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 mice in restaurants, Tulsa, Cracker BarrelGate, and more.
Before we get into this week’s bag, I’d be a fool if I didn’t mention that Defector’s fifth anniversary sale is still ongoing. New subscribers get their first three months for five bucks. This has been the most successful sales push we’ve ever had, and it’s not because we bought airtime on NFL games. It’s because there’s something always good to read on Defector, and five bucks ain’t shit. So tell your friends, your co-workers, your dog, everybody. Get them on the Defector train now to show them what they’ve been missing for the past five years. Also: tell them their team sucks.
OK, that’s the end of my little pitch. Time for your letters:
Eric:
Will Dave Portnoy last longer on Big Noon Kickoff than Rush Limbaugh did on Sunday NFL Countdown?
For those of you who have been blissfully unaware, Fox Sports recently announced a most unholy union with Barstool’s founder and his dogshit company. All four feet, six inches of Dave Portnoy will appear regularly on the network’s college football pregame show, as will his personal assistant Dan Katz. Barstool also gets its own morning show on FS1 in the deal. Comedy really IS back.
Don’t expect this arrangement to fall apart anytime soon. I know that ESPN’s creative partnership with Barstool lasted all of one episode before the wokes got it banished from the airwaves, but Fox is a different animal from ESPN. Clay Travis has already been lingering around the Big Noon Kickoff set for years now and no one has raised a fuss, mostly because Clay Travis’s existence is remarkably easy to forget about.
More important, America 2025 is a markedly different place from America 2017. Once Trump got reelected last year, everyone else in power decided that they didn’t have to bother with the whole “being good and decent human beings” thing anymore. Very freeing for them. So what does Fox care if people complain about the unfunny, woman-hating dwarf on TV? Woke is dead now, and we’re probably about to have Supreme Court justices openly muse that the era of Prohibition on sexual assault needs to come to an end. When your country is determined to get angrier and stupider no matter the cost, this is the inevitable result. Maybe the mass culture will come back around at some point, but there’s nothing to indicate it’ll happen anytime soon. So Foxstool will remain a thing.
And it’s not just Fox that’s rolling around in the muck. ESPN just joined forces with a still-toxic WWE. Leadership at the Washington Post wants to know how it can draw in more readers that watch Fox News. And Aaron Rodgers still draws a salary. Any cancellation attempts will prove futile. As such, I’m left with no option but to pine for the more pleasant broadcasters of yore, like the spiritual boomer that I am.
[awkward segue]
Speaking of which, Lee Corso will appear on ESPN pregame show for the final time this weekend. Now, Lee Corso doesn’t leave college football with clean hands. We’re talking about a guy who had a powerful enough platform on College GameDay to influence both final AP polling results (almost always in favor of his alma mater, Florida State) and Heisman voting (almost always in favor of shitty players like Chris Weinke). Just as Dick Vitale caped for some of the greasiest coaches ever to walk the earth, so has Corso.
And yet, I fucking adore Lee Corso.
Even when I was groaning at Corso saying nice shit about Bobby Bowden for the thousandth time, I loved him. Even when ESPN kept him on the air for far too long after a stroke he suffered 16 years ago, I loved him. I loved the mascot heads. I loved, “Not so fast. My friend.” I loved, “Closer than the experts think.” I loved the twinkle that old man got in his eyes when he was about to break down a shitty 12 p.m. ACC game. Like John Madden, Lee Corso always radiated a pure, simple love of football that even casual viewers could get swept up in. That’s a talent that few sportscasters, few people, possess.
Together with Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit, Corso made the original College GameDay the best pregame show that ever was or ever will be. Whenever that show hit the road on Saturday mornings, students would camp out at the crack of ass just to get a decent spot in the crowd behind the set come 11 a.m. All of them showed because they loved their team, and they loved holding up funny signs. But it’s also because they loved Corso. He was great company, even when he was talking bullshit.
After Saturday, he’ll have to talk that bullshit from home. It was long overdue, but the college kid still living inside of me will mourn. There’ll never be another Lee Corso. Even if there were, they wouldn’t get airtime because network heads would prefer that a raging prick get a chair at the studio desk instead of a genuinely talented person. Hence, Pat McAfee entering GameDay a few years ago as Corso’s spiritual successor. That show will be demonstrably worse for the change, but that’s par for the course with regards to pretty much everything changing in America right now. I can’t do much to stop it, but I can at least still like the people I like, and not the ones that Rupert Murdoch wants me to like.
[puts on giant Lee Corso head and waves bye to you]
David:
The new Cracker Barrel logo is bad, right? Not for all the dumb worm-infested MAGA dork reasons, but because it is bland and pointless. The old logo has charm and truly conveys what it is.
Again, I must recap recent events for those blissfully unaware. Last week, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store changed its logo from this:
To this:
MAGA types got all fucking weird about this, because they think the switch is—heaviest sigh—an act of premeditated wokeness. As usual, these people have missed the forest for the trees, because David up there is right: This new logo really does suck. Not because it’s woke, but because it’s BORING.
Look how empty that redesign is. It could be a sticker on a loaf of shitty wheat bread, for all an unsuspecting consumer might know. The minimalist design aesthetic strikes again, and for what? It’s fucking Cracker Barrel. How is sleeker branding gonna help a joint that was designed to be old-fashioned? Are they hoping that yuppies will walk in thinking it’s a Sweetgreen?
Here’s yet another example of corporate overlords deciding that putting ANYTHING distinctive in their product design—a man in a chair, a mountain range, a cartoon dog—will turn off consumers who prefer that everything they see and hear be sanded down to fucking nothing. No brand wants to stick out and risk embarrassment, which leaves you with a culture where nothing ever sticks out. Everything looks the same. Everything is generic, even pro sports team uniforms. Meanwhile, Bob’s Red Mill is banking millions because they decided to make a product that looks like it’s been around for 200 years. I’d say there’s a lesson in that example, but people hate learning shit now, so there’s not much point in it.
Kevin:
It’s 2025. Should I read Infinite Jest?
Do you want to? That’s really the only thing that matters here, because we’re well past the years when people read that novel just for show. I don’t wanna dissuade you from challenging yourself, because reading for pleasure includes reading things that give your mind a lot of work to do. So can always start reading Infinite Jest to see if it sets your gears whirling, and then bail if it’s not to your liking. Teacher won’t give you an F.
I have never read Infinite Jest. In fact, I’ve never read any David Foster Wallace novel, which is curious given that I was an English major in the 1990s. Every English major back then was required to have a framed picture of DFW hanging over their mantel. One of my creative writing professors, whose own prose is still very much stuck in 1990s, told me that DFW would be just the author for me. She didn’t quite grasp how lazy of a reader I was.
But I did read a lot of DFW’s short nonfiction, and it was top of the line. So maybe I too should plunk down for a copy of Infinite Jest and then settle into a booth at Peet’s Coffee to flip through its 78,000 pages. I read Ulysses in college (and really liked it). I even read the definitive Van Gogh biography, which runs 1,500 pages (and very much felt that long). So I know I have the cognitive power to ingest such a work. But football season is dead ahead, and my time right now is at its highest premium. I’m sure you understand.
Even though I’ve written books of my own, I’m still as intimidated by doorstop books as any other reader, especially if it’s a novel. My greatest coup in high school was somehow avoiding the English class where everyone had to read The Brothers Karamazov. I only know Tolstoy from blockquotes. Anytime I see that a lengthy novel is a generational epic about a family, I sprint to the Kindle storefront looking for a 300-page tick-tock of the Donner Party expedition. And, like everyone else, I also own a copy of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker that I’ve been too lazy to commit to. That book occupies a special place in my to-do list, because I know damn well that I’ll like it. Also, I downloaded it to Kindle because the dead-tree edition is so big as to be physically unreadable. To own a big book is to nag yourself about it, and so I nag myself here and there to finally crack that fucker open. And I will … when I have time. This is the part where you shake your head in exasperation.
HALFTIME!
Paul:
You're always going on about the Chargers having the best uniforms in the NFL. What about the worst? Now that Washington has the racist logo in the garbage bin, which teams' unis should be redesigned purely out of aesthetics? Cleveland and Chicago seem obvious choices to start.
Oh wow, you went there with the Bears. I remember ripping those uniforms in a Why Your Team Sucks preview a couple of years ago, and people were deeply annoyed. That was the bridge too far, because readers deemed the Bears uniforms to be a classic. I backed off, even though those getups still do nothing for me. I don’t like the skinny numerals, and Chicago always plays slow in them. They’re not worth the historical cachet, in my opinion, especially given that the Bears have won dick in 40 years.
But I’ve gotten off track. Paul here wants to know which teams have the shittiest uniforms overall. Even with everything I said up above, I don’t think the Bears deserve to be in the running. Nor the Browns, strangely. No, my choices are far more predictable than that. I’ll rank them so that we can argue about it.
1. Titans. I don’t even know what kind of look they’re going for, nor have I ever. Anyone who lays eyes on a Titans uniform immediately thinks, “Those aren’t the Oilers uniforms,” and then continues thinking that until the Titans have lost the game 9-6.
2. Jaguars. They’ve had decades to come up with a decent uniform and still always land on some variation of vomit-stained teal. This team could have rocked leopard print helmets from the very start and been the coolest team in the universe. Instead they pulled a Jags.
3. Commanders. They ditched the racism, but threw the baby out with the bathwater. As a result, the official uniforms that Washington uses now still look like a temp design. That’s the reason why Josh Harris decided to bust out the throwbacks (minus the old logo) for the coming season. The burgundy and gold look was cool. The Dollar Store action-figure redesign is not.
While we’re rehashing this topic, let me go ahead and issue a few other, familiar sartorial mandates to a handful of NFL teams:
- The Rams should go back to their classic unis
- The Falcons’ jerseys are ugly and the numerals are nearly illegible
- The Chargers do indeed have the best uniform in the world, but should never be allowed to swap out powder blue for dark blue
- The Giants need to go back to the old helmets
OK, that’s enough of that. Moving on…
Ben:
Because of some unique medical issue, you must now either be fed by IV or baby birded, i.e. your food is pre-chewed up and dropped in your mouth. Liquid will be delivered the same way. The IV port will have to be moved every few weeks to prevent serious damage to the vein it is placed in, but you have the best phlebotomist in the world jabbing you so it's not too bad. Which do you choose and why?
The Alicia Silverstone thing. Not even close. I’d rather that my burger not come pre-chewed, but at least I’d still get the sensation of tasting the burger slurry on my tongue and then gulping it down. That’s way better than never being able to taste a single thing ever again.
This reminds me of something from when I was very small. One day my sister spat into my mouth, which was very rude. But she’d just been eating chocolate, and there were heavy traces of it in her saliva. So little fat Drew was like, “Actually, that was good! Spit into my mouth again!” So she did. When my mom discovered us doing this, she called the police.
Andy:
I recently made a breakfast sandwich (simple sausage, egg, & cheese) and used a Martin's potato roll, and all I could think was, "Why isn't this a thing?" After a thick piece of toast, I think this is my new preferred bread for breakfast sandwiches.
How do you know it’s not a thing, Andy? Shake Shack famously uses Martin’s potato rolls for all of their sandwiches, breakfast included. The Martin’s company is anything but woke, but they know how to make a bun that has just the right amount of squish. Inquiring minds are well aware of this, which is why I almost always use those rolls when I make myself an egg sandwich at home.
And I make that sandwich often. Breakfast sandwiches became a fixture on every foodie’s radar years ago. You can now get an ornate breakfast sandwich—replete with applewood smoked pork belly, aged cheddar, and a tangy jicama slaw—pretty much anywhere. But goddamn if I love me just a plain-ass fried egg sandwich with nothing else on it. We used to visit my grandparents every spring break, and I always ordered a fried egg sandwich for lunch whenever I was in the lunchroom. The woman behind the counter was named Mert. I will never forget that her name was Mert, nor the way she said “fried egg sandwich” in a cigarette-stained rasp to the cook whenever I asked for one. Some of my most indelible memories are utterly ordinary ones. That’s one of them. I love a fried egg sandwich.
Greg:
When famous actors say, "I don't watch any of my movies," that’s bullshit right?
In general, yes. False modesty is baked into every press tour. But I’m willing to entertain exceptions. For example, let’s say that the actor in question endured hell on earth during the shoot and never wants to relive the trauma. I can see them ducking out of the premiere early if that was the case. Or what if the actor thinks the movie is fucking terrible? Most stars know when they’re in a piece of shit, so why bother watching all of some direct-to-streaming thriller named Dangerous Target 6, a movie you only agreed to because some Belarusian producer offered you $3 million for five days' work? I once wrote an article for Penthouse. Doesn’t mean I read every other article in that issue.
(I looked at the spreads though.)
Harry:
Last Sunday my wife and I took my parents out for my dad's birthday, to what we thought would be a fine-but-average neighborhood gastropub near their house. To our surprise, the food was much, much better than we thought it would be, and all of us loved what we ordered. As we're waiting for our check, I see a mouse scurry across the dining room floor and jump into the booth next to us. I don't think anyone else in the restaurant noticed (certainly not the two people seated in the booth the mouse jumped into). So I discreetly notified the staff, settled up, and left. On Wednesday we saw my parents again and agreed that, in spite of the mouse sighting, we enjoyed our meal so much that we want to run it back at the same place. Are we insane to have been so nonchalant about this?
I’d pause if I saw the mouse scurry into another booth. That’s too close for full comfort. But if the meal was, like, REALLY good? Yeah, I’d probably go back. I worked in restaurants, so I know how filthy most of them are. I also prize a tasty meal over my general health, as dramatized by the video below:
Most readers will not agree with me here. They’ll say OH MY GOD FUCK NO BURN THAT PLACE DOWN AND SALT THE ASHES. I have no good counterargument to that. A good restaurant should not have Remy the rat hanging around the dining room. But gluttony is gluttony, and I’m not the sort to let the specter of Legionnaires disease turn me off of a nice gastropub.
I’m also a heavily socialized animal. Case in point: We went to a Mexican restaurant once. When I stepped out for a moment to rest my ears, I saw a mouse scurry across the dining patio and then behind a tent flap. I told my wife, because she’s the kind who wants to know such things. She was like, “Was the mouse inside?” No, I told her. I only saw it outside. She said, “Oh, then whatever,” and that was that. If she had freaked, I would’ve freaked. But she didn’t, so I kept on grubbin’ on my enchiladas. I’m an easy lay in that regard.
Matt:
Fuck raw tomatoes. Fuck them to death. I hate raw tomatoes so fucking much. Oh, the best time to eat them are these 2.5 perfect summer weeks? FUCK OFF. If you rely on raw tomatoes to make your dish, your dish sucks shit. Put the tomatoes in a can or jar, or fuck right off.
I don’t agree with Matt here, but how can you not respect his commitment to antipathy? I’ve been where he’s been, too. Outside of salsa, which barely counts, I hated raw tomatoes until I was like 30. I picked them off of every sandwich and surgically extracted them from every salad. My own sons now do the exact same thing. So I get it. Most raw tomatoes in America are low quality, so they’re not worth adding to dishes. But I like good tomatoes enough now that I can power through a mealy-ass slice on my burger if I have to. Also, douse a raw heirloom tomato in olive oil, salt, and fancypants balsamic, and suddenly there’s a party in my mouth and everyone’s invited. Maybe the light goes on for my boys in a similar fashion down the line. But if they stay anti-tomato like Matt here, I’ll know why.
Email of the week!
Nick:
A few weeks ago me and a buddy went to Tulsa, Oklahoma to check out the Bob Dylan Center. I wasn't expecting much from the city, but I was blown away. The Dylan Center was awesome, as was the Woody Guthrie Center, and we got a fantastic tour of The Church Studio from an old hippie. I also had one of the best croissants I've ever eaten at a bakery where we stood in line for an hour, and we had great conversations with some locals. We capped off our trip with a minor league game where there was live catfish noodling. It was awesome.
Being a blue-state liberal from Minnesota, I had many stereotypes about the Sooner state. I still think that their politicians are dumb, but this trip reminded me that there are still cool places and people everywhere. My question is, is there a place you've been that shifted your perspective after experiencing it firsthand?
I really enjoyed my time in Cleveland when I went one time many years ago. I’m sure that not attending a Browns game had a lot to do with it.
And yeah, there are a lot of cool places with uncool politics. Never be afraid to go exploring.
