I went to my kid’s kindergarten class a week ago to be the “Mystery Person” for the day. This is a thing where, once a week, one of the parents shows up unannounced and talks to the class about what they do for a living. So I go in and explain my job to the class (in the vaguest possible terms, since I barely do anything, and what I do do is reprehensible).
“Do you guys wanna be writers?” I asked the kids.
“YEAH!”
“All right, well let’s tell a chain story. Someone starts the story, and then another kid says what happens next, and then another kid says what happens after that. Got it?”
“YEAH!”
So one kid starts the story:
“Once, there was a princess…”
And then another kid followed:
“And then along came a dragon and it killed the princess.”
And then another kid:
“And then the dragon killed a hundred people.”
And then another kid:
“YEAH! And then another dragon came and killed THAT dragon!”
I’m telling you, it was a fucking bloodbath. Every single kid’s addition to the story included murder and/or genocide. It was like the entire run of Game of Thrones packed into 60 seconds. The teacher had to step in and warn the kids to NOT talk about death, but they didn’t give a shit. They piled on dead body after dead body until I gave up and read “Clam-I-Am” to them instead. I’m not sure if the kids were just naturally that dark, or if I did that to them. “Hey, that guy looks like he wants to hear about people being burned alive.” I can’t ever show my face to that teacher again.
Anyway, never let children tell stories. Now, your letters:
Anthony:
As I’ve been watching the playoffs, I’ve been struggling to put my finger on just what I find so unlikeable about Steph Curry, and how to describe that look he always has on his face that somehow manages to be indifferent, cocky, and self-pitying all at the same time. Then, my wife nailed it — he looks like such a fucking Millennial. (Note — I’m only 5 years older than Steph Curry. Nobody in the history of humanity reached “the kids these days!” status faster than those of us straddling Gen X and Millennial status. Fuck Millennials.)
I think you probably dislike him because, on the court, Steph Curry can pull off all the cool shit that your local playground shitbag TRIES to pull off: long range shots, fancy dribbling, etc. Remember all those videos of Justin Bieber forcing his minions to take a dive against him on the court? He’s basically trying to be like Steph Curry, but only Steph Curry can make that work. Everyone else who does it is insufferable. You’re so used to dipshits trying out those moves that it’s jarring to see someone play that way and actually succeed. In other words, you are projecting your justified dislike of TEEN basketball showoffs onto Curry, which makes perfect sense.
Other than that, outside of rooting interests, it’s hard to find a reason to dislike Curry. He seems like a decent guy. He doesn’t seem too fake or brandbot-y. He’s a brilliant player with a gorgeous family and a perfect life where nothing ever goes wrong because HE’S JUST SO GODDAMN SPECIAL, MY GOD, I WANT TO TEAR HIM TO PIECES BECAUSE MY LIFE IS SO EMPTY BY COMPARISON. The fucker. Always doing things the Right Way, are you? KISS MY ASS.
Oh, and if you hate Mark Wahlberg, there’s the damning photo above. I bet Marky Mark is an insufferable pickup player.
Brendan:
Which general subject (English, foreign language, science, math, history) do you think has the most teachers (grades K-12) who smoke weed? My wife thinks it’s language teachers, because she had a couple really weird German teachers. I think it’s science teachers because people who like science and are idealistic and want to make the world a better place (but aren’t talented or rich enough to really do that much) usually smoke weed, and science teachers are those things 95% of the time.
If we’re ruling out college professors, then it has to be English. All of the science teachers I had before college were pretty strait-laced, including Mr. Butz, who was apparently unaware of how funny his last name was. English teachers were much more likely to wear tweed jackets and have sex with students and keep pillowcases stuffed with weed at home. High school English is the subject most vulnerable to bullshitting, and stoners are bullshitters. “What is Hemingway REALLY saying here? ****MASSIVE BONG RIP****” It takes a lot of weed to convince yourself that you’re the Dead Poets Society guy.
I don’t mean to discount history teachers here, because they probably also get a healthy portion of weed-smoking teacher population. THIS COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED BY PEOPLE WHO WERE INTO ALIENS, MAN! When you’re stoned, you see history in a whole new way, a way that is 100% inaccurate.
That all changes in college, by the way. In college, the biggest stoner teacher I had was a geology teacher, which makes perfect sense because who else would teach geology except some stoner dude who likes going camping and looking at rocks all day? “Like, that layer of rock was around for dinosaurs, man.” Once you get into advanced, post-grad disciplines of math and science, you will find a whole shitload of stoner burnouts who require pounds of weed to see into new dimensions of quantum mechanics.
Bob:
You only get one for the rest of your life: sandwiches or tacos. Pick.
It’s sandwiches. You can skirt the taco issue by having burritos or fajitas instead. I mean, a fajita is just a taco you build yourself. It ain’t that different. As much as I love tacos as a delivery device for food, I can’t give up the full panoply of sandwich options to keep eating them. Think of all the sandwiches out there: PB&J, grilled cheese, paninis, breakfast sandwiches, hot dogs (if you’re in that camp), s’mores, Italian subs…. Oh God, Italian subs. With the layers of meat and melted provolone and all that shredded lettuce on top… Fuck me, I could really go for an Italian sub right now. It is the king of subs.
Anyway, the answer is sandwiches. Even if you had to give up burritos and fajitas as well, you still got tortas if you’re in a pinch. I could survive. Barely.
Matt:
I’ve been wondering: what would it take for a TEAM to get kicked out of a professional sports league? I don’t mean all the team’s players getting suspended, I mean the actual organization from owner to ball boy being dismissed from the league. Obviously we’ve seen teams fold for financial reasons, but is there some sort of heinous organizational horseshit that could make the league’s other owners just say “NOPE, they’re gone.”
Oh, you mean like a mass hacking operation discovered by the FBI? MWAHAHAHAHAHA.
It would vary by team (contracting the Milwaukee Bucks is a much easier proposition than doing likewise to the Dallas Cowboys), but it would probably have to involve some kind of organization-wide, systemic criminal activity for it to happen. And even then, it would be dicey. Like, if it turned out that the Miami Dolphins were actually a front for a MASSIVE global cocaine smuggling enterprise, and members of the front office personally beheaded the leaders of a rival cartel, I think the Dolphins would still continue to exist. They could just fire everyone and then say, “We cleaned out all the bums!” and keep their precious brand equity.
You know what? The cocaine isn’t enough. Maybe a kiddie molestation ring. No, you know what? It would have to be 9/11 2. If members of the Dolphins organization plotted and carried out a SECOND 9/11 attack, then the name Miami Dolphins would become so toxic and poisonous that the NFL would have no choice but to fold the team and start fresh with the South Beach Wave or some other terrible expansion franchise. That’s what it would take… some kind of horrific brand stain that makes the very idea of the Miami Dolphins nauseating to the general population (I, of course, already find them nauseating, because Mercury Morris).
Otherwise, brand names in sports are pretty much indestructible. One of the benefits to modern pro sports transience—players and coaches and owners shuttling around all the time—is that it makes it hard for one person to bring down the whole enterprise. I mean, look at the Clippers. Even Donald Sterling couldn’t snuff them out for good. These brands are alarmingly resilient.
Richard:
If a dog eats his own shit and then burps, is it technically a mouth fart?
No.
Mike:
Which fictional universe has the weirdest fanboy porn? My vote is the Star Wars universe.
Snorks. For real though, I looked up “Star Wars porn” just now and the results include numerous drawings of space aliens deeply penetrating Princess Leia. It gets real weird real fast.
But I’m gonna say that The Simpsons has the weirdest porn. There’s nothing worse than accidentally stumbling upon Simpsons porn drawings, which almost always feature kiddie incest. It disturbs me greatly. It hurts my inner child. I don’t wanna see that shit. I wonder if there’s anyone out there who legitimately masturbates to it. I could jack it to Star Wars porn. Throw Slave Leia into the mix and that’s no trouble at all. But any kind of adolescent cartoon fare made into fucked-up porn makes me glad the NSA is monitoring the nation’s fapping activities.
Mike:
On the way home from my pot dealer’s place last week I was still kind of high and suddenly got a huge urge to eat some bacon, so I stopped at the store on my way home. To my delight, all of the bacon was on a big sale, like nearly 50% off. I couldn’t decide what kind I wanted, so I grabbed like six different types and made my way to the check out counter. I was slightly anxious since I was still kinda high and buying a shit load of bacon, so I chose the checkout lane with a long haired kid who looked like he was still in high school.
My eyes get really red and slanty after I smoke and when the kid looked at me he could immediately tell, and he gets a big smile on his face. We don’t say anything the entire transaction but when he hands me the bag he proceeds to give me a fist bump and says “Nothing better than some bacon when you’re stoned.” I didn’t know how to react so I just grabbed the bag and bolted out of there like I robbed the place. Have you ever been called out before by a stranger for being high? How would you have handled that situation?
Aw, that should have been a nice moment between you and that future geology professor. But you were high and paranoid, so it makes sense that you would pass up that brief moment of solidarity. Whenever I’m high, I spend most of my time wondering if other people will know that I’m high, and then I wonder if they’re high as well. One time I got high and went to buy a slice of pizza, and the dude behind the counter was smiling and giggling and shit, and it freaked me the fuck out. I left the place convinced that it was all a front for weed smuggling, and that my pizza was laced with PCP to get me hooked on their product. Still ate the pizza, though. Not bad!
Anyway, if you’re high and a stranger calls you out on it (in a friendly way), just laugh and nod your head like the stoner dipshit you are. That’s proper stoner etiquette.
HALFTIME!
Miles:
Let’s say you were immune from red light tickets for all time. However, all other repercussions apply (you are responsible for accident and for whatever problems arise with children and discipline). How often would you run red lights?
Never, because I live in a busy area and I would get t-boned by a soccer mom doing 90 if I blew through a red light. Red lights and stop signs are the only things keeping this nation from devolving into utter chaos, so I would still obey traffic laws. If any other drivers got the wrong idea from me blowing through a deserted stoplight, the whole system would break down. Now, if I lived Montana? Fuck that. I’m running every light. Who’s gonna see? No one lives in Montana.
(Also, I am personally spooked by running red lights because I deliberately ran a red light at 3am once in rural Maine and there was a cop waiting for me. It’s the first and last time I ever deliberately blew through an intersection. I couldn’t even get away with it one time in my life. I blame God.)
DP:
What do you think will happen first: the end of construction or the end of the world? In other words, do you think it’s conceivable that every last plot of land could eventually be built on or otherwise utilized by civilization?
No. As much as I would like the Earth to one day resemble the planet Cybertron, that’ll never happen because too much land on Earth is either unusable or inhospitable to human life. You can’t build on it, and you wouldn’t build on it even if you could. There’s no point in overdeveloping Siberia because people tend to cluster in the nice areas, like the tropics. And when people get tired of building in the tropics, they just tear the old shit down and build new stuff there instead. I mean, not to go all treehugger on you, but it’s kind of obscene that people will raze the land, build a house on it, and then sell the house to another person who’s like, “Nah, this house sucks. Let’s throw this house in the garbage and put a new one in that has a domed Jacuzzi.”
This happens as a matter of routine, and it can’t be good for the planet. I mean, the shit that gets thrown out at just one single home construction site could occupy its own landfill. It’s fucking crazy. We should probably stop building stuff. Right, George Carlin?
Mark:
At any point in your life, do you legitimately think you or someone you were with was the single drunkest person on Earth at that moment?
No. As much as I enjoy a good drunkbrag (“Bro, I must have had 30 beers last night.”), I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’ve ever beaten out the millions of ambitious drunkards out there, at any point. Vodka Samm isn’t an anomaly. There are people out there who can put away a frightening amount of alcohol… cases of beer and magnums of wine and handles of gin. Anyone who has ever laid eyes on a legitimate alcoholic in action knows how prolific they can be. All of Russia is drunker than you at any given moment.
As much as I enjoy drinking, and as much as I drank in my early years, there only so much I can take in. At a certain point, my body shuts down and I pass out in my own vomit. I’m not built for ultra-boozing. Champion alkies just keep going and going. You don’t want to try to beat them. You will fail. Or worse, you’ll succeed and become one of them.
Chris:
My 2-year-old daughter hates taking a bath. So every time, I end up holding her down and forcefully stripping her naked. Sometimes I start to worry that I am causing her deep psychological damage, so that she will grow up to have creepy rape fantasies and hate me. Is this just me being crazy? Can wrestling my two-year-old into a bath really ruin her forever?
Nah. There’s a reason that kids don’t remember shit until age 4 or 5. It’s a biological blessing that allows you to discard any memory of daddy wiping your butt or mommy spurting hot breast milk into your eyes by accident. If you remembered everything from when you were a baby—every poop explosion, every time Daddy cursed you out for not falling the fuck asleep—you’d be a husk of a person. So traumatize the kid now, while it’s still young and resilient. You can strip down a two-year-old for a bath. If you do likewise to a fifteen-year-old, you belong in prison.
Jon:
Who would you rather have as a babysitter for your baby: a dog trained by the best trainers in the world or a robot developed by the world’s premier robotics experts? I say you gotta go with the dog, what it lacks in intelligence and ability to grasp things it makes up for in instincts. Plus a robot malfunction is much more dangerous, and likely than a well trained dog going all “Siegfried and Roy tiger” on the baby.
How can say with any certainty that a robot babysitter is more likely to snap than a dog babysitter? Look at Rosie on The Jetsons. Perfectly capable robot chambermaid. I’m taking her over a fucking trained Labrador. It’s not even close. If Google can build a decent self-driving car, then they can probably build a decent robot nanny. Oh God, what a luxury. You know what I would pay for quality robot day care? At least five dollars. The robo-nanny could teach the kids three different languages, give them piano lessons, and monitor their porn intake. I need that so, so badly. I can’t do any of those things on my own. It’s basically a crime that children are legally allowed to live under human supervision. The robots could adopt all our children for sake of the common good.
Yannai:
What’s the best way to read a Twitter feed? Do you refresh to the most recent tweet first and then go backwards or do you just start from some appointed time and read the tweets in order?
I always go right to the top for reasons that escape me. I think I just want to make sure that I know what is happening right now RIGHT NOW, like if aliens have landed or Jesus has returned. Every time I open up Twitter, I keep expecting the first tweet I see to be like “What Jesus’ Return Means For The 2016 Elections.” I always get the big news well after Twitter has kicked into the analysis phase.
Anyway, this is bad way to read your Twitter feed, because I keep scrolling down, praying I will get to the tweet where I left off, so that I don’t have to check Twitter anymore. And then I get to that point and I zoom back up to the top of queue, to see if Jesus arrived in those two minutes when I was looking at all those other tweets. I’m not a very useful person.
Eric:
If you were forced to re-enter the dating pool and could only use FarmersOnly.com or ChristianMingle.com to meet women, which dating service would you choose?
Farmer’s Only! If porn movies and old David Lee Roth videos are true reflections of real life (and they are!), then I say farm girls are more likely to get right down to business. There’s no pesky Jesus tagging along as the third wheel on every date. No promise rings. Just hot action. I’m hopping on Farmer’s Only and gettin’ nekkid in the hay loft, y’all! PUMP UP THE CHESNEY.
Jon:
My wife and our friends make fun of me for this. I need you to weigh in on it and side with me: When you are eating food indoors and take that food outdoors, the food tastes different.
Grab a drumstick from the kitchen. Take a bite. Step out on the deck. Take another bite. That fucking thing tastes different outdoors in the fresh air. Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s worse, but it doesn’t fucking taste the same. No way on Earth. Ninety percent of your sense of taste depends on your sense of smell, and the air outside smells different from the air inside. Period. I’m not crazy. Tell me I’m not crazy.
You’re not crazy, but you’re probably wrong. I mean, taste is heavily linked to smell, but that usually means the smell of the food. I’m sure every dish’s flavor varies depending upon the ATMOSPHERIC FLAVOR PROFILES (“I feel like your dish was missing a note of oxygen”), but we’re talking about walking from inside your house to a deck three feet away. Your deck isn’t located in Tuscany. Where do you think the air in your house came from? It’s not that different. If you can detect a microscopic difference in flavor just from stepping outside, then you are Captain SuperTongue.
Obviously, the experience of eating food depends on where you’re eating, and the company you keep, and whether or not you’re high, and all kinds of other external factors. Eating a hot dog in front of the TV isn’t anywhere near as fun as eating a hot dog out by a pool. Shit like that. But it’s still a hot dog. Its physical makeup doesn’t change if you decide to teleport to New Zealand to eat it.
Elliott:
How long after we touch down on an alien planet before we eat some of the critters we find there? You can assume that the planet has no higher-intelligence lifeforms to tell us what to do, that we have brought plenty of food with us, and that we can resupply from home whenever we want (i.e., there is no need to eat them). I’d take the under on a one-month over/under.
They can talk? We’d never eat them. Too close to eating a human. You don’t see us eating apes, do you? That’s because apes are kinda man-like, and eating them would be disturbing. Also, those aliens wouldn’t be safe to eat. They’d be jam-packed with all kinds of gamma rays and toxic space radiation that will give you ass cancer. No, thank you. I won’t be dining on the Glorggg tonight. Unless we’re eating out on the porch! I ONLY LIKE MY GLORGGG AL FRESCO.
Email of the week!
Stabley:
How fast do you think a pitcher could pitch if he was throwing from the bed of a moving pickup truck? Say they get to drive the truck from the outfield and get it up to 55 MPH and the pitcher winds up and throws right as the truck gets to the mound. The truck of course has to veer off the field before it gets to the batter’s box and crushes the batter and ump. I’m thinking they could get into the 120’s because science and stuff.
Our Tim Burke said the formula for determining the speed of the truckball is “the hypotenuse of a (acceleration of gravity) ^2 + b (acceleration of vehicle) ^2 = square rooted. This applies to basically everything until you start getting close to the speed of light, then you need Einstein’s equations.” Bottom line is that Burke says the truckball would have some added speed. Which is why we need to make truckballs legal.
Drew Magary writes for Deadspin. He’s also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at [email protected]. You can also order Drew’s book, Someone Could Get Hurt, through his homepage.
Pic by Getty.