Tag: Memorable Monday

Memorable Monday Morning Movie Review: A Very Portly Christmas: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

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With Christmas Break looms large, I’m taking it a bit easier with the old blog.  I’ve seen some great—and not-so-great—movies lately, but they can wait a few weeks for 2024.

Instead, I thought I’d take a look back at a timeless Christmas classic of yesteryear, a film I reviewed along with Audre Myers and Ponty during the 2022 Christmas season.

That film, of course, is 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life.  It’s a film that is somehow more than a mere movie.  It’s a flick that can be judged and appreciated as a movie, of course, but it’s also one that transcends the medium, and is part of the whole Zeitgeist of Christmas.  It’s hard to separate it from the very notion of “Christmas.”

With that, here’s my review from last year:

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Memorable Monday Morning Movie Review: They Live (1988)

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Longtime readers know that I love John Carpenter‘s films.  Weird, funny, thought-provoking, action-packed, scary—they all have a certain “quality” that is quintessentially, uniquely Carpenter-esque.

So when my local cinema screened 1988’s They Live a couple of weekends ago, I naturally had to go.

I wrote an entire piece about They Live, entitled “They Live: Analysis and Review” back in 2019.  I rereading my original review, I find that I agree with most of my original summary and assessment, but I think my analysis was colored too heavily by the derring-do of the Trump Administration.

In viewing the film again, I’d still argue that it makes a compelling point about our worship of Efficiency and her consort, Productivity, at the expense of everything else (like God, family, friends, community, art, etc.).  Our elites will sacrifice everything to keep GDP growing, even if it means grinding us into a spiritually empty enslavement to mindless jobs and mindless entertainment—drudges in a machine that only wants to keep us mollified until the next deadening shift at the salt mines.

With that, here is 20 May 2019’s “They Live: Analysis and Review“:

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Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2023]!

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Another Labor Day—another day for eating hot dogs and chilling out around the house.  Other than some half-days and a professional development day, it’s the last holiday for yours portly until the insanely good Thanksgiving Break that I get now.

I’m on mild dog sitting duty for my neighbors, so I’m keeping it local this weekend.  I did quite a bit of driving (most of it floozy-related) in early-to-mid-August, so I’m looking forward to a little time at the house.

Looking back at prior year’s LD posts, it seems I did not make it to Florida as predicted last Labor Day.  It ended up being a weekend for some South Carolina-based adventures.

There are more adventures to come, just not this weekend.  This weekend is for the dogs—both canine and hot.

With that, here is “Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2022]!“:

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Memorable Monday^2: Away in a Manger

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Good old Ponty is under-the-weather and was unable to submit his pick for Best Movies of All Time, so I’m reaching into the archives to pull out some Christmas merriment this Monday morning.

I decided to look back at a post about “Away in a Manger,” a Christmas carol that has become one of my favorites (maybe Ponty and I should do a countdown of the Top Ten Best Christmas Carols, but I have a feeling it’d get pretty redundant pretty quickly).  My Middle School Music Ensemble played this piece on the Christmas Concert, but we put it in 4/4 time and gave it a groovy bass line (the same riff from the Poison cover of the Loggins and Messina tune “Your Mama Don’t Dance“).

It was a fun twist on the original, but even though the Poison riff version was my idea, I prefer the original in its sweet, lilting 3/4—the perfect time signature for a peaceful lullaby.

Regardless of how it’s played—or which of its many variants are sung—it’s a beautiful little song about the Birth of Jesus.

With that, here is “Memorable Monday: Away in a Manger“:

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Memorable Monday: Cyber Monday Musings

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It’s Cyber Monday here in the United States, yet another day to hawk my wares to my unwitting—uh, I mean “loyal”—readers.

Here’s the big one:  the Kindle edition of my book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is on sale for just $0.99 through midnight (EST) this Thursday, 2 December 2022!

And the paperback version is the perfect gift!  Why give someone a boring, predictable gift, when you can give them a collection of unsolvable, absurdist noir detective stories to read around the yule log?  Enjoy egg nog-enriched guffaws as your friends read mystifying tales of hyper-sleuthing.

Give the Gift of Weird this Christmas—like crudely painted primitivist artwork!

While you’re at it, why not head over to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1/month to unlock all of my SubscribeStar Saturday posts.  For $5/month, you get fresh doodles every Sunday, as well as other random bonuses.

Well, you get the idea.  Support yours portly on this feast of savings!

With that, here is 2 December 2019’s “Cyber Monday Musings“:

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Memorable Monday^2: Thanksgiving Week!

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Ah, yes—the glorious freedom of Thanksgiving Break.  Those of us in the education biz are spoiled with constant holidays, workdays, days off, etc.  Sure, I work twelve-hour days several times per week, and I can’t go to the bathroom whenever I want to (I’ve taught for hours with an urgent need for relief—you just get used to it) during the school day, but all this bogus time off makes up for it.  I can hold in my urine for a few hours in exchange for a week of indolence.

Back in the old days, we just got Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving.  Ah, what benighted times!  Around the time I was in high school—the early 2000s—school districts realized that everyone was taking off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to travel (not my family, but those bourgeois ones with—gasp!—family in other States), so they granted us Wednesday off.

Naturally, everyone then started taking off the Tuesday and even the Monday before Thanksgiving.  Last year, my little private school relented, and ever since we’ve enjoyed the entire week off.

So, what is a portly pudge like myself to do?  Go to the doctor and the dentist, of course!  ‘Tis the season for getting in all of those annoying but necessary appointments.  I also desperately need a haircut.  Yours portly is looking more and more like Bigfoot every day.

But I digress.  We’ll be back with Monday Morning Movie Reviews in December.  There will be some original posts this week, but also quite a few reblogs—it is a week for rest, after all.  But The Portly Politico will still be hitting your inboxes every morning ~6:30 AM EST (or whenever the WordPress Happiness Engineers decide to post them, as apparently a simple “schedule post” function is too difficult to implement flawlessly; posting at 6:45 AM is not 6:30 AM, WordPress!).

So, curl up with a good book, your favorite device, and some classic TPP leftovers—the best part of Thanksgiving!

With that, here is 23 November 2021’s “Memorable Monday: Thanksgiving Week!“:

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Memorable Monday: Happy Halloween!

The Portly Politico4 Comments

It’s Halloween!  Sure, it’s also Monday, probably the lamest possible day for such a mirthful holiday, but let’s hope that just improves Monday, rather than drags down Halloween.

For newer readers, Memorable Monday posts are the equivalent of the weekly TBT posts, in which I republish an old post, adding on an additional layer of commentary.  The key difference is that Memorable Mondays are far rarer than TBTs, as the former only pop up on special occasions or holidays (like today!), while TBTs are every Thursday.

That brought up a bit of a mild conundrum:  this post has been reblogged twice as “TBT: Happy Halloween!” and, last year, as “TBT^2: Happy Halloween!.”  I didn’t want to copy-paste those posts and the original and make them part of Memorable Monday, because it would throw off the exponent (in 2023, it’d be “TBT^4” if I reblog these posts on a Thursday).  I also wanted to avoid some unwieldy future title like, “TBT^4: Memorable Monday: TBT^2: Happy Halloween!”

Of course, that’s all tedious, mildly autistic, inside baseball.  I’m sure some of you can relate to this desire to maintain an excessive sense of order to everything, but others are probably wondering, “What does this have to do with Halloween?”

Well, not very much.  Let’s just say I’m excited to spend the evening watching spooky movies and handing out candy with my dog.

With that, here is 31 October 2019’s “Happy Halloween!“:

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Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2022]!

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Ah, yes—Labor Day.  The last day off (for yours portly, anyway) until the glory that is Thanksgiving Break.

I’ve been writing a brief, annual Labor Day post since 2019, and it’s interesting to see what has changed (and what hasn’t) in that time.  I don’t play video games nearly as much as I used to (or as much I’d like to), and my life has gotten much more interesting (read: busier) and better since 2019.  Even if Western civilization is collapsing all around us and we’re living in a banana republic, I can at least enjoy and appreciate God’s Blessings as the ship goes down.  And, hey, it could be worse!

Speaking of cautiously optimistic declinism, Labor Day seems to be a day immune to progressive chicanery.  It’s the product of radical labor unionism and the socialistic tendencies thereof, so it should be safe.  Of course, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia, so if labor suddenly falls out of favor for being too “white” or not “woke” enough, then I suppose we could end up changing it to “BIPOC Exploitation Memorial Day” or some such nonsense.  Columbus Day sure isn’t safe.

Well, whatever.  I’m not worried about the Leftist whiners today.  I’ve spent the weekend (presumably) in sunny Florida, enjoying getting to know my girlfriend’s family better and living it up.

With that, here’s “Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2021]!“:

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TBT: Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico2 Comments

As I wrote yesterday, today I’m taking my students to a music festival, where they will play and sing solo selections for judges.  They get a score based on their performance, as well as useful feedback from the judges about tone, pitch, articulation, musicality, and the rest.  It’s a very fun day, but also a very busy one.

As I noted in yesterday’s post, it always seems to coincide with one of the busiest seasons of the year, when time constrains are at their most stringent and intense.  Almost everyone reading this blog understands there is an ebbing and flowing to life:  you might enjoy one (even two!) weeks of routine, maybe even a bit of a lighter schedule than usual.

Then—BAM!—everything comes due, breaks, and goes haywire at once.  As my friend and regular reader Barnard Fife once told me, “trouble is like grapes:  it comes in bunches.”  Amen, BF.

The original post behind this threat, “Monday Steakhouse Blues,” was written at a particularly tough time for yours portly.  I found myself without Internet and putting in very long hours (and this was well before I had twenty-ish students for private lessons).  I spent a weary Monday evening eating steak at Western Sizzlin’ and writing a blog post on my phone.  The steak was good, but everything else at the time was pretty miserable.

Thank God for better organization, a greater sense of perspective (this is just life, and it will pass), and for 10 milligrams of citalopram every morning.  Gotta be thankful for the little things.

The “Memorable Monday” version of this post, which I have also reblogged below, went live the week before everything in South Carolina shut down due to the dawning of The Age of The Virus.  In other words, it was the last week of The Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago.  There are many things I miss about The Before Times, but a silver-lining of The Age of The Virus was that it saved me from the intense burnout I was experiencing at the time.

With that, here is 9 March 2020’s “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues” (on a Thursday!):

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Memorable Monday: MLK Day 202[2]

The Portly Politico4 Comments

In lieu of the usual movie review this week, I’m taking advantage of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to lighten my blogging load slightly.  I’ll have another Midweek Mad Scientist Movie Madness post for $3 and up subscribers on Wednesday, so if you want your weekly fix of filmic schlock, check back then.  An aunt of mine has requested a movie review, and as soon as I figure out how to watch the flick, I’ll be reviewing it one Monday (I’m looking out for you, Aunt Marilyn).

After a week of virtual learning and lots of time alone (well, with Murphy, at least), I’m eager to get out of the house, but I will likely spend today prepping for the abbreviated school week and getting the house in order.  I’m thankful for the day off, but I’d probably appreciate it more—as I did in January 2020—if I were utterly exhausted—as I was in January 2020.  I think slightly less appreciation is a worthwhile trade-off, though!

This post from 2020 delves into some of the complexity of the Reverend Dr. King’s legacy, and warns against excessive idolization of historical figures—even martyrs.  Much of the inspiration from the stories of Christian Saints, for example, derives from their human frailty.  Even the great Saint Augustine, when praying to God for control over his lustful nature, prayed, “Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.”

From the evidence, it appears that King participated in some really debauched, even evil, sexual practices.  The FBI’s suspicions that he may have been are Marxist were probably justified to some extent, even if the FBI treated him shabbily and is a despicable tool of oppression.  If King were alive today, I’d wager he’d be knee-deep in the CRT foolishness that his famous “I Have a Dream” speech explicitly rejects.

Yet from this extremely imperfect vessel came ringing declarations of spiritual equality.  Regardless of our race, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.  That is the part of King’s legacy we should celebrate, while remembering he was a deeply flawed individual.

In other words, let us put our faith and trust in Christ, not in men.

With that, here is January 2020’s “MLK Day 2020“:

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