Playin' those MIND GAMES...
...while shopping on Ebay late at night...


Hey, it's fun, interesting and absorbing for me. A couple of times a week, I check out the "Beatles Records" pages on Ebay, and that means a long time on computer; most of the time, there are at least 50 pages of stuff, with at least 30 items on each page...which means, a lot of e-browsing. Ebay has made it easier for me to locate Beatles stuff I want; I used to have to go to bigger metro areas to run down the stuff with which to fill the 'holes' in my collection. Now all I have to do is smack my computer keyboard a few times with a sledgehammer, and voila, another order is placed. (See "technical note" below...)

One of the Ebay listings I ran across tonight gave me pause to ponder; no, it's not a record, and no, I'm not gonna buy it, but just the same, it provided a different way to look at the Beatles, upon the occasion of their 20th anniversary of either their first record, made in 1962, or the advent of Beatlemania, which occurred in the United States in early 1964. Anyway, pictured below is the 'anniversary' Beatle-button I ran across...



On this lil' ol' button, you see '70s and '80s images of John, Ringo, Paul and George. The picture of John is from the mid-'70s, similar to the photo used on the picture sleeve of his "Mind Games" single. George's photo (with hand raised) also looks like a '70s photo. He is sporting that same hair style on his '33 1/3' album, which came out in 1976, so named because he was thirty-three-and-a-third years old when it came out. No foolin'. It's surprising how much the Beatles still form a large part of our collective consciousness; the radio still plays their music, and their music still sells, and sells very well. Not bad for a band that's been broken up since 1970.

Sadly, life goes on, in spite of the fact that we've lost two of them. John was gunned down in 1980 and George died of cancer in 2001. A part of many of us died when we lost them. I know I think about the band every day (what with Beatles records laying around all over my place), and I'm sure many others do too. So anyway, the above '20 year' button got me wondering what a similar '40th anniversary' button might look like...

Paul still records and plans to tour as soon as things are settled between him and his gold-digging soon-to-be ex-wife, and Ringo still goes out occasionally with "The All-Starr Band", a group that has a new lineup of, you guessed it, all-star musicians each time a new tour gets underway. And the records keep spinning 'round. So do the CD's. And the music will survive on MP3s, IPods, and whatever soon-to-be-invented other forms of playback come along. The music continues to comfort us in our darkest hour; it speaks words of wisdom, more easily enabling us to...Let It Be.
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Technical note: I usually have enough foresight to run a "defrag" before actually breaking out the sledgehammer; as a result, I don't have any broken keyboard pieces lurking around for me to step on and gash myself. So now you know.