I’m writing today’s post the morning that we head out for our flight before our current cruise (that’s a lot of clauses). I’m excited to see what kinds of modern art adorn our current ship, as it’s a different one (I think) than the one from our honeymoon.
As such, it seemed like a fun time to look back at the art from that honeymoon cruise. Some of it was quite odd.
With that, here is 19 December 2025’s “Phone it in Friday CXIV: YouTube Roundup CLXXIV: Cruise Art“:
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One of the enduring temptations for Christians of a more intellectual or theological bent is to take pride in their knowledge of Scripture. It’s scarily easy to fall into that trap, but it’s one that must be avoided, lest we either a.) fall into the heresy of Gnosticism or b.) are so proud in our knowledge, we sin against God. Really, both are likely outcomes, and “b.” includes “a.” Furthermore, no one is an effective witness if they come across as a boastful know-it-all.
The danger of that pride is very, very real. Consider that it was the pride of the Pharisees that condemned Jesus to the Cross. The pride of the Athenian elites condemned Socrates to hemlock. In both cases, the condemned poked at and exposed the foolish pride of their tormentors.
The appeal to know some “secret” knowledge, or to have the real answers, is one that those of an intellectual stripe must constantly guard against. I speak from experience (and that’s not me giving myself a very roundabout, backhanded compliment, but acknowledging that I have struggled with this sin). Ultimately, Jesus Is the Source of all Truth.
With that, here is 26 November 2025’s “Wayback Wednesday: Gnostic Mysteries“:
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Yours portly has been in a chorale mood, to the point that I was asking CoPilot about churches that actively commission original sacred pieces (it’s information was fairly dated, unfortunately, as the few leads it offered were from some years ago). I love playing around with little mathematical harmony problems, and seeing where long, sustained notes will take me.
When putting together last week’s piece, one of the proposed instrumentations I pitched to readers on various platforms was soprano saxophone, English horn, and oboe—a highly unorthodox blending of higher reeds. I ended up going with a more traditional woodwind trio of flute, oboe, and bassoon, but I wanted to try that other instrumentation for this week’s effort. I was pleased with the outcome.
The piece itself began as some jotting after Dr. Wife and I had our pre-breakfast Bible reading time together. I wanted to play around with writing a chorale in 6/4—something a bit different, which would also give me some more flexibility in moving the voices.
The process for mastering/mixing this piece was virtually the same as last week’s piece. I imported the WAV from Noteflight into Audacity and applied a “Small Dark Room” reverb effect; an “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Tape” master effect. The granular effects are probably slightly different, as I tend to tweak the chorus and master effects slightly, but listeners will recognize a similar soundscape as the one I shared a week ago.
I then took the audio and pictures of the score and track artwork and imported them all into iMovie. From there, I imported the resulting video into YouTube Create, where I added my favorite filter, “Vaporwave.” I got this one churned out quickly, as we were packing for our cruise (I took advantage of a Dr. Wife nap to hammer it out).
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Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Ponty and I did a series of posts about our favorite films. I ranked 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back as my number one pick. If we redid the lists, I doubt it would rank that high, but it would certainly be in the top five.
At the time, I noted that Empire was the first film I ever reviewed for what would become Monday Morning Movie Reviews. At the time, I just called it Monday Movie Review, perhaps knowing there’d be days I’d miss the “morning” deadline. Regardless, the review of that film marked something of a turning point for The Portly Politico, moving away from primarily political topics and moving more decisively towards cultural ones.
With that, here is 28 September 2020’s “Monday Movie Review: The Empire Strikes Back“:
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As you’re reading this post, dear readers, Dr. Wife and I should be cruising the high seas, adrift in a wonderland of luxury somewhere in the Gulf of America (née Mexico). As such, why not cast our gaze back to cruise- and cruiser-related posts of yestyear (specifically, last yesteryear):
Happy Sunday—and, if you’re also on a cruise, Happy Cruising!
—TPP
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
After some delays and enjoying America’s 250th anniversary, yours portly is back with some reading, now featuring a once-great literary form: poetry.
Poetry gets a bad rap, likely because the former has largely devolved into the latter. It’s pretty easy to write prose and then chop it up into sentence fragments with some white space and indents and call it poetry.
Here’s that last sentence as “poetry”:
Poetry gets a bad
rap, likely because the former
has largely
Devolved
into the latter. It's pretty
easy to write
Prose and then
chop
it
up
into sentence frag
ments with some
white space and
indents
and call it
Poetry.
Well, you can see the problem right away. It’s obvious that this style isn’t really poetry at all. A humorous example of this phenomenon is the gag book The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump, 2009-2019, which Dr. Wife (then Dr. Girlfriend) got me for my fortieth birthday. The “poetry” consists of our president’s tweets formatted into various blends of shapes and white space akin to my example above. It’s fun and a big, beautiful addition to my collection, but part of the joke is that it’s not poetry (although there is a poetic quality to President Trump’s tweets, at time).
That said, one needn’t harken back to the days of yore to find good poetry. All of today’s examples are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Naturally, there’s tons of great poetry from the first half of the twentieth century (apologies to W. B. Yeats for not making the list this time; you will soon!), but the twenty-first century tends to be moms writing lengthy odes to their children on Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the efforts are rarely “poetic” in the truest sense of the word.
But poetry is vitally important, as is the ability to read and analyze it. Consider that large chunks of the Bible consist of poetry. The Book of Psalms is a collection of poems and song lyrics. Song of Solomon is a sensual love poem that depicts both the intense passion of a groom for his bride while also echoing the intense love of The Groom (Jesus Christ) for His Bride (us, the Church).
All that preamble aside, here are four works of poetry and/or collections you should add to your home library:
You can pick up all of these in paperback on Amazon for between $36.88 and $51.88 (Jeremy Miles’s—God Rest his soul—collection in full color is $30, but the greyscale edition is half the price). Centrism Games is the best value at just $5.57, and I highly recommend it.
To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.
Dr. Wife and I are hitting the road for a lengthy cruise before she begins work, so stay tuned for The Best of TPP next week while we’re away. In the meantime, here is a grab-bag of some recent YouTube videos for your delectation. Enjoy!
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It’s another insanely hot summer here in South Carolina, and we had a long drought in June with nary a drop of rain. It makes me wonder how people in pre-modernity survived droughts and famines that lasted for years.
The rains have come, but the days are still quite intense with heat. The afternoon showers are not as routine as I’d like, but they are at least bringing some reprieve in the evenings. Our upstairs unit runs nonstop on sunny days, regardless of where we set the thermostat; one day it was 85 degrees Fahrenheit up there! Our downstairs, thankfully, maintains a reasonable frostiness, even in the heat.
The koi and the minnows seem to be holding up well, however. The minnows don’t seem to mind at all! I’ve noticed, though, that even they stay a bit below the surface on the hottest days. The koi, who usually eat more when it’s hot out, have been eating less than usual; I think they’re enjoying the cooler temperatures a bit further down.
Dr. Wife and I are taking a cruise next week, and its a tour of the Western Caribbean: Mexico, Honduras, Belize, and another stop in Mexico on the way back to Tampa. It’s going to be brutal in the tropics, but at this point, how can it get much worse (perhaps I just jinxed it). One day we’re going to see a Mayan temple, so maybe yours portly will end up roasted on a spit above a pagan altar. Gulp!
With that, here is 23 July 2025’s “Interminable Heat“:
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Note: the following post contains affiliate links. I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. Additionally, Automattic is (hopefully) compensating me for promoting WordCamp US 2026; you can get $20 off a general admission ticket with promo code AF26. —TPP
Last month I wrote four posts about WordPress.com and its various features. I’ve been using WordPress.com as my main platform for blogging and shameless self-promotion since 2018, and daily since 2019, so I’ve had eight years of experience working within its ecosystem.
A major part of that ecosystem is the community of writers and readers who share their stories and perspectives on their own WordPress.com sites (or at least in the comments section). It’s been pretty cool to develop links to great writers like Erin over at Existential Ergonomics; Audre Myers at Words on the Word; and Dave at Nebraska Energy Observer (not to mention frequent commenter and contributor Ponty, to whom I owe a deep debt of gratitude for his dedication to yours portly’s scribblings). It’s a sincere joy to exchange ideas with these and other writers, and to create our own little “blogosphere-within-the-blogosphere,” as it were.
An idea that gets floated from time to time is the blogger get-together. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we all met someday?” Surely it would, but the realities of travel, age, family commitments, and the fact that we’re all relative strangers (even if it feels like we’re not on the Internet) makes that dream more elusive than Audre’s beloved Bigfoot.
But what if there was a way to hang out with your favorite bloggers—and meet a lot of other writers, developers, designers, online retailers, and so on—in a safe setting under the auspices of WordPress.com/Automattic?
Well—you probably saw this coming—good news: WordCamp US 2026 (WCUS 2026) is coming to Phoenix, Arizona, for four days of networking, learning, and connecting. The event runs from Sunday, 16 through Wednesday, 19 August 2026 at the Phoenix Convention Center, and it’s only $100!
Actually, it’s only $80 for a general admission ticket with promo code AF26. You can purchase tickets here.
The folks behind Automattic products and services like WordPress.com, Jetpack, and Akismet (I love Akismet; I would be buried beneath an avalanche of juicy spam if it weren’t for that service) will be there, so I imagine it would be a good opportunity to give in-person feedback (and/or to complain bitterly to the Happiness Engineers—pick your poison) to the people who make this ecosystem possible. Indeed, Sunday, 16 August 2026 is “Contributor Day,” which specifically is about collaborating “with fellow WordPress enthusiasts” to “help build the future of the platform” per the conference’s website.
I’ve never attended a WordPress.com event, but WordCamp US 2026 is the kind of event I’d like to attend if possible (and if airfare from the nearest airport to Phoenix is reasonable). The fact that it’s so affordable (again, just $80 with promo code AF26) makes it tantalizing. I’ve been blogging long enough that getting out to Arizona for a few days to learn more about it from the pros (and the people that make real money doing it) could be a worthwhile investment.
If nothing else, I could maybe write a sequel to my highly unsuccessful collection of travel essays, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.
But I digress. For those of you with a professional development budget, the $80 ticket price (again, with promo code AF26) is insane for four days of conferencing. If you use any Automattic services for your employer, this conference would be great to attend—your employer only shells out eighty bucks for the conference itself, and you get to go to Phoenix, Arizona for four days and rub elbows with your fellow nerds. Other than the location being in Phoenix in August (imagine the sweat by late afternoon, although I’m assured that the convention center is “fully air-conditioned”), it’d be an easy sell to your boss.
If you had an opportunity to attend WordCamp US 2026, what would you most like to learn? Should yours portly take the plunge, book the flight, and cover this conference in absorbing detail for the blog? Leave a comment and let me know!
Oh, and keep writing!
The Portly Politico is me, Tyler James Cook. I’ve been blogging on WordPress since 2018, and daily since 2019. I love to write about politics, culture, and music, and frequently feature my original music. Check out my musical creations here on the blog or on Bandcamp. —TPP
Dr. Wife and I had some errands to run last week, and while she was tending to a few things I jotted down today’s piece. I will sometimes keep little bits of staff paper open in my music journals for short musical sketches, and I had three glorious staves waiting for an opportune moment to do some hasty composing.
The result is this set of three chorales. I posted polls on Substack and Telegram asking for feedback about the instrumentation, but results were limited. I initially arranged it for a string trio—violin, viola, and cello—but changed to a woodwind trio of flute, oboe, and bassoon. I think that captured the sound I wanted better.
I imported the WAV from Noteflight into Audacity and applied a “Small Bright Room” reverb effect; an “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Tape” master effect. I then took the audio and pictures of the score and track artwork and imported them all into iMovie. From there, I imported the resulting video into YouTube Create, where I added my favorite filter, “Vaporwave,” and added one bit of text that reads “<–“(C# Locrian)” to indicate that the “A major” section in the handwritten score is, actually, in that highly unusual key signature.
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