It’s time for your weekly edition of the Funbag Defector. Is something worrying you? Send the Funbag by email. And buy Drew’s new book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today we talk about quitting your job, husband nomenclature, gender, backup field marshals, and more.
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Your cards:
I was born in Texas, but I grew up before my father retired from the military and we moved there, so my love of sports grew while living elsewhere. As a child, I applauded Our Lady because she enjoyed culture and uniforms and it is the legal responsibility of each and every Irish Catholic to encourage this insufferable team. When I was going to school in New York, I also started shooting for Texas because I missed home. to army football as an alumnus, which is wonderful now because they suck so much less than when I went there. Am I a giant fraud?Do I have to decide on one team and only one?
It’s all right. Bigamy is allowed in college ranks, especially when you have private ties to various places. I also like that you cheat ND and Texas, two systems that deserve to be betrayed at all times. Irish even more of you for cheating on you with Army. They betrayed Our Lady before Brian Kelly. Fabulous.
There are many school football teams, so if you’re not an Oklahoma pervert who sincerely believes Lincoln Riley is Judas’ time, there’s no explanation for why stick to one school of morons or another.
Alejandro:
Throughout my life, each and every primary sports league in the United States has necessarily had 30 teams. Why is it the magic number? It’s not like there are 60 metropolitan spaces big enough to house sports franchises, and there are many cases of giant cities ultimately helping various teams, not to mention the fact that cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas have remained without an NFL team for decades. In addition, the NHL, MLB and NBA have shown that Canada is a viable and potentially underserved market. And the markets are temporarily divided when a new team appears. DC’s dominance was solidly Orioles’ territory for a long time, but now there is a healthy domestic market there. Why can’t we have a 60-team NBA with an annual portion of 32-team playoffs or something?I vote for more rivalry and more chaos as soon as possible.
I asked some other reader to write angrily about this express topic when Florio proposed a few weeks ago that the NFL expand to 40 groups. If you saw Zach Wilson face Tyrod Taylor on Sunday afternoon, you’d be right to be like, hey, there are too many terrible quarterbacks in this game; we don’t want more. It would also be my intestinal reaction. HOWEVER, I have experienced 4 NFL expansion groups (five if you count the Bucs, which were founded the year I was born), six MLB expansion groups, and 8 MLB expansion groups. NBA. La NHL has DOUBLED his club since I was born. In none of the cases has the expansion actively reduced the way I watched any of those games. He gave me something to urinate on and complain about at the time, yet I looked anyway. The games mattered to me exactly the same. It’s like any other substitute you fear: you complain and then get used to it, sometimes quite quickly.
So I wouldn’t do a crusade for a 40-team NFL, but if they ever add 8 new Jacksonville Jaguars, and one day they will, I’d still see Sunday Ticket and do the same NFL fanboy I’m doing right now. later, it would be hard for me to imagine an NFL without the San Antonio San Antonians. That would scare me a lot. Again, I watch school football even though it has many groups and I have NO idea what it does. I’m used to chaos. We can even institute relegation with a 40-group NFL. Don’t win anything and you can end up in the NFC East the following year.
David:
Has Donald Trump ever used a hammer on a nail?
You saw him excited in a big truck, didn’t you?He definitely grabbed a hammer and did something with it.
Steal:
I was reading Albert Burneko’s post about that horrible Washington Post article about quitting his job, and I learned that I had unknowingly followed all of the Post’s terrible recommendations when I resigned from my last assignment earlier this year. four weeks!). I wrote to a stupid little consultant to pass on my wealth of wisdom to the one who replaced me; I wrote a short resignation letter that only served to document that I was quitting smoking; I felt smart when the company’s VICE PRESIDENT told me I was going “in the right direction. “Do I care too much about being perceived as a professional?Help! PS: A few months later, my old employer closed its doors and leftovers were bought through my current employer for a few cents on the dollar, so I guess none of that mattered.
No, no, you’re doing very well. The day I left Deadspin was the only time I stopped immediately, however, those were normal circumstances. Every time I resigned, I have been a smart soldier, just like Rob here. I resigned in person. I gave him two weeks in advance, even apologizing to one of my bosses because he was quitting after only a few months of work, leaving him struggling to fill a position he had already struggled to fill before I arrived. ‘Notice, I didn’t intend to give the CEO a loose nursery or any other nonsense advised through the WaPo article. business as I can be, if not more. Many of those bosses remain my friends to this day.
So I give up the general path, to make their lives and that of everyone else in painting easier, it was a matter of fundamental courtesy. The other people who run G/O Media were the only other people I painted for who didn’t deserve that courtesy and even when I quit that job, I did so with this email to Paul Maidment, sent on Halloween morning 2019:
Dear Paul,
Please accept my resignation from Deadspin, effective Saturday, November 2. Thank you.
With Respect,
Drew Magary
That’s it. I never told him or Jimmy Spanfeller to fuck off, even though those two guys had it more than deserved. The act of stopping, almost immediately, said everything he had to say. I stayed professional without being a fucking doormat. useful in this way: it preserves the relationships you might want and ends the ones you don’t have with minimal unwanted reaction. After resigning, I started this site with all my former Deadspin colleagues (including my editorial chief, Barry Petchesky), and now Paul Maidment is probably sitting somewhere in England, unemployed and betting on Candy Land in opposition to him. I win.
Evan:
How old were you when you started unpacking your suitcase when you arrived at your destination of simply making a living from it?
Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . many years ago. With certainty. Definitely. She would never live in a suitcase on the road, it would be so rude.
I only unpack if it’s a long stay: regularly one for excitement and not business, and yet I doubt because I don’t need to leave anything on a hotel dresser, and because my wife forced me to believe that each and every hotel / Airbnb has bed bugs EVERYWHERE. Even the TV has bugs in the bed, if you believe it, which means my curling iron is the only sanitary position on Earth for all my belongings. My clothes all over the room when I’m alone on the road? Of course not. Basically, I unpack each and every place I go to on the ground.
Calvin:
Can you help me assign a new word to the male spouse?”Mari” is an ugly word, and the derivatives are even more nauseating. Hubby, husband, Husbo. . . I saw someone call their male spouse “The Hubster” today. vomit. As a husband, I’m offended by those nasty nicknames. There will have to be a more important word out there.
Well, we only have here a “man-woman” who, as others have already pointed out, the Internet is determined to permanently update the “husband” even if he is vulgar and stupid. “Husband” is a clever word. I don’t see the desire to fuck with it. I enjoyed telling other people that I was an official husband right after I got married. It made me feel like a MAN. I also used “husband” without guilt or irony, because why not me?These other variants that Calvin indexed as “spindle” never crossed my radar, and I doubt he’s alone in that. Most people say “husband” or “husband” and it works perfectly well. You can use “spouse” if you want it to look like you’re filling out a tax form all the time, but I’m not going to sign up on your behalf.
The much more urgent challenge is to update “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”, either of which was clumsy even before the dawn of the twenty-first century. I know I’m a middle-aged guy because I timidly asked my colleagues the other day if other younger people had already updated the terms of the “partner,” because I get a lot of emails and see a lot of tweets with “partner. “”used for “girlfriend” or “fiancé” or even “husband”.
[screaming at the cloud] But the “partner” is also weak. I understand why all the crazy children migrated there, yet it is still MORE indistinct than “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” were. They may be fucking, or they may be writing a biology paper together. How do I know? Just call the user you sleep with with your “asshole” and everything will become clear. Do it for my sake.
Stephane:
Because this is the quarterback substitute season, I have never played this sport, how difficult is it to be a backup quarterback?Run an offensive designed for you and have all eyes on you?
Yes, for all the jokes I make about envying Chase Daniel, Kyle Orton, and any other clipboard holder who charges tens of millions of dollars, backing QB is still incredibly hard work. We still have to train. You want to examine the tape. You have to lift. You have to make all your marks in front of the coaches so they don’t see you. You have to spend all day wondering if you’ll ever be smart enough to get started. . . If you count as a team. he thanked the bench warmers for helping the starters prepare, and we were told the team wouldn’t win without us, I never believed a word of that. I knew it was sacrificial, I knew it was worthless. Worse, I knew everyone knew.
You have to prepare as if you were going to play, and rarely do you have to play for real, which is a nightmare. One day, very little is expected of you and then, suddenly, the global is. There is nowhere to hide. If you suck, everyone will know and I only felt this feeling at the D3 level, in an invisible position, transfer all this to the biggest sports league on the continent and to the top scrutinized position within it, and suddenly, Chase Daniel’s paycheck is rarely very simple money.
HALF TIME!
Patrician:
I’m one of the best instructors in school and I’ve had the joy of coaching Shakespeare with selfless teenagers (and, frankly, I don’t blame them). But I marvel at the fact that we still examine 400-year-old texts, and that led me to Wonder: In 400 years, will young people examine videos the same way we examine Shakespeare?
You don’t have to wait 400 years for videos to be canonized, it happened a long time ago. They already get young people to examine old movies, especially in college. My daughter receives PODCASTS to do her homework. So yes, the canon will continue to incorporate other means as humanity adopts them, which means that my descendants will take a look at Kermit’s meme drinking tea with wonderful reverence centuries from now. It’s very exciting to think about it.
My oldest son never watches movies. I can no longer tell you the last time he watched a movie, or even a TV show, I tried to get him and the younger one to watch Dune with me, but they either gave up after 20 minutes. of me accepts that it is: that my son grows up in a different culture than I grew up in, which means that he will prioritize certain types of media over which I used to prioritize.
But part of me is grief, and you know why?Because I’ve become a movie connoisseur again.
This is harmful terrain, because film connoisseurs are among our worst citizens. I was an unbearable movie guy for a peak of the ’90s. We had a video store in town through a guy named Leon, that was his real call, and I would go over there each and every day to hire any movie I saw that was directed through the Coen brothers, which Ebert had given 4 stars to, or that it starred James Woods. I would force my classmates to watch Taxi Driver and tell them why it’s a smart movie WHILE we watch it. They hated me. I once stayed up all night because One False Move was on HBO at 2am. things about me at the time.
Then they gave me a job, they married me and I had children and you know how everything works. No more movies. No more Prestige TV. More news. For over a decade, I lived in a pop culture black hole where the only things that made it onto the radar here for me were Pixar movies and a bloody SpongeBob SquarePants. But my kids are all older now and the fog has lifted, so I started watching shitty movies again. Every weekend morning I go to the basement when the kids are hunting on their own screens and watching a movie that is on the must-see list that I stay in my app Notes: Barry Lyndon, The Stranger, The Green Knight, Blowout, each and every Guy Ritchie detective movie that I have missed in one way or another, etc. Movies are wonderful because the investment of time is nothing compared to serial television. It is the most productive endeavor of any and all and all the studio money is packed into a neat two to three hour time frame. I wish the older guy had joined me one morning for a tasteful screening of Butch and Sundance, yet my record of selling movies about other people is rarely that wonderful.
The pandemic took away a lot of features of life, and it still does, but at least they gave me back some videos. I became ’90s Drew, logging into this video store and asking Lion for his non-public advice before ignoring it. hire The Onion Field instead. This has been an unexpected and decidedly delicious benefit of middle age. I might worry about the “future of videos,” like an idiot filmmaker, but I’d rather create my own canon. I don’t care what’s left in a bunch of years, because I’ll be too dead for me to care.
I like Shakespeare.
John:
Before the pandemic, he was a thin guy, but now he weighs 65 pounds more and everything is big. One thing I realize about being fat is that I’m super excited, much more excited than when I lose weight. rub one several times a day. I really like that component of being fat. My question is: Do you think fat people have more sex than other thin people?
Well, I had sex when I’m a match and when I’m overweight, and I can tell you it’s still pretty awesome anyway. I think I liked sex more when I have a compatibility because I felt sexier doing it. But no, I never got the impression. that there is a physiological difference to have. I had sex and I fought the same way anyway. An orgasm is an orgasm.
I’m not as excited as I used to be. Since my weight has been pretty steady over the last decade, aside from the coma, I know it’s more about age than anything else. And honestly, I struggle with that. Like many of the guys in the ’80s, I put a lot of my identity into my libido: nurturing it and then satisfying it. I have equated sex with a smart life and still do it in many tactics. So every time I catch myself without thinking about fucking, I feel like I’m 1,000 years old. I hate prudes, and I read this Vanity Fair article about each and every one in Hollywood taking HGH so they can fuck more and I was MUCH more interested than outraged. I was like, “Hmm, I can go. ” But no, instead I write books, cook wonderful meals, raise a loving family, and am happier, in many tactics, than ever before. You may have been an abnormal sex addict all along!Tragic shit.
Thomas:
If you could make one song disappear, what would it be?I would decide on Queen’s “We Will Rock You. “I like the most of Queen’s discography, but I never liked it, I felt it played through and for the idiots who stopped. and applauded and idea “Look at me!This is about me!”The terrible GMC Sierra announcement pushed me to the limit. This ad captures the losers who think this song is great. No offense to the queen.
I HATE THIS AD! A bunch of rich yuppies clapping on the radio as they drive a van they’ll never use once to pick up things is NOT rock n’ roll!The only car this song is expected to explode with is a 1972 Dodge Dart with a trunk full of weeds. Every van on Earth deserves to be buried under a mountain.
Sorry, I got distracted and didn’t answer your question. My answer is “Hotel California”.
Mate:
I recently learned that a friend of mine uses the bathroom (poop!) In the presence of her husband, and vice versa. I am horrified, mortified, stunned and essentially all “-strong” that anything can be about it. What is your opinion?
It’s an open bathroom, right? I’m not horrified. You get married and go on to see and know everything about each other. This is how marriage works, unless you’re a Promise Keeper monster.
That said, my wife and I don’t do our best to hang out with others in the middle of it. Everyone deserves their space.
Jeff:
Against my nature, I have had patience with COVID. Me quarantined I made sourdough (she is now dead). I drank excessively at home, zoomed in, skipped vacations and vacations, put on masks. I got the vaccine. I kept wearing the masks. My question is when do we finish?
Yes, I’m tired of it too. Once the word of the Omicron variant blew up last week, I like FUCK YOU, MAN. I didn’t need to hear that. I did my damn job, my wife and I were stimulated. My youngest son is getting his dose at the moment on Saturday. We’ve already earned the right to get rid of this fucking pandemic. I’m tired of being a smart game while all of Florida is wiping its nose. In the meantime, Twitter keeps calling. that’s why I’m desperate with each and every new progression that appears.
However, it’s not all bad. Reinforcement paints. Pharmaceutical corporations will know very soon if vaccine paints oppose Ozymandias, and even if they don’t, Moderna has already said they can recreate some other vaccine for it in the MONTHS. at the end of 2021 we would have a vaccine, that my total circle of relatives would have it, that the stadiums would be full again, that I would be perfectly padded with a mask in public places, and that I had not gone to any yet TWO rock concerts, I would have done it, I would have danced a jig, I would have been so happy.
So I’m looking not to forget that, because I could be sitting here right now in a vax-free world, with my kids STILL at Zoom school and me doing a much darker calculation: deciding how many threats I accept. with my life just so I can go back to eating a fucking Californian tortilla. Much of that threat has already disappeared, and yet I’m still waiting for someone to tell me that life is now one hundred percent when it never was. a guy who just came out of criminal but is afraid to leave his apartment afterwards, so you and I have finished as we would like.
However, all antivaxxers go live in a damn box.
Email of the week!
Acacia:
I was reading the most recent Funbag (that’s how I did it after training over a hundred eighth-graders) and you were talking about chocolate and gum sodas. It reminded me of the year my mom bought a random bag of Halloween candy for anything on her desk. , had leftovers and gave them to me in exchange for bribes so that teenagers would avoid being teenagers for 30 seconds. When I dug into what was left, it was like 70% Laffy Taffy chocolate.
Some of the guys I was training at the time tried, because it’s 1000% what teenagers do. I was given a half-silly description that was functionally useless, so I dared to check one out. You know, for science. It was like having dinner at a Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa blfinish. It’s as if someone from the Ferrera Candy Company drinks a cup of Swiss Miss and says, “You know what?It would be even better if I could chew it. No child was so much. It is difficult for Candy to convince herself to end this crime opposed to chocolate. He went to the trash where he ended up 4 years ago, but that’s not the case because my teacher’s workplace is a black hole for chance. my circle of relatives and I needed to know this sweet abomination.
It sounds horrible, again, I like to eat a hot chocolate mix.
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