Month: May 2021

John Prine passed away in April 2020, and the legendary musician left behind a whole bunch of artists who he influenced. This fall, some of them are set to come together to honor Prine for “You Got Gold: Celebrating The Life & Songs Of John Prine,” a week-long series of tribute events that will take place at various venues across Nashville.

The series will feature tribute concerts at venues like the Ryman Auditorium (on October 6 and 7), CMA Theater at The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (October 8), and Basement East (October 9). The week will culminate on October 10, which would have been Prine’s birthday. The roster of artists set to participate in the festivities has yet to be revealed.

Proceeds from the week will benefit The Hello In There Foundation a new foundation established by Prine’s family “to honor John’s memory, the work of the foundation will be inspired and guided by John’s simple song title, ‘Hello In There,’ and aims to identify and collaborate with individuals and communities where people of all ages are marginalized, discriminated against or, for any reason, are otherwise forgotten.”

More information about “You Got Gold,” including a more detailed list of festivities, can be found on the event website.

Pusha T is currently hard at work on the follow up to his 2018 LP Daytona. The rapper has confidently said the 12-track effort is his bid for the “best album that drops in 2021.” But the upcoming album isn’t the only project Pusha wants to be working on. In fact, he’s apparently always dreamed of becoming a children’s book author.

Pusha first shared the news in response to a fan’s tweet about playing his Clipse song “Keys Open Doors” for their two-year-old kid. The rapper replied with, “Thanx and I’ve been trying to write a children’s book for years…they won’t publish me…”

One fan offered a theory as to why Pusha has a hard time securing a book contract. “It’s because you’ve used too many regular items as drug references,” they wrote.

Pusha had a simple response, writing: “A simple metaphor can be the death of you…”

If Pusha T did in fact end up securing a book contract, he wouldn’t be the first rapper to write a children’s book. Earlier this year, Lil Nas X unveiled his illustrated ABC picture book C Is For Country. It featured lines like “S is for swag. Just ’cause I’m going to bed doesn’t mean I can’t look good!” and “A is for Adventure. Every day is a brand new start!” In less than a month, the book landed on the New York Times’ best-sellers list. So if Pusha really is committed to children’s literature, he already has some stiff competition.

Nearly a year after it was first revealed last June, we’re finally getting some brand new Horizon Forbidden West information — and a lot of it too. On Thursday, May 27, Sony is hosting their next ‘State of Play’ livestream, and the focus is solely on the sequel to the 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, a game we still think you should clear you calendar for. According to game director Mathijs de Jonge, the presentation will last around 20 minutes, and feature “14 minutes of brand new in-game action featuring our heroic protagonist Aloy, all captured directly on PlayStation 5.”

For those unfamiliar with the series, the PlayStation exclusive titles follow a young woman named Aloy as she ventures across a far-future America, battling mechanical dinosaurs and uncovering the truth behind both her past and the world’s post-apocalyptic state. The first game in the series, Horizon Zero Dawn, was met with nearly universal acclaim upon release, with critics citing it’s lush open-world, fluid action, and the performance of voice actress Ashly Burch (who you might recognize as Rachel on Apple TV’s Mythic Quest) as major triumphs. Horizon Forbidden West, which is currently set to release sometime this year, directly continues Aloy’s story as she travels west to a new and dangerous frontier.

For those interested in watching, you can catch the next State of Play over on PlayStation’s Twitch and YouTube channels. The stream will being at 2 PM PT on May 27, and will run approximately 20 minutes. However, if you feel like pulling up a bit early, Guerrilla Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment have stated they will be kicking off the show with a “uniquely crafted countdown” starting at 9 AM PT.

Alright, listen. These hats, the new line of “Local Market” hats that will be released for Major League Baseball teams, you gotta see them, folks. They are not particularly good. The lede ends here, let’s dive in.

What are we doing here?

What are we DOING HERE?

COME ON.

Here is the thing with Major League Baseball hats: The ones that are usually the best are the ones that do not try to do too terrible much — think of the classic Yankees hat, or the blue and red Cubs hat, or the Red Sox hat that are just a base color and a big letter B. Most times that we get these kinds of unique releases, it ends up taking something good and adding way too much to it, either by doing some weird pattern design (an example!) or by adding so much unnecessary stuff that it takes away from what makes the hats great.

These are just a lot — I, a Yankee fan, do not need to own a hat that has a slice of pizza and a boombox on it — and if there is a silver lining, it’s that there appears to be a sense of solidarity in how uniformly strange all of these are. Well, that, and this seems like a pretty fun way to learn about area codes for teams in other markets.

When the owners of the Lucky Stop convenience store in Southwick, Massachusetts discovered a $1 million winning lottery ticket in a stack of discarded tickets, they could have kept it for themselves or given it to a friend or family member. Instead, they returned it to the woman who had bought it and accidentally tossed it aside—an act of integrity and honesty that both heartwarming and inspiring.

Lea Fiega bought a $30 Diamond Millions scratch-off ticket at the end of March, but she didn’t scratch the ticket fully. If she had, she would have noticed two matching numbers that indicated she had won $1 million.

“I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn’t look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away,” she told the Associated Press according to WACH News.

The ticket sat in a wastebasket of discarded tickets for 10 days, until the store owners looked through them before permanently throwing them away.

“One evening, I was going through the tickets from the trash and found out that she didn’t scratch the number,” Abhi Shah, the son of the store owners told WWLP-TV. “I scratched the number and it was $1 million underneath the ticket.”

“I was a millionaire for a night,” Shah told CBS News. He began thinking of all the things he could do with the money.

But the family consulted together the next morning, even calling Shah’s grandparents in India for their input. Fiega was a regular customer at the store, and the Shahs knew that the ticket had belonged to her. They also knew that she obviously hadn’t meant to throw away a million dollars.

Shah told CBS News that his grandmother said, ‘Let’s not keep the ticket. It’s not right. Just give it back to them. If it’s in your luck, you will get it anyhow.'”

So that’s what they did. And boy was Fiega surprised when Abhi Shah showed up at her workplace.

“He came to my office and said ‘my mom and dad would like to see you,'” Fiega told WACH News. “I said ‘I’m working,’ and he said ‘no you have to come over.’ So I went over there and that’s when they told me. I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them.”

Million-dollar lottery ticket returned to winner who mistakenly discarded it

www.youtube.com

Fiega had already felt incredibly lucky after she nearly died earlier this year after contracting COVID-19. Getting the news from her local convenience store that she had accidentally thrown away a million dollars and that the owners were returning it to her was nearly unbelievable.

“I mean, who does that? They’re great people. I am beyond blessed,” she said.

Fiega told WACH that she gave the family part of her winnings and that she’s saving the rest for retirement. The store owners also receive $10,000 from the state lottery commission for selling the winning ticket.

Other regular customers told CBS News that they were not surprised by the Shahs’ kindness and selflessness in returning the winning ticket.

“They’re just purely good people,” one customer said. “You can tell just by talking to them.”

Thank you, Shah family, for serving as an example of doing the right thing even when you don’t have to, and for giving us all a boost of faith in humanity.

Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, commonly known as AOC, has bravely revealed she is focusing on her mental health after living through the trauma of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.

AOC’s admission that she is “doing therapy” to help her process the incident is powerful because it shows that even one of the country’s most prominent leaders needs to take time for their mental health.

We live in a world where people still face stigmatization for going to therapy, so for a person who is often the target of malicious attacks, to let her guard down is courageous. It’s also a great example for people everywhere. If one of the fiercest members of Congress needs time for her mental health, it has nothing to do with weakness.

When hundreds of pro-Trump insurgents stormed the Capitol building, Ocasio-Cortez thought her life was in danger. “Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated,” she said after the event.

Several of the insurgents had guns, pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and zip ties to take hostages. Video from the attack shows attackers chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

Garrett Miller, an insurgent from Richardson, Texas, made death threats during the attack on the Capitol tweeting, “Assassinate AOC.”

Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t in the Capitol building during the attack, but she sheltered in her office at the nearby Cannon House Office Building. At one point she hid in the bathroom and was startled when a police officer pounded on her office door asking, “Where is she? Where is she?”

AOC thought the man pounding on the door was an insurgent who came to hurt her.

“And I just thought to myself, ‘They got inside’ … I mean, I thought I was going to die,” Ocasio-Cortez said, according to People.

The 31-year-old Congresswoman told the LatinoUSA podcast that the January 6 insurrection was an incredibly scary moment for her and her coworkers. “You have this transition period of escalating violence, which really culminated on the 6th, for which was an extraordinarily traumatizing event that’s not really being discussed,” she said.

As a Congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez is constantly reacting to the never-ending business of government, but after receiving some heartfelt advice, decided to take a break and pay attention to her mental health after five years of incredible stress.

“Oh yeah, I’m doing therapy but also I’ve just slowed down,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “I think the Trump administration had a lot of us, especially Latino communities, in a very reactive mode.”

“After the 6th, I took some time and it was really [Rep.] Ayanna Pressley when I explained to her what happened to me, like the day of, because I ran to her office,” AOC explained. “And she was like, ‘You need to recognize trauma. And this is something that you went through, but we’re all going through. And it’s really important to pause after that, because that’s how you process it.'”

While Chris Hemsworth‘s Instagram has more recently been filled with super jacked photos as he films Thor: Love and Thunder, on Tuesday, the actor switched things up with a little fatherly disappointment. In what starts as an adorable photo of Hemsworth walking with his son while taking a break from filming the fourth Thor film, the insanely ripped dad revealed that their father-son chat didn’t go exactly as planned.

With the boy wearing a red cape just like the God of Thunder, Hemsworth asked him the “age old question” of what he wants to be when he grows up. Unfortunately, the Thor star didn’t get the answer he was looking for when the boy responded, “Superman,” which prompted Hemsworth to note that he’s lucky he has two other kids.

All of this is very cute and fun, sure, but if you happened to glance at his legs and notice that something seems a bit… off, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. The actor’s brother, Luke Hemsworth, jumped into his younger sibling’s replies and asked what we’re all thinking: “Bro?! You’ve been skipping leg days again?!”

Of course, it could just be a weird camera angle, and we’re not about to question the Thunder God’s workout routine. Not when he’s packing those guns.

(Via Chris Hemsworth on Instagram)

The CW is turning Cartoon Network’s lovable The Powerpuff Girls into a live-action series starring Chloe Bennet as Blossom, Dove Cameron as Bubbles, and Yana Perrault as Buttercup. Also, Turk from Scrubs plays their father, Professor Utonium, which is excellent casting. But the show was curiously left out the network’s fall 2021 schedule. That’s because the Powerpuff pilot is being overhauled and reworked.

“The reason we do pilots is sometimes things miss. This was just a miss,” The CW chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz said during upfront press call on Tuesday. “We believe in the cast completely, We believe in Diablo [Cody] and Heather [Regnier]… In this case, the pilot didn’t work.” He continued, “But because we see there’s enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot. So that’s why we didn’t want to go forward with what we had. Tonally, it might’ve felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might’ve felt. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And so in this case, we felt, let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.”

Pedowitz’s comments after the pilot script supposedly leaked. Deadline reports:

A portion of the Powerpuff script supposedly leaked on Twitter and gained some negative attention. The leaked snippets teased the disillusioned superheroes’ sex lives, “edgy” attitudes, and more. Pedowitz did not confirm the leak.

I’m not sure what the Powerpuff Girls being “rooted in reality” means. But if it involves Bubbles having a monologue about being “a weirdo,” the CW made the right call.

(Via Deadline)

J. Cole’s professional basketball career has been, for lack of a better term, pretty modest. As a player for Patriots Basketball Club in the inaugural season of the Basketball Africa League, Cole has scored five points in three games. He’s looked like, well, a person playing professional basketball for the first time, although he does certainly have some skill on the court.

The biggest thing Cole’s done is bring attention to the league, although for one player, that trade-off is not worth it. Terrell Stoglin, a guard for AS Salé who averages 31 points per game, certainly sees the benefit of “a lot of attention, and, I guess, money” coming in because of Cole, but generally thinks he is disrespecting the game.

Via ESPN:

“I think there’s a negative and a positive [to J. Cole’s presence],” Stoglin told ESPN. “The negative part of it is: I think he took someone’s job that deserves it.

“I live in a basketball world. I don’t live in a fan world. I know a lot of guys that had their careers stopped by COVID and they’re still home working out and training for an opportunity like this.

“For a guy who has so much money and has another career to just come here and average, like, one point a game and still get glorified is very disrespectful to the game. It’s disrespectful to the ones who sacrificed their whole lives for this.”

Patriots chief operating officer Haydee Ndayishimiye unsurprisingly disagrees with this assessment — “We made a basketball decision which can be justified by our performance so far,” she said — but it is fair to point out that someone who has put their life towards playing ball professionally lost out on an opportunity to someone who recently started pursuing a basketball career. Still, the only rule is it has to work, and the brain trust with Patriots seem to be happy with Cole’s performance on the floor.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Plan B, a teen sex comedy coming to Hulu this week, is how many different movies it manages to homage (if not directly rip off) at the same time. On one level, it’s like Can’t Hardly Wait, if it focused exclusively on Lauren Ambrose’s Denise Fleming, trying to find the morning after pill following her unexpected hook up with Seth Green’s tragic poseur Kenny Fisher. On another, it’s Booksmart if the leads weren’t caucasian, it’s Harold And Kumar except with girls, and it’s one of those sad slogs about two girls trying to get an abortion that hits the arthouse every few years, except a comedy.

Plan B, directed by Parks & Rec actress Natalie Morales in her first feature (with a script by Joshua Levy and Prathiksha Srinivasan) is maybe so busy riffing, ‘shipping, flipping, and gender-swapping other stories that it neglects to find its own. It ends up being pleasant enough and occasionally pretty funny but not quite a romp.

Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles play Sunny and Lupe, horny Indian-American nerd and goth Mexican-American best friends in South Dakota. They both have conservative parents — Lupe, a single dad played by Jacob Vargas who makes her wipe off her black lipstick before she goes to school, and Sunny a single mom who barges in on Sunny while Sunny is double flicking herself to the sight of an anatomical penis drawing in a health textbook (kids do still this? can’t they watch amputee porn on their smart fridges now?). The drawing isn’t the only exposed penis in Plan B, whose unabashed raunch is by far its best quality. It’s also the only part of Plan B that doesn’t feel overly mannered.

Sunny has a crush on a lank-haired cardigan enthusiast named Hunter, played by Michael Provost, while Lupe pines for a musician who lives in a different town (you wouldn’t know them, they go to a different school). A disastrous sexual experience in a bathroom compounded by their town’s lack of a Planned Parenthood sends Sunny and Lupe on a wild-pill chase/journey of self-discovery that will test their friendship, bring old secrets to light, expose our nation’s unconscionable lack of healthcare for teen girls, and blah blah blah.

If it sounds like a slick pitch, it is. Plan B has a tendency to feel more like a series of great pitches than a movie in its own right. It obviously draws heavily from the Harold And Kumar playbook (Harold And Kumar screenwriters Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz are even among Plan B‘s team of producers), which isn’t a terrible thing, but that movie, despite its occasional earnest elements about a Korean and Indian guy just trying to get along in a Caucasian world, was about two dopey stoners trying to get a burger. For all Plan B‘s aspirations of progressivism, we still seem to demand that our teen girl protagonists be not just goofy and dopey and stoned, but also clever and plucky and open-minded, committed to dismantling the patriarchy. Which tends to induce applause more than it does laughter. Plan B is occasionally really funny (Verma and Moroles have solid chemistry) and occasionally has a nice message, but it almost never does both at the same time (with creaky transitions between the two).

Some local color as more than just a backdrop probably would’ve gone a long way. Plan B is more specific in its pitch than in its execution. It’s set in South Dakota but you never really get a sense of South Dakota as more than “some conservative place,” or that the filmmakers know more about it than where it exists on a map.

Known-ish comedic actors show up for occasional kooky cameos, like Jay Chandrasekhar from Super Troopers as the Indian pharmacist and Edi Patterson, who’s so brilliant in The Righteous Gemstones, as the truck stop cashier. There’s an extended bit where one of the characters does bad drugs. Basically, all the scenes you could close your eyes and imagine being in a teen sex comedy are also in this one.

Still, a lot of Plan B‘s jokes about dicks, buttholes, bodily fluids, and toilets are pretty decent, including the one that ends the movie. It’s always nice to see a comedy nail its closer. What Plan B needed in order to truly sing was to get personal. Instead, it mostly offers a facsimile of it.

‘Plan B’ premieres May 28th on Hulu. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.