Another Saturday Off

Hello, dear readers.  Yours portly is exhausted after a very busy week.  I worked until 9:45 PM and 8:45 PM Thursday and Friday nights, respectively, and spent a good chunk of the week preparing for a big beauty pageant at the school (I was not a participant, to be clear; I ran the lights and sound equipment).  I also announced my first ever lacrosse games—an interesting experience.  On top of all that, I released a new album, Epistemology.

Needless to say, I’m taking yet another Saturday off.  My apologies to subscribers.  I’ll make it up to you soon with some tasty posts.  I just ran out of steam and, honestly, don’t feel like writing today.  I don’t want to get into the habit of missing posts, but I have bigger demands on my attention at the moment than slamming out blog posts.  Next week is the annual Music Festival, which itself is a daunting undertaking.  I might finally get to sleep after next week (if Murphy will let me!).

So, here’s a YouTube playlist with Epistemology.  Y’all should really listen to it; it’s some of my best work.

Cheers!

—TPP

Day Off

Yours portly is taking the day off from blogging.  I’m enjoying time with my girl (the human one, not Murphy; Murphy is enjoying time with my neighbors).

I was hoping to run Ponty’s response to my masterpiece review of Donnie Darko (2001) today.  You’ll hear from Ponty on a different topic later this week, but I can only assume his extended tardiness in sending along a detailed critique is a tacit indication that he has come around to my viewpoint.  Indeed, readers will readily agree that the only reasonable reason he hasn’t sent his review—surely it’s not due to busyness, or illness, or spending time with Tina—is that dear Ponty has realized I was right all along, and there’s no point in challenging me further on the issue.

So with that note of brotherly reconciliation and rhetorical dominance, I bid everyone a wonderful Monday.  I’ll be enjoying a relaxing day with my girl, basking in the knowledge that I’ve once again swayed public opinion about twenty-plus-year-old movies in a positive direction.

Cheers!

—TPP

Memorable Monday: MLK Day 202[4]

I’m on my way back from a much-needed trip to the mountains, and I’m phoning this one in, folks.  It’s MLK Day here in the United States, which is like getting a bonus day of Christmas Break right after being off for however long it is.  It honestly feels a bit frivolous so soon after Christmas and New Year’s, but I’m sure it’s what the Reverend Doctor would have wanted.  He was, after all, a notorious libertine.

What would MLK have become had he lived?  My suspicion—a sad, jaded one—is that he would have gone the way of race hustlers since.  I do not think he was a race hustler, but I think he was starting to trend in that direction with his view on poverty, and for a man who clearly took advantage of his power to engage in some truly heinous sexual escapades, it’s not a big leap to assume he’d go full on Creflo Dollar eventually—or, more likely, full on Al Sharpton.  Yikes!

Regardless, his “dream” of a nation based on judgment of character and not skin color has not exactly come to fruition.  I mean, it did for about thirty years.  Ever heard of Lando Calrissian?  It seems like we had a good run from roughly 1980 until about 2010.  Now we’ve gone from trying to treat everyone as equals to privileging certain races over others.  Isn’t that what all those 1960s radicals fought so hard against?  Yet they’re the very ones celebrating the new apartheid.

Well, whatever.  I’m just a honkey enjoying a weekend in the mountains.

With that, here is January 2020’s “MLK Day 2020“:

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Phone it in Friday XLVI: Christmas Break Begins!

At long last, Christmas Break has arrived!

I take it for granted that most people don’t get two weeks off at Christmas.  Frankly, that should be the norm; in some ways, it seems to be, at least in “white-collar” work.  When I was working my one major job outside of education, I don’t think my office phone rang for two days.  E-mails came in at a trickle.  If I had the work ethic then that I have now, I would have knocked out a lot of little tasks; instead, I read Wikipedia entries and took it easy in the mostly-empty office.

We may not appreciate the True Meaning of Christmas anymore, but there’s still a very strong, vestigial reverence for this season.  Everything shuts down for a week or two; everyone is cheery; and everybody is enjoying parties and family time.  There’s a general sense that this time is not meant for working, but for indulging in fatty foods with loved ones.  Late nights by the fire, reminiscing about departed family, remember old glories and ancient stories—that’s Christmastime.

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Happy Memorial Day 2023!

In time-honored TPP tradition, I take Memorial Day off from writing movie reviews.  Memorial Day marks the last day off from work until summer break, which literally starts in about three days for yours portly.  It makes the day off somewhat superfluous, but, really, the next two or three days of work will be largely superfluous, too.  We’ll finalize grades for our classes by department, and by the time you’re reading this brief post, I should be done with report card comments (all 100 of them, exactly!).

But for today, I’m (hopefully) kicking back after a busy weekend of Spring Jamming and graduation-attending.

What of Memorial Day itself?  Back in 2021, I wrote the following:

Memorial Day typically marks the beginning of summer.  Given that it’s a day to remember those who have died for our liberties, some might see it as somewhat ironic, or even disrespectful, that we spend the day at the beach eating hot dogs.

I prefer to think of it another way:  it’s a celebration of everything for which those men died.  Hot dogs, pool parties, familygood musicgood times; in essence, freedom, the kind of freedom that Americans savor.

That freedom was bought with a heavy price—and it’s been bought over and over again.  Indeed, the fight continues here at home.

Don’t take these freedoms for granted.  Take a moment—between bites of hot dog—and give thanks to those men for our liberty, and to God that we live in the United States of America.

That pretty much sums it up.  Here’s to hot dogs—and liberty!

God Bless,

TPP

Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2022]!

Ah, yes—Labor Day.  The last day off (for yours portly, anyway) until the glory that is Thanksgiving Break.

I’ve been writing a brief, annual Labor Day post since 2019, and it’s interesting to see what has changed (and what hasn’t) in that time.  I don’t play video games nearly as much as I used to (or as much I’d like to), and my life has gotten much more interesting (read: busier) and better since 2019.  Even if Western civilization is collapsing all around us and we’re living in a banana republic, I can at least enjoy and appreciate God’s Blessings as the ship goes down.  And, hey, it could be worse!

Speaking of cautiously optimistic declinism, Labor Day seems to be a day immune to progressive chicanery.  It’s the product of radical labor unionism and the socialistic tendencies thereof, so it should be safe.  Of course, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia, so if labor suddenly falls out of favor for being too “white” or not “woke” enough, then I suppose we could end up changing it to “BIPOC Exploitation Memorial Day” or some such nonsense.  Columbus Day sure isn’t safe.

Well, whatever.  I’m not worried about the Leftist whiners today.  I’ve spent the weekend (presumably) in sunny Florida, enjoying getting to know my girlfriend’s family better and living it up.

With that, here’s “Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2021]!“:

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Lazy Sunday CXLI: Thanksgiving Stuff(ing)

Another glorious Thanksgiving Break has come and gone, so yours portly will have to struggle through another three weeks of work before enjoying another ridiculously generous break at Christmastime.

In keeping with the spirit of doing a lot of “rerun” posts this past week, here’s a Lazy Sunday dedicated to various Thanksgiving posts from yesteryear:

Apparently, I write a lot of posts about Thanksgiving, and I recycle almost all of them every year.  I think a good bit of that is because I am usually worn out by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, and rather than tax my weary brain with fresh material, I just reuse the treacly tripe I wrote in prior years.  Also, pageviews are way down during the week, chiefly because people are enjoying time with their friends and family, rather than wasting time at work reading the angry screeds of a portly man.

Regardless, Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Retro Tuesday: Thanksgiving Week!

It’s Thanksgiving Week, which means I am really going to be phoning in some posts this week.  I love writing, but even I need a break from the constant output that my insatiable readers demand.

In the original post from this thread, I spelled out my argument in favor of an entire week off for Thanksgiving, in exchange for some lesser holidays.  With districts caving to reality and giving students the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off, families have just moved the start of their break back to Tuesday, with mass absenteeism the norm the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.  Indeed, many families take the entire week off.

Well, my school—and many public schools in my area—took my sage advice:  we are off for the entire week.  It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!

However, I also predicted that, with an entire week off, the siren song of leaving for an extended vacation even earlier would be hard to resist.  I was right:  last week, we had a few students leaving town as early as Wednesday—a full eight days before the bird faces the executioner.  Whoa!  The trend only intensified Thursday and Friday.

Of course, it strains credulity to argue for any more time off.  At this point, I think it makes far more sense to increase Christmas Break than to lengthen Thanksgiving any further.

One downside to this newer, longer break:  with losing some other days earlier in the semester, everyone is completely burned out.  We teachers are not a hardy breed:  we’ve grown soft with cushy vacations.  In all seriousness, though, we get pretty worn down, as anyone would corralling and attempting to mold young minds all day.

Well, enough of that.  Now I’m enjoying the sweet life.

With that, here is 23 November 2020’s “Memorable Monday: Thanksgiving Week!“:

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Driving the Georgia Backroads

Murphy and I spent this Labor Day Weekend visiting my girlfriend and her German Shepherd in Athens, Georgia, which is about three-and-a-half hours from Lamar.  As such, I spent a solid seven or so hours on the road this weekend, not counting time we spent tooling around Athens.

For a three-day weekend, that’s not much driving, and I’ve driven longer distances.  Way back in the mists of graduate school, circa 2006 or 2007, I drove from Knoxville, Tennessee to Rock Hill, South Carolina (not far), then from Rock Hill to Richmond, Virginia and back just to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra with a friend.  She took the wheel only for the last hour of the drive back, and apparently as soon as I got into the passenger seat, I was out cold.

Granted, I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time.  In the intervening fifteen years, my zest for driving all night to hear live symphonic holiday power metal has waned considerably.  Now I’m lucky if I can make it to 10:30 PM without falling asleep on the couch, my multiple after-school drives to Universal Studios notwithstanding.

But I digress.  While I may lack the stamina of my reckless youth, I do alternatively loathe and appreciate a long drive.

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Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2021]!

Well, it’s another Labor Day here in the States, and I couldn’t be happier.  Last week was a slog, but a productive one—I managed to get caught up on all grading and even get a good bit of writing done, even though I was suffering from a gnarly head cold.  Hopefully by the time you read this I am on the mend.  I’ll have spent the weekend enjoying some rest and relaxation in Athens, Georgia, with my girlfriend and our dogs.

It being Labor Day, I’m going to observe the holiday in the spirit intended, and keep enjoying the rest.  That means some glorious reblogging today, looking back past Labor Day posts.

Labor Day has always been a pleasant holiday early in the academic year—the symbolic end of summer, and a chance to catch one’s breath before the mad dash to Thanksgiving.  It also seems to usher in the “spooky” season building up to Halloween.

As a child, we used to attend a massive Labor Day picnic my childhood church hosted every year at a campground in a rural portion of Aiken County.  I loved that picnic, especially the opportunity to explore the woods with a fried chicken leg in my hand.  It was a chance to play at being an adventurer, while still indulging in my beloved childhood obesity.

I’m not sure if there will be any picnicking today, but I can assure you I’ll be eating something decadent and unhealthy.  With that, here is “Memorable Monday IV: Happy Labor Day [2020]!“:

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