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 iPhone complaints, America’s infrastructure tragedy, changing clothes at the airport, and more.
Your letters:
Monte:
Congrats! That grody looking lamp you bought has a genie in it! You are granted only one wish, and it can only be for a pill (suppository) which will instantly cure/heal a specific sports injury. What injury would you solve from sports? Concussions? The end of Tommy John surgery wiping out seasons and derailing pitching careers? The dreaded ACL?
This is tricky because football is my priority sport, which makes concussions the obvious choice for yours truly. Other sports, especially hockey, would stand to benefit from my concussion wish, but not many of them. I’ve always said that, as President, I would end all sports injuries. I also don’t want Roger Goodell stealing my valor and claiming that he was the one who singlehandedly ended the concussion epidemic. Fuck you, Ginger Hammer. Kazaam and I did that shit, not you. Am I being too petty here, given that a concussion-free world would save countless lives? Yes. But what else is the internet good for but pure, self-defeating pettiness? Nothing, I tell you.
So you know what I’d pick? All hamstring injuries. I can accept torn ACLs, torn Achilles tendons, and all other season-ending injuries. But the dreaded pulled hamstring, which can put an athlete on the shelf for anywhere between two and 67 weeks? No. Enough. I’ve had it up to here with this hammy nonsense. As wishmaker-in-chief, I would make all pro athlete hamstrings invulnerable. No wideout would ever miss time with a pull, and any one of them who tried would immediately be recognized as faking it. GET YOUR ASS BACK OUT THERE, SON.
Ben:
How do you feel about e-scooters? I was involved in a head-on collision with a guy riding one recklessly fast around a blind corner while riding my bike to the grocery store earlier today. While I was okay (as was the bike, more importantly), I have been seething in rage at the existence of these machines since the accident. I feel like they're exclusively ridden by dumb children who shouldn't have access to them and by reckless adults with no regard for the pedestrians and cyclists with whom they share roads, sidewalks, and other paved surfaces. What do you think of these things? What is to be done about this?
Plenty of cities have banned e-scooters, but that hasn’t stopped BIG SCOOTER from making incursions elsewhere across the country. And you didn’t even ask me about e-bikes, which are arguably even more dangerous. I’ve seen shitheads on e-bikes doing 20-plus mph on local sidewalks. Without a helmet on. It’s a murder/suicide waiting to happen.
Now, Americans—cyclists especially—are very sensitive about their chosen modes of transport, so I’m not gonna use this answer to condemn any single vehicle here. Because this is an infrastructure problem. You and I know that American travel infrastructure is a goddamn tragedy. Instead of having functional mass transit, the government just paves every available swath of land with bonus freeway. Sidewalks in the exurbs are nonexistent. And high-speed rail systems are tarred as an expensive, radical woke daydream.
But the biggest issue of all is how poorly this country integrates different modes of transport. At any given city intersection, there’ll be a loose conglomeration of cars, semis, delivery trucks, buses, taxis, bikes, e-bikes, scooters, pedestrians, and dipshits riding those hover-unicycle thingies. There’s no order to it. Sometimes there are designated bike lanes, which are frequently interrupted by highway entrance ramps. Sometimes there are bus lanes, which every commuter presumes they’re entitled to drive in because they’re in a super big hurry. It’s urban planning by committee, if every committee member did cocaine and traveled exclusively via private jet. The end result is like sticking 10 people who all speak separate languages inside a conference room and asking them to write a novel together. And I can guarantee you that American industry will keep on throwing more newfangled, potentially dangerous modes of transport into the mix. An e-boxcar or some other shit.
None of this will be fixed anytime soon, because “Infrastructure Week” in this country has long been comic shorthand for “Donald Trump gets distracted and decides to bomb a foreign grocery store.” But let’s take off our pragmatist caps for a second and imagine a bright future where Woke 2 takes over and President Mamdani gets all the votes and funding he needs to remake the American transportation system. First of all, there would be an affordable, efficient, interstate high-speed rail system, perhaps modeled after the interstate highway system that President Eisenhower innovated back in the 1950s. Secondly, all motor vehicles would be banned outright from city centers. Thirdly … OK, listen, I have zero education in civil engineering. I don’t know the ideal way to manage all of this. The good news is that my son, 17, wants to study civil engineering in college, so he’ll be able to suss it out for us.
[Trump dismantles the entire education system and uses the money to build a statue of himself made out of old issues of Time magazine]
Oh god dammit.
Eric:
What if an hour had 100 36-second minutes?
Wait a second, are you proposing we adopt the metric system for time? No. Too far. My head would explode if this happened. WOKENESS IS STILL OUT OF CONTROL, I TELL YOU.
Jon:
I travel for work regularly and on my return trip I sometimes change from dress shoes to tennis shoes in the airport bathroom. I use the handicap stall to give me more space, but it does require me to lay my suitcase on the floor of the bathroom, so I can swap shoes. Is this weird or acceptable behavior? Wearing dress shoes sucks.
You’re talking to a guy who has, on multiple occasions, changed all of his clothes while inside an airport bathroom stall. I’ve even changed my socks in there, gladly touching my bare feet to the vile bathroom floor. I don’t give a shit. I just stewed in my own juices inside an airplane cabin for four hours (or am about to). I gotta be comfortable, and the bathroom stall is pretty much the only private spot at the airport for me to make the switch. Not once have I been arrested for this, and not once have I contracted scabies by coming into contact with foreign linoleum. I regret nothing.
By the way, a lot of airport lounges have changing rooms for business travelers. This is why we must riot.
Jim:
Who do people hate more, Zack or Dan Snyder back when Snyder was an NFL owner?
Oh, Dan Snyder. It’s not close. Zack Snyder may be a lousy filmmaker, but by all accounts he’s a nice guy, and he’ll only deliberately sabotage a film if the studio hires Joss Whedon to shadow-direct it, which is justifiable. Dan Snyder was a shit owner, but an even worse person. Nothing redeeming about the man whatsoever. Put Dan Snyder in charge of a Batman movie and he’d cast Joe Theismann in the title role. Horrible.
David:
I caught this on the channel guide recently and took a pic with my phone mostly to prove I wasn't hallucinating. But also, 1) There was a 2025 National Bubble Gum Blowing Championship??! And 2) It was good enough that ESPN showed it again recently here in 2026?? It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
Well yeah, that airtime won’t fill itself. And ESPN never met a sponsored event that it wouldn’t broadcast, especially if it might bring in the prized Children 5-8 demographic. Also, I’m pretty sure this event was part of the four-letter’s The Ocho bit. If you’re my age and miss the days when off-hours ESPN featured multiple episodes of World’s Strongest Man, this bubble blowing contest will please you more than it enrages you. I want ESPN to broadcast sports, no matter how obscure they might be. How the fuck would I have found about World’s Strongest Man otherwise? I don’t live in Finland. I need someone to bring me these idiot sports, and I’d much rather see this on ESPN than see Pat McAfee’s face for the 90,000th time.
Eric:
What percentage of adults could fight off the most recent Boston Dynamics robot? Either the human-looking one or the dog one, doesn’t matter. Let’s assume you have only household items around you.
One hundred percent. A grown adult could fuck up a vacuum cleaner, yes? Same deal here. I know that Boston Dynamics puts out a good sizzle reel, but the spate of robot peers unassisted-ly eating shit all over the world puts lie to the idea that any of these gadgets are gonna one day evolve into the T-1000. All you have to do to defeat one of these robots in a fight is walk 10 yards backwards and let it fall on its face. Or you can just throw a bucket of water on one and watch its circuitry go BZZZZT! The only robot I fear is one being driven by Kyle Shanahan.
Wheat:
You are playing quarterback for an average NFL offense playing against an NFL defense of similar caliber. You have the ball at the opponents' 25-yard line. You have 100 chances to run a play. After each play, the defense's memory of the previous play is erased and you and your teammates are completely healed from any injuries you sustain. The defensive play/scheme does, however, change every time. Can you throw a touchdown on one of the 100 plays?
Nope. I know you’re trying to game the hypothetical here so that I might have some chance of success, perhaps if I execute a simple dumpoff pass to a back and let him do the rest of the work to hit paydirt. But 0.0000000001 percent odds of success is still essentially 0 percent. To execute any play, I would have to line everyone up correctly (impossible), know the play design (nearly impossible, unless it’s a JV-level play), recognize the defense I’m facing (impossible), call out the snap count correctly (impossible), field the snap cleanly (much harder than it looks), and then execute the play successfully (harder than everything else I just listed). I don’t even complete 50 percent of my throws when playing catch with my children. I’m not built to play in the NFL under any magical conditions, nor are you. This answer is over.
HALFTIME!
Lewy:
Imagine a colony of aliens landed on Earth and they were friendly, spoke our language, didn’t carry devastating diseases, culturally assimilated easily etc. but could do everything ~50% better than humans. Run faster. Jump higher. Throw harder. Etc. Would we eventually let them into our professional sports leagues or would they have their own NFL, MLB, etc?
No, we would murder them all. Haven’t you seen Disclosure Day? We humans suck at living with each other. There’s zero chance we’d be able to peacefully coexist with an extraterrestrial species, especially one that can dunk a basketball effortlessly. Look at that cocky-ass Zzurgeb, thinking he’s so hot just because he can shoot 85 percent from beyond the arc. That asswipe better hope he doesn’t meet me and my Sig Sauer in a dark alley late at night. Then we’d really see who’s the better man.
Taylor:
I'm outraged at how bad the voicemail feature is on iPhone. I'm further outraged that Apple keeps adding lenses to the goddamned camera and offering an array of pastel-colored iPhones, instead of fixing this fundamental and necessary piece of cell phone functionality. I'm furthest outraged that I'm forever married to Apple and unable to adopt a different cell phone with working voicemail because I don't want to be the guy in the group text that screws it all up with green text bubbles.
Ooh, are we here to complain about our iPhones? Because I got beefs, too. The voicemail thing isn’t one of them, because no one worth a shit ever leaves one. If they do, my phone gives me the transcription so that I don’t have to actually listen to the thing. And here we all have been talking about AI like it’s a bad thing.
But I still got problems with you, iPhone! Taylor mentioned the camera functions. My camera is fucking annoying. Somehow I always touch the screen wrong and put the shutter on a three-second timer. The range is shit and if I try to zoom in for an action shot, the resulting photo looks like it was taken by Bob Nightengale. Portrait Mode is fantastic, but both the light and the subject distance need to already be perfect if you want the photo to look like anything special.
That’s hardly my only gripe. The iOS software needs constant self-updating. There’s always a lingering notification in my General Settings telling me that I need to set up something that I already set up. The phone itself is unable to handle calls if I get so much as a drop of ear sweat on the glass. The pedometer in the Health app is a liar. The Weather app sucks, and the Maps app isn’t much better. Then there’s the open hostility to Android devices. If I wanna text a photo to a friend group and one of them dares to use a Pixel, suddenly that picture needs 50 minutes to load before I get an error message that I can’t then dismiss. I know these companies are competitors, but for fuck’s sake, man.
But my primary hangup is the iPhone’s text highlighting capabilities, or lack thereof. When I’m trying to copy and paste a sentence, one false move and OH DID YOU WANNA COPY THE ENTIRE PAGE, PHOTO CAPTIONS INCLUDED? Sometimes I have to move the cursor to just before the first letter of a sentence/paragraph, otherwise I’ve suddenly highlighted 19 paragraphs instead of what I wanted. Once I’ve copied what I wanted to copy, I must then tap the screen just so for the PASTE option to appear, otherwise nothing happens. Steve Jobs would refuse cancer treatment a second time, he’d be so disgusted with the interface’s shortcomings.
And don’t “first-world problems” me. If you make a product, no matter how frou-frou it may be, it should work. I can’t remember the name of the dweeb who took Tim Cook’s job as CEO, but he better fix that shit tout de suite or else I’m gonna switch over to a Samsung Galaxy.
[looks at Samsung Galaxy prices]
Are you shitting me? I thought the Sega Master System phones would be way cheaper!
Caitlin:
I am a hardcore San Francisco 49ers and Orlando Magic fan, because I'm a masochist. I recently started seeing a man who isn't particularly into sports. I asked him if there were any sports he does enjoy, and he told me that he likes watching the World Cup "when it's on" and Olympic women's beach volleyball. Is this guy a serial killer?
Nah, he just sounds like a casual sports fan who tunes into the World Cup because everyone else does, and likes women’s beach volleyball because it makes him horny. No need to analyze it further. You can date a guy like that. Unless you walk into his house and there’s a life-size cutout of Gabrielle Reece sitting at the dining room table.
Zachary:
Nobody is using the panic button on the car key, right?
Zachary, you are a man asking another man that question. Who might need that button on hand more than you and I do?
Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve used the panic button to locate my Tucson in a parking garage (still couldn’t find it).
Gabe:
In your opinion, after two-plus decades of broadly available access, has the internet proven to be a net good or a net evil for society?
Nothing irritates me more than the “The internet was a mistake” meme that pops up every other hour on my feed, because it's tired and because it’s not addressing the right question. I owe my career to the internet, so of course I’m gonna look on the technology favorably. But that’s all the internet is: technology. It’s an inanimate object, much like a kitchen knife is. Someone has to want to USE such tools for evil ends, or program them to do evil things. We’re in an age where all of the worst people in society have seized upon the internet as a means of doing horrible shit. But I don’t blame the internet for that. I blame Trump, and Elon, and Sam Altman, and every other fuckface trying to become cyber-christ. They’re the villains here, not the ones and zeros.
There could come a day—you’re already chuckling—when the tech giants are properly regulated and we humans have an internet that works as its ARPAnet founders genuinely intended. If that day ever comes, likely the same day that I have magically rid the sports world of hamstring pulls, then you and I would never have to ask if the technology was a mistake. You can’t stop progress, you can only steer it in the right direction.
Now please don’t ask me the same question about the nuclear bomb. Go sit through Oppenheimer for all of that.
Gary:
Let me start by saying I am high as balls right now, so bear with me. I'm cooking myself up a couple chicken sandwiches just now. When I go into the pantry to get the buns, I saw that I had already opened a bag, with six left inside. I reach in to snag two more, and without thought, I took from the bottom layer of front row. But I got to thinking, should I take the next two from the top layer? I think there's a superiority to the buns when stacked, as I feel it is a sturdier package with better opportunity to express as much air while closing it. But is leaving an intact single layer the more appropriate move, without man-handled tear marks? I feel a single layer of buns is more susceptible to squishing in the pantry. Am I the neanderthal here?
P.S. I found what happened to the first pair of buns I misplaced; the cat stole them.
This is a good stoner question. I always take the buns nearest to the bag opening first. This is because I want my potato rolls right now. I don’t want have to go digging way into the bag for one. I’m trying to make myself an egg sandwich here, man.
Alex:
Have you ever invested too much time in something that left you disappointed? This year, I grew two jalapeno plants in my garden, and spent months watering, feeding, and caring for them, only to be left with four peppers that resembled Jose Canseco's shriveled ding dong.
Yeah, raising my kids. HEY-OOOOOOO!
(If my kids are reading this, please know that was a cheap joke and I’m very proud of you all.)
Anyway, Alex’s story is a shining example of why I hate gardening. But I have endured plenty of other, ultimately fruitless endeavors in my lifetime. A few examples:
- Attempting to bake my own bread during the pandemic.
- Working for a year on a Point B TV series treatment that no one bought. You’ve got some nerve, Netflix.
- Buying a betta fish and keeping it alive for however long a stupid betta fish lives.
- Those three spec screenplays I wrote that no one gives a shit about.
- Trying to win over the girl of my dreams all through sixth and seventh grade and remaining imprisoned deep inside the friend zone the whole time.
- Spending an entire college football offseason at Colby trying to get my 40 time down, only to still clock in at nearly six seconds. I lost 80 pounds that year man, WTF.
- Watching the entire first season of The Killing only for them to punt on revealing who did it.
- Being a Vikings fan.
- Any game of Monopoly.
You get the idea. But hey, at least when I’ve wasted my time, I get to write about it. Use every part of life that you get.
Brian:
Whenever microwave instructions for a frozen meal say something like, "Microwave on high for 30-45 seconds depending on the wattage of your microwave," I always arrogantly shoot for the lower end of the range. Do you have similar microwave oven hubris?
You read the instructions?
Anyway, I shoot for the low number more out of fear than pride. If you overcook something in the microwave, all the moisture gets sucked out of the food and you end up with a plate that has more pores in it than the surface of the moon. You know the kind of tragedy of which I speak. Better to undernuke that shit than overnuke it.
Email of the week!
Andy:
Did you have a kid in your orbit growing up who claimed his uncle worked at Nintendo and he got to play the games early? I'm 41, and have interacted with enough people from different areas of the country to become convinced that this lie went viral around 1987 and every town had one of these kids. My question is how did this specific lie spread? Lying about having a girlfriend at sleep-away camp is more easily explained.
Yeah, but not as potentially viral. Every kid in America played Nintendo back in 1987. Not every kid in America cared if Gary Hanson in Winnetka was getting some or not.
