One of the most striking images from World War II is a massive swastika being detonated in Nuremberg, Germany, symbolizing the end of the bloody European conflict. The explosion happened on April 22, 1945, a few weeks before the Nazis surrendered to Ally Forces on May 7, 1945.

The massive marble swastika had huge significance for the Nazis as it overlooked Zeppelintribüne, Adolf Hitler’s most powerful pulpit at the Nazi party rally grounds. The pulpit was located within Zeppelinfeld stadium, which was built in 1934 by Nazi architect Albert Speer.

It was from that pulpit that Hitler delivered venomous anti-Semitic screeds to 200,000 of his Nazi faithful.

Three days before the detonation, the Army’s Third Division invaded the stadium and held an award ceremony honoring five men for their actions of valor by giving them the Medal of Honor. The troops also covered the swastika with a large American flag.

On April 22, American engineers placed demolition charges around the Nazi emblem and blew it to pieces in one of history’s most satisfying moments.

Swastika Blow up, Hakenkreuzsprengung

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Although the swastika was destroyed, Zeppelinfeld stadium still stands to this day, but it is in an advanced state of decay. From 1947 to 1995, the Nurnberg American High School used the field for soccer and football practice. It has also hosted motor sports events and played host to heavy metal festivals in the ’80s.

via Wikimedia Commons

The stadium is home to a sinister past, but over 250,000 tourists visit the structure every year. Its existence has been the cause of controversy in Germany for decades. Some want it to be preserved for its historical significance while others would like it to return to nature.

Recently, lawmakers came to an agreement to preserve the site at a cost of €85 million ( $95 million). The decision was made to preserve the building because of its historical significance. The building serves as an important reminder of the city’s difficult history.

via Wikimedia Commons

“We won’t rebuild, we won’t restore, but we will conserve,” Julia Lehner, Nuremberg’s chief culture official, told Smithsonian.

“We want people to be able to move around freely on the site. It is an important witness to an era—it allows us to see how dictatorial regimes stage-manage themselves. That has educational value today,” she continued.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. In a world where conspiracies and Holocaust denial are prevalent, the stadium is undeniable evidence of Nazi atrocities and a reminder to stay forever vigilant against racism.

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We can’t possibly imagine it.

Those of us who are sitting in our homes binge-watching Netflix, or even those of us who are out working in essential jobs, simply cannot fathom the horror that’s occurred in the nation’s COVID-19 hotspots these past few weeks. We see the numbers and statistics. We might read a story or two from a front line medical worker. But we aren’t there, seeing the wave of COVID-19 patients arrive, watching person after person die in our care, piling up their belongings in a storage closet for their families to retrieve someday. We aren’t there, worried about our own health, knowing that we don’t have adequate protection and that we are far more likely than the average American to catch the virus. We aren’t there, watching our colleagues fall ill, having to treat our friends and coworkers as patients in addition to the constant flow of strangers we’re trying to save.

The toll of this virus isn’t just in the infection and mortality rates. It’s emotional. It’s mental. The doctors and nurses in hard-hit hospitals are experiencing nothing less than the trauma of war. There will be PTSD for many of them. There will be years of therapy. And there will be people for whom the grief and despair prove too formidable a foe to overcome.

The nation has lost a hero in the coronavirus fight with the death of Dr. Lorna Breen, who served as head of the emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan. According to the New York Times, Breen, 49, had contracted the virus, recuperated for about a week and a half, and then gone back to work. However, the hospital sent her home again, and her the family took her home to Charlottesville, Virginia. This weekend, she died of self-inflicted wounds.

Breen’s father told the Times that his daughter had no history of mental illness. However, she had described to him the devastation of the ER during the outbreak, of patients dying before they even reached the hospital entrance. Her father said she seemed detached when he last spoke to her, and he could sense something was wrong.

“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said. “She was truly in the trenches of the front line.”

“Make sure she’s praised as a hero,” he added, “because she was. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.”

Indeed. This is a woman whom coworkers described as always looking out for other people’s well-being, who checked in with colleagues while she was sick herself to see how they were doing, who was “a lively presence, outgoing and extroverted,” and a talented physician who had obviously witnessed more than her share of emergency situations.

It’s hard for those of us who are in areas that are less impacted to understand what those in hot spots have experienced these past several weeks. Some doctors and nurses have taken to social media to share gut-wrenching accounts of what this virus looks like up close, to give us an idea of what we’re all trying to prevent elsewhere. They all say the same thing. It’s not like a normal day in the ER. It’s not like a bad flu season. It’s not like anything they’ve seen. It’s nonstop COVID and constant death. They are placing body bags in refrigerator trucks. They are holding phones and iPads while their patients’ loved ones say goodbye over a video call. They are the final faces that tens of thousands of people are seeing before they die without any family by their side. They are people’s last hope, and far too often, there isn’t any they can offer.

This pandemic is a beast, and Dr. Lorna Breen died a hero trying to fight it. Let’s remember her name.

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Quentin Tarantino is notorious for publicly speaking about movies he never winds up making. There’s a good chance we’ll never get that hard-R Star Trek movie he was talking up. Maybe the most infamous: the one about the Vega brothers — that is, Vincent (played by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction) and Vic (played by Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs). Both were killed in their respective films, each shot to gory death, but Tarantino spent a good while openly talking about bringing them back from the dead for a conjoined prequel.

Now, as per The Hollywood Reporter, we have some — albeit not many — details on what may have been. The day after dropping a jokey stay-at-home video recreating Dogs’ classic ear-slicing scene, Madsen spoke to the paper about the movie that never quite found life.

“We were supposed to be in Amsterdam, criminally,” Madsen revealed. “The picture was going to start out with the two of us being released from prison in different states. And we open up a club in Amsterdam.”

Indeed, in his first scene in Pulp Fiction, Vincent tells Samuel L. Jackson’s Julius all about his recent trip to Holland — not just about the copious marijuana but also, of course, the different names they have for McDonald’s products. So there could have been a tie-in!

Eventually too much time elapsed and Madsen and Travolta got far too old to play younger than they were in Dogs and Pulp, respectively. That didn’t stop Tarantino from still trying to get the two together.

“He had come up with this idea that it would be the twin brothers of Vic and Vincent, who met after the deaths of their siblings,” Madsen told THR. “It was very complicated, but when Quentin starts discussing an idea, it’s very easy to go along with it.”

Eventually Travolta and Madsen were united onscreen, in last year’s Trading Paint: “We had a scene where we are at a big retirement party, and I walked up to John and he goes, ‘I thought you were dead.’ And I looked over at him and I said, ‘Well, I thought you were dead.’” And so Trading Paint, a car race movie that saw a tiny theatrical release, may be as close as we ever get to a Vega brothers movie.

(Via THR)

ESPN’s The Last Dance continues to generate massive interest in the sports world, with sky-high television ratings for the third and fourth installments on Sunday and seemingly endless discussion on social media. While six (!) episodes remain, this week’s content didn’t disappoint, from stories about Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman to the revelation that Michael Jordan hates the Bad Boy version of the Detroit Pistons “to this day.”

One of the reasons for that animosity is the now infamous decision by the Pistons to leave the floor early at the end of Game 4 of the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals, exiting without acknowledging Bulls in the final game of what became a sweep that sent Chicago to the NBA Finals. During The Last Dance, Jordan said “you can’t convince me (Isiah Thomas) wasn’t an asshole” for how things transpired and the discussion of the incident continued into Monday.

Former Pistons big man and current Las Vegas Aces head coach Bill Laimbeer visited The Jump on ESPN and, in short, he didn’t hold back or apologize for anything that transpired back in 1991.

“They whined and cried for a year and a half about how bad we were for the game, but more importantly, they said we were bad people,” Laimbeer said. “We weren’t bad people. We were just basketball players winning. And that really stuck with me because they didn’t know who we were or what we were about as individuals and our family life. But all that whining they did, I didn’t want to shake their hand. They were just whiners. They won the series. Give him credit. We got old. They got past us. But okay, move on.”

Laimbeer likely isn’t alone, especially when discussing folks that were rooting for the Pistons back in that era, in having this viewpoint, but it certainly isn’t the mainstream consensus after all of this time. That won’t stop the discussion from persisting on this topic and, while it has been three decades, there seems to be just as much energy on the two sides as there has ever been, particularly with how Jordan lit up when discussing the rivalry on The Last Dance.

In the end, though, it certainly isn’t a surprise to hear one of the enforcers of the Bad Boy Pistons taking this particular stance. Now, attention will turn to the final six episodes of the documentary series, with plenty of other avenues to explore for controversy.

The Last Dance has been an oasis in the sports desert since ESPN moved up their highly anticipated documentary series on the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls. The first installments pulled in 6.1 million viewers over the two hour broadcast last Sunday, and there was little dropoff for Week 2.

Episodes 3 and 4, focusing on Dennis Rodman, Phil Jackson, and the Bulls-Pistons rivalry, drew 5.9 million viewers across the two hours, with 6.1 million tuning in for the third episode and 5.7 million staying around for the fourth. That gives The Last Dance the four highest rating episodes of any ESPN documentary, as You Don’t Know Bo previously held that title with 3.6 million viewers.

ESPN also reported that the first two episodes added nearly 3 million viewers from “time-shifted and on-demand viewing,” meaning the total rating for those is 9.6 million and 8.8 million, respectively. Those are massive numbers for a documentary on a 20-plus year old subject, and is representative of how starved sports fans are for some original, new content to watch — provided it meets a certain level of intrigue.

Without live sports to offer constant viewing experiences, sports fans have shown that right now they are happy to set aside some time to settle in for whatever big event is able to be put in front of them. The NFL Draft pulled in record viewership from Thursday to Sunday on ESPN, the NFL Network, and digital platforms, and Sunday only kept the good vibes going at the Worldwide Leader.

Tonight, in the With Spandex WWE Raw open discussion thread:

Before they meet in the Women’s Money in the Bank Ladder Match one week from Sunday, Asuka, Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler will battle in a Triple Threat Match tonight on Raw.

All three women have been dominant in recent weeks, and they all bring their own devastating style to this huge showdown. They’ll surely be looking to punish their competition and leave them hurt before they risk it all at WWE Money in the Bank.

Who will leave with a statement-making victory heading into WWE Money in the Bank? Find out on Raw, tonight at 8/7 C on USA! (via WWE.com)

Place your bets: who hurts who in that triple threat? The only other things advertised are another in a series of nights of Triple H appreciation, and a segment where Seth Rollins and Drew McIntyre “make it official.” Congratulations to the happy couple.

As always, +1 your favorite comments from tonight’s open thread and give them a thumbs up and we’ll include 10 of the best in tomorrow’s Best and Worst of Raw column. Make sure to flip your comments to “newest” in the drop down menu under “discussion,” and enjoy the show!

One of the greatest things to come out of the coronavirus lockdown is the creative musical burst coming from our fellow humans. We watched Jimmy Fallon, Sting, and The Roots use random household items to play The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” We’ve seen parody takes on the Bare Naked Ladies’ song “One Week” and enjoyed Hamilton cast members peform “The Zoom Where it Happens.”

So many pandemic parodies, so much time.

Kelsey Walsh posted her at-home quarantine version of Tones and I’s global hit “Dance Monkey” on Facebook, where it’s been viewed more than 3 million times. Even if you haven’t heard the original song, Walsh’s performance is enjoyable and impressive in its own right. Check it out:

Clever use of homemade instruments, lovely voice, totally appropriate coronavirus mitigation and quarantine lyrics—this is one of the better pandemic parodies we’ve seen. Well done, Kelsey.

And for reference in case you’ve missed it, here’s the original “Dance Monkey” song. It’s been making waves around the world since it was released last year, topping the charts in 20 countries. In February, it became the first song written by a woman to hit the U.S. Billboard Top 5 since 2012.

TONES AND I – DANCE MONKEY (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

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