Month: February 2022

Stormi Webster is officially a big sister. Earlier this afternoon, Kylie Jenner announced the birth of her second child with Travis Scott by sharing a black and white photo of the new baby’s hand. She shared the birth date, 2/2/22, indicating her second child was born last week, and also included a blue heart emoji, leading many people to believe her new baby is a boy. Since TMZ is also reporting the baby is a boy, it seems like that’s probably the case, but Kylie hasn’t officially confirmed the gender yet on her own.

At least this is some positive news for Travis Scott, who has understandably been lying low since the horrific tragedy at Astroworld last year, a festival that left nine attendees dead. Looks like the fans who were convinced Kylie had her baby back in January were just a little premature. Congratulations to the happy couple, and knowing the way the Kardashian content machine rolls, we’ll be getting photos of this little guy some time in the very near future.

Here’s hoping that after witnessing what Kanye and Kim are going through right now with custody of their children, Travis and Kylie are able to keep things cordial as they co-parent. Check out the Instagram post here.

Billie Eilish just recently kicked off the tour behind her new album, Happier Than Ever — as in, three days ago recently — but she is of course already making headlines. The young pop star has already been known to keep things incredibly real with her fans, and the general public, and seems to be hyper aware of her own role when it comes to checking in on the safety and health of her fans at shows.

At a concert in Atlanta on Sunday night, Eilish interrupted her entire set to make sure a fan got the inhaler she needed, instructing her security to bring one from backstage. TMZ has footage of her (above) seemingly addressing last year’s tragedy at Astroworld, saying “I wait for people to be okay before I keep going.” She calmed the rest of the crowded auditorium while that fan recovered, and got huge cheers for her statement.

The issue at Astroworld was that Travis Scott kept performing, allegedly oblivious, while nine fans were trampled to death. Obviously, that’s a nightmarish situation even if Scott was totally unaware of it happening, but it seems very unlikely anything of that nature could happen at an Eilish concert.

Though Billie followed up her debut album incredibly quickly, releasing her second record only two years later, rumor has it she’s already back in the studio again, working on yet another new album. Now that’s dedication.

The Miami Dolphins were one of three NFL teams still with a head coaching vacancy entering the weekend after six hires had been made around the league in recent weeks.

Miami was searching for a coach after firing Brian Flores after three seasons, including back-to-back winning years, with the expectation of taking the leap into the contender tier. The Flores firing set into motion the eventual lawsuit from Flores against the NFL for discriminatory hiring practices, citing texts from Bill Belichick about Brian Daboll getting the Giants job before Flores had his interview in New York, as well as alleging that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross had offered him $100,000 per loss in the 2019 season when Miami was seeking a high draft pick.

With that shadow still hanging over the team, they have moved forward in their hiring process and will reportedly hire Mike McDaniel out of San Francisco, where he was the offensive coordinator for one season after previously being the team’s run game coordinator.

The 38-year-old McDaniel is considered one of the league’s up-and-coming offensive minds, and that has been the trend of late with NFL hiring processes, seeking out the next Sean McVay or Kyle Shanahan. For a Dolphins team hoping to see Tua Tagovailoa take the next step as a quarterback, hiring McDaniel sends the clear message that they want to surround him with a staff that will try to take advantage of his unique skillset as a quarterback.

McDaniel’s hire leaves just the Texans and Saints as the last two teams with vacancies.

For the past few days, Kanye West has been airing out his issues with Kim Kardashian, and they mostly relate to their children. In one instance, Kanye criticized Kim for letting North West use TikTok against his will. He also claimed Kim tried to “kidnap” their daughter, and days later, he claimed that she would not let him bring their kids to Chicago for a basketball game. While Kanye has received support from far right pundit Candace Owens, Azealia Banks is not coming to his defense at all. In fact, the singer took a moment to share a lengthy message criticizing his behavior and treatment of Kim Kardashian.

“Y’all are making way too many excuses for Kanye,” she said to began her message which she posted on her Instagram Story. “This is the second time he has publicly bullied North West. First with the abortion sh*t, and now putting her on blast on his Instagram page as if she’s some sort of criminal.” She continued, “Kanye had no problem with that magazine cover where North had on a f*cking belly top and purple eyeliner with her little buds showing thru the shirt, he thought it was fashion. You all said nothing.”

Banks went on to accuse Kanye of trying to “wreck the mental health of the only person around to care for children” while criticizing him for his new relationship with Julia Fox. Banks also suggested that Kanye was going through “rapid opioid/heroin comedown/withdrawal type outbursts.”

“Kanye is an abusive psychopath, it’s beyond mental illness,” she said. “Stop trying to help him and start trying to help the poor child that he keeps on trying to embarrass and abuse publicly to garner sympathy for his ashy ass.”

With Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Simu Liu went from an obscure working actor to a big enough star to host SNL. He even holds a major first: He’s the first Asian star of an MCU romp. And it may not have happened had Liu done something any ambitious careerist does to get ahead: embellish one’s qualifications to get a big job.

As caught by Entertainment Weekly, Liu participated in Variety’s “Actors on Actors” showcase, speaking with West Side Story break-out (and fellow SNL Season 47 host) Ariana DeBose. And he confessed that his martial arts skills may not have been as robust as he claimed at the time.

“When I got the part, they asked me about my martial arts background and experience, which of course I exaggerated because I wanted the job really badly,” Liu confessed. “I had done some work as an on-again, off-again stuntman, but if we’re honest, I think I was more of a dancer than I ever was a martial artist.”

When he got the job, Liu realized he had to do some catching up. “Pretty much from the moment I was cast, I started working with trainers and learning how to move. I had such awful flexibility,” he told DeBose. “A big part of that early process was just bending my body and trying to rip those legs apart.”

To make things worse, he was supposed to do martial arts opposite two biggies of the genre: Tony Leung (alum of John Woo movies and the Jet Li starrer Hero) and Michelle Yeoh (whose martial arts CV is legion). Luckily they were very understanding.

“Very different people, but an aura of warmth and friendliness,” Liu explained. He said Leung was “famously shy, and very, very soft spoken. You would never know his stature and his fame just by looking at him.” Yeoh, meanwhile, was a “goofball” on top of a “badass,” and she had a “wonderful way of telling me to relax and just settle in.”

So if you wind up exaggerating your way into a martial arts blockbuster with the stars of the 1993 wuxia classic Butterfly and Sword, they may have your back.

(Via Variety and EW)

With the trade deadline four days away, trade talks are heating up around the NBA and we are finally starting to see some movement and not just reported discussions.

The first big deal of the weekend arrived on Friday when the Clippers traded for Norman Powell and Robert Covington, as the Blazers looked to move out of the luxury tax and officially signaled they are moving towards this season being about the future. While the big dominos remain standing, that move seemed to pop the lid off the trade market a bit, as Sunday brought word of another fairly significant deal.

The Cleveland Cavaliers have been wanting to add guard help for months, particularly with the injuries to Collin Sexton and Ricky Rubio, and have found that additional backcourt help for breakout star Darius Garland in Indiana, where the Pacers have been reportedly open for business for more than a month. On Sunday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Caris LeVert was headed to Cleveland for Rubio’s expiring salary, this year’s first round pick, and a pair of seconds.

The Cavs are firmly in the playoff hunt this year and needed to make a move to ensure they weren’t just a regular season darling, but had some additional floor balance for the postseason. LeVert can hopefully provide that, offering quality secondary scoring alongside Garland as the Cavs have loaded up with frontcourt talent but found themselves a bit thin at guard.

For the Pacers, it’s the beginning of the expected selling off to kickstart a rebuild, with Domantas Sabonis and/or Myles Turner both potentially on their way out this week as well. They get a first this year and a pair of seconds, along with some future cap flexibility to begin what they hope will be a relatively quick rebuild.

We’re just a week away from Super Bowl LVI, which means we’re a week from the game’s Halftime Show, which features an eclectic array of performers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, and Mary J. Blige. The artists are expected to perform classic songs from their catalogs, with a slim chance of them performing some new and/or unreleased tracks. Another thing viewers will catch during the halftime show is a performance from a pair of deaf rappers.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Eminem has invited Sean Forbes and Warren “WaWa” Snipe to take the stage during the show. Forbes and Warren will perform interpretations of the headliners’ songs in American Sign Language (ASL), which will. mark the first time that the NFL has ever incorporated ASL into their halftime show. It’s described as “an elevated accessibility experience” and the performance will be made available through the NBC Sports website and app.

“The doors to accessibility are busted wide open with something like this,” Forbes told the Detroit Free Press during an interview. While it will be Forbes’ first appearance at a Super Bowl, Snipe previously appeared at last year’s game, where he joined Jazmine Sullivan and Eric Church to perform the national anthem.

When he’s not fleeing his constituents for Cancún or helping inspire violent Trump supporters to overturn democracy, Ted Cruz can be found annoying people on Twitter and then getting owned. No one likes him, not even the star of his favorite movie. On Saturday he was at it again, using social media to agitate an already agitated situation: the band of anti-vaxx truckers cruising around the nation, protesting mandates. And of course, it only ended up with Cruz getting owned.

On Friday, the mayor of Vancouver, Kennedy Stewart, released a statement made a simple request of the truckers, who were planning a protest in the city: “As the Mayor of a city with an over 95 per cent vaccination rate, my message to the convoy is this: Vancouver doesn’t want you here. Make your point and then go home.”

But Cruz wasn’t moved by the call for public health measures. Indeed, he seemed to want to make it worse. “Mayor says “Vancouver doesn’t want” truck drivers there,” he tweeted. “Folks might feel differently with empty shelves.”

Is it strange for an American politician, even one born in Canada, to joke about citizens in another country to go hungry? You betcha. His tweet did not go unnoticed by Stewart himself, who clapped back by pointing out his grim hope was impossible anyway.

“Can someone tell @tedcruz our store shelves are fine thanks to the 90% of Canadian truckers who are fully vaccinated. Too busy high-fiving all the awesome folks in #Vancouver that are helping push back against the #hateconvoy.”

It’s not the first time in the last few days that Cruz was humiliated on Twitter. Late last week he was dragged for daring to make a Cancún joke as his constituents once again found themselves without power during a winter storm.

(Via Raw Story)

Over the last few years, Schoolboy Q has grown to love the game of golf. It’s something he spoke about heavily during the release of his fifth album, Crash Talk. Back in 2020, he appeared in a trailer for the game PGA Tour 2K21 alongside WWE Superstar The Miz, PGA Tour cover athlete Justin Thomas, and Christopher McDonald (aka Shooter McGavin from the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore). Fast forward to the present and Schoolboy Q has been enjoying his time as a participant in the 2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in California. During his time there, the rapper was asked how golf has impacted him.

“Coming where I come from, the life that I had, I never thought about playing golf, and I got into it and it changed my mental,” he said. “It let me learn myself as a person, like this is why certain things in my life are going bad or why certain things are going good because of the attitude thing, you get what I’m saying? It fixed my attitude in life, it fixed a lot of things about me in life.”

Schoolboy added, “Life is a golf game — some good shots, some bad shots. But most importantly, keep going you never know. Don’t give up because you’re in the sand on your fourth shot, you might chip it in. It just taught me a lot about life.”

You can watch Schoolboy Q speak about his connection to golf in the video above.

The Brooklyn Nets are in freefall right now, having lost seven straight games to slide to 29-23, just a half-game above the No. 7 seeded Raptors. Their losing streak has come with Kevin Durant sidelined with a knee sprain, Kyrie Irving still in and out of the lineup as a part-time player only playing on the road, and James Harden battling a hamstring issue that has kept him out four of the last six games (including Sunday night’s upcoming game against Denver he’s been ruled out of).

On top of injury issues, there’s apparent discontent with the current situation in Brooklyn from Harden, who reportedly isn’t thrilled with Irving’s part-time status or the fact that he is once again finding himself having to carry the bulk of the creative load on a team he figured to share the spotlight on with two other stars. That has led to growing buzz about the potential for Harden to leave the Nets this summer when he’s able to become a free agent, and even some murmurs that he could be had at the trade deadline should the 76ers, known to covet the star, offer Brooklyn a sizable trade package with Ben Simmons as the focal point.

On Sunday, prior to their game against the Nuggets, Steve Nash offered a public rebuttal to those rumors, telling reporters in his pregame availability that Harden has confirmed to Nash that he wants to be in Brooklyn, and Nash offered as firm an on the record response to trade rumors as you can get.

Now, there isn’t a world in which Nash would stand before reporters and tell them they’re going to trade Harden at this point, but it’s notable that he says this four days before the deadline, pouring cold water on Philly’s dream of nabbing the star during the season. It still feels most likely that Harden’s situation gets interesting this summer and that he, at the very least, explores his options outside of the Nets in free agency, which maybe leads to a sign-and-trade situation.

While Harden may not be on the block, the Nets do figure to be active this week in trying to upgrade the roster, both in the immediate to try and keep things afloat until Durant comes back and even for when their stars are all at full strength, as there’s serious uncertainty about Joe Harris’ availability going forward this season.