Fuck Sore Losers | Defector
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking about socks, mowing the lawn, filth, and more.
My apologies for a shorter than usual bag today. I’m just coming off of a week of work in the field for SF Gate, and I’ve already started in on Why Your Team Sucks, the debut of which is on the horizon. So I’ve been a touch squeezed. But fear not, the take lab is still bustling and ready to produce more sterling content for you in the coming weeks and months.
Now, your letters:
Matt:
Is calling an athlete at the highest level a sore loser a fair thing to say? They’re performing at the peak of their sport with the most amount of pressure. Are we expecting too much to ask them to handle a loss in a certain way?
No! I don’t care how good of an athlete you are. If you go out like a crybaby, then you’re a fucking crybaby. You’re familiar with Aaron Rodgers, yeah? Is that prick excused from making excuses and deflecting blame after his team has eaten shit, all because he’s a Hall of Famer? Of course not. He’s a grown adult, he’s played football for decades, and he’s experienced losing before. Any athlete of his stature should be able to take an L with dignity. Even Draymond Green, in his best moments, knows how to do this.
Basic sportsmanship plays into this. But above all else, it’s a sign of professionalism to admit defeat and then shake it off. One of the many reasons we’re currently trapped in shit city is because so many working professionals, in every sphere, are sore losers. Stomping your feet and crying “No I’m not no I’m not” is kiddie shit. I expect adults to handle tough losses like, you know, adults. Admitting defeat means you’re willing to grow, and to learn. I’m not giving anyone, least of all myself, permission to avoid all of that just because losing is hard.
Joff:
Are scientists moving the goalposts on the singularity? They say it hasn’t happened yet, but are we supposed to believe that ChatGPT is not already more informed, more logical, and even more self-aware than the average Trump voter?
ChatGPT is NOT more informed, more logical, and more self-aware than the average Trump voter. It can’t be, because it’s not human. MAGA types may have truly horrible taste in politics, but they can still think, feel, and conceive. They have human brains, as much as I like to joke otherwise. There’s no truth, and also no utility, in characterizing them as stupider than a chat prompt. Dehumanization is an ill no matter who’s dehumanizing whom, and rewarding AI human status—which is exactly what the bad guys would like us to do—only exacerbates the problem. In my experience, ChatGPT doesn’t even do a particularly good job of pretending to be human anyway. It’s just fancy Siri, with no mind of its own. And you know what? It’ll never be anything more than that, because brain chemistry can’t be replicated outside of a living skull.
That’s as purply as I care to get about this issue. All you need to know is that all of these future tech promises are a lie. A cheap sales pitch. Artificial intelligence*, with robots being all smart and sensitive? That’s a lie. The Singularity, where you can live forever by becoming the Lawnmower Man inside a distant server? Lie. The metaverse? Lie. A viable Mars colony? LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE. Proper science asks questions; it doesn’t promise results first and then ask questions later. So don’t buy any of that Singularity shit. I’ve been hearing about this supposed landmark moment ever since I wrote The Postmortal, and it’s an even flimsier idea now than when I started. Present tech products haven’t given us the future, they’ve exposed it. We’re all better off just getting a dog.
(*If I ever ran a chatbot, I’d offer it exclusively via a robot dog, or some other tangible product that consumers can anthropomorphize. When AI is just a fucking tab on your browser, that tends to lessen the reality effect.)
John:
Do you think this whole ICE thing is just a warm-up for the midterm elections? ICE agents will be detaining anyone voting for a Democrat on Election Day.
Joke’s on ICE, because that would require Democrats doing something, anything, that makes people want to get out and vote for them.
Don:
Yes or no, is basketball a contact sport?
Yes. Spend five minutes in the paint on an NBA court and you’d have more bruises than a peach dropped from a sixth-story balcony.
Josh:
What do you think is the most consistently gross thing in an otherwise clean person’s house? The item that made me think of this question is oven mitts.
You’re probably dead on with that. I’ve dipped my oven mitt into hot food by accident and then just left the residue on there to cake and rot. The cure for ALS is probably culturing on one of them as we speak. My personal choice would be the plug in any bathroom sink drain. Ever pull one of those fuckers out? It’s like a zombie flick under there.
Now, let’s do a turbo sprint through some other candidates:
-Sponges (don’t Google how dirty sponges can get; you’d be appalled)
-Keys
-Loose change
-Cash
-The area behind the toilet
-The area behind/under the couch
-The dog
-Daddy’s taint
Our commenters will have many, many additions to the list. All of them will be correct.
Chris:
I was visiting my family and my brother saw me pull out a pair of socks from my pocket. He asked, “You wore those already?” I replied, “I wore them today, so yes.” And to be clear, I had them on but it’s not like I hiked up a mountain or did anything to stink them up. Then he says, “Oh, I don’t do that.” I look at him and say, “What? Don’t put your socks back on? How many pairs of socks do you wear in a day?” His wife looks at me and says, “You don’t want to know.” To be clear, he washes his socks, so it’s not like he’s putting on a brand new pair every time. But I still think it’s the craziest thing I’ve heard him say. Should I be changing my socks every time I take them off? Or is my brother nuts?
Oh, I’m here for sock talk. Now, some people who read Chris’s email will be like, What kind of psycho carries socks around in their pocket? I do. Every morning, I get up and carry my socks with me downstairs in my pocket. I do some morning stuff in my bare feet and then, when it’s time to start writing, I put on my socks and sneakers to become Business Drew.
If those socks are still relatively pristine—unlikely this time of year—when I’m ready to take a break, I ball them up and set them next to my computer or my recliner for later use. Thus, my wife is often greeted by loose socks stationed around the main floor of the house. It’s not her favorite thing, especially since the kids now leave their socks lying around, and without the “it’s still clean” prerequisite that I employ. And I really do keep track. I’m not a college kid anymore; I prefer my socks clean, and I believe that taking off sweaty socks is one of the great pleasures that life has to offer. So I end up changing socks at least once a day, especially in wintertime. Our laundry output is proof of that. Again, not my wife’s favorite thing.
At the other send of the spectrum, I once knew a guy who worked in finance and, no lie, wore NEW socks every time he changed them. Literally, this man never wore the same pair of socks twice. You want strange? That, my darlings, is strange.
Shane:
Your fav bit from the latest Naked Gun trailer?
I’ve been wary of this remake ever since it was announced, and I grew even more wary once I found out that Seth MacFarlane was involved. The genius of the first Naked Gun, and all other Zucker/Abrams/Zucker movies, was that the gags were stupid but original. They weren’t just easy pop culture references, which tends to be MacFarlane’s way of doing business.
Fortunately, he neither wrote nor directed the Liam Neeson Gun, so that newest trailer does have some shit that scratched my longstanding ZAZ itch. I’ll give you two. The first is a disembodied arm handing New Frank Drebin (Neeson) a coffee through his car window while he’s going 75 mph, which reminded me of this classic gag. The other is Drebin asking Pam Anderson to take a seat, and then her literally stealing a chair out of his office. If the whole movie is like that, then I’m in.
HALFTIME!
Chris:
Is it mow the lawn or cut the grass?
I assume this falls along loose regional lines. They probably call it “hackin’ the back” in Tennessee or some shit. All I know is that I call it “mowing the lawn” and always have. Calling it “cutting the grass” gives me the visual of doing it with a pair of scissors, which only a Howard Hughes type would ever attempt.
Jon:
I think you may have addressed this before, but could you please give us a definitive ranking of the actors that have played Jack Ryan?
AS Jack Ryan, you mean? I made a quick crack about this on Bluesky, which is that everyone my age is bound by law to recognize Alec Baldwin as the best, and in some ways, the only Jack Ryan. I really do feel that way, although I’ve never seen any Jack Ryan stuff outside of The Hunt for Red October and the two Harrison Ford Ryan movies (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Baldwin was easily better in the role than Ford, mostly because ’90s Ford had his sense of humor surgically removed. Baldwin had enough of a comedic flair to make the character something more than just “Robert Mueller, but he knows how to handle a firearm.” The Ford movies were perfectly good, but nothing special. Red October, meanwhile, remains a perfect film, in no small part because Baldwin (and Sean Connery, of course) nailed that role.
But I haven’t seen any of the other Jack Ryan movies and shows. Never saw Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, Chris Pine in Shadow Recruit (I actually forgot this movie existed until just now), or John Krasinski in Jack Ryan. Every new actor in the role struck me as a downgrade. This is especially true of Krasinski, whose entire post-Office career has felt like a concerted effort to tell everyone, “I’m not just Jim Halpert.” A Quiet Place was a goodass movie, but you’ll still always be Jim Halpert to me, Jim.
Furthermore, Jack Ryan as a character has apparently gone from being a hapless bureaucrat in Red October to being an avatar for every pickup truck driver who fancies himself a Navy SEAL. This is actually how author Tom Clancy himself conceived of the character: as a wet dream version of himself. If you know how big of an asshole Clancy was when he was alive, that tends to make his creation less appealing.
Now if we’re just ranking these actors as actors, I’d go like this:
- Ford
- Baldwin
- Affleck
- Pine
- Halpert
I like Affleck as an actor more than just about anyone—I’d even argue he was the best Batman of this century, even if he was trapped in shitty movies while playing him—but he’s no Alec Baldwin. Even when you account for Baldwin’s lousy body of work post-30 Rock, he’s still one of the most talented performers of his generation. Just don’t let him near any on-set firearms.
(By the way, Ford was always a vicious asshole. I just read Chris Nashawaty’s The Future Was Now and there’s a passage in that book about how Ford deliberately roughed up Sean Young for the love scene in Blade Runner because he hated her so much. That was supposed to be a normal love scene, but Ford opted to bruise her all over instead. Director Ridley Scott also has his hands dirty for that sordid bit of movie history.)
Cody:
I need some of your dad perspective. In your opinion, at what age is it appropriate to bring your kids to a march or protest? Last weekend I wanted to go to our local No Kings protest, but since we live in deep red MAGA country, my wife was unsure if it would be safe to have our three-year old there due to increased tensions and potential for violence. While I shared her concern, I noted that protest by its very nature tends to happen when conditions are tense, and I don’t think the Trump regime will get MORE chill about civil rights so in a weird way, now might be the safest time to protest. We talked some more and agreed that since we had no childcare available, I’d go to the protest and she’d stay home with our son. I grant that three might be too young to understand what’s going on, but I want my kids to learn from a young age that democracy isn’t something you just do every four years at the ballot box. It requires bodies in the streets. Am I wrong trying to enlist a preschooler in the cause? Should I just chill?
Since 2016, my wife and I have taken our kids with us to basically every protest we’ve attended. Our kids have protested against Trump, ICE, police brutality, mass shootings, and even Beltway expansion. There was only one instance where things got hairy. It was an anti-gun protest on the National Mall, with David Hogg giving a fiery speech from the main stage. After Hogg was finished, there was a loud noise that everyone thought was a gunshot, so the crowd broke into a light run away from the scene. It turned out to be nothing, and neither my wife nor I regretted bringing the kids along. Even when our youngest wasn’t old enough to understand what we were doing, he still got to be outside and interact with new people. That was reason enough to rope him in.
Now, here’s the twist. Now that the youngest is 13, he wants NOTHING to do with politics. He gets pissed if we start yapping about it at the dinner table, and that’s not because he’s grown into a Stoolie or anything. He just doesn’t care, which makes sense given his age. He only wants to talk about kid shit: anime, video games, Takis, etc. Grownup shit bores him. So don’t be shocked if your own kids develop a similar news aversion. You can instill your values in them, as my wife and I have, but don’t be surprised when they pull kid privilege and opt out of all our grownup horseshit. That’s their right.
John:
I just completed a road trip with the family last weekend (you better believe I made sure to tell everyone we beat the GPS by three minutes). While driving, I was thinking about all the billboards you see. Almost every other billboard in a state with legal weed is advertising the nearest cannabis shop, and in Wisconsin (state of aforementioned road trip), every three billboards tells you where the nearest Culver’s is. But a mainstay of the highway billboard lineup, as long as I can remember, is the local “Adult Super Center” billboard, right off Exit [XX]”. What share of drivers actually see these specific billboards and think to themselves, “You know what, I’ve been meaning to update my adult toy collection, let me get off the highway.” To that end, other than your billboards advertising food, hotels, gas (the essentials), what category of billboard that you see on a road trip do you think is most effective?
Oh I love new billboard day! And yes, I especially love seeing big signs for the nearest strip club and/or dildo emporium. Even if I don’t end up stopping, and the temptation is real, those billboards are still a pleasant reminder to be horny. I see an ad for Tony Impala’s Gentlemen’s Club, with a dolled-up pornstar staring lasciviously down at me from her lofty perch, and I think to myself, “Oh right, sex! Fuck yeah, sex!” Then I start plotting some private time for myself once I reach my final destination. This country isn’t openly horny enough, so I thank those billboards for their efforts in helping reverse the trend.
I also enjoy the regional flavor of billboards. Rural Georgia had so many methadone clinic advertisements that I got a REAL good sense of how folks out in that part of the country were doing. And every billboard to and from SFO airport is for a D-list app or tech firm that you’ve never heard of, and hopefully never will. Every half-mile, I was greeted with some tasteful message that Dorpa will change the way I see business modeling. Can’t say I was terribly convinced.
But you know what billboards do work on me? Fireworks outlets. If I can get dangerous fireworks for cheap, I’m pulling over. That’s a Big Daddy Drew promise.
Email of the week!
Seth:
Years ago, my wife and I went to an ice cream shop in a very affluent suburb of Los Angeles (shoutout to Sweet Rose Creamery in Santa Monica). Keep in mind that this was a while before the pandemic, so sampling was still a common practice. The couple ahead of us was in their mid-50s, clearly wealthy, and were very vocal about their flavor-related indecisiveness. When they approached the counter, the husband asked for a sample. But when the employee reached across the counter with the spoon, the man leaned over and ate the sample straight from the employee’s hand. The rest of the shop was absolutely fucking floored by what we had just witnessed.
No chance I get over witnessing something like that.
