Month: March 2021

A disturbing joint report by USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting found that tens of thousands of pets have been harmed by Seresto flea and tick collars. Seresto was developed by Bayer and is now sold by Elanco.

Since Seresto flea collars were introduced in 2012, the EPA has received incident reports of at least 1,698 pet deaths linked to the product. Through June 2020, the EPA has received over 75,000 incident reports relating to the collars with over 1,000 involving human harm.

The EPA has known the collars are harming humans and their pets but failed to tell the public about the dangers.

“The EPA appears to be turning a blind eye to this problem, and after seven years of an increasing number of incidents, they are telling the public that they are continuing to monitor the situation,” Karen McCormack, a retired EPA employee who worked as both a scientist and communications officer, said according to New York Daily News.

“But I think this is a significant problem that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.”

McCormack says the collars have had more incident reports than any other pesticide pet product she’s ever come across.

Pierre, a 9-year-old Papillon service dog owned by Rhonda Bomwell, is believed to have died because of the product. In June of last year, the dog suffered a seizure and died a day after wearing the collar at a veterinarian’s suggestion.

Bomwell administered CPR to the dog but didn’t take off the collar. “I just didn’t put it together,” she said.

The EPA is in charge of regulating the product because it contains pesticides, imidacloprid (10%), and flumethrin (4.5%). The collars work by releasing small amounts of the pesticide onto the pet’s skin over a period of eight months.

The collars are designed to provide protection from fleas, flea larvae, ticks, chewing lice, and sarcoptic mange.

The harmful effects the collars have on humans vary widely and include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat as well as skin rashes and lesions. The incidents usually happen after the human has nuzzled or slept in a bed with an animal wearing the collar.

The report shows the EPA has put the lives of countless pets in danger by knowing about the harm posed by the collars but keeping its findings private. The EPA has found the product to be “eligible for continued registration” going forward.

“No pesticide is completely without harm, but EPA ensures that there are measures on the product label that reduce risk,” an EPA spokesperson said. “The product label is the law, and applicators must follow label directions. Some pets, however, like some humans, are more sensitive than others and may experience adverse symptoms after treatment.”

The troubling report brings two sad truths to light. One, that a major company would continue to sell a product that’s harmful to both humans and pets without any inclination of taking it off the shelves. Two, that the EPA would allow it to be sold without notifying the public about its dangers.

The good news is that USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting have got the word out about the dangers so people can make a safer choice for their pets. Hopefully, this will alert pet stores to the harm the collars are causing so they can start selling safer options.

After storming onto the pop-punk and post-emo scenes in the early 2010’s, Toledo-based outfit Citizen have spent the last few years evolving and redefining themselves into a band that are more difficult to define. The band’s fourth full-length, Life In Your Glass World, feels like a culmination point for this evolution. Across the album’s eleven tracks, it is difficult to find one that sounds anything like the pop-punk that the band perfected on their earlier releases. Instead, the band’s new songs are influenced more by dance beats and auteurs of the new-wave era.

To celebrate the new album, frontman Mat Kerekes (who also has an incredibly impressive string of solo releases) sat down to talk being inspired by his brother and seeing Slipknot live in the latest Indie Mixtape 20 Q&A.

What are four words you would use to describe your music?

Loud, quiet, angry, sad.

It’s 2050 and the world hasn’t ended and people are still listening to your music. How would you like it to be remembered?

I think we do whatever we want musically and I think that’s a pretty cool thing. I would like us to be remembered by how we stay true to ourselves and that’s about it.

What’s your favorite city in the world to perform?

TOLEDO, OHIO.

Who’s the person who has most inspired your work, and why?

My brother Chris. He get into music after me but he’s such an insanely talented songwriter that I feel like I have to keep up with him.

Where did you eat the best meal of your life?

One time we stopped in Las Vegas on tour and we splurged on the Caesars Buffet. I ate only crab legs for around three hours.. with breaks here and there of course.

What album do you know every word to?

Out Of The Vein by Third Eye Blind.

What was the best concert you’ve ever attended?

I saw Slipknot at DTE Energy and that was pretty awesome. The energy was crazy.

What is the best outfit for performing and why?

The best outfit is whatever you feel good in. I’ve been known to go onstage in sweatpants and what not and that makes me feel comfortable.

Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter and/or Instagram?

My girlfriend Shay because she’s beautiful and also hilarious. It’s a great combo.

What’s your most frequently played song in the van on tour?

One time I listened to “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire on repeat for five hours straight with only a short break from it to go into the gas station.

What’s the last thing you Googled?

Stimulant-free energy drink.

What album makes for the perfect gift?

Citizen – Life In Your Glass World, of course.

Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever crashed while on tour?

Something that has haunted me for a while is… one time we stayed in a hotel next to a slaughterhouse and the screams throughout the night were very disturbing. It made me feel sad and disturbed.

What’s the story behind your first or favorite tattoo?

My first tattoo was a sailboat on my leg. I got it done in someone’s house when I was 15. I was really excited about it. Then I went to school and showed all of my friends and they told me it sucked and looks like sh*t. I then attempted to get it covered up with a really cool eagle which also ended up looking like sh*t.

What artists keep you from flipping the channel on the radio?

I have not listened to the radio in a really long time so I’m not sure. I listen to Spotify playlists that either I or my girlfriend make.

What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?

I guess it’s not really a one time thing but I do think it is pretty crazy the amount of support I or Citizen receives. The fact that people are excited about the things we do is really awesome and makes me feel really grateful.

What’s one piece of advice you’d go back in time to give to your 18-year-old self?

Relax, see things from perspectives other than your own and don’t be so selfish.

What’s the last show you went to?

I played a house show in Feb 2020 in Toledo right before COVID shut the world down.

What movie can you not resist watching when it’s on TV?

Forgetting Sarah Marshall! I love that movie.

What would you cook if Obama were coming to your house for dinner?

I would make the only thing I can make…. Cajun and red cayenne pepper stir fry. I hope he likes spicy things.

Life In Your Glass World is out March 26 via Run For Cover Records. Pre-order it here.

When Amazon announced over a year ago that the seventh season of Bosch will be the last for the cop drama starring Titus Welliver, it sure seemed like the show had a good run and, like all good things, was coming to end. Not so much. In a curious development, a new “spinoff” series has been ordered for IMDB TV. And while spinoffs normally center on supporting characters, this one will be about Bosch, and continue to star Bosch star Titus Welliver as, you guessed it, Bosch. Via Variety:

The new series will follow Harry Bosch (Welliver) as he embarks on the next chapter of his career and finds himself working with his one-time enemy and top-notch attorney Honey “Money” Chandler (Rogers). With a deep and complicated history between this unlikely pair, they must work together to do what they can agree on – finding justice.

In a very excited statement to Variety, Welliver seemed especially pumped to return to the title character after filming the final season for Amazon made him want more of that Bosch life. “To say I am ecstatic is an understatement!” Welliver said. “To be given the opportunity to tell more Harry Bosch stories is a tremendous gift. The process of shooting season 7 with the shadow of it being our final loomed heavily so when the idea was presented to continue with the possibility of a spinoff, without hesitation I said, ‘let’s go.’”

As for where you can find IMDB TV, in a probably not-so coincidental move, Deadline reported on Wednesday that the app became available for free on Amazon Fire TV just hours before the Bosch spinoff announcement.

(Via Variety)

Rita Ora is currently serving as a judge on the Australian singing competition series The Voice alongside celebrity judges like Keith Urban. Ora is now far along enough in her career that she rarely gets starstruck when she meets fellow celebrities, but the same cannot be said of the time she met Madonna. Ora recounted her first encounter with Madonna on Tuesday’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and she said it was “very awkward.”

Ora fist met Madonna when she was just starting out in her singing career and was assisting with a campaign for the pop icon’s clothing line. After they chatted for a bit, Madonna apparently had an odd request: The singer wanted them to sit on the floor. Ora said:

“The highlight of my life is obviously Madonna, that’s one of the biggest idols of all time. I had an amazing moment with her. Very awkward but also unbelievable. She really just made me find my light, and by doing that, we had to kneel on the floor. I thought it was ‘Like A Prayer’ in real life that was happening. I had to go breathe in the bathroom before I actually did meet her, I mean this was earlier in my career. I was doing a campaign for her clothing line and so then she came to meet me and I loved it, I couldn’t breathe. She was like, ‘This is not my light. Let’s get down.’”

Elsewhere in their conversation, Ora talked about her recent EP Bang and how it was truly a global effort. “I wanted to do a project that felt like there was no pressure that a bunch of my mates could just jump on,” she said. “We did it all virtually, actually, like this. I actually collaborated with a producer Imanbek, who is from Kazakhstan and doesn’t speak a word of English. I know this might sound corny, but really, music has no language because it was proved with this EP. We really just connected through music and I wanted it to feel like a global phenomenon.”

Watch Ora’s interview on The Tonight Show above.

Bang is out now via Atlantic. Get it here.

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

Sacramento rapper OMB Peezy has been arrested in connection with the shooting on an Atlanta music video set two weeks ago, according to XXL. The well-established hip-hop magazine confirmed via Fulton County court records that Paris LeDade — better known as OMB Peezy — was arrested Monday, March 1 for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony for an incident on February 21, the day of the shooting. Peezy’s bond is set at $40,000 — $30,000 for the assault and the rest for possession of a firearm.

Born in Mobile, Alabama, Peezy relocated to California before high school and has since shuttled back and forth between the two cities, maintaining roots to both the Bay Area post-hyphy and Southern trap sounds. He most recently released the mixtape In The Meantime while working on his next album, the follow-up to 2019’s Preacher To The Streets, dropping the “Dope Boys” video with Rylo Rodriguez in early February. Unfortunately, it seems art imitated life in this situation, leading to the arrest and fans’ concern that 42 Dugg and Roddy Ricch, the two rappers whose video set the shooting occurred, were injured or worse.

However, Roddy and Dugg very quickly allayed those concerns, confirming that they were not among the three people injured in the shooting. No motive for the shooting has been reported as yet.

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

Perfume Genius called on a roster of collaborators to rework his album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately for an upcoming collection called Immediately Remixes. He announced the album in January and today, he has shared an A.G. Cook remix of “Describe.” The original tune goes in grungy, slowcore-inspired direction, while Cook’s rework veers the proceedings into more electronic, trip-hop territory, which has the effect of making Mike Hadreas’ vocals sound closer in style to those of Thom Yorke.

Hadreas previously said of the original version of the song, “Originally, it was very plain — sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn’t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50 percent of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they’ve been and who they’d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.”

Listen to the Cook remix of “Describe” above.

Immediately Remixes is out 6/12 via Matador. Pre-order it here.

When 17-year-old singer Tate McRae was growing up, she wanted to be a dancer. McRae pursued her dreams as a contestant on So You Think You Can Dance, where she finished in third place. But she has since uncovered her love for music, which kicked off with her 2020 debut EP All The Things I Never Said. Now, McRae is gearing up for another project, which she has previewed with the simmering track “Slower.”

“Slower” offers a lush look at her upcoming EP Too Young To Be Sad and features a rolling beat under McRae’s earnest lyrical delivery. She sings of wanting to move things along in a relationship, but feeling as though the sentiment is not being reciprocated. Speaking about the single in an interview with Nylon, McRae said:

“This one’s so funny because I wrote this when I was 14, and I loved it. But the problem is, when you sit on a song for two years, it becomes really stale and you just hate it. That’s what kind of happened with this song. So my team pulled it out again and were like, ‘We should listen to this one again.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no. I don’t like it, and I sound super squeaky on it. I sound like I’m 14.’ We reproduced the whole thing. I rewrote a few lyrics and I recorded it in my 17-year-old voice, and it sounded completely different.”

Listen to “Slower” above and find McRae’s Too Young To Be Sad EP’s tracklist below.

1. “Bad Ones”
2. “Rubberband”
3. “Slower”
4. “R U Ok”
5. “You Broke Me First”
6. “I Wish I Loved You In The 90s”

Too Young To Be Sad is out 3/26 via RCA. Pre-order it here.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo became a national political figure in the early months of the pandemic, with daily press briefings about the state’s disastrous coronavirus situation providing people at least some sense of order amid the chaos and indifference the Trump administration showed on the federal level.

That luster in recent days, however, has worn off considerably as Cuomo is now embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal that has seen three women come forward with allegations of inappropriate behavior and contact. The scandal is troubling to say the least, and has exposed the more brutish behavior he’s shown in office over the last decade.

That side of Cuomo was addressed by Trevor Noah on The Daily Show on Tuesday night, where the host described Cuomo as a “shaved Geico caveman” and lamented his inappropriate behavior.

“Sweet Jesus, man, what are you doing? I mean, on the one hand, asking a woman for consent before you kiss them is what you’re supposed to do,” Noah, who last year called himself a “Cuomosexual,” said. “But the other part of consent is waiting for them to answer. You don’t just grab them by the face like a bear yanking on a beehive.”

Noah then acted like a bear grabbing said beehive before addressing something Cuomo has said in his defense: he didn’t know he was making people uncomfortable with inappropriate touching.

“Look at this photo?” Noah asked. “How can you not tell that you’re making this person uncomfortable?” Noah then said if you’re doing something that turns them into the gritted teeth emoji, “you have done something wrong.”

Cuomo, for his part, issued an apology on Wednesday during a coronavirus briefing.

Right now, though, it’s unclear what the scope of the harassment claims are and whether that apology will be enough to save his now-troubled political career less than a year after he became the voice of reason for a number of stressed-out New Yorkers.

There won’t be a 2021 NBA Rising Stars Game, as All-Star Weekend has been condensed down to just the game itself and the normal Saturday night competitions taking place before the All-Star Game and during halftime. The contestants for those competitions were announced officially on Tuesday, and even though there isn’t a Rising Stars Game, the league announced rosters for the annual rookie-sophomore extravaganza anyways on Wednesday.

The U.S. vs. World format remains and, as such, there’s plenty of hand-wringing over snubs, particularly given how thin it can get on the bottom of the World roster each year. Still, the expected names are on the list, headlined by a loaded U.S. squad that features actual All-Star Zion Williamson, along with Ja Morant, and LaMelo Ball, among many other top names. The World roster is headlined by RJ Barrett, enjoying a breakout sophomore campaign in New York, as well as Lu Dort and Brandon Clarke, who likewise are enjoying strong second seasons in the NBA.

The full rosters for both squads can be found below.

US

LaMelo Ball
Anthony Edwards
Tyrese Haliburton
Tyler Herro
De’Andre Hunter
Keldon Johnson
Ja Morant
Michael Porter Jr.
Zion Williamson
James Wiseman

WORLD

Precious Achiuwa
Nickeil Alexander-Walker
Deni Avdija
RJ Barrett
Facundo Campazzo
Brandon Clarke
Luguentz Dort
Rui Hachimura
Theo Maledon
Mychal Mulder

Last year, Nick Jonas pointed out that while Drake has the “Drake curse,” which apparently causes teams and athletes that associate with him to do poorly, Jonas has an opposite sort of thing going on. He noticed what he dubbed the “Jonas blessing,” a trend of athletes — Patrick Mahomes, Cody Bellinger, and Lewis Hamilton — going on to have great success after having some sort of involvement with him and the Jonas Brothers.

He spoke about that on The Tonight Show yesterday, joking with Jimmy Fallon that he’s thinking about charging athletes to get blessed:

“It’s quite simple, you know? In reality, what happened is when the brothers back together — we went on tour, the Happiness Begins tour, back in 2019 — we had a number of athletes, high-performing athletes, come out to some shows. So the first was Cody Bellinger, who then went on to win the World Series with the Dodgers, right? We had Patrick Mahomes, who in the 2020 Super Bowl won the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs. He came to a show in KC. And then Lewis Hamilton, who surpassed the all-time record, he went on to, after he came to a show, to do that. So basically, we established, and I think it was really me more than the brothers that… I saw the trend, I was saying, ‘We’re going to have to start charging these athletes.’ If they want the ‘Jonas blessing,’ to come to a show and then go on to win a championship, they’re going to have to pay up, you know?”

He then added, “Little-known fact, too, Jimmy, is that Tom Brady, we actually did a private COVID-safe show for Tom Brady before the Super Bowl and that’s why [he won].”

Watch the interview above.