Month: November 2022

Aaron Carter, singer and brother of Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter, has reportedly died. TMZ was first to report that police had been called to his address after word of a suspicious death. A source confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that it was Carter himself. He was 38 years old.

Multiple sources told TMZ that Carter had been found dead in his bathtub. There is no evidence of foul play. Photos obtained by TMZ show sheriffs’ cars and paramedics, as well as caution tape, outside his home in Lancaster, California.

Carter got his start opening for his older brother’s band back on their 1997 tour. He enjoyed fame as a solo artist; his debut album, simply titled Aaron Carter, went Gold. His follow-up, Aaron’s Party (Come and Get It), was even more popular, going triple platinum and boasting the singles “I Want Candy,” “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)” and “That’s How I Beat Shaq.” For that album, he opened for Backstreet Boys, again, as well as Britney Spears for her Oops!…I Did It Again tour.

Carter transitioned into rap and also did some acting. He made his Broadway debut in 2001 as part of Seussical the Musical. He came out as bisexual in 2017. Last year, he partook in a celebrity boxing match with Lamar Odom. He’s survived by his son Prince.

(Via THR and TMZ)

Ron DeSantis might be president one day. Maybe not in the wake of the 2024 election, but one day. He’ll almost certainly continue to be Florida’s governor, even if he won’t commit to spending all four years in office. Still, he has a dodgy track record, and a new report by The New York Times about his stint, in his early 20s, as a high school teacher only adds to his infamy.

In the early aughts, at age 23, DeSantis spent a year teaching history and coaching baseball and football at Darlington School, an independent private school in northwest Georgia (which, incidentally, is today represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene). He was a fresh-faced Ivy League graduate, ambitious and arrogant. He made it clear he wasn’t long for the school, destined for greater things — like, say, governor of a state and arch-nemesis of a future former president.

As coach, DeSantis was reportedly helpful and inspirational. As a history teacher, however, he was extremely questionable. Former students, who made him the talk of their 20th reunion, told NYT that they questioned the veracity of the claims he made in class, especially about the Civil War. What’s more, he was allegedly “mean” and “hostile” to some of the school’s Black students. One such student remembers how he treated her:

“Mr. Ron, Mr. DeSantis, was mean to me and hostile toward me,” said Ms. Pompey, who graduated in 2003. “Not aggressively, but passively, because I was Black.”

She recalled Mr. DeSantis teaching Civil War in a way that sounded to her like an attempt to justify slavery.

“Like in history class, he was trying to play devil’s advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people — Black people,” she said. “He was trying to say, ‘It’s not OK to own people, but they had property, businesses.’”

DeSantis’ factually dubious claims about the Civil War — including that every city in the South had burned, prompting one student to point out that her hometown, Savannah, had not — were such that students even made a satirical video about him:

The video, which was reviewed by <em>The Times</em>, includes a short snippet in which a voice purporting to be Mr. DeSantis is heard saying: “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North. …” while a student dozes in class. (A student voiced the role of Mr. DeSantis, because students did not have any actual footage of him, according to a student who helped put it together.)

Unsurprisingly, DeSantis also professed his hardline anti-abortion views in class.

Oh, and he reportedly wasn’t above partying with teens:

Several students recalled that Mr. DeSantis was a frequent presence at parties with the seniors who lived in town. Most spoke about socializing with him on the condition of anonymity because they feared backlash for speaking publicly about it.

“As an 18-year-old, I remember thinking, ‘What are you doing here, dude?’” one former student said.

He would also allegedly attend parties with recent graduates. And he had a terrible haircut.

Cut two decades, and not only is DeSantis a governor and presidential hopeful, but a guy who still bullies students. Sometimes people don’t change.

(Via NYT)

Lord have mercy, check out this punt. The game of the day in the world of college football takes place in Athens, where the third-ranked Georgia Bulldogs are playing host to the top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers in a game with SEC East, SEC, and College Football Playoff implications. There are a ton of exceptional players involved in the game, but the best play of the game — of the season, of the decade, of all time — comes via Bulldog punter Brett Thorson.

The Dawgs found themselves lining up to boot it from their own 24, because going for it on fourth-and-4 from there would have been a bad idea. Thorson lined up to kick it, and the next thing you knew, we had ourselves a 75-yard coffin corner punt that pinned the high-powered Vols offense at their own 1.

It can be easy to get a bit hyperbolic about punts, but in all seriousness, it is dang near impossible to get this bounce and have the ball land where it does. Even his own teammate thought he had to go after it to prevent the ball from going into the end zone! The Dawgs deserved to get points for this, because it was beyond impressive.

The Indiana Pacers have managed to start the 2022-23 NBA season 4-5. While it’s not the most flashy record in the world, it’s respectable for a team that was expected to spend this year competing for ping pong balls in the 2023 NBA Draft Lottery. But unfortunately for the Pacers, one member of the rotation will head to the sideline for the next few weeks.

According to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, second-year guard Chris Duarte suffered a high ankle sprain that is expected to keep him out for the next 4-6 weeks.

Duarte rolled his ankle early on in Indiana’s game against the Miami Heat on Friday night when he landed on Kyle Lowry while trying to contest a layup.

The Pacers took Duarte, an older prospect out of the University of Oregon, with the 13th overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft. While the team struggled last year, Duarte was a bright spot, as he earned All-Rookie Second Team honors and looked like a player the team could build around going forward.

So far this season, Duarte has appeared in all nine games with five of them coming as part of the starting lineup. He’s averaged 8.9 points in 19.7 minutes per game while connecting on 34.2 percent of his attempts from behind the three-point line.

Tennessee football fans are feeling themselves a bit right now. The Volunteers are the No. 1 team in the country in the inaugural College Football Playoff rankings, they knocked off Alabama in one of the games of their year, and starting quarterback Hendon Hooker is one of the favorites to win the Heisman Trophy. It’s quite the rise for a team that was unranked coming into the 2022 college football season, and on Saturday, they have perhaps their steepest test yet, as they travel to Athens to take on the defending champion Georgia Bulldogs.

While the Vols enter the game as substantial underdogs — Georgia is favored by nine points — the vibes surrounding Josh Heupel’s squad are sensational right now. As evidence of how well things are going, here is a Vols fan on College GameDay absolutely housing an entire bottle of yellow mustard.

Despite being someone who loves mustard, I cannot condone eating a whole bottle of French’s. Anyway, if you are wondering why this person did this, it goes beyond “I wanted to be on television.” Earlier this week, Hooker signed French’s first ever NIL deal in the aftermath of the one-year anniversary of a 2021 game against Ole Miss in which a Vols fan threw a bottle of mustard onto the field to protest decisions made by the officials. Or maybe this guy just really likes mustard.

Before Donald Trump was president of the United States, he was just guy on Twitter. His tweets didn’t yet do things like unsettle the world economy. (Nor was he yet an Axl Rose whipping boy.) He was just some bozo with too much time on his hands, tweeting out his dumb thoughts on a public sphere. One of those tweets, from 2012, was about Kate Middleton, who had semi-recently become the Duchess of Cambridge. And it was so crude that it may have permanently pissed off members of the Royal Family.

Newsweek obtained a copy of Christopher Andersen’s forthcoming book The King: The Life of Charles III, and like many tomes about modern day world affairs, it’s got some dirt on the 45th president. Only about six months into her marriage to Prince William, a Danish tabloid published pictures of her on a nude beach during her honeymoon. It created a scandal. Lawsuits were filed. And Trump — a man prone to skeevy thoughts he sometimes makes public — weighed in.

“Kate Middleton is great – but she shouldn’t be sunbathing in the nude – only herself to blame,” Trump tweeted. “Who wouldn’t take Kate’s picture and make lots of money if she does the nude sunbathing thing? Come on Kate!”

Well, members of the Royal family were not amused, especially given Trump’s history of lusting after some of them, as per Newsweek:

The former U.S. president sparked “torrents of profanity” from Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry after he said that Kate Middleton had “only herself to blame” for topless photographs taken without her consent and published in French magazine Closer.

Trump also left Charles “disappointed” after referring to him as the “Prince of Whales,” spelled like the sea mammals, rather than the “Prince of Wales,” author Christopher Andersen wrote in The King: The Life of Charles III. Trump suggesting that he “could have nailed” Princess Diana, if he had wanted to, also “didn’t help.”

Andersen himself elaborated upon Trump’s feeling for Princess Diana:

“It didn’t help that Trump had aggressively pursued Princess Diana after her divorce—overtures that were rebuffed—and claimed later on a radio program that he could have ‘nailed her if I wanted to,’ but only if she passed an HIV test.”

Cut to 2017, when Trump was planning on visiting Britain. The Royals had no forgotten about his previous comments. Princes Charles, William, and Harry reportedly “burned up the phone lines” trying to work behind the scenes to discourage his visit. Trump later cancelled the trip, claiming it was because of some Obama-era real estate deal that made him mad.

Charles seems to have never forgiven Trump. When he was being impeached for the first (of two) times, Charles followed it closely, at one point reportedly remarking, “What a ghastly, awful man.” (Perhaps this will all wind up on The Crown one day.)

Still, at least one of his jokes had a fan. Camilla, now the Queen Consort, reportedly told a friend she “couldn’t stop laughing” at Trump’s “Prince of Whales” line — which, you know, props.

(Via Newsweek)

Matthew Perry has a new memoir out, called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. It’s a bracing account of his struggles with addiction, which very nearly cost him his life. It’s also caused a bit of inadvertent chaos. It also has some more lighthearted dirt about his career, such as how he coaxed Julia Roberts to guest star on Friends.

Speaking of guest stints, the book has another amusing bit about how they got another star to appear on the show. Bruce Willis spent a three-episode arc on the show, playing the father of a student David Schwimmer’s Ross was dating. Willis’ character even wound up hooking up with Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel. Willis won an Emmy for it — his second, after his starmaking stint on Moonlighting. But according to Perry, he only wound up doing it because he lost a bet.

Perry and Willis co-starred in the hit mob comedy The Whole Nine Yards, from the year 2000. The two hit it off, even though they were a touch different in some ways. “Bruce was a partier; I was an addict,” Perry writes. “Bruce has an on-off button. He can party like crazy, then get a script like ‘The Sixth Sense’ and stop the partying and nail the movie sober. He doesn’t have the gene — he’s not an addict.”

The two were able to keep it together and make a crowd-pleasing hit, despite Willis’ pessimism. “Bruce hadn’t been sure the film would work at all, and I’d bet him it would — if he lost, he had to do a guest spot on ‘Friends,’” he recalled. Alas, it was a hit and Willis fulfilled his end of the bargain, which worked out pretty well for him.

Like some of the more lighthearted stories in Perry’s memoir, this one’s tinged with melancholy. “If ‘The Whole Nine Yards’ was the start of my movie stardom, it’s fair to say that ‘The Whole Ten Yards’ was the end,” he wrote.

Perry also recalled spending time with Willis. “Sometimes, at the end of the night, when the sun was just about to come up and everyone else had gone, and the party was over, Bruce and I would just sit and talk,” he wrote. “That’s when I saw the real Bruce Willis — a good-hearted man, a caring man, selfless. A wonderful parent. And a wonderful actor. And most important, a good guy.

“And if he wanted me to be, I would be his friend for life,” added Perry. “But as is the way with so many of these things, our paths rarely crossed after that.”

(Via Insider)

It’s just over a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter. How’s it going? Well, soon as he grabbed the reins, there was a massive uptick in racial and anti-Semitic slurs. He’s pissed off Stephen King and the Twitter user known as “@Catturd2.” There have been massive, possibly illegal layoffs. And advertisers have been fleeing. The last one may be the thing that really bugs Musk, as advertisers are the backbone of Twitter’s budget. But don’t worry, because it appears Musk has an outside-the-box solution on how to lure them back.

On Friday, Musk blamed the advertiser exodus not on controversial far right extremists or his own erratic behavior but on “activist groups” he claimed were “pressuring advertisers” to jump ship. His service’s own moderation team flagged that post, adding context that contradicts that claim. But he found a sympathetic ear from conservative operative Mike Davis, who gave him some (dubious) advice: “Name and shame the advertisers who are succumbing to the advertiser boycotts. So we can counter-boycott them.”

Musk, though, seemed to like the idea, writing, “A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.”

To sum up, Musk’s plan to lure back advertisers — and attract new ones — is to agree with a MAGA head to threaten them with boycotts if they don’t return.

Mind you, Musk hadn’t announced this was his game plan. Earlier in the day, he seemed to be trying to mollify advertisers’ concerns over Twitter turning into a wild west of bigoted trolls. “Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged,” he wrote. “In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.”

Then again, by the end of the day he was trolling the many critics of his plan to charge for blue checkmarks.

That included Dan Rather.

We are truly awash in Princess Dianas these days. Kristen Stewart received an Oscar nod for her role in the surrealist Spencer, and Emma Corrin won an Emmy for her wide-eyed Di in Season 4 of The Crown. Now Elizabeth Debicki grabs the baton and gives us the most tragic incarnation yet: a Diana who has seen some sh*t and who we know will go through more of it. The result is fascinating watch that will keep attracting those people who don’t care about the Royal family but can’t resist The Crown. Get ready, for there will be real-life fallout.

It’s no wonder, then, that King Charles III is said to be very concerned about this season. Specifically, he’s said to be worried about how awful it makes his princely acts look. In response to backlash from Royal supporters, Netflix has been covering their butts by tacking on a “fictional dramatization” label to their most recent trailer. However, Charles probably should be worried because there’s not a single redeemable thing that Charles, the character, does this season.

Yes, he’s now somehow worse (while portrayed by Dominic West) than the newlywed who threw a horrific, days-long tantrum because his wife dared to be likable throughout their Australian tour. A decade or so on, Charles not only treats his wife like garbage but refuses to stop acting like ^^ this ^^ with Camilla. Yes, the notorious leaked phone call where he wistfully wishes that he was a tampon does happen. As well, Charles isn’t so wonderful regarding his mother. He wildly maneuvers in an attempt to “king” himself in the mid-1990s. As we now know, he doesn’t get there until 2022.

On another level, it’s really something that this season is landing right now, not too long after Diana’s younger son, Harry the “spare,” has left the building after watching his own wife (Meghan Markle) allegedly be treated horribly by this same family.

So in a way, this season is “ladies’ night,” although it’s not a celebration full of free drinks at the bar. It’s more of an observation of how Diana survives within this male-crafted institution. Ironically, those ideals are enforced by Queen Elizabeth (now played by Imelda Staunton), who’s all too keen to make a couple stay together despite being in agony, even after she fully realizes that her own marriage ain’t all that. Recent history even tells us that Liz’s husband, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce), kept a “companion” up until his death at age 99. That would be Penny Knatchbull, and she appears in this season as portrayed by Natascha McElhone. It’s uncomfortable to witness.

If one adds Diana’s misery and Elizabeth’s sudden (and self-quieted) revelations to Princess Margaret’s ongoing unhappiness (after Elizabeth refused to let her marry Peter Townsend back in the early days of this show), man, it’s nuts. All three women were believed to sit in positions of power, but the gilded cage adage rings all too true. Naturally, it’s difficult to feel too bad for Liz, given her status as puppet master. She’s lost much of her likability from previous seasons. This grows all too clear with an on-screen callback to Claire Foy’s Queen christening of the Britannia yacht as a symbol of a mighty nation; soon after, Imelda’s version stomps her feet to demand Britannia’s lavish renovations on the struggling taxpayer’s dime.

Back to Di, though. There’s a moment early in this season when she hears a click on her phone, and then, you know it’s on. She’s been tightly controlled ever since finding out about Charles’ affair on the eve before their wedding, back when this show defecated all over the fairy tale. Well, those phone clicks keep happening, and Diana’s eventually motivated to expose her mistreatment. It’s a stunning but bittersweet development, given that she’s threatened with exile and separation from her sons. We also know that Diana’s Royal exit brought an unintended death sentence to come.

Still, it’s a remarkable sight to see a reimagining of how Diana took the gloves off. It’s quite something to watch her covert participation in Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story biography and her progression toward the BBC interview that paved the way for her divorce. Even though those who followed Diana’s place in history are aware that these things happened, watching it go down onscreen brings the show to a crescendo. In doing so, Diana exposed cracks in the Windsor dynasty.

Those cracks still haven’t healed, and in 2022, Charles is acting a little bit assy as king. He may even go through more prime ministers than his mother did. And with Season 5, The Crown fleshes out a 1990s situation that largely reflects what’s still going on with the Royals. Yes, King Charles III will officially be coronated next spring, but all is not well in a time when the public is (once again) questioning why they fund a monarchy.

With all of that said, a somewhat sad season still offers enough soapy delight for an entertaining watch. There’s literally a raging inferno and a raging prince, and at the center of it all, Diana decides that she will be in charge of her public image. Dodi Fayed is hanging around, too, so more of him will come in Season 6. For now, we gain a sense of who Diana was behind her vulnerable exterior. Her story didn’t last much longer, but at least she told this part of it in the way that she wanted.

Netflix’s The Crown returns on November 9.

Rudy Gobert is extremely good at a whole lot of things on a basketball court. One weak spot for the gigantic Frenchman, however, is connecting on shots from behind the three-point line — Gobert entered the Minnesota Timberwolves’ game on Friday night against the Milwaukee Bucks 0-for-12 from deep in his NBA career, as he’s usually more comfortable scoring near the rim.

But the opportunity presented itself to let one fly against the Bucks, with Gobert getting the cleanest look in the world during the third quarter of action. Gobert found himself at the very top of the key with absolutely no one near him, and if there was ever a time to see the ball go through the rim from deep for the first time in your decorated NBA career, this was it.

Unfortunately, it did not look great out of Gobert’s hand, and it eventually hit the ground without clipping the rim first.

Gobert even makes a face as if to say he understood this could have gone much, much better. Anyway, the only way to make a three is to keep shooting threes, so perhaps we’ll see Gobert continue to get up jumpers so he can knock down that elusive first three of his career. Or maybe he’ll keep hanging out by the rim and continue to be one of the best rebounders and lob threats in the world.