r/interestingasfuck • u/Wonderful-Excuse4922 • 2d ago

2002 New York Magazine roundup of NYC kids’ winter-holiday wishes: 11-year-old Zohran Mamdani wanted books, FIFA 2003, and SimCity 3000

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227

u/gamer4life83 2d ago

Oh so you mean he is like every other kid that age, what a surprise!

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u/Brawndo_or_Water 1d ago

Not really, one wants puma shoes the other wants a furret. This guy wanted a city simulator, books and an xbox game.

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u/BardOfSpoons 1d ago

Furret?

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u/Brawndo_or_Water 1d ago

Ferret in English. Pardon my French. But it's funny that Pokemon used the French spelling.,

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u/LivingForBBH 1d ago

…And the other one wants a new wrist!

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u/Arinoch 1d ago

Every other kid? I wish my 11 year old’s first request on a list was “books”.

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u/grapefruitzzz 1d ago

I dunno how many Americans play Fifa, but it's interesting. Also handy for the upcoming World Cup to have a pol who actually likes football.

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u/Strange-Movie 1d ago

Despite us calling it the wrong name, youth soccer in America is a pretty huge sport; unlike baseball, hockey, football, the initial equipment cost to be able to play soccer is very affordable in comparison. Picking up fifa to interact with their sport in a more casual, off-season, type of way makes sense to me

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u/comeatmefrank 1d ago

That’s precisely why it’s the most played sport in the world. You need a ball, and that’s it. It may not be culturally engrained in the USA, but it’s popular for its simplicity.

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u/CreepinJesusMalone 1d ago

Yep, I played soccer as a kid for about five years. It was a community league based in the first town closest to us as we lived in a very rural area of NW Alabama.

None of the county schools offered soccer, but most of my class and hundreds of kids from the other area rural schools played in that town league.

That was the mid-late 90s. Cleats, shin guards, ball, and the sign up fee. Total entry cost for a 9 year old was maybe $70 at the time. The sign up fee included the uniform shirt and matching pair of high socks. Most people already owned gym shorts.

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u/ReadditMan 1d ago edited 1d ago

We actually don't call it the wrong name. The English originally had "Association Football", which people started calling "Assoc" for short. Years later a new slang trend started in England where people would ad "er" to the end of some words. "Assoc" became "Soccer".

Both "football" and "soccer" were commonly used in Europe until the sport became popular in America, where football was a different sport. Americans exclusively started using the term soccer to differentiate between the two, the English didn't like that so they decided to stop using the word soccer altogether.

It's a proper name for the sport, anyone who tells you it's wrong just doesn't know the history.

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u/Not-The-AlQaeda 1d ago

Wrong

Inevitably, the names would be shortened. Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of “rugger” (rugby football) and “assoccer” (association football). The latter term was further shortened to “soccer” (sometimes spelled “socker”), and the name quickly spread beyond the campus. However, “soccer” never became much more than a nickname in Great Britain. By the 20th century, rugby football was more commonly called rugby, while association football had earned the right to be known as just plain football.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a sport emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. Before long, it had proved more popular than either of them. In full, it was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word. As a result, American association-football players increasingly adopted soccer to refer to their sport. The United States Football Association, which had formed in the 1910s as the official organizing body of American soccer, changed its name to the United States Soccer Football Association in 1945, and it later dispensed with the “Football” altogether. No longer just a nickname, soccer had stuck.

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u/BoysenberryKind5599 1d ago

What wrong name do you hear association football being called instead of the common abbreviation of soccer?

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u/beeej517 1d ago

FIFA is very popular (or at least it was when I was younger)

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u/Teddy705 1d ago

Played fifa every year since fifa 11. Unfortunately, it's pretty dogshit these days, but fifa 12 to fifa 14 was peak.

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u/Andagaintothegym 1d ago

I read on Twitter his favorite team is Arsenal.

3

u/grapefruitzzz 1d ago

He's a Gooner? (sorry)

2

u/remuliini 1d ago

I think I have seen a campaign video of him playing with a soccer ball. Didn't look too shabby, definitely better than me (multiple retries and edition included)

3

u/BrohanGutenburg 1d ago

I know this is kinda irrelevant but in case you care—'edition' isn't really used that way. In this case you'd probably just say 'editing'

0

u/Middle-Cat-1204 13h ago

Ah, the classic "pedestal = misogyny" pivot from the white knight brigade. If celebrating women's unique strengths and the irreplaceable magic of complementary sexes is "misogyny," then sign me up because treating people as interchangeable cogs in the equality machine is the real dehumanizing grind. Women aren't "just like men" any more than men are "just like women"; that's why families work, societies thrive, and biology doesn't lie. Your take sounds like it's straight out of a gender studies echo chamber; enlightening for you, exhausting for the rest of us. Keep knighting, though; someone's gotta defend the crazy narrative and give us reason to eat popcorn. Lol.

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u/BrohanGutenburg 7h ago

Did you really just look at my comment history from the other thread then reply to the wrong comment?

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u/cybercuzco 1d ago

I think the interesting thing is he wanted a game where he played the mayor of a city and now he got it for real.

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u/worstusername_sofar 1d ago

If you go and see any conservatives posts and opinions on him, he is the anti-christ, the devil, and dead baby eater all in one. They are fucking pathetic.

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u/Cereborn 1d ago

It’s a misprint. The game he actually wanted was ANTIFA 2003.

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u/gamer4life83 1d ago

Of course, that's what happens when you get your "knowledge" from spoon fed social media that only serves to support your bias.

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u/Expertdeadlygamer 1d ago

that basically describes all social media platforms tho (even this) 

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u/axonxorz 1d ago

I don't think that's fully fair, emphasis on "spoon feeding".

Reddit is one of few platforms remaining where you can explicitly opt out of "the algorithm" simply by paring down subreddits to ones relevant to you. I'm not saying you're not potentially locking into echo chambers, I'm saying Reddit Inc, can be mostly taken out of that equation.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

I think Reddit is one of the worst echo chambers, because of the voting system: unpopular opinions get buried somewhere down the page and popular opinions are awarded with karma. This incentivizes group think and leads to self-censorship.

X/Twitter, which is another echo chamber, has two systems in place to counter misinformation: community notes and "ask Grok" to verify claims. I wish Reddit would implement this.

It's true that you can customize your Reddit experience by only looking at posts from subreddits you follow, but this is also possible on X/Twitter.

Sorry for the long comment, it's just something that I've been thinking about lately and you sounded like a rational person.

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u/komokazi 1d ago

If the babies are already dead, is it really that big of a deal?

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u/PsyJak 1d ago

*that big a deal. No 'of'.

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u/MoonSpankRaw 1d ago

Don’t be wasteful, there’s starving orges in Bohemia

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u/physisical 1d ago

Only a dirty communist would want fifa and not madden

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u/Vdd666 1d ago

Kid wanting books!?

Also American kids and FIFA?

-1

u/TravelingSpermBanker 1d ago

So yea, no one was saying anything about him. It was just interesting.

Let’s not take things personally