Play me for my ping pong table! – $50/150 (Greenpoint/Williamsburg)
I have a perfectly functional, regulation size Sportcraft ping pong table that I need to sell before I move into a smaller place. It folds up so you can store it in a corner.
In order to have a little fun in the process of letting it go, I decided to make a wager: best out of 3 games to 21. If you win, you can buy it for the low price $50, but if I win you buy it for $150 (which is still not a terrible deal). We’ll shake on it up front. I’m a man of my word, and I expect you to be a person of your word as well. I can help you dismantle it for transportation after the game.
I’m not making the bet because I’m sure that I’ll win. In fact, I realize that an ad like this might attract very good players. I just wanted to make the process of letting my table go more exciting than sad.
Much like team owner Fred Wilpon, Mr. Met is a balloon-headed symbol of mediocrity. (Image by richiek.)
Madoff-mired Mets owner Fred Wilpon, the handsomely attired and hapless dummkopf who, with help from his jugheaded scion, Jeff, has run the New York baseball team into the ground for half his adult life, is the focus of anew profile in the New Yorkerby the reliably excellent Jeffrey Toobin. An excerpt:
“In the game against the Astros, Jose Reyes, leading off for the Mets, singled sharply up the middle, then stole second. ‘He’s a racehorse,’ Wilpon said. When Reyes started with the Mets, in 2003, just before his twentieth birthday, he was pegged as a future star. Injuries have limited him to a more pedestrian career, though he’s off to a good start this season. ‘He thinks he’s going to get Carl Crawford money,’ Wilpon said, referring to the Red Sox’ signing of the former Tampa Bay player to a seven-year, $142-million contract. ‘He’s had everything wrong with him,’ Wilpon said of Reyes. ‘He won’t get it.’
After the catcher, Josh Thole, struck out, David Wright came to the plate. Wright, the team’s marquee attraction, has started the season dreadfully at the plate. ‘He’s pressing,’ Wilpon said. ‘A really good kid. A very good player. Not a superstar.’
Wright walked.
When Carlos Beltran came up, I mentioned his prodigious post-season with the Astros in 2004, when he hit eight home runs, just before he went to the Mets as a free agent. Wilpon laughed, not happily. ‘We had some schmuck in New York who paid him based on that one series,’ he said, referring to himself. In the course of playing out his seven-year, $119-million contract with the Mets, Beltran, too, has been hobbled by injuries. ‘He’s sixty-five to seventy per cent of what he was.’ Beltran singled, loading the bases with one out.
Ike Davis, the sophomore first baseman and the one pleasant surprise for the Mets so far this season, was up next. ‘Good hitter,’ Wilpon said. ‘Shitty team—good hitter.’ Davis struck out. Angel Pagan flied out to right, ending the Mets’ threat. ‘Lousy clubs—that’s what happens.’ Wilpon sighed. The Astros put three runs on the board in the top of the second.
A triumphant Wanjiri in Beijing. (Image by 正在休渔期.)
In a sad and bizarre story, the great 24-year-old Kenyan long-distance runner Sammy Wanjiru, who became the first marathoner from his country to win Olympic gold, apparently killed himself in a leap from his home’s balcony after a domestic dispute. From the just-published Reuters report:
“Jaspher Ombati, the regional police chief for the area, said Wanjiru appeared to have sustained internal injuries after the fall and was confirmed dead by doctors at a nearby hospital.
‘It is not yet clear whether it was a suicide or if he jumped out of rage or what caused him to fall to the ground,’ Ombati said of Wanjiru, who also won the Chicago and London marathons.
Ombati said Wanjiru’s wife, Triza Njeri, had come home to find Wanjiru in bed with another woman and locked the couple in the bedroom and ran outside. Wanjiru then leaped from the balcony, Ombati said.
••••••••••
Wanjiru in 2009, as he prepared to run the Chicago Marathon, which he won:
Only one supermarathon has been inspired by a prison break by MLK assassin James Earl Ray.
A brief history of the bizarre and creepy origins of the annual Barkley Marathonsin Tennessee, from “The Immortal Horizon,” Leslie Jamison’s new Believer account of the grueling 100-mile race:
“The first race was a prison break. On June 10, 1977, James Earl Ray, the man who shot Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and fled across the briar-bearded hills of northern Tennessee. Fifty-four hours later he was found. He’d gone about eight miles. Some might hear this and wonder how he managed to squander his escape. One man heard this and thought: I need to see that terrain!
Over twenty years later, that man, the man in the trench coat—Gary Cantrell by birth, self-dubbed Lazarus Lake—has turned this terrain into the stage for a legendary ritual: the Barkley Marathons, held yearly (traditionally on Lazarus Friday or April Fool’s Day) outside Wartburg, Tennessee. Lake (known as Laz) calls it ‘The Race That Eats Its Young.’ The runners’ bibs say something different each year:SUFFERING WITHOUT A POINT; NOT ALL PAIN IS GAIN. Only eight men have ever finished. The event is considered extreme even by those who specialize in extremity.” (ThanksLongform.)
On this Kentucky Derby weekend, we look back more than three decades ago when Bluegrass State native Steve Cauthen collected record earnings in 1977 as a 17-year-old jockey and followed it up by winning the Triple Crown the next year astride Affirmed. Cauthen became an international sensation, featured in Peopleas well as Sports Illustrated. But he couldn’t maintain jockey weight as he continued growing and moved to England to compete for a few years, as that country’s jockeys ride at a heavier weight.
Cauthen and Affirmed triumph in 1978 at Churchill Downs:
From a 1977 SI issue in which Cauthen was crowned Sportsman of the Year: “It is not enough to marvel that at the age of 17 he has accomplished more in a year than any jockey in history. It is not enough that already there exists the mad school of thought that this little boy is the finest rider of all time. These are incredible things to ponder about someone so young, but somehow, as young as he is—and younger-looking still—the immensity of his achievement in 1977 cannot be properly understood until you stand in his high school and see the open country faces of the other children of Walton and realize that Steve Cauthen should be there among them still. He should be a senior in high school this day, hearing the bells and whiffing the smell.
And he would be…but for the coincidence of his size and his family background, but for the depth of his desire and some amazing gift of God that no one can comprehend.
Instead, almost at this very moment, several hundred miles away, when a bell rings, Steve Cauthen will burst from the starting gate at Aqueduct, bound to his horse in consummate harmony, seamless, one with the creature—a prodigy like none we have ever seen before, the leading money rider of any year, a fearless athlete, a resolute little doll-person, Sportsman of the Year, so very tiny, so very young, so very extraordinary and ageless in his grace at this one thing he does that he always calls ‘race riding.'”
Willie Mays, one of the five best players in baseball history, probably made many catches and throws as good as the one he made in the 1954 World Series on a fly ball by Vic Wertz. But on the grand stage of the Fall Classic, it became legend. Say hey.
From a fun 1974 People article about the wedded life of roller derby royalty, “Dynamite” Mike Gammon and Judi McGuire, who married in their mid-teens and separated a few years after this piece was published:
Mike Gammon and his wife Judi McGuire are leading practitioners of one of the world’s most demeaning professions. They are stars of the New York Chiefs of the roller derby which is closer to third-rung Minsky or carny than organized sport. Their six-game-a-week 51-week season is an escape-less loop of one-night stands, in smoggy arenas, with nothing in between but smelly buses, crummy motels and junk food. The circuit is a demanding test of their family’s ability to stay intact. They get to see their 12-year-old daughter Sharilee only about once every six weeks. And the Gammons put up with all these indignities to perform before lunatic crowds, bellowing the foulest of four-letter abuse, pelting them with old sneakers and plastic cups full of beer, and generally carrying on in a manner that makes ice-hockey rinks seem, by comparison, like Wimbledon.
For nearly 16 years now, Mike, 31, Judi, 33, and their marriage have toughed out their little hell on roller skates with seemingly minimal damage. They look clean-cut enough to play a TV situation comedy. Physically they are not noticeably marked, because those skirmishes that bring out the animal in the audience are often artfully faked. (“The winning and losing team is predetermined before the match, but there can be a lot of jammings and other free-lance rough stuff along the way,” says one player.) Why do the Gammons put up with it all? “If you want a paycheck, you skate,” Mike explains. “We don’t like it much, but when you’re hungry, you’re hungry.” And because he dropped out of school after the eighth grade—it is one of the few ways to pull in $45,000. That is between them, though, and includes supplements for extra work: Mike is one of the roustabouts who install the track pre-game, and Judi stitches up the clawed and tattered uniforms during the endless bus trips.
Judi sometimes regrets that having started in the derby in their teens, “we had almost no time to grow up.” But she concludes stoically, “It’s been a good life, because we’ve been together nearly 24 hours a day, and that’s made us stronger.”•
__________________________________
“This is roller derby…they call it America’s fastest growing sport…that it is…15 million people watch it every week on television.”
"The doctor also told him to keep away from the barn." (Image by Leslie Ward.)
Even more than a century ago, you had to live a fast life to be thought of as an old-timer by the age of 34. That was sadly the case with a jockey who met his end on Valentine’s Day in 1901. An excerpt from a Brooklyn Daily Eagle story about him:
“Lawrence Urelli, 34 years old, no home, was found dead in a barn owned by Dr. Robert S. Waters, this morning at Avenue U and Van Sicklen Avenue. It appeared that the man had been drinking of late and the doctor had warned him yesterday to stop it. The doctor also told him to keep away from the barn. This morning when he found the lifeless body of Urelli part of the contents of a bottle of wood alcohol which was in the barn had been used, and it is thought Urelli drank it. The Coroner was notified.
Urelli was an old-time jockey, and the Jockey Club will assume all obligations for his funeral.”
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Wide World of Sports, ABC’s great anthology program that introduced closed-in Cold War Americans to cities around the world, from Moscow to Monte Carlo, and made Muhammad Ali and Evel Knievel even bigger stars. And where else could you see frog jumping and drag racing and wrist wrestling in the same 90-minute span?
From ABC’s anniversary program in 1978:
“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”
Sports Phone jingle: "Get all the sports news instantly, dial 9-7-6-1-3-1-3." (Image by Holger.Ellgaard.)
Information is instant now, but for roughly a decade before the advent of cable TV, sports-talk radio and the Internet, New Yorkers routinely called an outfit named Sports Phone and paid a dime to hear updated recorded messages from fast-talking announcers with nicknames like King Wally, who could jam all the latest scores and news into a one-minute call. The company, which received updates from a collection of stringers, was an especially important tool for gamblers. Other cities had similar services.
It wasn’t just sports. Information of different kinds, now disseminated by the Internet, was available via the phone: weather, soap opera updates and pornographic messages. In 1983, Sports Illustratedpublished a piece about Sports Phone, providing no hint that the whole empire was about to crumble. An excerpt:
“In 57 seconds, Rickey Henderson can circle the bases a couple of times and Howard Cosell can just about get through half a sentence. Fifty-seven seconds is roughly the time unit into which two telephone sports information services sausage the entire major league baseball scoreboard, the results of a couple of tennis matches, the latest on who George Steinbrenner got from whom and occasional micro-mini-interviews. Fifty-seven seconds is what you get when you call from home or put a dime into a pay phone and dial one of three regional Sports Phone franchises. For half a buck you can call Dial-It, the only national service, from anywhere in the country and get a 59-second slice of sports.
Sports Phone and Dial-It have boiled the sports world down into 57 and 59 seconds because the FCC measures message units in 60-second intervals. Both services lop off a few seconds to give the caller time to hang up. And though compressed, the format has been a tremendous success, for both Ma Bell and the two services.New York’s Sports Phone received 40 million calls last year. The Pennsylvania-based Dial-It draws about 350,000 calls a week from across the nation. On one football Sunday last October, Dial-It got about 130,000 calls.”
"It’s gonna be huge. Support us. The Cosmos are back."
The Cosmos, the New York soccer team that Steve Ross and Warner Communications built into a jet-setting, championship-getting phenomenon more than three decades ago, with the the aid of aging international stars like Pelé. Franz Beckenbauer and that ball hog Giorgio Chinaglia, are back–well, possibly. A British entrepreneur named Paul Kemsley is reviving the brand and hoping to coax lightning to strike twice, something the skies generally do rarely and at their own caprice. David Segal of the New York Times reports:
“’Thanks so much for coming,’ [Paul Kemsley] said, turning serious. ‘We hope you get it. It’s gonna be huge. Support us. The Cosmos are back.’
Hang on — the team that gave Americans their first taste of soccermania, once packing Giants Stadium with more than 77,000 fans? That rum band of night prowlers with their own table at Studio 54 and Hollywood hangers-on? The franchise that vanished not long after Steve Ross, the head of Warner Communications, decided that pro soccer had no future? Those Cosmos are back?
Certainly the brand is back. Amid all the team memorabilia on display at that February party were plenty of crisp new Cosmos shirts, shorts and warm-ups, part of a recently unveiled line of clothing from Umbro, the English company that co-sponsored the shindig.
But Kemsley’s ambitions far exceed retro sportswear. A former real estate mogul who flamed out spectacularly in England when the recession struck, he is now chairman of the Cosmos, whose rights he bought recently. Since then, the team has been his all-consuming passion; he talks about building a stadium as well as Cosmos-related restaurants and hotels in New York City. He predicts that he and Umbro will sell a fortune’s worth of shirts in Europe and Asia. He has a staff of 16 already (including an executive named Terry Byrne, a close friend and former manager of David Beckham’s). He is touring the world to spread news of a second coming.”
••••••••••
The trailer for the Cosmos documentary, Once in a Lifetime:
"Angell is the grand master of the first-hand observation, which is why his baseball writing in T"he New Yorker" is so original and lively and has been for 50 years." (Image by George Grantham Bain.)
The opening of “Still at the Top of His Game,” Michael Bamberger’s excellent new Sports Illustrated appreciation of nonagenarian New Yorker legend Roger Angell, who continues to write some of the most eloquent and incredibly visual sentences you could ever hope to read:
“Roger Angell’s memories of Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium are moving pictures in his head, deposited there when he was a boy absorbed by the pastime and the world around him. The Babe’s big bat, his heavy flannel uniform, the men in fedoras watching him: You and I, way late to the party, have been fed these black-and-white snaps by PBS specials and Hall of Fame exhibits, but that’s not the case for Angell. For him, they’re in color. Angell is the grand master of the first-hand observation, which is why his baseball writing inThe New Yorkeris so original and lively and has been for 50 years.
They say if you watch baseball long enough you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. Maybe that’s what has kept Roger—he’d invite you to call him that—so young, the promise of what the next game might bring. Reading him, you’d never guess his age. He’s 90.
Whatever he wrote in hisNew Yorkerblog last week, you won’t see anywhere else. His pieces get published, on the magazine’s website and in its pages, with no predictable pattern, and every time you come across one, it’s a delight. If you want a traditional ode to the new season, don’t read Angell. Only once, in 1963, did he compare the return of newspaper box scores in April to spring flowers. Only once, in 1988, did he call Bart Giamatti, then the president of the National League, a ‘career .400 talker.’ Only once did Angell compare Tim Lincecum’s stride to ‘a January commuter arching over six feet of slush.’ That was last year.
In his little 20th-floor office in the sleek Condé Nast building in Times Square, Angell—trim and fit in the tweedy uniform of the gentleman farmer—has a pile of Mead spiral-bound notebooks.”
"He turned his head to see what was going on, and there was the steel grille of a black van heading straight toward him."
From “Lucky Jim,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s amazing 2002 GQ profile of Jim MacLaren, an incredibly accomplished athlete and actor who suffered two devastating accidents and passed away last year:
“Soon he could run a marathon in just over three hours, routinely finishing in the top third of able-bodied contenders. And then he took up triathlons. Yes, triathlons. Once he’d survived a few of those, he set out to conquer the Ironman, one of the most brutal organized sporting events ever imagined. Two and a half miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and a full 26.2-mile marathon, all in one race, all in one day. And all on one leg. Which explains what Jim MacLaren was doing in Southern California on that cool June afternoon in1993. He was participating in an Ironman.Jim was excelling. He was speeding through the town of Mission Viejo on his bicycle, tearing ass at thirty-five miles per hour. The sidewalks were crowded with spectators, and he was dimly aware of their cheers. He had just pulled ahead of a thick snarl of cyclists. He was leading the pack. Suddenly, Jim heard the crowd gasp. He turned his head to see what was going on, and there was the steel grille of a black van heading straight toward him. He realized he was about to be hit by a goddamn car.It was supposed to have been a closed racecourse. But for some unknown reason,a cop guarding an intersection decided to let one car through, and he misjudged how fast the bicyclists were coming. As Jim MacLaren was approaching,the cop was gesturing to the driver of the van to hit the gas. The driver, a 50-year-old man on his way to church, was merely obeying orders. He floored it. He didn’t see Jim until Jim was on his windshield.This time Jim vividly remembers being hit. He remembers the screams from the crowd. He remembers his body flying across the street and smashing into a lamppost headfirst, snapping his neck. He remembers riding in the ambulance and being aware that he could not feel his limbs. He was put under anesthesia for emergency surgery on his spine, and when he woke up he was in the trauma ward. He could not move. His head was shaved. There was a bolt screwed into the back of his skull, preventing him from shifting his head even a millimeter. Jim remembers this well. But what he remembers most clearly is this image: All the nurses were in tears.’We’re so sorry,’ they kept saying. Jim MacLaren was now a quadriplegic. He was 30 years old. And this is where his story begins.” (Thanks Kevin Kelly.)
“The next day Willig met with Mayor Abraham Beame, who settled for a fine of $1.10—a penny for each of the tower’s 110 stories.”
From “The Only Way to Go Is Up,” Sam Moses’ 1977 Sports Illustrated profile of George Willig, a Queens toy designer and mountain climber known as the “Human Fly,” who scaled the South Tower of the the World Trade Center that year:
“At 10:05 a.m., 3 1/2 hours after he began, admittedly very excited by now, but not tired, Willig lifted himself over a ledge at the top and crawled, feet first, into an inspection hatch on the roof. He was none the worse for wear, except for blistered hands and insteps. He was greeted by policemen, who congratulated him, requested his autograph, then handcuffed him and served him with a summons for disorderly conduct, criminal trespass and scaling a building without a permit. In addition, it was announced that the city was going to sue Willig for $250,000 for the trouble and expense he had put it to. The next day Willig met with Mayor Abraham Beame, who settled for a fine of $1.10—a penny for each of the tower’s 110 stories. In return, Willig readily agreed not to reveal the details of his climbing apparatus, to forestall imitators from attempting similar climbs.
Of course, Willig was asked why he did it. He responded with the expected answer, the classic and clichéd ‘Because it’s there’—which at the time was the easiest way to reply to a simple question that in truth has such a complex answer. Another reply might have been what Louis Armstrong said when asked to define jazz, ‘If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.’
Nonetheless, Thursday night, before he took his phone off the hook and went to bed at about 1 a.m., Willig tried again to answer the question. ‘A couple of times during the year I planned this climb I thought. ‘What the heck is in me that makes me want to do this?’ I guess it’s just a love of excitement and adventure, an appetite for action. Maybe it has a lot to do with asserting my life, just to myself—feeling more alive.
‘I did wonder, at times, if I should go through with it. But I never at all seriously considered not doing it, never from the first time I got the idea.'”
"The fact is, they know very little about him. He has had no baseball career." (Image by "Sports Illustrated.")
As April Fools’ Day and baseball season approach, it’s time to look back at one of the greatest pranks ever pulled, a George Plimpton article in Sports Illustrated entitled “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” which was published on April 1, 1985. The piece, about a newly discovered, larger-than-life baseball player who could supposedly throw a fastball 168 miles per hour, was presented as fact by the mag and fooled people across the nation for several days. Outside of War of the Worlds, it may be the best large-scale hoax in American history.
And it’s unlikely to be surpassed. You see some person or another tricked occasionally on April Fools’ Day now, but a mass prank that permeates through the culture over the course of a week is only really possible in a world where communication is limited, information imperfect and a sense of wonder prevalent. The information explosion has passed April Fools’ Day into obsolescence. In our time, it’s much easier to be shocked by truths than tricks. An excerpt from the article:
“The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottlemyre and a few members of the Mets’ front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick’s Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch’s fastball. The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighs about five pounds and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher. A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch’s velocity — accurate, so the manufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of the gauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is named after the oldtimer’s descriptive — the ‘jug-handled’curveball) was a Roscoe Tanner serve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned for a baseball was 103 mph, which it did, curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the 1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at that speed. On March 17, the gun was handled by Stottlemyre. He heard the pop of the ball in Reynolds’s mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. Then the astonishing figure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottlemyre remembers whistling in amazement, and then he heard Reynolds say, ‘Don’t tell me, Mel, I don’t want to know. . . ‘
The Met front office is reluctant to talk about Finch. The fact is, they know very little about him. He has had no baseball career. Most of his life has been spent abroad, except for a short period at Harvard University.”
Ketchel killer's were captured and convicted to life sentences, though both were eventually paroled.
John Lardner was a New Yorker writer in the 1930s-50s, a superlative scribe on all topics, best known for his boxing stories. He died before turning 50 and his name has largely fallen into disuse except among the dwindling legions of boxing enthusiasts, a graying and nostalgic crew. When he is remembered it’s usually for a single sentence he wrote among thousands. In a piece called the “Down the Great Purple Valley,’ an account of the 1910 murder of famous boxer Stanley Ketchel, which was published in 1954 in the long-defunct True: The Men’s Magazine, Lardner delivered what is thought of as one of the greatest leads in journalism history, an eloquent line that sets up the whole piece. Here it is:
“Stanley Ketchel was 24 years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”
••••••••••
In the year before he was slain, middleweight Ketchel fights valiantly but is clearly over-matched by the great heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, in a bout in Colma, California.
Girl in Maui with "surfer hair." (Image by Rachel Amarette.)
The opening of “Life’s Swell,” Susan Orlean’s excellent 1998 Outside article about Maui surfer girls:
“The Maui surfer girls love each other’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it — yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits. Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean, and each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into braids. The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, 14 or so — they love that wild, knotty, bright hair, as big and stiff as carpet, the most un-straight, un-sleek, un-ordinary hair you could imagine, and they can love it, I suppose, because when you are young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes it cool and fabulous. A Maui surfer girl named Gloria Madden has that kind of hair — thick red corkscrews striped orange and silver from the sun, hair that if you weren’t beautiful and fearless you’d consider an affliction that you would try to iron flat or stuff under a hat. One afternoon I was driving two of the girls to Blockbuster Video in Kahului. It was the day before a surfing competition, and the girls were going to spend the night at their coach’s house up the coast so they’d be ready for the contest at dawn. On contest nights, they fill their time by eating a lot of food and watching hours of surf videos, but on this particular occasion they decided they needed to rent a movie, too, in case they found themselves with 10 or 20 seconds of unoccupied time. On our way to the video store, the girls told me they admired my rental car and said that they thought rental cars totally ripped and that they each wanted to get one. My car, which until then I had sort of hated, suddenly took on a glow. I asked what else they would have if they could have anything in the world. They thought for a moment, and then the girl in the backseat said, ‘A moped and thousands of new clothes. You know, stuff like thousands of bathing suits and thousands of new board shorts.'” (Thanks Longform.)
