There are rules to the Deadcast, although we don’t generally pay that much attention to them. For the most part, as you might have noticed, it goes like this: Bullshit/sports, sports, sports/Funbag, Funbag. It’s not a lot of structure, but it keeps us honest. This week, though, we faced a Funbag question so powerful and profound in its implications that it slipped the surly bonds of the Funbag and pretty much became the sports portion of the Deadcast. What would happen, reader Justin asked, if the Toronto Raptors had to make a choice between retaining the services of Kawhi Leonard and the continued presence of multiplatinum sideline goofus/mascot Drake? I feel more confident in my answer than I do in my Drake imitation, but this week’s Deadcast contains both:
That was not the only way in which this Deadcast broke with historic norms, or even the most noteworthy. The first chunk, for instance, which is supposed to be about either sports or the hosts saying “pee-pee” and “poo-poo” back and forth to each other was given over to what I found to be a very emotionally resonant story from Drew about hearing Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky” for the first time since ... well, since he performed it at karaoke on the night he suffered a brain hemorrhage and almost died. I naturally did my best to undercut it, as that is my role on the podcast, but don’t believe I entirely succeeded in that. Me grafting a reader letter about the lost world of ringtones—and, more precisely, a ringtone bringing MIMS’s “This Is Why I’m Hot” into a tense medical situation—was also not strictly rule-compliant, but it’s my policy to mention MIMS whenever given the opportunity.
Once we got into the Funbag, things stabilized a bit in terms of format but predictably went instantly to hell in terms of content. The ‘bag had it all, from questions about every professional sports league competing in a track and field battle royal to a non-scientific ranking of mass-produced snack cakes to a discussion of fake band names that I somehow turned into an excuse to discuss a Jonathan Franzen invention that has tormented me for years.
Regarding that last question, I would like to offer an apology: the question concerned the best fake band names to appear in movies, which we quickly turned into a discussion of the worst. During this discussion, I neglected to mention that Ethan Hawke’s band in Reality Bites was called Hey, That’s My Bike. That should have been my answer. I can’t promise that I will do better next week, but we’ll at least try harder to stick to the rules.
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