Category: News

Mike Lindell has been all over your TV for years. Well, maybe not your TV. But he’s the MyPillow guy! His company makes what are alleged to be some of the softest pillows imaginable, all for the low, low price of about 40 bucks. But he’s been on television a lot more often recently, and not because he wants to make your life easier. Quite the contrary. He’s a longtime ally of Donald Trump, and when the outgoing president lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, he leaned hard into the many increasingly nonsensical conspiracy theories about said election being rigged, stolen — anything that claims his friend didn’t lose re-election by several million votes.

On Saturday, Washington D.C. was once again overrun by Trump supporters who still refuse to accept his loss. It was a who’s who of people who’ve become famous for spouting nonsense about Trump. There was Melissa Carone, aka Rudy Giuliani’s “wine lady witness.” There was also Lindell. He’s been saying that God will sort this out, that God will help Trump serve another four years. Truly, at this point, after losing dozens and dozens of court cases and repeatedly getting shown the door by even the Republican-leaning Supreme Court, it will take a miracle.

But on Saturday Lindell — whose own state of Minnesota went to Biden by over 7 percentage points — laid out his case for how the election was stolen by… Fox News, apparently?

It’s a dense text, Lindell’s speech, alleging some half-remembered data about how Biden got “1.2 votes for every vote,” while Trump got “.66.” How specific! And therefore how almost certainly true! He said Trump, who received around 74 million votes to Biden’s 81 million, really got “probably 80 million.” There was something about how there were so many Trump votes they “broke the algorithms in the machines.” (“I look at algorithms all day,” he boasted, as proof that he knows what he’s talking about.) There was something about voting officials stopping the counting and then “backfilling” the votes for Biden. “It’s craziness,” Lindell said.

What Lindell is positing would require a vast conspiracy with many players — pretty much everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter, really. He then came for an outlet that’s received a shockingly large amount of scorn by Trumpists: Fox News. The infamously right-leaning news network has been bleeding Trump supporters since Election Night, when its election desk called Arizona for Biden long before other networks called what was eventually certified as a Biden win in the state. But Lindell went farther than most.

“Why do you think Fox declared Arizona with only 14% of the vote in?” Lindell said. “They were in on it. I’m serious. They had to be in on it. You don’t know this stuff.” He said “they” should go to prison “when they are found out.”

Lindell also called out the “Republicans out there that didn’t back this great president and us as a people.” He cited Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia, saying, “We voted them in. They’ve got to be hiding something.”

Meanwhile, the majority of the GOP has remained silent about the tall and unproven claims made by Lindell and those like him — theories that have turned Parler into such a hive of red hot madness that their users are alleging 2020 election interference by the late Fidel Castro. But if they continue to do nothing, we’ll bet people that like Mike Lindell will eventually listen to reason.

After an historic run of six consecutive live shows, SNL took a bit of a post-election break before returning with a new episode last week. Saturday will mark the second new episode in a row, with Timothée Chalamet doing his maiden voyage as host. But f you’re a big fan of SNL you already know he’s appeared on the show before — or at least been the brunt of many jokes. Ahead of him taking the reins, the show’s social media accounts reminded fans that the cast has had plenty of fun impersonating Chalamet over the years..

There was that time Pete Davidson playing him on a Family Feud sketch. But it was Chloe Fineman, appearing as him teaching Masterclass, who truly nailed the chill vibe the actor emanates.

And it’s not the first time Fineman played the Call Me By Your Name actor either. She has also broken out her Chalamet at about the 2:10 mark of the above sketch about the 2020 Oscars. With the help of a hair flip and some buggy acting, she nailed the collective cast of Little Women before making Colin Jost a bit uncomfortable.

The point is that SNL has certainly had its fun with Chalamet the person before he ever showed up to Studio 8H. So it will certainly be interesting to see what he actually does as host on Saturday night.

It has been quite a year for rising R&B stars Chloe x Halle. The twin sisters released their debut album, Ungodly Hour, earlier this year, and it is widely regarded as one of the best records put out in 2020. There was even a few months this year where I thought it might top my year-end list all together, that’s how great it is! Anyway, the sisters have already been established in the music industry in a big way because none other than Beyonce has been supporting them along the way as a mentor. She signed them to her Parkwood Entertainment label five years ago, so needless to say she’s been instrumental in helping them grow as artists.

Last night Bey made a rare appearance via video to present her proteges with an award for the Billboard Women In Music Event. The pair were up for The Rising Star Award, and though she’s been mostly off the radar during 2020’s chaos aside from her Black Is King release, Beyonce couldn’t let the honor pass by without letting Chloe x Halle know how proud she is of them. “Ladies, I am so so proud of you,” Beyonce said. “You’ve done this with authenticity, with grace, with raw talent, and you managed to shine in every room you enter. And I’ll always love you.”

Not a bad way to kick off the year of your debut album eh? Watch Beyonce’s shout out below.

There’s a whole lot of questions about what the Houston Rockets will look like this season because of the looming questions surrounding James Harden’s future with the franchise. Regardless, John Wall is in town now, and on Friday night, the former All-NBA guard made his debut in the Rockets’ first preseason tilt.

Houston managed to come out on top against the Chicago Bulls, 125-104, with Wall having a respectable showing. He scored the opening bucket of the game on a layup, and on 19 minutes of work, Wall scored 13 points on 6-for-10 shooting with nine assists, five rebounds, and a pair of steals.

Just seeing Wall on the floor again, even if it was in an unfamiliar uniform, was great to see, and after the game, he discussed his debut as a Rocket. As he explained, opening the game with a layup made him feel like he was “back.”

“I just knew I was back,” Wall said. “I know how much hard work I’ve been through the last two years. It was a surreal moment for me even though it was preseason. I’ve been through so much in the last two years of not knowing if I’ll play basketball again, or losing my mom, having another boy. It’s just so much I’ve been through and adversity, that I feel like God just gives his strongest battles to his strongest people.”

Wall had not appeared in an NBA game since December of 2018, so again, this was quite the step for him to take. Building on it, of course, is the big thing, but with everything he’s gone through since his last game, this is one heck of a foundation.

From the moment it was dropped, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion‘s “WAP” has inspired controversy. Some saw no issue with it, even loved it. Others were horrified. Still, it’s taken four months for one person to make their opinion known. That person is Snoop Dogg.

The West Coast legend stopped by Central Ave, where he wound up talking about the much talked-about track. And he was not on the pro side. “Oh my God. Slow down. Like, slow down. And let’s have some imagination,” he said. “Let’s have some, you know, privacy, some intimacy where he wants to find out as opposed to you telling him.” He added, “To me it’s like, it’s too fashionable when that in secrecy, that should be a woman’s…that’s like your prize and possession. That’s your jewel of the Nile. That’s what you should hold onto. That should be a possession that no one gets to know about until they know about it.”

That said, Snoop did reveal that his daughter, who is 21 years old, does not agree with him. “She’s from this era,” he said. “She may be doing the ‘WAP’ or apart of the ‘WAP’ and I can’t be mad at her ’cause it’s her generation, you know what I’m saying? But, at the same time, the things that I would rather see, you know, ’cause I’ma older man.”

Lastly, Snoop took note of how hypocritical his comments were due to the music he made early in his career. He also said that perhaps he thinks that way because he’s “an older man” now. “Now, when I was young, 21, 22, I may have been with the movement,” he said. “I probably would have been on the remix. But as an older man, I love it, that they are expressing themselves and doing their thing. I just don’t want it that fashionable to where young girls express themselves like that without even knowing that that is a jewel that they hold onto until the right person comes around.”

You can watch Snoop Dogg’s interview in the video above.

It’s long been assumed that the identity of the “Zodiac killer,” who terrorized Northern California from the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s, is one of those mysteries that will never be solved. David Fincher’s film Zodiac is about that very idea. (Then again, some people think maybe it was Ted Cruz.) And yet we now have one piece of information we’ve never had before: As per The New York Times, codebreakers recently cracked a cipher attributed to the puzzle-loving murderer, one that had baffled cryptographers for over 50 years.

The cipher had been mailed to The San Francisco Chronicle in November of 1969. On December 5, just over 51 years later, a solution was sent to the FBI, cracked by three citizens: David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia; Sam Blake, an applied mathematician from Melbourne, Australia; and Jarl Van Eycke, a warehouse operator and computer programmer from Belgium.

As in other cracked Zodiac killer ciphers, it contained no punctuation and included deliberate misspellings. The message found several dark boasts, and it can be read below in its entirety:

“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me that wasn’t me on the TV show which brings up a point about me I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death I am not afraid because I know that my new life is life will be an easy one in paradice death.”

Mind you, this brings us no closer to identifying the killer, whose trail evaporated in the early 1970s. Oranhak, who runs both a website and a YouTube series about the ciphers, said as much, expressing his concern that it may give families of the killer’s victims false hope.

“The message in that cipher — I don’t see it as being helpful to them,” Oranchak said. “It’s more of the same junk that the killer liked to write about. It’s just intended to hurt people and make them afraid.”

Previously only one Zodiac cipher had been solved, also by citizens, namely a California couple, back when the killings had just started. This one, however, was considered even more complex.

The Zodiac killer claimed to have taken 37 lives, but only five have been verified. The San Francisco wing of the FBI says the Zodiac case remains an “open investigation.

(Via NYT)

Christopher Nolan was the first filmmaker to come out against Warner Bros.’ controversial decision to dump their 2021 movie slate onto HBO Max, and he’s also been the most furious. Since then other directors, including Dune’s Denis Villeneuve, have joined him, calling the studio out for what they see as a short-sighted decision. Now Nolan is back to slamming Warner’s, and while he’s a little less keyed-up, he’s sticking with his guns.

Nolan’s beef isn’t so much that Warner’s is disrespecting the hard work of his cast and crew as it is that they’re missing out on making some serious dough. “The economics of it are unsound unless you’re purely looking at movements in share price, number of eyeballs on the new streaming service,” Nolan told NPR. “Theatrical is really only one part of what we’re talking about here. You’re talking about your home video window, your secondary, tertiary windows. These are things very important to the economics of the business and to the people who work in the business.”

Nolan was also worried about his crew, including those below-the-line employees who rely on huge productions, like Tenet and Dunkirk and more, to pay the bills and feed their families. “I’m talking about when I come on the set and I’ve got to shoot a scene with a waiter or a lawyer who has two or three lines,” Nolan explained. “They need to be earning a living in that profession, working maybe sometimes a couple of days a year. And that’s why the residuals structure is in place.”

He continued:

“That’s why the unions have secured participations for people down the line … “So when a movie is sold to a television station 20 years after it was made, a payment is made to the people who collaborated on that on that film. And these are important principles that when a company starts devaluing the individual assets by using them as leverage for a different business strategy without first figuring out how those new structures are going to have to work, it’s a sign of great danger for the ordinary people who work in this industry.”

It’s a more restrained — though no less impassioned — takedown of Warner’s decision than the one he made earlier in the week, where he called HBO Max “the worst streaming service.” (He was probably referring to its struggles to make a mark in the marketplace, not to its content, which is, frankly, the best and most diverse in the business.)

Warner’s HBO Max deal will involve them dropping their new releases both on the streamer and in theaters on the same day. It came after Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, dramatically underperformed at the box office, almost certainly because most audiences are terrified of sitting inside with strangers during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

(Via NPR and EW)

Before his career in the music world began to take off earlier this year, Mario Judah spent much of his time living the life of a die-hard Playboi Carti fan. But things have changed. The rapper recently expressed his frustration with the constant delays involving Carti’s third album, Whole Lotta Red. He even threatened to release his own album, with the same title, in an attempt to get him to hurry up. The deadline he issued was December 11. That day has come and gone, and sure enough, there’s now an album called Whole Lotta Red. But it’s not by Playboi Carti.

The Judah version of Whole Lotta Red is an entirely-solo release with four songs, including his most recent single, “Bih Yah.” Speaking about his mini Whole Lotta Red effort, Judah reaffirmed his Carti fandom saying, “I’m still a Carti fan but he’s making it difficult.” He added, “I’m doing everything in my power to get him to drop. I’m beyond disappointed, I’m furious!”

As of this writing, Carti has yet to respond to Judah’s bold move. Hopefully at some point we’ll have two very different albums, each called Whole Lotta Red.

Whole Lotta Red is out now. You can listen to it on SoundCloud here.

Keyontae Johnson, a standout junior forward for the Florida Gators’ men’s basketball team, was taken to the hospital on Saturday afternoon. Johnson, the preseason SEC Player of the Year and a first-team All-Conference selection following last, collapsed after the team came out of a timeout during the first half of action, and after receiving attention from the medical staff in Tallahassee, was stretchered off and taken to a local hospital.

Via Myron Medcalf of ESPN:

Before the incident, Johnson had just finished an alley-oop on a pass from Tyree Appleby. He was celebrating with teammates and walking toward the sideline before he collapsed.

Florida players were crying and hugging each other during the timeout. Gators coach Mike White put his arms around his players before the game restarted.

Both programs tweeted about the incident, with the Gators giving updates on the youngster and the ‘Noles sending out a positive sentiment towards Johnson and the Florida hoops program as a whole.

Per Florida SID Denver Parler, Johnson is in critical but stable condition.

Johnson is a former four-star recruit in the class of 2017. He showed flashes as a freshman in Gainesville, then exploded onto the scene last year, averaging 14 points and 7.1 rebounds a night. Through three games this season, Johnson has averaged 19.7 points and six rebounds per game.

It’s been almost a year since the release Cats, the instant bad cinema classic take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s deathless musical. But the movie was already notorious long before its hit theaters. When the first trailer arrived, social media exploded with jeers, many of them about the creepily realistic derrieres on the human-felines. The already overworked effects crew then had to painstakingly fix that, which may have caused them to ignore other issues, like the fact that some cats still had human hands. But was there ever a version of the film where they didn’t change that problem? Is there in fact a “butthole” cut of Cats?

That’s what Stephen Colbert wanted to know. On Friday’s The Late Show, Colbert asked one of his guests, James Corden — who played hungry trash pussy Bustopher Jones — about the existence of this legendary version. Alas, even he couldn’t give a clear answer.

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. I’ve not watched the film,” Corden said, implying that he may have never actually watched any version of the film. His host then asked if a Cats where every performer had anatomically correct rear ends would perhaps make it better, or at least more entertainingly awful. “I think, either way, it probably can’t save that movie,” he responded.

Alas, it’s almost certain the “butthole” cut does not exist. The trailer was released some six months before the film’s release, and it’s highly unlikely the editors had at that point even completed an assembly cut, which is to say the whole movie laid out, before trimming it down to a releasable form. Of course, if there was ever high demand for a “butthole” cut, the effects team could go back and undo their fixes. But they’ve already been worked to death and would surely like to move on with their lives. Still, one can dream.

You can watch Corden’s chat with Colbert in the video above. The Cats discussion begins around the 1:50 mark.

(Via ComicBook.com)