Author: The Portly Politico

Tyler James Cook is a singer-songwriter and bon vivant living in Bennettsville, South Carolina. He sings and plays sax, keys, and bass, and rhythm guitar. He won the 2012 Artsville Songwriting Contest's People's Choice Prize for his original song "Contest Winner." When he's not teaching, composing, transcribing, and arranging music, he spends time with Dr. Wife and their two dogs, Murphy and Nugget, as well as their koi fish, minnows, and aquatic snails. He also maintains _The Portly Politico_, a politics and culture blog, at https://www.theportlypolitico.com.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Professional Development

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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.

Koi Dance is out now on all streaming platforms and at https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com. It’s 90% off (!) with promo code koipond. That means it’s $1 for twelve tracks of great music (and that promo code is also good for everything on the site).

The school year is back in swing, and while I’m now on extra-super-secret-double-part-time (a little-known codicil in the modern working world’s constitution), I still have to complete some mandatory trainings each year. These trainings are rarely interesting, but nor are they particularly onerous; they’re just the boxes one has to check to appease that dread fiend Liability.

For example, each year my colleagues and I go through mandated OSHA bloodborne pathogens training. It’s a simple presentation reviewing procedures for dealing with a child (or anyone) bleeding all over a classroom. Believe it or not, that kind of thing does happen, although not for the grisly reasons readers’ minds might be conjuring up. It’s usually something benign: an unexpected nosebleed (yours portly had his share of those in high school) or a skinned knee. One time a pianist had a stubborn hangnail that got caught while playing and he bled all over the baby grand piano (it was pretty metal).

We also go through active shooter training, which is a grim reminder of the godless dystopia we currently inhabit. It’s useful to be reminded that the world is fallen and that there are truly wicked people out there. It’s also a reminder that law enforcement often view everything from the absolute worst-case scenario (“that big window is a death trap!”), which I suppose makes sense, given that they interact with the fallout of worst-case scenarios everyday.

This year I just had to attend a handful of these mandatory trainings, included the two mentioned above. However, due to a miscommunication from my admin, I attended an additional training that, were I still a classroom teacher, might have offered some marginal utility. Even in my new role as Chaplain, it had some relevant insights.

However, as with many such “professional development opportunities,” it presented something of a microcosm with everything that is wrong with the teaching profession.

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Phone it in Friday CXLI: YouTube Roundup CCI: Loaches and Water Treatment

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Koi Dance is out now on all streaming platforms and at https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com. It’s 90% off (!) with promo code koipond. That means it’s $1 for twelve tracks of great music (and that promo code is also good for everything on the site).

The intense summer heat has kept the fish deeper underwater, where they can escape the sun and enjoy cooler temperatures. Even the rosy red minnows, who usually swarm any food we toss into the pond, have been more taciturn of late. It had me a bit worried, but water testing indicates that everything looks good. I imagine we’ll see more activity once temperatures began to back off… in late November—ha!

That said, we’ve had a few fun sightings. One of our intrepid loaches has been making himself known, and it’s always fun seeing those weird, goofy-looking critters near the surface.

Loaches typically live at the bottom of the pond, and like to burrow into the dirty substrate. They eat food that’s fallen to the bottom and generally feed on detritus and what not. But they will surface in response to barometric changes, and we have at least one that loves to explore (I’m pretty sure he’s the same one I saw wriggling around in the filter basket one morning; my attempts to relocate him were marginally successful). It’s always super fun seeing them in the ivy, which our big yellow koi, Sunny, also seems to enjoy.

So it is that I have loach-related videos for you today, as well as one kind of boring update about the unsexy side of pond management.

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TBT: First Day of School 202[6]

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Yesterday was the first day of classes for the 2026-2027 academic year. It is the first “first day of school” I have not attended in fifteen-ish years.

Instead, today is my first day of the school year. I’m now the part-time Chaplain for my school, and I only go in (usually) once a week, on Thursdays, for the morning Chapel service. The new headmaster will be covering today’s Chapel, so I won’t give my first devotional until next week.

It’s a little surreal being “back-to-school” in this new role—and without truly being “back” all the time. But I love it so far.

I had to attend a few of the back-to-school trainings and professional developments, and while my school is incredibly mild with that stuff compared to public schools, it was a confirmation that leaving full-time classroom teaching was the right move. Admin was scrambling to finalize the master schedule (in part because there is a new schedule this year), and one colleague had a substantial, last-minute change to his teaching load (fortunately, I was able to give him all of my materials for the course, so he should be good to go). Everyone is magically expected to be ready for this week, and it’s a testament to the kind of miracles teachers pull off that most of them probably were!

Avoiding that kind of chaos is pretty sweet. I’ve had a small dose of it, as the time for Chapel kept shifting around as the admin continued to make tweaks to the new schedule, but I’ve found that being proactive and trying to nail down details with them in writing and in advance goes a long way in the CYA department. Also, I don’t really have to work anymore, so I have ultimate outcome-independence. Being able to say, “no, I don’t think I will” is pretty liberating, albeit counterintuitive to an innate people-pleaser.

Well, here’s to doing the fun part of education with almost none of the baggage. Woooooooooot!

With that, here is 18 August 2025’s “First Day of School 2025“:

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gym equipment

Exercise

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Yours portly has had a lifelong aversion to exercise. Not physical exertion, per se—I grew up moving furniture around my parents’ Victorian house and still lug sound equipment hither and yon—but the idea of physical exertion for its own sake. Why sweat when you don’t have to?

Well, because it’s not “physical exertion for its own sake”; exercise serves a greater purpose in that it improves one’s health. The physical benefits of exercise are, of course, well-documented: weight loss and/or management; greater strength; increased stamina; better cardiovascular health; etc. The mental benefits are pretty profound, too: better sleep; better mood; better ways to sweat out the bottled-up rage of decades.

Still, even with all the alleged benefits, I’ve rarely been one to go out of my way to seek additional physical exertion just because—gasp!—it might be good for me. Exercise is hard. It’s sweaty and unpleasant. Especially when I was working full-time, I dealt with enough sweaty unpleasantness that, in my precious spare time, I preferred to stay glued to my computer desk chair than move around unnecessarily.

Naturally, that’s partially why yours portly is, well, portly (not to mention my unhealthy relationship with food—I’m a sensualist when it comes to eating mish-mashed leftovers). Living life as a larger-than-life bon vivant has its advantages, but it also carries some hefty baggage.

So I’ve been taking some small steps towards improving my overall physical (and mental) health. Dr. Wife and I take a long walk most nights after dinner. I’ve been doing that for a few months now. I enjoy walking, but as my older brother once told me (to paraphrase), “walking is good, but it takes a tremendous amount of time [to see any real caloric burn].” If Dr. Wife isn’t with me I’ll sometimes get in some brief interval running, but I’m not consistent with that at all.

What’s a portly bon vivant to do?

“Eat less, fatso”—hey, I heard that! But, yes, I’m doing that (imperfectly).

“Find exercise that works for you, tubsy”—ah, yes. A good solution. Well, walking works for me, but, as my older brother has noted, it’s fairly inefficient. Running is unpleasant (again, most exercise, for someone like me, is).

Dr. Wife, as usual, presented the solution in the way only an upper-middle class American white girl can: ride the Peloton.

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New Music Tuesday XX: “Chorale for Single Reeds”

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Sunday morning I jotted down another chorale—I’ve been on a chorale kick lately—and decided to experiment with 9/4 time. I really just wanted to see how composing for longer measures might affect the final product. I did find that my “grammar” changed a bit while composing in this unorthodox time signature, with more subdivisions of three popping up.

I exported the WAV from Noteflight and imported it into Audacity. There I applied a “Large Room” reverb filter; a “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Lush High-Ends” master effect.

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Lazy Sunday CD: 🐟Koi Dance🐟 Posts

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Koi Dance is out now on all streaming platforms and at https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com. It’s 90% off (!) with promo code koipond. That means it’s $1 for twelve tracks of great music (that promo code is also good for everything on the site).

As such, I’m featuring some posts related to Koi Dance (and the title track, “Koi Dance”):

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

jalapeno popper on hand

SubscribeStar Saturday: Jalapeño Poopers

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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.

For those of you looking for Issue 3 of The Town Crier, here’s the embed; I’ll get around to creating a separate page for these issues soon:

The Town Crier Vol I Issue 3Download

Now, on to today’s post! —TPP

My younger brother sent me the following Tweet from the legendary X user Catturd ™:

His wife came up with the title “Jalapeño Poopers”; my brother asked me to write a blog post with that title. So, here we are! I’m never one to turn down some scatological fun.

But back to that Tweet (or are they called “Xes” or “Xs” or eXs” now?) from Feline Dookie Catturd ™: doesn’t it seem like we’re experiencing tons of diarrhea-inducing outbreaks in our food lately? By now, we’re all familiar with the infamous cyclosporiasis, which has had a whopping 0.1% of Michigan’s population glued to the porcelain throne, with around 22,700 cases nationwide. Nearly half—11,500—of those cases are from Michigan itself.

Most notoriously, Taco Bell, which is already known for its diarrheic properties, had lettuce infected with the dookie-inducing spores. Dr. Wife and I eat at Taco Bell almost every Sunday after church, and I forbade any lettuce for at least a couple of weeks after Taco Bell sent out a reassuring e-mail that they’d removed the offending lettuce from their supply lines. Believe it or not, I trusted Taco Bell/Yum, Incorporated; I didn’t trust their franchisees to toss the old lettuce (although I think we’re in the clear now).

Now that other staple of Mexican cuisine, the spicy jalapeño, is spreading salmonella across the land. In looking at the map in this New York Post piece, it seems that Minnesota and Colorado have the highest number of cases, with large swaths of the Midwest suffering from the highest concentrations (there are even “5 to 6” cases here in South Carolina).

Granted, the total cases according to that map are around 345 nationwide—probably fewer than people who just have run-of-the-mill loose stools and diarrhea from eating too many clean jalapeño poppers at any given moment in the country. Additionally, there have been no deaths yet, and even the dreaded cyclosporiasis seems to be responsible for only two. That’s two too many, of course, but as far as devastating outbreaks go, that’s not screaming “nationwide panic,” even if the news coverage seems to be leaning in that direction (granted, I wouldn’t be ordering any salad in Michigan anytime soon).

What I’ve noticed, too, is that the news cycle’s hysteria is not “taking” the way it usually does. Sure, it could be because the numbers are, nationally, fairly low. It’s also possible to avoid consuming contaminated foods to some extent, whereas a communicable disease is a bit harder to guard against.

I think, however, that there is something different going on here.

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🐟Koi🐟 Dance Splashes Up Mogadishu Matt

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Mogadish Matt, Somalia’s #1 Libertarian and a longtime friend of the blog, shared a bit about Koi Dance (out today on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp; 90% off with promo code koipond) on his blog, Free Matt Podcast:

Guest Highlight: The Portly Politico

Thanks for the shout-out, my grizzled friend!

Also, I’ll be hosting a listening party tonight (Friday, 7 August 2026) at 8 PM EST; join here.

Thanks again, Matt!

—TPP

Koi Dance Write-Up at Existential Ergonomics

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Thanks to Erin at Existential Ergonomics for this awesome write-up of my new album, Koi Dance (out today on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp; 90% off with promo code koipond).

https://existentialergonomics.wordpress.com/2026/08/07/a-new-release-from-tyler-james-cook-koi-dance/comment-page-1/#respond?page_id=23342

I’ll also be hosting a listening party tonight (Friday, 7 August 2026) at 8 PM EST; join here.

Thanks again, Erin!

—TPP