Illustration by Sam Woolley

Your letters:

John:

Rank the best sports to watch live while inebriated. Hockey has to be the worst, right? Every time I’m at a game and reach down to get a drink or get lost in a slurred ramble, that’s the exact moment the puck glances off three people and goes in. That never happens with football or baseball!


The NHL used to actually run ads about how easy it is to lose track of the game action (starring Matthew Perry! Look at this classic), which isn’t the smartest way of promoting your chosen sport. Anyway, here are my rankings for the best sports to watch drunk and in person:

1. Horse racing. The clear champ. Honestly, I should go to more horse races. A horse race is just a big fucking party periodically interrupted by 90 seconds of hot horsey action. I could be a dozen cocktails in and still muster the required attention span to watch My Dick fail to win, place, or show. Oh well. [tears up ticket] BACK TO DRINKING.


2. Baseball. Baseball has so many advantages when it comes to drinking: inning changes so that you can go get more beer, a shall-we-say leisurely pace that allows you to tune the game out and shoot the shit until something dramatic happens (with the crack of the bat essentially serving as an alarm to get you to pay attention when shit is going down), and good summer weather. The pace of play is a problem for baseball only when it comes to TV. At the ballpark, they could screen a full movie between innings and I wouldn’t really give a crap.

3. Golf. I know it sounds terribly boring to watch golf live, but again, that’s the point. I can prioritize getting drunk over watching the actual sporting action. I’ve been to a couple of golf tournaments. All the best viewing spots are already taken by weird old people who show up with nylon chairs at 6 a.m. The rest of us walk around the pretty environs swilling beer and craning our heads if some famous golfer walks by. I THINK THAT’S PHIL! It’s a solid way to waste an afternoon.

4. Hockey. This is probably too low because hockey is the best live sport and NO ONE DENIES THIS. Even though the game action is too fast for your average lush, you can at least PRETEND you saw the goal and go apeshit along with the rest of the crowd. Also, I enjoy the serenity that comes with being drunk and watching a Zamboni resurface the ice. Very satisfying when the driver covers up that last dry spot.

5. Soccer. I took my son to a DC United game and it was AWESOME. The tickets were dirt cheap, the seats were good, and they sold huge-ass cans of Tecate all over the concourse. Plus people were singing and wearing fun scarves and stomping their feet. Get drunk inside RFK and you’ll understand instantly why old Skins fans wax nostalgic over that dump.


And even though soccer doesn’t have any extended stoppages in gameplay, you can at least sense when a goal is close because of the flow of the action. There’s usually a long and excruciating a buildup to the shot, which gives me time to look up. Then, if someone actually does score, it’s fucking bedlam. I watched one of the DC guys lob a shot right over the goalkeeper, Carli Lloyd-style, and into the net. I stood up on my seat like a crazy person, I was so jazzed. My son was like, “Dad, please sit back down.”

6. Pro wrestling. The drunker you get, the realer it becomes. I went to a WWE thing in Jersey once and I got so shitfaced that I was ready to storm the ring to defend D-Generation X against THE CORPORATION and those vile McMahons. Booing while drunk is the best kind of booing you can do.


7. College football. It’s a four-hour game, so you really HAVE to sneak a hip flask in to pass the time. Also, the weather is still usually pretty nice.

8. Basketball. Too fast. I need everyone on the court to just, like, chill out so that I can finish this Miller Lite. If you ever bring me to an NBA game, I will ask you who’s winning at least a dozen times, even though there’s a scoreboard right there.


9. NASCAR. The whole fun of NASCAR is drinking BEFORE the race. That’s when you get to set up your RV and wander around the tailgate lot and carouse with other lunatic rednecks. That’s a good time. But once the race starts? No, fuck that. That’s torture. Waking up after a NASCAR race is like waking up after you’ve smoked for the first time in years.

10. NFL. The worst. There’s a reason everyone fights at NFL games. They’re all drunk and angry. No one has ever regretted staying home to watch an NFL game on TV.


Parker:

Is it possible to poop on your balls? It’s never happened to me but if you were to sit a certain way and/or you had disproportionately low hanging balls, is it possible?


Well, if you’re a pig, it’s clearly possible. All it takes is an infected and/or low-hanging scrotum and a severe case of diarrhea and PRESTO! You’ve got sewage on your nuts. After all, where does the nutsack really begin? Does it begin at the folds, or a little higher up where it joins the taint? Easier to get poo there.

Also, if you were determined, you could probably push your balls back and then let fly directly on top of them. Again, that’s if you’re determined, which seems unlikely. Otherwise, it’s a neat trick that the butthole is located so close to your privates but rarely attacks them. Well done, God!


Fred:

I saw someone walking today on the street, eating fried rice with chopsticks like it was nothing. I was utterly amazed. Rice, with chopsticks, while walking at a normal gait and not dropping any? What’s the hardest food and the easiest food to eat while walking somewhere?


I think we have to limit this to street food, because chances are you aren’t walking around trying to dig into a slab of prime rib. Within those parameters, the easiest thing to eat is a big fucking slice of pizza. I don’t even keep the plate. I just walk out of Famous Ray’s or wherever, fold my slice, and throw the paper plate directly in the trash. Then I walk around dripping orange grease all over the sidewalk. It’s great.

Do you know what the hardest street food to eat is? An ice cream cone. It’s true. Every summer, we all buy into eating a fatally flawed mobile food product. Why do I EVER buy a fucking ice cream cone for my children? I should know by now that I’m committing suicide. It drips everywhere and then you need a million napkins and then the napkins stick to the cone and don’t come off. Someone needs to DISRUPT the cone space with a cone that has its own waffle base to collect the runoff. I’m the guy who asks for a cup to go WITH the cone, because I lack nerve.


Oh, and you know what else is a bitch to eat while on the go? A big fucking kebab sandwich. The kebab van usually sells you sandwiches or platters, and the sandwiches are cheaper and SEEM easier to eat on the go, but they are not. I got a lamb kebab from a van once and squirted too much hot sauce on it, and the whole thing was a disaster. The bread wilted and the toppings fell out behind me. I must have left a pound of lettuce on the ground while I was snotting all over myself. I should have used a plate, maybe one of the plates I threw away while I was busy housing a slice of pizza. Going freestyle was a mistake. You can eat pretty much anything on the go if they include one of those rectangular paper basket things.

Also, beware of fully loaded hot dogs. I know it’s easy to chow down on a plain hot dog on the move. But if you get one of those big Chicago jobs that has a pound of salad on top, it’s a whole other challenge.


John:

If you put Steph Curry on Mt. St. Mary’s the 68th ranked team, how far would he take them in the NCAA tournament?


Didn’t he take Davidson to the Elite Eight? That sounds about right. That was such a great run, too. I really wish he had finished Kansas off and made it all the way to the Final Four. No one needs to see Kansas in there ever again. I would have lost my shit. Anyway, I believe that you can single-handedly carry a team through the first couple rounds of the tournament before you hit a buzzsaw. Even though Curry is otherworldly, he’d eventually run into a stud team that triple-covers him and lets the rest of Mt. St. Mary’s brick their way to defeat. TEAM GAME!

By the way, I wish there was a guaranteed correlation between tourney success and NBA success. Curry is one of those rare players who made his name with a Cinderella run in the tourney and then actually became an NBA superstar. Usually, those guys fall off the face of the fucking Earth, like Harold “The Show” Arceneaux. I like it when someone like Curry or Gordon Hayward keeps the excitement going.


Derby:

Every time I visit D.C. for business I immediately pretend that I’m House of Cards. I’m actually doing it now just emailing you while my taxi is driving past the monuments to take me to a secret meeting to decide the future of the free world (read: dinky hotel and boring sales pitch). You live in D.C. so do you do this all the time? Or is the political intrigue too boring for you now?


It happens any time I’m at the National Mall and walk by an empty park bench. I always want to sit down on the bench and then have Donald Sutherland sit next to me and explain how JFK couldn’t have possibly been killed by just one man (still the greatest truthering scene in movie history; I believed every goddamn word of it back in high school). And if I see OTHER people sitting on benches, I assume that they are spies executing a dead drop. I bet if I tackled them, the microfiche would unspool across the lawn.

I also watch House of Cards, and I get unreasonably excited when they show off parts of DC, like that’s something special. “Oh wow, the Washington Monument! I’ve been there!” Show me any place where I’ve lived on television and I will feel like the most special little boy in the world, even if it’s one of the most obvious filming locations on Earth. “Oh wow, the Empire State Building! I used to live 30 blocks from there!” Pretty cool brag!


Zach:

Why are ravioli portions so small compared to other pasta dishes?

Because, for the sake of presentation, they don’t want to stack them on top of one another. At home, I will eat ravioli out of a gallon bucket. But at a restaurant, the ravioli is so fresh and so delicate that you could tear one open just by blowing on it wrong. So they artfully arrange four of them flat on the plate and that’s your stupid meal. It’s an appetizer. Unless you’re in St. Louis, always plan for ravioli to be appetizer-sized, and order accordingly.


I made ravioli for my wife the first time I cooked for her on a date. I invited her over and sat her down at the table and, just like at a restaurant, I lovingly arranged the ravioli on the plate without stacking them, and then drizzled Ragu sauce over them like I was Jackson Pollock. Then she asked if I had wine and I said no, I only had tall boys of Bud. It worked. We totally made out later. ROMANCE.

HALFTIME!

Mike:

Are Bert and Ernie considered Muppets? My friends and I have been debating this for years. I contend that any puppet created by Jim Henson is a Muppet, whereas my incorrect buddies believe a Muppet must have appeared on the Muppet Show. Please settle this once and for all as these debates are getting really heated.


Well great, now you’ve got everyone here feuding about it, too. Anyway, if you go by the official listings, they ARE Muppets. But personally, I say they aren’t Muppet Muppets, you know what I mean? I think of the Muppets as a very specific troupe of puppets that includes Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, etc. Even though Bert and Ernie have indeed appeared on the Muppet Show, Kermit introduces them as being “from Sesame Street.” See, that’s a whole other puppet troupe for me: Big Bird, Oscar, Elmo, etc. Those are the Sesame Street Muppets and not the TRUE MUPPETS. True Muppet fans know what I mean. I know Jim Henson created all of them, but the Muppets are their own club of puppets, and losers like Zoe don’t get to be part of it.

Anyway, I put this question to the Deadspin staff and the fucking apocalypse broke out:



Nick:

If you ate a bowl of plain yogurt — no toppings just plain yogurt — would you later poop it out or pee it out?


Both. Your body would absorb the water from the yogurt, send it into circulation, and then whizz it out. Then it would take the leftover curd, wring it of nutrients, and send it flying down your corn chute.

I had an argument with my wife yesterday because she swears by the health benefits of yogurt and I keep telling her that BIG YOGURT is lying to her, and that you don’t need extra bacteria aiding your digestion when your body is already well-suited for the process. I then did some cursory research and found that the Mayo Clinic says probiotics do have some potential health benefits, but I’m not sending her the link. I STAND BY MY SLUR.


James:

If you were teleported to a Vegas sports book exactly one year back in time, with $50, how much money do you think you could make? Do you remember enough specific game scores to start winning thousands of dollars? Or do you just wander about, homeless, waiting for your bets on the Cavaliers and Cubs to pay out?


One year ago today was tourney time, so I could spin that into some quick cash. Hang on, let me consult the original 2016 bracket to see where I could rack up the dough:

(checks)

Fuck. Fuck me, I couldn’t do it. Was it Green Bay that made some noise last year? God dammit, I suck at being a sports fan now. It’s pathetic. Oh wait, didn’t Syracuse make it all the way to the Final Four as a lowly 10 seed? I can’t be sure of that unless I cheat.


(cheats)

AHA! They did. Unreal. (Green Bay did nothing.) Man, I don’t know if I would have been confident enough to lay that down on Syracuse, even with the inkling. Anyway, Villanova was 8-1 to win the whole thing, which would only net me $400 with a futures bet. I would have wait in a sports book and bet on an individual games or prop bets I knew to be a lock, and then just hang on and try to keep doubling my money on every pass. You’d need to double your money 11 times before getting into six figures. I bet I’d ruin it and spend my money on drinks before I had a chance to amass any kind of fortune. I’m very angry at myself right now.


John:

Why doesn’t McDonalds have onion rings?

Because people would still just order fries anyway, and because McDonalds is built upon consistent delivery of its product. The fries are always the same. The nuggets are always the same. The burgers are always the same. Do you know what those three foods have in common? They can be formed. They can be pulped into mush and then sculpted into mass copies of the same product model. You can’t do that with an onion ring unless you mash it down and make some bizarre McOnion ring that no one would ever eat. I do not want an onion ring made of pink onion slime. Onion vary in shape and size, especially when you slice them, which means that onion rings do likewise. There’s no way McDonald’s is gonna trust a 17-year-old fryalator kid to churn those out consistently and keep the fryer clean.


By the way, thick onion rings are garbage. Those big, beer-battered fuckers that they put on top of a TGI Friday’s burger? Awful. The batter is an inch thick. My favorite onion rings in the world come from this beach shack that slices them thin and fries them up into these little strands. You eat them by the fistful. Now those are some goddamn onion rings. Don’t come at me with some big deep-fried onion bracelet.

Doug:

Do you think a road team has ever had no fans in attendance? My thought would be that it would have to be one of these expansion-era teams playing in some non-tourist northern town, like the Rays at the Mariners. Is it possible a road team has never had a single fan in attendance?


God, Marlins Man ruins this whole question, doesn’t he? Fucking Marlins Man. The Marlins don’t deserve to have a Man, even a man as lame as Marlins Man.

Anyway, I’m sure it’s been done, especially back in the dying days of the Montreal Expos, when nine people would show up at the stadium, and most of them were forced to be there as part of a tour group. But think it’s hard to pull off in professional sports because every city has a fanatic transplant or two in it that only sees their hometown team visit once or twice a year, if that. I bet there’s like, ONE guy in Milwaukee who is diehard Atlanta Hawks fan and never misses a chance to see them when they swing through. All you need is one asshole like that to ruin it. And if the Bucks are shitty and have horrible attendance, then all the better for a potential visiting team’s fan trolling StubHub for cheap seats. So if it ever happens, it’s extremely rare. Jonah Keri says that those latter-day Expos drew at least 2,000 people to the game. That’s still a lot of people. I bet at least one Phillies fan up there was jazzed to have a whole section of the joint to himself.


That’s pro. If we’re expanding this question to college, then the answer is definitely yes. Florida A&M doesn’t travel well at all.

(Please note I do not count that 2015 Orioles game where they shuttered the whole goddamn park because of police protests. That was insane to do.)


Andrew:

Is there any cooler feeling than when you’re grocery shopping and walk in front of your cart to grab something, and then do the push/spin thing from the front of your cart and catch it in stride by the push handle as it completes a 180? I always feel like such a bad-ass when I execute that maneuver.


NICE. I also like to put my foot on the bar and then spin the cart like I’m doing donuts in the Talladega infield. SO MUCH TORQUE.

Crysta:

I got into a heated argument with a friend over whether peanut butter should be refrigerated or not. I grew up refrigerating my peanutty spread. It’s always consistently the same cool temperature and never gets runny or overly warm in a pantry. This is not the first time I have been side-eyed for this. Please settle the dispute once and for all.


I’m sorry, but I leave it out. Why would you want your peanut butter cold? That makes it harder to spread. The only peanut butter that gets overly runny is the oily, all-natural kind, and that shit is worthless. I use Skippy, and I keep it in the pantry so that it’s always nice and spreadable. I spread it on my nipples. And again, I save on precious fridge real estate this way. The fridge is for beer and meats and cheeses. Everything else can get triaged to the cabinet.

Kirk:

With March Madness upon us, can we come to a consensus on which seeds are high and low? I’m pretty sure the best teams (1, 2 & 3 seeds) are considered “high” seeds, because I remember reading ‘85 Nova is the “lowest” seed to win the whole thing. But I just read an article about which double-digit high seeds could spring an upset.


Yeah I think the “high” seeds are the lower numbers, specifically one through three, maybe four if I feel like being charitable. That is top of the seedings, as it were. Those are the seeds where, if they lose in the first round, it’s a big fucking deal. That’s when I scream out loud watching at the bar and the dramatically tear up my bracket in front of everyone.

By the way, all the teams are basically the same after that No. 4 cutoff. No one really gives a shit anymore if a 12 beats a 5. That’s SOP during the tourney. If anything, those seed numbers confer unearned prestige upon teams that may not deserve it. Minnesota is a 5 seed this year. Take it from a Minnesotan: there’s no way they deserve to be a 5 seed. U-Minnesota basketball is worthless. Even when they make a run, it gets vacated. No one is screaming at the bar if they get their shit ruined in the first round.


Brett:

My daughter just turned one. As an almost toddler, she’s beginning to find her voice, which means long strings of incoherent babbling. She’s obviously trying to communicate with us, and respond to things she hears the people around her say. Yet, in so many instances, our instinct is to respond to her gibberish with more gibberish. Ga ga goo goo and all that crap. How badly are we confusing this kid by not talking to her like a human as she inches toward uttering her first real words?


You aren’t supposed to talk baby talk back to a baby, even though that feels like a perfectly natural way to react to a baby going, “Ooooooo flarp gung!” I remember when my kids were babies and I was like, “If I talk their language, they’ll understand me better! FLARP GUNG TO YOU TOO, KID!”



But no, that’s bad. The kid needs to see how you form real words with your mouth so that they can emulate the proper pronunciation. In fact, if you’ve ever had a kid go through occupational therapy, they actually have parents point to their mouths WHILE talking, so that the kid pays attention to the shape of your lips and tongue. I know that sounds weird and gross, but I swear it’s on the up-and-up. For developmental reasons, you should talk to your kid like a normal person. An adult, even. The more you do that, the sooner they talk like grownups. You’ll be sharing war stories and brandy with your toddler in no time.


Email of the week!

Joshua:

I found a package on my doorstep this morning and opened it without looking closely, as I was expecting an Amazon delivery and figured that’s what it was. Turns out this package was meant for Apartment B in my building, and I live in A. I open it up, and there’s easily several hundred dollars worth of sex toys in here. Specifically, two Fleshlights, a Fleshlight shower mount, a Fleshlight warmer (heady veteran move...don’t want to put your dick in a cold, fake vagina), and several varieties of lube. So what do I do? I’m obviously not going to keep it, and I certainly can’t knock on his door and hand him the open box. That’s a level of shame and embarrassment I wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially a guy I live next door to and see every day. Do I try to re-tape it and stealthily put it on his doorstep? Send it back to the fine folks at Fleshlight and say it was delivered to the wrong address? Throw it in the dumpster, and hope he files a lost package claim and gets it re-delivered?


Retape it and leave it on his doorstep. But scrub the box of fingerprints. Opening mail that isn’t your own is a crime, especially when it’s a fake shower vagina.