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It's been a few weeks since we heard anything salacious, greedy, stupid or just plain time-wasting from Bill Belichick, which is a surprise as well as a blessing given that he is one of those sports figures who producers and station managers never tire of churning. In short, enjoy the sounds of nature in a vacuum, because fall practice starts soon and we are about to relearn what it's like to be angry at and sick of the North Carolina Tar Heels the way we were the New England Patriots. But that's no longer the standard, because as much as he wants his new job to be about football, he knows in a corner of his mind that he is actually a science experiment on the hoof. Specifically, how Old Folks America can pretend to be interested in a team just because he's there at a time when that team is in a sport that's shrinking back into a regional entertainment. It is a question of how long bankable fame actually lasts before it turns into something pejorative, or worse. It is also a test case on how long teenagers in an open market can be moved by someone who is a hero to their parents and grandparents.

Financier Bill Ackman has been widely shamed for his appearance in a professional tennis tournament last week. Since shame is no longer operative in American culture, he's continued to explain every painstaking detail of the experience in his tweets, which read like a transcript of a front-facing video filmed in a car. In the course of defending his embarrassing appearance at the Hall of Fame Open, Ackman is approaching something like performance art. Ackman denied the charge that his doubles match at the tournament was a pay-for-play situation. "Many also claimed that I bribed the [International Tennis Hall of Fame] for the wildcard, which is entirely untrue," he wrote on Sunday. "The HOF asked me for nothing and I made no commitments to the HOF. I had in the past donated to the HOF, but had done nothing in recent years." When denying a bribe, it's always important to complete the terms of the bribe: Ackman announced a few paragraphs later that he would be granting the Hall of Fame a "$10 million endowment that I will manage for free."

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 the national anthem, Kevin Costner, desert island actors, action film musicals, and more. Final reminder: Why Your Team Sucks returns to these fine servers next week, so get your submissions in here before I go turning off the spigot. We’ve got a lot of NFL teams to preview and a lot of sucking to cover, so don’t fuck around. Get me that hate and get it to me fast.

When I was growing up, my mother kept notebooks where she meticulously recorded every dollar our family spent. She never talked about them with me, she just left the notebooks on the kitchen table where I could see them. I would flip through the lines of expenses, horrified at the dollars and cents I’d incurred by just existing, terrified that I would bankrupt our family.  My parents were young and making it work on a second lieutenant's salary, so they didn’t earn much money to begin with—as the child of Korean War survivors, my mom learned to hold tight to what little she had. With her savvy budgeting, she kept me fed and clothed and even entertained. We spent countless afternoons at the library and in the children’s department of the city’s free art museum. Decades later, my family’s financial situation has improved drastically, but the years of scarcity have shaped us both. She still records her expenses in the notebooks and hides the majority of her money from herself so she won’t spend it. From her, I learned that money is a source of fear and shame.

One advantage I have always held in the literary arts is speed. I am a fast reader and an even faster scanner. I can draft quickly, churning out hundreds of words as if turning on a spigot. It's an advantage in the age of quantity, and the ability to write a lot all the time is one I never take for granted. But it is a blessing as often as it is a curse. What you lose with speed is often beauty, care, and intention. If I wrote as fast as my brain would prefer (at the speed of light), there would never be a good turn of phrase, and I would hate myself. But I hate myself all the same when I force myself to go slowly in order to make something beautiful and creative, because it is so hard for me to do so. For a piece I really care about, I have a lot of tricks to convince my brain to slow down, and think more critically and carefully about the words in front of me. I sometimes write longhand before transcribing to the computer. To revise, I will read the sentences from bottom to top to make sure they all stand up on their own. And when I'm feeling very bogged down and uninspired by the English language, I read Shakespeare.

There is no shortage of entrepreneurial Bills in New York City. A trip around town can bring you to such businesses as the diner Bill's in Ridgewood, the bike shop Bill's Cyclery in Woodside, the jazz club Bill's Place in Harlem, or Bill's Supper Club in Midtown. (There is also a Brooklyn bar called Post No Bills—a command we are vehemently disregarding this week.) But out of all the Bills in my city, I selected Bill's Wines & Liquors in Sunnyside, Queens. I've lived in Brooklyn for the last eight years, but I've recently been spending a lot of time in Astoria, at the northwest tip of Queens, because that's where my boyfriend lives. I can't claim that there's any grander reason why I chose Bill's Wines & Liquors over the other Bills than "it was the closest." So: High marks for Bill's in convenience.

On Monday night, Major League Baseball gathered together all the big boys with their big bats from around the league to show off for us. And they did! Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh showed off the most, and so he won. Every year, MLB gets all these big boys with their big bats, and they line them up on national television and ask them to hit baseballs one million miles. This is cool. I like to watch this! I am in no way a Home Run Derby hater, because I think it's fun when guys who play games for a living get to play games for fun.

Kathryn Xu: This weekend, my family and I went up to Lake Placid, where I saw several loons. As is the case when I see birds of note, I informed Barry Petchesky of this fact, only to discover that I was not the only Defector staffer to recently see loons and subsequently inform Barry Petchesky of the fact. What are the odds! Sabrina Imbler: I am no statistician, but I imagine they are quite low! I spent the past month in the Adirondacks, and had no idea Kathryn also came up to the beautiful North, and the land of loons. I too saw loons on a lake and informed Barry Petchesky, because this is simply how things are done here. Barry then told me that Kathryn had also seen loons, and this is all the context you need to understand how we arrived here, in this blog. Kathryn, was this your first loon sighting? What did you know of loons before this weekend?

Bill Simmons has been a part of my life for about 20 years now. As with any relationship that lasts that long, my feelings about him have evolved. At various points I've been a fan, a hater, a critic, a detached observer, and a begrudging admirer, sometimes all at once. I'm not alone in this. I have only recently discovered that I am part of a whole demographic of sports fans for whom Simmons occupies an odd, conflicted space in their media diet. They are dedicated listeners of his podcast, which they primarily consume in order to find things to make fun of him over, and they would be devastated if Simmons were to retire tomorrow. Thousands of these people congregate on a subreddit dedicated to Bill Simmons, where they crack jokes at his expense, maintain the lore of The Bill Simmons Podcast universe, and speak in a language that can only be understood by fellow sickos. Some of them even listen to a podcast about The Bill Simmons Podcast.

The MLB All-Star Game has unfortunately been handed over to Pat McAfee, who spent Monday kicking off the week's festivities on ESPN. What better way to get baseball fans excited about the Home Run Derby than by subjecting them to a few hours of a poached ex-punter bellowing about a sport he barely follows while he embellishes his yinzer accent? McAfee had a few lowlights today. While emceeing a press conference with Tarik Skubal, Paul Skenes, Dave Roberts, and Aaron Boone, he stammered his way through an answer to some pointed questioning by Jen Ramos Eisen. He also duffed an interview with Shohei Ohtani, at one point instructing Ohtani's interpreter to provide some "energy on the delivery" of his question. But McAfee's most embarrassing moment was probably donning a sleeveless jersey while sucking up to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred by stumping for a salary cap: