Koi Dance is out now on all streaming platforms and at https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com. It’s 90% off (!) with promo code koipond. That means it’s $1 for twelve tracks of great music (and that promo code is also good for everything on the site).
The school year is back in swing, and while I’m now on extra-super-secret-double-part-time (a little-known codicil in the modern working world’s constitution), I still have to complete some mandatory trainings each year. These trainings are rarely interesting, but nor are they particularly onerous; they’re just the boxes one has to check to appease that dread fiend Liability.
For example, each year my colleagues and I go through mandated OSHA bloodborne pathogens training. It’s a simple presentation reviewing procedures for dealing with a child (or anyone) bleeding all over a classroom. Believe it or not, that kind of thing does happen, although not for the grisly reasons readers’ minds might be conjuring up. It’s usually something benign: an unexpected nosebleed (yours portly had his share of those in high school) or a skinned knee. One time a pianist had a stubborn hangnail that got caught while playing and he bled all over the baby grand piano (it was pretty metal).
We also go through active shooter training, which is a grim reminder of the godless dystopia we currently inhabit. It’s useful to be reminded that the world is fallen and that there are truly wicked people out there. It’s also a reminder that law enforcement often view everything from the absolute worst-case scenario (“that big window is a death trap!”), which I suppose makes sense, given that they interact with the fallout of worst-case scenarios everyday.
This year I just had to attend a handful of these mandatory trainings, included the two mentioned above. However, due to a miscommunication from my admin, I attended an additional training that, were I still a classroom teacher, might have offered some marginal utility. Even in my new role as Chaplain, it had some relevant insights.
However, as with many such “professional development opportunities,” it presented something of a microcosm with everything that is wrong with the teaching profession.
His wife came up with the title “Jalapeño Poopers”; my brother asked me to write a blog post with that title. So, here we are! I’m never one to turn down some scatological fun.
But back to that Tweet (or are they called “Xes” or “Xs” or eXs” now?) from Feline DookieCatturd ™: doesn’t it seem like we’re experiencing tons of diarrhea-inducing outbreaks in our food lately? By now, we’re all familiar with the infamous cyclosporiasis, which has had a whopping 0.1% of Michigan’s population glued to the porcelain throne, with around 22,700 cases nationwide. Nearly half—11,500—of those cases are from Michigan itself.
Most notoriously, Taco Bell, which is already known for its diarrheic properties, had lettuce infected with the dookie-inducing spores. Dr. Wife and I eat at Taco Bell almost every Sunday after church, and I forbade any lettuce for at least a couple of weeks after Taco Bell sent out a reassuring e-mail that they’d removed the offending lettuce from their supply lines. Believe it or not, I trusted Taco Bell/Yum, Incorporated; I didn’t trust their franchisees to toss the old lettuce (although I think we’re in the clear now).
Now that other staple of Mexican cuisine, the spicy jalapeño, is spreading salmonella across the land. In looking at the map in this New York Post piece, it seems that Minnesota and Colorado have the highest number of cases, with large swaths of the Midwest suffering from the highest concentrations (there are even “5 to 6” cases here in South Carolina).
Granted, the total cases according to that map are around 345 nationwide—probably fewer than people who just have run-of-the-mill loose stools and diarrhea from eating too many clean jalapeño poppers at any given moment in the country. Additionally, there have been no deaths yet, and even the dreaded cyclosporiasis seems to be responsible for only two. That’s two too many, of course, but as far as devastating outbreaks go, that’s not screaming “nationwide panic,” even if the news coverage seems to be leaning in that direction (granted, I wouldn’t be ordering any salad in Michigan anytime soon).
What I’ve noticed, too, is that the news cycle’s hysteria is not “taking” the way it usually does. Sure, it could be because the numbers are, nationally, fairly low. It’s also possible to avoid consuming contaminated foods to some extent, whereas a communicable disease is a bit harder to guard against.
I think, however, that there is something different going on here.
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.
Poor Belize City. It’s becoming something of a punching bag for yours portly. I wanted to like it so badly, but it was really the most disappointing stop on our recent cruise.
That doesn’t make me a heartless monster. We tipped our tour guide, Omar, and bus driver, as we do for all of our excursions. It was cool seeing a city and a country that I’d never visited before. I appreciated how Omar and our driver improvised to deal with the heavy rain that hit when we made landfall.
But, as I’ve noted ad nauseum, the city itself was a letdown. That’s the heart of a review I completed at Omar’s urging (he came around with a QR code on his phone that we all took a picture of). I’m still not sure I’ve actually reviewed the correct service and/or tour, as the QR code wouldn’t scan properly, but, hey, I tried my best (and gave Omar a shout-out; he was, after all, the man who inspired the genre-defying megahit “Drink the Rum“).
The Doomed QR Code
So, with a dearth of better content to share, here is the full text of my TripAdvisor review (which you can also read here):
It’s been nice being back home (even though it was a sad start to last week), but I did enjoy our cruise. I’ve finally lost my “sea legs,” but I’m looking forward to another in the future, although I imagine it’ll be a bit before out next one. That said, I thought I’d share some recent cruise posts:
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.
Today Dr. Wife and I will be returning from a week-long Royal Caribbean cruise through the Western Caribbean. The cruise left from Tampa on Saturday, 11 July 2026 and returns this morning (Saturday, 18 July 2026). Along the way, we made stops in Costa Playa, Mexico; Roatán, Honduras; Belize City, Belize; and Cozumel, Mexico. It was a jam-packed itinerary with plenty of time for rest—and celebratory gluttony.
Before diving into the details, here were my favorite stops, from most favorite to least favorite:
1.) Roatán, Honduras – they have Bojangle’s! It’s also just a beautiful place with super friendly people.
2.) Cozumel, Mexico – we only saw the touristy area just off of the cruise ship, but you can buy stuff like azithromycin over-the-counter, which is wild.
3.) Puerto Costa Maya, Mexico – we saw Mayan ruins here and drove through a village called “Pineapple Town.”
4.) Belize City – I really wanted to like Belize City, hoping it’d be some kind of Anglo-Caribbean wonderland nestled in Central American. Instead, it was like the rest of Central America and the Caribbean, but somehow worse. I thought British imperialism would have left a bit more of a positive mark on this damp, effluvial city.
This cruise was only my second, but it cemented for me that I am a cruise person.
Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP
After some delays and enjoying America’s 250th anniversary, yours portly is back with some reading, now featuring a once-great literary form: poetry.
Poetry gets a bad rap, likely because the former has largely devolved into the latter. It’s pretty easy to write prose and then chop it up into sentence fragments with some white space and indents and call it poetry.
Here’s that last sentence as “poetry”:
Poetry gets a bad rap, likely because the former has largely Devolved into the latter. It's pretty easy to write Prose and then chop it up into sentence frag ments with some
white space and indents and call it Poetry.
Well, you can see the problem right away. It’s obvious that this style isn’t really poetry at all. A humorous example of this phenomenon is the gag book The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump, 2009-2019, which Dr. Wife (then Dr. Girlfriend) got me for my fortieth birthday. The “poetry” consists of our president’s tweets formatted into various blends of shapes and white space akin to my example above. It’s fun and a big, beautiful addition to my collection, but part of the joke is that it’s not poetry (although there is a poetic quality to President Trump’s tweets, at time).
That said, one needn’t harken back to the days of yore to find good poetry. All of today’s examples are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Naturally, there’s tons of great poetry from the first half of the twentieth century (apologies to W. B. Yeats for not making the list this time; you will soon!), but the twenty-first century tends to be moms writing lengthy odes to their children on Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the efforts are rarely “poetic” in the truest sense of the word.
But poetry is vitally important, as is the ability to read and analyze it. Consider that large chunks of the Bible consist of poetry. The Book of Psalms is a collection of poems and song lyrics. Song of Solomon is a sensual love poem that depicts both the intense passion of a groom for his bride while also echoing the intense love of The Groom (Jesus Christ) for His Bride (us, the Church).
All that preamble aside, here are four works of poetry and/or collections you should add to your home library:
Robert Frost, Robert Frost’s Poems – This collection of poetry from one of the most popular and enduring poets of the twentieth century is well-worth having at hand. Frost’s ability to evoke the Beauty of God’s Creation through verse is nourishing food for the soul.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets – This collection is on my “to-read” list. I remember reading The Wasteland in high school English class, and I loved Eliot’s obtuse thicket of classical allusions. I’m likely taking this slim volume on the cruise.
You can pick up all of these in paperback on Amazon for between $36.88 and $51.88 (Jeremy Miles’s—God Rest his soul—collection in full color is $30, but the greyscale edition is half the price). Centrism Games is the best value at just $5.57, and I highlyrecommend it.
Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP
It’s summertime, so it’s a great time to do some reading, especially the reading of fiction!
I was hoping to highlight some worthwhile poetry this week, but we’ll save that for next time. I’m out of town at the time of writing and don’t have immediate access to my books. However, I did recently purchase three books and I want to feature them.
Some of these will fall under “Short Fiction“; I defined that category in the first post in this series as “both short story collections and shorter novels/novellas” at fewer than or equal to 250 pages in length. Some of these probably come in a bit over that (admittedly generous) page length. Regardless, they’re all books I plan to read this summer, and I’ve already made substantial progress in one of them.
You can reader Parts I & II here and here, respectively. Part I looked at short fiction; Part II looked at non-fiction.
Here are three books I purchased earlier this week, and which I am currently reading:
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend – I’m currently reading this classic of 1950s horror. I recently watched the film adaptation starring Vincent Price, and realized it was high time I grabbed a copy of this book. The book is a harrowing study of the protagonist Robert Neville’s struggle against demons, both real (the vampires attacking his home) and psychic (his own tortured, alcoholic realization that he’s the last man on Earth). This version also comes with a collection of Matheson’s other stories and novellas.
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes – I wrote a review of the film adaptation last October, and I love the flick. I cannot remember if I purchased a copy of the paperback at that point, because it feels like I remember reading it last fall; now, however, I can’t remember, so I may have just blown cash purchasing another copy. Regardless, I’m looking forward to reading—perhaps re-reading—this book.
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz – Canticle has been on my list to read for awhile. Apparently, it’s one of the inspirations for the Fallout video game series. The concept is that a group of monks in the Utah deserts piece together bits of the past from some Jewish guy’s shopping list. Naturally, all of this occurs after a nuclear war of devastating proportions (I Am Legend also happens after a less devastating war in which—it is implied—atomic bombs fell in the United States).
More on I Am Legend below the punch. I’ve nearly read the entire novella (it’s around 170 pages). That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of dystopian, horror, and weird fiction, you can scoop them all up for under $35.
Last summer I served as the fill-in pianist for the local United Methodist Church in what became our new town. You can read about that here. Two Sundays ago I was invited to play for the local Presbyterian Church for their annual camp service.
What is a “hedge pianist”? Essentially, it’s a term I’ve coined for a freelance/unaffiliated pianist-for-hire. The “hedge” comes from the concept of a “hedge knight“; the hedge knight is a landless, traveling knight who takes work where he can, hoping his skills will land him in the retinue of some great lord, with all the benefits that come with it. With just his horse, armor, and arms, the hedge knight seeks to prove his skill in tournaments and small conflicts.
Similarly, a “hedge pianist” is a masterless pianist traveling about, taking gigs where they come, with a possible interest in gaining enough renown to land a cushy weekly church gig, or playing Friday nights at an upscale eatery. It’s also just a nerdy (or cool?) way of making playing as a fill-in pianist at local churches sound like I’m some kind of musical ronin roaming about the countryside looking for a piano to play.
Regardless, I had the opportunity to play that role two Sundays back for the local Presbyterian Church. The church has a “camp” service every year in preparation for their Vacation Bible School, and the pastor asked if I could play some hymns and all the usual pieces for High Church Protestant services, namely “Doxology” and the “Gloria Patri.” Naturally, I agreed.
The ChapelA Gazebo with a Bent CrossThe Campground and Buildings
The service was held at a campsite owned and maintained by the Southern Baptist church that Dr. Wife and I attend. It’s a beautiful little spot about twenty minutes outside of town, tucked away among the pine trees. The grounds and buildings are very well-maintained. I had some trepidation that the service would take place outdoors, which would present two inconveniences: the intense South Carolina summer heat, and the wind blowing my music everywhere.
Fortunately, the camp has a commodious (and air-conditioned) chapel, where a responsive Yamaha digital piano waited for me. There was also a delectable fried chicken lunch on the other side of the service.
