As a general rule, you can tell how much fun we are having on a given episode of the show by how far the episode wanders. This isn't to say that we aren't enjoying ourselves when we are in Hater's Guide mode, or on the episodes where we really are just talking sports/getting at it as hard as we can. That, too, absolutely beats working, and is a thing that Drew and I both enjoy doing enough that we routinely do it for free, without any recording devices nearby. Personally, though, I love a peripatetic episode of the podcast. Not just because it means that I am in some way winning, either, although to be clear it does mean that at least to some extent, since Drew generally tries to keep things moving along and I am always trying to interrupt that progress with a long story about a particularly large sandwich I got from Fia Deli in Ridgewood, N.J. in 1995.
As fun as it is to dominate, though, I also just like an episode that moves around from one thing to another, some of them timely and some of them whatever the working opposite of "timely" is, at something like the pace and with something like the randomness of an actual conversation with friends. This episode, on which we were joined once again by the Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay, is one of those.
This would ordinarily be the part of the post in which I recap all the different things we discussed during the episode, but it would be easier in this case to just say that we didn't really talk very much about hockey or contemporary art and leave it at that. In the interest of better serving you, the reader who has presumably not listened to the episode yet or is otherwise out of blog posts to read, I will note that we discussed Jason's new book on parenting during the pandemic, the delightfully titled I Wouldn't Do That If I Were Me, shortly before Jason and Drew compared notes about their experiences covering auto-racing, which was in turn shortly before we combined for a speedrun of Remembering Some Lower-Tier Porno Magazines.
It didn't get more ribald than that, because this is not that kind of podcast. But, because it very much is this type of episode of this podcast, it didn't really slow down much, either. We talked about NFL ownership in its current avant-garde mode, with special attention paid to last week's powerful match-up between Jim Irsay and Mark Davis. We talked about the enduring appeal of swaggering executive cruelty, in sports and elsewhere, with specific focus on Houston Astros owner Jim Crane. We gave our uninformed thumbnail odds for the U.S. Men's National Team in the World Cup. There was some time given to whether the Jets and/or Giants are actually good, during which I managed to more or less keep it together. Given that it was a Jason Gay episode, and given that Drew is now a true-blue cycle boy, there was kind of a lot of cycling talk in there. I am sure I'm missing something, it was honestly going by pretty fast.
This is before we even got to the Funbag, where the question of Buffalo-style nachos was considered and instantly approved, and we put our cards on the table about doing mundane midlife tasks while idly pretending that we are Jason Bourne. And then, after a breezy 54 minutes, it was over. If we had just gone the whole hour, we might really have been able to cover every conceivable topic. But it's nice to leave something for next week.
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