Today, we’re talking about T-shirts, gorilla suits, flowers, peeing, and more.
Before we get into your letters, I am gonna be in NASHVILLE next Monday Night (Nov. 5) for a live Deadcast and a big fat Monday Night watch party. So grab your tickets here (free drink included!) and head over to HQ Beercade. We’ll drink some beers and play some video games and watch some shitty football and then we’ll ALL stumble over to Cook Out at 2 a.m. to get milkshakes and throw up all over the curb. HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY.
Letter time!
Dave:
My boss just followed me on Twitter. I only have my first name on the account, so I’m assuming he found me because my phone number is linked to my account. Now that Twitter from time to time shows you tweets that people you follow have liked, I think there is a good chance that he will see some of the ‘weird twitter’ posts that I like. What’s my move here? I don’t really want to explain these weird tweets to a 50+ year old man.
Eh, if looking at @dril tweets is your biggest Twitter crime, I don’t think you have all that much to worry about. I don’t think your boss is gonna fire you because he took that one tweet about candle budgeting literally. The good news for you is that literally EVERYONE has a shady online record now, so it’s just a matter of not being TOO shady. The only reason to check a person’s likes is to see if they’re horny online or racist online. Everything else about a person’s likes is boring and useless, which is probably why Twitter was allegedly planning to do away with likes altogether.
(By the way, it’s better to assume that Twitter is outright evil rather than merely hapless, so I fully believe that the company really was considering getting rid of the like button, specifically to end ratio-ing. They don’t want my colleague David Roth seeing a shitty tweet in the wild and then putting a photo of Kent Hrbek’s baseball card next to it. That’s just too rude for the Bari Weisses of the universe to handle. I think a bunch of racists and fartsniffer media types went to Jack privately and they were like MEW MEW MEW PEOPLE USING TWITTER CAN TELL WE SUCK BECAUSE OF THE LIKE BUTTON and then Jack was like, “We have to rectify this to IMPROVE DEBATE.” That’s why likes were potentially in danger. Whatever Twitter can do to help make things easier for white supremacists and cowardly enablers, they’ll gladly do it. Even if they keep the LIKE button, they’re gonna end ratios somehow. I can feel it.)
As for you, Dave, if you’re still worried about your boss asking you what Chapo is, just let your account go dark and boot up a new, anonymous account. That way, you can tweet like no one’s reading. It’s more fun that way. That’s why I opened up my own burner account @Clownfister69GoodTime four years ago. Every time an actual person I know says they saw a tweet of mine, I want to crawl into a hole and die. You guys weren’t, like, supposed to READ those tweets. I only enjoy talking online to strangers and weirdoes, thank you very much.
Anonymous:
I’m on the job market, and I recently discovered that I have a Google problem. I searched my full name and discovered that a child molester has my name, and he lives in a state where I went to college and once got arrested. In addition, his birthday and mine are only one day apart, albeit in different years. What is the most genteel way of letting potential employers know that I’m not this person before they do their obligatory Google search of me? Mentioning on a cover letter or resume or application that I’m not a child molester seems painfully awkward at best and likely stinking of “doth protest too much.” What would you do in this situation?
GUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. That sucks. Karma owes you a winning Powerball ticket for that shit. For now, I think you’re gonna have to trust that a prospective employer can tell the difference between you and Jared from Subway. Open up a Twitter account in your name and have NOT THE NOTORIOUS CHILD PREDATOR as your bio. If you’re lucky, they may not even bother to do a background check. The Detroit Lions sure don’t!
If you get radio silence every single time you send out a resume, then it might be time to take more drastic action and fuck with your name on your resume. If the child molester doesn’t share your middle name, include your middle name on it. If he does (GUHHHHHHHH), then include your nickname at the top of the resume, like Michael “Big Mike” Samson or whatever. That way, the person looking at your resume goes, “Oh wow, he goes by Big Mike! Let’s do a Google search for THAT!” and then you’re in the clear. Failing that, you’ll either have to change your name to something more tasteful, like Baron Von Clitt, or you’ll have to track down the child molester and murder him in cold blood. They can’t hire a dead man!
Or here’s one other idea: Run for public office. In 2018, being tied to such monstrous allegations can only help you as an aspiring politician. You can send out an email being like, “As sheriff, I’m gonna take on the REAL criminals: the FAKE NEWS MEDIA trying to sully the good Clitt family name!” Then you can run an ad with the word SOCIALISM in big flame letters, with riot footage in the background. BOOM! You got yourself a cushy government gig with an early retirement and lifetime pension. Not bad for a guy named Jonathan Wayne Gacy!
Kat:
A friend recently revealed that, when the urinal in the men’s bathroom at his office is being used by someone else, he uses one of the stalls in the bathroom without shutting the door. He says there is no functional difference between that and using a urinal, and I see how that is true in theory, but I have a visceral and extremely negative reaction to the idea of someone not using a stall door when one is provided. I think it’s outrageous. Do all men do this, or is he insane?
No, it happens. It might shock you to hear this, but men can occasionally be lazy. It’s true! From time to time, I go to piss in a stall without bothering to bolt the door shut. Why? Because I have to pee real bad, and I can’t be bothered to expend one extra micron of a second of effort to turn around and secure my privacy.
Please note that I do NOT endorse pissing with the stall door open. When you do this, an even lazier man will walk into the bathroom and see the stall door cracked and will be too lazy to explore the situation further. Instead, he will kick that door open and swing it directly into your ass, sending piss everywhere. This has happened to me because I am a fucking moron and I deserve to be called out for not closing the door.
And yet, I’ll probably leave it open again next week, too. I never learn. Sometimes I walk away from the dishes when they’re only halfway done. My laziness is as boundless as it is inexplicable.
Trey:
Hot take!!! Roses are overrated. The edges of the petals turn brown almost instantly. What are your go to flowers when trying to seal the deal for special occasion sex?
I think I told you this before, but one time when I was in college I showed up for a second date with a single red rose and it was the kiss of DEATH. The first date had gone really well, too. We kissed and everything. So I thought that rose would help get me laid. WRONG. SO WRONG. I completely bricked it. Her face died the second she saw that stupid flower. Who the fuck brings a single red rose on a date in college? Who DATES in college? I have so many regrets about everything.
All that said, I don’t think roses are overrated. I went to the Portland rose garden once and it was fucking awesome, and I don’t even like gardening. There are roses there the size of grapefruits. You don’t even have to lean in to take a whiff of the flowers because there are four million of them. The air… it is PERFUMED with rosy fragrances. I give the rose garden five stars. I would like to go back again, and I would like to be on drugs when I do.
For married gents like me, roses are fine if you like doing the occasional “I got you these just because” move. That’s solid husband-ing and the wives enjoy it. Tulips are probably the #1 flower for that job, but roses also work so long as you pick any other color besides blood red. Do NOT get blood red roses. Those are for murderers. “I got these for you…. DARLING.” Mix it up and get them in pink or yellow, and make sure you get enough to fill a vase. I’ve gotten too cheap with roses and brought home half a dozen. Then my wife trims them and it’s not enough to qualify as a bouquet. In a proper bouquet, the flowers nudge against one another, like cinnamon rolls in a pan. When you buy too few, you end up with just a sad, sparse handful of flowers, waiting to die. That tends to lessen the erotic atmosphere of a household.
Elie:
Assuming you haven’t already done this, what are the best and worst T-shirts? Is #1 plain white tee? Or is it plain black tee? And where do band tees and front pocket tees and sports giveaway tees and all the others rank?
I like the look of a crisp, plain white t-shirt, but I can’t be trusted to wear one without INSTANTLY ruining it. It’s automatic at this point. One second I look fresh as a daisy, the next there’s a constellation of gravy stains all over the fucking thing. If you’re someone who can rock a white tee all day long without staining it, I hate you. Go back to your home planet.
Therefore, I can’t really put white t-shirts at the top of these rankings, because an actual plain white t-shirt is just a myth. Here’s my personal order of preference:
- Plain dark T-shirt. Usually gray or dark blue. When I discovered Uniqlo sold these for just $5 a pop, I nearly shit a brick. They’re perfect. I bought a bunch and now I look like a stagehand ALL THE TIME! Such a hot look.
- Plain white T-shirt. With the caveat noted above.
- Band T-shirt. One time I was at the merch stand and I wanted to try on a shirt. So, in front of God and everyone, I took my other shirt OFF and was about to try on the new one when the cashier was like WHOA WHOA WHOA YOU CAN’T DO THAT. Honestly, he probably should have arrested me for it. Anyway I love band T-shirts even though they always end up being too small. It’s humiliating.
- Bar T-shirt. You’re still not over that last story, and I understand if you never want to talk to me again. Anyway, I have a bar T-shirt I like a lot because it has the bar logo right there on it. That lets people know I’m a guy who likes to DRINK AND PARTY. Oh, have you heard of Horny Jake’s Beer Hut? Well I’ve thrown up there. TWICE.
- Pocket T-shirt. Because why NOT put your sunglasses in there and give yourself a uni-boob?
- Button T-shirt. I think button t-shirts look good and I should probably buy some once I magically shape-shift into a catalog model with perfectly groomed beard stubble.
- Sports team T-shirt. There is a vast, yawning difference between how you THINK you look with team merch on and how you ACTUALLY look. You think you look like you could get a job on the sidelines as a quality control coach. But you actually look like a Steelers fan just barfed up a Packers fan.
- Graphic tee. I have a lot of graphic tees, which is bad because I’m not 13 years old. I should stop wearing generic T-shirts from Target with a dolphin and KONA BEACH written in cursive across the front.
- Sports team CHAMPIONSHIP shirt. Vile.
- Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt.
- V-neck T-shirt, alone. I’m hilariously inept when it comes to fashion but even I know this is a bad look. Only Simon Cowell and gross old men from South Beach do this.
- Novelty T-shirt. Obviously the worst. There’s a cutoff for wearing novelty T-shirts, and that cutoff is 15 ½ years old. I can walk along a boardwalk spotting novelty tees and know exactly who’s still into Larry the Cable Guy.
HALFTIME!
Jim:
What percentage of Bill Simmons’ fame and success is due to Boston’s run of success as a sports town since 2000? If he had been the Atlanta Sports Guy, or if Boston sports had been as inert as Atlanta sports for the last two decades, would he even be a minor player in sports media?
Well, Simmons was well on his way to being a big deal even before the Sox won their first title, and before Boston became Ground Zero for sports fan insufferable-ness across the known universe. So no, I don’t think he owes his career to the Sox or Patriots or Celtics. You could argue that Boston’s insane run of dominance this century has helped goose his profile a little bit, but you could also probably argue the opposite and say that all those titles have only hurt his appeal, and that some people tuned out his homer ass ages ago because of it, and that he’d have an even higher profile right now if he didn’t continually indulge his worst impulses as both a sports fan and as a human being because he’s such an embarrassing, egomaniacal dipshit. You could say such things reasonably.
BUT … I do think it would have hurt him if he had been, like you suggested, the Atlanta Sports Guy, or the Dallas Sports Guy, or some other awful city’s resident Sports Guy. As you’re already well aware, Boston fans make up an insanely disproportionate number of sportswriters, sports media people, political writers, bad actors, and such and such. This is because so many ELITE schools are located in New England, which means they’re disproportionately crammed with shitty little goateed Sox fan students, all of whom then graduate and spread out across the land, getting jobs at the Harvard Lampoon and appearing on each other’s talk shows and essentially operating as an unofficial welfare system for one another.
So yeah, of course the fucking kid who went to Holy Cross somehow got himself a job at ESPN, which just happens to be headquartered in the armpit of Connecticut. It’s not a coincidence. It’s pure incest and anyone who tells you otherwise is a blind idiot. We need to cap this shit. No more famous Boston people for 50 years. Get some Chiefs fans in there or something. That team is tearing up the NFL and I think the only famous fan they have is Len Dawson.
(Actually, Paul Rudd is apparently a huge Chiefs fan, but unlike Boston fans it appears he does not feel compelled to remind the world of this fact every five goddamn seconds.)
Matthew:
Would you rather have a penis in the shape of a broad noodle or would you rather have it shaped like a tuna can? Your penis still all the same usual functions.
Oh, the noodle. I don’t think there’s any choice. I was gonna ask you which way my dick stuck out if it was shaped like a tuna can, but either way is suboptimal because my dick would be a hockey puck. At least my noodle dick would still be relatively straight, like my old dick. I could get used to that. I would not want to have to negotiate a puck dick, regardless of whether the puck stuck out sideways or from the bottom. Just a nightmare all around.
Joseph:
What is the best music to cook to? I would say that Jazz music has to be a top genre because I feel articulate and sophisticated cooking to those kinds of tunes. It adds a background that seems simple to a possibly chaotic world of the culinary arts.
That’s very grown-up of you, and I get where you’re coming from. Let me offer two other suggestions for your listening pleasure. The first is classical music, for obvious reasons. Not only does it make you feel refined and wealthy, but you also get to pretend you host your own PBS show. “Today on COOKING WITH DREWBEAR I’m going to be showing you how to make shitty Old El Paso tacos from a box. Now, for this, you’re gonna need a skillet, a seasoning packet, one pound of contaminated ground beef, a microwave, and no expectations of any sort.”
The other thing I would suggest is Spanish guitar. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you can’t hear it in your head right now… all those pretty finger taps and complex arpeggios dancing around your kitchen as you meticulously prepare a Spanish omelet for one. I like to wiggle my hips a little when I cook to this music, to let everyone know I’m sexy and flirty. NOW I’M COOKIN’ WITH GAS BABY.
Most of the time, I cook to whatever pop and rock I’m listening to at the moment, which I deeply enjoy until the kids turn on the TV and I got two different speakers coming at me at the same time, and then everything is ruined. My youngest son will straight up walk up to my phone and turn my music off without asking me. SO RUDE. I should jail the boy for it. YOU THINK ANYBODY LIKES HEARING YOUR PLAYLIST EITHER, YOU UNGRATEFUL BASTARD?!
Christopher:
Why do you think it is that no major American city besides L.A. (and maybe Miami) seems to have a good college football team located in it?
Because most of the best CFB teams are big-ass state schools that happen to be located in strange podunk towns due to old political skirmishes involving commerce, bribery, corruption, bootlegging, sex, faulty real estate speculation, and all kinds of other amusing shit. I watch a lot of Aerial America, and they always do a flyover of empty college football stadiums, even demonstrably useless ones like Iowa State’s. And the founding story of every college town/state capital is like, “In 1843, an oilman named Corn Bludgefuck petitioned the governor to build a NEW capital in the oilman’s hometown. When the governor balked, Bludgefuck built the capital anyway, using funds stolen from a train heist. ‘I think it the finest capital in the land,’ he cried. Then he shot the governor dead. Today, that ‘new’ capital city of COLUMBUS is still going strong!”
The other thing is that college football still has a paternalistic atmosphere where isolation is promoted as a huge benefit to [hearty chuckle] student-athletes. Coaches, parents, and even players themselves are convinced that a remote, bucolic campus is just what a young mind needs to flourish. The first thing some nutjob like Dabo says when he enters a recruit’s living room is I’LL LOOK AFTER YOUR BOY. He’s gonna take your boy to a secluded campus away from the big scary city and all its distractions, and he’ll keep him confined to two-mile campus radius for all four years, where he can’t get into any trouble. Then your boy will get into a bar fight and Dabo will blame it on a lack of Jesus in video games today.
Anyway, that’s a sales job that has worked for decades. And there’s a bit of truth in it. Who doesn’t like the idea of a college that its own little universe, where everything is perfect and pretty, where everything revolves around the school, and therefore you as well? I remember arriving at college being like I WILL OWN THIS TOWN. I was, uh, mistaken.
Last thing is fan support. Big cities tend to be bastions for pro sports, which means that fan enthusiasm for college football can’t be as rabid as it would be in a place where it’s the only game in town. You need those fans to be fucking INSANE, so that they form booster clubs and launder their small business income through illicit donations to the team hot tub facility so that they don’t have to pay child support. That’s how you build a winning FOOTBAW program. Most big-city schools can’t pull that off. People have other shit to do.
Sam:
Shouldn’t all links embedded into online articles link out to a new tab? I can’t tell you how many times per day I’m reading something online and click a hyperlink only to have the entire tab load to something else.
Just hit CONTROL as you click the link and it’ll open it in a new tab for you. If you’re on your phone, hold on the link and then it’ll give you the option to open it in a new tab. PRESTO! You are now 30% less homicidal than you were a minute ago. There are greater browser crimes anyway, such as autoplay, articles that sideswipe, and of course articles that reload every five seconds even though you never hit the reload button. That last one, man… That will be what causes me to rip my own face off. HOLD FUCKING STILL YOU STUPID ARTICLE. Just thinking about it right now makes me want to throw shit.
Mike:
Browns winning percentage:
2016-2017 - .03125
2018 - .3125
It took a tenfold INCREASE in production to get Hue fired!!!!
The standard is the standard.
Email of the week!
Clayton:
Is it OK to scare the hell out of your kids on a regular basis?
My parents used to scare us all the time growing up. They absolutely loved it. One time that sticks out in particular is when I was about 8 years old, me and my sister who was 12 years old at the time and my cousin who is my age, decided to camp out in the backyard. We told my parents our plan and unbeknownst to us, mom went and bought a full-on realistic gorilla costume, with furry gorilla-hand gloves and everything. She then called all of my aunts and uncles and told them what she was going to do. They were not about to miss out on some high quality child-scarring entertainment, so they all came over while my dad took us kids to the store. My mom put on the gorilla costume and hid in the back yard and waited… like a god damn serial killer. My aunts and uncles were hiding not far from her. When it was dark out and we had a fire going and were getting ready to make s’mores, she snuck up behind us and grunted... ALL. HELL. BROKE. LOOSE. Basically, we all instantly shit ourselves and screamed like we were being murdered in the backyard while she chased us around until we finally realized what was going on. I remember I was laying on my back, after my cousin William Perry’d me in the chaos, and I was hyperventilating while screaming (and probably having a mild heart attack) while this gorilla bore down on me. I thought I was going to die before my mom took the mask off so I could see it was her. My dad, aunts and uncles and mom rolled around crying and scream-laughing in the back yard for a good hour after that happened.
It’s definitely something I will never forget.
Do you ever really scare your kids and/or wife?
Not like that. That’s fucked up, man.