I would love an Ozzy Man review of Happiness, the Todd Solondz film.
Tuesday covid number update.
Good news: as a percentage of active cases, serious cases holding at 0.10% with an indication of a possible decrease. Serious cases in terms of absolute numbers is going up, but the cases are skyrocketing, so the percentage is steady.
Yesterday showed a record 800+k cases. I again calculated the slope of cases/day, and now the acceleration is about 19k/day^2, up from 15k/day^2 last week. This gives a 14 day rolling average of new cases in 7 days of over 330k. Today it is 226k. Again, I predict over a million cases/day sometime this week; watch your MSM for the gleeful announcement.
State level: Florida cases now 40% higher than delta wave, though deaths are way below. 70% of the FL cases are in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties, though that didn’t seem to be of concern to AOC. CT is an outlier in that deaths are also increasing and now equal to peak of delta. NH cases not increasing…unusual for the states I track. Colorado cases way up, but deaths trending down; same for NC. Georgia failed to update yesterday.
I guess Florida is not immune to the testing psychosis…sigh…
At this point who could be ignorant of the fact that minuscule numbers of kids die from this virus while there are very real risks for kids taking the stab?
So. Evil.
I’ve already seen a media report of over a million covid cases in the US in one day. Of course, they either don’t tell you or it is buried in the story, but many states did not report on NYE, NY or Sunday. So, the number was really overstated.
My state (OK) will be reporting in about an hour, but it is still too close to the holiday weekend to be reflective of the disease progression. And most Mondays, they do try to breakout the cases by Sat/Sun/Mon.
I have noted comments about the increased positivity rate, but again, it is a stupid criteria. How many people are using the quick tests at home, are negative, and do not report the result to the health department? So, the reporting is missing a bunch of negative tests….
These self tests are also used to permit going to school,work or travel,so how does a person show the negative home test? If you take a picture on your cellphone, why can’t you save yourself time and money by reusing the same photo every day?
I think it was Rep. Jim Jordan who gave us this gem over the weekend:
“the hardest part of the 15 days to flatten the curve is the first 18 months.”
The there’s the look on your daughter’s face when she comes home after being proposed to…and saying “yes.”
That’s how we ended 2021. Yeah…that’s more than happy…that’s joy, but there’s a bucket-ton of happy in there too.
I’m going to have a son-in-law. I may have to clean up my act eventually.
Question for physicsguy about COVID shots given by unauthorized people: LegalInsurrection has a post about a teacher in Long Island who gave her son’s friend a shot of the J&J vax in her home: “Authorities allege Russo had a vial of an approved COVID-19 vaccine in her home, though police didn’t say where she got it. According to officials, her son had a friend over and the friend asked for the vaccine because his mother allegedly didn’t want to have him inoculated against COVID at this point. The teenager told his mother when he got home that he had gotten the vaccine. She notified the police.”
How often do you think this sort of thing is happening, given the ongoing frenzy about COVID?
Seasons greetings from the great northwet. We are on generator for the 2nd time in 3 days. US 101 has been closed since Sunday due to downed power lines and trees. So far 2022 has been a blast of wind storms, ice and snow. waiting for the four horsemen now.
I went to a neighborhood party on Friday, and to a restaurant Saturday. No COVID so far. If this is so transmissible, surely I’ll get it this month — unless the cold I caught a week after Thanksgiving was it.
Chases Eagles, so glad you have a generator.
We should all be grateful we weren’t on I-95 south of DC yesterday. Some people have been there, not moving, stuck in their cars for 24 hours.
Kate,
Been there, done that, and that–and many other reasons as well–is why I l now live in the South.
Just another open-thread comment about something I read.
For 74 years, Gallup has traditionally polled the country to determine its most admired man.
This year they didn’t reveal the results. Most people assume that this famously nonpartisan organization doesn’t want to call attention to the overwhelming admiration that Americans have for our great insurrectionist and Russian stooge — i.e. the bad orange man who cannot be named. (https://tinyurl.com/ukjwck9w)
JimNorCal – I’d love to call that video a parody except it isn’t far off from the propaganda that is put on the airwaves here in the NYC metro area.
One of the videos (yes, they have more than one pushing the propaganda that kids should get the shot) is that kids will once again be allowed to get see a Broadway show after they are vaccinated. Seriously!? How many kids go to Broadway shows anyway? That is just one indication about how out of touch the government is with your average person.
Most of the other propaganda videos are along the lines of the one you linked to (not as saccharine though) stating that “let your kids be kids again” by getting them the shot.
Australia has a Fake Abo Problem — there’s all kinds of benefits and cash and prizes for Abos and triple that for those who can manage to walk and chew gum and not be drunk in the gutter all day. BTW the Abos down under get special Gold Class Level concierge-style health care in the public hospital system which is not available to Whites or anyone else. They literally have their own better staffed and equipped clinics and even little hospitals within hospitals. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Supposedly to redress ‘discrimination’. You have to laugh. Not funny though. Allocating those resources kills or degrades quality of life elsewhere. But I guess only Whites. No big deal.
“One of the iron laws of the universe is that whatever the America Left is warning about is usually something they are plotting. Alternatively, whatever they are accusing others of doing is something they have already done. The Russian collusion stuff is the most recent example of this. They accused Trump of plotting with a foreign government, the Russians, but we learned it was official Washington all mobbed up with the Ukrainians, Chinese and anyone else with extra cash.
Of course, for the last year the ruling class has been yammering about the insurrection and the ongoing threat to “our” democracy. Meanwhile, they have been dragging people off to secret dungeons, harassing citizens for their politics, throwing people off social media and all the things we associate with a thug regime. Go back further and they spent four years claiming the 2016 election was rigged and then committed massive election fraud in the 2020 election.
This is how you can discern the future in regime rhetoric. Regime-ology, like Kremlinology in the Cold War, is becoming a skill in this age. You read the regime organs like the Washington Post or New York Times not for the literal content, but for the esoteric content, the stuff between the lines. In order to be prepared for what they will do next, we have all been forced to be Straussian. Of course, we also have the opposite rule of liberalism to guide us.
This is why the stories about a potential military coup are interesting. This one from December got the ball rolling. It is framed as a warning of a possible coup by the imaginary army of insurrectionists, but clearly the authors are imagining themselves as a triumvirate saving “our” democracy. A couple of weeks later, the Pentagon assured us that they are ready to send troops into Washington and seize control of the government if people vote the wrong way in the next election…”
Roll On 2024.
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly..
Best chop it off right there given humorless ignoramus FedBots.
Re: Speakers
Zaphod:
So I’ve now got the speakers setup on my big work table and am revisiting my faves The KEFs are quite wonderful. I’m pretty sure this is the best imaging I’ve ever had at home. It’s like a 3D movie playing on my desk.
I think my old Bose speakers had decayed into something worse than the flatness you ascribe to the brand. I don’t have the expertise to put it into words. It wasn’t just flat. Some stuff was just missing.
Good tip on KEF. Sometimes I like doing an earnest consumer trawl. Other times I’m happy to take someone’s advice, if they sound intelligent and passionate enough.
OMG. Riley’s “In C” is a revelation.
Re: Balkan Bass / Reich “Come Out”
Zaphod:
Did your Balkan guy, Nenad, used to do the “Seinfeld” slap bass transitions? Glad to see he is pushing his talents in more experimental directions. 🙂
I hadn’t heard the Reich piece (though I know Reich). Joe Byrd was part of the experimental scene back then and went totally hippie. Byrd copped “Come Out” for an astonishing transition between the first two songs of his “American Metaphysical Circus” album. @3:20-4:00.
Yuppety yup… the first time one hears *real* stereo imaging it’s a Revelation. It’s not just a sense of leftness or rightness or being encompassed by sound (Ye Fabled Bose Smear)… 3D / Holographic Imaging as you say is exactly it.
Glad you’re having fun!
I just upgraded my headphones and headphone DAC/Amp setup and spent the non-trolling half of yesterday revisiting recordings. The thing with Headphones and their ancillary kit is that you can get asymptotically close to the performance of a $100K+ speaker hi-fi system in a purpose-built listening room for 1-5% of the outlay not including knocking down your house and rebuilding it.
Also less likely to cause a neighbourhood insurrection at 3am.
Ah yes… I’ll bet the Bose speakers didn’t have tweeters that could handle all that dinging and cowbell type stuff at the beginning of In C.
Mind you, sounds like someone stuck a gamelan in a big barrel and rolled it down the road.
@Huxley:
When I did some searching for how best to set up my sub woofer I found a Serbian audiophile YouTube reviewer. He recommended a fellow Serb for some bass test tracks.
Double Bass is good for this because the high frequency components of the plucking and slapping give you positional information whereas the bass string vibrations should not if everything is set up right.
@Huxley:
–“Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies..1969..Kalyani..You Can’t Ever Come Down”
You’re not wrong about the transition. One of these these things is not like the other.
@Huxley:
On a totally unrelated subject, I assure you…. What do your fellow infinitely younger fellow CS students make of you? What do you make of them?
Any and all anthropological observations might be of some interest to readers here.
Mind you, sounds like someone stuck a gamelan in a big barrel and rolled it down the road.
Zaphod:
Quite vivid imaging (so to speak)!
“In C” has a cunning plan:
__________________________
“In C” consists of 53 short numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times at the discretion of each musician in the ensemble. Each musician thus has control over which phrase they play, and players are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. In this way, although the melodic content of each part is predetermined, “In C” has elements of aleatoric music to it. –wiki
__________________________
I knew a bookstore owner whose mind was so blown by “In C” that he bought five vinyl copies when it came out and sealed up four in plastic covers. He figured he could ration his plays so that he would always have a decent copy to listen to for the rest of his life.
Re: CS students
Zaphod:
They accept me as an oldtimer oddball who nonetheless may have the Right Stuff. But generally they are too busy to figure me out.
In the team programming class last Spring I was the lead for a three-person group. I was the only person doing real work until the last week. I crashed and told them I wasn’t going to finish the full networking across multiple machines on Linux. I couldn’t get the debugging to work at that level and I was exhausted. Fortunately a teammate was experienced on Unix and hacked the hell out of my design enough to get to full spec using printf debugging. Which was fine with me.
The teachers required us to grade each other and ourselves on all the niceties of team programming. Which I found horrible.
My resolution is to avoid all team programming for the rest of my courses, if at all possible.
The kids are all right — the usual mix, I suspect. My impression is that everyone is working so hard and fast, I wonder how much they are really learning.
Here’s my favorite review of “In C.” It’s by Paul Willliams — the first rock critic according to “Rolling Stone” — and his review was quoted on the album sleevenotes. Definitely a product of the sixties, but he’s on the right track.
_______________________________
“[Listening to “In C”] may be like staring at a mirror for forty-five minutes; or it may be more like sitting at a window and watching the carnival of life go on below. It is a matter of enjoying things that happen, of being moved helplessly by an exciting performance and at the same time following each development in the performance, and somehow determining in your own head what is and isn’t a development and therefore really defining for yourself whatever it is you’re following….
Most of the prime components of the musical experience are expressed here, and expressed in such a basic way that one’s awareness of these components is totally unimportant, unnecessary: They are there before you, for you to dig; and nobody’s asking you to file them away in categories. The music is close to the nitty-gritty; you can go into it with no assumptions whatsoever and come out of it with no assumptions and still be very certain that you heard something that it was refreshing, that it was incredible, that its inability to be classified is of no importance at all. This stuff here is close enough to the basics of what music is to be listened to and appreciated with no musical background of any sort. It’s kind of like not necessarily knowing if you dig ballet, but definitely liking the way the girl across the table moves her hands. No preconceptions, you just dig it. Welcome in.”
–Paul Williams (1968)
_______________________________
Williams was also a good friend of Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer. Williams wrote a great book of essays and interviews with Dick: “Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick.” I highly recommend for fun and insight and to anyone interested in PKD.
@Huxley:
Thanks. I’ve heard dim rumours that there are other ways to debug, but I’ve always liked printf meself. Or unit tests.
“My impression is that everyone is working so hard and fast, I wonder how much they are really learning.”
That’s a worry.
As is the evaluation of other group members. Nothing wrong with it if you sign up to join a Communist Party Cell… but it’s not what Universities are supposed to be about.
I would love an Ozzy Man review of Happiness, the Todd Solondz film.
Tuesday covid number update.
Good news: as a percentage of active cases, serious cases holding at 0.10% with an indication of a possible decrease. Serious cases in terms of absolute numbers is going up, but the cases are skyrocketing, so the percentage is steady.
Yesterday showed a record 800+k cases. I again calculated the slope of cases/day, and now the acceleration is about 19k/day^2, up from 15k/day^2 last week. This gives a 14 day rolling average of new cases in 7 days of over 330k. Today it is 226k. Again, I predict over a million cases/day sometime this week; watch your MSM for the gleeful announcement.
State level: Florida cases now 40% higher than delta wave, though deaths are way below. 70% of the FL cases are in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties, though that didn’t seem to be of concern to AOC. CT is an outlier in that deaths are also increasing and now equal to peak of delta. NH cases not increasing…unusual for the states I track. Colorado cases way up, but deaths trending down; same for NC. Georgia failed to update yesterday.
I guess Florida is not immune to the testing psychosis…sigh…
https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/covid-19-testing-site-announces-it-reaches-capacity-within-five-minutes-opening/DBKE5KWLPFDGPP4WBMNLQVF4BA/
And for some humor from the Bee:
https://babylonbee.com/news/leftist-who-keeps-getting-covid-tests-says-he-can-quit-anytime
A deranged “Lib on TikTok” promises kids they can have a normal life once they get The Shot.
Isn’t that what adults were promised a few months ago?
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1478135999309893633
At this point who could be ignorant of the fact that minuscule numbers of kids die from this virus while there are very real risks for kids taking the stab?
So. Evil.
I’ve already seen a media report of over a million covid cases in the US in one day. Of course, they either don’t tell you or it is buried in the story, but many states did not report on NYE, NY or Sunday. So, the number was really overstated.
My state (OK) will be reporting in about an hour, but it is still too close to the holiday weekend to be reflective of the disease progression. And most Mondays, they do try to breakout the cases by Sat/Sun/Mon.
I have noted comments about the increased positivity rate, but again, it is a stupid criteria. How many people are using the quick tests at home, are negative, and do not report the result to the health department? So, the reporting is missing a bunch of negative tests….
These self tests are also used to permit going to school,work or travel,so how does a person show the negative home test? If you take a picture on your cellphone, why can’t you save yourself time and money by reusing the same photo every day?
Ozzy Man needed to include a few happy cats in his video: here goes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivRi1jsJomU&ab_channel=ThePetCollective
(Includes a cat/soldier reunion, of course).
I think it was Rep. Jim Jordan who gave us this gem over the weekend:
“the hardest part of the 15 days to flatten the curve is the first 18 months.”
The there’s the look on your daughter’s face when she comes home after being proposed to…and saying “yes.”
That’s how we ended 2021. Yeah…that’s more than happy…that’s joy, but there’s a bucket-ton of happy in there too.
I’m going to have a son-in-law. I may have to clean up my act eventually.
Question for physicsguy about COVID shots given by unauthorized people: LegalInsurrection has a post about a teacher in Long Island who gave her son’s friend a shot of the J&J vax in her home: “Authorities allege Russo had a vial of an approved COVID-19 vaccine in her home, though police didn’t say where she got it. According to officials, her son had a friend over and the friend asked for the vaccine because his mother allegedly didn’t want to have him inoculated against COVID at this point. The teenager told his mother when he got home that he had gotten the vaccine. She notified the police.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/01/ny-teacher-faces-charges-for-allegedly-injecting-minor-with-covid-vaccine-without-parent-consent/
How often do you think this sort of thing is happening, given the ongoing frenzy about COVID?
Seasons greetings from the great northwet. We are on generator for the 2nd time in 3 days. US 101 has been closed since Sunday due to downed power lines and trees. So far 2022 has been a blast of wind storms, ice and snow. waiting for the four horsemen now.
I went to a neighborhood party on Friday, and to a restaurant Saturday. No COVID so far. If this is so transmissible, surely I’ll get it this month — unless the cold I caught a week after Thanksgiving was it.
Chases Eagles, so glad you have a generator.
We should all be grateful we weren’t on I-95 south of DC yesterday. Some people have been there, not moving, stuck in their cars for 24 hours.
Kate,
Been there, done that, and that–and many other reasons as well–is why I l now live in the South.
Just another open-thread comment about something I read.
For 74 years, Gallup has traditionally polled the country to determine its most admired man.
This year they didn’t reveal the results. Most people assume that this famously nonpartisan organization doesn’t want to call attention to the overwhelming admiration that Americans have for our great insurrectionist and Russian stooge — i.e. the bad orange man who cannot be named. (https://tinyurl.com/ukjwck9w)
JimNorCal – I’d love to call that video a parody except it isn’t far off from the propaganda that is put on the airwaves here in the NYC metro area.
One of the videos (yes, they have more than one pushing the propaganda that kids should get the shot) is that kids will once again be allowed to get see a Broadway show after they are vaccinated. Seriously!? How many kids go to Broadway shows anyway? That is just one indication about how out of touch the government is with your average person.
Most of the other propaganda videos are along the lines of the one you linked to (not as saccharine though) stating that “let your kids be kids again” by getting them the shot.
It really is quite sickening.
Good article by Dan Greenfield on Fake Indians:
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/01/americas-millions-of-fake-indians.html
Australia has a Fake Abo Problem — there’s all kinds of benefits and cash and prizes for Abos and triple that for those who can manage to walk and chew gum and not be drunk in the gutter all day. BTW the Abos down under get special Gold Class Level concierge-style health care in the public hospital system which is not available to Whites or anyone else. They literally have their own better staffed and equipped clinics and even little hospitals within hospitals. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Supposedly to redress ‘discrimination’. You have to laugh. Not funny though. Allocating those resources kills or degrades quality of life elsewhere. But I guess only Whites. No big deal.
Re: Coups
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=26214
“One of the iron laws of the universe is that whatever the America Left is warning about is usually something they are plotting. Alternatively, whatever they are accusing others of doing is something they have already done. The Russian collusion stuff is the most recent example of this. They accused Trump of plotting with a foreign government, the Russians, but we learned it was official Washington all mobbed up with the Ukrainians, Chinese and anyone else with extra cash.
Of course, for the last year the ruling class has been yammering about the insurrection and the ongoing threat to “our” democracy. Meanwhile, they have been dragging people off to secret dungeons, harassing citizens for their politics, throwing people off social media and all the things we associate with a thug regime. Go back further and they spent four years claiming the 2016 election was rigged and then committed massive election fraud in the 2020 election.
This is how you can discern the future in regime rhetoric. Regime-ology, like Kremlinology in the Cold War, is becoming a skill in this age. You read the regime organs like the Washington Post or New York Times not for the literal content, but for the esoteric content, the stuff between the lines. In order to be prepared for what they will do next, we have all been forced to be Straussian. Of course, we also have the opposite rule of liberalism to guide us.
This is why the stories about a potential military coup are interesting. This one from December got the ball rolling. It is framed as a warning of a possible coup by the imaginary army of insurrectionists, but clearly the authors are imagining themselves as a triumvirate saving “our” democracy. A couple of weeks later, the Pentagon assured us that they are ready to send troops into Washington and seize control of the government if people vote the wrong way in the next election…”
Roll On 2024.
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly..
Best chop it off right there given humorless ignoramus FedBots.
Re: Speakers
Zaphod:
So I’ve now got the speakers setup on my big work table and am revisiting my faves The KEFs are quite wonderful. I’m pretty sure this is the best imaging I’ve ever had at home. It’s like a 3D movie playing on my desk.
I think my old Bose speakers had decayed into something worse than the flatness you ascribe to the brand. I don’t have the expertise to put it into words. It wasn’t just flat. Some stuff was just missing.
Good tip on KEF. Sometimes I like doing an earnest consumer trawl. Other times I’m happy to take someone’s advice, if they sound intelligent and passionate enough.
OMG. Riley’s “In C” is a revelation.
Re: Balkan Bass / Reich “Come Out”
Zaphod:
Did your Balkan guy, Nenad, used to do the “Seinfeld” slap bass transitions? Glad to see he is pushing his talents in more experimental directions. 🙂
I hadn’t heard the Reich piece (though I know Reich). Joe Byrd was part of the experimental scene back then and went totally hippie. Byrd copped “Come Out” for an astonishing transition between the first two songs of his “American Metaphysical Circus” album. @3:20-4:00.
–“Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies..1969..Kalyani..You Can’t Ever Come Down”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR2hzKcZKDA
@Huxley:
Yuppety yup… the first time one hears *real* stereo imaging it’s a Revelation. It’s not just a sense of leftness or rightness or being encompassed by sound (Ye Fabled Bose Smear)… 3D / Holographic Imaging as you say is exactly it.
Glad you’re having fun!
I just upgraded my headphones and headphone DAC/Amp setup and spent the non-trolling half of yesterday revisiting recordings. The thing with Headphones and their ancillary kit is that you can get asymptotically close to the performance of a $100K+ speaker hi-fi system in a purpose-built listening room for 1-5% of the outlay not including knocking down your house and rebuilding it.
Also less likely to cause a neighbourhood insurrection at 3am.
Currently reading up on HRTFs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
Ah yes… I’ll bet the Bose speakers didn’t have tweeters that could handle all that dinging and cowbell type stuff at the beginning of In C.
Mind you, sounds like someone stuck a gamelan in a big barrel and rolled it down the road.
@Huxley:
When I did some searching for how best to set up my sub woofer I found a Serbian audiophile YouTube reviewer. He recommended a fellow Serb for some bass test tracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenad_Vasili%C4%87
Double Bass is good for this because the high frequency components of the plucking and slapping give you positional information whereas the bass string vibrations should not if everything is set up right.
@Huxley:
–“Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies..1969..Kalyani..You Can’t Ever Come Down”
You’re not wrong about the transition. One of these these things is not like the other.
@Huxley:
On a totally unrelated subject, I assure you…. What do your fellow infinitely younger fellow CS students make of you? What do you make of them?
Any and all anthropological observations might be of some interest to readers here.
Mind you, sounds like someone stuck a gamelan in a big barrel and rolled it down the road.
Zaphod:
Quite vivid imaging (so to speak)!
“In C” has a cunning plan:
__________________________
“In C” consists of 53 short numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times at the discretion of each musician in the ensemble. Each musician thus has control over which phrase they play, and players are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. In this way, although the melodic content of each part is predetermined, “In C” has elements of aleatoric music to it. –wiki
__________________________
I knew a bookstore owner whose mind was so blown by “In C” that he bought five vinyl copies when it came out and sealed up four in plastic covers. He figured he could ration his plays so that he would always have a decent copy to listen to for the rest of his life.
Re: CS students
Zaphod:
They accept me as an oldtimer oddball who nonetheless may have the Right Stuff. But generally they are too busy to figure me out.
In the team programming class last Spring I was the lead for a three-person group. I was the only person doing real work until the last week. I crashed and told them I wasn’t going to finish the full networking across multiple machines on Linux. I couldn’t get the debugging to work at that level and I was exhausted. Fortunately a teammate was experienced on Unix and hacked the hell out of my design enough to get to full spec using printf debugging. Which was fine with me.
The teachers required us to grade each other and ourselves on all the niceties of team programming. Which I found horrible.
My resolution is to avoid all team programming for the rest of my courses, if at all possible.
The kids are all right — the usual mix, I suspect. My impression is that everyone is working so hard and fast, I wonder how much they are really learning.
Here’s my favorite review of “In C.” It’s by Paul Willliams — the first rock critic according to “Rolling Stone” — and his review was quoted on the album sleevenotes. Definitely a product of the sixties, but he’s on the right track.
_______________________________
“[Listening to “In C”] may be like staring at a mirror for forty-five minutes; or it may be more like sitting at a window and watching the carnival of life go on below. It is a matter of enjoying things that happen, of being moved helplessly by an exciting performance and at the same time following each development in the performance, and somehow determining in your own head what is and isn’t a development and therefore really defining for yourself whatever it is you’re following….
Most of the prime components of the musical experience are expressed here, and expressed in such a basic way that one’s awareness of these components is totally unimportant, unnecessary: They are there before you, for you to dig; and nobody’s asking you to file them away in categories. The music is close to the nitty-gritty; you can go into it with no assumptions whatsoever and come out of it with no assumptions and still be very certain that you heard something that it was refreshing, that it was incredible, that its inability to be classified is of no importance at all. This stuff here is close enough to the basics of what music is to be listened to and appreciated with no musical background of any sort. It’s kind of like not necessarily knowing if you dig ballet, but definitely liking the way the girl across the table moves her hands. No preconceptions, you just dig it. Welcome in.”
–Paul Williams (1968)
_______________________________
Williams was also a good friend of Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer. Williams wrote a great book of essays and interviews with Dick: “Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick.” I highly recommend for fun and insight and to anyone interested in PKD.
@Huxley:
Thanks. I’ve heard dim rumours that there are other ways to debug, but I’ve always liked printf meself. Or unit tests.
“My impression is that everyone is working so hard and fast, I wonder how much they are really learning.”
That’s a worry.
As is the evaluation of other group members. Nothing wrong with it if you sign up to join a Communist Party Cell… but it’s not what Universities are supposed to be about.
USGov keeping things classy in Hong Kong:
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3162240/us-consul-general-hong-kong-and-his-husband-announce-birth
Light on a Hill.
But that’s not all!
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3162252/taiwanese-activists-buoyed-court-ruling-allowing-same-sex-adoption
So all those flyover country White Boys will be dying for something worthwhile.
Haw, haw, haw.
Not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian Grenadier.
Z still blowing smoke. Do you have any own goals for us today Z?