Category: SubscribeStar Saturday

SubscribeStar Saturday: Returning to School in The Age of The Virus

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This past Monday teachers returned to work at my small private private school.  We start classes this Thursday, 24 August 2020.  We’ll be holding classes in-person and on-campus, with a number of new safety and sanitation protocols to attempt to limit the spread of The Virus.

It is in times like these that I’m glad I have been teaching for a decade.  My heart goes out to the new and first-year teachers, who are entering the classroom for the first time in highly atypical—indeed, unprecedented—conditions.  Building and planning out courses is a heavy enough load for a first-year teacher; doing so while enforcing various mask and social-distancing policies on rowdy youngsters is a Herculean task.

Needless to say, school is going to look a bit different this year.  Most of the changes are fairly doable, but it’s going to take consistent enforcement to implement them, and it’s really going to require a culture change at our school.  Our formerly informal but professional culture among teachers, administrators, and students is likely to become far more regimented.

A note to subscribers:  I finally caught up on tardy posts.  “Universal Studios Trip No. 2” and “Family Fun Time” are complete and available for $1 and higher subs.  Thank you for your patience!

For $5 subs, earlier in the week I posted “BONUS Doodles I“—one of several random perks for $5 and up subs.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Family Fun Time

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I’ve just gotten back from one final, final hurrah with the family, this time to celebrate my niece’s fifth birthday, which is officially this Sunday.  In The Age of The Virus, it was one of the smaller birthday shindigs, but still a great deal of fun (pizza and wings, along with good company, certainly help).

Earlier in the week, my older brother—the other uncle on my niece and nephews’ dad’s side of the family—took the two older kiddos to Chuck E. Cheese, where—as children of the 1990s will remember—“a kid can be a kid.”  That, too, was an adventure, and a bit different than my own, vanishingly rare childhood visits to the Mecca of Cheese and Arcade Games.

Finally, this post will look at one of the more intriguingly interactive gifts my niece received:  the LEGO Mario playsets.  She received the starter kit and several expansions, all of which the Mario figurine—which syncs with a LEGO Mario app on your cellphone via Bluetooth—can interact with in various ways.  You can build your own courses, fighting enemies and collecting coins along the way to the finishing flagpole.  It’s great fun.

The bulk of this post will be slightly delayed, as I’ve been having so much family fun time, I haven’t been able to write until nearly 9:30 PM!  I’m also quite exhausted from aforementioned family fun time, so writing a one-thousand-word essay isn’t in the cards tonight.

The long-awaited post about my trip to Universal Studios is still in the works.  I just haven’t had an opportunity to get it done.  I will hopefully have it completed soon.  My apologies for the delay.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Fripp Island

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This weekend I’m visiting Fripp Island, which is about forty-five minutes past Beaufort, South Carolina on US-21.  If you’ve ever visited Hunting Island State Park, Fripp is the island just past it.  One reason I attended the Yemassee Shrimp Festival last fall is because we always drive through Yemassee on our way to Fripp Island.

Fripp Island is also where I revived this blog in 2016.  I harbor some romantic sentiments about writing (such as writing shirtless in a hot attic, a la every Stephen King protagonist in his earlier novels), and there’s something about being at the beach that brings out the literary side in me.  Perhaps it’s the general sense of escaping from reality—and even from the Internet—for a bit that gets the juices flowing.

Regardless, I have come to realize how spoiled I am:  since about 1988, I have enjoyed—through no effort of my own—mostly ready access to a beach house on relatively uncrowded beaches.  Even now, the one-day beach trip—a summertime ceremony for most Americans—is foreign to me.  Muscling through throngs of dad bods to grab a spot of sand at Myrtle Beach in August is my idea of torture, but that’s the reality for most beach-goers.

As such, my beach-going experience is far more cossetted and luxurious than the average American’s.  I’m very thankful for my grandfather’s business savvy and years of hard work, which have made possible thirty-two years of beachy lethargy.

All that aside, Fripp Island is, truly, one of the most wonderful places on Earth.  Let me tell you about it.

Last week’s post about my trip to Universal Studios is still in the works.  I just haven’t had an opportunity to get it done.  I will hopefully have it completed soon.  My apologies for the delay.

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Delayed SubscribeStar Saturday: Universal Studios Trip No. 2

The Portly Politico4 Comments

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I’m currently on a trip to Universal Studios—shockingly, my second this year.  I’m going to write all about it, just as I did back in February, but it’s likely going to be delayed until my return.

Thank you for your patience.  Enjoy your weekend!

—TPP

This post will be completed upon my return from Universal Studios.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Lamar Special Election Analysis

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As readers know, I ran in the Lamar, South Carolina special election for Town Council this past Tuesday.  Former Town Councillor Tamron McManus resigned earlier in the year, triggering a special election.  The election was originally slated for 12 May 2020, but was rescheduled to 14 July 2020 due to The Virus.

I posted the results on Wednesday, after I spoke with the Darlington County Election Commissioner.  Of the two filed candidates—Buzz Segars and myself—neither candidate won.  There was a surprise, sleeper, dark-horse write-in candidate, Mary Anne Mack, who blew both of us away.  The final tally was 86-28-23, Mack, Cook, Segars (read Wednesday’s post for the full breakdown).

In my results post, I wrote that “I will offer more detailed analysis in this Saturday’s edition of SubscribeStar Saturday.  Some of my insights, while I believe accurate, are a bit spicy, and should be behind a paywall.”

So, as promised, here is my analysis of this highly unusual election.  While Lamar is a small town of just under 1000, I think this election has some important implications for small municipal elections, especially in the South.  The Mack Strategy of running a quiet write-in campaign among a tight-knit group, thereby catching the publicly announced candidates off-guard, could be hugely effective.  Implementing it—or learning to combat it—could significantly change municipal elections in rural and small town communities.

The rest of this post will be available on my SubscribeStar page shortly.  I am attending a family wedding this afternoon and will be a tad delayed completing the post.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Independence Day 2020

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America turns 244-years old today.  We’re living through a moment that is unusually difficult, as racial grievance mongers and hipster terrorists loot cities and topple statues.  Even Mount Rushmore, where President Trump gave a powerful speech last night, is under attack—some defeated tribe sees it as a legacy of white imperialism (which, let’s be honest, ended millennia of Neolithic tribal warfare).

But America survived worse than our present crisis.  We went through a similar—and, to the discredit of today’s milquetoast (yet, to be clear, still dangerous) activists, far bloodier and gutsier—wave of radical upheaval in the 1960s and the 1970s.  We saved Europe in two World Wars.  We endured the Great Depression—and many other economic downturns.  We’ve been through four presidential assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy).  We reconciled following a protracted and brutal civil war.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, when the Leftist mobs and their corporate and governmental enablers seem so dominant, that America has conquered far greater crises than these current ructions.  What we have achieved before, we can achieve again.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020

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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.  NEW TIER: $3 a month gets one edition of Sunday Doodles every month!

It’s that time of year again:  summer!  That means we’re due for The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020!

I’m actually a bit overdue for this list.  I typically publish it in early June, to give those of you blessed to enjoy summer vacation a chance to look them up.  But my long illness for the first couple of weeks of the month waylaid a number of plans, and last weekend I was occupied with family festivities, so the list is a few weeks later than I like.

But, like Sunday Doodles—a perk for $5 a month subscribers—my philosophy is “better late than never!”  And with the Independence Day holiday approaching, it’s a great time to do some reading.

For new readers, my criteria is pretty straightforward.  To quote myself from the 2016 list:

The books listed here are among some of my favorites.  I’m not necessarily reading them at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!

Pretty vague, I know.  Additionally, I usually feature three books, plus an “Honorable Mention” that’s usually worth a read, too.

For those interested, here are the prior two installments:

But that’s enough yackin’.  Here’s The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020:

1.) Richard Weaver, edited by George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr., The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (1999) – Regular readers know I love Richard Weaver, and I featured his masterpiece Ideas Have Consequences on the 2016 list.  The Southern Essays feature a collection of Weaver’s writings on the South.

Weaver was a literary critic and English professor at the University of Chicago, but his roots were in Asheville, North Carolina.  He possessed a deep and abiding love of and respect for Dixie, particularly its writers.  Weaver’s background in literature and poetry is evident in these essays, in which he ruminates on the abundance of prolific Southern literary types.  He also brings some nuance to the question of the American Civil War and the South’s role therein.  I believe it was in this collection that I first learned of John Randolph of Roanoke, the great, ornery Virginian who resisted federal overreach in the early nineteenth century.

Weaver’s writing can be a bit dense, but once you get used to his mid-century style, his ideas are easy enough to absorb.  I highly, highly recommend you pick up this collection.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Leftist Utopia

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As the nation continues to burn and authorities cede ground, rioters in Seattle, Washington have established the so-called “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or “CHAZ,” an area of around six-to-ten city blocks in downtown Seattle in which the mob rules.  Seattle municipal officials have essentially given up the area to the rioters, allowing them to setup their own Leftist utopia.

Besides representing the wholesale abandonment of authority, law, and order, it’s also a fascinating bit of political science.  What happens when a group of ideological hooligans are allowed carte blanche to run a section of a city?

The results are in, and it doesn’t look good for CHAZ.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Civil War?

The Portly Politico4 Comments

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The nation is aflame in disorder.  These race riots—really, thinly-veiled pretenses for mob violence and destruction—have become a depressing feature of our progressive utopia; perpetual revolution for the perpetually aggrieved.

The reactions from the two sides of our great national divide illustrate the unavoidable contrasts.  The Left either celebrates the violence, or washes its hands of it, claiming they can’t condemn the riots “without walking in the shoes” of looting blacks.  The Right, grounded in reality and respect for rule of law, expresses disbelief that anyone, even a progressive, could somehow endorse or even ignore rioting.

The United States has not been so divided since the 1850s.  When John Brown, the crazed radical abolitionist, staged his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he was hanged for his reckless crime.  Brown’s goal had been to use federal arms to equip slaves, leading them in a massive rebellion—the deepest fear of slave owners.  In the North and among the elites, Brown was heralded as a hero of and martyr to a noble cause.  To Southerners, this praise seemed like cheering for a murderer—a murderer who wanted Southerners in particular dead.

Slavery was wrong—as tiresome as it is to have to repeat it in the vain attempt of shielding one’s self against attack—but Brown’s zealotry shed blood needlessly.  Had he succeeded, many innocent Virginians would have died—and the rebellion would have been put down.  Regardless, the differing reactions of the two sections of the country highlighted how thoroughly alienated both had become.

So it seems we are similarly poised today in the United States.

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