Welcome to the weekend, corresponding with another drinking holiday or Holidrink – Cinco de Mayo.  As you prepare for queso and margaritas, we put together a five-minute quick that could give you plenty of happy hour conversation starters, or what we now call Prompts.  We also updated the With A Shout playlist this week, and we named today's newsletter after one of our subscribers called the playlist “A perfect mix of upbeat and angsty-ness.”  That is well said; enjoy the day!

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Americans love to party, and we also love to co-opt celebrations that have origins in other countries, and the original country doesn't celebrate the "party-style" holidays we create.  Today is one of those days; according to Microsoft Bing Chat, Cinco de Mayo is a recognition of a Mexican army that conquered Napoleon's French army in 1862.  The win over the French satellite state in Mexico took place on May 5th, 1862, and was said to boost the morale of the Mexican soldiers and civilians.

We celebrate your victory over French rule as a continental relative to your north.  Back in 1862, we were a little busy with our own brutal Civil War, but today we love any excuse to raise a cerveza and a margarita in support of the fight, the fight for your right To Part-ey!  We can add this to the pile of Ireland's St. Patrick's Day and even our 4th of July.  Celebrate a revolution, a battle for independence, and reduced oppression.  The fight and the parties continue; cheers!

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The NYT wrote an article several years ago about relationships.  I don't know how it returned to the feed, but it is an excellent article to highlight.  The report focuses on research to determine if two strangers can increase intimacy by asking each other questions.  The questions are broken into sections; the further you get through them, the more intimate they become.  The author of the original essay that Daniel Jones from the NYT writes about, named Mandy Len Catron, added her own task to the questions she found from the study with the questions.  Her final mission is to stare deep into the eyes of the person you are with for four minutes. 

Try staring into anyone’s eyes for four minutes, known or unknown it’s an eternity.  Doing it after you've taken that new person down a path of 30 plus other intimate questions, and if they didn't run for the door by question 20 and made it through the four-minute deep-in-my-eyes challenge, you should marry them.  We plan to do some of our experiments on the questions and report on the results in a follow-up newsletter.  Here is a unique question in the first set that should lead to interesting conversations:

We also found interesting in this story the algorithm the NYT uses to serve ads with stories.  Look at the ad it served up on this page about Strange Love…

The B-52s are a genre-bending music group who, along with R.E.M., came out of the alternative scene in Georgia.  Funky, fresh, and new in many ways, they continue to impress without fitting into any category.  Here is a clip of the Saturday Night Live performance from 1980 that will remind you how good they are.

Strange Love.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

7 minutes of good cheer every day. Become a Fan to get daily posts and updates.

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