke. It’s a uniquely oriental thing. Friends and family gather around the TV and start passing around the “magic microphone”, “Magic Mike” for short. Dang! That’ll be my name from now on. Just call me “Magic Mike”! The words appear on the screen in front of rotating still pictures that vary from the aerial view of Mad Ludwig’s German Castle to a beach in Hawaii. The words themselves have been placed there by some Japanese or Korean guy who barely knows how to speak English. He apparently sits in his Tokyo apartment all day listening to American CD’s and trying to write the words down exactly as his Samurai brain slowly processes them. The grammar is always twisted and goofy, many of the words are wrong. The mistakes on the screen can throw me way off singing one of my favorite songs when it gets to the part about “birds is flying over the rainbow, so why won’t I?” Ah! The total comic artistry! And get this, the machine scores the performance. You can hit the most cat-strangling, nails on blackboards sort of notes, and if you hit the beat right, it gives you a 94 and calls you a star singer. Sinatra is turning over in his grave. Barbara Streisand will be turning over in her grave too as soon as my singing kills her.
Don’t get me wrong. As silly a thing as karaoke is, I love it. It makes me feel good to belt out a round of “I did it my way”. I sing better than some of our friends. But, we have some real singing talent join us on occasion. James is smoother and more polished singing a Beatles tune than the Beatles themselves. Ernie sings “Beautiful Sunday” so well it brings a tear to my eye. And of course, there’s nothing that tickles me more than hearing a Filipino tenor putting his all into “My Wild Irish Rose”.
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Teaching Los Vatos Locos
I have spent the majority of my teaching career teaching Spanish speakers in South Texas. So, believe me when I say that for a gringo like me, there has to be some kind of art to it. I have taught so many surly, excessively macho boys and very feminine, but definitely aggressive girls, that I think I may have found an insight or two on how to do it.
First, you must be brave. And you must recognize that bravery means remaining outwardly calm while on the inside your heart is pounding wildly and you are fighting not to wet your pants. My first year we had to walk our eighth grade boys to and from the cafeteria four blocks away on another campus. I, being a rookie teacher, was given the delightful job of forcing the two most evil vato locos (crazy dudes) to return to classes and schoolwork after lunch instead of wandering off for the afternoon. I had to face down El Mouse and El Talan and convince them to catch up to the rest of the class without killing me. I have to say, at that point I did not have a forceful personality and could not give the laser eye of death that all South Texas teachers need to develop. I didn’t make the mistake of saying please, but implied I could actually do something to them to make their lives more miserable if they didn’t let themselves be herded along like cattle. El Talan picked up a metal fence post as if it was a baseball bat, and I got the chance to review my whole short life for a few tense seconds. But they relented. I didn’t show fear, and they put down the post and sauntered on with their lives. I got them back to the corral for afternoon classes. Both of them went to prison after dropping out of school. Both of them are dead now. One was killed by a rival drug dealer. I made the mistake of telling that tale to my mother. At the time, she nearly submitted my resignation for me.
Second, I learned you must have a heart. Veteran teachers told me that I should not smile before winter break, and even then, I should only smile at students’ misfortunes. That advice turned out to be a vat of puppy doo. I learned early on that students are people. They have feelings. They will return what they get. Unfortunately they often dish out what they get from other teachers, from parents, and even from local law enforcement. But more than once I was given a kid that everyone else said was a bad kid, and I treated that kid like a human bean… er, I mean being… and was forever after that kid’s favorite teacher, and someone that they would do anything for. I was one of those teachers who kids return to visit. Faces would appear in my doorway often like so many blooming flowers, blossoms lit up with sunshine. They would be high school kids who came back to get an encouraging word, or graduates coming by to tell me how successful they were. Often they came because of something they remembered from class. They felt they had to share their sunshine. Believe me, sometimes it was vital to me to be able to continue to get a little of that sunlight in the midst of daily darkness.
I have to confess, I did not reach every kid. Some have made poor choices and died from them. Some have turned to the dark side of the force and are unrepentantly Darth Vader. Some I could not stand and did everything in my power to extinguish their bad behaviors with punishments that never worked. Some that I could not stand were among the ones that came back to visit too. Funny how you can do everything you possibly can to defeat a kid, and they will still come around, still tell you that you were their favorite teacher, and the only thing they remembered about middle school was something that happened in your classroom. It’s not even always something you want them to remember.
The kid in today’s Paffooney was not one of the bad ones. Manuel was the son of a border patrol agent. He was smart. He knew what was right and what was wrong. I don’t know where he is now, or what he is doing, but I believe in him, and I know he was worth every effort I ever put into teaching him.
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I am Popeye
I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.
First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in my chin, very little hair left on my ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.
Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed high schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in my ears and my squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on my face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I have taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.
Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.
So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!
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Old Oil
Today’s Paffooney is an oil painting I did in the 1980’s. It is an attempt to prove to myself that I could paint realistically enough to call myself a surrealist. I know you may think that last sentence is a mix of oxymoron and just plain moron, but it is necessary to have the REAL in place in the middle of the surrealism. I chose to make it from photographs. I used a picture of myself and David (a child who was my student, but taught me more than I taught him) with another photo of a building that my grandparents had taken a vacation picture in front of from Tombstone, Arizona. It was important to get the light right. I wanted to establish a dramatic light source in the upper right of the picture and bathe the scene in sunlight.
As a self portrait this works because it shows a lot of what I am as a teacher. I willingly wear the black hat. I am a cowboy. I shoot from the hip, in the sense that I actually teach stuff that’s in the literature book instead of doing test-preparation worksheets. I teach because I actually care about kids, not because I’m greedy for the fantastic salary they offer to Texas teachers, especially one that is willing to teach in a poor rural community where most of the kids are Hispanic, under-fed, and under-loved by the people who run this lovely business-friendly State.
The boy in the picture is one who didn’t have a father living at home, whose mother was always working, and who never got a break from the social workers, police, and other school personnel. I had a very progressive and wonderful principal at the time who knew I’d studied to be a foster parent in case of need and knew that other boys had been successfully mentored by me. He suggested I keep an eye on David and help him out when no one else could. It was David who taught me that if you feed a child like him (I was a lousy cook but I could make hamburgers and mashed potatoes) they will continually show up at your door like a stray cat. I was single at the time. It was a bit risky to let a child into my home where people might think I was some kind of child-molester. But I kept the apartment windows open, hid nothing from anybody, helped him with homework (if I could get him to do any), and played computer games and role-playing games with him. I took him to the doctor a couple of times. I listened when he needed to talk about things, and he was my friend until he graduated high school. Now he is married with children of his own. I haven’t seen him in over sixteen years, but I know that skinny little mosquito-sized boy has grown into a big healthy, well-fed man. It is important in life, and in oil paintings, to make a difference for someone else. He made a difference for me. Notice how he uses his rabbit-ear fingers to keep me humble in my self-portrait.
As a composition, even though this is a realistic picture, it works because of numerous rectangles that stack and pile and lead the eye into the depths of the background while the strong diagonals made by shadows, arms, and edges not only draw you to the center of the picture, but bring the figure of the boy and I closer together than we are in the actual image. Layers of reality, carefully composed, to capture and portray… That last sentence is a three line poem to explain what an oil painting really is… or maybe what it SURreally is.
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600! Yay!
I have been social media marketing for just over a year now. 208 followers on WordPress. 602 likes on my Facebook novel page, Catch a Falling Star. What does it all mean? Well, no one is reading my books still, so it means, “Write more books!” cries a crazed Mickey who is like Sisyphus in that he doesn’t know what will happen at the top of that hill.
January 17, 2014 · 3:45 am
Now, That’s Entertainment! (reposted for the love of laughter)
(pictures borrowed from; http://www.whenmoviesweremovies.com/RedSkeltonimages.html, http://godcelebs.com/22413-red-skelton.html, http://vint-rad.blogspot.com/2013_03_01_archive.html)
How do you spell comedy? R-E-D-S-K-E-L-T-O-N! For real, that’s how I spelled it during a third grade spelling bee in 1965. Pretty dang dumb, wasn’t I? But it got a laugh from the prettiest girl in class. I truly couldn’t get enough of Red Skelton on Wednesday nights. It was on past my bedtime, but Dad always let me watch, because… well, I think it was his favorite show too. George Appleby always trying to get something past his wife who would always catch him and punish him soundly for something that truthfully wasn’t his fault. That con man tricked him into drinking that stuff that made him act like an insane lady’s man. San Fernando Red pulling a gag on the man with the silver six-gun and hoofing it out of town before the townsfolk caught on to him with the tar and feathers. He never truly got what he had coming, or what he wanted, either. Someone else got it instead. Freddy the Freeloader making even poverty and homelessness funny. He never passed up a cigar butt in the street and found a dime on every sidewalk.
I always thought that if it was going to be funny, it had to be done Red’s way. Let’s face it, there were two kinds of humor back then and only one my parents truly approved of. They were Eisenhower Republicans living in Iowa, the heart of the Midwest. Red’s gentle humor, with its hidden ribald parts, could profoundly make you laugh, and once in a while bring a tear into your eye. It was never mean-spirited or cruel. It never made a political or religious point. It always assumed that all people were good deep down, and even the bad guys could be reformed with the right joke or prank to make them see the error of their ways. That was comedy.
The other kind, the scary kind was Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. They would say bad words, even though you couldn’t say Carlin’s famous seven words on TV back then. They made jokes about dark and desperate things. Democratic political conventions in Chicago, the Viet Nam War, racial tension, the Black Panthers, these were all fair game for satire and black humor. Their jokes assumed that all people were basically bad and greedy and ignorant… full of malice towards all. Not even the comedian himself was assumed to be the exception to the rule.
And seriously un-funny things were happening. Kennedy was shot in 1963. Another Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both killed in 1968. Patty Hearst was first kidnapped by and then somehow forced to be a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Chaos took the world we knew and turned it upside down. You had to learn to laugh at dark things, because laughing was somehow better than crying and hurting inside. The pictures of the My Lai Massacre in Life Magazine made me sick to my stomach for weeks. I did everything I could in class to make that pretty girl laugh, and when I couldn’t… I had to shut up for a while. I had to think.
I decided early on that I needed humor to live. I had to have the funny parts in my life in order to ward off the darkness. I whistled walking home from choir practice at the Methodist church on dark November nights. I told jokes to the rustling leaves and invisible hoot owls. I got by.
So, what is the lesson learned? If you read this far without gagging, then you know I mix a little funny with a little sad… and try to make a serious point in my writing. Maybe I’m a fool to do it, but I truly believe that Red had it right. People are basically good. You can reform a bad guy with a good joke. You can get by in the dark times.
If dark times are truly here again, then maybe that is why I have to tell my stories, make a few jokes, and make people think. I know I may be killing you with boredom by now, but that’s what I do. I’m a professional English teacher. I bore people to death. And if you read this far, and you’re still alive, maybe I can make you a little bit smarter too.
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Metaphor and Meaning
In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
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Snow Babies (Proof that I’m not a loser as a writer)
My novel Snow Babies that I submitted to Chanticleer Book Reviews for the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction has been awarded a place among thirty-one finalists. Here is the link; http://chantireviews.com/chanticleer-contest-deadlines-and-announcement-projections/finalists-for-the-dante-rossetti-awards-for-young-adult-fiction/
I should know by the end of January if I win or not, but the fact that I made the finals feels like vindication!
Above you see the mock-up cover that I drew for myself. (The novel was submitted as an unpublished manuscript). Here is another Paffooney with the main character of Snow Babies, Valerie Clarke.
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Wise Guy
At school today the principal asked us to come up with one word that we wanted to apply to our own lives as teachers. You know how the teaching game is. You start a new semester; you have to be subjected to eight hours of blah-blah-blah. It is required blah-blah-blah mandated by Texas education laws. My magic word was wisdom.
So, what does wisdom imply? Well, I am old. I should have some of that thing in one pocket or another. So I search my pockets. As a kid I vowed to become a wizard. What is a wizard if not a wise man? A wise guy. How, then, do you acquire wisdom?
In the movie Mystery Men, Ben Stiller tells us that mystical wisdom from the wise guy mystical sage is only saying a thing is its opposite. Thus true wisdom comes from learning how foolish you really are. It’s a good joke, but it’s also true. You can’t be wise unless you realize how little you actually know out of all the things that there are.
Why would I want to be wise? Well, I have the fool thing down pretty well already. As fools go, I’m a humble fool who trades in foolishness and calls it humor and young adult novels. So it follows, by logic, an advanced form of foolishness, that I must be wise.
Okay, wise guy, time to say something wise in the conclusion… Doh!
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Catch a Falling Star 