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 lazy rivers, track lengths, the importance of music videos in 2025, and more.
Your letters:
Jack:
Whenever I have plate of spaghetti in front of me I always slice it up like a checker board so all the noodles are relatively short and easy to scoop up with the right amount of sauce onto my fork. For some reason this upsets other people, as they say that's not how you're supposed to do it. Am I the smart one here or should I be banished from polite society?
You don’t have to go to jail, but you do eat like a toddler. Cutting up your spaghetti is just a tick away from eating a burger with a knife and fork. Scott Conant would have you taken into a back alley and shot for this, as would many other Italians. Spaghetti is messy, enough so that “actually spaghetti is one of the minor pasta shapes” is a take that Roth and I have welcomed on the podcast. But even if you find spaghetti difficult to eat, you shouldn’t turn it into a tray of Lunchables in front of polite company. Instead, you should simply eat your spaghetti the way I do. Are you ready for the spaghetti lesson? Good. Here it is.
1. Grab your fork.
2. Twirl the spaghetti until you have a wad of it that’s roughly the size of a baseball on the fork.
3. Lean in toward your plate, until your face is hovering roughly a foot above it
4. Eat your big honking forkful of the pasta rudely, like an animal. Don’t worry if strands of the pasta are hanging out of your mouth like fringe curtains. That makes every bite more fun.
5. Keep your face stationed directly above the plate and repeat steps 1, 2, and 4 until no more spaghetti.
That’s it. Problem solved. You won’t find hacks like this on TikTok.
By the way, our 16-year-old won’t eat spaghetti because he also finds it too cumbersome to eat compared to the farfalles of the world. I love you son, but it’s a rough world out there. You’re gonna have to confront your spaghetti demons sooner or later. Twirl the pasta in a spoon so that you feel like a mob boss.
Andy:
Recently I was at a water park with my kids. We spent a LOT of time on the lazy river. So much so that I convinced myself that I would enjoy watching Olympic Lazy River. The format I have in mind is: have swimmers swim one lap in the direction of the river's flow, then one lap against it, then a final lap with it again. (The lazy river we were on had a "wave machine" feature for one long straightaway stretch, bonus points if that can be incorporated as well.) Are there any other vacation-coded activities you'd like to see elite athletes vie for Olympic gold?
Everyday lazy rivers are competitive enough as is, Andy. I know because I have three children, and if I tell them, “Hey, this park has a lazy river,” they lose their fucking minds. Every kid does. Because of that, every inner tube at the water park become more valuable than prison cigarettes, and the river itself becomes jammed like traffic on I-95. You got middle-aged ladies who are floating way too slow, sugar-addled middle schoolers all racing each other like they’re on a grand prix course, and entire groups of people linking their tubes together like they’re at a fucking family reunion. It’s chaos, I tell you.
This is why the ideal lazy river setup is one that you either own yourself, or one you have exclusive access to because you play football for UCF. This is America. We don’t do sharing in this country. Ever have a hotel pool all to yourself only to have another guest RUIN your good time by jumping in, too? Horrible. Get out of my pool, Fran.
So we’ve got the competitive version of lazy rivering already going on at every Wet N’ Wild and Typhoon Lagoon across the Sun Belt. No need to drag the Olympics into it, because that would take us even further away from the founding fathers’ vision of what a lazy river ought to be. Maybe it would work as an exhibition event. Maybe after the Games are over and we get all of the athletes remaining in the village good and drunk before jumping into the river, it’d make for compelling television in an MXC kind of way.
But if we’re gonna do steeple chase swimming, we need to think beyond lazy rivers and incorporate more obstacles: sharks, underwater hoops you must swim through, the aforementioned wave pool stretch, floating turds to dodge, and a fish-out-of-water 100-yard dash to end the race. Now our river is more sporty than lazy, because the contestants involved must suffer. Suffering is what makes it sports. This is why skydiving should be an official event. Whoever can stay in freefall the longest without opening their chute wins.
Michael:
How much would you have to be paid to walk around on your hands and feet for an entire year? No exceptions, everywhere you go.
A fucking year?! $300 million, and I’d keep as tight a radius as possible for that year. I’d never leave the house except to occasionally crawl around in the backyard. I’d use every delivery service to get my errands done. I’d move my bed down a level so that I would never have to crawl up or down the stairs. And I’d eat takeout from the dog’s food dish. I’m not crawling on asphalt, gravel, or any of that shit. The simple act of pissing at a rest stop would give me a permanent disability, so I’d never travel. That’s not cheating, by the way. Michael said I had to crawl everywhere I went, but he didn’t say I had to go anywhere. MONEY PLEEZ.
Because even with this gameplan, I’d still end the challenge year all fucked up. I still have patches on my knees from all of the rug burn I got playing on the floor with my kids when they were little. I have to exercise regularly just to keep my love handles from reaching my armpits. I have a shit back. I’m not built for the quadruped lifestyle, so even if I completed my walk-less year and got my prize money from Mr. Beast, I’d still be a wreck. My joints would kill. I’d have the musculature of an astronaut returning from fucking Mars. And my spine would be frozen into the shape of a question mark. The good news is that I’d be AMAZING at crawling to the toilet when suffering from a case of the barfs.
Jack:
Just read your bit about Tom Browning. You might be a bit too young to remember when Dave Dravecky snapped his arm in half in 1989 and had to have it amputated, but I was watching that game on TV and I remember being able to hear it snap. As I'm one to always turn away whenever a serious injury is replayed (often even when it isn't serious as well) so I did not watch this video in full, but I assume it shows it.
For those who missed it, I said in a previous bag that Tom Browning’s broken arm was the grossest sports injury I’d ever seen. To this day, I’ve never watched Dravecky’s injury, because I was relatively young when it happened, and our house didn’t have ESPN. So, for the sake of journalism, I will now watch the video that Jack linked to and record my gut reaction to it. One moment please.
[clicks over]
Well shit, why is the camera stationed so far away? Was Bob Nightengale in charge of this broadcast? I can’t see anything, expect for poor Dravecky collapsing in a heap. I feel a bit let down, to be honest. I thought I’d see some real Paths of Glory shit and then write GAHHHHHHHHH NO NO NO NO! as my response to it. Instead, I’m just happy that we now live in the age of HDTV.
Anyway yeah that injury looked pretty bad. Remind me to never throw things.
Brian:
When listening to a song, do you want the track length indicator to be fixed at the end, so it always says “4:26” and the counter on the left to be ticking towards that number, or do you want the ticker at the end to be counting down telling you how many minutes and seconds remain in the song?
Oh I like this question. I was mildly obsessed with track lengths when I was younger, especially if they were printed directly onto the cassette or the album sleeve. Whenever I listen to Metallica’s …And Justice For All (often), I remember checking that album out at Musicland and being wowed by the fact that it had not one, but two songs that clocked in over nine minutes. Tweenage me was like, “Damn, that’s really long.” Just my luck that both of those songs, the title track and “To Live Is To Die,” are masterpieces. After that, I expected any lengthy song to be a meticulously crafted symphony. Then some kid at camp played The Grateful Dead on his boombox and I learned that wasn’t the case at all.
The mass decline of physical media has tempered my fetish over song length. Process-wise, there’s very little anticipation in listening to a new album now. You don’t shop for it, and then unwrap it on the car ride home (unboxing is huge now because it’s the only time customers have a meaningful tactile interaction with a product they’ve bought). You don’t crack the record/cassette open and then study the track listing, the artwork, the lyrics, and the band photos. You don’t listen to the whole album to make sure you got your $10 worth. You just click and HEY PRESTO! There’s a new song that you can take or leave in 20 seconds flat. I don’t rue this change, I’m just saying it’s not the same dynamic anymore.
That’s why I don’t need the track length indicator fixed in place. If it’s counting down to the end of the song, I can still figure the length of that song pretty fast thanks to the power of mathematics. And I’m old enough to know a song’s quality varies regardless of how long it runs. Also, everything is the same design on a streaming service, across all artists. The fonts are fixed. The track listings are all laid out the same way. There’s nothing distinctive about a band in those elements of the listening experience, just a little album cover thumbnail. Meanwhile, I can still see the Justice back cover font crystal clear. Looked like heavy fucking metal.
Streaming movies and TV shows are another matter. I need to know how much time is left on that clock. I could be called upstairs at any moment to walk the dog, to help fold the laundry, or to grab an emergency handful of Cheetos before the 12-year-old finishes the bag. Time is precious here, so when I hit pause and it turns out that Netflix show still has another 35 minutes to go, it gives me a precise idea of how likely I am to finish it before duty calls.
HALFTIME!
Mike:
Do people still watch music videos? How are they even relevant in the post-MTV world, especially when you can stream music a hundred different ways at any given time?
How many views does the “Despacito” video have on YouTube right now? Fifty billion? I remember reading somewhere trustworthy that Americans listen to/watch music on YouTube more than any other streaming service. The trusty YT algorithm is how I stumble on just-released videos from Electric Callboy and other artists I like. The video pops up on my homepage, I go ooooh, and then I watch the video as a little break from work. It’s not the same as watching a full episode of Dial MTV every afternoon in 1990, but it’s still a good time.
More important, these videos are one of the few remaining options for artists to distinguish themselves as artists in the digital economy. They can’t sell millions of physical albums anymore, and their press photos get buried in the middle of articles or photoshopped to include full penetration. So, outside of a live show, where can an artist present themselves to you on their own terms? In a video. It doesn’t have to be an expensive video. It can even be one of the official lyric videos that some bands put out. No matter the production cost, a music video still gives you a visual concept of the artist’s idea to go along with the song, so that your mind always links the two together. That makes your bond with the song stronger, and that’s no small thing.
I’ll give you a stupid example. I had never heard of Sabrina Carpenter until two months ago. Then I heard “Espresso” for the first time and was like, “Hey, this song is fun as shit,” and then I added it to one of my playlists. If you have Spotify, you know that they sometimes display miniature video clips if you enlarge whatever song you’re listening to. So I looked at the “Espresso” video clips and enjoyed them (non-pervert reasons), so much so that I decided to watch the whole video over on YouTube. It’s a great fucking video. The label gave Sabrina enough money to make it look good, but plenty of expensive videos are shitty. This one, on the other hand, matched both the artist and song perfectly, and that made me happy. No art form has to be relevant for you to enjoy it, it just has to exist. And music videos, much to my delight, still exist. Yayyy. Don’t let Sabrina steal your boyfriend. She’s trouble!
Michael:
I went to the bar with a buddy straight from work yesterday to hang out for an hour or so. We were just having a few beers at the bar and at one point two clearly drunk women in their 40-50s came up to get more drinks. They started talking out loud to each other about whether my friend and I were hot. It ended with the one saying she'd fuck us after three beers, and the other agreed and they walked away. I guess my question is how acceptable is that to actually do out loud, and am I weirdo for not being that mad about it?
It’s generally pretty rude to get drunk and talk openly about whether or not you’d like to fuck a stranger in front of that stranger. Ask any American woman who’s ever gone to a bar; they’ll tell you that’s a no-no. If someone ever pulled that shit on me, I too would find it rude.
But would I be mad? FUUUUUCK NO. Of course I wouldn’t be mad. You’d fuck me after three beers? You’d fuck me right now? Holy shit, that’s awesome. I spent the first 20 years of my life PRAYING that someone would treat me like a sex object, and I still pray for it. I’d never take up any indirect offer for casual sex, but you better believe I’d keep that memory good and alive, especially if the person indirectly hitting on me was also hot. I have an imagination, and I know how to use it.
Brian:
If you arrive at a (presumably small location) rental car agency and the counter worker informs you the only car available (across all sizes) is a Tesla, do you get behind the wheel or refuse it?
Oh, I rent it. First of all, there’s content to be had for me driving any Tesla. Secondly, driving a Tesla is pretty much the only good thing about the Tesla experience. Being a passenger in one blows, because Tesla interiors are both boring and uncomfortable. But those cars have terrific pickup, so I’d gladly rent one to go vroom vroom and then see how many eggs end up spattered across my windshield after two days. It’s a rental. Who gives a fuck. Egg away, America.
On that subject, Tesla vandals might be our best line of defense against the current administration. Democrats are eternally worthless, court rulings are now routinely ignored by the bad guys, and every mass demonstration gets buried on page Q87 of the New York Times. Therefore…. (NFL end zone voice) it’s on us to protest every Tesla dealership in person, to shun Tesla owners as if they were lepers, and to spray paint a dick on every Cybertruck. Direct action works.
Mike:
I have this coworker, we can call her Nina. She's been with the company for a bit under a year and we've been paired up on a handful of projects together. Nice enough person, good enough colleague. No complaints… until this week. We were walking a few blocks over to get lunch and, mid-conversation, she pulls out nail clippers and starts cutting her fingernails, letting them fall on the sidewalk. She didn't make a note of it and didn't notice my revulsion, but what the fuck are you doing right now?! This is gross, right? Super gross? Extra gross? I'm being a prude? No, this is disgusting, right?
It sure is, Mike. This is not the first email I’ve received from a reader who’s had to deal with co-workers clipping their fingernails/toenails out in the open, either. If you brush your teeth at work, I get that. If a dentist tells you that you gotta brush after every meal or else that’s your ass, you might be inclined to listen if you’re my age. But clipping your nails isn’t anywhere near as urgent a matter. You can do that shit at home or, at the very least, inside of an office toilet stall. You never have to do it in front of others, so why the fuck would you? I’ll tell you why: because manners no longer exist in America. Everyone is rude and shitty because there’s no shame in it anymore. THANKS A LOT, CHUCK SCHUMER.
Related: my wife always asks me to clip my nails into the garbage can rather than the sink or toilet. She thinks the nails can clog up the plumbing if they’re not disposed of properly. But girl, have you ever tried landing your nail clippings cleanly in the trash? I have NO fucking clue which way these things will go once I’ve set them free. Anthony Richardson’s passes are less erratic. One of the nails could fly straight into my eye, they’re so unpredictable. Please stop making me a victim of chaos theory. (I still clip them into the toilet when she’s not looking; don’t tell her.)
Jamie:
Have you ever almost thrown up watching sports? Like, not just because you're shitcanned, but because a singular event has recently transpired in front of you that is so terrible/unexpected/tragic/gross? I'm from Cleveland, so for example:
The Fumble, 1987 AFC Championship game. Ernest Byner fumbled at the 3-yard-line at the end of the 4th. I almost threw up in my aunt and uncle's living room.
The Shot, 1989 NBA Eastern Conference Playoffs. Jordan over Ehlo. I almost threw up in my church's basement during a youth group event.
The Decision, 2010: LeBron James takes his talents to South Beach. I almost threw up at Arthur's in Cincinnati.
Sports have never put me on the cusp of vomiting. The most visceral reaction I ever had to a game (non-joy division) was when Blair Walsh missed that field goal. I screamed and collapsed to the floor, where I stayed for a good long while. But I never felt nauseous after that kick. I just felt shitty, which I guess was a blessing. Hooray.
Given how old I am, I don’t know that any sporting event/injury could have me crawling for the toilet. If it hasn’t happened yet, what the fuck could possibly trigger my gag reflex? Justin Jefferson would have to rip off his jersey to reveal a swastika carved into his chest or something.
But if sports have ever made any of you vomit or almost vomit, please do share in the comments below. Let’s have a complete and total barf-o-rama.
Brian:
After years of multiple people telling him he needed them, my almost 80-year old father-in-law finally purchased hearing aids in late 2023. After about two weeks he stopped using them, and now offers various excuses as to why he won't wear them ("they don't feel right", "it's too loud in public"). To no one's surprise, his hearing has gotten worse. My kids/his grandkids get frustrated repeating themselves to him. I have talked with multiple people about this for advice, but none of them have been through what you have, so I wanted to pick your brain about how best to approach it and get him to stop being so selfish.
This is a problem so widespread that even I can’t convince my loved ones to fix their hearing problems. Old people are too vain to wear hearing aids, and too existentially afraid to accept that part of their body has deteriorated beyond repair. You’d think that telling them, “It’s nice to be able to hear,” would be a persuasive enough argument. It isn’t, because Americans are stubborn assholes who hate being told what to do, even if it’s an enjoyable thing to do.
So here’s what I do now instead. I tell people, “Look, I can’t make you want to hear better. You have to want it yourself, and if you’d prefer to be hard of hearing and miserable, then so be it.” That’s my spiel. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t, but at least I know that I said my piece while also granting them full control over the decision. It’s the same for a lot of other shit. I got my hearing fixed because I wanted to fix it. I stopped drinking because I wanted to stop drinking. I went to a therapist because I wanted to treat my head issues. Sometimes you have to let people learn these lessons on their own. If they choose to do nothing, then they gotta own it.
Ben:
The slam dunk will ALWAYS be cooler and more awesome than a three, simply because not everyone can do it. You either have to be pretty tall or have some good hops to reach up there and slam it home, but any dipshit can stand behind the three-point line and throw a couple hundred balls towards the rim until one goes in. I'm sure there are second graders who shoot 50% from three in their travel teams now. I can dunk and it ALWAYS feels awesome and cool. Yes, three-pointers are cool, but NOT the kind of awesome cool that slam dunks are, right?
First of all, I’m shocked a Defector reader can dunk. That blows my mind. Secondly, if you’re making me choose between dunks and threes, I also take the dunks. Dunks are what made me a fan of basketball, and I’m the kind that always stays loyal to a first love.
Threes are still awesome, though. Don’t let the haters tell you otherwise.
Email of the week!
Phil:
As a fellow maltese owner, I figured I’d send in a pic of our dog Tommy. Not long after we adopted him, he learned to enjoy a couple sips of craft brew (and wine!), enough that if one of us cracks an IPA, he’s excited. He’s still excited if we pour a gin or bourbon, but not so much once he catches a whiff. What’s the extent of your dog’s epicureanism outside of the normal dog treats? High up on Tommy’s list are also ice cubes (chicken stock or water). Calorie friendly snacking!
Awww loogit cute lil alcoholic pooch. My dog is uninterested in beer. Steak night is another matter entirely.
