Shilgia? Are you still there? Shilgia?
I watched the second half of the game and all the overtime. I was hoping that The Netherlands would win. But, they didn't; even when I was cheering for Russia secretly I was hoping that the orange would win. Every team I've rooted for while watching the game has lost, sigh. I think today I will simply watch, stone-faced.
Shilgia is right now probably on a bus from Newburgh, NY, back to the city, in blissful ignorance. I was in NYC on Thursday and she and I saw Hamlet in Central Park. Good, especially Sam Waterston as Polonius. He made him a human being instead of just a laughingstock. Hamlet was good too. We didn't like Laertes or Claudius (André Braugher). Some of the staging looked to me as if it had been plagiarized from a production I saw at the Old Vic four years ago, at the time of the last European Cup.
Then on Friday, shilgia and walked the length of the borough of Manhattan, top to bottom. Ahem. Shilgia and I walked the length of the borough of Manhattan. From one end (north) to the other (south). All the way. On foot. The Bronx, as the song says, is up, and the Battery's down, and we walked from one to the other. Some wimps may, I understand, be satisfied to walk the length of the island of Manhattan, but shilgia insisted on the whole borough (aka New York County), which includes a few hundred meters on the mainland, which used to be part of Manhattan Island before they dug a ship channel to the south and rerouted the Harlem River.
Manhattan is about 15 miles long, and we did some wondering east-west on route. Shilgia and google maps confirm that we walked a minimum of 16.1 miles, and probably a good deal more.
I'm sixty years old, by the way.
The on Saturday we drove out to a farm not far from Cooperstown New York and that night heard a 95-year-old clarinetist celebrate his birthday with a pretty good performance in a local café, unfortunately in the presence of four or five generations of his descendants who had a lot of catching up to do and made it hard to hear him. Fun, anyway. Shilgia also got to see a deer, hear and see American frogs (the "glunk" type frogs don't sound European, apparently), and see some of what the Europeans call the real America. (A fiddler playing Turkey in the Straw at the farmers' market this morning, for example).
3-1. Ay! Well, if Ta' Tarra (or whatever was the name of that 38-1 shot) can win the Belmont, anything can happen. If the outcome were predictable, no one woudl pay any attention. Now that Croatia and the Netherlands, my two sentimental favorites, are out, I've got to find someone to root for.
(Tentatively) Up gli Azzurri! Forza It . . . no, can't quite do it.
Don't say it Vinny!!!!
Thank you. And congratulations on your peregrination through NYC.
I don't know who(m) to cheer for now either in the Euro2008 match. Turkey will be the underdogs with all their suspensions and injuries. I suppose Russia will be the underdog too, but I will hope Spain win.
The National Folklife festival inconsiderately starts on the same day as the first semifinal. Hmmph. There is a duo from Texas, Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines, that I want to see; they are only in town the first week. With the football matches, the only realistic time I can see them are either a Friday evening concert that almost conflicts with something my sister is doing, and Saturday.
A potential first bird for North America if not the entire Western Hemisphere is a 3 hour drive away, and I'm not sure if I can get , ah, right, Friday is basically out too. So, anyway, the bird, if it's identification is upheld by experts, is apparently the African form of what Americans currently call Great Egret, +Egretta alba+ or +Ardea alba in the scientific literature. Its facial structure is that of a Great Egret (which is a large, all-white heron), but it has dull green skin around the eye and an entirely black bill. Western Hemisphere Great Egrets have all-yellow bills at this time of year and the skin around the eye is brighter. The mystery bird seems smaller than other Great Egrets but there has been no side-by-side comparison yet; the smaller size is good for the African form. It's looking like the best time to look me to look for it involves missing the Euro2008 on Sunday. Though the African population is not a distinct species, it is an interesting sighting and I do want to look for it.
If the italians were your choice Vinny... try choosing again. I think I'll be cheering for the Spaniards now. Olé!!!
All the trouble they took to dig those underground trains and you insist on walking all the way from Bronx to Battery Park... What are you doing next, go to California on stagecoach? :-)
I like all kinds of herons very much, is the kind of bird I could spend hours looking at. It's so elegant.
We have some herons nearby too. Gray ones. And some bird that looks a bit like a heron, but has shorter legs and no webbed feet. It's about the size of a duck, and no, it's not a duck or a seagull, or a pigeon. We have seen it a few times lately on the edge of the Canal du Midi, which runs one kilometre from the house and along which we jog (I'm not quite at Vinny's venerable age yet), cycle to go downtown and my husband walks to work every day.
I hope either Spain or Germany win. Putin doesn't need anything else to make himself feel even more arrogant.
Herons are Elegance.
bjd, are those birds European Coots (Fulica atra)? All dark slaty gray with white bill, and short ?greenish legs lacking webs?
It's hard to think of the Russians as underdogs in anything, at least for someone who grew up watching the Soviets in the Olympics (and thinking of the Soviet anthem as the Olympic theme).
I've got some German ancestry and in fact a German sister so maybe I will go with Blut und Boden. (Probably not a phrase they would like to hear me to use.)
I suspect my friend who was giving shilgia a ride as far as Newburgh stayed on at the farm an extra day, meaning that she would have to also.
No, Peromy. The bird is gray, with a white stomach, some black on its head and it has a long beak.
The bird on your picture looks like a water hen. Is that the same as a European coot?
#23 -- D. did not decide to stay an extra day, but the trip home was, let's say, eventful. I came home around midnight, to a broken internet connection.
3-1... Ay. It's my fault, perhaps, for saying that it was unlikely that the Russians would win, to Vinny, who instantly said that I shouldn't have said that. I guess I shouldn't.
I'm having trouble picking a new team also. Dutch people just can't root for Germany, it's physically impossible. I like Italy, but I don't like their style of football, so that's out as well. Russia would sort of make sense, first because it's better to be beat by the future champion than by some other random team, plus the coach is Dutch. (Nationalist? Me?) But I don't really like the way they play football either, and although they are underdogs as a football nation, their country is too big to deserve being an underdog. I think I'll have to go with Turkey, for lack of a better choice.
For the record, I have to say that Vinny and I stole the Bronx-to-Battery walk idea from DianaHaddad and evilproofer. So perhaps this is now a NToSB tradition.
Peromy, how long do birds of the type you'll be looking for on Sunday typically stay in one area? I'm surprised that you can plan a birdwatching trip seven days ahead.
Egrets are more Elegance than herons, no? Herons (when they're not in flight) always look to me like bearded, hunched old men.