Tag Archives: Paffoonies

September 2, 2015 · 2:23 pm

Matters of Religion

People around this country are busy expressing their religion. They refuse to do their government clerical jobs and deny people marriage licenses. They do it because of their beliefs. They picket military funerals with signs about “God hates fags” (though I don’t see why the creator dislikes English cigarettes so much) because of their beliefs. They refuse to bake wedding cakes because Christian fundamentalism has somehow become about who gets to eat your cooking. They condemn parts of the Middle East and pray for war because there is religious head-chopping going on, and certain countries are not promising to give up their nuclear daydreams sincerely enough. Expressing religious beliefs seems to be mostly about condemning stuff. And, admittedly, some of it is bad stuff… like the head-chopping. But is that what religion is for?

The Paffooney I am using today is called “One Day the Old Mad Gods Will Be Made Whole Again” which is a nutcake picture created during my grad student years in response to the basic undercurrent of fear that underlies most of Christianity. I think I may have written it wrong, though. It used to be about “fear”, and today it has become about “FEAR!”

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

People turn to religion primarily because they fear death. Christianity promises an ever-lasting immortal life, either in Heaven (Which I have my doubts you will ever find on a map) or (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses in my family believe) on a Paradise Earth. To never die you are expected to follow a secret formula, or somehow cast a magic spell that will guarantee that even if you are killed, you will never die. If you knock on enough doors to share the “Good News of Christ’s ransom sacrifice” you will be resurrected to everlasting life. If you “Love what is good and hate what is bad”, you will claim a spot in Heaven. But you can’t earn this undeserved kindness. God gave his only son to die on the cross so that everyone else might live. …But not sinners. Not people who do not get the formula right… or do not express the right views… or say the wrong thing. What the… Heck?

It is not a logical construct. Elders among the Jehovah’s Witnesses explain to me that is all about belief. You have to express belief through action. And where belief conflicts with science or logic, you must prefer belief.

So, the man puts his hand down in an old aquarium full of rattlesnakes, and God is supposed to protect him. But if the man gets bitten and dies, well, he must’ve been a sinner or needing to be punished. Hellfire for all eternity… you can’t beat fundamental Christianity on the matter of punishment for sins.

If you have gotten this far through my essay without throwing up your hands and consigning my sinful soul to the darkest pit of hell to burn for eternity, then you have probably concluded that I am just another old philosophical atheist spouting semi-logical nonsense about why there is no God. And you would be dead wrong. There is a God. I talk to him daily. He helped me write this post. I am a Christian existentialist. I believe there is a God, and he can be found in the Bible at First John 4:8. “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.” I don’t believe in everlasting life. I believe I am a part of the whole. I believe in love, because loving my fellow man is part of loving myself. I would willingly lay down my life to save another, out of love, because that other person and I are one. And when they bury me to become worm food and fertilizer, I won’t be feeling the pain and confusion and fear anymore, but I will still be part of the whole. And the whole is God.

4 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, religion

Tagged as colored pencil, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, philosophy, religion

August 25, 2015 · 1:47 pm

Mixed Media

I am once again needing to write an easy post because I am feeling quite ill. So let me talk about an artist thing that is totally boring for those who already know about this stuff and fascinating to anyone who always wanted to know art secrets from the secret tomes of drawing-wizards and painting-wizards. So here is some of the arcana gleaned from years of experimentation in the tippy-top of Mickey’s wizard’s tower.

Pen and Ink – When I first discovered I could make pencil pictures of naked girls, long about the magical-hormone-age of twelve, I began regretting the fact that pencil pictures easily smear. So, I had to find a further magical technique to make the pretties stay free of the dark clouds of graphite smudge. The magic wand I chose first was the ink pen with black ink.

Of course, I am not using examples of middle-school me drawing naked pen-and-ink girls. Mothers, girlfriends, and wives make those things go away. But I am showing examples that have magical little elements in them that reveal my secrets. One thing that magically works is filling shapes and areas of the drawing in with specific patterns. The crosshatch work in the mermaid picture is obvious in the mountains and the mermaid’s hair. Not as obvious is the suggested scale-pattern in the mermaid’s fish tail. Notice how it only fills in the areas I need to suggest shadow and create 3-D form. The pattern that makes the floor for the hoola-hooper is a pattern that subtly suggests radioactivity.

This high school art project, the very first in incarnation of Rabbit Castle, shows my utter failure to effectively use pen and ink wash. I think I did get the wood pattern and the brick pattern right. But the filling of areas with diluted ink wash was a total mad failure of mud-making proportions. I decided against further using pen and ink wash in high school.

Water Color – I also experimented with adding life to drawings by using water color. Don’t look too closely at this horse-head bookend picture because I accidentally gave the poor pony severe-plaque psoriasis with watercolor, something I wouldn’t wish even on a horse made out of plaster or stoneware. Water color is difficult for me because I am highly controlled when I draw. I do not like the many “happy accidents” of the water-color world. I do not adapt well to runny color. So, water color also became a NO for me in high school.

Colored Pencil – I did however find magic when I first learned to blend colored pencil colors on the page and create full-color drawings. I especially like the fact that bright colors are easy to manipulate and contrast for me. I am somewhat color-blind (red-green color-blindness that is worse in my left eye than my right). I like colors I can actually see. If you look carefully at this picture of Bobby and Horatio T. Dogg, you will notice that this is solely made up of colored pencil lines and shading and color-blends. It was with this media that I found my true art mojo.

Mixed Media – So the style I most often use for the magic of forging Paffoonies is a mixture of my two favorite media… colored pencil and pen and ink. So here is the magic formula; 1. Draw first in pencil. 2. Go over the lines in black ink. 3. Fill in all areas with texture and color made from colored pencil.

7 Comments

Filed under artwork, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawing, experimenting with art style, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink

August 23, 2015 · 7:13 pm

How to Reason With Stupid People

Okay, I know… I keep promising that I will never resort to insult humor, and then I go and write mean-spirited stuff about Donald Trump and other Republicans. But I need to point out that as a middle school English teacher for 24 of my 31 teaching years, I had to talk to a lot of stupid. And I am not being mean when I say that. Unformed, immature minds are full of misinformation and wrong-way pig-headedness. Those are both synonyms of “stupid”, aren’t they? And I have the further disadvantage of being a freakishly high level of smart. I have a lot of experience dealing with stupid.

And it often begins with, “Well, I know you are very, very smart, but I have common sense!” That’s how the argument started this morning with my beloved wife. When we are wrestling with financial and health and family problems, we always start with the assumption that I am completely wrong and headed for disaster. An acceptable compromise is when the two of us talk it out for an hour, with me listening and agreeing and her laying on me a thick layer of sometimes-aromatic common-sense solutions. We reach a compromise, by which we mean I accept that she is right and I am wrong. And then we talk about the yes-buts. “Yes, but have you thought about the consequences of that expense when it comes to the APR on your credit cards?” “Yes, but if you talk to your boss that way, would she consider firing you?” “Yes, but if you give that prized possession to our son as a gift of love, will he be resentful if you take it away again as a punishment for a minor error?” Sometimes the common sense people have to be gently reminded that their simple solution might need to be looked at from the back side as well. (Don’t get me wrong. I am not calling my wife “stupid” here. She is not. And I am not looking to make a fatal mistake in my blog.)

It helps when talking and reasoning with stupid people that they know you really love and respect them. When I have to talk politics with my more Republican relatives, well, I have to be very reasonable and polite. Some of them are clinging to toxic candidates that, if they elect them, are going to do the exact opposite of what is good for people in their socio-economic group. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are intentionally playing on the fears and prejudices of people that are thinking with their “lizard brain” instead of their higher-level thinking functions. It helps them to see that you care enough to explain things like “socialism” and “labor unions” and “taxes” in simple terms that help them to grasp that there is a good side to those things as well as a bad.

A large part of the lives of stupid people is the pain and uncertainty that being a part of humanity brings to them. So many of them have no idea of the value of what they do and who they are. They are so caught up in the pain of being themselves that they never realize how much the world around them appreciates and loves them. They don’t understand that being stupid is the common condition of mankind, and just because they are not as smart as God himself, it doesn’t make them bad. Sometimes the only way to talk to stupid people is to stop thinking of them as stupid, and reassure them that you love them and you will do everything you can to help them. If you say it and mean it, they will not be stupid people any more.

“And that is all I have to say about that…” -Forrest Gump

6 Comments

Filed under empathy, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as empathy, goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, philosophy, stupid people

August 22, 2015 · 3:16 pm

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?

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.

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.

6 Comments

Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, drawing, Friday the 13th, goofiness, humor, numbers, numerology, Paffoonies, superstition

August 19, 2015 · 3:29 pm

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.

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 the movies that were not Disney movies. When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 58. 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.

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.

6 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as all kids are gifted, Annette Funicello, artwork, colored pencil, humor, music, music and memory, Paffoonies, pen and ink, talented kids, teaching, teaching gifted kids

August 13, 2015 · 5:04 pm

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Yesterday I posted a political satire in which I accused Rand Paul and Chris Christie of being the reincarnation of Laurel and Hardy. I may have also suggested that Republican Presidential candidates are mostly possessed by the spirits of old comedy teams who share the bully and the idiot style of comedy made famous by Stan and Ollie. That post had about 380 calories from empty carbohydrates and the saturated fat was off the charts. If I am to provide a healthy diet of low-quality purple paisley prose to those who ready my pretentiously faux-literary blog, then I need to alternate in some high-fiber, low calorie fare. After all, this is a place where people come to sample my ideas and my so-called humor. Any and all fat that they get from here goes straight to their head. It can clog the arteries of the thinking organ. So, let me offer something light and fibrous today.

Yesterday I finished the first-pass edit of my novel Snow Babies. I also got it sent to my editor at PDMI, Jessie Cornwell. Her edits caused serious pain and minor bleeding, but that is merely an indicator that she is very professional and does the job well. And on occasion, she makes me laugh. She identified and corrected my creepy fascination with the word “penis” and cut it out of my novel. I am sure you can imagine how painful something like that can be. But I deserved it. A writer has to be aware that there are quirks in his thinking that interfere with communicating ideas to the reader. And the nutritional value of the ideas and thinking in a book are not only what makes it worth reading, but worth writing in the first place.

It is a little odd to be working on a novel about a blizzard in Iowa in deep December when it is August in Texas and we are undergoing 100-degree plus weather during the yearly heat wave and drought. It is hard to imagine deadly cold and Christmas-wish thinking when you have to sit naked by the air conditioner and you still sweat out gallons. (Notice I did not use the word “penis” even once in this paragraph, Jessie.) (Oops! Okay, don’t count the parenthetic expression, please.)

But I love these characters.

Valerie Clarke, the main character, is an eleven-year-old girl trying to make her way in a cold world after the death of her father. She finds and latches onto a mysterious old hobo who goes by the name Catbird. The man wears a coat which is a crazy quilt of colorful patches. He carries around a dog-eared copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it as if it is his Bible. She gives him a place to stay, with her and her grieving mother in the nick of time before the blizzard hits her little Iowa town. Valerie is based in part on my own daughter.

A bus gets stranded in the rural farming community and the bus contains four boys who are not only passengers, but runaway orphans escaping from the Illinois foster care system. The youngest boy is crippled.

So, I am for the moment only posting something light that you really don’t have to work too hard to consume. The main idea is simply that I have finished another step in the process of publishing my long-delayed novel. And hopefully this post isn’t needlessly fattening, like many of my posts are.

3 Comments

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, PDMI Publishing, Snow Babies, working with editors

August 10, 2015 · 2:13 pm

Timeline – Finale

So how do I end this little trilogy of timeline terror? I have to fit in the remaining novel projects that are related or at least partially done. And the unrelated ones too. I have way more in the Mickian bag of tricks than I will ever have the magic-using years to actually use. The thing about wizards is that, by the time they have accumulated all the knowledge, wisdom, and arcana that it takes to do the wizardry, they are already old and near to death. How much time is left for the actual magic? I have been living this weekend in fear of imminent stroke. But I believe the random brain pain has actually turned out to be sinus problems. So here are the projects that finish the timeline and are the projects least likely to get written and published.

Connected to Catch a Falling Star is its sequel, Stardusters and Space Lizards. This is a novel I have most recently been trying to finish. I am in the home stretch at 40,000 words. It is the story of the failed Earth invaders continuing their journey to another planet, an even worse place than Earth. Galtorr Prime is the planet of the humanoid lizard people. Their world is on the very brink of extinction by global warming, toxic politics, and war. The remnants of the Telleron aliens who tried to invade Earth and their Earther-human friends not only have to make a colony for themselves here, but have to save the planet itself as well. It is a cautionary-type science fiction tale in the same comedy-young-adult-novel genre as Catch a Falling Star. It also happens in the early 1990’s (intended to mean the time on Earth which is not relevant in any case).

The next novel is Monstro, a ghost story in which the Norwall Pirates have to take on the Lonely Ones, the spirit-echoes of the crazy people of the past in a haunted farm house that awakens to feed on the living. The story is more than half written, but is looking at a near total rewrite to make it conform better with comedy young adult fiction. It is set in the mid 1990’s, around 1995.

None of my Hometown Novels will go beyond the 20th Century. Monstro is ostensibly the last of the novels.

I am a science fiction writer as well, though. The first book I ever published, Aeroquest, is set more than three thousand years in the future, at a time when the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (where Earth has its street address) is largely colonized and thoroughly inhabited. As the novel now stands (a sorry mishmash that no decent publisher would’ve ever printed) it is in need of a total re-write and make-over. It is a novel that I humorously say is about teachers in space… though I do realize that “humorously” has to be qualified as a big bald-faced lie.

So this is run-down in time order of all the stuff I want to do as an author. How much gets done in reality is anyone’s best guess. Who knows? I may live another twenty years and finish at least one novel every year.

Timeline – Part 2

You may remember that yesterday I was giving a run-down of my various Home Town Novel projects according to the order they supposedly happen in real time (measured in years). Here is what I went over yesterday;

Superchicken, set in 1974, the first Home Town Novel that I completed.

The Baby Werewolf (also possibly titled The Wolf in the Attic), set in the Fall of 1974, not yet completed.

The Forever Boy, set in Spring 1975, not yet written in manuscript form.

Sweet Pickles, set in the Fall of 1974 and Spring of 1975, half written, but possibly too graphic to publish.

Under Blue Glass, set in 1977 and not yet written in manuscript form.

When the Captain Came Calling, is set in 1983-84, the manuscript is currently at 25,000 words and being worked on.

And the novel I am editing for publication this week, Snow Babies, set in the Winter of 1984. Snow Babies is the story of how the small town survives the raging blizzard and faces the prospect of freezing to death. Valerie Clarke, in the picture above, is the central character in a large cast trying to avoid being the one the snow spirits have come to claim.

The second generation of Norwall Pirates, the boys’ club of dreamers, goofballs, and liars, have come to be led by a girl, Mary Philips and Valerie is the second girl ever to join the club.

The next novel has undergone two transformations. It started as a book called Little Boy Crooner. It is about an orphan from France who comes to live with ne’er-do-well Iowegian relatives. Homesick and deeply troubled, the boy has discovered a natural talent for karaoke, and has a voice that people come from miles away to hear. Then, the clowns of the Dreamlands began invading this story and had to be renamed. It is now called Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns. I may, however change the name to just Sing Sad Songs.

Sing Sad Songs and the next novel in the series, Fools and Their Toys, happen at the same time in 1985-86. They not only share a setting and many of the same characters, but they share a villain and many of the same plot-shaping events. They are, however, very different stories.

Fools and Their Toys is the story of autistic Murray Dawes. Because he has never really been able to communicate before, his turning point comes when a new member of the family, an adopted little brother, makes for him a ventriloquist’s dummy in the form of a zebra. He calls it Zearlop and uses it to unleash the hidden intelligence that was there through all those years when other people thought he was retarded. Unfortunately, just as Murray is blossoming, a serial killer comes along, targeting young boys. More unfortunately still, some from the area believe Murray may be the killer.

Leadership of the Pirates is passed from Mary to Valerie. And in 1988 I have set my current contest novel The Magical Miss Morgan. Valerie passes the leadership of the Pirates to her highly imaginative and extremely annoying cousin Timothy Kellogg. Tim is a the second most important character in the story of the teacher, Miss Morgan, who loves to teach. Miss Morgan is the sister of original Pirate wizard, Milt Morgan. Because of her brother, she inherits responsibility for a local war between good and evil fairies, while at the same time trying to save her job from evil principals, parents, and school board members and teach a lesson or two worth remembering forever. This full manuscript novel is currently being judged for the contest, and will be submitted for publication after.

Tim Kellogg is one of two main characters in the next novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. Orben Wallace, the inventor, is the title character who may have accidentally created a time machine. The novel is set in the years from 1988 to 1990, and it is about how the genius’ old inventions come back to haunt him as he tries to solve the problem of having invented a time machine, having worked on mysterious government projects, and having helped to fight off an alien invasion. This novel is also complete and merely awaiting the proper time to get published.

Catch a Falling Star is the published novel that started this blog and my dream of making it as a novelist. It is set in 1990 and tells the story of when the Telleron alien empire of frog-like fin-headed aliens fail to invade Norwall, Iowa because they hadn’t reckoned on meeting the Pirates.See Catch a Falling Star on Amazon here.

I guess I leave it here for today. It seems there is enough more to fill another blog… Part 3.

3 Comments

Filed under aliens, characters, clowns, humor, Iowa, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, Snow Babies, writing humor

Tagged as bad novel writing, humor, Paffoonies

August 8, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Timeline

Editing my novel Snow Babies has led me to realize that I need to align the events and character progressions in all the related Home-Town Novels. So here is a feeble attempt to make sense of the wealth of crap that this whole project has generated.

The first novel in the series is called Superchicken.

This story is about a boy who comes to live in the small town of Norwall, Iowa and struggles to make friends and fit in with a close-knit and inter-related group of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. It contains the origin story of the Norwall Pirates, a boys’ gang and liars’ club who cause most of the chaos in the story. It is intended to be an Iowa-River version of Tom Sawyer, a picaresque novel where the main character uses his natural instincts to try and gain the recognition of the world that he exists and has worth as a person.

The second novel is not completed yet. It is a story called The Baby Werewolf. It is about the Norwall Pirates pursuing an encounter with a very unusual child shut away in the attic of an aging house by the harried adults in his life.

All of these stories are humor novels written for a Young Adult genre audience. This one, however, also introduces elements of the horror genre.

Three more unwritten novels exist between this set of Norwall stories and the next set which introduce a whole new group of Pirates. Of the original Pirate stories there is an encounter with immortal beings who are somehow more than human and include a villain who is secretly an un-dead Chinese wizard looking to kill and consume another immortal who has taken refuge in Norwall. This novel does not yet have a name. The working title is The Forever Boy. Another novel involving the Pirates is called Sweet Pickles. It takes up the story of a girl nicknamed Pickles who is desperate to be loved and joins the junior high football team to impress boys. The novel includes the sexual awakening of more than one member of the Pirates, and though it is half-written, it may never see publication. I am not a pornographic writer, but the issues of this book have become so explicit, that it would have to be gutted and rewritten completely to be acceptable to my chosen genre. A more likely story is Under Blue Glass, the story of the Pirates handling their teens and high school and the excitingly horrible prospects of leaving home.

The next set of Pirate novels cover the 1980’s. The Captain Came Calling is about the reformation of the Pirates with Mary Philips, the story-teller’s little sister, taking on the daunting task of leading the Pirates through a new decade. South Pacific island magic brings the cursed Captain Noah Dettbarn to a farm town about as far away in all of North America as you can get from any ocean. The captain is cursed with invisibility and has to get to the bottom of a terrible family secret to cure it. Meanwhile, another terrible secret is destroying the family of Valerie Clarke, the main character of the novel.

Snow Babies is actually the second novel of this group, although it is the second novel being published. I will talk more about it as the process goes along and it actually reaches a state of publication.

After that comes a group of unwritten novels that are nebulously plotted out. I am thinking I probably need to declare halftime on this post at 600 words and do the second half of this timeline tomorrow.

Humor Without Insults

I am not one who can stand to watch Republican debates. I know the clown car is full to busting, but I can’s stand the idea that one of those narrow-minded, fact-free, duplicitous Bozos could end up being the next president. (Or fascist dictator, when you consider what “fascist” actually means, and what former President Carter has said about the U.S. not being a democracy any more.) If one of those clowns wins it, the true power will once again reside with the unseen ring master, like it was with the rodeo-clown George W. Bush and his secret puppet-master, Dick Cheney. And I pay enough attention to know that Donald Trump was so insulting to women during the debate, that Democrats can pick Beelzebub to run as their candidate and women still won’t vote Republican.

I watched the final Jon Stewart Daily Show instead. Stewart is more liberal than I am and uses a lot more bad words than I ever could, but his humor and politics are far gentler and kinder than anything coming out of the mouths of name-calling conservatives. They uniformly say terrible and untrue things about President Obama and Hilary Clinton. They don’t hold back from calling even their own Senate leader a liar (a la Senator “Slappy Happy” Ted Cruz.and Senator Mitch McConnell). The Donald is a master of the crude and inappropriate slam. Look at the unfounded claims he made against Mexicans and the cowardly way he impugned the honor of Senator John McCain. Jon Stewart mocks them by taking their own actual statements and putting them beside the verifiable facts to show the absurdity of their political beliefs and goals without casting insults. Yes, I love his turtle voice for aping Mitch McConnell, but there is a gentleness to his wit that shows affection for his subjects rather than laying waste to their psyches with crude insults and unfounded accusations.

I had to learn the kind of humor I’m extolling here as a classroom teacher. You cannot believe how fragile the little animals can be when you resort to calling them names. A growing, developing, vulnerable psyche cannot take the random bash and cruel cut the way an adult can (though even an adult shouldn’t have to). You have to learn to be funny by the surprising imagery you use, the comparisons with funny things, and the flat out absurd. And self-deprecating humor is the only kind of insult you can actually get away with. (I even learned that when a student grows to love and respect you too much, even insulting yourself to make a point is out the window.)

Humor definitely has its uses in the classroom. This classroom poster was used both to teach students how to write a quatrain of twin couplets, and also to teach them that classroom discipline was a matter of teaching them how not to be like cockroaches. I am not directly calling them cockroaches. Instead I am telling them that if they choose to use the thoughtless and rather dumb behaviors that are against classroom procedure, they are choosing to be like roaches. Of course, there is always the classroom clown like Steve-O Whoopsadoodle (not his real name, but a name he called himself) who glories in being like cockroaches. You also have to learn to laugh at them politely and give them their few minutes of fools’ fame.

So, to sum it all up, humor is a very useful thing in running the world and teaching things to others. It is why I always go for the joke in my writing. The place I am at doesn’t always have to be the happiest place on Earth, but it is a lot funnier and happier without the cruel and biting insult. (Sorry about earlier, George, you old rodeo clown). And if we can just be a little nicer to each other when we make fun, it might turn out to actually be fun. (You are welcome to find all the gaffs and mistakes I made in the old drawing above. I was still learning my craft in 1980. But please don’t call me names over it. I have had all the blue I can handle for one week. I used up the last of it in this last Paffooney.)

7 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing humor

Tagged as artwork, humor, insults and humor, old drawings, Paffoonies, teaching, writing humor

Tag Archives: Paffoonies

Matters of Religion

Mixed Media

How to Reason With Stupid People

Numbers!

Mickey Mouse Club Music

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Timeline – Finale

Timeline – Part 2

Timeline

Humor Without Insults

Catch a Falling Star FB Page

Recent Posts

Stars We’ve Caught

Catch a Falling Star

Follow Blog via Email

Categories

Meta