Month: April 2023

When Michael Todd started his freshman year at MLK prep school in Memphis, Tennessee two years ago, he only had one outfit to wear to school. High school kids can be incredibly cruel and Michael was mocked for three weeks for wearing the same clothes every day.

“I really don’t have clothes at home,” he told KTVI. “My mom can’t buy clothes for me because I’m growing too fast.”

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Kristopher Graham, a football player at MLK Prep, thought the bullying had gone too far and wanted to do something to help. “When I saw people laugh at him and bully him, I felt like I needed to do something,” Kristopher said. He texted his friend Antwan Garrett asking for help.

The next day, Michael was taken out of third period and when he stepped out of the classroom he was approached by Kristopher and Antwan. He froze with nervousness when he saw the two football players stopped him by the lockers.

Football players give student clothes

“I want to apologize to you for laughing at you and I want to give you something to make it up,” Kristopher told Michael. The football players handed Michael a gift, bags full of shirts, shorts, and shoes.

Michael couldn’t believe the football players’ kindness.

“I’ve been bullied my entire life.” But getting the gift was “awesome,” he said according to USA Today. “The best day of my entire life, basically.”

Video of the gift exchange went viral and has been seen millions of times. A few weeks later, the three teenagers were invited to appear on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” where they were greeted by Will Smith who gave them $10,000 each.

Antwan plans to use the money for trade school to become a diesel engine mechanic and Kristopher wants to invest his portion.

Antwan helped Michael because he understood what he was going through.

“We weren’t expecting the video to go viral. We just wanted to make a change,” Antwan said according to Commercial Appeal. “I know how it feel not to have nothin’. I don’t have much, but it made me feel better by seeing somebody else have. I haven’t had like the best of life. Everybody struggles.”

“My life has changed from sleeping in a house without no lights. With what is going on the outside affected me in school,” Antwan added. “I didn’t want to be in school. I wanted to help Michael and make him happy and it made me happy.”

The good deed was also commemorated by the Memphis City Council who honored the teens with a resolution and a round of applause.

Kristopher and Antwan are wonderful examples of what can happen when teens are taught that they have a responsibility to one another. While countless kids mocked Michael for something well beyond his control, they saw his plight as an opportunity to drastically change his life by taking action.

Just imagine if everyone saw others’ misfortune as an opportunity to help instead of judge.

This article originally appeared on 07.10.21

We’ve all been there. Standing in line to be seated at a fairly busy restaurant while your stomach growls in protest. But when two women left a concert August 22 in search of food, they had no idea they’d find themselves taking orders and cooking food. Sylvia Arrendondo and her mother Idalia Merkel went to a local Denny’s in Texas and were seated by another customer before realizing the restaurant was extremely short-staffed. Instead of taking their business elsewhere, they decided to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

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Arrendondo wrote about the unique experience on her Facebook page where she explained that only two people were working. One was serving tables and the other was the cook. As for the man that was acting as host, seating new guests, he had no idea what he was doing because he didn’t work there. He told Arrendondo and Merkel that his wife used to work at Denny’s so she started helping to serve tables and he decided to help get people seated.

The service industry has been hit hard by the pandemic and the subsequent “great resignation.” Complaints about low wages, poor management and rude customers that abuse staff members are just a few of the reasons cited by people who have left the industry. It may be surprising for some to learn that the federal minimum wage for tipped employees like servers and bussers is just $2.13 an hour. The rest of the wage is supposed to be made up of tips, which, depending on where you work, may be split at the end of the night between other workers. This act of splitting tips is called “tip pooling” and is calculated by number of hours worked.

Splitting tips after a long day of work dealing with customers who may not have been so kind would understandably make some people upset. But it didn’t take a deep dive on the treatment of restaurant employees for Arrendondo and the other customers who helped out. They saw two seemingly college-aged kids doing their best to keep the place running and they didn’t hesitate to jump in to help, completely unpaid.

When asked why she didn’t just leave, Arrendondo said, “We just looked at each other and it wasn’t even a question. We both knew what we had to do.”

“This was probably the most beautiful act of American unity that I have personally encountered,” Arrendondo told Upworthy. She added that the sole paid server would occasionally start to cry before being comforted by the cook, only to return the favor when he would get overwhelmed.

Talk about community.

These two kids had exhausted all of their resources, including calling their manager multiple times. And instead of customers getting angry, demanding better service or walking away, Arredondo and Merkel stepped up. The kindness of this group of strangers will surely stick with these employees and the people who were involved.

“The strength, courage and integrity by these two workers was beyond admirable. My mom and I have never been so proud and happy to help,” Arrendondo told Upworthy. “After all, we have all been there.”

Eventually after some convincing, the two employees shut the restaurant down and Arrendondo and Merkel went home much more tired than anticipated. Still hungry, but full of gratitude and pride.

This article originally appeared on 08.26.22

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Perhaps the funnest part—in addition to extended stays in exotic locations—residents will have a say in where the vessel goes. “What a typical cruise line might do in one month or three weeks, we will take three to four months to do,” Storylines founder and CEO Alister Punton told CNN Travel, adding that the residents “have opportunities to have input into where the ship goes next.” These “residents choice” days allow those on board to choose the ports of call.

See on Instagram

Is MV Narrative the only residential ship to sail the seven seas? No. The World has offered residential living since 2002, according to The Real Deal. Other lines, like Utopia and Victoria Cruises, also offer an all-inclusive lifestyle.

However, it could be the most eco-friendly. Travel and Leisure noted that the ship will run on clean-burning liquid gas and have a zero-waste farmers market selling local products. “We will definitely be the greenest cruise ship out there,” Punton shared with CNN Travel.

See on Instagram

Travel and Leisure states the MV Narrative’s current listing price range from $1 million to $8 million to own, with a small number of 24-year leases available from $600,000, which works out to around $25,000 per year.

Of course, if you were to forgo any homeownership and chose instead to live the life of a nomad, a lifelong cruise could be an even cheaper and more accessible option. Earlier this year, retired couple Angelyn and Richard Burk made headlines by fulfilling their travel dreams of hopping from ship to ship … all for around $36,000. Yep, less than an average mortgage. It’s no wonder why this is such a popular trend for adventurous folks of retirement age.

This might be because people are attracted to having both adventure and the comfort of home, which Storylines provides. “At the end of a long day discovering a new exotic location, they can come home to friends and familiar surroundings and sleep in their own bed,” Storylines co-founder, Shannon Lee, wrote in an email to Travel and Leisure.

What a time to be alive, when you can travel the world and never leave home.

This article originally appeared on 08.18.22

When parents give their teens the “drug talk,” they hope they listen, but there’s no guarantee. You can talk about taking unknown substances and the dangers that can occur, but what happens when your child thinks they’re testing their boundaries with a “safe” substance? What if they received whatever they’ve ingested from someone they know personally?

What’s safe and what’s not safe isn’t always so cut and dry. Teenagers are known to experiment with boundaries and sometimes that includes drugs and alcohol. Teenagers can easily overdose on illicit substances and some don’t survive. According to the CDC, overdoses among 10 to 19-year-olds increased by 109% from 2019-2021 while deaths involving fentanyls increased by 182%.

Experimentation with edible marijuana left one woman’s 14-year-old daughter hospitalized, and she’s ringing the alarm for other parents to take note.

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“On March 15th, my 14-year-old daughter was not acting like herself. I felt that she needed food and that she needed to get some rest,” Stacy Wylie, founder and CEO of Dope Beauty Cosmetics, explains in a TikTok video. “By March 17th, that Friday, she was completely manic. We decided to take her to the emergency room and she was promptly admitted. She had an admitting blood pressure of 145/99, and her heart beats per minute were 110.”

Wylie shares that after being transferred to another hospital and having more tests run, it was discovered that her daughter ate an edible she received from a friend. The edible was laced with an unknown substance according to Wylie, and while she doesn’t think it was done maliciously, the mom says that her daughter is still in the hospital.

“Physically, they stabilized her, but mentally she was at a very heightened state of psychosis,” Wylie explains.

Drug-induced psychosis can occur when you take too much of a substance or have an adverse reaction to mixing drugs, as well as when a person has an underlying mental health issue, according to American Addiction Centers. When kids are experimenting with drugs, developing psychosis isn’t something that may be on their radar, but Wylie is hoping to use her daughter’s experience to help others.

Watch her plea below:

@dope_chic81

#fyp #prayers #teensupport

Over the past year or so, Netflix took a breather from swiftly greenlighting show renewals, but sometimes, a series hits so fast and hard that the streamer doesn’t hesitate at all. This was the case for the Gabriel Basso-starring spy series, The Night Agent, which Netflix renewed after only one week after the show began streaming. The series bases itself upon the bestselling Matthew Quirk book, and it seems that Netflix has found its own Jack Ryan. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s some romance involved in the story, either.

The show is a hit, to put things mildly. As Deadline reports, The Night Agent racked up over 160 million streaming hours within a few days of release. That’s a third-place debut after Wednesday and Dahmer, and even more impressively, the show is expected to be a Top Fiver (within its first month) on the all-time list of Netflix’s English-speaking shows. The show only grew more popular in its second week due to word of mouth, and before much longer, it should go Top 10 of all time on Netflix:

Since its release, The Night Agent has tallied 385M viewing hours, making it about 120M away from hitting the all-time TV list. Currently the 10th spot is taken by Ginny & Georgia Season 2 with just over half a billion viewing hours.

That’s not too shabby for a series that felt like it landed out of nowhere and without A-list stars. It’s simply a good, old-fashioned bingeable series, and its viewers can already look forward to more.

(Via Deadline)

Like a loyal MAGA Republican, George Santos attended the rally protesting Donald Trump’s arrest in Manhattan on Tuesday where the embattled congressman found himself surrounded by a throng of press. However, what Santos didn’t know is that The Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper was hidden in the crowd, and he used the opportunity to ruthlessly mock Santos’ presence and his laundry list of lies that have plagued his short political career.

“We wanna hear about your volleyball career,” Klepper asked just inches away from Santos’ face. “We wanna hear about the legitimacy you’re bringing to this process.”

You can see video of Klepper heckling Santos below:

While Santos had no trouble blowing off Klepper, the situation went south as he eventually ran from the scene after being pursued by more hecklers and a swarm of people who were being cleared off the street by the NYPD.

At one point, Santos was practically in tears, but at least he can hang his head knowing he did more to support Trump than Ivanka and Melania who were nowhere near the legal fiasco:

Of course, Santos has legal problems of his own. Like Trump, he’s also under investigation for campaign finance violations and accusations of sexual misconduct. The House Ethics Committee is looking into Santos’ shady financial records and a claim from a prospective staffer who Santos allegedly hit on during an interview earlier this year.

(Via Mediaite)

Donald Trump is a self-professed rich guy. Or at least he used to be: On Monday, it was revealed that his wealth took a big hit thanks to the social media ghost town that is Truth Social. Still, in 2016 he could certainly afford to pay off a porn star with whom he had allegedly slept and think nothing of it. But Trump, like others who are (allegedly) obscenely wealthy, is also at heart a cheapskate, so much so that he’s accused of trying to weasel out of making the payment that has turned him into an indicted crook.

On Tuesday, Trump returned to the hometown that hates his guts to be arraigned as the first U.S. president to ever be indicted on criminal charges. He faces 34 felonies. He of course pled not guilty to all of them. Afterwards Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg released a “statement of facts” detailing each of the charges. Buried deep into the document, at number 19, was the allegation that Trump tried to delay the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels till the last possible second, in the hopes he could keep his $130,000.

“The Defendant directed Lawyer A to delay making a payment to Woman 2 as long as possible,” the document reads. “He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.”

Lawyer A is, of course, Michael Cohen, who did jail time for the hush money payment. Woman 2 is Stormy Daniels, who has been very vocal about not enjoying her alleged tryst with the future 45th president. Bragg and team will have to prove this allegation, but one thing seems certain: Trump’s base, even the evangelicals among them, really didn’t give a crap that their favorite president allegedly had it off with a porn star then tried to cover it up.

Trump has denied everything, including the affair, all the while using the indictment to further beg his sometimes cash-strapped supporters for scratch. But unlike in 2016, it seems like this time he really needs it.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year and a half since our lives changed forever when Chris Pratt was named the new voice of Mario. People cried, marriages were ended, and long-time friendships were squashed, all because this non-Italian was soon to be the voice of working-class plumbers everywhere. Pratt seemed to take the hate as fuel and ran with it using his tiny Mario legs. Then we all kinda got over it and accepted it once Anya Taylor-Joy stepped out in her Princess Peach racing outfit.

Now that it’s about to hit theaters, it’s time for the real moment of truth: is The Super Mario Bros. Movie good enough to warrant going out to a movie theater on a random Wednesday night in April in order to see it? It sure seems like people enjoyed it!

Despite the initial casting backlash, early reviews for Mario are pretty favorable, mostly praising the colorful aesthetics. It’s important to remember that, after all, this is coming from the same studio that forced Minions upon us, so not every joke will land with everyone. But it seems like if you are a fan of fun and/or Jack Black, you’ll have a nice time.

Here are some of the early reviews:

Christian Holub, Entertainment Weekly

It’s all quite fun, with a good sense of humor and a consistent computer-animated aesthetic — plus, at 90 minutes including credits, it’s short, sweet, and over before anything can get annoying. But it’s hard to escape the feeling, especially during the aforementioned Rainbow Road sequence, that you would probably be having more fun just playing a game together instead. Grade: B-

Pete Hammond, Deadline:

All of this is immensely likable and loaded with laughs, if not raging wit. Having the likes of Black and Rogen in the voice cast definitely ups the ante of some stabs at subversive humor, and all seem to be enjoying this stint, which definitely is set up for sequels as Mario and Luigi are about to start a new act in their long careers. The CGI animation goes big for bright colors juxtaposed with the ominous Dark Lands, and the film is helped immensely by a zippy and lilting musical score from Brian Tyler.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Mario presides over a digital playground that lifts the spirit to a place of split-second wonder, and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” stays true to that. Its ingenuity is infectious. You don’t have to be a Mario fan to respond to it, but the film is going to remind the millions who are why they call it a joystick.

Allegra Frank, The Daily Beast

Super Mario Bros is a film that takes the Nintendo faithful’s valid concerns into consideration, making up for its weaker spots by exploding the film with immeasurable heart. It may not offer much to turn the gaming-ignorant into full-on converts, but it offers plenty enough for the remaining millions of us. Beautiful visuals and exciting play—what more could a Mario fan really need?

Tom Jorgensen, IGN:

Mario, Luigi, and Peach’s adventure delights with its infectious energy and smart implementations of video game callbacks, and the top-shelf animation renders the Mushroom Kingdom as an Oz-like wonderland that begs to be explored in the inevitable sequels that will follow. The assembled voice cast puts a unique spin on each of their characters, but undercooked emotional arcs don’t get the same attention as the aesthetics, something not helped by a paint-by-numbers plot that bafflingly keeps Mario and Luigi away from each other for half the movie.

Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge,

Watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s impossible not to imagine what it might be like to one day play a game as visually-rich running on hardware that puts current-gen Nintendo Switch to shame. That’s probably (part of) the reason the movie exists. But as big budget commercials for video games and consoles go The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s going to be undefeated for quite some time.

David Sims, The Atlantic:

The narrative provides just the loosest nudges from scene to scene, and the colorful animation renders every set piece with polish. Pratt, an odd choice to play an outsized Italian American stereotype, hardly speaks after the first act of the film once the plot gets consumed by heady action. Black gets to do more as Bowser, singing emotional rock ballads and grousing over romantic rejection with his characteristic dorky rage. But almost every other part of the movie makes clear that the studio wanted the filmmakers to avoid straying too far from the hallowed source material.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie opens on April 5th.

Chris Pratt provided one of the best moments in Parks and Recreation history with his Kim Kardashian “comeback” joke that was sadly relegated to the deleted scenes. It still makes me laugh thinking about it. Drew Barrymore would probably like it, too, based on her reaction to a dirty joke that Pratt told on Tuesday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie star was asked by Barrymore, in character as Mitzy “Not Joan Rivers” Bananamore, to tell a joke that would make her do a spit take. “Did you hear about the Italian chef who died?” he asked. “He pasta way.” Nothing, although Drew cracked a smile when Pratt commented that the game would be easier “if the goal was to get you to swallow.”

Next up: “Why should you always knock on the refrigerator before opening? There might be a salad dressing.” Zero for two — until he added, “… And you don’t want to see the salad’s [bleep].” It’s unclear what the censored word was (although I have a guess!), but it was enough to make Drew spit her water out. “That is my kind of refrigerator!” she exclaimed. “You know what I’m saying?” Not really, but sure! It’s another iconic moment in former Parks and Recreation stars on The Drew Barrymore Show history.

You can watch the clip below.

Despite his hopes to the contrary, and several days obsessing over how his perp walk would look, Donald Trump did not have his mug shot taken during his arrest on Tuesday. However, that hasn’t stopped his campaign from selling t-shirts with a fake mug shot on them.

According to Mediaite, Trump’s campaign has already sent out emails that will allow MAGA supporters to obtain a mug shot t-shirt if they make a generous donation of $47. You can see one of the shirts below:

As for why Trump’s mug shot wasn’t taken, the reason is surprisingly simple: People already know what he looks like. Mug shots are mostly to help the public identify fugitives, but it’s kind of hard to miss a former reality TV star and 45th President of the United States. Plus the spray tan kinda stands out.

Via The New York Times:

Mr. Trump is not considered a significant flight risk, and as he is a former president who hosted a widely popular reality television show after spending decades as a fixture of the tabloids, photographs of him are more than readily available.

Several officials also said there was concern that a mug shot of Mr. Trump, which would be provided to the New York Police Department and other agencies, would be leaked. That would be a violation of law and could prompt an investigation and a political firestorm.

In a way, Trump also made it easy to identify him by selling t-shirts with his freaking face on them. Just look for the guy with the bad hair who claims to be “Not Guilty.”

(Via Mediaite)