Cloudy with a chance of faces

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Tom Falco

I started this thing called Cloudy With A Chance of Faces. It’s images I see in clouds.

I’ve been posting pictures over the years and a friend suggested I make a thing of it. I add a few outlines to show what I’m seeing and there it is.

I live in Miami, right on the Bay, that combination makes for interesting visions in the sky. The clouds here move very quickly, if you see a formation, you have to capture it quick or it’s gone.

Every morning when I wake up, I look outside and there is something staring me in the face. Many times the clouds look like mountains, other times Snoopy or a lady or whatever.

You could get addicted. I could literally stand in one place and get so many images in a short amount of time. Now that I’m doing this Cloudy project, it gets a big hard not to be obsessed and just be staring at the clouds all day long, waiting for the next image to appear. But oddly enough, when I’m deliberately looking, I don’t see anything. It seems to be an organic thing, you know, it just happens when you least expected, you look up and something is staring down at you.

A friend visiting from New York once said that our clouds have layers. I take that to mean they are very expressive. And they are.

If you’d like to follow my venture, I have set up two social media sites. I have the website CloudyWithAChanceOfFaces.com, too, but I haven’t done anything with that yet. I just wanted to get the name while it was available.

Here is the Instagram account: instagram.com/cloudywithachanceoffaces
and Facebook: facebook.com/CloudyWithAChanceOfFaces
Also Tumblr: tumblr.com/cloudywithachanceoffaces

Hope to see you there!

Madonna, Marilyn Monroe or Mae West? You choose!

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Right place at the right time

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Tom Falco

Today’s cartoon is about a peacock, or rather a peacock feather. When I looked at my personal Facebook page today, it featured a memory from two years ago – peacocks crossing the street. I don’t know how to show that here, but that isn’t the point, the point is that a sign like that means I am in the right place at the right time. According to my friend jak anyway.

jak always said that if you read a word and hear a word at the same time, that’s a sign that you are in the right place at the right time and coincidences like that always mean the same thing.

Where I live, we have peacocks all over the place. Some people love them, others hate them. I love them. But a few years back there was an issue that got in the news about people wanting to get rid of the peacocks. They would round them up and send them to a farm somewhere, which makes no sense, since they will never get them all, they are always proliferating.

NPR called me up to interview me on the radio about the birds. I talked to them about 15 or 20 minutes and I told them that I loved them and that they were part of the character of the neighborhood. I did say I could understand how people despised them because they were dirty, loud and they pecked at their reflection in cars in people’s driveways, which ruined the paint job.

The interview ran on the radio and it was picked up by newspapers all over the country. But what the newspapers did was pick up my comment about them being dirty, loud and a nuisance. They didn’t pick up the part where I said they should be left alone because they are loved by most of us and they are part of the village and village life!

One newspaper wrote a story and as is the case, newspapers all over the country picked this piece of news up. My uncle read my quote in the NY Post of all places! They ran my quote about them being loud.

I was in the Chicago Tribune and Michigan newspapers, Los Angeles, the Midwest, all over – I was branded a peacock hater, which was the total opposite! They all chose to run the negative comments, which really weren’t negative, they were just facts about the peacocks. I’ve always defended the peacocks, but that part they ignored.

It was a bit funny, except the people in the village where I live were not pleased with me. Since the original interview was on the radio, I didn’t have anything in writing to defend myself. But I was part of our peacock mascot project some years back where people painted and designed about 50 of those cement art pieces that you’ve probably seen in different incarnations and animals around the country (cows, dogs, cats, etc.). And I used the peacock as my business logo for years. So I am a peacock fan.

Anyway, I guess I’m in the right place at the right time today since the cartoon and one of the peacock memories popped up on Facebook today. Right?

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Angels

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Tom Falco

I posted this as an Instagram story on my Instagram site recently, you might have seen it.

What if all animals, or just dogs, are angels? They can’t talk, or if they can, they don’t, but they are in our lives, they are observant and they might do angelic things without us knowing it’s them. What if when they pass away after their short lives, they have gone after doing their work here on earth?

Ever feel the presence of an angel? Well it might be a dog. Perhaps they can understand all languages and can perform miracles, but we don’t know it.

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‘Petwords’

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Tom Falco

I had to reset my internet user name and password. For some reason, it just disappeared from the list, I couldn’t sign on or get internet – so a lady on the phone at the ISP reset it all for me.

She asked me for a new user name and password. I gave her a silly word for the password and felt embarrassed, so I told her it was my cat’s name. I don’t have a cat. Or a dog for that matter.

And that made me think of this cartoon. So many people use their pets’ names for their passwords.

A lot of people liked the cartoon and shared it, so I guess it hit a nerve.

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A visit to the zoo

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Tom Falco

I finally got the workout I have been looking for all year – I went to the zoo with a friend the other day.

We walked around in the sun and heat for five hours – that will give anyone a nice workout. We ended up walking miles! It felt good. According to an app on my phone, we walked 9 miles! Slowly and stopping a lot, of course, but still, 9 miles!

I could not move the next day. I hadn’t worked out so much in a year due to the pandemic. When I’m in NY, I have been known to walk 12 miles in a day, so I better work myself up for that for when I go this summer, otherwise I’ll be nursing sore muscles after one day out and about the city.

I have a friend in town from NY so we’ve been doing things, I’m not sure what possessed us to do Zoo Miami, but on that same day, one of my cousins announced that was her first day working at the Bronx Zoo, a lifelong dream of hers.

I got excited because I started watching all those behind the scenes zoo shows at the beginning of the pandemic. That was my Saturday nights and the Bronx Zoo episodes are my favorites of all of them. It’s very comforting, especially at the time of being locked inside for all those months.

There are zoos featured from all over – Tampa, England, Australia, Columbus, Ohio; North Carolina, etc. It’s amazing to see all the love and respect the animals are given by the caretakers. But my favorite is how they do it in the Boogie Down Bronx.

I have plans to visit the Bronx Zoo this summer – to not see the animals – but to see the human characters I see on the zoo tv shows!

A little zoo confusion

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Tom Falco

There was a little confusion regarding yesterday’s cartoon. While I love people having different interpretations of a specific comic. The idea here was never to throw the boy to the lions. But let me assure you that no children were harmed in the creation of yesterday’s cartoon.

To alleviate the concern, I changed it up a little and posted both versions yesterday. Now it’s about the ice cream, I guess.

They aren’t hungry. It’s just a gag on the usual, “Please don’t feed the animals.”

The animals are regularly fed at this zoo. Those two lions looking over the wall are just being curious, they aren’t hungry, especially for the boy. His dad and he are just visiting the zoo and they come upon the sign and the zookeeper is explaining the sign.

I noticed that in the comments on Facebook and Instagram, people are getting the wrong impression!

I got the idea from watching all those Zoo shows I like on Animal Planet.

A few people felt that the animals should be set free, but I don’t think we want wild animals roaming the streets and I learned from these zoo shows that most zoos these days are there to protect and breed endangered animals. And most of the animals live in natural sort of habitats that are recreated at the zoos.

It’s all about the animals

Posted on June 29, 2020 by Tom Falco

the-zoo

There’s another tv show I’m addicted to now that I have found now that I’m home a lot – on Saturday night’s I watch The Zoo on Animal Planet. I also watch Saved By the Barn after that. The Zoo is rerun at all times during the week, too.

The Zoo is about backstage at zoos – mostly the Bronx Zoo but also there are zoos in Australia and the UK and other areas of the US including San Diego and Columbus, but the Bronx Zoo is featured mostly. It’s so sweet to watch how much the zookeepers love and respect the animals and how they dedicate their lives to them. It’s quite interesting, too; you learn a lot and you get attached to the people, almost as friends in my head now.

During the time that tigers tested positive for covid19 at the Bronx Zoo, they addressed it on the show. The tigers are all well now.

Dan McKernan and one of his buddies

As for Saved By the Barn, that’s a show where a guy named Dan McKernan who goes back to his family’s large farm and he turns it into an animal rescue for farm animals where they can safely live out their lives. They rescue animals from various places and almost treat the farm as a zoo, but only for farm animals, so you wont see giraffes or elephants, it’s mostly pigs, cows, goats and that sort.

I know the next time I’m at the Bronx Zoo, I am going to be looking for the zookeepers rather than the animals, now! They are sort of minor celebs in their own right.