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When your Defector Pals announced the plan to start Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, none of us imagined unlocking our creativity would come with actual physical pain. But we are going to be brave and trust the process. Week 1 of The Artist's Way was an introduction to the practice. This week, we read about the self-sabotaging "blurts" that come out from our inner critics, and practiced paying attention to them without giving them too much power. We also have our first week of daily morning pages under our belt! Kathryn, Ray, Sabrina, Chris, and Alex all started Week 1 last week and, as promised, we are here to share our end-of-week reflections. If you're following along at home, we'd love to see your responses in the comments, too. 

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about football, football, football, and also sex. Your letters:

On Monday, Italian soccer club Lazio fired its longtime falconer Juan Bernabé after the 56-year-old Spaniard posted photos on social media of, uh, himself following a penile implant surgery. In a statement, Lazio said "[w]e, and the historic symbol of the eagle, can no longer be associated with a person who with his behaviour has made the continuation of any relationship impossible." The club also said it was "stunned" to see the photos. As a result of Bernabé's firing, the club's eagle, Olimpia, will not fly at upcoming matches, as is tradition. Lazio's statement acknowledged the "hurt" that will be felt by the club's fans over Olimpia's absence. Bernabé, who had been with the club since 2010, was operated on by Lazio's resident urologist, Gabriele Antonini. According to Spanish newspaper El Confidencial, the two met at the club's training ground, Formello. In an interview with Spanish radio station Radio24, Bernabé explained that the implant allows him to control his erections and how long he lasts during sexual activity, explaining that he "has to ejaculate whenever I have some free time." He went on to say that it was a "marvelous surgery" and that his erection is "natural, but with this implant, I can press a button that lets me perfectly control both the erection and the duration." If you're interested in seeing the offending images, let me first me first try to disabuse you of your curiosity, but if that doesn't work, here you go.

How Arsenal supporters handle sharing a name with chronic masturbators.

The explanations are both tiresome and unsatisfactory. The 14-3 Minnesota Vikings were annihilated, 27-9, in their opening playoff game Monday night against Los Angeles Rams. Two weeks ago, Minnesota was a lone victory away from securing the No. 1 seed in the NFC and the attendant boost in DVOA Super Bowl odds that would come with it. The Vikings had one of the best defenses in the NFL. They had Justin Jefferson. They weren’t supposed to be this good, but they were as legit as any other team at the top of the standings. Most important, they had a quarterback in Sam Darnold who, unlike his predecessor, had developed a knack for shaking off mistakes and making big-boy throws in big-boy moments. For 17 weeks, Darnold was one of the best passers in football. I saw it. I saw him put a 97-yard dagger into San Francisco. I saw him hit the mute button on the Seahawks home crowd with a game-winning rainbow to Jefferson, in the freezing rain. I saw him sweep the Packers and get his own Rudy moment in the locker room afterward. This was the quarterback that Sam Darnold, an impending free agent, was always meant to be.

At the end of 2024, the Philadelphia City Council voted 12-5 to approve the 76ers ownership group's plans to build a new arena, named 76 Place, in Center City, after two years of contention from Chinatown residents and business owners. The final deal exempted 76ers ownership, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, from paying property tax over their 30-year lease at the location, and instead required HBSE to make $5 million a year in payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) and a $60 million commitment to community benefits such as transit and after-school programs, down from the original $100 million that the council was requesting. The detailed impacts of an arena on the neighborhood and city under that deal can be found here, but in short, team owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer would save anywhere from $97 million to $273 million in tax benefits; the direct heuristic of the Washington Wizards' arena in D.C.'s Chinatown doesn't paint a rosy picture for the community's future. The deal would be far from the worst that a city has borne in terms of new stadium construction, but with potentially very high downside. Not that any of that is relevant anymore. On Jan. 12, less than a month after the city council vote, the 76ers announced that they would not be building a new arena in Center City, and will instead remain in South Philly, with plans to construct a new arena within the extant sports complex. The conflict that drove the initial plan to move to Center City—an inability to reach an agreement with the current landlord at the team's Comcast Spectacor–owned arena—was miraculously resolved. According to an official press release from the 76ers, the new deal includes Comcast taking a minority ownership stake in the company, plus plans to bring a new WNBA team to the city.

Before he became the Washington Commanders’ sixth kicker of the season, in mid-November, Zane Gonzalez hadn’t kicked in an NFL game since 2021. He weathered injuries and training-camp battles at one of the more volatile, confounding positions in football. So his mere appearance in Sunday night’s Wild Card game and his doinked-in game-winning field goal made him an appropriate hero for the Cardiac Commanders, who have now won five straight games on the final play from scrimmage. As a euphoric London Fletcher put it on the Commanders radio call, Gonzalez “kick[ed] in the door and kick[ed] us into the second round of the playoffs” in the team's 23-20 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. After the game, Gonzalez said he’d been dealing with some hip discomfort during his previous kick, but that he felt good about the attempt as it left his foot. “I’m just a small part of a big plan,” he told reporters, adding that he was excited to get home to his wife and newborn son. 

Since replacing two-time Coach of the Year Mike Brown with Doug Christie, who was in the broadcast booth three seasons ago, the Sacramento Kings have become the hottest team in the NBA. They fired Brown on Dec. 27, after five straight losses, and lost Christie's first game in charge the following night; since then, they've won seven in a row and have looked like a totally revitalized team in the process. The operative question is: What are the Kings doing differently? I'd like to nominate a stretch of time at the start of the fourth quarter of the game in Boston against the Celtics this past Friday as the most explanatory chunk of play in the short Doug Christie era.

Last week, when not-yet-former-coach Mike McCarthy was denied permission by the Dallas Cowboys to speak to the Chicago Bears about their own perpetually vacant coaching position, it was obvious that the Cowboys wanted to keep him in his current role as the frontman and designated crap-catcher for their carousel of nonsense. And yet it makes perfect sense, and is somehow exactly as obvious, that the Cowboys fired McCarthy on Monday, the next-to-last day of their exclusive negotiating window with him. I mean, that's how you figured it would go, right—one way or another, the team would find the dumbest thing to do, for the dumbest reason, and do it at the dumbest time. That is the Cowboy Way. And when we say "Cowboys," we mean of course Jerry Jones. Now you may find that firing McCarthy has its merits; this would especially be true if you somehow saw him as the only thing keeping the Cowboys from their true place at the center of the football universe, which is a denial of both logic and Jones's position as owner/general manager/godhead/glowering presence. This past season alone, McCarthy was up for a new deal after going 3-2 in the first five weeks, fired a million times when they lost the next five in succession, guaranteed a new deal a million and one times because the team then won four of their next five games to get to the edge of playoff contention, and then just left to sear evenly on the hot seat because nobody could figure out how to decipher the two losses at the end of their season.

Isaiah Collier is having a rough rookie season for the Utah Jazz. That team stinks real bad: After a cute 2022–23 season of pretending not to tank under then-new team CEO Danny Ainge, the Jazz have decided to suck shit for a while, and entered Sunday's home tilt against the Brooklyn Nets with the second-worst record in the Western Conference. They'll get down to the bottom soon enough, provided Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans can stay ambulatory for a few weeks. Collier, who was taken by the Jazz with the 29th pick in the 2024 draft, is certainly doing his part. Collier came to the Jazz from USC, where as a hotshot one-and-done freshman he shared the spotlight with Bronny James on a distressingly Fortnite-coded operation, earning with his chaotic and eyeball-searingly unethical style of play a reputation as someone you dearly hope will never wear the jersey of your favorite professional hoops team. Collier entered Sunday's home game against the Brooklyn Nets shooting 32 percent from the floor and 16 percent on three-pointers, and turning the ball over on more than a third of his possessions. Attention to detail is not yet a strength of his game. This all suits the purposes of a team that wants to lose, even if it sometimes drives his coach and veteran teammates to hysterics.