Tag: steak

Memorable Monday III: Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Well, it seems that my resolve yesterday to get back to our regular schedule waivered, before breaking down completely.  Yours portly has been exceptionally busy lately—March and April are always difficult, but this February was also quite brutal—and what little creative energy I have has been laser-focused on composing.

I also haven’t really watched any flicks worth reviewing.  To be clear, I have reviewed plenty of bad movies.  Lately, though, nothing has leapt out at me as worth hammering out 600-1000 words.  Maybe Ponty will finally write that rebuttal to my award-winning, trenchant, insightful, powerful, persuasive review of Donnie Darko (1999).

So I thought I’d cast back to an old post about eating a steak alone on a Monday night while using my cellphone to write a blog post.  I wrote the post on the eve of the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, which is one of the marquee events of our music program.  It’s a huge and chaotic undertaking, but super fun, and I love seeing my students get ready to perform.

I’m pretty on-the-ball this year, but that on-the-ballitude accounts, in part, for my poor posting—I’ve been working ahead on school and Music Festival stuff.

There probably won’t be any steak tonight, but there might be Thursday after I get back from the Festival.

Regardless, here’s 9 March 2020’s “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues“:

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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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MAGAWeek2021: Red Meat

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This week is MAGAWeek2021, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting today (Monday, 5 July 2021) and running through this Friday, 9 July 2021, this year’s MAGAWeek2021 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

Is there anything more delicious and American than steak?  Red meat is, perhaps, the finest meat God ever created.  Sure, pork and chicken are wonderful in their own ways—who doesn’t love pulled-pork barbecue?—but nothing beats a good steak.

Indeed, the noble Texas Longhorn is virtually a symbol for the Old West, just like the cowboys that guided him to market on the long drives of the nineteenth century.  The Texas Longhorn, according to Oklahoma State University’s Department of Animal Science, a product of natural selection, meaning the breed is the only beef cattle in the country that is not the product of human-guided animal husbandry or selective breeding.  Instead, the cattle adapted to survive specifically in North America, after cattle brought over by Christopher Columbus and early Spanish explorers made their way into what is now the American Southwest.

The Black Angus—a breed most Americans will recognize from endless restaurant adverts—is the most common beef cattle breed in the United States.  Grilling Black Angus steaks and burgers was no doubt a major part of many Americans’ Independence Day.

It’s no exaggeration to say that beef built the West, and fed the country in the process.

To read the rest of today’s MAGAWeek2021 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!

Lazy Sunday CXV: Memorable Mondays

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Tomorrow is Memorial Day, which got me thinking about an unofficial series of posts I do on Mondays when I’m too busy to write real content:  Memorable Monday.  It’s pretty much like TBT, but on Mondays instead of Thursdays.

At some point, I started numbering Memorable Monday, but apparently not consistently—only three of them are marked with my signature Roman numeral style.  As such, it’s unclear which is the first Memorable Monday.  Sure, I could just find the edition with the earliest date, but this is Lazy Sunday, and that wouldn’t be terribly lazy of me, would it?

So, here are two installments of Memorable Monday—the second and third.  Can you figure out The One True First Installment?  Leave a comment if you figure it out!

  • “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues” (and “Monday Steakhouse Blues“) – Steak and stress seem to be staples of my life.  What’s interesting is how the two seem to move in tandem.  This post reflected on the extremely busy nature of the end of third quarter, which seems to be the time of the academic year when everything happens at once.  At least this year I have learned my lesson:  I’m finally grading stuff in a very timely manner.
  • “Memorable Monday III: Memorial Day 2019” (and “Memorial Day 2019“) – Memorial Day is a day for low blog traffic and low expectations.  That’s not meant to diminish the memories of those who gave their lives for our country, just an accurate assessment:  people are outside having a good time, not sitting in a dark room reading The Portly Politico.  Ergo, why not take the day off, too, and do a little recycling?

That’s it for this very lazy Lazy Sunday.  If you figure out which Memorable Monday is the first installment, post a comment below!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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Election Day 2020 Updates at OCF

The Portly Politico5 Comments

My blogger buddy photog at Orion’s Cold Fire is posting Election Day updates all day.  You can view them here:  http://orionscoldfire.com/index.php/2020/11/02/pre-game-jitters-and-an-election-day-open-post/

I will also be posting updates, schedule permitting.  Election Day also happens to be my girlfriend’s birthday, so we’re going for a steak dinner.  Then I’ve told her I’m going to be awake most of the rest of the night watching returns rolling in.  Hopefully it won’t be too late, but we’ll see.

If you haven’t already done so, go vote for Trump.  Please!

—TPP

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Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Almost exactly a year ago today, I wrote a brief post from my cellphone at a Western Sizzlin’ in Florence, South Carolina.  At the time, I was incredibly stressed out, due to a combination of factors:  the end-of-quarter dash to grade papers, the looming Music Festival, and a home without Internet.

Here it is a year later and the seventy posts of a year ago seem minuscule.  I also find myself in a similar state of frantic scrambling.  This year, my Internet is working—thank goodness!—but we’re in the midst of our once-every-five-years reaccreditation visit.  It’s the culmination of eighteen-months of work, and the administration is hyper-vigilant (and extremely on edge) about us presenting the best, most Potemkin Village-esque version of the school.

I’m also preparing kids for the aforementioned Music Festival—which should now be done—and working on buying curtains for our stage.  Yikes!  And, in an object lesson of how we never learn our lessons, I’m struggling under a mountain of papers for third quarter report cards.  Ay caramba!

As such, today’s post is a reblog, a look back at one year ago.  I probably won’t eat steak tonight, but I did eat a fourteen-ounce, $35 blackened ribeye on the school’s dime last night, so that’s something.

Here is 2019’s “Monday Steakhouse Blues“:

I’m writing today’s post on my phone at one of the few surviving Western Sizzlin’ steakhouses in America. Yep, it’s been that kind of day.

Yesterday’s post marked the 70th consecutive daily post on this blog. That means I’ve posted at least one post a day for ten weeks.

I don’t have much to say today. I’m taking a group of roughly forty student-musicians to a “Solo and Ensemble”-style music festival tomorrow, and today report card grades were due. Without Internet at the house, everything had to get done today in a compressed time.

As such, the only interesting thing I’ve had a chance to hear about today was Tucker Carlson saying a bunch of controversial, awesome stuff on a radio show a decade ago—and, instead of kowtowing to the Left, he invited folks to debate him on his show: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/11/tucker-carlson-refuses-to-apologize-over-media-matters-compilation-of-shock-jock-call-ins/

More to come tomorrow and Wednesday. I couldn’t blow a 70-day streak.

Happy Monday!

–TPP