Today, we’re talking about bathroom boogers, Law & Order, forgettable football teams, office beers, and more.
Drew is on vacation. You’re stuck with me. Let’s get to your letters.
Tyler:
Why do baseball managers still wear baseball uniforms? Will the heads of baseball purists explode if this is changed?
I suspect this goes back to the very early days of player-managers, though the odd skipper as late as Connie Mack occasionally wore suits. I agree that this is silly, but silly in a good way, a way I wouldn’t want changed. Of all of baseball’s inertial traditions, this is the most harmless, and the cost of acquiring Bruce Bochy’s enormous caps singleheadedly keeps New Era in business. Instead I think you’re looking at it backward: Why don’t head coaches in other sports wear uniforms?
Think of it. Stan Van Gundy, whenever he gets another job, wearing an NBA jersey with no undershirt, exposing what I can only assume are exceedingly hairy shoulders. Bradley Beal visibly failing to take seriously a jersey-wearing Scott Brooks in a huddle. Barry Trotz wearing a helmet with a tinted visor. Claude Julien bringing back Cooperalls. Jon Gruden in full pads berating Derek Carr. Bill Belichick being forced to do something he’d hate. Where are the downsides?
Jules:
At my work, we have at least one person in the women’s bathroom who wipes their boogers on the bathroom stall walls. Every time I see the smeared, crusty trails, I want to set up spy cameras and identify this person and publicly humiliate them in the worst way possible. Is that an appropriate response?
While I understand that your intentions are noble and are for the good of society, HR might not. So I wouldn’t recommend putting a camera in the bathroom. What you could do instead is to bluff. Put up a sign inside the stall reading I know what you picked last Thursday or whatever. Maybe the person possesses enough shame that the mere indication that someone has noticed and disapproves will be enough to get them to stop. Probably not though, so you’ve got to make them think the jig is up, and if they do it again, they’ll be publicly identified.
We have a chair thief in our new office, and the victim made a very public stink about checking office surveillance cameras to identify the criminal. It wasn’t that she was ever actually going to look at the footage—she was counting on the person being so afraid of the possibility of being caught that they’d return the chair before it came to it. It didn’t work, but it was a good try. (I suspect the “thief” was just a member of the building cleaning staff who unknowingly moved the chair to a different room.) So: make the phantom boogie think you’re capable of and willing to finger them. Even if they don’t stop, you can take some satisfaction from knowing you’ve cost them some amount of pleasure from their disgusting habit.
Lee:
How toxic is OJ? If OJ Simpson endorsed him, so you think Trump would say nice things about him? Would he be all “You know you keep hearing it, OJ, our Juice, wonderful guy, completely innocent and wrongly blamed for the killing of his beautiful wife. She was very interested in dating me but I had too much respect for the Juice!”
O.J. joining Twitter feels inevitable in retrospect because it’s a convergence of two American trends: the rise of Wife Guys, and the death of shame. If people felt shame anymore, you wouldn’t see near-weekly articles from people explaining how they “paid off” their student debt through sheer pluck and also a $700,000 gift from their parents, you wouldn’t see the same pundits and politicians who got us into the Iraq War carrying on as if nothing happened, and Woody Allen would go away forever. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where the President of the United States is incapable of any sort of introspection, and where O.J. Simpson thinks it’s a fine idea to be out here giving fantasy football advice where everyone can see him.
To answer your question, Trump’s instinct would absolutely be to embrace O.J., because to Trump, fame is equivalent to worth, and liking Donald Trump is the surest measure of a person’s value. We’ve already seen him embrace genocidal dictators because he’s seen them on TV, and because he knows doing so will get him on TV. What’s a little double-murder between famous guys?
Trump has previously said he’s “not thinking about” pardoning O.J., but I suspect things would change if O.J. became one of his Reply Guys on Twitter, and started golfing at a Trump resort, and co-hosted a Fox Nation show with Kevin Sorbo. I think Trump would make a comment about pardoning him, get talked out of it by an aide, forget about it completely, and then in two years go in with O.J. to try to buy the Bills.
Kate:
Why are some people little bitches about swimming in cold water, and others are all like, “The water’s fine”? (I think the latter are lying!!!!)
They are either lying or from Maine, where “frigid” is as warm as the ocean ever gets. That said, once you’ve crossed the rubicon of submerging your genitals, even coldish water is comfortable enough, as long as you keep your shoulders under.
This may also have to do with body chemistry. We all know the deal with office thermostats, where men think the temperature is fine and women are shivering. This is a real biological difference, and a source of intraoffice beefing, and I’m not sure there’s a great answer to it other than splitting the difference. In my office, the women are constantly saying it’s too cold, while I’m wishing it were even a couple degrees cooler. I feel bad that they’re uncomfortable, but also my comfort is the most important thing in the world. My take here is similar to my take for why winter is better than summer: You can always put more clothes on when you’re cold, but if you’re hot you can’t do a thing about it. How does this apply to swimming? I’m not really sure. Swim through pee slicks to warm up, I guess.
Michael:
I’m one of the few American males who couldn’t care less about football and get tired of hearing about it over all the other sports all year long. Why not have baseball, basketball, and hockey play at the same time and football have winter all to themselves since they don’t care about playing in cold weather. Have football start up in November and run into March. Keep baseball the same (April-October) and just have all the other indoor sports on the same schedule. I’d rather be in a nice air-conditioned arena in the middle of summer than winter anyway. That way the media can focus on football only for 5 months and then they could fill the other 7 months talking about the other sports. Is there another downside other than losing the term March Madness?
There should be only two sports at a time. The regular seasons in MLB, the NBA, and the NHL are far too long, and while the leagues will never ever shorten them because that’d mean giving up lots of money, I’m beholden to no such concerns. So, to solve all of these problems that aren’t actually problems for anyone else, let’s delay the start of hockey season until after the World Series, and move up the NHL playoffs so that it’s not inevitably being played on shitty half-melted ice. I respect your desire to have hockey in the summer since it’s indoors and there’s not much else going on, but even the top-tier cooling systems can’t make that ice playable when the humidity is 114 percent outside. And let’s push back the start of the NBA season until Christmas, because that’s when it basically starts for real anyway, and because the offseason is better than the regular season.
Matt:
I just started working in a new company, and their office was boasted to have “plenty of beer if you need to work late”. They have a good selection, but in the month since I started I’ve seen no one actually crack open one. I’d like to have a Miller Lite when I work late, but don’t want to be seen as a drunk. Is this a trap? What’s the etiquette here?
Have you made any friends at work yet? Or even “someone you’d grab a beer with,” a low but valid standard for a work friend? Some evening you’re not the only one still at the office, ask around and see if anyone else would like to crack a beer with you. You can’t be a problem drunk if you don’t drink alone!
I would love to tell you that you should just go grab a beer when you want a beer, the rest of the world be damned, but only you have the read on the office vibe to know if it’s the sort of place where that’d be viewed askance. And if you don’t have that read yet, you will before long—the very fact that you’re even concerned about this would seem to indicate that you’re a generally aware person. That’s good.
There’s actually a new brand of non-alcoholic beer out and the ad campaign is specifically You can drink it at the office. Which sort of defeats the purpose? The fun of an office beer is drinking beer, in an office, a place where you generally don’t. If you’re sipping a near-beer and making co-workers think you’re getting ripped without getting to enjoy any of the actual benefits of beer, you’re only fooling yourself. Matt, maybe just go grab that beer. The forbidden nature of it will make it that much better.
HALFTIME!
Matthew:
What’s the optimal number of dogs to have?
The optimal number of dogs to have is one cat.
Ethan:
The Bachelorette this season, Hannah B, has been visibly agitated towards her dickhead lover contestants. So, if Hannah B just can’t take it anymore and pulls out an AR and guns down her contestants, what would the producers do? Would they try to stop the deranged Hannah B from taking more lives, or just keep on filming the carnage for millions of Americans to see?
Ethan, I regretfully admit that I don’t watch The Bachelorette. So I asked Bachelorette-knower and Vice features editor Kate Dries. Kate:
“This is the kind of deluded but wow-that-could-happen situation my brain has been carefully honed to consider for years.
“SO: in this hypothetical scenario, you could go one of two directions. The first is the more generous one, which is to assume that Next Entertainment and Warner Horizon Unscripted Television (who produce The Bachelor/Bachelorette) and ABC have safety regulations in place on their sets to prepare for this kind of horrific scenario. Also, following the Bachelor in Paradise debacle a few years ago, I think a lot of reality shows have tightened up their ships in a myriad of ways. That’s of course ignoring the fact that it’d be pretty unlikely the lead of a show could get their hands on a gun on set anyway. Though the leads have less strict packing rules than the contestants, I still imagine their luggage is searched before filming begins. But if someone even did, there’s security on all the sets that helpfully escorts contestants out of the way if they’re getting too violent and I think they would spring into action.
“The second is far more cynical, which is to say that there’s plenty of examples of reality television sets being much more loosey-goosey environments than scripted television shows, going without insurance or safety plans. Reality shows are also almost always rolling cameras in every single room, so it’s possible that even if someone did start shooting, they’d have it on film, which is what happened with the aforementioned Bachelor in Paradise situation.
“But it’s possible that the answer is a mix of both: that they’d immediately shut things down and get the producers, crew, and cast to safety ... but that, somehow or another, the cameras would be filming anyway. I sincerely doubt that footage would ever air—that would verge way too far away from the family-friendly content ABC is known for—but would a weepy televised special program about it be produced that would air during primetime? Yes.”
Kate, thank you.
Blake:
My girlfriend on long car trips loves to play the “Name all 32 NFL teams”-game. Considering she doesn’t know how most rules in the NFL work but she does know most of the good to great Browns players in the last two decades, which is impressive.
Inevitably every game she forgets the Jacksonville Jaguars, and it turns into a 10 minutes match of “wait, wait, don’t tell me”, as I remind her for the 12th time that she already said the Carolina Panthers.
Jacksonville has to the in the top 5 of most forgettable teams, but who else do you have?
We can actually do this scientifically-ish. Here are the most commonly gotten answers in a Sporcle quiz asking you to name all the Big Four sport teams.
The Chiefs, in an enormous upset, were the least-named NFL team, though it’s at least possible that poor spelling is to blame. Great googly moogly! I’m not shocked at all by the Titans being closest on K.C.’s heels. The Titans are infinitely more forgettable than the Jaguars, because Tennessee is newer, because Jacksonville is a memorably hilarious city to have a pro team in, and because The Good Place exists.
Please note that the above results do not indicate that the Cincinnati Reds are the most popular sports team in North America, or even a particularly notable one. The quiz just registers “Reds” while people are trying to type in “Red Sox” or “Redskins.” Which feels appropriate. The Cincinnati Reds: Still there even though you’re not thinking about them.
Kimberly:
Do teens know about Law & Order?
Do they know what it is? Yes, because Ice T’s character from SVU is a meme. Have they ever watched a full episode? That one’s way more doubtful, because A) teens don’t watch actual TV, and B) not even big Law & Order fans go out of their way to watch episodes.
Just from the million different channels showing the various spinoffs in syndication, all you have to do is watch any sporting event, fall asleep on the couch, then wake up at 2 a.m. and there’s a 60 percent chance Law & Order will be on. This is how I’ve seen probably every episode of Stabler-era SVU without ever once actively choosing to. But if you’re only using Netflix, that magical phenomenon of stumbling across a show you’re not really jonesing for, oh but wait this cold open is pretty good, okay I guess this is what I’m doing for the next hour doesn’t really exist anymore. I know SVU is on Hulu now, but I think the teens are too busy semi-ironically rewatching Full House for the fourth time to dive into the rich L&O universe.
Omar:
I live in Mexico and a group of friends has this debate.
There are the ones who don’t want to attend a game where his team is not playing, wearing their own teams jersey (example, the Pats-Raiders games wearing a Saints jersey).
On the other hand, there are the ones who wear a jersey of one of the teams playing even if it is not their team (example, wearing a Raiders jersey to said game, but you root for the Saints).
Of course an option is to not attend, but we only get 1 NFL game a year so a lot of people want to go just for the sport. What is the proper etiquette?
Normally, I’d say don’t be That Guy who wears a jersey to a game in which his team isn’t playing. That Guy is shitfaced drunk and either totally oblivious to the game action, or is actively looking to get in fights. That Guy is usually in a Steelers jersey. (Steelers fans lead the league in wearing football jerseys in places that are inappropriate for them, like church and job interviews.)
But the annual Mexico game is different: The expectation is that you’re there because you’re a football fan, not necessarily a fan of one of the two teams playing. NFL jerseys are expensive; it’s is absolutely not worth shelling out for a Chargers jersey just for a single game. So go and wear your favorite team’s jersey and cheer for good plays by either team and leave whenever you feel like it. It’ll be like you’re at a real Chargers game!
Email of the week!
Alan:
Several weeks ago you accused a reader of being from Holland when he pronounced his love for french fries dipped in mayo. Well, I just got back from the southern part of Holland and investigated. I don’t think you can call what they put on fries “mayo.” It is more of a thick bearnaise sauce with a ton of sugar in it. It seems to have a delicious touch of curry/vanilla flavor as well. Look, even CHICKEN WINGS are accompanied with this delicious sauce! Anyway, just wanted to let you know that the Dutch are not pushing BIG MAYO and can be trusted in all American circles.
That’s fritessaus, which to my understanding is very mayo-like but slightly leaner. But the important thing here is that since Drew is gone, I can state for the record that the official stance of the Funbag is now that mayonnaise is awesome and delicious and one of our finest condiments and makes just about everything better. Mayo forever.