Category: SubscribeStar Saturday

Rationing and Abundance

The Portly Politico1 Comment

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.

Thanksgiving and related observations have been a running theme this week.  Thanksgiving reminds us of how much abundance we truly have.  It’s hard not to recognize when there are tables full of fattening, succulent dishes, enough to rival the feasts of medieval kings.

In spite of that marvelous abundance, however, rationing is still very much a reality.  The inescapable fact of economics—indeed, the whole purpose of the field—is that there are only so many resources to go around, and societies struggle to figure out how best to allocate those resources.

This problem is particularly true when it comes to our most valuable resource:  time.

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Giving Thanks (and a Sales Pitch)

The Portly Politico42 Comments

Thanksgiving Break starts today!  For those of you that don’t work in education, here’s hoping you can enjoy some time off tomorrow and Friday.

I have some exciting, timely news:  my SubscribeStar page hit five subscribers yesterday!  That’s a huge deal, because SubscribeStar requires their “Stars” to have five subscribers before subscriptions automatically renew on a monthly basis.  So, a BIG “Thank You” to my five plucky subscribers.

For those of you interested in subscribing, here’s my Thanksgiving pitch:  each Saturday, I post a fresh post for $1/month and up subscribers.  It’s an insanely good value—the price of a large specialty pizza per year—and I write some juicy stuff that I can’t put on the main site.

If you want to get generous and go for $5/month, I’ve recently launched “Sunday Doodles.”  I throw up a couple of my wacky, absurd, grotesque doodles each Sunday, usually with a brief explanation about when/where I doodled them.  Here’s a sample:

Sunday Doodles III, 24 November 2019 - Thanksgiving!.jpg

The SubscribeStar page includes around thirty-five posts at present, with probably thirty of those being essays.  Like this blog, I use that page to write about all kinds of topics, including:

…and, of course, candy apples.

Also, every Fourth of July week is MAGAWeek, which is a week of exclusives only for subscribers.

Now that I’ve turned giving thanks into a lurid bid for your hard-earned cash, let me close by saying that I am, indeed, truly thankful to all of my readers.  Blogging daily this past year has been a challenge at times, but it’s also been a blast.  I’m incredibly thankful for those of you who read the site, and for the great new blogosphere buddies I’ve met along the way.

Thank you for your support, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: Shrinkflation

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

When Americans experience a sense that the world we live in is not what it should be, we’re often scolded for not being thankful for all of our material abundance.  Indeed, we are extremely blessed to live in an age with plenty of food, infrastructure, and novelties, and we accordingly enjoy a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of most of our forebears.

That said, there’s a nagging sense that, for all that abundance, things are amiss.  There’s a strong tug of to that undercurrent among conservatives today.  Material abundance is great, but it hasn’t addressed deeper moral problems or battles in the culture wars, because those problems aren’t materialist in nature—they can’t be.

Even within the plane of the material world, things seem a bit off.  That was the crux of my post about the new Mustang, a redesign so beyond the scope of the name “Mustang” that it’s ludicrous to call it as such.  Everywhere we look, there seems to be disintegration and decay—of value, of standards, even of size.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Culture Matters

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

An additional appeal, and an update:  starting tomorrow (Sunday, 10 November 2019), I’ll begin posting a Sunday Doodle for $5 and up subscribers.  I am a prolific doodler (yikes!), and, on the recommendation of my younger brother, I’m going to upload one or two every Sunday, but only to my SubscribeStar page.

The additional appeal:  I need one more subscriber to ensure that subscribers enjoy auto-renewal each month.  SubscribeStar requires five subscribers to enable auto-renewal as an anti-fraud measure.  If you or someone you know would be interested in a subscription, please forward them this link:  https://www.subscribestar.com/the-portly-politico.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Homecoming Week

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It was a wild Halloween Week for yours portly.  Halloween itself saw a tornado warning while trick-or-treating with the little ones, before the typically muggy weather turned into a frosty All Saints’ Day overnight.  Brrrr!

Meteorological phenomena aside, it was also Homecoming Week at the little private school where I teach.  That brings its own mix of fun and tornadoes.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Fall Cleaning; TPP Hits 300!

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The vicious plague that has swept through my family—and to which I succumbed late Tuesday night—seems finally to have run its wicked course.  After being unable to keep down even water, I am finally getting back to normal thanks to plenty of rest and ginger ale.

Being sick makes me appreciate my health even more.  It also helps me realize how much abuse I put this portly frame through—the bad diet, the long hours, the endless sitting.

But I’m sure all of that hard-won wisdom will dissipate by the end of the weekend, and I’ll be back to eating Wendy’s 4 for $4 meals and staying up too late.  Oh, well—at least today the blog reaches 300 days of posts!

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Festival Circuit: Ridge Spring Harvest Festival and Clinton Scots & Brats

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I hit up a couple of festivals in western South Carolina, continuing our autumnal tour of festivals (which includes Aiken’s Makin’ and the Yemassee Shrimp Festival), the Ridge Spring Harvest Festival and Clinton’s Scots & Brats (a Scottish-German Oktoberfest).  Here is a little travelogue about our visit to these festivals, and the small towns that host them.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Candy Apples

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Today continued the series of autumnal festivals my girlfriend and I are attempting to hit up as the long South Carolina summer turns to fall.  I’ll write a full account of our trip to the Ridge Spring Harvest Festival and Clinton’s “Scots & Brats” next Saturday.

Tonight, I’d like to write briefly about a delicious treat that only exists in the fall:  the candy apple.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: SATurday

The Portly Politico3 Comments

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Continuing with a recent theme, today’s SubscribeStar Saturday post is all about what I did this weekend—well, at least this Saturday.

After a long, productive week at school—which saw my team of super nerds win their Quiz Bowl regional competition on Thursday—I woke up before the dawn to head back to school.  I signed up to proctor the SAT, the dreaded standardized test that is part of the grand kabuki theatre of higher education admissions.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Yemassee Shrimp Festival 2019

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I kicked off an ad hoc autumnal tour of various festivals around the State of South Carolina with a trip to Yemassee, South Carolina, for the annual Yemassee Shrimp Festival.  Readers will recall our visit to Aiken’s Makin’ in my hometown of Aiken, South Carolina, earlier in the month.  That visit got us thinking about other fall festivals we could attend.

I stumbled upon the Shrimp Festival while researching the Yemasee War (note the single “S” in the tribal name; I’m not sure when the town decided to add the second), a brutal Indian war in which various tribes banded together to wipe out the Carolina colony.  The conflict lasted from 1715-1717, and the tide only turned for the colonists after the Cherokee Indians joined forces with the Carolinians in order to defeat their ancient enemy, the Creeks.

In reading about that unfortunate, disruptive colonial war, I came across the Shrimp Festival.  I love small-town boosterism, and these little festivals bring a good bit of money into rural communities.

More importantly, they’re just plain fun.  Where else can you eat curly fries hand-cut from a gigantic spud and fried fresh to order, or see a chihuahua dressed as a taco, complete with sombrero?  Yes, both of those were just part of the fun at the Yemassee Shrimp Festival.

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