Tag Archives: irony

October 16, 2016 · 4:13 pm

The Irony of Regular Blogging

This is an old artwork I have never shared before.

There are many things that I have noticed about being a blogger that are the opposite of what you might expect. Let me list a few…

Listing stuff makes a daily post easier.
I have posted something on WordPress as a blogger ever day for twenty two and a half months. I will soon hit two years without missing a day.
Writing every day makes the ideas flow more easily rather than running out of ideas. The well refills faster than I can drink its waters.
My most popular post is Be Naked More , which gets views practically every day, but including artistic nudes randomly in a post does not increase its views and popularity even when I put “naked” and “nude” in the tags.

20150204_085809

Reproducing artwork on a blog is difficult when you draw things too big for your little scanner/printer. No matter how good the camera and how bright the lighting, white becomes gray and the sparkle and luster of good colored pencil color is lost.
Good writing becomes more about writing less. But it also has to be more carefully crafted. The more I brew prose in my black cauldron of a blog, the more it seems to boil down to poetry.
Readers don’t seem to object to metaphors and purple paisley prose as much as editors and book reviewers do.
I like writing purple paisley prose (over-complicated grammatical structures with alliteration, metaphor, and asides that interrupt the flow like this one… taken to the extreme for humorous effect).

Art pieces can be manipulated and re-used or re-combined to make something new out of something old. Computers make art-editing infinitely easier.
Most people don’t actually read your blog all the way through. Some just like it for the pictures. If you actually read this far, you can let me know with a smiley face in the comments.
There are many, many good writers on WordPress… as I am sure there are on other blog sites as well. I despair of being able to find and read them all. If you are reading this bullet point, you are probably one of the ones I have found and read and liked. Blogging becomes a mirror that shows you your own self more naked than naked… not just what is under your clothes, but what you look like to yourself in your own head. And the more you walk around WordPress naked like that, the more you want to show it all off. (How’s that for an idea that will pull in the readers from the lonely parts of Siberia?)

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Filed under blog posting, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, irony, Paffooney

Tagged as blogging, blogging about blogging, humor, irony, Metacognition, naked, nude

January 27, 2016 · 4:30 pm

When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day. You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them. Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you. fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years. Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective. Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction. Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff. In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out. It could be complicated, but probably it was simple. All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses. Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate. “What have I learned today?” You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student. Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it. That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes. In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God. And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.

Teacher

I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL. Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management. My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library. I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls. I have entered a second childhood now. Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible. But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State. A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play. That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out. I am playing with words and ideas. They are my toys. Toys like this one;

turtleboy

This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony. He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words. Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing. Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post? If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.

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Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, teaching, Uncategorized

Tagged as focus, goofiness, humor, irony, lesson cycle, paffooney, satire, teaching, time management, writing exercise

September 10, 2015 · 3:03 pm

Reverse Humor

Have you ever noticed how Disney animated movies try to make you cry after you have been laughing for a while?

It is ironic, but true, that you have to use a little bit of the opposite to make something seem more like what it is. The sad moments in the Disney formula are there to make you see how light the lighter moments really are. The brightest light needs to be contrasted with the deepest shadow.

So, ironically, I find myself talking about irony as a story telling tool. You see it in today’s first Paffooney. In World War I pilots were usually dead if their plane was shot down. Parachutes were not invented until late in the war. Yet the pilot is giving the thumbs up sign as he sees you watching him fall to his death. Irony is the perceived twist on reality that overturns expectations and makes you severely think for yourself about what the meaning could be. Is the pilot happy because he is not the pilot of the pictured plane? Could he be the pilot who shot it down? Is it the Red Baron’s plane, forever robbing Snoopy of the ultimate opportunity? Is the pilot the Baron himself, happy to be done with his famously deadly career? Ironically, he is wearing a parachute in the painting, because ironically I didn’t look up the fact that the Frenchman, Jean Pierre Blanchard tested the first soft parachute in 1785, dropping a dog in a basket safely from high up in a hot air balloon until after I wrote the sentence about them not being invented in WWI. And ironically, they still were not commonly used by pilots in World War I because they were mostly flying a few hundred feet from the ground and parachutes rarely were able to save them that close to death. (Also, ironically, I seem to be using the word irony or its derivative parts of speech so much that the irony is lost by being made too obvious. Dang me!)

The Moose Bowling Paffooney is another example of the kind of reverse humor that I am trying to explain and confusticate today. If you can’t read the screwy legend on the swirl, it says, “Life is like Moose Bowling because… in order to knock down all the pins… and win… you have to learn how to throw a moose!” Now I know that Bullwinkle-ized moose humor is naturally funny in itself, but I believe this Paffooney uses irony to make a funny. You see, it is surprisingly the opposite of what you expect to happen when you talk about Moose Bowling (an obscure but well-loved sport in Northern Canada) and claim that you do it by throwing a moose at the pins at the business end of the bowling lane. According to http://www.cutemoose.net/moose_facts.htm, an average adult male moose weighs about a thousand pounds. He would be remarkably difficult to throw even if you could get the three finger holes successfully drilled into his antlers.

To sum up, you can plainly see that there is a real science to the use of irony in a humor blog… or maybe not… because I confess I dropped some excess irony on my left foot and nearly crushed it. I know it was irony because I saw the rust. Oh, and I forgot to add a whole nuther essay on why puns are a form of irony. Well… maybe another day.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney

Tagged as goofiness, humor, irony, Moose Bowling, Paffoonies, using irony, writing humor

June 3, 2015 · 11:25 am

Blog Happy

At the outset of 2015, back on January 1st, I made a plan to blog every single day of the year. Now in June I am nearing the halfway point and I haven’t missed a single day. I was worried at the outset that I would quickly run out of ideas or have to re-post a lot of old writing. But I hammered out a goal of writing 500 words every day… not rough draft words, but polished words that were as near to finished writing as I can get without obsessive-compulsive editing and the post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes. I found out that the more I write, the more the well refills with fresh prose needing to be drawn out in my daily bucket-full.

I am supposing that it doesn’t hurt that I have been in poor health and spend a lot of my day in bed where I do the writing. You have more time to write when you are limited in what you can do every day. For instance, wasting a day water-skiing is not really an option. Neither is mountain-climbing, tennis-playing, race-running. and acrobatic maneuvers in a space-plane. Well, I actually do some of that last thing… but only in my science fiction stories. Moose-chasing, pun-hunting, time-travelling, working elaborate voodoo spells, and swashbuckling are the things I really do… and I do them in my imagination.

It also really doesn’t hurt my overall goals that I am a cartoonist and I draw constantly. It gives me plenty of visual punch punch to fill up spaces between paragraphs, and I have real, honest-to-god professional writer friends that say the visuals are a key to good blogging now and in the near future. People respond more to the pictures than the prose.

I really can draw upon my life for topics. I recently read an article that claims stress and uncertainty in day-to-day life fuels creativity and writing efficacy. So that is good news for me. The house is falling apart. The weather has gone from a serious five-year drought to record spring rainfall. The ground our house is built on is shifting with the transition from shriveled to soaked like a sponge. So the foundation is cracking and the rafters will soon be landing on our heads. The flower garden that is the yard is turning into more of a jungle. I am in no condition health-wise to mow and maintain, but the city will fine us a lot of money I don’t have if I don’t do something to curb the jungle’s enthusiastic spread. And of course the dog produces five times her weight in dog poop every day. (Here’s that disturbing thing about poop references turning up in my posts again.) But the exercise I am forced to get from dealing with those problems on a daily basis is probably keeping my heart going and keeping me alive. And, besides, ranting about troubles is a source of humor and gives me something to write about.

Now, I started blogging in 2013 because my publisher at the time, I-Universe, told me it was a necessary part of marketing my book. They neglected to tell me that I would be the only one marketing my books and that I would probably never see a penny of profit in my lifetime from writing, but that’s the breaks, ain’t it? There is a very good chance that, even though I have been published more than once, and though editors say my writing is good, my books will never be read widely during my lifetime. I may get discovered along the way given enough time and endurance… but I may just be writing books for my own satisfaction and reading pleasure. It is the nature of the beast in this day and age that being a good writer and a mediocre marketer is a recipe for failure, while being a poor writer and a good marketer yields success. So, while irony is having its way with me, I would just like to say… blogging is now where I find my happiness… and thank you for reading my blog.

6 Comments

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as blog writing, humor, irony, novel writing, Paffoonies

March 3, 2015 · 12:09 pm

Fantasy Worlds

If you saw my post yesterday, you have probably already noticed I am not in love with the real world (and for those of you who naturally assume every conspiracy theorist is a nut job, I don’t love the world as I perceive it through my goofy senses). So what is the alternative? How about the world of the imagination?

Like many youths of the late 70’s and early 80’s, I trained my imagination with the Dungeons and Dragons game from Gary Gygax and TSR. I played first with my brother and two sisters, then with kids from the school where I first taught (middle schoolers when I taught them, but mostly high schoolers when they played in the vast worlds of my dungeon-master’s imagination). I first started buying and painting metal miniatures. Later I supplemented them with plastic figures, paper cut-outs, maps, and dungeon tiles.

I can now lay out a pretty impressive scene to play out the stories that I and my three goofy kids love to spin. Of course, you know that, although I lay out the potential story as the dungeon master, the players each pick a character and input their own directions and choices through that character’s point of view.

The characters face the monsters and problems they must overcome, and they must decide when to hit it, when to kill it, or when to try to charm her way through it.

After the monsters are dead you have to choose again. Do you cut up the dead Cyclops and eat it? Do you accept the gold from the princess who is thanking you for saving her and her children? Do you kill the bratty kids and take all their gold earrings and arm bands? Of course, the DM tries to squelch option three.

And then you gather up the group again in the castle courtyard, and away you go. Another adventure. Another problem to solve. It is so much easier than car repairs and school schedules and dealing with a dog that is a walking poop and spare-hair factory. Dungeons and Dragons life is so much more heroic and fulfilling than real life.

And then Mom shows up and says the game is over for today. Time to wash the dishes, vacuum the carpet downstairs, and walk the dang pooping dog. “Go away, Mom! We are busy learning about the important things in life.”

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Dungeons and Dragons, humor, irony, photo Paffooney, playing games, real life sucks

March 1, 2015 · 3:57 pm

Sanctuary

I am trying to hold everything together. I have made my plans, including plans for dealing with irrational things that some people might do. And so, it is time to go visit the rabbit people.

The Rabbit people represent the people and personalities from my past, fortifying me with good memories and pleasant thoughts. I depend on my interior mental life more and more as my body breaks down and my present life is more and more limited.

The hero is a younger me, leading the way to places I have been before and ready to defend me with old truth.

But there is no such thing as a perfect sanctuary. No castle of willpower and mental toughness is ever impregnable.

A thousand things now assail me. Unpaid tax bills, surprise expenses, continued struggles with illness, and other horrible goblins of chance and bad fortune continue to hound me.

The battle is not over. I have not yet lost, though I have not won yet either.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, rabbit people

Tagged as cartoon rabbits, colored pencil, goofiness, humor, irony, Paffoonies, self pity, symbolism

February 28, 2015 · 8:07 pm

Rabbit People

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in. (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.) And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people. Rabbits are people too. So, I have been walking among the rabbit people. Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people. They are not trying to profit off you. They are not trying to get everything they can off you. They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students. If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody. Teaching is like that. You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have started on the final edit of my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis. During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident. He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person. He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit. That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you. You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul. (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup. Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, goofiness, humor, irony, paffooney, rabbit people

February 26, 2015 · 12:39 pm

“Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people. I know this is not normal. In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”. The first one was my friend the faun. Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid). This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition. Wine, women, and song so to speak.

When he first came to me it was a snowy winter’s night, long about December of my 17th year. At that time I was still repressing the memory of what happened to me out behind the neighbor’s house when I was ten. But I guess I knew I needed help in reaching out to others. I was lonely and convinced that for some terrible unknown reason I was a horrible creature not worthy of love. Then he came rapping at my window. He was kneeling there in the snow, outside my upstairs bedroom window, on the roof of the front porch of the house, naked except for the goat fur on his legs. But he wasn’t shivering. After all, he wasn’t real. No one but me would ever see him. He was grinning at me.

“You aren’t going to leave me out here in the snow, are you, stupid?” he said.

“Who and what are you?” I asked, as I opened the window. The snow was shining with a silvery, blue-white light that originated with the street light out in front of the house.

“I am Radasha,” he said. “I am your faun… the part of you that feels things and needs things… the part of you you have stupidly been pretending doesn’t exist.”

All right, I know it sounds crazy. But I needed him in my life. Elwood P. Dowd had an invisible white rabbit. Why couldn’t I have a faun? And it was a very, very good thing. He taught me how to laugh, and how to love… how to actually live. And I know he has always been inside me, not really separate from me. In many ways he is the real me. But crazy people have their own set of priorities. And when I was a confused teenager whose personal self-concept had been sexually violated by another, older boy… Radasha was mine. An invisible friend to talk to. One who could explain everything… make me laugh and make me happy. And there is a sound to that. Do you know the piece by Debussy that this post is titled after? It is my favorite piece of music in all the world. And it tells the sweet-sad story of Radasha and me.

Snow Day 2015

Snow panic has hit the Dallas area. Schools are all canceled. Idiots are out ramming their cars together on the freeways. TV reports plead for Texans to stay off the roads if travel is not actually necessary. We are snowed in by a light dusting of snow and a serious patina of ice.

We Iowegians transplanted to Texas laugh at storms like this. It should not stop school. I drove through worse than this last year when I still worked for the only school district who refused to cancel school on an icy, snowy day over a year ago. But, a break to daily plans is a welcome thing, except possibly for the fact that you are stuck in the house with family all day with nothing to do. Hopefully we can stand the togetherness.

People All Have Worth

I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head. And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome. But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what. That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be. It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer. The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.

But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful. Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen. There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward. And people are not born evil. The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another. As a teacher you get to know every type that there is. And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!) Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica. But the Doctor is right. No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!

So let me show you a few old drawings of people.

Cute people like Andrew here.

Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.

Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.

Or young people who live and learn and hopefully love…

And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.

And hope and dream and play and laugh…

And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…

And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…

Because God made them all for a reason…

even if we will never find out what that reason is.

Tag Archives: irony

The Irony of Regular Blogging

Time For Wasting

Reverse Humor

Blog Happy

Fantasy Worlds

Sanctuary

Rabbit People

“Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

Snow Day 2015

People All Have Worth

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