Month: May 2026

Lazy Sunday CCCXC: Summer Reading Lists of Yesteryear

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Book titles in this post have an Amazon Affiliate link. I receive a portion of purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP

It’s been one of those rare, near-perfect Sundays, the kind of Sunday that is so peaceful, it’s hard to believe it’s possible. I know that Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the Sabbath, a day of rest, but I don’t think it’s ever really been that way for me.

Growing up, Sunday was a marathon of excessive churching, in which a hot, sweaty nap would be squeezed between seemingly endless church services and band practices. I’m very thankful for that upbringing in many ways, but it always meant Sundays were an exhausting scramble, usually topped off with finishing math homework after we finally got home at 9:30 PM.

As an adult, Sundays have become a working day. After church, the day is spent prepping for the week, with lesson plans, scheduling music lessons, and the like. Sometimes that includes hammering out succulent blog posts for the week ahead.

Top that off with the “Sunday scaries”—that vague sense of dread and anxiety that settles in around 4 or 5 PM on a Sunday afternoon—and I’ve never much cared for the day, or thought of it as all that restful. Church is great (and you should go, just probably not for eight hours every Sunday), but by the time I’m home from it, the weekend is essentially over and work begins. It’s why I try to take Saturdays as my “Sabbath,” when I truly do try to rest and recuperate.

That said, today has been what I think Sundays are supposed to be. Dr. Wife and I had a quiet morning and headed to church, after which we had lunch and picked up groceries. We came back and knocked out some chores around the house and in the yard, and then took a glorious nap with the dogs, from which we both got up from a short while before I wrote this post. Minecraft Camp starts tomorrow and I have a few lessons to schedule, but I don’t feel rushed. Dr. Wife usually has to drive back on Sundays to North Carolina, but because of the nature of her new rotation (which starts tomorrow), she won’t have to leave until tomorrow morning, and she’ll leave when I head out for camp.

The net effect is that it’s been a glorious and restful Sunday. Even as we’ve gotten things done around the house, it’s been a day both to celebrate and worship the Lord with other believers and time for rest and reflection. There is a peace over the house that I’m almost hesitant to articulate, lest the momentary blessing be somehow broken.

Well, enough of that waxing poetic (and complaining about going to church, which is somewhat hypocritical of me). For today’s installment of Lazy Sunday, I thought I’d look back at various Summer Reading Lists of yesteryear:

So there you have it! A little late, but a Lazy Sunday bursting with summertime freshness.

Happy Reading—and Happy Sunday!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part I: Short Fiction

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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.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP

It’s summertime! That means yours portly is getting in a ton of reading, especially in my favorite format: short fiction.

“Short fiction” here is a catch-all for both short story collections and shorter novels/novellas. Two of the works on today’s list are technically novels, but they’re both 250 pages or fewer (in the case of Jake Barter’s The Sniper, the book is exactly 250 pages). 250 pages might seem generous, but these are works that can be read over the course of several evenings, and are paced briskly enough that they won’t be piled on your nightstand for months or even years.

Typically I leave the full list behind the paywall for paid subscribers; however, as several of these authors are indie/self-published, I would like to boost their works more broadly (and, naturally, gain access to those sweet, sweet affiliate clicks). So, here are four books I’ve read and/or am currently reading that I highly recommend you order:

  • Jake Barter, The Sniper – “Jake Barter” is the nom de plume of blogger photog, proprietor of the excellent blog Orion’s Cold Fire. As far as I can tell, this book is his first outing. It’s the next on my “to-read” list after the next entry, but knowing photog’s writing, I can already recommend it. He’s been working on this book for years, and it’s not a hastily slapped-together book like one of mine.
  • Erang, Midnight Under the Monsters’ Mask – “Erang” is the nom de plume of, well, Erang, a mysterious, masked French musician who is among the pioneers of dungeon synth. I’ve just started reading Midnight in the English translation, and the stories so far are delightfully creepy. It’s a mix of horror and weird fiction that really shows Erang’s early exposure to horror flicks as a kid in the 1980s. Erang’s whole schtick is championing imagination over all else, and he creates in his music entire fantasy realms. Having listened to his music for years—over a decade, at this point—I can “hear” it in his writing.
  • Various authors, Amelia: Counterrevolution (the second anthology from authors of the “Lemurverse“) – this collection of short stories and poems found inspiration in Amelia, the viral, pro-British, pro-nationalist, anti-immigration character of a government-sanctioned video “game” that was intended to spook teens away from online “radicalization” (basically, becoming right-wing). The fatal flaw, however, is that the game designers made Amelia into a cute goth chick with a chic aesthetic and, well, commonsense arguments against flooding Britain with unassimilable invaders. It’s a fun collection and priced right at just $5.99 in paperback. Note that it does use AI-generated images, but not writing, as illustrations between stories, so if that cuts against your principles, be forewarned. However, the writing is 100% human!
  • John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids – a classic of 1950s British sci-fi, Triffids is a chilling tale of a world in which everyone is blind—and giant, carnivorous plants called “triffids” shuffle around killing people. But there’s way more to it than that; the work is post-apocalyptic, but it’s quaint in how “high-trust” post-apocalyptic Britain is portrayed—a stark reminder of how much that once-great nation has changed. I read Wyndham’s Foul Play Suspected earlier this year and can heartily recommend it as a tense crime thriller with an appropriately English sense of restraint and pacing.

More on Amelia and Triffids below the punch. I’ve read both of those in their entirety. That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of short stories or shorter novels/novellas, you can scoop them all up for under $50.

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TBT: Retro Games Website

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Before it became overrun with AI slop and bots, the Internet was the good kind of wild frontier, brimming with jokes and otherwise lost content. Well, the Internet is still that, there’s just a lot more trash to wade through to find the good stuff.

One website that provides “the good stuff” is RetroGames.cz, which makes possible the playing of some classic games via emulation in your browser. I spent a good chunk of time last year playing through the old Dragon Warrior game; eventually, I’ll get around to loading up my save state and finishing it. It’s the grindiest RPG I’ve ever played!

Occasionally, I find myself nostalgic for the rudimentary, homemade websites of the late 1990s and early 2000s, wherein website design philosophy consisted of cramming as many animated GIFs onto the homepage as possible, and everything was typed in Times New Roman font. The formality of the font contrasted with the frivolity of the overall design, to the effect that webpages in those days were akin to early digital folk art. The amateurism—which, it must be remembered, still required a good bit of working knowledge of HTML and JavaScript at the time—leant those websites a certain charm, even if that whimsical form came at the expense of function.

Well, enough of my waxing artistical. Go play some good games.

With that, here is 4 June 2025’s “Retro Games Website“:

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scale model toy of a woman figure

Open Mic Adventures CLXIV: “Ride of the Valkyries”

The Portly Politico8 Comments

I had a gig down in Charleston this past Saturday night. A young man from Connecticut was proposing to his girlfriend (she said yes, by the way), and he’d hired me to play a Lewis Capaldi song before he popped the question. It was a really fun, touching moment, and I’m grateful I could be part of it (he paid me pretty well, too).

In practicing for that little performance, I had fun flipping through my music, and came upon a piano arrangement of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” that I play on the saxophone. Since I’m playing unaccompanied, I don’t have to transpose the music (saxophone is an Eb instrument, meaning that if an Eb is played on a piano, it’s a C on the saxophone), so I just read the right-hand piano melody straight off the page.

I had fun with this version, which I’m sharing today:

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Memorial Day 2026!

The Portly Politico2 Comments

It’s Memorial Day once again! Yours portly has one more day of work tomorrow, then it’s summertime. I’ll spend the first week in June running my annual Minecraft Camp and teaching some lessons; otherwise, it’s gearing up for Dr. Wife to finish residency and for us to get the house in order.

For today, Dr. Wife is going to make us some hot dogs and hamburgers (which I will go forth to procure shortly) for lunch. We’ll do some additional, light unpacking of the house. The Boyz and I will do a little gaming this afternoon, and at some point I’m going to finish watching 1970’s Cromwell, which is free (with ads) on YouTube:

It stars Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) as Charles I, who is portrayed as a nuanced villain here, more a weak man buffeted by external forces and engaging in deceit out of desperation than a wicked tyrant. I haven’t finished it so I’m not sure how Cromwell comes out, but he’s already becoming more of a tyrant in the wake of the superciliousness of the other members of Parliament. We’ll see!

Here’s hoping you have a relaxing and restful day for those of you here in the States. For my English readers, here’s hoping the first day of your workweek goes well.

Happy Memorial Day!

—TPP

Lazy Sunday CCCLXXXIX: Memorial Day Posts

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It’s Memorial Day Weekend here in the States, which marks the beginning of summer (not astronomically, but culturally). It’s a time for grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and generally giving thanks for our liberties. I’m hoping Dr. Wife and I can go out to a State Park and try to catch some local minnows and tadpoles to add to our little koi pond.

In the meantime, here are all of my Memorial Day posts dating back to 2019:

Happy Sunday—and Memorial Day!

—TPP

alumni standing in academic dress

SubscribeStar Saturday: Yet Another Round of Dubious Graduation Wisdom

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It’s that time of year again: Graduation Day. At least, it’s graduation for my students, and my last graduation as a full-time teacher. Apparently, the graduating class is so large, and seats are so limited, the admin was encouraging teachers not to attend, but I’d like to be there, so I’m going.

Our graduation ceremony is blessedly short on speechifying. The honor graduate (“third in class”), salutatorian, and valedictorian each give a very brief speech, and there are some general platitudes from the headmaster. They announce a couple of teaching awards, and the kids process across the stage with little video montages they put together. If it weren’t for those videos, it would be lightning quick; as it is, it’s still pretty fast.

Of course, every year I roleplay the alternative: what if there were more speechifying, and I was asked to deliver the keynote address? Well, here’s another round of dubious graduation wisdom from yours portly:

Write Every Day

Most of you will not pursue writing as a career—nor should you, as it’s an oversaturated market that not only competes against real people, but now robots, too. But all of you should write something—anything—everyday. Most of you will through your work; even police officers have to write up fairly descriptive reports of arrests, for example.

Indeed, writing is inescapable. The problem is that very few people do it well, with any degree of competency. The only way to do it well it to practice doing it well. When you send a text message, for example, don’t (as a rule) just type, “k” in response to a message; instead, reply in at least a clear, complete sentence: subject, verb, predicate/direct object. “Okay, that sounds great”; “I will see you at the theater at 6 PM.”

And, yes, use punctuation, especially periods. Look, no one really knows how to use commas; just plop them in whenever it feels like there should be a pause for a breathe. Don’t do that thing that some people do where they end a sentence with an entire string of “…………..” or “,,,,,,,,,,,”—it doesn’t make any sense and it makes you look stupid. It is also really, really annoying.

But I digress. Even if you don’t nail all the grammatical rules, try to write in a way that is clear and precise. Yes, some of us are wordy, verbose writers, addicted to parenthetical asides and em dashes—which are now apparently taboo because AI uses them (don’t let the robots take good things from you)—but you have to learn to walk before you can ascend into a cloud of subjunctive clauses.

Of course, in order you write well, you must…

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Phone it in Friday CXXXI: YouTube Roundup CXCI: Simon, Garfunkel, and Urkel

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Today’s edition of Phone it in Friday / YouTube Roundup could really be an Open Mic Tuesday, even though there was no open mic involved. Dr. Wife was having a tough day Tuesday, and I’ve learned that offering actionable advice is never what a woman wants during difficult times.

No, lads, women want absurd covers of creepy old songs with images of your childhood Steve Urkel doll (sans glasses, because I took them off when I was a kid).

So, to cheer here up, I compiled this creepy-cute montage set to me singing a butchered, bowdlerized version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” interspersed with eerie closeups of Urkel and pictures of some of the family dogs:

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