The Dairy Barn illustrations, 2011-2015
Five years of breathing the dairy air inspried me to create many visual enticements to recruit volunteers to serve ice cream for a fundraiser. Numerous dairy-related puns were churned out. Complete illustrations, one very short film, and more details about how this all came out are in this blog post.
Click image to go to the song website, where you can download your copy.
Santa Came Too Soon
In 2018, I released this novelty Christmas song that Dr. Demento played on his national, long-running comedy music show. It was also played by a couple of radio stations in Iowa—including one in which I performed the song live. And it aired on a few other internet comedy music shows around the country.
There are many Christmas songs that worry about Santa arriving late for Christmas or missing Christmas altogether, but there seemed to be no songs about the problems that might arise if Santa arrived too early. This song addresses that.
Much, much more about the song at this link.
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Other website highlights:
Are you now or have you ever been a columnist? (Well, yes, I was ... but it was a long time ago)
A poem on farm market reports, thoughts on the use of profanity as a productivity tool, pondering generational labels, and trying to figure out why birds were trying to kill me. These were a few topics of a weekly column I wrote for just over five years. Though I wrote upwards of 250 of them, I mercifully only share (or inflict upon you) 20 of the columns here and reflect back—way back—to the days when I wrote them.
Column highlights:
• An ode to farm market reports
• Is it apropos to make English official?
• Lessons learned from birds that tried to kill me
• Too young to be a baby boomer, too old to be a Gen-Xer
• Wavering over flag burning law
Compiling songs about Iowa — not ‘Ioway’
A collection of songs by and about the people (not the folks) of Iowa (not Ioway).
My Ode to Dad Upon Selling the Shop
A poem for my dad, Chuck Plank, who sold his farm implement business after nearly 50 years in business.