Tag: YouTube Roundup

Phone it in Friday CXXX: YouTube Roundup CXC: Breakfast

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Yours portly is pro-breakfast. Yes, yes, it’s not the most controversial take; if you grew up in the 1990s, commercials and classrooms bombarded you with the mantra “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Our teachers always told us to eat a good breakfast before standardized tests (advice I repeated to my own students).

Breakfast offers so much. It can be sweet (like the breakfast featured in today’s video). It can be savory. It can be a glorious mish-mash of both.

For quick breakfasts, I prepare one of two simple meals:

  1. An English muffin with a layer of crunchy peanut butter, a layer of plain Greek yogurt, and a layer of sliced bananas (very filling)
  2. An English muffin with spinach, a little lunch meat, and a boiled egg chopped on top (also filling, but much lower-calorie than #1)

Sometimes Dr. Wife will make a glorious breakfast of scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, and turkey bacon on Saturday mornings. She puts spinach and sometimes onions in the eggs, too, so they’re really tasty.

Growing up, breakfast was the classic bowl (or, in my case, multiple bowls) of cereal. Cereal is a problem food for me, as I will keep pouring more because “I need to use up the milk in the bottom of the bowl.” Next thing I know, I’ll have eaten half a box of Golden Grahams. I’m The Portly Politico for a reason.

Also, in the days of penny-pinching and fear of staleness (and, by extension, food waste), my mom would pay us a quarter if we finished a box of cereal (and we were soft-locked from opening a new box until the current one was consumed). Being both food- and money-motivated, that incentive presented a dangerous scenario for a budding chubster. Keep in mind, too, that these were the days when the government assured us that eating a ton of grains and very little red meat was supposed to be the key to good health. Of course, I’m sure Kellogg’s and General Mills loved that (and probably paid for the “research” that resulted in the food pyramid). It was not a good time to be a little fat kid (or it was the golden age of childhood obesity, depending on your perspective).

Regardless, today I’ve got a very short Short showing my breakfast unfold in two seconds:

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Phone it in Friday CXXIX: YouTube Roundup CLXXXIX: Video Absurdism

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Yours portly possesses an abiding love for absurdity.  Chalk it up to years of watching [adult swim] in the early 2000s and growing up watching The Simpsons, but my artistic output visually—which consists almost entirely of unskilled doodling—leans heavily into the cartoonish and absurd and weird.  Indeed, I wrote an entire book based on that premise (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of all purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you).

YouTube provides an outlet to unlock that visual and aural absurdism, and today’s Shorts are indicative of the kind of ridiculous, sometimes contextless, silliness that I like to tart up and present as some kind of philosophically abstract absurdism, when it’s really just me being a goofball.

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Phone it in Friday CXXVIII: YouTube Roundup CLXXXIX: Snails!

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This installment of Phone it in Friday: YouTube Roundup is quite phoned-in, as all of today’s videos were in Wednesday’s post.  But if you prefer to scroll through videos about Japanese Trapdoor Snails and koi ponds instead of reading, today’s post is for you!

Japanese Trapdoor Snails Arrive!

It’s hard to understate how excited I was to get these snails.  Now that they’re here, I want more fish!  Such is the nature of human endeavors—we always want more.  There is always another fish to conquer.

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Phone it in Friday CXXVII: YouTube Roundup CLXXXVIII: Koi Snacks!

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The warm weather has the koi all in a tizzy whenever I get home from work.  The warmth makes them more active—and hungry.  So my new after-school ritual is to take Murphy out to do her business, then we sit by the koi pond while I feed the fish.

It’s pretty sweet.  I think we have about ten of them—they’re hard to count—and I introduced a couple of butterfly koi and another twenty rosy red minnows a couple of days ago.  Here’s hoping they do well!

I’m still waiting on Japanese Trapdoor Snails to show up at the big aquarium store down in Columbia, but I may end up ordering them from a supplier (or some guy on eBay, like I did with the ramshorn snails).

Regardless, here’s a fun video of the koi eating!

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close up of a crow calling outdoors

Phone it in Friday CXXVI: YouTube Roundup CLXXXVII: For Whom the Crow Caws

The Portly Politico2 Comments

This week I’ve had an unenviable but easy duty:  morning gym carline.  It basically involves arriving very early to campus and standing in the cold while the handful of students who park at the gym make their way into school.

I’m not clear what the purpose of the duty is other than to have a witness on the scene should two teenage drivers end up in a fender-bender (of devolve into early morning fisticuffs, but these  kids are too sluggish that early to devolve into anything other than sleepy sluggards).  I suspect it’s more about the optics—“we have people watching your kids!”—than anything else.

Regardless, it’s not hard.  What is hard is getting up that extra fifteen or twenty minutes earlier to make it to the duty in time.  That doesn’t seem like much, but anyone who has ever woken up even slightly earlier than normal will recognize the herculean effort required.

Now that I’m in the new house, my morning commute has tripled in length.  What was once a relaxed, fifteen-minute drive is now a relaxed forty-five-minute drive.  Ergo, yours portly must force his doughy, weary form out of the bed quite early.

That’s all the tedious build-up to this very simple video.  On Monday morning a massive crow alighted atop a nearby lamppost while I kept my lonely vigil.  It seemed as though he were joining me for this duty, fulfilling alongside his human companion the responsibilities of monitoring the children as they arrived to the back parking lot.

He also had a fantastic “caw”; give it a listen here:

I know for whom the crow caws.  He caws for thee!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

Phone it in Friday CXXV: YouTube Roundup CLXXXVI: Randall Taters (ECU)

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Just a reminder that everything is still 90% off with promo code moving at my Bandcamp page.

Also, buy my collection of absurdist detective stories for just $0.99!

I thought that Eggcraticus, the egg-devouring supervillain, would be a duology.  How foolish I was—how could I deny the people more steamy Eggcraticus content?

But sometimes our favorite supervillains need a bit of a break.  Too much exposure to the cardboard terror of Eggcraticus might—gasp!—diminish his stature.

How, then, does one take a beloved character and expand upon his universe?

Simple—introduce his cool cousin from out-of-town:  Randall Taters.

With that, here’s more from the Eggcraticus Cinematic Universe (ECU) with its hottest new character:

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Phone it in Friday CXXIV: YouTube Roundup CLXXXV: Hornpiping on a Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Just a reminder that everything is still 90% off with promo code moving at my Bandcamp page.

While packing up for the big move I found quite a few fun little items and mementos:  old notebooks from my childhood; photographs with friends in our doughy youths; doodles from former students who now likely have families of their own; bits of music I’d composed.  One of the coolest finds was my old Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50:

This little keyboard has been in my family for as long as I can remember.  I’m certain it was my older brother‘s keyboard, but through years of use it became “mine” in that way that childhood items do among siblings.  The keyboard is likely just a few years younger than me, which would mean it’s been around for nearly four decades.

And it still works—well, mostly.  The keys from the first F through the first D no longer play, but every key from Eb up to that third C work beautifully.  It runs on six AA batteries, which I apparently changed out recently, because I was jamming on this little puppy before packing it.

In my early, lo-fi-because-I-didn’t-know-any-better days, I recorded quite a few pieces with this PSS-50 plugged into my brother’s Crate guitar amp with an old computer microphone dangling in front of the amp’s horn (I’m going to release those recordings one day).  In the super early days, I’d record separate WAV files using Sound Recorder, then combine them using the same software, hoping everything lined up properly; Adobe Audition 1.5 smoothed that over for me, though.

I still remember some of the classic voices on this keyboard:  “26” cues up an “Electric Guitar” sound which has this amazing distortion to it while still sounding clean enough to use melodically.  The default “00” is a “Trumpet” that, to me, is the standard sound any synthesizer should have.  Indeed, there is a more robust Yamaha synth from this era that someone donated to the school years ago, and “Brass 1” is the default voice when starting the keyboard.

That yellow “Demo” button played an instrumental version of the song “Venus.”  My older brother changed the lyrics to “Booty, Booty, Booty, Come Home,” which he said was the theme song for my band, which he initially named “Booty and the Bootettes” before changing it to “Booty and the Flaming Booties.”

As you can see, dear reader, this keyboard and I share a lot of history together.  If it ever stops playing entirely, I’m going to have to write to Yamaha to repair it.  They’ll probably have to bring their last remaining 1980s consumer mini-keyboard specialist out of retirement/cryogenic freezing to do so, but I want this little guy handed down to (God Willing) my little guys!

So it was that I picked ol’ PSS-50 up and improvised a little hornpipe using “17”—“Reed Organ”:

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Phone it in Friday CXXIV: YouTube Roundup CLXXXIV: Koi

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It’s been awhile since I’ve written an update on the koi pond.  Dr. Wife and I got busy with moving and the like, and the extremely cold weather meant the koi were in hibernation mode until relatively recently.

With warmer weather, the koi are finally starting to come up to feed, and it’s been delightful to see them.  I’m still hoping to get some Japanese Trapdoor Snails and to add some more rosy red minnows to the mix.

That said, I’ll have some more juicy koitent soon!  Indeed, today I’m looking back at some classic koi-related videos:

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Phone it in Friday CXXII: YouTube Roundup CLXXXII: House Cleaning

The Portly Politico12 Comments

This week I’m really phoning it in, as the video today is showcasing someone else’s hard work.

My pastor started a cleaning business, Cornerstone Cleaning Solutions.  He specializes in carpet cleaning—and, boy, does he do an amazing job—but  he also does general house cleaning, including my least favorite chore:  dusting.

I had to get my house on the market and it was suffering from seven-odd-years of an overworked man’s routine.  Without a regular feminine presence, the dust had piled  up into thicc (as the kids say) layers.  It was pretty disgraceful, and definitely not fitting for showings.

Yours portly worked overtime for about two weeks to dust and declutter simply to prepare for my pastor to come in and work his magic.  He spent eight hours on his first visit deep cleaning the carpets, dusting, etc.

I’ve hired him to do twice-monthly visits until the house sells (it’s currently under contract, so God Willing, the closing will be soon).  I made this video after his second visit (just three hours compared to the initial one):

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