Filed under: Cartoons, Government, Humor | Tagged: Biden, Democrats, guns, Hillary, Memes | Leave a comment »
Precocious Great Grandchildren
Posted on 27/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe
A few years ago, I dreamed of becoming a famous writer of children’s stories. I even went so far as to enroll in a writing school for children’s writers. My wife Barbara and I enjoyed the benefits of having seven grandchildren, all between ages 3 months to ten years. To teach, entertain, and enjoy, I began writing stories about a cartoon character I invented while attending college. His name is Morty Angel.
Morty is a Guardian Angel whose assignment is to look after all my grandchildren. A side benefit for me was a chance to practice my cartooning skills by drawing pictures to help tell the stories. A couple of years after Barbara died and I took up with Peggy, my children’s story writing died too. Her grandchildren were 21, 22, and 23 years old. They were well past the age of my target audience, and my focus shifted to political cartooning.
This week, it occurred to me that I now have two precocious great-granddaughters born to Peggy’s youngest grandchild. I have never written them a personalized story yet. I decided it is time. They are now in grammar school and are already reading quite well. They would probably scorn upon being offered a cutesy child’s story, and I will have to step up my game and begin thinking about writing for the modern twenty-first-century pre-teens they are. At first, I thought I could get the stories written in time for Christmas. With all I have on my plate at the moment, that is unrealistic; priorities, priorities, priorities. It takes me an hour or two to draft a simple post like this one, and a story with a plot and characters might take a bit longer. I have just added the task to my bucket list of things to do before I escape Earth to Heaven.
Filed under: Biography, Cartoons, family | Tagged: Children's Stories, Morty Angel | 1 Comment »
A Mouse In the House
Posted on 22/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe
My experience is that there is nothing more dangerous for a man than a mouse in the house. Last evening, I returned from the regular Tuesday Stray Bar WIne club and was immediately confronted by Lovely to inform me of an intruder. It is Fall in the Midwest, and the temperature often drops below freezing at night. The vast network of wild creatures seek comfort in the heat. The frogs sink to the bottom of the pump well, where the water is warmest, and often, they get swallowed by the pump—a rather macabre way to die. Birds seek the comfort of dense shrubs and trees like Juniper Pfizer or pine, and mice seek refuge in loosely piled leaves or wood piles. Except there is an occasional mouse that takes the easy way out, he finds a tiny opening in the structure of a house. If the opening enters the interior unobstructed, warm air blows out of the hole and signals a clear path to a comfy winter. One of the attributes that God has given the mouse is the ability to squeeze through tiny openings much smaller than their bodies. Young mice, just born a few months ago, have little bodies. Combine that small size with a powerful desire to get warm gives them the urge to wriggle through that speck of an opening.
Hundreds of cartoons show a woman standing on a chair and shrieking, “Eek, it’s a mouse.” I have seen a fair share of these cartoons, and because they are so common, my correlation of women becoming dangerous when sighting such a creature in her domain is valid. Such was the state of mind when Lovely announced her plight to me last evening. She didn’t say hi, or hello dear, or how was the meeting? No, she said, “there is a mouse in the house. Go downstairs and trap it.” In my semi-drunken stupor, I put it to rest by saying, “I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” and that really made her dangerous.
Now, it is the tomorrow I promised to take care of the monster mouse problem, and here I sit writing an account about it and thinking I had better get my ass in gear to go hunting. Most men would take a wife’s demand that he go hunting as a sign of affection, but I am a bit Leary of that line of thought. I do believe I had better take care of the matter, and soon.
Filed under: Cartoons, Humor | Tagged: Mice, Mouse traps | 4 Comments »
A Debate or a Fumble
Posted on 28/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe
Writing is a chore. It was fun at one time, but now I consider it work. I long for the day I wrote my opinion pieces lambasting Obama for his socialist ways. Then it was fun, exposing his transformative ideas stolen from the communist manifesto. I admit he was Mr. Smooth in his delivery and his ability to put people to sleep with his melodic big-word speeches that sounded important but were all loaded with bullshit. It is not the same with Joe Biden. His brand of mumbling through speeches doesn’t appeal to me at all. Besides, I grew up in Chicago, the home of gangsters, and he is definitely one of them. The gangsters are evil, and so is Joe.
How this guy survived in the Senate for so many years is baffling. How he was ever chosen to be the VP candidate by Obama was equally baffling, except Obama is a crook too, and crooks of a feather must stick together. The biggest mystery to me is how he was ever elected to become president. I know he got more votes than Trump. That’s how. My boyhood was spent reading headlines about the “Machine” politics of Chicago’s Richard Daley. It wasn’t uncommon to have votes coming in very late from wards, which always seemed to lose a bunch of ballots and then mysteriously find them as the count proceeded. The system has been operating this way for as long as I can remember, but no one ever does anything about it. Except for Donald Trump, who finally questioned the veracity of the lost ballots being brought forth in the middle of the night from places no one ever knew existed, did anyone try to end the mystery of how they went missing and how they were found?
The audacity of the man, who is he to have challenged the process so carefully designed and developed over the years to bring home winners? The only way it seemed to beat this process was to be voted in by such an enormous landslide of votes that even the least savvy among us would understand it as a win.
Modern politics is an extravagant stage show by political actors to convince us that their process is fair and democratic. I turned on regular TV last night to watch the Republicans, who all want to become a better president and bring the system down. I’ve been watching debates since Kennedy and Nixon, and this one was the worst excuse for a debate ever. The moderators, three of them, never controlled the show. They explained how they would conduct the show, and then the free-for-all began. In most civil debates, the debaters will take sides and attack or defend the subject. This forum was composed of several candidates, and each was given a chance to answer a question posed by one of the three moderators. The candidate was given time to answer.
Before the debater could answer, the entire stage jumped into the fray simultaneously, attacking him and posing new questions. It reminded me of how when in a football game, a player fumbles the ball. In his attempt to recover, both teams attack him, pushing, shoving, grabbing, digging, and trying to steal the ball to take possession. In a ball game, the referee continues to blow the whistle and summons his co-workers to assist him in determining who really has the ball. The rules dictate that the ref has the final say in the game. It didn’t work that way in the debate. The seven debaters were all speaking rapidly to get their points in. They all shouted to be heard over all the others with the net effect that no one got anything, much less a point, to the audience.
I watched the debate for ten minutes before I switched to Netflix to watch the final episode of Ozark, which is about Mexican drug cartels controlling US Citizens by threatening them with death. The bullet always seemed to settle arguments and disputes. Perhaps we should require that the moderators be armed to help settle disputes and conduct a civilized debate.
Filed under: Biography, Cartoons, politics | Tagged: Biden, Crooks, Obama, politics, Shady elections | Leave a comment »
Commercial Suicide
Posted on 05/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe
The world has truly gone crazy. I have a very hard time believing that so many companies are being duped by governments around the planet. Their commitment to company suicide is admirable but assinine. It surprised me when I heard car company after car company climbing onto the bandwagon of switching to electric cars. Have they gone mad?
Actually, when Henry Ford began making cars, he had no idea where the gasoline would come from. There were no gas stations around the country to supply fuel to the suckers who jumped at the chance to buy a motorized wagon. In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a famous line “Build it and they will come.” I guess the entire world now operates on that philosophy. It is not a bad directive, but I would like to believe that there has to be a tiny bit more behind investing billions of dollars in a technology that is still years away from fruition. I give Elon Musk credit for sticking his neck out to build electric cars, but I don’t give GM, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and the many other car company’s any credit for rushing into this scheme built on the phenomenon of global warming being caused by humans. Yes, global warming can happen but it is far beyond our capabilities to make it so.
My intention with this post is to add to this fray of commercial suicide. I am proposing two of my designs for electric cars free to the world for use by humanity. Both are just as viable as the cars Musk and others are producing. In fact, these designs may be more reliable and cheaper to build than those in current production.
Design number one.
Filed under: Cars, Cartoons, Humor, Sarcasm | Tagged: Electric Cars, Man Made Global Warming, Saving the World | 2 Comments »
