It took a miracle pass from one of the world’s best players in the dying moments of the game for Portugal to steal a draw and avoid losing to the upstart Americans. I had video of the crowd’s deflation of that, but it just seemed cruel to show.
On the one hand, the U.S. had a win slip away from them. On the other hand, it was against the fourth best team in the world. On the dominant foot it was against a diminished Portugal. On the other foot, however, all of that happened and the U. S. played anything but their best soccer.
This team might go some place, and from the Group of Death, no less.
But the crowd reactions from around the country? They’ve been great. I just wanted to share one more.
For our anniversary dinner we had reservations at Warehouse Bistro. This was my dinner:
We go there maybe twice a year. I’ve noticed that the vegetable of the day is always that giant head of broccoli. Not that I’m complaining.
I mention it here because, for some reason, I always mention the food at the anniversary dinner. It is tasty.
We rode our bikes to the pool yesterday. That was six miles just to avoid parking, really. The swim was the point. I swam 1,500 yards and didn’t feel terribly bad about it.
One of our friends was working as a lifeguard and he offered a critique of my technique. He did not understand that my style is carefully designed to not use my legs, at all, in advance of the bike and run to follow.
He wasn’t the only person to offer criticism. A police officer thought enough of me to turn his loud speaker on and talk to me. Twice. He was well intentioned, but in error. Unfortunately we did not have the opportunity to discuss the state law together.
Today we did a regular route which puts in about 18 miles. It is one of my favorite rides, based on the performance. I always seem to do well on that particular set of roads. Indeed, today, on one hill I actually gained five miles per hour.
My speed and power might have continued to improve, but I ran out of ascent.
I do not know what is happening.
Soccer, which we haven’t talked about at all here yet. I listened to the Ghana game as I drove home on Monday. The Yankee, who is awesome, found an app with which to stream the game. But it was my turn to drive and so I would still a very brief glance here or there, not nearly enough to get a real sense of the game, which it sounded like Ghana gave away in more ways than one.
I got to watch a few games on the cruise and, of course, I’ve been watching this week. With Portugal tomorrow, I’m busy watching the hype videos.
This one doesn’t even show any game footage:
This one features the second goal from the Ghana game:
And here’s a slightly older one that highlights the American Outlaws, who should really be a cultural institution unto themselves:
I expect a lot more of these as the U.S. performance continues in the World Cup.
Things to read … because you can always expect more to read.
This is a great, and long read. But it is worth reading to the end this story of a new firefighter’s first blaze. Baptism by fire:
IT WAS QUICKLY DARK. Black smoke pervaded the apartment. He couldn’t see. Inside an apartment on fire, you are robbed of key senses. He had to pick his way with those gardenerlike gloves.
Noise was absent. No cries for help.
In his bunker gear, Firefighter Sullivan didn’t sense the heat.
I am resting my legs. I am resting my legs because I’ve ridden two days in a row. I’ve ridden a paltry 28 miles on Tuesday and Wednesday, my first two rides on a real bike in a calendar month. Both rides felt like bad first rides. They weren’t even particularly demanding rides. I sought out easy routes. My legs are in no kind of form and that’s unfortunate.
And so it seems clear to me that I need to find a way to travel with my bike wherever I go because this is silly.
I have a lot of catching up to do.
Things to read … because I can catch up there more easily, I’d bet.
The morning meeting is one of two large news meetings each day, with the other at 4 p.m. (For the record, of the 23 people seated around the main table, as opposed to the periphery, seven were women; two, both men, were African-American.)
The focus at the meetings, and The Times, has come a long way since the days when “what’s going on page one?” was the biggest question. Clearly, there’s an effort to make this, more than ever, an “all platforms” newsroom.
But the structural changes at The Times and in the larger media world are even more striking. And therein lies a problem that has no easy solution: how to fully transform for the digital future when the business model — and the DNA of the newsroom — is so tied to the printed newspaper.
How did anonymous sourcing become the rule rather than the exception in American journalism? Journalism professor Matt J. Duffy informs us in a new (and securely paywalled) paper that anonymous sourcing was sufficiently rare in the first three decades of the 20th century that none of the journalism textbooks and guides he examined made mention of the practice. The first textbook mention Duffy encountered was published in 1955 — An Introduction to Journalism: A Survey of the Fourth Estate in All Its Forms, by Fraser Bond. According to Bond, anonymous sources appeared primarily in foreign diplomatic reporting and in those cases that reporters wanted to attribute information from the president.
Luca Forlin, Head of International Product Partnerships at Google, shared several thoughts on where mobile publishing is headed. “There are two things right now. There are two things right now. The first is the around the devices and the second is around usage.”
Around devices, “the interesting element is that we have seen huge growth in smaller tablets – phablets – which are taking a huge share of the market from the bigger tablets. Does that change much in terms of what publishers do? The truth is we are not yet sure. What is clear is that publishers must abandon the idea of designing something one way and move to a world where content actually adapts. Optimisation is really important. The second thing is that, while phablets are taking over, in reality they belong to the smartphone family, which is entirely different from big tablets. That again forces them to abandon their old habits. Small screen sizes require much more simplicity, different design logic and different content.”
Think about it: text is text, but images are hard in some mobile platforms. Some videos work well there, others less so. We have to think not only about the content, but where it is going and, now, how it is going to look in several different places.
Tiger, War Eagle VI, has died, the university has announced.
Tiger never yielded, which is what you want out of an eagle that you ask to fly down a field. So long associated with Auburn, she was thought to be among the oldest golden eagles in captivity.
Tiger started that uniquely Auburn tradition, superlative to almost every other pre-game routine everywhere, at the beginning of the 2000 season.
A friend of mine was a member of the service fraternity who took care of her back then, when she lived in the aviary just off the concourse. You could see them training her at a particular time most any afternoon.
When my family came to visit my freshman year I took my grandmother by to meet Tiger. She had her picture made with her. “That’s just something you don’t get to do every day.”
My grandmother did it again the next year too. Then she said “I bet nobody ever gets to do that!”
The first eagle to fly free in Jordan-Hare Stadium soared through the 2006 installment of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry. For her last Iron Bowl, the 2005 “Honk if you sacked Brodie” game, Tiger landed near us on the field. They’d named the field itself after Pat Dye. It was Carl Stephen’s last game as the voice of the stadium. Tiger sacked Brodie twice.
During Tiger’s years of mascot service Auburn amassed a record of 75-27 with the SEC championship in 2004.
After Nova and Spirit took over the pre-game flights, Tiger kept touring and teaching as part of her role at the Southeast Raptor Center.
She helped educate audiences throughout the region. Her likeness remains a fund raiser. Believed to be one of the oldest golden eagles in captivity, Auburn announced today that she has died at 34.
War Eagle! Fly down the field! Ever to conquer, never to yield!
