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 Bluesky, farts, Sean Payton, and more.
Your letters:
Dan:
My big cuddly pitty always gets so mad when we fart near him. He's my angel baby dog, who lives for any chance to curl up under my arm or with his head on my lap. But he gets so offended when I fart near him. Sits up with some cranky grunts and looks me straight in the eye like I need to apologize for it. Then he’ll either leave, or he'll lie back down with the most dramatic five second sigh. This is a guy whose butt can peel the paint off the wall, but god forbid I drop one near him. He's a dog, it's not like he won't smell it if he's on the other side of the room! Why does my dog get mad at me when I fart on him?
You offended his primal instincts. Dogs can’t talk, so they have to communicate via barks, snarls, whines, and excretions. You think you’re just farting, but your darling Clementine believes you’re marking his rightful territory by polluting it with your own distinct blend of methane and spices. He feels betrayed. Besieged, even. Fart one more time around him and he’ll eat your asshole clean out of your body.
In all seriousness though, dogs are curious beasts, and that’s the fun of owning one. My wife bought new floor rugs for the upstairs at Target the other day. When she laid them down in the hallways, our dog refused to walk on them. Instead, Carter would hug the wall and walk along the bare strip of hardwood to get to the staircase. I have no idea what his issue was with the stupid rug, but it was funny as shit that he hated them so. We returned them.
One more story. My wife grew up with a dog named Max. One time she and her brother got into an argument. They got so loud that Max got mad, so the dog walked right between them and pissed on the rug. They still laugh about it to this day.
Marcel:
Ever since I saw a news article about a fatal Tesla fire after an accident I’ve started thinking of them as yuppie cookers. What do you think? Too dated a reference?
I use “yuppie” a lot because it remains a perfect descriptor. For you kids out there, the term “yuppie” was coined in the 1980s and is short for “young urban professionals.” These folks still exist, and they’re still as shallow as they were 40 years ago. They have money. They’re proud New York Times subscribers. They have a duplex apartment tastefully appointed with shit from Restoration Hardware. They get excited about a new cupcake shop opening around the corner, and get very concerned when there’s a shooting death six neighborhoods over. You know people like this. Hell, I was one until I no longer qualified as “young.” So I very much support bringing that light epithet back into the rotation. We’re about re-live the '80s all over again anyway, so there’s no sense in half-assing it.
And please, do call Teslas that. To think I once wanted one of those cars. *shudders*
Dan:
Now that I'm full time on Bluesky I've got a chance to reset my feed curation. I get that FOMO feeling if I'm not fully informed on current events, but it's not exactly useful in my daily life. Have I just been grasping for a level of control in this time of doom? Should I cut back on, "Here's a new thing to learn about that's very bad"?
Yes to both of those things. Social media is popular because it gives you the illusion that you have some modicum of control over the world around you, when current events have proven the exact opposite. I have been on Twitter since 2008 (oh my god), and in that timespan I managed to convince myself that speaking my mind, and that shouting down lesser minds, would help in shifting the attitudes of an entire country. An entire planet. Think about how deluded you have to be to believe that typing an ephemeral missive on a platform that only a small percentage of people use, let alone check regularly, can make you king of the world. I was that pretend king. Paper was the crown. Maybe social media can help you become a professional influencer who convinces people to buy your line of terrible skin creams, but that’s about the ceiling for your digital potential. You’ll never become the next Gandhi online, but social media has long made that delusion feel tangible, which is no small attraction to both celebrities and nobodies.
The result is that everyone drawn in ends up inhabiting in a world entirely of their own creation, so you end up with hundreds of millions of people all living up their own asses. And that’s how you end up with Donald Trump, who has lived up his own ass since birth, becoming President twice over. He’s the perfect avatar for a society that has rendered itself clueless; overdosing on information—both real and fake—and processing none of it correctly. In a world that’s nothing but spam, you get a spam president.
The bitter irony is that many people, myself included, ended up greatly disliking the alternate worlds they constructed for themselves. Even my digital utopia turned to shit. The number of tweets complaining about Twitter could circle the equator 1,000 times and still have enough slack leftover for a round trip to the sun and back.
So when Bluesky opened its doors a while back, I was more than happy to immigrate and make a new, more modest online home there. I was happy. For a bit. Then I was like, “Boy, there aren’t enough sports here!” As nostalgia-addicted as anyone else, I yearned to recreate old school Twitter in a different place. Same world, same delusions.
Lo and behold, Trump wins re-election and all of my old Twitter buddies instantly make the move. And when I say “instantly,” I mean it. My own follower account more than doubled in just about a week, and not merely because I have a great ass. Millions of people wanted the old Twitter high, and they decided that Bluesky was the place to find it. The lack of Elon at the new joint means it’s better. In fact, the transition to a zombie platform to one populated by recognizable humans is an eye-opening one. But it doesn’t make the delusion any more healthy. Pre-Twitter Elon was a fuck factory too, you know. Once the brands find Bluesky, and once Bluesky owners decide they need spam Nazis to turn a profit, we’ll have to do this shit all over again. America is country doomed to repeat its mistakes as long as it lives, and I suppose I’m no different.
But I have taken some precautions. This time around, I’ve curated my Bluesky feed almost exclusively around sports content. I’m aware of the irony, but I can’t spend another day seething about people I don’t know holding political views that are incoherent at best and unknowable at worst. I paid attention. I was outraged. Nothing came of it. So I’m gonna make my Bluesky account my little sports world: a place to type HOLY SHIT whenever the Chargers decide to blow a three-touchdown lead. I crave refuge, and I don’t want the news of world dictating my mood every waking second. I’m just here for the football, and maybe to get into pointless arguments about food. I know I’m not missing out on anything because I’ve spent the past 15-plus years searching for answers inside my stupid phone and never finding any.
Sean:
A co-worker, who's a vile Packers fan, asked me, a vile Bears fan, a question that I'll ask you, a vile Vikings fan: how much winning can the Detroit Lions do before you hate them as much as the other teams in the division? We agreed that there's a Triangle of Hate between Chicago, Green Bay, and Minnesota, and that no one hates the Lions because they've been so bad for so long. We also agreed that a Super Bowl victory was the breaking point. So how much hate do you have for the Lions?
First of all, please inform the Bears fan that there is no triangle of hate. I know Bears fans despise the Packers, but the feeling is not mutual because the Packers always win that game. It’s been a one-sided rivalry for the past three decades and change. The Vikings have won this division more than any other team in it, and the Packers are second. That’s the more even rivalry, even though daddy’s little Packers always end up getting the final word. Also, Vikings fans like me haven’t hated the Bears since Mike Ditka was the head coach. Chicago’s never been good enough to merit that level of enmity, nor have the Lions. So I consider both of those teams secondary rivals at best, and usually not rivals at all.
That remains true, even now. The Vikings are desperately trying to keep pace with the Lions for the division lead, but I still can’t bring myself to hate Detroit the way I hate Green Bay. There’s not enough history, and of course the Lions still haven’t won anything of import yet. A Super Bowl this year will change that dynamic, but I’m not certain even that’ll be enough. I’m gonna need Lions fans to go the full Philadelphia in the wake of that title and pretend A) they’ve been loyal fans of their team this whole time, and B) they’re the only team in the world that exists. Given the conduct of Michigan fans during the Harbaugh regime, I think this fanbase has some real potential for earning my hatred. Having a gritlord for a head coach certainly helps goose the process along. But for now, I’ll root for Detroit to win it all if my team doesn’t. I’ll drink any good milk before it’s curdled.
Jerm:
Which is more impressive: being able to fart louder, or being able to fart longer? No change in smell or pitch. Just louder or longer.
Length! You can amplify any fart just by sitting on a wooden chair. But to draw out a fart … that takes a bit more intestinal skill. With the right mix of confidence, pelvic floor muscles, luck, and day-old Chinese food, an expert farter can turn a half-second fart into a three-second aria. Like Mariah Carey holding a high note. Even your dog will have to respect it.
JB:
I live in Milwaukee and love going to Bucks games. The atmosphere is always great, but inevitably, in the fourth quarter, the people in the fancy lower bowl seats start filtering out. No matter what the score is, they beat traffic instead of doing the important work of being home fans. Even in marquee matchups or close games, these people start leaving well before the final result is clear. We can't control their behavior, but why don't teams come up with some kind of program or lottery or some kind of system where fans in the cheaper seats (like yours truly) can move down and help keep the raucous atmosphere going until the final whistle? Unrelated to my question: Fire Doc Rivers.
Pro sports teams aren’t gonna do anything to irritate their highest paying customers, even if that customer is usually a local insurance giant who comps front row seats to clients who aren’t even from the area. It’s not the seat those people are paying for, but the division. They get their own little special place in the arena where the filthy masses can never go. That isolation is valuable to the rich. Even if they never go to a game, they want to know that they own that spot in the world, and that no one else gets to. This has always been the case with class divisions in any society, and recent events will only exacerbate the problem. When Trump won again, it was like going down with the Titanic and seeing only his best friends get spots aboard the lifeboat.
HALFTIME!
Joey:
What did you feed your kids when they were young? We, as a family, are in a horrible rut of food. My kids (four and five) eat like normal American kids, with the slight exception that my five-year old will not eat ground beef. I can only feed them pasta or beans, rice and cheese so many times in a week. Please help. My wife insisted my four-year old try squash and he gagged so hard he barfed (which was memorable because it was VERY blue, unrelated to the squash).
Every small kid has a food hangup. When you’re a kid, you have little control over anything save for what you eat. So you exercise that small amount of control where you can, even if it’s not rational to your folks. When I was little, I hated the following foodstuffs: fish, whipped cream, melted cheese (except on pizza), orange cheese, raw tomatoes, radishes, mustard, mayonnaise, tunafish, and pretty much any vegetable that wasn’t a basic salad. Save for mayo, I grew out of those hang-ups and now eat anything. The same process will happen for your own kids. There’s no exact timeline for it, and keeping your patience is nigh impossible. For roughly the first 10 years of his existence, one of my sons would eat only breakfast bars, pizza, boxed pastas, chicken nuggets, or fries. We had to take him to a food therapist (they are legion) to help him cultivate his palate, and the lessons eventually took. I am not hamstrung by any of my kid’s food issues anymore, which is good but I like going to restaurants that aren’t named Papa John’s.
But again, it took time. Almost every parent encounters this rut. Sometimes you’ll get some asshole superparent who’s like, “My Dylan has loved broccoli his whole life!” but fuck those people. The rest of us have to endure the hell of making dinners their kids won’t eat, or taking them to restaurants where they don’t wanna order anything. It blows, but time usually solves the problem so long as you continually expose them to new foods. The average kid needs to be exposed to a food something like 10-20 times before they like it. I know that’s a daunting range of numbers, but exposure can come from them merely smelling a food, or just keeping it on their plate. If they try a food and hate it, that still counts as a victory even if it doesn’t feel like it (it won’t). You go bit by bit, adhere to the gospel of food chaining, and then one day they eat like normal people. And when that day comes, it feels fucking amazing.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also suggest bribing your kids to eat. We used to have a Dare Bowl Dollar at the dinner table, where each kid got a buck if they tried something new. It worked well until the kids figured out how to game the system by insisting that no, they hadn’t tried chicken before this. Not with gravy on it! FUCK YOU PAY ME, DAD.
Lexa:
How mad do you think Sean Payton is that the Steelers, who are allergic to offense unless it comes exclusively on the ground at 3.8 yards per carry, are the team who made Russell Wilson half decent again?
Sean Payton is mad all of the time, regardless of circumstance. I could hand-deliver a $50 million check to Todd Haley II here and the first thing he’d say to me is, "THE FUCK YOU LOOKING AT?!" So Russell Wilson’s prosperity barely factors into this man’s daily rage habit. He hated Wilson from the start (understandable), got rid of him, and is now enjoying mild prosperity with the 21st century’s answer to Chad Pennington. I don’t think he regrets any of that. He was still born pissed off, though.
Barry (not Petchesky):
I don't think the problem we're dealing with these days is misinformation or disinformation. I think it's information itself. You can trace this back to the founding of CNN and the 24-hour news cycle. People are inherently lazy. They don't want to be inundated with information, they want it in small pieces. And they want it delivered in blocks at designated times, the 6 and 10 news broadcasts for example. I feel that having news constantly being announced, much of it "BREAKING," has desensitized us to the point where no information is worth consuming anymore. Add on the litany of talking heads who serve only to offer us some canned opinions we can spout as our own. I can't tell if this has devalued information or if we're just happy with our ignorance.
Probably both. After Trump won despite praising Hitler, it made me think well wait, does every American even know who Hitler was and what he did? I know who Hitler is, because I’m 48 years old and had close relatives who fought Hitler. I took it as a given that everyone knew the deal there. I don’t anymore. I have no idea what kind of damage the spam economy has wrought on the American population. Do most Americans know what democracy is? What journalism is? What a lie is? Do they know what a President does besides give long speeches? I have no fucking idea anymore, which is a bit unsettling. This is on me for assuming my country shared my values. That’s real Jake Tapper shit, and I feel stupid for it.
But, to pull this answer out of the darkness, I’m not stupid. I’m a smart fellow, which means that I can act as decent news filter for both myself and for people I care about, including the Defector readership. If Americans, in general, are incapable of cutting through the clutter, at least I can. This’ll come in handy when nuclear war arrives and I’m the only person who’s left smart enough to find a nearby airport.
Philip:
An NFL team's head coach is likely the biggest parasocial relationship a lot of people have. At least three hours per week, 18 weeks per year, you are engaged with this person, watching them, learning their ways. For example, I have spent upwards of 700 hours, conservatively, in my adult life engaged with Sean Payton. I know that man like a dog knows a turd. Not only does this outweigh most actors, musicians, podcasters, etc., I have good friends I haven't spent 700 hours with. Outside of family and coworkers, that may be the most time I've spent with anyone. Good thing I don't really drink anymore.
OK yeah, it’s not healthy to have a one-sided relationship with Sean Payton, whom we’ve already established to be a compulsive dickhead. But that relationship is a necessary evil if you follow an NFL team. Your head coach makes all of the important decisions, decisions that can have a direct impact on your state of mind. Also, the TV cuts to that coach incessantly, so you couldn’t avoid their lingering presence even if you tried. It’s perfectly normal.
By the way, you also have a parasocial relationship with your QB, your owner, your GM, your defense, your O-line (especially if they suck), and whatever broadcast team is doing your game. So that spreads the obsession out, to a healthy degree. Oh, and you also have a parasocial relationship with certain actors, directors, writers, musicians, politicians, and fictional characters. It’s an extended universe of pretend relationships, and it’s so rich and diverse that you won’t need any actual social relationships to go with it!
Did I mention I’d take a bullet for Kevin O’Connell? Because I would.
Shane:
Watching “Cross” on Amazon (I call the show “Buff Detective”) and it’s grimy, serious and depressing, which I guess dads love. I find it often emotionally manipulative and overly padded. There are times while watching I wish I could just watch Buff Defective get into car chases in his Ford Mustang and apprehend criminals while doing curls. If you were tasked with creating a cop show in 2025, would you go super serious doom-and-gloom, or go light-hearted camp?
Gloom and doom, baby. I want tortured souls and dead bodies, with a streak of black humor mixed in. That’s high quality dad shit, and it’s pretty much the only sort of TV I watch these days. With the exception of Only Murders In The Building (more on that in a second), I haven’t watched a 30-minute comedy in decades. This is partly because Trump and his people have killed comedy outright, but also because of my own tastes. I only like comedy when it’s part of a greater drama, one with real life-and-death stakes. I can’t waste my precious time finding out if Bob REALLY hearts Abishola. That doesn’t scratch the itch. I need guns. I need a man with a haunted past who’s constantly on the verge of self-destruction. And I need sex scenes where none of the participants smile. I also need the show to be well made, with good acting and a good script. If you can’t give me that, then fuck you I’m gonna watch an old Kubrick movie instead.
As for Only Murders, it’s funny but also includes enough titular murders to keep me invested. Between it and Gladiator II (out this week), I’ve found myself doubly appreciative of old hands making good, old-fashioned stories. I don’t need Ridley Scott to reinvent the wheel, I just need him to give me sturdy action and sturdy tropes. It’s like going to your favorite noodle joint, which has been making its noodles the same way for decades. Getting old means liking shit that works, because so many other things don’t.
Email of the week!
Kurt:
So after a six-month battle with stage IV breast cancer, my mom passed away peacefully on October 30. We had her viewing on November 3 (which would have been her 67th birthday), buried her on November 4, and then the election was on November 5, and that of course was a trainwreck. Every person I talk to gives me the "how you doing/we're thinking of you" stump speech, which is fine, but it seems like everyone is paralyzed from doing anything of meaning.
My mom volunteered at food pantries, and since there is now one fewer food pantry volunteer in the world, my wife and I volunteered at one today just to try to fill the hole my mom left. It was nice, and though small and localized, we actually felt like we did something meaningful. I also bought a journal so that I can write down all the things I would usually tell my mom (updates on the kids, neighborhood gossip, etc) which has been really cathartic.
I don't really have a question, I just wanted to share that we can still make things better by finding meaning where we can. This was easily the worst seven day stretch of my life, but I have found writing and helping others has gotten me to a better place. Maybe this email will help someone else get there too.
I’m betting it will. Peace and love to you all.
