God help me, I’m fascinated by politicians and their garbage palates.

Initially, I’ll admit, I’d assumed that the trend of performatively eating bad food originated with Republicans. First, there was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who famously claims to have eaten two ham and cheese sandwiches every day for the past 26 years (with sad-looking photo evidence). Walker also gave us what Wired’s Ashley Feinberg called “the nightmare kebab incident of 2017,” featuring some char-less grey meat on a lukewarm grill.

Trump’s trash palate (well-done steaks, Filet O Fish sandwiches, bunless Big Macs) is well known and seems to have infected Air Force One, as evidenced by the viral sad pepper lantern disaster. Meanwhile, Senator Tom Cotton famously copped to eating birthday cake almost every day, Tennessee representative Kent Calfee was snapped swigging from a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup as if it were a flask on the floor of the statehouse (he claimed it was actually filled with water which is slightly less weird), and former Utah Senator Orrin Hatch appeared in a horror film about eating bacon (admittedly bacon is more basic than strange, but not the way Hatch does it).

Taken all together it does paint a vivid picture: A group of doddering old men with the collective palate of a preschool class.

On the flip side, Democrats may not brag about terrible food as often or in quite the same way, but they’re not innocent in this regard. Nancy Pelosi showed off an entire freezer full of expensive ice cream on James Corden as if it was her proudest (and most relatable) possession, while Joe Biden, apparently cribbing from the same playbook (or just using the same consultants) shot a high-larious “social distancing” video with Keegan-Michael Key from Key and Peele, in which Biden made a point of saying “I always start with dessert” while slurping down ice cream. These videos are extremely humanizing if you’re the type of person who enjoys seeing how various corporations celebrate Star Wars Day.

I’m not sure why every politician thinks eating processed unseasoned garbage or fetishizing dessert endears them to the American voter, but my guess is it has something to do with general disdain. Pandering and contempt for your audience are kissing cousins. “Hey, you guys are big fat dumb babies, right? I’m just like you!”

This is all a very circuitous way of introducing the latest bit of viral food content from a politician: a tuna melt recipe so horrifying it may qualify as performance art, courtesy of Virginia Senator Mark Warner. He’s a Democrat, though this recipe seems to owe more to Scott Walker than Nancy Pelosi.

(The embedded version comes from Twitter, but it’s basically identical to the one from Warner’s own Instagram page).

Warner calls this how-to guide for microwaving tuna “one of my favorite recipes.” Was it a bit? If so, it made me cringe more than laugh, and anyway I’m sick of trying to figure out which world leaders are being sarcastic, so I choose to take it more or less at face value.

Still, “don’t knock until you try it,” as they say, so I set out to see if could really create a delicious meal with just a few minutes, a few basic ingredients, and a microwave. First, the ingredients:

I couldn’t tell what brand of mayo Warner was using, but it definitely came in a squirt bottle (my favorite mayo is the Trader Joe’s canola oil brand, very lemony and with a custardy texture, but this Best Foods wasn’t bad). I used medium cheddar just as Warner specified (pleasantly surprised he doesn’t use American) and while we didn’t have the Chicken of the Sea he used, we did have some Starkist — chunk light.

I now think if you’re going to eat canned tuna, at least spring for the albacore instead of the leftovers they stick in chunk light, but I digress.

From what I could tell, Warner used A LOT of mayo, arranged in a circular pattern. Presumably, this is to compensate for just scooping the tuna directly out of the can, creating a kind of deconstructed, half-assed tuna salad.

Of all the offensive things Warner does in this video, I think that by far the most offensive is the way he doesn’t even bother to drain his tuna. He just scoops it straight of out the can, apparently straining with the fork, though he doesn’t seem too concerned about the moisture.

Do you see how wet a can of chunk light tuna is? Yecch.

Mmm, already looks horrible. But Mark Warner is a two-slice man, so today I am a two-slice man.

Pop it in the microwave and bingo bongo…

After 30 seconds in the microwave, the cheese on this tuna “melt” was still unmelted. Maybe my microwave is not as powerful as Senator Mark Warner’s? I popped it back in for 30 more seconds.

The cheese still wasn’t melted in the way I would imagine for a “tuna melt,” but the bigger issue was the giant, revolting wet spot that had developed in the middle of the bread — a predictable result of putting undrained tuna on top of some bread and then microwaving it. You might say this was a mistake, but I watched Warner do it four times and he absolutely does not drain his tuna. Maybe my bread was the wrong brand, or too fresh. Maybe you need two slices of 40-day dry-aged Wonder bread to make this recipe truly sing, hard to say.

Enough talk, time to taste.

Now, however gross you imagined this microwave tuna melt to be, let me assure you that the reality is ten times worse. It smelled like cat food and the texture was like something you’d find at the bottom of a trash can. Nonetheless, I am a professional so I forced myself to choke down at least one bite, even though the sight of the soggy bread made me shiver. It was somehow both soggy and dry, pungent yet unseasoned and bland. It barely held together long enough to make it to my mouth and when I lifted it, all the tuna goo dripped out and pooled into a toxic puddle on the plate:

This was a horror movie. One bite was enough. It was more than enough. I did the rational thing and fed it to my dog. Even he seemed a bit skeptical.

My advice: absolutely do not attempt to make a tuna melt like Mark Warner. Now, I’ve nothing against tuna. I used to make it every day when I worked at a sandwich place and it was great. Drain your tuna (preferably not chunk light), add mayo, mustard, celery, salt, and pepper, and it’s a solid sandwich filling. You can swap the celery for water chestnuts if you want the celery crunch but not the flavor.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the eight minutes you might spend making your canned tuna into actual tuna salad is a bridge too far. I would say that’s insane, but let’s accept the hypothetical. In that case: why the microwave? If you set your oven to broil just before you opened your tuna can and constructed the sandwich, you could stick the open-faced sandwich in there on the top or second-to-top rack and it probably wouldn’t take much longer than 30 seconds for your cheese to melt. Even better, put it on a cast iron pan and get a light toast on the bread while you melt that cheese. Not only would the cheese melt, the bread would dry out a little instead of getting soggier. The man is a senator, he clearly has an oven.

All I can say about Mark Warner’s sandwich recipe is that this is a prison sandwich conceived by a particularly uncreative inmate. I know it’s some attempt at a cute and relatable bit but like most political food content, it just makes me think that yet another politician is irredeemably strange, with values I barely recognize. In fact, anyone who thinks that this is an acceptable way to prepare food shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. Read more of his cooking commentary in UPROXX’s Cooking Battles. For past Top Chef Power Rankings, go here.

In a new interview to promote Tenet — maybe? — Robert Pattinson gave GQ a peek into his quarantine life, and it was an absolutely surreal trip from start to finish. The actor is currently holed up in a London apartment that was supposed to be a temporary home while filming The Batman, but when that production shut down barely a month into shooting, Pattinson found himself stranded with only a few T-shirts and a delivery of what he calls a “Batman meal plan” to keep him bulked up for the role. Or at least that’s the idea.

In reality, Pattinson hasn’t been working out at all and has been eating the kits like a college student shoveling down cheap meals between existential ponderings.

I’ll have oatmeal with, like, vanilla protein powder on it. And I will barely even mix it up. It’s extraordinarily easy. Like, I eat out of cans and stuff. I’ll literally put Tabasco inside a tuna can and just eat it out of the can.

You’ve been training all your life for this, apparently.
I… It is weird, but my preferences are…just sort of eat like a wild animal. [laughs] Like, out of a trash can.

And that’s just the beginning. Pattinson apparently fancies himself a chaos agent while talking to the media, which he definitely delivers in spades during the video calls with GQ. “My, um, my publicist always calls me up after an interview, and she’s like, ‘Is there anything, like, is there any kind of fires you set now? What do I have to fix for you now?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t even remember anything I said.’”

Several times during the interview, Pattinson admits that he has a very loose grasp of time and often finds himself in situations where he thinks something happened two years ago, but it was only two weeks ago. It’s led to some, uh, misunderstandings. “I’ve been emailing this guy recently who’s absolutely terrified of me,” the Twilight star tells GQ. “He eventually passed my email on to one of the actresses in his movie so she would speak to me instead so I wouldn’t email him anymore. And I thought it had been, like, two years and six months, in between each email, but it’s only, like, a few weeks apart.”

But things really took a turn when the actor revealed his business plan for a fast-food pasta restaurant, which he legitimately pitched to investors before the lockdown.

What if, he said to himself, “pasta really had the same kind of fast-food credentials as burgers and pizzas? I was trying to figure out how to capitalize in this area of the market, and I was trying to think: How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?”

The investors didn’t bite, and Pattinson went on to prove that was probably a smart decision by literally exploding his microwave while trying to make a pasta dish for GQ. Earlier in the interview, he had expressed anxiety over what happens if the owners of his London apartment want it back. He probably should be a little more concerned about if it will still be standing once the pandemic is over.

(Via GQ)

If you’ve listened to the Hamilton soundtrack or been lucky enough to see it in real life, you know how exciting seeing the original Broadway cast perform would be. If you haven’t jumped on the Hamilton train and you think it’s all a bit overhyped, I’m sorry to inform you that you are wrong. (I used to fit that description. I was SO wrong.)

Today, Hamilton fans and not-yet-Hamilton fans alike got THE most exciting news. Instead of being released in theaters next year, the fim version of the original Broadway production of Hamilton is coming to Disney + on July 3rd. That’s less than two months away.

Start the countdown now, because it’s been a while since we had something to look forward to.

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To get you prepared, here’s the cast’s performance of “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” from the 2016 Tony Awards:

70th Annual Tony Awards ‘Hamilton’

www.youtube.com

And if you need a free place to listen to the whole original soundtrack, it’s available on Amazon streaming music if you have an Amazon Prime account, or you can listen to the whole thing (plus some cut content) on YouTube:

[FULL LYRICS + CUT CONTENT] Hamilton: An American Musical

www.youtube.com

Thank you, Lin-Manuel Miranda! Look at how excited he was to share this news with us this morning—candid photo shared by his wife:

So glad we won’t have to “wait for it” much longer.

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“My whole mouth started tingling mid-kiss…”

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You’ll probably wonder why you didn’t buy these sooner.

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“My heart aches for that 22-year-old girl.”

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As the pandemic persists, the live music industry has taken a major hit. But some are finding inventive ways to bring back concerts. Denmark began drive-in concerts that adhere to the social distancing guidelines and a company in LA created a high-tech, futuristic suit that would allow protection against the virus in crowds. As music fans across the country anxiously await the return of live shows, a comprehensive safety guide has been released for venues, and it forbids large group activities like moshing and crowd surfing.

Steven Adelman and Jacob Worek of the Event Safety Alliance set out to compose a comprehensive, 29-page safety guide for venues by speaking with over 400 promoters, caterers, and Ticketmaster employees. Their handbook sets the guidelines for best practices for venues to ensure the safety of their staff, attendees, and performers. Along with recommending cleaning practices and how to handle sick employees, the guide says that concert attendees will have to adjust their habits.

“A few obvious changes will be necessary whenever GA events do reopen,” the guide states. “Patrons cannot all stand at the front of the stage like they are accustomed; moshing and crowd surfing are violations of social distancing per se and must be absolutely prohibited during this pandemic.”

Other recommendations include staggered entry times, limiting bathroom capacities, contactless merch ordering, and monitoring smoking areas to enforce social distancing.

Find the full Event Safety Alliance Reopening Guide here.

A Quiet Place Part II: pushed back from March to September. Black Widow: May to November. F9: May to April (?!?) 2021 (oh). Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every wide-release movie that was supposed to come out this spring and summer has been pushed back to the fall or winter, or even next year, and the few exceptions, like Trolls World Tour and Scoob!, went straight to digital. Then there’s Unhinged.

I write about the entertainment industry for a living, but before today, I had never heard of Unhinged. But now I’m fascinated by it, because the thriller has had its release date pushed UP, from September 4 to July 1. Meaning, it will be the “first new Hollywood offering” since movie theaters closed in March as the coronavirus spread across the country, beating the mind-bending Tenet by 16 days. Christopher Nolan must be fuming.

The decision was made by Solstice Studios, an “indie studio launched by veteran executive Mark Gill in 2018,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. “The U.S. debut of Unhinged will also follow or coincide with cinema reopenings around the world, including China, Australia, Germany, South Korea, and a number of European markets.”

Gill called Unhinged, about a “mother who leans on her horn at the wrong time to the wrong guy,” the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” adding, “I so believe in the theatrical experience. It is an important part of our culture. This is something that America does better than anybody in the world.” This is technically true, but China is getting closer.

Oh yeah. There’s one other thing I should probably mention about Unhinged: it stars Russell Crowe in the role he was born to play, “The Man.” Is it too soon to call Best Picture? Anyway, please enjoy the trailer for Unhinged below. Hope you like honking!

A new challenger has entered the ring. During a recent live chat with Fat Joe, Snoop Dogg posed his perfect pick for a Verzuz battle opponent: Jay-Z.

Snoop’s reasoning is as straightforward as it is logical: He sees Jay as the King Of New York in much the same way he is the longtime top dog of the Los Angeles hip-hop scene (allowing for “Los Angeles” to include his native Long Beach, naturally). “Biggie passed away and then Nas had it for a minute,” he elaborated for Joe. “Then Jay-Z took it and ran with it for numerous amounts of years. And then 50 Cent came and ran with it for numerous amounts of years. This is me looking in from the outside, looking at New York rap. So to me, it’s either Snoop or Jay Z. Because he’s been the king of New York around the time I was the king of the west.”

The suggestion certainly got fans buzzing about a potential matchup. The reaction was certainly more positive than it was when French Montana posited that he had more hits than Kendrick Lamar.

Meanwhile, both Jay-Z and Snoop certainly have plenty of potential matchups to choose from. DMX recently issued his own challenge toward Jay, while 50 turned down a possible revival of his Ja Rule feud to pick Snoop. Verzuz also has a highly-touted matchup with Ludacris and Nelly coming soon, so even if Snoop/Jay doesn’t take place, there’s a lot to look forward to.

Watch Snoop’s talk with Fat Joe above.