Inspirations and Illuminations

Trigger warning:  I'm not all that keen on the Beatles.  There.  I said it.  I'll go one step further:  I think they're mostly overrated.  Don't get me wrong, they did some pretty great songs, and there's no question how influential they were on the music scene at the time, all the way up to today.  They were a boy band, but unlike those of the 90s, they actually played their own instruments.  They wrote their own stuff.  And they were ridiculously prolific, especially considering how short a time they were together.  Like, crazy prolific.  But, in my humble opinion, for every great song they produced, there were probably three that were "meh" at best and pretty crappy at worst.   And, of course, the end of the Beatles paved the way for Paul McCartney and Wings.  Now there's a band I can get excited about.  I remember hearing "Band on the Run" on the radio when I was a kid, and seeing the scene in the James Bond ...

It's the first morning of 2026.  For many of us, the start of a new year is the opportunity to shake off the dust from the previous year, and to look forward with hope to the promise of a clean slate.  It's like opening a new notebook, with all those blank pages and the possibilities they represent.  We resolve to get fit, to learn something new, to be different and better.  We choose a word of the year, with the idea that everything we experience in that year will in some way reflect that word in a positive way.   Frankly, most of the time, none of that pans out.  I don't remember what my word of the year was for 2025, although I'm sure if I go back to my first blog of the year it'll be there.  I probably had several goals for 2025, but the only one I achieved was to read at least 52 books in the year (I did 63, plus the short Bible books I didn't count in the number).  I didn't finish any cross stitch projects except the yearly Christmas or...