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fuddy duddy

“Dad?” asked the Princess, “I heard a funny word in school today.  What does Fuddy-Duddy mean?”

“Oh, that’s a good word,” I said.  “It means an old fogey… a stick-in-the-mud.”

“A what?”

“A fussy old guy who likes to have everything his way.  Like, if you accuse your father of being one… which you often do… he’s a fuddy-duddy daddy.”

“Ooh!  I get it!” said Henry, chiming in.  “And if your father is evil, then he’s a fuddy-duddy baddie daddy!

“Yes,” I said, “and if it makes him sad to be evil, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie daddy!

“If you are not sure he’s really your father,” said the Princess adding a one-up, “he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe daddy!

“Yeah!” said Henry.  “And if you suspect he may have fallen into a time machine and been turned back into an infant, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby daddy!

“Now that he’s a baby again he will surely want to watch his favorite TV show again,” I said with a tear of nostalgia in my eye, “he’ll be a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby Howdy Doody daddy!

“What’s Howdy Doody, Daddy?” asked the Princess.

“No,” said Henry, “now you’ve spoiled it.  It just ain’t funny any more.”

“Yes it is!  He’s become a funny bunny fuddy-duddy hoo-dad doo-dad saddie baddie maybe rabies hoo-dah doo-dah…”

“Just stop,” said Henry.  “You always carry things too far.”

“Right you are!” I said.  “See this grin?  It means I win!”

“AW, Daaad!” they both said at the same time.

 

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Fairy Tales and Dragons (with pointillism)

Going through my old drawing portfolio, I found my children’s book project from my undergrad college years.  I have no idea now looking at the illustrations what the story was even about.  I lost the actual story, and I never made a cover for it.  But here is a look at old hopes and dreams and a way of seeing the world that begins; Once Upon a Time…

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I have no earthly idea what the heck this story is even about, but I do like the pen and ink work, and probably couldn’t repeat it if I had to.

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Surrealist Eyes

The moral of the story; never challenge Cowboy Flash Crumpwell to a rubber gun duel.

The moral of the story; never challenge Cowboy Flash Crumpwell to a rubber gun duel.

He was the marshal in charge at Crumpwell’s Wild West Dude Ranch and Rabbit Farm.  It was his duty to create order and peace on a lawless frontier… and keep the fur-bearing bunnies happy, and making more rabbit fur.  So, when Pistoleer Pete Pistachio-Mustachio came to town, it was totally up to Marshal Flash Crumpwell to put an end to his terrible reign of Pistachio-ness.

They faced off on either end of Main Street.  Their spurs clanked and jangled as they started their bowlegged walks towards destiny and each other.

Then the guns came out.

The triggers were squeezed.

The barrels began to wiggle and elongate like elastic melting on a hot stove.  Up and down and all around dueling rubber guns dipped and danced and maneuvered through two dimensional space, until finally… Flash’s gun found a target in Pete’s ear.

“I should’ve known better than to hide a target in my ear!” Pete said as he surrendered.  “I just didn’t think any fool with a rubber gun would ever look there.”

sur·re·al·ism
səˈrēəˌlizəm/
noun
  1. a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

The horrible truth is, I have always been a surrealist.  My unconscious mind is constantly bombarding my life and work with irrational images.  And my ultimate source of creativity comes from a simple assumption.  “I can make sense out of the irrational things in my dreams and the movies constantly playing in my mind’s eye.”  Of course, that assumption is total hoo-haw.  People really can’t make sense out of nonsense.  But I am the idiot that always swims upstream.  I tend to try impossible things that can’t possibly be possible, and I end up pretending I can do them.  I am not the only one who has ever done this silly, stupid thing.  Notice what the auteur has to say about Chuck Jones, a cartoonist and fellow Surrealist;

So here is my conclusion; If you have ever wondered, “Why am I drawn to reading the meandering nonsense of this daft bugger?  And why does he do all this irrational and random stuff?”… It is because I am desperately infected with the affliction of surrealism.  Take pity on me.  Laugh at my kooky quirks.

MickeyX22

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Sarcasm, a Super Power of the Future

It has come to my attention that the need for super heroes has reached a critical point in our history.  I have been watching television documentaries about Green Arrow and the Flash, and now there is a new one, Supergirl.  And I didn’t miss all the media attention when Robert Downey Jr. formed a super team of powerful people and destroyed a European country so thoroughly that I can’t find it on a map anywhere.  So, wanting to get in on the action, I decided I needed a super power of my own.  And I know what it is.  I am not strong.  I am not fast.  I am not as smart as Robert Downey Jr. who is both Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man.  So I have to settle for one of those second tier super powers.  Like sarcasm.

Sarcasto Fu

Unbeknownst to most who know me, I went away to the far oriental country of Kathman-dooki to study under an ancient master.  His name was Aiknowyooare Butwhattami, ancient master of the Shaolin art of Sarcasto Fu.  He was the one who taught me to meditate on the foibles of people I don’t like and the pet peeves that drive me to despise them.  He taught me that a well-placed sarcastic comment, like a well-thrown dagger, can cut right to the heart.

“You must focus your ire on the words you say, Grassstomper, to give the desired meaning to words that actually mean the opposite of what you mean to mean… in order to be mean,” said the ancient master.

“That makes perfect sense to me,” I said with a leftward eye-roll.

“Excellent, oh bug-headed one, you inflected that just right to hurt me fatally without revealing your witlessly shallow stupidity.”

I smiled at the praise as he wrote a big letter “F” on my report card.

Sarcastoman

But if I choose to use sarcasm as my super power, I have the unfortunate problem of competing with the super hero known as Sarcasto Man.  He has previously seized on this notion that you can defeat super villains by sarcastically shaming them into committing oriental ritual suicide… called Hairy Kurie, or something like that.  Or was that ornamental suicide?  You know, the kind that decorates the sides of your house with dark reds and crimsons.  I think you do it with a sword… or cut your own head off with a butter knife or something weird like that.  Anyway, Sarcasto Man has told me that he achieves his super-power effects by holding a very high opinion of himself and talking down to everyone else around him.  He was supposed to become part of a super hero team, but failed at the task because his sarcasm caused as many suicides among his teammates as it did amongst his super-villain enemies and their minions.  In fact, he could not use the power on minions very well because they are usually too stupid to understand that you actually mean the opposite of what you are saying.

“It was very discouraging after I defeated the Mangling Mingler,” Sarcasto Man told me, “because after he cut his own head off with a butter knife, his minions, the Mingle Men, blamed me for his death and started pelting me with rocks.  I got such a bunch of red welts on my buttocks.  Fortunately my head is rock-proof.” (Did I forget to mention that using sarcasm as a super power is greatly aided by having a very thick skull?)

turtleboy

I began to despair of ever achieving levels of sarcasm-ness to be in his league.  So I started looking for alternatives that were close in content, but different in application.  I briefly thought about using irony instead of sarcasm.  Tim the Turtle Boy (whom I interviewed as a potential boy sidekick… um, not trying to be gay or anything) demonstrates my irony skill by holding up his magical cast-iron flat iron with which he either creates irony or flattens out the super villain’s clothing wrinkles.  Well, maybe I am not all that clear on how one becomes a superhero, and I don’t want to make Robert Downey Jr. mad by trying to become Irony Man and crowding his personal shtick.  He might use sarcasm on me and suggest I would make a really great Pun-Man.  You know, killing villains with really bad puns and jokes that turn your head inside out.  That would be a truly shameful thing.

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How Pirates Make Money

This is a continuation of my cartoon series The Atlas of Fantastica that can be found at Mickey’s House of Fiction (my cartoon vault).  It is an adventure from a dream about pirates and money and bankers and finance.

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To be continued soon…

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Matters of Religion

old mad gods

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)

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.

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In Search of the Mythical Socialist Bigfoot

adventurers2x

While the Republican Presidential Clown College continues to shoot their mouths off… and sometimes shoot their own foot off… or put their foot in their mouth and shoot both off… (Dang!  See what you get for being too friendly with the NRA, Republicans?) I decided to track down the mythical creature that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh constantly warn is the socialist-communist-terrorist-really-bad-guy behind everything President Obama and liberals do, Saul Alinsky.

You see, I have been battling the evil Bond villain Badfinger for days now.  He has been exercising his evil on my more Republican and conservative Facebook friends for a while.  They have been posting up a storm of crap about how terrible Obama is, and how false climate change is, and how we should not try to lift up the poor by tearing down the rich… things that sound suspiciously like talking points on Fox News where they mention Saul Alinsky a lot.  (Yes, I do watch Fox News sometimes.  It is always on at my favorite A&W in Lewisville.  And besides, sometimes it is therapeutic to induce vomiting when you’ve had too much poison and disrespect.)

A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.

A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.

Boy, Saul Alinsky sounds like a real monster!  But if Saul Alinsky really said this, and he really is a socialist, why do so many of these sound so much like fascist/capitalist ideas?  The kind of control they are urging is what appears to me to be the thing that would benefit fat-cat oligarchs and rich-old-guy control freaks.  So I turned to Wikipedia to learn more about this evil, very evil guy.  (I know, Wikipedia is discredited because it is edited and referenced by the people who use it… but a source that is factually checked and edited daily can sometimes be more accurate than the rarely updated articles in Encyclopedia Brittanica.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

Saul_Alinsky

Wikipedia says that he was a Jewish-American community organizer and writer.  (Red flags have to go up for Republicans for that alone.)  And worse yet he was focused on improving the lives of poor people in American cities, particularly black people.  He was working with black people in ghettos in New York City, Detroit, and other notable “trouble spots” in the 1950’s.  How did he avoid the wrath of righteous commie hunters like Senator Joe McCarthy doing a work like that?  Oh, wait a minute… It says in the article that William F. Buckley praised him as an “organizational genius”.  How did he avoid prison after being endorsed by a commie like that?  Um, right?

His book, Rules for Radicals, begins like this; “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

There’s the damning evidence right there.  He means to punish the wealthy and the greedy and the powerful by taking away some of their excess and giving it to the powerless who are starving and suffering from want.  No communist except maybe… Jesus Christ… could have proposed anything more radical and perverse.

And look at some of the terrible methods he used.  He once used what he called a “fart in” to disrupt rich folks’ sensibilities at the Rochester Philharmonic concert in Rochester, New York.  He organized a group of classical-music-loving radicals to eat huge quantities of baked beans, then go to the concert and intentionally alter the atmosphere for rich patrons of the arts.  That will either bring down Western Civilization as we know it, or make somebody die laughing.  You can’t get much more evil than that, can you?

When asked whether he hadn’t actually considered joining the Communist Party, Alinsky responded like this;  “Not at any time. I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.”

Man, oh, man!  I owe such a debt to my conservative Facebook friends for exposing this monster to me.  I didn’t know what Fox News was ranting about until now.  I now believe this evil Saul Alinsky may actually be worthy of respect.  They may have actually reinforced my loony liberal belief that the American Government exists to better the lives of all its citizens.  It has definitely opened my eyes to the dangers of…thinking like a Republican.

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Badfinger

Yes, there is a James Bond villain who has targeted Texas freeways, liberal politics, and Facebook in general.  He is a bad, bad man who likes to inflame arguments, create racial tension, and fan the fires of road rage.  So, this is my attempt to call this bad man out and make you aware of at least some of what he’s doing.

redneck friends

First of all, I know a way that you can prevent Badfinger’s minions from driving on Teexas roadways.  You can cut off the middle finger of both hands, and those minions don’t know how to drive any longer.  I saw that in action today as I took my number two son to the oral surgeon to have four wisdom teeth extracted (and yes, I know that is probably a bad idea, but he didn’t really have that much wisdom with the teeth still in, anyway).  To get into the proper turning lane, I chose a spot I thought I could get into.  I pulled up to the spot with my turn signal on so the driver in that lane could clearly see my intention.  He zoomed up to close the opening and gave me the middle-finger-indication of his approximate I.Q. as measured by driving habits.  So, I decided to go behind him.  But he immediately, without signaling, tried to ram his way through to the lane I was patiently waiting in.  I had to back my car up while sitting, waiting for the light to change.  The guy behind me felt he needed to signal his I.Q.   But he was apparently smarter by one than the other driver as it took both hands to accomplish this feat.  When the light turned green, the minion in front of me reminded me of his I.Q. again and zoomed into my lane and passed three cars in the lane he was originally in, then forced his way back into the lane to make the turn.  This bit of gracious roadway etiquette accomplished two things the driver probably didn’t intend.  One, he nearly got his precious BMW dented by the car he cut in front of, and two, his mad swoop left a void in his lane that I could get into so that I might safely round the corner on the next green light.

John Kasich flipping the byrd at teachers.

John Kasich flipping the byrd at teachers.

Another minion of Badfinger is a politician that, until recently, I thought was one of the least evil of the toxic clowns in the Republican Volkswagen, John Kasich.  He proved to be an enemy of mine because recently he put the finger on the entire problem with education, teacher’s lounges.  Apparently it is not enough to take strong union representation away from teachers.  He doesn’t want evil communist teachers getting together to complain about class sizes, increasing teacher layoffs, reduced funding, and increasingly draconian testing rules in bastions of communist union power, which he believes are the insidious teacher’s lounges.  I’m not sure why he thinks he’s punishing teachers by taking that cramped little misappropriated closet space away from us.  What will we lose?  A place to make copies on the xerox machine?  Our departments have no money for paper or ink.  A place to put our lunches in an antique refrigerator which may or may not prevent spoilage at temperatures a little warmer than room temperature?  Most of us can’t afford the slice of our fifteen minute lunch hour to walk all the way to the other side of campus and go up two flights of stairs.  But he doesn’t want us to have a place to bad mouth the government that exists only to make our lives harder. And he doesn’t realize that most teachers save their gruesome and evil plans for rebellion until they can meet together at Hop Xing’s Bar and Grill (now with Karaoke) at a time of day when it no longer matters if they get totally schnockered, or if they burst into spontaneous karaoke versions of Journey songs.  Teachers will continue to do the job even without the lavish teacher lounges that don’t actually exist anyway.

So, what am I proposing we do to combat Badfinger and his multiple minions in the fight for God and country and a little respect?  How about an anti-bloviator ray gun that we can disguise as an ink pen?  It might  prove useful against Donald Trump and other Republicans that are our potential next President and chief vilifier of rogue educators.  How about a secret politeness pill that we can slip into the drinking water and make everybody, Badfinger’s minions included, into nicer people?  I’m sure those things will never get voted for… primarily because we really need them.

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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.

Ariel

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.  4th Dimension

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.

Rabbitcastle b&w

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.

wash ink

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.

Bobby

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.

minions BandWminions color

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.

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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.

annette

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.

Annette in DLandnI 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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