Looking back at the my oeuvre, I’ve written precious little about my favorite breakfast beverage, coffee. However, I’ve done just enough to phone in this smooth and nutty edition of Lazy Sunday:
Happy Sunday—and Happy Brewing!
—TPP
Blogger Esoterica over at Existential Ergonomics has once against inspiration for today’s post. She posed a fun question to readers in her post “Q&A: Are you a tea or a coffee person?“
It’s a smart title because it’s dripping (no pun intended) with engagement potential. Naturally, the comments section was poppin’—and yours portly was not shy about discussing coffee (and tea) with the other readers, especially after purchasing a new coffee grinder (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you):
That got me thinking about a post I wrote way back in 2021. I looked it up, and was shocked to find that I’d never featured it in a TBT. Well, it’s time to change that and look back at a post about my favorite breakfast beverage.
With that, here is 24 March 2021’s “The Joy of Coffee“:
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Yours portly has been noodlin’ on the old sax a good bit over the past couple of weeks, so for lack of a better topic—and, uh, to catch you up on my latest adventures in noodling!—here are some recent posts featuring a total of six saxy jams.
The title for today’s Lazy Sunday comes from this classic scene from The Simpsons, which I probably think about every time I pick up the saxophone:
Now—onto the list!
Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!
—TPP
It’s truly wild to think how much the world has changed in just a few short years. When I first wrote this post in 2021, we were living through Peak Woke. The Left tried to discredit Trump with the Epiphany Demonstrations and Joe Biden served as a sleepy, somnambulant puppet for a shadowy cabal of hyper-progressive ghouls intent on devouring the corpse of decent society.
Now it’s like we’ve stepped into some kind of time machine or portal to another dimension. It’s not only tolerated, but almost borderline accepted that, say, people will openly complain about Indian H1B workers writing horrible code, or denouncing the oft-repeated lie about homosexual men not being into lurid acts with underaged kids (to be fair, it seems like our ruling class is also into that stuff—horrible!). People are saying things on the Internet and publicly that would have cost them their jobs in 2021—and, let’s be real, for as long as I’ve been alive.
I don’t know if this moment will fade once Trump leaves office or if we’ve really seen a cultural shift. I suspect that large corporations will simply go wherever they think the prevailing winds are blowing, which makes me pessimistic about the long-term prospects of such hardcore red-pilling in that arena. But people overall seem to be waking up to Reality.
Once again, the “Pride” celebrations seems muted. The flamboyant pastels and wiener-tucking kids’ clothes of yesterpride have been replaced with the drabbest of beiges—praise the Lord! I get The New York Times‘s The Morning newsletter sent to my school e-mail address, and the author for 1 June 2026’s newsletter wrote, “Happy Pride Month.” No even an exclamation point! He knew he had to write something about it, but it’s like that scene from The Office where Dwight puts up the banner that says, “It is your birthday.”
Once again, I’ll renew my call that we restore the symbol of the rainbow as the sign of the covenant between God and Noah never to flood the earth again, rather than as a symbol of depraved sexual licentiousness and casual buggery.
With that, here is 5 June 2025’s “TBT^16: Reclaim the Rainbow“:
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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
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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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
With the baccalaureate service tonight, here are my sermons:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
What happens when a blog dies, especially a long-established one? Further, what happens when the blog’s author also goes missing, leaving no digital footprint behind?
The latter question seems almost impossible in our hyperconnected world, but it’s the case with Trinidadian blogger Renard, the proprietor of the now-gone Renard’s World. Renard and his little avatar, which looked like a character from The Boondocks, was so ubiquitous, he seemed like the unofficial mascot of WordPress. Here was a writer who churned out quality content every day, and like “Tom” on MySpace, he seemed to follow and be followed by everyone on the platform.
Then he disappeared.
The mystery has, as I wrote last year, “endured.” In attempting recent searches for “Renard’s World,” the same speculative blog posts show up as did last year. I even hopped onto Substack to see if our boy had made an appearance on that platform, but no dice.
Could Renard be blogging under a completely different identity? Or did he hang up the work for good?
There are, of course, the darker speculations, that Renard met with some unfortunate fate beneath the Caribbean sun. But the coordinated shuttering of all of his social media and online presence seems like something difficult to do if you’re dead and your relatives are fumbling to get into your accounts.
I pray that Renard is okay. I didn’t know him that well, of course, but I wish no ill upon anyone.
That said, if any readers have any updates on Renard’s whereabouts, leave a comment or contact me. I’m intrigued to know, although I suspect none of us will know for sure on this side of Eternity.
With that, here is 15 May 2025’s “TBT: Mystery in the Blogosphere“:
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The topic of Darwinian evolution and its staggering inaccuracies and inconsistences has been on yours portly mind of late. As such, it seemed appropriate to look back this Lord’s Day to some posts about (or at least related to tangentially) Darwinian evolution:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
