The cruise bug has latched onto me with its luxurious pincers and won’t let go. Dr. Wife and I enjoyed an amazing honeymoon on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, the Explorer of the Seas, which visited the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas. It was my first cruise, and I loved it.
Naturally, I took the opportunity to film some silly YouTube Shorts, three of which I’m sharing up today:
In my never-ending quest for lo-fi, low-effort YouTube (and blog) content, I make the most of whatever limited assets and time I have to churn out highly-compressed but—I hope—charming content for the masses.
Such is the case with today’s post. I made this video with just one picture I took with my iPhone SE’s camera (mainly to show Dr. Fiancée that I was playing as Blackbeard the Pirate in Civilization VII). I recorded the voiceover with the Voice Memo app on my phone, and used iMovie (again, on my phone) to put in the picture (three times) against the voice message.
Apparently, when I send the finished video file to Telegram, it deeply compresses the video quality (although I think it does the same if I save the video to my phone and upload it to YouTube from there). The most it can muster is 360p, which might as well be a VHS recording that I’ve sloppily converted to a digital format.
Whatever the case, the video was a fun experiment. I hope you agree!
Lately yours portly has been losing weight (I’m down about thirty-one pounds since July 2025), so I’ll often search for calorie counts for unusual food items to make sure I’m not going to blow my entire caloric budget for the day with one ill-considered snack. That has sent me down some gut-bustingly hilarious rabbit holes, where I will ask Google’s Gemini AI insane questions like, “how many calories would be in a four-pound baked potato, into which I cut canals and holes to increase fat absorption, and which I soaked overnight in pure goose fat; then, I bore holes into either end and insert luscious Italian sausage in the middle of the potato, after which I wrap it in thick-cut bacon and deep-fry it in beef tallow?”
The AI then usually scolds me for how unhealthy consuming such a sumptuous, greasy feast would be, at which point I try to double-down on the absudity.
Clearly, yours portly has an odd (and probably unhealthy, given my medical history) relationship with food. That strange obsession has manifested itself on my YouTube page.
Don’t worry, dear readers: I’m not a “lolcow,” consuming vast quantities of food for the sick and twisted pleasure of a hate-watching audience. I just like to do what every mother warns against: I play with my food.
Today’s videos are examples of that tendency to elevate food into absurdist humor:
Yours portly is worn out after the second week of school, so I’m keeping it quick today: I’m sharing a video of some baked potatoes—and the recipe for making them yourself.
Yours portly is trying to drop some pounds (so far, so good!) for the wedding, which means I think about food more than normally (and normally, I think about it a lot!):
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Yours portly loves food, and if my constantly fluctuating weight is any indication, I have a contentious relationship with it. Food for us fatties is like a narcotic to the addict: we know we shouldn’t eat so much of it, but it numbs us to the harsh realities of life. Conquering the hold food has over us is an eternal struggle.
So here I have some classic posts about food (or the lack thereof):
Bon Appétit!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
With school back in session, I’m enjoying sandwiches on a semi-regular basis again. I am a great lover of the sandwich, perhaps the most ingenious form factor for delivering vegetables, proteins, carbs, and fats in a handy, handheld package (pizza and burritos also deserve kudos in this regard).
So it was that I thought I might look back at some sandwich related posts:
Happy Sunday—and Happy Eating!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
On Monday, America celebrated its 246th birthday. I don’t know what the word is for “250th” (bisesquicentennial?), but that will be fun when it arrives in 2026. I’m still hoping to make it to the tricentennial in 2076, but I’m not holding my breath—I’ll be ninety-one-and-a-half (maybe I’ll blog about it—ha!)! I also imagine the United States of that time will be as unrecognizable to us as the United States of today is unrecognizable to someone at the bicentennial, much less the centennial observance.
America is not in the best of times, but victories abound nonetheless. Sure, prices are through the rough and shortages seem to be increasingly commonplace. But babies have a chance at life now, and our most basic constitutional rights continue—for the time being—to be upheld, albeit imperfectly (we have what are essentially political prisoners wasting away in jail without a trial because they were invited to walk around the US Capitol Building).
Regardless, I’m proud to be an American, and I’m thankful to live in this country. It’s not perfect, but it’s home.
With that, here is “TBT^16: Happy Birthday, America!“:
Everyone reading this post has noticed their grocery and gas bills shoot up over the past few months. These are not the result of the war in The Ukraine, despite the mewling protestations of the Biden Administration to the contrary. In part, they are the result of extended lockdowns during The Age of The Virus, and the subsequent disruption to the world’s “just-in-time” production model. Shutting everything down immediately probably didn’t do much to stop the spread of The Virus, but it definitely stopped the spread of goods, and the production thereof.
But these shortages seemed largely academic until recently. Sure, you’d hear about them here and there, and it was impossible to buy toilet paper for awhile, but other than a few panic-induced shortages, you could pretty much get what you needed, even if you had to pay double for it.
Now, for the first time since the very early days of The Age of The Virus, I’m getting seriously concerned about looming shortages—and not just a few missing luxury items from store shelves (not that toilet paper is a luxury item, but there are always substitutes for that), but the basic necessities of life.
Well, it’s not quite Valentine’s Day yet, but I thought it would be worth looking back to 2020’s Valentine’s Day post, which was mostly a collection of various blog posts and reflections on the holiday.
I’m still wondering how Jay Nordlinger gets to travel the world writing pithy little observations about violin concertos and the like. How do I position myself to take his place when he finally retires or kicks the bucket? Who else is going to critique all those free concerts in Vienna?
But I digress. The Season of Love is upon us, and I suspect restaurants will be packed this weekend with lovers canoodling over their cannoli (or, in the case of the high number of breakups on Valentine’s Day than average, crying into their kishka). Sounds like another weekend of frozen pizza and spaghetti for yours portly.
So, here’s some great stuff from better writers to celebrate your Valentine’s Day Weekend. It’s 14 February 2020’s “Phone it in Friday VI: Valentine’s Day“:
The Portly Politico 