Tag: Subscribe Star

SubscribeStar Saturday: Epic Universe: Super Mario World

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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.

My family and I took our annual-ish trip to Universal Studios earlier this week (Dr. Wife, sadly, is still in the depths of residency, so she was unable to join us).  This year’s trip was a bit different from those of yesteryear, however:  we visited Universal’s new park, Epic Universe, on our last day in Orlando.

Epic Universe has been in the works for years, and suffered (I believe) some delays due to The Age of The Virus.  The wait and the delays were worth it—it was truly, as my younger brother put it, the “theme park of the twenty-first century.”

The premise behind Epic Universe is that a central hub of celestial-themed rides and attractions leads to various “universes” or worlds.  Each one is accessed through a portal, and once you’re in one of the worlds, you are in it.  You can’t see the other worlds or the main hub until you leave that specific world.  Instead of areas blending together gradually, they’re distinct little pocket universes.

That separation greatly enhances the immersion.  When we were in Super Mario World—the subject of today’s post—it felt like we were inhabiting the world of Super Mario Brothers.  When we were in Dark Universe, the monster world, it was like being in an old Universal or Hammer horror flick.  The Harry Potter Ministry of Magic was akin to walking the streets of Paris—and so on.

Epic Universe consists of four separate worlds:  Super Mario World; Dark Universe; the Ministry of Magic (Paris); and the Island of Berk, from the How to Train Your Dragon film franchise.  There is also the Celestial Park hub area, which features the park’s signature coaster, Starlight Racers, and a celestial carousel at the center.

Today, I want to dive into the first of these worlds, the world of Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad, Bowser, and the rest—Super Mario World.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Moving, Minnesota, and Music

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After a couple of weekends of failing to post, yours portly is back with three subscriber-only posts only after SubscribeStar.  That makes up for the two missed weekends and offers something fresh for readers.

This week, I have posts on moving, Minnesota, and music:

  • “Moving Pains” – the story of my doomed foray into hiring a professional moving service (and the complaint to the Better Business Bureau that followed).
  • “Mayhem in Minneapolis” – my analysis of the situation in Minneapolis and the needless deaths there (spoiler alert:  if you interfere with law enforcement and attempt to hurt them, it probably won’t end well); it was so incendiary my own brother cancelled his subscription (so you know it’s good).
  • “Rosy Reds” – a preview of a piece for my work-in-progress album Koi Dance, “Rosy Reds” depicts the flitting about of rosy red minnows in our koi pond.

Subscribe for one buck a month and you can read all of these posts—and hundreds more!  It’s so cheap, I think I’m actually turning people away; they must think the low price means the quality stinks.  Or maybe it’s my recent unreliability that keeps potential subscribers at bay.

Of course, you could risk a single dollar to find out!

Happy Saturday!

—TPP

Lazy Sunday CCCXLXIV: Fire and Water

The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s a quick Lazy Sunday this week as Dr. Wife and I hunker down in the cold.  I’m casting my gaze back to two posts from earlier this week, one based in the coolness of the watery depths, the other in the fiery crucible of the modern restaurant industry:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Memorable Monday: Daybreak in America: Trump’s Inauguration, MLK Day, and a New Hope

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America, and tomorrow will mark one year since President Trump’s Inauguration.

It seemed fitting that Trump would be inaugurated for his second non-consecutive term on the day set aside to commemorate King, a man who very likely would have descended into grifter status had he lived much longer.  Trump election also continued the rollback of the affirmative action racialist system that King’s successors endorsed.

Most importantly for yours portly, it’s a day off—and a cold one!  I’m looking forward to a quiet morning with Dr. Wife before Murphy and I make the frosty trek back to the South Carolina.

With that, here is 20 January 2025’s “Daybreak in America: Trump’s Inauguration, MLK Day, and a New Hope“:

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Lazy Sunday CCCXLXIII: Empire

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It’s been the week of American imperialism here on the blog, and I don’t necessarily mean “imperialism” negatively.  Here are some posts about how the United States is embracing its destiny (and the peaks and pitfalls of doing so):

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: American Imperialism

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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.

Apologies for the evening post, dear readers; Dr. Wife and I played a key role in balloon arch construction for a friend’s baby shower, and yours portly took an extended nap after overindulging on chicken wings and fried pickles.  Now that all of that succulence has gone straight to fat, I’m slowly rubbing my neurons together to hammer out this post.  —TPP

The excellent website Free Speech Backlash ran a lengthy essay of mine this past Thursday, 15 January 2026.  “Trump: Nationalist or Imperialist?” is an attempt to place the Nicolás Maduro arrest in the broader context of American diplomatic history, specifically as it pertains to our hemispheric policy.  That policy dates back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which received an overhaul in the first years of the twentieth century during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.  The so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine argued that, in order to prevent European intervention in Latin America, the United States would intervene instead.

President Trump is clearly aware of this history—thus his invocation of the “Donroe Doctrine,” his own revival of the Roosevelt Corollary.  Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere is increasing, and The Donald has to take action.  The action in Venezuela was not strictly about securing oil—we have plenty of it—but to prevent China from controlling major oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere.  The United States also sought to prevent China and Russia paying for that oil with their own currencies, as the purchasing of oil in US dollars ensures the dominance of our increasingly devalued currency.

China has also sought to make inroads into Panama, where the Panamanians currently run the canal that Roosevelt took drastic steps to ensure could be built—under American auspices.  One reason Trump wants to reclaim the Panama Canal is precisely because if we don’t, the Panamanians will likely fold to the Chinese.

Even Greenland, the most memeable of Trump’s neo-Monrovian ambitions, is an application of the Monroe/Donroe Doctrines.  The Arctic is emerging as a major trade route for global goods—the fabled Northwest Passage now a reality—and China has already made attempts to bring the Danish colony under its thumb.  The Danes lack the will and the capacity to improve and defend Greenland—or even to exploit its vast natural resources effectively—and The Donald sees this island as the key to securing dominance in the Arctic in the Western Hemisphere.

Indeed, it was Greenland that generated the most commentary (and heart-bleeding) in the comments section.  The most common refrain from the opposition was that the Greenlanders have the right to self-determination.  It’s an argument I’m sympathetic with in principle, but in Reality, Greenland has a population of fewer than 60,000 people—only barely double that of the municipal population of my hometown growing up in South Carolina.  If the world were a peaceful place, an independent Republic of Greenland could probably be viable as an extremely small (demographically) nation.  In the world of cutthroat geopolitics, with China and Russia on the rise and the Arctic opening up new strategic challenges and opportunities, an independent Greenland is a costly fantasy.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Gig Defeat

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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.

The past couple of weeks have been quite busy as Dr. Wife and I began the arduous process of moving furniture, personal belongings, and various bits of bric-a-brac and knick-knackery to our new home.  As such, I’m playing a bit of catch-up with these subscriber-only posts.  Apologies for the frequent delays over the last few months, and thanks for sticking with me.  —TPP

Back on 20 December 2025 I wrote “Christmas Gigging,” an optimistic post about how fun, easy, and profitable Christmastime bookings are for musicians.  Christmas music abundantly available and instantly recognizable; it’s also fairly easy to learn a lot of it quickly.

I was booked to play saxophone at a Christmas party that night, way down in Summerville, South Carolina.  I’d booked the gig through GigSalad, one of several booking services available to musicians, birthday clowns, jugglers, comedians, and all the rest of us carny folk.  Over the years I’ve used the service, I’ve only closed 5.4% of all gigs I’ve quoted to clients (or 5 out of 93).  To be fair, I’ve received a whopping 776 leads over the years, which means I’m only sending quotes to just under 12% of the leads I actually received.

Many of those unquoted leads are due either to scheduling conflicts (lots of nursing homes booking during the day on weekdays, for example, or gigs too far away to make after work).  Some are instances of potential clients never responding to basic questions about their needs (I don’t like to send a quote for events like weddings, for example, without at least touching base with the client about what they want).  Still others—more than I’d like to admit—are simply me not responding until it’s too late.

Regardless, even with gigs that are quoted, the vast majority—well, 94.6%, as you can see—go unbooked.  Only a handful of those are because the client has booked another professional; they’re mostly due to people never responding to quotes at all—and most of those never even look at the quote (GigSalad indicates when a potential client has seen a quote and/or message).

But I digress.  I had a bout of good luck with GigSalad in December, managing to land two gigs within a week of each other.  The first client was very pleased—I played for his proposal to his girlfriend—and the client for the Christmas party seemed pretty eager for me to play.

I had a bit of a bad feeling about this gig.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Gigging

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Christmas is a goldmine for musicians, one I have not cashed in on in any meaningful way in years.  Christmas parties mean Christmas music, and a subset of those parties opt for live music.

Yours portly has been a longtime user of GigSalad as a free member, which means there are some limitations on my account.  From my experience with the service, it’s not worth the considerable price to upgrade to any of their paid versions.  However, lately I’ve been doing a bit better with bookings, landing two gigs within a week of each other.

Last Sunday afternoon, for example, I played for a young man’s proposal to his girlfriend (she said yes).  That saw me driving up to Wilmington, North Carolina after church.  It was an extremely cold and windy afternoon, and I played outside for about thirty minutes.  In spite of the weather, it was an honor to be part of such an important moment (and the client seemed pleased!).

Tonight, I’ll be heading down to Summerville, South Carolina, to play a couple of hours for a Christmas party (indoors, thank God!).  I loaded up a binder with copies of alto saxophone Christmas music from 8notes.com, an incredible online resource for music education and free sheet music.  It’s a two-hour solo engagement, which can be a bit daunting on sax, but it’s totally doable.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2025 Postmortem

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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.

Good afternoon, my loyal subscribers!  Apologies for a late post today; yours portly crashed out after a long but productive day at work yesterday, which included my students’ annual Christmas Concert.

I’ll allow GEOTUS to articulate this sentiment in the way only he can:

Regardless, in the grand tradition of The Portly Politico, it’s time the annual Christmas Concert Postmortem, where I break down the program and how everything went.

For non-paying subscribers, don’t worry—the kids did a fabulous job, as they always do.  My Middle School Music Ensemble (MSME) played three pieces:

  • “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
  • “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”
  • “Last Christmas”

And my High School Music Ensemble (HSME) played four pieces:

  • “What Child is This?”
  • “Mary Did You Know?”
  • “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
  • “O Holy Night”

For whatever reason, the HSME played a lot of songs whose titles are questions.  Don’t ask me why!

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Play Week!

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This past week involved the intensive preparations for the big Christmas Play, which was last night at my little school.  It’s a pretty big night from a technical perspective, as the Drama Teacher also conducts the Choir and our Dance classes.  As such, all of her students—actors, singers, dancers—all perform as part of a performing arts extravaganza.

It makes for a unique and fun, albeit hectic, experience, and requires yours portly to pull out all of his amateur audio tracks to make it happen.

All of our productions are, out of necessity, staged in the gym, which I call the “Gymnatorium” (at one point, students ate lunch there, too, so it was the “Gymnacafetorium”).  Getting good sound quality, especially for plays, has always been a struggle.

Fortunately, our Athletics Department invested in a new sound system, which offers much more complete coverage than the 15″ speakers I’d been using for years (although those speakers are great).  The problem is that the system came with a new digital mixer (a good thing) that only has six functional channels (that’s the bad part).

Because our productions often require at least a dozen inputs (and frequently more), I had to get creative with the sound system setup, and came up with this bad boy:

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