Month: December 2020

The undefeated Pittsburgh Steelers played their second game doubling as an after-school special on Monday when they hosted Washington Football Team for a 5 p.m. kickoff that was absolutely as weird as it sounds (and only on TV for half the country). The Steelers continued to play brutal, dominant football while Washington continues an aimless season with a starting quarterback who nearly lost one of his legs two years ago and required dozens of surgeries to continue his career.

That journey was a bit terrifying on Monday evening, then admittedly, it got pretty funny. Nearing halftime and already trailing, Smith suddenly appeared to have an extremely bloody leg after a lineman cleated his shin, requiring some medical attention.

As many noted, it was not his surgically-repaired leg that was bleeding. But any sort of blood in an NFL game is upsetting, especially when it looks to be that abundant. Smith left the field but apparently was OK, because after the Steelers made it 14-0 he regained possession of the Washington offense and led a drive down the field late.

Unfortunately, however, two straight sacks with the clock winding down put the Football Team in the position of having to rush off the field on fourth down for a frantic field goal attempt. That is, until Smith did a very savvy thing: he took the ball he was just tackled with off the field with him. And in the chaos of the end-of-half scramble, the person responsible for the K balls wasn’t ready to put one in play for Washington to kick.

Because Smith took the ball, officials didn’t have anything to spot and had to stop the clock. The clock briefly read zeroes, but officials stayed there was an “administrative issue” and explained there was no ball, which meant they had to reset the clock to 0:08, then blow the whistle to let Football Team attempt a much-calmer field goal.

With things more settled, they kicked the field goal to go into the half down 14-3. It was a bizarre scene, and one that rightfully had Steelers fans up in arms. It was entirely unclear if Washington could have even gotten set for a field goal, let alone gotten one off and even then, a kicker under pressure with a ticking clock makes for a much harder field goal than one with eight seconds to pull off.

Call it a savvy veteran move if you may, but it certainly was a weird sequence in what was already a weird game for a lot of other reasons.

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie turned 26 this Sunday, celebrating at the Teaneck, New Jersey nightclub RAIN. After a night of partying, a shooting reportedly broke out which ended with a victim being rushed to the the hospital.

According to HipHopDX, a video uploaded to WorldStarHipHop outlined the incident. Apparently, A Boogie’s entourage rear-ended a bystander’s carin front of the New Jersey nightclub. While insurance information was being traded, a brawl broke out, which eventually escalated to a shooting and one person sent to a nearby hospital.

New Jersey Township of Teaneck Police Chief Glenn O’Reilly confirmed that someone was shot Sunday night but did not specify who the victim was. She said that the injuries are thankfully not life-threatening.

It’s the latest news about A Boogie, who has released a handful of tracks this year. In June, he released a deluxe edition to his acclaimed album Artist 2.0. At the time, he mentioned that he would be donating $100k worth of tablets and laptops to students at his old Bronx elementary school, saying his charitable act was done “so that they can do their remote learning in the safest way.”

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The battle against COVID-19 is a multi-front war. It’s not just a fight against a biological enemy but a misinformed public as well.

Dr. Benjamin Janaway is a doctor at the UK’s National Health Service and a science communicator. He’s using social media to fight hard against COVID-19 misinformation so we can succeed against the virus.

He recently outlined the crux of the battle on Twitter.

“But consider the makers of the new Covid Vaccine, they must not just fight against the limits of science, but the ferocious and uninformed attacks of Hollywood celebrities, which on a one-to-one basis, most people aspire more to and entrust more than a distant ‘nerd’ a government and media have made their enemy before the start,” he wrote.

“It’s tough to develop a novel treatment using mRNA technology, push for social distancing, and argue with Laurence Fox at the same time,” he added.

(For those who don’t live in the UK, Fox is an actor who got into it with Janaway on Twitter over the COVID-19 vaccine.)

Janaway also shared a video on Twitter where he debunks conspiracies and myths about vaccines that are frequently shared on social media by anti-vaxxers.

The great thing is that he shuts down the entire movement in one minute flat. So even conspiracy theorists with short-attention spans can get the message.

Janaway starts out by explaining why vaccines are so great at stopping the spread of deadly diseases.

“Vaccines are made of an inert or dead form of a virus inserted into the body so the body’s white blood cells — i.e. its immune system — can develop a natural immune response, so when encountering a wild-type version of a virus, it breaks it down without any symptoms,” Ben says. “This breaks the chain of infection and reduces deaths. Millions, in fact.”

Then, he debunks popular falsehoods spread by the anti-vaccination movement.

“The link between vaccines and autism and vaccines and Alzheimer’s has been completely disproven by large-scale studies,” he adds. “There are no dead babies, bits of dead babies, or bits of anything else in a vaccine that is going to harm you. This is all myth,” he explains.

He did admit that there are some extremely rare side effects that come from vaccinations. However, none of them come close to the damage that can be caused by COVID-19.

“The actual risks of vaccines are: there is a risk of anaphylactic shock, which is vanishingly low; a risk of allergic reaction to foodstuffs that can be used (and they will ask before they give it); risk of local tissue damage (well, it is putting a needle in somebody); and a small risk of more general tissue damage, but once again, this is extremely low,” Janaway says. “You may get a few symptoms which is the body’s immune reaction, but not the virus itself.”

In the end, beating this virus is all about taking personal responsibility. Taking care of ourselves by wearing masks, keeping a safe distance, staying informed, and confronting misinformation, we can create an environment where other people stay healthy as well.

It’s Though many people are perfectly happy with their artificial versions (which have gotten more realistic over the years), there’s nothing like the look and feel—and smell—of a real Christmas tree.

Both options come with an environmental cost, however. The Nature Conservancy states, “In the U.S., around 10 million artificial trees are purchased each season. Nearly 90 percent of them are shipped across the world from China, resulting in an increase of carbon emissions and resources. And because of the material they are made of, most artificial trees are not recyclable and end up in local landfills.”

Real trees support tree farms, which only cut down and sell a fraction of the trees they grow and don’t have the intensive carbon emissions that artificial trees do to produce and transport. However, if you go the real route, you’re still killing a tree every year to decorate your home for the holidays.

This conundrum is why people are going ga-ga over the idea of rented, potted Christmas trees.

The concept is quite simple. Instead of buying a cut-down tree, you rent one in a pot for the holiday season. Alexandra Lautarescu shared a photo of her tree-in-a-pot from London Christmas Tree Rental and explained how it works. In January, the gets returned to the tree farm, where it lives the rest of the year.

You can actually rent the same tree each year until it outgrows Christmas tree height, at which time it gets planted in a forest.

The tree comes with specific instructions for slowly introducing the tree to the temperature of your home and for watering and care. Renters also have to pay a damage deposit that doesn’t get refunded if the tree dies, so there is some extra incentive to be a good steward of the tree.

It’s a small operation and a side business for owners Catherine Loveless and Jonathan Mearns—a woman who runs a ballet school and a man who works as a public servant.

“It all started when walking the streets of London in January and weaving between the Christmas tree graveyards that Jonathan decided enough was enough,” the company’s website read. “With 7 million trees going into landfill each year for the sake of 3 weeks of pleasure there must be a better way to do Christmas trees.”

The idea has proven to be quite popular. Last year, they rented out 100 trees and have sold out of their stock for this year.

The price of a rental ranges from around 40 to 70 British pounds, which equates to roughly $55 to $95 U.S., which is around the same average price of buying a cut tree.

There are some companies in the U.S. that offer similar live tree rental services. In fact, a California-based company, Rent a Christmas Tree, has been renting out potted Christmas trees since 2009.

As the desire for more sustainable practices becomes more and more embedded into people’s consciousness, choices like what kind of Christmas tree to get become more and more relevant. One household’s choices might not seem significant, but our individual actions do add up.

And as demand for more sustainable options grows, so will the supply. Just imagine how many more sustainable solutions humanity has up their sleeves.

The Kingsman prequel — known as simply The King’s Man — isn’t simply one of the many Hollywood blockbusters that have been affected by pandemic. It was actually originally supposed to come out over a year ago. The film — which stars Ralph Fiennes and Gemma Arterton as just some of the original members of the super secret English secret service — has been bouncing around the release calendar for a while now, and though it’s now slated for a late February 2021 release, who knows what will happen? But there’s one person confident that the franchise will live a long happy and productive life: director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn.

As per Deadline, the filmmaker — who’s also helmed Layer Cake, the first Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class, on top of the first two Kingsman movies — is allegedly getting super ambitious with his series. According to the CEO of Marv Group, one of its production companies, Vaughn has his sights set on “something like seven more Kingsman films.” Presumably that’s on top of the one that still hasn’t been released.

But there’s more, some of which we already knew. “We want to grow the business and the output,” said Marv Group CEO Zygi Kamasa. “We have a Kingsman TV series in the works and there are two-three other franchises that are being developed alongside the Kingsman world.”

That’s a lot of Kingsman! And mind you the first film came out six years ago, and in that time only one sequel has come out, three years back. But maybe that’s only made viewers more hungry to see more of Taron Egerton’s Eggsy.

(Via Deadline)

Before she became a household name, Lizzo got her start in the Minneapolis music scene, recording her first album in the bedroom of a nondescript home. And now that house is now on the market for a lot of money.

Per a report by Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, the house is now listed for $375,000. It was a staple in the Minneapolis music scene. Along with providing a home for Lizzo’s 2014 debut Lizzobangers, groups like Allan Kingdom, The Committee, and Poliça recorded there as well.

Aaron Mader, who worked with Lizzo in the house’s third-story bedroom studio, remembered the recording process fondly. “I remember tracking vocals with Lizzo on a stool, me on the couch, and Ryan [Olsen of Poliça] hovered over his folding table desk working Pro Tools,” he said.

Mader added, “That time period and that album specifically capture such a crazy and beautiful time in my life. We had zero expectations, zero money. Just making music with friends and so excited to be creating awesome art together. The older I get the more I realize how special those moments and pockets in time are. Such a joy.”

Lizzo recently opened up about how her success has impacted her mental health. “Fame only puts a magnifying glass on the sh*t that you already have,” she said in a recent TikTok. “So, I’m just telling everyone now, anyone who has internal issues or has like any type of self problems that they need to work out, work out now … Because money, fame, or success or even getting older doesn’t really fix that sh*t. Do the inner work, because if you don’t, it’s going to haunt you like a f*cking ghost.”

Lizzo is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Bill Nye has always been great at explaining science to children. But since the pandemic started he’s faced his greatest challenge: explaining science to people who refuse to wear masks. Over the summer, he unloaded on “skeptics” who throw a hissy fit over having to put a piece of cloth over the mouth so they don’t transmit a highly contagious disease. He even recorded a very popular TikTok video, explaining why masks work. Now he’s at it again — because a large chunk of America still, almost a year in, refuses to listen.

Right now, new cases and deaths are soaring across the country — and we haven’t even felt the post-Thanksgiving travel bump yet. So Nye, a scholar and one of the great bow-tie enthusiasts, went back to the drawing board, recording another TikTok video in which he, again, patiently explains why masks really do slow the spread.

After a little introductory joke about how difficult it is to speak clearly when wearing a mask, he gets to the business at hand: debunking the skeptics. He begins by whipping out a map of the United States, festooned with red marks over the parts of the nation that do generally wear masks — the two coasts, bits of the south, cities and their surrounding areas. He then places a translucent sheet over top of it, this one with black marks designating places where cases are spiking. The areas do not have much overlap. Ergo, where people are wearing masks, there’s less COVID-19. Where they aren’t, there’s more.

That’s simple enough to understand, but Nye tackled one other issue: the belief that the virus can travel through the fibers of a mask. But, he explains, that’s not how viruses travel. They travel, he says, “in driplets of spit and snot,” so they get tangled in the dense fibers of a mask. Nye even takes out a tablet peppered with pegs, then places a ball, representing a smidgeon of the virus, getting trapped. Think of it like the Price is Right game Plinko, only an understanding of this could save lives.

On TikTok, Nye’s latest anti-anti-masker video has been a sensation, amassing millions of likes and hundreds of thousands of shares. Can the youth save our nation by telling their elders to stop being a baby and put a piece of cloth over their mouth like a grown-up? We’ll have plenty of time to find out now that we’ve learned our outgoing president screwed up a deal with Pfizer that will slow down vaccine distribution in America. But at least there’s a good chunk of the nation that’s been listening to Bill Nye the Science Guy from the start.

(Via NowThisNews & BuzzFeed)

The 2020 presidential election, it simply cannot be stated enough, is over. The lawyer in charge of fighting to undo the election Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden is hospitalized with coronavirus, the Trump campaign has lost dozens upon dozens of legal battles, and states are certifying their votes ahead of the official vote of the Electoral College in mid-December.

Despite all that reality happening as time inexorably moves forward, the Republican fantasy that Trump somehow won the election (and a second term) has continued unabated on conservative social media and television and in the mind of Trump himself. And some Republicans are extremely willing to keep that fantasy going, including Texas senator Ted Cruz.

Cruz — who once stood by and said nothing when Trump suggested his father, Rafael, was somehow involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy — proudly volunteered to embarrass himself in front of the Supreme Court with the help of Fox News.

Cruz said he would represent Trump in a potential hearing in front of the Supreme Court over a Pennsylvania court case about mail-in voting. The case was brought by two Republican politicians in Pennsylvania, and Cruz has publicly pushed for the Supreme Court to take the case. Now he says he will present oral arguments if it makes it before the high court.

The Supreme Court was largely framed by Republicans as important to Trump’s attempts to win the 2020 election. He stated multiple times at rallies before and since the November election that he needed courts to come through for him in order to prevail. And it’s entirely uncertain if the case will make it to the highest court in the land: the case is arguing that something that’s been done for years and is extremely safe and legal — voting by mail — should be ruled unconstitutional and therefore millions of legally-cast ballots should be thrown out. So far ,zero of the many similarly-frivolous lawsuits have been given merit, let alone gone to higher courts with a prayer of victory.

But it’s a nice gesture from Cruz, whose entire intent seems to be not to legislate for the benefit of his constitutes but to rile up the libs online. I’m sure this thing, which is very unlikely to happen anyway, will please Trump for at least a fleeting moment before he pulls down on his Twitter timeline to find something else to get mad at.

(Via Ted Cruz on Twitter & Fox News)

In a report full of several “whoa if true” moments, a former Israeli general not only claims that aliens have been in contact with government officials for years, but that Donald Trump knows all about it. The general in question is noted Israeli professor Haim Eshed, who served as the head of the Israel space security program for almost 30 years and is the three-time recipient of the Israel Security Award, so his credentials check out. As for his recent claims about the existence of a “Galactic Federation” that has been working the United States and Israeli government for years, well, that’s open to debate. Via The Jerusalem Post:

The 87-year-old former space security chief gave further descriptions about exactly what sort of agreements have been made between the aliens and the US, which ostensibly have been made because they wish to research and understand “the fabric of the universe.” This cooperation includes a secret underground base on Mars, where there are American and alien representatives.

While the existence of a secret alliance between humans and aliens might sound far-fetched, it’s nothing compared to Eshed’s claim that Trump has knowledge of government officials working with extraterrestrials and was “on the verge” of blurting it out to the world before the Galactic Federation stopped him. Just think about that for a second. Donald Trump is in possession of earth-shattering information, and we’re supposed to believe he didn’t tweet it out and/or use it to overturn the 2020 election? Seems a little out there.

As for why the aliens don’t want to reveal their existence yet, humanity needs to work some things out first. Namely we need to “evolve and reach a stage where we will… understand what space and spaceships are,” Eshed says.

(Via The Jerusalem Post)

There are two games happening in the NFL on Monday, but only one of them will be able to be watched by the entire country. Monday night’s 49ers-Bills game (which is a San Francisco home game being played in Glendale, Arizona) is your standard ESPN Monday Night Football broadcast.

However, Fox has the Washington Football Team against the Pittsburgh Steelers, a game happening right now, but much of the country is not able to watch because it was originally a regional 1 p.m. ET kickoff and, because of the NFL’s deal with DirecTV for NFL Sunday Ticket, it remained a regional telecast even as it moved to a standalone Monday afternoon kickoff.

DirecTV customers can watch the game on channel 712, per CBS, regardless of whether they have Sunday Ticket or not, but for anyone without DirecTV, you best be living in one of those red areas on the above map. If you don’t, well, you’re likely reading this post in frustration because your current option on Fox is the evening news or, as is the case here on the west coast, Judge Judy.

The good news is for anyone that wanted to watch tomorrow’s rescheduled Cowboys-Ravens game, since that was already slated to be a national window broadcast on Thursday night, that will be available to all. Until then, we return to the dark ages of yesteryear in which an NFL game is happening and there is no way for you to watch it (legally) or even have check-ins on RedZone.