What's Duke "Fuck List" Author Karen Owen Up To These Days? Let's Find Out!

Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Find more of Drew's stuff at KSK or on Twitter. Buy Drew's book, The Postmortal, through here. Email the Funbag here. Today, we're covering Skittles, sex offenders, cockroaches, and more.

Your letters:


What do you suppose Karen Owen is up to these days? It has been 18 months since she put together her PowerPoint presentation... A crude Google search reveals nothing about her since then. To my knowledge, she has never given an interview (aside from a short reaction to the Law & Order episode based on her story), she hasn't been sued by anybody in the PPT, and the book/movie deals never happened.

Do you change your name? Live abroad? Hide in your parents' basement? Seriously, what do you do with your life after something like that? If she applies for a job, and HR conducts a background search, does the past kill her chances?

Well, Karen does have a Facebook profile, including one public photo album titled "Cover Photos" that includes shots of Joe Mauer, Austin Rivers beating Carolina at the buzzer (Owen's comment: "boy's got more swag than the entire uconn franchise" OWEN IS A SWAGGY BRO), and two pictures that were taken in South Africa, which is an appropriate place to decamp to if you feel like the entire world is staring at you.

Apart from that meager little album, Owen hasn't published any writing outside of the Fuck List (a list that was never meant to end up online). She's like Steve Bartman, if Steve Bartman had sex with lacrosse players (fingers crossed!). Personally, I think it's a shame because I thought her PowerPoint was funny. She could have embraced it and ended up with a writing gig for Girls, and then everyone would be mad at her because she got a writing job for Girls. Or she could have written Fifty Shades of Blakeley Cumberbatch IV. Either way, I think she still has a decent chance of living a relatively trouble-free life. Even though there are pictures of Owen online, I don't think you'd instantly recognize her if you saw her in the street. Unless you were a baseball player and she had ROCKED YOUR PARTY WORLD.

Even if Owen wasn't formally sued by any of the guys named in the list, It's altogether possible that lawyers representing those guys (all hired by their parents, I would imagine) threatened her with litigation if she EVER brought up the list up again or tried to profit from it in any way. And perhaps she caved rather than deal with any potential fallout from disobeying those requests. We wound up removing the names from the original "Fuck List" post, but I took a look at the original list and did some follow-up work on each person named. Three of her conquests have Twitter pages, one of which is protected. Six of them have Facebook pages that are relatively easy to find, and only one of them is fully protected, probably because Facebook requires you to donate an eyeball to make that happen. One of her men was dismissed from the Duke lax team and transferred to another school. Two of them are active minor league baseball players.

Of the 13 guys that Owen evaluated, only five have the saga turn up on the first page of a Google search. A source of mine at Duke says that one of the guys listed in Owen's Powerpoint ended up getting a job offer rescinded from Goldman Sachs because of the list. Oh, Goldman. But fear not! Another bank heroically swooped in and hired him. We can't have lacrosse players going without a six-figure job in the financial sector. That would be tragic.

More and more people fuck up online on a daily basis. There will come a point when all living beings have an embarrassing fact about themselves turn up on the internet. Even the Dalai Lama will one day have a regrettable donkey-blowing shot show up in his first page of Google hits. That's a world that favors Karen Owen, who is clearly a very smart gal and almost certainly has abilities beyond accurately rating the rutting prowess of privileged white kids. It's comforting to know that, regardless of the situation, things have a way of settling back down. Because no one wants to feel like they're the only person on Earth with skeletons in her closet.


It was brought to my attention yesterday that a registered sex offender is in my bowling league. According to nsopw.gov he solicited a 15-yr-old girl over the internet. Should all the guys who bring their kids to the alley be warned about this? The guy is a great bowler but a terrible person, even before I knew of his transgressions I thought he was a turd of a person. The oddest part was when that whole Sandusky shit happened he was one of the first non-We-Are-Penn-State people defending Jerry.

Absolutely, you warn them, especially if you see him trying to jam his finger into a ball that is clearly not the right size. He's clearly using bowling as a substitute for hosting wild toddler orgies.

Is this a candlepin league? I bet child molesters like smaller pins.


Let's say you are 35 years old, married with 2 children. You are very much in love with your wife and your kids are little angels. You tragically die in a car accident and you get to heaven and are forced to follow one person around for the rest of their lives and see EVERYTHING. You will have to see your widowed wife banging your children's new stepdaddy who has a way bigger penis than you and a lot more cash. Or you will have to see your daughter have sex for the first time or see your son masturbate to porn. Who is the person you would choose?

So you have to see everything that they do? I mean, you have to pick your wife or a child, even if it means seeing things that you really don't want to see. You want to know they're going to be all right without you. It would be tempting to choose a wild card and go with the president, but then my wife would come to heaven, find out I chose a stranger over her, and lay into me. I wouldn't want to have to explain that snub. Also, the president is only the president for a set amount of time. After that, he's all golf and lectures, all the time. BOR-ING.

You could also pick a hot actress or something, but again, explaining to your wife once she dies would be a real bitch. You ghost-fapped to ScarJo over ME?! YOU PIG.


After watching a Planet Earth marathon I was thinking how they never get any shots of animals taking shits, or how many times they have had some awesome footage only to have the animal take a huge dump and ruin the shot. I also got to thinking of the amount of poop footage they must have. Would you watch an hour long Planet Earth special of all different kinds of animals taking poos?

I'd definitely watch the first five minutes of it before throwing up.

For years, Craggs and I have lusted after all the B-roll footage compiled by NFL Films. I'm convinced that the NFL Films building has an archive of absolutely filthy material: drunk coaches, threats of spousal rape, open bounties all over the place... It's the Holy Grail of sports blog material. I'd be much more interested in that than any B-roll from Planet Earth. I'd wager that the most sought-after B-roll footage on Earth looks like this:

1. The gap in the Nixon Tapes

2. Pentagon secret assassination satellite feeds

3. NFL Films

4. Footage from any Marlon Brando film set

5. All raw David Lee Roth vocals


Attached is a picture of my dog from college; monty, going to town on an unsuspecting golden retriver at a doggy daycare. Mind you, this is a screen shot of live webcam feed - I just hope the owner of the golden wasn't tuning in as well.


Will dogs ever learn to stop raping faces?


When my wife on I got married, 90% of the gifts we got were from our registry. Now, we are expecting our first kid and, after 2 showers, 90% of the gifts we have gotten are not even from the same store. Is this normal? I don't mean to seem ungrateful, but it's a pain in the ass to return 5 different baby bath tubs to 5 different stores.

One of the ways you can avoid that kind of situation is to not find out the gender of your child. If no one knows the gender of your child, they're more likely to get you a functional gift (i.e., one from the registry). If they DO know the sex of your child, then they're far more likely to go rogue and order a goddamn sailor outfit that's already out of season and eight sizes too small once the kid is born, and they'll want a picture of the kid in that outfit before they die so that they know they were able to participate in the dressing up of your baby. Most baby clothing is worthless because babies barf and shit all over it, and because fancy baby clothes are a bitch to put on. I've got some plain white onesie for my kid that snaps on the side and it's practically all her wears because I don't have to try and wrangle a seersucker ducky polo shirt over his big wobbly head.


What if Magic doesn't really have HIV and never did? He got it at a time when his career was pretty much over, his fame and money were waning and the AIDS movement desperately needed a non-gay hero. Since no one ever talks about how or from whom he got it, I think it's entirely plausible that he didn't get it. His wife stayed with him and he stayed healthy. Completely healthy. It wouldn't be that hard to do. He made a bunch of money from his renewed celebrity and I'm sure it was easy enough to pay off a few doctors to lie about it.

If that ever turned out to be the case, I think we could all justifiably sue Magic for a billion dollars each and WIN.

This is why I'm kind of shocked that no active athlete has come out of the closet yet. There is a shitload of fame and adoration just waiting for that one brave soul, and you would think that would be enough to tempt some fame-starved player to step forward, even if he were completely hetero. Sure, your teammates might shun you and redneck fans might scream names at you, but look at that 32-page profile you got in Vanity Fair! What a coup!



With Roger Goodell attempting to control the narrative with the Saints Bounty-pocalypse and all of the work reassuring the public that football is safe and the NFL is committed to protecting its players, what would happen if high profile players started dropping out of the league because they didn't want to be targeted by opposing players?

Or even, for instance, how big of a shitstorm would it be if Andrew Luck decided to retire because he didn't want have his head ripped off by some guy aiming for a $5,000 bonus?

Well, we already had Jacob Bell retiring because he was scared of head injuries. Obviously, Bell isn't a high profile player, but his retirement (combined with Junior Seau's death) was enough to get the Tony Kornheisers of the world prattling on endlessly about the potential death of the NFL. If Luck were to decide that he didn't feel like risking his health out there, a couple of things would happen: 1.) Jim Irsay would murder him, probably by locking him in a room and bludgeoning him to death with Dylan lyrics; and 2.) people who are already spewing about the end of football would go absolutely apeshit. People like Wilbon, who hates the NFL, would declare that the NFL is over, and they'd begin writing tasteful op-eds that extolled Luck's bravery and urged other players to follow suit. Sports Illustrated would run a text-only cover that would read "SHOULD FOOTBALL BE ILLEGAL"? Yahoo! Sports would conduct a 15-month investigation of retired players using weed to soothe their concussion symptoms. Soccer fans would grab you and demand you convert to their sport because it's much safer. The world, in general, would be a far more annoying place.

I'm sure there will be more players who retire early or leave the game because they don't want to risk brain damage, but I doubt that we're on the verge of football's sudden end. People are too used to gambling on it and watching it on the weekends. It's embedded as a ritual in most people's lives, and that means that most people aren't gonna just stop watching as a matter of principle. Maybe Frank Bruni will, but that'll be about it. Most football fans already know that the game does irreparable damage to players and they watch anyway.

As for the talent drain, there are still plenty of nutjob sports parents who will happily ignore all the CTE warnings if they feel like Little Junior can still bag a scholarship. And I'm so used to watching football that I'll still happily watch even if the games are poorly played. I'm a Minnesota fan, so it's not as if things would be changing much for me on that front. Andrew Luck's retirement wouldn't kill the NFL. About the only thing that could really destroy it would be all the massive lawsuits coming its way, which is typical because LAWYERS RUIN EVERY GODDAMN THING.


A few weeks ago, I went into the bathroom to take a piss. Things are going well and I was simply minding my business and looking around when I saw a gigantic cockroach, like one of those monsters you see in movies or some such shit. As a male with a gaping gash when it comes to bugs, I immediately cut the stream (never a good idea) and sprinted out of my bathroom to find something to kill it with. I returned no more than 10 seconds later with a pool cue, ready to smash the fucker to bits. But it was gone. I looked around the toilet, under the bath rug (using the pool cue to lift things, as I am the aforementioned gash) and all over the room, but couldn't locate the beast.

Ever since, I have gone to bed just knowing that this roach was going to climb on my face while I slept, jump on me while I was in the shower or, in the absolute worst case scenario, try to make a home in my colon while I'm in the middle of a dump. This terrifies me. I should probably just move out and find a new place, right?


When I was kid, we lived in an apartment in Chicago, and I remember walking into the bathroom one night and seeing a cockroach the size of your forearm perched on the sink, just hanging out there. READY TO FEAST ON HUMAN FLESH. To this day, I still think about it and get scared shitless. I'll walk into a bathroom and think that THIS is the day I find another one sitting there, ready to swell to thirty feet wide and eat my face off with its giant roach mandibles. I don't think cockroaches understand their ability to put fear into humans. If they ever realized it, we'd all be doomed.


How often do you think pro athletes get injured having sex? I'm a Giants fan, so I remember when Plaxico Burress nearly missed Super Bowl 42 because he slipped in the shower and tweaked his knee. A few years later, I thought to myself, "This guy is a 6'5", 220 pound wide receiver who consistently makes one handed catches with only his toes on the ground, and he can't even keep his balance in the shower?" I can barely bend over and touch my toes, and I've never slipped in the shower. I mentioned it to a friend, who immediately brought up the time Sammy Sosa threw out his back from "sneezing". I'd imagine most fans can think of a similar incident involving their own team.

It's gotta be more often than you think, because A.) they're superhuman freaks, which means they can probably pull off sexual positions average guys can't even conceive; and B.) they generally have an unlimited supply of women to sleep with, so they have ample chances to get creative in bed.

In general, you should treat any off field injury with grand suspicion. No athlete ever really tears his Achilles while slipping on the porch. That's always code for "I was fucking a hooker while riding a motorcycle and then my wife saw me and I tore it while running away from her and I don't want my contract voided."

Anyone who has ever pulled a butt muscle while having sex or accidentally concussed a woman in bed because you were in the missionary position and she gradually inched too close to the headboard and you forgot to stop and drag her back to the center of the mattress before it was too late knows that sexual injuries are a part of life, and if you have MORE sex, as an athlete might, then you're more at risk. There's a treasure trove of pro athlete sex injuries out there just begging to be revealed. It can't just be an Italian soccer player thing. Think of all the muscles Pat Burrell has had seize up on him because he was banging your girlfriend. That's hard work!


Why do bags of Skittles have equal numbers of yellow (garbage) and red (nectar of the gods)? Does anyone like yellow the best? I say eliminate yellow completely. If you're going to keep it, there should be a 4-to-1 ratio of red-to-yellow.

This is why they have Tropical Skittles, sir. No more boring lemon Skittles that no one wants. I'm convinced that Starburst and Skittle manufacturers purposely load up on orange and lemon because they're easier to produce, and that red Skittles have to be made from white elephant blood. Don't fall into their cost-cutting trap!

Here's your email of the week and by God, it's a doozy:


As a firefighter, I see more than my fair share of weird shit. At first, every little thing out of the ordinary blew my mind, but after several years on the job, I pretty much go into each call expecting the unexpected. Quite often we get "lift assist" calls, where we have to help a fat old person off the floor after they fall down. Usually, they've been there for hours before they are discovered, and quite often have shit and pissed themselves. These calls have taught me a few things. First, people that are old and fat often have given up on pants. Can you imagine your life without pants? How many times would you have to shit or piss yourself before you just said, "Fuck it, I'm done with pants"?

The second thing I've learned is that the human body is an incredibly ugly thing. Now, I've seen tits as flat as pancakes, dicks that have seemingly been swallowed by rolls of fat, and limbs that have been blown to bits, but today I saw something that will haunt me til the day I die...a huge bellybutton. When I say huge, I mean fucking ginormous. This thing was beyond being an outie. It seriously looked like a baby's arm growing out of his stomach. At first I thought it was his dick, but I promise you it wasn't (I know this because I eventually saw his dick, as he wasn't wearing pants.) The poor soul was at least 350 pounds, and over 75 years old.

Now, I don't know much about the human body, but I've never heard of the belly button growing as one gets fatter, or older. I mean, maybe it'll get a little bigger, but this guy could have hung his coat on the thing. I was most blown away by it's length. At least 5 inches...no joke. I have no idea what to make of it. There has to be some sort of sound medical explanation, doesn't there? Did doctors in the 1920s commonly cut umbilical cords while blindfolded? What would you do if you had a 5-inch outie? Please help.

I know plenty of people who have had outies that were surgically corrected. But it's hard to call your doctor to get that operation if you're pantsless and on the floor pooping yourself.