Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about hot dogburgers, electrolysis, Brene Brown, fighting medieval peasants, and more.
Your letters:
Steven:
Is there any way to get people to stop putting Kobe Bryant on a pedestal? We continue to see him everywhere: on basketball broadcasts, in Nike Olympic commercials, praised as a hero by everyone from Jayson Tatum to Sabrina Ionescu. Will he ever be seen as a hyper-competitive, self-nicknaming weirdo and likely rapist? Or has that train forever left the station?
It’s gone. I can fight the lionization of Kobe all I like, but I’m helpless in the face of both a deranged fanbase (Lakers) and a mass media that have no interest in listening. Also, Kobe really does mean a lot to millions of young athletes and fans. They grew up with him. I grew up with Jordan, so for me Kobe has always been just a shameless biter. But if you’re 20 years younger than me, and you live in SoCal, he was one the defining athletes of your youth, if not THE defining one. You can’t erase those psychological imprints. They’re forever.
I long ago decided that I could separate art from artist, but what if that artist is so dear to you that you model yourself after them? Is that OK? Who’s an acceptable hero and who isn’t? Should your mental Hall of Fame have a character clause? If not, do you have the right to police other people’s heroes? Is this too many ponderous questions to ask without actually throwing down a take?
OK, here’s the take: We don’t always get to pick who inspires us, and we certainly can’t control what kind of people they are after we’ve grown attached to them. If you have a problematic role model, and you do, you’ll probably look past their transgressions (or even defend them) out of personal loyalty. That’s human of you. It’s also human to reckon with the worst aspects of their character and decide what’s worth taking from their legacy and what isn’t. You learn the difference between inspiration and idolatry. If you’re not willing to make that distinction, then you’ll have to be ready for people like me to tell you that Kobe Bryant was a piece of shit, and that he wasn’t even that fun to watch.
Brian:
So I'm already at the point where I have to shave every day, so that I don’t look like I slept in a bus station. My beardline nearly extends all the way up my cheeks, I have to tame my nose hair on the regular, and I more than occasionally pluck my ear hair. If my old man is any indication, I'm going to look like a walking ear of corn in another few decades. Is it vain of me to want to pursue electrolysis, or some such future-proofing to retain whatever semblance of looks I have now, or should I lean into it?
That’s what sucks about living this long. You have spend a great deal of time, money, and mental energy just holding onto whatever you’ve already got. It’s only natural to want, or often to need, outside help for this upkeep. That’s why just about every person my age where I live has Botox injections (it’s also why I have to wait eight months for a fucking dermo appointment to open up). It’s also why people get cosmetic surgery, and why they’re flocking in droves to get their hands on whatever Ozempic syringes they ransack out of the back of a CVS.
One of my worst old-man traits, and I have many, is that I’ve been conditioned to look down on these interventions, or to consider them shortcuts. That’s small-minded, especially in an age where cosmetic surgery is a godsend for a lot of people, trans people in particular.
It also happens to be self-defeating, because we all have, to varying degrees, body image issues that are imprinted on us and reinforced through a lifetime of exposure to arbitrary societal standards and expectations. I woke up at 234 pounds. this morning. That’s the most I’ve weighed in ages. Over the past month, I’ve been cool with it. I had a lot of outside stress (still do), so I forgave myself for stress eating. I even stopped counting calories because I would beat myself up if I went over my budget, or I’d second-guess my record-keeping if I snuck in under it. In some ways, letting myself go was freeing. I like that I’ve stopped defining myself by a number on a scale. But my underwear is getting tight, and the other day I pulled my waistband OVER the lip of my pot belly to make myself more comfortable (this move is also known as the Charlie Weis). It’s now annoying to be this heavy, and yet most of the old-fashioned ways I’ve tried to get back down to SexyTown have failed. So what’s left? Ozempic.
Last year, Men’s Health sent me to look into Ozempic. I met a dude who couldn’t get his insurance to pay for the stuff, a predictably common issue. So he bought the main ingredients for it on the black market, cooked homemade Ozempic up in his kitchen sink, and then shot himself in the belly with his Walter Whiteboy serum. It worked. I also spoke with a range of doctors and nutritionists for that piece, and virtually all of them said that these drugs are legit, and that the only reason some of their patients refused to take them was because those patients felt like it would be cheating. They felt like they had to earn their weight loss, rather than turn to a drug. They regarded weight gain as a personal failing, and I did as well. Part of me still does, even though I know that my weight is the result of physiological, environmental, and genetic factors that are mostly beyond my control. Americans are taught they can do anything, which also means they’re taught to bear the blame if they don't achieve anything of significance.
So it’s not vanity to wanna look good, Brian. It’s a natural human impulse, and one you're forgiven for indulging. Just make sure you understand that you can reduce your hairload and teens will still call you a fossil. Goddamn teens.
Hunter:
Who would win in a fight: a medieval peasant or an average US citizen today? Does the current US citizen's access to sufficient nutrition and lack of debilitating childhood diseases win out over their averageness? Or will the peasant, having already survived into adulthood, win due to their tough, agricultural-based existence?
BLOODY PEASANT! I did some half-assed research on this, and it turns out that the average medieval dirt farmer was smaller than the average modern American, but also much younger. So I, the American, would have the reach advantage. But the peasant would have all of the raging child laborer hormones on their side.
More important, they’d have nothing to lose. That’s the edge. I’d never get into a fight with anyone right now, because I’d worry about my bad back, my easy bruising thanks a Plavix regimen, and my glasses breaking. Nigel from Direshire would have no such hang-ups. That’s why he’d fuck me up with a quickness. What’s he care if I knock out one of his teeth? He already lost three of them in a mill accident back in 1509. He’d want that fight more than me, and that’s why I’d lose in two rounds or less.
Mike:
We all know that after Australia, you call yourself a Minnesotan. What’s the most Minnesotan thing that still lingers? Your Viking fandom? Saying ‘ope’ when you bump into me on the street? Calling a casserole a ‘hot dish’? Lay it on me.
It’s ope. I use it on a daily basis, and didn’t even realize it was a Minnesota thing until long after I’d been living there. I also say “Yeah no” a lot, which Minnesotans apparently claim as their own. I’m dubious about that, mostly because the advent of the internet has blurred, if not flattened, a great deal of regional vernacular. And given that I haven’t lived in Minnesota since 1991, I have an incredibly limited knowledge of what current Minnesotan sounds like. But I definitely say ope, and I’m definitely cooking up some hotdish for J.J. McCarthy’s sore knee, dontcha know.
(FUN FACT: I have never eaten hot dish.)
Joey:
Is Brene Brown reasonable? My sister-in-law is pretty into her, and generally the stuff she cites BB on is all pretty reasonable, but I've been jaded into both not trusting anyone who is selling something online, and suspecting that every self help guru is a Christian Nationalist.
For those of you who don’t know, Brene Brown is a massively successful podcaster and author who gives off very intense White Oprah vibes. My wife loves Brown’s podcast. She played it for me once and I didn’t really like it. Not for political reasons or anything; it just wasn’t my bag. But from the small amount of time I listened, I never got the sense that Brene Brown was a MAGA sleeper agent, or that she was a new age grifter with nothing valuable to offer her audience. She seemed very smart and eminently reasonable.
Now, is that something I want from a podcast? Absolutely not. I want two people fighting over the pettiest bullshit they can summon off the top of their heads. That’s when the content really sings. If Brene Brown’s podcast were more like The Distraction, she’d be doing Rogan numbers, she would!
Brian:
Now that Breaking is an Olympic sport, why not competitive eating?
Because it sucks. Breaking was cool. It also made me want Rap Battling to be made an official event for Los Angeles 2028. Look at him, already a has-been/Let Uncle Play say a rhyme that'll tuck ya ass in.
HALFTIME!
Steve:
I'm sure you have people you've been reading/following online for decades whom, at some point, you've just stopped engaging with their content. Maybe it's because your views changed, or theirs did, or you got older or had a big change in life. If you have gone through this, did you feel sad about it?
We’re talking fallen heroes again? Obviously Bill Simmons is the prime example here, but my complaints about that man are well-known and tiresome at this point. I’m not sad about falling out of love with Simmons’s work, because his back catalog isn’t worth the tears. I don’t even hate-follow him on Twitter anymore, because I got sick of hate-reading any writer sometime during the Trump administration. I swear this is true. The Times published a longread on Bari Weiss just this weekend and I had the willpower not to click. Feels great. I never liked that dipshit to begin with.
Where I do have mixed feelings is over writers I still admire but can’t read on social media. It’s always good to remind yourself that you can separate the shitposts from the person if you choose to. I used to believe that if I liked a writer, I should consume all of their offerings. This is a stupid idea. I love the Coen Brothers, but that doesn’t mean I have to think that Hail, Caesar! was a good movie (it’s not). So I don’t beat myself up anymore if I disrespect a friend by tuning them out. We all have to tune our friends out when they get annoying. It’s just one of those lessons you learn as you age, and it’s as necessary as it is shitty.
I also can’t bring myself to watch any Dave Chappelle special anymore, which kills me.
Matt:
What's the worst profession to shit yourself at work? My vote is teacher, but I'm biased because I teach 12th graders and I'm kind of a penis.
No no no, that’s a perfectly reasonable job to want clean undies for. Apart from a shower and change of clothes, what’s the first thing you want after having an accident in your pants? DISCRETION. You want to be alone and unseen. That’s not possible if you’re a teacher, a Presidential candidate presiding over a rally, a spinning instructor, or a Rockette. Those are all bad jobs for a surprise turdlinger.
The best? You guessed it: writer. In fact, I just shit myself while writing this and no one saw. The perfect crime MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Johnny:
Can you help me understand the hatred for Pat McAfee? I understand why someone would dislike him: he’s incredibly obnoxious. But there seems to be A LOT of words printed about how he’s dumb and bad, and I’m just wondering how that makes him different or worse than any other sports talk host? Sports talk has always been something I turn on for background noise, turn it up when they talk about something interesting to me, and turn it back down when it gets annoying. For that purpose Pat is no worse than any other option I’ve found.
I was right where you were just a few years ago. Sports talk radio was always my default listening option in the car, especially if I was driving alone. It made for good ambient noise, and I could listen closer whenever the conversation piqued my interest. It made for good company, and it was a tolerable substitute for me after Howard Stern bailed for subscription radio. But then I got sick of it all, mostly because the hosts were stupid more often than not, and because I could queue up good podcasts about my own team if I really wanted to scratch the itch (my kids have heard the opening riff to the Purple Insider podcast so many times now that they can sing it by heart). In other words, most sports talk radio, even when competently done, is useless.
Kinda like Pat McAfee. I’m sure I’d be fine with McAfee in small doses. I even had a moment where I was like, “Hey man I never even watch this guy’s show. He’s probably all right.” But I don’t get small doses of Pat McAfee. I get fucking Costco-sized servings of him, even when I’m trying to read or watch something else. That’s the difference. You know how old folks always complained (and still do) about having too much Stephen A. forced on them? Well, ESPN found a dopey white guy that they can now overexpose instead. They’re not letting me decide if McAfee is relevant to my interests or not, they’re just grabbing my eyeballs out of my skull and pasting them onto his tanktop. So you can understand why I might feel a tinge of resentment toward the guy, even if he’s more a dummy than a fuckhead.
Mark:
Someone told me that, as far as he was concerned, the opinions of fans who go to the games are more valid than my own, because I watch all sports from home. I felt hurt by this. What say you, Drew?
I am also offended as a Television-American by this rhetorical scofflaw. Watching a game live vs. watching it on TV is an apples-to-oranges thing. If you’re in the stadium, you’re gonna see some shit that the TV cameras don’t pick up, and you’re gonna have opinions on the game action that haven’t been coached into you by the announcing booth. But you’re also not gonna see every angle on a critical play, and you’re gonna be left in the dark about injured players being taken off the field. That’s why you see fans on phones at games. Some of them are just fucking around on Instagram or whatever, but a lot of them are trying to get more information on what they just witnessed. So both vantage points have something to offer the other.
But that’s not a fun answer to Mark’s question. This is: Mark, that guy is a fucking asshole. Ignore him. You think Marlins Man knows more about baseball than the average fan at home? Well then why don’t you go sit on a tree?
Rory:
Following a harrowing experience (not my own, just observed) in the Trenton Transit Center a few weeks ago involving a woman getting some extremity caught in the belt of an escalator, I've been asking people if they think they are adequately afraid of escalators and elevators. My brother agrees with me that it is something to monitor, while my other brother thinks it's the stupidest fear he's ever heard of. I even posed the question to Roth on Bluesky. Now I ask you: do you believe you are adequately afraid, or at least wary, of escalators and elevators?
I had a friend in college who was deathly afraid of elevators and would always take the stairs. My dad once fell on an escalator and had the belt eat up the flesh on his arm. And yet, neither of those incidents have deterred me from taking either mode of upward transit. I still think escalators are super fun (bonus points if it has a shopping cart escalator next to it), and I’m still way too lazy to climb 20 flights of stairs. My subconscious has performed the internal risk assessment and found both elevators and escalators to be safe for routine use. If you were around the Internet in the late aughts, you were likely traumatized by the plight of Nicholas White, the dude who got trapped in an NYC elevator for nearly two full days. That video stuck with me, too. But what are the odds that same incident happens to me? I’ll tell you: zero.
(A giant safe immediately falls out of the sky and lands on me)
That’s on me for getting too cocky. Please send help.
Ryan:
As an adult who (I presume) has never seriously engaged with Pokemon, what's the best Pokemon?
I’m so shitty with Pokemon names and powers and mutations, I’d need to take a college course on them to get up to speed. My youngest is a huge fan and goes to Friday night tournaments at the local card shop with his buds. These tournaments take fucking hours, but letting him go to one still beats playing Pokemon against him myself. I have no idea what the rules are to that game, and my mind goes blank when the boy starts explaining it to me. That’s why my favorite Pokemon of all … is Pikachu. I know that’s a deep cut, but I stand by it.
Philip:
I’m watching a show talking randomly about a birth. I have four kids (I know), and while their births were all big deals in the moment, we had to get to work raising them so quickly that we failed to appreciate what the fuck had just happened. My oldest is now taller, stronger, faster, smarter, etc than I ever was. My wife grew people in her body, delivered them out of her body, and now the first one is a grown ass human. This is really some wild shit we just take for granted. Also no I’m not high but I can’t wait to get high and talk through this more.
I’m not high either, but I 100 percent feel you. The oldest goes off to college two weeks from today(!!!!) and every night I’m like HOLY SHIT LOOGIT HOW OLD AND BIG THIS KID IS. Same with my two boys. The awe is real, and it is permanent. You SHOULD get high to talk through this more.
Email of the week!
Ryan:
I did a semester abroad in Prague just shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We lived in what would now be an AirBnB, and most of our meals were whatever I could cook on a hot plate, from whatever we could find at the local market.
What they didn’t have in Prague, at least at that time, was beef. Pork, yes. Any which way you wanted it. But no pork. What beef there was to be had, like the “anglicky biftek” (English beefsteak) we had at a nightclub, cost an entire week’s food allowance.
After a couple of months we were craving beef something fierce. So instead of going to our local market, we went to a grocery store in the basement of a Kmart that we’d heard stocked a more Western selection of goods. In the freezer section, we found a box that said “Hamburgery” and had a picture of a big, juicy hamburger on it.
I took it home, sliced a tomato, toasted some buns, and set out the ketchup, mustard, cheese, and pickles. The hamburger looked a little pink and a little thin, but I was too hungry to care that much. I fried it on the hot plate until it was cooked, but it never stopped being pink. Paying that no mind, I put it on the bun, salivating as I bit down. It turned out to be a round, flat, hot dog.
It was still good, FYI, it was just so not a hamburger.
But was it a sandwich?
