Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Drew's off this week. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking about string cheese, Twitter, Jared Kushner, and more.
Hello, sports fans, and welcome back to the Feinbag. The last time I did this, we all had a very nice time imagining Donald Trump and Jared Kushner naked. And for the next two years, Defector only ever asked me to do the Jamboroo. Did things get a little too “real” for the supposed truth-tellers of Defector.com? While I haven’t asked any of them that question outright, their silence speaks volumes.
Fortunately for you, I’m not afraid of those pesky little things called facts that the liberal media (Drew, I guess) would rather stay in the shadows. So join me, fellow free-thinkers, as we dig into that which has the corporate media shaking in their boots: Ron DeSantis’s tongue, Elon’s special private time, and well, Jared again, actually. This is the #FeinbagFiles.
Kevin:
As we approach the inevitable Trump / DeSantis primary, an important question looms: which one of these large men stands more awkwardly? Trump has his weird thing where he leans forward, but Ronny always seems like he’s doing a poor man’s version of it.
The question of who stands more awkwardly is an interesting one. If your question had been, who is more incapable of standing in a way approximating normal, the answer would unquestionably be Donald Trump. It’s true that DeSantis can occasionally be found in the stance that Republican voters go wild for.
But where DeSantis merely slips into the physical embodiment of existential discomfort whenever it suits him, Trump fucking lives it.
It’s who he is. It’s in his genes—his eldest son is regularly holding on to uprightness by a thread. As with most things, DeSantis is merely Trump, but less. But while I accidentally spent over an hour (not going to say how much over, respect my boundaries) browsing through multiple years’ worth of photographs of these two men standing in a variety of surroundings, I did find one area where DeSantis excels: constantly battling his own tongue for control of his mouth.
Whether DeSantis’s tongue is simply larger than most or he’s just never developed the fine motor control necessary to reel that bad boy in, the fact remains that its presence alarms. Sure, Trump’s own tongue has its own quirks when it manages to sneak through.
But for the most part, Trump is able to keep it contained behind his teeth and away from prying eyes. So congratulations to Ron DeSantis on his absolutely enormous, possibly numb tongue. You may be destined to fizzle out like nearly every other attempt at Trump But Polished before you, but at least you have this.
Ben:
I ate a string cheese without peeling it into the titular string. According to my wife, this is remarkable at best and serial killer behavior at worst. My position is that I was hungry and just wanted cheese in my mouth as fast as possible. Is that so wrong?
Here’s the thing, Ben. People are going to pretend to get mad about this. They’re going to post down there in their little comments about how it’s called STRING cheese for a reason, and if you’re not going to eat in its intended form, you might as well just gnaw on an eraser. But I’m willing to bet that, when these people are alone, unwrapping their little sticks of cheese while watching their precious little football game (see, I can talk about sports), they’re splitting these sticks into three, maybe four separate pieces max. String cheese is not manufactured with care. More often than not, it takes a considerable amount of concentration to get close to anything that could be accurately described as string-like. Chomping into a third of a stick of cheese is hardly any different than biting into the full stick itself. The only difference is that, when you do bite into a pure, uncut column of “string” cheese, you’re owning your choice. Never apologize for that, Ben. And anyway, I used to chew on erasers constantly. It’s fine.
Matthew:
Is the Nick Adams (Alpha Male) guy on Twitter a bit? It has to be right? Figured you may be the best suited person to differentiate between a bit and a chud this big. It’s borderline perfect satire:
I was actually wondering about this myself the other week. It’s particularly hard to figure out what he’s doing, since half the time he posts the sort of insane MAGA-brand drivel we’ve all gotten used to by now. Just earlier today he offered a relatively generic “President Trump’s campaign is as magical as ever, and he is well on his way to obliterating Joe Biden and returning America to greatness,” which could theoretically sound like a weak attempt at mocking. But just as often, he posts things that are stupid, yes, but still too dull to pass for parody (“Immigration is a privilege, not a right”). Then he’ll post something like this:
It’s obviously a joke, or at the very least tongue-in-cheek. And based on this video he made in 2015, it’s clear he’s doing some kind of performance. But it gets weirder the more you look into him, because he’s not a complete fraud. He actually did become Australia’s youngest deputy mayor in 2005 (he wanted to kill all the pigeons). And he really was appointed by Trump to be “a Member of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution.” All of which is to say, it seems like he’s pretty much the same as everyone else in Trump’s orbit: someone who’s a true believer on at least a baseline level, is desperate for even the appearance of power, but more than anything, just wants to own the libs. And in this case, I think that means occasionally making light of the movement to take the steam out of any lib attempts to do the same.
Alessandra:
Fuck, Marry, Kill?
Round 1:
Bill Belichick (gotta have a sports angle)
Elon Musk
Matt Yglesias (can be replaced with Hunter Biden)Round 2:
Kyrsten Sinema
Bari Weiss
Lena Dunham (can be replaced with Marjorie Taylor Greene)This question can be turned into two polls. Because I’m not a monster and your therapist will no doubt be busy during the holidays, I would accept a nuanced analysis of the results of the polls in lieu of an earnest answer by you.
You’re really making this much too easy with the alternate options, but I’m not about to argue. In the spirit of radical transparency, I did have to google Bill Belichick just now to make sure he was the guy I was thinking of in my head (he was not). For reason I haven’t decided to interrogate, I’ve chosen to only allow myself the knowledge of the first entry of his Wikipedia talk page (where editors discuss potential changes to articles). That entry reads thus: “Bill Belicheck should be mentioned as the original member of the Original GangSTARS of the Patriots along with mini Original gangSTAR's Brady and Moss. Tiny Original GangSTAR Welker may warrant mentioning too... Pure Dope Bangers!!!” It is unsigned.
With all of this in mind, I am afraid I must k*ll Original GangSTARS member Bill Belichick. Obviously you fuck Hunter Biden. If his laptop taught me anything, it taught me that. Which then means that I will be the proud stepmother of young X Æ A-12. With all the money at my disposal, I think I could probably lure my husband into some sort of subterranean labyrinth filled with people alternating between mocking him and worshiping at his feet, fulfilling all his emotional needs and preventing him from doing any further harm.
As for Round 2, while Kyrsten Sinema sucks, there is no question in my mind that she gets up to some weird shit. Pure curiosity requires that I fuck the junior senator from Arizona. Continuing with the journey of discovery, the only way I’m ever going to figure out what actually befell Lena’s various deceased pets is by earning her trust—in this case, through marriage. All of which is to say, Bari, I promise to erect a memorial statue in your image on the University of Austin’s campus, just as soon as it exists.
Christine:
I'm one of those aggressively thrifty people who scrape the last bit of peanut butter, mayo, tomato paste, etc. out of the jar or can before recycling it. I assume this means some extra plastic or metal particles end up in my food. Do you think this has a toll on long-term health (e.g., cancer) or not?
Here’s something I think about a lot. There are extremely old idiots everywhere. God knows the kind of shit they got up to in their youths, and yet, here they still are, puttering around mumbling slurs and voting like it’s their job. (But enough about Congress!) Anyway, I’ve long held the belief that we don’t really need to worry too much about things that could maybe end up killing us because we could just as easily die tomorrow. An hour from now, even! If we only have an hour to live, we might as well spend that hour knowing we lived our life as we saw fit. I’m also not sure when I moved from talking about “you” to “we,” but if I have to go out in the next hour, I’m glad I’m doing it knowing I bit straight into the string cheese.
Charlie:
Hello
can you post Kushner’s legs
Hi, Charlie. Yes, absolutely.
Thanks so much for your question.
Jake:
Do you feel like real life conversation is more difficult than it used to be because by the time you talk to people in real life you've already heard every take possible on any given subject?
Ah, a perfect question to follow Slenderman in the sun. At least for me, personally, I don’t know if the issue is that I’ve heard every take possible, but that I just know way too much about whatever it is to be able to talk casually in a way that feels natural.
I went home to Dallas for Thanksgiving, and at one point, I ended up talking to a cousin about Elon Musk buying Twitter. The ideal version of that conversation looks very different to someone who basically uses Twitter to read a few people’s tweets every so often (not me) than it does to someone who is perpetually logged in to four different accounts that all serve different purposes (me). My cousin’s entry into the topic basically amounted to “Damn that’s crazy that he’d spend so much money on it just to mess everything up.” And yeah, it is crazy! But the reason it’s even crazier involves getting into pedophile accusations, everyone making fun of him for the entire Thai cave rescue submarine coffin ordeal in general, how he lost his mind which led people to get a real taste of how deeply insecure he is, how he spent a few years getting progressively deeper into right-wing culture because they were the ones who told him how cool he was, his transphobia in general that reinforced basically every part of this, etc.
But because I’m not a complete sadist, my response instead was, “Yeah, it’s fucking crazy.”
Jordan:
Do you think Elon likes his own penis? I mean, I know he has enough offspring to indicate that he enjoys using it but like, does he _like_ it?
When he sits down for "Elon time" do you think he does so with roses, some nice lube, and a beautiful sonata playing in the background? Or do you think he furiously raw-dogs his fist with loud German metal blasting at an 11 through his Tesla Flamethrower headphones?
I’m going to be honest with you all—I almost skipped this one. For some reason, I have a particularly hard time imagining Elon Musk in any sort of carnal situation, and I don’t quite know why that is. Imagining the people least likely to get horny doing just that is one of my favorite games to play. When do you think Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip last had sex? I don’t know, but I think about it more than anyone probably should. Charles and Camilla are almost certainly banging as I type this—much less interesting. Anyway, despite his 300 children, I have a very hard time imagining Elon engaging in pretty much any activity that isn’t talking much too quickly between hollow bursts of Beavis and Butthead laughter.
That said, now that I am actively thinking about it, the first thing that came to mind was a memory from my youth. I was around 12, maybe, and hanging out at a friend’s house. We went on her dad’s computer, and just our luck, the internet history was open. Incognito mode was still but a distant dream. In my memory the URL was something like farmgirls.com, but the details are fuzzy because what happened next was that my friend and I were presented with a welcome page on which several naked women were straddling a variety of farm animals being led around by (what I assume was) a cosplay Amish man sans pants. I’m not about to explore why that was my first thought upon being made to consider Elon’s (perfectly natural!) urges when I had been successfully repressing it for some time, but some things are better left as is.
Anyway, I hope my friend’s dad is well and also not reading this.
Steve:
I’m on a plane and a guy just asked me to turn off my overhead light (I was reading) because it was bothering him. Am I nuts or is that some real sky Karen shit? I’d obviously never put my seat back or anything like that, but not letting me use my light feels like next level fussy. And yes, I’m writing this using airplane wifi (in the dark).
Steve, my friend, you are not nuts. The only truly genuinely convenient and helpful things provided by airlines are an overhead light and an air vent that are both somehow directed with the precision of a sniper rifle. It can be pitch dark in the cabin while my seat neighbor bathes themselves in a ray of light so impossible and pure that angels would weep. I’ve often marveled at this. Steve, that guy next to you can get fucked.
