Ancient Alien Technology V: MP3 Player II

21 May 202519 May 2025 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Last week I wrote about an old MP3 player I’d used for years (and which you can buy). In digging around in my Drawer of Forgotten Technology, I found another MP3 player, this one a Centon MP3 Player that doubles as a USB stick/storage device (you can buy it, too)!

I apparently never really used this one all that much, but I did find ten recordings from a Christmas Concert that my old group, Brass to the Future, played on 20 December 2009 at the Sumter Opera House. Since I can’t figure out how to remove those files (apparently, I can’t just delete them from the file folder in Windows), whoever purchases it will get those recordings (which, despite my apparent inability to delete them, I have managed to copy onto two external hard drives).

Open Mic Adventures CXXXI: “Ringtone Circus”

20 May 202513 May 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I’ve been composing quite a few trios lately, as I’ve been playing around with blending three of the same sounds. This week, I’ve got a fun little marimba piece that sounds very much like a cellphone ringtone.

Monday Morning Movie Review: In the Flesh (2013-2014)

19 May 202516 May 2025 The Portly Politico6 Comments

Today’s movie is not a movie, but rather a two-season miniseries that aired on the BBC from 2013-2014. In the Flesh consists of nine total episodes (three in season one, six in season two), and aired during the Silver Age of Zombie Films (during the great revival of the genre, when it seemed that zombie films, like their subject matter, were inescapable).

In the Flesh introduces a bit of a twist to the traditional zombie formula: it takes place after a zombie uprising, known as “The Rising,” took place, and a treatment—not a cure—for zombification has been found. With a daily dose of medicine, former zombies (called “the Risen” or, derogatorily, “rotters”) can live as humans. That said, they are not human—they cannot eat or drink food without getting violently ill, for example—and can revert to their “rabid” state if they miss a dose—or if they take an illicit street drug called “Blue Oblivion” that, for some reason, a quasi-terrorist organization called the “Undead Liberation Army” (ULA) distributes to its fanatical members.

Lazy Sunday CCCIX: Analog Horror

18 May 202512 May 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Shudder seems to be featuring horror and/or psychological thrillers based on analog or early digital technology quite a bit lately, and I love these movies. Granted, I have a personal fascination with and memory of some of these technologies, so that lends these flicks an air of nostalgia. Indeed, one of them isn’t intentionally nostalgic (Tesis, 1996), as it was made featuring technology that was, at the time, cutting edge:

“Monday Morning Movie Review: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)” – an extremely niche film about a British sound producer sent to work on an Italian giallo film.
“Monday Morning Movie Review: Tesis (1996)” – a Spanish psychological thriller that explores the relationship between romance and violence (and VHS tapes).
“Monday Morning Movie Review: Dead Mail (2024)” – a flick set in the early 1980s that focuses on early synthesizer technology and pre-Internet data collection.

Happy Sunday! And, please, be kind and rewind.

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Ancient Compositions II: Digital Sax

17 May 202512 May 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

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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.

I’m continuing to dig up ancient MIDI compositions (now converted to glorious, lossless WAV files) from twenty years ago (give or take). This weekend I’m sharing some digital saxophone compositions with readers.

I probably intended these pieces to be played by an actual saxophone quartet/quintet/sextet at some point. I played in a saxophone quintet in high school (two altos, two tenors, one bari) and a saxophone sextet in college (I can’t recall the exact instrumentation, but I think it had soprano, two altos, two tenors, and one bari), so I did quite a bit of arranging and composing for those groups. I also arranged a ton for Brass to the Future, the brass quintet (with saxophone) that my brother and I played in for a number of years in the early 2010s.

Now they exist as ghostly digital instruments, honking and squawking through the musical musings of a plump young Portly with a head full of dreams and a belly full of Cheez-Its.

“Saxophonic Organ”

I’m not sure what the original title for this piece was meant to be, but I do remember wanting to emulate the sound and rhythms of a 1970s classic rock organ in the context of a saxophone ensemble. “Saxophonic Organ” is the result of that experimentation, and I rather like it.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Phone it in Friday LXXXIX: YouTube Roundup XXXIX: Old Cars

16 May 202511 May 2025 The Portly Politico5 Comments

A common custom here in the Southern United States is to have your yard littered with old cars that won’t run. Through a combination of excessive agreeableness and excessive laziness, I had two old junkers on my property until recently: my old 2006 Dodge Caravan, and a late colleague’s 2003 Saturn L200.

I commemorated the departure of both vehicles before the junk car guy came and picked them up (and I pocketed a sweet $240 for each of them). Here are those short videos:

TBT: Mystery in the Blogosphere

15 May 20254 May 2025 The Portly Politico7 Comments

It was almost exactly a year ago that legendary Trinidadian blogger Renard, formerly of Renard’s World, disappeared—or, at least, his blog disappeared. To my knowledge, no one knows anything about the once-ubiquitous blogger or his whereabouts.

In searching for his blog, I found two different blog titles from his site, which still shows up in search results even though the site has been deleted: “Renard Is Not Overly Attached to His Blog,” dated 5 February 2024; and “Nothing Ever Gets Between Me and Blogging,” dated 12 April 2024. It seems Renard was sending mixed messages in the final months of his blogging journey.

The blog Geek Mamas ran a post on 30 May 2024, “What Happened to Renard’s World?“; it asks all the questions we in the WordPress blogosphere were asking at the time, and noted many of the similar themes: the change in Renard’s tone; the possible use of AI to generate images and/or to write his posts; the total and sudden disappearance of the blog. I can’t find much more (although, to be honest, I didn’t dig that deeply), and this may simply remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Internet.

Why speculate? Well, let’s be honest—it’s interesting. To understand how huge Renard’s sudden disappearance was, this guy was everywhere—every blogger on WordPress followed Renard, even if we didn’t always read him, and he seemed to follow everyone else. He even liked a few of my posts on occasion, which isn’t a brag so much as a kind of surprise, because the guy was all over the place.

Anyway, it seems the weeks of speculation died down, and I had not thought of old Renard until casting about for some old blog posts to repost for TBT. Now I have to wonder again: what happened to him and his site? Does anyone have any additional information?

Perhaps one day we’ll know, but I suspect that the mystery will endure.

With that, here is 15 May 2024’s “Mystery in the Blogosphere“:

Ancient Alien Technology IV: MP3 Player

14 May 202511 May 2025 The Portly Politico4 Comments

I’m back with more ancient alien technology. This one is a bit interesting in our world of endless streaming—an old MP3 player (I’m selling it on eBay, by the way):

This device is a SanDisk Sansa c250, which boasted a whopping two gigabytes of flash storage. To put that into perspective, my very first MP3 player—which I received for my eighteenth birthday in 2003—had a mere 64 megabytes of storage. In high school, a friend of mine had an MP3 player that sported an actual hard drive, and he kept it in his truck to play tunes; it was too big to carry around regularly!

This Sansa c250 likely came out when the iPod was getting going, and was a non-Apple competitor. The music industry in the early 2000s was still trying to figure out how to monetize the digitization of music, and I know for a fact a number of the tunes on this device were rips from CDs or recordings I’d made using crude digital methods. I know for a fact I owned the CD the song in the picture comes from, and I believe I still do.

But it was a golden and/or dark age of intellectual theft and copyright infringement, depending on one’s perspective, and these devices were quite popular for listening to music on-the-go without the need for a bulky Disc Man.

Open Mic Adventures CXXX: “Flamboyant Fanfare”

13 May 20259 May 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I’ve been composing quite a few trios lately, as I’ve been playing around with blending three of the same sounds. This week, I’m featuring a particularly flamboyant effort.

Monday Morning Movie Review: Dead Mail (2024)

12 May 20255 May 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The run of films based in the grimy past of analog technology keeps rolling. This week’s movie is a great example of another horror thriller that explores dated technology in fresh ways. Most flicks that attempt to look back at the 1980s tend to do so through rose-tinted glasses, and focus on the neon and the crazy fashion. Dead Mail (2024) looks back at the 1980s as I vaguely remember them—a drab post office in a small town.

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Month: May 2025