Jim:

Where on the list does “Mike Lombardi looks like an ass for shitting on Doug Pederson” fall on best things about the Super Bowl result?


Very high for me, personally. Here’s what the Football Knower said about Pederson early in the season:

“He might be less qualified to coach a team than anyone I’ve ever seen in my 30-plus years in the NFL,” Lombardi said of Pederson in September. “Everybody knows Pederson isn’t a head coach. He might be less qualified to coach a team than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Lombardi continued. “When will the Eagles admit their mistake? Will they throw away 2017 by stubbornly sticking to the Pederson Principle?”


Ah yes, the fabled Pederson Principle. And what of the Alshon Jeffery Doctrine that CLEARLY states that Jeffrey is NOT a true blue chipper? The Eagles violate at least six laws of my evolving blue chip manifesto. Gotta adhere to the ‘festo.

Anyway, fuck that guy. Look at him wearing a Super Bowl ring on his podcast like a fucking dork. Yeah yeah, nice work being Belichick’s towel boy.

There are few things more satisfying than when a humorless, purported Knower of Things turns out to be a clueless asshole. Take it from me, because I am one. Football, more than perhaps any sport, is dominated by self-serious wannabe Marines who tweak their nipples every time Belichick cuts a guy. These are guys who try to develop hard LAWS OF FOOTBAW that are always bound to be disproven because the sport is constantly evolving, involves a good amount of luck, and is a goddamn mess in general. I remember gagging on some of Lombardi’s rules of the game because they weren’t even rules at all. Look at this shit:

“Sometimes a shiny new object is just a shiny new object.”

That’s not a rule. Buy a fucking dictionary before you go knowing your football at me. To quote the popular film Goodfellas, which I have seen, “Always keep your mouth shut.” I swear I’d rather read a football column written by a bot. One of my biggest ongoing hang-ups with ESPN is that it still tries to cultivate a certain style of fan that can win the bar argument or whatever with his ESPN-imbued sports knowledge and elite take-boxing training. It’s an arms race of takes, and being wrong is something to be ashamed of, instead of just being a standard everyday learning opportunity. Lombardi’s shtick is no different. Experts and fans like this are annoying and I don’t like them. You don’t have to be an asshole to know things about football.


Also, and this is not exclusive to Lombardi, but I would kill for writers to STOP trying to coin terms that they hope get lodged into the public discourse. Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell made a mint off of conjuring useless terms designed to end up in the essay question of a college midterm, and a zillion other people have attempted to follow suit. That’s how you end up with The Pederson Paradox. Shoot me in the dick.


Rob:

What is the deal with Kosher salt? I like to cook. I think I’m pretty good at it, all told. But recently my confidence has been shaken because so many recipes call for kosher salt and I don’t know what the hell to do. My dad worked in restaurants for a spell and is the best home cook I know. He uses Mortons or Lawry’s and, when appropriate, all manner of exotic seasoning salts. But I have never seen kosher salt in his kitchen. Should I keep some in my seasoning arsenal? Why?


Yeah, buy it! It’s not like it’s expensive or hard to find. Buy a bigass box of kosher salt at the grocery store and use it when you’re seasoning anything. Table salt is so fine that it’s VERY easy to over-salt shit. And once you’ve over-salted something, it’s all but impossible to salvage it. Kosher salt comes in nice, big, visible flakes. That way, you can season your food evenly, plus you can make that shit rain from high above and feel like a fancypants. There’s nothing intimidating about it. When Burneko and I smoked meat in Georgia, we snuck kosher salt into the recipe behind our pitmaster’s back because his recipe called for table salt. I DEFIED MY ELDERS AND REGRET NOTHING.

I know it can be grating anytime you read some Ina Garten recipe and it insists on using “good” olive oil or something like that. But kosher salt is unpretentious and makes everything taste better. Just sprinkle that on any vegetable or piece of fish before you cook it and that’s often all you need. I mean, I always add other shit because I feel like it. But kosher salt really is a miracle like that. If you see it in nearly every recipe, that’s probably a sign that it works really well, you know?


Andrew:

Drew, you worked in advertising. Explain to us how something like that Dodge/MLK ad can happen. How is there not one meeting where someone pipes up and sheepishly says, “Hey guys, I don’t think this is going to come across how we think it will.” Is everyone just so far up each others’ butts with that sweet ad copy?


Pretty much. We all laugh at brand evangelism here, but it’s a very real thing out in the business world. These people BELIEVE in their brands. And to a point, it’s understandable. That’s your livelihood. Of course you’re gonna take pride in it, perhaps to the point of blindness. Also, if you’re a professional, you want to support and encourage your co-workers, which means sometimes people at work are just too damn polite to say, “Hey, that idea is fucking terrible.” Throw in standard industry power dynamics and office politics and people become even more reticent. That’s how you end up with Kendall Jenner ending police brutality by handing out Pepsis to people.

But the Dodge thing is a bit more complicated because that company secured the agreement of MLK’s family to use that speech. In fact, this is not the first time MLK was used to make a tasteless Super Bowl ad...

...and it probably won’t be the last. There have long been reports about infighting among King’s descendants, some of whom have tried to wring maximum profit out of MLK’s likeness, regardless of whether or not the brand in question makes sense as a business partner (SPOILER: Dodge does not). I don’t judge them for this. Virtually every famous person leaves behind a contested estate, and sometimes people need money. I get all that. It’s more just being frustrated at the nature of things, where something once pure and good inevitably ends up co-opted by a fucking brand.


And when that brands has its blinders on, you end up with that Ram ad. Do you wanna know something? I bet that ad worked. I bet they focus-grouped that spot in Arkansas and dudes were like YEP THAT’S ME. The Dodge people know exactly who they’re selling to, and they probably don’t give a shit if the rest of you have a problem with how they do it. In fact, that’ll be the next ad. WATCH US DRIVE THEM LIBRULS CRAZY BY PUTTING A HOLOGRAM OF MALCOLM X BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A SWEET DODGE MAGNUM.

Jon:

If you were unlucky enough to have one of the worst American accents for the rest of your life which one would you pick? Boston, Philly, NY, Baltimore, Southern, Etc.


Texas! Not even close. I’m not talking about the shrill Highland Park Y’ALL shit. I mean the grizzled old cowboy eating beans and farting by a campfire accent. Give me the Jeff Bridges drawl from Hell or High Water. I’d gladly wear that accent for my twilight years. Just drinking beer on a porch on grabbing my belt buckle and surveying the landscape and going, “Yip. Reckon it’ll be a damn shitshow of a day out thurr.” So cool.

By the way, I have an anti-superpower and that is that I have an awful Philly accent detector. To me, those people just sound like they’re speaking broken Jerseyish. Baltimore accents and Philly accents need to be more hilariously cartoonish for me to really distinguish them from all the other Northeast white trash accents. Just having, like, five weird words like WOODER isn’t enough. GET A REAL ACCENT, FUCKOS. YEAH YOU HEARD ME.


Elias:

Are the Eagles fucked now at QB? Do they commit BIG BUCKS to Super Scrub Nick Foles and shelve the face of the franchise?


No no no, they’ve already said Carson Wentz has the conn when he gets healthy. The question is if they’ll trade Foles in the offseason or keep him around for his final contract year as insurance for Wentz, and then let him walk afterward.

It’s impossible to take away any kind of big-picture prognostication from what Foles just did. Maybe he’ll go back to being an average QB. Or maybe he’ll keep this run going. Also, I have no idea if Foles’s victory signals the death of the NFL as a QB-driven league, or if some stud like Brady reasserts himself next year with a better defense and keeps the business model intact.


I will say, though, that it’s possible that Foles just cost someone like Kirk Cousins a bit of money with that Super Bowl MVP. Doug Pederson figured out what Foles was good at and had him do it. I know that sounds basic but it’s nearly fucking revolutionary in an NFL landscape where coaches treat their precious “scheme” like it’s the fucking Da Vinci codex. So maybe more coaches will unfuck themselves and see if they can make do with a guy like Foles instead of ponying up $35 million for Kirk Cousins and then realizing they don’t know what to do with him. My guess is that everything remains a complete mess and that Mike Lombardi will still suck.

Dan:

What if you pooped out of your dick?

Okay, that sounds very bad and gross. Solids are not meant to pass through that particular canal. BUT… if the physiology were such that you COULD poop out your dick, with no pain or discomfort, I think that’d be a real win. You could shit into a urinal! I mean, they’d have to redesign the urinal for such purposes. But I for one would be thrilled to shit standing up. No more waiting for a stall. No more laboring to get my pants off and sitting there on the can like a chump. I just unzip and go! WHY HASN’T SILICON VALLEY FIGURED OUT A WAY TO DO THIS?


No but for real, pray that tech bros don’t find a way to BIOHACK the excretory process in such a manner. Imagine a stadium bathroom if dudes could pee out poop. It would be a crime scene.

Joseph:

Cris Collinsworth is the worst, right? He was by far the worst part of an otherwise awesome Super Bowl.


I actually like him just fine normally. It’s a live, four-hour broadcast. If you’re an announcer, there’s a very good chance you’ll say at least one thing to irritate the viewer at home. I understand that job is harder than it looks, and Collinsworth usually at least has some good insights into what teams are doing during the course of a game.

But I thought he had a crummy Super Bowl. He kept praising the defenses while they were being shredded. He seemed legit upset that the Clement touchdown call went against the Pats. He rarely disagrees a holding or an interference call and will often twist himself into knots to justify them. ONE OF THE THINGS he also does is hammer points home over and over to the point of aggravation. “Ya just can’t say enough about what Nick Foles has done here tonight!” Okay, that’s true. But maybe you could say it differently.


Also, Brandin Cooks could have died in the locker room and NBC probably would have avoided mentioning it. “Oh, Cooks? He’s still questionable with a head. Second and 5…”

HALFTIME!

Alex:

When you fantasize about being in a car chase, have you ever been the chaser? I realised while stumbling on to some car chase on some shitty late night TV show that I’m always doing the fleeing. I’m never the cop, guy chasing kidnappers, etc. Is that normal or weird?


No, I think that’s my baseline too. And that’s a failure of imagination on my part. I should daydream more about being the chaser and not the chasee. I would definitely run down the gang of Russian thugs that kidnapped my nephew. In fact, let’s make it a SNOWMOBILE chase. Now we’re talkin’. The gang has my nephew—and my horde of diamonds—and I am just mowing through a goddamn forest to catch up to them and beat them to death with a chain. That’s the ticket. YOU GIVE ME BACK MY BOY, AND MY STONES. [throws kosher salt at a bad guy on a snowhog, causing him to drive right into a tree]


Jamison:

As a spoiled Boston fan coping with the Super Bowl loss, it got me wondering: could 2018 be the year we see all the Boston sports franchises lose championships in a single year? Patriots lose to Philly in SB LII Celtics lose to Golden State Bruins lose to (Western Conference Champ) in the Stanley Cup Red Sox lose to NL team in the World Series What happens with that outcome? Are we owned??

Yes. You are owned. Now I’m gonna go to church to pray to God for this and literally nothing else. I’ll sit right on God’s lap and tell Him I’ve been a good little boy this year and that the only thing I want on my list is… Wait. That’s Santa Claus. Whatever. My prayer still stands. Gimme a 2018 full of Boston getting their nuts crushed in the title round of every sport. It’s the least this shitty country can do for us.


Brian:

As a Chopped Champion and a fan of BIG FLAVORS, you must have some opinions on the recent cooking gadget crazes that have swept the nation. Do you own an Instant Pot? A sous vide water dildo? Some other fancy food contraption? I cooked some fine ass chili in my Instant Pot tonight, to much applause. And my sous vide steaks have reinvigorated my love for home beef cookery.


An instant pot is just a slow cooker, right? I have a dutch oven and that pretty much covers my needs. I made this with it the other day and I’m still nursing it, picking shreds of beef out of the fridge like a grubby hobo. I don’t own a slow cooker. I don’t own an Instant Pot. I don’t own a rice cooker. Part of that is analog snobbery (I like the rice I cook already), part of it is pride (I don’t need no fancy gadgets!), but mostly it’s my wife not wanting a bunch of shit cluttering up the counter. Counter space is sancrosanct. She’s not gonna abide a bigass breadmaker sitting there like a dormant droid all day long. The coffee pot and toaster take up enough room as is.

As for the sous vide thing…I don’t have one, but one of our treasured Minnesota readers was explaining it to me last week and swears by it. I was more or less sold. I’ve just been too lazy and cheap to try it. Also, I know there’s a “set it and forget it” appeal to a lot of these devices, where you can push a button and then fuck off for a while. But I kinda don’t WANT to fuck off. I wanna tend to that food like a daddy. I wanna fuss over it and stir it and turn on the oven light to make sure shit is going well. It gives me something to do, you know? What am I gonna do with all that extra free time, raise my kids? Don’t be ridiculous.


Ed:

So, with that, what do you think the City of Minneapolis and/or the Vikings would need to do to host another Super Bowl? Let’s assume that building another Billion dollar bird-killer is out of the question. Is there anything at all that Minneapolis could do this week to lure the NFL to host it here again? My only thought is if every stadium South of the Mason-Dixon is under construction and deemed unusable.


Yeah the entire Sun Belt will have to be under some kind of nuclear fallout warning, and global warming will have to raise the average temperature in Minnesota by a good 40 degrees. Otherwise, they’re never coming back. I genuinely loved my time in Minnesota, but the OTHER MEDIA GLORY BOYS can’t handle it.

Also, while the Deadspin Super Bowl team stayed in Minneapolis proper (wise move), the rest of the media were stuck out by the Mall of America, which is a good 20-minute drive from the city, and that’s without traffic. Minneapolis is fun as shit. The rest of those radio bozos were banished to exurbia. If the NFL ever gives Minneapolis another Super Bowl, those dudes will napalm league headquarters. And really, do you ever need Adam Schefter to tweet out a screenshot of his weather app ever again? You do not. The Super Bowl is never coming back…except in 20 years when they force taxpayers to build yet another goddamn stadium. I know how the cycle works now.


Nate:

I turned 30 on Super Bowl Sunday. What are the best parts of my 30s I should be looking forward to, and the worst parts I should be wary of?


It’s impossible to tell you because everyone has different experiences. My 30s were a blur because I spent the bulk of them changing diapers and assembling IKEA furniture. I remember nothing. I think they went fine. My kids aren’t dead yet! Advantage: DREW.

For real though, I genuinely enjoyed my 30s. I felt like I actually became a useful human being in my 30s, both professionally and personally. When you’re in your 20s, you’re really just a horny college kid with no homework to do. It’s fun. Your 30s are when you bear down and become a MAN. You grow up a little, which a pathetic thing for an already-grown man to say, but that’s the deal. I give the 30s four stars out of five. I’m docking a star for all the baby poop. Results may vary, of course. You’re not gonna like your 30s if you spend them in, like, prison.


Also, when I turned 40 everything went to SHIT. I have weird pains. It’s harder to lose weight. I have no energy. I think I’m dying. I want my 30s back.

Patrick:

Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to make iPhones (or anything) slick and slippery as shit? Jesus Christ there is no surface upon which I can lay my phone without it sliding all over the place.


Just buy a cover with a tacky surface. Problem solved. It’s amusing to me that Apple spends the bulk of their time honing and refining each new version iPhone for maximum aesthetic beauty, only to churn out a product that is hilariously fragile and slippery, and needs to be IMMEDIATELY sheathed in a fucking rubber bunny case. They never made an iPhone Sport because Steve Jobs was a weirdo who never showered or worked out. But he’s dead now, so I don’t know what the holdup is. I want an iPhone that looks like the old Sport Walkman, with the yellow plastic and rubber latches. That was all class, baby. Make it happen, Tim Cook.

Tommy:

Growing up my mom always told me not to eat cookie dough or brownie batter or anything with raw eggs in it. My mother was not alone in these demands, as everyone I know also had this irrational fear ingrained in them from an early age. But here’s the thing, I’ve been eating cookie dough (sorry, mom!) for years and years and I’ve never gotten sick once. In fact, I don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten salmonella from eating raw eggs. Maybe a tummyache, but that’s about it. I’m a grown ass man now but I still feel like I’m committing a crime when I do it. What gives? Is there a conspiracy afoot? Why does BIG MOM want to stop me from the joy of eating raw pre-baked goodies?


I’m with you. I have jammed my finger into the cookie dough and taken a lick over the years with no consequences of any kind. I’ll lick the beaters and my wife will be like DO NOT DO THAT. And I’m like, “Don’t you tell me what to do, Missy!” This will end with me dying of e. coli, but for now I enjoy my open defiance. I let the kids eat it! Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Supposedly, the real danger of eating cookie dough is not the raw eggs, but rather the raw flour. Raw flour can fuck you up. So the next time you indulge, make sure you eat a forkful of dough BEFORE mixing the flour in. That’s the responsible way to be fat!


Jon:

How much, if any, of the 2018 Olympics will Trump watch on TV over the next two weeks? My immediate guess is little to none since we all know how he feels about sports and exercise in general, plus the Olympics are not covered by any Fox TV channel. However, part of me thinks he’ll want to ogle and objectify the female ice skaters from other countries, throw shade towards the athletes from other countries, as well as any US medal winner who says they won’t visit the White House.


The Winter Olympic are the white people Olympics, so they’re definitely his favorite kind of Olympics. Will that be enough for him to change the channel to NBC? Probably not. He’ll probably just look a still shots from the events on FOX and then tweet accordingly: “So PROUD of our Winter Olympics athletes for honoring ‘Trump’ by standing for our National Anthem. Trump not getting enough credit for uniting us! Gold medal?”

Email of the week!

Michelle:

I just received a text message from Venmo: “[stranger ‘s name] has sent you $130 for anal.” My first thought was that this was a very smart new spam text strategy. My next thought was that my husband was pranking me but that would be a very weird way to do it, and he’s not much of a prankster. Then we began investigating. Some of this stranger’s previous Venmo transactions are visible to me and he’s clearly a guy who sends money to his dude buds with joke descriptions (like everyone else on Venmo). Also this stranger lives oddly close to me but I just learned there are like 40 women with my name in a 25-mile radius. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s clear this was an honest mistake... Butt... What is my obligation here? My ethical and/or social requirements? Google suggests the dude does fine as a Private Capital Manager so I’m inclined to just let the money simmer and see what happens. I am certainly not harvesting it into my bank account immediately but I also don’t feel obligated to contact him about this potential Venmo Anal Error in My Favor. What do I do?

Keep it and then delete Venmo forever.