Lazy Sunday CXLVI: Ultra Laziness

The Portly Politico1 Comment

In the past week I’ve had three posts that were, essentially, non-posts.  In an effort to get back on schedule while also embracing this recent bout of exhaustion-induced laziness, I’ve decided to turn this weekend’s installment of Lazy Sunday into an absurd metacommentary on not writing real blog posts:

  • “No Lazy Sunday Today” – Lazy Sunday somehow got even lazier.
  • “Nothing New” – There’s Phone it in Friday, then there’s nothing at all.  This post was right in between; at least, it was something about nothing.
  • “A Quick Update” – the most substantive of the lot.  See—I’m ramping back up to more real posts!

Have no fears, readers—I’ve just been extremely busy at work.  I’m talking ten-to-fifteen-hour days, everyday, since last Monday.  I took time Saturday to clean and get my house and vehicle in order, and made sure to take a very long nap.  Just gotta get through one more hump this Tuesday and things settle down quite a bit—for now.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

A Quick Update

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Yours portly is still playing catchup after a long week at work.  My apologies to subscribers for not delivering a SubscribeStar Saturday today.

Instead, here’s a quick update:

  • The school play was quite successful.  I had to stay afterwards to teardown equipment and store everything away in preparation for a large fundraiser at school.
  • The fundraiser, our annual Gala, is a silent and live auction.  It’s tonight, and I will be announcing each of the live auction items—literally just reading the descriptions from the program aloud before the auctioneer does his thing.
  • I’m celebrating my Mom and my younger brother’s birthdays tomorrow.
  • Monday I’ll be setting up for the big Spring Concert, which is Tuesday.
  • I’ve spent this morning cleaning up the house and trying to get things looking presentable.  I’ve also been running laundry nonstop.  My sheets desperately needed cleaning after a week of sickly, sweaty sleep.

That’s it for now, dear readers.  Normal programming should resume tomorrow.

Warmest Regards,

TPP

Nothing New

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Hi Readers,

It’s the busiest season of the school year for yours portly.  We finished up the big spring musical last night, and my school’s annual gala fundraiser is tomorrow.  Next Tuesday is my students’ Spring Concert.

Naturally, your chubby host is run ragged.  I’ve been running a low-grade fever this week on top of putting in twelve-to-fifteen-hour days.  Before you say, “kick your feet up, Port!  You need to learn to relax,” note that I have had to put in these many hours.  It’s not optional extra work.

See y’all soon,

TPP

TBT^2: Go to Church

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Church can be a beautiful thing.  Indeed, it should be—it’s the Body of Christ!  But many Christians are quitting church for various reasons.  The Age of The Virus gave everyone a taste of how the heathens live; unfortunately, too many Christians enjoyed it and dropped out of church almost entirely.

Perhaps the worst thing churches—and schools, and governments, and hospitals, and businesses, etc., etc., etc.—did during The Age of The Virus was to shutter their doors.  Churches should have been the last places to close down; during a pandemic, people needed access to their churches more than ever before, but the churches followed the world.  They’re suffering as a result now.

Granted, church attendance was on the decline In the Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus brought its authoritarian terrors.  The Plandemic was just the excuse to stop attending—“for safety!”—and it seems that many folks were not eager to return.  That’s a shame.  A church community provides so much, and while we can and should study Scripture on our own, we are part of a body.  An ear that hears but has no brain to process it or arms to react to the hearing is pretty useless.

So—go to church!

With that, here is 27 April 2023’s “TBT: Go to Church“:

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Myersvision: Bigfoot Buffet

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Our senior correspondent and resident cryptozoologist Audre Myers is back with a veritable buffet of Bigfoot footage—some plausible, most of it garbage, much like eating at a Golden Corral.  There are some surprisingly toothsome morsels surrounded by a great deal of flabby, fattening fluff.

Audre shares a video here with thirteen different alleged Bigfoot sightings.  She breaks each one down with her distinct brand of cryptozoological analysis.

With that, here’s Audre’s Bigfoot Buffet:

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Open Mic Adventures LXXVIII: “Robobop”

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For this week’s edition of Open Mic Adventures I’d like to feature the opening track of Leftovers II, which you can find it at the following sites:

If you like 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and robots, you’re going to love “Robobop“:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Late Night with the Devil (2023)

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I was born smack in the middle of the 1980s, so I missed the 1970s completely.  From what my parents have told me, it was a pretty cool time to be alive and coming of age (they were in their late teens and early twenties throughout the decade)—great music, crazy fashion, pool halls, etc.  Even though I missed the decade (and can barely claim to have “experienced” the 1980s, the greatest of all recent American decades), the 1970s were everywhere growing up.  South Carolina, like most rural States, lagged behind the pop cultural curve slightly, so the 1970s loomed large in fashion and architecture.  Plus, the 1990s saw a revival of the 1970s aesthetic, so the influence of the decade musically, culturally, and even sartorially was a big part of my early years.

Of course, the 1970s had loads of problems, too—crazy inflation; stagnant job growth; a wildly popular bamboozled out of office, followed by a clueless boob; a devastating, unpopular, unnecessary war.  It seems that I’ll never escape the Brutalist architecture of the time period, which still dominates the crumbling public buildings of offices of local, State, and national governments.  The Lamar Town Hall is a squat, ugly building, facing a squat, ugly U.S. Post Office.  While I like the earth tones of the 1970s—call me crazy, but there’s something about burnt orange, dark mustard, and drab olive-brown that I find aesthetically appealing—the decade’s aesthetic was an affront to Beauty, and probably to God Himself.  Perhaps wide lapels were the sartorial equivalent of the Tower of Babel—“our lapels will reach to touch the Face of God!”  No wonder we struggled under stagflation for so long.

For all its virtues and many, many vices, however, the 1970s possessed a distinct flair, especially when it came to the television talk show and variety show.  So when I heard there was a horror film that took place on the set of a fictional late-night talk show on Halloween of 1977, I had to watch it.  That film is Late Night with the Devil (2023).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Heptadic Structure

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly took a brief break from composing to catch up on some other work, but I’m back to composing, albeit not with quite the same intensity as during the late winter months.  I released Leftovers II earlier this month, and Four Mages is coming very soon (2 May 2024).  I’ve also completed a funk album, Advanced Funkification, which is coming on 7 June 2024.

If you’d like to listen to Leftovers II, you can find it at the following sites:

I figured that was a pretty good slate of releases, and that I might take a rest.  But then I started jotting down a little melody in the incredibly rare (and, admittedly, self-indulgent) time signature of 7/16:

Heptadic Structure Prewriting

What resulted was the piece “Heptadic Structure.”  The piece itself is exactly twenty-one written measures (although it’s technically longer with repeats).

That gave me an idea:  if I wrote seven pieces in 7/X time consisting of twenty-one measures each, I’d have a total of 147 measures of music.  14 + 7 = 21.  There’s a beautiful mathematical symmetry there.

Why 21?  It’s the multiple of 3 and 7.  Three represents the Holy Trinity; seven is God’s Number, a heavenly number.  So 21 is a reference to the Trinity and Heaven.

I came upon the term “Heptadic Structure” when looking for a title for this piece.  Apparently, the concept of a heptadic structure is nothing new, and is a major concept in the rather esoteric field of Biblical numerology.  The argument is that various portions of the Bible breakdown in mathematically consistent and beautiful ways, always with the number 7.  It’s a fascinating concept, one about which I only possess a passing familiarity, but I love these mathematical structures.  Maybe it’s all a grand coincidence—or, more likely, it’s all part of God’s Grand Design.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.