Prince has died!

"Prince's body was discovered at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota early Thursday morning. Multiple sources connected to the singer confirmed he had passed. The singer -- full name Prince Rogers Nelson -- had a medical emergency on April 15th that forced his private jet to make an emergency landing in Illinois. But he appeared at a concert the next day to assure his fans he was okay. His people told TMZ he was battling the flu."

Oh, my God. So shocking. So sad. I knew he'd had the flu. Such a great, talented star. He was 57. What a terrible loss.

I'd embed something, but I know he didn't like people putting his things up on YouTube.

ADDED: John collects some video and quotes Rolling Stone:

He played arguably the greatest power-ballad guitar solo in history ("Purple Rain"), and his solo on an all-star performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" during George Harrison's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2004 had jaws on the floor. But he can also bring the nasty funk like Jimmy Nolen and Nile Rodgers (listen to the groove magic of "Kiss") or shred like the fiercest metalhead ("When Doves Cry").... Prince gets a lot of Hendrix comparisons, but he sees it differently: "If they really listened to my stuff, they'd hear more of a Santana influence than Jimi Hendrix," he once told Rolling Stone. "Hendrix played more blues, Santana played prettier." To Miles Davis, who collaborated with the Purple One toward the end of his life, Prince was a combination of "James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye... and Charlie Chaplin. How can you miss with that?"

AND: Just last month — when we heard Prince had signed a deal to write his memoirs — Meade and I were discussing the meaning of "Just look for the purple banana 'til they put us in the truck":

I say it was what was a typical Prince message: Live it up because you're going to die. The banana is obviously the man's penis and the truck is the hearse that takes you away. Meade says the truck is the vagina. He agreed about the banana.

The song was "Let's Go Crazy" — the one that begins like a funeral:

Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called life

Prince sang about "the after world/A world of never ending happiness/You can always see the sun, day or night." And "instead of asking... how much of your time is left," you should ask "how much of your mind" you've got left. That's the song where he said "if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy, punch a higher floor."

He punched a higher floor.

AND: I wrote that before seeing that Prince was found dead in at his home in the elevator.

PLUS: I blogged about the elevator lyric and the afterlife back in 2011, in a post titled "'And if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy (Punch a higher floor!)'":

Prince lyric, which just occurred to me in the context of the feminist-in-the-elevator-at-the-atheist-convention incident. Prince was telling us to live now, because we're all going to die, which he sometimes said clearly — "You better live now/Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door" — and sometimes said absurdly — "Let's look for the purple banana/Until they put us in the truck." He also expressed a clear belief in the afterlife. ("In this life/Things are much harder than in the afterworld/In this life/You're on your own.") He's no atheist. How he behaves in an actual in-this-life elevator, as opposed to a metaphorical elevator, I have no idea. I bet he silently occupies his corner and avoids eye contact, in classic elevator etiquette, and waits for his floor.

15 hospitalizations for flu in Wisconsin so far.

Very early in the flu season.

Take cover. Or get vaccinated. And wash your hands, sneeze into your upper arm, don't share drinking cups, and stop using your bare hand to turn doorknobs in public places.

"Did you know that if you can't catch your breath and start hyperventilating, you will lose feeling in your legs and hands..."

"... and they will start to cramp, which you will not feel but see? I did not know this, but I think it is a good thing to know as otherwise the loss of feeling and cramping are a bit frightening."

Info to remember, in case you get the flu that's going around.

Tomorrow is my birthday, but today is a day for...

... getting a flu shot — done! — and a mammogram — later. The mammogram is something I'd been putting off, but deciding to go in for the flu shot gave me the push I needed to schedule the mammogram. Dialogue with the nurse:

NURSE: Do you have breast implants?

ME [with slight disgust and amusement]: Nooo! [Changing my tone:] Oh, I mean, I didn't mean any disrespect to the women who have breast implants.

This is the instinctive all-inclusive political correctness I carry about in my daily doings here in Madison, Wisconsin. Not that the nurse would have expressed disapproval if I'd said anything wrong. And I'm not even sure if my self-protective instinctive political correctness is a comic routine. It is something I see myself doing. Sorry if that's TMI on the breasts, but I'm just saying: Come on, everybody, get your flu shots and (if needed) mammograms.

Flu.

It's bad this year.

Have you gotten a flu shot? If not, why not?

I must say that I have not. I've only gotten a flu shot once in my life — following the instructions of the President of the United States. I've had the flu once, but only once, so I tend to think I'm good at not getting the flu, even as I know how horrible it is at the individual level. And I've read "Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic," by Gina Kolata, so I understand how horrible it can be at the global level.

Meade got a flu shot, as he usually does. I made my usual excuses. It won't happen to me, I think, even though I know I can't know that. And more importantly, it's not just about protecting myself individually, it's a responsibility that we have toward others not to be a vector of disease. I'm going to go in tomorrow. 

It is not too late to get a flu shot.

"It's just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus."

"And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it."

"The Masked Neocolonialist."

"Most of my colleagues remained under house arrest while Pamela (the other uninfected mzungu) and I traveled north to see some mountain gorillas. In Muhanga, a sound truck cruised the streets announcing that Americans had brought disease, and to keep away from us. When we walked through the streets, children covered their noses and mouths and turned away. The Rwandan newspaper New Times had an article about us."

"The engine of unbridled capitalism, with its unfair system of thought, has reached the end of the road and is unable to move."

"Selfishiness and insatiable greed have taken the place of such human concepts as love, sacrifice, dignity and justice. The belief in the one god has been replaced with self-belief."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the U.N. — as reported in the NYT.

Hey, I hope he really did say "selfishiness"? It's a cool coinage. Like there's something really suspicious about the selfishness of capitalism. And it stinks after 3 days.

AND: Elsewhere in today's U.N. speeches, Gaddafy said: "Perhaps tomorrow we will have a fish flu." Think about it.

“It will be assumed they have swine flu."

The UW health service stops testing students for swine flu after 100% of the students tested for swine flu symptoms tested positive.

Wash your hands, everybody. Sneeze and cough into your sleeve. Don't touch doorknobs. And stay home and protect us all if you get flu symptoms — a fever of more than 100 degrees along with either a sore throat or a cough.

"Practice coughing and sneezing into your sleeve."

Advice from "A Guide for UW–Madison Students: What You Can Do About the Flu." (PDF.)

Sleeve-sneezing... learn it before you have sneeze. And quit touching your face.

May I offer a piece of advice that is not in the flier? Don't touch doorknobs. Outside of my own house, I never touch doorknobs. How is that accomplished? Well, again, your sleeve can come in handy — but not part you use for sleeve-sneezing. You can also use gloves, a paper towel (when leaving a bathroom where you've washed your hands), or wait for someone else to open the door (when they are pushing out and you need to go in).

"We gots the swine flu."

(Jim Berhle's Kreepie Kats via Gawker.)

What to do about flu?

Change the name!

ADDED: Pork producers are awfully antsy, aren't they? It's not as though anyone says "We're having swine for dinner."

Swine, the other white meat.

Why did Obama's people buzz lower Manhattan with a jumbo jet and an F-16 fighter?

"The planes appeared on the horizon around 10 a.m. and sent a chill through the city. Flying in as low as 1,000 feet to 1,500 feet above New York City, they circled the Statue of Liberty before flying over Manhattan, Staten Island and New Jersey. Before they vanished, hundreds of frightened people had jammed emergency phone lines, and thousands of terrified people evacuated from buildings in the city and across the river in New Jersey. 'I was crying and praying to God to forgive me my sins because I thought I was going to get killed,' said Kathleen Filandro, who fled from 1New York Plaza when she spotted the planes."

Quiz:

Why'd did they do it?
	To get pics for propaganda, like they said.
	To distract you from the flu.
	To distract you from the economy.
	Because the torture memos weren't exciting you enough.
	So Obama could just eat his waffle, in a golf cart, and wear shorts.
pollcode.com free polls

"GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness."

The Democrats begin the week with an absolutely perfect issue.

Swine flu in New York City.

It's not just for Mexico anymore. Look out.

But don't worry, "Obama's health fine after trip to Mexico."

***

I've made a "flu" tag. I hope I won't need to use it too much.

Here's an excellent book: "Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic."

"It was a plague so deadly that if a similar virus were to strike today, it would kill more people in a single year than heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS and Alzheimer's disease combined." Between 20 million and 100 million people worldwide died in the 1918 flu pandemic, but for years afterward this deadliest plague in history was almost completely forgotten. Histories and even medical texts rarely mentioned it. This disconnect between the flu's devastation and its obscurity is the starting point for [Gine] Kolata's incisive history. She explains how the plague spread, covers the various speculations about its causes and origins and gives an account of the search to retrieve a specimen of the virus strain once genetic science had advanced enough to unravel the virus's mysteries. Tissue samples from an obese woman buried in the permafrost of Alaska and from two soldiers who died in army camps preserved by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in thumb-sized bits of paraffin prove to be the last remaining sources of the 1918 strain... Could such a deadly flu appear again?