Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking about mercy rules, Jason Statham, baseball, cereal, bad roommates, and more.
Your letters:
Josh:
I’m a sound guy, and as such am lucky enough to have some really talented musician friends. Some of those have albums that are absolute sex jams. Is it okay to bone to your friends’ music, and if so, should I tell them, or my partner?
I think all of that is fine. Music is made for fucking. So use it. Just because you’re having sex to Dave’s band doesn’t mean Dave is THERE, standing behind a curtain somewhere and watching you hump. It just means he does his job well. He’d probably be beaming with pride that his shit was good enough to make your coitus playlist. I know I would be. Hey yo people are having sex to ME and my tasty riffs!
I’d tell him. Hell, I’d make a video of the session and send it to him. BRO LOOK HOW WELL THIS TURNED OUT BRO! If people fucked to my podcast (and who wouldn’t?!), I’d want to know. I think. Okay probably not, but still. It would be one thing if it were, like, your DAD’S band. But if it’s your friend who also happens to be Sam Smith or whoever, I think you’re using their work as intended. They have to have chops. Don’t go fucking to some shitty bar band demo that sounds like Jim Irsay nut deep into a bottle of Xanax. To fuck to a song is to validate that song. So make sure all of that vetting has already been done in advance before you thrust in there with your own endorsement.
As for telling your bedmate, I think that’s also probably fine. It would be weird if you made a whole production out of it. Honey, tonight we’re gonna fuck… to Dave! And it would be weird if you disclose this factoid while you’re inside someone. But if your girlfriend knows the song before the fact and likes it, and if that song is already in the rotation and suits the occasion, it’s all good. You might even share a laugh about it. GUYS ALWAYS LOVE TO LAUGH WHEN THEY’RE HORNY.
Kirk:
I was watching your son Sam Darnold get taken apart on Monday Night Football and I’m starting to think should the NFL implement a mercy rule? The only thing that could happen that night was a major injury or Sam Darnold just sitting at the 50 rocking back and forth in the fetal position. Maybe two-hand touch with a running clock if you have as many first downs as turnovers at the start of the fourth quarter?
Nope. No mercy rule. NFL players are grown professionals. They can deal. They have to. That’s all part of the fabled development process. Any NFL team, even the Jets, SHOULD be good enough and dignified enough to keep a game from ending 222–0. They have honest-to-God world-class athletes on the Jets. They’d beat Alabama by 60. They should be able to withstand being on the wrong end of that kind of beatdown.
Besides, Bill Belichick essentially rigged the clock late in that game to give the Jets a bit of mercy anyway, depending on how you look at it. Even if he hadn’t done that, those games only appear long on television. If you’ve ever played in a football game, you know they feel like they’re over before you’re even finished tying up your cleats. All that goddamn practice and your reward is a game that goes by as quickly as a power nap. And then you lose by 90. It’s not the healthiest process. I remember standing in the sidelines during a blowout loss in high school and not WANTING the game to end. I was doing endless calculus in my head, mapping out how we could still come back. Well, if we just score a double touchdown and then recover five straight onside kicks, we’ll be golden! I wasn’t ready to concede defeat until, like, 50 seconds were left. Every elastic-brained jock thinks this way. They have no choice. It’s the only way you can function on a football field without getting your skull dislocated. Even guys on the Dolphins are trying to win and still think that they can before filing the formal trade demand.
That’s why it was so fucking beat for the Jets to bitch about Sam Darnold’s hot mic incident from that game two weeks ago (can a mic even be hot if you agreed to let the dude wear it?). Darnold had the gall to be openly vulnerable in a league where vulnerability is for pussies. It really wasn’t all that different from Anthony Rizzo confiding to teammates that he was a wreck during a World Series game. Like, I’m genuinely surprised and touched when these people act human, even though they very much are. Teams wanna bleed all of that emotional variance out of you.
But Darnold was getting crossed up by disguised coverages and battered back in the pocket. So he was, naturally, discouraged. I’m sure he still wanted to win. But the Jets were like HOW DARE NFL FILMS MAKES US, THE NEW YORK JETS, LOOK RIDICULOUS! That kind of willful blindness is what makes people openly ask if the NFL needs to tweak the rules specifically to accommodate Adam Gase’s wounded pride.
Patrick:
Without looking up stats, does a pitcher like Zach Greinke make it to the Hall Of Fame? Could you name a dozen players playing in baseball currently that will be in the Hall Of Fame?
I say Greinke makes the Hall, sure. Now let’s look at his career stats…
[looks]
I mean, it’s borderline, but at this point they’ll put in anyone who played for over a decade and wasn’t caught injecting blowfish toxin into tightened joints. Zach qualifies on both those counts. And I need him to qualify, because naming a dozen current HOFers off the top of my head is gonna be impossible. I wouldn’t have even thought of Greinke if you hadn’t mentioned him. I’m seeing ghosts already. Lemme attempt to excavate some names here:
- Greinke
- Justin Verlander
- Max Scherzer
- Anthony Rendon
- Stephen Strasburg
- Bryce Harper? If Bryce doesn’t make the Hall, there’ll be 50 shithead Nats fans camped outside his house and taunting him for it until they die. They’ll spell out NO HALL in duct tape over the back of his old Nats jersey
- Clayton Kershaw
- Mike Trout
- Aaron Judge
- Shohei Ohtani. Reaching…
- Jim Thome doesn’t still play, right? What about Ichiro?
- Oh wait! Madison Bumgarner! Him.
- Honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of 12 baseball teams, so I should probably be fired. All I need is one more, man. Oh god…
- …(deepest possible sigh) Trevor Bauer
That’s the best I can do, and I’ve done horribly. Ron Manfred is gonna issue flash cards to me and every other citizen to increase the collective MLB All Star Q rating. This is less a list of future Hall of Famers than just a running tally of active baseball players that I, Drew Magary, happen to be aware of. And even then, I had to spellcheck Ohtani. Just a horseshit effort from every angle.
I don’t like it when a Hall pass is automatically presumed for an active player. This is much bigger offense in football, when Al Michaels is like, “Zach Ertz, who will no doubt be in Canton one day…” Slow down there, amigo. Let’s just wait for the process to get underway. The player in question has to retire and then the committee needs five years to cook up reasons why they hate him. It’s a necessary ritual.
TOP FIVE STATHAM CHARACTER NAMES 5. HANDSOME ROB 4. LEE CHRISTMAS 3. NICK WILD 2. TERRY LEATHER 1. CHEV CHELIOS
Bacon should be on there. Bacon is right in the name, man. And he’s not even a fat character. I’m biased because I love Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. I randomly quote Statham’s lines from that movie out loud to my family even though NONE of them have ever seen it. Dinner is ready at the table and I go TEW LATE TEW LATE WILL BE THE CRY WHEN THE MAN WITH THE BARGAINS HAS PASSED YEW BY. My wife and kids pretend they don’t hear it. Anyway, here’s my list, since ZMF yelled at me to make my own:
- Bacon
- Terry Leather
- Chev Chelios
- Turkish (NOTE: He’s not Turkish!)
- Lee Christmas
- Sergeant Jericho Butler
- Evan Funsch
- “Farmer”
- Monk
- Nick Wild
- Deckard Shaw
- Uh, Joey
Looking at his IMDb page… I forgot Statham was in Collateral. Let’s go to the tape.
Pretty vital scene. I wish Tom Cruise played psychopaths more often. He barely has to stretch when he does it.
Joseph:
My girlfriend loads knives into the dishwasher with the blades up. Her excuse is they don’t get cleaned well enough when they face downwards. She’s a psychopath, right?
My parents do this as well, and I’m only reminded of it when I visit their house and I go to empty the dishwasher and I get stabbed in the fingertips. SURPRISE, BITCH.
I put regular serving knives blades up in there, but they aren’t pointy. If we’re talking about, like, a steak knife, that shit needs to be facing down. You’re taught to hold knives downward as a child. I don’t know why dishwashers would mandate the opposite. I don’t think it affects the knife’s cleanliness. Even if it did, why is that worth more than my hands? I USE THESE HANDS FOR PROSE. To damage them would be to damage humanity itself.
My wife likes to run the disposal when I’m at the sink and sometimes she does it without warning me. I totally freak out when that happens. I’m like, “My hands are INCHES away from those churning blades, lady!” And then she jams my head down there instead.
Nick:
Is wearing a Curt Schilling jersey the same as wearing a MAGA hat?
No. He was a great pitcher. It’s a fucking joke that he isn’t in the Hall of Fame already. I’m an insufferable liberal and even I know that. I can separate the art from the artist there. I’m not an idiot. If I had to disown an athlete just because they like Trump and/or have generally shitty taste in politics, I’d have to stop watching every sport. Go ahead and toss the NBA onto that blacklist because they’re the Mayor Pete of sports leagues. I’d rather just compartmentalize the way everyone else does.
A MAGA hat is its own Trump artifact. Its only purpose is to tell the world that you fucking suck. A Schilling jersey at least has some additional context in its metaphorical fabric. If you’re wearing one to pay homage to his career (or because you paid a lot of money for it and can’t afford a newer player’s jersey), go for it. If you’re wearing one just to be a dickhead… well, your Red Sox hat already gave that away anyway.
Jonah:
How far would a home run have to be hit for the pitcher who surrendered it to be taken out of the game *immediately*? Let’s assume it’s the first inning, and the pitcher got the first two batters out without incident. I feel like an entire mile would be hard to ignore.
Nah, he stays in the game. Once the ball’s out of the park, it’s out. How it goes out, and how far away it lands, is immaterial to the average nut-scratching addict in charge of throwing the ball. The batter doesn’t get EXTRA runs just because he hit one over to the next county (even though he should). It’s just a regularass home run in the box score, and thus Brody Houseboat out on the mound can treat it similarly.
I’d feel like an idiot if I were a manager and I pulled a pitcher way early because the crowd went OOH! extra loud. I just watched the Nationals start the bullpen phone operator for Game 5 the other night because arms were at a premium. Pitchers are trained to have short memories. They can treat a home run, even a monster one, as an anomaly and then get back to the business of being shelled like a real man. How far a homer goes makes no difference. And frankly, since networks have been able to post the tape measure of every dinger right away, I’ve become numb to all the distances anyway. The ball went far, probably somewhere between 400 and 500 feet. I get the gist. Same as when they clock the speed of running backs in the open field with Next Gen Stats. Oh wow, when no one touched him, Christian McCaffrey ran as fast as golf cart! INCREDIBLE.
HALFTIME!
Craig:
Are you ever able to get the milk-to-cereal ratio correct? I swear my cereal is either drowning or so bone-dry I’m choking to death. Is there a tried and true method I am missing out on? Have you ever gone back in the middle of eating a bowl and added more milk? I have and it NEVER works. (Disclosure: NOT A MILLENNIAL – I have been preparing cereal for myself for roughly 40 years).
I’ve added extra milk midway through. This is a necessity sometimes with highly absorbent cereals like Frosted Mini Wheats, where the mini wheat takes on enough fluid to keep a Missouri floodplain protected. Otherwise, as an instinctive rule of thumb, I pour the milk up to the point where the top of the cereal pile is just poking out. This generally gives me the correct amounts of milk and Cap’n Crunch in every mouthful, which is the goal. But if you’re skeptical of that method, I would just drown the bowl. Who gives a shit? That keeps the cereal moist AND gives you extra Cocoa Puffs milk as an aperitif. Truly, WHO SAYS NO?
One other thing is that your ratio may be all fucked up not because of how you pour the milk, but because of your bowl. Use a big bowl, but don’t fill it all the way. That way, there’s ROOM for the right amount of cereal and milk to coexist. You don’t get Crunch Berries overflowing, or milk creeping up perilously close to the bowl’s lip, your spoon poised to displace enough of it to send it cascading down the side and fucking your morning. If you still want more cereal after that, make another bowl. Repeat as needed. **PRINT THIS RECIPE**
Ryan:
Earlier this year, I took a pretty good fall on some ice. Braced my fall with my hand, hit my elbow and hip pretty hard. Wrist is still sore over a month later. If you could choose which body part to injure in a fall and it’d hurt for over a month, which one would you choose?
Well I can think of ONE body part I wouldn’t care to hurt in a fall, yes I can. And it’s not even my dick!
Thanks to the wonders of middle age, I am now at the point in life where random shit starts to hurt for a bit, and then goes away, and then a DIFFERENT part of my body starts randomly aching afterward. It’s fun to experience your own body breaking down in real time. Can’t get enough of it.
As such, I’ve got extensive experience in pain. I catalog pains now based on whether or not they’re indicative of greater structural problems that I need to address. Everything is now graded on the DO I NEED TO GET THIS CHECKED OUT curve. Like, if I get a twinge in my shoulder, I know that’s probably nothing to worry about. But if my sciatic nerve starts to ache down my leg, I’m fucked. I know the difference between inconvenient pain and existentially worrisome pain.
So, with that in mind, my answer to you is my lower leg. Like, the shin area. This might cause me to limp, but I’m the kind of guy who secretly enjoys limping because I think it makes me look like I just played in the NFC Championship game and/or fought at Dunkirk. Otherwise, it’s a nice big area to accommodate a nagging ache, and it’s away from the knee, the ankle, the hip, and other critical joints. I’ve hurt my lower leg many, many times before: falling off bikes, banging into tables, getting kicked by hyperactive toddlers, etc. It’s jayvee pain. I can Advil my way through that month.
I don’t want my hands to hurt because, as I told my wife, I do all my precious blogging with them. I’ve also ripped off a hangnail and been reminded that fingertips contain EXTREMELY sensitive nerve endings. Same goes for my toes. I don’t want my gut to hurt, because that means I’m about to lose my spleen, as my son Sam Darnold nearly did. I don’t want my aforementioned shoulder to hurt, because my shoulder is, like my fingertips, a wicked repository for suicidal pain. The only other possible options are my arm and my butt. As for the latter, I just experienced a case of the runs at the airport three days ago. If my butt’s unhappy, so am I.
Shane:
TNT’s new “24 shot visual clock” at the top of the key is the most useless feature. I wish I could turn it off. Your eye movement when watching basketball “jumps” in watching the ball and player matchup, so your eyes are focused on that. The players block the countdown on TV. You usually have the announcers, arena music, and crowd letting people know time us winding down. Most NBA plays don’t get down to the last second like the NFL, where every play is life and death and its crucial to get the play off in time. Did some TNT exec watch a football game and went, “that countdown clock should be in a basketball game too”?
I have not noticed this bug yet because I, like everyone else, know that the NBA doesn’t begin play until Christmas. But lemme take a look at the offending graphic in Autumn League action:
I can live with that. TV graphics are like webpage design where they change all the time and I bitch for ten minutes before adjusting and treating the design as if it’s always been that way. Like you said, I don’t think this is a particularly necessary feature, especially when it’s still right there in the fucking score bug. But the graphic is displayed in a faded white so that your eyes—or at least, my eyes—aren’t necessarily drawn to it immediately. As these things go, it’s downright subtle.
This is a little bit like the strike zone graphic in baseball, where I blanched at first glance before realizing that I was actually liked it. But I like that graphic because it’s giving me info I didn’t have before: the radar gun reading and the pitch’s landing spot in the box (Samer told me the latter part is often faulty but I still trust it anyway). This new NBA graphic is giving you redundant information. But at least it’s still relatively discreet. The reason you should be more concerned about it is that it opens up the possibility of digital Slim Jim billboards being pasted onto the court. Gotta make up for that lost Chinese revenue somehow. Our new corporate bosses are gonna demand autoplay ads appear in the lane during every possession.
I’m not sure if it’s new or not, but both NBC and CBS NFL broadcast graphics go into panic mode when the play clock goes below five seconds. On SNF, the red drains from the clock, like sand trapped inside an hourglass. It’s awesome, even when the time runs out and the refs, as they do far too often, inexplicably let the play go off even when the snap comes a beat afterward. Next season, TNT will have the entire court beep like a police siren if the shot clock gets too low. A few seconds later, James Harden will take six straight FTs. THAT will be irritating.
Kieran:
How many pounds over your current weight would you accept being if it meant you never had to worry about what you ate or drank again? Weight has been an up and down struggle in my life, so I think about this a lot. Originally, I was only willing to put on 25 pounds but the more I think about guilt-free burritos and beer, the more I think I could live life at 364 pounds comfortably.
The most I ever weighed at any time was 280, back in college. And I was deeply unhappy about it. I’m down to 207 now and, because I had to give up alcohol to prevent a second brain hemorrhage, it’s become much, much harder for me to gain weight. Back when I drank, it was nearly impossible to get weight off, particularly the requisite 10 pounds that everyone says they gotta drop. Shit’s the other way around now. I am now one of those DISGUSTING people with a frisky metabolism, so I can eat Popeye’s (and I do) and still keep my luscious bikini body intact. If I could booze again—and I would if I could—then go ahead and put me at 225 for life. That’s not much heavier than I am now, but I have learned in intimate detail, that when I tip over 230, I start to look and feel like shit. All the time. I looked at photos of myself when I was that weight and photos were so much crueler than a mirror ever could be. Photos see me as others do. Mirrors feel more within my control.
I remember stepping on the scale a year ago and seeing it go over 225 for the first time in nearly a decade. I grimaced and went about my day. You wouldn’t have known I was stewing over it to look at me. But of course, I was. I was profoundly upset about it. Anger—the real kind—starts off innocuously and then metastasizes within. I don’t like having that anger, and I know I would feel it even if I had carte blanche to booze and eat like a fucking banker. Feels good to look good.
Michael:
At some point, Han Solo had to get/buy clothes. Sure, maybe he stole that vest, or found it in a box of shit he was smuggling, or punched a guy right out of it, but he had to have shopped for at least SOME of his clothes (like his boots, or his Darth Vader Underoos), right?
Sure. This is actually covered at length in Solo: A Star Wars Story. There’s a 30-minute scene where Not Harrison Ford goes to a Salvation Imperial Army outlet on Tattooine and loads up on boots, vests, and souvenir dice. Incredibly compelling bit of SWCU lore.
In all seriousness, those are details that are best left off screen. One of the many awful side effects of mass fanboyism is that movie franchises now feel compelled to tell you the origin story of not just a character, but of EVERYTHING that character owns or interacts with. Where does Porkins get his helmet? The answer may surprise you! I don’t need to know all that shit and neither do you. Whether Han Solo looted his clothes off a guy he shot, or he got them at the finest Army Surplus store in the galaxy, it doesn’t matter.
Email of the week!
Kevin:
My roommate when I was a freshman in college was a sophomore who absolutely nobody liked. He was the only sophomore on the floor. He was about 5’3” and 100 pounds.
He loved to talk about how he used to play high school football but got injured and had to become a manager. He put pictures up on the wall in our room of his school football field (remember he’s a soph, so two years removed from high school).
So one night I came back to the dorm with some friends and I enter our room and I shit you not he’s in there watching a grainy VHS tape (this is 2002) of one of his high school football games and he’s doing play by play like he’s Gus Johnson. Sitting in our dorm room doing play by play of a years old high school football game he didn’t even play in. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
Oh that was me. My bad. Wait, let’s do one more.
Will:
I’ve never been madder about a media story than about what’s being done to Deadspin. Lump in my throat and too furious to sleep, just thinking about this absolute garbage. Cannot even imagine how it’s making you all feel. I can’t muster up the good-after-bad energy required to scream at your bosses from across the void, but I felt like it would be worthwhile to copy your entire masthead just to say thanks. You are one of the very best collections of writers, artists and thinkers that we have anywhere today. I know I’m not the only one who will continue to try finding a way to your work through whatever inane and dehumanizing obstacles that your purported superiors keep dumping in the middle of our path to each other. What you have created is valued and valuable, rare and special, and I hope you are all as proud of what you’ve built and the fight you’ve been fighting as your readers are of you. You have my deepest admiration and my strongest appreciation for everything you have accomplished to make Deadspin what it is. Simply put: thank you all for making my favorite website.
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