World Wide Wednesday
How I saw the Internet this Week.
Deep Routes
Joe Posnanski profiles Pete Rose in Las Vegas:
He is inside, the living legend, now 71 years of age but still the same somehow. He wears sunglasses and a Panama hat. He has a large blank sheet of paper in front of him, a sheet of paper that will soon be covered with names and numbers and little charts — Rose unconsciously scribbles when he talks. He has a coffee cup from Starbucks. He has an iPad next to him, live-streaming action from a horse track. And, at this moment, while the woman tries to coax a less-than-eager couple from Maryland to come inside (“Photos are free! Come inside! Come see the living legend!”), Pete Rose is folding a jersey that he has just autographed for a customer.
Rose is a magnificent clothes-folder. He folds in the sleeves quickly, with precision, then double-folds from the bottom; the entire process takes less than two seconds, and when he is done the jersey looks pristine, ready to be put on the shelf, folded in that subtly flawless way that is all but impossible for amateurs to replicate. He comes by this skill honestly. Pete Rose has signed a lot of jerseys. And he hated — HATED — watching people fold up those jerseys like they were old T-shirts pulled from the dryer. Didn’t they understand how much that signature was worth? Didn’t they want to protect their investment? So he took over. He would just fold them himself.
Will Leitch writes a GQ cover story on Jeremy Lin:
The thing that was most striking about Linsanity—the instantly iconic term that Lin admits still makes him uncomfortable (though that didn’t stop him from trademarking it)—was that Lin immediately became the best player on the floor. A kid who had reached double figures only twice in his brief NBA career, and never with the Knicks, dropped thirty-eight on Kobe and the Lakers, twenty-eight on the defending-champion Mavericks, and twenty-seven on the road against the Raptors, including a last-second three-pointer to win the game the way we’ve all imagined in our driveways. It was as though he emerged, out of nowhere, as a fully formed superstar. This didn’t make any sense, least of all to Lin. “I mean, to literally go from ‘If I score two, three, or four points today, it’s a good day’ to setting the record for the most points scored in your first five starts of any NBA player,” he says, still amazed. “I’d be a huge liar if I told myself, ‘I knew I could do that.’ You know what I mean? That’s not realistic. Let’s just be honest. I had no idea I could play like that. It was as amazing to me as it was to everybody else.”
Michael Lewis satirically takes up the plight of the Greenwich 12-year old whose father doesn’t make as much as he used to:
– Make lots and lots of new demands on his time.
Kids who don’t play the tuba or something should consider joining a travelling sports team or acting in a school play or, really, anything that requires your dad to be there to watch you do it. In theory, your dad should have more time for this kind of stuff. He isn’t making as much per hour, so his hours should be cheaper. But he doesn’t think that way. He’s trying to “get back to even.” He’s still trying to make as much as he did three years ago, which means working even more. This is tricky because you don’t want to discourage him from doing it. At the same time, his longer hours are just a huge opportunity for you. Because no matter what instrument or sport you decide to play, there is just no way he’s going to show up to watch you play it.
Quick Reads
- PHOTO: If Paul Ryan and Joe Biden switched haircuts.
- Ways to embarrass your pet on Halloween + 10 unamused pets dressed as food.
- SI has a brilliant gallery of athletes’ photos from when they were children.
- Simpsons quotes that, unfortunately, nobody gets anymore.
- 27 reasons why kids are actually the worst.
Food Porn
Creamy chicken/wild rice soup in a sourdough breadbowl with bacon + cheddar + pepperjack grilled cheese at Soupbox (Chicago):
My friend Dean got Pequods. He says it’s the best pizza in America. He’s wrong, but it is really good (living in New York, he of all people should know how much better pizza he can get than I can in Chicago)
