Tag: YouTube

Ancient Alien Technology IV: MP3 Player

The Portly Politico4 Comments

I’m back with more ancient alien technology.  This one is a bit interesting in our world of endless streaming—an old MP3 player (I’m selling it on eBay, by the way):

This device is a SanDisk Sansa c250, which boasted a whopping two gigabytes of flash storage.  To put that into perspective, my very first MP3 player—which I received for my eighteenth birthday in 2003—had a mere 64 megabytes of storage.  In high school, a friend of mine had an MP3 player that sported an actual hard drive, and he kept it in his truck to play tunes; it was too big to carry around regularly!

This Sansa c250 likely came out when the iPod was getting going, and was a non-Apple competitor.  The music industry in the early 2000s was still trying to figure out how to monetize the digitization of music, and I know for a fact a number of the tunes on this device were rips from CDs or recordings I’d made using crude digital methods.  I know for a fact I owned the CD the song in the picture comes from, and I believe I still do.

But it was a golden and/or dark age of intellectual theft and copyright infringement, depending on one’s perspective, and these devices were quite popular for listening to music on-the-go without the need for a bulky Disc Man.

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Phone it in Friday LXXXVIII: YouTube Roundup XXXVIII: Sensual Saxophone Solos

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Want to play the sax?  Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.

Yours portly is playing saxophone for a client and his wife this evening; the happy couple is celebrating their first anniversary, and the client has booked me to play a song or two as a surprise for his wife.

Naturally, he asked for videos of me playing two pieces so he could get an idea for what he will be getting, and just as naturally, I turned those into YouTube videos for my subscribers.

Now you, my dear readers, will get to hear some sensual, soulful saxophone solos:

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Ancient Alien Technology III: Flip Phones

The Portly Politico7 Comments

I’m continuing to find all sorts of dubious treasures in my Drawer of Forgotten Technology.  This Wednesday, I’m featuring these two beauties:

I’m trying to sell these two phones on eBay, so if you’re hankering for ancient flip phone technology, now’s your chance!

I used these phones for years.  I was way behind the curve on adopting smartphone technology.  When the black flip phone broke one morning, I finally made the switch… to a Windows Phone! 😣 I loved that phone, but by that point, the Windows Phone OS had zero app support, and I directly attribute it with a serious off-season in my dating life (which, in retrospect, was a good thing, because now I’m marrying the love of my life).

But I digress.  People tend to romanticize flip phones now because they allowed one to be relatively disconnected, and were only really good for calls and some limited texting (you had to hit a number one, two, or three times depending on what letter you wanted to use; somehow, I got really fast at writing text messages that were exactly the right number of characters for one message).  You could still keep in touch with people, but these phones weren’t constantly bombarding you with notifications, apps, games, distractions, etc., etc.  That said, the massive functionality of the modern smartphone is hard to pass up, even if they’re destroying society.

But I digress once again!  Here are some photos of these beautiful little LG smartphones:

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Phone it in Friday LXXXVII: YouTube Roundup XXXVII: Ancient Alien Technology

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Yours portly recently dug into his Drawer of Forgotten Technology and found some unusual bits of ancient alien (well, human) technology.  I’m currently trying to sell them on eBay (here and here).  In writing their listings, I made short little videos and uploaded them to YouTube; I want to share those videos today.

I wrote extensively about this technology on Wednesday in my post “Ancient Alien Technology“; now, here are the promised videos.

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Phone it in Friday LXXXV: YouTube Roundup XXXV: Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dance No. 1”

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Yours portly has an out-of-town gig tomorrow night for a private party in Wilmington, North Carolina.  I’ll be playing a mix of French and modern pieces on my alto saxophone.

Naturally, I have spent some spare time this week after school and lessons and practicing.  One of my recent favorite Romantic Era pieces is Alexander Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dance No. 1,” from his opera Prince Igor.

I made a small recording and uploaded it to YouTube:

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Phone it in Friday LXXXIV: YouTube Roundup XXXIV: Stroopwafel Series

The Portly Politico2 Comments

At the end of the 2023-2024 school year, teachers were given three tickets to put towards different items in an end-of-the-school-year raffle.  The items varied in quality and value, ranging from random coffee stuff to an Amazon gift card.  Naturally, the big(ger)-ticket items attracted the most tickets, so yours portly played the odds:  I put all three of my tickets in the random assortment of coffee stuff.

I was not surprised, but was still excited, when I won the item.  The coffee was pretty good, and I still have the basket and the mug that came with it.  But the best part of the collection was the box of Stroopwafels (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchase made through that link, at no additional cost to you—and you should definitely get some Stroopwafels).

If you’ve never had them before, the concept is simple:  you pour your steaming hot cup of coffee, then place a Stroopwafel on top of the mug for a few minutes.  The result is that the delicious caramel filling heats up to an oozy, flavorful consistency, and you have the perfect companion snack to accompany your cup of joe.

Naturally, a man of my generous proportions enjoyed this toothsome Dutch treat.  What I enjoyed almost as much as the Stroopwafels, though, was making a truly absurd, three-part YouTube Shorts series based on the flavorful concoction.

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Midweek Mongol Madness

The Portly Politico2 Comments

I’m getting into the Mongols in the next unit in World History, but our current unit on the Byzantines, Russians, and Turks has already run into the Khanate of the Golden Horde.

The vast Eurasian steppe is one of those parts of the world that seems like a big, open, empty area in which nothing of substance really happens.  However, the exact opposite is true:  it’s a virtual spawn point for nomadic, horseback-riding invaders.  Long before the Mongols, groups like the ancient Aryans (the historic people, not the mythologized Nazi ones) and Scythians drove down from the steppe into Europe, India, the Middle East, and even China.

History YouTuber WhatIfAltHist posted a video earlier this week covering the “anti-civilization” of the steppe, and how various invaders have shaped civilizations around them.

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Phone it in Friday LXXXIII: YouTube Roundup XXXIII: Pianistic Silliness

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Goodness, yours portly needs a vacation from his vacation!  It’s been another crazy week, as my consistently tardy posts have demonstrated.

Last night I played a little cocktail hour at the big hospital system in my area.  They host an annual fundraiser in February, and they’ve booked me to play sax for a few years.  This year, they asked me to play piano on their beautiful baby grand.  As such, I put in a lot of hours this week and last to hone my chops.

At one point, I started playing Electric Light Orchestra’s “Can’t Get it Out of My Head,” which gave me the idea to put together a promo reel for a fake ELO cover band:

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