Issue 2 of The Town Crier, my micro-newspaper/newsletter, is out in the world. Like the inaugural issue, I printed 100 issues and distributed them throughout our little town.
Believe it or not, the public schools started back on 21 July 2026. Yes, you read that correctly—students were back the third Tuesday in July. That seems borderline criminal to yours portly. That means teachers have been back even longer.
Most of the schools in South Carolina are transitioning to a quasi-/semi-year-round calendar. There are certainly perks, such as defeating the dreaded “summer slump,” and students get breaks at the end of every quarter, avoiding the long Labor Day-to-Thanksgiving slog of the first semester (and the seemingly endless April and May death march in the second semester). But there’s something about darkening the door of a schoolhouse in July that sends shivers up my spine. July is sacred—and hot! Nobody wants to learn anything when it’s 100-degrees out, the humidity is somehow above 100%, and bookbags make youngsters resemble tiny Quasimodos.
But I digress. Naturally, I touched upon the return to school in a far hokier manner in The Town Crier. The point of The Town Crier is to recapture something of the cheesy, blandly inoffensive, yet still charming little local newsletters of my youth. These would be sitting in tiny mom and pop diners and local eateries; you’d grab one and read some fun trivia while you waited for your meal. These were even more fun when traveling, as they offered a little glimpse into the local world.
I also continued to experiment with the formatting and layout in this second issue. A guy on a Discord chat recommended adding the shadowing to the masthead, which really does add more weight and heft to the title. I also added in some “fun facts” and a Bible verse. I took that experimentation even further with Issue 3, wherein I introduce some graphics to the masthead and throughout the paper, and reduced the crossword “solution” grid so it’s not so easy to glance at it mistakenly (more on that next week).
While this micro-newspaper is meant for the Marlboro County, South Carolina region, please feel free to print and distribute your own copies, or to read the current issue here:
I also extended my distribution network this time around, spreading my 100 issues across more locations in the hopes of reaching more folks in more diverse settings. Here’s what I did, and some observations from the second distribution.
My late dog Murphy was something of a minor Internet celebrity. She was known as “The Greater North American Bull Terrier” on YouTube, and I have dozens of videos of her frolicking and being ornery and cute.
The day before we took her to put her to sleep, I filmed this short video of her waking up. She was doing better because she was shot full of medicine from her visit to the emergency vet the night before, so it was nice to see her somewhat comfortable one last time.
Even at thirteen, she was such a cute dog. I still miss her deeply, but the pain is fading. I’ll never forget her, though!
Thinking about all the wild, modern art aboard our cruise ships got me thinking about this perennial chestnut, the story of how well-connected people with the right politics can get their “art” purchased for outrageous sums, not because it’s “good” art, but because it’s a form of purchasing influence. When Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter or Joe Biden’s son sell a work of art, there is—at some level—a transaction in access taking place. At the very least, there is a purchase of goodwill with powerful people and families and institutions. Art (or plum jobs or the like) provides a convenient vehicle for buying access that otherwise would be illegal: you can’t bribe a politician, but you can hire her homely stepdaughter to model or buy his son’s crappy paintings.
As much as this world of fine art influence peddling is distasteful, I think it’s something that elite Leftists get right—at least, in spirit. They actively support their own. Yes, there’s something luridly transactional about it, in that way that occurs when money and power intermingle incestuously, but it shows that they at least pay lip service to supporting their creatives. The Left has done that fairly well since at least the Works Progress Administration commissioned artists, writers, historians, musicologists, musicians, dramatists, radio hosts, etc., to produce works during the Great Depression.
Before the modern Left hit the scene, Gilded Age robber barons spent lavishly to support the arts, architecture, photography, and the like. Indeed, one argument I’ve read (and adopted) is that when these huge data centers roll into towns, they should exercise a degree of noblesse oblige and build parks, fund schools, contribute to libraries, and support the local economy through local hiring, etc.
Naturally, the Gilded Age model seems fundamentally and philosophically more aligned with this blog’s ethos—there’s a real risk to the national government using taxpayer dollars to fund garbage—but the idea of supporting your people is one that the Left gets right (of course, it’s easier to do that when you support your people with other people’s money).
I’ve made similar calls over the years, but it’s really important for conservatives to support one another’s endeavors, be they artistic or more traditionally business-oriented. There are signs of doing that when it comes to consumer products (just think of all the conservative spin-offs of products like coffee, soap, razors, chocolate, and the like). Folks on the Right tend to gravitate towards products that are more immediately and obviously usable.
But art is what moves culture, not a razorblade that’s just a Bic or Gillette rebranded. Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, Kirk—and on and on and on—these are the creators who shaped and continue to shape our culture.
Poor Belize City. It’s becoming something of a punching bag for yours portly. I wanted to like it so badly, but it was really the most disappointing stop on our recent cruise.
That doesn’t make me a heartless monster. We tipped our tour guide, Omar, and bus driver, as we do for all of our excursions. It was cool seeing a city and a country that I’d never visited before. I appreciated how Omar and our driver improvised to deal with the heavy rain that hit when we made landfall.
But, as I’ve noted ad nauseum, the city itself was a letdown. That’s the heart of a review I completed at Omar’s urging (he came around with a QR code on his phone that we all took a picture of). I’m still not sure I’ve actually reviewed the correct service and/or tour, as the QR code wouldn’t scan properly, but, hey, I tried my best (and gave Omar a shout-out; he was, after all, the man who inspired the genre-defying megahit “Drink the Rum“).
The Doomed QR Code
So, with a dearth of better content to share, here is the full text of my TripAdvisor review (which you can also read here):
Today’s piece, “Drink the Rum,” is a track with an unusual provenance. Dr. Wife and I were on a tour in Belize City on Wednesday, 15 July 2026. The tour guide, Omar, took out a bent cheese grater and a spoon to demonstrate how Belizeans make music out of anything. He played a rhythm on his grater and sang “Drink the rum!”
On the last night of our cruise I jotted down some haiku in a very nice journal Dr. Wife purchased for me. I shared a couple of haiku from that journal last week (read “Cruise Haiku I“). Before returning to the usual round of movie reviews on Mondays, I wanted to share a couple more (at least).
We really loved Roatán in Honduras. It’s an island that has its own unique culture. The mile is around forty-ish miles long, but only four miles wide, with a mountain chain making the spine of the island. It gives the place a feel that somehow blends the beach and Appalachia. The people speak very good—almost accentless—English, while also being largely fluent in Spanish. It also has Bojangle’s and Wendy’s, the former of which made it especially endearing to two Southerners abroad.
As such, today I’m sharing my five-stanza haiku about the island, as well as a shorter one about the doomed colony of Roanoke, where the words “Croatoan” were found carved in a tree. “Croatoan” (sometimes rendered “Croatan”) sounds close to “Roatán”—thus, the inspiration!
Also, per Ponty’s request, I have pictures of Roatán, too!
It’s been nice being back home (even though it was a sad start to last week), but I did enjoy our cruise. I’ve finally lost my “sea legs,” but I’m looking forward to another in the future, although I imagine it’ll be a bit before out next one. That said, I thought I’d share some recent cruise posts:
Yours portly has long been interested in the world of guerrilla publishing—zines, independent newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, newsletters, and the like. Blogging scratches some of that itch and captures some of that energy, but there’s something cool about finding a little bit of printed material out in the wild.
Back in college, a buddy of mine put together a fake newspaper called The Heartland-Crier Gazette. It was meant to mimic the style of eighteenth-century pamphlets, with different fonts for each piece (and even one using the letter “f” in place of “s,” like some manuscripts from that time). We published a couple of issues and put them around campus, but it never went anywhere. More successful was the website my friends and I ran, The Swain Site (I think it was at http://www.keepingitswain.tk, back when .tk extensions were a thing). I wrote a lengthy weekly piece called “Uncle Tybarb’s Corner,” which was essentially a proto-blog.
I was scrolling through Instagram a few nights ago and came upon the latest creation from artist Obvious Plant. Obvious Plant makes fake products and catalogues that look like the kinds of things you’d find in dusty discount stores. They are just on the edge of reality enough that their absurdism seems tangible, like something a factory owner in China would make thinking it would appeal to Americans.
His latest item is a sales paper for a fictitious discount store called Cheep’s. It had me laughing harder than I have in awhile. What was particularly fun is that OP placed about 100 of the sales papers in an empty newspaper/advert box, and the idea of someone coming along and grabbing one made the whole concept even funnier.
It also got me thinking: why couldn’t I do something similar, but less absurd than Cheep’s or the truly absurdist Heartland-Crier Gazette? I have this sweet new printer that can print hundreds of black-and-white pages on a single drum of toner. What if I created a small micro-newspaper?
So Thursday morning I set to work devising a little newspaper that could fit on one-quarter of a sheet of 8.5″x11″ printer/copier paper. I relied heavily on CoPilot to help me get the formatting right in Microsoft Word, which was the hardest part (that and creating a crossword puzzle). I had to make some tweaks and figure out some clever workarounds, as Word is famously limited when it comes to moving stuff around freely, but after about two or three hours I had a draft of the first issue.
Other than the formatting, the crossword puzzle was the most difficult part, as well as creating the “solution” grid and flipping it over. CoPilot was super helpful with creating the grid itself, but when I asked it to create a crossword for me, it failed utterly. The answers didn’t match the clues, and it would use vastly different letters between the “Across” and “Down” clues, to the point that there often weren’t any letters in common between words that were supposed to intersect. I finally told it that it was really bad at creating crosswords (sometimes the robots need reminding that they’re inferior to us), so it recommended Eclipse Crossword, a downloadable program that creates crossword puzzles for you based on user-created word banks. I then took the grid it created and reformatted it into the grid CoPilot helped me created in Word.
The solution grid required filling out the grid in Word; taking a screenshot with “Print Screen”; pasting it into MS Paint Classic; copying the proper selection (Word copies a large margin to the left of the grid, so it has to be trimmed in Paint); then using “Paste Special” in Word to paste the image as a “Picture – Enhanced Metafile” in order for Word to allow me to rotate (it just occurred to me that it would be much easier to flip the image in Paint—d’oh!).
Once all of that was done, I had a beautiful little micro-newspaper:
The beauty of this format is that I can create 100 copies of an issue on just twenty-five sheets of copier paper. A sheet is around $0.014, so it’s about 35 cents worth of paper. The toner itself is abundant—I can print 700 pages on the current toner drum—and there are third-party toners that are very inexpensive, so I figure I’m spending around 50 cents to $1 to produce an issue.
I then had to cut every issue. I’m going to invest in one of those cutting boards like offices have—you know, those things that look like you could cut someone’s head off with them, but they only cut through about four sheets of paper before they mess up—but for the first issue, I used scissors. Even though everything looked perfectly symmetrical in Word, printing through the top of the front page off slightly from the top of the back page, so the finished product is a little rougher.
Here are some pictures of the first issue, as well as a couple of the second issue:
I made a few little mistakes on the first few copies of the first issue; for example, I forgot to put “DOWN” before the down clues on the crossword puzzle. I also had some rough cuts, as I’m not master with scissors. Overall, though, the initial run of 100 issues came out looking quite nice, and I’m learning more how to make my own crossword puzzles in tighter spaces.
With the first issue formatted, written, printed, and cut, I needed to get it into the hands of readers. My plan was straightforward: visit several local businesses—with an emphasis on coffee shops, breakfast and lunch places, and some other local stores—and ask to leave copies on their counters. After Dr. Wife was off to work and the morning dishes and laundry were squared away, I set off to do just that.
Whenever Dr. Wife and I travel, I like to catch little moments on film, usually whispering into my phone so as not to a.) annoy other people and b.) embarrass Dr. Wife. Today I have some short videos of an angry sea and puffy clouds:
With Murphy’s passing, I figured I’d reblog this series of posts, dating back to before I picked her up for the first time. Yesterday would have been five years (I believe) since I first picked her up—her “gotcha” day. I was blessed to have that much time with this wonderful, loving dog.
I won’t say more at this point, as her passing is still very raw, but I hope you’ll enjoy this celebration of Murphy’s life. The way the old girl was doing even six months ago, I figured she’d probably keep ticking, but time caught up with her, as it will all of us. It just goes to show that we don’t know when Death will come knocking on our door; better make the most of the time we have with our loved ones, even the furry ones.
