Hello. I'm Andy Zehner. I live in rural Indiana and work as a data analyst at Purdue University. So my workplace is on of the most cosmopolitan environments in the world, and my neighbors are as white bread, gun-totin', Trump-votin' as they come. I've lived on a farm, in Indianapolis and Washington DC, in Liberia and in Kyrgyzstan. I am a Christian. Of all ideologies I'm most drawn to communitarianism. I read The American Conservative and Mother Jones regularly and I agree with them both. I don't listen to NPR. I'm pretty reasonable about most topics, but if you say Ringo was a great drummer . . . . Stephen Blackpool is a sympathetic character from Dickens' novel Hard Times, and I've chosen that name for my moniker.
Welcome! If I had to list my ideology it would be some combination of cultural, national or ultra-conservatism.
Ringo was who motivated me to play the drums. Not that it amounted to much, but.... Welcome to the party.
The story is that the Beatles kicked out Pete Best because they claimed his drumming was not so hot, and replaced him with Ringo who was allegedly a better drummer. But the word on the street is that the other 3 were jealous because Pete was overshadowing them with his good looks and his many adoring girl fans, which is the real reason they replaced him with dull-as-dishwater Ringo. I'm not a musician and don't know if Pete or Ringo was the better drummer, what do you think?
My reading of the situation is that George Martin gently hinted to Epstein that Pete's drumming was slightly below par, so Epstein panicked and told the other 3, who then told Epstein to sack Pete. The bottom line is that none of the other 3 dug in their heels and said "We're not getting rid of our mate Pete!", so they were as much to blame as anybody. Anyway Pete came up smiling 30 years later when he got a few million quid from the record company for work he did on the groups early records..