We enjoyed the story about the third-grade teacher who asked her students to use the word “fascinate” in a sentence. Molly said, “My family went to the New York City Zoo and we saw all the animals. It was fascinating.” The teacher said, “That was good, but I wanted you to use the word “fascinate.”

Sally raised her hand. She said, “My family went to the Statue of Liberty and I was “fascinated.” The teacher said, Well, that was good, Sally, but I want the word ‘fascinate.’”

Little Johnny raised his hand. The teacher hesitated. She finally decided there was no way he could damage the word ‘fascinate,’ so she called on him.

Little Johnny said, “My sister has a sweater with ten buttons, but she is so fat, she can only fasten eight.”

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After squinting his way through the past several months, Rob Long finally gave in and bought some of those reading glasses you get at the drugstore. He writes…..

As I type this, I’m wearing a $6 pair of black half-glasses, bought at CVS in a packet of 3. The strength, just to be clear, is the lowest available.

The strength, just to be clear, is the lowest available. So my eyes are old and tired but not yet totally useless — just like their owner.

I now wear these on Zoom calls and in restaurants, and the response from everyone has been uniformly upbeat.

“They look great,” people say, their voice going up at the end, which is the universal sound of a lie being told.

“They give you gravity,” they add. “No, seriously,” they say when I wave off their compliments. “They really look fine.” Upward inflection, upward inflection.

In other words, what they say is “distinguished, thoughtful, commanding.” What they think is, “Old and in the way.”

Now, I know: This is just what happens to eyes that are in their mid to late… actually, it’s none of your business how mid or where late. But I know it’s the result of years of reading and screen-staring and all sorts of things that exhaust the optic nerve. So while I’m not really complaining about getting older, I’m not embracing it with enthusiasm. I’m looking for workarounds.

I have an actress friend from India, a Bollywood starlet, and she tells me that over there, they have a concept called “Bollywood Age.”

Your “Bollywood Age” is any number less than 28, which is a complex and challenging fiction to maintain in a country as bureaucratic and document-mad as India, where your date of birth appears on dozens of forms and certificates.

The solution, she told me, was to make an annual trip to a major city in the United Arab Emirates, where a compliant local consular official will issue a new Indian passport embossed with a more graceful date of birth — for a charge, of course.

Of course, she told me all of this in an “aren’t we nuts” tone of voice, and I laughed along with her. But the truth is, things here aren’t that different.

I can think of at least three top-level media industry executives who I know for a fact are lying about their ages. All three graduated from college in the same year or the year before I did. They may be a year older or a year younger, but they’re not, as one of them tried to imply in a newspaper profile, five years younger. That would mean high school graduation at thirteen, implying a genius-level IQ, which is highly unlikely given the choices that particular executive made in managing his company.

The problem with the concept of the Bollywood age is that it requires a certain denial of the obvious. People get older. That’s what they do. They don’t look less old just because they’re wearing skinny jeans and Yeezy sneakers.

Still, I am always on the lookout for the perks of getting older. And my new reading glasses have delivered.

Reading glasses, I have found, can be peered over. Just looking at someone doesn’t instantly get them to shut up, but I’ve discovered that peering at them, head in a half-tilt down, eyes raised, sends the message that whatever that person is now saying, they’d better stop saying it soon.

Also, the glasses can be whipped off fast and tossed on the desk in theatrical frustration. That seems to indicate to everyone that either I’m about to say something useful or I’d really like someone else to say something useful.

Putting on the glasses, I’ve noticed, is also a kind of theatrical and meaningful gesture. Getting serious now. Thinking. Mind at work. Leave me alone.

What I’ve concluded is that all of this reading glasses drama, the peering and whipping and dropping and putting on, creates a kind of beehive of activity that looks to everyone to be actual work when, in fact, it’s just me manipulating a $6 piece of plastic with two magnifying glasses stuck to it, often while thinking about snacks.

And that, I’ve discovered, is the chief perk of getting older. You may not have spent the past 20-odd years getting better at your job or smarter at your craft, but if you can get good at reading glasses theatrics, at what actors call “prop work,” you can skate by doing very little, which is, as we all know, exactly what young people are doing.

by Rob Long

Washington Examiner

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There has been much discussion in the sports world about the decision of OU and Texas to join the Southeastern Conference.

Jason Gay wrote an interesting article on that issue this past week…..

College Football Gets Honest with Itself

A sport that used to wrap itself in nostalgia and school pride now fully embraces its capitalist future

The college football season is nearly here, and you’ve likely read about seismic stuff afoot—Texas and Oklahoma slinking off from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, an expanded playoff, the Big Ten/Pac-12/ACC alliance, the potential for more conference reshuffling, and, most excitingly, offensive linemen being paid in barbecue gift cards.

It’s a lot. You may wonder if this noisy sport of Saturdays is still recognizable.

So, let’s take a moment to gaze at our AP Top Four for 2021…

Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson, Ohio State.

Yup! Still extremely recognizable!

But change roils underneath the surface. College football is remodeling itself once more, as the biggest teams and conferences consolidate their power.

Some of the most hyped changes are a ways off, or remain theoretical. Texas and Oklahoma aren’t scheduled to join the SEC until 2025, though nobody will collapse in shock if their divorce from the Big 12 happens earlier. The college playoff expansion from four to 12 isn’t anywhere close to official; this year’s playoff event remains a quartet. There’s no breakaway “super league” of marquee teams, though there’s low-grade speculation one could happen down the road.

(Free BBQ, however—that’s real! As the Journal’s Laine Higgins chronicled recently, thanks to the new loosening of “name, image likeness” rules in college sports, wise BBQ titans are signing up assemblies of offensive linemen as new spokesmen.)

The Texas and Oklahoma move is the mammoth one. It’s everything you need to know about college football today—that a pair of high-leverage name-brand programs have no compunction about leaving for college’s sturdiest conference.

The prevailing reason, of course, is money. Why stick around with a lowerwatt conference—and less dough—if more cash is around the corner? The SEC is already college football’s shiniest conference—and if you don’t believe that, ask an SEC fan.

So here come the Longhorns and Sooners, into the land of the Tide, Tigers, Bulldogs and Gators.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC are forming an alliance to… well, it isn’t completely clear. It seems rooted in some hope to counterbalance SEC dominance and create some intriguing scheduling possibilities. (It also appears to leave the under-siege Big 12 on an island.)

The ground is shifting under our feet. There was a time, not so long ago, when moves like Texas’s and Oklahoma’s would have been met with wide condemnation. Now everyone’s eyes are open to the bigger financial picture—the mammoth, multibillion-dollar business in which most of the cash flows to the teams and conferences with the firmest grip on eyeballs. There’s some irritation—the Big 12 is not happy, to say the least—but there’s also plenty of shrugged-shoulders realism. Why wouldn’t Oklahoma and Texas make a move?

Same goes for “name, image, likeness” reform, which is in its infancy. The early wave of endorsement deals for college athletes is an acknowledgment of the obvious—players have real economic clout.

I don’t think there’s a sports topic where public opinion has migrated more in the past decade. The money is too obvious—the megadeals for regular seasons and playoffs; the multimillion-dollar annual contracts (and buyouts!) for head coaches.

Last year, the sport dove headlong into a pandemic and played inside empty stadiums because its TV deals were too valuable to pass up. It’s hard to observe that and cling onto the nostalgic idea of college football being driven by regional and school pride—and how accurate was that notion anyway? Big-time college football has always been an economic beast.

Which is why the expanded playoff is surely going to happen down the road. Why not? College football’s current postseason—a four-team playoff, plus a whole raft of zombie bowls that star players are increasingly (and rightfully) uninterested in playing in—is far from perfect. A playoff expansion would add urgency and variety (read: teams from “Group of Five” conferences) to a product that is starting to feel a bit predictable, even if it’s likely we’re going to look around in early January and still see the usual suspects.

But here, too, the biggest driver is money. An expanded playoff would be a behemoth product, replacing a week or two of destination TV with a month or more of it.

That’s why it happens. There are still wrinkles that need to be sorted out—the early proposal was too married to the zombie bowls and surrounding junket culture. These playoff games should be played on campus, as much as possible. But it feels inevitable.

As for other inevitabilities, yes: the preseason polls are not predicting much disruption to the traditional power balance. Alabama lost a lot of talent to the NFL, but they’re still Alabama. Clemson’s Clemson. OSU and OU remain OSU and OU. My Wisconsin Badgers are ranked No. 12 in the AP but have a heckalicious opening month in which they’ll play Penn State, Notre Dame and, yes, Jim Harbaugh’s Ann Arbor Academy of Interesting Football Decisions.

Health concerns linger, especially amid the Delta surge, but there’s hope that vaccines safely return fans to the stands and prevent the cancel lations and disruptions of last year. Conferences are talking tough; forfeits are on the table for teams that can’t field a roster. It might get weird. Of course, it’s college football. There’s always something.

By Jason Gay—WSJ