Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking menu boards, pets, pubes, ad music, and more.
It’s July 4th, so you’re getting a bit of an abbreviated Funbag today because I’m lazy, and because you’re probably not gonna read it anyway. I remain amazed at just how many people really do manage to go offline during weekends and holidays. It’s like you people have actual LIVES. Unreal. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there dicking around on Twitter on a holiday evening like an unloved hobo, wondering why the Internet has gone dark and no one is posting an endless stream of disposable content for my amusement. Perhaps I have issues.
Now, before we get into this short little Funbag, please note that the paperback edition of The Hike comes out TODAY. You can actually buy the hardcover for the exact same price as the paperback over at Amazon currently, but I’m gonna ignore that bit of information and still try to sell you on the idea that if you were too cheap to buy the hardcover, now is your time to STRIKE. If you’re cheap like me, you’re always like, “Oh, I’ll just wait until it’s in paperback,” or “Oh, I’ll just wait until that movie is On Demand,” or “Oh, instead of going to that nice restaurant, I’ll just go behind it and eat out of their dumpster instead.” Well, now is the time to cash in on your aggravating blend of patience and laziness.
Also, the paperback tour starts on Monday in lovely Manhattan Beach, Calif. I also hit Denver and Austin that week, so come out and let’s all be beautiful people together.
Got all that? Neato. Let’s hit your letters:
Justin:
Is parsley the worst herb? I find that it tastes like nothing, doesn’t smell great and mostly is only useful for making a dish colorful. Parsley sucks.
You’re wrong! Although I understand your antipathy to parsley. Like you, I was once a misguided soul who thought parsley was just some horseshit garnish that people use to ruin things. Please refer to this ad for proper reference:
However, I have learned that parsley is awesome when used properly. Are you ready for a recipe? You know you are. Here is a [Aaron Sanchez voice] chimichurri sauce that will blow your nuts off when you put it on steak:
- 1 bunch parsley, soaked and loosely chopped
- ½ cup olive oil
- Juice of two lemons
- ½ a shallot, loosely chopped
- 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
- 1 tbsp water
- Salt and pepper to taste
Put all that shit in a food processor and whip it up. Add more water if it’s too thick, or more oil if you prefer it to be on the luscious side. Spoon it onto a fatty ribeye and you got yourself a party.
That’s the key with parsley. It’s much better as an ingredient than a garnish. You can add it to sauces and marinades, and you can also chop it up and mix it with ground meat for sausage, meatballs, and Fleischpflanzerl, a German dish that we make that’s basically like Salisbury steak if Salisbury steak wasn’t fucking awful. Fresh herbs always help enhance the flavor of things, and parsley’s no different. You can even buy one of those windowsill herb gardens and then grab your parsley as you need it. Then you can be one of those uppity pricks who’s like WE USED HERBS FROM THE GARDEN! Those people suck, but the food is usually tasty.
Kevin:
Let’s say you’re interviewing for a new job, and you get asked why you’re looking for a new position. What do you tell the interviewer if you’re looking because your current job is an absolute nightmare?
Tell them anything but that. It doesn’t matter if you give your interviewer a string of press- conference-quality horseshit. That’s far preferable to actually airing your grievances like a bitter crazy person. “And then there’s this one lady who replies all to every email from the CEO and it drives me fucking NUTS!”
Just tell them you’re looking for opportunities to grow, or that you think this particular job has greater potential, or anything else like that. If they press you for more specifics, just talk about how the old job wasn’t quite the right “fit,” or that people “did not appreciate me microwaving salmon curry at 10 in the morning in the office kitchen.” These are boring, limp answers to that line of questioning, but it lets your future employer know that you’re the kind of person who isn’t gonna run around wantonly shitting on people you still work with and companies you still work for.
Sometimes blandness has its place. You don’t always have to turn into Lenny Bruce when people ask you for the truth. As a consumer of filthy rotten gossip, it always disappoints me when famous people give diplomatic answers to thorny questions, but I get WHY they do it. No one wants to hire a bridge burner. That’s why I work for Univision, the GREATEST COMPANY IN THE WORLD WHERE NOTHING EVER GOES WRONG AND LEADERSHIP TOTALLY KNOWS WHAT IT’S DOING.
In general, you never want to come across as negative during a job interview. You have to present yourself as confident and enthusiastic even if, in reality, you are a cynical bastard who will poison the entire bullpen with your shit attitude within five days of taking your new position. Let them figure that out well after they’ve rescued you from your current job, which I assume is in a department of Amazon somewhere.
Brian:
Does anyone actually like these digital menu boards at fast food places and movie theaters? I’m trying to decide what to get, and then all the lists disappear and I have to watch a 10-second clip of a soda being poured into a cup before I can get back to the list. Not to be an old man shouting at clouds or anything, but can the gall-dern menu just stay a menu so I can read it???
I don’t mind the digital menu boards because it means I can eyebang the menu from 90 yards away. It’s not like some old, faded McDonald’s menu board where I gotta lean over the counter and squint like Clint Eastwood just to make out the Dollar Menu. I promise you that your average fast food joint has developed those boards with the sole purpose of joining you together with your food in the fastest, most efficient way possible. They want to process you through the pig trough so that you come back again and again. They also want you to be able to see the menu even AFTER you’ve ordered, so that you perhaps order again on impulse. “Oh, they make a Cheeseburger McFlurry now, do they? Well, I should probably try that.” I’ve never come across a menu interstitial that was all THAT distracting.
I’ll tell you which digital boards are far worse: flights. Like, if you wanna know if your flight has WiFi but you’re too chickenshit to ask the gate agent? You gotta put laser eyes on that video board at the gate and wait for it to flash through the seating chart (what a shock; all the aisle and window seats are Economy Plus!), and the departure time, and the warning about carrying live snakes on board. Then you get distracted by a hot lady walking by and miss the amenities billboard entirely. Stupid sexy lady. I’ve had fantasy stats for my TE2 delivered on a TV screen with greater frequency.
Tyson:
Is it just me or is there a true “commercial” music market now? I’m not talking jingles, like full-lyric songs that are purposefully made for commercials. So many songs have melodies, lyrics that I can only imagine being used in snippet form. Am I just an old 37-year-old that is out of touch with music? Has this always been the case?
Oh, I think certain bands and artists definitely think about that sort of thing now. Queens of the Stone Age just released a new single and the second I heard it I thought it sounded like movie trailer music. Listen to it and tell me you can’t see it playing over some snappy trailer where the production logos snap by quick and people playfully flash guns and AN EDGAR WRIGHT FILM appears on the screen.
I’m not saying the band did that deliberately—Josh Homme would cut me if I suggested it—but I wouldn’t begrudge them if they did. Now that artists make nothing from album sales, they’re entirely dependent on merch sales, concert revenue, and licensing fees. So why NOT think about how a song is gonna be used in an ad or in some TV show? There’s no real stigma to it anymore. Any snob who accuses a band of selling out just because they licensed a song to McDonald’s is a fucking asshole. These are real people with real debts and expenses. As long as the song itself is genuine (and good), I have no problem with it. Now if the Black Eyed Peas get commissioned to write a whole song about the wonders of T-Mobile’s data plan, then that’s fucked up.
Michael:
What would you do if you walked in on your wife banging a robot?
I’d ask her where she got the robot and if it’s on sale. DUH. I’m not an idiot.
Paul:
My girlfriend and I have been house hunting the past month or so, and as such have been to 30+ open houses, sometimes up to five a day. With my small bladder, this is really difficult. Is it ok to piss while attending a house showing? How about dropping a deuce? So far I have been polite and held it back til we got to the closest McDonalds.
It’s fine to piss. It’s not like you’re gonna go urinating into the toilet tank. You’re a clean, respectable person who knows how to use a bathroom properly. You can be trusted to do the right thing. If you gotta go, you gotta go. I’ve pissed in open houses. I regret nothing. Hell, I’d shit at an open house just for the sordid thrill of it. After all, what better way to judge the craftsmanship of a home than to void your waste in it? What if a giant spider crawls out of the toilet every time you flush? Glad you did that bit of legwork now, aren’t you?
That’s the risk people run opening their homes to the general public. If maximizing the sale price of your house means potentially letting in nosy neighbors and visitors only interested in free cookies (me) and people with chronic IBS, that’s the price of doing business.
HALFTIME!
Patrick:
I was recently watching Netflix with a friend who is fully capable of hearing and she asked me to turn on the captions. Like any normal person that has the ability to hear, I looked at her like she was crazy for asking such a thing. She is crazy, right?
Did the show feature any heavy Scottish accents or Irish brogues? I know people who need captions for that shit, and I find them to be weak. As an Anglo-Saxon mutt, I take pride in the fact that I don’t need a goddamn translator to watch Peaky Blinders. My people come through loud and clear.
Anyway, my guess is that your friend is the kind of person who would prefer captions to the TV being too loud. My wife likes the volume so low that only a fucking arctic wolf can hear the dialogue. It’s frustrating for me, a strong and virile man who likes everything—movies, TV shows, music, sex—at jet-engine volume. I keep telling my wife that LIFE IS LOUD, but then she tells me that there’s no need to shout at the public library. The nerve.
My stance is that your friend should just get used to actually turning the volume up. Birds won’t fall out of the sky if it happens. You turn it up, and then you turn it up more the next time, and then you max out the volume because it’s never loud enough, and then you’re hearing impaired for life. That’s the proper way of doing things.
Dan:
What level of craziness is worse, apeshit or batshit? Important that the right degree is applied to a particular person/situation to reflect it properly. Also, how did apes and bats get associated with lunatics, while horses and cows are linked with lying or ridiculousness?
I think of apeshit crazy as ANGRY crazy, like throwing around poop and letting out very loud roars because someone stole your phone charger. To me, batshit is much more general kind of crazy. Like if you go on a date with someone and they tell you they like doing needlepoint portraits of famous cats, you’re gonna be like WHOA MAN THEY ARE BATSHIT CRAZY. Apeshit is how I react when my kids spill something and refuse to pick it up. It’s a much more focused, perhaps temporary kind of crazy.
By the way, I have no answer for the second part of your question. Sometimes certain profanities SOUND right, even if they make no logical sense. There’s a reason no one says “He want bearshit” or “That girl is flat-out sharkshit,” because that would sound so dumb, you know?
Adam:
It looks as though Tiger won’t break Jack Nicklaus’ record for most Major Championships. What would happen if someone did break the record, but he only won a certain Major? For example, take Jordan Spieth. He has two (a Masters win and a U.S. Open win), but let’s say he wins 17 more Masters tournaments. Does that count as breaking the record? I say you have to at least have one in each Major, then whatever you win counts.
I think it counts. It’s not like tennis, where there are different surfaces and you get extra credit for mastering all of them. I know the British Open has links golf, and all sorts of fun botanical elements like fescue and gorse and Scottish cunt-heather, but it’s still grass. The PGA Championship isn’t played on FieldTurf. If Jordan Spieth won 17 more Masters titles, I think he’s earned the right to be considered the GOAT. Anyone quibbling with the accomplishment is just some old fuddy duddy golf dick who will never let anyone, no matter how accomplished, surpass Jack or Arnold Palmer in their misty eyes.
By the way, I am still bereft over the fact that Tiger will never pass Nicklaus. I’ve been spoiled by an awful lot of good sports in my lifetime, but I’m greedy. Watching Tiger smash the majors record really would have been astonishing. Apart from witnessing the achievements of Michael Jordan and (GUHHHHH) Tom Brady, it would have been the defining sports moment of my lifetime. I had been counting on Tiger doing it for so long that it still feels strange and wrong to admit that it’s never happening. If only my man could have somehow kept his dick in check and magically developed a lethal swing that didn’t exact an impossible toll on his spine. It could have all been so easy!
Brandon:
Can you honestly say you’re a homeowner if you still owe on your mortgage? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that you own a mortgage rather than a house?
Fuck that. The deed to the house has your name on it, doesn’t it? You’re the owner. Sure, you’re in hock for the next three decades for that right, and you never know when the axe will fall and you’ll be left unable to make payments, with the bank casually and cruelly wresting your house away from you and selling it to distant third Trump cousin Norville Trump. It’s still yours. That is your domain. You are free to yell at people when they mark up the walls and fret endlessly over the prospect of anything breaking. Such a strong, powerful feeling!
Christopher:
Would as many people have pets if you had to clothe them like a human being? I’d say the number of owned dogs would go down by 30% and the number of owned cats would go down by about 90%.
Have you met dog and cat owners? They love nothing more than to dote on their little shits. We put a sweater on our dog during the winter and everyone found it impossibly adorable. Tell my kids they can put little booties and a Sherlock hat on my dog every day and they’d probably force me to adopt a second one. There’s nothing people love more than getting a dog or a baby and accessorizing the shit out of it, even if the dog or baby clearly hates the process. My dog acts like I’m taking him to prison just because I wanna put a harness on him. GET BACK HERE, MOTHERFUCKER. It’s just a harness!
Anyway, dog ownership numbers wouldn’t change significantly.
Andrew:
Do you think Mike Krzyzewski dyes his pubes too?
Nah, there’s no need, although he probably does yell at his pubes to stand up straight. I’ll tell you what though, Coach K deserves credit for keeping up that dye job for decades now. I’m so used to it that I would freak out if he let it go gray, Bob Barker-style. He has willed that dye job into normalcy, and that’s to be commended.
Email of the week!
Scott:
A number of years ago, myself and a group of close friends decided to fly to Southern California for the Coachella music festival. We made the dreaded mistake of camping outdoors at the festival grounds, which was less of a campground and more of a refugee camp. Anyways, we proceeded to annihilate our bodies for the entire festival with warm beer and liquor for four straight days, barely catching any sleep over that timeframe. Needless to say, my body was crying for help and was in the near meltdown stages.
On the last full day of shows in the late morning, a few of us were sitting around our campsite, suffering intense hangovers and severe malnourishment, sharing stories and a few laughs. A fit of laughter ended quite abruptly, as without warning, my shorts were instantly filled with a hot wave of brown lava. Now most pant-shitting stories typically have some elaborate lead-up where the body is giving you several warnings to find proper facilities to prevent an embarrassing pants evacuation, but not here. I am still not able to properly explain the sensation. The temperature of this particular oil spill was so intense, it felt like someone had just dropped a pot of boiling gravy directly in my asshole. As there was a large group of us sitting in a tightly formed circle, at this stage oblivious to the rectal massacre that had just taken place, I was frozen in fear.
Fortunately, by some divine miracle, one of my friends knew what had happened instantly. It was as if he had this supernatural ability to sense the ever-so slight shift in the barometric pressure in the atmosphere caused by the 1000 degree squid ink explosion in my cut-offs. Without as much as a single word, he grabbed my arm and threw me into the tent, along with a box of baby wipes (which we had been using in lieu of showering … gross I know). After my own personal Crying Game consisting of a long period of intense scrubbing and internal questioning of self-worth, I tossed my shorts and gitch in a plastic bag and inconspicuously made my way over to the large make-shift garbage disposal area in the festival campground. As you can imagine by the final day of the festival, it was a horrifying scene.
Fast forward about 10 hours, where we were well into our cups at one of the main stages. One of the guys leans over and asks me if I had still had the money that everyone had paid me to do that grocery and beer run that I had promised the group earlier in the day. For the second time in the day, I froze. Of course after the incident, I amped up the drinking in an immediate effort to block what happened from memory, and in the process completely spaced and never went to get the supplies. More importantly, I had about $400 of the group’s money in my pockets, which of course was dispensed along with my chocolate covered shorts.
I had a real dilemma on my hands. Go back to sift through three days of festival campsite waste to find the shitty shorts and recover the money (adding the high risk of not being able to find them), or fork out a fresh $400 and explain to everyone why I had lost the money. As a typical young, broke, and stupid individual; I sprinted back to the campsite to the mini-landfill, said a prayer, and started digging. By some miracle of God, I found the shorts along with the money, and was able to do so without vomiting all over myself. I told everyone the story about a year later, and now the act of shitting oneself is known colloquially as “Scotting” yourself …
Poor bastard.