Tag Archives: humor

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

 

 

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

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Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

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Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Pirate Novels

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My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college.  I finished it in four years.  It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling.  You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery.  Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns.    It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through.  I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it.  But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing.  My sisters served as my beta readers for this story.  They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood.  They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt.  There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story.  He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently.  In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down.  This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character.  My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature.  Fortunately for me, it was not.  I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.

But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative.  The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic.  The crew were re-animated skeletons.  The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew.  His name was Hairy Arnold.  One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot.  Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous.  But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise.  It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market.  There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.

My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely.  The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction.  The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy.  There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer.  I had to stop trying to be serious.  My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality.  So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.

 

In the end all the main characters die.  All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter.  Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died.  So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day.  I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it.  And so to this very day I… oopsie.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Uncategorized

Jungle Book

Last night my family and I went to the new Disney movie Jungle Book directed by John Favreau.  It was the movie version I have been waiting for all my life.

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The amazing thing about this movie is the way it took the book and layered its themes and central idea on top of the classic 60’s Disney cartoon.  The music is still there and intact, though mostly moved to the end credits.  The kid is still cute and mostly vulnerable, at least until the conclusion.  And they have still given the Disneyesque comedic touch to the character of Baloo the bear, voiced by comedian Bill Murray in the this incarnation.  But this is a live action movie and the kid-friendly Bowdlerization of the original story is a thing no longer.

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A classic book illustration by E.J. Detmold

Fortunately for the young actor, Neel Sethi, they don’t require him to play the entire movie naked as would be required by a strictly by-the-book approach.  They allow him the Disney-dignity of the cartoon red loin cover.  But the sense of a human child facing the violence of the jungle naked, armed only with his creature-appropriate natural defenses, has been put back into the story. This version literally has teeth and claws.  We see the boy’s body wounded and scarred during the course of his life in the jungle.  And at a time of crucial confrontation, Mowgli takes the defense stolen from man village, a torch of the feared red flower, and throws it away into the water, facing the terrible tiger with only his wits and the abilities of his fangless, clawless human body.   Thus, an essential theme I loved about the book when I was twelve is restored.  Man has a place in the natural world even without the protections of civilization.

The story-telling is rich and nuanced, with multiple minor characters added.  Gray Brother has been restored to Mowgli’s family.  The fierce power of Mowgli’s wolf mother has been written back into the screenplay.  And the character of Akela is given far more importance in the story than the cartoon could even contemplate.  Although his role in aiding Mowgli to kill the tiger Shere Khan has been taken away from him, Akels’s death becomes the central motivation bringing Mowgli and Shere Khan together for the final inevitable confrontation.  And this movie does not shy away from the reality of death as the cartoon did, resurrecting Baloo at the end and Kaa’s attempts to eat Mowgli being turned into a joke (though I would like to note if you have never read the book, Kaa is not supposed to be a villain.  He was Mowgli’s wise and powerful friend in the book).  Even the tiger survives in the cartoon version.  This is no longer a cute cartoon story with a Disney sugared-up ending.

I will always treasure the 1960’s cartoon version.  I saw it at the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa when I was ten.  I saw it with my mother and father and sisters and little brother.  It was my favorite Disney movie of all time at that point in my life.  I read and loved the book two years after that, a paperback copy that I bought with my own money from Scholastic book club back in 1968, in Mrs. Reitz’s sixth grade classroom.  That copy is dog-eared, but still in my library.  But this movie is the best thing that could possibly happen to bring all of that love of the story together and package it in a stunning visual experience.

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Doodle Day

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If you do art, then you also doodle.  Really!  No matter how hard you may try to keep it a secret, you doodle, and people all know it.  So, since the secret is out… Here are some of my doodles.  This jester-sort-of-half-white-clown was a doodle yesterday while watching TV… something I do with my hands while my mind is doing something else.

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Here’s another doodle… same day, different piece of paper, different TV show.

But not all doodles are meandering swirls and girls.  I have a whole book of home-made cartoons that start with a blank page and end up with a page that furthers whatever curious cartoon story I am trying to make.  Here are a few examples of that.

Now, I know your doodles probably look nothing like mine.  My doodles are seriously demented.  I have doodled enough that I have seriously worry about going blind.  And my doodles are influenced by a lifetime of bad arty-habits.   But they do give me practice.  They also help me think.  They relieve stress.  And they make an easy and somewhat racy post.

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, doodle, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Mr. Lucky

Self Portrait vxv

Sometimes everything goes wrong.  That, of course, is something that happens more often than the times when everything goes right.  Lately I have had the fortune to experience the more common of those two sometimes.

My most recent publisher, the one that was supposed to publish Snow Babies, underwent a reduction in capacity and financial difficulties.  They had to reorganize and reduce their commitments.  That meant they could no longer publish any of my other novels.  It apparently also means that they will no longer fulfill the publishing contract on Snow Babies.  Bummer.

My new car, a Ford Fiesta that I bought from Enterprise Rental Car to replace my old Ford Fiesta that was unceremoniously killed by a passing motorist as it sat in front of my house, is now in the shop with it’s own hoof and mouth disease.  While picking up kids from school, I hit a pothole on a Dallas street.  Not just any pothole, but a huge camouflaged cavern of a pothole capable of taking a huge bite out of the right front wheel.  I was not speeding.  I did not do anything wrong but drive in place I have driven a hundred times previously… though this time it was after torrential rain and a bit of nasty hail that I had no way of knowing made potholes bigger and angrier and more horrible.   I am surprised that it didn’t eat any other cars in the moderate traffic I was surrounded by.  But I initially thought that once a passing motorist, younger and more pothole savvy than me, did the good Samaritan act of helping me change the tire, that I would only have to get the tire fixed or replaced and would be happily on my way again.  No such luck.  Not only was the tire ruined, but also the rim it was mounted on, and possibly the undercarriage of the car.  It was going to cost at least the $500 deductible from my insurance company, unless something even worse happened that they couldn’t see without looking at their bank books a little harder.  And I had to get another rental car in the mean time.  But, of course, the recent hail storm not only had most of the rental cars rented, but the rental companies had lost cars to hail damage as well.  I was stuck with a rather expensive Dodge Challenger that the car insurance can’t completely pay for.  And I have no place to park it if the hail decides to revisit us this week.  Double bummer.

And, of course, it doesn’t end there.  Having kids in school is a challenge, especially this time of year with high-stakes testing going on.  I can’t give you particulars because some things have to remain private, but even really bright kids like mine, the children of two teachers, can be subject to test-anxiety and failure and the resulting depression which can prove fatal if not taken seriously enough.  Triple damn ding-dang bummer!

But we can’t let bad luck be the end-all of the story.  I am a pessimist by nature.  Nothing has happened to me recently that took me by surprise.  I am always expecting the worst to happen, and life rarely disappoints me on that score.  So I am not floored by these randomly-occurring sucker punches.  Rather, I am given that shot of anger and adrenaline needed to pick myself up and start fighting back.

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I have my novel Magical Miss Morgan almost ready to submit to another publisher that I found through a friend, with a couple of backup publishers to send it to after it is rejected the first time.  I have researched three possibilities so far.

I talked to the insurance agent today to stop the hemorrhaging of money down the drain of car repairs, and though I have taken a pretty good-sized cannon shot in this battle, it will not sink my little pirate ship.

And a conference with principal and teacher and student and parent solved a lot of the other problem.  It can be an advantage to a kid to have a teacher as a parent.  We tend to know how everything works, and we speak the secret language of Edjumacation to help get things actually done.

So, no worries, man.  Even though all my luck is bad luck, I am still lucky… since there is a lot of it.

 

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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, education, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, pessimism, publishing, Uncategorized

Talislanta

In the 1980’s when I was a Dungeons and Dragons nut, I found a role-playing game that was sort of unique.  It was called Talislanta.  Created by Stephan Michael Sechi, it was a game like D&D, but totally without elves and dwarves and orcs and even humans.  It was set on the world of Talislanta with many weird and wonderful races that didn’t exist anywhere else in literature.  I used it to play RPG games with South Texas kids, and the Baptists preached against the demons and devils in D & D.  The only way I could get away with D & D games was by playing Talislanta, where the Baptists couldn’t preach against me because they didn’t know what the heck it was.  So, I created stories and art from Talislanta, inspired by the work of the game’s lead artist, P. D. Breeding Black.

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Kastur, hero and adventurer

Hal Vas was a Jaka wilderness scout, while Xeribeth was a Zandir Sorceress who specialized in spells of flight and levitation.

Orrin, the headless snow wizard, and Teveron, the Tanasian pyromancer were both bad guys who tried to defeat the heroes at every turn.

Magnolia and Willowleaf were both Muses, the butterfly-winged people who used magic mostly for the purposes of entertaining others.  They were attended by the tiny butterfly-winged people called Wisps.

Talislantans were many different colorful races.  There were green ones like the Cymrillians, the Tanasians, and the Oceanians.  There were blue ones like the Mirin.

Sunnyjias was a Cymrillian enchantress while Zoran-Viktor was a Mirin alchemist.

Spooky was a Man-ra Shapechanger who could alter his body shape drastically.  Harun was a Phantasian astromancer who could fly using sailing ships powered by anti-gravity wind crystals.

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And Tazian Thralls were warriors who had elaborate colorful tattoos over every inch of their bodies.

It was a fun world to play in.  Magic and mystery and wacky wizards abounded.  And it wasn’t all about throwing fireballs and whacking stuff with swords… although there was a lot of that too.

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Filed under drawing, Dungeons and Dragons, fairies, Paffooney

Mr. Bean

Rowan Atkinson is a genius comedian, and the character of Mr. Bean is the greatest work he has done, the best proof of his genius.  As someone who works at humor and tries to get it right, I have to analyze and carefully study the work of the master.  How does he do it?  What does it all mean?  And what can I learn from it?

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Atkinson not only created the character, he co-wrote the entire television series and controls every aspect of the performance as the central character.  Mr. Bean is the bumbling every-man, going through horrific troubles because of the cascade effect of simple little errors.  We laugh at him because we have all been there.  Tasting the hot sauce leads to a meltdown that causes chaos and disaster for the entire store.  Overcoming fear of heights makes him the center of attention for the entire pool-house when can’t overcome the urge to use the diving board, and yet, can’t make himself jump off.  We have all lived the nightmare of being trapped naked in the hotel hallway, locked out of our room, just when the hallway becomes crowded.

There is a certain charm to Mr. Bean.  He is a childlike character, blissfully unaware of how much he doesn’t know about the complex society around him.  He has a teddy bear that sleeps with him and comforts him.  He lays out his supplies for the big exam, and he’s thought of practically everything he will possibly need, but basic physics fails him and makes the pencils keep rolling out of place.

 

Rowan Atkinson is a master of the art form because he has such tremendous control of his rubberized goofy face and manic body.  He can drive his goofy little yellow car from a sofa mounted on top.  He can change clothes while driving.  Just watching him shave with an electric razor is a total hoot.

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It is mostly physical comedy, almost slapstick, and yet it is not the broad unfeeling poke-in-the-eye you get with the Three Stooges.  Most of the real damage is done to himself, though pompous and deserving people are often near enough to get a helping of it smack in the face.  A lot of it is practically pantomime, with hardly any real dialogue.  Much of it, like the sword fight with the bumblebee using a butter knife, is simply silly.

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The movie, Mr. Bean’s Holiday, extends the character by making him actually interact with other characters, though in his own inimitable Mr. Bean way.  The limited dialogue thing is amplified by the fact that he is traveling in France and does not speak French.  Still, he interacts with the boy he accidentally kidnaps, the girl who wants to be a movie star whom he helps in her quest by an accident at the Cannes Film Festival, and the movie director whom he almost kills but ends up saving his career with a hit home movie.

Mr. Bean makes the ridiculous an art form by helping us to laugh at ourselves as we are beset by all the little troubles of life that Bean magically floats through.

So, now I have told you why I love Rowan Atkinson as a comedian.  He is a comedic genius.  Of course, you knew that already, right?

 

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Filed under artists I admire, comedians, humor, review of television, sharing from YouTube

Superheroes from the 60’s

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I was a comic book nut from a very early age.  I started collecting comics in 1966 when I was ten years old.  Almost as soon as I started collecting them, I began copying the drawings, copying Spiderman, Hawkeye, Captain America, Avengers, and Batman.  I am a comic book lover, and I am also a comic book plagiarist.  But I promise to use my own artwork and photographs to illustrate this blog post.  After all, I am illustrating being a copy cat.

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Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad in the style of artist Curt Swan in 1962.

My parents didn’t approve of kids with comic books.  I desperately wanted Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books, like the ones I read in the barbershop every time I was waiting for a haircut.  But they had gotten wind of Frederic Wertham’s campaign against comic books two years before I was even born.  The learned psychiatrist insisted that comic books corrupted children with sexual images hidden in the artwork (oh, gawd, look where Saturn Girl’s hands are… close anyway), Batman and Robin were homosexuals trying to influence young boys to be gay, Wonder Woman was a lesbian who was into bondage.  This he said in 1954, but it didn’t really reach my parents’ ears in rural Iowa for another 12 years.  The result was severe limits on my comic book ownership possibilities.  But Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes were acceptable, as were Casper the Friendly Ghost and Scrooge McDuck.

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So, my copy above of Curt Swan’s work is from the Legion of Superheroes.  Superman was boy-scout enough to qualify too.  I could get by with Tarzan even though he was a mostly naked guy running around the jungles.  And time and money solve a lot of problems.  I was allowed to subscribe to Avengers and X-men and the Amazing Spiderman once I had field-work money to put towards it.  I drew lots of comic book heroes from that point onwards.

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I learned how to draw men with unhealthy amounts of muscles, women with waists that would break in two with the amount of breastly boobage a teenage boy would pack on top, and numerous people who actually seemed to think capes made sense as a fashion statement.  I also learned how to do shading in pen and ink and foreshortening from master artists like John Romita Jr. and George Perez and Barry Windsor-Smith.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t give proper credit to Murphy Anderson and Jack “King” Kirby.  I know you don’t know who those people are because you are not the comic book nut I am… nobody is.  But believe me, they are masters of an American Art form.  And I will never be one of them, because even though I am almost as good as some of them, I chose to be a teacher instead of being a comic book artist, a thing I could’ve so easily succeeded at back in the 1980’s.  You should know this too…  I have never regretted making that choice.

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Walker

 

 

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60’s Rock and Roll (Poems made of Memory)

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  1. Pete Townshend is Now Old

I heard it and didn’t believe

Who heard it, you say, and then leave?

Yes they heard it and didn’t believe

Who sang it, you say, for reprieve?

Don’t shoot me, they sang it, believe!

Who told it, the pinball retrieved?

Yes they told it, and now I am peeved

Who wrote it and must be believed?

Yes they wrote it and made me believe

A pinball wizard, his song has grown cold

And finally they sang it and now it is sold

And a generation loved and laughed and were bold

But both Pete and Roger are now really old!

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  1. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart

They were the soul of the movement

And love did surround them

The little girls screamed and that’s how

We all found them

With a real nowhere man

Living in a nowhere land

And poor Elinor Rigby’s lost love

There were one, two, three steps

Right down Penny Lane

Blue meanies and lovers regret in the main

And light shines upon us from somewhere above

But the thing I regret beyond yesterday

Is the fact that love grew and then went away

And in the darkness a shot rang out…

And John’s voice was silent…

As tears replaced cheers and grew dark all about.

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  1. Monkees and Mayhem

I saw her face, and I’m a believer

I laughed when she laughed and never deceived her

On the last train to Clarksville in the quietest car

I watched her bright antics and loved from afar

The song they were singing was really quite frantic

And never could I be quite so pedantic

To tell the daydream believer her show was now over

And move on to leave her for a dog, name of Rover.

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Filed under poem, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wordplay

Hogfather (a Book Review)

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I finished reading the book Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett,  while sitting in the waiting room as the dentist worked on the wires of my son’s braces in a nearby dentist’s chamber of horrors.  The receptionist and secretary probably thought I was insane for incessantly chortling and making those other rude snorty noises you make when you don’t want to interrupt others with laughing, but can’t help it.  What better way to wait in the cold chambers of dental anxiety than to read a funny, funny book about an assassin named Mr. Teatime who meant to slay the Hogfather, Terry Pratchett’s version of Santa Claus, by stealing children’s teeth from the tooth fairy and using them to control young minds and make them stop believing in the Hogfather, that giver of gifts on the sacred and festive Hogswatch Eve?

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This story has an unusual hero.  Death, that skeletal reaper of souls and talker in ALL CAPITOL LETTERS.  Oh, and not just Death.  His granddaughter Susan is along for the adventure.  So Death puts on the red suit to make people believe in the Hogfather again while Susan tracks down the perpetrators of the tooth fairy plot.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are full of bizarre but highly developed characters who not only make you laugh, but make you think.  The books can be fairly thick and full of complex ideas, and yet, the pages melt away as you read.  And the people who can hear you laughing about the book will think you are absolutely crazy.

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