Category: News

Every now and then, a quarterback throws a pass that does not seem like it should be possible. They mean to do whatever they do, of course, but the pass that they throw is so breathtaking that it leads to a bunch of football fans wonder what the hell just happened — think, for instance, of the incomplete pass Patrick Mahomes threw in the Super Bowl when his body was parallel to the ground.

A rare offshoot of this is when the quarterback seems to do something unintentionally and it somehow works out. That, my friends, is what happened during Saturday’s spring FCS showdown between Villanova and Delaware. Wildcats signal caller Daniel Smith took a snap on third-and-1 from the doorstep, rolled out to his right, and then did some total nonsense that I can’t really describe. Just watch.

I think it’s probably safe to say this was an accident and the ball just slipped out of his hands? Maybe he meant it intentionally! I don’t know. It’s stupid. But stupid is very good here, because this is one hell of a play by Smith to turn a sack into a touchdown, even if he did not mean to do this by any stretch of the imagination.

Next week will mark two months since Bobby Shmurda was freed from prison after spending more than six years locked up on third-degree conspiracy and weapons possessions charges. Since his release, the rapper has seemingly been focused on staying out of trouble and preparing his return to music. His upcoming release will be the first piece of music he’s released as a lead artist since 2014’s Shmurda She Wrote. While the wait for it continues, Bobby stopped by the Maino Presents: Kitchen Talks podcast to share what he’s been working on.

“Man, we got so much new music coming,” Bobby proclaimed. “We got music coming with the biggest artists, from Maino, Quavo, DaBaby, 42 [Dugg], Uzi, Rowdy [Rebel], Jay. There is so much sh*t coming out it’s gonna be a hot summer.” While some were quick to assume “Jay” was a reference to Jay-Z, Bobby did not confirm whether or not he meant the Roc Nation founder.

Bobby is still on parole until early 2026, the special conditions of which prohibit him from drinking alcohol, going to bars, and associating with gangs. He also has a set curfew of 8 p.m., must submit to drug testing, and must receive aggression and anger counseling. Lastly, he must seek, obtain, and maintain employment, an easy requirement to stick to with the new album on the way.

You can listen to the podcast episode above. Jump to the 1:19:15 mark to hear him discuss the features for the upcoming project.

There are many things in life that can be defined as simple pleasures: the smell of fresh cut grass, for instance, or eating something that warms you up on a cold winter’s day. The sports example of this is when a baseball team is getting their teeth kicked in and they decide to put a position player on the mound, and fortunately for those of us who get joy out of this, the Minnesota Twins did exactly this on Friday night.

Minnesota lost to the Los Angeles Angels, 10-3, and instead of burning their fifth pitcher of the night during the bottom of the eighth inning, the team turned to utility man Willians Astudillo, who has become something of a cult hero for his portly appearance. The funniest thing is that Astudillo was the Twins’ best pitcher on the evening, as he did not allow a baserunner and got out of the inning without any sort of damage, in part because the Angels couldn’t get good contact on his 46 mile per hour heat.

It is extremely good that he dropped that eephus down the middle of the strike zone and there wasn’t even an effort to swing at it. It is also extremely good that him painting the edge with a 72 mph fastball probably looked like he was really letting loose. Do not think it is controversial at all to say he needs to pitch more. I mean, the results speak for themselves.

Award shows during the pandemic have been a bit awkward. There have been fires. There have been technical difficulties. There’s been possible sleeping. There have been nominees, usually dressed to the nines, going casual-casual in Hawaiian shirts and hoodies. The Oscars are up next, but its producers — including Academy Award-winner Steven Soderbergh — are promising it will be different. In fact, it will be, they say, downright cinematic.

“I know it’s not going to be like anything that’s been done before, so we’re leaning into that,” Soderbergh said during a press conference with fellow producers Jesse Collins and Stacey Sher. They were short on details, hoping for an element of surprise, but presenters will be playing versions of themselves, reciting dialogue from scripts. “You’ll feel like you’re watching a movie.”

Soderbergh also cryptically referenced how COVID-19 restrictions will be involved, saying, “Masks are going to play a very important role in the story of this evening.”

The tone, however, will not be downer, even though a number of the nominated films, like Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah, are. “It’s going to be a very sincere show, and it’s also going to be optimistic,” said Collins, who has also been involved with pandemic era iterations of the Grammys and the Super Bowl halftime show. “It’s going to show us where we can go in the future. And I think that’s exactly what the Oscars needs to be at this time.”

“We have to acknowledge what we’ve been through,” added Sher, “but we also have to fight for cinema.”

The Academy Awards will take place on April 25.

(Via THR)

Two years after its predecessor, Young Thug and his YSL Records collective returned with Slime Language 2. The highly-anticipated album dropped Friday, backed by 23 songs and guest appearances from Drake, Travis Scott, Big Sean, Meek Mill, and others. But it was supposed to come out much earlier. Back in August, Thug tweeted that the project would drop that month. He quickly retracted the news after he said his account was “hacked.” Now that the project is finally here, the rapper stopped by Zane Lowe’s Apple Music radio show to talk about making the compilation album with some of the industry’s biggest names.

“It seemed like a show,” he said. “It seemed like a Lollapalooza, Coachella. It just seemed like a show. Every moment was performing. Those was more a performance. You got to show up. You know what I’m saying?” He added, “Everybody’s watching there. Everybody here. Everybody in your shit. Everybody in your face, you got to show up. It just felt like that. Every moment.”

You can listen to the full episode, which also features an appearance from Gunna, here.

Slime Language 2 is out now via YSL Records/300 Entertainment. Get it here.

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

Jim Caviezel has long been one of Hollywood’s more conservative actors, forsaking the typically decadent life of a movie star to appear in religious and right-wing movies. Still, people on social media were surprised to learn that even a guy who made a Jesus movie for Mel Gibson (and arguably dragged down Persons of Interest) appeared at a conservative conference against COVID-19 restrictions, where he parroted a particularly virulent QAnon conspiracy theory.

The gathering — entitled the “Health and Freedom Conference,” and held over the weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma — was about spreading misinformation about the pandemic, even concluding with a mask-burning closer. Despite this, Caviezel didn’t join them in-person. Instead he safely social distanced, addressing the crowd over Zoom. And yet he still went tinfoil hat, talking about “adenochrome,” a conspiracy theory that last year became popular with believers of QAnon and Pizzagate.

Technically Caviezel was there to promote his next film, Sound of Freedom, in which he plays Tim Ballard, a real-life former CIA agent who quit his job to helps save children from human trafficking. While talking about Ballard, Caviezel casually mentioned “adenochrome,” which he later elaborated upon, sort of, saying it involves adrenaline in children…but not really elaborating for those who’ve never heard of it.

“It’s the worst horror I’ve ever seen,” Caviezel told the crowd, though he later said, cryptically, “even if I never, ever, ever saw it.” But to whoever’s doing this mystery thing, he said, “there will be no mercy for them.”

So what is “adrenochrome”? As per The Daily Beast, it’s an “easy-to-come-by chemical compound, usually found as a light pink solution, that forms by the oxidation of adrenaline, the stress hormone.” Some, including Aldous Huxley and Hunter S. Thompson, used it as a psychedelic. Johnny Depp, as Thompson, took it in the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie, and there’s even a Sisters of Mercy song about it. But for the QAnon crowd, it’s quite different — and it somehow involves a beloved Pixar movie:

For conspiracy theorists, adrenochrome represents a mystical psychedelic favored by the global elites for drug-crazed satanic rites, derived from torturing children to harvest their oxidized hormonal fear—a kind of real-life staging of the Pixar movie Monsters, Inc. “QAnon also likes to say that Monsters, Inc. is Hollywood telling on itself,” says QAnon researcher Mike Rains, “because the plot of scaring kids to get energy is what they really do.”

So that’s weird! And according to Wired, it’s not just QAnon types who believe this; anti-Semites who spout nonsense about “blood libels” do as well. And a famous actor — appearing at a conference that also included crumbling. MyPillow guy Mike Lindell — was repeating it in a conference for people who don’t think a highly infectious disease that has killed over half a million Americans and over three million globally is that big a deal.

When video of his appearance hit social media, people realized there’s a reason they barely see Caviezel in movies or TV anymore.

Some even roped in Mel Gibson.

So that’s what the guy who played a domestic terrorist in the Denzel Washington thriller Deja Vu is up to these days.

It been a little over a week rapper DMX’s tragic death, but he will not be forgotten. His manager, Steve Rifkind, has announced plans to honor him, telling TMZ that a public memorial for DMX will be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on April 24. However, it won’t be open to the public. The family has chosen to limit it to just close friends and family. The arena, which normally seats 19,000 people, will only allow 10% of its capacity. Despite this, TMZ reports that the memorial will be livestreamed for people to watch.

The announcement comes a week after Yonkers mayor Mike Spano offered his city’s massive raceway as a potential location for the public memorial. The outdoor venue, which resides in DMX’s hometown, carries 7,500 seats, nearly half the capacity of Barclays Center. But the late rapper’s family chose the bigger location for the service. Spano also promised to honor DMX in the city with a “lasting gesture” that may take the form of a street name, a statue, or a mural.

The news comes after a posthumous verse from the late rapper — on “Been To War,” his collaboration with Swizz Beatz and French Montana — was dropped. DMX’s music streams have also increased by nearly 1,000% since his death.

At the beginning of 2020, brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi, who comprise the rap duo Rae Sremmurd, were hit with tragic news: Their stepfather, Floyd Sullivan Jr., was shot and killed by their half-brother Michael Sullivan. He would eventually be arrested and charged with felony first-degree murder, facing life in prison if convicted. More than a year later, Swae Lee is using his Snapchat series, Swae Meets World, to open up about the incident with fans.

Swae spoke a bit about his stepfather’s passing in the first episode of the Snapchat series entitled “Swae Lee’s having the wildest year of his life, no cap.” “Allegedly the police say my brother shot my dad,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. You can’t even imagine. It’s like something out of a movie. I’m still dealing with it. I don’t even know how to deal with it all the way completely. It’s traumatic but it like puts fury inside of you. It puts fire inside of you. You can’t bring nobody back.”

At the time of his stepfather’s passing, Swae mourned the loss on Twitter. “I pray this world let’s me keep some compassion,” he wrote. “I’ve been tested my whole life.”

You can watch the trailer for the forthcoming series above and head to Snapchat’s discover page to watch the new episode.

The Utah Jazz avoided the worst-case scenario with Donovan Mitchell’s ankle. According to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Mitchell, who suffered a pretty nasty looking ankle injury on Friday afternoon against the Indiana Pacers, had both an x-ray and an MRI come back clean and showing no signs of any major structural damage.

As a result, instead of any extended absence, Mitchell is expected to miss a few games before getting the green light to return to Utah’s lineup, per Woj.

A timetable for a return is unclear, but considering that Mitchell needed to be helped off the floor after rolling his ankle, it’s pretty good news for the Jazz that he isn’t slated to be out for a particularly long period of time. Still, the sooner his return the better for Utah, which sit 1.5 games up on the Phoenix Suns for the 1-seed in the Western Conference — the two teams are slated to play on April 30 in Phoenix, but the Jazz will play six games between now and then.

Mitchell, who made his second All-Star team this year, is in the midst of a career season, leading the team with 26.4 points per game. Wojnarowski pointed out that Mitchell has taken his scoring to another level since the All-Star break, putting up numbers the Jazz have not seen since Karl Malone’s time with the franchise.

After pump-faking on its initial release date of August 2020, Young Thug finally released Slime Language 2, the sequel to the compilation album he and his YSL record label released back in 2018. Less than 24 hours after the project’s arrival, he dropped the music video for “Ski,” his collaboration with Gunna. It finds the two rappers throwing a lavish pool party filled with plenty of women and lots of energy.

The video sports appearances from Swae Lee, Nav, Seattle Seahawks’ wide-receiver DK Metcalf, and fellow YSL members T-Shyne, Strick and Lil Duke. A number of TikTok stars can also be found, like the Corvette dance creator Dorien B. Scott and the Up dance creators Mya Nicole Johnson and Christopher Zion Cotter.

Slime Language 2 presents 23 tracks in a star-studded affair, including contributions from Drake, Travis Scott, Big Sean, Meek Mill, Rowdy Rebel, Coi Leray, Lil Baby, Lil Uzi Vert, Future, and more. The compilation album also arrived on the six-year anniversary of Thug’s Barter 6 mixtape, which helped push the Atlanta rapper into the spotlight.

You can watch the “Ski” video above.

Slime Language 2 is out now via YSL Records/300 Entertainment. Get it here.

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