Hooray For Our Side!

I think that humans are just competitive by nature. You see it in war, sports, business, and politics. Like most traits of human nature, though, some people have more of it in them than others. My competitive instinct must be pretty low because I care more about what I'm doing than what everybody else is doing. If I do something well and somebody else does it even better, then more power to them.

I'm not sure what motivated Ken's three amigos. They might have just not been interested in the class and were trying to go their own way, or they may have been competing with the teacher for dominance or the spotlight of attention. Kids that age are always trying to draw attention to themselves, and some of them never do outgrow it.

Music is different, or at least it should be. My daughter played in the band in school and, while they had competitive events, I think that she was more concerned with playing her best than with winning. When I was a kid, we used to sing a lot. We sang in church, we sang in school, and we sang in Boy Scouts. It seemed to have the effect of bonding the group together. I tried to get the kids to sing on my school bus, but they usually broke up into sub groups, each one singing a different song and trying to drown the other groups out. The one time I got them all to sing together was when we did "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall". I was so proud of them that I keyed my radio mike so the whole buss fleet could hear them. My boss was not pleased. For one thing, he said, the radio is for important communication, not for entertainment. For another thing, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" is  not an appropriate song to teach children. Hell, I didn't have to teach that song to them, they all knew it already. Besides, it's a kids' song in the first place. You ever hear adults sing that song? I hadn't sung that song since I was a kid myself and, for a moment, it made me feel young again.

The more I think about it, that wasn't a message from Microsoft that I got yesterday, it was a message from the Windows program in my own computer. My computer didn't crash, just my Windows did. There must be a diagnostic or something in there that has the ability to troubleshoot things like that. Those guys that call you on the telephone are all scammers. I tell them,  "Shut up and leave me alone!", and then I hang up.