Friday the 13th

Ah them Beatles, sell outs if you asked me.  I was a Stones guy, Street Fighting Man, now there is the real stuff.

I don't think so.  The image of the Stones was created by their manager to contrast with the Beatles in their nice suits.  But as the Stones were getting together in their tidy middle class London environment the Beatles were playing in Hamburg, four hours a night in the dodgy bars of the Red-Light district.  Check out their greasy haircuts and black leather; a tough bunch, if you ask me and they paid their dues.  And they were young, John Lennon was 20 and George Harrison was 16 or 17.  When Brian Epstein became their manager he cleaned them up and the rest is history.

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Sometimes I wonder if I'm losing my marbles or if Uncle Ken is playing with his Blogger posts.  I could have sworn that his post of last Thursday was originally half the length of the final version.  It seemed that his post was incomplete and fizzled out when I first read it but a later reading had all kinds of extra stuff, veering into the political realm.  Was that post amended with extra content?  I didn't copy and save the original post as is my usual habit so maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.

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Very quiet in the Institute lately, even Uncle Ken has slowed down his posting.  I don't mind; blogs can have a life of their own as they ebb and flow or even fade away and die.  This fits in with one of my crackpot philosophical notions, that everything changes all the time, everywhere, and nothing is constant.  Maybe Thelonious Monk said something like that originally, maybe not.  We can fight the changes or go with the flow but I think we can make ourselves very miserable and end up beating our heads against the wall when things don't happen the way we want them.  But this is as far down that rabbit hole I'm going today.  I'll let the pundits, politicos, and other yahoos yammer and try to make themselves relevant in their own reality.  They are not my people, whether they are red, blue, or purple.  Ooops!  Another rabbit hole!

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I don't know how you guys are hooked up to the internet but I've been doing the WiFi thing with my router and the results haven't been good lately.  My old (10+ years) laptop seemed to be slowing down, even with my dandy fiber-optic connection.  And because I sometimes don't see something when it's right in front of me I let it go until I ran some tests on the connection.  There are real-time online speed tests that you can run and my machine was "very slow" and should have been much better.  But when I tested the connection from the server it was blazing fast, the fault was with my WiFi connection.  The solution was simple, connect the laptop to the router with an ethernet cable.  Easy peasy, as they say, and I didn't have to do anything;  the laptop recognized the connection and now the internet  is crazy fast, so fast that I've been watching a lot of movies at 1080p, which is kind of high definition.  Too many movies, some might say but who cares what people say?  If you're looking for a quirky Christmas movie the next holiday season I recommend Violent Night.  It's a hoot and makes me want to believe in Santa Claus again.