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 trash days, dying in Australia, old man rock, and more.
Your letters:
John:
I recently started doing the NYT crossword again, which I've subscribed to for about a dozen years (I do the puzzle on my iPad, which is cheating according to the hardcore crossword community). I've always considered myself a casual crossword guy, and can do the Fri-Sat-Sun run in decent time. However, I finished a recent Friday puzzle in about 13 minutes. The crossword community threw a conniption over how easy that puzzle was, claiming it was Monday caliber drivel, and possibly an error in publishing date. This got me thinking: based on how we've voted in the last ten years, the average American probably can't even complete a Monday puzzle, right? (Also, the only thing that everyone can agree on is that the Thursday puzzle can fuck right off.)
John, I’m glad you asked this question. First of all, the answer is no. The average American probably can't complete a New York Times Monday crossword puzzle. This is because Americans are fucking stupid. I’m not blowing your mind letting you in on that little secret.
But here’s something that WILL blow your mind. Just within the past few weeks, I have become a crossword freak. I ponied up a NYT Games subscription after they put their Mini Crossword behind their paywall (Fiends! Only we at Defector are allowed to use a paywall!). The Mini is basically a Junior Jumble for Kamala voters. I can usually finish it in less than half a minute, which suits my ego nicely. But I was too daunted by the real deal Times crossword to ever venture it. Anytime I tried doing the Times crossword in ink many years ago, I’d end up stonewalled. Being me, I then developed a seething resentment of the puzzle and its editors. Oh, don’t you people think you’re so clever, with all of your in-jokes and references to shit that happened in 1912? I didn’t want to be one of those people. The reality, of course, was just that I wasn’t good enough to ever become one of them.
Once I plunked down five bucks a month for the Games app, I figured that I should try the big boy puzzle just to get my money’s worth. Plus, I didn’t have to use a pen or pencil, which was the REAL sticking point before. Nothing worse than having to erase/cross out boxes you fucked up. I had just weaned myself off of doing the Defector crossword with the Error Check turned on, and it didn’t affect my finishing time all that much. Maybe I wasn’t as sucky at crosswords as I’d been all those years ago.
I wasn’t. Because I’m well into middle age, I have become the target demo for this stupid puzzle. So I got the hang of Will Shortz and his crazy baby games in short order. I still hated the Thursday puzzle, because I don’t like rebus crosswords. I prefer one letter per box, and for words to be wholly intact. Plus, the app didn’t even fucking work when they put up a rebus where you had to spell out a number, i.e. “one,” in a single box. Fuck you, asshole. Just give me a normal-ass crossword, or at least gimme a rebus puzzle I can actually fill out.
I also got better at the weekend crosswords, so much so that I recently finished a whole Sunday one without having to turn on error check for help at the very end. Oh, reader. Oh, was I psyched. I was the smartest little boy in the world that morning, yes I was. I doubt I’ll ever familiarize myself with crossword culture as a whole. If those people think doing a puzzle online is cheating, then it’s probably best that I not engage with them. I prefer my crossword exploits to be a solitary affair. Just me and my brain, working together. I love good puzzles like crosswords and Pips because I love figuring things out. Thinking you have everything figured out is Republican shit. It’ll also give you dementia before you turn 50.
So I’m now fully committed to my crossword habit. I do the Times one every day, even Thursday. I love getting to know a puzzle’s contours, and I love the chain of sensations I get when one answer clues me into another, and then another. I sit in my chair, focus on the clues, and become the wise old man I was always destined to be. Feels good. They’re also fun to do while you’re gummified.
Jonah:
Baby Hitler vs. Baby Trump in a boxing match. Who ya got?
Oh, Baby Hitler. Unlike Trump, Hitler actually WENT to war. That’s the sort of newborn who would flourish in the octagon.
Peter:
When do you know something is beyond your skills to put together? For me it’s when a tape measure or level appears in the instructional video.
When I don’t want to do it. That is my breaking point. I’ve done plenty of house projects in my time, even ones which require the use of a level and/or tape measure. But if we need to replace some drywall in the basement? Fuck that shit, I’m calling the handyman.
Joe:
I think 25-50% of identical twins end up with their sibling’s birth name as adults. What do you think? Please just call me Joe if you use this.
Every non-twin thinks that identical twins routinely get switched at birth. I know identical twins, so I’m always tempted to be like, “Hey Jim man, how do you know you’re actually Jim and not Tim?” But I’ve never asked this, because I don’t wanna get punched in the dick.
Hospitals go out of their way to keep all newborns properly identified. They use ID bracelets and triple-check them constantly, so that Baby Hitler gets that pay-per-view match against Jake Paul, and not Baby Trump. Then, once back home, the new parents grab a Sharpie and write the name of each baby across that baby’s forehead. BOOM. Problem solved.
Jeff:
What is the more legitimate trophy: the NBA Cup or a "World's Greatest Grandpa" coffee mug?
The latter. The NBA Cup exists to make early regular-season NBA games seem more important than they actually are. That worked on me the first time around. Now I just want them to play games on a court with a floor design that won’t give me spontaneous epilepsy.
Now, a World’s Greatest Grandpa mug is a whole other story. You really DO have to accomplish a lot to earn one of those. If you’re a grandpa, that means you’ve lived to old age in this country without dying in a mass shooting. No small feat. You’ve also had kids who have had kids. No player on the Orlando Magic can make a similar boast! You’re probably also really good at the Sunday crossword! Your honorific is legit. By comparison, an NBA Cup title is about as prestigious as a Golden Globe nomination.
Brian:
A question only a middle aged man could ask: What’s the best trash day? Town moved us from Monday to Friday and it fucking sucks. Monday was perfect. You throw away the evidence of the weekend and start fresh. Friday is terrible. There’s gotta be a right answer here.
You just answered it, and thank you for reminding me that MY trash day is Friday. You know how badly that fucked me over back when I used to booze? No wonder I had to start drinking earlier in the week. The sanitation department made me do it! I’m innocent!
By the way, my in-laws live in a town that picks up their trash TWO days a week. Two! Even Jeff Bezos doesn’t live that well. Imagine how much extra shit I could buy and then throw out if I had two trash days every week. I’d be like a god.
Jeff:
Mike Tanier wrote this week that Justin Jefferson is "developing into one of the NFL’s better defenders." Do you think they should play him both ways?
No. Besides, WR3 Jalen Nailor was Minnesota’s best involuntary defender on Sunday, when he ran down Riq Woolen after an interception and punched the ball out. In fact, Nailor is the only Vikings wideout having a good season. Jefferson has been terrible. Adam Thielen was so underutilized that he asked for his release and got it. And Jordan Addison now catches the ball about as well as he drives an automobile. Somehow I find this much more irritating than the fact that my team doesn’t have any viable quarterbacks on its present roster. Let’s move on.
Steve:
This is something I push back on personally a lot and wanted to see if I'm just wrong. I get annoyed when people say they don't want to go to Australia because of all the dangerous animals. I get mad because AMERICA is also full of dangerous animals. Just off the top of my head we have bears, cougars, venomous snakes, spiders, and scorpions. We have sharks off the coasts, and gators in the swamps. Am I nuts?
You didn’t even mention how dangerous Americans themselves are. If one of our gators doesn’t kill you, a native Floridian with an AR-15 will be ready to do the job.
But let me play my “Actually, I was born in Australia” card for a moment to say that our lethal florae and faunae ain’t got shit on all the creepy crawlies hanging out Down Under. My old man routinely found giant spiders on the underside of the lid whenever he took out the trash. My brother was hospitalized after walking into the woods and stepping on something he shouldn’t have stepped on (to this day, we still don’t know what bit him). And my folks once walked into my sister’s nursery to see a funnel web spider hanging from a thread directly above her. The memories of those incidents linger.
The dangers beyond our house were even more pronounced. Australia also has box jellyfish, man-eating crocodiles, and something called the “paralysis tick,” which does exactly what it says on the label. There’s some light xenophobia when it comes to Australia in this regard. Shunning an entire continent just because a snake could bite you is some pretty narrow thinking. But Australia’s monster squad is venerated for a good reason. No one is afraid of the wildlife in Belgium now, are they? In terms of both climate and topography, Australia is a remarkably harsh continent. Animals there had to evolve into finely tuned killing machines just to survive. If their presence doesn’t serve as a big neon sign screaming HUMANS ARE NOT WELCOME IN THIS PLACE, I don’t know what else could.
That shouldn’t dissuade anyone from visiting the country. Lord knows that Australians have terraformed enough of the coastline to keep all of the scared white people safe in their luxury condominiums. And if a vampire kangaroo still manages to bust down the lobby entrance, your average Aussie will be far too drunk to know or care. MY PEOPLE.
Chris:
What’s your reaction to people when they say, “I don’t believe in therapy”? I try not to judge other humans without perspective, but this seems like some boomer bullshit way of not addressing human feelings. Granted, I’m biased because therapy has helped me tremendously.
I don’t judge people who say that. I can’t, because I myself didn’t believe in therapy until I went for the first time in 2020. Prior to that, I respected people who went to a professional for their mental health troubles, I just didn’t think that I had any of them. Then I went to therapy for the first time and was like, “Oh, this helps a lot! I’m way more fucked up than I thought!” That turned me into a big fan of treatment, but I try not to be Evangelical about it. Therapy doesn’t work for everyone, and the people too stubborn to try it aren’t people that I’m going to successfully persuade. It’s like asking Pete Hegseth to not murder people. All I can do it share my own story with people and let it marinate. I’m not gonna march anyone into Dr. Katz’s office at gunpoint.
HALFTIME!
Jackie:
Why are there suddenly so many more alternative unis for NFL teams this year? Am I being curmudgeonly when I get irritated by teams that regularly change up on their color schemes, or is this a legitimate gripe? For example, it seems like neither LA team can settle on a shade of blue, and it really bothers me. Your thoughts?
The deal with the alternate unis is that Nike and the NFL rolled out a new series of Rivals uniforms this year. This coincides with the league recently relaxing its draconian uniform policy to accommodate for different colored helmet shells, plus a few other sartorial flourishes. The goal, of course, is to sell more merchandise, but some of these alts have really hit for me, especially New England and Tampa. The other alts are whatever, but I appreciate the changeup, especially when it’s not monochrome Color Rush pajamas. If there’s real design in the design, I’m a happy camper. And players like alts, too. Gets them more hyped to play. Anyone who doesn’t like it falls more into the old crank genre than they want to admit.
Because the NFL is still wildly staid compared to the other leagues. Alternate uniforms in the NBA have become SO different from the original uniforms that the league had to issue an order this spring, telling all of the playoff teams remaining that they had to wear their normal shit, so that viewers knew which teams they were looking at. Soccer has also had this problem. I never know when Liverpool will decide to take the pitch wearing some limited edition violet plaid kit designed by a friend of Banksy. That tends to defeat the purpose of wearing any uniform at all. Make sure I know which team I’m looking at, and THEN fuck around all you like.
Unless you’re the Chargers. Jackie is right that both the Rams and the Chargers have both over-tinkered, with the Chargers seemingly going out of their way to NOT wear their classic powder blues, which are the best unis in NFL history. Look at how many different blues these buttheads use right now. JUST PICK ONE, DEAN SPANOS. This isn’t a fucking Gap.
Jordan:
Two weeks ago, we found out my wife is pregnant (please congratulate me for being a sex-haver). This is obviously far down the list of priorities right now for us, but what does Dr. Drew recommend for new dads who are cinephiles? How long can I expect myself to be completely in the dark on new movies and music and whatnot once our kid is born? Am I a selfish prick for even asking this question?
Congrats on having the sex, Jordan! Sex is natural, sex is fun/Sex is best when it’s ONE ON ONE. Sorry, that song always pops into my head, even though it’s terrible.
Now let’s talk about your life as you know it ending. If you’re an American, you’re already a selfish prick. No further study required. You better believe I had the exact same worries as Jordan when my wife first got pregnant. Will I be able to keep up with prestige TV? If her due date is next Sunday, does that mean I can’t watch the game that night? Will she and I ever fuck again? When can I do drugs around the baby? I better take a two week vacation to Amsterdam so I can get in as much fun as I can before my life turns to dogshit!!!
You’re not a bad person for having selfish impulses. Your life is about to change, in ways you can’t really know. So you’re gonna freak out a little, especially if you grew up watching Bachelor Party starring Tom Hanks as often as I did. The 20th century taught boys like me that single manhood was the optimal form of manhood, and that every married man was on the verge of suicide. That all turned out to be a lie, and I only needed two decades of experience raising kids to learn it! Wow! Great success!
Anyway Jordan, you’re about to enter a pop culture black hole for a few years. You’re not gonna see as many movies as you’d like. I myself still haven’t eked out time to watch Breaking Bad, which is tragic. HOWEVER, once you serve your time in poopy trenches, your schedule begins to clear up again. It will take longer than you’d prefer. Soooooooooo much longer. My oldest kid turns 20 in two months. I feel like I’ve been parenting her for triple that amount of time. So I earned my right to binge all of Slow Horses over a single weekend, and TV earned is sweeter than TV won. You’ll get there.
CG:
We all know that Appetite for Destruction is perfect. If you took the 12 best songs from the Use Your Illusions, how close does it get to approaching Appetite's greatness? It gets closer than you think, IMHO. And what 12 songs would you pick?
CG is referring to Guns N' Roses, in case you’re a couple decades younger than the both of us. Appetite, the band’s first album, was recorded on analog tape and is an eternal masterpiece. One composition left off of that album, “You Could Be Mine,” would end up being used on the band’s followup double LP, Use Your Illusions I and II.
It’s no coincidence that “You Could Be Mine” is easily one of the best songs across the Illusions. That’s because after GNR went big, everyone in the band got heavy into egomania, insanity, and heroin. So for the Illusions, the band members wrote a lot of the songs on their own and then recorded their parts for each song alone too, often in different cities. That disjointed way of recording tends to have an adverse effect on quality control, which is why the Illusions ended up being such a bloated affair. No one wanted any of their songs left on the cutting room floor, so they kept all of them instead. The final product ended up including 30 songs, with a running time of over two and a half hours. That includes two covers, two versions of the same song but with different lyrics, plus a shitty hip-hop song called “My World” that frontman Axl Rose recorded and used as the closer for Illusion II without telling anyone else in the group (they all despised it, as did listeners).
This project desperately needed an editor, and aging metalheads like CG and I have spent the past 30-plus years retroactively attempting to play that editor. Here’s the track listing that I eventually landed on:
- “You Could Be Mine”
- “Don’t Cry”
- “14 Years”
- “Bad Obsession”
- “Knocking On Heaven’s Door” (Dylan cover)
- “Locomotive”
- “Civil War”
- “The Garden”
- “Don’t Damn Me”
- “Pretty Tied Up”
- “Estranged”
That’s 11 songs, one less than CG asked for. I once had the 10 minute-plus epic “Coma” on here, because I too had once been comatose. But it’s an objectively messy song. I also didn’t include the biggest hit off of those albums, “November Rain,” because that song is just Axl trying to be Elton John for seven minutes before the real music kicks for the coda. “Estranged” is the better epic ballad, and makes for a solid album closer. By all means, use the comment section to tell me how wrong I am.
Regardless of what condensed version of the Illusions you prefer, it won’t hold a candle to Appetite for Destruction. I know CG wants to believe it can come close. But it doesn’t. All you gotta do is listen to all of GNR’s catalog to know that. Axl said his goal was to “bury Appetite” with the Illusions. Thirty-four years later, he’s still singing Appetite songs to stadium crowds to earn his living. That’s how singularly good that album was. Few other rock bands have created anything that equals it. GNR sure hasn’t.
Phil:
As a fellow misophonian (?), can you try to explain to me what it is about eating loudly that unlocks a more pleasurable dining experience for you? It would seem like eating with your mouth closed would enhance flavor, as you're able to maximize the olfactory exposure of what's going on vs. just allowing it to escape out into the non-mouth local atmosphere. Does the primal caveman instinct of loudly gnawing flesh from a carcass supersede that nose bonus, if indeed it exists?
Well I can’t smell, so harnessing maximum aroma out of my food isn’t a top priority. By the way, Phil is referring to a previous Funbag where I confessed that my wife hates how loudly I chew my food. I’ve tried my best to come correct, and she’s been satisfied with the effort. But if she’s not around, you better believe I eat with my mouth open. WIDE open. You know why? Because it’s fun. You take huge bites and then smack your mouth like a saber-toothed tiger while chewing your food down. It feels more savage, more visceral, more pleasurable. I take to all good things in life—food, sex, rock and roll—with fierce gusto. I want everyone without earshot to know just how passionate I am about housing this bowl of Raisin Bran Crunch. Again, I am an American. We are not a species built for immodesty.
Thomas:
Who would win in a tennis match? Me (a relatively in shape 24-year-old who can successfully hit the ball over the net but no more), or Roger Federer using a cast iron pan?
Which brand of cast iron pan? We talking Lodge here? Because I find Lodge pans to be strangely overrated. Anyway, Federer would annihilate you using a cast iron pan, or a softball bat, or a canoe paddle, or a small dog. Doesn’t matter what handicap you force upon him. He’s still Roger Federer and you ain’t.
(I bet swinging a cast iron pan repeatedly would eventually cause his shoulder to fall out of its socket, though.)
Chuck:
Assuming you're listening to regular radio in a car, not streaming or your playlist, what group or artist makes you change the station the fastest? Like, you'll wreck the fucking car to turn that dial ASAP. Linkin Park for me.
Sia, although that’s far less of a worry now than it was a few years ago. World’s most overwrought singing voice. Also, there was a brief stretch of time when “Heart Attack” by Demi Lovato got frequent airplay, and that’s one of the worst goddamn songs I’ve ever heard. Really did have me lunging for the stereo to change the station before the chorus hit. Demi Lovato’s music was designed specifically to use on Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Email of the week!
Todd:
A few months ago my laptop crashed, so I took it took it to the local computer fixit shop to see if they could salvage it. I was received by a bored, monotone speaking woman behind the counter. I don't even think she said hello when I walked in. I explained what had happened and mentioned a few things that the computer was doing before dying. Could those be the source of the problem, I asked? "Maybe, but it’s probably just a coincidence" she responded.
The encounter would have been totally normal, even forgettable, except that she pronounced the word coincidence, "co-inky-dink." I would've brushed this aside, even thinking I misheard her, but she went on to say "co-inky-dink" three more times! What are the chances this woman thinks coincidence is pronounced "co-inky-dink?" (She fixed my computer and I'm using it now.)
Zero. Take it some from someone who, without thinking, started to work a playful “coinkeedink” into his daily parent vocabulary. We olds do shit like this constantly. We’re not even fully aware of it.
