There are times when the lag between when we record The Distraction (on Tuesday mornings) and when it goes up (the first minutes of Thursday) is not to our advantage. But there are also instances, like this week, where it is absolutely essential.
As frustrating as this can be, I think the very fact that this week's episode is a pretty straightforward football-and-Funbag installment of the pod, and not a morose reckoning with the horror and unknowability of this country and this moment, is a good thing. You'll get one of those soon enough, but for the time being perhaps I could interest you in something more along the lines of "Three guys trying to figure out what's wrong with various lousy NFL teams, as if they had no other care in the world." Also I got kind of upset about my co-hosts' bagel orders of choice, which is maybe small or ungenerous of me, but which I also stand by.
There has never been a time to think, really think, about how messed up the Las Vegas Raiders are. That does not reflect anything terribly positive about the moment, obviously, but it was nice to be able to do so, considering the alternatives. Our tour through the league's more profoundly borked organizations gave us an opportunity not just to consider Whatever The Raiders Are Doing but also the bleak Cryptkeeper-scented stalemate that prevails in Dallas, and the Colts' seemingly final decision to give up on Anthony Richardson and the strange upside-down style of quarterbacking that he and he alone embodies. Drew put the Miami Dolphins on this list as well, and while I sort of made a case for them grounded in the fact that they actually have some really good players whereas the other teams discussed mostly do not, a decently compelling case was made against them as well. It's a strange thing to be mad at a team you don't cheer for because they were insufficiently rigorous in signing a backup quarterback, but all three of us were able to reach consensus on that one.
With the exception of a brief moment on the NBA's looming All-Star tweakage and the inherent difficulty of making an uninteresting, low-stakes thing somewhat more interesting through introducing some sense of stakes, the rest of the show was ice-cold Funbag nonsense. A listener alerted us to Mark Wahlberg's Ohio car dealerships, which was kind of a lot to sit with. An email about a Proustian experience of 1990s butthead music, filtered through Scott Rolen's walk-up music, ended in a hail of Anthony Kiedis imitations—first from me, then from Drew, but sadly not from Ray.
We also addressed the unparalleled cultural hegemony of the Yankees hat and considered the prospect of the Angels as a possible rival in that space; I confused Tyler Anderson for Chase Anderson, there, which is of course very embarrassing. A brief and enthusiastic discussion of the shithead Yankees fans trying to steal the ball from Mookie Betts segued into a discussion of the Fireman Ed Community, and mindset, and lifestyle. We heard a voicemail from a listener who actually consumed the Russell Wilson football-shaped bread, the existence of which I subsequently had to/got to explain to Ray. And that, give or take an avant-garde final voicemail, was that: an episode that was full, inconsequential, and which feels to me like it was recorded a year ago. All things considered, I'll take it.
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