Sunday Fun: Soccer Buffs on Patio

7/7/2020

Sunday Soccer: Edmundo, minus guitar. Three unidentified fans. Laptop plugging greatest soccer book ever written. (Youtube of show, below.)

You’ve heard of Men in Blazers?
Get ready for (what I like to call) Men in Shorts, talking footy from a suburban patio on a Sunday morning.

My St. Louis pal Tom Schwarz is part of an eclectic group of soccer buffs who emit the weekly show, captured as it happens and sent out through the mysteries of Youtube and Facebook.

The merrie bande called me Sunday, July 5, and we talked about survival during the bungled pandemic, viewing “Hamilton” on the tube, live sports in empty stadiums. I am heard from Minute 30, as long as they can carry me.

The show is “live” on Facebook, so I am told, but later put together for Youtube. They occasionally get a real soccer person, like Taylor Twellman of St. Louis, ace scorer now ace broadcaster, on Jan. 20, 2019.

Cast members include:
Edmundo (Gail Edmunds, plus guitar).
Ted Williams, not the frozen one, women’s soccer authority and show producer.
Josh McGehee, Bradley Univ., 2018, labelled “our resident soccer expert” (every show needs one.)
Russell Blyth, St. Louis Univ., Dept. of Mathematics, “native of New Zealand” (you can hear it), reads the scores of Sunday matches in “traditional BBC fashion,” lover of tango and Liverpool fan.
Patio Host Tom Schwarz, seller of plants, world traveler, family guy, outside gunner in basketball, and master salesman who once hawked 175 copies of my Stan Musial biography in soccer pub in one night.

The lads are gearing up their act for the arrival of a St. Louis club in Major League Soccer in the 2022 season, an honor for one of America’s best nurturing cities for the sport.

Meantime: socially distanced. (My old photo vanishes by pushing the video arrow, I hope.)

Roy Edelsack

7/7/2020 11:44:28 am

Obligatory (and a Shea Stadium staple in 1986):

The Curly Shuffle
Jump 'N the Saddle Band

When me and my friends go out on the town
We can't sit still and we can't sit down
We don't like to fight and we don't like to scuffle
But we dance all night doing the Curly shuffle
(Hey Moe hey Moe) hey Moe hey Moe
(Well nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck) well nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck
(La da dee la da dee) la da dee la da dee
(Woo woo woo woo) woo woo woo woo
Well we never miss a chance we get up and dance and do the Curly shuffle
Well me and my friends love Curly and Moe
We love Curly's brother Shemp and his fat clone Joe
It's such a delight to boogie and hustle
Dancing all night doing the Curly shuffle
(Hey Moe hey Moe) hey Moe hey Moe
(Well nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck) well nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck
(We dee dee dee we dee dee dee) we dee dee dee we dee dee dee dee
(Oh,…

George Vecsey

7/7/2020 08:54:43 pm

I guess the three lads appeal all over the place. I believe Jay Horwitz, long-time PR guy, is a 3 Stooges fan. They were big in 1986? It blurs.
GV

Roy Edelsack

7/8/2020 12:07:30 pm

WHAT`S THE METS` PROBLEM? ASK CURLY

CHICAGO TRIBUNE-July 7, 1987
Most people think the Mets are in their current desperate state because

(a) their pitching staff self-destructed, (b) half the team would like to get traded or (c) Darryl Strawberry lost his alarm clock.

But here`s the real reason: It`s the Three Stooges.

See, they used to show the video to the world-famous song, ''The Curly Shuffle,'' virtually every night at Shea Stadium. They used to win virtually every night they did that, too.

But this year they got into a copyright battle and weren`t able to show a single ''Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk'' all season until finally settling the dispute last week.

However, they`re allowed to show this critical video only 50 times over the next three years, so they`ve got to pick their spots. The spot they picked for the first showing was the bottom of the ninth last Tuesday, their game with the Cardinals tied at 2-2, and an 8 1/2-game deficit staring them in the face if they lost.

They didn`t. They scored in the ninth to win 3-2. The evidence, therefore, was overwhelming. It had to be those Stooges.

''We haven`t had it (the video) all year, and we haven`t played very well,'' said Davey Johnson. ''I don`t know why it took us so long to get it back. That`s probably been our problem.''

Oops! This just in. Moe and Larry called in with the flu, Curly says he`s tired of playing with backstabbers, and Keith Hernandez is trying to call a Stooges-only meeting to clear the air.

Alan Rubin link

7/7/2020 12:56:04 pm

Just great. Impromptu is often more realistic than the best of planning.

If I had continued playing clarinet after high school, you might have had a goalkeeper's perspective in the chat.

Ted Williams link

7/9/2020 09:42:45 am

George,
it is such a pleasure to have you join us for our weekend broadcasts. This new FB Live to YouTube version is just the latest on an AM local sports radio roller coaster that has been truly memorable. We value your participation with our Merry band of "men in shorts." Talk again soon.

Ted Williams
St. Louis

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

Sunday Fun: Soccer Buffs on Patio

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