Before we get to the Funbag, some notes of vital interest. If you're in New York tomorrow night, I'll be doing Scott Rogowsky's Running Late show over in Brooklyn. It's like a live talk show-type thing. You can buy tickets here. You get a free beer (not kidding) if you mention Deadspin at the door, plus $2 off your ticket if you enter the promo code MARTY online. Among the other guests tomorrow night will be human Straw-Ber-Rita Tucker Max, so that'll be interesting. I'm told the event space has a bar for afterward, which makes it one-stop shopping for us all.
And if you're in Boston on Thursday night, I'll be doing a reading and signing at the Harvard Coop at 7pm. FACKKKKK YOU. Drinks and Game 4 afterward at John Harvard's. Then, I'm back in DC on Saturday doing a reading at Politics & Prose at 6 p.m. Again, drinking afterward. Somewhere. Probably Comet or that other bar across the street. I dunno.
OK, with that out of the way, let's get to your letters:
Josh:
Who would you put on your Mount Rushmore of Most Punchable Faces? And can I cast all four of my votes for Florio?
First slot goes to Hitler automatically. He's a shoo-in, like the RSTLNE combination you get in the final round of "Wheel of Fortune." Somewhere out there, a person has already carved his face into a cliff for this very kind of anti-memorial. If Hitler were resurrected and a local entrepreneur offered the general public a chance to punch Hitler in the face for three dollars, the line for the Hitler booth would stretch around the globe six times. NO ONE DENIES THIS.
There are certain necessary elements for a punchable face, and Hitler has them all. You must be bratty. You must be a loudmouth, so that a punch to the face will silence your constant braying. You must have a damning personal history. And you must have a resting expression that, simply on its own, causes people to want to ball up their fists and throttle you right in your stupid fucking jaw. Hitler has all that going for him. His is the most punchable face in history. Him and Jesus. JUST KIDDING.
So, with those qualities in mind, let's chisel the rest of our cliff face:
• Hitler.
• Mike Lupica. Not only is he a loudmouth and a brat, but he has those glasses. You just know he paid $800 for those things. God, it would feel so good to drive my knuckles right through those glasses, to hear them go CRUNCH and feel the frames snap, watching with joy as the shards from the lenses (in my fantasy, they are not shatterproof lenses) pierce his eyeballs and cause them to leak fluid all over Bill Rhoden's lap. There are so many sports personalities you could put on this list (Christian Laettner, Bobby Heenan, Eli Manning), but Lupica tops them all.
• Chris Brown. I hate giving him the satisfaction of canonizing him on this mountain, but fuck him. He's a savage woman-beating troll who is BEGGING to be 25th Hour'ed. He's so punchable, he knocks Justin Bieber off the mountain, which is crazy because the whole world wants to beat some sense into Justin Bieber.
• Billy Zane. As nominated by Spencer Hall. It was between him and Ethan Hawke. "Not the better half (sneers)." FUCK YOU ASSHOLE PUNCH PUNCH PUNCH.
Devon:
How many people, in the history of human existence, have joined the Mile Low club? I guess we're limited to people in submarines, or deep underground in mines? Has to be lower than the number of people in the Mile High club, right?
According to Wikipedia, modern submarines have a crush depth (crush depth means your sub goes too low and, you know, gets crushed) of 2,400 feet at best. That's not even half a mile. So whatever smoking hot navy buttsecks is going on aboard the USS Freelove, it's not happening a mile below. Some submersibles can dive to much lower depths, so I suppose it's possible that James Cameron brought along a hooker in his capsule to give him handies at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
That's probably a better bet than land-based holes. "Did you know the hole's natural enemy is the pile?" The deepest man-made hole in the world is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which goes nearly eight miles deep. But there's not a boudoir at the bottom of that hole. There is just Satan attaching a boot to a fishing hook and yanking on the line to fuck with Russian scientists. A mile below the surface of the Earth is likely to be a hellish place—hot and lacking in oxygen and all that. No fallout shelter is buried that deep. In all likelihood, the number of people who have boned that far beneath the surface of the Earth can be counted on one hand. Why, we could build a Mount Rushmore of them!
Tom:
For 6 million dollars (tax-free) would you agree to let Shaq anally fist you once a day every day for a full calendar year? You get Christmas and your birthday off.
Every day? Not a chance, especially if he has the rings on. Even ONCE a year would be a stretch, and I mean that literally.
Mike:
If one athlete were to die in a plane or car crash, which athlete would create the most stir/news about his death? ESPN would practically shut down their headquarters if Tebow died, so I'm putting my money on him.
At this very moment, it would be LeBron, because LeBron is not only one of the biggest stars in all of sport, but because his sport's showcase event is going on right now. If LeBron were to crash his Ferrari (right before he hits the other car, I bet LeBron makes the same face he makes when he gets called for a foul) and die TODAY, right before Game 3, that would cause a lot more dilemmas (and therefore, discussion points) than if he died during the offseason. Do they play the game tonight? If they put it off a day, what do they do about Game 4? If the Spurs win the title after that, do we put a little asterisk by the title in the shape of a Ferrari being T-boned? If he died in a plane crash, maybe the rest of the Heat would be completely freaked out by air travel and not want to fly back home. Maybe Don McLean would write an ENDLESS song about LeBron's death called "The Day The Basketball Died." Skip Bayless would orgasm on the air. Loudly. It would be mass chaos.
If we're taking the actual circumstances of sport out of the equation and just focusing on the biggest name dying in a crash, then the answer is Tiger Woods. Because who knows what he was doing at the time of the crash. Maybe Jayden James was blowing him while he was piloting that underwater submersible. Lindsey Vonn should have known better!
Kevin:
Say you're Tom Hanks in Castaway, how many days after the crash when you are stranded do you hold out to fap? Do you fap into the fire? And is Wilson off-limits?
Wilson is off limits. Friends don't do that sort of thing to each other. I say he jacks it after a day or two: After getting over the shock, making fire, building a shelter out of palm fronds, and scavenging for food and water, he'd finally have a chance to sit down and realize he has nothing better to do. After that, FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP.
Ian:
With everything I've learned from a decade of watching CSI, do you think I could get away with being a serial killer? I mean a serious, curfew-enducing serial killer with a nickname like the "Bartime Butcher." With what I know about DNA, fingerprints, blood, hair, security cameras, and facial recognition software, I feel like I could evade Lieutenant Dan and Sam Malone for a while.
Well, the CSI shows take place in an alternate universe where every city has about ninety active serial killers, and all of the serial killers are BRILLIANT. "Don't you see, I cut up the bodies to resemble characters from Milton's Paradise Lost! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!" They all execute their crimes in a precise and efficient manner. You, Mister Amateur Killer, still have an awful lot to learn about killin' folk.
If you want to become the Brown River Killer, you shouldn't be watching CSI. You should be watching Blood Simple, so that you get a very good idea of just how much blood you're gonna be dealing with, and just how messy it is to try to clean up. SO MUCH BLOOD. You'll need that kind of wake-up call about how daunting your task is going to be.
Chances are, you'll be able to pull off a handful of these crimes and get away with it if you are an expert in victim selection. GQ ran a long piece a few months ago written by a woman who came face-to-face with truck stop killer Robert Ben Rhoades. The whole thing is horrifying, but the most disturbing aspect of it is how selecting runaways and hookers made it easy for Rhoades to kill. If you're a serial killer and you pick the CNN-friendly white girl from a suburb, your face will be on Nancy Grace within an hour of you committing the crime. But if you pick one of Rhoades' "invisible people"—poor, abandoned, and usually not white—the lack of prompt reaction from law enforcement is pretty frightening.
I should note at this point: PLEASE DO NOT GO AROUND SERIAL KILLING. That would be bad.
Gerald:
Do you think, in our lifetime, we will see a gay couple on the same team? Of any sport.
Given the rapid progress the gay rights movement has made just over the course of the past five years, it seems like an inevitability. Although the idea of a gay couple on a team brings up all kinds of workplace issues that exist well outside the boundaries of plain old discrimination. Two players sleeping together are shitting where they eat. Like any office romance, if things turn sour, they turn VERY sour. So I don't know if the sports world—which ABHORS the idea of players being distractions—would approve of such affairs. And then you'd have the people at BIG GAY being like, "You're just disapproving of their relationship because you secretly hate gays! GAY HATER!" And then everyone would be annoyed at one another.
Personally, I would like to see gay couples in sports right now. It would jack up the drama of any game by at least 20 percent. Is Colin Kaepernick actively avoiding throwing the ball to Vernon Davis because they broke up a week ago? What will happen now that Alex Smith has laid down a "he goes or I go" ultimatum to the Chiefs after breaking off his torrid affair with coach Andy Reid? And what if Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are actually lovers? MY GOD BEST RIVALRY EVER. I'm all for it.
HALFTIME!
Blake:
Suppose you were transported to 1950 and they asked to you transcribe as many song lyrics as you can from your lifetime. How many songs could you crank out? Initially I thought I could come up with quite a few, but then realized that my odds of getting songs 100% accurate were pretty pathetic.
So you have to get every lyric in the song right? That's pretty rough. One of the shitty things about getting old is that, for the life of me, I can't commit any new songs to memory. I could listen to them a thousand times and still not get every word right. But ask me to write down the lyrics to some old song like "Tears in Heaven"—a song I don't even like—and I could throw them down in about six seconds. I MUST BE STRONG AND CARRY ON... The songs you hear as a kid and teenager get emblazoned on your brain, and they stay that way, often at the expense of newer, awesomer music.
And that's only rock songs. Don't forget about kiddie songs, ad jingles, and dozens of other musical snippets that crowd the average American's psyche. If Blake here was more forgiving about getting the lyrics exactly right, the average adult could probably write down thousands of songs. Perhaps more. It's quite staggering when you consider the sheer volume of songs—good and horrible—that are archived inside of you. I'd be really impressed with my own ability to retain information if that information didn't include all the lyrics to "St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion)."
Mike:
I'm not a huge golf fan, but I live near this year's US Open, so I'm going. Do you have any suggestions of something cool to yell if I get close enough to know it would be heard on TV? "Mashed potatoes" was funny, but seems to be played out. "Get in the hole" was never funny and is DEFINITELY played out, so I'm looking for something clever. My only idea so far is the chorus of Killer Tofu by The Beets. Please help me.
This is golf, so if you yell out anything silly, all the humorless pricks in the gallery will turn around and stare daggers at you, as if you strangled a puppy in front of them. So remember to get drunk enough to not care about such things. Normally, I would say to just yell out BLOWJOB!, but I assume you don't wanna get kicked out. Some more unorthodox choices...
• Get in MY hole!
• FANCY!
• BURN THE WITCH
• GET LEGS! (still my favorite automated yell from the gallery back when I played computer golf in 1994)
• WAFFLES AND SYRUP!
• BAH GAWD! THEY KILLED HIM! (Jim Ross voice)
• DERRRRRRRRRRP
Justin:
How much money would it take for you to never watch sporting events on TV again? You can go to games and you can check scores and watch SportsCenter (torture, I know) but you cannot watch any sporting events, professional or collegiate, on TV ever again.
I gotta GO to NFL games? Christ. Can I stay in the concourse and watch the TVs there? Or is that cheating? I have to actually sit there and watch the whole time? That sounds like hell on Earth. If I can watch highlight packages and still follow NFL.com GameCenter, I suppose that isn't that bad. I would spend the rest of my life staring at my team's GameCenter, pumping my fist like an idiot any time a long arrow appeared on the drive chart (I have cheered while staring at a GameCenter in the past; it can be done). If you paid me enough money, I could hire a team of monkey butlers to re-enact every game, which would bring me no shortage of amusement. Call it $20 million and we can seal the deal. I barely watch non-football sports anyway.
William:
Could you beat Kobe Bryant one on one right now?
I'm not sure how far along he is in his rehab. Can he walk? If he can walk, forget it. You and I are toast. Even hobbling around on a reconstructed Achilles, he would find a way. Kobe Bryant is an insane person. If beating you in a meaningless exhibition means throwing lye in your face and beating you to death with his hospital cane, he'll do it. He's a sociopath.
Guy:
For the next 3 months, I'm going to be living in the house of my sister & her husband. I've already started to notice that my bro-in-law literally NEVER washes his hands after using the toilet. I'll admit I'm a bit of a germaphobe; but in my humble opinion, neglecting to wash your hands after potty time is not only classless, but disrespectful to your fellow man. Sometimes he cooks dinner, and I'm tired of making excuses not to eat. How do I approach him about this?
Just tell your sister. Let her bust his balls for you. That's easy money.
Matt:
I was on a Greyhound from a small-town Northern Ontario to Toronto today and there were 30-40 Amish people on board - adults, kids, teens - it was crazy. As the bus gradually got closer to the city they progressively lost their shit more and more at things that are totally ordinary to me. Pressing their noses to the windows at the sight of a shitty zoo, miming how rollercoasters work when passing a theme park, pointing at every single fucking plane they saw, etc. If you were completely ignorant to big city life what would freak you out the most when you first saw it? It's gotta be the first sighting of a hooker, right?
I think it would be the buildings. If you've lived in a barn for the first fifteen years of your life, and you've never even known about the existence of buildings, you're gonna have your SKULL BLOWN by the sight of skyscrapers reaching a hundred stories high. I am a fully grown adult and I have been to cities before, but skylines STILL blow my mind. Anytime I see a skyline from a car window or a plane I'm like HOLY SHIT THERE IT IS. It's the big city, y'all! Even now, when I walk up next to a tall building like the Hancock building in Chicago and I stare up at it, I'm still amazed and horrified. What if falls on me? Could that happen? How the hell did people build that thing?
So imagine being an Amish person—a time traveler, essentially—laying eyes on the Manhattan skyline for the first time. I'd be astonished. I'd be so astonished, I wouldn't even notice the first hooker until twenty minutes later. And then I would go fap in my overalls.
AB:
How does receiving anal sex effect your bowels? Does it make pooping a lot easier given that your butthole is used to stretching with ease? Also, on the flip side, does pooping yourself become more of a worry as it's harder to really clench up? I imagine it's the difference between a vacuum sealed ziploc bag vs. one of those shitty Shoprite bags.
Since I am not personally familiar with the havoc that repeated anal sex can wreak on your excretory system, time for a simple Google search:
Well, the anus does indeed become a little looser. That is why the actresses in blue movies so often have rather gaping bottoms. This widening can lead to minor problems with ‘soiling’ of underwear.
OK! That settles it. Nothing like visualizing a gaping, leaking asshole with afternoon snack. I imagine that lube and fancy oils can help mitigate this damage, along with the size of the object being inserted inside of you. If you've got a gallon of Astroglide and a pencil dick to work with, you're probably minimizing the damage. But if it's Big Jim Slade going to town on your dry asscrack on a prison floor, that would probably compromise your sphincter. So take care of that bunghole! It's the only one you've got. Don't let Shaq fist it!
Email of the week time!
Adam:
My junior year of undergrad (2002-2003) I lived in my fraternity house, which was really just an old dorm building that was built sometime during the height of the Cold War. On the side of the house right outside of the door exiting from the kitchen, we had a dumpster "area" that basically consisted of a wide-open square piece of asphalt. Anyway, as typically happens with fraternities, trash, cans, bottles, food, and other unidentifiable objects would build up in the house over the course of a few weeks until we would clean the house top-to-bottom.
After one big cleaning day that winter, the dumpster area was piled high with trash bags, rotten food, leftovers, etc. Later that same night and after a few of us had been drinking pretty heavily, we were hanging out in the kitchen making food when we heard what sounded like a bum rummaging through our trash area. As drunk as we were and ignoring the hepatitis and HIV infections we would undoubtedly get if we actually physically encountered a bum, we decided we should go yell at him to stop picking through our trash.
When we went to the door, though, the rummaging noise stopped and when we opened the door we didn't see anything. We figured the bum saw us coming through the window and took off, so we went back to eating and drinking. About 30 minutes later, somebody went to throw out some trash in the dumpster area and came running back into the kitchen, screaming like he'd just been stabbed by a hobo. The rummaging noise, it turns out, was actually an opossum.
At this point, we all ran over to the kitchen door and looked out to see the biggest and nastiest God damned opossum any of us had ever seen. This son of a bitch must have weighed 20 pounds and as soon as it saw us, it started hissing and snarling at us like it had rabies. At that point we figured that we needed to get rid of this thing before it nested in our dumpster area, but we were all too drunk, scared, or both, to dare step outside and test how territorial this thing was.
As I mentioned, our fraternity house was really just an old dorm building, so it was four stories tall. In our collective inebriation we determined that the best way to get rid of the demon spawn in our dumpster was to go up to the 4th floor, open the window, and drop heavy objects onto it. The first item was an old-school CRT computer monitor. Unfortunately, trying to line up a square shot on an opossum with a computer monitor from four stories up is difficult, especially when drunk, so we didn't get the kill shot we were looking for. Instead, we delivered a glancing blow to the beast and it appeared we managed only to hurt its leg and piss it off even more.
Despite almost being splattered with a computer monitor, the thing went back to rummaging while we regrouped and found our next weapons - two cinder blocks. The next attack went much better, as from the kitchen window it appeared that one cinder block landed a direct hit to the middle of the opossum's back and the other literally landed on, and severed, its tail. Convinced we had conquered the beast, we checked out the battle scene and were satisfied that we had, in fact, murdered the thing.
A few hours later some of our brothers returned home from the bars and we needed to proudly show them what we had accomplished...the only problem was that the only evidence left in the dumpster area was a broken computer monitor, two broken cinder blocks, and a bloody opossum tail. That's right, THE GOD DAMNED THING SURVIVED HAVING A CINDER BLOCK DROPPED DIRECTLY ONTO ITS BACK FROM FOUR FLOORS UP AND IT WAS PLAYING POSSUM!! I didn't sleep right for two weeks, afraid that the opossum would show up like some kind of deranged Michael Myers-like marsupial and seek its revenge.
Drew Magary writes for Deadspin and Gawker. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at [email protected]. You can also buy Drew's new book, Someone Could Get Hurt, in time for Father's Day through his homepage.