Somebody Has a Good Soccer Gig in Portugal

3/7/2015

Unfortunately, the trip needed a layover in Lisbon

Our daughter Laura has had many good assignments in her career as sports columnist in Albany, Seattle and Baltimore and as political columnist in Harrisburg.
This would appear to be one of the better gigs. Just saying.

The plate says: King of the Chickens

But she has been working. Here is the proof:

USA practice. Temperature in the 60s. Photos by Laura Vecsey

Some of her stories:

http://www.foxsports.com/soccer/story/usa-prepare-to-silence-critics-answer-questions-ahead-of-all-important-2015-algarve-cup-030315

http://www.foxsports.com/soccer/story/uswnt-usa-has-solid-start-to-algarve-cup-with-win-over-norway-030415

http://www.foxsports.com/soccer/story/usa-3-0-switzerland-algarve-cup-alex-morgan-amy-rodriguez-abby-wambach-match-report-030615

Ed martin

3/7/2015 07:16:23 am

I can imagine how much pleasure you and your wife get from watching Laura Vecsey flourish. And just before I read this I see USA shutout Switzerland with Hope Solo as keeper.

George Vecsey

3/7/2015 08:44:02 am

Well, there is the dollop of envy when she tells us about the weather there. She's been putting lots of pictures on Facebook, I hear. GV

Thor A. Larsen

3/9/2015 05:07:46 am

What a tremendous experience and excellent write-ups. Portugal is a fantastic place to visit as well, with Lisbon a wonderful city and the ocuntry side beautiful, excellent roads, still inexpensive and food very diverse and excellent. In fact we sat on the same spot as the gentleman with the guitar, but without the guitar. Perhaps Laura will write the next book on future World Cups!!

George Vecsey

3/9/2015 05:57:09 am

Thor, we were telling Laura about the hills...she seems to have found them. We were there, oh, a few decades ago. I remember going down a steep staircase a few hundreds years old, steps all grooved, and I went down on my butt....rookie mistake. She is raving about the food, said the chicken dish pictured above was the best she has ever had.
Your son is also in Europe. We raised out kids right.
see you in May,
George

John McDermott

3/9/2015 09:10:21 am

Difficult work, but someone has to do it! Glad it is Laura.

Alan Rubin link

3/9/2015 11:38:14 am

George

I cannot think of a better way to take a break from unpacking than to check in on your web site.

Portugal is everything mentioned and much more. Make sure Laura hears some Fado. It is best to go late at night and avoid the early tourist traps. The music is infinitely better then.

I never ate fish until I went to Portugal. Sandi said that if I did not like it in Portugal, I would never like fish.

Hope Solo has had a troubled past, but she is one of the premier goalkeepers in the world. She exemplifies the importance of goalkeepers to teams. Stopping shots is a small, but important, part of what goalkeepers do. They direct the team and build their confidence. The USWNT has played better since she returned.

I'm offering Laura the same service that I had offered you for World Cups, I'll carry the laptop.

George Vecsey

3/9/2015 11:50:22 am

Alan, you are too late. Go carry the laptop for Jen on her Moth expeditions. I am volunteering to do the logistics for Laura's WWC run.

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

Somebody Has a Good Soccer Gig in Portugal

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