Yours portly doesn’t have any new music or covers this week, although I have arranged a delightful rendition of the theme from Agatha Christie’s Poirot and hope to record that soon (thanks to Ponty for that recommendation). Here’s the theme song itself, which is a killer sax solo:
The one thing that has forestalled my practicing and recording of my arrangement of the piece is my printer. I purchased an Epson printer some years ago because I’ve had good experience with other Epson products (we use their projectors frequently at school). The printer was, as most printers are, always a bit finicky, but it worked well enough for my needs, and it’s typically rare for me to need to print anything at home.
Then one fateful day I made the mistake of updating the firmware. Suddenly, the perfectly serviceable third-party ink cartridges I used weren’t good enough for my printer, which demanded only the finest (and overpriced) Epson ink. That took me down a rabbit hole of cheapskatery in an attempt to locate an earlier version of the firmware online.
I started writing this review Sunday evening and decided to spend time with Dr. Wife, who is now done with residency and living here in our South Carolina house permanently! This morning was full of errands, including taking Nugget to the vet for her annual visit and taking care of things around the house. Ergo, I’m finally getting around to finishing up this review. —TPP
Also, this post includes some Amazon Affiliate links (the book and movie titles). I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links at no additional cost to you. —TPP
On Saturday I wrote about Richard Matheson’s novellaI Am Legend, which I enjoyed reading over the past week. What prompted me to purchase the book was re-watching its 1964 film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth. The film stars Vincent Price is the role of Robert Neville, the titular last man on Earth not to succumb to a terrible plague that turns people into vampires.
Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
Over the course of June I’ve written four posts about WordPress.com and its various features. It’s been a pretty intensive overview of a service I’ve used for years, and I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.
Now that the series is complete (for now?), here are the entries I penned over the course of June 2026:
What do you think of WordPress.com? If you were to start blogging (if you weren’t already), would you use it, or opt for one of its competitors? Would you use multiple platforms? If you already use WordPress.com, what made you pick it over competitors? Have you ever considered jumping ship to another platform? Do you cross-post across multiple platforms?
Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP
It’s summertime, so it’s a great time to do some reading, especially the reading of fiction!
I was hoping to highlight some worthwhile poetry this week, but we’ll save that for next time. I’m out of town at the time of writing and don’t have immediate access to my books. However, I did recently purchase three books and I want to feature them.
Some of these will fall under “Short Fiction“; I defined that category in the first post in this series as “both short story collections and shorter novels/novellas” at fewer than or equal to 250 pages in length. Some of these probably come in a bit over that (admittedly generous) page length. Regardless, they’re all books I plan to read this summer, and I’ve already made substantial progress in one of them.
You can reader Parts I & II here and here, respectively. Part I looked at short fiction; Part II looked at non-fiction.
Here are three books I purchased earlier this week, and which I am currently reading:
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend – I’m currently reading this classic of 1950s horror. I recently watched the film adaptation starring Vincent Price, and realized it was high time I grabbed a copy of this book. The book is a harrowing study of the protagonist Robert Neville’s struggle against demons, both real (the vampires attacking his home) and psychic (his own tortured, alcoholic realization that he’s the last man on Earth). This version also comes with a collection of Matheson’s other stories and novellas.
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes – I wrote a review of the film adaptation last October, and I love the flick. I cannot remember if I purchased a copy of the paperback at that point, because it feels like I remember reading it last fall; now, however, I can’t remember, so I may have just blown cash purchasing another copy. Regardless, I’m looking forward to reading—perhaps re-reading—this book.
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz – Canticle has been on my list to read for awhile. Apparently, it’s one of the inspirations for the Fallout video game series. The concept is that a group of monks in the Utah deserts piece together bits of the past from some Jewish guy’s shopping list. Naturally, all of this occurs after a nuclear war of devastating proportions (I Am Legend also happens after a less devastating war in which—it is implied—atomic bombs fell in the United States).
More on I Am Legend below the punch. I’ve nearly read the entire novella (it’s around 170 pages). That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of dystopian, horror, and weird fiction, you can scoop them all up for under $35.
With the summer heat bringing warmer water to the pond, the koi and the rosy red minnows have been more active than ever. As noted, our rosy reds have reproduced, hatching at least two batches of fries (baby fish). Dr. Wife first spotted the tiniest, rice-like babies swimming about a month ago, and those initial hatchlings are growing quickly into squiggly adolescence. You can see the eyes on the sides of their tiny bodies now, which is humorous—they have these kind of bug-eyes. In addition, we’re seeing more “grains of rice” swimming around.
The koi are also doing well. We’re up to feeding them about three times a day. Our koi food recommends five daily feedings at current water temperatures, but I find that the koi are good with two or three feedings. The pond is quieter in the mornings, so I rarely feed them before lunchtime; after lunch, though, the koi are hungry and ready to eat!
What’s fun is that the baby rosy reds will swim up and nibble on the koi feed right next to the massive koi! They don’t seem stressed out by the koi at all. The larger adults aren’t, either. I’m sure that our koi have nibbled on a rosy red from time to time by mistake, but it amuses me how even the tiniest babies will swim right into the middle of a koi feeding frenzy to get a nibble at some feed.
The pond is bursting with life. Dragonflies and other insects will dip down for a drink, and it’s cool seeing how they’ll use the surface tension of the water to rest on top of it while sipping. One time I accidentally started a lizard into the pond, and he skittered across the surface to the other side! The koi and rosy reds are likely eating any mosquito eggs and larvae that manage to get into the pond, and the always-running filter likely dissuades mosquitoes from laying eggs there in the first place. It’s such a beautiful little ecosystem.
Maintaining this pond and adding fish and snails to it has been such a blessing. The babies are confirmation that we’re doing something right: the original rosy reds were comfortable and safe and fed enough to lay eggs and bring them fruition. The babies swimming about brings us so much joy.
I particularly love how delighted Dr. Wife gets anytime we feed the fish. She has a lifelong fear of fish, but you wouldn’t know it; she’s even tried touching them! Her sister/my sister-in-law is shocked and amused, because Dr. Wife loves these little creatures. When I mentioned that some pond keepers will cull excess fish, she balked at that idea—so do I! We’re not anywhere near that point, but I’m already researching starting an indoor tank for some of our rosy reds, where I’d also like to introduce some non-color-morphed fathead minnows (rosy reds are just a color morph of the fathead minnow) to breed some cool colors (most will turn drab olive, but some will have little rosy speckles).
God Is Good! I hope our thankfulness to Him comes across in today’s fishy videos.
In surveying the vast expansion of the much-discussed Overton Window last year, it seemed like things couldn’t get any better. After a decade of oppressive wokery, people were suddenly letting it all out in a cathartic moment that felt incredible.
A year on, it seems to be getting even better. Maybe that’s because I’m using Substack more, which basically takes all the hot takes of X and transforms them into pseudo-intellectual essays (the writing on Substack is really good, by the way). People on there have zero qualms about saying anything, which makes it a pretty exciting intellectual environment. When no idea—even the bad ones—are off-limits, everything gets discussed—and exposed.
It’s refreshing. I remember how bad things got in 2015-2016, when even here in super conservative South Carolina you couldn’t audibly espouse support for Trump in mixed company, and certainly not in a professional setting. Now people are like, “Trump hasn’t gone far enough.” I mean, look, I agree; it’s just wild how we can say it out loud now.
So, no more equivocating, folks, no more disclaimers. Let it all out in a flurry of free speech!
Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
As we head into the end of June and reach the end of my series of pieces on WordPress.com (read the other installments here, here, and here). Last week I compared WordPress.com to Blogger/Blogspot, the platform I used to start my blog way back in 2009. This week, we arrive at the final boss of blogging platforms: Substack.
Even as I went to Substack to retrieve a link to it, the site and its writers sucked me in for a solid fifteen minutes. It’s why I’ve taken to calling the platform “Subcrack,” because it’s really good at roping in readers.
The secret to Substack’s appeal seems to be its unique blending of X’s short-form observations (“Notes” in Substack) and WordPress.com‘s long-form content. But there’s something more, too: the minimalism of Substack’s interface makes it a pleasure to read, especially when put in “Dark Mode.”
Yes, users have a degree of customization with their individual Substacks. They can change the homepage’s layout and the colors, but the customization is fairly limited beyond that. In some ways that limitation can be a strength, as it gives the sensation of experiencing many branches of one service, but I’ll get into that below.
I setup my own Substack page earlier this year, and I’ve been cross-posting my content from WordPress.com to Substack. While I still almost all of my long-form writing natively in WordPress.com‘s block editor, I use Substack primarily for its “Notes” functions—and to reach an audience that is almost entirely separate from the WordPress.com ecosystem.
As with last week’s post, I’m going to compare WordPress.com and Substack in three areas: overall interface (looking at the home screen, for example, when you first log into your account); the posting interface/editor; and the final published content (what the blogs look like when published).
Note that Substack is free for authors/creators. With WordPress.com I have the Premium plan, which is $8 a month when paid annually (or $18 a month otherwise). Substack does not have any inherently paid options for creators, but enables readers to pay for a subscription to their preferred creators. One way that Substack functions like X is that there might be many users, but only a handful of actual creators, although I’ve found that the Venn Diagram overlap is very high on Substack. Similarly, people can have a WordPress.com Gravatar without actually maintaining a blog, but that pool seems very small.
To illustrate, here’s a Venn Diagram I created in MS Paint based totally on vibes:
“Readers with an account” means those users who have an account with the service but only use it for commenting or “liking” posts, and not for writing posts or maintaining a blog-like presence themselves.
Regardless, the basic functionality of posting, checking analytics, etc., is analogous enough between Substack and WordPress.com to compare the two. I think it’s especially important because, right now, it seems like Substack is WordPress.com‘s biggest potential competitor in the blogosphere.
Yours portly hasn’t had a chance to noodle out any more new saxophone compositions or to tinker with new digital compositions, so I’m digging up a little something I put together last year and waited until Sunday—the first day of summer—to upload.
I recorded this little cover of the jazz standard “Summertime” from the opera Porgy and Bess last summer when I was driving up to see then-Dr. Fiancée. On those long, boring drives, I would usually entertain myself by sending her goofy voice messages. These usually hit in the third and final hour of the drive, when I’d be dying to get out of the car and see my girl.
Such is the provenance of this cover, my own little rendition with some altered lyrics.
My Boomer-esque journey into the glory of free movies (with ads) on YouTube continues with the 1978 remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the classic featuring the likes of Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and Jeff Goldblum. At the time of writing, the film is available for digital rental or purchase on YouTube, but it was available for free last week:
Regardless, it’s been a couple of years or so since I last saw this classic, and watching from the relative intimacy of my office computer—up close, largely focused, with a clear view a foot or so from my face—I appreciated Invasion of the Body Snatchers more than ever.
Yours portly has been noodling away on his alto saxophone and putting together some experimental recordings, which I’ll eventually compile and release as Säx II: Noodling. These aren’t great masterworks, but I’ve enjoyed putting them together, especially taking a more DIY and improvisational approach to composing and creating music.
Of course, in case you missed it a few Sundays back, here’s what I’m referencing in the the title for today’s post:
With that silliness out of the way, here’s three posts about recent sax recordings:
“New Music Tuesday XIV: ‘Sumatran Snake Charmer’” – I really love this piece; it’s my favorite of the three I’ve done so far. The scuttling of Nugget’s feet and the chirping of birds bleeding into the drum part really lends it that mystical, Far Eastern quality (along with the slithery sax part).
“New Music Tuesday XVI: ‘Old Boy’” – Such a weird piece (and accompanying video); I really love how strange this one is, and it’s based off a “vocal stim” I sometimes chant/mutter/recite around the house, ha!
