“What Virgil Flowers Wore”

Fans of the Virgil Flowers novels by John Sanford know and respect Virgil’s fondness for rock band t-shirts. I was afraid I would have to reread the novels to make a list but that won’t be necessary.

What Virgil Flowers Wore: An unofficial guide

“Dark of the Moon”
Sheryl Crow (carp)
Modest Mouse
Flaming Lips
Decemberists
Arcade Fire
AC/DC
Franz Ferdinand

“Heat Lightning”
Bif Naked
WWTDD
Hole
KMFDM (Money)
Pogues
Interpol
Death Cab for Cutie

“Rough Country”
Sebadoh
Nine Inch Nails
Breeders
Rolling Stones (Paris, 1975, tongue)
Gourds
Blood Red Shoes
Appleseed Cast

“Bad Blood”
Virgins

“Shock Wave”
Freelance Whales
My Chemical Romance
Slobberbone

“Mad River”
Wolfmother

DSL vs. AT&T Wireless

We have a DSL line from our local telco for internet access. We pay $45 a month for 10 megabits download speed (never get more than 8) and less than 1 megabit upload speed. Not great but all that’s available where we live.

Been having problems for the last couple of weeks with technicians coming up to check lines, etc. Keep thinking they have it fixed but the problem persists so we’ve been using the hotspot feature on our iPhones. Yesterday I stopped by the local AT&T store to talk about our data plan to avoid getting surprised by a huge bill.

We’re currently paying $130 a months for 15gb that Barb and I share. Historically, we use very little of this but if we start making heavy use of the hotspot feature that could change. Without getting any further into the weeds here, I upgraded to an “unlimited” data plan for $150 a month. But the plan lets us stop paying for HBO and we get some other discounts so the faster service winds up costing me less than I was paying.

I’d never checked to see what kind of speeds I get from our AT&T wireless so I figured this was a good time to take a look. We’re getting 18 mbs down and 5.6 mbs up. More than twice as fast as the DSL line!

We don’t stream a lot of movies but do have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. I’ll keep the DSL service for a few months while we monitor our wireless data use, but I’m thinking I can adios the DSL.

This is might be more noteworthy to me because I remember the dial-up modem days. 2400, 14,400, 56K. Dark days? An exciting time? Could never have imagined I’d be able to connect to the internet with a mobile phone. Could never have imagined a mobile phone.

Renz Prison Farm

You can see what’s left of the Renz Prison Farm just across the river from Jefferson City, Missouri. I’ve been meaning to take a closer look for years and yesterday my friend George poked around for a a few minutes but there wasn’t much left to see. (There’s a bit of the history in this Vox article from 2015.)

The building is too far gone to get much of an idea what it was once like. I didn’t see many individual cells and assume the large open rooms were dormitories. This four minute video (not mine!) offers some different views: