Your letters:
Jim:
Is it ever okay to throw a drink in a woman's face? I mean, if she says something soul-crushing that she could not possibly ever make up for? What are the factors one should consider? How many people are around to witness the act? I'm not talking about conking her on the head with it or scalding her eyes or anything. What would be an acceptable drink to throw in a lady's face? I'm thinking a tepid pint of beer or a white wine spritzer. As a two-time recipient of a cup of beer to the face at house parties, I am eager to know what you think.
It's true. There IS a gender double-standard when it comes to throwing a drink in someone's face! A man will get a drink to the face if he's rude or if he asks for a blowjob outright or if he's caught with another lady OH NO YOU DIDN'T. There are a shockingly large number of acceptable reasons for a woman to throw a drink in a man's face. It's almost as if women PLAN on doing it before they even get to the bar. For every woman you want to hook up with, there are just as many intent on assaulting you with a martini. YOU CAD.
But if I do it to a lady, then I'm an asshole? Well, that is just the greatest injustice in American history. I think you should be able to throw a drink in a woman's face if…
- She threw a drink in your face without provocation
- She says something racist!
- She stole your father's cadaver and sold it
- She's a lawyer
- She has a John Cena tattoo on her arm
- She's your friend, and this is all a crazy game! WHEE!
- She didn't call. I'm not made of stone!
Derek:
Has anybody just considered paying collegiate athletes the normal student-worker hourly rate? Not all student work is created equally, but it seems fair enough, and they'll still probably be the highest-paid student employees.
Just for fun, I checked out Kentucky's hourly pay rate for student workers, and your pay depends on what class you're in. Freshmen get $7.25 an hour on campus, while seniors get a whopping 60 extra cents per hour for the same work. Because EXPERIENCE. If I were a freshman, I'd be livid. Anyway, I'd love to see a college coach try to convince a freshman superstar to stay by pointing out that he gets a "raise" every year. With that $7.85 an hour, you could buy your mom a house!
Let's say that the NCAA made it legal to pay athletes the student wage based on the number of "countable hours" they're supposed to dedicate to sports every week. According to their bylaws, that amounts to 20 hours a week during the season and eight hours a week in the offseason. Now, those hours are complete horse shit. You and I both know that if Little Johnny skips out on a "voluntary" captain's weightlifting session at 5 a.m. at the field house, he will wake up with his nuts duct-taped to his asshole. But working within those laughable rules, a player on the current Kentucky roster would get $3,045 for his labor this season, and $1,798 for a full offseason of studying tape and running suicides to the point of vomiting. That's $4,843 for the year. That's not bad as far as slush-fund money goes (when you're a college student, $4,843 is a goddamn fortune), but it's still a relative pittance compared to the revenue you bring in and all those unofficial hours you worked.
The other problem is that this system treats all college athletes as equals when they're not. You know what that is? COMMUNISM. Jack Haley Jr. sitting on the end of the bench at Kentucky isn't earning his keep the way Aaron Harrison is. They shouldn't earn the same money. That's crap. So you have to figure out a pay system where top performers get a higher wage or bonuses or something like that. You'll never see the NCAA do this, because A) it's difficult, and B) no senior official is going to divert revenue that's currently going directly to his bank account. Would you? Life is expensive, man. You gotta hog all the money you can to pay for cars and shoes and water and stuff. If I were some phony-baloney NCAA official making bank and living in a baller house, I would keep things EXACTLY the way they were until some lawyer came around and forced some new, probably equally terrible revenue-distribution system on me.
I still say you could solve this problem by making boosterism fully legal. Just let boosters pay athletes whatever the fuck they want. Competitive balance is already a joke in the NCAA, because the big schools can "pay" their athletes by building them a W Hotel to train in. If Big Jim Strongboots at Bama wants to slip the quarterback an envelope stuffed with $50,000 in cash, let him go right ahead. The best players would get the biggest payouts and hottest escorts. The free market works! I want to see Bama go the full Dan Snyder and use booster payments to assemble a superteam that ends up horribly underachieving. YOU CAN'T BUY TEAMWORK, SABAN.
Tim:
In college, I took a class on presidents taught by one of Al Gore's former senior advisers. He said that Clinton used to have all Arkansas games and other big college basketball games taped and then he'd wake up the following morning at 4 AM to watch them before briefings started.
How many hours a night sleep do you think a president averages over their term? A normal night has to be less than 5, and then you have to factor in assorted all-nighters for secret wars. Can't be enough to maintain sanity, which is a comforting thought.
So Clinton got up early and expended all his creative energy shouting WOO PIG SOOEY at his TV set? I don't approve. That was back in the pre-DVR days, so Clinton would have had to fast forward the commercials automatically. On a VCR, this takes longer than just sitting there and watching the commercials in real time. Or maybe Clinton had a Secret Service guy do the fast-forwarding while he enjoyed fellatio from a White House page. That would make for efficient multi-tasking. I guess that's an okay use of taxpayer funds.
Anyway, I think that the average President gets roughly five to six hours of sleep every night, enough to be exhausted all the time, but not quite enough to earn full GRUDEN GRINDER status. Does Obama study as much tape of Putin as Gruden does? I highly doubt it. THIS GUY PUTIN, HE BELIEVES IN HIS SYSTEM, I TELL YOU THAT. I bet Obama needs Ambien to knock himself out after witnessing the day's atrocities, and then his staff has to intervene when he's tripping balls at 2 a.m. and wants to play pickup basketball in the nude.
I'm sure the amount of sleep varies wildly depending upon the man in office. Sure, Clinton got up early and probably stayed up all night chomping on vagina cigars and cutting ineffective side-room deals with shitbag Congressmen. But then you got Ronald Reagan, who almost certainly slept 16 hours a day and stayed awake only long enough to read the occasional speech and coldly ignore his own children. That job is entirely what you make of it. You can be a workaholic, or you can be a master delegator who requires only a 45-minute status meeting each day to see how all your wars are going. GOOD WAR DAY TODAY, SIR. I would choose the latter. I would assemble my Department of the Interior, tell them to get working on a system of elaborate turbo-charged moving walkways between cities, and then use my reality distortion field to get them to build it for me. LEADERSHIP.
Again, this is a shitty job. By taking it, you are automatically responsible for the bombing of a couple hundred children per year, so best not to get too worked up over it. The world is fucked regardless. I would take it easy. That way, nothing would get done, and I couldn't be blamed for anything. See you at Camp David, everyone!
Shelly:
Gwyneth Paltrow made some pretty dumb comments about working moms having it easier than her. Two questions: Are celebrities really that out of touch with the average person? And don't they have PR people and agents who help keep them from sounding like idiots during interviews?
Well, most celebrities ARE idiots, so it's hard to prevent them from sounding like idiots if they're determined. Even Paltrow, who puts on airs and pretends to be a supremely educated human being, was a UCSB dropout. She's dumb as a brick. The dumber you are, the less self-aware you are, which makes it far easier to believe all the breathtakingly stupid shit that comes out of your mouth.
By the way, I've been on film sets, and you know what? It sucks. The working day always goes long, and 99 percent of the people there have to stand around bored while the director and cinematographer try to properly light a candy bar on a stool. HOLLYWOOD MAGIC. If you're the electrician, or one of the poor bastards who has to restock the craft-service table with fresh Twizzlers every five minutes, you have every right to complain about it. But if you're a world-famous actress with her own trailer and a $5 million working fee and really great skin and you didn't even HAVE to sign onto this project and most of the free world would kill a baby to have your job, people won't be quite as sympathetic. You have to know that the world envies you and will turn on you if you take that shit for granted. If you don't, you earn its fury for being such an idiot.
People who work in creative fields (mine included) always want extra credit for all the work they supposedly did behind the scenes. But audiences don't give a shit, and they shouldn't have to. If I buy a computer, and the computer is a piece of shit, I have every right to think the computer is a piece of shit. I don't care how many hours the fuckers at the computer company put into it. They don't get bonus cookies for that. I don't forgive the shittiness of the end product. But write a mean book review, and the author will be like IF YOU ONLY KNEW HOW MANY PASSES I TOOK TO CRAFT THIS PIECE. Who gives a shit? Hard work doesn't give you a free pass to suck.
We also live in a world where successful people will use their success as a way of justifying every single position they hold. Their awesome life serves as proof that they are infallible in every regard. The attitude is… I'm rich and famous and successful, so how could I possibly be wrong about vaccines secretly containing AIDS? We call this Dan Snyder Disease.
Andrew:
How would society be affected if everyone's IQ was public knowledge? Imagine an internet database where you could look up anyone. Mandatory testing every 5 years done by private companies.
I don't think it would change much. For example, Geena Davis is a member of MENSA, as is the ever-horny Erik Kuselias. OH MY GOD MY WORLD HAS BEEN ROCKED.
[fart noise]
If you've ever met a Harvard graduate, you know that a person can have a high IQ and still be a clueless asshole. Everyone has a base level of tolerance for how stupid they want their friends and/or lovers to be, and whatever extra IQ points get heaped on top of that baseline are pretty much irrelevant. I like to mix and match. I like having stupid friends who are good at making pastries and smart friends who can explain THE MONOCULTURE to me.
HALFTIME!
Allen:
Is my house the only house in the entire world that has an entire closet full of plastic bags? Whenever we go grocery shopping, we always come back with a shitload of plastic bags that contained our precious groceries. Instead of throwing them out like normal people, we stuff them into a closet and periodically use them in our house as garbage bags in different rooms throughout the house. The worst part about that whole arrangement is that whenever you want to take one out and use it, the other billion garbage bags fall out and you have to try to stuff them all back in and close the door before they all start falling out again. So two points. A. Is it weird to hoard plastic bags? and B. Is it even weirder to use them as garbage bags instead of actual garbage bags that actual normal humans use?
My friend, you are not alone. Not only do I have a bag full of plastic bags in the closet, but that lone plastic bag is also the receptacle for all the other plastic wrapping that I'm supposed to take to the recycling bin outside the grocery store. That means, when I need a plastic bag and go in to reach for one, I almost always cause an EXPLOSION of raisin-box seals and peanut-butter-cracker wrappers. It's a mess. When I go to throw the thing in the recycling bin outside the store, a trail of tiny shreds and ribbons is left in my wake. Sometimes, when the bag is stuffed, and I just can't deal with picking up one more goddamn breakfast-bar wrapper, I say FUCK THIS EARTH and put that shit in the garbage bag. Take that, planet! If I manage to extract a plastic bag from the... uh… bag bag… without incident, it's a miracle.
Because you will always need a plastic bag at some point. Maybe you need to put your sneakers in one to give yourself the illusion that you've protected everything else in your suitcase from your rotting-corpse-flower foot odor. Or maybe you need to put one in the little garbage pail in your bathroom that you use for all the tampon applicators and trimmed pubic hair. Or maybe you need to give one to the baby to play with. You will always need one when there are ZERO bags in the house. IT DANCED WITH ME…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB0th8…
Nikhil:
What does a head coach taking a new job do with all the old team stuff they used to wear? What happens to all of Charlie Strong's Louisville swag? Goodwill? Thrown out?
College and pro coaches get so much free swag that I just assumed they wore everything once and then threw it out just because they could. I know I would! I would bust out a newly minted hoodie for every game. "New hoodie smell" would be my good-luck charm.
Obviously, a coach taking a new job has to divest himself of all his old merch, because if Charlie Strong walks around wearing a Louisville hat now, then HE AIN'T LOYAL or something. Those clothes hopefully get auctioned off for charity or donated to Goodwill. You should be able to give them to the players you leave behind, but obviously that would violate NCAA bylaw B976 (xii, subset 12), which prevents Louisville players from earning $7.25 an hour working the dining-hall griddle.
Matt:
My roommate's laptop is broken, so I let him borrow mine. I had a new Chromebook, so I let him use my old Macbook Pro for a few months, knowing that he'd give it back eventually. So yesterday I asked if I could have it back to do some work, and he gave it back to me. You can see where this is going — I opened it up and immediately found some porn he downloaded, along with video players necessary to watch said porn. This is the worst part — the screen even has some very questionable stains on it. My question is: Do I confront him about this, or simply burn it, throw it out, burn my hands, and never talk to him again?
Stains? Who literally jizzes ONTO a screen? I mean, I like to make jokes about jizzy keyboards and pages sticking together in the porno mag as much as the next guy, but you're not supposed to actually DO that. There are an infinite number of other places to bust your nut. Why would you choose the computer screen—which you need to keep operational—to target? That's insane.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to confront him about it, even make him feel humiliated about it. If you're gonna watch porn on a foreign computer, you risk that exact type of public shaming, and you deserve it if you can't even be bothered to cover your tracks. I would simply tell him what you found, and then tell him he can't ever borrow anything of yours again. Then I would tell him that you are entitled to jizz on one of his possessions when he least expects it: his toothbrush, his hair, his mom, the steering wheel of his car… you get one vengeance sliming. That's only fair. We should ALL get into the habit of conscientious filth consumption, people. Treat other computers as you would want yours to be treated. NO JIZZING ON THE SCREEN.
Brock:
What if a successful Muslim NFL player did the Muslim equivalent of Tebowing every time he scored a touchdown? Say he faced Mecca and dropped to his knees with his forehead on the ground. Seems like the refs would allow it (otherwise it would be clear religious discrimination, since they allowed the Christian celebration). But would the viewers go apeshit? Would sponsors pull out?
Oh man, now I really want this to happen. Viewers would go 100 percent apeshit. "What is that guy doing? Is he praying to Allah? IN AMERICA?! What is he planning? What if he has a bomb strapped to his body under his pads? ARREST THAT MAN." You could milk 1,000 pointless SportsCenter debates out of it. It would cross over to CNN and FOX News instantly. And then Roger Goodell would ban ALL end-zone celebrations—even Christian ones—and then Civil War would break out. It would be a disaster. We should pay a player to do this. I'll even pay the insurance fee if someone in the stands at Cowboys Stadium throws a bottle at him. Find me Najee Mustafaa, stat.
Maxx:
Would you rather be 5' 6 " 160 or 6' 6 " 360?
You'd rather be small and light. Always always always. I know short guys are testy little fuckers hellbent on ruining the world to compensate for their adorable tininess, but you don't want to be a very large, tall person. The world is not built for you. Clothing-store stocks are an outrage. Car seats are miserable. Your back hurts all the time. I'm 6'2" and over 200 pounds, and I'd probably be better off long-term if both those numbers were cut down to size. It ain't worth the strain to hear the occasional "Wow, you're tall!" compliment (#humblebrag!). I want to pick people up and juggle them when they say that, just to AWE them with my not-all-that-remarkable height. But otherwise, I would rather walk into a Gap and find pants that are actually my size. They have four million pairs of size 30 jeans and one pair in size 38. And it's in the back. And in purple. I should probably not shop for clothes at the Gap.
Jordan:
I'm 28, engaged and getting married in the summer. My fiance and I both do OK with work and have managed to build up a bit of savings to put towards a down payment for our first home.
She wants to move out to the suburbs where you can get a much bigger house, and I want to stay relatively close to the city center where you are on the subway line and close to things like cool restaurants, shops and general "downtown" stuff.
She claims that once we settle down and have kids we won't care about going out to "cool restaurants" anymore and having a bigger place further out of the city (easier parking, lower property taxes, big box stores, longer commute to work though) is well worth it. Is she right? Will that new, authentic Neopolitan Pizza/Ethiopian/Molecular Gastronomy place really not mean anything more to me once I have a toddler running around?
I think it depends on when you plan on having children. If you're gonna have kids right away, then by all means, pack up shop and head out to the suburbs. Because once the kid arrives, you are a face on a milk carton for two decades. You will never be seen again. Friends will wonder if you're dead. All of that is perfectly normal, mind you. You'll get so tired that even thinking about going out to a bar will exhaust you. I can't even fathom it anymore. Where do these young people find the ENERGY, I ask you? You won't want or need to be in a city. You will want to fuck off to the suburbs and huddle with other yuppies in a gated community where public schools aren't complete dogshit. I ate at Denny's the other day and ENJOYED it. That's how uncool I've become. I didn't even see anyone be racist to anyone there. Shocking, really.
But if you're not gonna have kids for a couple of years, stick around the city! Have fun, man. Be a freewheeling childless married couple that eats nice meals and walks around on sidewalks arm in arm, making other people sick. You need that time before you have kids. It's nice.
But when the kids come, suburbs.
Email of the week!
Matt:
In the Fall, our college town has a big block party on Friday nights. I had a bunch of friends in town and we decided to head down there (*Side note: We never do this because it is usually a bunch of little kids, facepainting, cheesy fight song chants, and washed up country music artists).
There are a ton of food vendors and I see this one vendor: Cake Pops. I fucking love cake pops! They had crazy flavors too. Bacon, salted carmel, you know, the real yuppy shit. So I buy a few and I house these things and we decide to stop in and have a sit down meal with my fiance, friend, and his fiance.
I didn't realize this at the time, but I ordered the sugar free ones. Sorbitol is a natural laxative and I'm CRAZY sensitive to it. Like I eat a piece of sugar free gum and I instantly just sit on the toilet waiting for the inevitable. So I'm going to this sit down meal with a timebomb ready to detonate my colon.
So we order our first round of drinks and we decide to do warm tequila shots for "fun". The nano second the shot hit my stomach, it felt like bomb went off. Instantly, my hands got ice cold and sweaty. I turn white. My fiance looked at me and asked if I was ok (*side note: up until that point, we did not cross to poop barrier). I told her I had to step out and take a phone call.
I go to the front of the building and walk around the side, pinching my ass cheeks with every ounce of strength. I go in through the back entrance and find the restroom. This is a busy restaurant/bar so naturally, there is a line for the bathroom. I do the awkward waiving everyone through who needs a urinal. I wait for the stall and I barely got my pants off before a gallon of liquid unleashed in the toilet. I come back to the table and my fiance is extremely pissed off because she thought I was on a business call. I made up some story about grandma being sick and got out of the dog house. I'm going straight to hell.
Sugar-free cake pops? The person who sold those deserves jail time.
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.
Art by Jim Cooke.
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