You remember the Super Bowl, from before. It was pretty good. It was played earlier this week, some cool stuff happened in it and some other less cool stuff happened in it, it was weird around the edges and the commercials were dispiriting in some familiar ways. It was for the most part like previous Super Bowls, give or take the ads from massive tech companies encouraging you to let your body die from last year. This year, all those ads were replaced by ones in which famous people maniacally booped things up on their phones or winked into the camera. Anyway, that is all nearly gone now, but before everyone moves on to whatever is next—regular season basketball, looks like—Drew and I spent the first part of this week's episode of The Distraction talking about the good and bad of that game, with special emphasis on The Patrick Mahomes Experience. I would file that under the "good" parts of the game, personally, but I don't want to give too much about the episode away.
Per the terms of my employment contract, we will not discuss the NFL again on the podcast until late August. Please hold any questions or comments until that time.
All of which, again, leaves us with...the middle of the NBA season. As luck and the NBA trade deadline had it, though, this has been an exceptionally busy and entertaining middle part of the NBA season. The Brooklyn Nets finally traded in their bulbous, luridly defective, gas-guzzling Homercar of a superteam for a sensible Kia Soul, which gave us an opportunity to assess the divergent futures of Kyrie Irving with the already pretty vibe-deficient Mavericks and Kevin Durant with the already promising but worryingly contingent Suns. All of this points insistently back at the question of how superteams tend to bomb, so there was a little more Nets chat, but I think we're likely done talking about them for a while, too. In the course of a LeBron appreciation session, Drew told a touching story about calling his son an "asshole" and I disclosed my no-longer-secret shame of having absolutely detested Michael Jordan throughout his heyday, and gave some advice on trying to appreciate greatness that I am certainly going to forget as soon as baseball season starts back up. For now, though, I stand by it.
And then, after a brief discussion of J.D. Vance and the hilarious purgatory of the conservative influencer/politician, we formally got to the dumb stuff. Not only do the episodes that are just the two of us—well, you hear our producer Eric Silver briefly in this one—keep us fresh, but they guarantee that we get to the part of the show where we talk about Tim Thomas and New Jersey high school excellence in a comparatively brisk and expeditious manner. We took just two questions from The Funbag, but each represented fine examples of this utterly debauched form. The first opened up the incredibly promising possibility of bringing the Remembering Some Guys mindset to non-sports settings, and set off a lively round of Remembering Some Teachers. The other Funbag question was about non-traditional underarm deodorant application methods, which feels right.
One bit that I'll underline here, which we mention in the episode, is that we apparently need some five-star reviews at Apple Podcasts to get more and better ads to read; a bunch of ancient trollish one-star reviews have dragged our numbers down to a deceptively unremarkable 4.0. It's a weird thing to ask for, but as this is a weird podcast listened to mostly by weird people I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you've got a minute to go here and do that, we'd be in your debt.
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