Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about football, e-shopping, lotion application methods, and more.
Your letters:
Raffi12:
A Stranger Things 5 review from you would be great to read. Thx bro, happy new year.
Happy New Year to you, Mr. Bananaphone. Now, onto Stranger Things. I have a soft spot in my heart for Stranger Things, because it’s been a very good show for the majority of its run. More important, it was the first real show that I watched with my daughter. In fact, the girl has aged along just about the same curve as the actors on that show have. And she steadfastly refused to watch the series finale without me. She wanted to complete the circle, which warmed my big fat dad heart. So, long after the New Year had passed, we all sat down to take in the ending as a family.
And then we all agreed that it sucked.
It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, I thought the penultimate season of Stranger Things was arguably its best. But quality control fell apart in this final season. Every scene that should have taken a minute lasted 10 minutes instead. Every actor got to give not one, but at least three tearful Emmy-clip monologues, often while the world was in the midst of ending. I watched Millie Bobbie Brown cry so many times, it felt like child abuse by the end. Let her character tell a fucking joke for once.
And lemme tell you something else: If the Antichrist was openly tearing down the fabric of reality—hey, just like America 2026!—I wouldn’t waste half an hour arguing with my buddy Steve about how awesome my dead friend Eddie was. Every script for ST Season 5 was overwritten into gibberish. And whenever the characters weren’t giving each other a daily affirmation, they were setting aside hours at a time to explain every single plot machination to one another. Then they’d all manage to find one another using a ham radio, and then the Avengers music got cranked to 11. You know the only character who wasn’t saddled with pages upon pages of tedious exposition? Vecna. The bad guy. The fantastical scenes where Jamie Campbell Bower’s character imprisoned a bunch of children inside his mind was easily the most compelling stuff of the entire season. I wish Vecna had prevailed, mostly so that every other character would finally shut the fuck up. My kids and I were yelling "GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT!" half the time we were watching.
That didn’t happen (excuse the spoiler). Instead, the hole-in-the-wall gang finally defeated Vecna, and then my kids and I were treated to a 45-minute denouement, with more false endings than a trick birthday candle. AND NO ONE FUCKING DIED. This show has always had a problem with killing off characters for good. You’d think that a series finale would have given showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer tacit permission to break the audience’s heart, but nope. Even when they killed off Brown’s Eleven at the end of the finale, the Duffers tacked on a coda where they were like, Actually maybe she didn’t die, we’ll let you be the judge! That’s not confident storytelling. That’s dogshit.
It’s a shame, because there were a lot of good elements in this season that went to waste. The jokes were sparse but good whenever the characters took time to make a few. Bower was excellent. New character Dipshit Derek (Jake Connelly), who is certain to anchor whatever spinoff series comes out of this, was awesome. Save for maybe the final battle sequence, the effects and production design were spot on. I could tell when Sadie Sink was trying to lift a boulder that was clearly made of Styrofoam, but I respected the filmmakers’ using physical props instead of just doodling them in using shitty VFX in post. This could have been an extremely good, tight farewell season. But that clearly wasn’t Netflix’s priority. Their priority was to stuff every episode with constant reminders of Don’t you love these guys?! Won’t you miss this show when it’s gone? The sendoff mattered more than the story itself.
My kids knew it instantly. It was pretty wild to watch the show flashback to earlier seasons, when the kids in the cast looked so much younger. My daughter looked that young once! CRAZY SHIT! But my kid grew up and, in doing so, learned how to watch and think about art critically. So when both of us were like, “Hey man, that finale really sucked,” THAT was the real Hallmark moment for yours truly.
(Oh, and they cut the title sequence short for the finale! Of ALL the edits you decide to make, you cut short one of the best opening sequences in TV history? FOR SHAME!)
Daniel:
The 10-second runoff is fucking stupid, contrived, Ill-conceived, etc., right? Will the rules committee ever right this wrong?
No. The 10-second runoff exists to prevent offenses from stopping the clock when they have no right to. If you commit a false start at the end of a game, the refs have to stop the clock in order to assess the penalty. But they have to punish the offense for wasting teacher’s precious time, hence the 10-second runoff. Not enough rules favor the defense in football, so I think NFL defenders deserve this single, nearly meaningless bone thrown their way. Also, I like it when a bumbling-ass offense fucks up so badly that the refs are like SCREW IT, THE GAME IS OVER NOW, CHUMPS. Incompetence gets what it deserves.
Peter:
What’s the metric that you would use to say a head coach needs to be replaced? Is it not adapting to changing styles? Freezing under pressure? Poor second half adjustments? To me it seems like so much of NFL games is pure luck that I give Mike Tomlin a lot of credit for just getting a positive win-loss record for as long as he has.
I’d strongly dispute that “so much” of NFL game is based on pure luck. If that were really the case, the Cleveland Browns would have a Super Bowl victory—hell, even a Super Bowl appearance—by now. They’re eternal basement dwellers for very good reasons, same as how the Chiefs won a bunch of Super Bowls recently for very good reasons. You make your own luck in football by having good management, good players, and good coaching. That doesn’t guarantee you a championship, but you do have to have all three of those things if you ever hope to win one. I can’t convince someone who inherently dislikes the NFL (not meaning Peter up there, but in general) that football is hard. But it is. It’s REAL fucking hard. Anyone who thinks otherwise is someone I’m probably going to ignore.
Now to the matter at hand. Outside of straight-up losing the locker room (this happens to whoever is coaching the Giants sometime around October), there’s no hard set of criteria for when you should or shouldn’t fire your coach. If there were, NFL owners would just ignore them anyway and then hire Urban Meyer.
But for a serious owner, one who puts actual thought and care into the role, the decision is tricky, especially if you employ a coach like Mike Tomlin, who has never had a losing season. After all, good coaches are hard to find, and there’s no guarantee that the next guy you hire won’t turn out to be Brian Callahan. So you have to weigh what you have against the risk of taking on the unknown. That means answering a few basic questions about the head coach presently in charge, as I will now about Tomlin. (Update 2:54 p.m. ET): Tomlin's out!
-Are the players confident that this coach knows what he’s doing? (Yes.)
-Does he routinely hire good assistants? (No.)
-Is he good at scouting his own roster and making the right cutdowns? (Yes.)
-Is he good at developing quarterbacks? (No.)
-Is he good at managing the day-to-day operations of a team, from practice schedules to travel plans? (Yes.)
-Is he good at managing every unit on the team, and not just a handful of them? (Yes.)
-Can he manage the game capably? (No.)
-Can he manage the media capably? (Yes.)
-Is he willing to learn on the job and grow, just as players must? (No.)
-Can he win in the playoffs? (Not anymore.)
You can actually boil all of this down to a single question, although it’s a nebulous one: Are we going anywhere with this asshole? Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti looked over John Harbaugh’s recent track record and decided the answer there was no. Packers management took a look at Matt LaFleur—who, like Harbaugh and Tomlin, is better at his job than most of his peers—and concluded the opposite. Meanwhile, the Steelers will take a look at Tomlin’s contract (he’s got a year left) and cry out, We can’t fire him! We’re not made of money! I have no fucking idea if any of these franchises made the right decision. In the case of LaFleur, I hope Green Bay made the wrong one. I hope that little shitweasel sticks around forever, mismanaging every future playoff game like the timid little jackass he is.
(My team’s head coach has never won a playoff game.)
Matthew:
I hate that I'm asking this question, because it feels like I'm in middle school, when in fact, I'm forty-fucking-one: If Mikey Madison were your daughter, would you have watched Anora?
Well no, because I hated that movie. You think Stranger Things lacked a proper editor? Wait till you get a load of this piece of shit!
But I’m evading Matthew’s question now, aren’t I? Our man is asking if I’d be willing to sit in a theater for 139 (very long) minutes and watch my kid get naked up there on the screen. I would. I wouldn’t be, like, psyched about it. I don’t wanna see my kids naked anymore than they wanna see me naked. But if one of those kids ever became a world-class actor, I’d want to see their work. I’m old enough to know how to compartmentalize that kinda shit, and I’ve outgrown the whole “Keep them off the pole!” panic that was ingrained into many Gen X dads. Also, God knows how my family feels whenever I decide to write about my dick. Turnabout is fair play.
And hey, what if one of my SONS wanted to be in an acclaimed celluloid fuckfest, hmm Matthew? Double standard much? I bet one of my boys would kick ass at being a shady Russian failson who fucks Anora until he gets bored of her!
Michael:
Can you think of a movie that was really good the first half and then went to total shit in the second half worse than Troy?
I can’t answer that, because I’ve (wisely) never seen Troy. When critics tell me to stay away, I listen more often than not.
But I can offer you another example here: Molly’s Game. The first half of that movie featured a shit-hot Jessica Chastain building a miniature poker game empire. I liked that part of the movie so much that I gave it a favorable review in the Jamboroo before I’d even finished it.
Then I finished it. The words “directed by Aaron Sorkin” should have warned me for what was coming, but I was too distracted by Chastain to grasp that before it was too late. What started out as Classy Rounders basically turned into a replacement-level episode of The Practice. You can’t take the TV out of TV people. I hate myself for ever having endorsed it. Did you know that it’s Sorkin, and not David Fincher, who got tapped to direct the upcoming sequel to The Social Network? I’d rather die than subject myself to that shit.
HALFTIME!
Don:
This feeling has been building for me for a while, but do you agree that online shopping is now completely useless? Not that long ago you could go online, find something, buy it and feel reasonably satisfied with what you bought when it arrived. Now, that is becoming increasingly impossible.
Skill issue. Sorry to be rude, Don, but that’s the truth. I still buy shit online and, more often than not, I’m happy with what I get. That’s because I don’t shop blind. I have an idea of what I want already in my head, I check the Wirecutter and other places for recs, and then I look for exact matches at retailers I trust. I also know when Amazon or Walmart is trying to push a dogshit third-party seller on me, so I do my homework on that seller, especially their return policy.
You’re equally shrewd, I’d imagine, which means you should be able to still get what you pay for when you shop online. A lot of Americans, through no real fault of their own, are much dumber consumers. You and I have been conditioned to care about low prices and convenience more than the actual products we buy. That’s how certain companies have been able to degrade their offerings over time without losing business. This is true for physical goods (department store clothing), travel (United basic economy), TV and movies (Stranger Things Season 5), news (CBS), and food (Subway). But good products haven’t ceased to exist entirely. You just have to know how to look for them. That’s how you ended up subscribing to this website, after all. Consumer Education should be a pre-req at any high school worth a shit.
Sean:
Whenever I need to apply something like shampoo or lotion, I squirt it into one hand and do a preliminary rub between my hands to pre-spread it around instead of just applying a glob to the target area. My wife says this is wasteful. I say this helps cover a larger area faster. Who’s right?
My wife gives me shit for this exact thing! Doves are crying, Sean. Real dove tears!
Anyway, this is a “whatever floats your boat” kinda thing. I have a LOT of surface area to cover on my body, so I gotta grease my palms up with sunblock real good before I start to put it on. My wife is a little teeny tiny person by comparison, so she has the ability to cover all of her face with a single gram of the shit. I have to flood the zone. Neither of us is wrong in how we go about it … but then again, I’m not the one judging their spouse for it. YOU HEAR ME, HONEY?! I’LL SMEAR THIS NIVEA LOTION ALL OVER MY BODY AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!
Michael:
Why can't you trip the ball carrier in football? The objective is to get them to the ground, sometimes a good trip can do that. It seems like an unnecessary penalty.
Yes, but the NFL is keen on reducing lower-body injuries rather than increasing them. So that’s why you can’t trip other players. Unless you were playing in the Chargers-Pats tilt the other night. I think the entire crew for that game lost their whistles. Terry McAulay was aghast.
Greg:
So if one had to go full on evil, what would be the best way to make a ton of dough without a lot of work? Couple quick scams then retire to the beach? Oil? Krypto? AI? ICE?
Oh, just get a job working for Clay Travis. HEY-OOOOO.
In all seriousness, just invest in the market. The market is evil, but it always goes up.
Ben:
The success of the Hoosier FOOBAW team on one hand is one of the most delightful and coolest things to happen in decades. The losingest program in college football history has vivisected every team they have played this season. But, on the other hand, there's Curt Cignetti's demeanor. The guy NEVER smiles or has a corner of his mouth turn upwards. He was really yelling at a player during the Oregon game. But then it was mentioned during the game that Cignetti DOESN'T demand his coaches spend 20 hours a day at the office doing football things, they get to go home and see their wives/have dinner etc. Is it cool to like what Indiana and Cignetti have accomplished and how they've done it?
Sure. First of all, every college coach is a deranged prick. It’s not like Curt Cignetti is some psychotic outlier among his peers. They’re all like that. Secondly, I have no idea what that man is really like, nor do you. I can’t even buy that he really does let his assistants out of the film room to walk around the prison yard for 20 minutes. That could all just be PR. It’s more likely that Cignetti whips his employees with a cat-o'-nine-tails anytime they ask to take a personal day.
Hence, I can only judge Cignetti by what I see on the field, and what I see is a college football team that’s more buttoned up than half the NFL. The Hoosiers never fuck up. Ever. And this program was nothing! It’s never been anything! Then Cignetti comes over from James Madison, gets a quick infusion of NIL cash in his new team’s budget, and HEY PRESTO! In just two years, he’s got the Hoosiers playing like the 2019 LSU outfit. This shit doesn’t happen in college football. Even when Nick Saban turned Alabama around, that was still Alabama. You’d have to go all the way back to Howard Schnellenberger magically turning Miami into a powerhouse in the early '80s to find a decent comp. I’ll never stop being astounded by what Cignetti has done. Even now, when the promos for Monday’s night’s national title game flash the IU logo, my brain still can’t process it.
That’s a very long, annoying way of saying that what IU is doing is indeed cool. I’ll say a prayer for Fernando Mendoza when the Raiders draft him three months from now.
Drew (not me):
As someone stuck in a hotel trying to watch highlights, is ESPN mobile the worst thing to try to watch them on? I just watched three extra ads because my phone orientation switched and it started over.
I had to tussle with that app when YouTubeTV and Disney had their little carriage dispute a couple of months ago. And Other Drew here is right: It sucked! I couldn’t find any of the live events I wanted to watch. And when I could find them, the app still fucked up when I tried to open them. It’s a dogshit product, so I was more than happy to abandon my subscription once YTTV got ESPN back.
I don’t know why this shit is so hard for companies. Google is evil as shit, but they know how to serve up a user-friendly app experience. You give customers a clean main menu, you display all of the programs that the data says they like, and you make it easy to start a show from the beginning, to skip ads while knowing precisely where you are in the broadcast, and to stream the broadcast without any buffering. Easy peasy. And yet here’s Disney fucking it all up for $30 a month. Fix your shit or eat a dick, Bob Iger.
Doug:
What's the appropriate level of anger/hatred for manipulative children's content like Mr. Beast or Vlad and Nikki? We've banned YouTube, but this shit bubbles up to the streaming services and there is no way to block specific content.
I had this problem over a decade ago, when YouTube was somehow even weirder than it is now. Mostly, my wife and I dealt with the problem by A) banning YouTube from the main TV, and B) looking at whatever our kids were watching on a smaller screen and going, “Oh no, that’s awful, stop watching that” anytime they were watching some spoiled brat unboxing a new iPhone for 20 minutes.
And you know what? It worked. We never used any parental controls because those things never work, and because all they do is foster distrust between parent and child. We just modeled good taste in front of our kids and then demanded they have good taste of their own. That didn’t stop any of them from watching weird shit, but it did teach them to know what they’re looking at. Kids have their own instincts too, you know. They’re not gonna automatically get into hentai porn at 5 just because it’s there. A strong perversion is something that must be cultivated over time.
Andy:
Every Christmas people give me fancy types of sea salt. I can't tell the difference between these and normal table salt like Morton’s. Are bespoke salts really special or a bunch of malarkey?
No no, they’re important. Morton’s salt is crap. You need it for baking, and for the iodine, but you shouldn’t use it for everything. Not to go all Bon Appetit on you, but you’re better off using a salt grinder for the table, kosher salt for cooking and seasoning, and fancy sea salts for finishing dishes. There’s more nuance to be had on this front, but we ain’t got all day here. So I’ll just say that salt is, by far, the most important seasoning in any kitchen. Therefore, it behooves you to use the best salt you can, instead of shit that Morton’s scraped off a nearby freeway.
Greg:
Your daughter brings her new boyfriend home for dinner. You ask what he does and he says he is an ICE Officer. How do you respond?
I throw a handful of Maldon salt in his face and then tell him to get the fuck out of my house.
Email of the week!
Mike:
I know Kelsey McKinney stopped writing Zillowing Out. However, I think this one will appeal to you because it involves Jim Steinman, the composer who worked with Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler, and Celine Dion. This house is located right outside of Ridgefield, CT, which looks like one of those Canadian towns that stand in for U.S. towns in Hallmark Christmas movies.
Take a close look at the pictures on Realtor, especially the "art" and "sculptures" (especially the sculptures). Steinman died in 2021, and they have been trying to sell this house since then. It started at $10 million, because the family thought someone would want to jump at a celebrity's house with all of his belongings still in it. It is now on sale for either $3 million (with all of Steinman's belongings, including his wheelchair with bat wings, as part of the price). Or, you can buy it for $1,475,000, but you don't get the memorabilia or furniture.
My wife, who used to be a newspaper reporter back in the day when news was still printed on paper, went down the rabbit hole in researching Steinman. Since we are looking for a house in CT, and our realtor knew the realtor showing the house, we were able to get a viewing. I can't really afford this house, but it was one of the coolest houses I have ever seen! This is like Graceland, but if it was built in the 80's. Lots of (crazy nice) dark wood and a nice dark blue paint.
I think if they could get the belongings out of the house, they would be able to sell this place at their asking price (or possibly more). Not really sure where I am going with this, but it is sort of sad that they can't seem to sell the place. Like I said, I would LOVE to see it with all of the stuff taken out of it, but you just have to imagine that. Feel free to give this to Kelsey if this is still her thing (I loved her real estate stories); but you might want it after looking at it.
I was not ready for that first sculpture photo. My man really went all out to decorate his forever home.
