Month: August 2022

Two-and-a-half years after the COVID-19 pandemic came to America, things are slowly returning to normal. Although people are still catching the virus, the seven-day average of deaths is around 15% of where we were at the pandemic’s peak. Lockdowns and mask mandates are over, kids are all back at school and there’s a definite feeling that the worst is behind us.

The last 30 months have been a time of anxiety, loneliness, fear, sickness, death, misinformation, and political and economic upheaval. Over that time, most of us were forced to change how we worked, socialized and learned. Even as the pandemic winds down, we live in a world that will never return to what it was like before the virus.

Now’s the time to try to make sense of what we’ve all been through so that if there’s a next time, we know how to do things better.

A Reddit user by the name Affectionate-Ad1060 asked the online forum, “What is the most important lesson learnt from Covid-19?” and they received more than 19,000 responses.

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Some thought that the pandemic taught them the importance of being around people. Others realized that maintaining one’s mental health isn’t just about resilience.

A lot of people were discouraged by how incredibly selfish some acted during the pandemic. Many were surprised by the number of people who put their political beliefs ahead of the health of themselves and others.

A lot of our norms and assumptions about society have been significantly challenged over the past two and a half years. The only way that we can create a feeling of hope that things will be better the next time is to examine the lessons learned from COVID-19 so we can be better.

Here are 21 of the most important lessons that people learned from COVID-19.

1. 

“No matter how strong and resilient you think you are, your mental health can be penetrated without you realizing it.” — Lentewiet

2. 

“You should take the time to spend with those you love.” — idontworktomorrow

3. 

“That it wouldn’t take much for civilized people to turn on each other.” — hindmaja

Strength-in-the-Loins added:

“A wise man once said something like ‘Humanity is perpetually 9 meals away from utter barbarism.”

JimmyHammer12 really put the nail on the head with their response:

“It could also be said based on the way people went FOMO for all that toilet paper that ‘Humanity is perpetually 9 rolls away from utter barbarism.'”

4.

“People’s mental health ain’t no joke… people need people.” — vg4030

5. 

“Pandemic was just the proverbial group project in school all over again. A couple of intelligent and hard-working people trying to keep everything from falling apart while the rest sit on their ass or choose to straight up sabotage everything. Yet somehow everyone gets the exact same grade.” — NaughtyProwler

6. 

“Bold of you to assume we’ve learned anything.” — Airsoft07

7. 

“Healthcare needs a overhaul.” — Toxic_Politician

8. 

“The extent to which politicians will sell out public health for their political advantage is much higher than I thought. Usually, life or death situations are good for all politicians, just be a voice of stability and hope and you’re good. We all pull together and get through it. This time, dividing us intentionally to cause chaos? I still can’t believe real people did that.” — Griswald

9. 

“Most schools weren’t as ready to switch to digital methods as they bragged about.” — SenpaisReisShop

10. 

“Most grown adults are nasty and have to be reminded to wash their hands.” — shantyirish13

11. 

“The ‘supply chain’ is far leaner and vulnerable to the vagaries of pandemic conditions than most had thought.” — Back2Bach

12. 

“You can have all the free time in the world and still manage to do nothing with it.” — hogaway

13. 

“We need to teach statistics and critical thinking better.” — hardsoft

14. 

“I work in childcare. We learned that children really need socialization. You would think with time off parents would work on things. Kids came back to daycare, not potty trained, still using a pacifier, speech behind, and refusing to share. It’s better now but it was really interesting seeing a child pre-Covid who you potty trained…. Come back months later acting pretty helpless. don’t know if it’s parents, the lack of social pressure, or just some other thing. But it was an interesting experience.” — Paceim

15. 

“People are willing to die over politics.” — morinthos

16.

“That 50% of jobs can be done from home while the other 50% deserve more than they’re being paid.” — Kayin_Angel

17. 

“That being tied to the office, working insane hours, super long commutes are not necessary.” — squashedfrog

18. 

“People make irrational decisions when afraid.” — AaaON_

19. 

“During covid, I was laid off for months and spent that whole time keeping up to date on everything going on in the world. I mean everything I possibly could, every single day. I reached the point of obsession and the massive amount of negative crushed me. There was so much bad going on so much suffering that eventually, one day I just set it all down and said I’ll check in in a month. Best decision I made that year, the only thing that kept my sanity. Just taking time away and not bathing in it every day.” — Primerallen

20. 

“People will listen to politicians over their doctors.” — GhostalMedia

21. 

“A decent amount of people I work with surprised me a lot during the pandemic. People I used to have some respect for revealed themselves as complete idiots. It was really sobering.” — RiW-Kirby

Megan Thee Stallion has been teasing her new album for a long time now, with songs like “Plan B” and “Pressurelicious” helping build up anticipation to unimaginable heights. Today, she raised it even higher by sharing a freestyle she did on Power 106 Los Angeles on Twitter.

“GRIND MODE IT’S ALBUM TIME HOTTIES GO CHECK OUT MY LA LEAKERS FREESTYLE,” she wrote while sharing the video, which quickly went viral. At a little over a minute and a half, the song is full of great quips that have fans flipping out in the replies. It’s performed to the instrumental from Warren G’s “Regulate” feat. Nate Dogg, which samples Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’.” Megan’s rap touches on a lot of topics, including her ongoing feud with her record label 1501 Certified Entertainment: “How you want to be me, at the same time want to shake me / I be makin’ money on the motherf*kin’ daily / Got my label mad but them n****s gotta pay me.”

In an Instagram story late last month, the rapper announced that her next LP is done. “So happy abt my album,” she wrote. “It’s finished. It’s for the hotties. It’s honest. It’s me. It’s real.”

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

While the WNBA has seen tremendous growth in recent years, the league still lags behind in a number of areas compared to the major men’s sports leagues, particularly when it comes to the amenities afforded to players. While the last collective bargaining agreement upped player pay, the league still restricts travel options for teams, making players fly commercial from game to game and refusing to allow owners to charter flights for the team even if they wanted to pay for it.

This has been an issue for a number of teams in the past, but on Sunday night, the L.A. Sparks got stranded in Washington D.C. following their win over the Mystics and, because there weren’t enough hotel rooms for all of them, some of them, including WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike, spent the night in the airport before their rebooked 9 a.m. flight home.

As Ogwumike notes, while she’s seen some travel disasters in her time as a WNBA player, having to spend a night in the airport is a new one. On Monday, she penned a statement that the WNBPA sent out officially calling on the league to alter their rules amid the current climate of air travel in the U.S. — which anyone who has flown recently knows is a bit of a disaster with delays and cancellations — and allow teams to charter flights, starting with the playoffs.

If it seems like a simple solution, that’s because it is, and the league’s stance that it’s a “competitive advantage” for a team to fly a charter when not every ownership group can afford it (or, more accurately, isn’t willing to pay for it), is an outdated one. As Ogwumike notes, there are owners wanting to do this and more money and interest in the league than ever before, so it wouldn’t be all that difficult to find 12 ownership groups willing to pay for charters.

The charter flight issue is one that isn’t just a fight between players and the league, but one happening within the Board of Governors, as Joe Tsai, who owns the New York Liberty (and the Brooklyn Nets), was fined $500,000 for secretly chartering flights for the team last season after someone from another team complained to the league about it. There is a clear divide between new owners like Tsai, Mark Davis in Vegas, and Marc Lore in Minnesota, who come from those major men’s sports and want to spend the money to treat the players like the elite athletes they are, and longtime owners who don’t necessarily have that level of expendable funds. That issue might get resolved whenever expansion comes, as two new owners will almost assuredly fall into the new money camp willing to spend, but in the immediate we still have situations like this that only serve to make the league look awful.

It seems unlikely that the league agrees to this change before the playoffs, but hopefully they’ll reconsider their stance this offseason because it’s past time for teams to at least have the opportunity to fly charter and avoid these kinds of travel disasters and be expected to play their best afterwards.

On Monday, FBI agents used a search warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago, the resort where former president Donald Trump now resides. Sources told The New York Times the investigation pertained to the 15 boxes of classified material he took with him after his lone term came to an end. Trump himself whined about it on his rinky dink Twitter clone, where he also accused Hillary Clinton of stealing “antique furniture” from the White House. Fox News also covered it, and if you ever wondered what having a mental break was like, watch this.

Host Jesse Watters and former Breitbart reporter Dana Loesch were there to weigh in on the breaking news. Like most, at the time they weren’t sure why the feds had knocked on Trump’s door. But they had some theories. Lots and lots of theories. Any theory they could think of made it to air in a series of stream-of-consciousnesss splutterings.

“We were told that the FBI wasn’t going to get involved in any politically-charged search warrants, investigations, announcements, indictments before an elections. We were told that!” Watters said, visibly and audibly grasping at straws. He then brought up whatever he popped into his head. He turned the page back to the fall of 2020, when the feds, he said, refused to look into Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. “They’re going to send agents into Mar-a-Lago before the midterm election? This was not what we were told the FBI was going to do.”

Watters then moved onto Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. Then he moved onto her son. He talked about Asia. Then he moved back to Hunter. Then “suspicious wire transfers.” Watters seemed to be arguing that the FBI should be investigating…whatever all that was. “Did they get the address wrong?” he asked.

Loesch herself weighed in, claiming there was “more evidence to implicate, I think, the Bidens than ever has been.” She added “green energy stuff” to the quickly towering pile, as well as China and cobalt mines and — why not! — the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We should be talking about these issues instead of trying to settle the score of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats,” referring to someone who hasn’t had a job in the White House since 2013.

In the span of less than two-and-a-half minutes, Watters and Loesch both managed to throw out so many ideas it was like watching James Austin Johnson’s Trump impersonations, where his broken brain moves from one unrelated subject to another with dizzying speed. It was like watching a pitch meeting for Fox News conspiracy theories. Or it was a sign that they knew an era in which they both played a major part might finally be coming to an end.

For more than 40 years, ESPN and the Big Ten have been synonymous when it comes to the broadcasting of college football and college basketball. Though FOX has emerged as a prominent partner for the Big Ten, both in showcasing top-tier games and actually owning a majority stake in the Big Ten Network, ESPN is often associated with the conference due to a longstanding relationship that provides the network with a great deal of programming. However, a report from John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal indicates that could be changing in the near future.

Ourand notes that, while “there remains the possibility ESPN could wind up with a package,” it would take a “last-minute change of direction” for the worldwide leader to keep a piece of the Big Ten’s media rights on its next deal. FOX already secured the most prominent part of the Big Ten’s next package, but Ourand reports that CBS and NBC are now “clear front runners” to split the rest of the conference’s offerings.

In addition to FOX’s branding of “Big Noon Saturday” built heavily around the Big Ten in the early window, their agreement also includes Big Ten Network and FS1 rights for both football and basketball. In the arrangement that could be coming together in the near future, CBS would replace its vacated SEC rights in the 3:30 pm ET time slot (after ESPN swiped those away), with NBC reportedly projected to carry Big Ten games in prime time.

The loss of the Big Ten would be quite jarring for ESPN, though Ourand’s piece does hint at a potential run at the Pac-12 and/or Big 12 to replace some of the tonnage. Still, that doesn’t quite carry the same luster, particularly with the recent agreement for UCLA and USC to join the Big Ten and the Big 12’s loss of Oklahoma and Texas. Elsewhere, NBC adding the Big Ten alongside its current agreement with Notre Dame would be quite intriguing, and CBS avoids the large-scale absence of college football after the well-publicized shift away from the fabled SEC on CBS broadcast.

ESPN certainly can’t be ruled out until the ink is dry on a signed agreement, but this would be a big loss for the network. It would also set up a situation in which Big Ten fans could be treated to national windows from noon and into prime time with the conference’s programs on display across the board.

Some much-needed wholesome news: The lovely city of Richmond, Virginia is introducing a new bike lane street sweeper and residents have voted that it be named MF BROOM, after the late rapper MF DOOM who tragically passed in 2020.

In a bracket not unlike that of March Madness, the options consisted of MF BROOM, Kate Brush, Meryl Sweep, Sweep Carolina, Dirt Reynolds, Bike Dyson, LeBroom James, The Bus Duster, The Legion of Broom, Wall-E, The Grim Sweeper, and more creative names. MF BROOM and The Grim Sweeper made it to the final round, and the former won with a 59%-41% vote.

“The people have spoken!” Venture Richmond tweeted in the announcement. “We crowdsourced name ideas, you voted, and the name of the new @DPW_RichmondVAbike lane sweeper is… MF BROOM. Until then, enjoy your clean bike lanes!”

“Just remember all caps when you spell the mans name,” one user replied.

The beloved hip-hop legend is being memorialized in many ways. For instance, it was announced in May of this year that a biography of MF DOOM is in the works. It will be titled The Chronicles Of Doom: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast, written by veteran journalist S.H. Fernando Jr. and arriving via Astra House.

For the past couple of weeks there has been little movement on the Kevin Durant trade front, as executives around the league take vacations and most of the trade chatter has died down — with some reports here and there about previous offers for Durant coming out, like the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown package.

However, on Monday we got the closest thing to a substantial report regarding Durant and the Nets as we’ve gotten in some time, as Shams Charania reported the star had met with owner Joe Tsai in London this weekend and laid down an ultimatum. Durant doubled down on his trade request, unless Tsai was willing to completely change his organizational structure by firing head coach Steve Nash and general manager Sean Marks. That, naturally, sparked plenty of chatter on Twitter as fans wondered whether the Nets should (or would) choose Durant over their GM — one has to feel that Nash would be gone if this was just about him.

On Monday night, we got our answer in the form of a tweet from Tsai himself that made clear which side he was choosing in this situation.

That leaves no uncertainty about how the Nets are proceeding, but it would sure seem to escalate things between the Nets and Durant to do this publicly. It’s not a surprise Tsai is doing this, as it’d be a pretty terrible look to leak that demand from Durant (which pretty clearly came from the team side as KD has no reason to put that out there) and then give in to it. It’s clear Tsai is trying to draw a line in the sand here and show that the Nets are no longer going to be a team run by star demands, but they’re honestly a bit late with that declaration and now things get sticky.

The price tag on Durant sure doesn’t sound like it’s getting lowered, and to this point no one has really come close to meeting their demands. That’s probably not going to change in the immediate, as there’s no reason for teams to put their best offer out there in mid-August, but as training camp nears, we’ll start to see pressure mount on all sides to get this done and not let it linger into the season.

Ashton Kutcher is on Monday night’s episode of Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge, which presumably features a lot of stomping around Mother Earth. But not that long ago he wouldn’t be have been able to keep up with the adventurer. In a clip from the episode, Kutcher can be heard revealing that he once had a rare disorder that kept him from seeing, hearing, even walking.

In the clip, the soon-to-be-returning That ‘70s Show vet tells Grylls that two yeas back he had a “weird, super rare form of vasculitis,” which involves the flaming of the blood vessels. The disorder, he revealed, “knocked out my vision, and knocked out my hearing, and knocked out all my equilibrium.” He said, “It took me like a year to build it all back up. You don’t really appreciate it till it’s gone, until you go, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to see again. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to hear again. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to walk again.’”

But as you can see, Kutcher was able to walk again, and to hear again, and to see again. He added that he’s “lucky to be alive.”

On the plus side, it gave him a newfound look at life. “The minute you start seeing your obstacles as things that are made for you to give you what you need, then life starts to get fun, right?” he said. “You start surfing on top of your problems instead of living underneath them.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, vasculitis “can cause the walls of the blood vessels to thicken, which reduces the width of the passageway through the vessel. If blood flow is restricted, it can result in organ and tissue damage.”

Along with his wife Mila Kunis, Kutcher has made himself helpful, helping raise money in the early days of the pandemic and raising millions for Ukraine, where Kunis was born.

You can watch the clip in the video below:

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Donald Trump has never had to formally pay for his many alleged crimes, beyond getting booted from his favorite social media service. But that doesn’t mean he never will. He’s got multiple legal headaches on right now, from the investigation into his business by the New York State attorney general’s office to the soon-to-return Jan. 6 hearings. Are the walls finally closing in? Who’s to say? But it’s probably a big deal that on Monday the feds raided the resort he now lives in.

The New York Times reported that the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, where the former president is known to rant about his many woes to strangers. Sources say the investigation involves the 15 boxes of classified documents Trump brought to Mar-a-Lago last year and only returned under threat of prosecution.

Trump appeared to try and get ahead of the big news, firing off one of his makeshift press releases on rinky dink Twitter clone, which was filled with his usual pity-party ramblings.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home … is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump wrote (or “Truthed”). “Nothing like this has happened to a President of the United States before.” He added, “They even broke into my safe! What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat [sic] National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.”

Trump went on about the continued “political persecution of President Donald J. Trump,” referring to himself in the third person. He whined that Hillary Clinton, who never tried to steal an election or help drive supporters to a failed coup (and was never president, despite repeated efforts), was never treated in such a way. He then brought up her infamous e-mails, claiming she was “allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 email,” even accusing her of taking “antique furniture” from the White House.

The news seemed to interest Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, who served time for him and delights in hearing about his many woes.

The raid comes the same day as a report that, while president, he not only demanded his military parades snub “wounded” veterans, but also praised “German soldiers” during World War II, aka the Nazis.

(Via NYT)

It’s been 20 years since Tom Waits released the albums Alice and Blood Money. To celebrate, he’s re-issuing them on vinyl on October 7, as well as sharing unreleased live cuts of some of the songs, including “All The World Is Green” and “Fish And Bird” today.

“During the ‘70’s, too many of my songs were drowning in strings,” Waits said about Alice. “I didn’t want to hear another blasted violin. So, we found string players who felt the same way about their instrument, formed an odd, skeletal chamber orchestra and tried to avoid all the old familiar phrases where strings love to play.”

He added about the other LP, “Blood Money is flesh and bone, earthbound. The songs are rooted in reality: jealousy, rage, the human meat wheel…They are more carnal. Kathleen and I are well suited to this material. She is hilarious, blasphemous and ominous. I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things.”

Waits started re-issuing his catalog in 2018, with his 1973 debut record Closing Time, as well as 1974’s Heart of Saturday Night, 1975’s Nighthawks at the Diner, 1976’s Small Change, 1977’s Foreign Affairs, 1978’s Blue Valentine, and 1980’s Heartattack & Vine.

Listen to Waits’s London performance of “All The World Is Green” above and “Fish And Bird” below.