Category: News

The Mavs and Grizzlies met in Memphis on Wednesday night in a terrific game between two of the league’s top young stars, as Ja Morant and Luka Doncic squared off and did not disappoint with their efforts.

It looked for all the world like the Grizzlies would get the win after Luka Doncic somewhat surprisingly drove to the basket down three with under five seconds to play and got fouled, splitting the free throws and sending a 90 percent shooter to the line on the other end in Grayson Allen. However, Allen somehow missed both free throws and Dallas called timeout on the rebound with 1.8 seconds remaining to advance the ball needing a three to win or a two to tie.

Somehow, Memphis let Luka Doncic get free to catch the inbound and the man who’s made a name for himself with clutch stepback threes did something completely different, hitting a three-point floater at the buzzer to give Dallas a 114-113 win.

Review confirmed he got the ball off just in time and had his foot behind the line when he let go the circus shot for the game-winner, as the Grizzlies were handed a gutting loss after playing terrific all night. Doncic finished with 29 points, nine assists, and five rebounds on 10-of-20 shooting and just 3-of-10 from three, but none bigger than that ridiculous winner.

The Grizzlies had a balanced effort, with five players in double figures led by Allen who had 23 on an otherwise terrific shooting night prior to his crucial missed free throws. Morant finished with 17 points, five assists, and four rebounds, while Jonas Valanciunas had 19 points and 15 boards inside. It was a big win for the Mavs who are now 2.5 games clear of Memphis for the 7-seed in the West at 30-24, and just one game back of Portland for the all important 6-seed to avoid the play-in. The Grizzlies slide to 27-26, just a game ahead of Golden State for eighth as the West playoff race cocntinues to heat up.

One of the true joys of going to a baseball game is eating ballpark food. Sure it’s all overpriced, but it’s one of the few places where you are free from judgement for eating a giant hot dog, nachos, ice cream, and some 32 oz beers all in one sitting.

However, with eating at the ballpark comes danger, particularly if you’re in foul ball or home run territory. You never want to be caught, food or beverage in hand, when a ball comes hurtling towards you at 100+ mph, suddenly tasked with making the decision between dropping your very expensive food or drink or taking a baseball to the chest. On Wednesday night, a fan at Dodger Stadium was enjoying some nachos in the front row of the bleachers, where L.A. is kind enough to provide a ledge to use as a table.

As such, when Justin Turner hit a drive deep to left center, he didn’t need to figure out whether to go for the ball or not. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful in catching the ball on the fly as it landed smack dab in the middle of his nachos, covering him in hot cheese.

The best part was they reviewed the home run to look for fan interference, which led to them just replaying this over and over and over — they quickly realized that he had not gone over the wall to grab the ball and instead had it splat into his food on the other side of it.

The good news, at least, was that the nachos stopped the home run ball and allowed him to grab it, rather than the ignominy of having his nachos get exploded all over him and seeing the ball bounce away to another fan. The Dodger broadcast went to check on the man, who happily displayed the ball before his friend sitting with him picked up a chip and dipped it in the cheese on his chest.

I wouldn’t call that sanitary and probably unwise in, uh, a pandemic, but at least all that cheese didn’t go to waste.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats and Republicans came together to advance a bill that would direct the Justice Department to speed up its review of anti-Asian hate crimes, in the wake of an outbreak of violent attacks on the AAPI community. Well, most of them came together, anyway. A mere six Republicans voted against it. And few are surprised about which ones.

They included Senators who helped spread voter fraud lies that inspired the MAGA insurrection of January 6. Ted Cruz was one of them. Josh Hawley — whose biggest critics seem to be journalists from his home state of Missouri — was another. Ditto Rand Paul, who’s long been against the government doing anything other than granting him employment. So was Tom Cotton, who became famous for saying the National Guard should move into New York to take care of BLM protesters. The others were Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville and Kansas’ Roger Marshall.

The vote comes just shy of a month after a brutal massacre in the Atlanta area that targeted Asian-owned massage parlors, leaving eight dead. Still, the bill — sponsored by Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, the first Asian-American woman voted to the Senate — passed through the Senate, and with flying colors. Six isn’t bad, and besides, these six are the usual suspects. Cotton attempted to defend his nay vote, saying, “The ‘COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,’ has been moved to the Senate floor with little commentary, factfinding, or Committee consideration.”

Still, people weren’t surprised that it was these six.

That didn’t mean people weren’t angry.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Idris Elba may never get to play James Bond, but he did spend five seasons as the lead on Luther, the BBC’s beloved detective series, which maybe, one of these days, could get a movie. But there’s one critic of the show: BBC diversity chief Miranda Wayland. At the digital MIPTV conference on Monday, she told the crowd about her main issue with the show, which was that it wasn’t authentic enough.

“When [‘Luther’] first came out everybody loved the fact that Idris Elba was in there — a really strong, Black character lead,” Wayland said. “We all fell in love with him. Who didn’t, right? But after you got into about the second series you got kind of like, ‘OK, he doesn’t have any Black friends, he doesn’t eat any Caribbean food, this doesn’t feel authentic.”

She wasn’t done: “It’s great having those big landmark shows with those key characters, but it’s about making sure everything around them, their environment, their culture, the set is absolutely reflective. It will be very much about how can we make sure that this program is authentic in terms of the storytelling.”

But a number of people took issue with Wayland’s characterization. One of them was Calvin Robinson, a political advisor and commentator at the Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Robinson himself had recently been harassed for posting pictures of friends, none of whom were, like him, Black. He pushed back at both those attacking him and those attacking Elba’s Luther.

“These lazy stereotypes are racist!” Robinson wrote on Twitter. “Great thing about Luther is that his skin colour isn’t the core of his identity. He’s fighting many battles. An example that we’re all human, we all struggle, but our ethnicity doesn’t always play a part in that.”

Others pointed out that Luther is very authentic to Black life.

Others were simply confused.

(Via IndieWire)

The Sixers and Nets met on Wednesday night in a game with serious seeding implications in the East, as the winner would take a one game lead for the 1-seed in the East and Philly could earn the tiebreaker with Brooklyn with a win. The Nets, coming off a back-to-back after playing Minnesota on Tuesday afternoon following a postponement, was without most of their stars, as Kevin Durant, James Harden, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Blake Griffin were all out.

For the first three quarters, it looked the part of the expected Philly blowout as Joel Embiid dominated, Ben Simmons did Ben Simmons things, and in general the Sixers offense was humming. However, in the fourth quarter the Nets bench got going and narrowed the Philly advantage to as few as three — without Kyrie Irving who was also terrific — and forced Simmons and Embiid to return to close it out. As Embiid stepped to the free throw line up three, the Philly crowd turned their attention for some reason to Kevin Durant who had not played and was standing on the Nets bench, launching a “KD sucks” (or maybe KD’s soft?) chant at him which earned a pretty funny reaction from KD who just threw his hands out like “what did I do?”

DeAndre Jordan’s confused turn to the crowd was also funny. Durant had, to my knowledge, not said a word about the Sixers recently, as his energy has been focused more on Shannon Sharpe using fake quotes of his to critique him than a Philly team he wasn’t even going to play against. There wasn’t really any reason for this beyond it’s a game in Philly so they’ve got to heckle someone and KD’s more fun to heckle than, like, Bruce Brown. That they were yelling during their own team’s free throws was also odd given that home arenas usually try to stay silent in that situation, but Embiid knocked them down and the Sixers pulled back away for the win.

Moneybagg Yo is someone who always keeps the pedal to the metal with his full-length releases. In 2020, he began the year with his third album, Time Served, and nearly four months later he dropped a deluxe reissue, with seven additional songs. In September of that year, the Memphis rapper also teamed up with Blac Youngsta for their joint album, Code Red. Now Moneybagg has returned with an announcement for his next album, A Gangsta’s Pain, one that arrived with a rowdy new song, “Go!”, featuring Big 30.

The track finds the Memphis native flexing some muscles and throwing plenty of attacks to his opponents, while Big 30 uses his verse to remind his peers of the potential enemies that lay around them. A Gangsta’s Pain is currently led by two singles, “Time Today” and “Hard For The Next,” the latter with Future. The former arrived with a video that saw him take aim at the media while the latter took a moment to praise their romantic partners. As for the album itself, Moneybagg will present 22 songs, though the titles and additional guest features for the album remain to be seen. The rapper confirmed it would arrive next week on April 23.

You can listen to “Go!” in the video above.

A Gangsta’s Pain is out 4/23 via N-Less Entertainment/Interscope Records. Pre-order it here.

With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics now just a few months away (and taking place in 2021), the U.S. Olympic Team unveiled their team outfits for the closing ceremonies. The Ralph Lauren collection goes heavy on outerwear with a look that seems more befitting of a Winter Olympics rather than the Summer games, as they’ll be wearing an all-white ensemble.

They are very much in line with recent U.S. outfits from Polo and look a lot like what Ralph Lauren has been doing for a long time — as someone who was a merchandiser for Polo from 2012-14, they look very familiar. That is to say, they’re not exactly inspiring but also are not a disaster that will garner significant ridicule from the internet. That honor is bestowed to Team Canada which will be wearing, and I really wish this was a joke, airbrushed jean jackets to the closing ceremonies from Hudson Bay.

This is not a first, as they’ve had a jean jacket in the collection before but with patches, not airbrushed, and not as the centerpiece of the closing ceremonies. Usually they wear some extremely red blazers or coats with CANADA or a giant maple leaf on them, but this time they swung for the fences and, unsurprisingly, the internet has plenty to say.

The most frequent jokes, though, were about how the entire Canadian team will now look like Robin Sparkles from How I Met Your Mother.

After the closing ceremonies, the team will at the very least be ready to go to the mall.

Lil Nas X has dominated the entertainment world for nearly three consecutive weeks. The streak began with the release of his latest single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” followed by its controversial video, and by the even more controversial “Satan Shoes,” a customized pair of Nike Air Max 97s in collaboration with MSCHF. Through it all Lil Nas stuck to his trolling ways. But as the drama dies down, he joined a recent episode of Arts & Raps to answer some questions from a couple of kids.

One kid asked him, “What does it mean to ‘come out of the closet?” Sticking to his humorous ways, Lil Nas X said that it “means you’re like, ‘Hey everybody, I’m this thing and you guys didn’t even know that but now you know.” Soon after, another child asked, “Why are people in the closet in the first place?” The singer replied, “Back to the thing I said earlier about [how] we think about what other people think about us. Once we tell somebody we’re this thing or that thing, their mind shifts completely. It doesn’t matter how close you are to them or whatever.”

This answer led into a quick “closet story” from one of the show’s young co-hosts, in which they talked about locking his cousin in a walk-in closet and flickering the lights on and off while screaming “666” and “Bloody Mary.” Lil Nas tried his best to hold back from laughing and said, “That’s exactly what happened to me. That’s what I meant when I said I was coming out of the closet.”

You can watch the full episode in the video above.

Since Trump left office, Tucker Carlson has become the most hated man in conservative media, and for good reason. He’s spread misinformation about vaccines, floated white supremacist theories, even tried to defend the failed MAGA coup of January 6. So consider this latest social media dogpile a lighter side of Tucker nonsense: On Wednesday, a lot of people watched him and a guest try to claim marijuana use is dangerous, and that only led to widespread mockery.

During his daytime show Tucker Carlson Today, Fox News’ most watched and despised host had a chat with former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson about weed. Marijuana use has skyrocketed during the pandemic, and a number of states, including even New York, have recently legalized it. So Carlson and Berenson decided to play killjoys, claiming that, while it’s not chemically addictive like heroin or cocaine, it could totally kill you dead. Maybe.

After Carlson admitted that, having grown up in Southern California, he smoked marijuana “as a child,” Berenson brought up what is called “cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.” What is that? He said it’s basically “uncontrollable vomiting as a result of THC.” Granted, this is real. It’s just, according to Cedars Sinai, rare. But if you catch it, Berenson said, “it can actually kill, you become so dehydrated, you need to get to an emergency room.”

Mind you, this is only among habitual users, and again, it’s rare. But Berenson and Carlson then escalated it even further, comparing weed to benzodiazepines, like anti-anxiety medication or muscle relaxers, which are addictive and are known, in many cases, to cause problems worse than the ones that drew doctors to prescribe them. They’re not comparable.

But by then the two had gone into Reefer Madness territory. Soon Berenson was being paranoid about a fairly common side effect among some, but not all: the paranoia. “If you’re sliding into mental illness, start smoking a lot, you may temporarily muffle that anxiety at the cost of your paranoid syndromes getting worse,” Berenson said.

But some people had simple solutions for such thoughts: Get better stuff.

Some called BS.

Others simply belittled them as old school scaremongering.

Some offered an antidote, if weed’s making you puke.

And others thought that kind of sounded awesome, frankly.

Still, better Tucker saying nonsense about marijuana than…anything else he likes to talk about.

Researchers at Harvard University have studied the connection between spanking and kids’ brain development for the first time, and their findings echo what studies have indicated for years: Spanking isn’t good for children.

Comments on this article will no doubt be filled with people who a) say they were spanked and “turned out fine” or b) say that the reason kids are [fill in the blank with some societal ill] these days are because they aren’t spanked. However, a growing body of research points to spanking creating more problems than it solves.

“We know that children whose families use corporal punishment are more likely to develop anxiety, depression, behavior problems, and other mental health problems, but many people don’t think about spanking as a form of violence,” said Katie A. McLaughlin, director of the Stress & Development Lab in the Department of Psychology, and the senior researcher on the study which was published Friday in the journal Child Development. “In this study, we wanted to examine whether there was an impact of spanking at a neurobiological level, in terms of how the brain is developing.”

You can read the entire study here, but the gist is that kids’ brain activity was measured using an MRI machine as they reacted to photos of actors displaying “fearful” and “neutral” faces. What researchers found was that kids who had been spanked had similar brain neural responses to fearful faces as kids who had been abused.

“There were no regions of the brain where activation to fearful relative to neutral faces differed between children who were abused and children who were spanked,” the authors wrote in a statement.

“While we might not conceptualize corporal punishment to be a form of violence, in terms of how a child’s brain responds, it’s not all that different than abuse,” said McLaughlin. “It’s more a difference of degree than of type.”

It seems to make sense when you consider that hitting a child on the bottom isn’t fundamentally different from hitting them anywhere else on their body. Open or closed hand, a strike is a strike, and a strike is, by definition, violence.

In full disclosure, I wasn’t spanked as a child. My husband and I have also never spanked our own kids, who are now a tween, a teen, and an adult. (And quite delightful, well-behaved human beings, I might add.) The majority of our close family friends have not spanked their kids, and we’ve also watched those kids grow into delightful, well-behaved human beings.

When you don’t grow up with spanking, the idea honestly seems very strange. I’d no sooner hit my children on the bottom as hit them anywhere else, and I’ve never understood why people think that a slap on the buttocks—an area that feels quite private to me—is somehow less problematic than a slap across the face. I understand that people might see spanking differently if they’re raised with it, but when it isn’t something you grow up with, it’s just weird.

It’s also just not necessary. I’ve seen people argue that there are certain situations where spanking is either necessary or the most effective means of addressing a behavior, usually in situations of safety. I know many parents, for instance, think a quick smack on the bottom is an appropriate response to a small child running into the road. Little kids don’t understand reason, the argument goes. However, there are other ways to instill a desirable fear into a child who doesn’t understand a mortal danger.

When my wee ones headed toward the road, I grabbed them and scooped them up and showed them my own fear—with some purposeful drama thrown in for good measure—”Oh my gosh, sweetie! Are you okay?! That was SO scary! I was afraid a car was going to SQUASH you! Let me look at you.” Then I checked them over, head to toe, and expressed my relief that they were okay. That did the trick with all three of them.

People often mistake positive parenting for pushover parenting, but it’s not. My kids have boundaries. They are taught to be respectful to everyone, me included, and to behave like civilized humans. But kids can be taught those things through non-violent means. I can’t think of a single thing that spanking would address better than methods that don’t involve slapping a part of someone’s body—especially a part that would be considered sexually inappropriate in any other context.

As more and more research shows that spanking isn’t just unnecessary but potentially harmful, parents may wish to reconsider spanking as a method of discipline, which is the message the study authors hope people take away from this research.

“It’s important to consider that corporal punishment does not impact every child the same way, and children can be resilient if exposed to potential adversities,” said lead study author Jorge Cuartas. “But the important message is that corporal punishment is a risk that can increase potential problems for children’s development, and following a precautionary principle, parents and policymakers should work toward trying to reduce its prevalence.”