If I may, I would like to take you Inside The Game. There was a moment during the recording of this podcast—it came maybe two-thirds of the way through the experience of my boss absolutely fucking cleaning my clock at Guess The Price Of This Ridiculous Gilded Kitchen Doodad—when I looked over at Megan Greenwell pretending to run some numbers in her head to guess the right price of an artisan panettone and realized that she was not pretending. There really were gears turning in there, numbers—numbers with decimal points—shifting between columns, considerations and reconsiderations. She knew what a pound of Stilton cheese costs in a normal retail setting. She was accounting for shipping and the significant but significantly variable Williams-Sonoma markup. She was pricing in the crate in which the cheese would be sent. I was absolutely cooked.
And friends, Megan did indeed beat my ass in the guessing-game portion of Drew’s annual celebration/desecration of the Williams-Sonoma catalog. But I like to think that the real winner is not necessarily you, the listeners, but people who didn’t know how to make soup but always wanted to make soup. There’s an expensive gewgaw for that, it turns out. Just dump your soup shit into it and turn it on and eventually it all turns to soup. It costs less than I thought it would.
This episode was not all about one of the regular co-hosts getting fucking trounced on the price of novelty cake pans and peppermint-dusted lollipops, though. No, I also got owned by the NFL team I care about, which traded one of its two interesting young stars to the Cleveland Browns either to appease Mike Francesa or as part of its organizational strategy of plugging its mopey 37-year-old quarterback into a more age-appropriate 2002-style offense, or both. So we talked about the NFL a little bit, and told some stories about what Drew was doing when he would usually have been writing his annual Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog—it involved being completely supine and very thirsty in a hospital—and then immersed ourselves in The Funbag.
There, as always, all of us were equally overmatched. Your questions touch upon the right way to rename the Cleveland Indians and the wrong way to make an omelet and Jeopardy! contestants soiling themselves. There’s a Trump question of the week that is less upsetting than the norm but somehow sadder. Honestly it all got a lot better for me once I got to stop thinking about the price of elaborate home wine-aerating decanters.
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