Confessions Of A Cheeky Anglophile

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, B-movies, peanut butter, and more.

Your letters:

Dave:

I’m British and one of the things I love about Defector is the unexpected amount of UK media that makes its way into your articles. So far this week we’ve had Oasis, the Bake Off, various Premiership shenanigans, and (good lord) Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4. My question is: what British media has Defector tried and really, really hated?

You would be mistaken to think that every member of the Defector staff is an Anglophile. Some staffers are vehemently anti-England, which I take unreasonable offense to. How can these people not find England charming?, I ask myself. Sure, Great Britain engineered the blueprint for industrial colonialism, but how the fuck can you hold that against Guy Ritchie, who is the greatest director in world history? ISS COMIN’ ‘OME!!!!

This is because I myself am a lifelong Anglophile. My brother can take partial credit—or blame, depending on your vantage point—for this. He’s the one who got me into Monty Python, Benny Hill, Spinal Tap (made by Americans but English in spirit), Iron Maiden, Mr. Bean, and many of the other formative entertainers of my youth. To this day, Alex and I speak to each other in British cultural references. Often at the dinner table. No one else eating with us finds it terribly charming, but that’s their problem now, innit?

I’ve also spent a great deal of my life discovering British influences on my own, falling for Def Leppard, Oasis, EPL soccer, EPL soccer announcers, Guy Ritchie movies, Page 3 girls, Top Boy, pre–Love, Actually Richard Curtis, and more. I also spent a semester abroad in England in 1997, where I lost my virginity. So you understand why I might be unflinchingly loyal to a culture whose best days are likely well behind it, and why I secretly think a lot of England haters online are just trying to score easy woke points. I got too much of the U.K. in my blood to ever disavow it.

But does that mean I like EVERYTHING that England produces? Why, no …

You won’t find many Tina Brown defenders on the Defector staff. We’re not big fans of Piers Morgan, either. I’m betting you could have guessed that.

Ben:

My college friend Danny (also a Funbag reader) and I watched about a dozen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies when he visited me at home this summer, and we were wondering if you had any favorite JCVDs. Our agreed-upon top three are Bloodsport, Hard Target, and Double Team. We're also particularly fond of The Quest, because Van Damme beats up cops while dressed as a clown, and Sudden Death, because Jean-Claude fights the Pittsburgh Penguin with a meat cleaver. 

I haven’t seen enough JCVD movies to answer this question definitively. I’ve only seen Bloodsport (excellent), Kickboxer (worse than Bloodsport), and Hard Target (also worse than Bloodsport, although John Woo directed, so you get a lot of doves in every shot). I’m still curious about JCVD, the indie movie where Van Damme plays a satirical version of himself, but not curious enough to have actually sat down to watch it. And we don’t have to talk at length about Bloodsport, because bloggers my age have already done that a million times over. Instead, I’d rather talk about the REAL best Van Damme movie, which is Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning:

I’ve mentioned this flick elsewhere, but it’s worth a re-endorsement in case you were still unaware. Three years ago, I read a post on Zombie Gawker about the awesomeness of low-budget action movie star Scott Adkins, and got hung up on this bit of copy from writer Robert Rubsam:

2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is the fourth direct-to-video sequel to a 1992 Jean Claude Van Damme/Dolph Lundgren vehicle, and one of the best American action movies of the 21st century.

I grew up with Blockbuster Video, which means I’m used to direct-to-video action movies being absolute dogshit. So when a writer I inherently trusted said that one such movie—and an unwanted sequel, at that—was worthy of canonization, I had to know if he was in on some sort of B-movie secret.

He was. This really WAS one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen. Van Damme plays the villain this time. The first time you see him appear on screen, he shoots Adkins’ wife and son to death. It’s as brutal a scene as any I’ve ever seen (how often do you see children straight up murdered on camera in a film, without the director tastefully cutting away?), and the visceral trauma it induces carries the story all the way through. You want Adkins to get satisfaction, and you want the Muscles from Brussels to pay.

More important, every fight scene is fucking bananas. Director John Hyams was clearly working with a limited budget, so he ditched a lot of campy VFX in favor of shooting every fight close in, so you feel like you’re trapped in between the combatants. It’s equal parts harrowing and thrilling. Staging fight scenes this way in a sci-fi flick is the kind of on-the-fly innovation that happens when a talented director has to work within limited parameters. Jaws worked this way. So did Halloween. I’m not afraid to lump in Day of Reckoning with those masterpieces; it has that same kind of ingenuity to it, which is rare. The advent of CGI has neutered that ingenuity to a certain degree. No need to creatively solve a storytelling problem when you can just order some poor VFX house to make it work. That renders low-budget classics nearly extinct, so I’m grateful whenever I stumble on a new one.

Whether you count this as a Van Damme movie is up to you; Adkins is the main character, while Van Damme himself has limited screen time. But when JCVD does appear on screen (often without dialogue; letting Van Damme talk tends to ruin the script), you definitely feel something you’ll never feel while watching any other JCVD performance. There’s zero camp, all menace. I’d like to see this movie’s predecessor, Universal Soldier: Regeneration, but it’s not available on streaming, unless you count a low-quality YouTube upload. This is the greatest crisis facing our country at the moment.

Louis:

I'm a Lions fan. Aside from the asskicking from the Packers in Week 1, I was dismayed to see that the new Lions offensive coordinator, John Morton, calls the plays from a box. For reasons I can't even articulate, I'm certain that coordinators who call the game from the sideline are superior. Do you have a preference? Am I being irrational in preferring coordinators on the sidelines?

I’ve never really had an opinion on it. All my fandom, I’ve mostly gone along with the color guy’s explanation for why some coordinators work from the sideline and others from the box. The box gives you an all-22 view in real time; the sideline allows you to work out adjustments with players directly, instead of over the fabled sideline phone. Let’s pause here to remember a photo of Steve Young talking on that phone, in all its analog glory. I bet Bill Belichick had all of those phones tapped.

Those Montana/Young 49ers minted a shitload of gifted coordinators who did their work up in the booth: Mike Shanahan (offense), Mike Holmgren (offense), and Pete Carroll (defense) foremost among them. But that dynasty burned out in the 1990s, and I have hard time thinking of a Super Bowl–winning OC who’s called plays from upstairs since then. All I think about when it comes to booth OCs this century is Ken Dorsey famously annihilating his headset a few years back. In the digital age, you shouldn’t really need to call plays from up there. You can work the sideline and still cue up the all-22 replay on a tablet if you need to dissect it. That leaves me to guess at the reasons for a present-day coordinator to go upstairs. Here’s the sad list that I came up with:

• Seeing the all-22 action live gives them an extra split second to process
• They want the relative quiet
• They need easy access to a bathroom
• They need easy access to the beer in the fridge
• They prefer calling plays nude from the waist down
• They don’t want to face the offense after calling yet another failed bubble screen

None of these explanations are satisfactory, therefore I now spit on any OC who lacks the IRON BALLS to work down on the field. And yes, Lions OC John Morton’s crew hung 53 on the Bears while he was up there, and then turned around and ran over Baltimore last night. However, it’s only September. Therefore, all booth OCs will be considered honorary Kubiak kids until they prove worthy of my favor.

(One more digression for the olds: Remember when they would fax down all-22 stills to the sideline? Imagine that a football game you’re playing in suddenly becomes a trip to Kinko’s. Awful.)

Todd:

Do the diehard use-Apple-for-everything people know they have a superiority complex?

Hey man, you’re attacking my children with this question. My daughter’s Macbook died a few weeks ago and she refused to replace it with any other kind. My wife and I were like, “Dude, you can get a PC laptop that works just as well for hundreds less.” She reacted as if we’d replaced the dog with a goldfish. I know that this is how kids operate. I’ve been there. I once asked for a Nintendo for Christmas, I got a Sega Master System. Kids are specific in their likes; parents ignore that in the name of saving money. It’s been that way forever. There’s a Simpsons gag about this that I’m too lazy to go hunting down.

So kids who like Apple shit want Apple shit. Plenty of adults are the same way, although I don’t think of this as a moral flaw on their part. They’ve been conditioned by pop culture to prefer Apple products. More important, Apple doesn’t WANT you venturing out of its ecosystem. That’s why any group photo text I send bounces back if someone on the chain is an Android user. That’s Apple being like, “Ope sorry, our products don’t work with loser phones.” So then you have kids and adults shunning friends whose texts come up as green bubbles instead of blue. Apple refuses to be 100 percent compatible with other devices, and your rep suffers for it instead of Tim Cook. I find this insidious. Also, you can take my iPhone from my cold, dead hand.

Baron:

Is it my imagination or did we go from "kickers hitting from 60-plus is insane and rare" to "this happens all the time and it's no big whoop" in the blink of an eye? Either way, we got from there to here, and it seems weird that it's basically gone unremarked upon. 

Please note that Baron submitted this question before the Week 3 slate, when every critical field goal attempt ended up getting blocked. Our own Ray Ratto noted that the kicking game adds a chaotic element to football that more than justifies its existence. That remains true even with Brandon Aubrey nailing kicks from two counties over. Kickers have indeed gotten better at their jobs this century, and there have been plenty of high-profile “Are these kickers TOO good now?” pieces issued in the wake of it. It’s been remarked upon, because everything in the NFL gets remarked upon.

It’s also still pretty fucking astounding. I did not hit the can while Aubrey booted a 64-yarder to tie up the Giants, nor when Steelers kicker Chris Boswell nailed one from an even 60 to beat the Jets. I took neither of those kicks as automatic. Instead I watched, and I marveled. Just because kickers are making those kicks more often than before doesn’t mean that they’re easy. You still need a lot of things to go right for that ball to sail through the uprights. You gotta get off a clean snap and good hold. The line has to keep Jordan Davis from breaking through. There can’t be a sudden gust of wind that nudges the ball over to Section 118. And the kicker himself still has to hit the ball square and true. I’ll never stop being impressed by that. Jeff Fisher coached in the wrong era.

So bring on more of these freaky attempts. Many present NFL kickers have openly said that the 70-yard barrier will be broken soon (Jags K Cam Little nailed one in the preseason), and I wanna see it. I love cheap thrills.

HALFTIME!

Mark:

How much did/do you and your wife police who your kids hang out with? We have one in kindergarten and we’re already starting to form somewhat strong opinions about who the shithead kids seem to be. Is trying to steer him towards the “nicer boys” a losing battle?

Yes. You won’t make it through parenthood without encountering an asshole kid. There are MILLIONS of them. At least one of those pieces of shit will inevitably come to your house for a playdate, leave all the toys out, demand snacks without saying “please,” fake a tantrum because someone grazed his elbow, and try to ride your dog. You can’t prevent it, you can only endure it.

And you will. A lot of parents my age are still scarred by Malcolm Gladwell declaring that parents have less influence over their children than outside influences do. I know I was. I figured that the movie Thirteen was a documentary, and that my kids were doomed to end up snorting meth, shooting up homerooms, and watching bestiality porn. We, as parents, were utterly helpless.

Then we actually raised our kids and—you’re not gonna believe this—it turned out that Malcolm Gladwell was full of shit. Le gasp! You don’t influence kids by saying, “Don’t hang out with that kid Buzz, he’s bad news!” You influence them by avoiding such dipshits yourself. Little kids take most of their cues from you, so if you have a good sense for who’s a fucker and who isn’t, there’s a good chance they’ll pick up on that by osmosis. My sons are 16 and 13, respectively. They should be complete dicks at that age, and still can be if they’re tired and/or hungry. But usually, they come home from school and tell us about all of the dicks they had to deal with that day. Ninety-nine percent of parenting is modeling, which means showing them the right people to chill with instead of telling them who they can and can’t be buds with.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write a blog about how Jake from State Farm should be given the electric chair.

Joe:

Who do you think are the United States' sweatiest presidents? My gut says Roosevelt was #1, but I gotta imagine Taft and Nixon are up there, too.

You’re generous to leave Trump as an option for me. The man is 300 pounds and coats himself in a seven-layer dip of foundation every morning before rocking a suit in August weather. Every pore in his skin is a water balloon.

Todd:

Are you a Skippy man or a JiF man? Inquiring minds want to know (I wanna know!).

I was a Goober kid, actually. I never ate it on sandwiches, mind you. I just spooned that shit straight out of the jar. By lunchtime, there wasn’t enough Goober left to make a lunch with. I regret nothing.

I grew out of PBJ in my adulthood, so I never kept any brand around as a pantry staple. Then my wife and I had kids, and she bought Skippy for them as a matter of routine. It wasn’t Goober, but I still enjoyed it. So long as the peanut butter was loaded with sugar and mysterious preservatives, I was down. Then my wife got on a health kick (uh oh) and started buying organic peanut butter. To her credit, she at least sprung for the no-stir kind. But the kids and I were still outraged. This shit wasn’t peanut butter; it was actually good for you! Awful.

Because while I don’t eat PBJs for lunch anymore, I am a certified nut butter pervert. If I see a Reese’s cup in my kid’s Halloween bag, I go for it. If I see a Fast Break in there, I let out an audible whoop. If there’s a peanut butter–themed dessert on a restaurant menu, my eyes go wide. And my wife can longer buy the dark chocolate almond butter cups from Trader Joe’s, because I’ll polish off the entire container within 48 hours of its arrival. When people tell me they don’t like peanut butter desserts (my wife), I look at them the same way that mayonnaise enthusiasts look at me. Seriously? How can you not love peanut butter, you weirdo?! Thus, I don’t have a favorite brand of peanut butter because, at my core, I love all peanut butter.

Which brings me back to the organic garbage. I cursed my wife under my breath for buying that shit. Then I tried it and liked it. I hid this revelation from her for at least a week. Couldn’t let her gloat. Also, she’d never guess that I was the one sneaking spoonfuls out of the jar.

Scott:

Apologies if you've covered this before, but which is better (or worse, I guess) as a sports fan: defaulting to optimism or pessimism? I had this thought because my son's friend's dad and I are both Bears fans. He's a pessimist and I'm an optimist about the team, even if neither of us thinks we're sniffing the playoffs. For example, I was talking about Caleb Williams making some great improvisational plays and whipping the ball around the field. His response was, "I'm afraid he's a bum.” I said Colston Loveland might be a beast, and his response was, "We should've drafted a lineman, if only Poles could draft linemen." Neither of us is really wrong on the facts, but we look at them differently. What say you?

I’m on the record as hating fatalism, because I consider it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think shit will go bad, it will go bad. Of course, this has virtually no application to sports fandom, because we fans have virtually no control over how a team will perform. And yet I stick to optimism anyway, mostly because I find pessimists to be fucking annoying. I’m trying to get psyched up for a football game here, man. Don’t go moping about it before the fucking coin toss. YOU’RE HARSHING MY BUZZ, DICKNOSE. Optimism is for romantics, and that’s me.

To a fault. You might be aware that my election prognostications have a dubious track record. This is because I’m often too wrapped up in my dreams to see the reality going on outside my office window. Prior to the 2024 election, I called any liberals consigned to Trump’s re-election “doomers,” and treated them with according disdain. This accomplished nothing. Now we are living in a world of shit, and I partially alienated otherwise reasonable people with my—Christ, I hate this phrase—toxic positivity. I was too busy seeing the world as I wanted it to be to see it as it was. This is why I ain’t saying fuck all when 2028 comes around. Instead of being Team Rah Rah or Team Fatalist, I’ll just check out the facts on the ground, cast my vote, and then hope for the best.

But that’s politics. If you’re a Vikings fan and tell me they’ll never win a Super Bowl, you can go die in a car accident.

David:

I recently picked up Kelsey's latest book from my local library. I was somewhere in the 40's on the waiting list, which I think is a good sign that the author’s book is in demand. HOWEVER, I realized after it was my turn that Kelsey would likely receive no monetary gain from me being a library member. As a great author of merit yourself, how do you feel about your works being consumed by library users for free?

I’ve gotten this question a lot over the years, which is very nice of people but also somewhat misguided. Of course I’m fine with people checking out my books at the library. We need all the libraries we can get, especially when shit like reading books is considered “too woke” for concerned Evangelical parents and the scum they vote for.

Furthermore, authors do benefit monetarily from libraries. The library itself has to pay for copies of your book, and every new reader means that word of the book will spread: to their friends, to their colleagues, to their Goodreads following, and on and on. You don’t see Sally Rooney living below the poverty line because her novels are in constant library circulation. She’s a rich Irish lass because of those library patrons. Reading breeds more reading, and every writer benefits in the process.

Feed one of my books into an LLM though, and you’ll be hearing from my attorneys. You pile of shit.

Jefferson:

When did it become clear that Aaron Rodgers’s family knew what they were doing?

I guess 2020, which feels far too recent. I’d like to think that my penchant optimism isn’t just naiveté in a cheap disguise.

Brennan:

For the first time, it really feels like an American sport has figured out instant replay. The NFL finally having a replay booth take an immediate look and overrule/confirm the call on the field is the glaringly obvious answer across all sports. We’ve been subjected to years of too-serious dudes interminably staring at TV screens trying to decide whether their own call was correct. It’s damn near rendered my beloved NBA unwatchable. Is there any way we can force the other sports leagues to accept this model?

The only thing that makes replay palatable is speed. Regardless of sport, regardless of the call, no fan wants to wait around for the game to continue, especially in tense moments. We already have enough stoppages in the form of timeouts, ad breaks, and all of that other shit. Adding in more stoppages so that Gene Steratore can drone on for five minutes about catching processes deadens the entire fan experience. With replay assist, the NFL figured out a way to make that process more efficient by orders of magnitude. It’s not flawless—no type of officiating ever is—but it’s tolerable. That last part is all that matters.

And it’s the part that the NBA seems to have ignored entirely. Fix that shit, Adam Silver. Don’t turn the final minute of a kick-ass game into a Congressional hearing.

Email of the week!

Eric:

I'm 40 years old and moved to Thailand last November for early retirement. One of my goals was to get in shape, and ultimately try my hand at a Muay Thai Fight. I've dropped 20kg and will be fighting at 75kg in about 10 days. I'm feeling pretty good, all things considered. I've never fought before (save one amateur fight earlier this year, no elbows or knees allowed, leg protection worn, demolished the guy). 

My question is, what kind of opponent should I be hoping for? A Muay Thai pro who will teach me why 40-year-olds shouldn't start fighting this late in life? A young guy who I can bully with old man strength? A tuktuk driver who fights every week for a little income supplement, but takes a dive at the first bit of solid contact? A fellow foreigner who is also a newbie? Something else? Who would you want to fight? I won't know my opponent til a day or two before, and I probably won't know anything about their fight history.

A baby. I’d want to fight a baby. It’s the safest choice.