Tag Archives: photography

January 18, 2025 · 1:20 am

Return of the Star Wars Figures

On a previous Saturday I admitted to the crime of using 12-inch action figures to play the Star Wars role-playing game. The Dungeons and Dragons RPG world was horrified. You are supposed to use scale-appropriate metal miniatures. How can you simulate combat without small figures on a grid? I have to confess. It was via x’s and dots on graph paper. But we didn’t use the action figures to represent ranges and lines of site in combat. And one of my players was my niece, an actual girl. So, I guess, to be honest, we were actually playing with dolls.

But it helps to have a lot of dolls.

Emperor Palpatine, Snow Trooper, Obi-Wan, Jar Jar, Quigon, Droid Soldier, and home-made Mace Windu

We started play after the first two movies in the Prequel Trilogy.

Wicket, Imperial Walker, Astroboy (What’s he doing there?) Darth Vader, Little Anakin, and Boba Fett.

We got creative with stories.

Jango Fett, General Grievous, and Admiral Akbar

Anakin Skywalker

Robot from Lost in Space, R2D2, Slave Girl Leia, and a Green Orion Slave Girl Dancer from Star Trek

So there is evidence available to my offspring to help them have me committed to an institution. The truth is, these are not even all of my Star Wars Dolls. So this morning’s confession session is now at an end, though all of the horrible truth is not yet revealed.

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Filed under action figures, autobiography, doll collecting, Dungeons and Dragons, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as action figure, art, books, movies, photography, rpg, Star Wars, writing

December 17, 2024 · 1:00 am

Living in the Spider Kingdom

Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.

My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.

For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.

So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.

We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.

But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.

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Filed under commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as 365ways, art, book review, books, food, grim-reaper, hemingway, horror, humor, oregon, photography

October 14, 2024 · 12:02 am

Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind

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As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane. But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your 68th birthday is just around the corner. (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 68, but can you believe that that Mickey is going to be 96 on the day after I turn 68?) Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years. Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.” But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.

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You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking. You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together. After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school as an English teacher?

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And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post. You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.

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And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post. You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time, and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly. And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit. Take a nap. Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.

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And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.

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Filed under battling depression, blog posting, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, healing, humor, illness, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

Tagged as art, humor, illness, photography, scrapbook post

July 7, 2024 · 2:21 am

Picsart

This self-portrait of me is made from several of my old selfies fed through the Picsart AI Photo Editor app.

It is my way of getting to Florida in spite of my health problem and ill fortune. Picsart synthesized a picture of me in front of an AI-Generated background. Picsart is not really intelligent. The app creates an image based on what you put into it. It can generate images in the same way that other infamous AI art apps do it, scraping images from the internet, mixing it all up,, and rawlfing out a picture based on a sentence or phrase. But it also works as a very good Photoshop program, allowing you to remove backgrounds, isolate images, paste them in new surroundings, and adjust colors… far better than the cheap-o little Photoshop clone I was using before.

I can take a colored pencil drawing (which is increasingly hard for me to do) and put it on computer to use digital tools.

I can draw and color more easily on a touch screen with a stylus, once I learn all the computer controls.

I can finish the drawing by hand and put in a background that matches the style of my drawing using Picsart Smart Backgrounds. But you can see the creeping crudity of my hand-drawn work. So, I can also go back and put it together again with even more AI help.

I can use AI Mirror to put the original drawing through a realistic anime style format that redraws my drawing, including all the flubs that AI is heir to. Crooked fingers, changing the gender of the subject, shrinking the nose, crossing the eyes, and a total misunderstanding of clown paint.

Using Picsart again to put in the Martin Bar and Grill background.

And then I make final corrections with the digital pen and paintbrush to turn Francois back into a boy wearing clown paint while he sings sad songs.

And so, as I get more and more familiar with the things I can do with Picsart, I let it turn me into a Jimmy Buffett clone again, sending me back to Florida where my heart is this weekend.

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Tagged as ai, challenge, digital art, fashion, photography

July 4, 2024 · 2:25 am

Dows, Iowa

Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood. You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are. Dows is not the town where I grew up. But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them. It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives. My cousin and her second husband were there. Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there. We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!) The experience taught me a simple lesson. We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives. So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us. We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe. We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead. It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us. Nothing lasts forever. Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing. A simple word for that is “farming”. Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after. But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond. And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

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Filed under autobiography, family, farm boy, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Iowa, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Dows, family, humor, Iowa, photography, photos, travel

June 21, 2024 · 12:40 am

The Care and Feeding of a REALLY BIG DOG

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My neighbor, Wendy Wackyname, is the owner of a really big dog. I asked her how she managed a dog that was bigger than a moose and weighed more than an elephant.

“You have to be able to solve problems you never thought you could have,” she said.

“Problems like what?” I stupidly asked.

“Well, a dog that big not only chases cars, he often catches the littler ones like yours. It became a real problem when he finished chewing on them and wanted to bury them in the back yard. When we lived in Oklahoma, our back yard just wasn’t big enough, and the local police kept wondering about what might be buried there. I guess they had a lot of missing persons cases.”

“Oh, that does sound bad.”

“Yeah, but moving here solved that problem. We now live next to this nice big park with lots of room for a dog to bury stuff.”

“So he isn’t cured of chasing cars?” I asked nervously.

“No. But that isn’t the worst problem. Feeding him is really expensive. We have to buy a truckload of dog food every week. That problem has gotten worse since we left Oklahoma. There used to be a cattle ranch nearby. At least until the last of their stock mysteriously disappeared.”

I decided I should probably change the subject a bit.

“How do you walk a dog that big?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t. I climb up on his neck and hang on to the collar as hard as I can, and we go for a run. We ended up in Waxahachie, Texas last week.”

“Does your mother ever let the dog in the house?”

“Oh, no. Foozy is an outside dog. If he wags his tail indoors, he breaks all the furniture in the room. Besides, the doors in this new house aren’t big enough for him to fit through.”

“Wendy, did you ever read those kids’ books about Clifford the Big Red Dog?”

“Oh, sure. But life with Foozy is nothing like that. Giant dogs are a much harder pet to take care of than people think.”

I remembered then how my little dog somehow managed to make five poops a day. Did Foozy do that too? And how did poor little Wendy go about bagging it and depositing it in the trash? I finally decided I didn’t want to know.

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Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, pen and ink paffoonies, satire

Tagged as art, books, Clifford the Big Red Dog, dog owners, exaggeration, food, humor, photography, travel

June 14, 2024 · 1:05 am

Inside Toonerville

The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.

Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time. The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now. The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time. I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working. So, what will I do with Toonerville?

Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.

Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.

Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.

Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.

But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.

A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.

Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)

Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.

So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds. Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.

Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)

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Filed under art editing, artwork, autobiography, farm boy, foolishness, humor, illustrations, photo paffoonies, Toonerville

Tagged as artwork, blog, funny, goofiness, HO model train, humor, nature, Photo-shopped Paffooney, photography, Toonerville

June 7, 2024 · 1:33 am

Something Creative Goes Here

Not Alone

Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool. That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting. So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa. And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s. It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time. But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!” But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow. I hope that turns out to be a good thing.

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Filed under aliens, artwork, blog posting, conspiracy theory, goofiness, Paffooney, self pity

Tagged as art, artwork, books, creativity, filler post, food, goofiness, humor, photography, travel

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Norwall

The little Iowa town where all my hometown novels are set is based on the little town where I grew up and spent all of my school years from Kindergarten to Senior Year of High School. I call it Norwall. It has all the same letters in it as the town of Rowan, the real town behind all my farm-boy fantasies. I also added an “L” for love and an “L” for laughter. All these stories, whether written already or still percolating in my demented bean, are set in this little town.

The school building where I went to learn through the sixth grade was gone after the 1980’s. But the gymnasium with its theater built in still stands and is used as a community center to this day. It was here where I had my first crush, where I first saw a girl naked who was not my relative, where I was deeply embarrassed during the square-dancing lessons in Miss Molton’s Music Class, and where I told such big black hoo-haw lies that I truly got the proper training I needed to be a story-teller.

This isn’t what Main Street really looked like to me. I saw it in the 1960’s and 70’s. This is the 1950’s, when the artist who created this blanket was in high school. But It contains the world I knew. The water tower is missing, but the fire station and post office are there at the far end of the street on your left. The grocery store, the cafeteria with its George’s Malt Shop sign, the Brenton Bank building, and the hardware store are there on the left. The town hall and V.F.W. is on the right hidden by the trees. You can just see the steeple of the old Congregational Church that was torn down and moved to a new location during some of my earliest memories of the street.

This is what it looks like now that the hardware store is gone. The bank and the cafeteria have been updated and changed. The water tower has changed from silver to blue.

The Methodist Church, built in the thirties and torn down in the eighties, was an important part of my boyhood. It was a place where my faith in God was nurtured and reinforced to the point that my highly active and existential mind could never truly turn to atheism and doubt. It was also the place where a Methodist minister took the time to explain the facts of life to me and helped me overcome the terrible secret I kept inside me about being molested when I was ten. In more than one way, my life was saved in this building. I miss the place terribly.

So, here it is, the town that made me who I am and provides the background for the most important thinking and writing that I will ever be able to do.

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June 6, 2024 · 12:02 am

June 4, 2024 · 2:08 am

Western Art

Yesterday, on Friday the Thirteenth, we went to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. My parents, both in their eighties, took us there in a week-long celebration of Dorin’s graduation from high school. It was a worthy thing. Unlike most kids, my three are not bored to apoplexy by art museums. In fact, for most of the exhibitions, they traveled at my heels. It seems I know enough about art to fascinate them. All three of them are amateur artists themselves.

The Amon Carter Museum is centered on old Mr. Carter’s collection of the paintings of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell.

Remington was an adventurer and story-teller. He was also a sculptor with a gift for creating action-filled scenes in bronze. The Bronco Buster, the statue pictured here, is on prominent display in the foyer of the museum. It is one of Remington’s first, and one of his best known (in large part due to the Amon Carter Collection). The painting that follows was used as an illustration for one of his western stories. Remington wrote western novels, articles about the west, and factual essays about Native Americans. He had actually lived with Indians for a while and did a lot to lend credibility to everything he wrote about them. He didn’t save them from the depredations of the white man, but then, who could have done that? His nighttime scene is ultra-realistic and you can learn a lot about Indians just by studying the picture.

Russell came after Remington by a few years, but he was a contemporary and an admirer of Remington’s work. Russell is also an artist of intricate detail and accuracy, having also studied Indians from inside their villages and camps. The Silk Robe painting shown below and exhibited at the Carter reveals detailed knowledge of curing a buffalo hide that only could have come from watching the process in real life. He also did bronze sculpture and watercolor paintings along with his fantastic oil paintings. In fact, in his day, Russell was considered a sculptor who also paints. I don’t know how you can look at his cowboy art and still believe that. He is a truly masterful painter.

You’ll have to forgive me for taking a break from the usual humor blog, but I have an overwhelming love for art and painting, and this museum visit put an Indian arrow right through my silly old heart.