Has Donald Trump Ever Eaten A Piece Of Fruit?

Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Your letters:

Adam:

What is the last entire piece of fruit Trump has ever eaten? A single grape doesn’t count.

On its own? Whole? Fuck man, that’s an impossible question. Like, I would have said a banana because Donald Trump strikes me as the exact kind of old man who still thinks a banana split is the most luxurious dessert ever conceived. But if we’re talking about him just eating a banana plain, fuck that. It’s too phallic for his 1988 brain. Also, Trump is a legendary fussbudget who would freak the fuck out if a stray banana string ended up laced across the back of his hand. He’d demand his entire body be disinfected if that ever happened.

I think the answer is an orange. That’s a fruit I could see Trump eating on special occasions. He wouldn’t peel the orange himself. Too messy. Too liberal. He’d have a Doral waiter peel it and supreme it for him, and then he’d eat it with a knife and fork. He might deign to ingest it after all that. You never know.

Kickass oranges like Valencias are the kind of fruit that can fit squarely into the category of Fruits Sweet Enough That Even Unhealthy People Like Them. This category includes watermelon, pineapple, mango, and cherries (another possibility for Trump). Trump might willingly eat that, if only to show people he’s among the healthiest specimens ever to walk the planet. He would chew on it to get the juice out and then spit out the fibrous innards, like the fucking two-year-old that he is. Also, oranges have the whole Florida angle going on, and Trump is a proud Floridian. He fits into Florida’s ethos much better than he ever did New York’s. Someone probably told him orange grove workers in Central Florida get paid a dime an hour and that made him even hornier for that particular fruit.

But, like, an apple? Not a fucking chance. I don’t think Trump would even fuck with a fruit salad. This man has assuredly walked past 670,000 fruit salad trays at a hotel buffet in his lifetime. I’m the kind of prick who cherry-picks the pineapple out of those salads, but Trump wouldn’t even bother doing that. He’s just go right to housing some lard toast. If Trump has ever eaten a piece of actual fruit, with no strange and needlessly elaborate prep of any kind behind it, he probably did it decades ago when he was at military school. I bet they demanded he eat his ration of oranges one time, and then he spent the rest of his student career dodging fruit like it was fucking live combat.

By the way, when I was a kid my grandparents lived in Florida. We would go to their pool club and, as a treat, the club would bring out whole peeled oranges on sticks. They were fucking great. If you are not the president, I strongly recommend an orange on a stick.

Bret:

I work in a large office building and every day when I’m walking out to my car after work, there is this dude whistling loudly “The Andy Griffith Show” theme song. He really gets into it. I think he’s a douchebag. Should I give him the benefit of the doubt or is my hatred justified?

I would let it slide. I think it’s weird to whistle that tune on your way FROM something. You whistle the Andy Griffith theme on your way TO doing shit: fishing, hiking, working, an appointment with your dominatrix, etc.

But that’s beside the point here. The point is that the dude you hate is whistling outside and not inside. I think outdoor whistling is permissible. If someone whistles in the elevator, you’re legally allowed to shoot them between the eyes. But outside? I can deal. I got plenty of space to get the fuck away from the weird whistling guy.

It’s like roaches. When I see a roach in my house, I freak out and want it atomized on the spot. But if I see a roach outside? Well, that’s his turf. He’s got as much of a right to walk down the street as I got. It’s when he ventures onto my POPPITY that such decorum no longer applies. When that happens, I quickly drop my “We’re all citizens of this world!” liberal horseshit and grab a shoe. Same deal goes for whistlers. You wanna whistle? Take that shit outside. Otherwise, you get the shoe.

Sam:

Cream cheese. You open the plastic lid and there is another cover, typically foil, that you need to peel back. In my younger days, I would peel back this foil layer without completely removing it from the container and, after my cream cheese needs were satisfied, carefully put it back in place and then re-apply the plastic lid. As an older man (late thirties), I can no longer abide this extra barrier. Now, upon first opening a new tub, I completely remove and discard the foil layer so that upon subsequent uses there is nothing between me and the cheesy goodness other than the plastic lid. Am I a monster? Is this wrong? I would like to say I have noticed no appreciable diminution in shelf life or freshness since beginning this practice, but I really haven’t been paying attention.

If you haven’t noticed any difference since you ditched the seal entirely, you have your answer. I don’t keep the seal on. I know some people do but it’s a pain in the ass. I want my cream cheese NOW. I don’t wanna have to negotiate an extra barrier flap that doesn’t even need to be there to begin with. All that foil is gonna do is pick up extra bits of cream cheese still in the tub and then transfer those bits directly onto my wrist. Now I gotta rinse my hands off before I even get to eat my bagel. WHOLE DAY RUINED.

For your sake, I checked the tub of Philly in my fridge just now to see if there were explicit instructions to keep the foil lid partially on. I could find no such instructions, which is actually a surprise because big companies like Kraft usually have lawyers in place who demand such supers be included, lest someone in Ohio sues them for punitive damages after opening an old tub and finding an extra milliliter of watery cream cheese runoff. To that end, I DID see a disclaimer warning you to eat all the cream cheese within 10 days of opening the package. I have never seen this disclaimer before and I’ve definitely never obeyed it. Unless that cream cheese has mushrooms growing out of it, it’s fine to eat by me. It’s industrial cream cheese! There’s no cheese in it! It’s just creamed bath salts! Perfectly safe food.

Matthew:

Is Adam Schefter happy? What does he do for fun in his spare time? Does he have a good marriage? Is he a good father? Looking into those cold, dead eyes, I can’t imagine he is anything more than robotic when the cameras are off.

Oh I think Adam Schefter is the happiest man in the fucking world. There is nothing to indicate that ESPN’s premier access stooge has any moral quandary about being the official launderer of the NFL’s bullshit. He loves the league. He loves Roger Goodell. He loves the owners. He loves his fatass paycheck. Why wouldn’t he? He’s got every NFL player and coach on speed dial. That’s the dream for a lot of sports fans out there, and Schefter will absolutely tell you he’s living that dream every day. He will say it in the corniest, lamest terms … and he’ll work in a promo for Slim Jims along the way. But he believes it.

If you think he’s still an inane robot when the cameras go off, then it’s even LESS likely he’s unhappy if that’s true. If he’s so preprogrammed by the machine (and he is) that he can’t toggle into a more grounded form of humanity once he’s home, then he’s always gonna be the jolly lapdog you already see gracing your TV screen.

It’s fucking unnerving that grown adults can turn out this way, but it’s hardly uncommon. Adam Schefter is an IDEAL employee of ESPN and, by proxy, the NFL. He believes in the business as a cause. He has no interest in hearing opinions or finding evidence that might challenge those beliefs. There are plenty of other people at ESPN like that. And at Facebook. And Lockheed Martin. And Amazon. And every other business that wants its mission statement embedded in your very DNA. All those companies have the culture and the money required to assimilate all the little Schefters they please into the collective.

You are currently living in a country dealing with the horrific effects of that mass assimilation. I know that’s a big reach, given that we’re talking about a dipshit NFL insider. But it’s true. There’s a reason American pharma lobbyists are, as we speak, trying to dismantle the UK’s model national health care system. They want money but they ALSO think they’re doing the right thing. They’ve been roboticized. Turns out the ideal business model is a death cult. Also, Colts wideout Chester Rogers is out for the season. One tough break for one tough player.

Ace:

Who has the biggest personal porn collection in the world, and what does it contain?

You do. It’s called … (dramatic pause) … your PHONE. Wow. Did I just shift your whole paradigm with that? I bet I did.

But that isn’t what you asked. You’re asking who has the largest collection of analog porn: magazines, videotapes, DVDs, vintage stills of Bettie Page in a pointy bustier, etc. Much as I tried back in the day, my personal porn collection would not have merited consideration. I had a couple of Andrew Blake movies on DVD, plus a few reliable, no-filler Playboy compilations like Playboy’s Book of Lingerie, The Best Of Anna Nicole Smith, Playboy’s Nudes, etc. I could only fit so much under the mattress, you know. I had to optimize my porn stash.

Compare my meager stockpile to that of, like, Larry Flynt. I’m hopelessly outgunned. There are zillions of weird old rich dudes out there who not only collect porn for fapping, but because it’s perhaps valuable, and because they genuinely admire the art of it, and because they like the crass twist of collecting antique shit but having that shit be antique daguerreotypes of your grandma and a horse. By now you know the lengths that rich old farts will go to in order to nurture their perversions. When Bob Kraft gets back from his weekly drive-by handjob, he probably has a stack of old copies of Velvet a mile high waiting for him next to his toilet.

But again, I’m thinking too narrowly here. Think about countries where pornography is illegal, and access to online porn is banned outright. China has an awful lot of rich people and an awfully large ban on porn in any form. Jack Ma probably has a warehouse devoted just to porn he had REENACTED. Or consider Japan, where hentai is still fucking huge and occupies its own enormous corner of popular culture. Or consider bin Laden, who liked himself some boobies. Or consider Jared from Subway. I mean it. Child porn monsters have a vested interest in owning material that isn’t traceable online. Much wiser to keep it in 50 boxes in the garage. No one will EVER detect it there.

Anyway, my answer is some filthy-rich prince who’s into child porn AND regular porn and amasses metric tons of each just because he can. Second place goes to Mike Pence.

Nicky:

What’s worse? Sneezing while you’re eating or having to poop more after you’ve finished wiping?

The latter. I have a strange allergy where dark chocolate makes me sneeze. Anchovies, too. Sneezing out either of those foods makes for a real adventure. Still, that’s only a problem for me if I happen to be on the witness stand when it happens. Otherwise, I can just change my shirt and go about my day.

The return wipe is worse because it’s inconvenient (you mean I gotta shit MORE? I have things to do!), and it has a much more lasting effect because wiping too much can dry your butthole out and leave you with a certified not-so-fresh feeling for the rest of the day. It’s a variant on swamp-ass that you’d rather not endure.

HALFTIME!

Ray:

Recently, my co-worker unfortunately passed away (right before his 51st birthday, RIP brother). A large group of us went to the visitation, some of us with friends and family from outside work. As groups like this do, we wound up drinking and eating afterward, since we don’t all normally do so after work. Since then, one of the deceased’s closest friends found out that her on-again-off-again boyfriend (there’s a lot to the story, obviously, none of which is crucial to the story here) was seriously considering proposing to her after the visitation. This is certainly far worse even than proposing at someone’s wedding. But how much worse is it? Like, are we getting into college level math to quantify this?

You’re talking to a man who proposed to his now-wife less than a month after 9/11 happened. I didn’t propose BECAUSE of 9/11. The timing just happened to fall that way. I proposed in the car. I was gonna propose at a restaurant but the ring was burning a hole in my pocket and I didn’t want to risk losing it. Also, I really really wanted to propose. I didn’t want to wait. So I pulled over and sprung the ringbox on her in front of a lake. Since my wife is half-German, I asked the question in German. I did not get the wording right, but the ring did all the copyediting for me.

That’s a long way of saying that there’s no wrong way to propose. Doing it after a funeral sounds fucking weird, but funerals and weddings are inextricably linked. I don’t mean that strictly in Shakespearean terms. I mean that a funeral, like a proposal, is a fucking intense, existential event to participate in. If I go to a funeral, I’m gonna think about the dead person up there in the casket, even if I don’t know him/her very well. But I’m also gonna take the moment to think about my own life, and what it means, and what I wanna do with it before I die myself. You’re gonna think about love in those moments and you’re gonna think about it really hard. It’s why funeral receptions can be strangely warm affairs. You get to see old friends. You get to eat and drink. You get to think about cultivating some good out of all the terrible shit that just happened.

So, when you think of it that way, it’s almost natural to want to propose to someone after tragedy strikes. I mean, you two could just fuck instead to keep it modest. But death is grand and so is love, and so there you go. Just don’t Instagram it.

Steph:

I’ve worked from home for the last eight years and just accepted a new job offer where I’ll be working each day back in an office. What’s changed that I should know about?

You’re asking ME? Steph, I haven’t worked in an office in a fucking decade. I have no idea what’s different now. I assume having a foosball table in an office break room is no longer the draw it once was. Other than that, I’m in the dark. I used to go to the Deadspin offices in New York strictly to take a nap. I got shit for it. I regret nothing.

I’m going by secondhand info here, but I think I can tell you a few new wrinkles to expect once you go back to the halls of Dunder Mifflin. First of all, the free snacks are gonna be worse, if there are any free snacks at all. Secondly, human resources won’t actually help you with anything. They’re like Verizon operators: there to tell you that they UNDERSTAND your frustration but can’t actually do anything about it. Every #MeToo tick-tock you read these days includes a section about HR ignoring serious complaints. Those goons exist now mainly to give plausible deniability to execs and health care companies. Also, your desk will be too small and your chair will suck. Every office is like an airline now. To cut costs, bosses willingly sacrifice leg room and other general necessities. If you bring a bag to your new job, you’ll be charged a $40 carry-in fee for it.

Finally, your new office will have its own evangelist brandroids embedded in it. Schefters, as it were. Avoid them. Do what you have to do for them when asked, but not one fucking thing else.

Grant:

Can active players be Guys , or do they have to retire first? Like, is Justin Smoak a Guy or a Future Guy? Is the remembering part vital to the nature of Guys or were they Guys all along?

They have to be retired. For example, running back Peyton Barber of the Bucs is TOTALLY gonna be a Guy you randomly remember a decade from now. But he’s currently an active NFL player. You don’t have to remember him because he’s right there on Red Zone Channel every Sunday. So yes, the remembering part is vital. Remembering an otherwise forgettable athlete or movie or band from your past is fun because of the novelty, but also because each Guy is a little snapshot of you own past. I remember Christian Fauria distinctly as a Guy because he played on the 1994 Colorado team that won on a Hail Mary in Michigan Stadium. I remember because I was there. I also remember that being the day I discovered that a) I wanted to leave Michigan (not because of the game) and b) I had a hernia invading my ballsack. Christian Fauria brings all of those sad memories back. He owes me an apology.

By the way, former Broncos head coach Vance Joseph was on that Colorado team. And so was Rashaan Salaam. And Kordell Stewart. And Rae Carruth. Strange team.

Aaron:

So I work at a store by myself most of the time and I can play whatever music I’d like to hear. 9/10 days I will play at least one pre-Synkronized Jamiroquai album, and 10/10 times the ONLY types of people who respond to it are either middle age women or 90’s kids like myself. Being middle-aged as well, maybe you could tell me what happened that nobody else wants to admit they’re fans?

I assume because they aren’t. I remember being ashamed of liking Jamiroquai back when Jamiroquai was popular! I can’t even explain why I felt that way. I think a pasty British dude in a funny hat pretending he’s Stevie Wonder just naturally invites derision in any era. Even just associating with that dude invites it. So I kept a lid on my Jamirocrush and jammed out to “Alright” only when no one was looking.

It was only after college when I embraced Jay Kay fanboyism wholeheartedly. I put on Travelling Without Moving when girls came over to my apartment. You know, to set the mood. I gleefully watched the episode of the Naked Chef (which was not as good as the OTHER Jamie Oliver show called Oliver’s Twist but still a good show all the same) where Jamie and Kay cooked a meal together. I also wrote a spec screenplay that included an extended dance sequence that featured a dude spotting a hot woman walking past him in a D’Agostino and then breaking out into a full rendition of “Cosmic Girl,” behind her, with all the customers and clerks joining him in the rapturous choreography until the song ends and every goes back to normal. That screenplay never sold.

But I still like that song! No shame in that game. If no one under the age of 35 feels likewise, and I doubt they have the energy to feign such indifference, that’s fine. No sense is letting what other people like dictate your own tastes. Unless I hate something. If I hate something you should also want it dead.

Tyler:

My wife and I are expecting our first child, and have started to brainstorm baby names. We picked a handful of names we like, and moved on to middle names. For a girl, my wife brought up her own middle name. The thing is, it’s one of the four or five middle names that seemingly EVERY girl has, so I was less than enthused. I told her this, in so many words, trying to be as delicate as possible, but the rest of the evening was a little uncomfortable. My question is, am I a jerk for not being totally on board with using her middle name (it’s not a family name or anything)? And how could I have navigated through this without hurting her feelings?

Nah nah nah you weren’t a jerk for offering your opinion. You’re entitled to have one of your own. I don’t think there was any real way to express that particular opinion without your wife feeling let down by it. Baby names are personal. People expend a lot of mental energy thinking and dreaming about them (even the middle name!), often well before they’ve even gotten married. So when you said to your old lady, “I’m not so sure about Emmabellaphia as a middle name,” you were bound to hurt her feelings if she had her heart set on it.

But that doesn’t mean you should have avoided the quarrel. Being married means you don’t dance around each other. You tell each other the hard shit, and then you work it out. Regardless of whatever middle name you and your wife end up picking, the argument behind it will eventually fade. It’ll just become part of your own little personal lore. I had a lot of shitty baby name ideas on my list and I’m not even from Utah. I had DUKE on there, man. Duke Magary. I’m an asshole. I’m glad my wife crossed it off the list, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I was appreciative of it at the time. I also nixed some of her ideas, too. It’s a baby name. It’s forever. It’s not always gonna be easy to land on one.

Tom:

I’ve been introducing my kids to Star Wars. They could give fuck all about Luke and the gang. It’s all about Rey and Finn. My nephews, who are older, care only about Anakin and Obi Wan and the Clone Wars. What’s the deal? Do we just like what was out when we were six and fuck all the rest?

Pretty much, yeah.

Email of the week!

Richard:

My freshman year at UMass I get to my double first. I set my stuff up in one of the dressers and take one of the beds. I set up a TV that I had bought in a centrally located part of the room assuming it would be good for both of us to be able to use it.

I still haven’t met my roommate yet and go out and meet up with some other friends. When I get back to my room that night my roommate has set up his side of the room but I still hadn’t seen him.

Fast forward to the next day and I walk back into the room and he is playing Madden on his Xbox hooked up to my TV. I try and introduce myself and say I like playing Madden too and we should play. He looks at me and goes “I only play alone” and turns away without another word. The next day I took my TV and set it up on my desk facing away from his side of the room.

We didn’t say a word for the rest of the semester and the RA told me I would be having a new kid move into the room come spring semester.