Do Any NBA Players Smoke Cigarettes?
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Email the Funbag. And preorder Drews next book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while youre at it. Today, were talking about art guys, terrible beach food, Porkys, and more. I wonder this quite often when watching games. I go back and forth on it. I know they are psychopaths about fitness, but also Id imagine some party REAL hard sometimes. But also cigs seem so outdated, especially for the ultra wealthy. Im not sure! Yeah there are athletes who still smoke. Dont you know those thingsll kill you? I know that modern athletes have deranged fitness regimens and I know that their teams designated Chip Kelly is waiting around every corner demanding to taste their urine for traces of rogue mineral elements. But these are still jocks were talking about. They still love to fucking party, and many of them are quite stupid. Also, many NBA players come from Southern Europe, where smoking counts as food. Those dudes smoke. They can get away with it. I was in the best shape of my life when I was 20. I also drank like a fucking fish and dabbled in the occasional I only smoke when Im drunk Parliament, usually to impress girls (they didnt care). You can pull off that kinda shit when youre young. Or if youre Jay Cutler! Remember that meme! Those were the days. ERMAHGERD REMEMBERING MEMES IS TEH SEXAY. The only difference now is that players and coaches arent gonna smoke out in the open, Jim Leylandstyle. They keep that shit in the closet. Or they do it at Paul Pierces house. But these are not Mormons youre watching. They still squeeze some naughty business in. Vaping may be healthier, but thats no fun. If you dont think Dwayne Haskins doesnt suck on the occasional Pall Mall, you havent watched Dwayne Haskins play quarterback. Brings his own. To be a good salesman, you MUST believe in your product, and no one believes in his own product more than the fascist pillow dumbfuck. Not counting people whose job it is to do so (e.g. some TV critics, people who worked on the show, etc), I think youd have a tough time finding any normal person whose seen it all. Everyone my age stopped watching after season 11 or 12, and anyone younger whos picked it up since then is unlikely to go back and enjoy the very early seasons. Absolutely, yes. Its the most popular TV show thats ever existed and it has millions upon millions of fans that span across multiple generations. I know every line from the first eight seasons of that show and Im on the MILD end of Simpsons obsessives. I barely even qualify as one, frankly. There are completists out there. Many of them. All of them are proud. All of them have been trained to eat shit by the Fanboy Industrial Complex. And all of them have been conditioned by the modern television industry to NEED to watch every episode. Im no different. When I start a new show now, I do so under the assumption that Ill start with the pilot and watch every episode in order. This makes sense for something like Succession. It makes absolutely no sense for 85 percent of the shows currently on TV, The Simpsons included. But youre ordered like a sheep to clean your plate, and so everyone does. Our own Dan McQuade, who has by far the most intriguing TV habits on the Defector staff and who still watches The Simpsons every week, hasnt seen every episode, but hes seen over 500 of them by his count. He HAS seen every episode of Baywatch, though. To me thats by far the more impressive achievement. Not long. It also wont take long for MLB to be like, Actually selling rights to your waistband is against league bylaws and we apologize to our fans for the offense. Also, batters will now only be allowed two strikes for the sake of broadcast expediency.  I also dont think itll take long for college athletes to utilize NIL laws on the field, either. Were just months away from some dude in a Tuesday night MACtion game scoring a TD and lifting up his shirt to reveal a Golden Palace brand logo. Thats happening. Mitch Albom will shit tears when it goes down. Anon:  In Murder, She Wrote episode 1.5, a producer (played by tremendous character actor John Saxon) has nefariously acquired Jessica Fletchers movie rights to her murder mystery bestseller called The Corpse Danced at Midnight. When Jessica confronts him, he tells her he wants to turn her book into a combination of Halloween, Porkys, and Flashdance (this episode is from 1984). Yes. I actually think this would be the greatest film ever made. Disagree. Lemme tell you what its like to watch Porkys when youre 14 and you just wanna see some boobs on TV for one of the first times in your young life. It BLOWS. I was at the perfect age to laugh at all of the jokes in Porkys, but I dont even remember any of them. One dude was named Meat and had a big dick. One dude was named Peewee and couldnt get laid. Then the movie turns insanely dark when the titular Porky has his men beat the piss out of everyone. The only nudity I remember from it was a few minutes of 80s-mandated shower peeping. Two people probably fucked in a car. I dunno. In its time Porkys was, like American Pie, a deeply shitty ripoff of Animal House. No good can come from ripping off Porkys. Just rip off the opening dream sequence in Porkys Revenge instead. Thats a masterpiece of cinema. The other two movies are good, but you dont have to look hard for existing movies that plunge unstoppable serial killers into the hardscrabble world of erotic dancing. I do NOT give your desired film adaptation a green light. For me, it would be to outfit an entire (large) room with the entire GI Joe collection. Id have the big ass aircraft carrier in a body of water, all the airplanes hung from the ceiling, all sorts of landscapes to match the characters, etc. Thats really been a lifelong dream and if I ever get F-U money thats how Im spending it. Because it was just this past year when I realized that if I ever became obscenely wealthy, I would TOTALLY become an art guy. I went to a Lee Ufan exhibition in D.C. with my folks two years ago and I was like, I would like that shit in my house. Then I went to MoMA two months ago and saw this painting by Kazuo Shiraga (flat pictures dont do it justice), so I went and looked at prices for Shiragas work on the private market. Virtually all of them cost over a million dollars. I found one in six figures and I was like, Thats not THAT bad. In real life, that bargain painting was roughly the size of a book cover. So I cant buy an original Shigara. But if Defector Media becomes the multinational conglomerate we ALL know it has the potential to be, well then fuck you. All the Shigaras shall be MINE, and only my bestest friends and associates shall be allowed to view them in my parlor. I wanna be an art guy. When I went to MoMA, it was the day after the CDC lifted its masking recs for the fully vaccinated, but the museum itself was still a relative ghost town. No one was there. There was no crowd around The Starry Night. I could have gawked at it from a foot away for an hour if I had wanted to, and the areas around lesser-known works were even more sparsely populated. It gave me an ever-so-slight idea as to what it would be like to own a priceless work of art: one so big that you have to buy an entirely new house worthy of showcasing it. Id buy myself an art house. It would overlook the sea, and have an atrium with 20-foot ceilings, and the centerpiece would be an Orozco mural the size of a fucking IMAX screen. And then, at night, I would fill a brandy snifter with blackberry Spindrift and just stare at my shit. Im not kidding. I would unironically do this. That would be the fucking tits. My wife and I have her paintings up all over our house and not only do they add the requisite touch of elegance we crave, but theyre fun to stare at. I have no obligation to a painting. I dont have to articulate WHY I like it (especially when the painting is abstract). That would ruin the magic, actually. In turn, the painting has no obligation to me. It doesnt even know Im there. Everything in my Writer Brain toolkit is purposeless when it comes to paintings, and I like it that way. And my Critic Brain turns off too, because I know so little about art, outside of the things my wife has taught me about it. I dont suggest edits to myself while Im looking at a masterwork. I dont think of tweets to fire off in reaction. Its like meditation, only I dont fuck up every other minute as Im trying to let go of myself. Its very freeing. One enormous painting I saw in New YorkI forget the artistincluded a note on the placard that said the intention was to make it feel like encountering the painting gave you the same sensation as encountering another person. And by God it did exactly that. Im horny for art as I type this. I did that little MoMA jaunt as time filler on a trip to New York to do other shit. But I live in an area that has many free art museums, and I dont take advantage of that fact nearly enough. Im gonna start going to those museums more often. Im gonna wear a nice suit when I do. Then Im gonna go to Art Basel in Miami and hang out with even trashier rich folk. Then Im gonna graduate to fine auctions, raising my paddle just as the auctioneerhis voice quiveringraises the bidding to $100 million, eliciting audible gasps from the rest of the room. I might even dabble in the stolen art market. Twasnt I! HALFTIME! Colin:  Last weekend, another family came to join us at the beach for the day. They left our house at the same time as us, but arrived about 15 minutes later. Brilliant on their part because they got to miss the chair/umbrella/tent/blanket setup  but apparently the delay was to stop for donuts. They waltzed in with a dozen assorted and a box of donut holes. I have never encountered donuts on the beach before. This is the week I learned that our own Laura Wagner enjoys snow cones with a healthy dollop of marshmallow fluff atop them, so nothing in the realm of Chaotic Beach Snacks can surprise me anymore. Anyway, I love donuts but youre just asking for them to be ruined if you take a box of them to the beach. My hard law of beach snacks now is that every snack needs to be small and, if possible, individually wrapped. If I bring a full-size bag of chips to the beach, my kids will inadvertently fill it with sand within nine seconds. They are infectious sand agents, these kids. Only by packing a Frito-Lay variety pack can I contain their spread. A donut is particularly bad because you only need one grain of sand to ruin it. If I get sand in a tiny bag of Fritos, its gonna fall to the bottom. Thats not happening to a sand-infected donut. Youre definitely biting down on that shit and ruining your afternoon. This is why, like Colin, I cant support beach donuts. That TOTALLY makes sense. I see no conflicts there. James:  I am a father of two boys (six and three) and feeding them can be a crapshoot at best. Especially breakfast. Some days they will eat multiple bowls of their favorite cereal (currently Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Apple Jacks) other days they will have maybe two bites before stating their fullness and leaving a soggy mess for me to bus. It is a completely random event. As I sit here typing this, the big one has finished his, the toddler has barely touched his. Lunch and dinner is a similar gamble, though slightly less. If you ever get there, lemme know. Because I have NO sense at all for my childrens appetites. The 15-year-old will make a two-course lunch for herself at 4 p.m. The only time the 12-year-old reliably cleans his plate is if Chick-Fil-A is on it. And the 9-year-old is hungry all day EXCEPT when mealtime arrives. Im absolutely fucking lost. The good news is that all of these kids are old enough to make their own meals, which I leave them to do at breakfast and at lunch. Guess what, kiddos: YOU fucking cook it. As for dinner, my wife and I keep it as Rockwellian as we can. Everyone eats together, at the table, with the screens off. I used to get pissed when the kids wouldnt eat, or when Id cook them a separate meal from the main course and they wouldnt eat THAT either. Now Ive been in the trenches so long that I cant bring myself to give a shit. All I care about now is MY food, which means Ive followed the trajectory of every other dad throughout history. Peter:  Mike Pence doesnt certify the election results and welcomes the mob into the chambers. Walk me through this alternate reality. There would have been more violence and many people in Congress would have been murdered outright. All you had to do was watch the riot unfold in real time to know this, but last weeks video timeline from the New York Times made it definite. It wouldnt have scared enough Republicans to take action because I just watched those same Republicans actively block any inquiry into the riot. It would have simply emboldened them to be even bigger Nazis than they already have proven to be. After that, I have no fucking idea what would have happened. More police shooting innocent people, for sure. Maybe sectarian violence. Maybe random bombings. Maybe a military coup. I dont know. All I know is thatgoing by the past five yearsmost Americans still would have found a way to shrug it all off. Because the numbness is the point. I thought about that when the Trevor Bauer news dropped and his shitbag lawyer all but blasted Gold Digger from loudspeakers atop an L.A. record store. Its the same awful people doing the same horrible shit over and over and over again until you cant feel a goddamn thing when they offer up another helping of their evils. They dont care how bad they look and they dont care how loud you scream at them. Theyll just keep at it. So this was probably not the last attempted insurrection of my lifetime. Judging by the spate of horrifying voting laws that are passing across the hayseed states, another one is already being orchestrated and executed. I feel numb already typing all this, which means Ive succumbed to the desired effect. The good news, of course, is that Pence DID certify the election results and gifted us the familiarly dysfunctional government we all know and are currently enjoying. Its not perfect, but you will not die in a perfected world. I can say that with absolute certainty. This is especially true now that you and I know everything bad thats going on in the world at any given moment. Those bad things will continue because theyre impossible to stop in totality, nor will you be able to digest them all and carry on about your day. So to stave off the numbness, I choose my battles where I can (this involves a combination of voting, giving money to productive organizations like the ACLU, writing to my representatives, and yelling a lot) and then I take time out to both notice and appreciate all the GOOD shit around me: my family, my friends, a good Key lime pie, etc. Thats about the best I can do, and its how Im gonna roll going forward. If its corny to be that way, so be it. I dont give a shit. Robert:  Its well-established by now that most men over 70 are fascinated by World War II, with Ken Burns and the History Channel supplying hours and hours of content to satisfy that fascination. The US has been at war for more than half our lives, so it aint that. I feel like its either going to be home renovation shows or retrospectives about whole decades (the 90s, the 2000s). Youre already experiencing it in the form of Space Jam 2. Bill Simmons just built a podcast empire around that very conceit. God forbid that you acquire newer, more sophisticated taste in pop culture as you grow older. No no, its still a bunch of grown-ass men demanding Hollywood give them their favorite shit from back when they were shitting their Underoos. Now if youll excuse me, Im gonna go fire off an angry tweet about how bands dont rock anymore. By the way, therell always be a History Channel demo of old men, regardless of generation. World War II will never not be interesting to people of my age and girth. Brian:  Theres nothing I find more tedious and tiresome than leaving the vacation house, packing up shit, cleaning out the fridge, having that conversation about whether the ketchup is worth saving, or if we should bring home those three remaining eggs, packing something you brought from home but didnt touch, or just tossing out something you brought from home. Funny you asked, because I just went on vacation with my family and spent the entire first morning bitching about how much shit we were packing into the car. Once I had the suitcases and beach chairs loaded, out came the beach bags. And then the flip flop bag. And then the bag of snack sand. And then one bag of dry goods after another. And I said to my wife, This isnt a fucking magic van. The space inside is definitive and limited. She fired me from packing the car, which happens every trip, and had the kids stuff it full in my stead. The twist is that it was MY idea to bring a few dry goods with us, so that we wouldnt have to go grocery shopping right away. In my mind, there was a perfect shopping combination where you bring a few things, buy a few more once youre there, and then have NOTHING left in the rental kitchen once your vacation is over. Such an endgame doesnt exist, and theres no point in hunting around for it. The better move is either get takeout for everything, or to buy some groceries once youre down there and accept that youre gonna throw some of them away. I hate throwing away food more than anyone alive, but at the end of our week at the beach I poured damn near a whole quart of milk down the drain before we went home. I regret nothing. Its a vacation. If youre working your ass off to make it go off without ANY hitch, youve defeated the purpose of it. Email of the week! Brian:  A couple weeks ago my fianc and I went on vacation. We stayed in a beautiful place (which, obviously, she picked out) and we had a great time (including great meals, a carriage ride, and a whole lot of being goofy tourists). On the morning we left, I made a return trip to the car in order to cram one of our newly filled-to-capacity suitcases into the trunk. Upon opening the door, I found myself staring into the disgruntled face of a mouse who had managed to crawl inside the car somehow and nestle down into a sweatshirt I kept in there as a just in case item. The damndest thing is that the just sat there and stared at me, as if pissed that I was intruding upon his nap time. ITS MY GODDAMN CAR, MOUSE! GET A JOB AND BUY YOUR OWN! We felt lucky since we found no evidence of mouse habitation left behind until two hours later (of course!) when my beloved found three small brown pellets in the cup holders. Needless to say, all our souvenirs, leftover food, and permanent car fixtures (an umbrella, a tool bag, my sweatshirts) have either been trashed or Lysoled with enough spray to give each of us multiple cancers. I obviously also lit the inside of my car on fire to ward off any lingering mouse germs. Yup. Fuck that mouse right good.