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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 brackets, bartenders, hot people with shitty taste, and more. Your letters: Chuck:

Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick. This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results. Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.

Madison Booker is a perfectly polite, charismatic young woman, but there is no other player in her sport for whom the word "rude" comes to mind as often. In basketball, rudeness is a two-pronged trait: It's being good enough to make a hard game look easy, but more than that, it’s being good enough to make your opponent’s hard work seem like a waste. It's strutting into a department store, knocking over a stack of neatly folded sweaters, and heading home. What you feel when you watch a defender stay in front of Booker, only for her to rise up and nail a midrange jumper over their head, is overwhelming pity. If Texas was likely to be a one-seed in the NCAA tournament anyway, the SEC Tournament championship Booker led them to this past weekend should ensure that the Longhorns end up with the third overall seed, in the Fort Worth regional not far from home. In three tournament games—a quarterfinal against Alabama, a semifinal against Ole Miss, and a final against South Carolina on Sunday—the junior Booker averaged 20 points and 8.3 rebounds, shooting 61.4 percent from the field and earning tournament MVP honors in her very rude way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lCZwOJmvcY

The University of Maryland honored all the men's basketball team’s departing seniors on Sunday before facing Illinois. Diggy Coit, Collin Metcalf, Elijah Saunders, and Solomon Washington walked onto the court with family and assorted loved ones, and got framed jerseys and drawings of themselves to commemorate the end of their run in College Park. Their Maryland careers are over, yet it seemed like they'd all just gotten here. Well, OK, they all did just get here. Every honoree in this year's senior crop was a first-year Terp. You gotta combine all their days in College Park together to amount to what only yesterday passed for a standard college stay. "Yeah, it was not the typical mood for a senior day," said Maryland booster Jack Cullen, who said he can "count on two hands" how many Terps home games he's missed since his days as an undergrad in the late 1970s. 

It goes without saying that there is a great deal of Psychology going on in Donald Trump's second term. None of it is especially complicated, because the people involved are without exception clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who universally dislike and distrust each other, see their hugely consequential jobs primarily as opportunities to make short-form video content and fly on private planes, and have not let their (correct) understanding that they will be going to go to hell when they die sway them from gulping down huge foamy draughts of humiliation every single day. But if none of it and none of them are very interesting, the volatility of the visibly decaying real-estate priss at the center of it all generally keeps it surprising. For the most part, this is a matter of nausea and dread—a drawling executive digression revealing plans to invade "four or quite frankly five" new countries, the most powerful politician in the world either nodding along or nodding off as his chief health officials stammer through an endorsement of miasma theory. But sometimes it plays out as it does in this Wall Street Journal story about the president compulsively gifting pairs of Florsheim dress shoes to the underlings and supplicants that wind up sitting across from him at meetings. The Journal story quotes a woman who works in the White House saying "all the boys have them," and another laughing that "it’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them." In one sense, this sort of behavior won't really be surprising to anyone who has spent time around a disinhibited and declining older person; thought processes become both less linear and much more legible in that cohort, and in this case Trump's interior progression from "bored with person talking" to "noticing that person's shoes" to "telling them to put on new shoes" is no longer interior at all. The Journal story describes Trump interrupting a lunch meeting with Tucker Carlson to start talking about "his 'incredible' new shoes" and pausing a December meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to point out their "shitty shoes" before "retrieving a catalog" and getting to work on crafting a presidential solution to that issue. If this habit had in any way distracted the president from dropping bombs on foreign schools or his ongoing domestic terror campaigns, it would be much easier to laugh about it. As it stands, it's just one of those stupid things everyone gets to walk around knowing about while all the bombing and terror stuff continues. There's very little surprise left in that, either.

Despite what a pair of suspicious NBA owners have whispered to Pablo Torre, I don't believe that the NBA rigs the draft lottery. Certainly, it makes a sort of cockeyed, intuitive sense that the league would want to reward the Dallas Mavericks with a generational prospect in Cooper Flagg, for inexplicably giving their marquee superstar to the league's marquee franchise, thus increasing its sale value; or for the league to fortify the San Antonio Spurs' status as international darlings by giving them Victor Wembanyama. But the league clearly has more to lose than gain from stacking the deck. Also, a committed cork-boarder could engineer a post-facto rationale for any lottery outcome having been rigged: The Orlando Magic got Paolo Banchero in 2022 because the league was doing Disney a favor amid tumbling stock value; the Atlanta Hawks got the first pick in 2024 as part of an outré attempt at election-rigging. However, I think the NBA should rig the lottery. On a recent episode of Zach Lowe's podcast, Lowe raised the idea of the draft order being assorted in the basketball equivalent of a papal conclave. I love this idea. The concept of the lottery, with its recently flattened odds and the tweaks sure to come after this summer, is that by partially decoupling draft order from win-loss records, the league can discourage tanking. This is always going to be an imperfect solution as long as the two are connected at all: The incentives are too powerful, especially when one player can change the fortunes of a franchise so dramatically—and can do it on a sharply below-market contract for up to five years. If the NBA were to openly rig the lottery, however, different virtues (other than proficiency at destroying one's on-court product) could be rewarded. No longer could the worst teams in the NBA ensure better draft picks by losing a ton, nor would they jump through any of the strange hoops possibly being set up for them next year, such as counting wins toward draft position after a certain date. No, a rigged system could reward abstract values such as honor, virtue, and suffering with nobility.

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles's columns "have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know." Free Press columnist Joe Nocera wrote that "everything she does is funny and wise," in response to a tweet from John Podhoretz about how Bowles has "the soul of Borscht Belt comic deep within her." Bowles has recently been described by Weiss as "the lovechild of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion" and "the funniest writer in America." A writer of such skill and observational talents will find no shortage of opportunities to fashion piercing, hilarious, and illuminating prose from the current political and cultural situation. With that in mind, let's see what Bowles has to say about the United States' war with Iran, a topic she grappled with on Friday: → Trump at war: We’re officially bombing Iran. And Iran is bombing, well, everyone they can. They’ve reportedly lobbed missiles, drones, and deck chairs at the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Turkey as well as Israel, its number-one bombing love. But it’s been a pretty dismal showing. We’re very much and clearly winning. Like, really, really easily. Here’s Trump on the war timeline: “We also projected four weeks to terminate the military leadership, and as you know, that was done in about an hour so we’re ahead of schedule there.” And here’s Trump on who should become Iran’s new leader: “Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. . . we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports.” And they should stop picking one among themselves: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela.” It will be done in ancestral Trump fashion, via swimsuit competition in an indoor/outdoor pavilion at a resort. In other war news, a U.S. submarine sank an enemy ship by torpedo for the first time since World War II. Welcome back to water warfare, baby! There’s unbelievable footage of a fighter pilot shot down over Kuwait, in a bright and cheery mood as locals approach her there in that dust bowl. They thank her for what she’s doing, and offer her help (thank goodness she didn’t land in Minneapolis).

Following the Iran women's national soccer team's third group-stage match of the 2026 Women's Asian Cup, five members of the team have reportedly defected and are now in protective Australian police custody. The defections come on the heels of a turbulent week for the team following the joint U.S.-Israel military offensive against Iran, which killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, and which has killed over 1,300 civilians in the country. Though the national team had left for Australia for the tournament prior to airstrikes, the war has been felt half a world away. In the pregame routine ahead of the team's first tournament match against South Korea on March 2, the Lionesses stood silently while the Iranian national anthem played, a longstanding gesture by Iranian athletes usually interpreted as a form of protest against the regime. The gesture was condemned by the state back at home: Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting personality Mohammad Reza Shahbazi called the team "traitors during wartime" during a broadcast and said that they must be dealt with "more severely" due to the timing of the anthem protest, just 48 hours after the death of Khamenei. https://twitter.com/abornaei/status/2029591780610503035

The Miami Dolphins are releasing Tua Tagovailoa, eating an NFL-record $99 million cap hit just to do it. It's an ignoble end to his six seasons in Miami, but it was inevitable to anyone who has watched the Tua roller coaster. Even with an offensive wunderkind like Mike McDaniel hired to bring out his best, Tagovailoa ultimately could never rise above the mediocrity of the Dolphins' infrastructure and his own limitations as a quarterback. Hell, there are still arguments he shouldn't even be playing football with the number of bad concussions he's suffered through his career. In a statement on the team's behalf, general manager Jon-Eric Sullivan said "as we move forward, we will be focused on infusing competition across the roster and establishing a strong foundation for this team as we work towards building a sustained winner." About Tagovailoa specifically, he had this to say: "I recently informed Tua and his representation that we are going to move in a new direction at the quarterback position and will be releasing him after the start of the new league year. As I shared with Tua, I have great respect for the person and player he is. On behalf of the Miami Dolphins, I expressed our gratitude for his many contributions, both on the field and in the community, during his six seasons." — Jon-Eric Sullivan

When video of FBI Director Kash Patel falling on his little ass during this year's annual FBI vs. Secret Service hockey game was exclusively provided to us, we were told by our source that Patel fell down at least two more times during the game. Defector has now received additional footage from the game, and can confirm another instance of Patel eating shit while attempting to skate. Wow, he fell right over.