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 dipshits, friends who are way too into pro wrestling, disposable football helmets, and more.
Your letters:
Adrian:
There are so many excellent deliveries of “fuck” in the cinema. One of my favourites is Uma Thurman saying “fuck” when she finds out she’s pregnant in Kill Bill. Do you have any favourite deliveries of this versatile word in movies or otherwise?
I do, and it’s this one:
That was the last scene that Stanley Kubrick ever put out into the world, which is fiendishly appropriate. What a fucking talent that guy was; I wish there had been 1,000 of him. Now, is that the ONLY movie “fuck” that has been enshrined into my mental Hall of Fame? Of course not. I have loved that word ever since I first heard it, making me a true fuck fan. A “fuckboy,” if you will. So let’s remember some other fucks!
- In honor of Adrian’s British spelling, the entire opening of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is mostly fucks. This predates the now legendary all-fucks scene on The Wire by about a decade, but there’s no chance I deduct points from David Simon for reusing the format.
- Graham Chapman screaming, “Now fuck off!” to his followers in Life of Brian, only for one of them to ask, “How shall we fuck off, oh Lord?”
- Eddie Murphy as Bill Cosby in Raw: “Youuuuuuuuu cannot say FUCK in front of people!”
- “No, we’re not gonna do fucking Stone’enge!”
- Robert Redford screaming it in All is Lost. I’m pretty sure this is the only line that Redford’s character says out loud in the entire movie, which makes it all the more gratifying. Director J.C. Chandor would go on to make Kraven the Hunter. Hollywood is broken.
- Ralphie saying “Oh fudge” in A Christmas Story, only for Jean Shepherd’s narrator to make it perfectly clear that “fudge” was not the word uttered. Sometimes it’s the "fucks" you DON’T say.
- An exasperated Leo saying “Fuck a duck!” in the middle of Killers of the Flower Moon, which made the entire theater roar when I saw it.
- Basically every fuck in every Coen Brothers movie
This is a partial list, of course. I could keep on compiling it until I’m dead in the ground, but that would be selfish of me. You guys get to remember some fucks, too! Go ahead! It’s fun as fuck!
Brian:
How much time do you think CJGJ (CJ Gardner-Johnson) could have wasted during his free play interception? Everyone knew the touchdown wasn't going to count, so how long do you think he could have run around without going out of bounds or being tackled? Could he have burned the whole five minutes avoiding the Chiefs offense?
The refs can penalize hijinks like that at their discretion, just like when they threatened to award the Eagles a touchdown in the NFC title game because Frankie Luvu kept committing offside penalties by diving over the line of scrimmage (which, to be clear, was super awesome).
So if CJGJ, one of the most roundly despised players in the NFL, had tried pulling some cutesy bullshit to tamper with the game clock, he would have either gotten pinched by the refs for it, or someone on the Chiefs offense would have taken his head off. Obviously, it would have been fun to see either of these scenarios play out. I feel deprived.
Michael:
Virginia McCaskey finally croaked. We Bears fans have been waiting years for this. Do the dipshit children sell the team to someone who actually cares, or is it going to just continue to be awful?
No chance the McCaskey kids sell the team. The Bears are one of many blueblood franchises that will never be sold out of family ownership. These are rich families that have nothing to distinguish them from other rich families outside of, “We own an NFL team.” So precious Georgie McCaskey will never divest himself of his birthright, and he’s already rejected Chicago fans’ requests that he do so. Those vampires will be there forever. That said, they DID just hire a fancy new head coach, and Kevin Warren really does seem to have been given complete control over football operations. I don’t know if that’s enough to overcome the inherent disadvantages of having your team be owned by a family of clueless shitheads, but it helps.
Bryan:
Why doesn’t the NFL use crunchable helmets that absorb damage like cars? Surely it can’t be the cost per helmet smash.
I’ve heard a zillion ideas to make football helmets “safer,” including forgoing helmets altogether, but not once did I think of giving players helmets with crumple zones. I know that Bryan here assumes that the NFL can easily absorb the cost of disposable helmets, but he’s also assuming that league owners are genuinely interested in making the game safer rather than making it appear safer (concussions have never been lower!!!).
This is a faulty assumption. League owners aren’t gonna spend money they don’t have to spend, and disposable helmets would cost them a SHITLOAD. Those space-age helmets that players wear now? They can cost up to $1,300 each. Now imagine having to replace every one of those helmets, on every player, after every play. You might get a few QBs and wideouts who can successfully avoid head contact on a few plays per game, but otherwise those things are getting totaled after every snap. And not just during game reps, but practice reps, too. Shit, the average Mike linebacker would bust his helmet just head-butting a teammate to get psyched up during warm-ups. That kind of expense shows up in a balance sheet.
Also, what do you when your helmet shatters mid-play and you have to keep playing? And where does that shrapnel go? Do we also need to install an airbag under your shell to prevent shards of plastic from digging into your brain? I hate rejecting Bryan’s idea with all of this nerdy bullshit, mostly because seeing equipment break in any sporting event is always cool: broken bats, broken hockey sticks, broken teeth. I love all of that. Alas, Bausch & Lomb Oasys Daily Wear helmets can never become a reality.
Matthew:
I'm thinking of changing my signature. Nothing too radical, just going from a pointy M to a more round, cursive M. I'm 58. Too late to change it? Will it mess up some signature-comparing software and prevent me from ever being allowed to vote again?
I changed my entire handwriting style four years ago and am happy with the results. My penmanship still looks like a grade schooler’s, but at least it’s now legible. I didn’t change my signature though, because I’m now at the age where you can just draw a squiggle (especially on any touchpad) and everyone will accept it as legit. Sometimes I make a more concerted effort to have my signature resemble my printed name, but that’s only if I’m signing my own will. Otherwise, everyone gets the prescription pad treatment from me.
But I’m a lousy role model here. If you take old school pride in your signature and want to make it more distinctive, go for it. The worst thing that happens is that you just go back to your old way of doing it. And I’ve signed enough iPads at coffee shop registers to know that the software doesn’t give a rat’s ass. So long as they have a signature that allows them to take your money, you’re good.
Dave:
My six-year-old got a free red hat from a school event. Am I wrong not to want him to wear it? Are red hats ruined forever, just like the Hitler mustache?
You can still wear red hats. You see me disavowing elephants just because they’re the GOP mascot? Of course not. Sometimes I see a red hat from behind and my Trumpdar goes off, but then I see it’s just a Nats hat and I realize I’m walking behind an unhappy baseball fan and nothing more dangerous. Don’t let them take red from you, otherwise you’d be … blue. Hey, why are you running at me with that tire iron no no no NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Jonathan:
Which is the better concert experience, seeing a band early before they really hit the big time or seeing a legendary act’s final big show? If you need a hard example: early Zeppelin, or either of their final stadium shows?
I prefer the early shows because then I’m seeing my favorite band in a smaller, more intimate venue. There are exceptions to this for bands that have mastered playing larger rooms. The best QOTSA concert I ever attended was at the Nets arena, and I’m one of the yuppies who sang along to every song when I saw U2 on the Elevation tour.
But in general, I wanna see a band when they’re at their most ambitious, and not when they’re just trying to squeeze one last drop out of the orange. Think of how many sadass reunion tours have been undertaken because everyone was broke. Zep is an exception because they decided to quit right after John Bonham died in 1980, before they could become a revival act. But otherwise, you’re gonna hear more backing tracks than live music at a legacy act’s stadium show.
Jason:
I'm 38 and I have an alarming amount of close friends who actively follow pro wrestling. To them, WWE is appointment viewing and they root for and against the characters with real passion. These are otherwise smart, responsible people, but every time my text thread is flooded with real conversations about whether "Undertaker or Roman Reigns the GOAT," I lose a little respect for them. Our entire friend group was formed through sports and sports fandom, so I feel bad shaming them about it. But to me, this isn't a sport, and I just don't respect it or anyone who thinks it's cool. Can I call my friends morons?
You can’t, and the pro wrestling bloggers on our staff would DDT me into a concrete floor if I ever said that you could. I watched the shit out of pro wrestling when I was a kid, and then had a brief second fling with it during the WWE Attitude era, mostly because I enjoyed seeing naked women parading around the ring. So I get why the people who love pro wrestling really love it. They love the theater of it! They know it’s fake, but they know that the bumps are very real. And they savor the emotional jolt they get from the stagecraft when it’s done properly. I respect all of that, even when the in-ring product is lousy (and my colleagues will always tell you when it is).
You don’t have to like pro wrestling yourself—I haven’t watched it in ages—but you can’t play the fartsniffer and alienate your friends just because they like it. That’s asshole shit. Just mute the group text and then move on. Tell them you don’t respect them because they love something you don’t, and they won’t be your friends for much longer. IT’S STILL REAL TO THEM, DAMMIT!
Mike:
What Super Bowl ads drew the most chatter in your house, for good or ill? In my house, “No, my smoker cuts grass” prompted the biggest guffaws.
I didn’t watch any of them! That’s not a brag or anything, I just didn’t give a shit. I used to get a kick of the ads before the popular internet, when they were a real event and a welcome diversion from the seriousness of football. But now, if there are any decent Super Bowl ads, I can just watch them on YouTube the next day. And chances are that most of the ads were shitty anyway. I don’t wanna watch a Slap Shot cast reunion that turns out to be an ad for fucking Uber Eats. That’s a waste of time. I still love a good ad when I see one, but the Super Bowl is no longer the exclusive home of them. Those ad buys are so expensive now that you can see all of the fingerprints in every spot.
HALFTIME!
Frank:
I want to apologize for bringing up yet another political question to the Funbag. I'm just as exhausted from all of this as everyone else surely is, but am I the only one that just doesn't understand how Trump won? How did he win every single swing state when down ballot Democrats won on most other tickets? Am I taking crazy pills?? Am I too online?
We’re all too online, amigo. I’m also far too tired to wade into all of the possible economic and sociological reasons that Americans would vote Trump into ultimate power twice. Ruminating on it will just exhaust me further, because there won’t be some easy answer that’s like, Oh, we just forgot to reboot all of the voting machines before using them! And freaking out over everything does the bad guys more good than it does me, so I’m just gonna live my life instead. I check the news in the morning, I process it, and then I get to work.
But if you need a simplistic answer just to shut your brain up, I’ll give you one: greed. I came of age in the 1980s, when Reagan cut rich people’s taxes in half and The Me Decade resulted. That decade has never ended in the pop culture sphere, and it hasn’t ended in policy terms, either. Greed has metastasized across every state, every business, every arm of government, and every social network. Deep down, no American believes that what’s good for the gander can possibly be good for the goose, so they get theirs and say fuck the rest of the world. That’s the true American Dream: to get rich, and then to stay that way. They don’t want a middle class. Any middle class. Being stuck in the middle class means you’re a fucking loser, and Americans wanna be winners.
Everything now runs on that greed: greed for money, greed for property, greed for attention, greed for validation, greed for sex, greed for more boneless Buffalo wings. Some forms of greed may be more benign than others, but it’s still greed all the same. And greed will seek out the most useful idiot around—that’s Trump—to keep it fed. That’s the nut of it, and it’s not terribly new. Greed’s been fucking shit up ever since white people discovered sea power, and it’ll keep fucking shit up long after you and I are gone. There’s an odd bit of peace in accepting this. If you know that you can’t cure the world of greed, you won’t beat the shit out of yourself trying to. You can just get to work on making your own little world happy, and see if it radiates outward from there.
Also, I’m not leaving the US. I’m too lazy, and I like football too much. You’re stuck with me, you greedy fucking losers.
Ben:
I was lurking on a message board in a thread discussing Mad Men. A poster there said that they had spent their entire career in advertising and that the industry was nothing like what was portrayed on the show, which is interesting since Matt Weiner spent a LOT of time making sure every detail was time period appropriate. But as far as the actual sausage making aspect, he just bullshitted his way? As someone who worked for an ad agency, did the process of creating an ad on the show seem like what went on at your agency (Minus the constant drinking and sleeping with secretaries)?
You have to understand that I worked in the ad biz a solid three decades after the period when Mad Men takes place. There’s also the fact that Mad Men is a TV show, which means it’s gonna take dramatic license to make the story more interesting, unless watching a schlubby copywriter bounce a tennis ball off a wall for an hour is ASMR to you. My agency employed no creative directors who stole their identity off a dead soldier in Korea, nor did anyone in my office have their toes sheared off because someone took a lawnmower for a joyride down the hallway.
However, plenty of people in my agency fucked one another, and we all started drinking the second we’d turned in our work for the day. We even got a warning from HR about leaving empty Solo cups in the conference room after we’d played flip cup for hours in it. There was also plenty of sexism, although less overt than back in the late '50s and early '60s. More important, a lot of the actual work depicted on Mad Men DID feel accurate to me: clients being both clueless and demanding, feckless account execs, creatives freaking out when they can’t remember a good idea they thought of, and creative directors like Don Draper pitching ad campaigns as if they’re holy scripture. We concepted ads like Sterling Cooper creative teams did, and our fancypants CDs would present mockups on boards like Draper did. All of that reminded me of being at work, which is why I didn’t watch too much of the show at first.
But I got over that hump and was duly rewarded. A good storyteller like Weiner obsesses over the period details in order to make the story feel accurate, even if it’s not quite so. If you get the audience to believe in the world you’ve created, then it makes the ultimate story you tell all that richer. So I’d go ahead and dismiss that Redditor who’s all, The producers of this show don't know squat. Itchy should've tied Scratchy's tongue with a topline hitch, not a sheet bend. Nobody likes a know-it-all.
Andrew:
Dipshit is a great word, but what does it really mean? And where could it have come from?
According to the OED, “The earliest known use of the word dipshit is in the 1960s.” That means one of your hippie grandparents might have coined it after someone chiefed their joint during Hendrix’s set at Woodstock. But we can go back even further than that, because the word “dip” had already long been established as its own slang for a stupid person. “Hey that, that guy’s a real dip.” Not that hard to envision Cheech Marin tacking a “-shit” onto the end of it to coin a newer, funkier epithet. Tell all of your filthy slattern friends about it!
Alex:
I celebrated my birthday last weekend (yay me!). And my brother, my only sibling, forgot. We are both middle aged with families and careers, so I wasn’t expecting anything other than a text or quick call. Instead I got nothing. There wasn’t any type of emergency to prevent him from doing it, as my sister-in-law was posting on Instagram all day about random, non-emergency things. I’m not mad, just pretty sad. That being said, both of their birthdays are coming up and I am debating if I should be totally petty and “forget,” or if I should be an adult and acknowledge them. I’ll abide by your wisdom.
Wish them a happy birthday. First of all, it’s still the nice thing to do … far more so than starting a war of passive aggression that only you know is taking place. Secondly, the second you wish them a happy birthday, they’ll realize that they forgot to do likewise for you. Then they’ll be all like, OMG WE’RE THE WORST and you can be like, Aw, no you’re not, even though they TOTALLY are. Don’t be shitty just because someone else was shitty. That always ends up making things worse.
On a somewhat related note, I’m pretty sure one or more of my relatives have forgotten to wish me happy birthday in the past. Seeing as how I’m now 48, I’ve never really cared. It’d be nice to get the call, but it’s not gonna ruin me if I don’t get it. I can just go by myself some Chinese takeout to celebrate anyway. That’s the only thing that really matters.
Greg:
Let's say it's 11:59pm Saturday night, your kid promised they'd be home by 11:30 but they're not. They haven't texted and you haven't texted them, to avoid being too much of a hardass. What's your ideal midnight snack to kill some time, burn off hunger, and get yourself in the right mood to remind your kid to keep their promises without being an ogre? And maybe share with the kid when they show a decent level of contrition when they roll in at 12:25am? Leftover pizza warmed up in the toaster oven? Ramen soup? Tater tots? Freshly popped popcorn? For me I'm thinking lo mein warmed up in a frying pan in the stove so it gets crispy, but I'm curious what your ideal option would be.
Wait, I have to share my midnight snack with the offending child? Never. When my kids are out late and incommunicado, I got zero problem being a hardass about it. I’ll send a stern text: “This isn’t cool,” etc. Then they tell me I’m being mean, and then I tell them that I’m fucking tired, and then we both go to sleep and forget all about it the next day. We’re not wrapping up that little session by splitting a hot fudge sundae. Also, I eat my midnight snacks at like 8:30 p.m., and my favorite choice remains a bowl of Raisin Bran Crunch. Second place goes to midnight eggs, which I scramble with a shitload of butter. On very special occasions, I do nachos. Those I share with the kids, but only if they’re already home. No nachos for stragglers.
Steve:
With the Luka trade bringing Adelson-by-marriage Patrick Dumont into the limelight, it feels like we need a term to describe the in-law equivalent of a nepo baby. What’s the proper name for a nepo baby who married into their situation, rather than being born into it?
A WHITE WIDOW.
Email of the week!
Ben:
My parents rented Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life when I was a teenager, at an age when certain things were embarrassing as hell if they happened when my parents were around. The scene at the British private school with John Cleese as the teacher telling the students all about the wonderful world of sex and 'vaginal juices' was one of those embarrassing things. I chose the beginning of the scene to go upstairs and make some popcorn. Have you ever been so embarrassed watching a particular scene in a movie with your parents that you made an excuse and left the room until it was over? If so what movie(s)?
I saw Boogie Nights with my mom in the theater. Nowhere to escape that day. Her verdict on the movie is that it was “cute.”
