Category: News

While it’s not uncommon to see older musicians perhaps not look on the new generation of stars fondly, that’s far from the case with Elton John. In recent months, he has either collaborator with or otherwise shown appreciation for BTS, Rina Sawayama, Phoebe Bridgers, Teyana Taylor, 6lack, and Gorillaz.

He also performed with Dua Lipa at his annual Oscars party a few months ago, and now the pair is back together on a new remix of “Cold Heart.” The song was remixed by Pnau, an Australian trio that has counted John as a mentor for years now. The new version of the track interpolates recognizable parts from some classic John tunes, including “Sacrifice,” “Rocket Man,” “Kiss The Bride,” and “Where’s The Shoorah?”

John says of the track, “The last 18 months have been hard, but being off the road has meant that I’ve actually had time to get back to my roots as a session player and collaborate with some wonderful artists. And having the opportunity to spend time with Dua, albeit remotely, has been incredible. She’s given me so much energy. She’s a truly wonderful artist, and person, absolutely bursting with creativity and ideas. The energy she brought to ‘Cold Heart’ just blew my mind.”

Watch the “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix)” video above.

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

If you spend much time on TikTok, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the pop stylings of London DIY performer PinkPantheress. Just signed to Parlophone, the 20-year-old has garnered more than half a million plays for the super-catchy “Break It Off” and has seen a similar amount of success for “Pain.” Now, she’s got a new one for us to listen to: “Just For Me.” Produced by Mura Masa, “Just For Me” is a hyper-quick pop bop, complete with delicate guitar strums and, of course, PinkPantheress’ helium-high vocals.

“‘Just For Me’ is a song based around unhealthy obsession and is almost a part two to ‘Pain.’”

At the moment, PinkPantheress remains a largely anonymous pop breakout; according to a few interviews she’s done, the songs she’s released were written in her college dorm in London (“I have my uni work to do, and I didn’t have the luxury of a recording studio or ‘creative me-time,’” she’s said). Aesthetically, PinkPantheress draws significant influence from Lily Allen, ’90s and ’00s pop and punk acts, and K-pop. “A lot of my melody choices are from pop-punk bands like Blink-182 and Good Charlotte,” she recently told Dazed. “Some of the more complex melodies derive from early Panic! At The Disco, the beat choices are inspired by a lot of K-pop, Linkin Park, Frou Frou, and British dance music.”

Listen to “Break It Off” above.

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

Nancy Wilson is, of course, along with her sister Ann, the headliners of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band Heart. But, today, we are here to talk to Nancy Wilson because she was highly involved in the making of Almost Famous (with her then-husband, Cameron Crowe): from writing Stillwater’s “hits” like “Fever Dog,” to recreating what backstage at a ’70s rock concert actually looked like, to teaching Billy Crudup and Jason Lee how to physically look like rock stars on stage. (Almost Famous has just been released on a new 4K disc.)

Oh, yes, and then there’s the famous, “I am a golden god,” scene after Billy Crudup’s Russell Hammond takes LSD. You see, Billy Crudup had never taken LSD and didn’t know quite how to act. Nancy Wilson was familiar with the experience and gave Crudup some advice that, well, let’s just say that scene is just about perfect.

Ahead, Nancy Wilson explains how the song “Fever Dog” happened and what ’70s band she based the style on. And she explains why they had to teach Billy Crudup and Jason Lee to play while panties and gummi bears are flying at their heads.

Here’s how you can tell a movie has stuck around. When the Matt Damon movie Stillwater came out, there were a lot of “Fever Dog” jokes on social media.

Oh my God. That’s so funny. It’s great when it all connects. All the references all connect with each other, that’s great.

Speaking of “Fever Dog,” I’m always fascinated when someone has to create, in the universe of the movie, what would be a hit song. Because making a hit song sounds very difficult. Though, obviously, you know how to do that.

It’s a play within a play. It’s a fictitious band in a film that has, in their own era, in their own universe, has their own hit song. So it was a really fun project to write the Stillwater songs. And we had to come up with a coinage, to coin a phrase. Just based on, like, “Radar Love,” or something like that where you coin a phrase and you come up with a caricature of the nastiest person in rock, that would be “Fever Dog.” You make it up. At the time, me and Cameron were hanging out at the beach in Oregon where we’d done a lot of writing before. And we were in hysterics, we were paralyzed in hysterics with tears coming out of our eyes when we thought of “Fever Dog.” Because it’s the iconography of the mid to late ’70s blues rock: a fictitious, mid-level band song. We were just aiming at focusing straight into one exact spot. And I think with “Fever Dog,” we nailed it.

What’s also interesting is you’re not writing a number one hit. You’re writing like a number 20 hit.

It’s Top 20, yeah. It’s not as good as Led Zeppelin. It’s got to be mid-level good. So yeah, exactly, you totally get it. It’s not a tall order to fill because it’s got to be in the pentatonic, bluesy world of how a lot of what maybe Bad Company songs would go. Allman Brothers songs would go like that. A lot of the songs, radio songs, but not necessarily big, big hits.

Was there ever a time where you thought to yourself that “Fever Dog” was becoming too good. That it would be a number one song and you have to dial this back a little bit?

Yeah, just dial that back. Yeah, just take a little poetry out. But, no, we didn’t have that problem. But that would be a good problem to have! It was really, very, very Bad Company for the most part. We were borrowing off Bad Company, mainly.

The other thing I keep thinking about, Heart evolved over time. From the ’70s stuff into the ’80s stuff. And then into the ’90s with The Lovemongers. By the way, I still listen to your version of “The Battle of Evermore” all the time…

Oh, that’s a good one! Oh, that’s so cool.

But how do you get back in the ’70s mindset? You evolved as a musician over all these years and then all of a sudden be like, “I have to write a ’70s hit.”

Well, it’s just like, when you’ve lived through an era like that, you’ve absorbed into your DNA so much of the information from radio and from listening to records and going to shows. And it’s part of your persona by that point. If we wanted to, for instance, try to write a Joni Mitchell song, it would be much harder, obviously, because there’s the poetry right there. Even in the film itself, there were such authentic, rich, granular details that we made sure were in the film itself. Just the scenes in the film and the backstage areas and the detail of the roadies asleep, sleeping off a hangover on some road case in the background. Just the camaraderie and the community and the family of being. And then the whole aspect of putting on a show in these big arenas and having the moments that are bigger than life, larger than life, where the music happens? I think all that stuff is portrayed really perfectly in this film. I think a rock film is really hard to accomplish realistically because usually it’s a Hollywood translation of a rock lifestyle. But in this case, I had. And Cameron also had lived the rock life and been on the road and traveled with the band and been on the buses and the hotels and the bad pizza and all of it. So it was a real love letter to the authenticity of what it really is like to be out there on the traveling minstrel circuit with all the actors.

You taught Billy Crudup and Jason Lee how to create their stage personas?

Oh, yeah. We took a couple of weeks in a rehearsal space, we called it Rock School and watched a million Who videos and Zeppelin videos. And Crudup was not a player. So, the other guys were players already, but he was the one who really needed to perfect.

And he’s supposed to be one of the greatest guitarists in rock at the time.

Peter Frampton came and helped out and was another consultant on the Rock School project. But it was a lot between me and Billy Crudup, that I think he got the body language and stuff. Because I said, “You can’t look healthy and upright. You cannot have good posture. You have to be slouchy and you have to lean on one leg and go backwards and look like you’re standing in water all the time.” A lot of these cues I gave him for body language, he was really good at picking it up and adding it to his performances.

Okay why is that? I don’t know anything about this, so why would you need bad posture and standing like you’re in a puddle?

You’re kind of standing in some water because you’re like some seaweed in the water. So you’ve got this fluidity going on in your body language.

I see.

So you’re not like an upright Olympian player. Gravity is all over the place for you and you’re slinky and slouchy and crouchy. And if you’re going to be in your other world, there’s another world you’re in when you’re playing. And people might just run up to the front of the stage in front of you while you’re trying to concentrate on your music, playing your songs. And they’ll be like, “Please, please, please, please, please, sign, sign, sign something, sign something, sign something.” And you know, you can’t sign anything. So that was some of the stuff: I would run up to them when they were rehearsing the song stuff. I would go, “Please, please, please, please…”

So you’re actively trying to distract them to get them used to it?

Yeah.

Oh, that’s interesting.

And throwing stuff at them! And there’s panties flying at your head. And there’s Gummi Bears and stuff coming at you. So, it’s not a war zone, but sometimes-

It sounds like a gauntlet.

It’s a gauntlet. That’s the right word. But once in a while, an M80 would go off behind the stage. We’re glad it wasn’t on the stage. And I gave them some other advice for the Golden God scene where he’s on the roof at the party.

Oh, what was that?

Yeah, he was like, “Have you ever been on LSD?,” because he wanted some more direction. So I said, “Yeah, I have been on LSD in the late ’60s. I wouldn’t do it now.” But he said, “What was it like?” And I said, “Well, your brain is like an observatory that opens up to see all the stars above. And you have this electricity coming out the ends of your fingers and your hair. There’s electric bolts, little lighting bolts coming out of the ends of your fingers. And you’re in the heavens.” And I think he did a really good job with that scene.

Wow.

He looked like he had electric lightning bolts coming out of his fingers. It’s a funny story and it speaks so well of him as an actor. He’s so suggestible and I thought he just really nailed it.

Billy and Jason, were you modeling their stage presence after you and Ann? Were you Billy? Were you like, “This is how we interacted on stage and if you do this this is going to work”?

That’s a good question. I think with me and Ann it was a different dynamic just because we’re sisters … and female. But with guys in the band, with the egos of guys, and the way guys’s egos interact, that’s what we, with Cameron, too, were trying to portray. The best scene that explains that most of all would be the argument over the T-shirt.

Yes.

It’s like, “I do the biggest job in the band and you’re just a guitar player with mystique. Your looks have become a problem.” And that’s the male ego. To me, that’s pretty brilliant the way that scene was pulled off. Because it just speaks volumes of the rock and roll male ego trip.

Speaking of that, re-watching this in 4K now, I had never noticed before that there’s a scene a few scenes later where it shows Jason Lee as Jeff Bebe, wearing a shirt that just says, “Jeff Bebe.” It’s so funny.

That’s really funny. I know, that’s really funny. I remember that day when we were shooting that scene that he wore the Jeff Bebe shirt, really funny. There’s so much authenticity going on in that film that Hollywood could never really get right with a rock film. They always get rock and roll wrong if you ask me, because it’s just through the lens of Hollywood.

Yeah, it seems like, especially the biopics, they have a way of showing the band together and starting to write their songs. And they somehow come up with all their hit songs all at once as they’re sitting there in one session.

It just magically appears out of thin air.

Well, I’m glad we’re still talking about this movie and we’re talking about Stillwater. And there’s a movie called Stillwater in theaters.

Oh my God. I must see that.

They do not play “Fever Dog” in it, so don’t go in expecting that.

Okay then.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

As you might have heard, Sleater-Kinney and Wilco are currently on tour together (Chicago’s Nnamdï was slated to open but had to pull out at the last minute due to an injury). Anyway, due to inclement weather, Sleater-Kinney and Wilco unfortunately had to cancel their date at Kansas City. To make up for things, the two bands decided to jam it out in the dressing room at Grinders KC, and the resulting livestream is now on Instagram for your viewing enjoyment.

Among the set list were songs like “Either Way,” “Impossible Germany,” “Theologians,” and “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” among other Wilco classics. “We’re really sorry, Kansas City,” singer Jeff Tweedy said at the end of the livestream. “We’ll come back.”

Earlier today, Sleater-Kinney also announced that they would be requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative test result for the following tour stops: St. Louis, Atlanta, Nashville, Richmond, DC, Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago. “This decision was made in the best interest of our fans, the crew, and the bands,” the band wrote. “We’re working hard to keep our shows as safe as possible. As we wait on confirmation from other venues, please know that we will continue to keep you updated with these new covid protocols.”

Look into tickets here. Sleater-Kinney’s latest album, Path Of Wellness, is out now via Mom + Pop. Get it here.

“Ball Is Life,” Swae Lee‘s contribution to the newly released Madden NFL 22 soundtrack with Jack Harlow, is a bit of a departure from the mostly aggressive, boisterous material from fellow contributors like Tierra Whack and Moneybagg Yo. Instead, it’s a spacey, trap&b head-nodder on which Swae croons about “balling every day” over ethereal synths and booming 808. Harlow comes in on the bridge with his usual rags-to-riches braggadocio.

Swae hasn’t released too many solo singles this year, instead popping up on tracks with PnB Rock and Pink Sweats (“Forever Never“) and Skrillex and Siiickbrain (“Too Bizarre“), and on an episode of FX’s Lil Dicky comedy Dave with his brother Slim Jxmmi. Harlow, though, has had something of a breakout year, dropping his debut album That’s What They All Say to overall positive reception and featuring on songs with some of music’s biggest stars including Eminem (“Killer” remix with Cordae) and Lil Nas X (the controversial “Industry Baby“). He also got to meet Saweetie, which was fun.

Listen to “Ball Is Life” above.

The Madden NFL 22 soundtrack is out now via Interscope. Get it here and check out Spotify’s extended playlist here.

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

When P.T. was released on the PlayStation 4 it was a phenomenon. The short horror game became infamous quickly for being one of the most terrifying experiences players had ever gone through. The gameplay was simple, walk through a looping hallway and attempt to uncover a secret in the process. What was that secret? Nobody was really sure, they just knew they had to keep hunting for it.

The game itself wasn’t long, it only takes about two hours to beat, but the payoff is still one of the coolest moments in recent memory. The secret was that the player was actually playing a “Playtable Teaser” for the next Silent Hill game, Silent Hills.

The idea of a playable demo being the way to announce a game blew everyone’s minds. Unsurprisingly, it was the work of Hideo Kojima. The Metal Gear Solid director was well known for being theatrical in how he announced his games, but this was one of his most brilliant works yet. P.T. was a horror masterpiece and many people saw it as a genuinely great game on its own. A popular trend at the time was to get the game and go through it with friends. It became a social experience and these experiences pushed P.T. to a status nobody had ever seen from a demo. All of this helped the upcoming Silent Hills game become one of the most anticipated new titles in development. Add in the detail that Guillermo del Toro would be joining Kojima in the production of the game and excitement for it only grew.

Of course, most people know the story by now, Silent Hills never came. There hasn’t been any Silent Hill game since 2012 and P.T. is technically the last game the franchise ever got. Unfortunately, it’s now very hard to play P.T. because of the very public fallout between Kojima and the owners of the IP, Konami. P.T. was removed from PSN forever and it now only exists on the PS4 consoles that already had the game downloaded. A piece of video game history is gone forever.

While the game itself may be gone, however, its impact is still being felt today. P.T. was such a massive success that when Resident Evil decided to go back to more traditional horror games it released their own playable demo for Resident Evil 7 and it even followed a similar format. The inspiration from P.T. was obvious. It left such an impact on Silent Hill fans that they’re still keeping their ear to the ground on even the slightest bit of news about the dormant franchise, because P.T. was the proof fans needed that it was still possible to make a good Silent Hill game.

Is P.T. ever going to come out again? Who knows. It seemed impossible at the time of the split between Kojima and Konami, but time heals all wounds and the two sides could maybe work together again some day to revive not only Silent Hill, but P.T. Kojima has been celebrating the seven years since P.T.’s release by sharing fans love and appreciation for the game. It’s clear that he still feels very proud of his work on it even if it technically is forever unfinished.

For anyone that hasn’t played P.T. before, there are numerous walkthroughs and ways to experience the game still, but nothing will ever be the same as when it first came out. It was a cultural moment that many video game fans will remember forever. Despite being only a two hour game it impacted the industry and video game fans more than any of us ever could have expected.

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — It’s a good show

I’ll be the first to admit I did not expect Dave to be this good. I enjoyed the first season, too. It was funny and weird and not exactly like anything else on television anywhere, even if it did share a lot in common with Curb Your Enthusiasm, on paper. They’re both shows about tightly-wound white dudes who work in the entertainment industry. Both of the white dudes have a manager/friend who supports them and gives them questionable ideas. Both of them have had relationships crumble because of ambition and ego. Hell, both of them have a Black friend/supporter who gives them advice and refers to them as LD. Even some of the braintrust is the same, with producer Jeff Shaffer’s fingerprints all over both.

But season two went and leveled-up in some surprising ways. The show leaned into Dave’s obsession with success to create conflict. He burned bridges and hurt feelings, he yelled a little, he ignored some important stuff. He came across as a real jerk for a solid chunk of the season, which is a wild thing for someone to do one show in which their character shares their real name and that real name is also the title of the show. Think about that one for a while. Think about if you’d want to play a loosely fictionalized version of yourself on television and make the audience kind of hate you on purpose. I do not think I would enjoy that.

All of which made the arc of the season — right up to the last moments of the season, which I will not spoil for people who haven’t watched yet, but did make me tear up a little — such a satisfying ride. A wild ride, to be sure, but satisfying. There were guest stars galore, including a really great episode featuring Doja Cat, and weirdo flights of fancy that sometimes involves hallucinations and/or anteaters, and some of the sharpest takes on cultural appropriation you’ll see on television. Dave showed his balls a few times. It was a trip.

But the real story was the growth. The connection. The friendships strained and ruined and repaired. Especially the one between Dave and GaTa, his hype man and friend, who supports him unfailingly but fears getting left behind. The show had already done something cool by diving into GaTa’s mental health issues (anxiety, mania, etc.), and this season all of that got cranked up a bit as Dave became singularly focused on making his album. GaTa became the most likable character on the show and one of the most likable characters on television. That’s cool.

I don’t know where any of this goes from the finale, which aired this week and which, again, I will not spoil. It could go a lot of ways, I suppose. In a weird way, I’m kind of not worried about it. Through the first two seasons, Dave has been a show that rarely goes where I expect, in a good way. It seems like everyone involved has a good grasp of who the characters are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s a good feeling, to watch a show that has things under control. To just let it take you where it’s going. I like that.

So, yeah, check out Dave if you haven’t yet. It’s on Hulu and each episode is like 30 minutes long. You can binge it all before summer is over. Or, if you’ve already seen it… I don’t know. You can come over to my place and talk about it with me a bunch. I’ll probably lead off with a solid 20 minutes about how Biff Wiff — the real name of a real guy, one who played Crashmore on this season of I Think You Should Leave — appeared as himself in one of the season’s best episodes. We’ll get to the rest of the show eventually, I swear. Probably.

Dave is a good show. I think you will like it. Watch Dave.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — I have a bad idea

The good news here is that The White Lotus has been renewed for a second season. Or a second installment. I don’t know what the rules are here, exactly, terminology-wise. None of the characters will be back. And it will move from Hawaii to… somewhere else. But it will, one assumes, still feature a lot of terrible rich people. And a pretty location. At least that is what I have deduced through a combination of my tireless detective work and the thing where I read this sentence in HBO’s press release: “The next chapter of The White Lotus leaves Hawaii behind and follows a different group of vacationers as they jet to another White Lotus property and settle in temporarily amongst its inhabitants.”

So there’s that. The show’s creator, Mike White, elaborated on it all a bit in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that took place before the renewal.

“We would go somewhere different because there’s no way we could be able to afford the Four Seasons in Maui, not in a pandemic,” White says. “So yeah, it would have to be The White Lotus: Kyoto or something. Which would be fun too, because we could get into culture clash ideas and stuff like that.

This sounds great. I love it. The first go-round of the show has been a fun ride so far, with dead bodies and awful teens and Jennifer Freaking Coolidge and all of it. But it does bring me to the bad news: I have an idea.

The White Lotus is transforming into a series that will switch up scenic locations and wealthy characters. The next Knives Out movies will also feature new settings and a slew of new wealthy characters, with Daniel Craig swooping in to investigate new murders. So, what if, and just hear me out here, the two projects just kind of cross over by accident? Like, Benoit Blanc stumbles across a dead body in the fifth episode of the next season of The White Lotus and then that becomes a thing?

Hmm.

No.

No, actually this idea is very bad.

I apologize.

Disregard.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — Well, look at that, it’s news for Brian

There are, as far as I can tell, two possibilities here:

• Britney Spears did not watch The Young Pope but found this promotional photo from the show and decided to use it as a meme
• BRITNEY SPEARS WATCHED THE YOUNG POPE

And two things are true about these two possibilities:

• The first one is more likely
• I have chosen to ignore this and accept the second one as fact

The Young Pope was a wild show. Jude Law played an American priest named Lenny Belardo who became Pope out of nowhere. He drank Cherry Coke Zero and had massive abandonment issues and his two chief advisors were a dastardly scheming cardinal and a basketball-loving nun played by Diane Keaton. The Australian government gave him a kangaroo and the kangaroo hopped around the Vatican gardens for a few episodes and then it died. At one point, Jude Law said this:

I want to live in a world where Britney Spears watched this show. I want to talk with her about it for hours. I want to do a Young Pope podcast with Britney Spears. I’m serious about this. I bet she would have fascinating takes about a character who is thrust into worldwide fame and then largely cut off from that world in a walled-off palace. I cannot stop thinking about this. It is easily one of the top-two most important pieces of Britney Spears news this week.

And guess what, ladies and gentlemen: this wasn’t the only bit of television-related news this week that appeared to be targeted directly at me. There’s also this: Scrubs and Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence is adapting Carl Hiaasen’s book Bad Monkey for television, with Vince Vaughn in the lead role.

Written by Lawrence, Bad Monkey revolves around Andrew Yancy (Vaughn), a one-time detective who was demoted to restaurant inspector in Southern Florida. A severed arm found by a tourist out fishing pulls Yancy into the world of greed and corruption that decimates the land and environment in Florida and the Bahamas. And yes, there’s a monkey.

Bad Monkey, like most Carl Hiaasen books, is a blast. They’re all full of the wildest and goofiest characters you’ve ever met, and they’re all set in South Florida, and sometimes there’s a mischievous monkey or a snake that eats an old lady or an aquatic mammal that humps a villain to death. One of his books, especially this one, coming to television with Lawrence and Vaughn attached, is good news. For me. And maybe Britney Spears. I will happily do a podcast about this with her, too. Britney, if you are reading this, please consider.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — A sincere thank you to Halle Berry for mentioning Catwoman and giving me an excuse to post the basketball scene again

There’s a big new profile of Halle Berry over at Entertainment Weekly this week. That’s cool because Halle Berry is cool and has been for decades now. People should be writing about Halle Berry all the time, not just when she’s promoting a new movie, which she is doing right now. I’m part of the problem here. I can admit that. Let’s work on it together.

But that’s not the point. I mean, it is, but it’s also not. The point is that, in this profile, Halle Berry discussed the movie Catwoman.

Berry is well aware that past roles haven’t always allowed for that same level of nuance or control. Still, she’s adamant about owning the entirety of her career — even Catwoman, the latexed slice of superhero camp whose grim reviews lined the litter box, earning her a Razzie award. (In typical good humor, she accepted in person, and brought her Oscar along to the podium.) “For me,” she insists, “it was one of the biggest paydays of my whole life, which, there’s nothing wrong with that…. I don’t want to feel like ‘Oh, I can only do award-worthy stuff.’ What is an award-worthy performance?”

Good for Halle Berry. This is healthy. The movie is not good at all, but that’s not really on her alone. And her mentioning it in that paragraph has given me a legitimate newsworthy reason — today, in the future! — to post the basketball scene from that movie, which is also good. For me. I need you all to watch that video. Even if you’ve watched it before. It is the worst basketball scene I’ve seen in any movie ever, which is saying something considering I once wrote an absurd amount of words about the awful basketball scene in The Amazing Spider-man.

I do not know why superhero movies keep including these weird basketball scenes. I assume it’s to give the audience a relatable activity that the character can do that will drive home their superhuman physical gifts. Honestly, I do not care. I just want them to keep doing it. And keep editing the scenes like they are Mountain Dew commercials from 1998. It makes me so happy. I want to see Thor dunk.

Thank you to Halle Berry for letting me talk about it again today. And for being cool about it. She’s a pretty righteous lady.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — There appears to be no limit to the amount of Cocaine Cowboys content I will consume

Have you seen the new Cocaine Cowboys docuseries on Netflix? Lord in heaven, I hope you have. It’s incredible. It’s incredible right out of the gate, too. That screencap up there, the one that depicts a drug-running speedboat racer who has fabulous 80s hair and is named Willy Falcon, is from the first 10 minutes of the first episode. This is how you start a docuseries.

It continues on this trajectory straight through until the very end of the sixth and final episode, which features about 20 mind-blowing little updates and reveals. None of this should be a surprise. Billy Corben, who made this as well as the first two Cocaine Cowboys movies, is really good at his job. Just super, super good. He gets like a dozen lawyers and drug dealers and FBI agents on-camera to talk about all of it and, boy oh boy, do they ever love to talk about it. Especially the lawyers. Especially the defense lawyers. You have to watch it.

Did I convince you yet? No? What the hell?! Fine. Fine. Let me try this: Here are some screencaps from an interview with an FBI agent who went undercover at one of the nightclubs where the speedboat-racing drug dealers liked to party.

This is not even one of the ten wildest things that happens in the docuseries. At one point, the speedboat-racing drug dealers get caught because, while on the run from law enforcement agents in California, they popped up on ESPN during a nationally televised speedboat race in Miami. I’m sorry, I said “during” when I meant “competing in.” They were competing in a nationally televised speedboat race in Miami. While they were fugitives. Again, they got caught because of this.

People throw around phrases like “you can’t make this stuff up” all the time. It’s usually not true. You can make up all sorts of stuff. The Fast & Furious franchise just sent Ludacris to outer space, for the love of God. What people probably mean when they say that is “you could make it up but people would laugh at you and call you stupid and/or crazy.” That’s what is happening here. If you put that twist in, like, an episode of NCIS, I would roll my eyes. But it happened in real life. It really did.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Sarah:

Congratulations, you are in charge of a new streaming network! Grubbroxx, we’ll call it. What’s the first show you greenlight? Do you go with a heist series? (The Adventures of Thomas Crown!) Do you get the gang back together for a new season of Zoo? Do you cast Helen Mirren as a blimp captain gone rogue? The boardroom is full and your staff is waiting. What do you have for them?

Sarah, this is a wonderful question. All of these options are terrific. They would definitely be on my list. “Helen Mirren as a rogue blimp captain” would be way up there, for sure, now that I’ve read that collection of words and they live inside my brain. But I think I would greenlight a series about Allen Iverson.

I would do this in part because I love Allen Iverson and find him legitimately fascinating (his history in high school and college, his impact on the culture at large, the thing where he loves TGI Fridays more than any place on Earth), and in part because I just read this piece from Interview Magazine in which he discusses his new cannabis business and tells this story about getting too high around Puff Daddy shortly after getting drafted by my beloved Sixers.

I was with Bad Boy, with Puff and them. When I got there, I came to the studio and Big was in there recording Life After Death. We were sitting in there and we were smoking. I remember having a really bad episode where I went to the bathroom and I couldn’t find my way back to the studio. I was so high. I had on a Janet Jackson t-shirt, the one where the guy has his hands on her boobs, but it was a cartoon. It was an alien. I remember going to the bathroom and looking at the shirt and seeing the actual photo. I thought I was trippin’. I was wiping my shirt to wipe the real picture back on the shirt when in reality, it was a cartoon. That’s how gone I was. I remember walking back and forth and trying to get back into the studio. I could never find my way back and kept ending up at the restroom. So I just tried one of the doors, and Puff was in the room with his mom.

I need to see this on my television. Like, tonight, if possible. It is now my only goal in life. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Canada!

An Alberta garlic farm was on track for a bumper crop this summer.

Then the heat wave arrived in early July, scorching almost half the crop. And several weeks later, thieves hit the farm — not once, but twice — making off with about 1,500 garlic plants yanked out of the ground.

Two things:

• I thought that first sentence said “Alberto Garlic” for a second and I almost dropped my phone
• Folks, we have a garlic heist

Moving on.

After the first incident, the farm installed a trail camera that was able to capture images of two people who slipped into the field nine days later. The photos weren’t good enough quality for police to identify the culprits, she said.

When RCMP came out after the second incident, Ulmer said, officers told her that “no one has ever experienced a garlic heist in Parkland County.”

The phrase “no one has ever experienced a garlic heist in Parkland County” is pretty funny. That’s undeniable, just the idea of a cop saying that to a person. But I’ll tell you what would have been funnier: If they had experienced a garlic heist before. If there was a garlic heist unit. If they had a whole task force dedicated exclusively to the theft of garlic. If they recruited the best of the best for it and called the Garlic Squad.

And if you think Garlic Squad sounds like a good television show, buddy, wait until you read this next blockquote.

However, if the police manage to track down the garlic, the case may be solved by analyzing DNA to see if it matches the remaining garlic at Ulmer’s farm.

“It would probably get heavy into the forensic side of things,” Zanbak said.

I need a flashy CSI-style montage of attractive Canadian scientists doing garlic forensics and I need it as soon as possible.

Our thoughts are with pillow czar and cyber symposium promoter Mike Lindell today.

That’s because, despite months of confidently hyping up his followers for the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president, an event he predicted would happen on August 13th, his dream of usurping our democratic process and putting an ousted president back in the White House has officially died. (Ok, maybe not died because these people don’t know when to quit, but his prophetic street cred has taken a real blow.)

Just last month, Lindell told The Daily Beast that he hoped to have sufficient evidence of voter fraud to bring to the U.S. Supreme Court by the end of July. He theorized that, when that happened, the Republican party would have Trump back in office by the end of August. He later specified that date, telling the conservative Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network that August 13th would be the chosen day when the world would finally rise up and demand that their overlord be placed back in power.

Well, that day has come and Trump seems firmly rooted in his retirement status on a golf club down in Florida. As for Lindell, he just hosted a convention to share his mountains of proof of election fraud — evidence that ended up being bogus. He’s having a rough time of it, for sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t cackle at his misfortune, especially when Twitter just makes it so easy:

Perhaps Lindell can join some kind of “failed doomsday prediction” support group. Maybe one of those Zorp followers from Parks and Rec can hook him up.

Back in the late ’80s, NASA was looking for ways to detoxify the air in its space stations. So it conducted a study to determine the most effective plants for filtering the air of toxic agents and converting carbon dioxide to oxygen. In 1989, their results were published in a clean air study that provided a definitive list of the plants that are most effective at cleaning indoor air. The report also suggested having at least one plant per every hundred square feet of home or office space.

---

1. Dwarf Date Palm

2. Boston Fern

3. Kimberly Queen Fern

4. Spider Plant

5. Chinese Evergreen

6. Bamboo Palm

7. Weeping Fig

8. Devil’s Ivy

9. Flamingo Lily

10. Lilyturf

11. Broadleaf Lady Palm

12. Barberton Daisy

13. Cornstalk Dracena

14. English Ivy

15. Varigated Snake Plant

16. Red-Edged Dracaena

17. Peace Lily

18. Florist’s Chrysanthemum

What’s in our air?

Trichloroethylene – Found in printing inks, paints, lacquers, varnishes, adhesives, and paint removers. Symptoms associated with short-term exposure include: excitement, dizziness, headache, nausea, and vomiting followed by drowsiness and coma.

Formaldehyde – Found in paper bags, waxed papers, facial tissues, paper towels, plywood paneling, and synthetic fabrics. Symptoms associated with short-term exposure include: irritation to nose, mouth and throat, and in severe cases, swelling of the larynx and lungs.

Benzene – Used to make plastics, resins, lubricants, detergents, and drugs. Also found in tobacco smoke, glue, and furniture wax. Symptoms associated with short-term exposure include: irritation to eyes, drowsiness, dizziness, headache, increase in heart rate, headaches, confusion and in some cases can result in unconsciousness.

Xylene – Found in rubber, leather, tobacco smoke, and vehicle exhaust. Symptoms associated with short-term exposure include: irritation to mouth and throat, dizziness, headache, confusion, heart problems, liver and kidney damage and coma.

Ammonia – Found in window cleaners, floor waxes, smelling salts, and fertilizers. Symptoms associated with short-term exposure include: eye irritation, coughing, sore throat.

Please note: Some of these plants may be toxic for your pets, so please do your research to ensure your furry friends stay safe.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler handed the power of Jewish cultural life in Nazi Germany to his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels established a team of of regulators that would oversee the works of Jewish artists in film, theater, music, fine arts, literature, broadcasting, and the press.

Goebbels’ new regulations essentially eliminated Jewish people from participating in mainstream German cultural activities by requiring them to have a license to do so.

This attempt by the Nazis to purge Germany of any culture that wasn’t Aryan in origin led to the questioning of artists from outside the country.

---

Nazi book burning via Wikimedia Commons

In 1938, English author J. R. R. Tolkien and his British publisher, Stanley Unwin, opened talks with Rütten & Loening, a Berlin-based publishing house, about a German translation of his recently-published hit novel, “The Hobbit.”

Privately, according to “1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again,” Tolkien told Unwin he hated Nazi “race-doctrine” as “wholly pernicious and unscientific.” He added he had many Jewish friends and was considering abandoning the idea of a German translation altogether.

The Berlin-based publishing house sent Tolkien a letter asking for proof of his Aryan descent. Tolkien was incensed by the request and gave his publisher two responses, one in which he sidestepped the question, another in which he clapped back ’30s-style with pure class.

His publisher sent the classy clap-back.

In the letter sent to Rütten & Loening, Tolkien notes that Aryans are of Indo-Iranian “extraction,” correcting the incorrect Nazi aumption that Aryans come from northern Europe. He cuts to the chase by saying that he is not Jewish but holds them in high regard. “I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people,” Tolkien wrote.

Tolkien also takes a shot at the race policies of Nazi Germany by saying he’s beginning to regret his German surname. “The time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride,” he writes.

Here’s the letter sent to Rütten & Loening:

25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.
I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and
remain yours faithfully,

J. R. R. Tolkien