Artist, Stan Kurth, is the 2023 juror for the show.
Venue: Matzke Fine Art Gallery and Sculpture Park , 2345 Blanche Way, Camano Island, WA 98282. 360-387-2759.
Awards Reception: Oct. 28, 2023, 2:30-5:00, Potluck party starts at 5:00.       

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Recently, I signed up for my very first pickleball tournament. Previous to that the last time I participated in a formal athletic competition of any kind, Richard Nixon was our nation’s Commander-in-Chief. In case you’re curious what that previous sporting event was …. More at View from the Bleachers ➜

"My teachers and my parents and the TV shows of my youth kept telling us kids that the way to deal with bullies was to confront them, they’re actually, deep down, nothing but cowards. My family moved north from Georgia to Milwaukee when I was 13, a radical transition from semi-rural living to urban discomfort. My junior high school had the usual mix of cliques with one exception, the hoods, guyz who dressed up as gangsters to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the Massacre. Nice bunch, kept switchblade knives on themselves and guns in their lockers. Welcome to the city, Farm Boy!"  More at The Skeeter Daddle Diaries ➜  

"Thanks to the new Google Kindness Translator, Davie is about to avoid a nasty fight with his roomie Brad. Davie texted into the Kindness Translator on his phone: “If u don’t clean up yr trash tonight, I’m throwing u out.” But the message Brad got was, “Bro wanna do za for dnr?” Problem avoided – well, for the moment anyway"..  More at View from the Bleachers ➜

"I read in the news the other day that the average kid text messages 200 times per day.  You might be skeptical of that number … unless you’ve sat in a room with some of these nimble fingerers.  They will ignore an incoming meteor before they put down their I-phone or whatever device their parents have empowered them with.  Hell, I even see the folks now just as addicted, drifting off from our conversation to check an incoming text message." More at The Skeeter Daddle Diaries ➜  

Author’s Note: As a nationally recognized expert on mental health and the proud owner of a doctor’s white medical jacket costume I bought on Amazon.com for a Halloween party a few years ago, I periodically share emails I receive from some of my patients in hopes it may shed light on an issue others may be grappling with. This is one of those letters.  More at View from the Bleachers ➜

Author’s Introduction: Everywhere in the news I’ve been reading about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and programs like ChatGPT will be eliminating thousands of jobs in countless industries. Thanks to recent advances in AI, fashion magazines can create images of fashion models that are so realistic, there may soon be no need for human models. Writers and actors are on strike right now in part because of very real fears that artificial intelligence will make their jobs obsolete. Why pay a few hundred background actors thousands of dollars when movie producers now can just create digital fakes to accomplish the same thing? Why hire writers when ChatGPT can write a complex script in minutes?

It got me to thinking. Is MY job as a humor writer at risk? You tell me. The other day, I asked ChatGPT to “write a satirical humor article about being an American man married to a Canadian woman in the style of Tim Jones’s View From the Bleachers humor website.” (My wife is Canadian.) … and this is what it came up with: More at View from the Bleachers ➜

To serve my country day by day
At any humble post I may;
To honor and respect her Flag,
To live the traits of which I brag;
To be American in deed
As well as in my printed creed.

To stand for truth and honest toil,
To till my little patch of soil
And keep in mind the debt I owe
To them who died that I might know
My country, prosperous and free,
And passed this heritage to me.

I must always in trouble’s hour
Be guided by the men in power;
For God and country I must live,
My best for God and country give;
No act of mine that men may scan
Must shame the name American.

To do my best and play my part,
American in mind and heart;
To serve the flag and bravely stand
To guard the glory of my land;
To be American in deed,
God grant me strength to keep this creed.

Edgar Albert Guest (1881 – 1959) was a British-born American poet who became known as the People's Poet. His family moved from England to Detroit, Michigan when he was ten years old and he lived there the rest of his life. He worked for the Detroit Free Press for 64 years. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and was thought to have written over 12,000 poems. His poems often had an inspirational and optimistic view of everyday life. Of his poems he said, "I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them. "His popularity led NBC to produce a weekly 15-minute radio program, “Guest in Your Home,” which ran from 1931 to 1942.
The Globe editorialized his passing by quoting Philip Coldren, the late editorial page editor who wrote that the key to Guest’s greatness was “that among the thousands of Guest poems, ‘there has not been a single one that has promoted wickedness or meanness or anything else but kindness and gentleness and peace and hope" 

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence to announce the colonies' separation from the Kingdom of Great Britain, bringing a new nation into the world,
Although the Constitution provides the legal and governmental framework for the United States, the Declaration, with its eloquent assertion “all Men are created equal,” is the founding document of the United States.

It is now up to us, as the American experiment continues and our laws evolve in fact and interpretation, that we remain vigilant and make sure our leaders are faithful to the aspirational intent and vision of our Nation's Founders. Let's evolve by improving not by regression ant let's keep in mind the still very pertinent words from Thomas Paine's Common Sense  "......some Masaniello (opportunistic agitator) may hereafter arise who, laying hold of popular disquietudes (grievances), may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, finally sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge".  More