I’m in the process of working on three different releases right now, two of which consist of old material (some of it very old), one of which includes new works. My tentative plan is to release all three of them on the same day, so listeners will enjoy an explosion of new-to-them pieces from yours portly.
The collection of new pieces is Ringtone Circus. The pieces don’t all have a Nokia cellphone ringtone feel to them, but several possess that plinking, happy, upbeat quality.
Today, I’m sharing the pieces that prominently feature mallet-based instruments: vibraphones, marimbas, etc.
Yours portly is taking this weekend off from extensive blogging. Enjoy leftover Independence Day foods with your family and friends. I’ll be flying back from a week in Indianapolis with my older brother.
Before I dove headlong back into Civilization VII, I spent a solid two or three weeks playing Sid Meier’s Colonization on Governor difficulty (the penultimate difficulty level). I finally won a game as the Dutch, with a strong colonial basis in modern-day Argentina and Chile:
I first played this game in the mid-1990s when I was a kid. I was hooked immediately, and this game is largely responsible for sparking my interesting in teaching American history. It also ignited a lifelong interest in the American Revolution.
So, how does it hold up thirty-one years after its release?
Yours portly has finally dived back into Civilization VII after almost three months away from the game. The hiatus was not due to disinterest, but rather to the overwhelming busyness of the end of the school year. Longtime players of Civ games—or any other franchise or game in which picking up after an extended break is difficult—will understand how the thought of returning to a half-finished save file is challenging, as you’ve likely forgotten what you were doing and what your goals were.
That made it difficult to return to my last save file, but when I play Civ VII, I need hours of uninterrupted time to lose myself in the game. I’ve never been good at playing for an hour or two and then heading to bed. I need to know I have three or four hours to dedicate to the game, and that my plate is clear of any obligations or tasks.
Naturally, that state of limitless free time is rare for yours portly, except for two months every year: June and July. Yes, I’m keeping busy with writing blog posts, teaching lessons, practicing piano, filming silly YouTube shorts, planning a wedding, etc.; but after dinnertime, I’ve got hours of gaming goodness ahead of me.
That’s all to say that, after a few weeks of dipping into Colonization, I’m back to Civilization VII. The game has had a number of updates (with version 1.2.2 coming soon, promising massive map sizes and other improvements), and they have really improved the gameplay experience. It’s still not perfect, but the game is getting better.
Yours portly has been flying more frequently, which is out of character for me. My older brother lives in Indianapolis, and I’ve flown up there twice this year so far for various events (and will do so a third time this summer).
Between the two trips, I’ve somehow set off TSA’s full body scanner three times. No, dear reader, yours portly is not some kind of chaos agent attempting to smuggle more than three ounces of shampoo into the airport. For some reason, my manly area is setting off the scanner.
At first I thought it was the pants I was wearing. I wear these Member’s Mark mason pants (just $15 a pair at Sam’s Club!) and they have a brass (or some similar metal) button above the zipper. I figured those were setting off the scanner.
So on the way home from Indy, I wore a pair of shorts with a plastic button. Surely, I thought, I’d be immune from setting off the scanner, but I set it off nonetheless.
Is it the zipper? We’ve all heard of microplastics; are there micrometals? Is my personal area full of tiny particles of metal?
Regardless of why I keep setting off these scanners, let me explain to you, dear reader, what it is like to be fondled by Uncle Sam.
Ah, ’tis the season for postmortems. I’ve gotten another Minecraft Camp in the books, and it was another good year.
For my British readers who might find the conflation of “Minecraft” and “Camp” confusing, allow me to clarify: in America, “camp” can be a.) a woodsy outdoor adventure, consisting of “roughing it” in a cabin or tent and staying overnight in such accommodations or b.) any sort of hobby or activity in which children (or, in some cases, adults) spend part of a day (or a full day, or overnight) pursuing for fun or learning.
Minecraft Camp is the latter—it is a “day” camp, meaning children just attend for a few hours (9 AM to 12 PM) and then go home. When the camp first began way back in 2014, we actually went from 9 AM to 3 PM for five days, but I found that was too much for students (and me). When the school instituted summertime hours that closed campus on Fridays, I shifted to a Monday-through-Thursday morning camp.
Even with that reduced camp time, I find that students still start to get a little weary of playing Minecraft by the end of the third day, especially the younger ones. It’s a bit like a little kid thinking that eating forty-seven scoops of ice cream would be amazing, but by the fourth scoop, he’s ready to stop; by the eighth, he’s ready to vomit.
So I always provide some alternative activities. The big favorite is LEGOs. I bring a huge box of them, and kids are free to tinker and build with them to their hearts’ content; some of the kids built some cool stuff this year. My counselors also started playing Hangman with some of the kids, which was a big hit. Additionally, we take a couple of “screen-free” breaks in the sunshine, and the kids will shoot hoops or kick a soccer ball around. On the last day of camp, I brought King’s Hawaiian Rolls—a time-honored Minecraft Camp tradition—which the kids devoured with the pitiless fervor of the sea lion.
On Friday, 23 May 2025 I hosted the fifth annual Spring Jam Recital on my front porch. It is one of two front porch recitals I host each year, the other being the Spooktacular in October.
This year’s Spring Jam featured a fairly intimate crowd, with seven students in total performing, as well as my buddy John playing some pre-recital tunes. I think it was slightly larger than last year’s, especially as one little girl brought not only her parents and brother, but a number of extended family members as well. One of the parents, a local restauranteur, brought delicious wings from one of her establishments.
As usual, my Mom made her famous Rotel dip, this time with sausage added. My Dad and my younger brother grilled up some all-beef hot dogs, and Dr. Fiancée helped with selling t-shirts and getting the table set with my mother. My niece and one of my nephews played, too; it’s always fun having a family get-together mixed in with the recital.
Today is another graduation, which means it’s time for yours portly to dish out some more dubious graduation day wisdom. The older I get, the more I realize that the only certainty we can have is found in Jesus Christ. Human frailty is such that, no matter how hard any of us try, we are going to let even people we love down—and they’ll let us down (don’t worry, no one I love has let me down lately—ha!—and I hope I haven’t done the same, I’m just noting a general Truth). Perhaps that is the greatest wisdom I have to offer, younglings: put your trust and faith in the Lord.
But besides the preachy stuff, what about more spicy nuggets of enlightenment? Come, gather at my feet, and let me teach you.
I’m continuing to dig up ancient MIDI compositions (now converted to glorious, lossless WAV files) from twenty years ago (give or take). This weekend I’m sharing some digital saxophone compositions with readers.
I probably intended these pieces to be played by an actual saxophone quartet/quintet/sextet at some point. I played in a saxophone quintet in high school (two altos, two tenors, one bari) and a saxophone sextet in college (I can’t recall the exact instrumentation, but I think it had soprano, two altos, two tenors, and one bari), so I did quite a bit of arranging and composing for those groups. I also arranged a ton for Brass to the Future, the brass quintet (with saxophone) that my brother and I played in for a number of years in the early 2010s.
Now they exist as ghostly digital instruments, honking and squawking through the musical musings of a plump young Portly with a head full of dreams and a belly full of Cheez-Its.
“Saxophonic Organ”
I’m not sure what the original title for this piece was meant to be, but I do remember wanting to emulate the sound and rhythms of a 1970s classic rock organ in the context of a saxophone ensemble. “Saxophonic Organ” is the result of that experimentation, and I rather like it.
Last week I submitted subscribers to Säx, a collection of saxophone quartet pieces I wrote and recorded way back in 2004 in a buddy’s attic studio. In digging around in the vast depths of my backup hard drive, I found quite a few compositions I believed were lost to time (and/or to a 32-bit operating system; my ancient version of Cakewalk 3.0 won’t run on modern, 64-bit operating systems).
Eventually, I’m going to re-release Säx and release these MIDI-based compositions on Bandcamp and on streaming platforms. I managed to convert the MIDI files to lossless WAVs, and I am doctoring some of them up using Audacity. Säx will be released in its original form—what paid subscribers could hear in full last week.
For now, I wanted to share some of the tracks from what will be the MIDI release, as well as a recording of one of the pieces I did on a tiny Yamaha keyboard my family has had since I was a small child (and I still have it—I think it works, too). Paid subs will have access to some other pieces over on SubscribeStar.
The first piece here is “Euroclydon,” named after the Mediterranean storm from the Book of Acts. I remember learning the name from a sermon at my parents’ church years ago, and I am guessing I composed the bulk of “Euroclydon” around 2012:
“Euroclydon”
The next piece is “Aachen Cathedral Chorale.” I used this chord progression and melody in a number of pieces, including my organ solo “Organic Evolution.” I’m sure it’s from some famous Baroque composer, but back in the day, it was one of my favorite themes to incorporate into music.
This version consists of three MIDI files I converted to WAVs and then aligned in Audacity. I also added some additional reverb and chorus effects. Essentially, I had the same theme composed for organ, strings, and saxophones, and then mashed them together into this glorious wall of sound:
“Aachen Cathedral Chorale”
This version of “Aachen” was played using the Yamaha keyboard and splicing/aligning all of the parts together. As I recall, I plugged the keyboard into my older brother’s ancient Crate amplifier, then dangled a primitive computer microphone in front of it and recorded either to Adobe Audition 1.5 or Windows Recorder (the latter would have been a nightmare to line up properly, so I’m thinking it’s the former). I am playing all of the parts on this one:
“Live at the Aachen Cathedral”
It’s wild to think that I wrote some of these pieces as early 2004 or so. I found stuff that I likely composed in high school, which would place the absolute earliest possible compositions at 1999. I was using Cakewalk 3.0 in the eighth grade, so I have some material that would date back to 1998—whoa!
One day I’ll finally figure out how to setup a Windows 95 virtual machine on my desktop so I can run Cakewalk 3.0 natively, but I’ve never had much success doing that.
Regardless, let’s see what else a young Portly cooked up back in the day.
The Portly Politico 