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
"Among the things that have long fascinated people about Jesus and explain his enduring appeal is his method of dialogue and teaching. "He asked a lot of questions and told a lot of stories in the form of parables. In fact, parables form about a third of Jesus’ recorded teachings. The Gospels were written decades after he died, so his questions and parables clearly left a deep impression on those who bore testimony to him....
"Some of Jesus’ questions were rhetorical; others were meant to challenge or even provoke. In some cases, Jesus used questions to parry attacks by religious authorities who set traps for him. In others, he used questions to enter more fully into the lives of others and to help people look at the state of their hearts. He asked people about their fears and their faith. Jesus used questions to free a woman caught in adultery from condemnation and to inquire whether people considered him to be the Messiah. He probed deeply into questions not many had asked before him, like “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
---(Peter Wehner, long-time White House consultant and writer, in the NYT last week about Jesus Christ’s method of teaching by asking questions.)

"Would that I could mention all the illuminating details in this biography, for example, why Wells praised Black Americans so highly, saying, 'I took a mighty liking to these gentle, human, dark-skinned people,' and 'Whatever America has to show in heroic living today, I doubt if she can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast efforts hundreds of black and colored men are making today to live blamelessly, honorably and patiently, getting by themselves what scraps of refinement, beauty and learning they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.''
-- "How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century," Charles Johnson, NYT Book Review, Nov. 19, 2021. ***".

...the monsters arrive."
"They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.
"Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry."

---The great Margaret Renkl, from Nashville, one of my favorite NYT bylines, Oct. 26, 2021.
(She describes our Long Island enclave to every decibel, every stink.)
lwww.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html
---

Forget the Super Bowl. Go to the Beach

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