Month: May 2021

The last we heard from the National Rifle Association they had filed for bankruptcy. It was mid-January, Trump was on the way out, and news that one of the most reviled organizations in the country had gone Chapter 11 inspired much rejoicing. Executive Vice President (and public figurehead) Wayne LaPierre tried to calm his base, saying it was a convoluted attempt to wriggle out of a New York State lawsuit and that somehow they’d wind up stronger than ever. A new ad shows they’re at least keepin’ on keepin’ on, even if they apparently can’t hire a proofreader.

The brief clip finds Republican senator John Kennedy — no relation whatsoever — clutching and admiring a gun. “Folks, I believe that love is the answer,” Kennedy says. “But you ought to own a handgun just in case.” His words are helpfully printed on the screen. One problem, though: “believe” is spelled “belive.”

The NRA has long played a sinister presence in America, always there to sing the praises of guns after each and every one of the country’s many mass shootings, always able to use powerful lobbyists to keep the government from infringing on sales. So when they made a stupid typo, people who feel helpless to stop them made themselves feel better by doing a good old fashioned social media piling on.

Some wondered if it was just a Freudian slip.

And others wondered if they intentionally misspelled one of the few words in their ad, just to appeal to a base that finds correct spelling elitist.

Anyway, it’s just a typo! They’ll survive this and how. And pointing out a misspelled word does absolutely nothing to eliminate their powers. But it still feels good.

Golf is often referred to as the gentlemen’s game, one where respect for your fellow playing competitors and the game itself has been of the utmost importance. As such, golf rivalries are rarely actually spicy. They tend to be media creations, pitting the best players against each other and trying to form some competitive rivalry out of little more than familiarity at the top of leaderboards.

The guys on the PGA Tour are mostly friends, given that they travel from course to course each week and the nature of golf makes it very uncomfortable to have to play a round with someone you genuinely hate. As such, we rarely get actual hatred between playing competitors but we have just that right now among two of the best players in the world: Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau.

Koepka, a four-time major champion, always seems to show up in the biggest tournaments and the Florida State product is an immensely talented and strong player, often overpowering courses and opponents on his way to wins. He also is a very laid back personality off the course, putting in his work but he’s not much of one to talk about the nuances of the golf swing. DeChambeau is the opposite, a man obsessed with the science behind everything from the golf swing to the human body, and his approach to golf drives Koepka crazy. On top of how long Bryson takes to play, accounting for every possible variable and doing full on math calculations on the course before each shot, he’s also become obsessed with distance, bulking up and using guys like Brooks to measure himself and how much further he can hit it.

The two have yet to play together since their rivalry formed, as tournaments seem to want to let that pairing happen naturally on a weekend rather than force it. But for anyone wondering if their rivalry has cooled at all, Brooks legitimately losing his train of thought because Bryson walks behind him during an interview at the PGA Championship this weekend proves they still very much hate each other.

Brooks’ face as he tries to just ignore Bryson, surely talking to his team about something with his swing, is incredibly relatable for anyone who has tried to deal with someone obnoxious at work. That he completely breaks and is unable to continue his interview makes it even better.

My sincerest thanks to whoever leaked this from the Golf Channel compound, because it has made my, and the rest of the golf world’s, week so much better.

When it was announced that The Powerpuff Girls — that candy-colored pint-sized superhero cartoon that lorded over the late ‘90s through the mid-aughts — was getting a gritty, live-action reboot, it seemed too good to be true. Well, that’s because it was, sort of: According to Variety (in a bit teased out by The A.V. Club), the revival has been shelved, not because The CW, who ordered it, no longer wants it. It’s because they want to give it a Mulligan.

The network was announcing some of the shows that are definitely coming in the fall, including Ava DuVernay’s superhero show Naomi and the spin-off All American: Homecoming. But Powerpuff — as the reboot’s been called, and which was to revisit the characters as disillusioned twentysomethings, unhappy that they spent their childhood fighting crime — is not. That’s because it’s getting reworked. No reason was given. Perhaps they decided to make it less gritty. Perhaps they’re keeping it gritty but realized the version they made was just a bit (or a lot) off.

The latter seems more likely, as Variety reports they’re retaining all four leads — Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault, and Donald Faison — as well as “the remainder of the cast and the creative team.” A gritty Powerpuff Girls certainly not a bad idea, and it would be fitting with such renegade superhero shows like Umbrella Academy and The Boys, which effectively do a more comedic version of Watchmen, dissecting comic book tropes and delivering more adult fare. So it sounds like the CW is giving the reboot team a second chance to get it right the first time.

(Via Variety and The A.V. Club)

You don’t hear about current White House press secretary Jen Psaki as much as you did Donald Trump’s four press secretaries, and one of them, Stephanie Grisham, barely held any press conferences. She’s comparatively boring, which is to say she’s professional, courteous to journalists, and — for the most part, though not exclusively — open about what’s going on in the Joe Biden White House. But every now and then she goes viral, and it usually involves her shutting down conservative reporter Peter Doocy.

Doocy is the son of Fox & Friends mainstay Steve Doocy, and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He, too, works for Fox News, although his job entails dragging himself to the White House and pelting Psaki with rightwing talking points. The two established a frenemy relationship pretty much as soon as she took the job, and on Monday he tried to press her on newly awakened concern over how COVID-19 began.

A new Wall Street Journal article reveals that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Urology in China had been hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November, shortly before the virus spread worldwide. Doocy pressed Psaki about Biden pushing for more intel. Psaki responded that they were pushing for an “expert-driven evaluation of the pandemic’s origins that is free from interference or politicization.”

But then Doocy asked the leading question he really wanted to ask, one that tried to make Biden look incompetent. “With 589,920 dead Americans, at what point does President Joe Biden say, ‘We don’t want to wait for the W.H.O., we don’t know what they are doing, this needs to be an American-led effort’?”

When Psaki began to tell him that they first need “access to the underlying data and information to have that investigation,” he interrupted her, asking why he can’t just call Chinese president XI Jinping, she shut him down completely.

“I think you are misunderstanding how this process works,” she told Doocy. “An international investigation led by the world health organization is something we have been pressing for several months in coronation with a range of partners around the world, we need that data and information from the Chinese government. What we can’t do, and what I would caution anyone doing, is leading ahead of an actual international process. We don’t have enough data and information to jump to a conclusion.”

This wasn’t a moment like the ones with Trump secretaries, like Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Kayleigh McEnany, who regularly went viral by being snippy or rude to journalists asking sometimes unflattering questions. Psaki was cool and collected but blunt, attempting to mollify someone trying to instill fear and impatience in an already anxious American people.

And so social media, who usually ignores Psaki, decided to praise her for something she probably does too much, which is deal with people like Peter Doocy.

Others saw through Doocy’s methodology, which here involved citing the number of deaths was a clear attempt to pin hundreds of thousands of American deaths on Biden, not the president who oversaw the vast majority of them and did little to stop it.

The discussion surrounding NBA awards is wide-ranging and dominant, with ink spilled all over the basketball landscape each year. On Monday evening, the first of the league’s major trophies was handed out, and the hardware was distributed in a bit of a different way. Prior to a game between the Miami Heat and the Milwaukee Bucks, TNT’s Inside The NBA crew was interviewing Utah Jazz standouts Jordan Clarkson and Joe Ingles when Ernie Johnson prompted the pair on the history of the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year honor.

In short, it was a sneaky way to announce, via Ingles, that Clarkson is the 2020-21 winner of the award distributed to the league’s top reserve.

Ironically, it was Ingles that finished as the runner-up, with Clarkson receiving 65 of the 100 first-place votes and Ingles grabbing 34 of the remaining 35 votes at the top of the ballot. Ingles leaned into the bit, playfully indicating that Clarkson “stole” the honor from him.

Only Knicks guard Derrick Rose secured a first-place vote outside of Utah. From there, the former NBA MVP finished just ahead of Dallas Mavericks guards Jalen Brunson and Tim Hardaway Jr. for third place overall.

Clarkson enjoyed the most productive season of his NBA career, averaging 18.4 points per game in 68 appearances for the Jazz. Utah’s team success unquestionably bolstered the candidacies of both Clarkson and Ingles, but Clarkson’s advantage in counting statistics (i.e. scoring average) seemingly pushed him over the line against Ingles, who put together a tremendously efficient profile.

For a while, Andrew Yang’s run for mayor of New York City was going better than his run for president of the United States. He’s been slipping in the polls, which he once consistently topped. His instantly notorious appearance with comedian Ziwe isn’t helping — and the full episode hasn’t even dropped yet. The host has been releasing clips from Yang’s forthcoming appearance on her Showtime show, and they’re not flattering. First he massively flubbed a Jay-Z question. Now he’s enraged New Yorkers over his basic take on the subway system.

Ziwe — whose shtick involves pretending to be a too-online internet addict who asks deceptively simple questions that often get her guests in trouble — had a seemingly straightforward query for her latest guest: “What’s your favorite subway station?” To be fair, it’s an odd question, even as a joke. Many who live in NYC probably have no favorite station, the MTA being a necessary evil that’s often the source of long waits, overcrowded spaces, and, in the summer, crippling levels of heat.

And yet Yang’s answer was bizarre. “It’s my stop, so Times Square,” replied Yang, who took heat for leaving the city during the pandemic. “It’s big, it’s cavernous, there are entertainers there. Sure, like, what’s not to like?”

There’s a lot not to like, many said over social media. For one thing, like his Jay-Z question — in which he struggled to come up with a favorite song — it’s clear he was stumped. But his answer, when it belatedly arrived, left a lot to be desired. Times Square is an incredibly basic answer, probably the only station most tourists could name.

And so many called him out for not seeming like a real New Yorker — a problem if he wants to be the city’s mayor.

Some, though, said his answer could have been worse.

Others defended his choice, pointing to the station’s size, its diversity, its artwork.

It also inspired locals to name their own favorite stops.

Although others instead named the worst ones.

Will Yang’s appearance with Ziwe put the final nail in a campaign that’s fallen on hard times? Probably not. It won’t help, though, and after dominating the polls for so long, he’s recently slipped to second place behind former police officer Eric Adams, though he’s still ahead of longtime locals Scott Stringer, Kathryn Garcia, and Dianne Morales. None of them, of course, would list Times Square — overrun by tourists and people dressed up as Marvel heroes and eye-piercing adverts and questionable eateries — as the best of anything the world’s greatest city has to offer.

Oscar nominee and The Umbrella Academy star Elliot Page’s team recently revealed that his career offers were pouring in since coming out as trans in December 2020, but the actor knows how to prioritize rest and relaxation. In doing so, Elliot is letting the world know that he’s ready for summer.

Page posted his first swim-trunks photo since coming out and having top surgery, a process (to remove breast tissue, also known as a subcutaneous mastectomy) that he recently discussed during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Elliot had explained how “freeing” the procedure made him feel and how the surgery “changed my life,” and now he’s Instagrammed some pool time while expressing palpable joy.

“Trans bb’s first swim trunks,” Page captioned the photo, along with the hashtags #transjoy #transisbeautiful.

Page also previously told Winfrey (via People) that he believes top surgery “is life saving and it’s the case for so many people.” He added, “There is such an attack on trans health care right now, when already there is such a lack of access or trans people who don’t even want to go to the doctor.”

(Via Elliot Page on Instagram)

In an effort to help streamers “celebrate themselves and their communities,” Twitch is rolling out over 350 new tags related to “gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more” starting this week. Among them are tags such as transgender, Black, disabled, veteran, and Vtuber, and many others. The change comes after years of marginalized creators asking for the streaming service to add them, thus helping fellow community members find content created by safe and like-minded people, a fact Twitch addressed in the blog post announcing the news.

“When we launched tags in 2018, we did so to boost discovery, to help creators describe their content and to help viewers find streams they’re interested in. We intentionally designed that system for creators to be able to describe what they were streaming, not who they were or what they stood for. We have maintained this distinction since that time, and we were wrong.

When viewers talk about why they love Twitch, they don’t just talk about the content. They talk about creators, what they care about, and the communities they have built. By expanding tags, we are giving creators more ways to be discovered and viewers more ways to find communities that they want to call home.”

According to the blog post, Twitch partnered with several organizations — including GLAAD, The Trevor Project, AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, and more — to make sure they “we were being as inclusive as possible” with the new rollout. In addition, the post included instructions on how to report “bad actors who may use the ability to find streams for malicious purposes,” a fear that kept some from being completely on board with the idea.

Furthermore, Twitch is also removing “ally” from the LGBTQIA+ tag, and is instead creating a new, standalone tag specifically for allies. This is a huge win for many members of the LGBTQIA+ community who have expressed frustration with being unable to find fellow LGBTQIA+ streamers due to a large number of allies using the tag.

It takes away from those streamers who are actually in the LGBTQIA+ community when an “ally” uses the tag for discoverability. If you are currently using it and not in the community please understand the concerns of people in community and know why it can not be helpful sometimes

— iamBrandon (@iamBrandonTV) December 16, 2020

For those seeking to learn more about the initiative, Twitch has announced they will be going live on their channel May 26 at 9:30 AM PST to any additional answer questions.

Norman Reedus has the power to do whatever he wants, and what he wants to do is bring exploitation trash king Russ Meyer to anyone with a cable subscription. According to Deadline, the Walking Dead superstar is teaming up with his longtime network AMC for a TV remake of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, the 1965 cult classic and arguably the crown jewel in the filmography of the man responsible for making nudity — and much else besides — acceptable at the movies during a much. more restrictive time.

It’s not clear whether Reedus would also star, though it’s also not clear who he’d play. Pussycat! follows a trio of amoral go-go dancers — chief among them icon Tura Satana, who shouts most of her hard-boiled dialogue — who run afoul of a crippled, wealthy rancher. Meyer imagined it as a movie “where the women kick the s*it out of the men” for a change, and it’s filled with towering femme fatales having their way with lesser dudes, all while barking lines like, “The point is of no return, and you’ve reached it!”

Reedus, a lifelong Meyer fan, says his redo will “reimagine this story for the modern world.” Considering how the 56-year-old original is very much of its time, that should be interesting, though it’s worth noting, with its strong camp sensibility, that it’s long appealed to queer and feminist audiences. (John Waters is one of its bigger fans.) In the meantime, good luck finding the original, which, like most Meyers, is not streaming anywhere.

(Via Deadline)

If you’re a sneakerhead looking for a place to celebrate all things sneakers, look no further than aftermarket site Grailed’s Sole Supply — a two-week celebration of sneakers and the people who collect them that officially launches today. The campaign promises to dive into Grailed’s vast community of collectors and curators, delivering a series of rare drops from sneakerheads around the world, with special attention given to former Versace VP and Yeezy designer Salehe Bembury. Fans of Bembury’s truly next-level designs will have the chance to score personal items from Bembury’s closet, which includes rare items and one-off pieces from brands like Supreme, Kith, Nike, and Chinatown Market.

“I’m excited to team up with Grailed again to celebrate the diverse tastes and perspective of its passionate community of sneaker enthusiasts,” Bembury said in a press release, “As a designer, I’m always looking for sources of community, which is why it’s always empowering to see like-minded folks on Grailed coming together to create a hub for discovery and connection.”

This Thursday, May 27th, Bembury will deliver a deep dive into his career, offering insights into the inner workings of his creative process and offer fans the chance to shop his wardrobe. But perhaps the most exciting part of Sole Supply will be the chance for sneakerheads to cop a pair of 2020’s Off-White Jordan Vs in any size of your choice.

The pair will be given away via a raffle exclusive to the Grailed community members, but Grailed promises other coveted drops and curated bundles from the site’s biggest sneaker sellers as well, so you may leave these next two weeks with a pair of sneakers you never thought you’d get a chance to own!

Check out Sole Supply at Grailed here, which runs from today to June 7th.