Monday Morning Movie Review: B-Monster Movies: The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961)

19 August 202418 August 2024 The Portly Politico13 Comments

Yours portly had a pretty lazy (yet oddly productive) Saturday. I spent a good bit of the day at the computer, hammering out some blog posts, tweaking some assignments for the first two weeks of school, playing some old video games. I also did a bit of composing, and listed several new pieces for sale via Noteflight.

I also watched some schlocky old movies, as I am wont to do. Shudder had a couple of B-movies featuring giant monsters wreaking havoc, both from the late 1950s and early 1960s—the golden age of loud, alarmist monster movies.

These classic monster movies are the kind of thing that would have aired on cable television in the 1990s on a dead, lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when nothing else was worth watching. You’d stumble upon them in your idle quest for entertainment, then nod off into a fitful, sweaty nap, maybe waking up as the beast undertaking its third-act rampage. These airings would be buttressed by ninety-minute infomercials for vinyl siding, which you (or, at least, yours portly) would endure, hoping that it’s got to end any minute now, vainly waiting for the vinyl to sidle into some crumb of afternoon mediocrity.

I could see myself drifting off into a fitful, sweaty nap with these two films, The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961). That’s not an indictment, though; while neither film is a masterpiece, both possess their own dated, nostalgic charm.

TBT^256: Back to School with Richard Weaver

15 August 20248 August 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The 2024-2025 school year resumes this coming Monday, 19 August 2024, and yours portly has already been back on campus for the past few days, busily preparing for another school year.

Without any warning, my administration has given me two sections of World History to teach, rather than my usual US History classes. While they should have told me about the change two months ago, I’m excited to dive into a subject I have not taught in many years (the last time I taught the class was in the 2011-2012 school year, and I taught its kissing cousin, Western Civilization, off-and-on in 2014 and 2015 at the local technical college).

Last school year was a fairly brutal slog, and I’ve been alternatively dreading this year and looking forward to it. Perhaps the opportunity to teach World History will reignite the spark (plus, World History is just cool).

But what of our good friend Richard Weaver and his book Ideas Have Consequences? At the time of writing I haven’t dipped back into Weaver the way I would like, but I find that his ideas always help to crystallize for me what teaching and education are all about—the preservation of civilization for at least another generation.

With that, here is “TBT^16: Back to School with Richard Weaver“:

Kick Out the Cat Ladies

7 August 20246 August 2024 The Portly Politico26 Comments

Regular readers will know I have a strong, even pathological, anti-femite streak. It’s perhaps ironic, as many of my readers are women, and I actually find most women quite charming and pleasant company. That said, I can’t ignore how terrible things tend to go when women are in charge of anything more substantial than the local church bake sale or the PTA.

With the notable exceptions—and I have to mention them because women in particular don’t seem to understand the concept of “generalization“—women are not really suited for politics, governance, management, etc. What they do really well, however, is act as the social glue that binds a community together. Again, if you want your church bake sale to be a success or your PTA to hound delusional administrators, women are your best option.

If you want to direct grand strategy and pursue a sane domestic policy, leave it to the men. Women in politics seem to boil down to “kill babies, give me free stuff!” It was Republican women in South Carolina, for example, who blocked a total abortion ban in my State; all three of them were booted from the South Carolina Senate in their primary elections, leaving our State Senate blessedly free of female meddling.

Lately there’s been some hubbub over J.D. Vance’s past comments about women, particularly his claim that our country is being run by “childless cat ladies” and the “childless Left.” National Review, the bastion of fake conservative handwringers, fumed simpishly over Vance’s comments, while not exactly addressing the substance of what he said. After all, Vance said the unpopular part out loud—the cat ladies “are miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Monday Morning Movie Review: Stigmata (1999)

5 August 202431 July 2024 The Portly Politico31 Comments

Our senior correspondent Audre Myers has been asking for a review of today’s film, Stigmata (1999), for at least a year now. I can’t recall what prompted the initial request at this point, but it did engender some minor controversy from Ponty, who immediately expressed his disdain for the film.

We’ve been here before with Bicentennial Man (1999), a flick that Audre praised and Ponty panned (my take: it’s pretty good, if a bit long). So where will I fall this time around—Team Audre or Team Ponty?

SubscribeStar Saturday: Cruel Christian Women

3 August 20241 August 2024 The Portly Politico44 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. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

I’m officially announcing my retirement from an ill-fated career of attempting to date single Christian women over 30. I gave it my best shot, but this demographic consists of some of the most broken, spiritually confused, and cruel people I have ever encountered.

To be clear: “not all Christian women over 30 are like that”; indeed, the ones that have been married and have kids are ironically among the best of that group. After all, they’ve fulfilled their God-Given function: they’ve birthed and reared children. Something snaps in most women if they haven’t given birth by 30 or 35; they truly become unhinged, and it manifests itself in a number of unpleasant ways.

But childless “Christian” women over thirty are particularly awful. Here is the pattern I’ve noticed:

Woman spends her twenties riding The Carousel
Woman experiences major conversion or reversion experience right as she is hitting The Wall and her sexual marketplace value (SMV) is starting to crater
Woman’s newfound “faith”—and plenty of man-bashing/woman-affirming pastors—convinces woman that she is a “pearl of great price” (which doesn’t even make sense biblically) or “more precious than rubies,” giving her an inflated sense of her value in the dating pool
Woman demands wealthy, physically fit, tall, aggressively-masculine-but-gentle-as-a-lamb man with the desert-sculpted physique of Jesus on the Cross because she’s a “holy princess” or some such nonsense
Woman brutally critiques any weaknesses or shortcomings in a potential partner and justifies it as helpful honesty and as a “guarding her heart“
Woman likely still sleeps around with Chads, chalking it up to “struggling with her faith”; woman continues to reject decent, normal Christian men
Woman occasionally develops a weird, Christian-adjacent mutation, such as being too interested in Judaism or insisting on only eating “organic” foods; this mutation becomes the centerpiece of her personality and she demands total adherence to it as a qualification, not understanding things like “compromise” and “reasonableness” exist

The delusion among this demographic is through the roof. Instead of their alleged “faith” encouraging introspection, humility, and gratitude, it manifests itself as a perverted sense of self-worth.

The Blood of Jesus Washes away our sins, but it does not make us sexier.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

TBT: The Joys of Fasting

1 August 202426 July 2024 The Portly Politico15 Comments

Yours portly had a particularly grueling school year last year, and I fell into my bad habit of overeating to cope with the stress. Because of an unfortunate quirk in my schedule, I did not have time for lunch most day, which meant I would eat a large breakfast, then gorge myself during a morning planning period on whatever lunch I had packed. I’d get home in the evenings very late and tired, and would proceed to eat even more.

Fortunately, I didn’t quite get to the “disgracefully fat 271.8 pounds” of the 2022-2023 school year, but I still chunked up a bit. At the time of writing, I’m slowly dropping weight, and am down from about 260 pounds to around 252 pounds.

My approach, as always, is intermittent fasting and the elimination of most snacks. Essentially, I skip breakfast; eat lunch around noon; and eat dinner around 6 PM. If I have a particularly light lunch I might have a snack around 3 PM—a fig bar, for example—but that’s about it.

I’m not much of a “get-out-there-and-exercise” type, either, and with the brutal heat and humidity this summer, I’ve become quite sedentary, treating my house like it’s some kind of biodome habitat plopped onto the surface of Venus. It reminds me of that Ray Bradbury short story, “All Summer in a Day,” in which Venusian schoolchildren only get two hours on the planet’s surface every seven years.

That’s how I’ve handled summer: take Murphy out; go to lessons; do the bare minimum outside; get back inside. It works, but I’ve become like George Costanza during “The Summer of George“—atrophying due to a lack of movement.

Well, I’ll be hoofing it again soon enough.

With that, here is 28 July 2023’s “The Joys of Fasting“:

Guest Post: Brian Meredith: There’s No Such Thing as Bad Art

31 July 202427 July 2024 The Portly Politico25 Comments

We have a new contributor here at The Portly Politico, a chap from jolly old England, Brian Meredith. He’s a graphic designer by trade and is Internet friends with our own senior correspondent, Audre Myers.

In this piece, “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Art,” Brian makes an essentially semantic argument: if we glorify pieces we like or appreciate as “art,” we conversely consider “bad” pieces as “not art.” Ergo, we cannot have “bad art” if art is definitionally whatever we define as “good.”

As Brian noted in an e-mail to me: “I would like to make it clear that my intention was to write something about the use of language rather [than] about art itself and in particular the commonly-accepted assumption that the very idea of art confers status.”

It’s an interesting argument, and one that I think has its merits. I disagree with the underlying premise, in that we can create things broadly termed “art” that are, indeed, quite poor in quality, either because of aesthetic choices or merely a lack of craftsmanship on the part of the artist. There can be “art” of varying qualities.

But I think Brian is correct when we look at “art” as a term of social categorization—as a form of judgment. In that regard, anything that we think is worthy of praise—even if from an objective or technical standpoint it is not very good—could be elevated to the status of “art,” as his argument is that society uses the term “art” almost exclusively as a term of praise. As such, if enough rubes agree that, say, an ashtray is a work of art, it is merely laudatory “art,” and not “bad art,” which—again—cannot exist in this usage of the word.

That explains why there are plenty of poor craftspeople whose work is lauded as “art” because they are well-connected (as I have written about before on this blog).

Ultimately, this subjective, linguistic/definitional argument results in the kind of postmodern garbage we see coming out of art studios today. I do not think Brian would agree with the sentiment he points out—he seems to be a diagnostician, not a physician, of this problem—but its existence is certainly real. As such, because lay persons exclusively use the term “art” in a laudatory context, the result is that we do end up with a great deal of bad art, even if definitionally that’s impossible.

It’s an intriguing semantic argument, but like most semantic arguments, it seems like it too easily devolves into postmodern nonsense. Again, I don’t think Brian is advocating for that, but is merely diagnosing the problem.

With that, here is Brian Meredith’s “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Art”:

Monday Morning Movie Review: House on Haunted Hill (1959)

29 July 202425 July 2024 The Portly Politico6 Comments

My blogger buddy photog at Orion’s Cold Fire posted last week about his favorite classic horror films, all of which are pre-1960. It’s a great list, and one of his readers, War Pig, added in some more that go as late as the 1960s. The black-and-white era was truly a golden age of horror, and many of the films on both lists holds up quite well.

The latest film chronologically on photog’s list is House on Haunted Hill (1959), a William Castle ghost story starring Vincent Price as a wealthy industrialist who offers cash-starved party guests $10,000 each if they can survive the night in the titular spook house.

I just happened to watch House on Haunted Hill last Wednesday night (24 July 2024) on Shudder, and while watching it, stumbled upon photog’s list. I’ve seen the film before, but it really struck me this time how spooky it is, perfectly setting the tone and feel of a classic, almost Victorian, ghost story.

It also helped that it was a literal “dark and stormy night” while watching it. The crisp black-and-white cinematography, coupled with the brooding atmosphere, made for perfect ghostly viewing.

Lazy Sunday CCLXXII: Harris Stuff

28 July 202425 July 2024 The Portly Politico5 Comments

Well, Kamala Harris is heading up the Democratic ticket, unless something crazy happens before or during the Democratic National Convention. Harris is the ultimate example of failing upwards—after dropping out early in the Democratic primaries in 2020, she found herself as the nominee for the vice presidency.

Now that her boss has ended his Weekend at Bernie’s-esque charade, Harris has fallen up to the de facto nomination for the presidency. The concubine-turned-prosecutor-turned-pandering-politico who checks all the intersectional boxes is now energizing a demoralized—but still quite cringe—Democratic base.

One unremarked upon quality of President Trump is that he manages to appeal to Boomers while also not coming across as unbearably cringe. The unwittingly cringe Boomer is a meme at this point (God Bless them, but I’ve got quite a few who read this website—love y’all, but wise up, fogies), but it’s pretty wild that Trump can capture that demographic and still come across as school. Of course, it’s because he’s authentic: he’s just being himself, warts and all.

Harris, on the other hand, is nobody, because she tries to be everything to all people. She has no identity beyond a lust for power (and Willie Brown’s willy, it seems). She is tokenism made manifest, and we’ll all be enduring her insufferable cackling—and fawning coverage of the same—between now and election day.

As such, I thought I’d feed the fire and look back at some Kamala-related posts:

“The Collapse of the Obama Coalition?” – Thank God for Tulsi Gabbard, who effectively destroyed Harris’s campaign.
“Breaking: Biden Picks Harris as Running Mate” – Harris’s political career was saved by a geriatric zombie.
“Biden Out” – Biden’s out, and we’re looking at an election akin to that of 1828.

May God Have Mercy on us all.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00

$10.00

$25.00

$5.00

$10.00

$25.00

$50.00

$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Social Contract

27 July 202426 July 2024 The Portly Politico10 Comments

A few weeks back I wrote a post entitled “Boomer Rant,” the inspiration for which was a piece by Erin over at Existential Ergonomics called “The Boomer Mentality,” which detailed the grasping materialism and petty shallowness of the various Boomer caricatures she and her boyfriend experienced during a visit to Yellowstone National Park. Both Erin’s lighthearted post and my more strident polemic about that larger-than-life generation generated a stream of comments from outraged Boomers, all of whom played the part of victim well. As I noted in my post and in multiple comments, “Boomers are either the heroes or the victims of their stories—they are never the villains.”

What was interesting in the resulting discussion was the lack of any concept of a social contract existing between one generation and the next. That broken and/or missing social contract was the heart of the complaint both Erin and I brought in our respective posts: where is the sense of obligation—and even just empathy—to the plight of Millennials, et. al.? Not a single Boomer commenter—even the ones that do not fit the negative Boomer stereotypes—would come out and say, “You know, you’re right—the Millennials and Gen Xers and Zoomers have had and will have it harder than us. We had our own struggles, but we enjoyed pretty good economic conditions for most of our lives.”

That failure or unwillingness to acknowledge the struggles of younger generations makes any sense of social contract impossible for the Boomers. Remember, these are people who are gleefully boasting about how they will not leave their children anything, taking out reverse mortgages and blowing their fortunes (and pensions and Social Security payments) on RVs and casinos and luxury vacations. Meanwhile, they’re the same people that complain about how expensive spaghetti noodles have gotten and will penny-pinch on stupid things, like the water bill—the living embodiment of “penny wise and pound foolish”—or their own children. They’re the generation that tips 10% on a $500 tab.

Again, my point with this hyperbole is not to Boomer bash, per se, but to note the very concept of a social contract between generations—an implicit understanding of the obligations of each generation to the other that has existed in some form in every society in every age—is dying, if not non-existent. That does not bode well for the future of the nation. Indeed, it breeds radicalism and desperation.