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 comparing and contrasting highway rest stops and malls and discussing NFL quarterback busts, plus knives, best-movie lists, and more.
Hello! Drew is off. I am your Funbaggist today. All hail the Funbaggist!
Zach:
What is the threshold for evil at which a company would get actual pushback for using Santa in commercials? I like to think people would be up in arms if the gambling apps had Santa making picks, but they've gotten away with a lot so I'm not sure. Or do these standards not exist anymore, and we'd all kind of just shrug if Palantir suggested that Santa used their service?
It's funny to think of people getting up in arms about any capitalist appropriation of "Santa Claus," a 100-percent made-up corporate advertising mascot bearing the same relationship to the Christian historical figure of Saint Nicholas that Hannibal Lecter has to the murdered prison guard whose sliced-off face he wore as a disguise to escape confinement. This is a figure that exists pretty much explicitly to obfuscate the religious meaning of Christmas in favor of a Satanic monthlong veneration of shopping and consumerism. "Santa Claus," the ruddy-cheeked Greed God presiding over the modern December avarice bacchanalia erected atop Christmas like a ghastly Trump hotel casino built on the ruins of a chapel, is in that sense as close to a figure of pure evil as our society now has. Imagine! A world where Jolly Old Saint Nick tells innocent children that the true meaning of Christmas is sports betting, instead of credit cards and Toyotathon. Truly a depraved, fallen place.
(Here is where you are free to observe the irony of Christmas's less objectionable celebratory traditions having themselves been assimilated from the rags and bones of pre- or un-Christian wintertime festivals supplanted during the evangelization of Europe. Be my guest!)
Anyway to answer your question, my hunch is that companies likely already get some amount of pushback from people who object to Santa's use as a pitchman for luxury goods and Coca-Cola or whatever. To me this is roughly as absurd as complaining that a scuzzy convenience store is doing a disservice to Tianeptine by displaying it on the same rack as the cigarettes.
Hm. This has not been a very merry start to this Christmas-week bag.
Maribel:
For basically the entire time I have been driving long distances in my car, I have worked to avoid stepping into highway rest stops whenever possible in favor of exiting and going to a nearby mall to catch up on things.
My main rationale is that the people who still go to malls in current year are less "chuddy" than the average rest stop goer. An additional factor is the proximity to actual food: If there isn't a sit-down restaurant in the mall itself, there's usually one nearby.
Do others still do this? Was this the intended purpose of shopping malls the whole time?
Huh. I kind of think highway rest stops are great? The idea of preferring a mall is surprising to me.
Part of this, I'm sure, is association. Highway rest stops I associate with long road trips—it's the only time the average person would ever visit one—and vacations, and the pleasure of stepping out of a car and stretching your legs and clocking how many miles closer to your destination you are than the last time you did this. I associate them with the heavenly relief of peeing when you really damn need to. They make me think of summer and adventure.
I even sort of appreciate the general municipal dankness of the rest stop's interior, the sense that nobody in particular is minding this place except for a lone gray-faced janitorial worker with a cigarette dangling from their lip who shows up once a week to give the whole deal a wipe and a mop and some fresh paper products, reliably, week in and week out, forever. It makes me think of, like, going to a zoo or a museum or a national park as a kid: The public bathrooms and storage lockers there have the same atmosphere. They are not places anyone would ever want to go, nobody wants to hang out in them, and nobody would ever, like, set out to make a special visit to one. But they are places you pass through as part of a larger good time, and which play a small but important role in making that good time possible. As places that are not ashamed of their utility, and that do not make you wade through a sea of potential impulse buys to make use of them, they have a certain charm.
Whereas malls, man... malls chew shit. I associate malls with shopping, and noise, and endlessly recycled air, and the vague hostility and suspicion that attend to you when you are a person without spending money in a mall. They make me think of retail workers catching hell from bourgeois assholes who think their intention to spend money entitles them to lordly deference. And that's when it's all working as designed. When people have access to other, even more appalling ways to shower goods upon themselves, the mall turns into a giant drywall corpse, disused and decaying, an Uluru-sized blight on the world—whereas the rest stop keeps on doing what it does, which is simply exist, and provide working lights and plumbing, so that travelers can pee.
This gets, I think, at key differences between the meaning of these places. A mall is a place that exists to extract money from people and only provides its amenities in service of keeping you there and spending. The rest stop, by contrast, is an amenity, provided free of charge and without any expectation of profit, maximally convenient and designed to get you back onto the road as quickly as it can. Its imperative is not a commercial one but the recognition of a simple human reality: We all have bladders, and other places to be.
To wit! The typical mall is an obnoxious pain in the ass to get into and out of compared to a rest stop. Barring an extraordinary traffic situation at the rest stop, you can be out of your car and in line to use the restroom within 30 seconds of leaving the interstate; you can be reentering the interstate within 90 seconds of washing your hands. At a mall, however, you will have to navigate acres of parking, stacked or sprawled hideously across the earth, then explore the mall labyrinth itself on foot until you can find its public restrooms. And the whole time, you're in a mall! Ew!
I will grant that the mall typically has better food options than the rest stop, in the sense that the mall typically has food options, and the rest stop, if it doesn't have a janky vending machine, likely has no food at all. Here I think we're getting into a basic difference in road-trip strategy.
When I am on a road trip, if I want to stop and sit down at a table somewhere and eat some hot food, then I will not be looking for a rest stop, and I certainly will not be looking for a mall. I will be looking for a restaurant close to a highway off-ramp—close enough that the highway sign listing the upcoming exit's gas and food options will include the restaurant on there—and I will, if you must know, use the restaurant's restroom while I happen to be stopped there for a meal.
The rest stop suits a whole other set of intentions. When someone in the vehicle needs to get to a toilet, or we've been driving for a long time without stopping and everybody would like to stretch their legs for a few minutes, that is when the rest stop is called for. When, in other words, we are looking to stop for a few minutes, tops, and then get going again. (Alternatively, if it is late at night and everyone eligible to drive is falling asleep and it's getting dangerous, a rest stop can be a place to park and snooze for a little bit that is at least somewhat less hazardous than the shoulder of the highway.)
I don't really know what to do with the bit about the people at rest stops being "chuddy." They're just travelers! Moreover I am not really looking to have an encounter, man. I'm just trying to empty my bladder and get on with it. I guess I just take for granted that at the rest stop we are all in Pee Mode. Maybe this is like the poker-table maxim: If you have not spotted the chuddy rest-stop goer, you are the chuddy rest-stop goer. Maybe I'm the chud! Oh no!
Walter:
What do you think the percentage of NFL quarterback busts in the last 10-15 years are due to coaches' overly complicated offenses?
This year, we see J.J. McCarthy shows signs of life as Kevin O'Connell and staff publicly admit that they told him not to overthink and just play. We've also seen former washout QBs become competent starters after failing and bouncing around the league (Geno Smith, Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold). The 2026 versions are Mac Jones and Daniel Jones.
Not every QB is able to process the complexities like Brady, Manning or Rodgers. That's not a bad thing. Some guys are athletic enough or decisive enough to grip it and rip it, but once the coaching staffs overwhelm the QB's ability to process, they get lost.
It seems like an obvious correction for coaches and staffs to make: Simplify the offense until the QB is able to process every aspect that they're being asked.
With the caveats that I have not watched a full regular-season NFL game from beginning to end in over a decade, and probably could not name more than maybe half the current NFL starting quarterbacks, I think this is basically right? Except that I think I would amend the critique slightly, from "overly complicated offenses" to just "offenses that aren't built to suit their linchpin player."
This is hardly a novel observation, but it seems to me that a plague on basically every sport is that of the "system" coach, who comes into the job with a trademark system of tactics and tactical principles and then either tries to fit a roster of square pegs into that system's various round holes, or demands that the organization find them a new roster of round pegs in order to make their system work. In nearly all cases a great professional athlete, in any sport, is one who has honed what they are good at to a nearly superhuman degree—to the point at which they can deploy their talents and skills with speed and immediacy that preclude conscious thought altogether. For a coach to take an athlete who can do that, and be like "OK yeah, but try doing it this whole other way instead," is insanity. The smart and good coaches are the ones who take their tactical cues from their players' strengths and weaknesses, and can build a game-plan to suit those, whatever they are—the ones who can take his'n, to paraphrase Bum Phillips, and beat your'n, or take your'n and beat his'n.
That game-plan might seem impenetrably complicated to the wrong quarterback and blissfully intuitive to the right one. A guy who came up playing football one way might be lost trying to execute the real-time peripheral-vision reads that go into a read-option running play at NFL speed; a guy who came up playing another way might execute those reads so smoothly that it's indistinguishable from pure reflex, and might also prove dangerously slow at working through the progressions and if-then dependencies of a bunch of complex route trees. And like, yeah, over time, you might be able to get each of those guys to a certain level of competence at the other stuff, but, in the meantime, they're already good as hell at their main shit! That's how they got to this level! Simply have them do their main shit!
The other part of this is how the contours of a player's abilities can make executing a given system more or less complicated than it otherwise might be. An example from basketball is someone like, say, JJ Redick, who was a phenomenal perimeter shooter with endless stamina and a sharp mind for how to drag a defender through a shifting series of screens, but, I think I can say without insulting him, was not particularly great (for an NBA player) at literally any other part of basketball except free throws. For Redick, an offense where he stayed on the move at all times, mostly without the ball in his hands, was not just easier but simpler than it could ever be for, say, John Wall, because of how the threat of Redick's three-point shooting warped an opposing defense. By the time the ball came to him, his choices were whittled down to almost comical simplicity in a hugely advantageous setup: Shoot right now, or make exactly this one pass right now (or perhaps after one hard dribble).
That style of offense would have been not just more difficult but more complicated for Wall, whose strengths did not include floor-warping shooting range; all the off-ball running in the world would not have produced the same quality of advantage or the same simple set of choices. When Wall got the ball at the end of a sequence of running through screens, he would not be facing a defense ripped to tatters and a rock-simple choice between shooting now or passing now; he would be facing a shortened shot-clock, tired legs, and a well-entrenched defense that he'd have to probe and pull apart in order to create a shot opportunity for himself or someone else out of nothing.
The converse is true, too. Wall's ideal offense—the ball in his hands, catch-and-finish teammates with three-point range ready to set ball screens for him or pull their defenders out to the perimeter so he could attack his man—would be not just hard but complicated for Redick, who couldn't beat a decent NBA defender off the dribble, wasn't a threat to attack the rim, couldn't read the floor from sideline to sideline while handling the ball like Wall, and couldn't whip laser passes to any spot with either hand. He'd have to process the action and exploit openings so incredibly much faster than Wall would, to make up for his heavier feet, his weaker handle, his inability to threaten a dribble-drive to the rim or his inability to put the kind of pace on passes that Wall could generate to fit them through transient windows. He'd have to be a supercomputer, if not an outright clairvoyant.
All of this is a long and somewhat tedious way of saying this: Although I take for granted there are NFL coaches whose offenses are overly complicated in an absolute sense, and likewise quarterbacks with greater or lesser ability to handle complicated scheming, I think in general that stuff is pretty contingent and too often gets framed in a way that portrays certain (ahem) types of players as simply smarter than others. That's by way of generally agreeing with what I take to be the thrust of Walter's long-ago argument, 40,000 words ago, that in general QBs who succeed at big-time college ball and get drafted up near the top of the draft are good enough at enough of the stuff of playing quarterback that there is a way to succeed with them*, provided their control-freak coaches quit tripping over their own dicks for long enough to see what they have and put it to its best use.
*Except for Tim Tebow. That guy stank!
HALFTIME!
Cameron:
I recently came back from Japan with a couple of really good chef knives as a souvenir. They weren't eye-wateringly expensive, but they were definitely more expensive than what was in my kitchen previously. In addition to being beautiful, they're so much more pleasurable to use than the regular stamped-ass knife sets that I picked up when I was younger.
Am I going to have to replace all of my knives with better quality ones? Am I going to turn into the kind of wagyu-cooking dingus who won't use anything lower quality because it's just not as good? And more broadly, is there any other class of product where you can't go back to using cheaper shit once you've broken the seal on something that's better?
Cameron, I don't think you need to replace your knives!
Regular readers of mine may recall a photo in an old blog showing the magnetic knife rack on the side of my kitchen cabinet, and all of my ridiculous big knives hanging there. I own a bunch of big kitchen knives, including: a fancy Shun chef's knife; an equally fancy Shun Santoku-style knife; a Cutco Santoku-style knife I received as a gift; a very fancy 10-inch Messermeister chef's knife; a completely random Santoku-style knife of unknown provenance with an almost certainly stamped blade; and a somehow even more anonymous 8-inch chef's knife with a stamped blade and a flimsy plastic handle, which probably came from the kitchen goods aisle of a grocery store 15 years ago. Leaving aside the revelation that in times of greater abundance I spent on redundant knives money that right now would do real nice paying to have the smashed side-view mirror on my car replaced, the reason I bring this up is because, out of all of those knives, the one that gets the most day-to-day use almost certainly is the last one, the mystery junk knife from the cutlery equivalent of a disreputable pet store with a bin of puppies in the front window.
This is not because it is a better knife than any of the others! It is not in any way even as good of a knife as any of the others. In fact, that's among the reasons why it gets more day-to-day use: I don't really give a damn about it. I did not spend a ludicrous amount of money on it (except to the extent that I probably did buy it at some point, for some amount of money, as part of a larger ludicrous and offensive lifetime knife expenditure). In fact I do not even remember ever acquiring it. This means, in my opinion, that if it wears out faster than the others, that is not my problem.
The thing of it is, keeping even a crappy kitchen knife sharp and good to use is pretty easy. You just spend less than 30 seconds honing the thing whenever you're about to use it, and then maybe once every year or two you sharpen it (or get it professionally sharpened). And in the meantime you store it in such a way that it is not constantly banging against other things that will bend or mar its blade. Sure, yes: The crappy knife may not hold its edge as well as the fancier knife. It may not be capable of sharpening to the same thin V-shape as the fancier knife without chipping. But these are marginal concerns for a knife that you almost certainly are not using for any regular tasks more demanding than dicing some celery.
Take good care of the crappy knife and it can still be a perfectly serviceable knife 25 years from now. You can even bequeath it to your descendants, like a king's sword! And then they can wonder where the hell it came from. That is what the hell they call "The Circle of Knife."
Kyle:
I'm a bit late to the party but I recently saw the NYT Top 100 movies of the 21st century, which got me thinking about all time movie lists. What would have to happen for a movie made post 2025 to take the top spot on a best movies of all time list from a reputable source? It's impossible, right?
I dunno, I guess since you said "best" rather than "greatest" (the latter of which in my opinion pulls in consideration of things like historical importance), I think it's perfectly possible for a present-day movie to grab that top spot.
I mean it's not as though Citizen Kane was a huge hit in its heyday; in fact it was a bit of a flop with audiences and wasn't generally recognized for any particular excellence for more than 10 years after its release. Casablanca wasn't regarded as more than a particularly enjoyable studio-machine movie for years and years, until the culture kinda took a second look at it and realized it was one of the best movies ever made. Vertigo was a box-office dud relative to the run of movies Alfred Hitchcock had been on when he made it, and critics mostly didn't regard it as anything special; Orson Welles hated it. In the past 20 years it has been a very normal inclusion in lists of the best movies of all time.
I guess what I'm saying is that the upper ranks of those lists are filled with movies that benefited, in terms of critics' and audiences' estimation of their quality, from the passage of time. There is probably a whole host of reasons behind that, but one of those reasons, for sure, is that as a movie gets older, the idea of suggesting that it's one of the best movies ever made stops seeming like breathless overreaction. Also, over time, a movie's discrete pleasures get easier to separate from a contemporary context in which that movie might have seemed weird or inexplicable; what seemed deranged in the moment might be, 20 years later, easier to recognize as having been visionary. For example: In the year 2001, the suggestion that Mulholland Drive—which many critics absolutely despised and which made no particular impression on mainstream audiences—was one of the best movies ever made might have struck the average person as obviously ridiculous; in 2022 Sight and Sound's critics poll had it in the 8th spot, and nobody seems particularly mystified by that.
I haven't watched One Battle After Another yet, but I'm aware of the reception it's gotten. If a time traveler appears in front of me right now and tells me that 25 years from now some reputable poll will have named One Battle After Another the best movie of all time, I will not scream and claw at my face in surprise. Rather I will calmly observe that to have used time-travel powers for the sake of telling me about future best-movie rankings instead of to carpet-bomb Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl's marital bed was an obscene and unforgivable crime against humanity.
Alex:
Recently, I drove past a new restaurant in my hometown that called itself a "bistro," and I realized that the name "bistro" doesn't intrigue me the same way a "diner" or "grill" would. But I'm more interested in a bistro than I would be in a new "eatery" or "cafe." How would you rank your interest in a place based on how it styles itself alone?
"Bistro" is kind of fun. It makes me think of crusty bread and, like, duck confit. It makes me think I can probably get a simple li'l salad with baby frisée and lemon and olive oil. That's nice. "Grill," by contrast, makes me think of TVs mounted in the corners and gussied-up bar foods. Friggin' cheese fries with truffle oil. That's fine, but I would rather go to the bistro.
"Grille" is less appealing. I will not be able to afford dinner at "Grille." Also "Grille" seems prohibitively likely to be the kind of place where the waiter will be unable to hide a flash of disgust when I ask for water instead of a $30 cocktail. The steaks are the size of bricks at "Grille" and the burger is one of the works Ozymandias thought would make ye mighty despair.
"Diner" is nice, so long as it's not a chain. I feel like "Diner" implies, or ought to, a reliable slate of options, none of them ambitious but all of them satisfying; someone who has been to a couple of diners ought to be able to just about recite the menu at "Diner" without even going inside. On the other hand if your restaurant says "Diner" on it and I can't get corned beef hash and over-easy eggs in the morning, or meatloaf and gravy in the evening, you will simply have to burn in hell. If you are not interested in doing The Diner Foods, then I believe you owe it to the public not to deceive them with "Diner" in your restaurant's name. There was a time when "Eats," as in like "Bob's Eats," would have had a similar meaning to "Diner," but I think nowadays "Eats" seems likely to signify a kind of twee performance that I might find annoying if my mood is not aligned precisely correctly upon entrance.
"Cafe" is fine. I think it tells you not to expect much, foodwise; this is a place that regards food as an accompaniment to coffee or tea. It might have pastries! Pastries kick ass. It also might have a brunch menu on the weekends. "Cafe" very probably has blueberries in it, somewhere.
In the United States, outside of a tiny number of cities, I think "Ristorante" tends to be a minor red flag. It puts me in mind of gloop, and overcooked pasta, and menu items that are pretending to be separate things (e.g. cacciatore, arrabbiata, and Bolognese) but which in practice are all just the long-simmered house tomato sauce with one other thing (chicken, red pepper flakes, or ground chuck, respectively) added to it. Which is fine! Sometimes disreputable fake Italian-American junk is what you want! This is why every American town with more than 53 people in it has at least one restaurant called like "Paisano's Ristorante" in it. But this is also why finding out that your town or neighborhood has a "Ristorante" in it is not really exciting. "Trattoria" or "Osteria," however, might tell you that this is a place that does more than boil various pasta shapes all the live long day. That's kind of intriguing.
What else? "Inn" makes me think the lighting will probably be dim and the sounds pleasantly muffled; I expect "Inn" to have meat-and-potatoes dishes on the menu, like lamb chops and/or a roasted half chicken. I also expect "Inn" to have been open for 45 years, to have undergone no renovations in that time (complimentary), and for there to be local elderly couples who have been going there on their date nights for decades (charming). "Tavern" hits me basically the same way except to me it sounds a little more beer-forward and I will probably choose "Inn" over "Tavern," all else being equal.
"Steakhouse" just puts out all the wrong vibes for me. I love a steak, but I do not really ever want to eat at "Steakhouse." In my head there are two kinds of steakhouses: Texas-themed novelty places with menus shaped like ten-gallon Stetson hats and never fewer than 20 divorcées clustered at the bar, and chesty power-dinner hellholes that make me think of huge necktie knots, banker collars, and wristwatches. No thank you!
"Chophouse" is an artisanal "Steakhouse"; the head chef's beard looks like he is French-kissing a Pekingese dog; he owns at least one trilby. The menu has offal on it, which is fine, and an ostentatiously normal cocktail costs more than my entire wardrobe, which is also fine, both because I do not drink and because at "Chophouse" they are cool with you ordering sparkling water.
I assume "Bar" has food but also I will not find out. I will never know anything about any "Saloon" that does not have swinging batwing doors. All I will know about a "Saloon" that does have batwing doors is that it has batwing doors.
Ezra:
I am in the process of planning my wedding for this summer and I find myself very much dreading the first dance. I have never danced seriously in my life and the idea of solemnly swaying with my recently consecrated wife in front of 100+ friends and family is truly excruciating.
Is this just a thing everyone does? Is it normal to find that horrifying? Is there any advice one can be given for this? My fiancée for the record is agnostic about it, but I fear she is trying to be kind and leave me an opportunity to bail on it.
It's fine to do the dance! It's not even really a dance. You just hold each other, hand-in-hand on one side and around the torso on the other, and get real close, and sway from foot to foot in time with the music. It does not have to be solemn, nor should it be. You can smile at each other and you can lean in and whisper "I can't believe I haven't broken any of your toes yet" and laugh about it and it's fine. Literally nobody cares one whit about whether you know how to "dance" in any real way. They just want to see the romantic image of the two of you embarking on your married life together, and they will be happy to observe this tradition that is very harmless and sweet. If you do it, you will be glad you did it.
It is also fine not to do the dance! My wife and I did not do the dance. Our reception was in a smallish dining room without any real dance floor, and if I remember correctly we just had a stereo playing music, if even that, and in any case there wasn't any dancing. And not having done it is no big loss! Our wedding kicked ass anyway, and I wouldn't change anything about it.
The thing to do is to and ask your fiancée, openly and in a way that is not angled toward getting any particular answer, to please tell you truly whether she would prefer to do the dance or not. And if she says, yeah, she kind of always envisioned the first dance as part of getting married, then frickin' do the dance, and be glad and not sulky about doing the frickin' dance! It'll be sweet and a nice memory and tuning everybody else out to do this goofy thing together will be a unique experience of intimacy and as soon as it's over your trepidation will seem kinda funny in retrospect.
This is your one and only life, Ezra, and, if your loveliest and most ambitious promises endure, it will be your one and only wedding. Do not make decisions about it on the basis of being worried that you will look dorky swaying with your new spouse for three minutes. Be courageous! Also: Congratulations!
