SubscribeStar Saturday: Yulestravaganza 2022 Review

24 December 202222 December 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

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It’s Christmas Eve, the most mystical and magical night of the year. Last Saturday was the annual Yulestravaganza, the most bonkers night of the year.

The Yulestravaganza, for those wondering, is not a consonant-ridden Welsh holiday. It’s the little Christmas show my buddies John and Steve O and I put on each December.

Well, not quite each December. During the long years of The Age of The Virus, the Yulestravaganza was a no-go, and we have been unable to get it together in other years due to scheduling conflicts.

But we managed to slap it together this year—very nearly at the last minute—and had a grand old time.

The Yulestravaganza is a “songwriter-in-the-round” format. Each of us plays a solo selection (usually with one or both of the others hopping in here and there for harmonies or additional accompaniment), then we play a group selection. Rinse and repeat until the gig is done.

It’s a very fun, very loose way of putting together a show. We don’t have a set list, just a mental or jotted list of songs we’d like to get in before the evening ends.

So, how did the Yulestravaganza 2022 go?

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Delayed SubscribeStar Saturday Delivered!: Christmas Concert 2022 Review

17 December 202216 December 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I never got around to writing about the annual school Christmas Concert last Saturday, so subscribers are getting a double dose of SubscribeStar Saturday today. Despite this past week being exam week—historically full of free time—I was quite busy with a number of things related to closing out a semester of school. Some Town Council things came up, too, so it was a fairly productive week.

All excuses aside, I’m finally getting around to it.

The short version is as follows: it was amazing. The kids performed extremely well. Some of them gave what I would consider to be career-best performances. There’s something magical about the stress and excitement and anticipation that bring out the best in students.

It wasn’t without glitches, but those small bits aside, it was fantastic.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Analyzing Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

17 December 202216 December 2022 The Portly Politico8 Comments

One of my shameful holiday pleasures is the cloying, condescending, tone-deaf “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by British New Wave super group Band Aid. At least, that’s how the tune would be described if it were written today.

At the time, it was a progressive project: the Ethiopian Civil War and related famine inspired the songwriters, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, to write a song to raise funds for the people there. That’s actually quite noble, and it’s an enjoyable and fun song.

It also spawned millions of pounds in sells and royalties to help Africans, and sparked the United States to respond with “We Are the World” in 1985 (and, later, a heavy metal variant).

I’m not sure how it was received upon its release in 1984, but many of the lyrics are unintentionally hilarious. Today the very same progressives who can’t wait to sign on to the latest cringe, woke charity project would call these lyrics Eurocentric or anti-African

My favorite line is “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime.” Never mind Mount Kilimanjaro, which stays capped in snow year-round.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Mayhem

3 December 202229 November 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It’s Christmastime, which means a mad dash of yuletide craziness for yours portly, followed by a stately glide into New Year’s. Right now I’m riding the wave of insanity, hoping I don’t wipe out along the way to the crest.

Years ago, I worked for a municipal performing arts center as the Cultural Coordinator—a cool title for a stressful job. The venue was a beautiful opera house of the kind that graced many mid-sized Southern towns in the late nineteenth century. We did not host an opera company (as far as I can recall, not a single note of opera was performed in the venue while I was there), so the name is a bit of a misnomer, but we did feature a number of different performances, both those we booked ourselves through the city, and those put on by enterprising residents who rented out our facilities.

The month of December was brutal. In addition to our own events, we were also slammed with rentals. Friday and Saturday nights saw me splitting my time between an outdoor musical event and whoever happened to be in the opera house that weekend. One Christmas, I was so stressed out I starting losing weight without even realizing it, leading to my 2011 weight loss odyssey.

Unfortunately, I was so busy and stressed, I started loathing Christmas—a holiday I love!

Fortunately, while I’m still pretty busy at the holidays, I no longer dread their approach. That said, I have had quite a week, and have another major one ahead of me.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Considering Secession

26 November 202220 November 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It seems as though I post about “the s-word”—secession—about once a year (2019, 2020, 2021), and always on Saturdays (two of those posts are behind paywalls for a reason; it’s amazing how charging a buck for something on the Internet is the best way to ensure no one ever sees it).

The recent, abysmal midterm elections got me thinking about the topic again, but what really got the juices flowing was this map my brother forwarded to me:

The map comes from this post at Bright Line Watch, an organization that—so far as I can tell—gauges how the health of “our democracy,” to use the parlance the Left loves so well (it’s pedantic to point out, but we’re a constitutionally-limited federal representative republic with democratic mechanisms—at least, we used to be—not a democracy). Like most such outfits, I suspect they are institutionally Leftist, but in this case, I don’t think ideology infects their numbers.

Note that 66% of Republicans in the South support secession into a new regional union, spanning from Texas to Virginia (I’d say let’s stop at the border between South and North Carolina, but that’s just me), as do 50% of Independents. Only 20% of Democrats do, but that makes sense—they’d probably not much like being in a Southern Union dominated by conservatives.

I do think it’s a tad far-fetched to think that 66% of Southern Republicans pine for secession. Most Republicans I know are still flag-waving Boomer types who worship Abraham Lincoln (what I was until just a few years ago).

Still, (allegedly) 44% of Southerners supporting the idea of breaking out into a thirteen-State union (the old Confederate States of America, plus Oklahoma and Kentucky) is ridiculously high. It only takes a dedicated minority of 20% to shape policy and push change at a societal level (thus the concepts of the “Silent Majority” versus the “Noisy Minority”), so 44% is more than double that threshold.

Does it mean anything? Is America headed for The Civil War II?

Disclaimer: I do not want or advocate for a violent revolution; I am merely exploring an issue of growing interest in our fractured political times. The restoration of true federalism is the preferable answer, but barring that, a peaceful separation of the States could—not necessarily is—another possible outcome that prevents widespread violence and continued tyranny at the national level.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Floozies

19 November 202215 November 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Ah, women. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Literally—without women, the human race would cease to exist. That many of them are shirking their God-given gift to do so—and a disturbing chunk of those want the Molochian freedom to slaughter their own children—does not bode well for the future of humanity, at least not in the West.

Modern women have bought into a narrative that the path to true fulfilment lies in eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of a career in graphic design. Rather than tending to their man and their children, they’ve been duped into thinking it is somehow better to keep some strange man’s calendar, or to dedicate their most (re)productive years to maintaining the social media accounts for some megacorporation.

Of course, men—who perhaps shortsightedly permitted such rights to be extended to the fairer sex—bear all the blame for when things go awry. There are “no good men” left, meaning something equivalent to “there are no men earning six-figure salaries who are willing to wife me up after spending my twenties riding the carousel of one-night stands and non-committal flings.” Some men take advantage of this sexually-liberated situation to bed unsuspecting floozies, but many of those same women believe they’re “living their best life” by engaging in multiple sexual liaisons with strange, predatory men.

But expecting women to recognize their folly and to restore themselves and our culture is unreasonable. As Jack Nicholson’s character said in 1997’s As Good as It Gets, when asked how he writes women so well: “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”

In that same film, however, the same character tells former babe Helen Hunt “You make me want to be a better man.” Do modern day floozies still inspire that drive to improve, to build, to conquer? Forget Helen Hunt; are there are any Helens of Troy out there?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Disappointment

12 November 20229 November 2022 The Portly Politico10 Comments

Well, the midterm elections have come and gone, and my primary reaction is bitter disappointment.

I’d been tepid about the elections this year, barely taking notice of them, but allowed myself to fall for the “red wave” hype. In a sane world, that should have happened—a major backlash against inflation and insanity.

Instead, we have a brain-dead automaton in the United States Senate and a lean Republican majority in the House—a majority, I fear, that will be ultimately meaningless. At the time of writing, the balance in the Senate itself is questionable, and the Democrats may even walk away controlling it—completely the opposite of what we all thought would happen.

I was a fool to get my hopes up about national politics. Even had the Republicans taken huge majorities, what would have been the result? Would anything have substantially changed?

Perhaps with time I’ll take a more measured response to events, but right now, it seems like our national republic is a joke, and the American people are addicted to government largesse and cultural degradation. We don’t want to improve, and we don’t want to be free. We want to be children, and children can’t govern themselves.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Feelin’ Musky

5 November 20222 November 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

It’s official: Elon Musk owns Twitter!

After months of wrangling and negotiating, including Musk incorporating some dread game and walking away from the deal, it’s finally done. Musk walked into Twitter headquarters last week carrying a kitchen sink, in a fun visual pun. It’s the kind of lighthearted whimsy for which the innovative billionaire is known.

The Left is melting down, thinking that a man who not long ago supported the Democratic Party is suddenly going to turn the platform into a recruiting site for Neo-Nazis (all four of them that actually exist). No Leftists panicked when Jeff Bezos—a far less lovable, far more tyrannical—figure purchased The Washington Post, turning it into a propaganda organ for Amazon.

Ah, but Elon Musk supports free speech—or, at the very last, far freer speech than any progressive wants. Free speech is anathema to the Left, because their ideology doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny of daylight. Free inquiry undermines the carefully constructed narratives of the Left—human-caused climate change; diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE); systemic racism—and, therefore, represents a major threat to their political power and control.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Malfunctioning Robots

29 October 202227 October 2022 The Portly Politico1 Comment

After two years under the befuddlingly tyrannical rule of a mentally-impaired geezer, our electoral standards have slid to meet the lowered expectations of our time. Now a mentally-impaired greaseball wants to be the United States Senator for Pennsylvania, and until a disastrous debate performance that was impossible to ignore, it seemed that Pennsylvanians were willing to vote for him.

To be clear, I take no pleasure in the profound illness of another person. John Fetterman suffered a stroke—a terrible thing—but he is still pursuing public office. As much as Henry Clay disliked Andrew Jackson in the 1824 presidential election, he wasn’t going to throw his support behind Secretary of Treasury William Crawford of Georgia (the election was thrown to the House of Representatives; Crawford was in third, but had suffered a major stroke and would pass away soon afterwards, with Clay giving his support to John Quincy Adams).

But we’ve grown accustomed to power-hungry wives and political parties propping up brain-dead puppets in public office. Indeed, the historians of the distant future will no-doubt look back at our time and think of it as The Age of The Impaired. We celebrate every manner of impairment—transgenderism, paralysis (both moral and physical), gluten intolerance, etc.—as some kind of special mark of holiness.

Of course, we should treat such people with compassion, but we shouldn’t be electing them to public office, no matter how good it makes us feel about ourselves to do so. Public service is hard, even for the able-bodied and clear-minded. Being a United States Senator is exceptionally difficult—and a position with incredible amounts of power and prestige.

What we saw with Fetterman—much like Marco Rubio’s glitching out in 2016—was an Establishment robot malfunctioning on live television. I’m only being mildly hyperbolic—Fetterman can only process incoming sounds via a computer. That’s a miraculous bit of technology, but do we want a cyborg serving as one of the 100 men and women of the US Senate? Even if we did, would we want one that was constantly breaking down in stressful situations?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Spooktacular 2022 Review

22 October 202221 October 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

The 2022 Spooktacular is in the books, and it was the best one yet.

Yes, yes, people always say that—“you’re the best Music students I’ve ever had!”; “that was the best concert ever!”—but in this case, it’s true! As far as Spooktaculars go, the 2022 one was the best so far. The musicians, the sound, the crowd—everything was on-point to make for a great evening.

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