Month: August 2022

We’re in the off-season of Jeopardy! as the calendar rolls over to August, but it’s clear that there’s a lot of new syndicated trivia goodness coming for fans in the fall. The show’s forthcoming Season 39 has its two hosts locked in, and as we learned this week there’s a lot of new content coming in the months ahead.

Even the reruns are a bit different this August. As executive producer Michael Davies detailed in a blog post in late July, the show’s producers hand-picked six weeks worth of episodes that will tease a lot of the content coming in the new season. More importantly, we also learned a rough hosting schedule now that Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik are firmly locked in to co-host the show. Starting with Jennings hosting most episodes through the rest of the year, including a new tournament altogether:

Ken will kick off the season in September, host the inaugural Second Chance competition and the heavily anticipated Tournament of Champions featuring Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, Mattea Roach, Ryan Long, and many, many more. His initial hosting run will take us through December. In the meantime, Mayim will host Celebrity Jeopardy! on ABC in primetime. When she takes over from Ken in January, the current plan is to have her host a couple of new tournaments as well as the Jeopardy! National College Championship and as many weeks as she can manage with her other primetime commitment to “Call Me Kat.” We know you value consistency, so we will not flip flop the hosts constantly and will keep you informed about the hosting schedule.

Ahead of the Tournament of Champions, the show will also put on a Second Chance Tournament featuring a group of 18 strong players who will get another shot at glory. The full list of contestants was revealed on Monday, as was the fact that the winner of that tournament gets a bid in the Tournament of Champions itself.

And as revealed on the show’s new podcast, Inside Jeopardy, the ToC will have a slightly tweaked format, likely starting with that automatic bid for the Second Chance Tourney winner. That podcast is likely to have loads of little details about the show and taping, which starts this week. No real offseason for syndicated game show trivia anymore, is there?

(Via Jeopardy.com)

As the MLB trade deadline approached, all eyes in the baseball world were on the future of Juan Soto. The Nationals superstar outfielder had turned down an extension offer prior to the All-Star break and when Washington wasn’t willing to make a new offer, they put him on the trade market and fielded offers from teams around the league.

While it took longer than expected, the Nationals finally found a deal they liked as the San Diego Padres continue to go all-in on their young, talented core, sending three of their top 14 prospects (per MLB.com’s prospect rankings) to Washington in the deal, along with three other players, per Jeff Passan and Jon Morosi.

Hassell and Wood are the Nos. 1 and 3 prospects in the Padres farm system, as the Nats get a pair of talented young outfielders and seriously bolster their farm system in the process. On the Padres side, they’re fine sending two of their top prospects out for the uber-talented Soto, as they are looking to battle the Dodgers for NL West supremacy for the long haul (after also trading for star closer Josh Hader from the Brewers), with Soto joining Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. (currently rehabbing a wrist fracture) in what will be one of the most fun, young trios in all of baseball.

You don’t often think of local politics when you think of rappers but in Atlanta, it seems there’s a growing political class consisting almost entirely of hip-hop artists who like to get involved by popping up at city council meetings and the like. During one such meeting on Monday this week (August 1), 2 Chainz and Killer Mike spoke out against a controversial new ordinance that they believe could have potentially crippling effects on small businesses in the area — including their own (2 Chainz owns a pair of restaurants; Mike has a chain of barbershops, among other interests).

In May, Atlanta’s city council introduced an amendment to current nuisance ordinances that allows the city to close a business deemed a nuisance by a municipal court twice in 24 months. That’s a lot of leeway — especially when business owners are being held accountable for incidents that occur outside their businesses and outside of their control. The amendment is ostensibly aimed at reducing violent crime around the city but owners like 2 Chainz and Mike are concerned it could be used to target Black-owned nightlife establishments, which would eventually be overtaken by franchises, according to Rolling Stone.

As Killer Mike put it during the meeting, “As Atlanta grows, corporations are going to be coming into here. Somebody is gonna have a nightlife in the convention city.” He noted that this could result in a choice between “the owners of Hard Rock [Cafe] or the owners of Hooters or the owners of a W Hotel, or it’s gonna be the little people that went to Frederick Douglas [high school]… and Southwest DeKalb, and schools like that” — in other words, locals. “We will not be electing council people from here, we will not be growing businesses from here. Because it will all be turned over to corporations… Are we going to keep Atlanta a place where local people can grow and thrive here?”

2 Chainz also spoke up, saying, “I’m very blessed, and I also like to be a blessing to others, and that’s what my businesses have allowed me to do. They need to retract some of the things they have on the ordinance. And I think crime is up everywhere, not just in Atlanta.” He’s right; crime is up around the country. It’s also still down from pre-pandemic levels, although that could change because of record inflation, a rising wave of evictions (after protections were removed by the federal government), and other crime-prevention protections expiring or losing funding (in favor of raising police budgets which… don’t prevent crime).

Even Young Thug’s father, Jeffrey Williams Sr., spoke up on behalf of businesses in place of his son (who is currently incarcerated because he rapped about his label, which supposedly has the same name as a gang). “If a crime happens by city hall,” he asked, “Was it city hall that caused it? You’re trying to hold artists responsible for the crime that’s in the city. Now you’re trying to point the finger at the nightlife to be part of the crime in the city.”

Despite the ability to have two-factor authentication and all manner of other safety protocols, we still have famous people getting their Twitter accounts hacked so the hackers can try to scam their many followers out of some money.

Sometimes this happens in the world of sports media — ask Jeff Passan and Tim Bontemps, who have both had their Twitter accounts hacked to shill NFTs and/or PlayStations — but on Monday night it happened to Lakers owner Jeanie Buss, whose account started offering up PS5’s under the guise of selling them for charity (and offering to fly someone out for lunch with the “Lakers family.”)

In a shocking turn of events, the owner of the Lakers was not actually auctioning off PlayStations via DM on Twitter and instead this was a big scam, but it apparently succeeded in at least getting a few gullible souls to respond because on Tuesday morning the Lakers official Twitter account had to release a statement from Buss to not interact with her account until she got control of it back.

I think a good general rule of thumb is to not try to buy video game consoles from any Twitter account, much less a famous person who suddenly is tweeting out an image of a PS5 box sitting on the floor of a house or apartment that looks in no way like where a billionaire NBA team owner would live. However, it’s important to state these things directly and hopefully Jeanie gets her account back soon so she can go back to firing off cryptic tweets about loyalty and stirring up rumors that way.

Kevin Smith never thought that he’s see the age of 52. In 2018, he suffered an enormous heart attack, and since that time, he’s committed to clean eating (very little eating at all, actually) and fitness habits galore. The director will talk up a storm (he even told us, “I have to be able to prove to myself that I’m not an animal”) about his hiking and fasting regime, and here we are with Kevin Smith celebrating his birthday.

And he’s sharing some wisdom that might seem like a small thing, but it’s useful wisdom. “Today is my 52nd birthday!” the Clerks III director tweeted. “The first photo of me & my sister Virginia was taken on my 14th birthday back in 1984 (when @cabriniuniv was still just a college). Pic 2 is of me walking in my hometown yesterday. In a half century, I’ve learned exactly one thing: Sunglasses work.”

Sunglasses do work. You gotta protect the eyes, you gotta look cool, and you gotta avoid those vampire headaches. Not that Kevin Smith is a vampire, although no one ever proved that he wasn’t one.

In all seriousness, Kevin Smith is still cranking away in the movie and TV realms, years after his life was in serious jeopardy. Now if we could only convince him to delete the worst tweet in the world. It can’t hurt to ask!

Harry Styles is at a peak in his career, with “As It Was” just leaving the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 after ten total weeks and getting into a tie for the fastest song to ever hit 1 billion Spotify streams. The seeds of all this are back in 2010, though, when Styles auditioned the UK version of The X Factor and eventually got grouped with the rest of his One Direction bandmates.

Styles auditioned solo, though, and now X Factor recently shared previously unreleased footage from the audition. In one unaired moment, Styles and Simon Cowell banter about Styles working in a bakery. The most notable unreleased clip is of styles singing a brief snippet of Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister.” Cowell wasn’t particularly satisfied with that, so he asked Styles to sing something a capella. Styles then launched into a rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” a performance that was aired on the original X Factor episode.

Meanwhile, 2022 has been great for Styles. Along with the aforementioned accolades, Harry’s House was 2022’s first album to go Platinum, it’s the year’s best-selling album on vinyl so far, and “As It Was” was the year’s first Platinum single.

Check out Styles’ extended X Factor audition above.

A woman claiming to be Nicki Minaj‘s former assistant has made some wild accusations against the rapper. The person, who goes by Kate Miller on Instagram, claims to work for Republic Records, and took to Instagram Stories yeserday to air out alleged secrets. Among said secrets were the existence of an alleged sex tape with her labelmates Drake and Lil Wayne, Minaj being a hypocrite in regards to slamming drug use, and her owing over $173 million to the IRS.

These bits of gossip were shared hundreds of thousands of times yesterday, despite seeming rather farfetched and non-credible. Several fans theorized that the Instagram account belongs to a fan of a rival rapper posing as a Republic Records employee.

Minaj took to Instagram, immediately dismissing the rumors, also adding that she believes this comes from a stan of a rival.

“I am mind blown that people are this f*cking dumb,” said Minaj. “That people are really believing that I got somebody that work for me and now they spilling tea. Chile. But it’s not even that; it’s the tea that sounds so f*king dumb, and for a person to believe it, you would have to be dumb. It’s clearly a kid. Do you know how much money you have to make to owe that amount of money to the IRS? … Like, come on. What? Get off of my sweet Trinidadian p*ssy. I really need y’all to either get a job, invest in yourself and your future.”

Upon further research, we verified that a woman named Kate Miller does, in fact, work at Republic Records (per a LinkedIn page). However, this woman was the senior vice president of visual content at the label, and most likely has never worked as an assistant to Minaj.

Social media was designed to bring people together but sometimes it does so in unconventional, unexpected, and unintentional ways. For instance, there probably isn’t much overlap between fans of independent Namibian rapper Lioness and those of the English women’s football (fine, soccer) team, the Lionesses, but many of the latter are learning about the former as they seek to congratulate the English team for their recent EUFA European Championship win. Quick recap: on Sunday, England — who hosted this year’s tournament in Wembley — won 2-1 over Germany in front of a home crowd of more than 87,000 proud crumpet munchers.

Poor Lioness, though, has been fielding many of those congratulatory tweets as fans mistake her account (@LionessOfficial) for the English women’s teams account (@Lionesses). To be fair, plenty of those are probably from people typing too fast as Twitter auto-populates the account name after the @ sign, but either way, as Lioness herself puts it: “My Mentions Are A Mess.”

A quick search reveals this to be true, as plenty of accounts, perhaps in a rather un-English display of exuberance and emotion, tagged the wrong account. However, the rapper seems to have taken all this in stride, and even used the error as a promotional opportunity, reposting a video of a 2021 promo she recorded for the Barclays Women’s Super League, joking, “Maybe You’ll All Take This More Seriously Now.”

She’s not the first rapper to deal with this problem, and she probably won’t be the last. In 2017, Compton rapper Buddy started getting tagged in photos of people’s pets after finally changing his Twitter handle to his professional name, and arguably, Burna Boy’s stateside popularity was sparked by fans discovering his 2018 song “Ye” while trying to stream Kanye West’s delayed album of the same name. Let that be a lesson, I guess; when selecting a stage name these days, it’ll apparently help to consider how likely you are to be confused for someone else.

Kevin Costner is ready to hop in the saddle for Liz Cheney. The Yellowstone star offered his endorsement via T-shirt while filming the powerhouse western series. In a photo shared by the Republican congresswoman on Twitter, Costner can be seen wearing “I’m For Liz Cheney” shirt ahead of her Wyoming primary later in the month. Cheney captioned the photo, “Real men put country over party,” a nod to Costner’s history of predominantly supporting Democratic candidates. Although, for the record, Costner considers himself an independent.

Unfortunately, Costner’s endorsement may not save Cheney’s re-election campaign. Thanks to her participation on the January 6 committee, she is trailing behind MAGA candidate Harriet Hageman who is one of the few candidates that Donald Trump’s endorsement is actually helping. Despite the January 6 hearings dropping bombshell after bombshell as it investigates the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol building, the proceedings have made Cheney a pariah in Republican circles, and during a recent poll, she was 20 points behind Hageman.

That said, Yellowstone has been an absolute powerhouse for the Paramount Network. The series has drawn in massive ratings despite airing on a traditional broadcast instead of streaming. Considering the show has been a huge hit with conservative viewers, Costner’s endorsement could give Cheney a boost, but probably not enough to sway Republican voters in Wyoming who are apparently still deeply loyal to Donald Trump.

(Via Liz Cheney on Twitter)

Ted Cruz would rather pick fights with fuzzy muppets than provide assistance to veterans who have been exposed to toxic pit burns. Speaking of toxic burns: Stephen Colbert had some of those for the creepy Texas senator on The Late Show.

“I’m going to start by saying, I’ve been making the political jokey make-them-ups for over 20 years now and I’ve never seen anything so baldly cynical and pointlessly malicious” as what the libs-owning GOP is doing to the PACT Act, an usually serious Colbert said. “If we’re going to go to war, we have to take care of the warriors — except that due to an administrative issue, the Senate had to re-vote on the bill, and this time, the bill was blocked because 25 Republican senators flipped their votes.” He flipped them in return.

Colbert then turned his attention on Cruz, who he called a “butthole all dressed up for his prostate exam.” The senator was caught on camera giving a pathetic fist bump to Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) after blocking the bill. “I imagine there’s some veterans out there who would also like to bump Ted Cruz… with their fists,” Colbert cracked.

You can watch The Late Show with Stephen Colbert clip above.