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Lancashire v Kent, Yorkshire v Glamorgan and more: county cricket day three
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*This is an extract* from the br...
34 minutes ago
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ReplyDeleteTo slip past a battalion of cops and a platoon of security operatives in gray suits with small white techno-polyps in their ears attached to coils of white intercom cord trying to keep us under control… as we all but trample the raggedy, homeless-looking ranks of the television crews and every other laggard in our way.
We are ablaze!—ablaze with excitement, burning, yearning for a glimpse of the John Jacob Astor, the Andrew Carnegie, the E.H. Harriman, the John D. Rockefeller, the Henry Ford, the Bill Gates of our century… and that’s him! Look at him! He’s not wearing Astor’s wing collar debouching a silk four-in-hand or John D.’s stiff silk topper and morning coat with a red carnation in the buttonhole of the left lapel and a pair of striped pants, nor even Bill Gates’s off-the-Joseph A. Bank—rack sack suit. No, our man is only 27 years old and attired as a tycoon of our time… His shirt is a gray T-shirt, one of the 30-some gray T-shirts he has on hand in order to make sure he is clad in the same rebelliously fashion-defying teenager garb every day… and over it, a dark-gray sweatshirt with a hood, a garment known familiarly as a hoodie. From this day, May 7, 2012, forward, the hoodie becomes his symbol, his trademark, his battle standard.
In 15 minutes he will be inside the ballroom with an invitation-only crowd of neckties who make up America’s, in fact the world’s, wealthiest potential investors in the initial public offering of an estimated $104 billion worth of stock in his company, a new addition to our most modern industry, known as IT, for “information technology.”
As anyone who has read this far knows before we can say it, his company is called Facebook, and he is our century’s first tycoon of IT, Mark Zuckerberg. As of May 14, Facebook had 901 million customers, one of every eight people on earth (and would soon have one billion, one of every seven). No one had ever dreamed of such a thing, a “social network” that would enable people all over the globe to reach each other instantly, for free, and share pictures of themselves and God only knows what else.
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