Want to play sax like me? Check out my updated guide on getting started with a budget sax!
I had a gig this past Saturday, so I took my practice time as an opportunity to churn out some sweet, sweet YouTube content. Here are three videos of my saxophonic noodling, curated for your listening pleasure:
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Before it became overrun with AI slop and bots, the Internet was the good kind of wild frontier, brimming with jokes and otherwise lost content. Well, the Internet is still that, there’s just a lot more trash to wade through to find the good stuff.
One website that provides “the good stuff” is RetroGames.cz, which makes possible the playing of some classic games via emulation in your browser. I spent a good chunk of time last year playing through the old Dragon Warrior game; eventually, I’ll get around to loading up my save state and finishing it. It’s the grindiest RPG I’ve ever played!
Occasionally, I find myself nostalgic for the rudimentary, homemade websites of the late 1990s and early 2000s, wherein website design philosophy consisted of cramming as many animated GIFs onto the homepage as possible, and everything was typed in Times New Roman font. The formality of the font contrasted with the frivolity of the overall design, to the effect that webpages in those days were akin to early digital folk art. The amateurism—which, it must be remembered, still required a good bit of working knowledge of HTML and JavaScript at the time—leant those websites a certain charm, even if that whimsical form came at the expense of function.
Well, enough of my waxing artistical. Go play some good games.
With that, here is 4 June 2025’s “Retro Games Website“:
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Summer Break begins today! Yesterday was yours portly’s last official day of the school year. Indeed, it was my last official day as a teacher. Of course, I’ll always be a teacher, but that particular position has ended formally. I’ll be returning to my little school on a very-part-time basis as its chaplain.
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I had a gig down in Charleston this past Saturday night. A young man from Connecticut was proposing to his girlfriend (she said yes, by the way), and he’d hired me to play a Lewis Capaldi song before he popped the question. It was a really fun, touching moment, and I’m grateful I could be part of it (he paid me pretty well, too).
In practicing for that little performance, I had fun flipping through my music, and came upon a piano arrangement of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” that I play on the saxophone. Since I’m playing unaccompanied, I don’t have to transpose the music (saxophone is an Eb instrument, meaning that if an Eb is played on a piano, it’s a C on the saxophone), so I just read the right-hand piano melody straight off the page.
I had fun with this version, which I’m sharing today:
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It’s Memorial Day once again! Yours portly has one more day of work tomorrow, then it’s summertime. I’ll spend the first week in June running my annual Minecraft Camp and teaching some lessons; otherwise, it’s gearing up for Dr. Wife to finish residency and for us to get the house in order.
For today, Dr. Wife is going to make us some hot dogs and hamburgers (which I will go forth to procure shortly) for lunch. We’ll do some additional, light unpacking of the house. The Boyz and I will do a little gaming this afternoon, and at some point I’m going to finish watching 1970’s Cromwell, which is free (with ads) on YouTube:
It stars Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) as Charles I, who is portrayed as a nuanced villain here, more a weak man buffeted by external forces and engaging in deceit out of desperation than a wicked tyrant. I haven’t finished it so I’m not sure how Cromwell comes out, but he’s already becoming more of a tyrant in the wake of the superciliousness of the other members of Parliament. We’ll see!
Here’s hoping you have a relaxing and restful day for those of you here in the States. For my English readers, here’s hoping the first day of your workweek goes well.
Happy Memorial Day!
—TPP
It’s Memorial Day Weekend here in the States, which marks the beginning of summer (not astronomically, but culturally). It’s a time for grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and generally giving thanks for our liberties. I’m hoping Dr. Wife and I can go out to a State Park and try to catch some local minnows and tadpoles to add to our little koi pond.
In the meantime, here are all of my Memorial Day posts dating back to 2019:
Happy Sunday—and Memorial Day!
—TPP
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It’s that time of year again: Graduation Day. At least, it’s graduation for my students, and my last graduation as a full-time teacher. Apparently, the graduating class is so large, and seats are so limited, the admin was encouraging teachers not to attend, but I’d like to be there, so I’m going.
Our graduation ceremony is blessedly short on speechifying. The honor graduate (“third in class”), salutatorian, and valedictorian each give a very brief speech, and there are some general platitudes from the headmaster. They announce a couple of teaching awards, and the kids process across the stage with little video montages they put together. If it weren’t for those videos, it would be lightning quick; as it is, it’s still pretty fast.
Of course, every year I roleplay the alternative: what if there were more speechifying, and I was asked to deliver the keynote address? Well, here’s another round of dubious graduation wisdom from yours portly:
Most of you will not pursue writing as a career—nor should you, as it’s an oversaturated market that not only competes against real people, but now robots, too. But all of you should write something—anything—everyday. Most of you will through your work; even police officers have to write up fairly descriptive reports of arrests, for example.
Indeed, writing is inescapable. The problem is that very few people do it well, with any degree of competency. The only way to do it well it to practice doing it well. When you send a text message, for example, don’t (as a rule) just type, “k” in response to a message; instead, reply in at least a clear, complete sentence: subject, verb, predicate/direct object. “Okay, that sounds great”; “I will see you at the theater at 6 PM.”
And, yes, use punctuation, especially periods. Look, no one really knows how to use commas; just plop them in whenever it feels like there should be a pause for a breathe. Don’t do that thing that some people do where they end a sentence with an entire string of “…………..” or “,,,,,,,,,,,”—it doesn’t make any sense and it makes you look stupid. It is also really, really annoying.
But I digress. Even if you don’t nail all the grammatical rules, try to write in a way that is clear and precise. Yes, some of us are wordy, verbose writers, addicted to parenthetical asides and em dashes—which are now apparently taboo because AI uses them (don’t let the robots take good things from you)—but you have to learn to walk before you can ascend into a cloud of subjunctive clauses.
Of course, in order you write well, you must…
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Today’s edition of Phone it in Friday / YouTube Roundup could really be an Open Mic Tuesday, even though there was no open mic involved. Dr. Wife was having a tough day Tuesday, and I’ve learned that offering actionable advice is never what a woman wants during difficult times.
No, lads, women want absurd covers of creepy old songs with images of your childhood Steve Urkel doll (sans glasses, because I took them off when I was a kid).
So, to cheer here up, I compiled this creepy-cute montage set to me singing a butchered, bowdlerized version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” interspersed with eerie closeups of Urkel and pictures of some of the family dogs:
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Summertime is upon us, and yours portly is all but done with the academic year. That means it’s time for video games.
Civilization VII dropped its huge update, which brings some major changes to the game; I’m hoping to sink some hours into that again soon. I’m also hoping to get back into Old World, which devoured so much of my time back in April with its deep gameplay.
Of course, I still have my lovable Zelda Game & Watch by Nintendo (that link is an Amazon Affiliate link, which means I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you). I haven’t played it in awhile, but it still keeps time like a tiny Hyrulean champ.
With that, here is 22 May 2025’s “TBT^4: Zelda Game & Watch“:
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It’s another day tending the home fires, with our local handyman doing a number of repairs around the house that I’m either too lazy or incompetent to do myself. While he’s doing that, I’m knocking out some cleaning around the house (and writing this blog post). I’ve also been calling various vendors to setup appointments.
I just got off the phone with the pest control company. We haven’t had any major issues with pests, but I wanted to get us signed up for quarterly sprayings because, well, this is South Carolina and the roaches are big as mice, and we don’t want those hanging around in our walls. The receptionist was very friendly and, when she realized I am a teacher, she started to ask some questions.
You see, for the last fifteen-ish years I’ve taught both history and music. I don’t have any degrees in the latter, just a great deal of experience writing, composing, arranging, transcribing, playing, performing, and teaching it. When I returned to teaching in 2011, I had a golden opportunity: to teach history (in which I have two degrees, although I learned far more in high school and undergrad—and after graduate school—than I did working on my Master’s, and this was before wokeness took over the academy) and to create a music program from scratch. Someone with my credentials should not, the world tells us, get that opportunity, but that’s the beauty of the world of private education.
I relayed an abbreviated version of this to the receptionist—we Southerners are very chatty when completing even perfunctory administrative tasks—and she almost immediately asked if I teach lessons. What started as booking our pest control spraying turned into a friendly sales pitch for music lessons.
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