Yours portly has, admittedly, pretty trashy tastes in movies. Thanks to a subscription to Shudder, I’ve watched some pretty gnarly horror and suspense films over the last couple of years, not to mention plenty of sleazy exploitation flicks.
Even yours portly has his limits, and recently endured one insufferable exploitation flick from 1977, Death Game.
There is little I love more than playing and singing my humorous original songs. But a close second is subjecting my readers to my bizarre short piano compositions. So, why not look at back at some of my weird piano music?
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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Lately I’ve been listening to a number of historical biographies from The People Profiles, an excellent YouTube channel that produces incredibly balanced, detailed biographies of historical figures. The videos are always very well done, and the channel hosts a stable of exquisite narrators with British accents.
My absolute favorites are their biographies of English monarchs (at the time of this writing, they’ve just posted a video about King Charles II, which I am excited to listen to soon). What strikes me about these monarchs is that, even as rulers, they dealt with constantly shifting political landscapes that would make our current politics look tame by comparison.
It wasn’t like these monarchs were sitting back and eating grapes (I mean, they probably did do that stuff); they constantly had to balance the needs of their people; their ornery nobility; and their expensive foreign policies (which typically meant “expensive foreign wars”). Add to that rebellions, assassination attempts, succession crises, and all the rest, and it quickly makes one thankful for a relatively peaceful and predictable political order.
At the same time, there is something enviable about monarchical rule. A bad king could cause a great deal of damage—and many bad kings did just that to England—but could also be identified easily as the source of a nation’s woes. Dealing with a tyrannical monarch, in some ways, was far easier than dealing with a tyrannical bureaucracy.
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The first “week” of the new school years is nearly in the books, and yours portly is probably a puddle of exhaustion by this point. After a summer of sleeping in late, taking afternoon naps, and sitting around in air-conditioning, getting back on the move is certainly good for my physical health, but not necessarily for my sleep-deprived mind. Will I finally develop healthy habits during the school year? Probably not.
But what better time (and pretext) for another installment of Phone it in Friday: YouTube Roundup Edition? I’ve actually got quite a bit of new stuff on my YouTube channel, to which you should definitely subscribe (I know for many readers, “subscribe” is a dirty word—God forbid we support our favorite content creators!—but trust me, it’s totally free to subscribe to my YouTube channel).
So, all preambles and bitterness aside, here are some of my recent uploads:
The 2023-2024 school year commenced yesterday, which brings to mind this annual tradition of mine: re-reading the introduction to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.
Unfortunately, I don’t always manage to dip back into this classic work every year, but I find that when I do, it helps to crystallize why it is I do what I do, and what is at stake. I’m under no illusion—as some teachers are!—that I can “save the world” or any such messianic nonsense. The crusading impulse that I possessed as a naïve young teacher is no longer there, beyond some vestigial bits of self-righteous fury that peak from behind the clouds of well-worn cynicism.
Still, we have much to be thankful for, even as the empire burns around us and the elites fiddle. Life is sweet; the opportunity for an education is a privilege and joy. I’m thankful to be a small part of that process.
With that, here is 25 August 2022’s “TBT^4: Back to School with Richard Weaver“:
Here we are—the first day of school! The 2023-2024 school year marks yours portly’s thirteenth consecutive year in the classroom (after returning to my current school in 2011), and my fourteenth year total (I taught at my current school in the 2008-2009 school year, before being unceremoniously dumped due to the privations of the Great Recession). It’s been a crazy ride.
I’m at that point in my teaching career where I can pretty much coast in terms of course prep and assessments. I’ve pretty much memorized American history (well, at least, the very limited survey of American history that I teach), and as anyone who reads this blog knows, I can wax poetic on pretty much any topic for hours (much to my students’ chagrin, I imagine). It’s a good place to be professionally.
Back on Thursday, 20 July 2023 I made a pilgrimage back to Lula’s Coffee Company, which for several years before The Age of The Virus was the epicenter of a flourishing of musical and cultural activity in Florence, South Carolina. Then the management dragged its feet on resuming open mic post-pandemic, and I largely wrote it off as a venue.
Fortunately, I am overcame my stubborn resistance and occasionally make it out there for open mic night. It is a long way from my home now, so I don’t get out there much, but I found my most recent visit to be quite rewarding.
My buddy John Pickett and I played “Greek Fair“; I regard this song as the best I have ever written. Others have proven more popular, but I’m really proud of this one.
While I was visiting my older brother in Indiana in July, he took me to see the new Indiana Jones flick, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), on an IMAX screen.
I did not go into the film with high expectations. Everything I’d heard about the movie was negative: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character was obnoxious; Indiana Jones’s advanced age is played to denigrate the character; the whole thing is another one of Kathleen Kennedy’s wish-fulfillment films (in which she casts an unlikable British brunette to be a stand-in for herself, an unlikable feminist studio exec).
Perhaps it’s because I went in with such low expectations that I actually found the movie to be not that bad. Was it good? Not really. Should it have been nearly three hours long? Absolutely not. Was it as bad as critics made it out to be? Well, that depends.
It’s been the Summer of Deep Cuts for yours portly, as I’ve been digging deep into my songwriting book to play tunes that I rarely play live. It’s been a fun experiment, as I can see how my songwriting has evolved (or not!) over the years.
That’s it for this quick, almost-back-to-school, musical edition of Lazy Sunday!
Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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As yours portly edges ever closer to forty, something interesting has happened: I have suddenly—apparently!—become irresistible to the ladies.
I am as mystified as you, my dear readers. All I can figure is all the babes have finished riding The Carousel in their twenties and find a chubby, tall, financially stable beta male an attractive prospect.
The point of this piece, however, is not to brag about my sudden abundance of single ladies in their early-to-mid-thirties hankering for some doughy man-meat. Rather, it’s to document the state of the dating world today, and to identify for the curious reader the types of women that find themselves—like yours portly—cruising dating apps for a chance at love.
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