Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking about Tommy John, Tony Romo, babies at the movies, and more.
Your letters:
DP:
I feel like I am constantly seeing conflicting news articles regarding red wine. As someone who enjoys red wine, I am not sure whether I am killing myself slowly or prolonging my life indefinitely. So which is it? Which is the fake news?
I have a personal connection to the whole “red wine makes you live longer!” urban legend, because it was this 60 Minutes story from 17 years ago that gave me the idea to write The Postmortal. It’s a great segment if you’re in the mood to remember 60 Minutes as it once was, with the late Morley Safer looking tickled at the idea that resveratrol—a chemical in red wine—could help make human beings live forever.
Spoiler alert: It cannot. Fast-forward to now and you can buy resveratrol supplements pretty much anywhere. You should still ingest the chemical naturally, and even then, it won’t make you immortal. Resveratrol has some mild health benefits, but they’re the same kind of benefits that you’ll get from eating your fruits and veggies on a regular basis. As such, you might be safe drinking one glass of wine a day, but “safe” is pretty much where the miracle ends. Because red wine has alcohol in it, and alcohol has been a proven toxin since the dawn of humanity. Also, do note the one-glass limit that keeps wine safe. That RDA may be feasible in Europe, where people have heard of moderation. But we don’t do moderation here in America. One glass of red wine is what Americans have before they start really drinking.
I haven’t had alcohol in nearly eight years, and the only form of it I truly miss is a nice cabernet. There are plenty of near beers out there that taste as good as the real thing, but all de-alcoholized red wine is shit. I have very little hope that BIG SCIENCE will able to put out a convincing red anytime soon. A good red wine is far too complex a thing to replicate without one of its foremost ingredients.
So please, do have a glass of the real stuff on me. It won’t help you live longer, but aging isn’t a contest. You don’t win anything by dying at 84 instead of 81, and a life without pleasure isn’t a life worth living at all.
(Morley Safer died at 84, by the way.)
Ben:
I just got back from an incredible vacation camping with the family in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan. I got a new pair of sunglasses before the trip that came with croakies that were very convenient for our adventures, and really made me look like the summer camp counselor I was in my youth. I loved it! Now I’m back to my life as a suburban midwestern dad and while I think the croakies looked good, I’m worried it’ll look stupid when I’m not on a camping vacation. How long can I keep wearing these before I look like an asshole?
You’re a dad, yeah? And you’re worried that rocking a pair of croakies will make you look uncool? That ship sailed the moment your wife gave birth, amigo. Wear those croakies with pride, because pride is all you have left now.
You’ll need them, too. I know this firsthand because I have unwittingly started an annual tradition of losing my sunglasses at the beach. I go into the surf with my shades on, get my shit ruined by a wave, and POOF! Shades gone. One time we were swimming around in a bay in St. John, and my kids were like, “You’re gonna lose your sunglasses, Dad.” And I was like, “We’re not even swimming in the open ocean. It’s fine.” Ten minutes later, I was shade-less and my kids were laughing at me. Again. Like I said, it’s tradition now. That’s why I only wear cheap sunglasses into the ocean. Had to lose a $75 pair to learn that lesson. Yes, I know I’m dumb.
To mitigate the problem, my wife bought me a pair of croakies, which worked as intended the first time I brought them along on a trip. I have since failed to remember to pack them on every subsequent vacation. This is why I lost another pair of sunglasses in Cape Cod a month ago. Had to buy a new pair at the beach shack for $26. Not a bad price, all things considered.
The point is: Wear your croakies.
Brian:
I have a request for you. Can you do a quick remembrance of Tommy John, who recently passed (he was very much a guy)? My father and I would often remember Tommy John, especially his three-error game, which we watched on WPIX back in the day.
I cannot, because I’m a little too young to remember the man’s prime. He was still a name-brand pitcher when I first started watching baseball back in the late ’80s, but he was in the twilight of his career by then and ESPN wasn’t ESPN yet, so I have no memory of watching Tommy John play or doing anything cool. I only know him as the surgery guy, same as I only really know Lou Gehrig as the disease guy. One a day a ballplayer will die tragically and have death itself named in his honor—Jose Altuve Syndrome or what have you. It’s not the worst legacy a person can leave behind.
However, I don’t wanna move on from Brian’s request without first recognizing Tommy John’s ability to rock a dad hat, as seen here:
MAGA hats have kinda ruined the whole dad-hat phenomenon, but let’s take a moment to savor the more innocent times when a dad hat was just a dad hat. For maximum dorkiness, a seasoned dad bends the brim only slightly, and then rests the hat on top of his head. He never pulls the hat down onto his head, he simply places on his hair and assumes that’s all he has to do in order to look sharp and keep the dang sun out of his eyes.
As you can see, Tommy John’s hat game was on point. He could have been an abusive Little League coach with a hat game like that. He will be missed, I assume.
Jordan:
I’m 43 (I think my age group is referred to as Xennials) and am hoping for some insight from the parent of a Zoomer. Why is Backrooms so terrifying to Gen Z? As someone who grew up with campy ‘70s/‘80s horror (Halloween, Nightmare on Elm St , etc.) and more recent franchises like Insidious and Conjuring, I don’t find anything particularly scary about liminal spaces. Unsettling? Sure. Horrifying? I just don’t see it. If you ask my younger cousins (late-teens to early-20s) and their friends, they’ll tell you it’s the most spine-chilling thing they’ve ever seen but they can’t specifically tell me why. Can you demystify this one for me?
I liked Backrooms a lot, mostly because it was so different from most of the dogshit studio fare I have take in on a regular basis. I don’t remember being all that frightened by the movie, probably because I’m 49. When you’re younger, scary movies are scarier. When you’re an old man who has literally watched other people die, and nearly died yourself, you can shrug off jump scares a bit more easily. So that’s one part of the equation.
The other part is that Backrooms depicts a world where you’re stuck inside of an anodyne office space indefinitely. (Unless you leave. I dunno why the filmmakers made it so easy for characters to leave the backrooms … good thing it was the kind of horror movie where all of them were too dumb to heed me screaming DON’T GO BACK IN THERE at the screen.) If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle farm, you know it’s a very specific and dull form of hell. Zoomers have either intuited that fact from their parents, or have had the displeasure of being stuck in a cubicle job themselves. They’re also growing up in an America whose power brokers are hellbent on keeping employees trapped in said cubicle farms forever, so I can go the Full Critic on you and say that Backrooms has an existentially frightening element to it underneath the whole “cannibalistic animatronic pirate” shit.
But that’s overanalyzing it. Zoomers are probably just terrified of being trapped somewhere forever without their phones.
Paul:
The possibility of CBS firing Tony Romo is crazy right? He’s the best color commentator in the NFL. Are they paying him too much money? Maybe CBS thinks so, but it’s market rate. Drinking and driving is bad, and no one should do it. But Romo made the same mistake millions of football fans do every Sunday in the fall, in part because CBS and the NFL try to straddle the gray area between promotion, and ignoring, excessive/irresponsible alcohol consumption. Romo should pay his debt to society and go back to work, the way every other NFL fan does when they make this mistake. Or am I missing something?
I think you’re in the minority in loving Romo on the mic there, Paul. I’m one of the few people left who still enjoys when he does games, but that’s exclusively because Romo is so excited for some football, and because he provides a necessary emotional contrast to human tie clip Jim Nantz.
But even I know that Romo quit watching tape two years into the job, preferring to fill the air with all manner of grunts, squeals, gasps, and “I DON’T KNOW HERE, JIM!” This was the work of someone who sounded drunk in the booth, and may very well have been. Again, I don’t really mind that; Harry Caray spent his entire career drunk in the booth and it was magical. However, CBS doesn’t wanna pay $30 million a year to someone who barely gives a shit about preparation. That’s why J.J. Watt will almost certainly take over Romo’s job for good at some point this season. Watt’s good on the mic, and hasn’t released a DUI workout tape to the general public yet. If he yoinks the A booth and Romo never comes back, I can deal with that. So can most people.
HALFTIME!
Craig:
I went to see The Odyssey in iMax the other day with two of my daughters. I was very excited about this. One of my daughters went to our reserved seats in the theater, while the other stayed with me to order concessions. While at the concessions counter, my daughter texted me from the theater to let me know that there was a baby in our row. My first instinct was to get a refund and go home. Instead, I took a deep breath and decided to go with the flow. It turns out the baby slept through most of the movie and, when she was awake, one of her parents took her to the lobby (which was mildly distracting). Leaving all of this aside, who in their right mind brings a baby to a nearly three-hour, R-rated, iMax, loud as hell movie??? What is happening to us?
Brother, you’re talking to a guy who saw someone bring their kid to a screening of Natural Born Killers back in 1994. Not a baby, but a kid old enough to know what they were looking at on the screen. I was an 18-year-old asswipe at the time and even I thought that was fucked up. Didn’t help that Natural Born Killers wasn’t a very good movie, but I digress. Parents will take their kids anyplace if they can burn some clock and avoid shelling out for a babysitter. It has always been thus.
Bringing a tiny baby to a movie is a little bit different, because babies can’t process what’s happening on the screen. All they see/hear is static, which counterintuitively acts as a soothing agent. White noise mimics the sound of living inside your mother’s womb. That’s why a lot of parents keep a white noise machine in the nursery. It’s also why a lot of movie theaters have special Mommy Matinees open to parents with babies. I probably would have taken one of our kids to a showing like that back in the day.
But not The Odyssey. That movie has a truly bullshit R rating, but it IS long and louder than a fucking Blue Angels exhibition. You’ll blow out both of Junior’s eardrums if you take them to that flick, and you should probably rock some earplugs of your own. Someone please buy Chris Nolan some hearing aids already.
Noe:
I’ve been meaning to write in to ask you about cochlear implants, so it was cool to see you talk about it last week. Would you mind telling us more about how they are day-to-day? You wear a hearing aid on the other side so can you compare the two? I have worn hearing aids since I was 13 and have talked to numerous audiologists and ENTs, but they can’t tell me firsthand what it actually FEELS like to use an implant. Can you wear a hat? Can you lay your head sideways without piercing feedback? What are the quirks and features?
You can wear a hat over a cochlear implant, although you have to be careful when you take the hat off and/or adjust it on your head. A cochlear implant sticks to your melon via the power of magnets (how do they work?!), so a wrong move can knock it off. Of course, you’ll know something is amiss because you’ll stop hearing out of the processor once it’s been dislodged.
Otherwise, I basically never notice my processor when it’s affixed to my head. I don’t wear hats regularly, and I never wear my processor when I’m lying down (you don’t have to wear it to bed, because you don’t need all your hearing when you’re asleep). I’m always up and about when I’m wearing it, which means it stays in place and feeds me sound all day long. Takes a few days at first, if that, to get used to wearing one. But it’s no different from a hearing aid in that regard.
One last boring note: my implant processor is a MED-EL Rondo, which has no earpiece. I just wear it on the side of my head and trust the magnet to do its job. Many other cochlear implant processors include an earpiece to help keep them in place. But the earpiece has no functional value beyond that, so I’m not gonna stick something in my ear all day long if I don’t have to.
Ben:
What is your most unexpected celebrity encounter, like running into Glenn Danzig getting cat litter at the pet store?
When I was young, my dad worked for an airline and so we always flew for free, so long as we were willing to be on the standby list. Oftentimes that meant we ended up in first class on domestic flights, which is why I’m such a coddled little boy. Anyway, one day we get an upgrade and the rest of the first-class cabin is packed with almost nothing but WWF wrestlers on their way to an event. The Undertaker sat across from me. Viscera sat in front of me, next to some generic businessman, and I overheard that businessman asking Viscera what he did for a living. That was amusing.
I also sat behind Macho Man Randy Savage on another flight once. Pretty sure that one was in coach. Lemme tell you somethin’ Gene Okerlund, the Macho Man doesn’t like riding in coach class, oh yeah that’s right.
Barry:
With so much interleague play and the universal Designated Hitter, there isn’t any diff between leagues at all now. So why have leagues? Just declare MLB the MLB and take the top ten teams into the post-season?
This question isn’t that far off from demanding that the NFL/NBA playoffs do away with their playoff seeding by conferences/divisions and just set the bracket according to win/loss records and nothing else. I’ve always said that owners will never go for this, because owners like their division titles, plus the rivalries they can foster.
I’m not that far from agreeing with them. Even with the universal DH, I still prefer the American League and the National League to be wholly separate. I don’t like interleague play, even though it’s been around for a while now. I like it when every team has a set rotation of regional opponents, and I like it when the playoffs feature matchups I might not see at all during the regular season. It preserves, in part, the origins of these championship affairs, when conferences really were separate leagues entirely. Also, I’ve been watching sports for so long now that I really do have my own brand image for every conference and division, even if they’re more a construct of my imagination than anything actually distinctive. I’m a creature of habit. Most sports fans are.
That said, no South division team in the NFL should ever get to host a playoff game. I’m not THAT much of a romantic. Fuck those loser teams.
Lexa:
Across all pro and college sports, what is the best conference name? I loved the GLWHA (Great Lakes Women’s Hockey Association), but the most fun to say is NESCAC (New England Small College Athletic Conference). Dark horse to NEWHA, the New England Women’s Hockey Alliance because Alliances seem cooler. Who you got?
The SWAC, mostly because I like saying “swack.” It’s like a perfect combination of swag and smack. I guess you could also glean “wack” from that portmanteau, but no conference that Steve McNair played in could ever truly be described as wack.
I also liked the Pac-10’s name back when it existed, because it reminded me of Pac-Man. ABABABABABABABA.
Ian:
I’m in my 40s and know a few people who have died unexpectedly after a “brief illness.” Is it wrong of me to want obits to say exactly what killed someone young? Just as like community awareness? I’m also a musician and know a few people who have died of drug overdoses but their families never indicated that. I feel like this is stuff people need to know happens and can affect anyone. Am I being selfish or snoop-y?
Oh, I always wanna know why people died. That’s just basic curiosity, as far as I’m concerned. It can also prove to be valuable information, like how the deaths of Tom Petty and Prince helped raise awareness of the opioid crisis still ravaging the country. But obits are usually written by the surviving family members, who aren’t always wild about making the cause of death public. That’s their right, and I know when my curiosity crosses over into nosiness. So I defer to common courtesy in such instances. Will I still read every last detail of Hayden Panettiere’s final hours when some sleazebag publishes them? No comment.
Email of the week!
Brian:
My house recently burned down in the wildfires that tore through Spokane on Aug. 1. Our life since has been a chaotic blur, as you can imagine. Evacuations, staying with family and at hotels, trying to figure out what to do next, navigating insurance, and so on.
This past Sunday, we finally get into the long-term rental we’ll live in while we try to rebuild. Over the ensuing couple of days, we haul in some basic furniture, set up the TV & internet, stock the fridge, and chip away at all sorts of random administrative tasks.
On Tuesday, I get home from work, we order some pizza, the kids are playing happily upstairs, and everything is feeling somewhat calm and normal for the first time in two weeks. What a relief. I sit down on the couch and realize I haven’t watched a Mariners game since the fires, and haven’t even checked scores during that time, which is weird because we’re normally big fans. Baseball just got pushed off to the side.
Turn on the game, pizza at the ready. They lose 22-0 to the Brewers.
Go M’s.
Go M’s.