Month: April 2024

SubscribeStar Saturday: Heptadic Structure

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly took a brief break from composing to catch up on some other work, but I’m back to composing, albeit not with quite the same intensity as during the late winter months.  I released Leftovers II earlier this month, and Four Mages is coming very soon (2 May 2024).  I’ve also completed a funk album, Advanced Funkification, which is coming on 7 June 2024.

If you’d like to listen to Leftovers II, you can find it at the following sites:

I figured that was a pretty good slate of releases, and that I might take a rest.  But then I started jotting down a little melody in the incredibly rare (and, admittedly, self-indulgent) time signature of 7/16:

Heptadic Structure Prewriting

What resulted was the piece “Heptadic Structure.”  The piece itself is exactly twenty-one written measures (although it’s technically longer with repeats).

That gave me an idea:  if I wrote seven pieces in 7/X time consisting of twenty-one measures each, I’d have a total of 147 measures of music.  14 + 7 = 21.  There’s a beautiful mathematical symmetry there.

Why 21?  It’s the multiple of 3 and 7.  Three represents the Holy Trinity; seven is God’s Number, a heavenly number.  So 21 is a reference to the Trinity and Heaven.

I came upon the term “Heptadic Structure” when looking for a title for this piece.  Apparently, the concept of a heptadic structure is nothing new, and is a major concept in the rather esoteric field of Biblical numerology.  The argument is that various portions of the Bible breakdown in mathematically consistent and beautiful ways, always with the number 7.  It’s a fascinating concept, one about which I only possess a passing familiarity, but I love these mathematical structures.  Maybe it’s all a grand coincidence—or, more likely, it’s all part of God’s Grand Design.

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Support Culture, Not Political Machines

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Last week regular contributor and senior correspondent Audre Myers wrote a piece for Nebraska Energy Observer entitled “Lets Chat” [sic].  In the piece, Audre ponders the question of whether or not to continue donating to the Republican Party (by which I take her to mean the Republican National Committee), and solicits readers for their opinions on the issue.

Audre is quite aware of the perfidious machinations of the RNC, but the source of her quandary is whether or not to help cash-strapped President Trump with his campaign.  If you’re going to give any money to any candidate, my personal, unsolicited advice is to give to only two sources:  Trump’s presidential campaign directly—not through the RNC or any PAC—and to local candidates (or, alternatively, your county GOP).  That’s where your money will have the most impact.

Overall, though, I advise strongly against giving any money to out-of-state political campaigns or to political parties generally.  Indeed, in my comment on Audre’s piece, I argued that our money is much better spent supporting small conservative creators.  I think I made a compelling case:

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TBT^4: The Joy of Spring

The Portly Politico2 Comments

We’re enjoying a glorious Spring here in South Carolina, much like the Spring of 2020, which inspired the original in this chain of posts.  Other than a few bitterly cold and brutally hot days on either end of Easter, it’s been very pleasant—cool in the mornings, warm in the afternoons, with low humidity.  The nice weather and Pokémon Go have gotten me out in God’s Creation more than usual, and I’m enjoying its beauty while it’s still tolerable to do so.

With that, here is 20 April 2023’s “TBT^2: The Joy of Spring“:

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Myersvision: The Last of Us (TV Series)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Dear old Audre Myers e-mailed Ponty and me a couple of Sundays ago recommending the HBO Max series The Last of Us, based (albeit, I suspect, somewhat loosely) on the video game of the same name.  I’ve never played either of the two TLoU games, but I am quite familiar with the controversy surrounding the sequel, which went fully woke.  It is a classic scenario:  a hugely successful cultural phenomenon gets hijacked—willingly or otherwise—by the Cultural Marxists and becomes a pitiful version of its former self.  The Cult Marxists hope to trade on the popularity of the intellectual property or franchise by shoehorning their bizarre beliefs into it, thereby reaching a massive audience before everyone sours on it.

It’s a fundamentally vampiric, parasitic relationship:  the healthy host rapidly loses whatever cultural cache it enjoyed, becoming an insufferable, withered husk of its former self.

I was not surprised in the slightest that Ponty reacted so negatively to Audre’s request that one of us review the show.  As an avid gamer who (it seems) enjoyed The Last of Us video game and despised its woke sequel, I knew the suggestion would touch a nerve.  Poor Audre had no idea; I hope Ponty wasn’t too hard on her!

So, I proposed that Audre write a review.  I’ll check out the show when I’m able, but she is the queen of television reviews around here.

With that, here is Audre Myers’s review of the television series The Last of Us:

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Lazy Sunday CXLV: Murphy Vids, Part II

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My fat dog Murphy is the gift that keeps on giving.  Well, actually, she’s a huge drain on my financial and temporal resources, but, hey, who can put a price tag on love?

But back to that gift giving comment.  Murphy does bring in the views to my YouTube channel, which—like most of my artistic endeavors—would probably be a massive flop if I didn’t have a cute, sassy, ornery dog to showcase to the content-hungry masses.

So, here are the three latest editions of Phone it in Friday featuring my lovable, stinky bull terrier, Murphy:

Happy Sunday—and Viewing!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Chasing Pokémon at the Egg Scramble

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

My sweet niece recently forced me to download Pokémon Go to my cellphone in that self-serving way that women do when they want something:  she wanted me to be able to send her gifts, and to have another phone on which she can play the game (to be clear:  she does not have her own cellphone; she plays on her mom’s phone).  Being the agreeable and easily buffaloed uncle that I am, I obliged.  We downloaded the game and merrily went about catching Pokémon, the lovable little monsters from the smash hit video game franchise.

A week or two later she texted me (again, from her mom’s phone) asking me to be her friend in the game.  I was teaching a piano lesson.  After about fifteen minutes, she wrote, “I’ve been waiting on you for quite awhile. 😠”  Again, being the agreeable and buffaloed etc., etc., I hastily figured out how to accept her little request (it’s harder than it should be!) and we started sending each other little presents in the game.

That was the extent of my Pokémon Go-ing for a few weeks.  I grew up playing the Pokémon games and loved them—I still do!—but I didn’t think much about this little mobile app that seemed to have reached its peak in the first two or three months following its release in 2016.

Then Spring Break hit and, while yours portly kept fairly busy, I still had a good bit of downtime.  I also found myself taking a lot of walks with my dad.  While he’s technically retired, he still works part-time as the town administrator for a small town here in South Carolina, and conducts a great deal of his business on the phone while walking the dogs (perhaps the most Boomer work habit conceivable; they love being on the phone as much as us Millennials hate it).  That got me looking for something to do with my hands while he dictated life-changing decisions to bureaucratic functionaries, so I pulled out Pokémon Go.

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Phone it in Friday LVIII: YouTube Roundup XIV: Bull Terrier Edition, Part VI

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The Murphtent (Murphy content) on my humble YouTube channel has really helped the channel grow.  Unfortunately, I’ve been stalled at about 126 subs (at the time of writing) for about a couple of weeks.  Perhaps you, dear readers, can make some magic happen?  Wouldn’t it be glorious for yours portly to be monetizing his fat dog by the end of the year?  All it takes is 500 subs and 3000 (!!!) watch hours.  I’m sure some of you know 500 people with unlimited free time, hmmm?  I know for a fact that several of my readers have nothing but free time.  Get to watchin’!

In all seriousness, here is what to expect this week:  Murphy ensconced in pillowy comfort; Murphy sunbathing; and a special guest appearance by my dad’s dogs (and my unfortunate father) at a local graveyard—spooky!:

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TBT^256: End the Income Tax

The Portly Politico5 Comments

It’s that time of year again, when yours portly yells impotently at the clouds and demands the end of the income tax.  Unlike prior years, yours portly actually got his taxes done relatively early (if you count early March as “relatively early”), and while I owed both Uncle Sam and the Great State of South Carolina a pound of flesh, I ended up getting away with only paying $54 total—woooooot!

Still, the annual ritual of telling the federal government how many miles I drove to music lessons and what I paid for WordPress is an odious and obnoxious reminder that the federal government dominates our lives and our personal information.  I recognize that taxes are a necessary evil, but let’s focus on the “evil” part of that equation.

I don’t know what the solution is, and I think the Republican Party has spent far too much time quibbling over the placement of commas in the tax code instead of fighting the necessary cultural battles in our nation, but tax reform should be a no-brainer.  Here’s the Portly Proposal:

  • Tax all income at 10%
  • Don’t tax interest earnings in savings accounts

That’s it!  Easy.  Cheap.  Everyone pays the same percentage.  Maybe—maybe!—have a carveout for people who earn, say, less than $20,000 a year—they pay, say, 5%, or even just 1%.  If people want to withhold from their paycheck, fine.  But there are no surprises—if you earn $2000 in March, you withhold $200.  At filing time, all that would be done is confirming you’ve paid your amount; if you overpaid on that first $20,000, then you’d get a refund.

Even that is more involved than I’d like, but it gives a bit of relief to the working poor.  Otherwise, no deductions, no carveouts, nothing.  There’s still an incentive to save, since no one pays for interest earned on savings accounts.

Yeah, yeah—you want to write off your $300,000 mortgage.  No.  Sorry—let’s not incentivize people to borrow huge amounts of money so they can save forty bucks on their taxes.

With that, here is 13 April 2023’s “TBT^16: End the Income Tax“:

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