Tag: travel

Lazy Sunday XXVIII: World History

The Portly Politico47 Comments

Most of my pieces here at The Portly Politico focus on American politics and culture, with some occasional dabbling in British and European affairs.  But contrary to Ron Swanson’s historiographical claim, history did not begin in 1776 (though everything that came before may have been a mistake).

As such, I’ve written a few pieces about events, current and historical, that take place in more exotic locales.  While I am a parochial homebody, I appreciate travel and the contributions of other cultures (I still wish I’d seen London and Paris before they became part of the Caliphate).  I wish I had the time to do more of it (on that note, stay tuned for details of my trip to the Yemassee Shrimp Festival).

So, here’s some worldly pieces for your Lazy Sunday:

  • “North Korea Reflections” – I wrote this little piece on the occasion of President Trump’s historic summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore.  My interpretation of the summit was cautiously optimistic.  It’s still unclear what the future holds for US-Nork relations, but the gambit seemed to work—North Korea is a still a bloodthirsty, repressive, totalitarian regime, but they aren’t lobbing missiles around constantly anymore.
  • “The Impermanence of Knowledge and Culture:  The Great Library and Notre Dame” – this post was a synthesis of two events—the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, and the burning of a substantial portion of the Notre Dame Cathedral.  The fire at the latter riled up conservatives and traditionalists because the structure had endured for so long as a symbol of Christianity and of France’s faithfulness.  France is not a very faithful country now, but Notre Dame remains a powerful symbol of man’s capacity for focusing on the greatness of God.  The major point of this piece was to drive home how even great edifices eventually crumble, and that knowledge and culture must be preserved actively if they are to endure.
  • “Sri Lankan Church Bombings” – coming on the heels of the catastrophic Notre Dame fire, the island nation of Sri Lanka was shaken on Easter Sunday of this year with Islamic terrorist attacks on churches.  Democrats referred to the slain Christians as “Easter worshippers” in what appeared to be a concerted effort to appear politically-correct.  Yeesh.
  • “America’s Roman Roots” – I wrote this piece earlier in the week, based on an excellent op-ed a colleague sent my way.  Commentators often fixate on the similarities between the United States today and the Roman Empire, but often miss the parallels to the Roman Republic.  Those parallels exist because the Framers of the Constitution pulled heavily from Roman tradition, even naming key institutions like the Senate after their Roman counterparts.  The Roman Republic holds valuable lessons for Americans for how to craft a robust society that enables citizens to live worthwhile lives.

That wraps up this little tour around the globe.  Rome, France, Sri Lanka and North Korea—not a bad start, though I’d better get Africa and Latin America into the mix soon, lest I catch flack from the SJWs for lack of inclusion.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday XXVII: Bric-a-Brac

The Portly Politico50 Comments

It’s been a pretty crazy week, and the weekend has only eased up slightly.  Last week’s Lazy Sunday was all about small town living, and about how valuable social peace is to maintaining a healthy society.

I’ve been harping on this idea a great deal lately.  Politics is an abyss, and staring into it for too long and too often starts to distort and twist one’s perspective.  In some ways, avoiding the topic twists the perspective of those who are not staring into the abyss, as I wrote about yesterday.  Nevertheless, it gets tiring—indeed, soul-sucking—to focus on politics constantly.

Additionally, I am increasingly in a state of despair about the ultimate direction of our nation and culture.  President Trump has been a welcome, God-given reprieve, but even his efforts have been repeatedly stymied, even by those within the party he remolded into his own image.  Even normal ideas are increasingly considered “radical,” and we can’t even discuss problems openly anymore in a polite setting.  I am a declinist by nature, but this is just ridiculous.

So, in the midst of this deepening despair—and this sense that, in abandoning God, He’s abandoned us to our fate—I’ve been trying to write more about lighter topics.  Perhaps it’s a bit of buoyant distraction as the ship slowly descends into the murky depths of irreversible darkness, or maybe it’s the recognition that there’s more to life than petty political squabbles (although most of those squabbles are increasingly theological battles for the soul of the West), but I’ve found that writing about Saturn is more enjoyable.

With that in mind, here’s a grab-bag of portly bric-a-brac:

  • “The Bull on the Roof” – I wrote this post on my phone—never an enjoyable endeavor—while watching my little niece and nephew one evening (they lived, so I guess I wasn’t too negligent).  It’s about a delightful little piece of classical music from 1920, before modern classical music turned into atonal trash and killed the genre.  I wish music composition schools were still churning out composers who could write stuff like this piece.
  • “Funcling” – I love being an uncle.  My little niece and two nephews are fun (and exhausting) to watch and to play with, and their imaginations are amazing.  This piece was about their obsession with pretending to be various Nintendo characters, mostly Kirby and sundry Pokemon.
  • “Summer Reading: The Story of Yankee Whaling” – I read this little book over the summer, and loved it.  Written for children in the late 1950s, the book is an historical overview of the defunct whaling industry, an industry that built and fueled New England and America.  They don’t write history like this anymore; now, the book would be full of hand-wringing about whales being endangered species due to overhunting.  None of that in this book:  whales are powerful creatures, and men need to make a living.  Adventure ensues.
  • “Saturn: The Creepiest Planet?” – Other than Earth, Saturn is the best planet (and, next to Earth, the creepiest, it seems).  I dream of being able to visit other planets.  In fact, I get perturbed when talking to scientists because they’re such buzzkills about space exploration.  “You would be crushed instantly, TPP, if you tried to fly into Saturn’s gaseous core” (even that sentence mocking them is probably riddled with errors to which they would object)—yeah, I know!  Let me suspend disbelief for a minute.  Better yet, come up with some solutions.  I’m sick of nerds telling me that putting plants and potting soil on the moon won’t terraform it.  Figure it out!  Aren’t we paying you to make science-fiction a reality?

That’s it for this week.  Don’t let politics suck your soul away.  Maybe God will hear our cries for help and do something; maybe not.  Regardless, spend time with family, read good books, and listen to good music—and try to enjoy yourself as the ship goes down.

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Aiken Amblings

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

It’s been quite a nice week, Hurricane Dorian notwithstanding.  Last night I called my first varsity football game (I’ve been calling junior varsity games for a few years now), and I am eternally grateful to the eagle-eyed coaches in the pressbox who fed me some of my best lines.

After the game—a blowout of such proportions that the second half instituted a “running clock,” which meant an abbreviated evening for yours portly—I drove to my hometown of Aiken, in the western part of South Carolina.  My destination for the weekend:  the large arts and crafts fair known as Aiken’s Makin’.

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Saturn: The Creepiest Planet?

The Portly Politico10 Comments

Some time ago, I somehow ended up subscribed to daily updates from Quora.com, the website where users can submit answers to other users’ questions.  Apparently, I told Quora that I like dinosaurs, because most of the featured questions in my daily digest are about evolution.

Lately, however, I’ve been receiving more questions—and answers!—about astronomy.  I love space exploration, and I dream of one day walking on the surface of the moon.  It’s an outlandish dream, and one that I know is unlikely to ever be fulfilled, but I yearn for that opportunity.

So I was thrilled to see the kind of question that the science scolds on Quora hate—qualitative, rather than purely quantitative, in nature.  The question, simply, was thus:  “What is the creepiest planet in our solar system?”

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Lazy Sunday XXI: Travel

The Portly Politico54 Comments

I don’t really like to travel, mainly because I prefer sitting on my own toilet and watching my own TV.  If you’ve seen one trendy downtown district, you’ve seen them all, and going to cool places overseas is expensive, time-consuming, disruptive, and dangerous.  Yes, I would liked to have visited London thirteen years ago (when my family took a ten-day trip all around Ireland), but now that it’s part of the Islamic caliphate, I’ll pass.  Same with Paris.  The United States is a big country, with plenty to see and do domestically.

That said, I keep the road hot, and enjoy the occasional excursion to points of interest near and far.  With my recent trip to Wilmington—and with summer rapidly drawing to a close—I thought I’d dedicate this belated Lazy Sunday to posts about travel.

  • “Gig Day II” – This post is super short, but it briefly chronicles my trip to The Juggling Gypsy Cafe a year ago.  At that point, I was living in a hotel because my old apartment had flooded.  Because of the flooding, the power supply for my Casio keyboard was kaput (though it miraculously began working again a couple of weeks later), and I had to borrow an incredible Korg SV-1 from a pianist friend.  I’d spent the day laying sod at school, a grueling, physically-demanding job.  Conditions were far less than ideal for a late night gig in a distant city, but it went pretty well.
  • “Put Your Money Where Your Poll Is” – This piece analyzes a 2018 Gallup poll, in which 16% of Americans said they wanted to leave the United States permanently.  The findings showed that young, Democratic-leaning women tended to be the least grateful to live in this great country, as Ilhan Omar and Squad have demonstrated.  I posed the question then:  “So, young radical feminists, why don’t you put your money where your poll is?  I’d wager less than 1% of those who indicated they want to leave will actually do so.”  If you don’t like it—by which I don’t mean, “If you love the country, but you want to fix some things,” but rather, “If you fundamentally hate what our country is and stands for”—then get the hell out.
  • “Mid-Atlantic Musings” – This SubscribeStar-exclusive post details my trip to New Jersey, Coney Island, and the New York City Aquarium.  It also features hilarious of a video of an otter spinning head-over-tail in circles for minutes on end, one of Nature’s many bizarre pranks.  But you’ve gotsta be a subscriber—for just $1 a month or more!—to read it.
  • “Wilmington Wanderings” – Another SubscribeStar-exclusive post, this one covers my trip two days ago to Wilmington for another gig at the Juggling Gypsy.  It’s a detailed account of my encounters with a friendly transgender bartender/photographer, as well as the seedy nightlife of aging hipsters.  It’s well worth a $1 subscription (heck, you can even cancel immediately after reading it!).

That’s it for this week.  Here’s to the last week of summer vacation!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Airlines; Back to the Grind

The Portly Politico3 Comments

It’s a very late post today. Readers will know that yesterday was the end of a weeklong trip to New Jersey (you can read the full account of my trip at my SubscribeStar page). A delayed takeoff from Newark meant I missed my connecting flight in Charlotte, so I had to wait around for a later flight. Fortunately, I had a collection of ghost stories to keep me company, but the delays meant getting in fairly late, and with little energy for mental endeavors.

I recall reading a National Review critique of airlines and their incompetent inability to get people where they need to be. I think Kevin Williamson wrote it, but I was unable to find it. I did, however, find hundreds of blog posts and pieces on NRO about airlines and their shortcomings, perhaps reflecting the preoccupations of the coastal elites who write for the publication.

I haven’t flown since 2012. I don’t like it. It doesn’t scare me, but it is incredibly tedious, a lot of “hurry up and wait.” The security Kabuki theatre, the crazy packing restrictions, the usurious fees, the notorious unreliability—it’s a headache. Driving is vastly preferable. Yes, yes, it’s more likely to result in death, but at least I can stop and eat when I want to.

I flew American Airlines, which is, apparently, notoriously bad.  That short Williamson blog post linked above is about how American Airlines required soldiers to pay extra baggage fees for military gear they brought on flights during deployments, requiring soldiers to file for a reimbursement with the military after the fact.  Yikes!

The logistics of managing thousands of flights a day, in all manner of weather conditions across the globe, must be incredibly difficult, so I’m not without sympathy for airlines.  But, good grief, it seems that we could figure out a better way.  Flying in 2019 is pretty much what it was like when I flew as a kid for the first time around 1990 or 1991, just with more rules, less free stuff, and worse food.  Thanks to people pretending to have peanut allergies, they don’t even give those out anymore!

Anyway, I’m sitting down to write this at 9:30 PM because it was immediately back to the grind today.  That’s probably the best way to return from vacation—just throw yourself back into it.  I’m definitely missing sleeping in until 9 and eating good food.

More to come tomorrow.

–TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: Mid-Atlantic Musings

The Portly Politico10 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Thanks to everyone who supported #MAGAWeek2019.  Those posts—on Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, President Trump’s Independence Day Speech, and fast food—will always be available in full on my SubscribeStar page with your subscription of just $1 a month or more.

I’ve been writing all this week from central New Jersey.  Other than a brief stay in Jersey City on a school trip to New York City in 2014, I’ve never really been to New Jersey.  Contrary to my assumptions, New Jersey is not a dystopian nightmare covered in asphalt and broken dreams (although I’m told Newark is).

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