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 weed, old man smell, dying in a tornado, and more.
Ben:
Pete Rose is now eligible to be elected to the Hall of Fame because Rob Manfred is a shitbag I have heard NO ONE in the media saying that in addition to betting baseball, Rose lied about betting on baseball. He lied to everyone at every press opportunity. Hundreds, maybe thousands of times. He lied to multiple commissioners about it. Why are his endless lies to the general public to reporters to commissioners just being handwaved away? Why aren't those endless lies being taken into account in any way? Is being a congenital liar somehow to be admired in today’s society?
Whoever lies the loudest in 2025 America wins, and this is the result. I’m so used to being lied to now that I barely register it. Think about how many lies you and I encounter every day. We’re lied to by politicians, influencers, ads, sports leagues, the media, product packaging, random social media accounts, and customer service representatives. The default setting of this country is to spew bullshit, which reduces lying from a cardinal sin to background noise. It’s not that the American people admire liars. It’s just that they don’t care if people lie, so long as they enjoy whatever lie they’re being fed. Only Roger Goodell still adheres to the “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” approach to wrongdoing, and guess what? Everyone thinks he’s a dipshit for it. Even me.
This brings us to Pete Rose, whose offenses are so legion that “being Pete Rose” is more than enough of an offense to merit his banishment from OTB parlors, let alone the Baseball Hall of Fame. The gambling and the lying are now baked into his name, which is why Trump was so eager to free his ghost. I could go out of my way, like Ben here, to remind everyone about the extent of Rose’s lying, but I already know that most of us have exhausted our outrage reserves. Trump wanted Rose reinstated, and Manfred will do anything that anyone above him tells him to do. That doesn’t mean that you and I have to think of Rose as vindicated. He’s still the exact same Pete Rose he was before all of this, and I’d still piss on his corpse if there were five bucks in it for me.
Do you know the funny thing about all of this? If Pete Rose had never been banned by Paul Giamatti’s dad all those years ago, we’d have all been better off. I know that banning him was the right move, but it’s kept Pete Rose in the national conversation ever since. If he had been inducted into Cooperstown in 1991, his story would have died off, and him along with it. Ichiro Suzuki would have become the all-time hit king in the hearts of many (myself included), with Rose’s on-field accomplishments growing ever smaller in the public imagination.
That remains a possibility, especially now that Rose is eligible. Every year that man is kept out of the Hall—and I assume the BBWAA will deny him entrance even now, because they never let anyone not named Jeter in anymore—is another year that I have to hear about his sorry ass. Pete Rose was a world-class shitbag, and he’s dead now. Fuck him. Go ahead and induct him so that I all of us can stick a wad of used chewing gum on his plaque. This is a rare instance where justice hasn’t been worth it.
Chris:
I declared to my girlfriend that I am now a weed guy, to which she responded, “You mean a stoner?” I've since made the argument that there is a distinction. A weed guy/gal weaves marijuana into their everyday life, while for a stoner being high in and of itself is the goal. Am I on to something, or is it a distinction without a difference?
There’s no difference, you’re just switching out an older piece of slang for a new one. There’s no reason that you have to think of stoners as a monolith, and there’s no utility—this is the old crank in me talking—in the “X Guy” vernacular construct. “I’m a wife guy now!” Just say you’re a husband. You’re not as whimsical as you think you are, kid. You don’t see me telling everyone, “I’m a restaurant guy now!” whenever I decide to eat out at Legal Seafoods. Plain English works just fine.
Now, let’s talk about the weed part of this query, specifically this sentence: “A weed guy/gal weaves marijuana into their everyday life, while for a stoner being high in and of itself is the goal.” Those are not mutually exclusive concepts to the American stoner. If being high is your chief ambition, as it should be, you’ll naturally find ways to work weed into your everyday life: while doing chores, while buying groceries, while watching prestige TV. That’s especially true if you’re a grownup with a job and not still chilling out in college. We can’t all be Floyd from True Romance, although I wish to God we could be.
In fact, the widespread legalization of weed has changed the face of the American stoner forever, because everyone is stoned now. All the time. How else do you expect us regular folks to deal with all of the Trump bullshit otherwise? I go to the dispensary and I see soccer moms, teenagers, young professionals, old folks, event planners, gym bros, you name it. It’s the most diverse collection of people in America now that DEI initiatives have been all but outlawed, and it means that you can’t really stereotype stoners as dudes and dude-ettes who just sit on the couch all day, sucking on a bong. That robs weed of the long-standing identity it had cultivated back when it was illegal everywhere, and it probably makes schmokin’ some dope less cool than it used to be. But it’s still weed and it still works, no matter if you’re a stoner, a weed guy, a dropout, a hippie, a pothead, a druggie, a fiend, or B-Real. No need to overthink it more than that.
Andy:
You're at a restaurant and at another table you see a couple. Person A takes a bite of food and starts chewing, then spits the food into Person B's mouth like a momma bird feeding a baby. This happens every time Person A eats. How many times does this happen before another customer or an employee says something. I say more than four. My wife says once. Who's right?
It has to happen twice, but likely no more than that. If it happens just once, a lot of other people in the restaurant won’t see it. The people that do witness your hypothetical diners pulling an Alicia Silverstone will either be too shocked to say anything, or they’ll chalk it up as some weird drunken stunt that the couple won’t repeat. When it happens a second time, that’s when everyone in the joint will be like, OK this is fucked up. I have a hard time believing that it would take more than four feedings for someone to finally say something; it’d be less jarring to watch a couple next to you start fucking right there on the table.
Stinky Cheese Mal:
I am a late 40’s Gen X dude and I’ve noticed a development that chagrins me: my balls are getting stinkier. I get in there for a scratch n’ sniff and I come back with a fist full of Limburger. It doesn’t matter how much I shower, or how much soap I shove up there, or how vigorously I scrub… my stuff is stinky. Is this the start of old man smell?
Because I lost my sense of smell seven years ago, I can’t line up my personal experience with your own. I assume my balls smell worse than they used to, but can’t sniff around for proof. And I can’t ask others to check down there and give me their own assessment. I just have to pray that I’m keeping my testicles clean enough on a daily basis to ward off any nascent old man smell, because I fear old man smell terribly.
This is not a joke. I don’t care about the other signs of aging I’ve experienced. My hair is graying (my mom wishes I would dye it), my ear hair goes rogue with increasing regularity, permanent aging lines now mar my once pristine visage, and my tits are sagging. I’m not vain enough to care about any of those things. Getting old means looking old. But I am very much am vain enough to shudder at the idea of having old-man smell. That would put me over a threshold that I have little interest in ever crossing. If my wife ever tells me that I smell like that, I’ll bathe in tomato juice every day until I’ve purged the scent entirely.
That’s if all of me smells like old man, and not just my balls. Because when the fuck have your balls ever smelled good? I had to start using triple action Gold Bond in high school, my fromunda cheese was so pungent. I was hardly the only one. Gold Bond in a football team’s locker room is more valuable currency than cigarettes in a federal prison.
Peter:
“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” has to have the coolest backstory to a song right? My runner-up is, “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Just to catch some of you up, Peter is asking this question in the wake of me outing myself as an REM hater in last week’s bag (the resulting arguments down in the comment section of that post are genuinely fun to read). I wrote that “Kenneth” was the only song of REM’s that I liked. And I was very much amused by the inspiration behind the song’s title, which stemmed from an attack on then-CBS news anchor Dan Rather back in 1986. Rather’s assailants repeated a variation of that phrase to the newscaster as they were assaulting him. REM, in a rare display of humor, decided to name that song after it. I gotta give Michael Stipe his props for that.
But is that the coolest backstory to a song ever? I doubt it’ll cause many arguments if I say no. Off the top of my head, I can think of others, such as:
- Eric Clapton writing “Layla” because he was in love with George Harrison’s wife (and later stole her from him)
- Alanis Morissette writing “You Oughtta Know” after being groomed and then abandoned by Full House co-star Dave Coulier
- Kendrick Lamar recording “Not Like Us” to (successfully) brand Drake as a child predator
- Marvin Gaye titling his 14th album Here My Dear because he had to split the proceeds from it with his ex-wife
- Taylor Swift writing “Bad Blood” to make fun of Katy Perry, because it turns out that Katy Perry is kind of a fucking idiot
- Keith Richards thinking up the main riff to “Satisfaction” and playing into a tape recorder while shitfaced/high/insane and then discovering it the next day, having had no memory of it
- The Beatles recording “Taxman” as their first overtly political song because George Harrison and John Lennon were pissed about how much money the U.K. was eating out of their royalties
- Metallica originally making the “Enter Sandman” lyrics explicitly about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome before producer Bob Rock asked them to tone down the language so that everyone could make more money
- Any Fleetwood Mac song about the band members hating how much loved to fuck one another
You get the idea. You name the hit, it’s got a juicy backstory to it. REM was never quite that petty, although I’d like them 10 percent more if they had been.
HALFTIME!
Adrian:
I miss the days when you could just skip ads when streaming something, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it because it just feels like old style TV now. However, if the podcasting tech community takes away my ability to skip podcast ads, I think that will break me. Do you think the +30 seconds feature will be taken away from us eventually?
Hey man, those ads are how The Distraction makes money, so I ORDER you to listen to all 60 seconds of my ad read for Hims. If you skip those reads, you’re taking food out of my children’s mouths. YOU PRICK. You deserve to keep going bald!
Anyway, my guess is that streamers will find a way to block skipping ads on any podcast that’s exclusive to them (i.e. Joe Rogan and Spotify) unless you pay $X extra per month. After that, they might try to do the same for every podcast they host, but that latter effort will probably only result in mixed success. It’s like the Trump administration; they’ll find every way they can to fuck you and worry about the rest later.
With that in mind, let me just tell all of these people to leave Apple CarPlay the fuck alone. I love my CarPlay. I plug my phone into my dashboard and oh shit, I can rock out to my playlists and follow the GPS directions all at the same time. So clean. So friendly. CarPlay is my bestest friend on the road.
But BMW just started charging a subscription fee for drivers who use it, and you know damn well that every other automaker is horny for the idea. You fuckers. You’re even worse than people who skip my podcast ad reads, you are! If I hook up my phone one fine morning and suddenly my Hyundai is like MONEY PLEEZ, I will drive my car up the Capitol steps and stage a one-man insurrection. You can destroy the rest of this stupid country, but don’t fuck with my radio. I'll kill you.
Hugues:
As a Def Leppard aficionado I'd like your opinion on their 1996 album Slang. I feel that it's not well-liked by fans but it's my second favorite Def Leppard album. Maybe that's just weird nostalgia. Slang came out when I was in college, and right when I turned 21. At that point grunge was getting stale and here was a band I liked putting out something different. It wasn't grunge, but wasn't really "hair metal" either. I'm sure I listened to it 100 times back then. “Gift of Flesh” and “Work It Out” are two of their absolute best songs.
I never bothered listening to Slang because I knew in advance that it was Def Leppard attempting to be something other than Def Leppard. I just waited for them to release Euphoria, an album that I still listen to, later in the '90s to hop back aboard. So let me give Hugues’s two favorite songs off of Slang a try right now for my gut reaction. The rest of you can skip down to the next question if you want; I understand.
[queues up the tracks]
My apologies Hugues, but these songs aren’t doing it for me. I don’t want Def Leppard sounding like Bush. I just wanna dance.
Michael:
How would you rank dying in a tornado in terms on a scale of 1-10 as far as fear/pain/overall experience? I am adamant it wouldn't be that bad. Sure, you would be scared shitless immediately beforehand. But eventually you just get to fly around and smash into the ground at crazy speeds. You most likely wouldn't feel anything. My buddy says he would rather drown or get shot, both of which seem significantly more horrifying.
I dunno Michael, getting swept away by a tornado sounds PRETTY bad. At no time in the process would I be like, “Yay I’m flying! This is so cool!” I’d look down, see that I’m suddenly 100 feet off the ground, and then my brain and body would shut down just before I got kissed by a flying I-beam. The only upside is that my death would be quick, so I guess I’ll give this one an 8 on the horror scale, below dying of slow-metastasizing cancer but ahead of pretty much everything else. Tornadoes are scary. Ask any Oklahoman.
Of course, I have never died in a tornado, so I really don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. I did nearly die once (maybe you’ve heard), and it was painless in the moment because I was unconscious. This is pretty typical in emergency situations. Your body has all sorts of physiological mechanisms to soften the trauma. You pass out before fatal impact. You experience a euphoric sensation before you asphyxiate. You go physically and mentally numb from shock. You experience a surge of adrenaline that leaves you focused exclusively on survival rather than true dread. Your brain isn’t going to deal with pain when it needs to put 100 other fires out in that moment, so you get treated to a little bit of system-induced bravery before your pulse flatlines.
That makes dying in a tornado perhaps a little better than you fear. It’s still dying in a tornado, though. You know you ain’t landing in Oz once you’re up in the air.
Aaron:
Have ever used shallots raw in your cooking? The thought had unfortunately never crossed my mind before my sandwich today. It was fantastic *chef’s kiss*.
As always, shallots are what make restaurant food taste like restaurant food. Well, and a stick of butter in every dish, but that’s not germane to this conversation. I’m game to toss shallots into pretty much any entrée I’m making but, in to answer Aaron, I rarely use them raw because that would mean I’m making a salad, and I’m too lazy to make a salad.
My wife, on the other hand, requires a salad with any meal she eats. She’d probably ask for a beet salad before being walked to the gas chamber, she’s such a salad gal. So she adds chopped shallots to her spring mix and then adds a small amount of them to whatever homemade dressing she’s whipping up. I highly recommend that second part. Raw shallots in dressing elevate any vinaigrette. Don’t tell your dinner guests, though. Let them think that you have magical salad tossing powers. Wait, that came out wrong…
Josh:
One night, I had kid duty so that the missus could go hang out with her friends. So I took my daughter out for chicken nuggets. While sitting in our booth, I watch her grab her little brother's soda, then put her straw and his straw in her mouth at the same time. The look of enlightenment and bliss on her face as she invented and experienced the unholy union of lemon-lime and root beer was one that I can still see in my mind today. After seeing her do that, I understood why she did so much dumb stuff and realized that she was going to be just fine. Have you ever experienced that moment when you knew your kids would be alright? I hope you have.
Oh wow, your daughter is a spiritual weed girl now! She’s also kindred spirits with documented soda fiend Emma Baccellieri, which is always a sign that you’re gonna make it in this crazy world. I love it when my kids do shit that I’m too adult to do myself, and then I love copying them so that I can experience the joy of dunking my Oreo into a jar of Nutella. That’s good family bonding.
Anyway, my “they’re gonna make it” epiphany is far less playful than the one Josh outlined above. It was the early 2020s, and my daughter was back at high school in person after spending her entire freshman year in pandemic e-school. The virtual school year sucked, as every parent who endured it will tell you. We spent so much of that year in the dark about our daughter’s education. We weren’t sure if she was learning anything, or if she even wanted to learn anything. We also fought a lot. So when sophomore year came around and we finally got her out of the house, we had no idea how she would adjust to her first physical year of high school. I didn’t know what she wanted out of school, or out of life in general.
One day that year, the girl told me she’d done a charcoal self-portrait for art class. I knew she dabbled in art, mostly because my wife is a painter. So I asked to see her work. When she passed me her phone, my jaw dropped. It was gallery worthy.
“How big is this drawing?” I asked her.
“Life size,” she replied.
“Holy shit!”
Until that moment, I had no idea the girl was THAT talented. I was so busy dealing with the labor of parenting that I hadn’t taken a moment to really see what kind of person my oldest kid was becoming. And then, all of sudden, I’m looking at something she’d made that I never, in a million years, could have made myself. That was the moment I knew the girl had her shit together, and I’ve been riding that high ever since. Makes me wanna go wild at a Coke Freestyle machine.
Dan:
Do you think countries will boycott the 2026 World Cup because of Trump? And what about (god forbid) the 2028 Olympics?
I don’t know, because I never know what policies Trump will walk back whenever the money tells him to knock it off. I’m sure they’ll make a big to-do about keeping the country “secure” for these events—JD Vance has already done his ugliest JD Vance shit in the ramp-up—but maybe all of the sponsors will go to the President and quietly tell him to let the whole blood purge go for a month. It’ll all be messy and shitty, just like everything else this administration attempts to do.
You know what I would like? I’d like one powerful person, just one, to openly say, “This guy’s a fucking idiot.” I don’t care if it’s Bob Iger, Roger Goodell, Chicago Pope, or Keir Starmer. It doesn’t matter who it is, so long as they to state the obvious about Trump instead of firing their DEI department just to avoid the president levying a 0.5 percent tax hike on them. Trump is a moron who’s gonna cost all of us money, so maybe one goddamn power broker in this world can say that so that the dam breaks. Everyone above my pay grade is pretending this is all on the level, and for what? Y’all are gonna get killed by a fucking tornado for going along with this shit! It’s all so dumb that I now hope no one comes here to watch the fucking Olympics. Why do I want Casey Wasserman or the IOC to be happy anyway? Fuck ‘em all.
Email of the week!
David:
The other day I was at the grocery store and I saw a guy shoplifting in a Mark Trumbo jersey. I noticed the guy because he was wearing a Mark Trumbo jersey, and I thought "Hey, Mark Trumbo, there's one you don't see very often," all while I was looking at him he started shoving ground beef into his backpack.
I hope the guy got away with it and, as far as I know, he did. But I was just thinking about how a shirt that literally makes people go, "Hey I remember that guy" might not be great crime-wear. Then again, I was so distracted by the jersey I couldn't tell you the first thing about what the fella looked like. So here's my question: let's say you're in a robbery crew that uses Guys the way that Swayze & co used presidents in Point Break. Which jersey are you donning for your heists?
Jordan Addison! He’s my favorite master thief of them all!
