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 golf, Houston, candy bars, wet shoulder pads, and more.
I had a family emergency to attend to last week, and we weren’t able to get a guest Funbag host lined up in time after I had to drop everything. As a result, this slot remained vacant. My apologies. I hope you didn’t use that empty space of time to, you know, do actual work. That would have been tragic.
Now, with that out of the way … your letters:
Matt:
Let’s play a hypothetical. This election’s October Surprise is: “__________ presidential candidate has a salacious sex tape hacked and a verified video is published online.” Which candidate benefits more from this?
Neither of them. First of all, the past decade has rendered political scandals all but obsolete. One of the two major party candidates on the ballot right now is a dude who tried to overthrow the U.S. government. If THAT guy’s electoral prospects can remain viable after all of that, then no one will give a shit if either he or his opponent get caught on camera blowing an aide. That video was clearly a deepfake and hey, why aren’t we paying attention to what Kamala Harris is doing with transgender immigrant sex slaves, hmm? Why isn’t the media talking about THAT, apart from the fact that I just made that issue up off the top of my head?
More important, October surprises are bullshit. “X is fake!” is a college-kid take that you should usually ignore. But the “October surprise” is a byproduct of the political media’s imagination, one that Beltway insiders concoct every election cycle as a way of generating headlines when every halfway-informed voter has already made up their mind. I voted already, because I live in a normal state that offers mail-in ballots. I’m hardly alone. If you’re an “undecided” voter right now, after you’ve had eons to choose between two diametrically opposed candidates, you’re either a liar or you should be cast out to sea. Your influence is now zero. Fuck off.
This doesn’t mean that vital political news doesn’t break in the ramp-up to the election. October 2016 brought Jimmy Comey making “But her emails!” an official stance of federal law enforcement. But the intervening years have taught us that Hillary Clinton was a shit candidate from wire to wire. She could’ve botched an order at In-N-Out that October and it probably would have gotten equal traction, if you’re keen to re-litigate such things. I am not. The election is already underway. Sides have already been taken. If there’s gonna be a surprise, it’ll be next month, not this one.
On a related note, The Contender is a fucking awful movie.
Ladanian:
I'm getting into my mid-forties and starting to worry about being accused of being an old man yelling at cloud. For example, I'm a hardcore baseball fan, but watching games on MLB is becoming a major distraction with behind home plate (in tye-dye colors for Canva, or "Jesus gets Us" or various ambulance-chaser law firms), on the mound, on the outfield fences, on the uniform, and now on helmets for the postseason. Am I yelling at a cloud, or is this legitimate? How do you tell when you've gotten into yelling at cloud territory?
I’m pretty sure someone dumps the Abe Simpson meme into the comments anytime I write something here. When you get old, people will accuse you of being old. It’s unavoidable and yes, it’s also really fucking annoying. I’m 48. I wasn’t born before the wheel. I’m a healthy middle-aged professional who sometimes holds valid opinions on matters both important and trivial. So when some failed class clown tries to hit me with some “ok boomer” shit anytime I say anything, I want blood. That dig is older than I am, you dumb young fuck. Why don’t you go listen to some shitty mope pop while I run one of the most successful independent media companies in North America. You ain’t knocking me off my perch with a gag that’s been recycled into infinity. I RUN THIS WORLD NOW, SON.
This is why I can’t wait to turn 50. Fifty is when you go from, “But I’m still young, right?” to “You know what? I’m old. Fuck them kids.” It’ll rock.
Chad:
Why can't we give head coaches something like a jeopardy style buzzer to call timeouts? I think that'd not only be better, but I'm sure hilarity would ensue!
Do you not already get sufficient levels of mirth from Sean McDermott managing the end of a football game? A buzzer would make no difference in the timeout process, and I don’t want NFL head coaches to have a more outsized influence on games than they already have. We already have a janky challenge system in place that’s not worth the comedy it occasionally provides. I just want the football, and not all of the other shit.
Zach:
How many Super Bowls will the Vikings win this year?
No fewer than three.
(In all seriousness though, they’re a legitimately good team. Will they win it all? Probably not, but I’m more than happy to ride this thing as far as it’ll take me.)
Jason:
Why do golfers need absolute silence to hit a stationary ball? God forbid a camera shutter goes off while a golfer is in their back swing; they will flip out and cry like someone murdered their offspring. Am I way off base, or are golfers weak babies?
This is a take straight out of 1990s standup comedy, so allow me to skip rehashing old Gregg Rogell bits and answer Jason’s question seriously. Golfers are, indeed, weak babies. At the same time, you do need silence to hit a stationary ball. Consider how many recreational golfers fuck up a tee shot under ideal circumstances. This is because hitting a golf ball is hard. It requires a level of concentration that drives your average retired investment banker mad. In fact, the lack of crowd noise—Phoenix Open aside—might make the task even harder, because all you have to listen to during your backswing is the idiot voice in your head. It’s not a friendly one.
I’m not being consistent with this opinion, because hitting a 100 mph fastball is even harder, and MLB players have to do it with the crowd at full roar (unless they play for the A’s). But I don’t have the energy to argue my way out of this part of the discussion. Let’s just say that I like to see golfers fuck up in silence, and I like to see baseball players fuck up amid a ruckus.
Derek:
Who do you think is the better movie character: Gandalf or Darth Vader?
Vader.
Greg:
I was visiting my folks in the burbs outside of Houston recently, and noticed that in the endless strip mall-topia that is HTX, there were 10 different Cajun restaurants within 15 minutes of their house. In fact, there were options for every single cuisine known to man all within driving distance. Same with the feeling in LA, Vegas, or the entire east coast. Could one go on a quest to eat at every single licensed and unlicensed food vendor in these great cities? Would maybe one in twenty give you that Bourdain feeling of having the greatest meal of your life, or would you drop dead from ptomaine poisoning after the second day?
The late, revered L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold essentially built his career out of this kind of assignment. He understood that a great restaurant can be anywhere, so he ate everywhere that he possibly could. He took up this quest well before food trucks, gas stations, and other seemingly low-rent eateries became part of the extended foodie universe. Gold is one of the reasons foodies discovered those places to begin with. Smart diners have recognized that the fine dining scene has been overtaken by big restaurant groups, and that the most innovative cooking is being done in spaces that don’t charge $50,000 in rent every month—street corners, strip malls, exurban shopping centers—in areas of town that have a robust immigrant population. You could eat at these restaurants every day for the rest of your life and eat very well.
Houston contains a shitload of such restaurants. Ask people who know food and they’ll tell you that Houston is one of the best food cities in the U.S. Is that enough to ever make me want to GO to Houston? No. But if I ever had to visit the city out of obligation, you bet your ass I’d look into which seemingly innocuous tanning salon in Houston also happens to serve the best carnitas you’ve ever tasted.
What the fuck is going on with Greg Olsen's hair? Does it bother you as much as it does me? It's somehow longer on the sides than on the top, and comes off looking like an elaborate combover even though he seems to have a full head of hair.
Fox has promo spots joking about this very thing. You’ve seen them. Kevin Burkhardt and Olsen are chilling in the booth, only for Olsen to reveal that he actually has Terry Bradshaw’s bald spot. Much laughter ensues. Everyone knows that Greg Olsen’s hair looks a bit off, even if it’s real hair. That’s all the Fox production team needs to start up a years-long gag that only Bradshaw will find funny.
None of this bothers me. Not Olsen’s hair, because all TV people look weird, and because I only see Olsen’s face for two minutes total during any game broadcast. And I don’t care about the shit jokes either, because I’m so used to NFL “comedy” that it doesn’t even register in my brain when I encounter it anymore. Such are the benefits of watching anything that isn’t live gameplay on mute.
Olsen remains an excellent color man, by the way. He could have Trump’s face carved into his scalp and it wouldn’t change that.
Chris:
How do you feel about your son Joe Burrow’s frosted tips?
OK that hair is a different story. Those tips look shitty. I know that Burrow is a young guy, but surely someone told him what happened to Felicity when they cut Keri Russell’s majestic locks. Good hair is good content. I demand that Burrow grow out his roots, and to maybe teach my other son Sam Darnold how not to turn the ball over.
JJ:
My wife and I are planning a trip to Portsmouth, NH and then heading up to Portland, ME. Lobster and lighthouses are pretty much all we have planned for our seven-to-eight day vacation. We live in Indiana. Never been to New England. Any tips you can give? Are people in that area dicks? Places to avoid? Things to do other than lobster and lighthouses?
Since I went to school in New England, I can’t fathom the idea of people visiting the area for pleasure, especially if it’s anything other than a ski trip or a beach vacation. If you like damp weather and historical societies, New England is very much your kinda place. If not, you’re gonna have put in a little bit of extra planning to enjoy yourself.
That said, people in that area are, by and large, lovely. I’ve made a zillion Tommy from Quinzee jokes in my lifetime, but those gags are the byproduct of a mind that has been warped into thinking of New England as Barstool: The Place. The actual New England, Portland in particular, has excellent food, good beer, fantastic outdoor scenery (especially now, during leaf-peeping season), and residents who are happy to see you. So you’ll have a good time eating out, visiting all the parks on the coastline, and vomiting in an alley at 2 a.m. when you’ve had one too many. Take it from someone who passed out drunk in the middle of a street in Portland during Senior Week in 1998. Truly the hardest I’ve ever partied. I probably should have died.
(Side note: I visited Portsmouth just a couple of years ago and it was duller than I remember. Also, my mom said that locals there pronounced it porch-muth but I think she was wrong.)
HALFTIME!
Jackie:
Is it possible that at some point NFL broadcasting will extend its tentacles into Tuesday or Wednesday? How about Friday afternoons for the lamest matchups of the week? Is there an NFL saturation point, for the media, the players, and/or the viewing public? If so, are we getting anywhere close? Because even as a diehard fan, I'm starting to feel a little overextended.
Maximizing television revenue is the NFL’s chief reason for being, so you bet your ass they’ve done research into how many different days/networks they can place product without causing mass wearout. Thursday Night Football remains the definitive case study in unwanted NFL surplus, even if the Falcons-Bucs game last week was fun as shit. So the Ginger Hammer knows that the league is right at the edge of oversaturation…
…as presently constituted. You can only do so much with 32 teams and 17 games a season. But what if there were 18 games, as the NFL and NFLPA are currently discussing? And what if the NFL’s international series—now a rousing success by any measure—has made the overseas market ripe for expansion into Europe, and perhaps elsewhere? It’s not hard to see what owners are trying to do, especially now that they’ve gotten flag football into the 2028 Olympics. They want the NFL to become a global league, same as the NBA and the EPL. Once the footing is sure enough, they’ll jack up the number of games and teams, and then hunt out new ways to profit from it.
So we’re not anywhere close to the tipping point right now. There’s very much a future where NFL football is on every night of the week. Judging by how much MACtion I watch, they’ll get away with it.
Ben:
What are the best and worst grades (K-college) and specific classes (English, history, math) to be a substitute teacher for?
It’s a shame you didn’t include pre-K in your question, because my wife is a preschool teacher and I’d rather clean out a septic tank than sub for her. I am no longer built to deal with small children. They’re all fucking insane.
But since nursery school is off the table, I’ll go with middle school. Call it seventh grade English. I’d roll into that classroom thinking I could pull a Dead Poets Society on every kid there, and then I’d bomb like Trump in Hour Two of a MAGA rally. I’d have to run out for a dump midway through the period as a mental health break. I don’t know how teachers do what they do, and I have no interest in learning how firsthand. None of my charms work on tweens. To them I’m just a lame old shithead.
Best class to sub in would be freshman math. Know why? Because I’d just put on a movie. Ocean’s Eleven has some math in it. That’s good enough for me.
Malcolm:
"If you time-traveled back to X, how would you conquer/get rich/etc." is a clichéd genre of question. But do you have any thoughts on an advertising spin on that cliché? Something like: with the benefit of hindsight and knowing what types of ads resonate, could you go back in time and become Don Draper? With the right ad, could you make Hydrox the king cookie and Oreo the also-ran? Pepsi dominate over Coke?
No to all of that. Even if I knew everything there was to know about the ad game, and I had fully fleshed-out campaign ideas ready to roll, I’d still have to A) get an agency to hire me, B) rise high enough in the agency’s ranks to become a creative director, C) get clients to sign off on my cool ideas (this was Don Draper’s greatest skill), D) hire the right people to produce those ideas, and E) have a media team that places the resulting ads in the exact right markets and dayparts.
If the ad industry was a true meritocracy, and every agency and client made sound marketing decisions, maybe I could do all of those things. But that industry is anything but a meritocracy, and your average client has worse taste than your mom does. So I’d have the exact same ad career I already had, one in which I never rose past the level of copywriter and had to leave the ad game to become one of the most successful writers in the country.
Nick:
Can we talk about candy bar prices these days? Politicians love to rant about the cost of a dozen eggs, but the worst and most persistent inflation since the pandemic has been in Snickers bars. For the longest time you could get one for 99 cents. Now the vending machine in my building has them for $2.35! (Did I still buy one? Of course.) When will politicians and the media stop giving Big Candy Bar a pass?
Kamala is currently running a bunch of ads that address this. Every spot is THE COST OF SHIT IS TOO DAMN HIGH!, followed by Kamala telling the audience she’ll reduce the cost of living in America by $4,000 if elected. They’re very big on that $4,000 number. I guess it’s a round-enough number for most Americans to grasp, so they took it and ran with it.
I have not purchased a regular candy bar in ages, because I graduated to the gourmet candy bar aisle: Ghirardelli, Lindt, Chocolove, Eric’s Fair Trade Vegan Coca Nib Bar, and what have you. I love that section of the grocery store, and could stare at those bars for an hour before grabbing a half dozen Salted Almond Butter Chocoloves and throwing them in my cart. They even made Reese’s bars for that section. Reese’s was like, “Hey! We can cost $5 too!” Does that price offend me? Yes. Would I house an upscale Reese’s bar? In five seconds.
As such, I have lost any firm grasp on what a normal candy bar should cost in 2024. Fuck, I don’t know what anything should cost anymore. I am Lucille Bluth now. Someone will charge me $10 for a banana and I’ll just go along with it.
But I do draw the line at vending machine prices. [pulls up a stool next to cloud] I remember when I was broke but could still afford a snack in the 50-cent row of the vending machine. No chance that kind of money would get me a Twix bar, but sometimes it was enough for a microscopic bag of Fritos, a bag of shitty pretzels, a pack of Juicy Fruit, or some Andy Capp’s Hot Fries. But if I had a whole dollar, then I could have my way with the thing: animal crackers, Hostess pies, Famous Amos cookies … ANYTHING. A dollar made you a rich man at the vending machine.
Now it’s 2024 and those same machines want me to fork over MORE than a dollar. Some of the vending machines at the airport even think I wanna spend $200 on earbuds sold by Kylie Jenner! [yelling at the cloud now] THIS IS FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS! WHERE IS OLD MAN BIDEN ON THIS? PROBABLY MASSAGING HIS LIVER SPOTS!
Brady:
Do you think there are any professional athletes, particularly in sports like football and hockey, that that go without a base layer under their uniform? Is anyone raw dogging their shoulder pads like prime Michael Westbrook?
No, because no one wants to wear wet pads. If you’ve ever played football in the rain, you know this intimately. You can get an undershirt dirty and stinky as shit, especially if Under Armour is supplying your team with an infinite supply of them. But once you get your shoulder pads nasty, they stay nasty for a long-ass time. It’s not worth going commando underneath. It won’t even feel sexy.
I have to recuse myself from answering the same question about hockey players because nothing on earth smells worse than a hockey locker room. I haven’t played hockey since I was 8 and I no longer have my sense of smell, and I still remember how bad the stench in there got. No amount of undergarments can prevent it. So maybe Connor McDavid is out on the ice with his dick hanging freely under his pants. He’ll smell like a dissected frog by the time his shift is over regardless.
Karl:
Do you ever worry that you are going to run out of things to say? I'm not suggesting this is happening, but that has to be HARD to find new ways to talk shit about Green Bay ownership or a million other things. Maybe a better way to ask my question is, do you ever worry you are going to run out of ways to talk about things?
That’s every writer’s dilemma, isn’t it? Hard to write if you don’t have a firm grasp on what you should be writing about, or how you should be writing about it. That’s one reason that we had other writers come in to help with Why Your Team Sucks this summer. I knew I was stretching myself thin in terms of both workload and good material, so I asked for help. I’m extremely glad I did.
On the whole, I don’t really worry I’ll run out of things to say because A) I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years now and the well always replenishes, and B) I do my homework so that I’m not trying to just will shit onto the page when I have nothing/no one to get the idea machine running. You can’t write in a vacuum, so I never do.
The important thing is that I never treat any roadblock as some existential crisis. I’m not like OMG I’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO WRITE AGAIN I WANT TO DIE, because that’s drama-queen shit. Writing is a job, which means that, like every other job, it has challenges. You encounter a challenge, and then you handle it. You don’t sit there and lament how daunting the challenge is. You just write NO ONE DENIES THIS! in all caps and hope that someone out there is reading that gag for the first time.
Email of the week!
Dave:
I was in Iceland this past summer with my wife and kids, two other couples, and their children. One day we were pulling into the parking lot to walk to see a glacier when I all of a sudden felt a strong pain in my stomach. I'd felt this pain before. I knew I was going to have to shit immediately (I'm pretty sure I have IBS, or something similar). I was hoping the pain would subside, and that this was just a warning shot. That was a mistake.
We began the short, sprawling hike to the glacier when I felt the pain again. At this point, I knew I needed to find a place to shit. Unfortunately there were no trees, bushes, or shrubbery to hide behind. The area was also full of tourists. As everyone was taking pictures of the glacier, I took off to relieve myself in a lower area that was slightly hidden from the main pat. I squatted down and fertilized Iceland with some good old American shit.
As I was shitting, I heard something above my head. It was a drone, with a camera. Somewhere in the world someone has a picture of me with my pants down, taking a shit, with a beautiful glacier in the distance. I also had to use my hat to wipe my ass since there weren't any leaves anywhere.
Still a better film than Megalopolis.
