In going through my Cokesbury Hymnal this Christmas season, I’ve enjoyed playing some of my favorite carols. I’m struck by how rousing and jubilant they are, like “Joy to the World” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
A third could be added to that list of upbeat, glorious carols: “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
Today is the day of the big Christmas concert at school, and despite some moments of despair earlier in the week, I am feeling cautiously optimistic about the whole thing. The kids are going to do a wonderful job, I am sure; I’m more worried about getting all of the tech stuff done in time, but it will happen, one way or another.
That said, it’s going to be a short Supporting Friends Friday this week—at least for me. You, dear reader, get to listen to six minutes and twenty-four seconds of an excellent new Christmas track from my good buddy Frederick Ingram.
There’s a new Shudder exclusive just in time for Christmas: 2021’s The Advent Calendar, a Belgian production entirely in French (but with English subtitles). The film stars the improbably lovely Eugénie Derouand as Eva, a paraplegic who—before a terrible automobile accident—was a gifted dancer.
A lot of the recent Shudder exclusives have been rather ho-hum. I viewed one recently—I can’t even remember it’s name now!—that was essentially post-horror: it was only atmospherically creepy, but nothing else about the film provoked scares. Sometimes a horror movie is “scary” in the sense that it poses difficult questions (the way good science-fiction does), or presents some intriguing moral dilemma—or just depicts the terrifying consequences of a society pursuing a certain path. That film didn’t even fit that criteria.
But The Advent Calendar does. It’s not a particularly frightening film, but it presents a classic dilemma: given the ability to improve your life dramatically at an extremely high cost—including sacrificing lives to achieve your goal—do you take the opportunity? It’s a bit like The Monkey’s Paw, as another, less favorable review notes: your wish comes true, but with horrifying unintended consequences.
Despite nearly botching the dilemma—more on that below—the film is compelling, and a fun watch (even if you’re reading subtitles the entire time).
Last week I took some time to play a few games, notably The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Once my niece and nephews arrived, though, I didn’t have time for much else (although we built some cool planes and helicopters with a big bin of LEGOs). They love Uncle Portly’s “devices”—my Nintendo Switch Lite (the “big device”), Nintendo 3DS XL (the “medium-sized device”), and Nintendo DS Lite (the “small device”). My older nephew will spend hours building levels in Mario Maker 2 if left to his own devices. My niece usually ends up with the “medium-sized device,” leaving my littlest nephew to play whatever I happen to have that will run on the DS Lite.
In digging around for games a two-year old could grasp, I found my old copy of 2008’s Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution. It’s an interesting, almost “abridged” version of the full Civilization experience—what would now be a cellphone app. The game contains the major elements of a Civilization game from the Civilization IV era, and the game bears the stamp of many of that iteration’s innovations (as well as one of the major contributions from Civilization III, culture borders).
Naturally, my nephew wasn’t going to be playing that, but I popped it in one evening after the kids went to bed and found the game highly entertaining.
I’m coming off a dizzyingly long Thanksgiving, and while I enjoyed quite a bit of unstructured time, I surprisingly did not have much time for writing. Posts from the past week indicate the amount of phoning in I’ve done lately, and this week’s Monday Morning Movie Review will likely be no different.
The idea for this review came from my good buddy photog over at Orion’s Cold Fire. On Halloween he wrote a large double review of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu and the Werner Herzog remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).
After reading his review, I found that Shudder had the Herzog remake—which photog correctly identifies as a tribute to the 1922 F. W. Murnau film—and watched it. I will say that photog’s review really does an excellent job of detailing the highlights, so I’d encourage you to read it. As he goes through much of the plot, I’ll leave that alone, and instead will give some of my thoughts on the film.
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Elections all over the country on 2 November 2021 (and run-offs on 16 November 2021) came back with some surprising results—and results that, with due caution, should give conservatives hope. Popping all those black pills was premature, but all of our problems aren’t magically solved just yet.
Winning elections is one thing. Governing in such a way that honors the reasons voters gave you office is another. But the results from the 2021 elections are very encouraging.
Today’s post will be slightly delayed, but should be posted to SubscribeStar by this afternoon.
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It’s Black Friday today, so everyone is rushing out to get whatever picked over sales items they can. In the spirit of Black Friday, I’d be remiss if I didn’t hawk my book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard, and my music. Inspector Gerard is the perfect White Elephant gag gift, and at $10 for the paperback, it fits perfectly into the price point for most such novelty gift exchanges. I’ve also got some weird merch for sale.
I first wrote “Brack Friday Bunduru: Workers Need a Break“ back in 2019, at a point when I was feeling immense amounts of burnout at work. I stand by my original assessment—that companies shouldn’t gobble up Thanksgiving Day to offer increasingly early doorbuster sales so their workers can enjoy some time with their families—though now I would probably add some more caveats.
I realized that I never really explained the name “Brack Friday Bunduru.” I lifted it from an episode of South Park in which the kids heat up the console wars between the XBox and Playstation:
Ever since, I can’t help but say, “Brack Friday Bunduru” in an exaggerated Japanese accent ever Black Friday.
With that, here is 2020’s “Flashback Friday: Brack Friday Bunduru: Workers Need a Break”:
It’s Thanksgiving Week, which means I am really going to be phoning in some posts this week. I love writing, but even I need a break from the constant output that my insatiable readers demand.
In the original post from this thread, I spelled out my argument in favor of an entire week off for Thanksgiving, in exchange for some lesser holidays. With districts caving to reality and giving students the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off, families have just moved the start of their break back to Tuesday, with mass absenteeism the norm the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Indeed, many families take the entire week off.
Well, my school—and many public schools in my area—took my sage advice: we are off for the entire week. It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!
However, I also predicted that, with an entire week off, the siren song of leaving for an extended vacation even earlier would be hard to resist. I was right: last week, we had a few students leaving town as early as Wednesday—a full eight days before the bird faces the executioner. Whoa! The trend only intensified Thursday and Friday.
Of course, it strains credulity to argue for any more time off. At this point, I think it makes far more sense to increase Christmas Break than to lengthen Thanksgiving any further.
One downside to this newer, longer break: with losing some other days earlier in the semester, everyone is completely burned out. We teachers are not a hardy breed: we’ve grown soft with cushy vacations. In all seriousness, though, we get pretty worn down, as anyone would corralling and attempting to mold young minds all day.
Well, enough of that. Now I’m enjoying the sweet life.
With that, here is 23 November 2020’s “Memorable Monday: Thanksgiving Week!“:
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It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!—Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who expertly defended himself against a mob of Antifa rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was found not guilty on all of the spurious charges brought against him. After days of agonizing deliberations, the jury—facing threats of doxing from radical activists and even MSNBC—held steady and delivered the only verdicts that made sense.
Readers of this blog will surely know the pertinent details already, but the prosecution’s case against Rittenhouse was not based on any factual evidence, but instead on a hyper-politicized Left seeking to strip a young man of his rights to self-defense.
The hypocrisy of the Left was on full display: a group that views borders as “imaginary lines” on a map suddenly cared about Rittenhouse traveling twenty minutes “across State lines” to Kenosha, as if crossing that magical, imaginary line suddenly turned him into a bloodthirsty vigilante.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of the Left is useless, but here I think it is warranted: it nearly cost a young man his life. For defending himself—and Rittenhouse would have died that night had he not fought back—he was subjected to a politicized circus of a prosecution.
An important battle was won Friday afternoon.
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Today is Election Day in Lamar, South Carolina, and in several other towns in the region. We have a competitive mayoral race, and I am up for reelection for the Council seat I currently hold. Another Councilmember is running for reelection for her seat, but neither of us have any officially filed competition.
There’s also an election in Society Hill with seven candidates running—three for mayor and four for council seats. I’m particularly interested in that race because of a homesteading-related issue at the center of it, with one candidate running largely to fight an ordinance limiting the number of animals he is allowed to keep on his property inside city limits. Hartsville, home to the world headquarters of Sonoco, has five candidates running for mayor.
The Portly Politico 