Issue 2 of The Town Crier, my micro-newspaper/newsletter, is out in the world. Like the inaugural issue, I printed 100 issues and distributed them throughout our little town.
Believe it or not, the public schools started back on 21 July 2026. Yes, you read that correctly—students were back the third Tuesday in July. That seems borderline criminal to yours portly. That means teachers have been back even longer.
Most of the schools in South Carolina are transitioning to a quasi-/semi-year-round calendar. There are certainly perks, such as defeating the dreaded “summer slump,” and students get breaks at the end of every quarter, avoiding the long Labor Day-to-Thanksgiving slog of the first semester (and the seemingly endless April and May death march in the second semester). But there’s something about darkening the door of a schoolhouse in July that sends shivers up my spine. July is sacred—and hot! Nobody wants to learn anything when it’s 100-degrees out, the humidity is somehow above 100%, and bookbags make youngsters resemble tiny Quasimodos.
But I digress. Naturally, I touched upon the return to school in a far hokier manner in The Town Crier. The point of The Town Crier is to recapture something of the cheesy, blandly inoffensive, yet still charming little local newsletters of my youth. These would be sitting in tiny mom and pop diners and local eateries; you’d grab one and read some fun trivia while you waited for your meal. These were even more fun when traveling, as they offered a little glimpse into the local world.
I also continued to experiment with the formatting and layout in this second issue. A guy on a Discord chat recommended adding the shadowing to the masthead, which really does add more weight and heft to the title. I also added in some “fun facts” and a Bible verse. I took that experimentation even further with Issue 3, wherein I introduce some graphics to the masthead and throughout the paper, and reduced the crossword “solution” grid so it’s not so easy to glance at it mistakenly (more on that next week).
While this micro-newspaper is meant for the Marlboro County, South Carolina region, please feel free to print and distribute your own copies, or to read the current issue here:
I also extended my distribution network this time around, spreading my 100 issues across more locations in the hopes of reaching more folks in more diverse settings. Here’s what I did, and some observations from the second distribution.
Yours portly has long been interested in the world of guerrilla publishing—zines, independent newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, newsletters, and the like. Blogging scratches some of that itch and captures some of that energy, but there’s something cool about finding a little bit of printed material out in the wild.
Back in college, a buddy of mine put together a fake newspaper called The Heartland-Crier Gazette. It was meant to mimic the style of eighteenth-century pamphlets, with different fonts for each piece (and even one using the letter “f” in place of “s,” like some manuscripts from that time). We published a couple of issues and put them around campus, but it never went anywhere. More successful was the website my friends and I ran, The Swain Site (I think it was at http://www.keepingitswain.tk, back when .tk extensions were a thing). I wrote a lengthy weekly piece called “Uncle Tybarb’s Corner,” which was essentially a proto-blog.
I was scrolling through Instagram a few nights ago and came upon the latest creation from artist Obvious Plant. Obvious Plant makes fake products and catalogues that look like the kinds of things you’d find in dusty discount stores. They are just on the edge of reality enough that their absurdism seems tangible, like something a factory owner in China would make thinking it would appeal to Americans.
His latest item is a sales paper for a fictitious discount store called Cheep’s. It had me laughing harder than I have in awhile. What was particularly fun is that OP placed about 100 of the sales papers in an empty newspaper/advert box, and the idea of someone coming along and grabbing one made the whole concept even funnier.
It also got me thinking: why couldn’t I do something similar, but less absurd than Cheep’s or the truly absurdist Heartland-Crier Gazette? I have this sweet new printer that can print hundreds of black-and-white pages on a single drum of toner. What if I created a small micro-newspaper?
So Thursday morning I set to work devising a little newspaper that could fit on one-quarter of a sheet of 8.5″x11″ printer/copier paper. I relied heavily on CoPilot to help me get the formatting right in Microsoft Word, which was the hardest part (that and creating a crossword puzzle). I had to make some tweaks and figure out some clever workarounds, as Word is famously limited when it comes to moving stuff around freely, but after about two or three hours I had a draft of the first issue.
Other than the formatting, the crossword puzzle was the most difficult part, as well as creating the “solution” grid and flipping it over. CoPilot was super helpful with creating the grid itself, but when I asked it to create a crossword for me, it failed utterly. The answers didn’t match the clues, and it would use vastly different letters between the “Across” and “Down” clues, to the point that there often weren’t any letters in common between words that were supposed to intersect. I finally told it that it was really bad at creating crosswords (sometimes the robots need reminding that they’re inferior to us), so it recommended Eclipse Crossword, a downloadable program that creates crossword puzzles for you based on user-created word banks. I then took the grid it created and reformatted it into the grid CoPilot helped me created in Word.
The solution grid required filling out the grid in Word; taking a screenshot with “Print Screen”; pasting it into MS Paint Classic; copying the proper selection (Word copies a large margin to the left of the grid, so it has to be trimmed in Paint); then using “Paste Special” in Word to paste the image as a “Picture – Enhanced Metafile” in order for Word to allow me to rotate (it just occurred to me that it would be much easier to flip the image in Paint—d’oh!).
Once all of that was done, I had a beautiful little micro-newspaper:
The beauty of this format is that I can create 100 copies of an issue on just twenty-five sheets of copier paper. A sheet is around $0.014, so it’s about 35 cents worth of paper. The toner itself is abundant—I can print 700 pages on the current toner drum—and there are third-party toners that are very inexpensive, so I figure I’m spending around 50 cents to $1 to produce an issue.
I then had to cut every issue. I’m going to invest in one of those cutting boards like offices have—you know, those things that look like you could cut someone’s head off with them, but they only cut through about four sheets of paper before they mess up—but for the first issue, I used scissors. Even though everything looked perfectly symmetrical in Word, printing through the top of the front page off slightly from the top of the back page, so the finished product is a little rougher.
Here are some pictures of the first issue, as well as a couple of the second issue:
I made a few little mistakes on the first few copies of the first issue; for example, I forgot to put “DOWN” before the down clues on the crossword puzzle. I also had some rough cuts, as I’m not master with scissors. Overall, though, the initial run of 100 issues came out looking quite nice, and I’m learning more how to make my own crossword puzzles in tighter spaces.
With the first issue formatted, written, printed, and cut, I needed to get it into the hands of readers. My plan was straightforward: visit several local businesses—with an emphasis on coffee shops, breakfast and lunch places, and some other local stores—and ask to leave copies on their counters. After Dr. Wife was off to work and the morning dishes and laundry were squared away, I set off to do just that.
It’s another insanely hot summer here in South Carolina, and we had a long drought in June with nary a drop of rain. It makes me wonder how people in pre-modernity survived droughts and famines that lasted for years.
The rains have come, but the days are still quite intense with heat. The afternoon showers are not as routine as I’d like, but they are at least bringing some reprieve in the evenings. Our upstairs unit runs nonstop on sunny days, regardless of where we set the thermostat; one day it was 85 degrees Fahrenheit up there! Our downstairs, thankfully, maintains a reasonable frostiness, even in the heat.
The koi and the minnows seem to be holding up well, however. The minnows don’t seem to mind at all! I’ve noticed, though, that even they stay a bit below the surface on the hottest days. The koi, who usually eat more when it’s hot out, have been eating less than usual; I think they’re enjoying the cooler temperatures a bit further down.
Dr. Wife and I are taking a cruise next week, and its a tour of the Western Caribbean: Mexico, Honduras, Belize, and another stop in Mexico on the way back to Tampa. It’s going to be brutal in the tropics, but at this point, how can it get much worse (perhaps I just jinxed it). One day we’re going to see a Mayan temple, so maybe yours portly will end up roasted on a spit above a pagan altar. Gulp!
The new town where Dr. Wife and I reside is about twenty minutes from the border between North and South Carolina. When I go up to visit her at her little apartment in North Carolina (she’s living there during the weeks as she finishes up her medical residency), I drive through some tiny South Carolina border towns, places with names like “Tatum” and “McColl.” The comparatively larger Laurinburg is on the North Carolina side of the border.
These little towns have some interesting features. On the South Carolina side of the border, they’re tiny. Tatum is a few ramshackle buildings and a local manufacturer; I’m not sure there’s even a gas station there. McColl has a bit more going on, but not much. This section of northeastern South Carolina is very rural, and lies far enough from major Interstates and other population centers that they’re not receiving much beyond commuter traffic, which usually flows out of these communities.
There’s also the people that want to buy fireworks. On the South Carolina side, there are more and more fireworks stands the closet one gets to the State line. Even though we’re still two months away from Independence Day, I will see multiple cars parked at these places when I drive by, so there is apparently an appetite for colorful explosives year-round.
Fireworks are apparently lucrative. On the outskirts of McColl, the last town before hitting the North Carolina border, there is a little floral shop. It’s cute and sports a faded but fun shade of pink. On its sign, it advertises flowers—and fireworks.
As one drives closer to the North Carolina border, there are a number of dilapidated—or even entirely missing—video arcades. I have vague childhood recollections of driving past similar places along the SC-NC border and getting excited that there were video game establishments, but my parents explained they were not arcades like we knew from the mall, but places where people played video poker. One of these establishments has a garish onion dome a la the Kremlin or the Taj Mahal. It is completely vacant.
Video poker was legal in South Carolina at some point in the 1990s. The convenience store next to my late maternal grandfather’s furniture store in Bath, South Carolina had a video poker cabinet (it may have been blackjack), and I remember thinking it was insane that it cost a whopping two dollars to play. Of course, it was likely illegal for me to play it; even if it weren’t, it was too expensive.
Remember, these were the days when most arcade games cost a quarter to play. A good game—something really premium—cost fifty cents. A really awesome, cutting-edge game at, say, Myrtle Beach might cost a dollar. Two bucks to play a hand of poker or blackjack was outrageous (and not very appealing to a kid, anyway), but I imagine many a workman blew his pay packet at these machines every Friday night hoping to escape their situations (yes, there were desperately poor people in the 1990s).
I briefly (and unfortunately) dated the daughter of one of the guys who invented the video poker machine; he became a drug addict, which is tragic but, like most tragedies, also poetic. She was a hot mess (emphasis on the mess, not the hot), and was emblematic of what I call “nouveau riche rednecks.” They’re a type that jump from poverty to wealth too quickly, retaining a great deal of the trashiness associated with riotous country folk. Imagine the people who spend all their money on four-wheelers and jet skis and $80,000 pickup trucks.
To be clear, I’m just two generations removed from poverty on my father’s side. But my paternal grandfather and grandmother weren’t that kind of “country” Southerner that seem to be either the best or worst of people. They were something else, due in large part to their devotion to Christ. Yes, my Papa worked in the textile mill and Mama was a custodian at the library. When I was a little kid, and Papa was retired, I thought he was a scrap dealer: he would drive around in his awesome 1980s Honda Civic hatchback and pick up items people had tossed on the side of the road, then host a huge yard sale every fall. Papa would boast about how the Save-a-Lot brand canned spaghetti and meatballs had one more meatball per can than Chef Boyardee; it struck me as the wisest thing I’d ever heard.
But I digress. The point is that we slowly emerged from that milieu. We did not succumb to the video poker bubble; indeed, I imagine my parents and grandparents were glad to see it go. Governor David Beasley famously lost his re-election bid in the 1998 South Carolina gubernatorial race to Democrat Jim Hodges in large part because Beasley opposed video poker and a State lottery. It was an object lesson in how the people will clamor for their own destruction, which is itself proof that they shouldn’t be allowed to gamble.
Well, they can’t get their video poker fix in South Carolina, but crossing the border into North Carolina’s Scotland County immediately presents visitors with multiple cinderblock boxes with neon signs shouting “777” and “Skill Games.” These hastily-constructed hotboxes host video and other forms of gambling. South Carolinians itching to risk their paycheck on a pipedream can easily hop the border, just as North Carolinians eager to explode LEGO men in their backyard with bottle rockets and Roman Candles can scuttle on down to South Carolina.
There’s something about that liminal space (to use a favorite buzzword of Internet essayists everywhere) in border regions that brings out the unsavoriness of human nature. In a zone where legal and cultural and political identities melt into one another, unimagined possibilities gain life. There are always merchants of vice willing to imagine those possibilities for their desperate customers—for a price.
At least in South Carolina the vice we sell is fireworks, which are more of a fun novelty than a depraved invitation to dark deeds. I’d rather light up the sky with explosives than descend into the darkness of a vape-filled, cinderblocked gambling dungeon.
It is hot—interminably hot—here in South Carolina. I can only imagine how much worse it is for our senior correspondent, Audre Myers, down in Florida. My European readers will struggle to comprehend the kind of heat we’re experiencing. I still can’t comprehend entire nations in the developed world that don’t have air-conditioning; it is truly a privilege for Europeans to have the luxury of not having A/C, much less not having to run it constantly.
I’ve often referred to the South in the summer as akin to living on the surface of Venus. Our poisonous gas atmosphere is in the form of humidity—breathable, but barely. Imagine walking outside and feeling not just heat, but a kind of all-encompassing clamminess that somehow manages to make you feel even hotter. Yes, you can get acclimated if you’re willing to stay out in it long enough, but you have to drink constantly, as the combo of heat and humidity is constantly sucking moisture from your body.
Yours portly is still playing catch-up from a combination of end-of-the-school-year-busyness and post-vacation-readjustment. I know the blog has been short on substantive content lately; unfortunately, I simply lack the time and energy to put more into it at the moment.
I have a busy weekend of non-blog writing ahead (mostly stuff for the Town of Lamar), and precious little time today to work.
Last night (Thursday, 9 May 2024) the Town’s Police Department hosted an event with SC SLED (basically, the “FBI” for South Carolina) to discuss the implications of our new constitutional carry bill. There is a great deal of handwringing over the idea of hot-headed eighteen-year olds blowing each other way now that they can carry openly, but when I asked the SLED agent if any of the other thirty-four States with constitutional carry had experienced an uptick in these emotional bouts of lethal violence, he waffled, saying that “it varies from State to State.” My entire impression is that this law enforcement officer didn’t really know what he was talking about.
I love the police, but like engineers, they tend to look at an issue from only one angle, usually that of safety. Safety isn’t necessarily the enemy of liberty, but it frequently is. Eighteen-year olds are still going to blow each other away in the heat of the moment; now we can just see the ones stupid enough to display their $500 handgun on their hips. There’s a lot of hysteria over the new law, but not much thoughtful reflection.
Festival season continues apace; ergo, my reviews/travelogues/retrospectives/self-indulgent recaps of said festivals roll on as well. If my use of the word “ergo” hasn’t turned your stomach, read on.
Last Saturday, 30 September 2023 I attended the Pee Dee State Farmers Market, which was hosting its annual Plant & Flower Festival. I learned about the festival from, of all places, YouTube ads, featuring our long-serving Commissioner of Agriculture, Hugh Weathers. Commissioner Weathers has held his office since 2004, and I’ve seen his name most of my adult life on gas station pumps (there’s a little inspector’s sticker that bears his name), but I’d never seen him until these commercials.
That uninteresting fact aside, I needed to pick up some pumpkins for carving, and I figured buying some Certified SC Grown pumpkins was the way to go. There was also the added bonus of taking in another festival on a crisp, autumnal morning.
Blogging daily (today marks the 1545th consecutive day of blogging) is great fun, but it takes time. Longtime readers will probably have noticed the increase in guest posts (especially from Audre Myers and Ponty), as well as lighter posts from yours portly. Those lighter posts are partially out of necessity—in order to maintain my busy work and private music lessons schedule, I have to write some fluffier posts here from time to time.
No worries—I have not given up on political writing entirely, nor have I abandoned writing seriously about music, faith, art, etc. Sometimes, I just need to upload some pictures of a LEGO set I built and call it a day.
That said, blogging daily is also the source of Arizonan Sojourn, as blogging daily will likely be the source of my next book (topic to be determined). Pulled from four years of travel essays, with a particular focus on the six-part trip my older brother and I took to Arizona in December 2022, the book regales readers with tales of my not-so-outrageous exploits.
So, I found myself last week with a modicum of extra time because Middle School students were taking some horrendous standardized test, after which they were dismissed for the day. That removed my duty to teach Middle Music Ensemble for a few days, and that extra fifty-six minutes each day, along with the lack of private music lessons with Middle Schoolers, enabled me to complete the compiling, organizing, and edition of Arizonan Sojourn.
Unlike Inspector Gerard, I also made sure to proofread and revise Arizonan Sojourn much more carefully this time. I cannot guarantee it is free of grammatical errors—I found one as soon as I published the book (it is now fixed)—but it should be substantially less embarrassing in this regard than Gerard was.
Trapped in the blizzard in Indianapolis, pipes bursting across the land (including in my older brother’s house), there was little to do besides sleep and let the responsible adults take care of things.
There are few things more reassuringly cozy than sleeping under heavy blankets in sub-zero temperatures. It’s akin to the feeling of being inside with power during a torrential downpour or powerful thunderstorm—the sense of safety and warmth is experienced palpably in those moments. In some ways, it’s even better to get soaked first, then to come into the dryness of the indoors.
But sleep can only forestall reality for so long. Driving to South Carolina on Friday, 23 December 2022 as I’d originally planned was out of the question, given the frozen roads. Tales of major wrecks and traffic snarls echoed across the land, so it seemed best to stay put.
That said, I desperately wanted to get home for Christmas. The weather, it seemed, had other plans, but I soon hatched a plan that, if all went well, would get me South in time for at least some of Christmas.
As of about 8 PM EST last Thursday, I’ve been living the Summer Break Lifestyle. Other than camp and lessons, I’ve been enjoying a much more leisurely pace of living.
Summer is already filling up fast. While the first week of Minecraft Camp is in the books, I have another session next week. I’m attempting to run my Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for the second year, but as of the time of writing, it looks like I might just have one student, so that may get axed.
Nevertheless, it’s a good time to knock out some projects, especially when I wrap up camps. I’m hoping to get back—finally!—to wrapping up the first volume of my Sunday Doodles book, which will go through the first fifty editions of the feature (over at my SubscribeStar page). Indeed, I may do the first 100 editions, as I am currently at 144. That will require more editing, but will make for a beefier book.
It’s also time to get cracking on some short stories. I’ve been sitting on one story about a guy who eats an undercooked frozen pizza with bizarre consequences; now I need to write it!
