The Joy of Romantic Music

This semester started with two weeks of online learning (of which today is the last day before students and teachers return to campus after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), so it’s been an unusually slow start to the already sleepy January term.  However, that hasn’t stopped my music classes from listening to great music; indeed, we’re now covering what is perhaps my favorite period in the history of Western music:  the Romantic Era.

While I adore Baroque and classical composers and their works, Romantic music builds upon the forms established in those eras, stretching and expanding upon them to reach new heights of emotional intensity and musical expressiveness.  The music of the Romantic composers delights with its musical exploration of the supernatural, the mysterious, the Gothic, and the nationalistic.

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TBT: Warrior for Life

South Carolina has a reputation for orneriness—we were the first State to secede from the Union in 1860, after all, and threatened to do it nearly thirty years earlier, during the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33—and it seems our Catholic priests are particularly prone to use their pulpits to prescribe some red-pillsPriest Jeffrey Kirby delivered a fiery homily warning that with Biden’s election, the Church faces real persecution in the days ahead, and scolded parishioners who cast their votes for Biden as betraying their Catholic faith:

Priests and preachers usually shy away from overtly political sermons, but we’re overdue for some Truth.  We’re not discussing Democrats versus Republicans anymore; we’re talking about electing Evil—those that flaunt their desire to slay the unborn—and even the recently born!—and celebrate every opportunity they can force us to accept another progressive indignity.  Trannies reading storybooks to four-year olds isn’t a “blessing of liberty,” per wincing, politically-correct, noodle-wristed, mainstream Evangelical David French—it’s an assault on our values and our culture.  If they can make us accept something so ridiculous and patently unnatural—wicked!—then it puts that wedge in the door to pry it open to all manner of government-sanctioned evil.

Father Kirby’s bold sermon reminded me of another great warrior for Christ—and for Life:  Father Robert “Bob” Morey.  Father Bob is less bombastic in his denunciation of evil, but he is nonetheless a true warrior for his Faith.  In October 2019, Father Bob declined to give Joe Biden Holy Communion due to Biden’s pro-abortion—pro-infanticide, I should write—stance.

As such, I thought it would be a good time to look at Father Bob’s bold stance for life in this week’s TBT.  Here is October 2019’s “Warrior for Life“:

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Special Election Day 2021

Well, here it is—my second special election run for Lamar Town Council.  Polls open at 7 AM and close at 7 PM at Lamar Town Hall.

This election is a special election to fill a vacancy, the result of another resignation from Town Council.  Lang Howell, the Mayor Pro Tempore, stepped down, triggering the special election today.  I paid my $17.50 filing fee back in November, and am the only declared candidate on the ballot.

That said, in last night’s Town Council meeting, Mayor Darnell Byrd-McPherson noted that a young college student, Keon Mack, indicated just yesterday his intent to run as a write-in candidate.

Regular readers will recall that this similar tactic was used—successfully—to defeat myself and another filed candidate in a 14 July 2020 special election race.  Some churches in town, heavily inclined demographically in one direction, fielded a last-minute candidate, Mary Ann Mack, who won a stunning upset victory, winning 86-28-23 (Mack-Cook-Segars).

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Lazy Sunday XCV: The Best of Lazy Sunday

When I began writing this post, I thought it was the 100th edition of Lazy Sunday.  However, I double-checked the long list of “Other Lazy Sunday Installments” that I put at the end of each of these posts, and after applying the “Numbered list” option, realized I was off by five!

I traced the error back to the seventy-fifth Lazy Sunday post, “Forgotten Posts, Volume IV.”  I mislabeled it as the eightieth post.  So I’ve gone through and corrected the Roman numerals in the list following this post.  I won’t go back and change it in every post, but at some point I’m going to correct the titles of those posts, though the URLs will remain unchanged.

That will be a tedious task, but one worth doing for the benefit of accuracy (and to placate my own desire for fastidious organization).  I was excited to celebrate 100 Lazy Sundays, but it’ll be able to wait another five weeks.

But what won’t wait was my original plan—to look back at the “best” of Lazy Sunday based on pageviews.  It is Lazy Sunday, after all—why put forth the extra effort?

In addition to the best Lazy Sundays based on pageview, I’ll also highlight a couple of “Honorable Mention” posts.

I’ve enjoyed putting together Lazy Sunday posts, which give me a bit of a break on Sundays from writing full-fledged posts, but also allows me to organize some favorite posts thematically.  I’ve written so much over the past couple of years—over half-a-million words—that it’s easy to forget about posts.  Indeed, I routinely stumble upon posts I have no recollection of writing; Lazy Sunday gives me an opportunity to catch up with my literary red-headed stepchildren.

With that, here are “The Best of Lazy Sunday“:

  • Lazy Sunday XXX: Trump, Part I” (64 pageviews) – Thirty Lazy Sundays seemed like a pretty good milestone to go bigly with some posts about GEOTUS Trump.  That was late 2019, when things were looking good for Trump and America.  What a glorious age it was.
  • Lazy Sunday XIV: Gay Stuff” (55 pageviews) – The provocative title of this Lazy Sunday surely helps make it one of the more popular installments.  There was a great deal of loafer-lightened hysteria in Summer 2019, with gay Leftists sashaying their way tyrannically through the body politic, trying to get everyone with normal sexuality deplatformed.  Then the progressives came to prefer black destruction in 2020 to booty-shorted hijinks, and the gay mafia doesn’t seem quite as active these days.
  • Lazy Sunday IV: Christianity” (43 pageviews) – One of the earliest Lazy Sundays, looking back at some posts about The One True Faith.
  • Lazy Sunday XI: Walls” (37 pageviews) – I wrote a great deal about walls and border security in the earlier days of the blog.  Read all about these stony securers of national sovereignty here!
  • Lazy Sunday V: Progressivism, Part I” (36 pageviews) – To understand the issues facing the West today, conservatives must understand their opponents—the progressives.  Indeed, I think I write more about them than I do about us.  I have to be careful—if one stares too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back.  Gulp!

Honorable Mention:  “Lazy Sunday XLIX: Family” (35 pageviews) – I’ve always enjoyed writing about the family—which I think is the true basic building block of society, not the individual.  Our obsession with individuality—which, as an eccentric weirdo, I very much prize—has served, in part, to undermine the importance of the family.  It, not the individual, should be the focus of our society.  Anything we can do to support family formation and to keep families intact should be encouraged.

First Lazy Sunday:  “Lazy Sunday: APR Pieces” (30 pageviews) – The very first Lazy Sunday, this one featured some posts I wrote for American Patriot Radio, which I believe is now defunct, but the posts are still there (I just checked).  They were written during those early, exciting days of the Trump Administration in 2017, when every day brought some fresh victory of sanity and conservatism, and when Trump still had a ragtag team of outsiders spitting out policy reforms one after the other.  Talk about a great time to be alive!

That’s it for this not-quite-100 edition of Lazy Sunday.  Now to get all the editions from seventy-five on fixed.  Ugh….

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Sunday Doodles V, 8 December 2019 - Sophisticated Baby

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Spirit of 1776

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.

Disclaimer:  I do not endorse violence as a means to achieving political ends in normal circumstances.  That said, I reject the claim that “violence never solves anything.”  The vast annals of human history suggest the opposite is largely the case—violence has been the resort—sometimes final, sometimes not—to resolve any number of problems.  Our entire political system rests on the implicit use of violent force towards upholding the common good—and protecting those unable to protect themselves.  Jesus Christ died—quite violently!—for our sins, offering us ultimate salvation forever.

Further, our entire nation is founded on a last-resort to violence to secure American liberty:  the American Revolution.  Brave men pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors to secure liberty and to defend their rights.  Over 4000 did make the ultimate sacrifice—and many, many more since then—to win and secure our freedom.  Sometimes some turbulence is necessary—as the Left has told us all of last year as BLM destroyed cities—to secure liberty.

That’s an uncomfortable concept—I don’t necessarily like it, and I am sad to see it has come to that—but it’s the foundation of our Republic.  I sincerely pray for reconciliation and healing, as did John Dickinson prior to the American Revolution, but I am not optimistic given Democratic control of the organs of power.  The storming of the Capitol will be used as a pretext—it already is—to oppress and imprison conservatives.  At such a point, the remaining options begin to vanish.

I am not calling for or advocating violence in any form—but I’m afraid it’s coming nevertheless.  Please pray with me for reconciliation—true reconciliation, not the dictator’s peace of bending the knee to Leftist insanity—and prepare for troubled times ahead.

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Mask Mandates Come for Lamar

I know, I know—everyone wants to read and talk about the storming of our metaphorical Bastille.  I’m going to cover that in-depth in this weekend’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, not because I know it is the event of the decade—and will therefore crassly milk it for subscribers—but because my own observations are so tantalizingly spicy, I have to hide them behind a paywall.  Believe it or not, $1 is apparently a major hurdle.

Instead, I’m going to focus on a bit local draconianism that I will hopefully soon be able to address head-on:  my small town of Lamar has adopted a mask ordinance.  Given our current Town Council, I’m surprised it took this long.

The ordinance, dated 14 December 2020 and effective 4 January 2021—but only received in water bills on 7 January 2021—is entitled “REQUIRING INDIVIDUALS TO WEAR FACE COVERINGS IN RETAIL AND FOODSERVICE ESTABLISHMENTS, AND MATTERS RELATED THERETO.”  It features a number of “WHEREAS” justifications, mostly the “recommendations of public health experts.”  It then lists the “Use of Face Coverings” in Section 1, detailing that face coverings must be worn indoors at stores and restaurants, etc., with plenty of opportunities to not wear a mask listed in Section 2, “Exemptions”—religious reasons, dental cleanings, etc.

The penalties for infractions—detailed in Sections 3 and 4—are $25 for individuals and $100 for businesses that fail to require employees to wear masks.  Section 3 seems laughably unenforceable in a town that has maybe three police officers—and just a recipe for another unpleasant interaction between otherwise law-abiding citizens and police.  Section 4 is particularly onerous, though, as it forces private companies to force their employees to wear masks, or face daily $100 fines.

Granted, most business establishments have already bent the knee and have bought into the mask hysteria.  In my mind, though, that makes the mask mandate even more unnecessary:  if Dollar General is making me wear a mask to buy a $1.26 loaf of bread-based loaf product anyway, why does the Town Council need to ladle an extra dollop of self-righteous scolding?

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TBT: Dawn of a Decade

It’s the first Thursday of 2021, so here we are with the first TBT of the year!  Fittingly, I’m looking back to the first post of 2020, “Dawn of Decade.”  As I noted at the time, the decade really began on 1 January 2021, so I suppose this throwback post works even better now.

In looking back at this post, it’s sobering to consider how much difference a year can make.  At the end of this post, I wrote, “Predictions being what they are—extremely unreliable—I’ll make a bold one:  2020 is going to be a great year.”

Yikes!  Talk about missing the mark big time.  Of course, on 1 January 2020, everything was going pretty well, at least for yours portly.  Sure, Trump was facing a sham impeachment, but the economy was swingin’.  I’d just come off my best year financially in terms of musical proceeds—enough to pay cash for my plucky 2017 Nissan Versa Note (a fitting model for a music teacher), and was booking some gigs at fun new venues.

Then, of course, The Virus changed everything, possibly forever.  Despite that, I still had a great year—reconnecting with friends and family; traveling far more extensively than normal; and diving more into my love of music.  It was just a very different year than I anticipated.

At the end of least year’s post, I included a word total for the year 2019 (which now WordPress tells me is slightly higher than I reported originally:  232,348 words total for 2019), so I’ll do the same for 2020.  In 2020, I wrote 253,377 words.  Assuming a page of double-text, size-12, Times New Roman font typing is roughly 300 words per page, that comes out to a whopping 844.59 pages of writing.

Granted, some of that is from TBT posts like this one, but the takeaway for me is that it’s time to compile some essays into ebooks.  Cha-ching!

With that, here is 1 January 2020’s “Dawn of a Decade“:

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The Devil Went Down to Georgia

The results are coming in from the two Georgia Senate run-offs, and it looks like the Democrats (at the time of writing) have secured one US Senate seat, and are poised—thanks to some last-minute ballot-printing, no doubt—to win a second.  Raphael Warnock, the black minister who hates the military, defeated Kelly Loeffler.  Jon Ossoff, a progressive’s progressive (he attended Atlanta’s incredibly Leftist Paideia School), holds a razor-thin lead over David Perdue.  I’m sure Stacey Abrams will manufacture the necessary votes.

Of course, the Democratic victories—which will give the Democrats narrow control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency come Biden the Usurper’s inauguration later this month—rest squarely at Georgia Republicans’ feet.  Governor Kemp’s unwillingness to uphold the integrity of the presidential election demoralized conservative voters—why vote if the system is rigged, and your own party won’t fight to fix it?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: 2021 Goals and Predictions

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.

A new year has sprung, which means it’s time for every blogger, commentator, talking head, professional wag, and tin-foil hat prognosticator to make wild predictions for the coming year.

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that we are very bad at predicting future events.  I scoffed at the idea that The Virus would ever become anything more than a minor nuisance in our daily lives.  Now we live in a regime dominated by public health tyrants and their shrieking, useful-idiot toadies.

Nevertheless, you’re paying good money for conjecture, innuendo, and false hope, so here are my predictions (and some personal and blog goals) for 2021:

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