Month: November 2021

Ted Cruz may have had a delightfully “evil” response to a group claiming to uncover the Zodiac Killer’s real identity, but people aren’t thrilled with his reaction to that Cancun-and-Snowflake themed Halloween costume. Sure, he’s being a little bit self-deprecating, but there’s also plenty missing from his response. Let’s back up a bit.

A pair of brilliant Halloween costumes surfaced down in Texas from Rose Clouston, the director of voter protection for Texas Democratic Party, and Steven Becerra, who dreamed up “the scariest thing we could think of.” They did a pitch-perfect rendition with Steven dressing up as Ted doing the Airport Walk of Shame after he fled responsibility for his frozen constituents for a sunny Cancun vacation. Ted left his dog, Snowflake, behind with a security guard, and the dog was spotted (looking all lonesome) in the front glass door of his home. And Ted, apparently, loved the recreation

“Ok, I laughed out loud at this one,” Ted merrily tweeted. “Snowflake had a wonderful Halloween, and he was thrilled to be remembered in a costume!”

To give Cruz the benefit of the doubt here (I know), he may have thought the best political move here was to show that he can, you know, laugh at himself. What a sport! However, a lot of people wanted to know why he found anything about this situation — a fatal one, in which people literally froze in their homes — to be so funny. If he had acknowledged, even slightly, that he actually made a wrong move, these responses would have turned out much differently.

On Monday, Jessica Simpson commemorated a personal milestone: four years of sobriety. “This person in the early morning of Nov 1, 2017 is an unrecognizable version of myself. I had so much self discovery to unlock and explore. I knew in this very moment I would allow myself to take back my light, show victory over my internal battle of self respect, and brave this world with piercing clarity,” she wrote on Instagram, along with the “unrecognizable” photo of herself.

Simpson continued:

“Personally, to do this I needed to stop drinking alcohol because it kept my mind and heart circling in the same direction and quite honestly I was exhausted. I wanted to feel the pain so I could carry it like a badge of honor. I wanted to live as a leader does and break cycles to advance forward- never looking back with regret and remorse over any choice I have made and would make for the rest of my time here within this beautiful world. I can’t believe it has been 4yrs! It feels like maybe 2. I think that is a good thing. Ha.”

The musician and fashion designer said that there’s “so much stigma around the word alcoholism or the label of an alcoholic. The real work that needed to be done in my life was to actually accept failure, pain, brokenness, and self sabotage. The drinking wasn’t the issue. I was. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t respect my own power. Today I do.” Simpson called herself “wildly honest and comfortably open” and ended the post with: “I am free.”

You can read the entire Instagram post below.

Tucker Carlson is apoplectic! An evergreen statement to be sure, but this time he’s mad at fellow conservative Lindsey Graham, which is what makes this a story.

On Sunday, just one day before Carlson’s reprehensible January 6th docuseries Patriot Purge aired its first of three episodes, The Washington Post published a detailed accounting of the events that led to the insurrection on the Capitol. Among the new revelations was that as members of the Senate and the House were being evacuated from the Capitol, Graham—a longtime Donald Trump ass-kisser—snapped out of MAGA mode for just long enough to become enraged and scream at the Senate sergeant-at-arms: “What are you doing? Take back the Senate! You’ve got guns. Use them. We give you guns for a reason. Use them.” Which, in turn, has enraged Carlson.

On Monday night, as Mediaite reports, the Fox News host actually seemed to care about whether any of his fellow Americans live or die when he called out Graham for suggesting that a person officially entrusted with a gun and protecting the safety of the Capitol building and its inhabitants actually take measures to do that. According to Carlson:

What we just learned from this very long Washington Post “rebuttal” to our documentary series is that on January 6th, Lindsey Graham was running around the Capitol ordering the Capitol police to murder the protestors. Quote: “‘You’ve got guns. Use them. We give you guns for a reason,’ shrieked Lindsey Graham.”

Shoot American citizens for the crime of trespassing. Really? This is the conservative position? Unarmed protestors? They shouldn’t have been there. We’ve never defended that and never would.”

(But we will air a three-part docuseries titled Patriot Purge, in which we suggest that the insurrection was a “false flag” operation, after regularly downplaying the incident.)

“But kill them?,” Carlson continued. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Lindsey Graham? How long before you’re ordering drone attacks on people whose politics you don’t like?”

Probably about as long as it takes for Carlson to claim that a 17-year-old white kid with a gun is just “maintaining order.”

(Via Mediaite)

It is obviously never a good time to receive a positive COVID-19 test, but Ed Sheeran’s diagnosis came at a particularly inconvenient moment: He announced last month that he had tested positive just days before the release of his new album = and shortly before his planned stint as Saturday Night Live musical guest. There were fears that the show would have to replace Sheeran, but now that will no longer be necessary.

Today, Sheeran took to Instagram to let his followers know that he no longer has to quarantine and this his SNL performance will go on as scheduled. Sharing a photo of himself performing, he wrote, “Posting this pic to say I’m released from covid isolation today, so if you see me out and about I’ve had the all clear and done my quarantine. Excited to hit the ground running with work again, and SNL is still on, so tune in Saturday, see you there x.”

He also recently shared a post about making = with collaborator Johnny McDaid, writing, “Me and Johnny started this album June 2017 in Los Angeles, and finished it July 2021. What a journey, man. When lockdown hit we locked in together and started creating. Overpass Graffiti and Sandman came in those first few weeks, and countless others. Shivers was a pillar that the album oddly formed around. When things opened up we started working in more interesting spaces to write songs. Johnny would set up in old farms or country houses and we’d just make mad songs. Bad habits, Joker and the Queen and Be Right Now came all in a bonkers couple of weeks in Glemham Hall in Suffolk in January. We’ve had 10 years of making songs now, from Photograph to Shape of You. It’s a joy to work with you brother, thank you for guiding me on this album whenever I got lost. Thank you for pushing me, and doing 92 versions of a production just to get it right. We made something very special, and you are very special. Up the lads, youl never beat the lads.”

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

If ever there was a story that could simply begin and end with its headline, this is it. In what sounds like what would have been an amazing cover story for The Weekly World News back in the day, Raw Story is reporting that QAnon followers began gathering at the AT&T Discovery Plaza in Dallas on Monday night… to await the reemergence of John F. Kennedy, Jr. Yes, the same John F. Kennedy, Jr. the world watched salute his father’s coffin in 1963. And the same man who tragically died in a plane crash in 1999.

Yet, despite the fact that he was a lifelong Democrat hailing from a staunchly Democratic family, JFK Jr. seems to have become an icon for the batshit conspiracy theorists of the world (earlier this year, they flocked a man they for some reason believed to be JFK Jr. at Trump rallies… the man was not JFK Jr.). And they have somehow come to believe that his death was all a big ruse and that the son of the 35th president has been quietly working behind the scenes for the past 20-plus years to take down the “deep state.”

On Monday evening, journalist Steven Monacelli took to Twitter to post images of the scene and reported that “A popular QAnon theory recently is that JFK Jr. of the Kennedy family will be making a big announcement at Dealey Plaza by the grassy knoll sometime tomorrow.”

Based on some of the T-shirts seen in the crowd, it seems that at least a few of them believe that JFK Jr.’s announcement might not only be “Hey, I’m alive,” but also, “I’ll be running alongside Trump in the 2024 election.” (Has anyone told Mike Pence?)

Even more bafflingly, according to Newsweek, is that some of these people believe that JFK Jr. will reemerge to simply declare Donald Trump president. And that his mother and father may be there with him? Which… well, we’re not exactly sure how that works. Or what would give him the power to declare Trump president. Or why I’m trying to work logic into the equation at all.

It’s not the first time QAnon message boards have predicted JFK Jr.’s resurrection. In 2019, they also made a lot of noise about the former George publisher coming forward on July 4th to announce that he had been hiding out in Pennsylvania for two decades, as Rolling Stone reported at the time. No word on why that didn’t happen, though Fourth of July traffic is notoriously brutal.

For now, we’ll just wait and watch.

(Via Raw Story)

Former-president Donald Trump and his wife Melania attended game four of the World Series between the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros, months after calling for a boycott of Major League Baseball over the All-Star Game being moved out of the Georgia capital to protest voting restrictions. Trump seemed to have a grand ol’ time at the World Series game, though, as it gave him an excuse to do the tomahawk chop.

The chop, a stadium-wide chant and longtime tradition at Braves games, has been under renewed scrutiny as part of a national discussion about racism and racial imagery in professional sports. Several advocacy groups and observers have accused the chant of mocking Native American groups and decried it as racist… Trump has frequently sought to capitalize politically on such controversies as part of an effort to galvanize the White voters who make up much of his political base.

During Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, host Jimmy Kimmel segued from “outdated pumpkins” to Trump attending the game. “Trump claimed he was personally invited to the game by the commissioner of baseball, but a spokesperson for the commissioner of baseball said Trump invited himself to game. I wonder who we should believe there,” he joked. After reading Trump’s statement about boycotting MLB, Kimmel added, “Six months later, he’s guzzling Diet Coke and doing the tomahawk chop at a Braves game in Atlanta. The only exercise he gets is if it’s something racist.”

You can watch the monologue above.

(Via CNN)

What a wild few years this has been for release dates. Morbius was initially due in October 2020, and we saw the first teaser trailer trailer in January 2020, after significant interest in a moody first look from Jared Leto. That interest, most likely, sourced from people wondering how he’d make a comic-book comeback from his rather awful Joker turn in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Now, the timeline is all fudged because Leto struck a different Joker turn in Zack Snyder’s Justice League cut, and he’s also preparing to play the most cartoony Gucci family member of all in House of Gucci.

The dude is addicted to prosthetics and not looking like himself. That much is evident, and after a featurette showed Leto promising a “web of possibilities” (the Tobey Maguire-Spidey fans enjoyed that one), we’ve got a full-on trailer. Yep, the Sony powers that be knew that we wanted to see Michael Keaton as Vulture and Jared Harris as the most dignified guy in the room. From the synopsis:

Biochemist Michael Morbius tries to cure himself of a rare blood disease, but when his experiment goes wrong, he inadvertently infects himself with a form of vampirism instead.

Leto, for better or for worse, is making his official debut in the Sony Marvel Universe as Michael Morbius, a brilliant biochemist who becomes The Living Vampire in a Spider-Man spinoff (about the character who hails from 1971’s Amazing Spider-Man #101 issue). It sounds like Michael Morbius is not-so brilliant from the way that he botched his own self-experiment, and even though there’s a split second of Ripped Leto, this trailer frankly makes me want to watch The Fly, so there’s that. Yep, the powers that be really wanna build up the Sony Spider-Man Universe, although this probably won’t arrive with the fanfare of those Venom flicks. Still, we’re getting more comic-book Michael Keaton, and that’s never a bad thing.

Morbius arrives in theaters on January 28, 2022.

In a recent interview, Adele noted that there aren’t any features on her upcoming album 30. In fact, no song on any of her studio albums has had a credited feature. In the interview, she said, “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s not calculated. It’s just never been right for some reason.” She does have her eye on one fellow singer in particular, though: In a recent Vogue interview, she declared that her dream duet partner is Chris Stapleton.

Well, her dream came true, because Adele got a Stapleton feature on her new album, the tracklist of which was revealed yesterday. True to Adele’s word, Stapleton isn’t appearing on the core 30 album, but a Target-exclusive deluxe version of the album includes a rendition of “Easy On Me” that features Stapleton. Aside from that, the Target deluxe edition includes a pair of other bonus tracks, “Wild Wild West” and “Can’t Be Together.”

Check out the 30 tracklist, including the Target-exclusive bonus tracks, below.

1. “Strangers By Nature”
2. “Easy On Me”
3. “My Little Love”
4. “Cry Your Heart Out”
5. “Oh My God”
6. “Can I Get It”
7. “I Drink Wine”
8. “All Night Parking (with Erroll Garner) Interlude”
9. “Woman Like Me”
10. “Hold On”
11. “To Be Loved”
12. “Love Is A Game”
13. “Wild Wild West” (Bonus Track)
14. “Can’t Be Together” (Bonus Track)
15. “Easy On Me” (with Chris Stapleton) (Bonus Track)

30 is out 11/19 via Columbia. Pre-order it here.

Folks, buckle up because you are about to go on a wild ride.

On Monday night, college football twitter became enthralled by a story that at first seemed too outrageous to be true, but as facts and important people involved in the story came forward, it only got stranger.

Word emerged from an unverified account that claimed a monkey owned by Texas special teams assistant Jeff Banks bit a young trick-or-treater on Halloween. It seemed like such a ridiculous thing that it had to be a fake story, but as people did more digging, they learned that it was, in fact, partially true.

The real story was that Banks is now with an ex-stripper named Danielle, fka “Pole Assassin” — which, as an aside, is one of the best stage names in history — who was once on Jerry Springer and has a monkey named Gia who used to assist her in her act. The monkey even has an Instagram page which features some incredible content.

So after establishing that there is actually a monkey that lives at Banks’ residence and this story could indeed be true, his girlfriend jumped into the fray on Twitter and confirmed that the incident took place but it was not as vicious a bite as initially reported.

https://twitter.com/BrianMFloyd/status/1455366167082647553

She also took people on a tour of the backyard to show how far a child had to wander out of the haunted house zone they had set up, through multiple gates that said not to go through to get to the monkey’s cage/habitat area where the bite happened.

This, of course, was a terrible idea as it potentially incriminated her and the monkey, and at some point she was told to delete her tweets (and ultimately the entire account), but not before the internet was able to screenshot the tweets and pull the video in which she gave that tour. No one knows what the legal ramifications are in all of this, but it did spark a lot of jokes about monkey law and how Texas football is now definitely back.

We will continue to monitor this situation to see if there are further updates on Pole Assassin’s monkey and if this somehow becomes a thing that Texas has to release an official statement on.

British television tends to be much more colorful than in America. Yanks can’t even do Taskmaster, the brilliant game show in which comedians perform ridiculous assignments, for more than one season. But a new Channel 4 program has taken the old-fashioned dating game show in an even more ludicrous and wholly unexpected direction than HBO Max’s FBoy Island.

It’s called The Love Trap, and it premiered about two weeks ago in the U.K. In its native land, it was instantly infamous, as per The Sun, and with good reason. At first it sounds pretty stock: Twelve women compete for the affections of a single eligible bachelor, David Birtwistle. The twist is that half of them are only in it for the money. Birtwistle has to guess which ones are sincere and which ones are liars. And at the end of each episode, he, uh, um, erm, sends one contestant sailing through a trap door.

A clip from the ending of a Love Trap episode found its way onto American social media on Monday, some 12 days after the show premiered. It only shows Birtwistle choosing one woman to be jettisoned. And when she suddenly tumbles to an unknown future — hope she’s okay! — it was clear that it blew a lot of minds.

Some compared it to a task on Squid Game, which have already inspired nasty copycats.

Presenter Joel Dommett is very proud of what he helped create, saying, “I love lying, love, and trap doors so it’s all I’ve ever wanted. It’s genuinely a huge idea and I’m excited that they have trusted me at the helm.”

The Love Trap is currently not playing on American television, but it is streamable on Channel 4’s site. In the meantime, it’s not the first time it seemed like Squid Game had already become real.