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 bacon, the NBA Finals, graphology, and more.
Will:
What is one thing you wish you could experience again for the first time? Or two, if there's a tie.
Superficially, the obvious answer would be losing my virginity. But I’m like pretty much everyone else in that my first time was lousy for both people involved. I wouldn’t be any better at it if I got a redo. With all of my bedroom experience stricken from the record, I’d still be a fumbling jackass. Now, if we just knock that answer down to first orgasm, we’re getting closer. When that happened, I thought I had just discovered cold fusion. That would be a fun moment to relive.
But let's try a deeper cut: My parents rented a house in the tropics when I was 21, and they said I could bring my now ex-girlfriend with me at the time. BOOSH. She flew out a few days before me, and after she left, my best friend Howard arrived in her place. The second he arrived at the house, we each grabbed a cold bottle of Carib Beer and then hopped into the Caribbean. No one else was on the beach that night. It was just the two of us, the water, some beer, and a sleepy sun. To this day, Howard tells me it’s one of the best days of his life. Same goes for me. I’ve been chasing that particular moment of zen ever since. Deep down, I know I’m likely never going to find it, so gimme the time machine.
I probably should have answered “my wedding,” but there’s a reason vow renewal ceremonies are lame as shit. Our wedding was a blast, though. No need for Howard to rescue me from that one.
Amy:
Have you ever had a job where you just didn't know how to fill the day? I'm in my mid 50s now, and I have had at least two jobs in my lifetime where I could simply not figure out what I was supposed to be doing.
Yup. My first advertising internship, I basically sat in my cubicle all day waiting for someone, anyone, to give me shit to do. But none of the full-timers at that agency had any interest in dealing with an intern, so none of them passed along any work to me. Even when I peeked into this man or that woman’s office to ask if they needed help with anything, they usually said no. Because I was only 20 years old, I quietly loved the arrangement. I was like, Oh wow, office jobs are great! You can just surf espn.sportszone.com all day, leave at 5:00 p.m., and they pay you for it! When I got my first real job at an agency out of college, I secretly hoped that they wouldn’t give me anything to do, either. I didn’t want actual work getting in the way of my internet time. This is how I discovered Napster. Another moment in time I wish I could relive.
Then I got laid off and realized, Oh, not having anything to do at work is bad. If you don’t know how to fill your day at work, it’s because the people above you don’t have their shit together, and that they’ll fire you when budget cut season arrives because they’ll finally notice that you don’t do anything. That’s a fairly obvious take on workplace productivity in white collar America, but I needed years in the bullpen to learn it.
Once I got my first writing job, with actual assignments that I wanted to do capably, I began to notice how many people above me had nothing to do all day. Somehow, they had ridden the scam all the way into the c-suite, and I grew to resent them for it. My colleagues in the creative department did too, and we talked shit about the foot-draggers. The people above us clearly didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.
If you’ve worked for any big company, you too have likely had this epiphany. The whole DOGE bullshit got people talking about bureaucratic waste, but there’s far more of that waste in the private sector than there is in the federal government. I know because I used to work for Jim Spanfeller. These people don’t care about their employees, much less training them properly. That would require them to do actual work, and they’re too important to the company for that kind of nonsense. So you, the humble office worker, are left adrift. I remember jobs where I didn’t even know who my boss was supposed to be, and then I’d have to scramble to find that boss and get started on a project before someone in HR realized that I wasn’t doing anything. The people responsible for this clusterfuckery all made $300,000 a year. The American Dream at work.
Matt:
What are your three favorite cheeses?
When I was a kid, cheese was one of my primary food hang-ups. I was grossed out by any orange cheese, and I hated melted cheese on anything but pizza. One time my folks took the whole family to a nice restaurant in Paris and, when my entrée arrived at the table, I burst into tears because it was covered in melted cheese. The menu said nothing (in English) about melted cheese (because it was written entirely in French). So I refused to eat my dinner and asked if they had, like, spaghetti instead. I’m shocked by dad didn’t kill me on the spot. I know I would’ve killed me. I’d have been right to, especially since I have since welcomed all manner of orange and/or melted cheeses into my food intake.
Meanwhile, my favorite cheese back then was bleu cheese. In fact, I loved bleu cheese so much that, when I once passed by an open wheel of stilton at a different restaurant, I reached in with my bare hand and grabbed a hunk of it. My mom saw this offense and let me have it. Little me didn’t see the issue. The cheese was just sitting out there, for free. Didn’t they WANT me to do that? Ten years later I’d suffer a bout of food poisoning that put me off of bleu cheese for life. Karma at work.
So it’s best to keep all of that in mind when you gaze upon my boring-as-shit answer to Matt’s question. My three favorite cheeses, in no particular order:
1. Fresh mozzarella
2. Parmigiano Reggiano
3. Takeout cubes of feta
It’s not much of a cheese list, is it? I wish runny, stinky cheeses brie didn’t still gross me out, but alas. The ghost of Anthony Bourdain is appalled.
Raquel:
We got a small market showdown for NBA Finals. No shade to that. I have nothing against Knicks or Knicks fans, but I'm happy to see them out. Glad I don't have to endure Timothee Chalamet cosplaying as an overly invested Knick fan dude bro anymore.
Whoa hey, I actually kinda like sports Chalamet. If he decided to become a Knicks superfan as part of some needless personal rebrand, there are FAR worse rebrands he could have chosen from. He could have turned into an anti-vaxxer, or started hanging with Andrew Tate, or released an album. A host of poisonous career turns were at Timothée’s disposal, so I’m glad he opted for the relatively benign one of dating one of the Kardashajenners while showing up at Knicks games wearing a bunch of expensive shit. And I liked that he and the other celeb fans in attendance at MSG were there for the game, and not because they just had joined the cast of Chicago Dump. So long as you aren’t a network plant, I welcome you into sports fandom with open arms.
Now, about these Finals. Like Major League Baseball, the NBA still has to deal with market size takes anytime one of the big city franchises doesn’t make the championship round. I would have enjoyed a Knicks run to the Finals, because I’m as East Coast Biased as anyone. But I was alive for the ’99 Knicks run through the Eastern Conference playoffs and lemme tell you, the Finals tilt that ensued (against the Duncan Spurs) was so shitty that it destroyed any of the good vibes leading into it. The Thunder would have obliterated the Knicks in a similar fashion, giving us zero entertainment on the court, along with diminishingly interesting crowd shots of Sad Timothée and Sad Ben to go with it.
With that in mind, I’m excited for this Pacers-Thunder series from a pure basketball perspective. The Thunder will probably still cruise to a title, but at least Indiana has more bodies to throw at the problem than New York does. And any Cowherd out there grousing about the ratings is eliding the fact that the NBA doesn’t need the ratings to be high. In fact, that genre of empty take only serves to drive viewers away from a potentially fun series, reinforcing the problem of market inequality. It’s time that, like Racquel, you and I stopped giving a shit about the box office numbers for sporting events.
Hypebeast Timothée was still fun while it lasted, though.
Bryan:
With the NFL’s love of playing international games, why don’t they bring a game to our friends in the North? Surely there are loonies to be made?
Toronto was on the docket before the Bills got their new stadium deal. Remember when the Bills would play a game or two in Toronto every season, a la the Jags in London? Those games seemed to presage a relocation. But then Kathy Hochul gave the Pegulas a golden goose, which left the NFL content to mothball a Canadian expansion idea. The league doesn’t want to big-foot the CFL, and they already have a TV deal worth many loonies with Canadian broadcasters already in place. Giving Canada its own team wouldn’t, at least in the short term, goose league revenues substantially.
The rest of the world is another matter. Roger Goodell knows that if he can get Europeans and/or South Americans obsessed with the NFL, untold billions will be in the offing. These are relatively untapped markets compared to Canada, a nation that’s been familiar with American football for decades now. You Bobs and Dougs McKenzie will just have to content yourselves with cheering for the Oilers to win the Stanley Cup this month. Good luck on that (not sarcasm).
HALFTIME!
Andy:
My wife and I had a contractor come by to provide an estimate on some cabinets for our garage. He was extremely thorough, detail oriented and responsive. He also had a QAnon sticker on the back of his truck. Would you hire a QAnon follower to do work on your house, especially if he seems like he’d do a good job?
Fuck yeah, I would. If I had to cross every MAGA contractor off of my list, I wouldn’t have many contractors to choose from. And GOOD contractors are an even more precious commodity. So I don’t give a fuck if Billyjoejimbob is America’s No. 1 Joni Ernst fan. If he’s good and he’s reliable, he gets my money.
And I’d be nice to him, too. One of the reasons we’re in this mess to begin with is because of an epidemic of disconnection. Thanks to smartphones, people don’t have to talk to one another if they don’t want to. They don’t have to be polite, or make small talk with folks they otherwise wouldn’t. They can just yell at people online instead, and so you end up with millions of people who don’t know how to be social animals. They only know how to troll.
The solution to this problem isn’t more disconnection, with me spiritually blacklisting anyone who has shitty taste in politics. The better I get to know people, and they me, the more likely we are to care about one another. This is why I now firmly believe that every American kid would benefit enormously from basic etiquette training. They gotta learn how to look people in the eye, to speak in complete sentences, and to be nice even when they don’t want to be. Civilization is built on that shit.
Michael:
You always see the guys from Pawn Stars bring in a handwriting expert to verify signatures on memorabilia, which could just be for TV. Can your handwriting be that obviously you? And, would you be smart enough to try and fake it if you were writing a ransom note?
There are a lot of smart people who will tell you that graphology is a pseudo-science on par with phrenology. But handwriting analysis is permissible in court, and there’s some small-sample evidence that yes, properly trained handwriting forensicists can tell that you’re you from your handwriting. In my case, their work would be a cinch because I write like a seven-year-old. I can’t disguise my penmanship well, because I have none. Even when I write with extreme care, like on a government form, I still write like a grade schooler, just one trying to get an A on an English quiz.
This is why my wife is the designated forger in our house. If we need a bogus signature on something, it goes right to her desk. If I was placed in charge of forgery, we’d all be jailed within a month.
Grubby:
I am listening to you and Roth litigate Gazebos/Obezags as the worst nickname for a sports team, and I would like to submit my own nomination for that crown: In downstate Illinois, there's a high school called Centralia High, and their mascot is the Orphans. I cannot think of a worse school to represent/hype up/wear swag of than the Orphans. Please discuss.
Hang on, let’s peep that link to learn more about the Centralia Orphans.
The team’s name, “Orphans,” is not just a random choice. It’s said to have originated in the 1940s when a sportswriter, struck by the players’ worn and tattered uniforms, compared them to orphans.
Oh, that’s a great fucking story. Real News on Parade shit for an olde-timey sportswriter to be like, That team looks poor! I shall call them the Poors. With apologies to all of the orphans out there, I’m all for keeping mascots like that one. Every team’s nickname should be imbued with some local/historic color, so long as it’s not racist. So I’d rather play for the Obezags, the Orphans, or the Little Rascals than for the 50,000th Bulldogs team out there. That shit is boring.
Joe:
I’m on my last few weeks of parental leave, which I deferred until after my wife returned to work. So I’m solo parenting an eight-month-old during the day, which mostly means I’m going to playgrounds (for the baby), museums (for myself), and fast casual restaurants where I can eat decently while the baby can be distracted in a high chair (which works pretty well!). My question is, what should I make sure to do with the baby before I have to go back to work? I’m starting to run out of stroller accessible museums (I’m in the DC area). If the weather’s decent, there are some hikes I can do. Any other ideas or suggestions?
Nope. Every new parent hits an idea wall, and you’ve just run into it. You’re in the shit, which means you’re gonna spend the rest of your paternity leave (and beyond) burning clock any way you can think of. More playgrounds. More strolls. More craft projects. You might feel a tinge of guilt during this stretch, fretting that you missed out on some vital Kodak moment with your new child. You are not. You’re just parenting now, so you may as well just accept it and bask in the ennui, even if you don’t want to.
There was a time when I knew the location of every playground within a five-mile radius of our house. I even knew which ones had which equipment: tunnel slides, zip lines, carousels, blah blah blah. I don’t have to do that anymore now that all of my kids are 13-plus, but I do get that cheap nostalgia rush anytime I pass by one of those parks now. Ninety-nine percent of parenting is being there, so be there for the baby now and the reward will eventually reveal itself.
Pete:
It’s finally not tits cold in Detroit, and my seven-year-old wanted me to grill hot dogs for her tonight. If you’re drinking a can of beer while grilling, what is it? Being a Michigander, it’s Bell’s Two Hearted.
I have an Athletic subscription now, with Athletic Lite being my go-to lager for everyday use. Lite beer is good for grilling, because you can drink it mindlessly while fussing over your burgers and steaks. I don’t want an IPA for that. I can’t be bothered to search for notes of elderflower or whatever while I’m working the flame. I just want my manly thirst slaked.
Golden lagers work for this, too. If any beer has the word CERVEZA on the label, it’s gonna pair well with my Weber.
Ben:
I'm currently in a colossally stupid debate about the proper use of "Hohn, hohn, hohn!" when referring to the French. Is this only to be used when referencing pure French people from France, or is it also applicable to Quebec and Cajun people as well, who are not PURE French? I come down on using it for all of them because it's funny and cute, but others have this weird purist nationalist streak in them about this saying it only applies to France.
I guess I’m a purist, because I’d feel stupid going honh honh honh to make fun of Cajun people. Those folks already have their own vernacular for me to target (GUMBO GUMBO GUMBO), so bringing the French element into the ridicule isn’t necessary. And I’d rather make fun of French-Canadians for being Canadian. Thus, I only go honh honh honh whenever I encounter a real deal Frenchie, like Rudy Gobert. It’s not a moral decision, it just suits me better as a comedian.
Adam:
I've been caught off guard lately by my three year old son calling me by my first name. I mean, I get it. He's three. He hears my wife call me by my name (and me call her by hers) and he repeats those names. That makes sense. And yet, I've never heard of this as a normal part of child-rearing. I was talking with my friend about it on the phone and his three year old has been doing likewise. Did you get any "Dreeeeeew"s thrown your way in the early years?
I don’t remember. If I did, my kids grew out of it pretty quickly, perhaps because my wife and I lapsed and started calling each other “Mom” and “Dad,” as a lot of parents do. I don’t know what I would have done if my kids had decided to start calling me “Drew” instead of “Dad.” I definitely wouldn’t have liked it, because I’m a classicist in certain ways. Calling your parents by their first name feels disrespectful to me. More important, it just sounds off. So I probably would have chafed at my own kids pulling a Bart Simpson on me.
But I wouldn’t have yelled at them about it. Kids are kids, so if you tell them to not do something, that only makes them want to do it more. We had this problem when the oldest started calling the youngest “Hiney” as a nickname a decade ago. The boy hated being called that, so we yelled at the girl to cut it out. She kept on doing it anyway, to piss all of us off. Mission accomplished. That learned me real good.
(She doesn’t call him Hiney anymore; if you wait out your kids, you can usually prevail.)
Chris:
The last time we went out for brunch, we were seated with a view into the kitchen. That’s where I spotted a tray with a ridiculous amount of bacon on it. Had to be stacked eight or more inches high. Just a huge mound of cooked bacon strips. I figured they needed to have a good amount of it on hand, but this seemed excessive. We were there near closing and, as it's a breakfast joint, and just before we left I saw the bacon was gone. The whole pile has vanished. Now I can't stop thinking about it and where it disappeared to.
This is an easy answer, but it gives us an excuse to talk bacon so let’s answer it. They took that bacon back to the walk-in, where it’ll remain until the next day’s breakfast shift. Anything a restaurant can prep in advance of a rush, they will. If you worked for a restaurant, you could sneak into that walk-in and grab some of that bacon without the boss being any wiser for it. Might be worth applying for that perk alone.
By the way, one morning I went to Five Guys at Dulles airport and asked for some bacon. Just some bacon. They too had an enormous hotel pan of it just sitting there, and I was willing to pay an off-menu price to get some. No need. The cashier wrapped some of the bacon in foil and handed it to me, gratis. Now THAT’S a moment I’d like to experience for the first time all over again.
Email of the week!
Blake:
My good friend was an employee at a major conference-affiliated university and recently got canned. Part of it was the current administration's cutbacks on research grants and support for higher education generally, but it was also some real fuckery on the part of the school. I've been a lifelong fan of this university's sports teams, and there have been some real highs and lows that I've ridden out. I did not attend this university, but inherited the fandom from my dad (alum), who inherited it from HIS dad, who was not only an alum but also an employee at the school. I feel like I've put in some serious time and emotional bandwidth. But now I have to renounce that fandom, right? I do, in fact, love my friend more than the university and their teams. But I'm feeling some genuine angst about burning the numerous paraphernalia I have in my closet. So I guess I just need YOU to give me the final call before I pull the trigger (of the Bic lighter).
If you want to bail on Notre Dame—I have no idea if you’re talking about ND, but I’m using them as a placeholder just for kicks—then bail. You don’t have to burn your shit to formally sever ties. Just stop watching and see if you’re happier for it. I’m guess that you will be. Fuck that coward-ass school.
