Month: June 2021

If you think Fox News is unhinged now, well, it wouldn’t have gotten there without Glenn Beck. In the late aughts and early teens, the talk radio stooge-turned-TV commentator had the most deranged show on the network. Where Bill O’Reilly would sit at a desk and rattle off his offensive theories, Beck would stand in front of a chalkboard, patiently laying out convoluted nonsense conspiracy theories. At the peak of his powers, he got compared to Network’s Harold Beale and inspired Jon Stewart to dedicate Daily Show episodes to epic impersonations. But even Beck was too bonkers for Fox News. The two parted ways after only two years. Beck lost his grip on the culture and, eventually, he even started apologizing for the way he’d once acted.

Well, no more. It’s 2021, the most powerful figure in the Republican party is a failed blogger who lives alone in resorts, and it’s time for Beck, who after Fox News crawled back to his old home at TheBlaze, to come back, baby. And so he did, appearing Wednesday night with Tucker Carlson (obviously) to repeat one of the things that got his show thrown in the can a decade back.

That thing is this: Starting in 2009, Beck called then-president Barack Obama a racist. “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” he said on a different Fox News show. “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

But the rightwing mouthpiece who years later took that patently absurd charge back is now…putting it back in, or however one phrases it. After Carlson told Beck he thought that was a “deep insight,” Beck couldn’t help but agree that he was right about himself from ten years ago.

“I take my apology back! I was exactly right!” Beck told Tucker. “And I even stated it right. You are a racist if you believe in critical race theory, if you think that what Dr. Martin Luther King said, that envisions a country that is seeing people for the content of their character, not their color, if you think that’s wrong, then yes, you are a racist.”

It’s an exciting time for disgraced former Fox News employees, what with Bill O’Reilly joining the aforementioned Donald Trump on a nationwide (well, three-state) tour later this year to talk about the one-term presidency that ended with a failed but fatal insurrection. And if you want to see proof of how the network has fallen deeper into the ether, watch Beck return to repeat a ridiculous statement that, in a very different time, helped end his employment.

You can watch the full segment in the video above, if you’d like.

(Via Mediaite)

Taylor Swift has been having a great 2021. Not only did her second 2020 album, Evermore just break an all-time vinyl sales record, but those numbers also boosted it back up to No. 1 on the Billboard chart, which officially made Tay the artist with the third-most weeks at No. 1 in history. Not too shabby for the first half of the year! Tonight she picked up yet another award, this one a bit more family-centric, when the new music video she made for “The Best Day” (that would be Taylor’s Version) for her re-recording of Fearless took home the CMT trophy for Best Family Feature.

Taylor celebrated the news on Twitter with an all-caps appreciation for her mom, Andrea. “I LOVE YOU MOM,” she wrote, while sharing a short video clip of the song winning the award. Though Taylor and her mom have always been close, their relationship was on display for fans in a new way when Andrea was battling cancer. In a song off her album <em<>Lover from 2019 she collaborated with Dixie Chicks for a heartfelt reflection on what it feels like to love someone who’s sick, “Soon You’ll Get Better.” She’s since said she thinks it’s the only song she won’t ever be able to perform live. But tonight was a much happier chapter in their relationship. Congrats to both Taylor and Andrea!

Kasama Small Batch Rum is a rum that spans the globe. The juice is made in the Philippines. It’s then crafted and bottled in Poland. Finally, it’s sent to the U.S. for all of us to enjoy.

The rum comes from Alexandra Dorda. Dorda’s father launched iconic Polish vodka brands Belevedere and Chopin (for which Alexandra Dorda is the Brand Manager), so Dorda has the spirits-making chops in her DNA. However, when Dorda decided to get into the family business she looked not to her father but to her mother, who migrated to Poland from the Philippines. Dorda went to the Philippines — which has a rich rum history — and found a rum that highlights her Filippino ancestry, then sent that to Poland to highlight her Polish heritage.

It’s an interesting story that piqued our interest, so we gave it taste. Here’s what we thought!

Kasama Small Batch Rum

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $26

The Rum:

Kasama is a truly international spirit. The rum is made from noble cane juice. The distilled rum is then aged in ex-bourbon barrels for seven years under the warm, tropical sun in the Philippines. Finally, the juice is transported to Poland where it’s proofed and bottled.

Tasting Notes:

Wow. This noses exactly like a piña colada. There’s rich and creamy coconut mixed with fresh pineapple, a touch of sugar cane, soft vanilla, and a hint of sweet wood. The palate is like taking a sip of fresh pineapple juice with a very slight nod towards clove. The overall texture is silky smooth with the faintest touch of warmth. It’s really that piña colada with creamy coconut and the freshest, brightest pineapple juice that you’re left with.

The Bottle:

The bottle is a classic vodka-style bottle (perhaps giving a nod to Dorda’s Polish vodka experience). The raised palm leaves and postage stamp label give the bottle a true adventure vibe.

Bottom Line:

This was a breath of fresh air. It’s tropical, fruity sweet, and bright. It works really well as a simple sipper on the rocks or, naturally, mixed into a piña colada!

Rating:

85/100 — this is a really good rum that has no rough edges and shines at this price point. It gets a slightly lower grade by being fairly one-note and not as complex as drams of rum full of spices, woods, and burnt sugars.

As a Drizly affiliate, Uproxx may receive a commission pursuant to certain items on this list.

Moneybagg Yo is having the best year of his career so far. The Memphis native’s fourth album, A Gangsta’s Pain, sat atop the Billboard album charts for a pair of non-consecutive weeks, marking the first time he had a project go No. 1. The rapper has been promoting the album with a bunch of music videos, including “Free Promo,” “Hard For The Next,” and “Time Today.” But now he joins Belly in a video for their collaboration, “Zero Love.”

The video sees the pair bring their talents to the middle of a desert to fire off their confident bars. It also presents a group of dancers performing dabke, a traditional middle eastern dance as Belly described in an Instagram post. “Zero Love” is set to appear on Belly’s upcoming album, See You Next Wednesday, which will arrive through XO Records and Roc Nation. The project, which will be Belly’s first full-length release since his 2018 album, Immigrant, has yet to receive an official release date.

As for Moneybagg, the new video arrives after he teamed up with Memphis Grizzlies point guard Ja Morant for “Rookie Of The Player,” a track that appeared in the NBA player’s documentary Promiseland.

You can watch the video for “Zero Love” above.

Charles Barkley and snakes do not get along, and this fact is something that his Inside the NBA colleagues have used to terrorize the Chuckster over the years with rubber snakes and other gags to get him to jump and squirm.

On Wednesday, they took it to a new level, though, as Barkley fired off his latest GUAAAARANTEE, locking up the Nuggets to win Game 2 in Phoenix as Will Barton returned to action. Barkley’s “Guarantee” button has been the source of plenty of comedy over the course of the playoffs, most notably when he was gone and they used it to roast Chuck while Draymond Green was in his seat. Every night they have it set off some new celebration, from balloons to smoke machines, but on Wednesday it brought out a literal circus, including a woman with a giant live python that sent poor Chuck running from the desk.

Shaq caught Chuck and tried his best to make him face his fears by petting the snake, but Barkley wasn’t having any of it even as Shaq and Ernie happily said hello to their new reptilian friend. Kenny almost got taken out in Chuck’s haste to escape as he ran through the plexiglass between the two and almost went through Smith.

Afterwards, Barkley insisted that “snakes aren’t to be played with,” which is an understandable sentiment for one to have, but the clip of sheer terror on Chuck’s face when he saw the snake and tried to take off is surely going to get played over and over.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re just a couple of weeks away from stepping into a new Doja Cat era. The multitalented artist spent the last two years promoting her sophomore album, Hot Pink, which spawned her first chart-topping single, “Say So,” and a number of other highlight tracks, such “Streets,” “Like That,” with Gucci Mane, and “Juicy.” But it’s time to close that chapter as she prepares to release her third album, Planet Her. After a few delays, Doja finally shared the tracklist and release date for the upcoming album.

Planet Her will arrive on June 25 bearing 14 songs, and it will feature guest appearances from Young Thug, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, JID, and SZA. The album is currently led by one single, “Kiss Me More” with SZA, but earlier today, Doja teased another. The song is titled “Need To Know” and in speaking about it on Twitter, Doja wrote, “Need to know isn’t even the next single is just some sh*t before the next more important single comes out for you to enjoy.”

You can view the artwork for Planet Her above and its tracklist below.

1. “Woman”
2. “Naked”
3. “Pay Day” Feat. Young Thug
4. “Get Into It (Yuh)”
5. “Need To Know”
6. “I Don’t Do Drugs” Feat. Ariana Grande
7. “Love To Dream”
8. “You Right” w/ The Weeknd
9. “Been Like This”
10. “Options” Feat. JID
11. “Ain’t Shit”
12. “Imagine”
13. “Alone”
14. “Kiss Me More” Feat. SZA

Planet Her is out 6/25 via RCA Records.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Rudy Gobert has established himself over the past five years as one of the NBA’s most dominant defensive forces, as the Jazz’s center has become the anchor for what is perennially one of the league’s best defensive teams. Gobert is always among the league leaders in blocked shots but his impact goes well beyond just the shots he gets to, as he is such a deterrent that teams will avoid going to the rim against Utah when he’s in the game.

This postseason, Gobert is trying to rewrite the narrative about himself as a playoff performer, putting together a sensational effort in Game 1 of their second round series against the Clippers that he capped off with a game-sealing block of Marcus Morris on a corner three. Defensive Player of the Year is a regular season award, however, so his exploits during the 82- (or in this case, 72-) game season have twice earned him DPOY honors, and on Wednesday, he added a third to his collection as his teammates surprised him with the award at practice.

Gobert spoke with the Inside the NBA crew about the mentality he has to have to win the award three times, as well as what it says about the Jazz as a team on that end.

Gobert won the award fairly comfortably, beating out Ben Simmons and Draymond Green for the award with 84 of the 100 first place votes.

This season, Gobert set new career highs in blocks per game (2.7), block percentage (7.0%), and defensive rebounding percentage (33.5%) to help Utah to the top-seed in the West and the best record overall in the NBA.

The children of well-respected hip-hop legends are opening up a pizzeria in honor of their late fathers. T’yanna Wallace and Tyra Myricks, daughters of, respetively, The Notorious B.I.G. and Jay Master Jay, will open Juicy Pizza in Los Angeles this weekend. The new shop will serve New York-style pizza for residents of the West Coast city starting on Saturday, June 12. The restaurant is of course named after Biggie’s 1994 hit song “Juicy.”

In an Instagram post she shared back in February, Myricks explained, “I realized that L.A. doesn’t have good NY-style pizza, so instead of going on an endless hunt for some, I decided to make some!” Once she decided a New York-style pizzeria was needed in Los Angeles, Myricks reached out to Wallace about the idea, as the two had been friends for quite some time. “The more I thought about how to bring that New York theme to Los Angeles, I felt, ‘Who represents New York more than Biggie Smalls?’” Myricks told Business Insider.

Juicy Pizza sports a menu that includes cheese and pepperoni pizza, oxtail, beef and broccoli, jerk chicken, and chopped cheese egg rolls. The Los Angeles wing of food publication Eater adds that the pizzeria honors New York City with “subway car details and bodega vibes.” It should be noted that when the restaurant opens on June 12 it will be “with dinner hours only.”

We are a decade in to the “player empowerment era” of the NBA, which started with the Miami Heat when Dwyane Wade got LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join him in Miami to form a Big 3 and has continued through various iterations of that same manner of team-building by getting stars to combine forces in Cleveland, Golden State, Los Angeles, and most recently Brooklyn.

The volatility of this era has been fascinating, as stars are more capable of dictating their future, seeking out new situations when they feel it is advantageous to them — a stark change from when the power to make changes at a whim lay almost solely with front offices. The Nets with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden are the current title favorites in the NBA and have laid waste to the Milwaukee Bucks through two games of their second round series even with Harden on the bench with a hamstring injury.

Naturally, comparisons are drawn between Brooklyn and that Miami squad of James, Wade, and Bosh, and the latter of those was asked about that by Trevor Noah during a recent appearance on The Daily Show. Noah initially asked who would win, and Bosh explained that as a competitor he’d never say anything other than his squad, which led to Noah asking what the biggest difference was between that Heat team and this Nets team, to which Bosh heaped praise on not just the Nets but this current generation of NBA stars for doing things no one ever has on the basketball court.

As Bosh notes, the combination of offensive talent and skill in Brooklyn is like nothing he’s ever seen. To have three guys that capable of scoring and creating for themselves playing together is unheard of, and the way they have seamlessly meshed to dominate on that end without the hiccups and growing pains you so often see from superteams is truly a sight to behold. It’s also nice to see a Hall of Famer showing love to the current generation and acknowledging how far the game has come even in 10 years.

So often former players are loathe to heap praise on the current state of the game without adding a qualifier to ensure no one questions what they did, but Bosh happily notes that these guys do things he could never dream of and, as he said, he was able to fill it up himself. That’s good for the game and he recognizes his place in that lineage. Bosh was one of the players who showed what a big could do on the perimeter as a scorer and helped pave the way for someone like Durant to come in and take that to the next level, and he seems to recognize that and marvel at how this current generation has continued to build on and push the boundaries of what it means to be an elite offensive player.

When it was just a recurring SNL sketch, MacGruber — the Will Forte-led parody of ‘80s gadget-heavy action show MacGyver — always ended with its mulletted hero killing himself and everyone around him, only to somehow come back another day. So it was fitting, sort of, that though the big screen version, from 2010, died at the box office, it lived on anyway. First it achieved cult status on home video. Then it was revealed it was being revived as a Peacock show. Now it’s expanded its already stellar cast.

Variety reports that the revival, which already brought back Forte, Kristen Wiig, and Ryan Phillippe — the latter who did some fine straight man work in the film — has roped in three more big names. They are: Sam Elliott, Laurence Fishburne, and Mickey Rourke.

Elliott, the legend who received a belated Oscar nomination a few years back for playing Bradley Cooper’s quite older brother in A Star is Born, will be on hand as MacGruber’s estranged father, to whom he comes to for advice in his latest mission. Fishburne will play a general who’s married to our hero’s ex-wife and occasional team partner, Wiig’s Vicky St. Elmo.

As for Rourke, he’ll play Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth, aka the series’ main baddie. (Val Kilmer, another ‘80s heartthrob, performed the same service in the movie.) The actor hasn’t been seen a whole lot in the last handful of years, despite having earned a well-deserved comeback in 2008 with his Oscar-nominated turn in The Wrestler. This could be another chance for acclaim for someone who has been hailed as one of his generation’s finest actors — and who, pre-Wrestler, was one of the most frequent and welcome character actors in the business.

(Via Variety)