NowLoop

When we set out to do a supersized season of Normal Gossip, it was all tee-hee, ha ha, look at all these funny goofs we have! And then we went through The Process and made 12 actual episodes of silly, unhinged, or just plain weird stories. Now? We need a nap. Luckily for everyone, we saved the best for last! There was no way we were going to do a season of all-stars without bringing back our dowager queen, Kelsey McKinney! For our finale (for real this time), we brought Kelsey a story about a power struggle amongst the staff of a pediatrician's office, with grievances so petty and machinations so cursed that we actually had Kelsey sympathizing with management. (Possibly the first and last time that will ever happen.) If you’ve got feelings about plant parenthood, sound bowls, efficiency in the workplace, mysterious white powders, or the collective quest of office managers everywhere to get a five-star rating on the apps, this one is just for you. But if all you want is to listen to Rachelle and Kelsey laugh for an hour—hey, we’re not judging—we’ve got you covered there too!

Barstool Sports podcaster Ryen Russillo has an urgent message for you: He will be dead in 72 hours unless $12 million is wired to the following bank acc—sorry, my mistake. I just assumed that's what he was going to say based on the haunting thumbnail on this video. Now that I've played it, I see that Russillo is simply interested in selling you some appallingly lit food. https://twitter.com/TheRyenRussillo/status/2102566992217776535 The video appears to have been shot in a study room at the local library, and Russillo looks like he was told that recording this was the only way to ensure his family will be allowed to stay alive in West Germany. Did he film this thing by himself with an iPhone and a tripod? The abrupt cuts to stuttering first-person footage of troughs of bread and fries would seem to suggest so.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Giri answers a question about how to encourage your child to love your favorite sport.

In the grand scheme of things, Week 1 of the NFL season means nothing. There are still 16 games to go afterward, and a lot of teams use that first game as a kind of unofficial preseason game to iron out all the kinks. After just one week, it wouldn’t be fair to make such grand pronouncements as “The Falcons may never win another game,” or “Boy, the Lions are kinda fucked,” or “Justin Herbert has gone from overrated to just plain sucking ass.” But after two games? Well now, I think that’s a large enough sample size to make the kind of sweeping generalizations that make for good football radio. So that’s exactly what Arif Hasan and I do this week on All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/de74fc48-90f0-4703-b864-1530be9ac8bb

The Protect College Sports Act passed another procedural vote in the Senate yesterday, by a 70-21 margin. It will clear a few more procedural steps this week before going up for a final vote, at which point it is expected to pass and be sent to the House. In the meantime, it continues to mutate into a worse and more exploitative version of itself. More than 35 amendments were added to the PCSA yesterday, and one in particular stands out. Republican senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville amended the bill to sharpen its language on how NIL spending would interact with the proposed salary cap for players. The bill now explicitly states that vaguely defined NIL money earned by players would count against a given program's spending cap on players, which would be set at $48.8 million. https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/2102533363277910208

Ireland and Israel are, at least for now, set for some really weird soccer matches. Unfriendlies, you might say. Their national men’s teams have a home-and-home series scheduled to open this weekend, only there are no home games for either side. Both matches will be played in Central Europe: one in an empty stadium, the other with only Israeli fans. The top story in Ireland these days, sports or otherwise, is that the games will be played at all.   “I think we all agree we shouldn’t be in the position where we have to play the game,” John Martin, head of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), said last week.  And Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrimsson said he’d personally polled all his players, and "none of us feel comfortable playing in these games." 

Sisi is a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster.  Sisi, owned and operated by an Austrian company called Kora Yachts, is used for racing, her calendar divided between summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean, or what the rest of us know as "the life." In between all the racing, Sisi has to be delivered from port to port. To get to the starting mark of the Palermo–Montecarlo Regatta, she had to be sailed from the finishing mark of the Aegean600, in Sounion, Greece, to the port of Palermo. With roughly a month between the two races, Sisi's crew first delivered her to the top-of-the-line facilities at Marina Genova, adjacent to the international airport along the western waterfront of downtown Genoa, in northern Italy. There, across the harbor from the vast and imposing Fincantieri shipyard, Sisi was cleaned up, tightened up, and provisioned, and prepared to take on fresh crew for a three-day, 480-mile transit down the Tyrrhenian Sea. On Monday morning, Aug. 10, at approximately 9:00 a.m., I sat on a duffel bag in the shade of a dockside oleander at Marina Genova, watching from an awkward distance as several youthful Austrian crewmembers bounced around in Sisi's shallow cockpit. Photographs I'd consulted in preparation for this moment showed her painted a cheerful blue, but sometime recently Kora Yachts had decided to repaint Sisi's sides and keel a decidedly uncheerful black, all the better to represent her vicious demeanor. Sisi, already shimmering at this early hour behind rising columns of heated air, seemed small beneath her own towering mast, and to sit conspicuously low in the water. Hunkered down at dock Sisi looks lean and stark and scary, her low white deck gleaming above her black sides like the bleached skull of some primordial monstrosity. The feeling, watching her in the morning's meager shade, was not unlike the moments before skydiving out of an airplane. What am I doing here? Am I really about to do this? Why have I done this, and is it too late to back out?

A baseball season is very long and offers plenty of time for everyone involved to forget the stuff they would rather forget. For that reason among many others, it would make a great deal of sense to have long ago consigned Team USA's performance in March's World Baseball Classic to the ol' memory toilet. They were uniquely joyless in an event otherwise defined by goofball cheer; in place of the light nationalism that sets the WBC's otherwise highly variable stakes, Team USA was scowling, half-assed, and haplessly coppish. In a fun and loose exhibition event, Team USA alone dared to ask whether ballplayers too might not be a kind of special operations-style troop. Then they lost to Venezuela in the final, despite locker-room inspiration from one of the half-dozen or so SEAL-turned-influencer guys who claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden. Taken altogether, it was a perfect illustration of a certain American way of being in the world—the kind that makes an embarrassing scene at a jet-ski rental counter while wearing a Grunt Style T-shirt, a version of Uncle Sam that keeps the pointing finger but is also worryingly sunburnt and wearing blade-style sunglasses on the back of his head. But that was a long time ago, and a great deal of baseball has been played since. Enough baseball, in fact, that players like Paul Skenes are already giving retrospective interviews to their hometown papers about where things went wrong. The Pittsburgh Pirates were eliminated from playoff contention last weekend, despite a modest trade-deadline splurge aimed at shoring up what had been a terrible bullpen. There are things to be hopeful about in Pittsburgh, even in that bullpen, and also reasons for concern.

If José Mourinho bringing a printout of questionable fouls from the Madrid derby to a press conference was an objectively funny maneuver from the Special One, the resulting fallout is bewildering, convoluted, and a little bit pathetic from everyone involved. It seems that Mourinho's actions did what he meant them to do: They grabbed the attention of La Liga. Mourinho, however, may not have wanted the attention specifically of league president Javier Tebas. Tebas, who grew up a Real Madrid fan but who has turned out to be a thorn in the club's side, has never been one to keep his opinions to himself, whether that's about racism in Spanish soccer or about FIFA president Gianni Infantino. On that note, bright and early on Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. Spain time, Tebas decided to drop a response to the idea that there is some form of conspiracy against Real Madrid from La Liga's refs, in the form of a long-winded, strangely combative rant on his personal Twitter account. It's really worth translating and reading in full: Here they go again, the mouthpieces and the regime's television, building the same old narrative: the permanent conspiracy. When it's not Negreira, it's the referee; when it's not that, it's that they're not international. All clubs can be officiated by international referees and by those who aren't. None has the right to on-demand refereeing. But this article goes further: It claims that referees harm "the business that feeds them." What exactly is it asking for? Refereeing based on revenue, viewership, or the badge? What a way to understand equality in the competition. Real Madrid is crucial to La Liga. But claiming that "La Liga is worth nothing" without it reveals the disdain for the other clubs, their fans, and their history. The competition belongs to no one. Claiming that referees are directed against Real Madrid is living in another galaxy. That narrative serves as an excuse to cover up other shortcomings that are plain to see in these first matches of the season. It's more comfortable to point to a conspiracy than to explain what's happening on the pitch. And my stance doesn't depend on any position: A refereeing error doesn't prove a conspiracy, nor does repeating it for years turn it into truth. GET THE BLINDERS OFF! It's September, and they're already calling the League adulterated. No one with common sense buys that old excuse anymore.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about flawed domes, office condiments, life on one leg, and more. Your letters: Baron: