Month: January 2026

Chilly on Chili’s

The Portly Politico24 Comments

Dr. Wife and I love Chili’s.  For my European readers who aren’t blessed with the family restaurant concept (I assume you eat at McDonald’s or at pubs), Chili’s is a restaurant that acts like it’s all about Tex-Mex and Southwestern cuisine (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link to my highly unsuccessful book Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams, which features a chapter about eating a massive burrito on the drive to the Grand Canyon; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you), but really it’s a great burger place with chips and salsa.  The food is very American, with a bit of a Southwest twist.

Indeed, when I was playing the role of brash American in the comments section over at Free Speech Backlash, I kept joking with my detractors—the people who objected to the idea that the United States should take Greenland, because 60,000 defenseless Greenlanders have the right to sell their sovereignty to the Chinese but not to the United States—that we’d soon be dining together at the new Chili’s in Nuuk.  Eating an Old Timer with Cheese in Greenland will be one of them any blessings of American imperialism.  Who needs independence when you can get unlimited chips and salsa for free with the Chili’s app?

But I digress.  Chili’s and Texas Roadhouse were the two most profitable and/or fastest-growing restaurant chains in the United States in 2025 for good reason:  they offer patrons tons of great food at ridiculously low (for the post-Age of The Virus inflationary world) prices.  Dr. Wife and I can split a burger and get out of Chili’s sufficiently stuffed for under twenty bucks.

However, all is not well at Chili’s.

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New Music Tuesday II: “Koi Dance”

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I’ve been working hard on this week’s piece, “Koi Dance,” for about two weeks now.  It’s a chamber piece featuring two flutes, bassoon, and piano, and draws inspiration from Bedřich Smetana’s “The Moldau”; that piece also features a flowing theme that depicts the movement of water.

I plugged the finished piece into Audacity and applied some additional reverb and a master effect, both of which I think have allowed the sound to “pop.”

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Memorable Monday: Daybreak in America: Trump’s Inauguration, MLK Day, and a New Hope

The Portly Politico15 Comments

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America, and tomorrow will mark one year since President Trump’s Inauguration.

It seemed fitting that Trump would be inaugurated for his second non-consecutive term on the day set aside to commemorate King, a man who very likely would have descended into grifter status had he lived much longer.  Trump election also continued the rollback of the affirmative action racialist system that King’s successors endorsed.

Most importantly for yours portly, it’s a day off—and a cold one!  I’m looking forward to a quiet morning with Dr. Wife before Murphy and I make the frosty trek back to the South Carolina.

With that, here is 20 January 2025’s “Daybreak in America: Trump’s Inauguration, MLK Day, and a New Hope“:

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Lazy Sunday CCCXLXIII: Empire

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It’s been the week of American imperialism here on the blog, and I don’t necessarily mean “imperialism” negatively.  Here are some posts about how the United States is embracing its destiny (and the peaks and pitfalls of doing so):

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: American Imperialism

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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.

Apologies for the evening post, dear readers; Dr. Wife and I played a key role in balloon arch construction for a friend’s baby shower, and yours portly took an extended nap after overindulging on chicken wings and fried pickles.  Now that all of that succulence has gone straight to fat, I’m slowly rubbing my neurons together to hammer out this post.  —TPP

The excellent website Free Speech Backlash ran a lengthy essay of mine this past Thursday, 15 January 2026.  “Trump: Nationalist or Imperialist?” is an attempt to place the Nicolás Maduro arrest in the broader context of American diplomatic history, specifically as it pertains to our hemispheric policy.  That policy dates back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which received an overhaul in the first years of the twentieth century during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.  The so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine argued that, in order to prevent European intervention in Latin America, the United States would intervene instead.

President Trump is clearly aware of this history—thus his invocation of the “Donroe Doctrine,” his own revival of the Roosevelt Corollary.  Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere is increasing, and The Donald has to take action.  The action in Venezuela was not strictly about securing oil—we have plenty of it—but to prevent China from controlling major oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere.  The United States also sought to prevent China and Russia paying for that oil with their own currencies, as the purchasing of oil in US dollars ensures the dominance of our increasingly devalued currency.

China has also sought to make inroads into Panama, where the Panamanians currently run the canal that Roosevelt took drastic steps to ensure could be built—under American auspices.  One reason Trump wants to reclaim the Panama Canal is precisely because if we don’t, the Panamanians will likely fold to the Chinese.

Even Greenland, the most memeable of Trump’s neo-Monrovian ambitions, is an application of the Monroe/Donroe Doctrines.  The Arctic is emerging as a major trade route for global goods—the fabled Northwest Passage now a reality—and China has already made attempts to bring the Danish colony under its thumb.  The Danes lack the will and the capacity to improve and defend Greenland—or even to exploit its vast natural resources effectively—and The Donald sees this island as the key to securing dominance in the Arctic in the Western Hemisphere.

Indeed, it was Greenland that generated the most commentary (and heart-bleeding) in the comments section.  The most common refrain from the opposition was that the Greenlanders have the right to self-determination.  It’s an argument I’m sympathetic with in principle, but in Reality, Greenland has a population of fewer than 60,000 people—only barely double that of the municipal population of my hometown growing up in South Carolina.  If the world were a peaceful place, an independent Republic of Greenland could probably be viable as an extremely small (demographically) nation.  In the world of cutthroat geopolitics, with China and Russia on the rise and the Arctic opening up new strategic challenges and opportunities, an independent Greenland is a costly fantasy.

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TBT: Make Greenland American

The Portly Politico32 Comments

Yours portly has a lengthy post over at Free Speech Backlash today about Trump, Venezuela, and the intersection between American nationalism (“America First”) and American imperialism (the piece is called “Trump: Nationalist or Imperialist?“).  “Imperialism” is a dirty word, but America is an empire, whether we like it or not.  Indeed, we’ve been an empire since at least 1898, when the United States gained Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain, and occupied Cuba for several years.  Cuba became nominally independent, but remained a virtual American protectorate until Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in the 1950s.

Many on the Right are concerned that the Maduro capture is something of a “heel turn,” to use wrestling parlance, for Trump’s foreign policy, and that he’s abandoning America First principles in favor of open-ended American adventurism abroad.  My piece details why Maduro’s arrest is not another quagmire, and how it’s very consistent with traditional American foreign policy dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

Similarly, Trump’s desire to annex Greenland, which sounds like a joke or someone playing a True Start Location Earth map in Civilization VI, is quite serious.  Greenland is in the Western Hemisphere, which—whether we like it or not—is America’s hemisphere.  American geopolitical strategy since 1823 has been to dominate this hemisphere to avoid a balance-of-power situation like Europe’s in the nineteenth century.  It is also seeks to prevent foreign intervention into the independent nations of this hemisphere.  One reason for the Maduro operation was to prevent Maduro from selling his country off to the Chinese, which would put America’s primary geopolitical rival in our backyard.

Similarly, China and Russia have designs on the Arctic, with the former particularly attempting to gain influence over the tiny Greenlandic population.  Denmark is entirely too venal to combat foreign intervention in its colony, so greater, more serious powers will do so.  With ice caps receding, the Arctic is the great oceanic chokepoint of the twenty-first century, and America needs Greenland to secure our interests in the Western Hemisphere—and to keep China out.

It’s unpleasant to think about Great Power politics in the twenty-first century, when we’re supposed to be beyond all that foolishness.  But it is the rules-based international order of the 1990s that is the aberration, not the kinds of aggressive power plays we’re seeing today.

Taking Greenland—which the Trump Administration seems intent to do—is part of the broader return to Reality the world is experiencing.  Reality is often hard, but it cannot be ignored.

I wish no violence upon Greenland or Denmark—far from it!  Greenland does not need to be taken by force.  At a certain point, the United States can offer Greenlanders a package so enticing, they cannot refuse.  Denmark should be eager to offload an expensive asset that they are not using—and that the bankroller of their social welfare state is willing to go to great lengths to obtain.

With that, here is 15 January 2025’s “Make Greenland American“:

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Midweek Koi Pond Update II: Life and Death in the Pond

The Portly Politico21 Comments

This past weekend Dr. Wife and I visited our new home and checked on the koi.  We had unseasonably warm weather, which raised the water temperature just north of 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  That was just enough for the koi to come up when I spread (too much) food across the surface of the pond.

We did not get any pictures—d’oh!—but it looks like we have four or five existing koi in the pond:

  • A bluish one that Dr. Wife named Cobbler
  • A classic white and orange koi (Sherbet)
  • A white-ish one
  • One that seems black-and-yellow, although this might be Cobbler as well at a different angle
  • A more strikingly orange-reddish one

We also saw two or possibly three of the original population of ten rosy red minnows coming up to feed.  The others might have been hanging out below—or may have ended up as a snack for the hungry koi.  Gulp!

We did not see Milkshake or Brownie, the two younger koi we introduced the prior weekend.  I consulted with Microsoft’s CoPilot AI, which seemed to think that the two babies were playing it safe and resting down below.  That said, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

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Open Mic Adventures CLXII: “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)”

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Last week I made a big deal about how I’m shifting Open Mic Adventures into New Music Tuesday, and how it’s inaccurate to call these features “Open Mic Adventures” because they’re not really at open mics—blah, blah, blah.  All of that is true, but this week, I have a bit of a conundrum:  what do I do if I don’t have any new, original music, but have a cover of a song?

Well, my hasty solution is to use the old “Open Mic Adventures” label for those pieces that covers, as 1.) anytime I feature a cover, it’s me playing it, even if it’s not at an open mic night; and 2.) I don’t want to further muddy the waters with some other title, like “Saxophone Covers Tuesday” or whatever.  What a nightmare!

So, here’s how it’s going to be going forward:

  • Any performance that is a cover of someone else’s work will be an Open Mic Adventures
  • Any live performance will also be an Open Mic Adventures
  • Any original music—whether electronic or me playing a piece I’ve composed—will fall under the new New Music Tuesday feature

Shew!  Hopefully that’s all sorted.

With that tedious business out of the way, let’s get to this week’s piece!  A potential client is booking a saxophonist to play the BeBe & CeCe Winans song “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)” for their wedding.  The piece will play as the bride walks down the aisle.  At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for the official booking (fingers crossed), but I recorded a quick, abbreviated version of the piece on my alto sax Sunday afternoon [read my full guide on buying a budget sax if you, too, want to start your saxophone empire—TPP].

Here’s my humble attempt at noodling out this smooth gospel/R&B classic:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: 28 Days Later (2002)

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The next film in the 28 [Unit of Time] series, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple hits theaters this weekend, and yours portly is hoping that Dr. Wife and I can squeeze in a matinee showing this Saturday.  It also seems that Shudder has a couple of the earlier films on its service, including 28 Days Later (2002), which I stayed up late last night to finish watching.

I wasn’t sure I had seen this flick before, but several of the key scenes did click with me (like the father getting a single drop of infected blood in his eye, causing him to go made with the Rage virus).  I have seen it, but I’d forgotten most of the major plot points and the ending.  With the new film releasing this weekend, it was a good opportunity to refresh my memory (Shudder also has 28 Weeks Later [2007], which I watched recently as well).  I’d forgotten what a great film it is.

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