I finally groped my way up to the attic (my ankle is healed enough to allow it now) and pulled down the Christmas tree I purchased a few years ago. It was well past time. I still have a couple of Halloween decorations hanging up—yeesh!
Being one to never let a good thing go to waste, I decided to take some pictures of my tree, as well as make a video showcasing the little guy in all his multicolored glory.
Today is the day of our big Christmas Concert at school. It’s incredibly fun and incredibly stressful, but if everything has gone according to plan, it should go smoothly. It’s worth it to see the kids singing and playing and having a good time.
As I’ve grown older and, arguably, more professional (and almost certainly more ornery and ill-tempered), I’ve scaled back a bit of the theatricality and bombast of the Christmas Concert to something a bit more manageable. Gone are the days of singing while standing on a piano (I did that once, years ago). I also strive to make the concert focused on the kids and Jesus.
One big change this year is that our Dance and Choral students won’t be performing, because they had their performances as part of the Middle School Play last Friday. The Foreign Language Students will still get up there and belt out Christmas tunes in various languages.
I’ll be doing a full write-up one Saturday (possibly tomorrow) covering it, but for today, just pray for yours portly. I’m confident it will be a good concert, I just gotsta get through it!
As a preview, here’s what my students are performing:
Merry Christmas!
—TPP
In revisiting my 2019 review of 1988’s They Live, I looked into the short story that served as the source material for John Carpenter‘s iconic film: Ray Nelson’s “Eight O’Clock in the Morning.” The story is only six pages long, but it’s an excellent example of early 1960s science fiction.
The following is an adaption of an e-mail I sent to paid subscribers on 1 August 2023. I’m working hard to provide quality content on a daily basis, and am hoping to increase my subscribers. There are real financial costs associated with maintaining The Portly Politico, and ad revenue does not come close to covering those costs. Subscriptions are what keep the blog self-sustaining; without them, it would require a substantial financial outlay from yours portly to keep the blog going.
There is also a substantial amount of time that goes into maintaining the blog. It takes hours each week to write, edit, and promote the blog and my related ventures. Subscriptions certainly help financially, yes, but they also motivate me to keep going. I want to provide a quality product in exchange for your hard-earned dollars. It is difficult, at times, to churn out post after post, day after day.
As conservatives, we should support conservative creators. The Left is eating our lunch in the culture wars (well, they were until everyone started waking up in the last couple of years) in large part because they support their own. Maybe it’s not me you choose to support, but I would be humbled to receive your support. Remember, Ben Shapiro, Turning Point, Dennis Prager, etc., etc., have plenty of resources already.
As the below e-mail/post relates, I am a good steward of the money sent my way. I don’t blow it on fancy parties or glossy promos. I use it to maintain the blog and to obtain necessary supplies, and occasionally to commission works from other creators for the blog.
Thank you for taking the time to read this appeal. Even if you are not in a place to subscribe, please forward this message to others who might be interested. Every little bit helps.
Regards,
TPP
The first “week” of the new school years is nearly in the books, and yours portly is probably a puddle of exhaustion by this point. After a summer of sleeping in late, taking afternoon naps, and sitting around in air-conditioning, getting back on the move is certainly good for my physical health, but not necessarily for my sleep-deprived mind. Will I finally develop healthy habits during the school year? Probably not.
But what better time (and pretext) for another installment of Phone it in Friday: YouTube Roundup Edition? I’ve actually got quite a bit of new stuff on my YouTube channel, to which you should definitely subscribe (I know for many readers, “subscribe” is a dirty word—God forbid we support our favorite content creators!—but trust me, it’s totally free to subscribe to my YouTube channel).
So, all preambles and bitterness aside, here are some of my recent uploads:
Don’t be alarmed: it’s Thursday. I’ve “thrown back” to this classic edition of Phone it in Friday twice before, and even though The Age of The Virus is now over, it’s worth remembering the massive social and economic costs that came from the years of lockdowns.
The line from the Left now is, “oops, sorry, we overreacted, but we can let bygones be bygones, yeah?” Forgiveness is important, but it’s also important to realize how self-righteous busybodies with an untrusting faith in “science” berated all of us into wearing diapers over our faces and putting kids in online classes for two years.
Masks don’t work. If you can smell a tangy fart through an N95 mask, viruses can get through. About the only sensible advice anyone received during The Age of The Virus was to wash our hands regularly.
Yet we turned our civil and medical liberties over to a handful of unelected “public health” bureaucrats based on the flimsiest of information. Granted, those first “two weeks to flatten the curve” were scary, because we knew so little, but in hindsight, it looks like an attempt to see how much the American people would put up with before we revolted. The answer, sadly, was quite a lot.
One other note: I appreciate doctors for their training, though my faith in them has always been equivocal at best. But the real problem seems to be nurses and public health officials. The former is a profession that seems to attract its fair share of self-important nut jobs, and who hasn’t known a nurse who insists she knows better than the doctor?
The latter are people who couldn’t hack it as either a doctor or a nurse, so they got a relatively new degree (I first heard of people majoring in public health only about fifteen years ago) that somehow grants them enormous power to curtail individual liberties in the name of “public” health.
That’s a scary Pandora’s Box: where do we draw the line? I imagine there are all sorts of personally harmful but socially benign health choices that deviously creative public health officials could spin into activity that must be stopped in the name of “public health.” Even when we knew that masks did nothing—I remember folks saying, “Well, the mask doesn’t protect you, but it protects other people,” which makes no sense at all—it was always couched in terms of helping other people. It was the same way with The Vaccine—“if you don’t get this shot, you’re endangering others!” Malarkey.
With that, here is “TBT^2: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus“:
June is nearly over, and July starts tomorrow. I’ll be hitting the road for a week in Indianapolis to visit my older brother, which means I’ll probably get another poorly-selling travel book out of the deal—maybe something like Midwestern Musings, Washingtonian Woes. Of course, I need to finish my series on the wild, stressful trip to Washington, D.C., from this March. For whatever reason, I just haven’t had it in me to continue writing that saga, even though the best (and, at the time they occurred, the worst) parts are yet to come.
But I digress. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s another edition if YouTube Roundup, in which I showcase some of my recent YouTube uploads. Feel free to follow my YouTube page. Watch a video, like it, leave a comment—whatever you’d like. I upload approximately once a week, sometimes more.
Thanks to the gentle prodding of Audre Myers, I’ve decided to upload videos actively to my YouTube channel. I’ve had this channel for almost fifteen years (apparently), but only used it to upload a short video from the video game Spore in 2008 and some footage of my old group Brass to the Future playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Independence Day 2010.
I’ll mostly upload original music. There are plenty of songs I love to cover, but uploading those covers to YouTube without obtaining permission from the original songwriters is technically a violation of copyright law. I’m a big believer in the protection of intellectual property, and I’d rather not run afoul of the YouTube police, at least not for something legitimate.
That said, readers are welcome to cover my tunes, just let me know about it.
So, I thought I’d periodically post a digest of some recent uploads for readers who want to dive deeper into my music—for free!
Saturn is my favorite planet (after Earth, of course). Who can resist those beautiful rings, and the clear demarcation of the Cassini Division? There’s also something otherworldly and mysterious about it. Just listen to the opening bars of “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets:
Years ago I wrote a song, “The Rings of Saturn,” which has never enjoyed a formal recording. That’s a shame, because it is one of my better songs (I write with all humility). It will have to grace an edition of Open Mic Adventures soon. The header image for my Bandcamp page is the a picture of the planet.
Needless to say, I like Saturn a lot. I sometimes image what it would be like living on one of its moons, or if we’ll someday have mining colonies on the larger bits of icy space-stuff in its rings.
Well, it seems those beautiful rings are disappearing. Fortunately, as with all things astronomical, none of us will be around to see them disappear entirely.
LEGO has gone woke. Actually, they’ve been woke for awhile, but they released an “A-Z of Awesome” of fan-built sets to push wacky gender ideology on their consumers. A host of LEGO fans with alphabet soup “identities” built the sets (which I doubt will be made available as purchasable sets, because most of them are not that good or creative).
If child grooming among the LGBTQIA2+etc. community isn’t a thing, as our pedophilic elites insist (methinks too much), why are these queer activists pushing so hard to market “alternative lifestyles” to children? In the past we could at least isolate this indoctrination to public schools. Sure, a four-year old might see their teacher put a condom on a banana (it’s hyperbole, folks, to prove a point), but they weren’t going home and building the “4K Sex Ed Classroom” LEGO playset.
Nothing, it seems, is sacred, even my beloved LEGOs.
Now, some might say, “Tyler, you’ve gotsta stop feeding the beast.” Honestly, the sheer expense of LEGOs—which have embraced inflationary pricing and jacked up the prices on their sets even further—is probably the bigger reason to scale back the hobby. I can avoid a great deal of the LGBTQIA2+etc. foolishness, at least for now.
Honestly, though, I’m just a hypocrite. What can I say? I like LEGOs. If I avoided every product from every company engaged in civilizationally self-destructive behavior, I’d be living an ascetic life without Internet access. Naturally, there’s some happy middle ground between those two extremes, but as much as I abhor their policies, I can’t resist the the sweet, sweet hit of those little plastic bricks.
Which brings me to the real point of today’s post: I had the pleasure of building the LEGO set Battle of Endor Heroes (40623) in their popular Brickheadz series. It MSRPs at around $40, which is typical for a Brickheadz set, which charges around $10 per figurine, or $15 or a regular-sized figurine and a half-size one. This set consists of three full-size figurines from Return of the Jedi (1983)—Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Lando Calrissian—and two half-sized ones—R2-D2 and Wicket, the feisty Ewok.
The Portly Politico 