Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're covering elderly couple sex positions, soundproof pants, the end of movies, and more.
Your letters:
Jesse:
I'm at a 'tumble and cheer' thing and all the kids have their names on the wall. Here are the 'good' ones:
Cambree
Karli
Baylee
Jaslynn
Maccie
Balei
Addison
Izzabelle
Kasey
Jadyn
Abigayle
Kinley
Kinsley
Ryleigh
Kyler
Dravyn
Jacelyn
Jacelynn
Kolie
Khloe (2)
Caryss
Blayse
Karsyn
Jaylynn
Kennadi
Brooklyn
RylynnI may have missed a few because there were so many horrible ones they just blended together into one big clusterfuck of terrible.
Well, this email has to be from Utah. Jesus, that is a damning list. The only way Izzabelle is an appropriate name is if your last name is Stradlin. And Maccie! I hope she has a sister named Jayceepynny.
I'd also like to single out Kyler for supreme awfulness. They just took Tyler and switched in a K. That's such a white trash move. Expect a future riddled with Kamuels, Kessicas, and Katthews. There's no stopping these terrible baby namers. They are getting worse at an exponential rate. Look at how badly abused the letter Y is up there. Rylynn uses no vowels at all! I'm waiting for Utah parents to seize upon the W as the next replacement vowel. If you don't think there's a Jwcwlwnn in our future, you are dead wrong. Eventually, all American baby names will resemble some kind of old Welsh dialect.
/waits for a commenter to tell me I'm a dick because Kyler is actually a common Hindu name
Jesse:
What would have happened if Ted Ginn broke loose on the game ending safety punt and Flacco actually ran onto the onto the field, and successfully tackled Ginn, at say the Ravens' 20-yard line? What would the refs have done? What about the aftermath after the game?
In that situation, I do believe the refs have the discretion to award San Francisco a touchdown on the play anyway (although Flacco, who was clearly half-joking when you listen to the audio, apparently did not know this). Given how poor the reffing was in the Super Bowl, it's no guarantee that Jerome "The Booger" Boger would have had the sack to make the right call, especially given that, if Flacco really did run out and tackle Ginn on the return, mass chaos would ensue. People would swarm the field. Niners players would attack Flacco for pulling such a bush league play. Jim Harbaugh would burst into flames. The refs would huddle up for 20 endless minutes with everyone at the stadium screaming at them to make one decision or another. Ultimately, someone from the League would stick a gun in Boger's belly and tell him to award the TD to San Francisco. Then Boger would formally announce the call over the PA system, everyone would go batshit, and CBS would lose its main audio feed. I really wish this had happened. There were about 50 different cool ways that game could have ended and none of them occurred.
I also think Flacco would end up among the most vilified players in NFL history. He would almost certainly be fined a massive amount, and perhaps suspended for the first game of the 2013 season. Paparazzi would hound him for weeks and weeks after the infamous play went down. He would retreat into an emotional shell, barely speaking to anyone and never daring to say anything that would make waves. Which means he'd pretty much be the same person he is now.
Bill:
What if it became standard that all pants would be soundproof? We all know some farts you can't let out because you just know they'll have some serious volume. But once that's eliminated, you think we would be walking around in a permanent confusing "who done it" stinkfest?
Jesus, soundproof pants. I'd pay, like, at least $20 for that, which is WAY past my usual budget at Old Navy.
Obviously a percentage of farts are already silent, in which case your fartdar usually fingers the perpetrator by locating the smell of the fart cloud and pinpointing the person closest to it. So I don't think much would change in society at large because so many people are already hesitant to audibly fart in public.
On a side note, I would love to see the worldwide market share for silent farts. Is it half of all farts? Is it more than half? I'd also like to know all my cumulative fart stats when I die. I have to think that your personal silent fart percentage goes down after you've been married because you no longer give a shit. I fart so freely around my house, you'd half expect a turd to drop out of my boxers once a day.
Bronwyn:
A woman I know from the train works at a financial services and insurance firm, and she told me about the corporate Christmas gifts they got this year. The Giants sent a nice bottle of wine, with the label autographed by Eli Manning, and two Tiffany crystal wine glasses. But the Jets sent a bottle of liquid hand soap, with a Jets logo on it. She said it wasn't even fancy hand soap, it looked like the same stuff they use in the restrooms at the stadium.
Jesus, that's the saddest thing ever. Did the soap at least have a foam dispenser? I like it when my soap comes pre-lathered.
By the way, I'd wager that only 20 percent of all public bathroom soap dispensers have actual soap in them. Ever try every goddamn dispenser in the place before realizing you have no means to scrub the fecal matter off your hands? It's a real low point. And half the time, I can't even tell if the full dispensers are actually working. Did it squirt in my hand? Why was it so lacking in viscosity? Did the janitor fill this with pure urine?
Kevin:
I think it's fairly safe to assume everyone knows, right?
But I don't know. What does Mr. Suburban know? Does he know that Roger Goodell rigged the Superdome lights? Does he know the name of the bin Laden shooter? Has he found a particularly good place for chicken pot pie? I MUST KNOW. TORTURE ME NO LONGER.
Daniel:
What's up with quarterbacks licking their fingers before every snap? Isn't that kind of gross? I would not want to catch a ball that Mark Sanchez basically spit on. One year everyone is going to get foot-and-mouth disease.
I don't think you have to worry about Mark Sanchez throwing you a ball that you'll actually be able to catch. Maybe he used team-approved Christmas soap before the lick.
I have no problem with the customary pre-snap hand lick. You gotta get a good grip on the ball, fella. Plus, I get to copy the pros whenever I throw a Nerf ball to my kid in the backyard. I get real, real serious before that throw. No way I'm taking any chances with a saliva-free throwing hand.
Cameron:
If you were gifted powers to resurrect NFL players and coaches back from the dead to provide commentary for a game, who would you pick and why?
I think most people would choose Howard Cosell, and then immediately regret it. He was a fucker.
Mickey:
How long would you last if you were homeless? I asked my wife this question, and she said a week (she's fucking soft, though). I'd like to think I could make it several weeks, maybe a few months before I lost my will to live/die of starvation/hypothermia/shanking.
The stipulations are you can't ever not become homeless; once you're homeless, that's your permanent station in life. Also, you have to be homeless in a northern city, with harsh winters and shit...none of this pussy-ass, Fort Lauderdale homeless shit.
So then, am I AWARE that I'll never stop being homeless? Because that would factor into it. If you know that things will never get better for you, that's a much faster avenue to suicidal despair than being like, "Whoa hey, that rich guy gave me his baked potato! OL' DREW IS BACK IN THE GAME!" More than the elements, I have to think that the hardest part of being homeless is the destruction it wreaks on your self-confidence, and the growing idea that you BELONG out there on the street. That no one loves you enough to take you in. That you've fallen so far that you have no prayer of recovering. That you will die cold and alone and no one will give a shit. All of that might even be worse than waking up in someone else's feces. Then again, maybe not.
Theoretically, you should be able to live a good long time despite being homeless. There's no shortage of food and blankets to scavenge. There's free water at public water fountains. And if the weather turns rotten, there are shelters and churches to turn to if need be. Your biggest threats would be crime (for example, an arrogant mergers and acquisitions executive stabbing you for pleasure) and an obvious lack of health care. You could survive for years and years. Again, that's in theory. Personally, I start to have a nervous breakdown 20 minutes after the power goes out. When a massive blizzard struck Maryland in February 2010, the wife and I slept under 80 blankets in a 40-degree house and I TOTALLY pretended that I was living on the street. By 2 a.m., I was shivering and miserable and knew that I would never last out there in the real world of homelessness. I'd be shivved and left to die of tetanus within two days.
Don:
Which NFL players or coaches would you want in your crew when the inevitable zombie apocalypse arrives? Do you go with a goal line package like Vince Wilfork and Haloti Ngata, for the biggest human shield possible?
You don't want big guys. It's not like they require more bites to turn full zombie. They have more surface area for nibbling, and they can't run as fast. You need players who have agility, who can learn to use a lobo in a relatively short period of time and outrun the zombie hordes. And you need to make sure those players aren't ME FIRSTERS who will steal all the food from the campground and go freelancing on their own. That means Russell Wilson can play for my zombie killing team any day. You won't catch him standing around during armageddon!
And you need Jim Harbaugh. If there were a zombie attack, I would do everything Jim Harbaugh said. He would scream at me to start digging protective trenches and I would say, "I can't do it coach. I'm too tired and I've lost half my leg!" and he would grab me by the collar and scream, "DIG THAT TRENCH OR I WILL FUCKING EAT YOU MYSELF" and an hour later there would be a trench. Coach Jim pushes you to places you never thought you could go!
Josh:
Some of my close friends and I recently went bowling. The game quickly turned into who could bowl the ball the fastest when we noticed the mph counter on our screen. This new game of speed ball was so much more fun than regular bowling. I'm wondering what other activities would be improved with the simple addition of a radar gun?
There's a radar gun at bowling alleys now? Holy shit, that changes everything. I mean, I've always bowled for speed. I don't care if I knock down any pins so long as people know I'm a big strong man who can roll a ball really fast. I don't want to hit the pin. I want to ERADICATE the pin. This is why I always end up rolling a 64.
I think a speedometer would improve golf carts. Maybe fancy golf carts have them, but none of the oversized Rascal scooters I've been on have had one.
HALFTIME!
Casey:
In a fight to the death, who wins more often: a Hawk or a Human?
We are stripping any type of environmental variables out of the equation for this death match. This is one normal sized hawk vs. one normal sized man, in a white, plain room, 20 x 20 x 20. No perch, no weapons, no way out.
Both Human and Hawk are motivated to survive and kill the other, but neither possesses any extra rage or bravery out of the ordinary. Both are also aware of the stakes: there is no surprise attack element.
Personally, I think the human wins 70-85% of the death matches. Yes, the Hawk would badly scar and claw the human, but how many times would that need to happen before you actually died and your heart stopped?
So it's an ordinary hawk and not a DEATH HAWK? I think the hawk would have the upper hand at first because it's a wild animal relying on pure instinct, while you are still a man and thus aware of your own mortality. There would be a five-minute freakout period at the beginning in which you're screaming OH MY FUCKING GOD THIS HAWK WANTS ME DEAD! And that gives the hawk the edge.
I assume that the hawk would essentially stage a series of dive attacks on you, with you frantically trying to grab the hawk to snap its head off. For the hawk to kill you, it would have to swipe at your neck and open your carotid. OR, it could blind you and then slowly peck you to death over the course of hours, which is still preferable to going to a Mumford & Sons concert (ZING!!!!). I don't know that a lucky neck swipe is as probable as you reaching out and getting a firm hold of the thing. But getting a hold if it is still no guarantee that you'll emerge the victor. The hawk can retaliate by pecking and flapping and, again, freaking you the hell out. It has a built-in psychological edge, even if you are in full survival mode. So I put the human's win percentage down at around 50 percent. The hawk has air superiority and can be utterly relentless if it so chooses. I really hope I don't ever have to fight one.
Clinton:
I have lost the ability to watch movies by myself. I mean, if my fiance is there and we're watching a movie together, it's usually fine, or if I'm at a movie theater... no problems. But if I'm alone and I try to watch a movie... be it an old favorite or something new... I invariably get about 20 mins into it (30 mins, max), get bored/distracted, and turn it off. This happens damn near EVERY TIME. I'm 32 years old and I have the attention span of a Pixie Stix-drunk toddler. Is this just a part of getting older, or is something wrong with my brain?
It's a handful of things. First off, being older means that you are naturally pickier. Every year, your tastes become more and more narrow until you hate pretty much everything, including entire swaths of the human population (Pennsylvanians? FUCK THEM). That means that you're going to be less tolerant of sitting through an entire movie, especially if you have a good idea of where it's going. Also, being older means you have more responsibilities, so it's good bet that your movie-watching will be broken up by a late request from work, or a wife or a child demanding something. And once you're used to movies always being interrupted, that just becomes part of your watching routine. I don't even count on watching the full movie in one night anymore. I know that every movie I watch is now a two-part miniseries.
The other thing is that you now live in a world where the distractions are far more tempting. When I was a kid, there was no Internet to lure me away from watching Bachelor Party for the ninetieth time. The movie was the only leisurely distraction I had. But now you can check email and Twitter and see if anyone responded to your pithy comment on Reddit and you can sneak in a game of Temple Run. Those are all fun little distractions that don't take up a large amount of time. After that, watching an entire movie starts to feel like homework. And given how shitty a lot of movies are, a lot of us have better things to do than sit there and hope that the second hour of Snow White & The Huntsman is better than the first.
By the way, don't tell Leitch any of this or he'll strangle himself.
John:
I'm getting married soon, and we intend to try to have kids very shortly thereafter. I'm all about both of these things, but one thing about the kid really concerns me: what do you do with him/her if you two are alone in public and you have to take a massive shit? You can't just leave the kid outside, right?
It depends on the age of the kid. I have a seven-year-old and a seven-year-old can use a public bathroom on her own and hang outside while you take a shit in the men's room, which is HUGE. It's a milestone in parenting that deserves some kind of commemorative scrapbook. That's the day your child turns into a friend you can take anywhere.
But younger kids are a bit dicier. With a baby, you have to put the baby in a stroller and then either leave the stroller outside the stall or (preferably) find a handicapped stall to wheel them into. A three-year-old can hang with you while you shit, which is awkward for all parties involved. But sometimes it's preferable to leaving them on their own outside the stall, where they can lap up pubic hair-infested sink water or be abducted by the hobo shooting heroin in the next shitter over. Neither situation is an ideal setup, but those are the first moments in parenthood when you find that you have to leave your kid on their own for just a moment and that's good for them. They usually rise to the occasion while you're in there shitting your brains out. Sometimes they end up drinking toilet water, but other times they do just fine.
But yeah, shitting alone is wayyyy better. I look forward to doing it again in 2027.
Brett:
Ever thought about taking a curling iron and straightening out your pubes? It's risky because the thing's hot as fuck, but I'd like to see a girl's facial expression when you drop your drawers and there's a curtain over your dick.
I think it could look quite fetching. You could even style bangs for it!
Ryan:
Pulled this outta my ear with the paper clip. I was so amazed I couldn't toss it for two days.
That's distressing on so many levels.
Rob:
What if NFL teams could replace their offensive linemen with sumo wrestlers?
It wouldn't work. Sumo wrestlers are conditioned to wrestle for roughly 15 seconds. In other words, they're ideal offensive linemen if an NFL game consists of exactly one play. But when you're running 50 or 60 plays a game, Yokozuna isn't built to last. It's a shame, really. I'd like to see more human freaks incorporated into the sports world: the hypothetical 500-pound hockey goalie, the seven-foot field goal blocker, the 600-pound batter who is sent out to get hit by a pitch every at bat... I'd like all these proposed ideas given a trial run.
Alex:
So, my grandparents 69th wedding anniversary is coming up, and I was wondering, what are the chances anyone has ever 69-ed on their 69th wedding anniversary? It was the first thing that came to mind last week when they mentioned it'd be 69 years in 2013.
You're talking about two people who are in their late 80s at the very youngest. I just don't see how it's possible. Even if they were still physically fit and able to contort themselves into such a position (and were on the kinds of medication needed to keep their genitals stimulated), I still don't think they'd bother. By the time you're 90 years old, you already know that 69ing is overrated. Seriously, it sounds like a cool thing to do, but the man can barely breathe and the woman ends up working the top side of the man's penis, which is the least sensitive part. It's all wrong. They'll probably just share an Ensure bottle and turn in early. And good for them! 69 years and one filthy-minded grandson to show for it. That's good livin'!
Scott:
I was driving home for the holidays, and came across a "Speed Test Zone" on I-15. The posted speed limit was 80 MPH, and I couldn't tell you how happy it made me. I was hitting 88 MPH like my name was Doc Brown, but at the same time I was worried that if I actually crashed my car that it would prove that people aren't responsible enough to drive that fast.
Speed Test Zones exist? Holy shit, sign me up. I like the idea of designated areas where we can toy with state and Federal laws. You could have a one-square-mile area where dealing ALL drugs is perfectly legal (HAMSTERDAM). You could designate a random suburb of Cleveland as a legal fistfighting zone. There are so many ways we could improve society (and reap millions in potential television revenue) simply by taking certain areas of the population and testing them like lab rats. Sign me up for "legal frottage" district.
Daniil:
If you were granted a wish and guaranteed to always be allowed to drive a certain speed, but also, in no circumstance, ever be allowed to exceed it, what's the lowest speed you would agree to?
For example, if you choose 45, you're always guaranteed to go 45, meaning you'd never have to wait in traffic again. You're always allowed to go slower if you need to, but can never exceed 45. Obviously, you can say 120, but what's the absolute lowest you would accept?
You can't do 45 because driving 45 on any freeway for a significant amount of time would be torturous. It would take nearly twice as long to get anywhere. Everyone would honk at you. You would want to curl up into a ball and die from embarrassment. The lowest acceptable constant speed would have to be 60, MAYBE 55. But no lower than that. I'll deal with stoplights for the rest of my life to avoid being Louis Skolnick on the freeway.
Email of the week time!
Joey:
The other day at my high school, this kid I have known forever named Ryan committed perhaps the most depraved act of douchebaggery I have ever heard of. He was walking to gym class and walking by a backpack. The kids he was walking with jokingly bet him to take a shit in the bag, and they told him that if he did, they would each give him five dollars.
Surprisingly, Ryan decided to do it. He picked the bag up, walked to a secluded part of the hallway, and squeezed one out into some random kid's backpack. He shuffled back and returned the backpack. The only problem was that Ryan took the shit right in front of the security cameras. The result was a ten-day suspension and a hard earned twenty-five dollar fine.
High school kids are the worst.
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