Everyone has probably had some version of the dream before: naked in class, unprepared for a final exam, publicly humiliated by Jennifer Connelly in a crowded restaurant (this may just be me), tasked with running away from or catching up to something only to find that your feet have turned into caramel. Through my work on the Deadcast, I get to have this experience several times a year—while I’m wide awake, delightfully—every time we do a preseason preview or playoff reset on one of the leagues I don’t really follow or care that much about. This week, when Luis Paez-Pumar joined us to run down the English Premier League table and tell us who’s right corking and who’s proper shit, I got to live the nightmare again! Jennifer, please stop yelling at me!
It would have been very easy for Luis to make up an imaginary team or two and give us a preview of those teams, but it is very much to his credit that he didn’t make up a team called like Fudgely Town or Barnsmell United and convince Drew and me that they would finish ahead of Chelsea. As far as I know. It definitely seemed like the teams were all real. Some of them sound very interesting indeed! My sole contribution to the first two segments of the podcast is recommending David Peace’s long novel Red Or Dead, which is about Liverpool and which I have not even read. If it’s like his other books it will be either impenetrable or hypnotic, or more likely first one and then the other.
The back half of the proceedings belongs, as always, to the Funbag. The contents were dark, dense, and aromatic. This included questions on the proper care and storage of potatoes, and how many chips can be extracted from one potato, and also some non-potato questions. These include a summer camp comedy rivalry with Andy Samberg, where the repellent Ricketts family ranks in the hierarchy of shitty sports owners, and not one but two Trump Questions of the Week. It was probably unkind of us to leave you with the image of Trump trying to explain the plot of No Country For Old Men, but no one ever said podcasting was about kindness, and we all deserve our own nightmares.
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