Time for your letters:
RyGuy:
I live in Wisconsin and a good number of fans here immediately joined the Favre bandwagon following his manipulation out of Green Bay. The Jets were not necessarily a conflict of interest; however, a sizable number of people went all in with Favre when he connived his way to the Vikings. By this, I mean they bought Vikings gear and talked tons of shit after MINN beat GB twice in 2009. However, these very same people are now standing in their own Hell's Kitchen with the shit sandwich they made AND deserved as Farve as pooped said shit in the bed and GB is back on the rise.
Now, mind you, the following question comes from a lifelong Bears fan: Am I within moral grounds to murder any of these Favre/Packer repeat turncoats if they talk shit to me after the inevitable double-feature Lovie/Cutler implosion and GB takes out the Bears in the Wild Card Round?
Yes. Absolutely. Any Favretard who reverts back to being a Packer fan after switching to the Vikings for Favre's pit stop must be lashed. You people have justly earned your new lifetime sentence of cheering for the Vikings. As a lifetime Vikings fan, I assure you it is a cruel punishment indeed.
I went to a bachelor party this summer and one of the guys there was a Wisconsin native who switched allegiances to the Vikings after Favre signed.
ME: So you're a Favretard?
HIM: I just think they gave him a raw deal, and I was happy to see him stick it to them.
ME: But you know you're a horrible person, right? I mean, you're just an awful person.
HIM: No, I'm not!
I hope this entire Favre episode prevents any more fans from becoming obsessed fanboys of one player and ditching their team as a result. Surely, that's the only good that could come from this whole goddamn thing. If you are one of those miserable humanoids who ditched your team just for Brett Favre, YOU ARE A FUCKING MISERABLE WASTE OF LIFE AND YOUR SPAWN SHOULD BE INCINERATED FOR THE GOOD OF ALL. You people are the reason karma came back and fucked my team in the guts. I hate you. IF you are a Packer fan and you see a Favretard try and come crawling back, you CRUSH them.
TC:
How old do you think the oldest person who reads Deadspin is? Like consistently checks on a daily basis. Over/under 65?
Over. We've received mail from guys in the 50s and 60s, so I see no reason why there couldn't be some 70-year-old dude who's hip to the athlete dong. I know I will be when I'm seventy!
Jimmy:
The older I become, the less appropriate it is to run up and ask for an autograph when a celebrity is sighted (I'm now 34). So the question then becomes: who would make your list of top 3 people who you would unabashedly run up and ask for an autograph - no matter what age you were? The only one that came to my mind right of the bat was Neil Armstrong - I would absolutely effing ask for the 1st man on the moon's autograph, even if I like 45 and my kids were with me.
Does a book signing count? Because I feel like book signings shouldn't count. If you're 45 and you like Bill Simmons, I don't think you should feel like an asshat for going to his signing and having him write his name on the inside of your book (complete with Ian Ziering reference!). That's different than walking up to someone cold and asking for their signature. Once you hit your 30s, you're pretty much limited to Ali, the President, and the Pope as your options. If you're 34 and you go skipping up to Jeff Bagwell for his autograph when you see him out at a Cheesecake Factory, I think you're overstepping your bounds. Plus, you'd almost certainly be mistaken for a memorabilia collector, the fucking lowest rung of humanity. No one wants that. I think at some point you switch over to "I would like his autograph" to "I would like to buy that guy an alcoholic beverage of his choice." That's a way of showering praise upon someone you admire without looking like a slobbering jackass.
You know what I've never done? I've never done that thing where you have a waiter send a free drink over to someone and then the person receiving the drink expresses surprise and delight, followed by the waiter pointing over at you and you giving a cursory wave. That's called the Oskar Schindler, and I'm pretty sure it's only a smooth move if you're a Nazi weapons builder and/or international double agent.
Matt:
Say your very good friend (who is a dude) reveals to you that they have the powers of Mystique from X-Men. He can transform into anyone he wants. He is fully willing to turn into the girl of your dreams and let you fuck him. As soon as you're done he gets up, leaves the room, and then changes back into your friend. So do you fuck him? Some guys say absolutely not. Just too weird for them. After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that I would do it. Brooklyn Decker here I come! One friend went as far as to say he would marry his friend. Personally I couldn't do that because I do enjoy a female presence in my life to talk to at times.
Assuming I'm answering this question in the alternate funbag universe where I have no wife or children (FRINGEY!), the answer is still no. Or maybe once. Let's face it: If you fuck your manfriend while he's morphed into Brooklyn Decker, that friendship is pretty much over. You're not gonna relate to each other in a normal way ever again. Because why would the friend let you do that to begin with? Why isn't he morphing into George Clooney and snagging free trim and VIP hotel service in equal measure? It's probably because he loves you and is willing to change into a whole other person just to have sex with you. It's like in Being John Malkovich, when Catherine Keener will only bang Cameron Diaz if she's in Malkovich's body. Only you get to bang Brooklyn Decker instead of John Malkovich, which is a pretty good tradeoff. Still, odd.
And it's weird to confront the idea that someone who was always your friend now wants to be your sexual partner. I've known my best friend Jeremy for nearly two decades, and at least once during our friendship I wondered to myself, "Dude, what if he's gay and is in love with me? Man, that would be weird." AND IT WOULD BE! Anyway, he wasn't gay. And I was in dire need of a blowjob at the time. The mind will go astray like that.
Speaking of X-Men, I remember watching the first X-Men flick and thinking to myself, "You know, even if Anna Paquin sucked the life out of me every time I touched her, I think I'd still go out with her." Now THAT is how you know someone is attractive to you. If you are more than willing to brave that for some trim, you've got yourself a crush.
Shannon:
Why do painters wear white? Seems like the last color you'd want to wear. I don't get it. What's the optimal color - gray, maybe?
If I were a painter, I'd wear an entire outfit made of an oriental rug pattern. Nothing shows up on an oriental rug.
Or I'd paint shirtless. I hired a painter once and he painted the whole day without his shirt on. He was old, too. Like, sixty. And he'd be sitting there painting and sweating and his wiry gray chest hair was poking out and paint was dripping over him. It was like the worst SI swimsuit issue ever.
By the way, painting is fucking awful. I'd rather do 10,000 loads of laundry than paint some goddamn room. It's like moving without going anywhere, and in the end your jeans are ruined.
Sam:
My mother spent her mid-30's on a proverbial causeway between our dining room table and the Waltham Costco. Once my youngest brother left to go to college, my parents up and moved to New York City, but not before taking my just-graduated live-by-myself sorry ass to the Costco one last time.
After we checked out ($500), my mother and I walked over to customer services to cancel her membership. She was visibly sad, like a major part of her life was coming to an end (it was). However, she was instantly happy about her decision when the manager SHOWED HER THE COMPLETE TOTAL OF EVERY DIME SHE HAD EVER SPENT AT THAT COSTCO.
Between 1992 and 2008, my mother spent nearly $200,000 at Costco alone. Some quick long division shows that to be nearly 250 dollars a week! For sixteen years!! I, of course, was proud of myself. She cried on the ride home.
Just another reason I'm bitter there isn't a Costco within a reasonable distance of my home.
John:
Do you ever find yourself watching a late-night television program and wondering how many other people could possibly be watching that same program? In college, my friends and I would inevitably find either the Nickelodeon Games and Sports network (which showed replays of Nick game shows like Guts) or hair band videos on VH1 classic in the wee hours of the morning. Often times we'd discuss how many people could conceivably be watching those channels, and whether we constituted a slice of a very small number of people. I have a hard time believing that more than 2,000 people are watching BulletBoys videos at 3:30 on a Wednesday morning. Am I miscalculating?
No, that always boggles my mind, too. The audience for TV is shockingly vast. For example, 2.1 million people watched the 12/21 episode of Auction Hunters on SpikeTV. How the fuck is that possible? Did they all just happen to leave their TVs on? Even the shittiest network or cable show still manages to attract this otherwise enormous group of people, regardless of when it airs.
This is why cable companies need to create a LIVE function on their cable boxes, which allow you to find other people who are watching the program at the same time as you (just like seeking out other people when playing Xbox 360) specifically so you can ping them and say to them, "Holy shit! You're watching this, too? I thought I was the only one!"
HALFTIME!
Chris:
Try walking into the Met with your head full of shrooms. Yeah granted all the people in there will make you terrified of the actual walking up, but once you get into the modern European exhibit with huge paintings of Napoleon looking over huge swaying battle scenes or 7 foot tall graphics of naked ladies then you will instantly applaud your choice of coming to the Met on shrooms. And the best part? It's an art museum! So you standing in front of any Van Gogh for twenty minutes as you watch flowers dance in front of you will only have you heralded by the museum staff as someone who's "really into art."
Yep, I need to do that.
Mike:
What's the best monopoly to have in Monopoly? Gotta be the oranges, right?
I concur. Whenever I play Monopoly, I target the oranges as fast as humanly possible, and if someone manages to buy New York Avenue from me before I land on it, I curse at them and threaten them with physical violence.
The oranges are perfect because you can build up hotels on them relatively quickly and start getting that sweet rent money into your coffers. They're just the right price. The light blues are too cheap. No one gives a shit if they hit the hotel on Oriental Avenue. It's Oriental! IT'S CHEAP AND DIRTY AND A STAY THERE COSTS YOU NOTHING.
Whereas New York Avenue, that's when you finally get into four-figure rents. Plus, because New York Avenue is right before Free Parking, EVERYONE lands on it because God is cruel and loves to fuck people over like that. I think New York Avenue gets more hits on the Monopoly board than all of the CHANCE spaces combined.
By the way, anyone else throw out the "repairs" fee CHANCE cards before they play any game of Monopoly? I DO. Because I am a horrible person.
John M.:
I'm in the Air Force and have been in for 9 years now. This is previous iteration of the Airman's Manual from 1999.
Fast forward to page 49 of the .pdf.
Check out the bullet points images: airplanes. Look to the immediate right of that. There's a cartoon representation of the World Trade Center in crosshairs.
Now is that creepy or is that fucking creepy?
That is fucking creepy. AND AN OBVIOUS SIGN THAT 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB PERPETRATED BY THE LION'S CLUB.
Ali:
Here's a picture I took of a car in front of me in the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru in Long Beach, CA this past Saturday. No explanation necessary. I didn't get a good look at the driver so I don't know if she's telling the truth. Still, I appreciate her positive message.
She has big breasts and she likes chicken? MARRIAGE MATERIAL.
Ployd:
I was watching TV the other day and that Travelers Insurance commercial came on where all the animals in the animal kingdom are friends and having a great time at some African watering hole. Anyway, my wife says something about how it would be cool if animals were really like that and I immediately said, "Um, no. What if they formed some super animal alliance and decided to turn on humans and take over?" She promptly called me an idiot (rightly so) and went to sleep. However, WHAT IF. Animal kingdom (this includes insects) vs. Humans.
I say animals make us their sex slaves and lunch meat in less than 48 hours. There is no way we'd be able to keep hoards of spiders from biting us in our sleep. Insect nets? Animals with claws will solve that problem. Basically I stayed up way late thinking about how badly animals could own us if they ever decided to do so. Horses would surely rape our women (and men) while lions held our necks in their jaws while we watched. So terrifying.
I dunno, man. I think we'd still beat them. Haven't we already established our clear dominance over animals already? We have guns and tanks and nukes and all kinds of other crazy shit. Bugs and vermin always try and break into our homes, often to meet their doom at the hands of a glue trap or my size 12 Merrells (with the cushioned insole, I could kill all day!). Most of the most dangerous animals out there are already endangered. We could knock off the five remaining elephants in no time flat. And have cold elephant for lunch the next day! DELISH.
The only place we'd get owned would be the oceans. If all the sharks and electric eels and stinging box jellyfish (look it up and be horrified) decided to aggressively patrol our coastline, we'd never go in the ocean ever again. Until we killed them all by dumping arsenic-laced petroleum into the water. Then they'd all perish and we'd finally have the sea to ourselves. VICTORY.
Spence:
If someone had the ability to travel back to the Revolutionary War with a single M16/big fucking gun with a shitload of ammo, couldn't a single soldier kill the entire British army? Wouldn't that be the coolest thing ever? If I could do this I would.
You still wouldn't be able to kill an entire army because they'd have muskets and one of those little balls would eventually get you. Even if you go back before that, you'd still have to face down bows and arrows and blowguns and any other kind of primitive long-range weaponry, all of which would probably bring you down if 10,000 guys were aiming for you. If you're in some sort of fortified sniper position, where arrows can't hit you, then it's a matter of you being able to kill off an army fast enough to prevent one of the soldiers from reaching you and killing you hand to hand. To ascertain just how many people you can kill before this happens, I direct you to the most scientific killing simulation ever devised: SMASH TV
Man, I loved that game.
Time for your email of the week. Kethia, email the tips line for your prize. Time for a GREAT MOMENT IN POOP HISTORY. I call this one NIGHT AT THE POOPERA:
Kethia:
A Mexican guy entered the bathroom right before I did when I was at a casino. As soon as the door behind me closed, he started singing in Spanish...loudly. I went to a urinal to pee and he went to the toilet to shit. He took a loud, nasty shit and continued singing the whole time without the slightest grunt or break in song. And here's the thing, he was really good. He could have been an opera singer. If I had closed my eyes, I would have thought I was listening to Andrea Bocelli remixed with a fart noises. I find it really hard to pee whenever someone is watching me. I found out that day it's also really hard to pee when a Mexican guy is shitting and singing in Spanish at the same time.