SubscribeStar Saturday: Have We Forgotten?

14 September 202413 September 2024 The Portly Politico30 Comments

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This past Wednesday marked another observation of 9-11, the events of 11 September 2001. While there were the usual tributes to the fallen, the observation seemed quite muted.

Perhaps we can chalk it up to the anniversary falling a Wednesday, the day of the week least-suited to hosting holidays both celebratory and reflective. I suspect, however, that there is more to our forgetful ennui than the inconvenience of Wednesdays.

Consider that President Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt earlier this summer. Has anything really changed since then? Has the Left and its media toned down its murderous rhetoric?

Instead, they’ve ludicrously claimed that he brought it upon himself—or that his team coordinated a fake assassination attempt. Given the totally lax and inexperienced Secret Service detail, as well as the peeling away of President Trump’s most accomplished agents to cover some asinine speech from “Dr.” Jill Biden, these excuses smack of lame psychological projection.

Regardless of the hypocrisy of the Left—which isn’t going to change no matter how much we point it out—it’s clear that modern Americans have a woefully short memory about major events. If we’ve already moved on from the failed assassination attempt against a President and presidential candidate, how can we be bothered to remember a series of devastating terrorist attacks from twenty-three years ago?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Smash the Smartphones

7 September 20246 September 2024 The Portly Politico4 Comments

I read an interesting piece in The Morning, a little newsletter The New York Times e-mails out every morning. Now, before you think I’ve lost my conservative bonafides for reading the NYT, consider the following:

It’s good to keep up with what the enemy is writing and thinking and
Even a stop clocked is right twice a day.

In this case, I’m considering one of those rare “stopped watch” moments.

Now that I’ve reassured you of my commitment to conservatism (perhaps engaging in another kind of ideological purity test), let’s consider why I’m softly endorsing this particular piece. It’s a report about the growing trend of banning cellular telephones in schools. These bans are sometimes based in individual schools or districts, but in a few cases they’re bans instituted by State law.

The writer of the newsletter makes an excellent point: if smartphones had been around when he was in high school, he wouldn’t have learned anything:

From my perch behind the students, I can see how many of them are scrolling through sports coverage, retail websites, text messages or social media, looking up occasionally to feign attention. It’s not everyone, of course. Some students remain engaged in the class. But many do not.

I would have been in the latter group if smartphones had existed decades ago; like many journalists, I do not have a naturally stellar attention span. And I’m grateful that I didn’t have ubiquitous digital temptations. I learned much more — including how to build my attention span — than I otherwise would have.

Yours portly agrees. I flunked the first quarter of AP Calculus BC as a senior because I somehow missed how to do derivatives: the fundamental basis of calculus and a very easy calculation to perform (although if you asked me to do it now, I’d be at a loss—that was twenty-two years ago!). I wasn’t scrolling through Instagram—it didn’t exist yet—or watching YouTube—it also did not exist. I didn’t even have a cellphone until I was 21, and only got one because it was cheaper than maintaining a landline in my crummy grad school apartment.

So even without the endless distractions of an infinite digital world, I somehow missed the ten minutes of the class in which Mrs. Grooms explained how to do derivatives. Who knows what I was doing; I was probably doodling, or just zoned out (my family knows that I have a tendency to do this regularly).

Imagine if I’d had even my Gameboy at school—and was allowed to play it, overtly or otherwise, in class. I would have learned nothing.

One giant leap forward: imagine if I’d had a smartphone, with access to endless entertainment and information. Sure, I might have learned something from the latter, but I was an unusual kid who liked reading encyclopedia entries. Even I would have succumbed to the siren song of mindless apps.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Lounge Gig Review

31 August 202425 August 2024 The Portly Politico2 Comments

On Friday, 23 August 2024, my friend Sarah and I performed a show to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday. Sarah selected tunes performed by Adele and Linda Ronstadt, the two artists who have had the most profound influence on her own singing and musical tastes.

We’d been rehearsing all summer to play a small program of eight songs—four Adele, four Ronstadt, mixed up with each other—for the partygoers. Sarah wanted to capture a real 1970s piano lounge vibe, and even asked guests to dress up in cocktail dresses and suits.

Naturally, yours portly had to lean into this vibe with a pink velvet tuxedo:

It helped that I already owned that outrageous paisley shirt. Here’s me right after showering, my hair still wet:

I love how I look like a gay choir director in that second picture.

Questionable sartorial choices aside, the concert itself was a smashing success.

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Lazy Sunday CCLXXVI: Music Stuff

25 August 202423 August 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

This past week was a musical one for yours portly, so I decided to dedicate today’s Lazy Sunday to some recent music posts:

“Midweek Composing Updates” – a quick update on some musical projects I have in the works.
“Gig Day X: An Evening with Adele and Ronstadt” – a preview of a gig I played with my friend Sarah to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday.
“SubscribeStar Saturday: Composing ‘Ötzi’” (SubscribeStar) – a preview of a new piece about the legendary ice man.

Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Composing “Ötzi”

24 August 202423 August 2024 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Yours portly is teaching World History this year, and it has been so fun talking about prehistoric humans. Particularly, I find Ötzi, a Chalcolithic Age European who died roughly 5000 years ago in the Austro-Italian Alps, fascinating. Two German hikers discovered his mummified remains in the ice in 1991, providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about the lifestyle and diet of people in prehistoric Europe.

Ötzi has captured my imagination so much, I composed a lengthy piece depicting his icy trudge through the Alps, and his tragic last hours (an arrow pierced his back, likely killing him). Upon his death, snow began to fall, preserving Ötzi’s remains in ice for millennia.

I began composing a slow, morose tuba piece, which is only twenty-five measures long on paper and in my composition software:

The slow 6/8 section captures a gloomy-but-whimsical feeling, as one might feel on a frosty trudge through the high mountains. The 5/8 section speeds up considerably, depicting what may have been Ötzi’s hasty, violent retreat from his attackers.

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SubscribeStarSaturday: Hiking the Florence Nature Preserve

10 August 20248 August 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

On Saturday, 3 August 2024 my friend Ashley and I went hiking in the Florence Nature Preserve, accessible via the Upper Hickory Nut Gorge Trailhead, just outside of Gerton, North Carolina and down the road from Chimney Rock.

Ashley had proposed the trip a couple of months earlier, with the inviting question “do you like hiking?” I couldn’t respond to that query quickly enough, and within minutes we had planned the broad outline of our excursion to the trailhead.

We left right around 6 AM that morning in Ashley’s sweet 2021 Ford Bronco, which she was eager to road test on winding mountain roads, and after a couple of missed GPS turns due to the distraction of conversation, we made it to the trailhead around 10:15 AM. By 10:30 AM we were lathered up in sunscreen and on the trail.

By noon we were drinking in this beautiful view at Tom & Glenna Rock over some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches:

The entire trail is roughly five miles up and back, but there are various side trails and alternative routes available that can reduce the trek depending on experience level and time constraints. We opted for a modified version of the “blue” trail rather than the whole loop, which would have taken us pretty much the entire day to complete.

Here’s a map of our route (I’ve used the map from the Conserving Carolina website and added our route in pink):

According to some rough math based on the interactive map for the trail, Ashley and I hiked around 3.82 miles in total. Naturally, roughly half of that was uphill, so coming back down the trail was a bit quicker. We also paced ourselves heading up, as Ashley was documenting our hike via video for her mother. That deliberate pace was smart, because we did not wear ourselves out on the hike.

The trail is rated as “challenging” and/or “strenuous,” and after my “Summer of George” I was a tad concerned about my ability to huff and puff up a mountain, but yours portly performed admirably.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Cruel Christian Women

3 August 20241 August 2024 The Portly Politico44 Comments

I’m officially announcing my retirement from an ill-fated career of attempting to date single Christian women over 30. I gave it my best shot, but this demographic consists of some of the most broken, spiritually confused, and cruel people I have ever encountered.

To be clear: “not all Christian women over 30 are like that”; indeed, the ones that have been married and have kids are ironically among the best of that group. After all, they’ve fulfilled their God-Given function: they’ve birthed and reared children. Something snaps in most women if they haven’t given birth by 30 or 35; they truly become unhinged, and it manifests itself in a number of unpleasant ways.

But childless “Christian” women over thirty are particularly awful. Here is the pattern I’ve noticed:

Woman spends her twenties riding The Carousel
Woman experiences major conversion or reversion experience right as she is hitting The Wall and her sexual marketplace value (SMV) is starting to crater
Woman’s newfound “faith”—and plenty of man-bashing/woman-affirming pastors—convinces woman that she is a “pearl of great price” (which doesn’t even make sense biblically) or “more precious than rubies,” giving her an inflated sense of her value in the dating pool
Woman demands wealthy, physically fit, tall, aggressively-masculine-but-gentle-as-a-lamb man with the desert-sculpted physique of Jesus on the Cross because she’s a “holy princess” or some such nonsense
Woman brutally critiques any weaknesses or shortcomings in a potential partner and justifies it as helpful honesty and as a “guarding her heart“
Woman likely still sleeps around with Chads, chalking it up to “struggling with her faith”; woman continues to reject decent, normal Christian men
Woman occasionally develops a weird, Christian-adjacent mutation, such as being too interested in Judaism or insisting on only eating “organic” foods; this mutation becomes the centerpiece of her personality and she demands total adherence to it as a qualification, not understanding things like “compromise” and “reasonableness” exist

The delusion among this demographic is through the roof. Instead of their alleged “faith” encouraging introspection, humility, and gratitude, it manifests itself as a perverted sense of self-worth.

The Blood of Jesus Washes away our sins, but it does not make us sexier.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Social Contract

27 July 202426 July 2024 The Portly Politico10 Comments

A few weeks back I wrote a post entitled “Boomer Rant,” the inspiration for which was a piece by Erin over at Existential Ergonomics called “The Boomer Mentality,” which detailed the grasping materialism and petty shallowness of the various Boomer caricatures she and her boyfriend experienced during a visit to Yellowstone National Park. Both Erin’s lighthearted post and my more strident polemic about that larger-than-life generation generated a stream of comments from outraged Boomers, all of whom played the part of victim well. As I noted in my post and in multiple comments, “Boomers are either the heroes or the victims of their stories—they are never the villains.”

What was interesting in the resulting discussion was the lack of any concept of a social contract existing between one generation and the next. That broken and/or missing social contract was the heart of the complaint both Erin and I brought in our respective posts: where is the sense of obligation—and even just empathy—to the plight of Millennials, et. al.? Not a single Boomer commenter—even the ones that do not fit the negative Boomer stereotypes—would come out and say, “You know, you’re right—the Millennials and Gen Xers and Zoomers have had and will have it harder than us. We had our own struggles, but we enjoyed pretty good economic conditions for most of our lives.”

That failure or unwillingness to acknowledge the struggles of younger generations makes any sense of social contract impossible for the Boomers. Remember, these are people who are gleefully boasting about how they will not leave their children anything, taking out reverse mortgages and blowing their fortunes (and pensions and Social Security payments) on RVs and casinos and luxury vacations. Meanwhile, they’re the same people that complain about how expensive spaghetti noodles have gotten and will penny-pinch on stupid things, like the water bill—the living embodiment of “penny wise and pound foolish”—or their own children. They’re the generation that tips 10% on a $500 tab.

Again, my point with this hyperbole is not to Boomer bash, per se, but to note the very concept of a social contract between generations—an implicit understanding of the obligations of each generation to the other that has existed in some form in every society in every age—is dying, if not non-existent. That does not bode well for the future of the nation. Indeed, it breeds radicalism and desperation.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Chicago 2024, Part III: Pizza and Ice Cream

20 July 202419 July 2024 The Portly Politico6 Comments

After a busy day of scurrying all over northwestern Indiana and Chicago, my brother and I settled into our accommodations at the Palmer House Hotel and rested for a bit. My older brother is one of those guys who likes to have the television on constantly, and he had it tuned—bizarrely—to CNN (I guess he wanted to go for that “waiting-at-the-doctor’s-office” or “sitting-at-an-airport-concourse” feel). We were in Chicago right after President Biden’s disastrous glitching out during his debate with President Trump, and it was interesting seeing how desperate the CNN anchors and pundits were. The Democratic Governors met and announced their support for Biden, and it reminded me of how much work Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer—the one who the FBI plotted to kidnap to pin it on Republicans—has had done.

I showered the grime of Gotham and CNN from my doughy body and put on my best (and, I’ll hasten to add, only) Mickey Mouse t-shirt, and we went to Pizano’s Pizza and Pasta for dinner, a short walk from out hotel room. Pizano’s obviously serves Chicago deep dish pizza, but they also feature “Chicago Tavern Style,” which I thought Pizza Hut made up as part of a recent advertising campaign (apparently, it’s real).

It turns out that Chicago Tavern Style is not just a clever marketing ploy by a formerly renowned national pizza franchise; it’s actually a Chicagoan innovation to pizza. Basically, it’s the happy medium between, say, New York Style and Chicago Style slices. The crust is a bit thicker, with a doughier quality than New York Style, but not so thick that it’s like eating a lasagna, a la Chicago Style.

Here’s a handy picture to illustrate:

Wouldn’t you love to wake up in the morning to this fat man serving you pizza?

My brother described the crust as “redolent of the oiliness of a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza from the Nineties,” which is the perfect description. We ordered the “Jeweler’s Special” (the Loop is the old jewelers district in Chicago), which came with sausage and giardiniera. Giardiniera is the blend of various peppers and carrots that Chicagoans put on their hot dogs.

The pie was delicious, but too spicy. Keen observers will note the sheen of sweat on my massive forehead. That wasn’t just because of my excess portliness; the peppers were causing sweat to pour down my face.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Chicago 2024, Part II: Through Mordor and Onto the River

13 July 20249 July 2024 The Portly Politico3 Comments

After visiting Willis Tower my brother and I had to make a long walk across Chicago to a boat landing, where we would embark on a ninety-minute cruise of the river. The purpose of the tour was to showcase the incredible architecture in Chicago.

My brother is a bit of a Romantic—even more so than yours portly—and wanted to walk along the river for as much of our route as possible. I was fine with that, but in following our GPS directions, we realized that it would not be feasible to follow the river on the side of the street where we needed to be. I pointed out that we could cross back over the river and enjoy the river walk on that side, but that we’d be on the river for over an hour soon enough, so we might as well just follow the GPS.

Well, my brother’s Romantic wanderlust was right. My route took us along Lower Wacker Boulevard. Wacker is a multi-level street—it gets to as high as three levels—and the underside of the street is basically an underground tunnel. It’s full of steam pipes, service accesses, and darkness.

And a dead pigeon. When we emerged on the other side, my brother remarked that we’d been through Mordor.

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