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 the Trump shooting, infidelity, high toilet waterlines, and more.
Before I get into the bag, we have a bit of dirty, sinful business to attend to. Why Your Team Sucks 2024 begins next week, which means that submissions are now open. Just email us here, with “WYTS” and the name of your favorite NFL team (your team, not one you hate) in the subject line, and tell us why that team sucks. The more personal—and more learned—your animus, the better.
Oh, and one more thing: For the first time in the history of this series, we’re gonna have other writers—both from Defector and from the outside—do some of the previews. So if you were ever like, “I’m so tired of Drew’s bullshit, when are we gonna have Ray Ratto torch the Patriots instead?!” this is your time to celebrate.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, your letters:
Robert:
Help settle this classic bar debate (that has now turned into a basic litmus test for whether I'm inclined to like someone or not): Which feature defines a dragon more: its wings or its ability to breathe fire? In my experience, dragon nerds always say the wings. Supposedly, all dragons (fictitious creatures, mind you) have wings, but not all dragons breathe fire. Fair, but to this point, I always stress that the question is about which feature defines a dragon more. Put wings on a cat - what's it going to remind you of? A bird. Make a cat breathe fire, what will it remind you of now? A dragon. Still, it baffles me that answers are split to about 60% fire and 40% wings. What's your take?
You’re gonna feed me to Smaug for this, but I’m with the nerds. Wings make the dragon. I know this because I played D&D as a kid and had a working memory—long since faded—of which color dragon breathed which weapon. A D&D dragon could breathe fire, ice, acid (so metal), clouds of toxic vapor, or delicious raspberry croissants. But all of them could fly (NOTE: fact check required), because a dragon without wings is just a lizard.
Know how I know this? Because of the Komodo dragon, pictured here. Now that’s a lizard you don’t wanna fuck with, but do I feel like I’ve entered the realm of the fantastical when I see one? I don’t. I think to myself, “Pfft, that’s not a dragon. Also, The Freshman was a really good movie.” I have long resented the zoological community dubbing these oversized garbage-can scavengers “dragons” when they can’t fly for shit. Throw a Komodo off a cliff and what happens? That’s right: SPLAT. If you wanna be a real dragon, you better have wings and you better cast a shadow the size of a fucking B-52 when you’re passing overhead. You can breathe fire too if you want, but I promise you that I’ll be scared shitless even if you can’t.
Steven:
Which brother do you take to a tag team chicken wing eating competition, Rob or Rex Ryan?
Rob. Not even close. Rex Ryan is the more clean-cut Ryan brother. He gets his hair cut. He wears a suit on the ESPN set. And his foot fetish videos don’t smash cut right to anal. Rob Ryan, on the other hand, is the dirtiest dog to ever walk an NFL sideline. He’d house 100 wings and then let out a five-minute belch while taking his pants down. Rob Ryan eats the same way he coaches: like a man with nothing to lose.
Adrian:
I am Australian and have never had the opportunity to go to a Chilli’s. Right now I am at the top of the tallest building in South America (in Santiago, Chile). There is a Chilli’s up here. Should I go? I’ll need an answer quick on this one.
Also apparently someone just tried to clip Trump. What time to be alive.
No. The one time I ate at Chili’s (a Chili’s Too in an airport, which is a little different but still), my food had clearly been microwaved, and not even for long enough. And this was, like, a hamburger. I didn’t order leftover Chinese food; I ordered something that needs to be made on site. Chili’s let me down on that end. I like chain restaurants, mind you. I’ll eat at a Denny’s with zero hesitation. But Chili’s? Fuck that shit. Go eat Chilean food while you’re in Chile, mate. Don’t waste a meal just for a laugh.
And yeah someone DID try to kill Trump, and it was former Deadspin editor Tommy Crooks! And he blew it! Unreal! Stick around Defector this Wings Week for my essay, “How To Wing A Killshot.”
Dan:
How many more unprecedented times do we have to live through?
[insufferable prick voice] Actually, all times are unprecedented if we’re going strictly by the definition of that word.
But yeah, I understand your fatigue. I’m sure previous generations have had similar feelings—ugh, do we HAVE to keep fighting World War II? This sucks!—but that doesn’t make it any more comforting. I just want the Trump years to fucking END, and they refuse to. But I can’t spend every day freaking the fuck out over it, otherwise my heart will explode and nothing else will change. When Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate Trump on Saturday night, I was glued to CNN for a solid half an hour, which is the longest stretch of time I’ve watched cable news since the Capitol Riot. Almost immediately, I started thinking about the attempt in horse-race terms. This shooting is a clear win for Trump! Nonsense like that. This makes me part of the problem, because the truth is that no one knows a fucking thing, and no one ever has. If the political press, myself included, spent as much time reporting as they did speculating, this country would still have pensions.
But they don’t. Everything is sports (oh the irony), so here we are. My wife and kids watched the news with me when the shooting happened. Ten minutes in, my daughter said, “OK, that’s enough of this. Let’s go play pool” (our Airbnb has a pool table), and she and her brothers left. I turned off Wolf “Of course this is such a tragedy” Blitzer not long thereafter, and threw my cards in the air. Because I don’t have the energy for this shit anymore. The bad guys want me to feel crazed, helpless, and angry. But I’m none of those things. I’m sane, I’m still voting for Biden a few months from now, and I am heavily medicated enough to keep my cool during all of this shit. The modern American personality is anything but levelheaded, and that’s constantly reflected in the news cycle. We lost our chill this century, and our national flag might as well be a fucking PANIC button as a result. And what use does panicking serve? None. None uses.
So I’m gonna roll with the punches—and they’ve been some heavy ones—as best I can. I will endure. Because surviving and thriving is the best way to fight both against the powers that be and against the toll that they want to exact on my psyche. Because no one knows how this is gonna play out anyway. Hell, I bet this shooting is forgotten a week from now because J.D. Vance lost a chess piece up his butt.
Matt (“not that Matt, the other one”):
The Defector staff sometimes goofs on stuff published in the opinion pages of the New York Times. And every day that I go on Bluesky, there are a number of people losing their dang minds because of something Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, or some random guest Christian nationalist that day. A common refrain is that The New York Times Opinion Board has too much power. My question is: do they though? Is there really a significant percentage of Americans who both read the NYT op-ed pages and take the opinions of the arch conservatives seriously enough to swing their opinions on any particular topic? Or has everyone who freaks out because of a NYT op-ed watched too many Noam Chomsky documentaries?
It's not a direct cause and effect. Swing state polls aren’t gonna move by 10 points just because Maureen Dowd wrote, “Thomas Crooks Turned This Election ‘Inside Out’.” But she and the rest of her vacuous circle do have outsized influence on people with real juice, Joe Biden included. Joe Biden thinks David Brooks is a good writer. That’s WAYYYYYYYY more influence than David Brooks should ever have, and it’s a far greater indictment of the president than whenever he insists that this election is a referendum on the future of Dicktracy. I don’t ever care if Biden agrees with Brooks on shit. It’s the fact that Biden is like, “This guy writes some really snappy, entertaining copy!” that makes my heart sink. Is there not enough bad taste on the other side of the aisle, sir? HOW DARE YOU.
Point being, that op-ed page is read by world leaders, captains of industry, heavy donors, and other, highly suggestible media outlets. All of that trickles out and down: the entitlement, the ignorance, the arrogance. It’s opinion as high fashion, and it has a tangible, detrimental effect on the world. And publishing toxic waste from Bret Stephens and Pamela Paul (they used to bone) routinely gives legitimacy to Republican causes such as, “Let’s get rid of formal education.” That’s why so many of us keep hounding the Times, although those efforts likely draw MORE readers to the slop than to the few Times columnists like Jamelle Bouie who actually get it. But I can’t help it. These people think they’re the smartest, fairest minds in American society, and they always will. God, I fucking hate them. BURN. BURN, I SAY.
Matt:
My 80-ish dad is finally giving up on hearing aids and getting a cochlear implant in the fall. Any advice?
Yep. First off, I’d recommend my implant maker, MED-EL, to anyone. MED-EL did not pay me to say that, but I’ve had their implant inside my head for five years now and it’s served me gallantly the entire time. Secondly, tell your old man to do all of the post-op therapy for it. Americans, especially elderly ones, often make for lousy patients. That’s why hearing loss remains such an enormous problem across the country, because Nana and Gramps don’t wanna do anything about it. You have to wear the implant all the time, and you have to do all of the training games that, over time, significantly boost the performance of that implant. If you get a cochlear implant and you’re like, “Hey, this sounds kinda fuzzy! Fuck this I’m gonna leave my processor in the nightstand,” you’ll die in silence. You have to want to get better to get better.
Steven:
Which sports media is the most insufferable? Is it the access merchants like Shams and Woj? The old-timers like Joe Posnanski who jerk off to stories of Honus Wagner? The meatheads like Pat McAfee?
It’s Colin Cowherd. I know that’s not a “category” of sports media, per se. I could say “sports talk radio host,” but I actually enjoy sports talk radio when it’s done well. What I don’t enjoy is the same shit that made me want to become a sports blogger to begin with: lone guys with a mic who think they’re the definitive word on every goddamn thing that happens out there on the field. You guys aren’t allowed to lecture me, especially when you have a voice like Colin Cowherd’s.
HALFTIME!
Anon:
My best friend since ninth grade married his HS sweetheart. She and I have never gotten along, for a myriad of stupid reasons. Meanwhile, my wife and she have grown thicker than thieves. It's actually very nice, and it alleviates a lot of stress in our lives. But on July 4th, my wife told me, after hanging out with our families all day, that my best friend's wife has been having an affair. For over 10 years! She made me swear to keep it a secret. But it's been almost six days, and I feel like a fucking asshole. I'm torn between the love I have for him, because I do love him, and my wife, who is the only woman who can stand me for an extended period of time, the mother of my kid, my emergency fucking contact. She said that my friend's wife is going to leave him and is going to tell him soon. But in the subsequent time, I've got to keep my mouth shut. I feel awful. WTF do I do?
It's not fair of your wife to drop that bomb and then force you to keep it in your lap. You should tell her that if you haven’t already, because it puts you in an impossible situation and every choice you make in the wake of it will be a terrible one. You can either keep your trap shut and feel like a traitor—and who says this woman WILL leave your best friend, and that she’s not just stalling for time?—or you can tell him the truth and watch his heart break in real time. That’s how badly you, and especially your friend, have been screwed.
Personally speaking, I’d tell him right now. His wife is the offender here, which means that she’s not the one who deserves the courtesy of discretion. She certainly doesn’t deserve custody of you and your wife in the divorce. Your friend, meanwhile, deserves both of those things. If his wife has been carrying on with another dude for 10 years, fuck her. Your wife should know that, and you have the right be angry at her for giving the homewrecker slack. What if you were the cheater and no one ever bothered to tell HER about it? What would she think then? I can’t believe I have to take over for Dr. Ruth now, but here we are.
Greg:
What are some of your all-time greatest driving roads? Not necessarily the most scenic, or the most exciting, but the ones with the greatest personal impact? For example, for me when I was a kid going in the summer to my grandparents in Illinois there was a point where we'd leave Interstate 55 and hit a stretch of old Route 66. Somehow we'd always get there as the sun was setting. Grasshoppers would jump in our path and smear the windshield. The road wasn't expertly graded and there would be sudden rises and falls in the road, and my Dad would gun the motor so we'd hit a rise and get a millisecond of air before the tires settled back on the road. The radio would be playing some dumb AM radio song, Paul Harvey, or a Cardinals game, and we'd be surrounded by oceans of cornfields and soybeans as far as the eye could see. And it was perfect. What's your great road?
Former Defector intern Abigail Segel led off her guest turn of this column with a similar question, and one of her answers was the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which might be my least favorite road in the entire goddamn world. Just miles and miles of hell. But Abigail is cool, so I let it slide. Now it’s my turn to answer, and I’m just like Greg up above in that my favorite stretch of road is the one right before I get to my parents’ house. I’ve been making the drive there for decades now, and it remains an incredible pain in the pass, featuring long stretches on 95, the Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State, and 84. But the very last leg of the journey is a 10-mile run along a country highway that opens up to a view of the foothills of the Green Mountains on either side. It’s fucking gorgeous, and it makes me feel like I’m home before I’ve gotten home. That’s my favorite road in the world, mostly because it never has traffic.
Also, GQ once sent me to Penn State for the first football game played there after Joe Paterno’s death and that drive stays in my memory more than anything in State College did. It was a great drive, and there was a classic rock FM station on the drive that played deep cuts, and not just the usual canned rotation of Cream, Journey, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Best of all, I didn’t have to go on the PA Turnpike once. Now that’s a quality road trip.
Brian:
So I am rewatching Godfathers 1 and 2, and after the first I realized how astounded I would have been coming out of that movie theater with my friends. Godfather 2?!? I would have stumbled out of that theater wondering how any movie could have done it better. It then got me thinking, and at 40 years old, I think the best movie I have ever seen in theaters is the first Jurassic Park. What is the best movie you’ve ever seen in theaters, and the movie you wish you could have seen in theaters?
Fury Road is my answer to the first question. I’ve had a lot of memorable theatergoing experiences in my life. I saw Pulp Fiction the night it was released, at a time when I was stranded at UMich without a friend in the world. I saw Big Lebowski in theaters and it was, by far, the hardest I’ve ever laughed during a movie. I snuck out of work to go see Master And Commander at the now-closed Ziegfield in Manhattan. And I got shitfaced with a friend in Oxford and watched the original Scream in the theater with a bunch of other rowdy drunks. Those are all precious memories. But seeing Fury Road in a basic mall theater when it opened? I’ll never experience anything like that again. No way.
As for movies I wish I’d seen first on the big screen … what if I told you that the first time I ever watched The Dark Knight was on a mailed DVD from Netflix? Suboptimal.
Dan:
My partner, who is originally from Japan, has asked me why the water level in American toilet bowls is so high compared to other countries, a mystery that I didn’t feel the need to delve into too deeply until recently, when it touched my life in a very personal way: I dunk my balls.
When I sit down to do my business, I often need to prop myself up on one buttcheek in order to keep my junk above the water line. Fortunately it’s not as much of a problem if I’m taking a dump, since the old scrote seems to tighten up during that process. But I do occasionally want or need to sit down to pee, especially at night so I’m not hosing the place down in the dark at 3:00 am. I don’t think anyone would consider me to be especially well-endowed at all, but here I am feeling like Dirk Diggler every time I ascend the throne. Am I alone in this and actually a freak of nature, or is this just another of life’s indignities as gravity slowly takes command? And why is the water level in American toilets so high?
You’re not the only person to have investigated this issue thoroughly. We Americans have to do everything bigger than other countries do. So we use high volume toilets because they have greater flushing power, which allows us to extrude as many used Komodo dragon burritos as we like into the bowl and still safely flush (or plunge) it. The water level also covers bowel movements entirely, reducing both odor and the need for a courtesy flush. Lastly, the higher water pressure keeps the toilet cleaner, which means don’t have to clean it as often. Or ever, really. It’s just another instance where Americans prefer that someone, or something, do everything for them. We’re two years away from McDonald’s offering customers a fucking feeding tube.
As for your virile teste satchel, you’re not alone in watching that poor organ stretch out like taffy as you enter middle age. I have to tuck my balls into my shoes before going out into public nowadays. It ain’t right.
Email of the week!
Brandon:
I got laid off a couple months ago. I know the Defector motto is, "quit your job," but unfortunately I really liked that gig. I'm also not in superb financial shape, so it's been a stressful time. One hidden upside is I've been able to spend plenty of hours in my neighborhood park birding and walking the dog. One hidden downside is I got way behind on all my favorite blogs and podcasts since I mainly consumed that stuff on my commute or while "working." All this is preamble to explain why I'm writing in about a months-old Funbag reply after finally catching up on my media backlog.
I was really stoked by your defense of Garfield against the haters, and wanted to chime in with my own appreciation. "Jim Davis is a commercial shill who sucks" is one of those entrenched internet opinions that every online person thinks they're an original supergenius for retweeting, to the point that saying Garfield is hack has itself become hack. Now don't get me wrong, I know today's Garfield strips are a weaker product than the classics. I admit the merchandising is absurdly oversaturated. And I am sure the new Chris Pratt movie, which I will never see, is an unholy abomination. But there is still something worth cherishing at the heart of the fat furry feline.
Davis himself has fed into the negative perceptions with his own self-mythologizing; the popular chestnut that he created a cat comic to exploit a market inefficiency on the dog-heavy funny pages comes directly from his forewords and interviews. But historically, the origins of Garfield are much weirder. Davis's first comic for his local paper, Gnorm the Gnat, was about bugs; editors and readers found it so off-putting that he had to give up and try something else. Pivoting to a character more marketable than literally a bloodsucking insect seems less cold hard capitalism than common sense; in the end, Davis followed the oldest creative advice there is: write what you know. His new comic was about a struggling cartoonist, essentially a stand-in for its author, and it was called Jon.
The Jon Arbuckle of those early strips is barely different from the one we know today: a hapless pollyanna with no game and no life. Davis seemed to understand that this character — which, again, he based on himself — was so pathetic that readers would crave a confident, effortlessly cool foil to constantly roast him. Obviously, this was a job for a cat, and so Garfield was born.
There is something psychologically fascinating about an artist who would create a semi-autobiographical work in which he exists as the clueless punching bag for a funnier, more interesting character. But to his credit, Davis wasn't too clueless to notice that his feline sidekick was the real star of the show. When the comic was picked up for syndication, its first run consisted mostly of upcycled versions of the original Jon strips, but under a new title: Garfield.
Like anything that becomes too popular for its own good, Garfield has moved astray from its earliest, purest form in the past half-century. But Garfield's core ethos still rocks. He promotes body positivity and rejects hustle culture. "I'm fat, and lazy, and proud of it!" is a genuinely subversive statement, and Garfield got it printed in newspapers across the nation. As someone recently unemployed and less recently out of shape, so much of our culture insists that these are reasons to feel bad about myself. Not Garfield. Judging yourself by the value others assign you? That's loser shit. Jon Arbuckle shit. Garfield knows better.
Jim Davis may not have the walked away at peak street cred ala Gary Larson or Bill Watterson, but he found a way to make a living (and eventually, a media empire) doing what he loved. By tapping into his own insecurities and feelings of inadequacy, he created a work of popular art that made people feel better about themselves. On my worst day, I always know I'm not as hopeless as Jon Arbuckle. And when societal shame creeps in around me, Garfield is there to say: "Buddy, have another piece of lasagna. You deserve it." And I do. Fuck Mondays.
Oh wow, you just validated my childhood. God bless you, Brandon.
