Cynical-C

Kinda cool if you’re into flying guillotines I guess.

I’m rewatching Get Back actually. Picking up on more things on the second go. I don’t know if I would recommend the documentary to anybody who isn’t a Beatles fan. I feel like a lot of people may just watch it as a few guys getting snippy at each other and goofing off. But there’s so much creativity happening in between. What’s amazing about this documentary is that most of us only see a finished product, and don’t see what goes into actually making it. The number of times they need to fuck things up until they hone it to something amazing. Paul coming up with Get Back for example. Where he has nothing but a driving blues rhythm that he is noodling around with on his bass before he comes up with the descending melody on the IV chord and realizes he just found a nugget of something that might work out:

I’ve never seen anything like this on film before. Paul really has nothing at the 30 second mark—but 45 seconds later he’s got the makings of a hit single. pic.twitter.com/kvGOp1yuZs

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) November 28, 2021

On Fluxx Studio Notes on Medium has a list of 10 lessons that can be taken away from the doc.

1. The ‘yes… and’ rule

The first rule of improvisation (and brainstorming) is “yes… and”. When someone suggests an idea, plays a note, says a line, you accept it completely, then build on it. That’s how improvisational comedy or music flows. The moment someone says ‘no’, the flow is broken. It’s part of deferring judgement, where you strictly separate idea generation from idea selection.

As they slog through Don’t Let Me Down, George breaks the spell. Instead of building and accepting he leaps to judgement, saying “I think it’s awful.” Immediately, John and Paul lay down the rules: “Well, have you got anything?” “you’ve gotta come up with something better”.

Don’t judge, build.

5. Embrace happy accidents

In All Things Must Pass, George wrote the line “A wind can blow those clouds away” but John misreads his handwriting as a “A mind can blow…” which stuck.

So many moments with Trump for me have been not surprising but still shocking that they actually happened. I always expect the worst from him, but then when it actually happens, there’s a part of me that still can’t register how this terrible excuse for a human being was president and managed to get away with it. And knowing how awful Trump is, you know he may have saw this as an opportunity to possibly kill off his competition. Add another criminal charge that will never be prosecuted to his infinite list of crimes.

Donald Trump tested positive for Covid-19 three days before his first debate against Joe Biden, the former president’s fourth and last chief of staff has revealed in a new book.

Mark Meadows also writes that though he knew each candidate was required “to test negative for the virus within seventy two hours of the start time … Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there.”

Trump, Meadows says in the book, returned a negative result from a different test shortly after the positive.

Nonetheless, the stunning revelation of an unreported positive test follows a year of speculation about whether Trump, then 74 years old, had the potentially deadly virus when he faced Biden, 77, in Cleveland on 29 September – and what danger that might have presented.

So in a 24 hour or so period after testing positive for COVID, Trump knowingly exposed:
– Gold Star families
– the media
– his staff
– the Secret Service
– Joe Biden and everyone at the debate https://t.co/ctpVaqS048

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) December 1, 2021

thinking of Him as black friday draws near? pic.twitter.com/fSm4alVG6W

— The Soviet Onion™ (they/them) (@ASovietOnion) November 23, 2021

We’re living in such a bizarre time. Vaccines are fucking amazing. They do things like KEEP YOU FROM DYING. I’ve gotten 3 rounds of Pfizer now and got my flu shot back in September. Here’s the thing, viruses don’t care about your politics. Get your damn shots so you don’t get sick, and more importantly, you don’t spread your germs to others. Also, my 5G reception now is amazing.

Uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine has, unfortunately, become partisan like so much else in our society. Almost every Democratic adult (90% to 95%) has gotten a shot, while a little less than two-thirds of Republican adults have.
That partisanship appears to have transferred to at least one other important vaccination. An examination of flu shot data suggests that which party people belong to is highly correlated with whether they have or will get a flu shot this season — something that was not predictive of flu shot uptake the last few years.
Take a look at two recent polls that have asked about whether or not people have gotten the flu shot: Axios/Ipsos and Kaiser Family Foundation. By assessing two polls instead of one, we know what we’re seeing is a real phenomenon and not statistical noise.

According to the Ipsos data, 68% of Democrats said they have gotten a flu shot or are very likely to get one. Just 44% of Republicans said the same. This 24-point gap is very similar to the 30-point gap for Covid-19 vaccines.