Restart

I went to the WordPress Dashboard to start posting again, but I hit a brick wall with not being able to use the classic version of WordPress. Am I missing something or did WP just up and do away with the Classic version without a countdown warning? Or did I delete too many WP emails (one with a warning) thinking they were just spam.

I could probably eventually learn the new block process and maybe even get used to it, but I’m not sure that I want to at this point. I’m a firm believer that you can teach some old dogs new tricks, but I also know that a lot of old dogs are not that interested in learning new tricks.

Bottom line is I may or may not be restarting after all. Maybe after I get over this initial irritation and frustration of not being able to do things as I used I’ll be more inclined give this a try.

In the meantime I did figure out how to do at least one link. It follows after this setup.

Years ago, in what seems like a different lifetime, I attended the University of Missouri – St. Louis. UMSL was, and probably still is, a commuter campus. No student or Greek housing to be seen anywhere.

My wife and I lived in an apartment about 30 to 45 minutes away, depending on time of day. I rarely had a class schedule with back to back classes so I would often stay on campus rather than drive home just to have to turn around and go back. I would fill these dead hours with homework and library time. In the library I discovered “Reader’s Digest” magazines going back into the 1940s.

May of the articles from the WWII time period were interesting but my main attraction to theses magazines was the joke sections. I don’t remember exactly, but I think they had three of four categories of jokes in each issue. The three I remember were “Humor in Uniform’, “Laughter the Best Medicine”, and one that might have been called “All in a Day’s Work”, or something similar.

When I got tired of the “Reader’s Digest” I’d head to the back of the first floor of the library where they kept the huge two volume set of the “Oxford English Dictionary”. After having looked up all the “dirty” words, I would spend hours looking up the origination of all sorts of words. The OED was my 1972-1973 Google. With one initial word search leading me to another, which in turn prompted another search, and another, and another, going down the rabbit hole until I almost missed a class.

Another activity I would use to while the hours away was doodling. Just your normal silly little doodles, but I also had special doodles that I called “word puns”. For example I would draw a coil of rope laying on the grand and draw a bar of soap on top of it. Under the doddle I’d have a caption that read: Soap on a Rope.

Another example was a sick figure I drew of a very tall man (labeled John) and a much shorter man (labeled Sam). Sam had his head tilted back looking way up at John. Sam also had a speech bubble that said, “Your BAD!” The caption under this doodle was: Big Bad John. For background Jimmy Dean’s song “Big Bad John” shot to #1 on the Billboard chart in November 1961, shortly after its release. In 1962 it won four Grammy awards.

So that’s the idea behind word puns. Fast forward several decades to the digital era and me playing with computer graphics. I had a hobby of downloading news photos from the internet and pasting my head, or the heads of friends and family in the photo either replacing the famous person or showing me next to them. After awhile this became a “been there done that” kind of thing and I needed a new creative outlet.

I don’t know why but somehow I got to thinking about the old word puns and wondered if I could do it digitally. Maybe I could draw the doodles with my mouse using the Microsoft paint program or one of my photo editors. But then I thought maybe it would be better if I could just manipulate photos from the internet or ones that I have in my royalty free discs. Turns out that I could. Sometimes it was much harder than what I thought it was going to be, and a few times I had to create the photo myself, but I’m sure this was much easier than trying to doodle with a mouse.

So here is a link to the digital version of what I used to call picture puns. While the focus is pictures, there is a soundtrack, so turn on your audio.

Hope you enjoy it.

David