Forget the Super Bowl. Go to the Beach

2/4/2018

The Girl From Ipanema -- Celia Silva and Some Other People

While some Americans were preparing for the Super Bowl (see below) in icy Minneapolis on Sunday, the Silva family of Rio went to Ipanema.
Altenir, Neo and Celia posed at the statue of Tom Jobim, who wrote "Garota de Ipanema."
On the beach, hundreds of people are usually performing tricks, maneuvering a large round ball with their feet and chests and knees and foreheads.
The soul of that sport is in Brazil.
Senhoras e senhores, Antonio Carlos Jobim:

If one is going to see only one American football game per season -- and I did -- this was the game to see.
Super Bowl LII was full of twists and athleticism and trick plays.
The brain damage will be assessed in a few years.
I've got some friends who are Iggles fans, and they had never won the Super Bowl.
It isn't hard to root against the Patriots, except that Tom Brady is still admirable, on the field, after all these years. He had the ball in the closing seconds.
Great game.
Our daughter Laura made gumbo that warmed me up, maybe just as much as I might have been on the beach at Ipanema.
Boa noite a todos.

Altenir Silva

2/4/2018 06:25:37 pm

Wow! Tom Jobim is our pride here in Brazil, like Lou Gehrig is to the Yankees. Always when we get into the Ipanema Beach (Rio de Janeiro) and see the statue of Mr. Jobim, we remember you, George.
Thanks, my friend.
Cheers - Altenir

Alan Rubin link

2/4/2018 06:59:57 pm

Chilling out with Altenir and his family would be a great alternative to watching the super bowl (lower case intended).

The best we cab do is Alma Brasileira byHeitor Villa-Lobos.

Game note--I'm pulling for the Eagles. Nice article in the NYT Sunday sports section about how they use analytics very successfully.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/sports/football/eagles-analytics-super-bowl-lii.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ffootball&action=click&contentCollection=football®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

I agree with the concept of taking the long view and not always opt for the immediate score.

Gene Palumbo

2/5/2018 12:17:47 am

Alan Rubin:
I recently discovered something that makes life a bit easier: when copying a NYTimes link, you can drop all the characters that follow html. e.g. in the link you just sent us, this would have been enough: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/sports/football/eagles-analytics-super-bowl-lii.html

Ed Martin

2/5/2018 07:48:51 pm

Re: Antonios Carlos Jobim, aka Tom, our friend, the late U. Of Alabama Theater Director, Marian Galloway, PH.D, Iowa always referred to UI friend as “Tom” rather than Tennessee Williams. In case they thought she was name dropping, all they had to do was to see Blanche DuBois in “Streetcar.” Meanwhile Jobim made an album, circa 1990, of his compositions and one US piece, “You Do Something To Me... something that mystifies me....”. He sang it in English and we listened in the company of our newly born grandson, Alec, and we sang it to him many times. In a loosely asasociated note, Alec’s younger sister, Gwen, is in Liberia as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching math and science in a village with no water system, phone, etc. She has a dog she adores called, “Neymar.”

George Vecsey

2/5/2018 10:05:29 pm

Dear Ed, good for your grand-daughter.
Only thing I can say is that Brazil is so musical, and so attuned to other forms and cultures, that performers just toss an American (or Italian, or whatever) song in the mix. For example, Caetano Veloso has a CD, A Bossa de Caetano, with mostly Jobim, but smack in the middle he aces Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean"....and also Cole Porter's "Get Out of Town" -- charming pronunciations of the English.
They know our music, and theirs is part of our heritage now. Hope all is well. GV

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

Forget the Super Bowl. Go to the Beach

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