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 Ozempic, sex with Muppets, Matchbox cars, chips and dip, and more.
Happy Election Day, everyone. Get out there and take care of business. And if you need something to tide you over as the returns come in, I’ve got just the thing. Your letters:
Dan:
My wife and I ate at a B Dubs the other night and she ordered a 10-piece boneless wing plate with fries. She asked for half honey BBQ sauce and half medium. When they brought out our meals, she discovered that they had MIXED the two sauces together and put them on each wing. How do you feel about this?
Am I stoned for this question or just normal? Because if I’m stoned and/or 12 years old, mixing wing sauces is as instinctual as going ham on the freestyle Coke machine. But if I’m in a normal state of mind, I want what I ordered. I don’t like surprises arriving at my table. That’s how mayonnaise happens.
And I really don’t want surprises at any Buffalo Wild Wings, a restaurant seemingly engineered to dissatisfy any sober person in attendance. All of B-Dubs’ sauces are some mix of corn syrup and industrial flavoring solvent, and yet I have no faith that any two of those sauces would work harmoniously when mixed together. It’s like when I was a kid and tried mixing together McDonald’s BBQ sauce and sweet and sour sauce for my McNuggets. Sounded like a good idea. Wasn’t.
In general, I’m suspicious of chain restaurants getting in on the sauced fried chicken trend. Every B-Dubs and DQ saw Korean Fried Chicken explode and was like, Hey, we can do that too! Come try our soy garlic Chicklets! No you can’t, and no I won’t. I got a Bonchon 10 minutes away from my house. If I wanna be sauced, I’m gonna go to the pros.
Sean:
If you were a young lad of middling QB talent, which QB room would you rather be a part of: the Browns or Jets? Each is horrible in its own way, but you go with the Jets, right?
Absolutely. Aaron Rodgers is an insufferable public presence, but talk to him about his day job and suddenly he’s a normal, incisive person. I’ve heard this from people who have covered Rodgers (which I have not), but you also see it in a lot of press conference answers that get left on the aggregation cutting floor. The man knows his shit, and is more than happy to explain a Dagger concept to people in between vaguely expressing his displeasure with Garrett Wilson.
If I were a Spencer Rattler-type working as Rodgers’s non-threatening understudy, I strongly doubt he’d take me under his wing and become a fabled veteran QB mentor. For one thing, every young QB has a mentor in the form of his position coach. For another, no active QB is gonna devote a significant portion of his time, which is extremely valuable during the season, to coaching some other guy.
They don’t need to, anyway. Athletes learn by osmosis. Put a young one in the same room as an older one, and the former will naturally take cues from the latter just by watching them. I went to college to learn how to be a writer, but I learned how to be a pro by getting out into the workforce and seeing how the people I aspired to be did their jobs. Writing a blog post and attempting to win the New York Jets a Super Bowl are galaxies apart from being the same thing, but everything is modeling. You learn to throw the ball by watching the best throwers. You (OK, I) learn to cook by paying attention during cooking shows. You teach your kids good habits by practicing those same habits in front of them. And once you’ve acquired expert proficiency in these tasks, you know to stay the fuck away from the Browns organization, no matter how much money they offer you.
Aaron:
Which Muppet would be the best in bed, assuming Jim Henson gave them anatomically correct genitalia? And no, Gonzo can’t use his nose.
The obvious choice is Animal, because he’s Animal. If he gets after it in bed as hard as he gets after it behind the kit, we’re talking about some vigorous puppet fucking. But I’m gonna swerve on you and go with Miss Piggy. You don’t have to think about it for very long to understand. There’s a reason Kermit sticks with her.
Vince:
Game threads are poison, where humanity goes to die. Agreed?
Like, on message boards? I haven’t frequented a message board in decades, but I haven’t gone back to that well for a reason. I’m so used to watching my team’s games by myself that I don’t really want other voices crowding my mind. This is especially true if my team is losing. Scrolling through Twitter while we’re winning (yes, I still do it) is a fucking party. Doing likewise while we’re down by just a touchdown and is a neverending stream of complaints, disdain, and shitty troll jokes. It does nothing to enhance the proceedings. To go online is to cede control of the company around you to the chaos of the universe. I need that control back when we’re down seven at the half to a piece-of-shit Colts team. It’s just sound business.
Christian:
Halloween songs are better than Christmas songs. I will not be taking any questions.
What Halloween songs are there besides the “Monster Mash”? Like, does “Bark at the Moon” count (great song)? Christmas songs are a whole genre. For Halloween, I have to grasp at straws. I know that a lot of people have Halloween playlists that they update on Spotify and then blast out to the world, but I don’t have much use for them. I’d rather watch a scary movie on Halloween instead (my choice this year was The Witch, which ended up being pretty boring), but I do appreciate people who are super into Halloween even if I’m not one of them.
Also, this is the time of year when the retail sector flips the Christmas switch, and every store suddenly has gift displays of Ferrero Rocher at the end of every aisle and Christmas music blasting through the speakers 24/7. I had my first Mariah exposure just this past weekend. And you know what? I was down with it. If you work in retail, I can understand why this would be hell for you. And if you wanna recycle the complaint that Christmas décor came out way too early this year (this is also known as Pumpkin Spice Derangement Syndrome, or PSLDS), you’re more than welcome to. But I’m a documented Christmas lover, so I don’t mind the creep.
Not even this year, when I lost my dad. I was warned that the holidays would be rough after his passing, and yet I’m strangely looking forward to them. I banked a ton of Christmas memories with my dad, enough that the residual warmth will carry over into all future Christmases. I heard Mariah the other day and wasn’t triggered. Mostly, it just sounded out of place because it was still 75 degrees outside. But once the weather cooperates, bring all of that hoary shit to me. I’ll be your Santa.
No “Happy Christmas,” though. That song is unbearable.
Eric:
How far are we from having to place a bet in order to "unlock" an NFL game so we can watch it?
I hate that you put this idea in my head. I’ll get you for this.
Will:
I'm currently sitting in an empty theater to watch the new Beetlejuice movie. What is an older movie you'd want to see in theaters that probably won't get an anniversary release?
Miller’s Crossing. But the theater has to be packed, and everyone in attendance must be a genetic clone of me who is terminated immediately after the screening is over. A theater full of Drews reciting every line out loud in real time, and then high-fiving each other when Albert Finney takes down a car with his Tommy gun while still in his nightclothes. A magical night for me, and only me.
I’ve only been to one re-release screening in my lifetime, by the way. It was for the original Star Wars when the Special Edition was released on big screens in 1997. I had a good time. I was also in England. And SUPER drunk. That’s a good time to be super drunk. Shitty VFX updates matter less when you’ve got a bottle of Jameson in you.
Brian:
I have never supported a team from the city I lived in. I root for an MLB team from where I was born, my parents' alma mater, and the NFL team from where I lived in elementary school. In some respects I feel like a loyal fan, because I have never supported other teams, but I also feel like a fraud because I have no real connection to those places, and have never had the community/bonding experience of rooting for a team alongside my neighbors, coworkers, etc. Is this normal? Should I feel bad about supporting my "original" teams despite not having a real connection to them?
Not at all. I said this a couple weeks ago, but every team is national now. You’re not forced to root for your local team because they’re literally the only game in town anymore. You have options, which means that you can attach yourself to any team for any number of reasons: uniform color, cool players, lots of championships, your grandpa loves them, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I have an irrational distaste for sports bigamists and sports fan divorcées. But if you have one team you’ve stuck with for your whole life, I’ll always respect whatever reason you glommed onto them in the first place. That’s true even if you like the Packers. If I see a Packers fan out in the wild, I don’t immediately spit on them. I’m shockingly chill about all of that. Root for whatever team works for you, I won’t slander you as an impostor. After all, I’m a Vikings fan who didn’t know what hot dish was until 2018 (true story).
Jonathan:
What’s the simplest looking actually complex and difficult feat in football? For context, watching a field goal from a distance makes it seem simple but all the moving parts including the actual kick make it both complex and quite difficult.
There’s actually a whole genre of NFL reporting that zeroes in on seemingly innocuous details like this, and they’re way more interesting to read than the 500th iteration of “Can Lamar Jackson finally get the Ravens over the hump this year?” All pro football is hard, even the basic shit. Hold a three-point stance for longer than five seconds and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
So I could pick from a whole menu of options to answer your question, but I’ll go with the center/snap exchange. It looks easy, but what happens anytime your starting center goes out and the backup takes his place? Fumbles, and shitloads of them. It’s maddening to witness as a fan, because your team fucked up a play before they even had a chance to start it. How can they be so dumb? you ask yourself. Well, it’s because the new center and the QB need to have their timing lined up just so. That’s why any new battery will practice snaps on the sideline before heading out onto the field, and then they fuck up the snap anyway.
Also, I fielded a snap once and the center jammed my thumb with the ball. It fucking hurt. Didn’t like it.
HALFTIME!
D:
As someone from the writing generation that ruthlessly mocked establishment sportswriters like Rick Reilly, Peter King, Mitch Albom, Gregg Easterbrook, and yes, I'll include Bill Simmons, how do you stop yourself from becoming them as you get older?
I can’t. Live long enough, and you can’t help but become the same as the old boss. I made my bones shitting on all the gentlemen listed up above, but of course I was an avid reader of them all well before all of that (with the exception of Albom, who I never read but did watch on The Sports Reporters before it got rebooted as a Zoom call). I printed out Simmons and Easterbrook columns to read on my commute. I futzed with the dates in the Sports Illustrated URL every Monday morning so I could read King’s MMQB column before it had officially been posted online. And I read SI cover to cover throughout basically all of the 1990s. I was always bound to be inspired by these gentlemen, whether I fought against it or not.
I used to chafe at any comparisons people made between me and the darlings I yearned to kill—one Canadian newspaper dragged Someone Could Get Hurt as the kind of money-grab book that Reilly or Tony Kornheiser would have written, and I’ve never forgiven them—but I’m too tired to bother anymore. I’m gonna show my age whether I like it or not, and I’m gonna wear my influences on my sleeve.
But I have other influences. Other interests, too. So I have to forgive myself if I get too saccharine like Albom, too chesty like Simmons, too out-of-touch like Reilly, or too Dad-ish like King. That shit’s gonna show up in my work, but only in spots. Other times, I’m still gonna sound like Sam Kinison screaming until his head explodes. That helps balance out things. I also try to be as clinical as I can in assessing my own work. I read my drafts like someone else wrote them. And if I don’t like what I’m reading—if I don’t like the writer—then I fix it. That’s how you keep your voice as a writer your own.
It also helps to write cool novels, because none of those guys ever have.
Clark:
In an earlier Funbag, you wrote of semaglutide that, "the gold rush for Ozempic is well underway. Word's out. In five years, everyone will be on this shit." Based on your experience in the ad industry and your gut feeling (pun not originally intended), how will BIG FOOD respond if appetites everywhere do indeed get suppressed?
With price gouging, baby. It’s like when Americans realized that soda was bad for them and started avoiding it. That compelled our processed food overlords to slickly repackage junk drinks under brand names like Vitamin Water and to sell slim cans of Pepsi at a 30-percent markup. These fuckers can adapt to any environment, even one where people, on aggregate, consume food in lower quantities. They’re all huddled together at Frito-Lay headquarters right now, brainstorming ways to fuck you over anew. Come 2030, you’ll be 100 pounds lighter but forced to consume Doritos one at a time via a subscription service. That’s when we riot. You can eradicate democracy all you like. But if you fuck Americans on the price of Twinkies, they won’t stand for it.
Ben:
At a recent social gathering, there was a big bowl of onion dip with potato chips next to it, so I grabbed a chip and dug in. The chip was a ruffled sour cream and onion flavored chip. Why? Onion dip requires PLAIN ridged/ruffled potato chips, right?
As far as I’m concerned, yes. I don’t like mixing flavored chips with dip. Even Buffalo Wild Wings wouldn’t force such alchemy on me. If I’m eating a Nacho Cheese Dorito, I want to taste cheese dust and nothing else. And if I’m dipping a potato chip into a bowl of Helluva Good dip (which is true to its name), I want a plain chip for the task. Otherwise, you got two different flavors of sodium fighting against one another. Suboptimal.
This is a difficult sentiment to convey to people like my children, who use Hint of Lime Tostitos (it’s more than a hint) anytime they make nachos. I’m sorry kids, but this is a clear breach of nacho protocol. You don’t see real Tex-Mexican-Americans serving nachos with those chips, do you? ¡NUNCA EN LA VIDA! I am a junk food purist. This is why I don’t dunk Halloween candy into my Hawaiian Punch.
Adam:
I recently saw a friend who moved across the country for the first time in a few years. We stay close via text and phone calls, but upon seeing him up close I couldn't help but notice the clumps of hair protruding from the bottom of his nostrils. And he’s tall so looking from below is like staring into Wilford Brimley’s eyebrows. We are both in our early/mid 40s and have known each other since college, and he is otherwise stylish and well groomed. What is my duty, as his friend, to alert him to the nose bush?
If he’s your best friend, you can lightly rib him for it. Or you can lament your own nose hair issue (I’m pretending you have the same problem) as a way of inviting him to mention his own. Chances are he’ll take the bait.
Because every middle-aged person knows about their hair problems. They confront it in the bathroom mirror every morning. Sometimes I look at my own nose and it looks like the Dow scrubbing bubbles are trying to escape it. Then I glance upward and see a single eyebrow hair extending two full inches away from my face. And my ear hair borders on Englishman. You won’t take me by surprise if you mention this to my face. I don’t like it anymore than you do. So when my wife tells me that I’m getting a little too Werewolves in London, I don’t get pissed. I go grab the grooming kit. She’s my wife. She’s entitled to call it out.
Some random parent at a soccer game though? Hey fuck you buddy. Only your inner circle gets the privilege of telling you that you look like shit.
Andrew:
My wife and I have been married 13 years, and two years into marriage I realized she does two very specific things that I fail to comprehend: 1) She never closes the cap on bottles for things like dish soap, shampoo, or face lotion, and 2) if she folds and puts away my socks and undershirts (typically my purview), she never turns them right-side-in. She just leaves them inside out. While sometimes annoying, I also realize it's little quirks like these that I would miss terribly if she were to ever leave me or pass before I do. Does your wife or your children do anything odd little things like that you know annoy you but you'd also miss someday?
Oh, just everything. You love a person and you love all of them, even the annoying things. My daughter has been away at college for just two months and I miss her coming down in the morning only to speak in pissy grunts, her fun habit of leaving pasta bowls unrinsed in the sink overnight, her sloppy-ass roomkeeping, and her open declaration at the dinner table that she’s not that hungry because she and her boyfriend just went out for pho at 4:30 p.m. I can’t wait for her to come home for Thanksgiving so that I can complain about her bogarting my Hyundai.
And I wouldn’t be able to live without my wife riding my jock. Whenever I go away on business, there’s no one around to tell me to stop leaving all of my shit around. You’d think this would feel freeing, but it just feels abnormal. Wrong. My wife, like Andrew’s, also never turns my laundry right side in if she happens to be folding it. She’s teaching me a lesson when she does it, which bothered me until the first time I came upon an inside-out shirt in HER laundry pile. Ohhh, the karma. The sweet, sweet karma. The passive-aggressive dance is what I live for.
Unlike Andrew’s wife, mine does NOT leave anything unclosed when she’s finished using it. But guess who does? Just the other day, I pulled a little dried-up plug out of the spout of my leave-in conditioner and said to her, “These little nubs keep clogging the bottle!” To that, she said, “It’s because you don’t close it.” And then I said, “Oh.” And that is why we need a woman president.
Christopher:
With football season in full bore, we all know there's nothing better than the midgame nap. Curious your power rankings of the best commentators to nod off to? Brad Nessler tops the list for me. Those dulcet tones are like a warm blanket, and he knows how to pick his spots. If you're awaken from your slumber, something awesome is happening.
That’s an excellent choice, especially with Uncle Verne now retired. If I’m watching a mildly consequential college football game, I am primed for nappage. Hearing a long familiar voice like Nessler’s in that moment is like mainlining tryptophan. The man’s not boring me. He’s lulling me. I feel warm and snuggly just thinking about it.
Second place goes to Jim Nantz. I make fun of Jim Nantz all the time, because he’s a freak. But the man has gorgeous pipes, and my eyelids react accordingly.
Matt:
I grew up with Matchbox cars. We made our own sound effects (I also do about five kinds of firearms, from long-shot sniper rifle to stun gun). I’m afraid it’s a disappearing art.
Fear not. Until the end of humanity, little kids will always enjoy making weird noises. The internet didn’t kill any of that. When my own kids were smaller, they did the “vroom vroom!” thing with their toys (because I was doing it). They held up toy planes and made buzzing engine sounds. They had a running soundboard of every emergency siren. And they still make fart sounds to crack each other up. Art lives!
Email of the week!
Dusty:
Last week, I was chilling with my girlfriend while my eggs were cooking, and I found like five old D&D dice on the coffee table. We randomly started rolling them and calling which numbers would come up. We each nailed it a few times. But on like her fifth-ish roll (this was literally within the first five to 10 minutes), my girlfriend threw down five numbers, and EVERY FUCKING ONE HIT. These were not six-sided dice. One was a d20, two were d12, one was d10, and one was d6. I cannot do math, but I tried converting the odds online (probably did it wrong) and it came out to 0.000000000000695%. I am still shook from witnessing it.
And you thought you wouldn’t see history made early in the day today.
