Reviews - GEORGE VECSEY

Anjali Photo From Portugal - 2

6/26/2017

Photo by Anjali

Anjali and family are in Evora, a picturesque town, with its Roman temple of Diana.

Anjali spotted the ducks, venturing out of the shadows, as well as the reflection in the pond.

The stones look old. It’s Portugal.

When Laura was covering the great Algarve soccer tournament two years ago, she sent us daily photos of the specialty at her restaurant:

O Rei dos Frangos – The King of the Chickens, printed on every plate.

Today she sent us a photo of the main course in an outdoor cafe in Evora.

Cada um na sua, as they say in Portuguese.
To each his own.

Photo by Laura

Mendel

6/26/2017 01:47:47 pm

Doesn't look kosher to me.

George Vecsey

6/26/2017 02:08:33 pm

Dear Rabbi: Duly noted. I am going to see what I can do about equal time.
We did have a recent high-school gathering with attention to kashrut rules. 1-out-of-2.
best, George

Brian Savin

6/26/2017 07:44:12 pm

Wonderful photos!

We have a friend who, with her daughter, hiked the Camino Portuguese last year. She lost all her toe nails but made it to the end with many tails of nature scenes and fellow pilgrims. I suspect there may be many interesting photo ops in that trek if paths cross.

Brian Savin

6/26/2017 07:47:58 pm

"Tales". I blame iPhone for not correcting, but even worsening, my typos!

6/26/2017 09:30:42 pm

Spell check will start a war.

Ed Martin

6/27/2017 02:52:38 pm

In case anyone is unsure, those brownish lumps are garlic, (mouth-watering sounds deleted.)

PS. Brian, I blame Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the "alt. Spelling crowd."

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Anjali Photo From Portugal - 2

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