Greetings from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan! I can’t believe Wisconsin gave away this parcel of land to Michigan for free back in the day. Pretty weak, imho. Those gravy-bathing cheesehumpers let a copper-rich peninsula fall into the hands of a state that isn’t even connected to it. If I were Michigan, I’d take over Madison as well. Just raid Wisconsin for all its worth.
Also, The Hike is now out in stores. Apparently my dad was in a bookstore last week and moved all the copies of it from the Fantasy section over to the Read Now counter. So please, buy the stupid thing so that my parents get don’t arrested at some point for vandalizing a fucking Barnes and Noble. Your purchase is necessary if I want to secure a spot on the bestseller list and live in a house made of nothing but gold and 100% fresh tuna belly. I pray you understand.
Your letters:
Chris:
In a recent conversation with co-workers, we were discussing the reported 450,000 condoms that were distributed at the Olympics. It got us talking about what countries hook up the most amongst each other? Certainly variables like size and number of athletes come into play, but there’s got to be a few countries that top the list. Also got to imagine that some countries rank low on the Olympic sex medal count? I can’t see North Korea involved in many Olympic orgies.
You’d have to control for team size here because the USA sent the largest coterie of athletes by far (over 500), and our basketball team alone has probably fucked half the free world. We can overwhelm the horniness analytics with sheer numbers even though we are, at times, one of the more oddly prudish countries in the developed world. So let’s see if there are any other countries that could beat us on a per-capita basis. Here are some of the obvious choices:
1. Brazil. Brazil had the second largest Olympic team, AND they got to play host this year. If I were an athlete from the host country, I would offer my services to every other attractive female athlete in the Village. “Come. Let me show you my country. We are a kind and loving people. WHOA HEY LOOGIT THAT WE’RE IN MY BEDROOM HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?”
I guarantee you that Ryan Lochte hit on every single Brazilian athlete because he assumed that Brazilians are the horniest people in the world, and then he got crazy drunk and started pissing on gas stations when all the Brazilians turned him down.
2. Tonga. That oily guy. I bet he got laid a ton.
3. Australia. Fourth largest Olympic team, from a country notorious for swilling beer and then screwing in the dunny. Also, you can die of a mutant spider bite at any time in Australia, so the urge to have sex before an unexpected and horrifying demise is strong in my birthplace.
4. Turkey. Highest number of sexual partners according to this random site I found. Who knew? The only thing Erdogan cannot suppress is PASSION.
5. Norway. They actually sent a handful of athletes to the Summer games, which is weird because I assumed that Norway had no summer, and that you have to cross country ski 50 miles a day just to grab some seal meat at the grocery store. Anyway, no list of horny countries is complete without some Scandinavian joint full of licentious blondes and disturbed serial killer novelists.
6. France. Sixth largest team. Germany has the fourth largest team, but I assume they refuse to sleep with any other country’s athletes because they think that only Germans know how to do the sex properly.
One more thing about Olympic athletes all boning each other: I’d be really upset if I were participating in one of the last scheduled events. It’s gotta be nice moment when you’re finished with the formal competition and can then go drink and fuck to excess out in greater Rio. But what if your shit is dead last? And you have to stay focused and rested the whole time, while everyone else is finished and already dancing naked in the streets? I’d be very upset. Unless I played for USA basketball, in which case I can go clubbing every night and still coast to a gold medal.
Andy:
Do you really think out of the 6 billion people on the planet, there is not a single one who is faster than Usain Bolt? There has to be some Eskimo in remote Russia or village leader in Africa or athlete in another sport that is faster, but hasn’t been discovered or just doesn’t want to try, right?
Nope. Not a chance. He’s the fastest man on Earth. You saw what he did to the rest of that field. He looked like a father racing his own small children. This isn’t like a random farmer somewhere who maybe has the size and ability to play pro football but doesn’t: Ferdinand the bull smelling flowers out in the meadow all day. Maybe Kurt Warner 2.0 is out there, but there’s a difference between having pro potential and being an athlete of Bolt’s caliber: the best of the best of the best of the best. He’s a fucking freak. There isn’t some mythical sprinting Sidd Finch who could beat that man with no formal training or dietary regiment. Watching Bolt is a joy because I KNOW there’s no one else on Earth like him.
Not only is Bolt the fastest man alive, but he has been fully optimized thanks to years of practice and vitamin supplements of questionable legality. In general, sports have become so specialized—methods of preparation now so scientifically calibrated—that athletes as a whole have far exceeded what can be accomplished on raw talent alone. That’s why there isn’t a fellow athlete out there who plays a different sport who could beat Bolt, either. LeBron couldn’t beat him. Julio Jones couldn’t beat him. ’99 Randy Moss couldn’t beat him. Gritty DC reboot Flash couldn’t beat him. NO ONE DENIES THIS.
Alec:
What Summer Olympic sport has the most hateable athletes?
Swimming! It’s gotta be swimming. Consider that Michael Phelps isn’t even the biggest douchebag on his OWN team. How is that possible? Because swimmers are insufferable, that’s why. Look at them bouncing around before every race, flashing their abs and pretending they’re Cyclops from X-Men just because they have mirrored Tyr goggles on. Fuck those guys. Except for my friend Steve. He’s way cool. All other swimmers can go do backstroke down a toilet.
Some other hateable athletes:
Water polo. Like an asshole swimmer and an asshole football player had a large white baby. Water polo is an impossible sport that forces you to tread water for days at a time, and water polo players will never let you forget it. Screw you, buddy. You walk all day around pretending you’re some tough guy who has an ax to grind because people don’t understand how physically taxing water polo is. That’s on you for playing a sport no one watches.
Wrestling. I did wrestling for one year (never ever do this) and the kids that are into wrestling are REALLY into it, to the point of it adversely affecting their personality. Like, you’ll walk by a wrestler and you’ll say, “Hey, Bob! How’s it going?” And then Bob will be like, “I’M CUTTING WEIGHT AND I JUST HOCKED UP MY LAST OUNCE OF FLUID SO I’M NOT DOING WELL AT ALL. FUCK YOU.” Once those guys get into full Vision Quest mode, they don’t come back.
Sailing. Just because daddy raised you in Newport doesn’t mean I have to be impressed by your winching skills. Former Deadspin staffer Jack Dickey likes to sail and he’s a blithering idiot.
Equestrian. This site is already on the record as being anti-Horse People, and with good reason. Horse People are delusional rich kids in Hitler boots who think horses are people, and they will claw your face off the second you dare to question a sport where steeds with manes fashioned into rows of manbuns are forced to jump over flowerpots. Donald Trump has a better sense of humor than horse people.
Fencing. You’re not really a pirate. Or a knight. The only you’re on the fencing team is because the chess team and the squash team cut you. I went to prep school. I know how it works.
Weightlifting. Those guys yell even louder than the bench press* bros at the gym. Jesus. Act like you’ve jerked 500 pounds above your head before, Angry Georgian Guy.
(*Bench press should be an Olympic sport. I swear I would watch it religiously.)
Cycling. Like wrestling, cycling is a sport that becomes a lifestyle for its participants: a deeply annoying lifestyle, complete with dumb hats and a Cannondale frame stand sitting in the middle of your TV room. Oh, are you a cyclist? I never would have guessed from the racing singlets you have hung up on the wall.
Rowing. Again, this is a sport for people who can’t play other sports. You think Gawky Dave from Marblehead would make the Olympics any other way? Not a chance.
John:
In my state, it’s especially easy to look up a person’s voter registration and in which elections and primaries they’ve voted. So I did it for all the people in my office, and all my in-laws, and the information there caused me to question a lot that I thought I knew. This was a terrible decision, wasn’t it?
It sure was. Never ever do that. As a matter of sheer survival, you need to ignore the politics of your loved ones. I know that’s particularly difficult this year, when voting for Trump is an act of madness. Really puts your faith in others to the test. The guy’s a fucking fraud! A moron! He literally gets distracted by shiny things! HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU VOTE FOR HIM, UNCLE JOE?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
But again, you have to do your best to compartmentalize how you feel about your loved ones with how you feel about their politics. You can argue with Twitter eggs all day long about that shit because you aren’t looking them in the eye. But here, in the real world, you should be able to live with people and still disagree with them. That’s the point of America. And you definitely shouldn’t look up voting records, even if they’re technically public. Be happy your loved ones are hiding their white nationalist views from you! They’re doing it out of love. Don’t go poking the bear.
Steve:
How far into the future would I have to go to be blown away by a new technology? The bar is set pretty high now and I can’t imagine any invention 100-200 years from now would make me as shocked as automatic flushing toilets would be to Abe Lincoln.
I think 50 years would do it. I assure you that most people—no matter how jaded—are quite easy to blow away with technology. Best Buy salesmen rely on this. They take you into the Magenta section and crank up the Sonos and suddenly your average dad makes a face like he just got sucked into one of the spaceships from Arrival. Don’t pretend you aren’t dazzled every time Waze accurately spots a vehicle pulled over on the shoulder. OMG HOW DID IT KNOW?!
There’s futuristic shit that exists RIGHT NOW that would blow your mind if we had it in America. A friend of mine flew to Hong Kong recently and when he got off the plane, there was a shuttle train that took him to downtown DIRECTLY FROM THE GATE. His jaw hit the damn floor. Now that miracle of convenience isn’t possible here in America, because we’re an aging behemoth with outdated infrastructure and horribly corrupt corporate and government bureaucracies that are terminally immune to change. But that shit exists!
Fifty years from now, things will look in the same in some respects, perhaps even worse because half of all major coastal cities will be underwater. BUT, while mankind continues its sad and inevitable self-destruction, someone’s gonna invent hoverpods (WiFi-enabled!) and that’ll keep you awed and happy while the oceans boil us alive.
HALFTIME!
Brad:
As I was slogging through yet another round of cutting my grass in the blazing July sun, I got to wondering what percent of professional athletes actually cut their own grass. It has to be somewhere around 5%, right? Even that might be high. I assume that some baseball players love nothing more than throwing a dip in, cracking a cold one, cranking some country music, and hopping on their tractor, but I can’t imagine Tom Brady or LeBron hopping on a John Deere once or twice per week. Bastards.
It could be that your average NFL or MLB contract forbids it, because they don’t want you cutting your own hands off reaching into the mower blades. Lord knows that baseball players are stupid enough to injure themselves that way. I think your five percent figure is likely accurate, only because I think a lot of pro athletes live in apartments (no lawn), or they rent their house (the super mows the lawn), or they live in a fancy gated community where you’re forced to pay some sky-high co-op fee to keep all the grounds looking like Augusta National.
There are some exceptions to this, like those Bills players that had to shovel their own driveways a while back when 400 feet of snow blanketed the region. And like you said, there are plenty of country goobers like Brett Favre and Kerry Collins who live to WORK THE LAND and get their rocks off by playing Farmer Boy during the offseason. Mowing the lawn is a shitty chore, but it’s a MANLY chore. I bet Favre walks right by a stack of dirty dishes without blinking, but ask him to mow the lawn and he’s ON IT. It’s one of those things where the cost of having someone else do it isn’t worth the embarrassment of being a weak-kneed ninny who needs someone else to cut his own grass. I gotta pay someone to cut my lawn because my back is shit, and I feel like less of a man for it. I GOT CITY HANDS, PEOPLE.
So that’s your makeup of lawn-mowing pros: superstar rednecks and a handful of lower salary guys who do it to save money in some small market area where they own a home. That’s it. Derek Jeter isn’t mowing fuck-all.
Jason:
As has been pointed out ad nauseum, the rest of the world refers to soccer as “football”, which makes a certain amount of sense since players manipulate the ball with their feet. “Baseball” works as a name because you’re running around bases; “basketball” is about shooting the ball into the basket; “volleyball” centers around volleying that ball back and forth over the net. Based on those criteria, calling American football “football” doesn’t make a lot of sense, since very little of the game involves a foot in contact with the ball. So... if you were going to rename American football to conform with the other ball-named sports, what name would you choose?
Let me preface this by saying that football is a perfectly good name for football and that soccer, which itself is already a cool alternative name from “football,” should be the sport forced to adapt that alternative name worldwide to avoid mass confusion, because this is America and the world should have to conform to us, and not the other way around. BIGLY.
That said, yes it’s weird that football is called football when the only guys using their feet (kickers and punters) are weirdo specialists. One alternate name for the sport is “Gridiron,” which is what people in England once called it back in the sport’s infancy. “Gridiron” makes the sport sound very rigid and angry, which it is. But it doesn’t have BALL in it, as Jason has mandated. Let’s brainstorm some possibilities:
-Tackleball
-Hitball
-Murderball (NOTE: Already taken)
-Gridball
-Ironball
-Throwball
-Blitzball
-Rushball
-Martyball
As you can see, those are all horrible. We’re just gonna have to stick with football and live with the confusion.
Evan:
I just dropped a spike at work and used a roll of toilet paper that was left on the windowsill in the pounding summer sun, and it was the most luxurious thing I’ve experienced in years, possibly my life. Are toilet paper heaters some rich people shit that I’ve been too poor to ever know about? I feel like Trump definitely has one.
Sure, your average billionaire probably has heated toilet towelettes, plus a heated seat and a heated bidet and a heated food warmer so he can enjoy crostini while he has a bowel movement. But I think wiping is a matter of personal taste. A lot of people like using baby wipes because they’re cool to the touch: a breath mint for the anus.
Personally speaking, I’m not wild about using hot TP to clean myself because it’s too close in temperature to the shit I’m wiping up. Nothing feels worse than some big steamy shit getting stuck in there. I don’t want another steamy object touching it. I need some contrast. If I had the means, every bowel movement would be followed with a light eucalyptus spritz administered by an English butler, followed by a robot dog licking the area clean. And then, I get a cupcake.
Mike:
Say Trump wins the election. After six months, he realizes that being president sucks. Does he have a plan to get out of office? Obviously he won’t outright quit. Does he start world war three? Kill the secretary of treasury in a duel? What’s his out?
No, he stays. He never finds an out. Even if he hates being president, he’ll just stay and not work. It’s just like his campaign. That lazy orange blob hates the standard grunt work of campaigning, so he doesn’t do any of it. He just stands there like a fucking pud.
I am one of a parade of media gasbags who has openly speculated about Trump’s mindset during this election. He secretly doesn’t want to win! He’s in it for the branding! He’ll drop out next month once his polls drop into single digits! It’s all wrong. All of it. There’s no point in trying to ascertain Trump’s motives because he has no fucking brain. Trump’s mind is just a thought balloon with two monkeys throwing cake at one another. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this shit. He likes people talking about him, and that’s pretty much it. Everything else, from political motivations to business strategy—is an empty vessel. He’s the dumbest man on Earth.
And frankly, there’s little point raging at him anymore. At some point, we gotta blame the millions of shitburgers who have voted this slug into political prominence. You people did this. You gave him permission to wipe his dick all over this election. And just saying “WAHHHH I’M ANGRY ABOUT THE SYSTEM” doesn’t forgive you for putting Trump within a stubby index finger of the button. I know I said to forgive loved ones for their politics, but you gotta be shitting me voting for that guy. If you want to lodge a protest vote, vote for Gary Johnson, man. He likes weed and stuff.
Alex:
Watching some adult entertainment, and the girl says to the guy, “I’ve wanted to fuck you for so long.” Is this an acceptable phrase? I’d rather have a girl say to me, “I’ve wanted you to fuck me for so long.”
Nah, it’s fine. By your logic, you gotta be the one putting something into something to be the fucker, and the person who gets something put into them is the fuckee. But you don’t have to strictly define it that way. I say everyone can fuck everyone! That’s the 2016 way of going about things. Saying only people with penises and/or dildos can do the fucking is highly problematic now.
Also: if someone is talking dirty to you, you’re gonna be happy no matter what they say. You’re not stopping that girl to “Well actually” her grammar in the midst of a phone sex run. You could slip in a threat to kill my dog in the middle of dirty talk and it wouldn’t dull my momentum.
Jeremy:
I tore my Achilles recently, and I’m in a boot and on crutches. So, I’m at work, standing in front of an elevator alone, just waiting for that glorious ding to tell me the elevator came JUST FOR ME. But then, a very pregnant woman with a young child, an old woman (like, 70), and a FedEx delivery woman carrying a medium-sized box walk up. The elevator arrives and everyone looks around to see who walks in first. Standard protocol is ladies first, and since there were 3 ladies there, they should have walked on in. Instead, all of them insist I go first. It was very polite, but it got me wondering. How do you rank who should walk in first?
The very pregnant woman goes first, especially if she has another kid in tow. Parenting while pregnant is like having your boss yell at you while you’re taking a flu shit. It’s miserable business. That poor lady just wants to get in that elevator and head to the top floor so she can jump off the roof as quickly as possible.
After that, I think you get to go into the elevator unless the old lady is really old and really frail. Frankly, you’re of more service inside the elevator, where you can hold the DOOR OPEN button with your crutch like a boss while the slower people come filing in.
Package lady comes dead last. Ever wait for a hotel elevator and suddenly some bellhop pulls up with a luggage cart the size of the elevator car? What does that bellhop do? He lets you go first and waits. Or he takes the freight elevator. This is because packages and dollies FUCK elevators, so you should have to wait before stuffing up the car and ruining everyone’s position with your packaged ham.
Email of the week!
Dan:
I was eight years old at the time and my family of four decided that it would be a fun idea to do a two week planes, trains, and automobiles style trip through Europe. Being that I was eight at the time, I could care less about the history that we saw on a daily basis and was more focused on eating McDonald’s in every country that we were in (England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria). Suffice to say, I succeeded in my mission.
One of our last legs of the trip was driving from Switzerland to Austria through the mountains. As an eight year old sitting in the back seat of a car, I was prone to a little bit of motion sickness. This was only magnified by the fact that we were winding our way through the mountains on a two-lane road.
Eventually I knew that I wasn’t going to last and that I would eventually throw up. I told my dad what was about to happen. Given that we are on a two-lane road with a rock face on one side of the road and a cliff on the other with no shoulder to stop on, my dad presented me two options. Option one was to hold it until we got to the nearest stopping point so I could get out. Option two was to roll down the window and throw up out the window while making sure I didn’t get any inside the rental car.
Well I tried for option one but I couldn’t wait any longer. So I rolled down the window, stuck my head out like a dog, and threw up...directly onto a motorcyclist that was going the opposite direction. It all happened in slow motion, and I don’t think I’ve ever had that good of aim in anything I’ve ever done since, but i drilled this poor guy with an impressive amount of puke from an eight year old. We wanted to stop and check on him, but we couldn’t given the road we were on and that there was a line of cars behind us, so away we drove.
Don’t know what happened to that man from 18 years ago, but his life can’t be the same because of it, can it?
Sure can’t.