Tuesdays, which are the day that we record The Distraction, tend to be busy days for me, at least by the sliding scale I-work-on-a-computer-while-wearing-cutoff-shorts standards of this job. I do my standing radio bit with some delightful people at the ESPN station in Las Vegas who are up much earlier than I am, and then I record the podcast, and then... well, we all have our definitions of "busy," and no one really knows what a word means if you think about it. But the Tuesday before last really was busy, even by normal standards. I did my radio bit and recorded last week's episode, and then there was an hour-long meeting as part of my role on Defector's Culture Committee, and then we recorded the episode embedded below because Drew is on vacation with his family this week. The only reason I mention any of this here is that, on the off chance that you are reading this before you start listening to the episode, I feel as if you should be warned that I am decently punchy in this one.
If I were either a better performer or just a more easygoing guy I'd want to sound something like this in every episode. But even Drew, who is generally able to keep things on track while also being a very silly man on the merits, is a little goofier than usual on this one. A just-the-lads episode pegged to the bizarre ad hoc cocktails crafted by Defector commenters (and us) during their most desperate younger days and a host of Funbag questions is naturally going to be goofier than the average, and this one is notably goofier than that.
So Drew and I both air out some of the mustier wings of our respective mind palaces in this one, in part because we'd both recorded an episode just 90 minutes earlier, but also because we were both re-opening the warm weather parts of our brains. If this is not one of our more disciplined and on-topic episodes, and by now it should be clear that it is not, it would also be not just off-brand but inappropriate if our Spring Break Show was a focused and policy-forward discussion of the news of the day. Now does that mean that more or less half the episode's running time should have been devoted to breaking down those heroically unsavory improvised cocktails, and debating whether a vodka-and-vanilla-schnapps concoction is technically a martini? Or to an extended retelling of Drew's post-college spring break misadventures in Cancun? First of all I resent those questions, and secondly it is too late now to change the fact that the answer is pretty much "yes."
There is some more substantive stuff in the mix, too, although "more substantive" is relative, and in this case the insubstantial stuff is insubstantial enough that a brief assessment of the Boston Red Sox's mysterious team-building process and a frank discussion of elevated mayonnaise options easily clears that bar. Somehow in that last bit I (correctly) identified the great bar Dutch Kills as being in Long Island City and (incorrectly) identified that neighborhood as being in Brooklyn. As my bloopers go, this is both a minor one and, in this case, an on-brand one for this episode—it's mostly right, and also weirdly wrong, and arrived straight from the punchier corridors of my mind. If you are going to turn a spring break podcast over to two middle-aged men, one about to go on vacation and another with a mood disorder, this is the sort of cocktail you are going to be served: some juice from the vending machine, whatever intoxicant is at hand, given a decent shake, and served warm.
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