Myersvision: Metal Shop Masters

Our dear Audre Myers certainly has a niche—competition shows based on obscure crafts.  This week’s installment of Myersvision is no different.

But the craftsmanship (and craftwomanship) here involves bending heavy metal (the actual material, not the music) to the artists’ wills.  It’s a fiery example of forging life and art from inorganic, heavy matter.

I’d like to say I could forge my own metallic coffee cup from leftover aluminum cans (I think my neighbor can do that), but I possess no such skills.  The ability to smith my own nails with casual disdain is another casualty of our modern age (or, perhaps, my own unwillingness to learn blacksmithing when nails are in ready abundance at the hardware store).

Regardless, it’s always a treat to watch master craftsman at work, and Audre really captures the spirit and beauty of that process in this review.

With that, here is Audre’s review of the Netflix series Metal Shop Masters:

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Open Mic Adventures XV: “O Holy Night”

My favorite Christmas song of all time is Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night“—so much so that I wrote a subscriber-only post analyzing the song way back in 2019.  Naturally, it’s a perennial standard in my school’s annual Christmas concert.

In the interest of changing things up and preventing listening fatigue, I don’t program it every year, but it shows up just about every other year, so it’s fairly ubiquitous.  If I a particularly gifted singer, it makes for even more poignant performance.

This year I have been thus blessed.  Not only is the singer great, but the band is, too!

Of course, this video is not from an open mic night, so the title is (yet again) a bit of a misnomer, but it certainly fits into the spirit or ethos of the proud open mic tradition I so cherish.

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Memorable Monday^2: Away in a Manger

Good old Ponty is under-the-weather and was unable to submit his pick for Best Movies of All Time, so I’m reaching into the archives to pull out some Christmas merriment this Monday morning.

I decided to look back at a post about “Away in a Manger,” a Christmas carol that has become one of my favorites (maybe Ponty and I should do a countdown of the Top Ten Best Christmas Carols, but I have a feeling it’d get pretty redundant pretty quickly).  My Middle School Music Ensemble played this piece on the Christmas Concert, but we put it in 4/4 time and gave it a groovy bass line (the same riff from the Poison cover of the Loggins and Messina tune “Your Mama Don’t Dance“).

It was a fun twist on the original, but even though the Poison riff version was my idea, I prefer the original in its sweet, lilting 3/4—the perfect time signature for a peaceful lullaby.

Regardless of how it’s played—or which of its many variants are sung—it’s a beautiful little song about the Birth of Jesus.

With that, here is “Memorable Monday: Away in a Manger“:

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Lazy Sunday CLXXV: Solo Cover EP, Part II

Christmas is a-comin’, and I’ve got music on my mind!  Here’s another installment of Open Mic Adventures tunes for your yuletide enjoyment:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Phone it in Friday XXVIII: Christmas Concert

Today is the day of our big Christmas Concert at school.  It’s both my favorite and least favorite day of the year, because while the concert is incredibly fun, it’s also incredibly stressful.  It’s worth it, though, to see the kids singing and playing and having a good time.

As I’ve grown older, fatter, and achier, I’ve scaled back a bit of the theatricality and bombast of the Christmas Concert to something a bit more manageable.  Gone are the days of singing while standing on a piano (I did that once, years ago).  I also strive to make the concert focused on the kids (well, and Jesus).

Still, it’s a lot to pull together, with not only my two classes (the middle and high school ensembles) but also two choirs, three dance classes, and six Foreign Language classes.  I’ve completely eliminated solos (outside of soloists on songs within these classes) to streamline it as much as possible.

I’ll be doing a full write-up one Saturday (possibly tomorrow) covering it, but for today, just pray for yours portly.  I’m confident it will be a good concert, I just gotsta get through it!

Merry Christmas!

—TPP

TBT^2: Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy

Talk about a forgotten post:  I wrote this post way back in 2019, then reblogged it in 2020, and haven’t thought about it since.

When you’ve written and/or edited blog posts for going on 1430 consecutive days, it’s easy to forget some of the pieces you’ve written.  It’s one reason why it’s so foolish to crucify public intellectuals and other personalities for misguided tweets or ancient blog posts.  The nature of the medium is to produce, produce, produce—a constant churning of content.  That doesn’t mean we should be irresponsible with our words, but that it’s easy to forget old posts and arguments.

What brought this post to mind was a comment from the Quora contributor whose answer to a question inspired this post.  He commented over Thanksgiving and asked that I remove his name from the post, which I did.

Here was his comment in full:

I’m the one you’re quoting in this piece, and the connection you’re trying to make is utter nonsense. If you’d like me to explain the difference between trying to drink the ocean and altering the CO2 content of the atmosphere, I’d be happy to do so, but given the utter lack of scientific understanding displayed here, I’m guessing you wouldn’t care.

As a scientist, I’m offended that you’re peddling this kind of misinformation, and using my name to do it. As a Christian, I’m offended that you’re invoking the name of deity (and a diametrically wrong reading of scripture), to argue in favor of ignorance and lack of responsibility.

If you’re going to sell this kind of garbage, kindly leave my name out of it.

I respectfully disagree.  I think the poster missed the point of my piece.  Obviously, drinking from the ocean is not perfectly analogous to pumping carbon dioxide into the atrmosphere, but the two do seem related:  if we meaningfully affect sea levels by taking a collective drink from the ocean, it seems unlikely that we can meaningfully affect the ozone layer.

But the comment proves my point:  here’s a man so enslaved to the dogmatism of scientific materialism, he’s spending his Thanksgiving calling people stupid online.

I mean, I’m no scientist, and I probably am stupid about a lot of things, but I also didn’t shut down the global economy and civil society for two years and demand people trust my authority because I wear a lab coat.  My whole life I’ve heard that “science is our religion now” (probably true) and that “scientists are the new high priests of society.”

Well, they’re doing a pretty lousy job of it.  I wonder how many Westerners will freeze to death this winter because our priestly caste demands we bow obsequiously to Mother Gaia?  If questioning their dogmatic faith is “misinformation,” then I am proud spreader of the same.

With that, here is “TBT: Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy“:

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Myersvision: The Walking Dead

What happens when you consume the same piece of pop culture so many times, you peel back the layers of rotted flesh to discover hidden depths that, on first glance, you missed?

This piece by our dear Audre Myers is a beautiful illustration of that phenomenon.  That said, the series she’s reviewing—yes, as entire, decade-plus-long series—is arguably something more than mere pop culture.  It may represent a work of television art.

The late aughts and early teens of this century saw a golden age of television as an art form.  Outside the confines of a film’s ninety-or-so-minute runtime, television series have the luxury of developing characters across hundreds of hours of screen time and multiple seasons.  Narratives can explore deeper complexity.  Themes can be examined in all their glorious nuance.

I don’t want to give away Audre’s key insight about this show, but I’ll note that I think she is correct.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

With that, here is Audre’s series retrospective of The Walking Dead:

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You’ll Get Everything and Not Like It

Being one of three brothers who came of age in the 1990s—the golden age of watching ribald, edited-for-television comedies on basic cable—I was constantly exposed to humorous quips and one-liners from hilarious movies.  One perennial favorite was the raunchy (again, edited for television) comedy classic Caddyshack (1980), about a bunch of blue-collar kids working at a tony country club’s golf course (and Bill Murray trying to blow up a gopher).

My brothers and I still reference one brief but oft-quoted scene:

Judge Smails irate handling of his ingrate nephew is a classic, and something I have probably said to a student.  My older brother loves saying it to my younger brother’s kids, who, while not rotten, and definitely spoiled (a good bit by their Uncle Portly).

My older nephew, is nearly six, likes to invert the phrase, shouting at his other uncle, “You’ll get everything and not like it.”  It’s one of his many (unintentionally?) Zen utterances.

I was contemplating this amusing bit of familial banter on the way to work yesterday.  My sweet little nephew is right—we Westerners do have everything—and we’re miserable!

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Portly’s Top Ten Best Films: #5: Back to the Future (1985)

A recent installment of Open Mic Adventures inspired this pick, which I knew would show up on my list somewhere.  I’m not sure where I intended to put it, but I knew it would be in the top five; indeed, it should probably be higher, but it’s fresh on my mind, so I’m putting it at .

The film is one of the enduring classics of the 1980s.  It hit theaters on my half-birthday—3 July 1985—and was ever-present during my childhood on VHS (recorded from television broadcasts, of course).  The film franchise even inspired the name of my old brass quintet, Brass to the Future.

The flick, of course, is Robert Zemeckis’s science-fiction classic Back to the Future (1985).

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