Tag Archives: humor

September 5, 2025 · 12:12 am

Translating Texican

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I came to Texas from Iowa.  I was well-versed in how to speak Iowegian.  (I was, don’t-ya-know, and spoke it fluently, you-betcha.)

Then I arrived, fresh-faced and ready to change the world as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and began working in a mostly Hispanic middle school in deep South Texas.  Dang!  Whut language do they speak?  (Yes, I know… Spanish.  But my students straight from Mexico couldn’t understand the local lingo either. South Texas Spanish and Castilian Spanish from Mexico are not the same language.)  I couldn’t talk to the white kids either.   It is possible to communicate with Texicans, but it took me years to learn the language.  It takes more than mere usage of “ya’ll” and “howdy”.

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You can probably see what I mean when you look at these fake quotes based on the things real Texicans actually once said to me.  Of course, I can be accused of being a racist by interpreting things this way.  Texicans are concerned that you understand that they are not racists.  They merely rebel against being “politically correct”.  Apparently the political-correctness police give them all sorts of unfair harassment about speaking their minds the way they always have.  I should note, however, that I had to use a quote from Bubba rather than Dave Winchuk.  Dave is so anti-political-correctness concerned that he regularly said to me things with so much racial heat in them that they would even melt the faces off white people.  Face-melting is bad.  If you don’t believe me, re-watch the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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And to speak Texican, you must actually learn a thing or two about guns.  Yes, Texas is an open-carry State.  Apparently, Second Amendment rights are the most important rights in the Constitution.  My two sons grew up in Texas; the oldest is a Marine, and the younger is in the Air Force.  Guns are important to them.  I have those same arguments with former students, too.  I have learned to say the right things so that they will tolerate my unholy pacifist ideas about how the world might be safer if everybody didn’t have five guns in the waistbands of their underpants.  So gun-stuff ends up as a part of the Texican language I have learned to speak.

The point of it all is, language is a fascinating thing that grows and changes and warps and regresses.  I love it.  I try to master it.  And the mistakes I make usually sound purty funny.

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Filed under angry rant, education, gun control, humor, irony, kids, Paffooney, red States, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Texas

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September 4, 2025 · 12:01 am

Planting Some Onions

I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions.  Consuming them is good for you.  It cleans out the system.  It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them.  Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end.  And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane.  So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.

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It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.

  • Donald Trump is going to be our President until he dies.  I am not saying I want that to happen.  I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President for life either.  But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season.  Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for thirty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-and-crime-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
  • Human civilization is doomed.  We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!), and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive.  We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way.  And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway.  I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
  • The Roswell incident was real, and there are aliens living on planet Earth.  They will not save us from ourselves, however.  President Trump won’t allow that.  After all, they are immigrants.

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  • Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us.  It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way and make us see things from a different point of view.  Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally.   Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
  • Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese.  Onions get the gas out.  Cheese makes you constipated.  The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better.  Cheese by any other name still can stink like Limburger.
    “Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor, particularly foot odor.”

    Limburger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • So I have now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden.  In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin.  Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate.  You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.

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September 3, 2025 · 12:16 am

Skyscapes of the Cloudy Mind

I admit it.  Even though I collect pictures of sunrises to glory in the fact that I still have another day of life in this world, I rarely snap a picture of the cloudless sunrise.  It is very possible that this has something to do with what ultimately gives life value and makes it worthwhile to live one more day.

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If there is no pattern, no color-changes, no contrast, no variation… then why bother?  And this doesn’t only apply to living your life.  It applies to taking pictures of the sky too.  Solid blue or solid yellow are about as interesting as a minimalist painting.  (Have you ever seen the big beige squares and red squares that fill entire walls of the Dallas Art Museum?  Like a picture of a polar bear in a fierce blizzard or an extreme close-up of the side of a tomato.)

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Yes, sunshine and happiness are all well and good… but you don’t get a satisfactory skyscape without some clouds in it.  In fact, rain clouds provide the most fascinating patterns and colors.  What would the picture be without a little drama splashed here and there to make a center of interest or a counterpoint to the happy ending?  They say that variety is the spice of life.  And when they say that they probably mean cayenne pepper rather than parsley or oregano.  If that’s not what they mean, then why the hell did we bring food into the discussion?

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So, I am thinking, there have to be clouds.  (Notice, I said “clouds”, not “clowns”, because… according to the song, there “ought to be clowns”, not “have to be clowns”.)

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It is true that clouds can mean sadness… that the rain is coming, that your vision is obscured, that something has come between you and God’s eye.  But without clouds, the sky would be plain and boring.  Better to burn bright and explode in a short amount of time than to linger over a plain pale blue.

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September 2, 2025 · 12:34 am

My Post for Today

(This old post from 2016 comes from a time when I owned a laptop with keys that would stick in place, especially with the zoom keys and delete key.  It took me months to learn how to correct the problem.)

My computer is wearing out.  It blew up the WordPress posting sight on my screen to where the letters in the title are once again an inch tall.  The chances that it will suddenly wipe out everything I have typed and save a blank post over the whole thing almost instantly is making me tired.  To combat the problem, I must constantly keep a backup copy on Microsoft Word, which may also grow or shrink for no apparent reason.  It gets frustrating, and I am old, ill, and quite tired.  But I am also only a month away from two entire years of posting every single day, a feat I am not ready to fail at this close to the end.  So let me show something from my cartoon collections stolen from the internet at large.

From the Lola Bunny file;

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From Movie Art;

From Hanna-Barbera Toons;

And these are all things I could’ve written a 500-word post about with unique and possibly yawn-inducing Mickian insights, but today I would rather not.  Today I take the “picture is worth a thousand words” thing and give you 17,000 thousand words worth of not having to listen to me.

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August 23, 2025 · 12:17 am

Dog Writes

This is a repost of a classic bit… A post written by my dog using her tongue to lick-type. I offer this now nostalgically because she left us behind for dog heaven a year ago.

Jade Monster1

Okay, like, my name is Jade Beyer.   I know I look like a dog, but my family lets me be a people sometimes.  They let me eat enough people food from their table to turn into one of them.  You know, like, all fat and unhealthy and some stuff.  So, since Mickey is being lazy today, he said I could write his blog for him.   It won’t be very long because it is taking forever to pick out the right keys with my nose.  And my nose is bif… I mean big enough to hit the wrong key sometimes.  So I have to edif caretully and ofren.

My family does a lot of funny stuff I can tell about.  Like how they pee.  They go in my extra drinking places.  You know, the white things with the extra funky tasting water.  Why are you not laughing about that?  Don’t you get it?  The house is full of carpets where they could pee and mark their territory with their scents.  But they would rather just pee where I drink.  I don’t get it.  And why is Mickey yelling at me that I can’t write about that?  I just did, didn’t I?

But besides that I can tell you about my Momma.  Mickey is my Momma.  Why do I say that even though Mickey is a man?  Well, when I was a wee little puppy and my family found me in the street, Mickey was the first one to pick me up and hold me.  He was the first one to feed me.  He says I must have “imprinted” on him as baby animals sometimes do.  And that’s why he’s my Momma.  I love him best.  Even when he is grumpy and mad at me.  I chew up a lot of his stuff because it smells like him and I love him so very much.

I am writing this today because Mickey is busy shaving off his face fur.  He found some old pictures of himself for yesterday’s post, and it made him wonder if he could look anything like that again.  I tried to chew the old pictures so I could love them even better, but he just got mad at me and swatted me on the ears.  He said I could show you the old pictures, and not eat them.  So here they are before the temptation gets to me;

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Wasn’t he a goofy-looking kid?  I like him better with glasses.  I tasted his glasses once, but not the ones in the picture, the ones he is wearing now.  His face doesn’t look anything like the third grade pictures any more.  I would very much like to lick that little-boy face with the same tongue I use to lick my own butt, but Mickey says he’s glad I can’t because that kid was dumb enough to let a dog lick his face.  Apparently when people get older, you just can’t lick them as much.  It just makes them grumpy.

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August 20, 2025 · 12:08 am

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

I am the man from the Setting Sun,

Come to the future to deliver the past.

What does that even mean, that silly little two-line poem I wrote twenty years ago?  Am I not old enough to know better than to create a snippet loaded with goofy contradictions?  Apparently not.  But I am old enough to deliver the past.  I have been around long enough that I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated.  I saw Neil Armstrong take that “small step for man” on the surface of the moon.  I have learned a number of lessons from the past.  And as a writer, I can deliver those lessons in the form of stories.  I was born in a different century.  I have been around for more than half of one… approaching two thirds.  I have collected all kinds of wonderful things in my goofy old brain.  And make no doubt about it, with six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983, my Sun is about the set.  So, I have a mission, to open the eyes of people who are too foolish to avoid listening to what I have to say, or to read what I have written.

I saw The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews in the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa in 1965 when I was not yet ten years old.  I heard the song My Favorite Things for the very first time on the old black and white Motorola TV set in the clip I posted at the start of this post.  Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show I never missed on Saturdays if I could help it.  In a world before video games and computers and even color TV, kids still had priorities.  And my world was definitely a world of imagination.

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

                                                                              So, what kind of knucklehead must I be to think younger folks would want to know about any of this stuff from the time of dinosaurs and black-and-white TV?  I write books that are basically genre-breakers and about way too many different things to make sense to adults.  As a result, I classify myself as a Young Adult novelist, a writer for children… but not the beginning reader kind, or the early chapter-book kind… the kind like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in the Forest, or Dicey’s Song.  I write books about what it was like to be a kid in the past… the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s… last century.  And I have some knowledge and expertise in this area because I was one of those teachers during that time period that got to know the kids in my classes.  I made the horrifying mistake of actually talking to kids, asking them about their lives, and listening to their answers.  I talked about all manner of things with all manner of kids… brilliant things and stupid things… with dumb kids, smart kids, smelly kids, charming kids, and the kids everybody else hated.  You know… I did all the stupid mistakes that teachers who have no earthly idea how to do discipline would do, and got those kids to learn to behave at least halfway like human beings by being somebody they trusted and respected and… on rare occasions… believed.  Right now I am working on Snow Babies.  It is set in 1984.  And I hope to be good enough of a Sunset Man to be able to deliver it to the future.

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August 18, 2025 · 12:17 am

Mickey Mouse Club Music

Today’s essay was inspired by Annette Funicello’s Facebook page.  I was marveling at how a teen idol and Disney child star could have such a large following and leave such large footprints on social media when she is not only all grown out of her child-stardom, but is actually quite dead.   I, however, who am technically still alive, work very very hard at this author-self-promotion-thingy, and I hardly make any headway at all in the ocean of the internet.  So, I did what I always do when faced with the imponderables of this writing life.  I drew a picture.  I drew Annette naked.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate either.  I put clothes on her because, well, young-adult-genre authors don’t always have to think like a teenager.

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You see, I am not mad at Annette.  And my hormones no longer control the other things that once made me deeply regret the fact that Disney never let Annette appear in movies in a bikini, even in the movies that were not Disney movies.  When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 68.  Hormones don’t do all of my thinking any more… at least, that’s what I tell my wife.

And part of what I still love most about Annette is the music.  The Mickey Mouse Club was always about talented kids.  They could sing and dance and play the drums, and they were as easily professional quality as many of the adults… and cuter to boot.  Talented children have been a significant portion of my life.  As an English teacher in middle school, I taught kids that were Annette’s MMC age.  I taught them how to write and how to read, and occasionally I had to find other talents to promote and help those kids become winners in the great game of life.  And, it may be cruel to say it bluntly, but some kids are downright ugly.  Not merely ugly in terms of what they looked like, but how they acted and how they thought and how they felt about things.  Racism runs deeply through children who’ve been taught thoroughly by parents before the teacher even meets them.  Sometimes you have to dig around really deeply in the black pits of their personalities to find something bright and shiny enough to put the spotlight on.   But it is always worth it.  ALL CHILDREN HAVE TREASURE BURIED INSIDE THEM.  And it deeply hurts that too many adults in every community can’t be bothered to dig for it.

Annette in DLandn

I grafted a background on my picture of Annette to stress the fact that she is not naked in my picture.  She was a very public figure and a good portion of her personal treasure was that screen personality that showed through and sparkled in every role.  My favorite Annette piece is the movie Babes in Toyland, which I saw for the first time at Grandma Beyer’s house in Mason City on her color TV.  The songs from that movie still play in my dreams.

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August 17, 2025 · 12:22 am

Numbers!

“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” a very bad thing for the Native Americans it turned out, and in 1942 Hitler threatened the Jews of the world with annihilation at a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast in January of that year.  1942 and 1492.  What does it mean that my house number is 2914 Arkady Street?  Who is doomed to die?

Life on Mars

Don’t you think I know how crazy that is?  Numbers can’t possibly mean something like that.  Can they?  But all my life I have been plagued by a confluence of numerological signs and connected meanings.  And I don’t think I am alone.  Perhaps it is even a fairly common mental disorder.  Triskaidekaphobia is an irrational fear of the number 13.  And Friggatriskaidekaphobia is fear of Friday the 13th.  Is this a rational fear?  Maybe it was for the Knights Templar, because on Friday the 13th in 1307 Philip IV, King of France arrested virtually all the Knights, confiscating their fortunes and torturing them, then putting them to death after forcing them to confess to blasphemies.  And this was not the origin of the superstition.  There were 13 people present at the feast of Passover in the Upper Room on Nisan 13 (of the Hebrew calendar), the day before Jesus was executed on Good Friday.  When the 13th person left the other 12, that person was Judas Iscariot.  Either numbers do have consequences, or the world is just as crazy as I am.

Okay, so it’s the latter.  The world is just as crazy as I am.  But it is not all bad and dark omens.  I was born during a blizzard in Mason City, Iowa in 1956.  In 1985, the car I was driving had the mileage meter roll over to the point that the last four digits readable were 1956.  That same day I made love to a woman for the first time in my life.  I kept watching the odometer.  In 1994 the last four digits (in a different car) rolled to 1956 on the way home from a date at the Pizza Hut in Pearsall, Texas.  The woman I had dated married me the next January in 1995 and the first four digits turned to 1956 nine months later on the day my oldest son was born.

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And Douglas Adams fans like me all know that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.  This magic number is revealed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy that has more than three books in it.  Do I actually believe there is anything to this numerology claptrap?  Are we connected to the universe by numbers and equations through science, particularly physics?  Do numbers have mystical values that can be interpreted for our own benefit?  No.  Yes.  And maybe, I just don’t know for sure yet.  I believe in magic.  But I also believe in science.  Equations measure reality, but only through words can we define it.  Did I make you laugh?  Did I reveal myself to be totally bonkers?  Did I make you actually think?  Again… No.  Yes.  And maybe, I just don’t know for sure yet.  Unfortunately, there were 513 words in this essay… so I added this extra sentence.

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August 16, 2025 · 12:10 am

Lying as a Form of Social Responsibility

Mark Twain had a lot to say about lying.  Like in this quote from Following the Equator ; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar; “There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Mark Twain

Now, I would have to agree with the Biblical admonition against lying to get the people you dislike thrown into prison or beheaded.  I am especially concerned with some of the false witness pooping out of the mouths of some presidential candidates that would like us to believe their anti-science, anti-climate change, and anti-immigration lies would make good laws for our country.  If they go with Donald Trump’s idea of taking away birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, then my three children will lose their citizenship and could be deported from the only country they have lived in.  After all, after twenty years of marriage and applications and legal fees and enough frustration to make her give up on the whole idea, my wife is still not an American citizen.  She is from the Philippines, and Filipinos are one of the main groups that politicians site as reason for taking automatic citizenship away from foreign-born marriage mates back in the 1980’s.  And if we truly believe that climate change is a hoax and disproven by having Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe bring a snowball into the senate chamber, I believe we are all going to fry in Venus-like atmospheric conditions (Venus is 400 degrees Centigrade on the surface due to rampant greenhouse gasses like those emitted by the factories of Senator Inhofe’s primary campaign donors).  Some lies have fatal consequences, (and also, apparently, got Senator Inhofe the chairmanship of the Senate Science Committee).

But not all lies are bad lies.  Twain also says; “In all lies there is wheat among the chaff…”
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

And; “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.”
– “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”

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So I have actually started to think that the lies not forbidden by the Bible because of their fatal consequences are actually all good things, and not bad.  Yesterday in a post about talking to stupid people, I suggested that you should tell them lies about how you care about them and want the best for them, and you should lie about it so hard that you believe in the lies yourself.  After all, story-tellers like me tell nothing but lies.  My made-up stories are based on real events and people, and reveal real perceived truths about life, but they are basically nothing but lies.  This essay is a lie.  I was brought up in Iowa to be truthful and always tell the truth… and that was repeatedly reinforced by religious training from every church I ever attended.  And yet, the more I tried to tell the truth, the more I realized that I could never say anything that was not a lie.  Think about it, what is there in all the factual things that you know that you can actually prove is true?  “I think, therefore I am,” (a quote from Rene Descartes) is the only thing anyone has ever said that I can prove by my own perceptions.  Every scientific theory is constantly reviewed for lies and untruth and inaccuracy so that they can be revised for something better that is also not ultimately provably true in every detail.  It is entirely possible that everything else truly is a lie, and then the whole universe, science, physics, logic, and everything is basically untrue.

So, what do I do?   Anything I say is a lie.  Some of the lies are hurtful, even deadly.  So I have to be careful about those lies.  I should fight against those lies.  But the lies that make our existence in life meaningful and full of hope and mystery…  I have to let those lies live, and even learn to do them artfully.

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”
– Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.

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August 15, 2025 · 12:25 am

Ray Bradberry Pie

Yes, yes, I know it is supposed to be Ray Bradbury, not berry.  But now that the master has gone, I don’t want to think of him as bury which is too grave a term.  He was a master of metaphor and rhythm and image in writing.  His work is much more berry-flavored, and if you really intensively read a novel like Dandelion Wine, you can very easily get drunk on the richly fermented contents of his beautiful writing.

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angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)
angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

Mental Pie

I’d like to offer you a piece of my mind,

Though not a lecture, rant, or complaint,

But rather a piece of mental pie.

Its taste will be very sweet, you will find,

As I’m constantly thinking in ink and paint,

That gives you wings and allows you to fly.

You see, I think the literary mind does not have to sink to mundane and dark and dreary thoughts and ideas to accomplish lofty goals.  Often it is the special dollop of sugary metaphorical conceit that makes a Ray Bradbury or Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut to soar through the astral plane of ideas.  I know that’s cartoony thinking, and somewhat loony besides, but I am often frustrated when it seems that the only “realism” modern readers and audiences accept is what is gritty and bloody and depressingly painful.  Oh, I get it.  Douglas nearly dies in the course of Dandelion Wine.  Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Billy Pilgrim all suffer as much as we laugh in order to make their points in the novels they inhabit.  But the misfortune makes the moment of taking flight that much sweeter.  And it is in the language.  The loving description of everyday things and everyday events that become extraordinary through extra-close examination.  Sometimes silliness and humor and logical reason are not enough, and we have to speak in poetry.  We put in metaphors as peaches and plums.  Sensory details are raspberries and strawberries.  Sing-song rhythms and elegant pacing makes the batter whole and delicious.  And I know this whole post makes no earthly sense.  But sometimes you write for earthly reasons… and sometimes you try to reach heaven.  That is what Ray Bradberry Pie is made of.

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