Month: August 2021

Bryson DeChambeau is golf’s greatest villain, as the world’s 7th ranked player is about as polarizing a figure as the sport has ever seen. Once best known for being the young, nerdy science guy on Tour, DeChambeau is now on the leading edge of golf’s obsession with length, bulking up with one goal in mind: hit the golf ball farther than anyone ever.

The results are hard to argue with, as he’s won twice on this extended wraparound season and enters the Tour Championship second in FedEx Cup points. However, he has also ruffled feathers along the way, becoming a posterchild for slow play and his grating personality has led to a well-publicized feud with Brooks Koepka — which Bryson contributed to early on in his bulking phase by taking shots at Brooks’ physique. Brooks has made his stance on Bryson very clear, as he’s not a fan of The Big Golfer, and their beef has led to fans picking sides, with a lopsided amount of support for Koepka.

Over recent months, hecklers have taken to yelling “Brooksy” at DeChambeau, which on the sliding scale of sports heckles is fairly innocuous, even if childish and silly. Bryson at first shrugged it off, even trying to embrace it and say it doesn’t bother him, it has ultimately worn on him. The culmination came on Sunday, when after he lost a six-hole playoff to Patrick Cantlay to the delight of the Baltimore area fans at Caves Valley, he finally snapped back at a fan, telling him to “get the f*ck out” after the latest “Brooksy” taunt (via ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg).

Two days later, the PGA Tour has decided enough is enough and will now kick fans out who yell “Brooksy” at Bryson, which seems like a rather steep punishment for a non-vulgar taunt.

All of this is part of golf’s battle with itself, as they want so badly to expand their fanbase to a younger generation while also maintaining the unwritten rules of etiquette that have long been a part of the game within the country club crowd. It’s hard to imagine this doing much beyond leading fans to finding something new to yell at Bryson — or fans just accepting an ejection from a tournament once they’ve enjoyed enough beverages.

While Drake’s Certified Lover Boy album announcement has dominated the news, one of his previous releases quietly passed a major milestone. Drake’s 2016 track “Hotline Bling” (the best song of the 2010s, we reckon) has apparently become his latest song to achieve the impressive feat of surpassing one billion streams on Spotify.

The achievement was first reported by the Twitter account Chart Data, though the song’s streaming numbers currently sit at 165,000 over the one billion mark.

“Hotline Bling” is far from Drake’s first song to reach one billion streams on the music platform. Drake’s track “One Dance,” which also appears on his 2016 Views album, was actually the first song on Spotify to reach one billion streams, which it did just a few months after the album’s release. Today, “One Dance” has nearly doubled in streams and now boasts well over two billion listens on Spotify.

Drake’s popularity on Spotify truly comes as no surprise as he’s constantly one of the top artists on the platform. Not only was Drake the most-streamed artist of the last decade, but he was also Spotify’s most-streamed artist of 2015, 2016, and 2018. On top of that, Drake became the first Spotify artist to have 50 billion listens on his music this past January, meaning his Certified Lover Boy album is sure to perform well on the streaming service.

After surrounding the classic game show in controversy by helping to choose himself as new host then being forced to step down as his past history of troubling remarks came back to haunt him, Mike Richards has been fired as the executive producer of Jeopardy!, and judging by social media reactions, he won’t be missed.

In a barrage of tweets that range from “What took you so long?” to roasting Richards for causing all of this by not staying in his lanes, Jeopardy! fans seem to be downright jubilant that he’s been fired while hoping that Sony Pictures Television can restore the show’s reputation, which has been tarnished.

In a statement from Suzanne Prete, executive vice president, business and strategy, for Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune (which Richards was also fired from), the decision was made after it became clear that his continued presence was basically making things worse. “We had hoped that when Mike stepped down from the host position at Jeopardy! it would have minimized the disruption and internal difficulties we have all experienced these last few weeks,” Prete wrote. “That clearly has not happened.”

Interestingly, Richards’ firing arrives after former Jeopardy! champs began speaking publicly about the damage that the host selection process has done to the show. Eleven-time champ Arthur Chu penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that encouraged Sony Pictures Television to honor Alek Trebek’s legacy by taking the focus away from the host and to where Trebek always felt it belong: the contestants.

This article originally appeared on 09.23.17

Proving that science and religion can, in fact, overlap, University of British Columbia researcher Evan Thompson has confirmed the Buddhist teaching of the not-self, or “anatta,” is more than just a theory.

“Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness,” he tells Quartz. “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”

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This reality that nothing stays the same should be liberating, because if people believe it, they’ll no longer define themselves by their thoughts or be limited by a fixed idea of who they are. Their possibilities will be endless.

Buddhist Monks have known for thousands of years what science is just now learning: the mind can be changed by training it. Neuroplasticity, as it’s called, endows people with the ability to grow and evolve, triumphing over bad habits and becoming more like the individuals they want to be.

Still, exactly how consciousness relates to the brain eludes both Buddhism and neuroscience. Buddhists suppose there’s an iteration of consciousness that doesn’t require a physical body; neuroscientists disagree.

“In neuroscience, you’ll often come across people who say the self is an illusion created by the brain,” Thompson says. “My view is that the brain and the body work together in the context of our physical environment to create a sense of self. And it’s misguided to say that just because it’s a construction, it’s an illusion.”

This article originally appeared on 09.23.17

Are you the type of person who is always waiting on someone in the shower, or are you the one holding everyone up with your epic shower songs? Either way, Elisabeth Buecher has the perfect shower curtain for you. The London-based artist created an inflatable shower curtain that fills soft spikes with air if the shower is on too long. After four minutes of running water, a sensor on the tap triggers an inflator for the spikes, and the bather is immediately reminded that it’s time to get out.

Buecher created the installation to raise awareness about water conservation.

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“They aim at provoking a debate around water issues and making people more aware of their consumption,” the artist said on her website.

Check out the steps from peaceful showering to an alarming wake-up call below.

Image via elisabethbuecher.com

Image via elisabethbuecher.com

Image via elisabethbuecher.com

Image via elisabethbuecher.com

This article originally appeared on 10.27.17

.The human body is an amazing organism, to say the least. To watch an athlete dunk a basketball or a ballerina turn a pirouette is to witness an extraordinary machine at work. But the human body is also a biological junkyard of useless ideas it has yet to ditch as we evolve.

If humans have a creator, it has a sense of humor, because why else would it clutter the human body with organs that have no use? Why is the occasional baby born with a tail? These useless body parts are known as vestigial organs.

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Proof of evolution that you can find on your body

www.youtube.com

The video above goes over just a few of the vestigial organs we can locate on our bodies if we know where to look. Ten to 15 percent of people can see a tendon in their wrists that connects to the palmaris longus muscle. Although it serves no purpose for humans, it’s essential for primates that live in the treetops and swing from limb to limb.

Humans also have three muscles around their ears that allow some people to make them wiggle. When fully formed in other mammals, the muscles work to rotate the ears in order to pinpoint the source of sounds.

Although these body parts are worthless in a practical sense, they serve as a reminder of our vast evolutionary history and reveal our deep connections to other beings on the planet. That knowledge is far from useless.

This article originally appeared on 09.23.17

Facebook user Savannah Root from Missouri stared at the photo above for hours before she finally figured out what it was. Everyone that sees it either gets it right away or sits there stumped. The picture is so mystifying that after one week, it’s been shared over 33,000 times.

via Facebook

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For the solution, scroll down past the comments to reveal the hidden picture.

via Facebook

via Facebook

via Facebook

via Facebook

via Facebook

It’s a cowboy with half of his face obscured by a shadow. Facebook user Cristian-Dumitru Popescu created a cool graphic that explains it.

via Facebook

This article originally appeared on 09.23.17.

History is full of great stories about bitter battles between loyal opposition. In basketball, there was Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. In the ’80s, harsh political battles were fought between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. But all of these rivals respected their opposition as competitors in their respective fields. Now, a year-long battle between a cleaning crew and a street artist can be added to history’s legendary battles between loyal opposition.

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Mobstr is a London-based street artist famous for the sarcastic typographic-based graffiti he’s written across London’s walls and billboards. His cat-and-mouse relationship with an unidentified city worker began on July 17, 2014, and would continue for an entire year.

“I cycled past this wall on the way to work for years,” Mobstr wrote on his website. ” I noticed that graffiti painted within the red area was ‘buffed’ with red paint. However, graffiti outside of the red area would be removed via pressure washing. This prompted the start of an experiment. Unlike other works, I was very uncertain as to what results it would yield.”

Red graffiti

www.youtube.com

At the moment, Eternals — Chloé Zhao’s highly anticipated post-Avengers: Endgame Marvel movie about the reemergence of an immortal alien race that has been secretly hiding out on Earth for more than 7,000 years — may be best known as the A-lister-filled movie for which Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani got totally ripped. But the Oscar-nominated actor/writer is hoping that its more lasting legacy will be something much more important: That it will be one of the few movies that totally rejects the stereotypes he so often sees in roles for what he calls “brown dudes.”

As IndieWire reports, Nanjiani (who was born in Pakistan) recently spoke with the Los Angeles Times about his upcoming role in Eternals, in which he plays Kingo, a superhero masquerading as a Bollywood star. In addition to discussing his much tweeted-about physical transformation, Nanjiani also spoke about how it was important to him that his character didn’t play into any of the stereotypes he’s run up against throughout his career, saying the following:

“I’ve been in this industry for about a decade and I looked at the usual opportunities that the brown dudes get. We get to be nerdy. I wanted him to be the opposite of that—I wanted him to be cool. With nerdy goes ‘weakling,’ and I wanted him to be the opposite of that and to be strong physically. Or we get to be terrorists, and I wanted him to be the opposite of that. I wanted him to be this character full of joy. In working with Chloé, we were like, let’s take every single thing that I haven’t gotten to do and make a character who’s the exact opposite of the way a lot of American pop culture see people from Pakistan or the Middle East.”

In addition to being an opportunity to turn an all-too-frequent stereotype on its head, Nanjiani also saw this tack as a way for his character to stand out amongst an enormous, and enormously impressive, cast that includes the likes of Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Brian Tyree Henry, and former Game of Thrones buds Richard Madden and Kit Harington.

“I was very lucky that Chloé was really on board with that,” Nanjiani said. “Because when you have like 10 characters, you’re trying to set yourself apart from the other characters and find your own shadings. You’re not going to get a ton of real estate. So you want it to come from a very specific place. I decided going in, I’m going to have fun during this process.”

Eternals is scheduled to be released on November 5, 2021.

(Via IndieWire)

The complexion of the West Coast rap scene is soon to change as Kendrick Lamar prepares his final album under the Top Dawg Entertainment flag, but rumors of the label’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. Just as Kendrick announced his departure, TDE launched the career of its next potential star: The Long Beach born-and-raised Ray Vaughn, who introduced himself in impressive fashion with both a three-song EP titled Peer Pressure and an eyebrow-raising debut freestyle for Power 106’s LA Leakers.

Today, he shares the video for “Tap,” one of his three introductory singles from Peer Pressure, a harrowing look at the travails that made him who he is today. As he details his struggles and stories of survival on the streets of East Side Long Beach, the video straight up assaults viewers with images of just what those roadblocks looked like, from drugs and violence to the stresses of having incarcerated friends and zero mental health care.

Like fellow TDE signee Reason, Ray first attracted attention from the label with his “Freestyle Fridays” series of videos on YouTube, building a following on social media that his newly announced connections are sure to supercharge. He was introduced to the crowd at Isaiah Rashad’s The House Is Burning listening in LA, where he proved he’s got the charisma, presence, and performance to justify his inclusion on the storied TDE roster. He’s working on his debut album, with the release date to be determined.

Stay tuned.

Watch Ray Vaughn’s “Tap” video above.