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!
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.
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!
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
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:
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”:
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:
It’s my second consecutive year teaching World History (I taught it last school year for the first time since the 2011-2012 school year—whoa!), and I’m pleased to see that I’m two weeks ahead of schedule compared to where I was last year. That’s likely due to having a bunch of my lessons done this year, so I’m not trying to pad out lectures with a bunch of riffing.
So it is that, as of the time of writing, I’ve just covered the Mongols in detail (minus a couple of slides before we talk about medieval Japan).
The Mongols are wildly fascinating, in part because they were wild—nomadic horsemen who would drink the blood of their horses when they were low on supplies; wore silk underwear that served as protection against arrows; and would switch horses mid-ride, spending as much as ten days in their saddles. Under Genghis Khan, they spilled an immense amount of blood, slaughtering an estimated 40,000,000 (that’s forty million) people, equivalent to low-end estimates of those who perished in the Second World War. Again, these are estimates—numbers from the thirteenth century aren’t necessarily reliable—but that comes to roughly 13% of the global population at the time. Indeed, while writing these numbers, they seemed fantastically large; I had to go back and consult my World History textbook (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you).
Genghis Khan’s conquests, as well as those of his successors, brought an odd peace, the Pax Mongolica (also an Amazon Affiliate link), to Eurasia for about 100 years. It was the peace of the graveyard, as so many people were killed in the course of these invasions, there was no one troublesome enough left to cause a ruckus. It also marked one of the few times in human history that a single political unit (sort of) controlled the great Eurasian steppes, allowing for the (alleged) journeys of Marco Polo and doubtlessly thousands of other unsung but intrepid merchants, missionaries, and explorers.
Naturally, the largest land-based empire ever to exist in the world could not long survive. The Mongol Empire was probably never anything as such—a single, unified political unit—but more of an amalgamation of tribes, peoples, and regions swearing allegiance to the Great Khan. After Genghis Khan’s death, the empire was divided into four khanates, with an ostensible Great Kahn ruling over the four, but with the regions going their own ways in practice.
Nevertheless, there is something captivating about the sheer scale of these conquests, and the way a nation of clannish, nomadic horsemen swept across the world, spreading their terrible fury and bloodlust as they went (and, it seems likely, the Black Death that would depopulate 25% of Europe).
Will another horde arise from the Eurasian steppes? If so, let’s pray they fall far short of ambitious conquests of the Mongols.
With that, here is 5 March 2025’s “Midweek Mongol Madness“:
Yours portly is pumped for Rupert Lowe, the founder of the Restore Party in England. I was listening to Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) discuss Lowe’s epic platform of national restoration while driving to see Dr. Wife, and it inspired me to belt out this hilarious campaign song:
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):
My old bull terrier, Murphy, loves winter. She really seems to come alive in the cold, and even loves frolicking in the snow.
This Friday, I have three videos of Murphy adapting to some wintry climes:
