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 rug spills, shitty Chinese takeout mainstays, college visits, and more.
Your letters:
Mike:
My son is very smart: straight A’s, top 1% pre SAT scores. Maybe not Harvard smart, but close. So if you could advise him on college choice, excluding Ivies and Stanford, where would you point him? Pretend cost is no object. He’s 16 and has no idea what he wants to study or where—can’t even provide a quadrant of the country, can’t tell us big school or small. Essentially he’s a lump of clay looking for molding.
Mike, have you ever come to the right person. I just had to attend our area high school’s college fair with our 17-year-old son, and I took notes! For example, did you know that southeastern U.S. schools have experienced a massive surge in applications, while non-Ivy liberal arts schools are desperate for more of them? Or that a lot of schools went test optional in the wake of the pandemic, which resulted in a massive spike in average test score listing per school because, for a brief stretch, only the kids who got 1601 on the SAT submitted theirs? Those same schools are now like, Actually, we’re not test optional anymore, because they no longer have to pretend to care about test bias. In fact, our keynote speaker had a line graph that showed how minority admissions have suffered in the wake of Trump 2.0 and holy, holy shit. If you’d like to see evil quantified, that chart was a useful example.
But everything in the above paragraph was about getting into a college, not choosing a college. The latter is a much more arduous topic, given the literal thousands of colleges that your child has to choose from. My wife and I have already sent one kid away to college, and we’re primed to send away another shortly. Here’s some of what I’ve learned from all of that:
-The vast majority of colleges in America accept well over 50 percent of their applicants. So worrying that your kid won’t get into any college at all—and I very much had that worry—is unfounded. Your kid doesn’t have to be a genius like Mike’s up there to find a place that will let them in. The continued existence of Texas A&M stands as proof.
-Teenagers are both lazy and, as Mike noted above, raw. They don’t know what the fuck they want because they don’t know who they are yet. That’s why they need to go to college in the first place. This is the time when the average copter parent likes to barge in and dictate what school/life track will be best for little Junior. If you ever watched Dead Poets Society, you know that this is a poor approach. The more effective, loving method is to sit with your kid—many times over, because they get distracted—and ask a lot of tiresome questions. Would you like a big school or a small school? Where would you like that school to be located? Somewhere cold and shitty, like Waterville, Maine? No? Where else? What would you like to study? Will you want to play a sport? What kind of college accepts kids with your statline? You will ask your kid these questions many, many times. You’ll also get different answers each time, along with an endless stream of "I don’t knows." Then you’ll give up and tell them to just go to the University of Phoenix.
-Book campus tours yourself, because your kid will be too lazy to do it before spots are all filled up. Take virtual tours and classes if they’re offered.
-See which colleges do rolling admissions, because rolling admissions are a godsend. Our daughter got into one school in October of her senior year. Everything after that was gravy, man. All admissions should be rolling.
-Buy the Fiske guide. Not only does it have useful information, but it’s great nostalgia porn for us parents who are using their children’s college hunt to relive their own college hunt from 30 years ago. I know that an annual Why Your College Sucks reference manual, with real talk from current students, would sell a bazillion copies every year. But I’m too lazy to put in all of the legwork such a guide would entail. So the Fiske one will have to do. It’s not blunt, but it still has way more personality than the Princeton Review guide.
-Nag your kid in stages. High school students have a lot of shit already on their plate, and they process information at their own speed. Give them all the information so that they can mull it over in between AP classes, soccer practice, and trying to get laid for the first time. Occasionally nudge as required. Don’t hold it over them 24/7.
-Remind them that college is what you make of it, and that where you go to school shouldn’t define your self-worth. Then tell them that they have to attend MIT or else you’ll sell them to the highest bidder.
Jake:
I got a little high last night and, besides listening to the Distraction episode, watched S4E2 of Industry. Mistake! It was a disorienting drug trip episode. There was a lot more creepy hallucinated priest quoting Cormac McCarthy in the monitors than you would want, ideally. My question: What TV/movie experience of yours was LEAST enhanced by being stoned?
Rebel Moon. I popped a gummy midway through that piece of shit, hoping I’d at least be able to laugh at how bad it was. Nope. The weed did nothing. Didn’t help when I had to see Melania in theaters, either. Irredeemably bad movies on weed are still irredeemably bad movies.
Now let’s talk about Industry for a moment, because I’m on the verge of bailing. For most of its run, Industry has been my soap opera of choice. It has tons of drugs and sex, but it also did an excellent job depicting the grunts (relative term) forced to labor on the trading floor of a big investment firm. These characters all had to work with the sword of Damocles hanging over them. If they didn’t work 18-hours days, if their market positions fell below expectations, or if they dared to oppose the wider human damage caused by their work—including the damage their own bosses did directly TO them—then they’d be cast out of the finance sector altogether. That’s great material for a soap opera, and Industry usually made the most out of it. I also liked all the parts where the characters got naked.
The problem is that all of those same characters eventually rose up and became bosses themselves. So now I’m watching a show where mercenaries, heiresses, drug-addled tech bros, and sexual manipulators are all scheming to out-maneuver one another. The one character who still felt grounded by the end of Season 3, Robert (Harry Lawtey), isn’t coming back this season at all. Instead, we get a Season 4 arc featuring a vague Elon Musk stand-in (Kit Harington) and a vague Jeffrey Epstein stand-in (Max Minghella), both of whom are a drag on the story. There’s no one left to root for on Industry, so now it feels like nothing is at stake. It's like watching an inferior version of Succession. If Industry had stayed in the cubicle farm, it would have been better off for it. Because that’s where the real conflict was. More important, it’s where the show had characters that you and I could relate to.
Michael:
How much would you need to be paid to sleep while wearing a bike helmet for a month?
A billion dollars, and even then I still might say no. That’s how much a good night’s sleep matters to me. Due to my middle age, I have a growing list of requirements to achieve it. I need a firm mattress. I need one pillow under my head and two pillows under my legs (I’ve had to call down for extra pillows on certain hotel stays). I need my jammy jams. I need a blanket on top of my comforter when it’s cold at night. I need my dog within petting distance on the bed. And I need two supermodels to gently fan me with palm fronds as I slip off into a long, peaceful slumber. Without any of those things in place, I suffer greatly. You want me to be awake? In this economy? I don’t think so.
So you see why adding a bike helmet to the equation is a nonstarter for me. I own a bike helmet. It’s a comfortable bike helmet, one with a little extra cushioning to protect my damaged brain. I wear it every time I ride, like a good little boy. But to bed? Fuck that shit. I just had a neck spasm thinking about the idea, and so did you. A billion dollars is no good to me if I have to suffer a dislocated spinal cord for it. I’d rather spend a month in prison for the dough. At least my cot would be flat.
Greg:
What kind of things do you and your family order from an old school US Chinese restaurant? I think it's always interesting to see what things out of the typical menu of 100 different items people tend to gravitate toward. My typical family order is some selection out of orange chicken, lo mein, tofu and black bean sauce, sesame noodles, pork dumplings, and Chow Ho Fun flat noodles, moo shu pork, Szechuan green beans, or chicken and snow peas.
Fuck, now I want some shitty Chinese food. I don’t care that it’s 9:18 a.m. as I’m writing this, I want some shrimp toast NOW, god dammit.
Which brings me to Greg’s question. Anytime we order Chinese food, I gotta throw an order of shrimp toast into the cart. I can’t make shrimp toast myself, not the way China Garden does it. I’m talking about the truly evil shrimp toast, where the bread is so overly saturated with frying oil that it starts leaking grease the second I bite into it. That’s primo shit. The best part is that I’m the only member of my family who likes shrimp toast, so I get to eat all of it. Ask any dad, and they’ll tell you their favorite thing in life is whenever they get food all to themselves. That’s me, baby. I have been eating Chinese takeout since I was a little boy, and they haven’t altered the shrimp toast recipe in that timespan. They haven’t changed any of the recipes, really, but this paragraph is reserved for shrimp toast praise and shrimp toast praise only. Shrimp toast.
As for all the other shit my family orders, here’s a fairly predictable list of what our cart looks like:
General Tso’s chicken or orange chicken. Same diff.
Moo shu anything. Usually chicken instead of pork, because no one else in my family wants pork over chicken. Plus extra hoisin sauce on the side, because hoisin sauce is pure goodness. I keep a whole bottle of Lee Kum Kee in the fridge, just in case there’s not enough hoisin sauce with my order (and there never is). Also, cold moo shu out of the fridge is one of the better Chinese leftover experiences.
Singapore noodles. When I was in my 20s, I treated chow fun like it was the most authentic Chinese dining experience one could have. This despite the fact that my takeout joint usually sent me a container of wide noodles that were all fused together into a kind of mung bean kugel. Now that I’m older and pickier, I go right for the Singapore noodles, because they’re always nice and thin. Perfect for face stuffing.
Chicken teriyaki skewers. We have two teenage boys, so having extra meat on hand is always vital.
Scallion pancake. For extra fat.
Cumin anything.
Chicken and cashews. My wife’s favorite. Do I carefully pick out all of the water chestnuts from my serving? You know I do.
Dumplings. But only if the restaurant in question makes a good dumpling. I’ve grown too snobby to tolerate shitty steamed dumplings, the ones that are 50 percent dough. As a certified dumpling fiend, I require a bit more craftsmanship now.
You’ll notice that egg rolls and spring rolls are conspicuously absent from the above list. This is because, takeout-wise, Vietnamese rolls own the shit out of Chinese rolls. I can’t go back to boring-ass egg rolls after having my skull blown by some cha gio from across town. I also never order any of the soups, because they’re pointless.
HALFTIME!
Adrian:
Cigarette ads have been banned for a long time, for obvious reasons. I know it’s not happening anytime soon, but do you see a time when gambling ads will be banned, and what would it take for that to happen?
Angry moms! Angry moms have dictated national policy ever since I was a kid. Who forced the record industry to adopt content warning labels? Angry moms. Who made the prevention of drunk driving into a nationwide cause? Angry moms. Who turned the 2024 election into a referendum on grocery prices? Angry moms. If you want a representative in Congress to listen to your plea, you send an angry mom their way. Only a NRA lobbyist has more pull.
And I’m wagering that a great many moms and dads are pissed about the burgeoning online gambling crisis. The statistics are dire and the individual stories are even worse. Over a third of boys under 17 have gambled in the past year. Why? Because DraftKings and FanDuel have gone the full Joe Camel and are spamming the airwaves with incessant ads to lure young Americans into using their product. The cause and effect is so obvious as to be offensive.
While I can’t count on adults in America to act like actual adults, I know they don’t like it when their own children grow suicidal over gambling losses, or they rack up six-figure debts that mommy and daddy will have to pay for. There’s already a Moms Against Gambling advocacy group, although their homepage looks like it was designed by the year 1999. If a group like that gets traction in the press, then it will become an “issue” that gets brought up on the cable news shows. And then, many years from now, we’ll get formal, half-assed regulation. Believe in the cause!
Todd:
Let's say Trump dies in Year 3 of this term. Does JD Vance go away from MAGA to the be a Never Trumper again, trying to get independent voters? Or does this smug asshole double down on all of the base instincts he's sold himself out to, and continue the fascism?
I’ve always thought that when Trump dies—which will happen a thousand years from now—the spell will break. I’m not saying America will be cured, but there’s no logical successor to Trump in the modern American fascist movement. No one else is so effortlessly able to command the world’s attention the way Trump can. JD Vance sure fucking can’t; he’s just a sentient groundhog puppet who does whatever the money tells him to do. So when Trump kicks the bucket, which again will never happen, the freakshow coalition he’s amassed will splinter because no one else has the force of personality to keep it together. Instead, we’ll all be left to fight over the mess that President Barfbag has left behind. That’s my prediction and, as you know, my political predictions are never wrong.
By the way, it’s funny that I’ve spent the past few years thinking to myself, “All we need to defeat fascism is someone who has the same dictatorial visibility and chutzpah of Trump, but wants to use it for good!” I have a college education. I should not be this stupid.
Brian:
I have to say I was surprised you bashed a fellow author/writer (Chuck Klosterman) without even reading the book in question (Football). I don't think you would like it if someone else made smartass remarks about any of your books (which I have read and enjoyed very much!) without actually reading them. It's bush league, even more so when you are both in the same writing fraternity, so to speak. I didn't really have a question, I just think you should either come to a conclusion after reading said book, or keep your mouth shut.
Brian, I’m a blogger. It’s my job to have uninformed opinions about everything, including the works of Chuck Klosterman. If I kept my mouth shut, I’d go broke. Do you want that happening? I. Don’t. Think. So.
You’re fair to shit on me, though. I’ve never read any Chuck Klosterman book, so it’s not really fair to goof on his newest book using just a single, extrapolated paragraph from it. I wouldn’t like it if someone did that with one of my books. But they have, and they will. That’s the information environment that you and I are living in now. No one reads past the headline, or they “read” an article by looking at a screengrabbed excerpt that someone posted to social media. Every word on the internet ends up ignored at best and twisted at worst. It’s a world in which context has gone utterly, irrefutably extinct. I can’t hide from the fact that I’ve helped contribute to this problem. I might be a jolly hater, but I’ve hated all the same. Brian is right to ding me for it.
I still bet that Klosterman book is lousy, though.
Michael:
I dropped a bottle of Listerine and it spilled onto the living room carpet. I'm pissed about it, but it's not the worst thing to drop into carpet. Can you please rank the top 10 worst things to spill onto living room carpet?
Not gonna do the listicle thing, but I will give you the No. 1 answer, which is soy sauce. My old man once spilled soy sauce all over his car. Guess when the stench cleared out? I’ll tell you: never. You never want to spill anything on your carpet that will leave a lasting stain, or a lasting odor. Soy sauce, a magnificent creation in every other context, does both. I suppose vomit would be even worse, but you usually don’t spill vomit onto a carpet. That usually comes right from the source.
Alex:
I’m a lifelong Bears fan living in Chicago (the city, not the burbs), and I keep having an emotional reaction to the team for sure leaving the city and maybe leaving the state. I won’t go on a rant, but I feel hurt by them maybe moving to Indiana. Is this warranted, or do I need to grow up?
You become a sports fan so that that part of you never has to grow up. So yeah, you’re allowed to be hurt by the Bears using Indiana as leverage to get a stadium they don’t need. This comes on the heels of them trying to move to Arlington Heights, Ill., which would be just as inconvenient for city residents to visit. Even though the Indiana legislature is now involved in this process, it still reeks of the Bears attempting to rope various municipalities into their reality distortion field. They care more about getting that free money than they do winning a Super Bowl, and that’s been the case for a long time now. So any longtime Bears fan has a right to feel abandoned. Another helping of Polish sausage will help dull the pain, my friend.
Michael:
You get into a road rage incident and are forced to leave your vehicle to engage in battle with the other driver. You have a choice of the following the weapons to take with you: a 42" sjambok, a tube sock 1/3 filled with nickels, or a tiny folding blade from a Swiss Army knife. Which weapon are you going with, and why?
Well first, let me look up what a “sjambok” is.
Oh wow, it’s a three-foot whip made from a rhino’s ass! I’m taking that, brother. You want the reach advantage in any fight, especially if you’re old and frail and helpless like me. The BMW driver who hit me is free to come at me with his switchblade, but he’s gonna feel the sting of the lash many times over before he can even get near me. Suck my balls, Todd! This whippin’s for you!
Sean:
This came up on Bluesky in the wake of the Tony Clark situation. What’s a worse betrayal, sleeping with your brother’s wife, or sleeping with your wife’s sister?
My wife’s sister. No-brainer. Would you rather piss off your wife than your brother? Then you must be a Kelce of some sort.
Bryan:
I am something of a Robe King myself, but I'm sometimes at a loss of what to wear under it. Commando is a no-go, boxers-only feels creepy somehow, and I’m certainly not putting it on over the clothes I wore for the day. What's the proper sartorial choice here?
I usually just wear it over my lounge clothes (T-shirt, loose pants). But here is where I confess that I don’t wear a robe that much anymore. This is because I prefer the pocket location on my hoodie. More important, the 13-year-old finally grew tall enough to steal my Ugg robe (it was the best one I tested for Outside magazine) and never give it back. He’s also the same shoe size as me now, so my prized collection of Skechers slip-ons could also be in danger (they’re in no danger).
Email of the week!
Jim:
Hey man. Thanks for including my email in the latest Funbag, but I did some back of the envelope calculations and am not giving up on this Connor thing. That name is way over-indexed in the NHL. Gory details below:
Over the last four years, active NHL rosters have included between 13-22 Connors (or some variant of the name). And during that time there were ~500 US/Canadian players in the league, which means that "Connors" represetned about 2.5% to 4.5% of the combined US/Canadian NHL player population. I assume most players are 18-30 years old. So, I looked at US and Canadian name popularity for those born in the aughts and, during that time, Connors represented only about .2% of males born in the US and .7% in Canada. Do a little weighting (3:1 Canadian vs US hockey players) and "Connor" is over-represented by 5x to 7x in the NHL.
I spent a couple hours down this rabbit hole, but don't have the fancy databases or interns to comb through this more precisely. I bet you do. Still interested to know the golden names in other sports.
And get this: Our men’s team had a player with the LAST name Connor on it, too! That gave us two Connors over the Canadian team’s one. Was that the difference in those two countries’ epic gold medal battle? I say yes.
