There’s no sense in waiting for it at this point. The New England Patriots, who have been shitting up the mid-winter for sports fans throughout this entire terrible millennium, are not remotely close to going away, not any more than, say, measles or famine are close to going away. They’re a problem, but one that gets managed more than it gets eradicated. It’s embarrassing that, at this late juncture and despite the near-unanimity in the culture that Something Needs To Be Done About The Fucking Patriots, seemingly nothing can be done about the Patriots. They’re in the Super Bowl again and you’re a fool if you think they’re not going to win it in some sort of hideous and repellent way. They’re going to have a parade and Bill Belichick is going to pass a kidney stone the size of a Hyundai Elantra while a bunch of mutants with unforgivable beards cheer him on. Anyway.
Anyway: in hopes of better understanding the persistent and intractable social problem presented by this hideous football team, and so more effectively arming ourselves for the struggle against it, Tim and I invited resident Patriots fan and otherwise perfectly delightful human Luis Paez-Pumar to join us on the Deadcast. Then we mostly just yelled at him.
Once we got that out of our system, things actually moved along quite nicely. We discussed baseball’s startlingly satisfying new Hall of Fame class and considered the much more problematic one—I know, but you come up with a better word for a group that consists of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling—that will belatedly arrive next year or sometime shortly after that. There was a brief and spirited defense of Sammy Sosa and a somewhat longer consideration of whether his avant-garde Instagram account might be doing as much to keep him out of the game’s good graces as anything he put into his bloodstream back when Bill Clinton was president.
And then it was into the Funbag, which belched up the usual fragrant horrors—absolutely terrible personal op-sec, the most horrific micro-communities on Twitter, the question of what a good home cook even is, and the horrible possibility of a warehouse somewhere out in Queens stocked with discontinued Aqua Net hairspray designated for the sole use of one very powerful and very forgetful man. We did not solve any of the problems that confront us. We did not even do much to contain or otherwise manage them. But we probably made Luis uncomfortable about the Patriots for a little bit, and maybe that’s a start.
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