Month: November 2020

Donald Trump has been having a rough time trying to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania. To add insult to injury, he’s been relentlessly mocked by PA Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who’s become a social media star in the days following the election for his brutally refreshing takedowns of the president’s failed legal strategies. Case in point: the PA Supreme Court has dismissed a significant lawsuit from the Trump campaign that would’ve invalidated millions of votes. It was yet another stunning blow to the president’s legal team, who has been consistently failing in court.

Feeling confident with his state’s record at swatting down attempts to overturn the election, Fetterman quoted Ariana Grande in response to a new resolution from Republican state representatives that has “zero chance” of flipping the results for Trump.

Fetterman’s penchant for man-handling Trump and his surrogates earned him the nickname “Lt. Gov. Stone Cold” from John Oliver, and his hulking frame caught the attention of comedian Leslie Jones. The former SNL star posted a thirsty video on Twitter, where she got down with Fetterman mopping the floor with Rudy Giuliani and said she wants him as her personal bodyguard.

You can watch Jones’ hilarious reaction video below:

While Fetterman is well known in the state of PA, he rose to national prominence shortly after the election when he delivered a badass rebuke of the Trump’s strategy of claiming election fraud. Fetterman assured MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that the counting process was going smoothly and firmly stated that the only problem with the process is “Trump campaign showing up on our corner in Philadelphia like some sad carnival barker, making outlandish claims.” The massive lieutenant governor also made it clear why the president had no chance of overturning the results. “Math is math.”

(Via John Fetterman on Twitter)

Back in 2018, Machine Gun Kelly made headlines when he released the Eminem diss track “Rap Devil,” a clap back to Em’s Kamikaze number “Not Alike.” Eminem settled the beef shortly thereafter by obliterating Kelly with the follow up “Killshot,” which incidentally became one of the most-viewed YouTube premieres in history. While Kelly put the beef behind him and is now celebrating his No. 1 pop-punk album Tickets To My Downfall, he can’t help but blame the diss track for his 2019 album’s flop.

In a recent conversation with actor Dave Franco for Interview Magazine, Kelly explained why his beef with Eminem was to blame for the poor reception of his album Hotel Diablo.

“That was the first time I really expressed my true self with no outside influence, meaning the label. As a hip-hop album, it’s flawless front to back, and also a hint at the evolution of how I went into a pop-punk album. But it was coming off the tail-end of that infamous beef [with Eminem]. So no one wanted to give it the time of day. It’s like if you make a sh*tty movie and then you come out with a great movie right after, but people want to focus on the fact that they hated whatever you just did. What I did in the beef was exactly what it should be, but that project wasn’t welcomed. The next album came from already feeling like I’d counted out, so I didn’t even care what the public was going to think. That’s why the project was ironically my best received one, because it was the most effortless, with the least outside influence.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Kelly spoke to how critics received his pop-punk pivot:

“I made four albums straight-up not giving a f*ck what critics had to say. But this one, when the numbers were what they were, and the fans were as excited as they were, and the fact that we against all odds got the number-one spot, it was really weird to see that critics couldn’t even be like, ‘Hey, man, way to stick it out and finally show the world that you can conquer all the obstacles.’ It was weird to see people be like, ‘Well, now because you got success, I need to go out of my way to go against the popular opinion and tear away at it.’”

Tickets To My Downfall is out now via Interscope. Get it here.

The monolith plot has officially thickened on Monday, as another mysterious structure has appeared on the other side of the world from where the first one was discovered in the Utah desert.

If you’re just catching up on the monolith talk, Thanksgiving week featured some bewildered members of the Utah Bureau of Land Management who stumbled on a reflective metal tower in the middle of the Utah desert. The group that was scouting some bighorn rams found and documented the monument, then shared the news on a post on the government agency’s website.

Things got weird over the weekend, however, when the structure disappeared as mysteriously as it was discovered. And in what may be the final endgame of the weirdest year on record, a second monolith reportedly surfaced near a significant ancient site in Romania.

The Daily Mail reported on Monday that a new monolith was discovered, while Vice points out that this one appears to be different than the first one now missing from Utah:

This one has what look to be deliberate loop-de-loop scribbles scratched on its entire face and stands at about the same height as its Utah twin. The European monolith is only a few feet away from where an ancient Dacian fortress once stood, according to The Daily Mail.

It doesn’t appear that it’s the same monolith that was taken from Utah and dropped in Romania. It may, however, be more evidence that the works are part of artist John McCracken, who died in 2011 but according to some reports hoped to leave works behind for people to discover well after his death.

Hopefully, this isn’t the beginning of the end of the world, but in that case you’ll probably see it happen in real life, not in a news story online.

Tom Cruise does not fear for his safety too much, that much is clear. He perches atop a speeding train like it’s no big thing. The guy’s a notorious daredevil and devoted to the most bonkers of stunts — he leaps off skyscrapers, and casually dangles from the side of helicopters, and runs everywhere. Still, Tom Cruise knows that the smartest move of all during a pandemic is to take things seriously and mask up. Mission: Impossible 7 has resumed filming in Italy, where Tom can be seen above while taking a breather in Venice. As always, he’s happy to wave to fans, and as one can plainly see, Tom is not messing around with Covid-19. He’s double masked (quite like me hitting the grocery store), with a surgical variety underneath a cooler black exterior mask.

The Daily Mail has even more photos of Tom doing car stunts in Rome alongside co-star Hayley Atwell. Both of them, of course, are taking no chances in between takes and masking up while in close proximity with others. Here’s an Instagram shot from director Chris McQuarrie as he prepared to roll camera near a telltale landmark.

It’s been a long time coming, obviously, given that all movies shut down production earlier this year, and Cruise personally called Norway’s culture minister to reboot European shooting, all before igniting a local controversy involving cruise ships. This followed a Polish bridge kerfuffle and a stunt gone wrong, but things are now humming along throughout Italy for the Cruise train.

Mission: Impossible 7 is currently scheduled for a November 19, 2021 release, and please enjoy this stop-motion rendering (by Victor Patator) of Cruise in stunt mode.

Did you know Tyler the Creator was in Grand Theft Auto V? Apparently, one fan didn’t until he noticed that distinctive Wolf Tyler growl coming from a random non-player character (NPC) during a nostalgic playthrough of the game and shared their realization with Twitter. Of course, it’s easy to overlook Tyler’s character as his dialogue almost entirely consists of goofy nonsequiturs like “You like potato salad, ’cause I like potato salad.” Also, staring at him for an extended period results — as it so often does in real life — in a fight when “Tyler” pulls a gun to pistol-whip the player’s avatar.

Now, this isn’t exactly news for longtime gamers, as Tyler’s appearance (as well as Danny Brown and Flying Lotus) was covered extensively at the time. However, since the game is almost a decade old (it released in September 2013) and Tyler was still the fresh-faced creator of hair-raising projects like Goblin and Wolf, it makes sense that a new generation of gamers who venerates Grammy-winning, Flower Boy Tyler as a superstar would not only be unaware and also astonished by this tidbit. If nothing else, the incident highlights how far he’s come; if he were to voice a character in a game now, it would almost undoubtedly be a starring role. Or, he could very well go the Travis Scott route and actually perform in-game as himself now that he’s one of the most respected superstars in music.

Check out the fan’s “discovery” above.

Rico Nasty has been teasing her upcoming album since this past spring. Now after ushering in the beginning of a new era with the singles “IPhone,” “Own It,” and “OHFR?” Rico Nasty has finally uncovered some more details about her impending release Nightmare Vacation.

Rico Nasty returned Monday to officially unveil her Nightmare Vacation album art and tracklist. Speaking about the project in a recent interview with W Magazine, Rico Nasty addressed certain pressures she faced while penning the album:

“I started feeling like I should make what I hear on the radio. I was only making those songs to please my A&R, like, does this sound mainstream? By the time the studio session is over, you have a song that you wouldn’t listen to if somebody paid you. […] I look back at my tracklist like, not only did I overcome people trying to tell me what I should sound like, but I overcame a f*cking pandemic and was still able to create it. I think I’m on the cusp of being ready to just take sh*t head on, take it for what it is.”

Check out Rico Nasty’s Nightmare Vacation cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Candy”
2. “Don’t Like Me” Feat. Don Toliver and Gucci Mane
3. “Check Me Out”
4. “IPhone”
5. “STFU”
6. “Back & Forth” Feat. Amine
7. “Girl Scouts”
8. “Let It Out”
9. “Losers” Feat. Trippie Redd
10. “No Debate”
11. “P*ssy Poppin”
12. “OHFR?”
13. “10Fo”
14. “Own It”
15. “Smack A B*tch (Remix)” Feat. PPCocaine, Rubi Rose, Sukihana
16. “Smack A B*tch (Bonus)”

Nightmare Vacation is out 12/4 via Sugar Trap / Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The NFL made it 12 weeks without any games being officially canceled, but as case counts rise across the country and weeks on the NFL schedule become thin with no more bye weeks available to shuffle games into, their hopes of completing the season without such a situation is growing more perilous by the day.

The Baltimore Ravens have been dealing with a COVID-19 outbreak that’s seen stars such as quarterback Lamar Jackson test positive, among many others, causing their Thanksgiving night game with the divisional rival Pittsburgh Steelers to be initially pushed to Sunday and then, later, to Tuesday night. One day out from that hopeful rescheduled game, the Ravens found themselves still in limbo, having not been able to practice on Monday and unsure of whether they would be able to even travel to Pittsburgh for the game.

On Monday evening, word emerged from ESPN’s Adam Schefter that the game would be pushed back yet again (but still would be attempted to be played), this time on Wednesday night rather than Tuesday.

This comes after Ravens players reportedly held a players-only meeting in which they concluded they didn’t want to play if they couldn’t practice, which is why another day of delay will hopefully get them on the field on Tuesday.

From a football perspective, the game is extremely important for the Ravens playoff hopes, who enter the game needing a win to keep pace with the Colts and Dolphins in the chase for the final Wild Card spot in the AFC at 7-4 (and one game behind the Browns at 8-3 for second in the division).

However, beyond that, this situation shows the flaw in the league’s plan for this season, which did not add any additional bye weeks to the schedule when it could’ve built in a later break to account for such a possibility — particularly with there being long held concerns about a second wave spiking around the holidays (which, really, ended up being a third spike). Now the NFL finds itself in a position they had hoped to avoid but had not planned strongly enough to ensure they could work around, with the Steelers and Ravens upcoming games also in flux, likely being moved to a weeknight next week as well.

Will Cain may best be known as a guy you maybe saw speaking on ESPN while the TV was muted at your barber shop, but the reactionary sports commentator somehow parlayed that into a job braying political nonsense on Fox News earlier this year. There were other things going on back in April, of course, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you didn’t realize Max Kellerman’s punching bag was talking about election results.

The latest example came on Tuesday, when Cain advocated for various state legislatures that have certified election results in favor of Joe Biden to defy those results and put in place Electoral College voters who would elect Donald Trump, a man who lost the 2020 presidential election by millions of votes and a substantial margin in the aforementioned Electoral College.

Trump, of course, has baselessly ranted about massive fraud that no one in his legal team or sycophants on TV have been able to claim, so now the next talking point is tearing directly at the fabric of democracy and just putting in electors who will do what Trump says, not the millions of people who voted him out of office.

“It is absolutely unprecedented what happened in this election,” Cain said. “There may not be enough evidence for a court system, but there should be enough evidence for state legislators to change their electors.”

All of that is nonsense, as there is still zero evidence that anything out of the ordinary happened with mail-in ballots and vote counting. None of Trump’s various lawsuits have panned out in any meaningful way, with some of them seeing harsh dismissals from judges, even Republican ones. And while some noted that Cain may not have been expressing his personal opinion and was instead laying out the Trump campaign’s perspective, it is nonetheless incorrect and dangerous to try to delegitimize the election results.

Which is why that video going viral also came with people on Twitter remembering some less-than-flattering moments from Cain’s past life as a sports broadcaster. First of all, the video that made it clear Snoop Dogg really dislikes Will Cain.

And then there’s Shannon Sharpe saying Cain is the one person he absolutely refuses to listen to when it comes to sports talk.

“Will Cain, anytime he’s on I mute,” Sharpe said, barely letting the interviewer finish the question. “He could be telling me I won $10 million, I’d never know. I won’t pick that prize up.”

The feeling was common among other sports fans and reporters who, well, could have told those in the political sphere that this kind of stuff was coming.

It’s just a good reminder that if a professional sportscaster has no respect for what another person does on-air, that sportscaster probably shouldn’t be trusted when he’s suddenly spouting conspiracy theories on another network about something he’s probably not qualified to talk about, either.

Dennis Schröder is coming off of the best season of his career in terms of finally putting together productivity and efficiency, starring in a sixth man role for the Oklahoma City Thunder. The 26-year-old point guard averaged 18.9 points, 4.0 assists, and 3.6 rebounds per game on a 46.9/38.5/83.9 shooting split, with career-highs in field goal and three-point percentage, and that earned him the attention of the defending champs who traded for him this offseason.

While Schröder came off the bench, he still held a starring role for OKC, playing 30.8 minutes per night and was effectively tied with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (19.0) and Danilo Gallinari (18.7) for the team’s leading scorer. One would think that experience and the success the Thunder saw with that rotation might have made an imprint on the German guard, and led him to recognize that starting isn’t as important as finishing — and that a bench role can actually increase your usage and effectiveness for the team.

However, that doesn’t appear to be the case as Schröder met with the Lakers media for the first time on Monday and made it abundantly clear that he believes he is a starter, full stop, and that his agent made that clear to L.A. prior to the trade.

With Rajon Rondo in Atlanta now (where Schröder started his career), it’s very likely the Lakers see him operating in that starting capacity as well. That likely means a starting lineup with Dennis, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and Marc Gasol, with Alex Caruso, Montrezl Harrell, Kyle Kuzma, and Wesley Matthews headlining the bench unit. Frank Vogel will have his hands full adjusting his rotations to a new lineup and figuring out exactly how he wants to deploy all of his new players, but one thing is clear and that is that Schröder isn’t here for the “bench stuff” anymore — which isn’t exactly a new stance from Schröder, who didn’t enjoy his time as a reserve behind Jeff Teague in Atlanta.

What will likely determine whether his move back to being a starter is successful is whether his shooting efficiency translates with the Lakers, which is a genuinely big question. Schröder was tremendous shooting the ball last season, but that came in part from being deployed alongside at least one, if not two, fellow on-ball creators in Chris Paul and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in OKC, who helped tee him up for catch-and-shoot looks. LeBron James can certainly do that, but that’s about it for perimeter players on the Lakers capable of doing so and that will test exactly how real Schröder’s shooting uptick last year was. If he dips back to a sub-35 percent shooter with L.A., it’ll provide some of the same spacing problems LeBron had to navigate a year ago — although, that obviously ended up working out just fine in the end.

It’s a massive opportunity for Schröder to take on a major role with a championship favorite, and his confidence has never been lacking. However, embracing whatever role is asked of him hasn’t always been a strong point, and you can bet that LeBron and Vogel have an idea of what he’ll be doing. How much that matches up with Dennis’ desires to be a starter and key contributor will likely determine exactly how successful their partnership is as the Lakers chase a second straight championship.

After being charged in the Operation Varsity Blues college bribery scandal and serving time for her participation, Felicity Huffman is set to make her return to acting with a new comedy series for ABC. The network has picked up a pilot for the show that’s reportedly inspired by the real-life story of Susan Savage, the owner of the Sacramento River Cats, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

The ABC comedy, meanwhile, will also star Zack Gottsagen (The Peanut Butter Falcon). It centers on Huffman’s character, who inherits her husband’s beloved minor league baseball team after his sudden death. She navigates her new life with the help of her dysfunctional family, including her eldest son (Gottsagen), a baseball devotee with Down syndrome, her new work family and the Sacramento community.

Huffman’s casting comes as a surprise even though it’s been over a year since she served time for committing mail fraud after she and other wealthy parents, including Fuller House‘s Lori Loughlin, were caught by federal investigators in the intricate scandal. (Loughlin is currently serving her sentence.) The guilty parties took part in a scam that faked their children’s SAT scores and extracurricular activities to get them into prestigious universities. However, unlike Loughlin, Huffman immediately cooperated with prosecutors and only served a 14-day sentence, which earned her scathing criticism from her Desperate Housewives co-star, Ricardo Chavira.

In a now-deleted tweet, Chavira wrote, “White Privilege. And I saw Eight years worth of it, so I know what I’m talking about. Accountability and Responsibility don’t mean sh*t to these people.”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)