Month: December 2020

After spending five years on the market, Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch property — which was renamed to Sycamore Valley Ranch after the late singer faced sexual abuse allegations and lawsuits — has sold for $22 million. According to The Wall Street Journal, billionaire and co-founder of the investment firm Yucaipa Companies Ron Burkle, who was also a former associate to the King Of Pop, purchased the property for what was a relatively cheap price, at least compared to the $100 million for which it was initially listed back in 2015. In the years following, the ranch was repeatedly forced to lower its asking price, with last year’s listing a mere $31 million.

Jackson originally purchased the Neverland Ranch for $19.5 million back in 1987. Soon the property, which is located 40 miles from Santa Barbara and spans about 2,700 acres, boasted a number of attractions for children, including a railroad, an amusement park, and a zoo. The ranch was shut down in 2006 and two years later, the pop singer defaulted on a loan that was backed by the ranch’s co-owners, the real estate investment trust Colony Capital. The property’s title later became a joint venture between Jackson and Colony Capital, after the latter bought the note for the loan.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal about the purchase, a representative for Burkle said the purchase was “a land bank opportunity” for him to add to his California property portfolio. The Neverland Ranch acquisition also comes after the pop singer’s estate won a court appeal over HBO’s Leaving Neverland documentary, which claimed the film broke a nearly three-decade-old non-disparagement clause.

(via The Wall Street Journal)

James Harden is still a member of the Houston Rockets. Despite the fact that he wants out of dodge to go compete for a championship somewhere, the Rockets have held firm, making it clear that they will not make a bad deal just to part ways with a player who is under contract through next season.

Harden has apparently made clear he’d accept a trade to any number of teams, and yet he’s still with the Rockets. The reason, as Adrian Wojnarowski made clear on ESPN’s Hoop Streams, is that Houston has a handful of offers for him on the table, they just don’t like any of them, and they are willing to wait for something right.

“The Rockets know that, to make a James Harden trade, they’ve got to get maximum value back in the trade market,” Wojnarowski said. “They don’t need to rush this contract — obviously they have him under contract for two more years. They don’t want this cloud to hang over them, it is a difficult situation in Houston right now for them to function, but I think as an organization, they know that they can’t do a bad deal. And right now, the deals that they see out there in the marketplace feel like they’re not good enough, and I think that they hope that those offers will improve as teams get into the season and teams, maybe they’ve overestimated the group they had. Maybe they start to feel a little pressure to really, dramatically improve their team, offers improve in that way.”

Reporting has indicated that Houston both has a high asking price and is “willing to get uncomfortable” with Harden, who has certainly challenged them in recent weeks by going to public events without a mask on. Still, he’s a member of the Rockets and appears set to be for a while … unless, of course, one of the other 29 teams decide to go all-in.

Taylor Swift has had a great 2020. The year produced two albums — Folklore and Evermore — in the span of four months, both of them debuting at No. 1 on the album charts. But now some bad news: Fans are extremely confused and disappointed that the singer was removed from an iconic mural in the city where her music career began. According to TMZ, Swift was removed from a legendary Nashville mural, which is positioned at Legends Corner on Lower Broadway. The report says that Swift’s face was replaced by Brad Paisley, who will join other notable icons, including Reba McEntire, Willie Nelson, and Dolly Parton.

Swift’s followers did not take the news well. One person wrote, “Taylor swift did not become the first woman to be awarded the pinnacle award and contributed so much to country music only to be replaced on a Nashville mural, utter disrespect.” Another wrote that her removal from the mural left them “at a loss for words,” adding, “She expanded the boundaries of country music and brought so many fans to the genre that wouldn’t have listened otherwise … Country music would not be as popular as it is today were it not for Taylor Swift.”

The news also caused the phrase “young Taylor ran country” to trend on Twitter.

(via TMZ)

The New York Knicks have been the butt of jokes since — [does quick maths] — the dawn of time. Being the team that plays in New York City in any sport will, inevitably, open you up for a bunch of opportunities to get dunked on, but particularly over the last decade or two, the Knicks’ frequently being among the worst teams in the NBA makes it a little easier.

They’re no strangers to getting made fun of in forms of media that have nothing to do with basketball (see: this clip from Family Guy), but we got a new one this week courtesy of the fine folks at Disney. Soul, the latest release by Mickey Mouse and Pixar, hit Disney+ on Christmas Day, and thanks to Taylor Rooks, we were made aware of a joke made at the Knicks’ expense. Make sure you stay until the end of the clip — which shows the lead character, Joe, entering the Great Beyond — on this one.

As it turns out, the person behind this joke was Kemp Powers, one of the film’s writers and, as he explained on Twitter, “a diehard, lifelong Knicks fan.”

Let this be a lesson to everyone who prods the Knicks: no one is willing to go farther to make jokes at the team’s expense than Knicks fans.

The majority of music by the late singer Aaliyah has long been unavailable on streaming services, but it looks like that’s finally coming to an end — sort of. The singer’s estate announced on Christmas that they secured control of her official account on YouTube, promising they would drop her music on there at some point in 2021.

But this is just the beginning. A few months ago, Aaliyah’s estate announced it was in talks with other streamers. “To our loyal fans: We are excited to announce that communication has commenced between the estate and various record labels about the status of Aaliyah’s music catalogue, as well as its availability on streaming platforms in the near future,” the post read. “Thank you for your continued love and support. More updates to come!”

Aaliyah’s three albums, which have influenced some of today’s biggest names, have long been long been AWAL from online services. However, the fight to get them to digital platforms has been a long and hard one. Blackground Records, which houses the singer’s full-length releases and was founded by her uncle Barry Hankerson, is no longer operational, and it is believed that Hankerson is mostly responsible for blocking her music from streaming services. But it appears things will change in 2021.

More than two decades after Mariah Carey released her Christmas classic, “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” the song continues to dominate the holiday season. This year was another good one: As per TMZ, the song now owns the all-time record for the biggest, single-day stream in Spotify history, tallying a shocking 17.223 million streams on Christmas Eve alone. The previous champion was Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings,” which was streamed 14.966 million times on the first day of its release in January 2019.

After hearing the news, Carey shared her excitement in a tweet. “WOW,” she wrote, followed by a trio of enthusiastic emojis. “I know people think I’m making ‘coin’ (lil’ secret: artists make very little from streams) but the real reason I’m sitting here in astonishment & gratitude is seeing the joy this little song I wrote brings to people.” She added, “THANK YOU & MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!”

The new Spotify record comes just over a week after Carey’s song topped the Billboard singles chart for the second time in as many years. The track also anded the No. 1 spot last December, albeit for the first time in the song’s 25-year lifetime. With its return to the top once this year, it’s clear that this could become a Christmas tradition.

(via TMZ)

In the spring, many New York City residents fled the metropolis, seeking refuge from the endlessly ringing sirens and the unshakeable feeling of loss. At that time, it was as if the city could be split into three groups: those hunkered down in their homes, the essential workers and emergency first-responders who were helping people, and those who were sick. Between travel restrictions and dread, New York became a place to avoid.

But Safi Rauf, a Navy veteran and Georgetown pre-med student, traveled upstream to help pull New York City back from its worst days. Rauf, who remained a Navy reserve corpsman, had been keeping tabs on the spread of the novel coronavirus through Asia through the winter via a Department of Defense database. When he saw that potentially infected travelers were being allowed to take commercial airlines around the country back to their homes, he knew things were about to get bad.

“It just didn’t seem right,” Rauf says, “and fast forward, it started spiking in the U.S.”

Around that same time, Georgetown went virtual, and Rauf began volunteering locally at the Arlington County Public health office as a contact tracer. In early April, the Expeditionary Medical Facility Bethesda, in which Rauf serves, was mobilized to help set up a field hospital at the Javits Center in Manhattan.

There, Rauf and his colleagues worked 13 to 14-hour shifts completely in isolation, with only one break to use the restroom or have a meal so that the unit could “minimize wasting the personal protective equipment.” What Rauf saw when he got to the city was a clear picture of who was mostly being afflicted with the deadly virus. At the Javits Center, which was “like a big warehouse,” Rauf mostly cared for unsheltered folks and immigrants, many of whom had never seen a doctor in their lives or were not fluent in English. Despite serving as a translator and cultural advisor with Special Operations units in Afghanistan, Rauf found himself unable to communicate with many of his sickest patients. “We just gave them everything, monitored their body fluids, and hoped for the best,” he says.

Now, Rauf is back at Georgetown, where he is part of the 2020 class of Tillman Scholars and the president of the Georgetown University Student Veterans Association and studies antibiotics treatments. It just so happened that the incredible test of human strength that he experienced in New York in the spring served him well as he interviewed to earn a scholarship from the Tillman Foundation, a nonprofit named after the football star turned military hero, Pat Tillman, that empowers service men and women and their families through education and community.

Rauf, who was born in an Afghani refugee camp in Pakistan and moved to America when he was 16, had a powerful backstory and history of military service that was already exemplary, but he believes the experience in New York put his application over the top.

“Us Tillman Scholars, we don’t feel like any one of us is good enough, but at the end of the day, every single one of the Tillman Scholars has a unique aspect to them,” Rauf says. “You won’t find two Tillman Scholars who have the same story.”

On the other side of the interview process was Marie Tillman, the chair of the foundation and wife to the late Pat. The team had to make the selection process virtual this year, and reschedule its annual charity run in Phoenix near Pat’s alma mater of Arizona State University. As 2020 continued, though, Tillman was proud to see that from public health to social justice to politics and everything else that has bubbled up during this chaotic year, there always seemed to be a Tillman Scholar leading.

“If something’s going on, we more than likely have a scholar who’s right there trying to have an impact on that issue,” Tillman says.

Shortly after Pat’s death in April 2004, the foundation was formed to help the next generation of armed forces members and empower a new generation of leaders. The first class of scholars came in 2009, and as the scholars have gotten older and gone out into the world, their impact has been manifold.

Take Chris Diaz, a Navy veteran and 2011 Tillman Scholar who started Action Tank, a veteran-led non-profit in Philadelphia that brings people of different disciplines together to tackle a significant societal issue through a yearlong project, alongside two of his fellow scholars. After jobs in sports and medicine as a performance psychologist, Diaz is now also volunteering as an executive secretary of the agency review team for veterans’ affairs on the Biden transition team.

There are countless others like Rauf and Diaz. Shreveport mayor Adrian Perkins is a Tillman Scholar. Kimberly Jung, an entrepreneur and “Shark Tank” contestant who got an investment from Mark Cuban for her Afghan saffron company Rumi Spice, is a Tillman Scholar. And this year’s Make Your Mark award winner, Jackie Munn, is a colleague of Rauf’s at Arlington County Public Health, as well as a mother looking after her children while her husband, a former Green Beret, was away for work.

What comes through from Tillman Scholars — and trickles down from Marie, as well as foundation CEO Dan Futrell — is not only a steadfast belief in leadership, but a resounding optimism. Particularly in 2020, it seems almost impossible that a group of people could wake up every day with a belief that better is on the horizon. Yet that’s exactly what this community of veteran leaders has.

“If all great crucibles, we need those things in our lives to rise as leaders, then this is no different than that,” says Diaz, who led Action Tank’s work restoring Philadelphia tree canopies in 2020, “so I view it quite frankly as a blessing that I’ve gotten this opportunity to hone and sharpen my own leadership abilities through this time of crisis because that’s what always has happened.”

That resonant positivity, says Futrell, who was a 2013 Tillman Scholar before becoming CEO, comes from a desire to live up to Pat Tillman’s legacy, which includes leaving a career as an athlete behind to enlist in the Army and his eventual death by friendly fire in Afghanistan.

“I and 695 other Tillman scholars have committed ourselves to have an impact in the name of somebody who lived before us and lived a good life that we were motivated by,” Futrell says, “so you know it’s not lost on us that, as, as the years continue to take on after his death, that, that there will be fewer people that might know his name.”

The foundation has helped foster community and connection among its scholars this year by hosting virtual events including leadership talks as well as simple meet-and-greets for networking. Guest speakers have come in to lend a voice and support scholars as they continue on the front lines of the world’s many struggles.

“The thing about building community, and a responsibility that the foundation has taken on, is creating an environment where the connections can happen,” says Diaz.

Yet in sifting through all the through-lines of 2020, another is that America again had to determine what its relationship with the military was. The presidential election polarized the nation, often with discussions over military service at the center. One of the brilliant things about a big, diverse group like the Tillman Scholars, and the veteran community more broadly, is that it is not monolithic in its politics or its view of the world.

There are Tillman Scholars who helped run Veterans for Trump and others who led the Veterans for Biden organization, and folks who have supported all sorts of candidates in the past. The Tillman Foundation itself is, as a non-profit, inherently apolitical, but nevertheless derives value from its diverse viewpoints on politics and society.

“That’s where we want to be,” Futrell says. “Because we know that our scholars are carrying the right set of values, and are going to have a discussion with each other and ideally in the world that is respectful and that is … built to advance the conversation and not just tear each other down.”

It’s a principle core to Action Tank’s work in Philadelphia and Diaz’s worldview, too, in large part due to a curiosity and wisdom forged through multiple military deployments.

“The military is a small microcosm of the country,” says Diaz, “so it’s made up of every color, race and creed, and you’re able to take from that experience and see the full breadth of the human experience, both in all of its heights and all of the pain and depravity and suffering that is war.”

Leading then becomes easier when people can join one another on common ground and bring the best out of one another. The Tillman Foundation believes creating and supporting leaders creates the largest possible impact.

“We always talk about, because we invest on an annual basis in a relatively small amount of people, the impact those people have through the work that they do and the leadership roles that they’re taking has such a huge impact,” says Tillman. “Being able to leverage what we’re able to give and support, the fact that it is in the leadership sector, there’s an amplification of that.”

Since returning to Georgetown, Rauf has heard from many students, some veterans and some not, asking for advice about a career in medicine or how to nab a Tillman scholarship. He organized the large annual Veteran’s Day celebration on Georgetown’s campus in a socially distant and mostly virtual capacity and got some wiggle room from trusting professors to design his own research.

Some day, Rauf hopes to become a surgeon but will keep seeking out ways to lead in his field. Doing just that, though, he may only be able to help his own patients. But as a leader in his military unit or medical team, there is no end to the impact he could have.

“If I can influence that type of policy in a leadership position, I can help millions of people,” says Rauf.

In one sense, it might seem odd that Melania Trump, a former model, has not been a fixture of magazine covers over the last four years. But in other ways, it’s not surprising: Her husband has been a relentless source of controversy, and Melania, while often quiet or lurking behind the scenes, has done her share to add to that unpleasant mystique. (Then again, she’s never more relatable than when she appears to despise him and his children.) But there’s one person who thinks the media should have been treated like a goddess: her husband, Donald Trump.

The outgoing president spent Christmas Day as he spends most days: golfing and rage-tweeting. In this case, it was a quote-tweet of one of his sycophantic media outlets, Breitbart, who published an article calling out the “elitist snobs in the fashion press” who have “kept the most elegant First Lady in American history off the covers of their magazines for 4 consecutive years.”

Trump added some brief, albeit autopilot, thoughts of his own, seeming to call his wife the “greatest of all time” and throwing in a vaguely directed chorus of “Fake news!” As ever with the 45th president, don’t try to parse the logic of what exactly was “fake news” about magazine covers not granting prime real estate to a woman who dismissed immigrant children being caged.

Perhaps it was all a ploy to stop her from leaving him once he’s out of office and subject to all manner of financial and legal duress. Whatever the case, it was one of the only tweets he’s made in weeks to not get flagged by Twitter’s top brass for spreading misinformation, so maybe he’s right?

(Via The Daily Beast)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wonder Woman 1984.

End credits scenes have been de rigueur for comic book movies ever since the first Iron Man, and they tend to fall into one of two categories: surprise reveals of characters who will play a role in coming adventures or nudge-nudgey jokes. Wonder Woman 1984 has one that’s neither. Instead, it goes above and beyond, bringing back a legend of comic book media.

At first the scene seems like more of our hero, Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince, saving yet another life. We see a dark-haired woman rescuing a group of bystanders from a falling pole. But when one of them goes to thank her, she turns around, revealing that she’s in fact Lynda Carter, aka the first actress to play Wonder Woman, in the CBS show that ran from 1975 to 1979. (HBO Max made the program’s three seasons available a few days before 1984 dropped.) She says her name is Asteria and that she’s been “doing this for a long time.”

Carter is on record praising Gadot’s cucumber cool work as Diana, telling People back in 2017, ““I just said that she knows who this character is. Because Wonder Woman — it’s the idea of her. It’s not about superpowers, it’s about her intellect and compassion. It’s so much more than some comic book character, because we identify with it.”

Wonder Woman 1984 is now streaming on HBO Max and is in any movie theaters that are open.

(Via EW)

UPDATE:

Kawhi has received stitches for a cut on his mouth after colliding with teammate Serge Ibaka, and Tyronn Lue is optimistic about his recovery.

Kawhi Leonard had 8 stitches to treat a mouth laceration after colliding with Serge Ibaka, the team says. After the game, coach Ty Lue said he believed Leonard will be “fine.”

— Malika Andrews (@malika_andrews) December 26, 2020

EARLIER:

In the final contest of the Christmas Day slate, the Los Angeles Clippers had been clinging to a healthy lead for most of the second half, right up until the Denver Nuggets tried to stage a furious rally late and close the gap to under double digits. But in the midst of all that, we had a scary moment as the two teams battled for a rebound.

Jamal Murray came up with the loose ball and bolted down court before getting fouled, but it was the play right before that which left Kawhi Leonard bloodied on the floor after colliding with teammate Serge Ibaka as they both went up for a rebound on the other end.

Kawhi lay on the ground for several minutes with blood covering his face and shoulders as he was being attended to and was eventually taken to the locker room for medical care.

Serge Ibaka caught Kawhi with an elbow on the way up pic.twitter.com/D8UomXD8nb

— CJ Fogler #BlackLivesMatter (@cjzero) December 26, 2020

Wow this angle of Kawhi getting elbowed by Ibaka pic.twitter.com/3iuqHPzU5Q

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) December 26, 2020

According to Malika Andrews, Kawhi will not return to the game and will continue to receive care.

Kawhi Leonard is out for the rest of the game and continues to be evaluated by the medical staff, the team says.

— Malika Andrews (@malika_andrews) December 26, 2020

It remains unclear exactly what the nature of the injury is, but Kawhi obviously took a very hard blow to the face that will require extra caution. We’ll continue to update the situation as more information becomes available. The Clippers came away with the 121-108 victory to remain undefeated on the season.