Less than three months ago 56% of Tory members in a CONHome poll said they backed Trump – politicalb
Less than three months ago 56% of Tory members in a CONHome poll said they backed Trump – politicalbetting.com
The above is from a ConservativeHome survey that was published four days before the American election on October 31st 2020 and shows overwhelming support for the incumbent who was seeking a second term.
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TrumpBiden, as I said all along.The best I have seen in the past few years is Ross Noble, but because so much of it is improv, he can also miss badly as well. Far too many that were ok, have a bit like Scott n Paste, been driven made by Brexit and can only do Brexit is shit, Orange man bad stuff, and you can feel it in the audience people don't want that. Its divisive and you can only hear so many ways of they are shit jokes before you have heard them all.
I saw Mark Watson 18 months ago, and he had at least the sense to have twigged nobody wants that and came out and said you guys pay your money to have a night off from the real world, so I am not doing anything fights over Brexit, instead this show is all about something much more depressing my divorce.
I used to like Mark Thomas live, but how he is much older, he doesn't really have the tales to tell about all his experiences on joining crazies on a protest. His show about his wife beating dad who loved opera and died a horrible death although not his funniest work, was incredibly moving.
Iliza Shlesinger
It should really be called ConConHome.
Absolutely right. He will be back in 2024 if not barred from office.
But people are increasingly looking for a full "show". Nobody's asking Dave Gorman or Stewart Lee to adapt his set to the room or banter with the audience, and nor should they. They're not doing some observational chat then saying "you've been a lovely audience, why not try the buffet?" They've got a beautifully structured show which takes you on a journey, has some laughs along the way, but also tells a wider story. Heckling is rare, and everyone thinks anyone who does it is a prick ruining the performance just as much as if they did it at the Old Vic - it just isn't what people are going there for these days in many cases.
There still is a stand-up "circuit" of course. But the people on it are largely cutting their teeth as a route to something else. So the ones who make a career of it have, to a large extent, failed and aren't that great. Whereas in the past that just WAS the career.
https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1347046544747462656
He also had a really good way that even though I basically don't agree with him on much politically, I can still go to the show, have a laugh and not feel like I am personally being attacked. Some other "comedians", seem to be on a mission to shame those that don't agree with their politics and / or convert you.
And then on came a still little-known comedian, who did a fabulous 15 minute set, based on the madness of the 24-hour rolling media in the first three days of that war. Fair to say, it was genius. We LOVED it. Huge ovation at the end.
And thus, I was introduced to Eddie Izzard.
The West Coast Americans all got into podcasting as California shut down, led by Rogan’s success. Listening to two or three comedians play off each other for a couple of hours can be very entertaining.
Of the British comics, the standout for dealing with a crowd is still Jimmy Carr, who will be very rude indeed to anyone who interrupts his show, or who looks out of place in the first few rows. Australian Jim Jeffries is also very good at crowd work, as is American Anthony Jeselnik.
There’s been a few hits and misses of how to do comedy during a pandemic - zoom comedy definitely doesn’t work, the late-night TV hosts working from home were also misses, drive-through cinema comedy (pioneered in the US by Bert Kreischer) worked quite well, and the best of the online formats has been the 30-jokes-a-minute YouTube monologues of Andrew Schulz - who was rewarded with a Netflix end-of-year show for his efforts.
https://twitter.com/Pouriaaa/status/1347142830356049921?s=20
Now, often it is about creating this one show that lasts 90 mins and you tour it into the ground in big venues. Then rinse and repeat.
I liked watching Stewart Lee's show a few years ago, I thought it was really clever and interesting. But, I have said this before, I got to the end and realised I hadn't laughed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6oajPBSnO8
These things also differ culturally. I cannot stand the combative US club comic (French & Saunders among others do great parodies of the sort of thing). But they've got a finely honed skill, you have to give them that.
They have just added the numbers to some other pages as well.
Personally I’ve thought for a long time that comedians are the far too acknowledged legislators of the world. My spirit quailed when I saw that that diddy (during an extended whine about cancel culture) that writes Titania McGrath also runs standup comedian courses. Looking forward to lots of hilarious jokes about comedy PhDs to go with ones about degrees in media studies.
Although it's clearly the same show, it's not exactly the same show, and he does engage with hecklers
In Brum for example when he asked the audience if anybody was not from the UK, someone shouted out Glasgow, so he then did a whole Indy riff
Heckler: I've fucked your Mum
Jimmy Carr: Well my Mum's 65, you're what 19, I'd say that's a great result for my Mum.
He even cracked a 7/7 joke which even I gasped about and his response was brilliant.
One name not mentioned so far - Bill Burr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a17duTUK6qw
I forgive him everything he does now as even back then he was a Charlie Chaplin-type (as in Chaplin's political views) war is stupid let's love everyone kind of guy.
https://twitter.com/Mike_Fabricant/status/1347186935568232448?s=20
https://twitter.com/Mike_Fabricant/status/1347187033681371137?s=20
Ross Noble is wonderful (but I just have a nagging doubt about how much of his "improv" is pre-worked segments he shoe-horns in). That said, he had a ball with a former colleague, who he got to admit had fallen off the bridge over the River Kwai. Stunned silence. "I'll get back to you later...."
And so he did. Tragically, no recording exists.....
https://twitter.com/sallylockwood/status/1347188249920475137
Which leaves the BBC or YouTube which is not really the same thing.
Didn't Bojo promise sceptical tory MPs day by day updates?
(I am obviously being facetious, but is it reasonable to - without having much interest either way in US domestic affairs - prefer that Trumpism had burned itself out peacefully in eight years, rather than being rudely interrupted after four, in favour of a candidate almost everyone agrees wasn't particularly impressive, and at the head of a party whose attempts to reign in their own extremist elements do not appear to be going particularly well?)
Overall however while 46.9% of US voters voted for Trump, only 13% of UK voters wanted Trump to win and only 26% of Conservative voters wanted Trump to win (and I suspect many if not most of those voted UKIP in 2015)
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1314158566228492288?s=20
Another favourite.
Heckler: “I’ve fucked your mum!”
Jimmy Carr: “Ah, I was actually told you would be here tonight, by your mum while I was fucking her.
At least, I think she was talking to me. I wasn’t the only one there.”
The best bit I heard him was when he asked a guy a few seats away from who he worked for and the guy was super nervous, sort of stuttered / stumbled and "Just Eat" came out as Justine....30 mins later we had this full created backstory of how this guy actually is forced labour in Justine's shed, is only allowed out once a week etc.
My view is based partly on the UK success with testing. After a decidedly rocky start, I see we are now conducting close 500,000 tests per day.
No reason why we cannot hit a similar daily target for vaccinations; it will take time to reach those levels though.
The release date for the daily updates is supposed to be this coming Monday (11th).
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.06.425392v1.full.pdf
Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 is constantly evolving, with more contagious mutations spreading rapidly. Using in vitro evolution to affinity maturate the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein towards ACE2, resulted in the more contagious mutations, S477N, E484K, and N501Y to be among the first selected. This includes the British and South-African variants. Plotting the binding affinity to ACE2 of selected RBD mutations against their incidence in the population shows a strong correlation between the two. Further in vitro evolution enhancing binding by 600- fold provides guidelines towards potentially new evolving mutations with even higher infectivity. Yet, the high-affinity RBD is also an efficient drug, inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection. The 2.9Å Cryo-EM structure of the high-affinity complex, including all rapidly spreading mutations provides structural basis for future drug development...
...While natural virus selection is not as efficient as in vitro selection, the gained information on the more critical mutations can be used as a tool to identify emerging mutations. We hypothesize that E484R will continue to spread and will become more dominant, especially in combination with N501Y. In contrast, we do not expect the rapid spread of S494P. Importantly, the mutation Q498R appeared in the library B4 after the incorporation of Tyr at position 501. This combination dramatically increased the affinity below 100 pM as is shown by the difference between RBD-32 and RBD-44 (Table 1). Notably, the wild-type RBD codon at position 498 is CAA, allowing for direct change to arginine codon CGA. R498 was not sampled yet by the virus (Fig. 2A) but its appearance should be carefully monitored. Moreover, R498 is located in a hypervariable location of the RBD (Fig. S11), which makes its appearance more plausible....
...An intriguing question is whether the spreading of the tighter binding SARS-CoV-2 variants in humans is accidental. From the similarity to yeast display selection, where stringent conditions are used, one may hypothesize that stringent selection is also driving the rapid spread of these mutations. Face masks of low quality (which are by far the most abundant) would provide such selection conditions, as they reduce exhaled viral titers, given tighter binding variants an advantage over WT to spread rapidly in the population (as a result of R0 of mutated viruses being >1, while <1 for WT viruses). This should be urgently investigated, as one may consider the mandatory use of higher quality face-masks, which will reduce viral titer to bellow infection levels (as indeed seen with medical personal who use such masks) and stop spreading these tighter binding virus mutations.</i>
Not sure how much reputation they can salvage at this point.
This seems to be a web-page design decision, new information being added - not an IT decision really, rather a business decision with IT input. Those sorts of changes often took far longer than they should do. I'm not defending it, just reporting my experience.
Of course IT decisions could be, and were, made very much quicker in different circs., weighing up the balance of risk of disruption versus impact of delay.
PS I retired from said bank 3 years ago. I'm not going to say which one it is but it's definitely got the best IT track record.
I'd rather just listen to the funny comedian tell jokes.
Vaccination will involve finding and vaccinating different people on every occasion.
When I saw him live, he had absolute mastery over the audience, but I didn't actually spend that much time laughing.
What is your evidence of re-seeding from Spain (as opposed to say, schools and unis opening again)?
This was established in a similar way to how we know about Cockney COVID and where it is popping up.
I sincerely hope this was done in a BSL4 lab and only after development of extremely stringent risk management protocols, with personnel not only trained in the appropriate safety protocols, but given refresher courses before they started on the research.
PS It is extremely worrying that this type of research paper has no discussion of the biosafety aspects - any acknowledgement of the risks, methods used to minimize them, or controls taken to contain any of the in vitro evolved strains. As a reviewer, I'd reject this paper out of hand until those issues were remedied.