It was a busy weekend for yours portly, so I’m putting off movie reviews for another week (don’t worry—they will return). In the meantime, I wanted to look at some feedback I’ve received from different folks about Koi Dance.
Koi Dance is still 90% off with promo code koipond. That means you can get the entire album for $1.
Here are some things listeners are saying:
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Mogadish Matt, Somalia’s #1 Libertarian and a longtime friend of the blog, shared a bit about Koi Dance (out today on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp; 90% off with promo code koipond) on his blog, Free Matt Podcast:
Thanks for the shout-out, my grizzled friend!
Also, I’ll be hosting a listening party tonight (Friday, 7 August 2026) at 8 PM EST; join here.
Thanks again, Matt!
—TPP
Thanks to Erin at Existential Ergonomics for this awesome write-up of my new album, Koi Dance (out today on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp; 90% off with promo code koipond).
I’ll also be hosting a listening party tonight (Friday, 7 August 2026) at 8 PM EST; join here.
Thanks again, Erin!
—TPP
Koi Dance is out TODAY, Friday, 7 August 2026, on all streaming platforms and at https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com!
It’s 90% off (!) with promo code koipond. That means it’s $1 for twelve tracks of great music (or 8⅓ cents per track).
That promo code is also good for everything on the site, including a full discography purchase. That means you can get thirty-one (31) releases—almost all of which include tons of original artwork, scores, videos, essays, etc.—for $9.70 with promo code koipond.
To put that into perspective, if you purchased every release on my Bandcamp page individually, it would cost $194. Purchasing the full discography (just click on any release to see the option to purchase my full discography) comes with a built-in 50% discount, so that brings the cost down to $97.
Use promo code koipond, and the price plummets to $9.70. That’s less than any one of my albums at full freight. It’s less than a small pizza. It’s less than two cups of coffee.
But if you buy just one release—or even just stream one release—make it Koi Dance. It’s my best release in awhile.
Also, I’m hosting a free listening party to the entire album tonight, Friday, 7 August 2026, at 8 PM EST. You can join in on the fun and conversation here: https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com/live/koi-dance-listening-party
Finally, it’s Bandcamp Friday, which means Bandcamp waives their usual 15% cut of sales, making it the absolute best time to support your favorite pudgy composer—me!
A couple of weekends back Dr. Wife and I purchased three weather loaches (sometimes called “dojo loaches“) from a seller on eBay. The loaches were due to arrive this past Monday, which was perfect timing: it was after Dr. Wife’s residency graduation and the related weekend of festivities.
Before the dogs and I departed (one last time—praise the Lord!) for North Carolina and the graduation weekend, I received an e-mail update: the loaches were arriving early! It turns out they showed up on our front stoop sometime last Friday, the day of Dr. Wife’s graduation dinner.
After doing some hasty research (talking to CoPilot), I learned that loaches ship very well and can tolerate the low oxygen environment of a mylar bag for up to a week. The fish had shipped out of Texas around midweek, so they were safe to sit on our front stoop for a day.
Of course, the South Carolina heat is intense right now, and when I arrived home, the bricks of our front stoop were emanating heat. The seller packaged the loaches well, including a few ice packs to keep things cold; those packs were completely thawed out. Upon getting the box inside and open, I could immediately tell that one loach had not survived the journey, with a second in questionable condition.
I began the usual process of introducing new fish to the pond: floating the bag for about thirty minutes so the water temperature in the bag could adjust to the pond’s temperature, then opening the bag and ladling in some pond water, allowing the bagged loaches to float for another fifteen minutes or so. When I added the water, I reached down to pull out the deceased one; in doing so, the other loaches began moving quite actively. Huzzah!
In the aquarium trade, sellers that ship fish almost always send an extra fish or two in case of any “D.O.A.s” (dead-on-arrivals). This seller was no different: they sent us four loaches, so with the loss, we still had the full contingent of three we purchased. Naturally, I would have loved for all four of them to have survived, but such are the risks.
As of the time of writing (Thursday morning), I have not found any loaches dead in our filter, so they seem to be doing well.
With loaches, we won’t see them too frequently. They largely live at the bottom of the pond, burrowing into the soil. That burrowing aerates the soil and keeps it fresh, releasing helpful nutrients into the water column. They’ll also eat detritus and other little dribs and drabs that drift down there.
They’re called “weather” loaches because they are responsive to changes in barometric pressure (indeed, they require a certain number of cold days in the winter and a certain shift in pressure to induce mating and breeding behaviors. If there is a sudden drop in pressure, they will (likely) surface. They also tend to surface after the other fish have fed.
We spent a little bit extra to get a golden color morph so we can see the loaches (and, less importantly, to match the aesthetic of our rosy red minnows) more frequently. They are really cool critters, something between a fish and an eel.
Today’s video examines the introduction of these humorous animals into our koi pond.
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With the summer heat bringing warmer water to the pond, the koi and the rosy red minnows have been more active than ever. As noted, our rosy reds have reproduced, hatching at least two batches of fries (baby fish). Dr. Wife first spotted the tiniest, rice-like babies swimming about a month ago, and those initial hatchlings are growing quickly into squiggly adolescence. You can see the eyes on the sides of their tiny bodies now, which is humorous—they have these kind of bug-eyes. In addition, we’re seeing more “grains of rice” swimming around.
The koi are also doing well. We’re up to feeding them about three times a day. Our koi food recommends five daily feedings at current water temperatures, but I find that the koi are good with two or three feedings. The pond is quieter in the mornings, so I rarely feed them before lunchtime; after lunch, though, the koi are hungry and ready to eat!
What’s fun is that the baby rosy reds will swim up and nibble on the koi feed right next to the massive koi! They don’t seem stressed out by the koi at all. The larger adults aren’t, either. I’m sure that our koi have nibbled on a rosy red from time to time by mistake, but it amuses me how even the tiniest babies will swim right into the middle of a koi feeding frenzy to get a nibble at some feed.
The pond is bursting with life. Dragonflies and other insects will dip down for a drink, and it’s cool seeing how they’ll use the surface tension of the water to rest on top of it while sipping. One time I accidentally started a lizard into the pond, and he skittered across the surface to the other side! The koi and rosy reds are likely eating any mosquito eggs and larvae that manage to get into the pond, and the always-running filter likely dissuades mosquitoes from laying eggs there in the first place. It’s such a beautiful little ecosystem.
Maintaining this pond and adding fish and snails to it has been such a blessing. The babies are confirmation that we’re doing something right: the original rosy reds were comfortable and safe and fed enough to lay eggs and bring them fruition. The babies swimming about brings us so much joy.
I particularly love how delighted Dr. Wife gets anytime we feed the fish. She has a lifelong fear of fish, but you wouldn’t know it; she’s even tried touching them! Her sister/my sister-in-law is shocked and amused, because Dr. Wife loves these little creatures. When I mentioned that some pond keepers will cull excess fish, she balked at that idea—so do I! We’re not anywhere near that point, but I’m already researching starting an indoor tank for some of our rosy reds, where I’d also like to introduce some non-color-morphed fathead minnows (rosy reds are just a color morph of the fathead minnow) to breed some cool colors (most will turn drab olive, but some will have little rosy speckles).
God Is Good! I hope our thankfulness to Him comes across in today’s fishy videos.
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I’ve been dedicating recent Wednesday posts to highlighting some of WordPress’s features, so I haven’t been running many Midweek Koi Pond Updates. However, we have big news from the pond: our rosy red minnows had babies!
Rosy red minnows are a color morph of the common fathead minnow, a popular baitfish that is found in freshwaters all over North America. The rosy red variety first appeared in the 1980s in Arkansas (I believe; at the time of writing, I can’t find where I read that—d’oh!), and the variety has become popular as a decorative fish in aquariums and ponds. It is still used widely as a baitfish, too.
Dr. Wife and I purchased our rosy red minnows from PetSmart back in the winter. The fish feed off of biofilm and other effluvia in the pond (and will also eat little bits of the kois’ food pellets), and help to manage algae while adding only minimally to the bioload of the pond.
They also reproduce very quickly. We started with an initial population of ten, then I added twenty more. I imagine some may have ended up as snacks for the koi, but a number of them have survived and thrived. As soon as the hot South Carolina summer survived, they laid eggs (which we never saw in the murky pond) and Dr. Wife spotted the first babies two Saturdays ago.
At the time, they were the size of a grain of rice. By last Saturday (when I’m writing this post—I’m working ahead!) they were bigger than they even appear in this video. They went from being tiny white little swimmers into being small, pinkish critters.
From what I can gather, we’re likely to get another batch of eggs at some point this summer; given that it appears this batch hatched three or four dozen, we’re looking at potentially having over 100 rosy red minnows in our pond. Again, my research indicates that even at these numbers, we’ll be fine in terms of bioload. Of course, we’re likely to see geometric growth, so at some point I’ll start giving rosy reds away or selling them locally as baitfish and pets. I’ll also eventually get a twenty-gallon tank and start raising some of them indoors, which should make for a nice little side project (one other goal is to catch some wild fathead minnows and let them breed with the rosy red color morphs, which will mostly see a return of the drab, olive-green coloring of the dominant gene, but will also produce some recessive rosy reds and—and this excites me—minnows with olive-green scales with pinkish spots).
Of course, the koi will likely thin the numbers a bit. For the most part, though, the koi have been ignoring the babies. We’ve seen Sunny, our big yellow koi, skim through the area where the minnows like to gather—the surface near where our cascading bog filter allows water to cycle back into the pond—and it appears he is sometimes picking up a rosy red snack—but there are so many of them, it’s probably beneficial for him to snack on a few. That said, one cool trait of rosy reds is that the fathers will guard egg clumps, and will even eat algae off of the surface of the eggs to protect them until they hatch.
What really makes me overjoyed about the babies (called “fries” in the fish world) is that it’s a sign that our pond is healthy. It also means that the rosy reds aren’t stressed out by the much larger koi, and are successfully reproducing. Of course, I also love how delighted Dr. Wife gets when she sees them.
Today’s video is probably already a bit dated, but I’ll continue to send along some more updates soon.
For now… it’s baby time!
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After a month of on again, off again composing—with a good chunk of “off-again” in there—I have finally finished composing “Japanese Trapdoor Snails.” I started the work on 15 April 2026 and wrapped it up late on the evening of Wednesday, 13 May 2026.
It’s an unusual piece, as snails are unusual creatures. I wanted to capture something mystical and contemplative—and, in a hackneyed kind of way, something vaguely Japanese—in the opening bars, with are a slow, flowing 5/4 time. I thought 5/4 fit the slow movements of snails, as if they need an extra beat to get where they’re going.
The “B” section, of sorts, shifts to 3/4 (after some shifting from 5/4 to 4/4) in the same tempo, with the flute moving in dotted quarter notes and the oboe moving in quarter notes. My goal here was to blur tonality and, again, to depict the kind of shuffling crawl of snails along the edges of a pond.
After a recapitulation that shortens one 4/4 phrase to 7/8, I launch into a lively 3/8 portion that has a sort of gypsy and/or Slavic feel to it. In retrospect, I think of this section as capturing the trudging lives of a Japanese Trapdoor Snails going about their never-ending business of pond cleaning. Note that I wasn’t quite sure how this portion fit thematically with the rest of the piece until after listening to it, which happens sometime—an idea pops into my head, I develop it, and then try to figure out if it should stay with that piece.
To be clear, I’m still not convinced it does fit, but I like the contrast and I think it gives some life to this otherwise contemplative and reflective piece.
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Finally—some new music for New Music Tuesday! I’m still working on “Japanese Trapdoor Snails,” but I took a quick aside yesterday to jot down a quick little piece.
You see, dear readers, the pond hobby creates an insatiable appetite for more aquatic critters. My next planned addition to the pond is a trio of weather (or “dojo”) loaches. These are cold-hardy bottom-dwellers that look like an eel and a catfish had a baby, but the baby is somehow cute and not a hideous monster.
Naturally, I had to write a trio depicting these odd but adorable (oddorable?) creatures, three of which I hope to add to the koi pond soon.
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Happy Tuesday, dear readers!
No New Music Tuesday today, I’m afraid. With the school year winding down, several aspects of the job are winding up as we enter into exam review season. I’m attempting to squeeze in one last mini-unit covering the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and European exploration in the span of three lessons, so my unstructured time has been spent putting together slides for those quite vast topics. We’ll see if I can speed run the biggest events of 1300-1600!
The point is not an in-depth analysis of these major movements, but to keep the students a taste before they head into United States History next year. The first part of United States History examines the political, social, and religious context of late medieval/early modern Europe, as that context is significant in the exploration and colonization of the Americas. I’d like the students to finish the “story” of World History in such a way that it dovetails with the “story” of United States History.
I’ve tinkered with my latest composition, “Japanese Trapdoor Snails,” slightly, but have hit a bit of a block with it. As with writer’s block, the solution is simply to write—in this case, music. To do that, though, I need to have a bit more unstructured time, and what I’ve had has been dedicated to more pressing matters.
