Month: September 2023

Most of us who live in the U.S. are used to looking out a window or walking out our front door and seeing squirrels. The cute, fluffy-tailed rodents often appear perfectly pettable, but they generally scamper away when humans get too close.

That is not the case for TikTok creator Derrick Downey Jr., however, as he has not only befriended his neighborhood squirrels but goes all out to help them live their best squirrel lives.

Downey shared a video in May of 2022 in which he chats with a couple of squirrels on his porch while feeding them and offering them water. That video received over 26 million views and kicked off a whole series of videos showcasing the adorable antics of Richard, Maxine, Hector, Consuela, Norma (may she rest in peace), and Hood Rat Raymond. He’s built Richard a house, rescued Maxine’s babies, mourned Norma’s transition (to wherever squirrels go when they die) and more.

People can’t get enough, and who can blame them? Squirrels are the best (when they’re not tearing up your patio furniture and stealing cotton for their nest, as Downey has experienced.)

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Here’s how it all started:

@derrickdowneyjr

#fyp

It’s fun to see how he has built up trust with his squirrel friends. He even shared a video showing some of the steps it took to get them to eat from his hand.

@derrickdowneyjr

Building trust takes patience 🐿❤️ Maxine and I working on a building a stronger bond, she’s more at ease when Richard is around but I would day today was a success. #foryoupage #squirrelsoftiktok #squirreltok #trustissues #derrickdowneyjr

Part of what people love about Downey’s videos is the way he talks to the squirrels—it almost feels like therapy. As one commenter wrote, “I think I just healed my inner child.” Others compare Downey to a real-life Disney princess.

All of his patience and trust-building have paid off. Watch how Maxine will now jump right onto him for a snack.

@derrickdowneyjr

Jump #pets #squirrel #foryoupage

Downey built an elaborate home on his balcony for Richard and Maxine, which was even showcased in Architectural Digest. He decorates it seasonally, which is hilarious. They even have furniture, a fireplace and a television. Check this out:

@derrickdowneyjr

Maxine never invite me to watch TV with her #cocomelon #fyp

But it’s not all fun and games for Downey’s squirrel friends. When some trees were cut down in front of his apartment, a nest of squirrel babies was displaced. The tree trimmers put the babies in another tree, but Downey was afraid dogs could get to them where they put them. He took their nest inside, made sure they were warm and comfortable and tried to feed them.

Then he found out that they were actually Maxine’s babies! Watch Mama Maxine collect her young ‘uns and take them to a new nest she made.

@derrickdowneyjr

Rescuing these baby squirrels and reuniting them with mama Maxine, was the greatest feeling ever! 🐿️ #babysquirrel #squirrels #squirrelsoftiktok #wildlife #wildliferescue #animallover #nature #foryou

It’s delightful and strangely addicting to follow the goings-on of Downey’s squirrel friends and watch him interact with them. Follow @derrickdowneyjr on TikTok for more.

When we think about the era of American slavery, many of us tend to think of it as the far distant past. While slavery doesn’t exist as a formal institution today, there are people living who knew formerly enslaved black Americans first-hand. In the wide arc of history, the legal enslavement of people on U.S. soil is a recent occurrence—so recent, in fact, that we have voice recordings of interviews with people who lived it.

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Many of us have read written accounts of enslavement, from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography to some of the 2,300 first-person accounts housed in the Library of Congress. But how many of us have heard the actual voices of people who were enslaved telling their own stories?

ABC News’ Nightline with Ted Koppel aired a segment in 1999 in which we can hear the first-person accounts of people who had been enslaved taken from interviews conducted in the 1930s and 40s (also housed in the Library of Congress). They include the voice of a man named Fountain Hughes, who was born into slavery in 1848 and whose grandfather had “belonged to” Thomas Jefferson.

As Koppel says in the segment, “The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak.”

Indeed, hearing formerly enslaved people share their experiences of being bought and sold like cattle, sleeping on bare pallets, and witnessing whippings for insubordination is a heartbreaking reminder of how close we are to this ugly chapter of our history. The segment is well worth ten minutes to watch:

This article originally appeared on 03.09.20

At 1:30 am on a Monday morning in February, an AMBER Alert went out in southern Louisiana about a missing 10-year-old girl from New Iberia. It was believed she had been kidnapped and driven away in a 2012 silver Nissan Altima.

A few hours later at 7 am, Dion Merrick and Brandon Antoine, sanitation workers for Pelican Waste, were on their daily route when they noticed a vehicle that fit the description in the alert.

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The sanitation workers thought it was suspicious that a silver sedan was parked alone in a field in St. Martin Parish.

“Something told me, like just look, I said what is that car doing in that field like that? What the car doing? Guess what, that’s the dude with the little girl,” Merrick said in a Facebook Live video. “That’s God.”

The video has been seen over 1.5 million times since it was posted on Monday morning.

To prevent the possible kidnapper from escaping, they parked the large sanitation truck the wrong way on the highway to “Make sure they couldn’t get out,” Merrick said. Then, they called 911.

When police arrived they arrested Michael R. Sereal, the man whose car was mentioned in the AMBER Alert. The police were also able to safely recover the girl who appeared unharmed. She was later taken to the hospital to be evaluated by medical personnel.

The Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department’s online sex offender registry has a Michael Roy Sereal but authorities wouldn’t confirm it’s the same man.

The young girls’ family got in touch with the two men who saved her and have shown amazing gratitude. “I’m just so happy and blessed that I have actually seen the car and we actually responded like we were supposed to respond,” Merrick told KHOU.

Merrick hopes that his actions will inspire others to be proactive as well. “Don’t be scared if you see something. If you know something is wrong, report it,” Merrick said. “Call authorities because it could save someone’s life.”

The two men were applauded by the St. John Parish’s Sheriff, who offered to buy them lunch.

“I was just doing my job man. I was just doing my job and actually came across somebody who needed help,” Merrick said. “Got me tearing up.”

The AMBER Alert system was created in 1996 after nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered while riding her bike in Texas. Since its inception, nearly seven in 10 AMBER alert cases have resulted in children being successfully reunited with their parents.

In 17% of the cases, the child’s recovery is a direct result of the alert.

As of December 2020, 1,029 children rescued specifically because of the system.

This article originally appeared on 02.09.21

These days, we could all use something to smile about, and few things do a better job at it than watching actor Christopher Walken dance.

A few years back, some genius at HuffPo Entertainment put together a clip featuring Walken dancing in 50 of his films, and it was taken down. But it re-emerged in 2014 and the world has been a better place for it.

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Walken became famous as a serious actor after his breakout roles in “Annie Hall” (1977) and “The Deer Hunter” (1978) so people were pretty shocked in 1981 when he tap-danced in Steve Martin’s “Pennies from Heaven.”

But Walken actually started his career in entertainment as a dancer. He took his first dance lessons at the age of three. “It was very typical for people—and I mean working-class people—to send their kids to dancing school,” he told Interview Magazine. “You’d learn ballet, tap, acrobatics, usually you’d even learn to sing a song,” he later explained to Interview magazine.

As a child, he also studied tap dance and toured in musicals. He even danced with a young Liza Minelli. “I’d been around dancers my whole life, having watched my parents make musicals at MGM, and Chris reminded me of so many of the dancers I knew growing up,” Minelli said according to Entertainment Weekly. “He’s talented in every way.”

Craig Zadan, Executive Producer of “Peter Pan Live!,” agrees with Minelli. “I think that if he had been around in the heyday of MGM, he would have been a big star of musicals on film,” he told Entertainment Weekly.

His dance moves were put center stage in 2001 in Spike Jonze’s video for Fatboy Slim’s song “Weapon of Choice.” Walken says he did it because one day he’ll be too old to cut a rug. “You think, ‘Well, do it now!’ You know, you get too decrepit to dance,” he told Entertainment Weekly.

This article originally appeared on 02.15.22

Nicki Minaj doesn’t seem to be relenting from her alleged beef with Cardi B and Offset. Earlier this past week, a video of her husband, Kenneth Petty, surfaced on the web, in which he appears to be making threats to Offset, standing outside of a hotel where he and Cardi were said to be staying.

After the video surfaced, Minaj doubled down, sharing a snippet of new music on Twitter, on which, she raps, “I can’t be playin’…I married a G/ I got some…that do what I say, if I tell ’em to shoot, they pull up on the three.”

DJ Vlad later slammed Minaj, taking to Twitter to blast this move.

“Nicki Minaj’s husband is on house arrest for threatening Offset,” Vlad said. “Right after that, she previews a song on IG saying she got killers who will pull up and do what she say. This was the same Nicki who threatened to send her husband to Akademiks’ house for his comments about her.”

Last night (September 22), Minaj took to her Instagram livestream, in which she is seen in a studio ahead of an airing of her Queen Radio Amp show. She is surrounded by people who seem to be backing her up. Minaj doesn’t directly address Vlad’s comments, and issued a warning, saying, “It’s a difference between making calls and calling the shots” throughout the stream.

Neither Cardi B nor Offset appear to have responded to this particular line.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

One idea that’s been thrown around since the beginning of the Damian Lillard trade sweepstakes is for a third or fourth team to get pulled into talks to help facilitate a deal. At the start of the saga, that theoretically meant finding a third team for Tyler Herro, as Lillard wants to go to the Miami Heat and Herro, the presumed centerpiece in a deal, doesn’t really fit on Portland’s roster.

But with trade talks apparently heating back up in recent days and the Heat reportedly not being involved in them (for now), there are now questions about what a Lillard trade could look like if another team gets called up. And according to Jake Fischer of Yahoo Sports, there are multi-team deals once again on the table, with the Blazers having their eye on one player in particular.

Additionally, the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz have materialized as peripheral teams that could factor into larger deals that help facilitate Lillard’s departure from the Blazers.

Assembling such a blockbuster requires the summation of many parts. One piece of the developing Lillard negotiations that seems clear: Portland has strongly considered acquiring Phoenix Suns center Deandre Ayton as part of a multiteam deal for Lillard, league sources confirmed to Yahoo Sports.

It’s not hard to see why the Blazers would be interested in a guy like Ayton, who is still only 25 and fits really well next to their young core of guards. While his deal is more expensive and over the same number of years as their current center, Jusuf Nurkic, he fits more snugly onto their timeline, while Fisher noted that Nurkic could potentially head down the Phoenix if a deal like this were to come to fruition.

Last week Howard Stern, a man who rose to fame by being cheerfully risqué, came out as “woke, motherf*cker.” It’s not that surprising; the onetime shock jock has mellowed with age, although as of last year he was still technically identifying as conservative. He’s has, though, come out against his former frequent guest, Donald Trump. Now Trump is firing back, in the middle of the night, as one does.

As caught by Mediaite, the former president went on a late-night rager, taking to his rinky-dink Twitter clone around 2am EST to tell the world what he thinks about the progressive Stern.

“The real Howard Stern is a weak, pathetic, and disloyal guy, who lost his friends and MUCH of his audience,” Trump posted. “Until just recently, I haven’t heard his name mentioned in years. I did his show many times in the good old days, and then he went Woke, and nobody cares about him any longer. I don’t know what they (really!) pay him, but it shouldn’t be much. His influence is gone, and without that, he’s got NOTHING – Just a broken weirdo, unattractive both inside and out, trying like hell to be relevant!”

During his broadcast, Stern said he took complaints that he’d gone “woke” as a “compliment.”

“To me the opposite of woke, is being asleep,” he said. “And if woke means I can’t get behind Trump, which is what I think it means, or that I support people who want to be transgender or I’m for the vaccine, dude call me woke as you f*cking want.”

Stern also boasted about getting the new vaccine soon as it was available, saying, “F*cking science. This f*cking country is so great.”

Howard Stern wasn’t the only thing Trump was angry about in the middle of the night on a Friday. He also railed against his successor’s handling of the United Auto Workers strike and electric cars and China and, well, see for yourself:

Crooked Joe Biden had no intention of going to visit the United Autoworkers, until I announced that I would be heading to Michigan to be with them, & help then out. Actually, Crooked Joe sold them down the river with his ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax. This wasn’t Biden’s idea, he can’t put two sentences together. It was the idea of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, & Communists who control him and who, in so doing, are DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY! Within 3 years, all of these cars will be made in China. That’s what Sleepy Joe wants, because China pays him and his family a FORTUNE. He is a Manchurian Candidate. If the UAW “leadership” doesn’t ENDORSE me, and if I don’t win the Election, the Autoworkers are “toast,” with our great truckers to follow. Crooked Joe Biden is the most Corrupt and Incompetent President in the history of the USA. If he is able to gather the energy to show up, tell him to go to the Southern Border instead, & to leave the Car Industry alone!

Strong “sir, this is a TGI Friday’s” energy there.

(Via Mediaite)

Raphael Saadiq is gearing up for a reunion of his ’80s band, Tony! Toni! Toné!. The group is gearing up for a tour and are working on a new album.

Saadiq spoke with Vulture and revealed that the album would likely come out after their tour. He also revealed that a song that was originally planned for Tony! Toni! Toné!’s album ended up going to Beyoncé.

The song? “Cuff It” from Bey’s seventh album, Renaissance.

“That record was going to be a Tonyies record,” Saadiq said, “the part that just sounds like [mimics the ‘Cuff It’ guitar riff]. But I gave it to a friend of mine and said, ‘I got this record. I was going to do it, but what about Beyoncé?’ She’s one of those people where if she’s feeling it, she’s going 100 percent in. I said, ‘It’s going to move people. It’s going to work, I’m telling you.’ I think she just put it away. From what I heard, The-Dream eventually found it. And he was like, ‘What is that?!”’ I already knew it was one of them joints. I always said, if you drop the right music on an artist, it could go, but I’m glad she has so many eyeballs on her, you know what I mean? You can’t really trick people, it’s got to be good.”

The song has since gone on to be a fan-favorite of Beyoncé‘s, earning a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance at the beginning of this year. It has also gone viral on TikTok, sparking dance challenges, and pulling in streams to bring it up to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.

There were plenty of moments during Shannon Sharpe’s tenure on Undisputed where things got heated between himself and Skip Bayless. It was part of what made them such a unique combination — Bayless has spent his professional career as a provocateur, while Sharpe is a gigantic, fun personality who would have genuine reactions to the stuff Bayless would say.

On the most recent episode of Stephen A. Smith’s podcast, Sharpe looked back on the one time that things nearly boiled over between himself and his former co-host. Back in 2022, during a conversation about Tom Brady’s longevity, Bayless made some comments that clearly rubbed Sharpe the long way, to the point that Sharpe got upset in a way that he was usually pretty good at avoiding. While talking to Smith about the incident, Sharpe went as far as to say that he had to resist the urge to come to physical blows with Bayless over this.

“Why would I be jealous of Tom Brady?” Sharpe said. “I’m happy that Tom — Tom was like me, given an opportunity, he made the most of that opportunity. I think that was, in all of my TV career, I remember going home, calling my sister, I called my brother, my homeboy, everybody had told him, he raced home, he’d watch it. It took a lot. It took a lot for me not to put my hands on him, it actually did.”

Smith said he was “so thankful” Sharpe didn’t do this, presumably because this would have ended extremely badly for Bayless. Since this incident, Sharpe has left Fox (Smith has indicated that this was not his decision) and joined First Take, where he is part of the rotating collection of personalities who debate Smith.

A lot of shady business about Clarence Thomas has emerged in the last handful of months. What’s up with his friendship with a billionaire who collects Nazi memorabilia? What about that shady loan he received from a health care exec to pay for his luxury RV? And what’s a Supreme Court justice doing attending private dinners for the right-leaning Koch brothers? While we’re at it, what is esteemed documentarian Ken Burns doing posing with Thomas at one of those soirees?

Last week, a pic of the guy behind The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Vietnam War, and many others circulated in which he’s seen smiling between Thomas and David Koch, both boogeymen to the left. The uproar was such that Burns had to step in with an explanation.

“Around ten years ago, Ken was stopped and asked to take a photograph with a Supreme Court Justice and David Koch, who was a supporter of public television and would later provide some funding for his film, The Vietnam War,” a spokesperson for Burns told The Hollywood Reporter. “So he took the photo, as he has done with many, many others. Other than the taking of that photograph and innocuous pleasantries, that’s the extent of his contact with Justice Thomas.”

So it was allegedly just a photo op. It may still seem strange that Burns is hanging with the Koch brothers, though their names are on progressive things as well, including an epic doc that explores both the American and Vietnamese side of the Vietnam War.

The photo of Burns, Thomas, and Koch emerged in a ProPublica piece about Thomas attending two functions for the libertarian billionaire brothers. Burns’ name was not mentioned in the piece. Still, for future reference it might not be a great idea for thoughtful documentarians to be posing for pics with people so far to the right that students successfully petition to get him booted from teaching a class.

(Via THR)