Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're covering screen angst, littering, socks, and more.


Your letters:

Matt:

I am having the most mind-numbing debate with my friends: creamy or crunchy peanut butter? I can't get off the fact that peanut butter was made to be creamy. If I wanted peanuts in my peanut butter, I'd just buy goddamn peanuts. It also messes with the consistency of a solid PB&J sandwich. I don't want a bunch of little crunchy fuckers in my sandwich.


This is one of those debates where people treat you like a fucking Martian if you happen to occupy the side that they do not occupy. OMG YOU LIKE CREAMY YOU'RE SO WEIRD BRO. This is how arguments about food and beer go now. We have made them partisan topics. It used to be about getting fat, man.

When I was kid, I loved crunchy peanut butter because I require textural elements, and that's what I'd probably buy if I were buying peanut butter on my own. But now I have kids, and they like it smooth, and that's fine by me, too. It still tastes good, and it's useful for cooking. I'm a peanut-butter whore. I don't care what form it comes in, so long as it has a fuckload of sugar and isn't that organic shit with the 50 pounds of oil sitting on top.

Kyle:

Let's say you were transported back in time to before the rise of smartphones—let's go with the mid-'80s. Wouldn't any wait at the doctor's office, dentist, auto-repair shop, or anywhere else totally suck? All you have is six-month-old boring magazines and, if you're lucky, maybe a TV tuned to some terrible station playing soap operas or something similar. How long before you go on homicidal rampage due to extreme boredom caused by a super-long wait at the DMV?


I think I'd adjust eventually. I mean, I've been on planes without WiFi (if you fly some shitty airline like United, the existence of WiFi is basically a crapshoot, and if you ask the gate agent about it, they NEVER know for certain and make you feel like a spoiled prick for asking), and I've done okay with a book or trying to sleep and failing or pulling out the in-flight magazine and reading the movie summary for Blended and getting one-third of the way through the "easy" Sodoku puzzle before giving up. I've managed to survive that, so I think I could handle being airdropped into the '80s. I'd probably feel all refreshed without my smartphone around to nag at me. I know that's your standard new-age horseshit, but it's true. Spending an hour not looking at a fucking screen now feels pretty invigorating. I'd also probably become an alcoholic—staring off into space is 10 times more fun when you're drunk.

When I wait in line at the DMV or the auto-body shop now—waiting at a mechanic, to me, is probably the worst wait in the universe, since at the DMV, at least you get a number—I check my phone, but the phone usually runs out of stuff to check. Once I go through all my emails and send out desperation texts that go unreturned and the Twitter news dries up, I'm shit out of luck. So I'll just swipe down and refresh and refresh and refresh until I'm like What the fuck am I doing? It's not much more enjoyable than just going without the thing.


Jeremy:

Suppose that a beloved artist/band announces that they will release a new album the day after Election Day, but only if their chosen candidate wins. Otherwise, the album will be destroyed. Let's assume that the promise is made with enough time to register to vote. Who would have the most influence? Who has the most voting-age fans who give enough of a shit to register and make it to the polls, but not enough of a shit to respect the democratic process? Beyoncé?


Beyoncé. I can't even think of anyone who would come close. Every white girl in her twenties would go fleeing to the polls, which would give the Democratic candidate a significant boost in terms of voter turnout.

In fact, if I were the Democratic candidate, I would do exactly this. I would set up a Super PAC and funnel $10 million to Beyoncé (do Super PACs work like that? Probably not), and then I would ask her to make a video to be released on midnight of Election Day, but it only gets released if I win (provided Beyoncé agrees with my liberal pledge to give every American a free puppy and institute a tax on misspelled web comments). Then I would sweep the coastal states, carry the Midwest, defeat the GOP, and Beyoncé would unleash a five-minute video of herself dancing with a chair and singing WAY too fast, and people would lose their goddamn minds. That's the kind of modern electioneering you have to look forward to in 2016.


Eric:

I live in L.A. and have a decent commute. Along the way, I like to enjoy a banana. Typically, I'll throw the peel in a planted median full of bushes. For the second time now, I've been beeped at for littering. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I destroying the fragile L.A. ecosystem with my biodegradable banana peels? I should also note that I consider myself an environmentalist.

Technically, you ARE littering, because you're tossing garbage out of your car. It's a safety issue. What if you throw the peel out, and you miss the bush, and it lands in the road, and an old man slips on it, and then his cane goes up in the air and crashes through the windshield of an oil tanker, and then the oil tanker crashes into a building and blows up, and then that building topples over and hits another building, which also topples over, and then people think it's a terrorist attack, and then the President nukes China in mistaken retaliation? See where all this leads? You should probably just keep the banana peel in the car and wait until you park to get rid of it, even if banana peels are gross and icky.


In general, you should avoid all fruit in a car because a) why have fruit when you can have a Slim Jim? and b) fruit is messy. I tried to eat a Clementine in the car the other day, and it turned out to be seeded (lousy seeds, I'll kill you all), and so I had to roll down my window to spit the seeds out into the freezing cold, which is ALSO probably littering. So avoid all car fruit.

Heather:

Last week my husband and I went to our local Culver's. Somehow, my order (to the high-school-aged cashier) of a butterburger with everything ended up being a butterburger with no toppings at all. I was hungry and I don't like to complain, so I just ate it, dipping it into the ketchup reserved for my fries. Surprisingly, it was the best damn tasting burger I've had in a long time. I'm turning 30 next month, and I am not a picky eater at all. I'll admit I silently judge adults who always special-request food or prefer children's food. My question is, how immature does it make me look to order a hamburger plain or with just ketchup? Will people judge me for this?


They might, but you can turn it around and pretend you're some kind of burger purist. There's a famous burger place in New Haven called Louis' Lunch that serves its burgers on plain toast and FORBIDS the use of condiments. You can get cheese or tomato or onion but there's no ketchup, no mustard, and no other toppings, which is some seriously fascist shit, but people love the burgers anyway. So if anyone rags on you for ordering a plain burger with ketchup, you can just sneer at them and be like, "Adding toppings dilutes the flavor of the chuck mix, YOU WHORE," and then carry on.

By the way, while I'm here, I'd just like to say that all appetizer "sliders" are horseshit. They always sound really good, and then you end up with a dry little patty tucked into a cream-puff shell. You are always, without fail, better off ordering a regular-sized burger. I know you think you can get away with being all cute and healthy by eating a miniature burger, but that is a LIE. Get the big burger. Big burgers are fucking great.


Jared:

Is it weird for my girlfriend and me to have a crush on another couple? I introduced my girlfriend to the other couple who are married. Since my girlfriend and I started dating, we've been hanging out with them and have developed some sort of couple crush on them. This past weekend we asked them out for dinner and drinks, and as we were leaving they asked what we were doing next weekend, presumably to hang out again. My girlfriend and I were giddy about this and subsequently talked about how well the night went the whole way home. Is there such a thing as being exclusive with another couple? I want that. I want to it to be Facebook official and everything. I want the four of us to have a nickname. I want to go on some shitty couple's vacation to a shitty beach and post pictures all over social media about how happy I am with this couple.


Are you gonna swap partners? That comes next, right? Gotta do that partner swap.

Anyway, these are common thoughts for any couple that has lucked into finding a perfect friend couple. Good couples are hard to come by. Usually, one of them is a dud (the guy; it's always the guy), and that means one spouse has to suffer in conversation while the other spouse enjoys a legitimate friendship. So when you happen upon a cool guy and cool girl who are together and like hanging out with you, it's like striking oil. OH GOD PLEASE DON'T LET THEM MOVE. But I would take it slow. You're gonna scare the shit out of this cool couple and drive them away, and then you're back to having dinner parties with Lawyer Bob and his wife, Crazy PTA Mom.


I never hang out with anyone these days, because I have three small children, and they require love and attention and chicken nuggets. But I daydream of the day when they are out of the house and my old lady and I are hosting tasteful dinner parties with some POWER COUPLE and we're all jetting off to Barcelona together and drinking shitloads of wine. I want my life to basically be Sexy Beast before Ben Kingsley shows up at the door. IT WILL HAPPEN.

Mike:

I just headed into the bathroom at work and saw the fire-alarm light next to the door. Do you think people have died because they were taking a shit in an office building and the fire alarm went off, and they refused to leave because they were shitting and assumed it was a drill?


I guess it must have happened once or twice. In the event of a fire, there's supposed to be a drill captain on every floor who makes sure everyone has evacuated the building, which means sweeping the bathrooms and conference rooms and whatnot and screaming out, "Holy shit, there's a REAL fire!" so that anyone mid-poop knows that playtime is over. But if some office was lax in obeying fire codes, maybe the end result was a guy getting burned to a crisp while pushing one out.

When I worked in New York, we had a shitload of office fire drills, and they were always poorly timed. They always happened right when I was about to start eating lunch, or whenever I was in the middle of reading the Real Ultimate Power website for the ninth time. I'd always react as if it were the biggest imposition on Earth. "Ugh, we have go through a three-minute rehearsal that could potentially save my life? GOD, TODAY SUCKS."


HALFTIME!

Jessica:

Where do you look when you're at the dentist and they're cleaning your teeth? I always keep my eyes open, but averted. If you close your eyes, does it look like you're enjoying it? And looking them in the eye is just plain crazy, right?!


I alternate between closing my eyes and looking away. I NEVER look directly at them, because they're usually wearing those weird glasses with the little microscopes on them, and if you look right at them, you can see into the dentist's very soul. I want no part of that. Instead, I will stare at that hanging light they use that looks like a spaceship steering wheel, and then I will shut my eyes when I'm on the verge of blindness.

Another good place to stare is at the wall, where the dentist has cross-section diagrams of the tooth root and thank-you notes from kindergarteners. The kids were forced to write those, obviously. No child likes dentists.


Tsunami:

In your opinion, who's the best and worst sports broadcaster currently? (any sport)


I'll take Chris Fowler as the best. Unless you're some loony college football fan who thinks every broadcaster has it in for Tennessee or something, I don't think I've ever met anyone who hates Chris Fowler. (Even if he does occasionally screw up; Kei Nishikori might hate him now, I guess.)

Everyone else is tied with Berman for the worst. By the way, every sports fan thinks they can be good on TV (I know I think this), and yet your average sports fans LOATHES every announcer, so I have to think that means the job is harder than it looks.


Seth:

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we find out the old knight has been guarding the Holy Grail for 700 years (kept alive by its power). Other than masturbation, what do you think he did all by himself in that room for 700 years? Do immortals still get hungry? How bad did he smell? I think I could last in that situation for like maybe two years before I said "fuck it" and walked out.


AND WHAT THE FUCK DID HE DRINK? That always nagged at me. I think that you're supposed to assume that, by drinking from the grail, the knight essentially passed being from a mere mortal into being a kind of demigod who requires neither food nor water, and exists in a state of such rapture that he can guard the grail for seven centuries without complaint. And Gregggggg wants to know how carrying the grail across the threshold triggers a booby trap! THAT CAN'T HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE.

Erik:

Do you think actors/actresses go to Halloween parties dressed as roles they've played? Like does Jennifer Lawrence show up to your costume party as Katniss Everdeen? Also, would that be super cool, or completely lame?


There's no way. You'd be seen as an egotistical nutjob if you did that. Now, all of those people ARE egotistical nutjobs, and maybe a few of them are shameless enough to just go waltzing around in costume at Halloween or any other time of year, for that matter. But I have to think that's an enormous faux pas otherwise. Also, those people are probably a) sick of dressing up in those costumes anyway (every moviemaking story includes a "horror" story about the actor having to sit in the makeup chair for five hours OMG THAT MUST HAVE BEEN LIKE PRISON), and b) desperate to not be typecast. Just once in my life, I'd like to hear an actor say, "You know what? I'm a shitty actor unless I'm playing a homicidal maniac, so you should just cast me as that from now on."

Also, I bet asking a movie star to dress up in character for sex is also a no-no. Imagine how many times Carrie Fisher got asked to throw on a slave-Leia outfit before intercourse. I bet she turned down every last request.


Mark:

Why can't you cancel a floor in an elevator by pressing it a second time? That shit is locked in if you mess up and you feel like a total dickhead. Why are there no elevator-button-pressing do-overs?


Probably because it would cost more to install that kind of button system, and because it would backfire. Imagine getting in and pushing the button for the eighth floor, only some punk kid undoes it just before the elevator gets there. You would murder that kid. That would almost be worse than the standard kid move of pressing ALL the buttons.

Aaron:

Why is it that deli meat tastes so much better as soon as it's sliced, and gets incrementally worse each minute that goes by thereafter?


This is why I eat half the bag of ham the second I get home and get it out of the grocery bag. Sometimes I even dive into it right in the store, which is completely out of line. People are horrified.

Anyway, I assume the meat starts spoiling the second they slice it, so the longer you take to eat it, the more rotten it becomes. I've eaten threshold ham, mostly because I don't want to waste money (or ham, for that matter). It's a distressing experience. Ham isn't supposed to be tangy.


Jeff:

My wife and I have been married three years now and are starting to talk about having kids. She is dead set on making a decision as to whether we are going to start trying. It freaks me out to make a direct and concrete decision on something like that. I feel like I am firmly in the "let it happen" camp, because I don't think you ever really can be ready for that type of firm decision. Am I being overly paranoid, or is it normal to establish a plan of attack for the kiddie-having?


Every guy wants to ease into the process because they want an extended period of babymaking sex. If you knock your wife up right away, then you only got in a month of unprotected mayhem. So the husband is like, "Let's play it cool."

Meanwhile, your wife has probably heard enough horror stories of infertility and timing your ovulation with the passing of Saturn that she wants to have a gameplan ready to go. This is completely reasonable, because getting pregnant isn't always a cakewalk. Some couples have to time that shit down to the microsecond, or else the opportunity is gone. And then it's Clomid and $50,000 Romanian in vitro treatments for you! And as more time passes without a positive test, the more exhausting the process becomes for everyone.


So, knowing all that, prepare for your wife to have a plan of attack. That's completely normal. Also, never waffle on shit like this. Don't hem and haw and let everyone just run you over in life. If you need a couple months, ask for a couple of months, and your wife will probably be fine with it. If you're into just letting things happen, mannnnnnn, prepare for shit to actually happen.

Aldo:

I have a friend who sleeps with his socks on, like, always. I tell him to go back to the village in the Old Country his parents are from, but he swears this helps with flu prevention, better digestion, and, possibly, virility (I'm not kidding about any of these). Should I continue to ridicule him or start donning my casuals at sleep time?


No, make fun of him. That's a crazy person. How could sleeping in a pair of Wigwams give you a bigger boner? You probably buy lots of QVC products if you believe that shit. It's one thing to nap in your clothes and keep your socks on before your feet quickly turn hot and clammy and you strip them off. But wearing socks for a full night's rest every night seems impossible. I don't know how you could tolerate it for more than six seconds, unless you have the flu or something*.

(*Sometimes, when you're sick and you got the chills, it feels kinda good to sleep under the covers wearing sweatpants and a fleece pullover and socks and all that crazy shit. NONE MORE WARM.)


Derek:

So, I'm a junior in college, never drank in my life, just never had a desire to. But, I just lost a bet, and now I have to get drunk once. Two questions: Am I a loser for not partying in college, and what should I get drunk on for the first time?


1. No. You're fine.

2. Beer. Beer is a fine starter alcohol, because a) it's an acquired taste, which means it usually takes a first-timer a bit to plow through one and B) it has a relatively low alcohol content compared to wine or liquor. The first time I got drunk was either in 8th or 9th grade (can't remember which), thanks to this one junior at my school, and he was like, "Drew, I'm gonna get you drunk." I don't think I've ever been more excited. I asked him how much booze it would take me to get drunk, and looked at how big I was (250 or so at the time), and he was like, "Two beers." AND HE WAS RIGHT! Two beers and I was in just the right state of mind. Of course, then I drank more and threw up. But for a few minutes, I handled my shit well!


Jamo:

After cooking with a pan on the stovetop, I like to take the still-hot pan and run cold water over it—especially over the part where the handle meets the pan (gets really hot there)—making it hiss and steam like I'm a badass 17th-century blacksmith quenching steel for a battle axe. My wife says this ruins the integrity of the cookware somehow. I contend that whatever damage this causes is outweighed by the fact (?) that doing this makes me look cool and sexy. What say you?


I DO THAT! I fucking love doing that. LET OFF SOME STEAM, BENNETT. My wife thinks I ruin all the pans by jacking the heat too high, and she's probably right. I go through skillets like they're underwear. But it's worth it. You need a high temperature for a PROPER SEAR, god dammit.

Email of the week!

Alex:

At the beginning of every month, I go to the store and buy an enormous amount of burrito ingredients (rice, black beans, refried beans, pinto beans, chicken, ground turkey, cilantro, spinach, tomatoes, cheese, salsa, sour cream, onions, green peppers). While watching football on a Sunday, I will chop, prep, cook everything up. I then mix this terrific volume of food together in a Tupperware storage container. Finally, I put the mixture into warmed tortillas and wrap them up in foil before freezing. Usually this process nets me around 40 burritos. Since these freezer burritos have become 80 percent of my diet, my GI tract has become a disaster. I'm farting constantly. It sounds like I'm constantly zipping a zipper, but on a massive scale. These are not small, squeaking farts. Think of a foghorn blasting inside a church cathedral. Now double that. I had one the other day that helped propel me up the stairs. Hand to god. My coworkers and friends treat me like a maniac for my dietary choices. I'm not concerned about them. I know freezer burritos are just good hustle.


You're insane.

Drew Magary writes for Deadspin. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at drew@deadspin.com. You can also order Drew's book, Someone Could Get Hurt, through his homepage.


Image by Sam Woolley.

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