The Portly Politico

The old year is waning, with just a few hours left. What will 2025 hold? Will yours portly expand to his greatest heights—and girth—yet? Or will I fly too close to the sun on my beautiful hot dog wings?

The future is full of mystery, but the past is a done deal. 2024 was, like any year, one full of ups and downs. As the old year passes away, I’d like to focus on the ups—the “best” posts of 2024.

I put “best” in scare quotes because I am basing that assessment purely on quantitative performance, not the relative qualitative merits of the posts.

The only other criteria are as follows:

I had to write the post (so no guest posts; sorry, Ponty and Audre)
I had to publish it in 2024

That’s it!

2024 was a so-so year for the blog. No posts written/published in 2024 “popped off,” as it were; the highest viewed posts published this calendar year are all under 100 views.

(For the curious, the post with most views—304—was 29 September 2023’s “Phone it in Friday XLIII: Ray Nelson’s ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’“; I imagine people searching for the short story are stumbling upon my post.)

So, here are the five Best Posts of 2024 based on views as of 19 December 2024 (the time of writing):

“Kick Out the Cat Ladies” (98 views) – My controversial-but-true post about the idiotic women ruining the country garnered twenty-six comments, with quite a few smart women chiming in and agreeing!
“Monday Morning Movie Review: Exhuma (2024)” (97 views) – Ponty must have shared this review of a Korean film, because it did very well for a movie review in the middle of summer.
“Lazy Sunday CXXXVIII: Firefly Dance Tracks, Part I” (88 views) – Sunday posts usually perform poorly, so it was interesting to see this one do well, especially as it features my original music.
“Lazy Sunday CCLXXI: Trump Stuff” (83 views) – Another successful summertime Sunday post! I guess GEOTUS in the lede helped.
“McDonald’s: A Vision of Our Dystopian Future” (79 views) – A humorous post about visiting a sepulchral, funereal McDonald’s that felt like some kind of waiting room for the damned.

Honorable Mention: “Cryptid Epistemology” (77 views) – A surprise hit, this post looks at the limits of our knowledge through the lens of cryptids and cryptid research.

So there you have it! The “best” of the year!

I often do a “worst of” list, but it takes forever, and the whole point of Lazy Sunday is to be, well, lazy. I’ve already put in more effort on this post than most Lazy Sundays. I always hoped that the “worst of” lists would see people clicking through to neglected posts out of morbid curiosity, but that does not seem to be the case.

Of course, if you do like the “worst of” list and look forward to it each year, please leave a comment! I can always churn it out in the New Year.

Speaking of, Happy New Year!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Way back in 2019 I wrote a post entitled “Napoleonic Christmas“; it took off thanks to being featured on a conservative news aggregator that, at the time, was presenting itself as an alternative to The Drudge Report, which inexplicably but notably turned hard to the Left after the 2016 election, in which it played an important role in getting GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus elected.

Napoleon has always fascinated me. Indeed, I wrote an entire tone poem about the enigmatic figure:

I don’t think Napoleon was a good guy, but he was great, in the sense that he was—much like Trump—sui generis, a man unto himself, and a man for the historical moment in which he found himself.

At Christmas, however, the Greatest Man Is a little Baby in a manger. The Son of God Humbled Himself to become like us. No Napoleon or Trump (the latter of which I like very much, and who I believe has God’s Hand of Protection over him) could ever do that—or would.

With that, here is 28 December 2023’s “TBT: Napoleonic Christmas“: