Month: February 2024

Jon Stewart might be best known as a late night show host and political commentator, but he is also a very loving dog dad.

That became evident Monday (26 February), as Stewart, eyes already bloodshot, as though he had been weeping the night before, told “The Daily Show” viewers that his beloved dog Dipper had passed away the day before.

“In a world of good boys, he was the best,” Stewart said, his voice already breaking. “I thought I’d get further.”

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Tears kept rolling as he paid an emotional tribute to his late dog, sharing the story of how Dipper came to be part of his family.

Stewart recalled that twelve years ago, his kids wanted to raise money for an animal shelter in New York called Animal Haven. After baking cupcakes to sell just outside Animal Haven, the staff brought out a “one-ish year old brindle pitbull” who had lost his right leg after being hit by a car. After Dipper sat in Stewart’s lap for the first time, all bets were off.

Since that fateful day, Dipper became “part of the OG ‘Daily Show’ dog crew.”

“We’d come to tape this show, and Dipper would wait for me to be done,” he said. “He met actors and authors and presidents and kings. And he did what the Taliban could not do, which is, put a scare into Malala Yousafzai.”

He then ran a clip of Yousafzai getting spooked by Dipper during her guest appearance.

Stewart then delivered the heartbreaking news that “Dipper passed away yesterday. He was ready. He was tired, but I wasn’t. And the family, we were all together.”

“My wish for you is one day you find that dog, that one dog… It’s just… It’s the best,” Stewart concluded.

The segment ended with a moment of silence for Dipper as a video of him happy in the snow played with the credits.

Watch the touching moment below:

The raw video resonated with so many viewers, and even inspired some to share their own tragic losses. One thing became clear: this heartbreak is a feeling shared by parents.

As one Youtube commenter poignantly wrote:

“Anyone who has had a pet will know that grief and loss are a part of that beautiful, goofy, loving, sometimes chaotic package. We know it when we take them on, and yet somehow, when the time comes, it’s always the same, heart-wrenching, emptying experience. I am so glad you found your heart-dog, and that he found you and your family.”

Though Dipper will be missed, Stewart is not without animals in his life. Eight years ago, Stewart and his wife traded in their city life to live on a farm, which eventually became the fourth property of Farm Sanctuary, an advocacy group that fights the factory farm industry and cares for abused animals.

I got a promotion a few days ago, so I decided to stop for a drink on my way home — just me and my sense of accomplishment.

I ended up alone in the bar, running defense against a bouncer who held my ID hostage while he commented on my ass (among other things) and asked me vaguely threatening questions about my sex life.

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This is not a Yelp review. It’s not an angry rant, and it’s definitely not something women need to be reminded of.

As far as I can tell, there is only one good lesson to pull out of this otherwise shitty and all-too-familiar interaction: In my experience, a lot of thoroughly decent men are still having trouble understanding this.

I have a friend who once joked that it was all right for him to catcall women because he’s good-looking. I had another ask me in faux outrage why it was OK for me to describe a cupcake (as in an actual chocolate baked good) as a “seven,” but not OK for him to rank women the same way. I was recently at a house party where a group of guys referred to a soundproofed recording studio in the basement as the “rape room” 45 times.

Some of these jokes were a little funny. Some of them really weren’t. But they were all endemic of something more sinister, and I honestly don’t think the men in question even realize it.

So to the generally well-intentioned men in my life, please consider this:

I have a friend who once joked that it was all right for him to catcall women because he’s good-looking. I had another ask me in faux outrage why it was OK for me to describe a cupcake (as in an actual chocolate baked good) as a “seven,” but not OK for him to rank women the same way. I was recently at a house party where a group of guys referred to a soundproofed recording studio in the basement as the “rape room” 45 times.

Some of these jokes were a little funny. Some of them really weren’t. But they were all endemic of something more sinister, and I honestly don’t think the men in question even realize it.

This has made me defensive. It has put me more on my guard than I would like to be.

Decent male humans, this is not your fault, but it also does not have nothing to do with you.

If a woman is frosty or standoffish or doesn’t laugh at your joke, consider the notion that maybe she is not an uptight, humorless bitch, but rather has had experiences outside your realm of understanding that have adversely colored her perception of the world.

Consider that while you’re just joking around, a woman might actually be doing some quick mental math to see if she’s going to have to hide in a bathroom stall and call someone to come help her, like I did three days ago.

Please adjust your mindset and your words accordingly.

This article was written by Laura Munoz and originally appeared on 03.08.16.

There’s not a woman alive who hasn’t suffered through an unwanted come-on from a creep. Some women are so afraid of these encounters they feel they can’t be as nice to men as they’d like, for fear their friendliness will be mistaken for flirtation.

One woman’s encounter with a creepy come-on has received over 110,000 likes on Twitter because of her flawless response.

Twitter user @LovableAndKind recently shared screenshots from a text exchange between her sister and a Jiffy Lube employee who found her phone number and sent her an unsolicited text.

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The woman received a text from an unfamiliar number that read: “You are gorgeous.” When she asked who it was he responded, “Your favorite oil change guy.”

The woman could have responded with anger or ignored the creep and blocked him, but instead she decided to create a teachable moment.

“While I know you were wanting to give me a compliment, it was completely unnecessary and unsolicited,” she replied. “I am a customer, you are a service provider, and there should be no communication outside of that unless I, the customer, express interest.”

She then explained why his text was so violating.

“It is a violation of my privacy for you to contact me from your personal phone with information that you got without my permission,” she continued.

“And now I know that you are the type of person to go back in someone’s file to find their personal information, what is to keep you from going back and getting my address? There are men who stalk, rape and murder women this way.”

She then wrote that she could call Jiffy Lube human resources to report his actions, but she’d rather he learned from the incident.

“Sorry about that yes ma’am,” he responded.

Then she hit him back with one final diss.

“Oh, and you didn’t tell me what the tire pressure was on the rear passenger tire like I asked, so you’re definitely not even in my top five favorite oil change guys,” she wrote.

Here’s the entire exchange.

This article originally appeared on 08.09.19

Today’s MAGA conservatives are a famously untruthful bunch, led by a guy who keeps getting sued for defamation. But there’s one lie that’s stranger than most: They’ve been painting New York City as a crime-ridden Boschian hellscape that’s slipped back to its gritty 1970s low point. Guess what? It’s not! It’s arguably the safest it’s ever been in its 400-year history. That doesn’t stop some in the GOP from claiming otherwise, even if crime is way, way, way worse in their own states. Enter noted dim bulb Tommy Tuberville.

The college football coach-somehow-turned-powerful Republican senator was among the rightwing voices thrown into a tizzy over Joe Biden eating ice cream Monday. His contribution to the furor was a little weaker than most, though: “Hope @JoeBiden enjoyed going out for ice cream in NYC while the rest of the city is afraid of crime and migrants.”

Tuberville could have asked any New Yorker if they think they’re living in the original Death Wish. They could have then laughed in his face. Crime has been tumbling for decades; it fell another 4.1% from 2022 to 2023. (That said, hate crime has been on the rise, some of it fueled by racist anti-Asian statements made by people like Donald Trump.) But Tuberville didn’t do that, and so he got rigorously owned on social media.

The most common attack on Tuberville wasn’t simply that he was wrong. It was that his own state of Alabama has a far higher crime rate. His tweet earned a brutal community note:

New York City’s homicide rate is 4.8 per 100,000. Alabama, the home state of Sen. Tuberville, has a homicide rate three times higher (15.9 per 100,000)

Others reminded him of his error.

The city’s mayor, who’s not exactly loved by his citizenry, even got in on the action, throwing in a reference to his recent dunderheaded comments about IVF that got him schooled last week.

Speaking of, some New Yorkers are far more scared of a powerful senator who controls women’s reproductive rights than some fictitious crime wave.

Besides, the nation’s finest city is so tough on crime one of its most prominent criminals was even found guilty of fraud.

Tuberville also received some miscellaneous jokes.

Tuberville’s no stranger to being dunked on social media. Last fall, as he was holding up hundreds of military promotions as a stunt, people tried to make themselves feel better by sharing an old clip of him falling down some stairs like a clutz.

(Via Mediaite)

From the founders of ONE Musicfest comes Twogetherland, the Southwest’s newest hip-hop and R&B music festival. The inaugural TwoGether Land will take place over the course of two days — May 25 and 26 — at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas. On the bill are some of the biggest names in music.

Including Lil Wayne, Summer Walker, Gucci Mane, and Latto. Fans can also expect fire performances from That Mexican OT, Muni Long, Jeezy, Mariah The Scientist, Three 6 Mafia, and Tyla.

Dallas hip-hop favorites, including Big Tuck, Erica Banks, Yella Beezy, Dorrough, and Chalie Boy, will had some homegrown flavor to the inaugural festival. The podcast stage will host tapings of podcasts by The Smooothvega Podcast — hosted by veteran music manager Lorenzo “Smoothvega” Zenteno — Angela Yee’s Lipservice, Whorible Decisions, and more.

TwoGether Land arrives to Dallas by way of a partnership between One Musicfest and Live Nation Urban.

“We’re thrilled about going to Dallas for the inaugural TwoGether Land Festival,” said J. Carter, ONE Musicfest Founder in a statement. “Continuing our motto of unity through music, the festival will be an unforgettable experience for our ever-growing community. We look forward to TwoGether Land becoming a must-attend event, much like ONE Musicfest.”

Tickets for TwoGether Land are available for purchase here. You can see the full lineup below.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Math is weird.

On the one hand, it’s consistent—the solutions to basic math problems are the same in every country in the world. On the other hand, there are multiple strategies to get to those solutions, and it seems like people are still coming up with new ones (much to the chagrin of parents whose kids need help with homework using methods they’ve never learned).

Math professor Howie Hua shares math strategies that make math easier on social media, and his videos are fascinating. Hua, who teaches math to future elementary school teachers at Fresno State, demonstrates all kinds of mental math tricks that feel like magic when you try them.

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For instance, Hua has two videos showing how easy and quick it is to add multidigit numbers left to right instead of right to left, and it’s genuinely mind-blowing.

Check out how he explains why adding left to right is “underrated.”

u201cNew TikTok video: Adding left to right is underratedu201d

— Howie Hua (@Howie Hua)
1665353677

OK, seriously. That is way easier to do in your head. It’s basically putting the numbers into expanded form and adding them, which makes it easier to visualize.

Adding this way makes sense, but subtracting is a bit more complicated, right?

Wrong, apparently. Watch Hua work his math sorcery subtracting two and three-digit numbers.

@howie_hua

Did you know you can subtract left to right? #math #mathematics #mathtok #maths #teachersoftiktok #teacher #mathtricks #mathtrick

Holy moly. That’s faster than the right-to-left, borrow-from-the-next-column method, isn’t it? And again, so much easier to visualize what’s actually happening, though I don’t know if I could fully do this in my head like I could with the left-to-right addition.

Hua recently shared another cool subtraction trick for problems with minuends that have a lot of zeroes. (The minuend is the first number in a subtraction problem. Don’t be too impressed. I had to look it up.)

Check this out:

@howie_hua

An underrated subtraction strategy #math #mathematics #mathtok #maths #teachersoftiktok #teacher #mathtricks #mathtrick

So simple, so time-saving and so something I would never have figured out on my own.

These tips and tricks might come in handy for anyone, but they’re especially useful for kids who are having to do these kinds of math problems at school all the time. Even if they’re supposed to solve the problem with a different strategy, these methods can be a quick way to check their answers.

Anything that makes math easier, I say. You can watch Hua’s videos on TikTok, YouTube and Twitter.

This article originally appeared on 10.12.22

There have been a few momentous changes since the dawn of the new millennium, creating an invisible line between those born before and after. The big events that forever changed culture are the creation of the smartphone, dawn of social media and terror attacks on 9/11.

People who were born in 1999 or later have, for the most part, lived in a world where they were either too young to know what life was like before these events or weren’t born yet.

That’s not to say that one era is better or worse. But, when an entire generation has no idea what it is like to go through a day without being connected to the internet, we’re bound to eventually lose any understanding of living IRL 24/7.

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Those of us who haven’t lived in a world without intense security while traveling will be less inclined to return to a time when it was easier to move through the world without fear. People who live in a time where everything is available on demand have no idea how much they should appreciate the convenience. Back in the day, if you missed a show, you may not ever have a chance to see it again in your entire life.

A Reddit user named Haunting_Ad_1224 posed a question to the AskReddit forum that got a lot of Gen Xers and older generations, nostalgic for the days before Y2K. They asked the forum, “What’s something that people under 25 will never understand?” and received nearly 2,000 responses. The commenters talked a lot about the benefits of being able to disconnect while also sharing their nostalgia for the days of landlines and cassette tapes.

Here are 15 things that people under 25 will never understand.

1. Taping songs off the radio

“Waiting for a song to come on the radio so you can tape it but completely forgetting until it comes on then making a mad dash to the radio.” — Collieman 1123

“Or having the dj talk over the intro.” — HorselRockit

2. The Time Lady

“Calling from a landline to get the current time.” — Surround726

3. Calling for movie times

“Calling your local theater for show times.” — Andushan

“Moviefone and a notepad and pencil.” — PerpetualGazebo

“Or checking the newspaper for show times.” — ieatboys999

4. Talking to parents

“Calling your friend’s house on the landline and making small talk with their parents when they were the ones who answered until your friend got to the phone.” — McVinney512

“Calling a girl you have a crush on but her mom answers and you have a 20-minute conversation because she sounds just like said girl until you say something embarrassing and she realizes she is not talking to her brother.” — GlyohedArchitect

5. Life before the internet

“I’m as addicted to my phone as the typical teenager, but I’m old enough to remember when I’d get off work at the end of the day and there was no expectation that I was reachable until I came back to work the following day. Good times, didn’t appreciate it enough back then.” — Moshethemean

“The idea that being asleep, having dinner, or watching a show was a perfectly good reason why no one answered the phone.” — Reavenas

6. Privacy

“Privacy is rapidly going away. But the root cause is people not valuing it. If you told people in the ’70s that people 50 years later would be happy to have open mics to multiple corporate headquarters in their living rooms they would freak out. There’s no way you could convince someone from the ’70s that people would actually want that and not value their privacy in any substantive manner. I can barely understand it myself.” — Dcnblues

7. Boredom

“Went to use the bathroom the other day while my phone was charging, resorted back to the old days, and read the stuff on shampoo bottles.” — Hairyemmie

8. Dial-up internet tone

“Trying to sneak online with dial-up when you’re supposed to be asleep. There was no muting those dial-up tones.” — XxVerdantFlamesX

9. Film cameras

“Taking pictures, then waiting for them to be developed to see if they turned out okay. YEAH, I am really old lol.” — Ranjoko

“… resulting in a few dozen cherished memories you will keep as treasures in a box or on a wall. Not thousands of no-effort shots in the cloud no-one will ever look at except perhaps AI image scanners.” — Moose2342

10. Life before 9/11

“You ever see movies where family or a friend is at the gate waiting for someone to get off the plane to hug them? Yeah that. … People could often even accompany you on the airplane to see you off, and then they’d leave the plane before departure.” — -DementedAvenger-

11. Being a free kid

“Being kicked out of the house for the day during the summer and riding your bicycles around town and buying candy with the 50 cents you have to your name. No phones, no tablets, just finding your friends at the or whatever. Having that become the best day ever.” — CapricornMonk

12. Commercial breaks

“The mad dash to go to the bathroom or heat up food before the commercials ended and your show came back on.” — Leokina114

“Alternatively, painstakingly programming the clock on your vcr, and setting it up to record the show on a blank tape.” — Griffin Flash

13. The power of channel 3

“Using channel 3 as the source to play video games or use the VCR.” — Substantial-Cream-93

“Also, when the reception went out, we had to go up to the attic to fiddle with the antenna. TV static is also different – went from fuzzy white noise to digital blips. We watched so many shows through static but when the pixels blip it’s gone. Also now it seems we lose service way more often than when TV wasn’t all digital.” — Shewholaughslasts

14. Aging

“How quickly they will become 50.” — Icy_Newspaper3739

“This is no joke. There’s a saying that the days are long but the years are short. Perhaps the most accurate phrases ever uttered.” — Junior-Gorg

15. Disappearing

“Being able to just ‘disappear’ for a while. Before cell phones, there was a time when people couldn’t get ahold of you at all times for any reason.” — Yikester

“This is something I love about flying, there’s no way to contact me since I’ve never paid for WiFi. No calls, emails, Whatsapp, can’t mindlessly scroll Reddit or watch YouTube, just completely disconnected.” — Dr-Kipper

What’s it like to sue Donald J. Trump? Just ask Roberta Kaplan; she’s done it twice. Kaplan was E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer in her two — and counting! — defamation suits against the former president. Shortly after the latest case ended with Trump forced to fork over a cool $83 million, Kaplan opened up about her experiences in a new chat with New York, during which she revealed her secret to driving an already tetchy guy totally bonkers.

Kaplan spent much of the interview talking about Trump’s deposition, which didn’t go swimmingly. (More on that in a bit.) At day’s end, before they parted ways, Trump’s team asked if he could say something off the record. “You could tell that they kind of had a joke about it,” she said.

It’s at this point that the 45th president looked up at Kaplan and said, “See you next Tuesday.”

Do you get it? If you don’t have a trash brain, you may not. Kaplan didn’t get it:

And so I said to him, “What are you talking about? I’m coming back on Wednesday.” Which was when the Carroll deposition was. And then I didn’t know anything until we got in the car, and my colleague — who is much younger and hipper — said to me, “Robbie, you know what that means?” And I said “no.” They told me, and I said, “Oh my God. I’m so glad.” Because I would not have kept my equanimity.

For those who still don’t get it, Trump called Kaplan the c-word.

Kaplan also discussed his antics before he dropped a sexist insult. Trump, she said, “couldn’t really control himself.” He’d hit them with a “constant barrage” of insults, mostly to Carroll, who wasn’t even in the room, but also to Kaplan. For instance, at one point he reiterated his claim that Carroll is “not his type,” only to tell Kaplan that neither is she.

“He told me that he was gonna sue me very strongly, whatever that means,” she recalled. “He told me that I was a disgrace, et cetera, et cetera.”

Kaplan admitted that she’s “not someone who’s known for their equanimity.” And yet she was able to suppress her inner beast:

I knew it was important to stay calm. And so I just did. I just let him keep saying it, and he would kinda go off. He does this a lot in all the different cases. He kind of goes on a tirade, like, he speechifies in answering questions — which is never what you want your client to do. And I would just kind of look up after a while, and I would say to him, “Are you done yet? Because I have another question to ask.” Which, of course, drove him completely insane.

Kaplan added that it “took a lot of impulse control on my part, but I managed.”

Trump, of course, wasn’t much better behaved in court, which Kaplan thinks may have been intentional, as though he wanted to lose to gain even more pity votes. That or may not be true, but since Trump’s reportedly planning to act up even more during his Jan. 6 trial, it probably is.

(Via New York)

It’s hard to imagine a 6′ 3 man such as Alan Ritchson as a scrawny teen pirouetting across the dance floor, but we all start somewhere. Ritchson might be the brawny Jack Reacher on Amazon’s wildly successful series Reacher, but when he was young he was just like every other teenage boy: dreading going to dance class!

Ritchson told Men’s Health that he met his wife, Catherine, as a teenager in a ballet class. But he surely didn’t have the confidence of Jack Reacher (who does?) so it took months for him to talk to her. He explained, “After the millionth time of us sitting next to each other, inches away, tying our shoes—so now it’s super awkward—I was like, ‘So I heard you ice-skate.’” The rest was history, and the duo got married in 2006.

The actor also shared that, despite his height and build, he was bullied by his peers as a teen, especially when a tumor on his face started growing. “When you haven’t hit puberty and you’re 17 and you’ve got a face growing out of your face, it fortifies a sense of kindness that I’m grateful for.” He had his face fixed and swiftly moved off to Florida to become a model. It was the early 2000s, and ANTM was all the rage, so at the time it was the right thing to do.

It took some time for Ritchson to break out in the mainstream. Reacher debuted in 2022 and he will appear in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare later this year. But will all of this talent and success, we still have not seen Ritchson’s ballet skills. Were all of those ballet lessons for nothing?? He better use those moves in Reacher season three.

(Via People)

The punches just keep on coming for Amazon’s remake of Road House. The film already had an uphill battle by attempting to recreate the cult classic starring Patrick Swayze as the effortlessly cool bouncer Dalton. This time around, Jake Gyllenhaal takes over the role and just getting the film released has been an all-out brawl.

According to a new lawsuit, original Road House screenwriter R. Lance Hill had a copyright claim to the franchise that Amazon allegedly ignored. In 2021, Hill had filed a petition to have the rights revert back to him in November 2023 when United Artist’s claim to the property expired. However, Amazon allegedly scrambled to get the Road House remake finished before the November deadline by using AI to replicate the voices of the film’s leads to skirt around the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.

According to Hill’s lawsuit, that plan didn’t work and the film wasn’t finished until January, well past the deadline. But the alleged use of AI is sure to raise eyebrows.

Via Los Angeles Times:

The lawsuit also alleged that the use of AI to simulate actors’ voices violated provisions in collective bargaining agreements between the major studios, including Amazon, and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, as well as the studio alliance contract with the Directors Guild of America.

Hill’s lawsuit is seeking to block the distribution of the Road House remake, which is already embroiled in an internal battle over its release strategy. Director Doug Liman has boycotted the film’s SXSW release after Amazon refused to give Road House a theatrical release despite Liman and Gyllenhaal making a direct plea to Jeff Bezos. Liman wrote a passionate op-ed decrying Amazon for streaming the film and essentially using it to sell “plumbing fixtures.”

However, a Variety report painted a different picture. According to sources, Liman and Gyllenhaal were offered a higher budget if the film was released on streaming, and well, they took the money. Gyllenhaal recently corroborated that report by confirming Total Film that Road House was made to be a streaming film, and Amazon was “always clear” on that.

In theory, Road House starts streaming March 21 on Prime Video.

(Via Los Angeles Times)