Today, we’re talking about Trump’s marriage proposal technique, breakfast foods, Home Depot, cursing sports announcers, and more.
Our large homie Drew is still recovering, so in the meantime the Funbag will be handled by a rotating cast of characters from the extended Deadspin universe. Keep emailing your questions; today, you’re stuck with me.
Derek:
How did Trump propose? I can’t imagine him being romantic in any way. Does he even allow his girlfriend an option to say “no,” or does he just declare “congratulations, you’re marrying me” and slide a pre-nup across the table? Also, he’s been married 3 times; do you think each time was different? Did he get lazier with each one?
Nobody I’ve raised this question to has had a solid answer. Hoping you, the foremost experts on his weird jelly brain, can clear this up.
I thought about this for way too long, and though I think the easy thing is just to assume that Trump would treat a marriage proposal like every other Very Important Business Deal he’s ever made in his entire fraudulent life, I think that underestimates just what a deeply strange and fucked up person he is.
When I try to imagine Trump being charming or funny or romantic in his personal life, I keep coming back to this clip that Conan O’Brien aired in 2005, in which pre-presidency Trump, in an attempt to, like, improv some comedy, acted like a true psycho:
Trump plunges further into previously unexplored depths of human strangeness with every batshit tweet and whinging press conference and yanking handshake and embarrassing photo op, and that’s all stuff he does when he’s embodying his public-facing persona! Imagine how much weirder he is in private.
What I’m getting at is that I don’t think we are capable of imagining what a Donald Trump marriage proposal would actually look like, because it would surely be a display that could only be hatched from his rotten brain. The closest I think I can come to touching that particular void is this: He invited Melania into his office, handed her a butterscotch candy, said “Congratulations,” and then softly clapped his hands three times.
Walter:
Waffles, Pancakes, French toast.
Who ya got?
It all depends on where you are. If you’re eating at home, pancakes are the way to go because they are easy to make well and don’t require a big-ass waffle iron. There’s no good reason to order pancakes at a restaurant, though, because the good ones are just good but the bad ones can be really bad and make you spend the rest of the day regretting not ordering biscuits and gravy. That’s where waffles come in. It’s extremely satisfying to order a big-ass Belgian waffle at a restaurant and then cut into that thing like it’s a steak. A feast fit for the prince of Candy Land!
You should reserve your french toast consumption for fancy brunch spots. If you’re gonna spend your hard-earned money on some soppy egg bread with cinnamon on it, it might as well be the fancy kind that’s made out of challah and encrusted in a maple butter glaze or something.
John:
I knew, at least on paper, that as I got older my body would just start to suck. And I’m not talking about the constant muscle, neck, and back pain (which are also there). What nobody told me was 1) how soon it would happen and 2) how it would just be small and annoying things that I’d never see coming.
Example: when I sleep now, my legs just sweat. I’m only 29 and about 6 months ago there suddenly was nothing I could do to stop my legs from sweating all fucking night. Shorts, pants, cold, hot. It doesn’t matter at all. I wake up in the morning and my legs feel like two live eels.
Do I really have 50 more years of this slow, inconvenient decline to look forward to? What else didn’t they tell me?
John, I’m worried about you! I turned 30 this year and although I have ascended to various levels of depressing and debilitating washedness, I have yet to encounter a problem as disconcerting as mysteriously wet legs. You should go to the doctor!
I should also go to the doctor. I haven’t been to the doctor in six years and I feel stupid about it every day. I’m convinced that when I finally go for a checkup the doctor is going to tell me that I have some terminal illness that could have been cured if only it had been discovered one day earlier.
Tommy:
Seriously, how much better would sports broadcasts be if announcers could use profanity? If, Thursday night, for instance, Joe Buck could have monotoned DERRICK GODDAMN HENRY GOES 99 YARDS TO THE GODDAMN HOUSE, or if Mark Jones could yell about LEBRON MOTHERFUCKING JAMES anytime The King barrels down the lane and crams on a hapless defender.
I want the local announcers for the Phoenix Suns to be able to say, “I don’t want to watch this shit-ass team anymore.” Fuck the FCC. This needs to be allowed.
I think this could rule pretty hard, but the key would be finding the right announcers for the job. Joe Buck has spent too many years being a pud to ever sound convincing or cool while cursing, so I think he’d just be a distraction in this case. You also wouldn’t want to go too far in the other direction, and end up with Lewis Black screaming obscenities and overpowering the game.
You know who would be perfect for this? Kevin Harlan! There’s already something sort of mischievous in the way he calls a game, and I think he could be trusted to save the f-bombs for when they really count.
Robert:
When’s the last time you’ve watched a program on tv from beginning to end without changing the channel?
I don’t really have a good answer for this because I’m a disgusting millennial who just watches everything through various apps and streaming services. I don’t even have cable anymore! Now I watch live TV on my PlayStation, and it whips ass. I can DVR everything and watch shows on demand and I don’t even have to change the input on my TV when I want to stop watching something in order to play the Cowboy Game. I am living in the future and it’s great.
I cannot, however, roast you for your lack of attention span. I watch television shows all the way through because I usually don’t watch them live and thus don’t have to worry about commercials, but I am a distractible mess when it comes to watching live sporting events. I’ve missed entire quarters of basketball because I was sitting on my couch dicking around on my phone. Not too long ago, I was playing video games on my TV while I had a sports contest playing on my laptop, and then, I shit you not, I considered putting a podcast on. I’m fucked up and bad.
HALFTIME!
Trent:
You’re a newly sentient AI deciding on a computer to inhabit. Let’s assume you can’t jump around - whatever physical container the computer is in is it for your entire artificial life. What do you choose? I’d probably land in some insane American military tech and accidentally blow myself up.
I’m definitely infesting whatever the most powerful computer at SETI is, for two reasons. The first being that I could spend the rest of my eternal existence attempting to communicate with aliens, and the second being that if I ever got bored with doing that I could start sending fake alien messages to the people who work at SETI just to mess with them. I’d tell them that I represent a Type 3 alien civilization that is poised to vaporize Earth unless Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani are traded to the Colorado Rockies.
Peter:
Is there a person out there who’s only had to make one trip to a Home Depot when doing a house project? If I go once, I’m going at least 3 times, no matter how simple the task.
Buddy, you’re tellin’ me. When I was a kid my mom was a big-time home improver, and I can’t even begin to count how many Saturdays we spent schlepping back and forth from Home Depot. It was always for some bullshit reason, too! We’d go in the morning and get all the stuff we needed and then be 90-percent done with the project only to discover that we were missing a specific type of lug nut whose absence threatened to derail the whole project. So then we had to go all the way back to Home Depot and find the Lug Nut Guy and spend 20 minutes explaining to the Lug Nut Guy exactly what we were working on while he looked at us suspiciously—the Lug Nut Guy was often a sexist dipshit who didn’t believe my mom could possibly be doing her own home improvement projects—before eventually deciding to share his knowledge of lug nuts with us. I hated it!
I miss it now, though. I miss hanging out with my mom and feeling the rush of pride whenever we finished tiling the bathroom or laying hardwood floors in the bedroom or building a brick patio in the backyard that is still severely crooked to this day. And I miss the vastness of Home Depot. You could walk around in that store for days, smelling the lumber and the plants and fantasizing about which tools you would use as weapons in a hostage scenario. Look at those sledgehammers! You could really fuck a guy up with one of those!
Anyway, what I’m saying here is cherish your time in Home Depot while you can. The reason you’re always going there is because you’re building and fixing shit with your own two hands, and although those experiences are exhausting and annoying in the moment, you’ll always look back on them fondly. When I step out on that old brick patio at my mom’s house and nearly trip because of the giant hump in the middle of it, I still feel sentimental. We built that damn thing together, and that’s why it’s good.
Michael:
Settle this for my wife and I. I’m obviously the correct one, and say a week starts on Monday. Saturday and Sunday are appropriately titled the week-end, therefore the week begins Monday. My wife thinks a week starts on Sunday because reading a wall calendar left to right, Sunday is the first column. When does the week start?
I am refusing to answer this question because I feel like it is bound to lead to a protracted and embarrassing argument like those bodybuilders had over how many days are in a week. The rest of you have fun, though!
Okay, before we get to the Email of the Week, I’d like to introduce a a new segment in honor of the Funbag’s true keeper. It is now time for the Drew Story of the Week!
So, the night before Deadspin Awards we all hung out at the office and had some pizza and beer. After a few hours only a handful of us remained, and we decided we’d go to a nearby bar to get one more drink. As I was telling people where we were going, Drew came up to me and asked if we could go to the bar he had walked by on his way to the office, the one that was all decked out in Christmas decorations. I was pleased to inform him that I was indeed taking us to that bar, at which point he clapped his hands together, held them under his chin, and made a face like a 12-year-old who had just been told that Santa had delivered double the presents this year.
There are many things to love about Drew, but the thing I love the most about him is how effusively he lives his life, and how willing he is to be made giddy by the world’s smallest pleasures, whether it be a dopey cock-rock band or an incredible football play or a bunch of Christmas decorations. I wish I could be more like that.
Okay, now for the email of the week!
Tyler:
So early this college football season I had tickets to a Northwestern game, and my best friend agreed to come along despite not giving a single shit about college football. I had tickets that included a free meal and end zone terrace seating/access. The end zone terrace was a nice view of the game, but the one downside is there are no bathrooms up there.
So my best friend is the first to have to go, and he heads down to the concourse level to find a bathroom. He returns shortly, and soon I have to go also, and I ask him for directions. Following his vague directions, I first encountered a set of four porta potties together in a rather dark area under the stands. I thought, “This can’t be it.” I saw a women’s restroom a bit ahead of me but no men’s. Still, I figured a real men’s room had to be close, so I passed on the plastic-walled shithouses. I found a men’s room maybe 30 seconds away and all was well.
Not too long after my return, my best friend leaves to go to the bathroom again. He was gone a little while this time. Despite what you may be thinking, he did not have to expel the catered hamburgers we had eaten. Rather, he explained to me that he had been using the porta potties I had shunned. And, because they were so poorly lit, he had been holding up his new iPhone with the flashlight on while he peed. And yes, he had dropped it straight into the poo and blue.
Because he dropped the phone face down into the muck, with the flashlight on, he could see where it was. Regardless, many might abandon the phone there in this situation. After some contemplation, though, he apparently decided his best course of action was to retrieve the phone by first removing his socks and using them as makeshift gloves. Phone acquired and white socks now stained blue on his hand, he carried the poo phone to the real men’s room only steps away. There he scrubbed his phone of other people’s poo in the sink as a disgusted stranger asked, “What are you doing?” He chose to explain he had dropped his phone in the porta pottie and was washing it. Then he came back and told me about the whole ordeal. He was now sockless and his fingernails were tinted blue. The phone still worked.
Jesus Christ!