Here’s another big sample of covers from the box of newly-discovered comic/horror books (in PDF format):
Tag Archives: story
Not all my heroes were cowboys…
A few weeks ago, while driving back from north Virginia, where my niece, Maggie, officially graduated from secondary school, I took my mother to dinner at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon.
We stopped in the quiet town to reminisce about my father’s days there as an extension agent and assistant professor for Virginia Tech.
His office was located at the Inn.
A block or so down the street is Barter Theatre, a venue for the performing arts.
I can remember more than one but less than a dozen times I took a date to see a play or musical at Barter Theatre, driving up from northeast Tennessee to show my female companions a bit of culture common to most cultures (but rarely, agar plate cultures).
As president of the Drama Club in our secondary school (for two years!), I felt it was my duty to support the arts.
The Barter Theatre presented mainly light entertainment such as, if my memory serves me well in this moment, I Do! I Do!, a musical that features the song, “My Cup Runneth Over.”
Right now, I cannot remember the names of the performers.
However, we were taught that more than one famous performer cut their teeth on the stage of Barter Theatre:
Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty and to tie this blog entry to a recent death, Ernest Borgnine.
The world is small.
On television, I watched Ernest Borgnine and his crazy cast of characters turn the U.S. Navy into a farcical front for jokes about bureaucratic nonsense, humour during wartime and the general state of the American sitcom exhibited in “McHale’s Navy.”
We all start somewhere.
If an ugly mug like Borgnine’s can become a nationally-recognized figure, anyone can.
We celebrate beauty in women with “Miss [name your region]” contests all the time.
How often could a woman proudly say she made the Ten Ugliest Faces of Hollywood list?
Borgnine did, along with Karl Malden and many others.
When they did, it made me smile and think, “Well, if they don’t care about their looks, why should I?”
You don’t have to be a cowboy or handsome to be successful.
Persistence is the key.
That, and an outstanding personality.
I have both.
That’s why I’m here, remembering my mother, my father, Barter Theatre and the actor who went from Abingdon to Hollywood decades ago, Ernest Borgnine, who became one of my heroes, both local and national, along the way.
My father was my first hero and will be my last. Borgnine was one of many important ones in-between.
May we laugh with our last breath or die trying!
Domesticated Animals
What is one gallon (3.75 litres) of water worth to you?
In many parts of the world, a toilet is composed of a seat, a bowl full of water and a reservoir of water.
While your derriere warms the seat, you eliminate waste products (e.g., urine, feces) into the bowl and then use a levered mechanism to flush out the bowl, replacing its contents with the water in the reservoir.
A simple procedure.
Some of us are trained to drain the bowl after every use.
Some of us are trained to conserve water and drain the bowl after more than one use.
Some of us have no idea how to use the toilet, growing up with other means of eliminating waste — a hole in the floor, a hole in the ground (over which a wooden hut is built and then called an outhouse), writing your name in the snow, doing your business on the grass and covering with leaves, etc.
I grew up with unisex toilets in the home and gender-based toilets (bathrooms or water closets) in public buildings.
I don’t know how the people who avail themselves of the facilities designated for women in public places use the toilets.
In the unisex toilet at home, our parents taught my sister and me to flush after every use.
In the men’s room in public places, I have observed over the years a variety of behaviours, from clean, flushed toilets to bowls overflowing with waste and toilet paper. [We have a toilet in the men’s room called the urinal but that one is eliminated from this discussion to focus on the more universal product for receiving our waste.]
When water is scarce, a gallon of chlorinated/fluoridated water mixed with waste products is as precious as some metals.
In that situation, what is proper is not prudent.
However, where water is abundant and treated water is inexpensive, let’s be courteous to those who’ll use the toilet after us and flush our waste away.
Surely, we’re educated and domesticated enough to handle that simple a task, eh?
There are plenty of other public places of your life to demonstrate your barbarian behaviour to better advantage.
Mayberry RFD, the next generation
So, word on the street in Hollywood is a remake of the Andy Griffith Show, with Opie returning to his hometown, OR…
A live version of the Archie comic series, because…
we’ve already re/made these:
So many more to read at my leisure before digging gold in Canada.
Did somebody mention the Gold Diggers?
Deep Secrets of the Subterranean Basement
In my parents’ house is a partially-completed basement, one section meant to be a couple of bedrooms turned into a big storage area many moons ago.
This morning, my mother calmly asked me to look at the heat pump system air filters to see if they needed changing. The one in the upstairs area was caked with dust, not changed in months.
A quick trip to Walmart later, I changed the upstairs filter. Lo and behold! we have cool air circulating throughout the upper floor of the house.
Meanwhile, in the darkest reaches of the basement is an air intake vent hidden behind piles of stuff from my old bedroom, long since converted into Dad’s office upstairs.
Mom pointed into the middle of the spider webs and said, “Son, can you reach in there and see if the air filter needs to be changed?”
My life for a clean air filter? Mom, is that all I’m worth to you?!
As I bargained with the hungry arachnids for a few seconds to disturb their threadbare threads, I nearly stepped on a box covered with contact paper from the mid 1970s.
Could it be the lost artifacts, the treasure of my forgotten youth?
THE BOX OF COMIC BOOKS I THOUGHT MY PARENTS HAD TOSSED OR MARKED DOWN IN A GARAGE SALE?????
Yes!!!!
Ahh…I myself had bought this box of illustrated tales, both comical and horrible, at a garage sale for the terribly high price of $2 or $3 decades ago.
My parents scoffed at paying such a fortune for mere paper covered with colourful drawings and stories of questionable morals.
Yet, I persisted and they caved in.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the second cover of one of the many dozens, including Beetle Bailey:
Meanwhile, a spider bite is itching…what evil lurks in the damaged hearts of regenerating men!
Get your tweet on
So how many people have tweeted that it would be fitting if the NASCAR driver AJ Allmendinger failed this drug test because of cocaine just before he’s supposed to drive in the “Our formula contained zero percent cocaine (but, maybe, coca leaf ‘extract’)” Coke Zero 400?
Random drug testing — another catchy phrase for “I saw my opponent use the same drugs as me and I want him to lose so I’ll report him before he reports me.”
Also known as the Jose Canseco Rule.
Who says NASCAR isn’t a professional sport? Unruly behaviour? Punching fans and reporters? Messy, public divorces? Failing drug tests? Gee, sounds like every other professional sport on this planet, doesn’t it?
In other words, time to sit back, unsnap the top button on my pants after eating a big, hearty meal at Amis Mill Eatery (Happy 23rd month birthday to your child, Brandi!) and snooze in front of the TV edition of the Doozy in Daytona, courtesy of clueless NASCAR owners/officials.
If history doesn’t repeat itself, why read about it in the first place?
What’s been going on in India lately that hasn’t been going in Sydney that I need to talk about here? Ich weiß nicht!
A Second Look at Female Suicide
Is it true more American military kill themselves than die in battle or perish in motorbike wrecks? If so, what is the ratio of military men to women self-sacrificers?
Compared to the civilian population and, more specifically, civilian job categories, how much higher or lower are male military or female military likely to kill themselves than, say, dentists or cops?
Finally, is it because we’ve infested the military population with the same microorganisms that push cat owners into ending their ninth try at a nice life?
Could we look back at those of the female persuasion who left written records and killed themselves, analysing their literary output for clues as to the true cause of their desire for demise?
For instance, take this poem of Sylvia Plath. Is it just me or is she perhaps using her poetic licence to drive home a point that it was secretly a creature of the feline persuasion that persuaded her to say goodbye to life, to children, to husband, to career?:
The Companionable Ills
by Sylvia Plath
The nose-end that twitches, the old imperfections—
Tolerable now as moles on the face
Put up with until chagrin gives place
To a wry complaisance—
Dug in first as God’s spurs
To start the spirit out of the mud
It stabled in; long-used, became well-loved
Bedfellows of the spirit’s debauch, fond masters.
Living memories
While cleaning out my father’s closet — clawing through his hidden stash of Viagra, box of .22 long rifle bullets of mine from my Boy Scout days, stack of Playboys, old Avon cologne bottles, ziplock baggie of .38 hollow tip bullets, Optimist Club pins, German spy camera, fedora hats from the 1930s/1940s, ties, and other stuff I’ll catalog one day — I found the following:
Picture and role of one of my mother’s early classrooms
Fez for Jericho Temple, as well as this book:
When I get my camera out, I’ll share pictures of an album my father had hidden at the top of the closet, right next to his Viagra stash: The Battle of Sex by Redd Foxx and Hattie Noel. Partial scan below:
A good quote is like a good wine — a matter of good taste.
“Between safety and adventure, I choose adventure.” — Craig Ferguson [recently]
“If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment.” — Voltaire, Le Sottisier
“Faccio sempre le mie stesse strade” [I always make my own roads] — Coleen Monroe [recently]
“Peter Higgs, the British physicist, who, as you’ve no doubt recently become well aware, was himself the originator of the concept of a particle now known as the HIGGS BOSON. Mr. Higgs was once married, to an American Linguistics lecturer named Jody but, after he became somewhat famous, she divorced him, feeling that he was excessively absorbed in his career. My contribution to this story is the thought that she didn’t want to become known as the HIGGS BOSON’S MATE.” — Ashleigh Brilliant
Ai, Ai, cap’n!
There are many ways to starve an opponent and almost all of them require patience while the opponent burns through reserves. Who is your opponent, what is the opponent’s reserves and do you have patience?
When one has millions of years to make a single decision, all the local noise becomes nonsense, even when one is dragged into the drama, the trauma and the “je ne sais quoi” of so-called daily living.
The rush from the crib to the bridge where one can feel the ship change direction when one turns the wheel, and thus the rudder, is such a tiny space of time that one forgets details that were important at the time.
The next storyline begs for its entry from offstage.
Droite? Gauche? Les notions de droite et de gauche renvoient à une opposition en politique mais, aussi, le théâtre et la scène.
Two suitors compete for the same target of their affection. Who will starve whom? Who is willing to bow out, to lose graciously, to achieve the goal of which one’s affection is just a stepping stone, a waystation, a port of call?
When a goal is more important than one’s happiness, emotions are removed from the equation.
When the equation is free of emotion, one can see variables that may or may not play to one’s advantage.
When one cares not for advantages, the equation reveals its answer, how it balances, what it means when time is irrelevant.
The same way that one double quotation mark makes no sense without a second, completing the set.
They are just symbols, are they not?
What does this mean to you?: “=”
Emoticon? An equation? An ironic statement of what the equals sign means? ASCII characters? One of the world’s simplest quotes, translatable into just about every language? A nonsense statement?
Time for another nonsense story…plenty of time before the next decision has to be made and revealed, which opponent will starve in the process.
If only predicting the future was the same as making the future…sigh…the subtleties…he who laughs, lasts, and that’s all that matters, n’est pas?
Leaning against the cushion of pain
Should the interiour of spaceships invoke aesthetic design criteria or functional?
Yesterday, I wanted to take my wife to a nice, quiet, flat lawn to sit and watch a fireworks show to honour the anniversary of the traditional start of the United States of America.
How many of us have sat in meditative silence in “Rocket Park,” a display of rockets, missiles and other gear located in the back lot of the US Space & Rocket Museum in Huntsville, Alabama?
Why not, I thought, grab a couple of cheap lawn chairs, a good book to read and some cash, buy food and drink from street venders and wait for the sizzle-n-boom of pyrotechnic fantasies light up the sky while surrounded by aerodynamic monuments to science?
Me, my wife, and a few hundred people, it turned out.
Rocking to the music of the AMC band (courtesy of the U.S. Army Materiel Command).
I made it about halfway through Craig Ferguson’s “American On Purpose” when threatening thunderstorms dampened the mood (and the book), pushing us indoors until minutes before the Main Event.
All of us have our stories to tell, don’t we?
Earlier in the day, we’d shopped at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, where I dared myself to get back into reading books again, picking up copies of “You Laugh, I’ll Drive” by Jenny Herrick, “Everything Bad Is Good For You” by Steven Johnson, and “A Short History Of Progress” by Ronald Wright.
So, I started my foray back into the writing styles of ghostwriters by reading Jenny’s autobiography and ended with Craig’s. But, strangely enough, not Jenny Craig’s. Hmm…
We can weld and program computing devices that explore the outer reaches of the solar system, can’t we?
We can enjoy the explosive nature of gunpowder without anyone getting hurt.
Is there anything we can’t do?
Yesterday, I was sad, the first 4th of July without my father and my mother in-law.
But it’s who/what I have and what I can do that matter most.
Like having chronic back pain for so long you’re consciously unaware of the fact you lean against the pain for support.
treetrunkdings 