Amir Sahragard hoped for safety in Australia but ended up in a brutal offshore camp. He is still dealing with the trauma as he starts a new life.

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Welcome to this week’s Wednesday Night Wars open discussion thread. This week it’s the go-home edition of AEW Dynamite for Saturday’s Double or Nothing pay-per-view going up against an episode of NXT featuring Rhea Ripley vs. Io Shirai, the winners of the Interim NXT Cruiserweight Title Tournament groups being named, and more.

On tonight’s cards:

AEW Dynamite

• AEW World Champion Jon Moxley vs. 10, Brodie Lee’s one shirtless henchman
• Matt Hardy vs. Sammy Guevara
• Orange Cassidy vs. Rey Fenix
• MJF vs. Marko Stunt
• Nyla Rose and Dr. Britt Baker DMD vs. Hikaru Shida and Kris Statlander
• a special confrontation between Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts and Arn Anderson

NXT

• Rhea Ripley vs. Io Shirai
• Interim NXT Cruiserweight Title Tournament Match: KUSHIDA vs. Drake Maverick
• Interim NXT Cruiserweight Title Tournament Match: El Hijo del Fantasma vs. Akira Tozawa
• Dexter Lumis vs. Roderick Strong
• Karrion Kross and Scarlett “kicking off the show” with a match

As always, +1 your favorite comments from tonight’s open thread and if we get enough comments, we’ll include 10 of the best in tomorrow’s Best and Worst of NXT and AEW reports. Make sure you flip the comments by selecting “newest” in the drop down menu under discussion, and enjoy the show!

Before contracting the coronavirus, Mike Schultz was a healthy 43-year-old—an avid exerciser with no underlying medical conditions. Eight weeks later, he’s lost 50 pounds and is now on a long journey of recovery.

Schultz, who lives and works as a nurse in California, has shared before and after photos on his Instagram and Facebook accounts, showing an alarming transformation in his body during the 57 days he was hospitalized with COVID-19.

As reported by Buzzfeed News, Schultz was on a trip to Boston in mid-March when he and his boyfriend started feeling ill. The couple had recently attended the a week long Winter Party Festival in Miami, an event attended by thousands. The festival had ended on March 10—the day before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

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“We knew it was out there,” Schultz told BuzzFeed News. “There were no real restrictions in place, though. No lockdowns. We just thought, Well, we gotta wash our hands more and be wary of touching our face.”

By March 16, Schultz was sick enough to go to the hospital—but his 103 degree fever and fluid-filled lungs were just the beginning. Within four days, he was taken to New England Sinai Hospital, where he was intubated for four-and-a-half weeks.

“I didn’t think it was as serious as it was until after things started happening,” said Schultz. “I thought I was young enough for it not to affect me, and I know a lot of people think that. I wanted to show it can happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, have preexisting conditions or not. It can affect you.”

Schultz told Buzzfeed that the photo on the left was taken about a month before he fell ill. The photo on the right was taken in a recovery ward. He admitted standing up just to take the photo was exhausting.

After weeks of being away from his loved ones, Schultz has finally back home. Today, he and his boyfriend celebrated his birthday with some Boston Market grub. “Nice to get out of the house for a little bit,” he wrote on Instagram. “Able to do more and more every day.”

Schultz explained on Instagram that May 6 was the first day he had really walked since being hospitalized. He mentioned that he still has “months of recovery” ahead of him. He wants people to understand the seriousness of COVID-19, even for people who seem healthy enough to not be affected by it—and he’s not the first recovering COVID-19 patient to share this message.

“This disease is no joke people,” he wrote. “If you think you’re too young to get it, think again.”

Wishing Nurse Schultz the best of luck, strength and resilience as he makes his way back to health.

If the first stop on your vision-board post-lockdown travel itinerary involved jumping on a plane and flying to South America this summer — sorry, they don’t want you. Keep your plans local for another season (at least), as the country of Columbia has joined Argentina in extending their international coronavirus travel bans until August 31st. According to MSN, on Wednesday, May 20th, Columbian officials announced an official extension of the country’s air travel ban, keeping all commercial flights grounded domestically until the end of June and keeping all international flights from landing until August 31st.

Latin America as a whole has implemented some of the strictest travel bans in the world. According to Forbes, in addition to Colombia and Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama have all grounded commercial flights and have repeatedly extended their respective travel bans throughout the duration of the pandemic. Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru are set to reopen by the end of May followed soon after by Mexico, which plans on resuming international travel sometime in June or July and currently is still restricting non-essential travel at the U.S. border.

According to MSN, Columbia’s decision to further extend its air travel ban is hitting Avianca Holdings — the country’s largest air carrier — especially hard as the carrier’s entire passenger fleet is unable to fly due to the restrictions of the countries they often serve. This month, Avianca filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. court and had hoped to resume flying in June.

According to Forbes, Greece is aiming to welcome tourists as early as July, though whether they’ll accept travelers from the United States, the current epicenter of the coronavirus spread, remains to be seen. While far-flung travel is fun to dream about, it’s just not realistic right now.

Twenty-one African countries have come together in an attempt to stop the Sahara desert from encroaching further south. Their mission: plant a 4,750-mile-long wall of trees.

When completed, the Great Green Wall will extend from sea to sea and reclaim 247 million acres. It’ll stretch from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, and will be three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef. The massive reforestation project will sequester 250 million tons of carbon.

The countries hope to have the wall completed by 2030.

The Sahara in northern Africa is the world’s largest desert (as large as the U.S.) and renowned for it’s extreme temperatures. A peer-reviewed study by the journal Climate found that between 1920 and 2013, the desert has expanded southward by 10%. The study says its expansion has been caused by man-made climate change as well as natural climate cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

If the situation is allowed to continue, the desert is likely to expand into the more fertile parts of Africa.

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The southern border of the Sahara is an area called the Sahel, an arid transition zone that is a point of demarcation between the desert, and the more lush, fertile savanna to the south. As the Sahara expands, the Sahel retreats, resulting in a mass migration of people, and a major disruption of the region’s fertile grasslands.

via Wikimedia Commons

The initiative began in 2007 and 15% of the trees have been planted.

Ethiopia: 36 million acres of degraded land restored, land tenure security improved

Senegal: 11.4 million trees planted, 6200 acres of degraded land restored

Nigeria: 12 million acres of degraded land restored and 20, 000 jobs created

Sudan: 5,000 acres of land restored

Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger: Approximately 120 communities have come together to plant a green belt over more than 6200 acres of degraded and dry lands. More than two million seeds and seedlings have been planted from fifty native species of trees.

The wall is made with drought-resistant trees that protect the soil from erosion, act as a barrier to the coarse Saharan winds and filter rainwater back into the ground. These newly green areas have created farming land for the indigenous people to plant vegetable gardens.

The Green Wall also safeguards the indigenous people against potential environmental problems. Patches of seedlings can become emergency food for cattle when the rains are late, fruit from the trees can be harvested or sold and trees can be cut for firewood.

The project has also resulted in thousands of jobs for area residents. This has helped to curb the large migration of people from the Sahel.

The Great Green Wall is another project that shows how doing something good for the environment can have a ripple effect that helps an entire region heal economically and culturally.

Over the past few months, we’ve been looking for comfort any place we can get it. We’ve done this by streaming all the movies, playing cards, and napping under cozy blankets whenever possible. We’ve also taken a lot of comfort in food. Everyone is baking bread these days. And you knew cheese was going to stay popular. Put them together, add heat, and you have the iconic and simple grilled cheese — perhaps the quarantine dish of 2020.

Tough to beat, right? And even better with a refreshing beer. Piero Procida, bartender at The London West Hollywood in Los Angeles has a few tips on pairing the two.

“I would stay away from any hoppy beers like IPAs and even wheat beers when it comes to grilled cheese,” he says. “It’s filling enough with the bread on the grilled cheese and having a heavy beer will just make you feel bloated. Also, overly aromatic and flavorful beers just kill the taste of a less flavorful grilled cheese. Don’t overwhelm the sandwich with an over-flavorful beer.”

Since we’re always looking for new pairings (and anything to take our minds off of the strange world we’re living in), we decided to ask some of our favorite bartenders tell us the beers they like to pair with a salty, gooey, grilled cheese sandwich.

Sapporo

Peter Ruppert, beverage director at Short Stories in New York City

If I’m whipping up a grilled cheese, I always like to crack open a Sapporo from Sapporo City Japan. I’m currently the head bartender of a brand-new bar called Dr. Clark in Chinatown and in the process of putting it together, I got in the habit of pairing Sapporo with everything.

Deschutes Da Shootz

Piero Procida, bartender at The London West Hollywood in Los Angeles

You want something that can somewhat quench the thirst from the saltiness of a grilled cheese. Lager or pilsner will work best and that is as far as I would go. One beer that has become a favorite recently and that we carry on tap at our hotel is Deschutes Da Shootz lager, which is a very refreshing American Pilsner that is clean, lightly toasted with a hint of citrus, and is very refreshing.

An easy to drink beer like this will match up perfectly with an easy to eat grilled cheese.

Grimm Ales After Image

Jordan David Smith, spirits director and head bartender at HALL in New York City

The answer to this really depends on how you make your grilled cheese. Are you keeping it classic to the core with Kraft singles and Wonderbread? If so, you’d honestly be best served by a PBR, because you need something light, crisp, and relatively straightforward. If you’re kicking it up a notch to Cabot cheddar and that fourth iteration of sourdough you’ve baked, move up to a tropically hop-forward IPA or DIPA, like Grimm’s Afterimage for its bitter backbone and juicy fruit notes to balance that salt and tang of the cheese and the slight funk of the bread. And if you’re one of those psychos who uses soft-ripened bloomy rind cheeses like 80% of what they crank out at Jasper Hill (think Harbison), you’ll want a saison for that characteristic blend of prickly carbonation, fresh-cut grass, and slight pepperiness; and you can’t get more true-to-type than Saison Dupont, though Hill Farmstead’s Anna is sublime if you can find it.

Maine Beer Lunch

James Arensault, director of food & beverage at Harbor View Hotel on Martha’s Vineyard

For this, I’d go with a New England-style IPA. Lunch (Maine Beer Company) Small batched New England IPA, citrus notes and a full flavor, pairs well with hot melted cheese and always very refreshing.

Carib Lager

Everson Rawlings, mixologist at Scrub Island Resort Spa and Marina in the British Virgin Islands

The best beer for paring with grilled cheese is normally an ale but ales are not popular in the Virgin Islands, so I go with Carib Lager which represents the Caribbean. It’s a light, refreshing lager that pairs with the rich cheese and crispy bread.

Olde Mecklenburg Copper

Scott Daniel, bartender at The Ballantyne in Charlotte, North Carolina

We enjoy pairing Olde Mecklenburg Copper with a classic grilled cheese sandwich, and, in fact, our chefs have gone a step further and created a savory OMB Copper Gruyere cheese that we feature in dishes like our onion soup.

Revelry Poke The Bear

Brandon Carter, chef at FARM in Bluffton, South Carolina

I like Poke the Bear from Revelry for this. I feel like they would work well together because they’re both comforting and unpretentious. Simple, light beer with a classic, simple comfort food.

Little Creatures Pale Ale

Sebastien Derbomez, brand advocacy manager of William Grant & Sons

Little Creatures (specifically their pale ale) of course. Grilled cheese sandwich brings me back to the time I used to live in Australia, Little Creatures has a beautiful old waterfront warehouse in Perth and their beers are delicious.

Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout

Jon Joseph, bartender at JL Bar Ranch, Resort & Spa in Sonora, Texas

Cheese is very fatty and just like wine, we need some structure to hold up to the fat content. We would choose a bourbon barrel-aged beer like Kentucky Breakfast Stout. It has a creamy finish to pair with the cream of the cheese. It works because it doesn’t overpower the sandwich.

Metropolitan Magnetron

Hayden Miller, head bartender at Bodega Taqueria y Tequila in Miami

One of my favorite beer styles is schwarzbier, essentially a black lager. The robust flavors of a stout but without the heft of a high-ABV beer make it an attractive pairing for something like a grilled cheese. My favorite domestic schwarzbier is from Metropolitan Brewing in Chicago — Magnetron. That being said, if you strike out looking for a true schwarzbier, there’s nothing wrong with a Guinness to wash down a good, savory sandwich.

Wynwood Laces IPA

Nicole Quist, beverage director at Bartaco in Aventura, Florida

I’ve got to go with a Wynwood Brewing pick here. We got the first canning of Laces IPA for our opening and the bold flavors here really stand up to cheesy goodness. I like it with our duck quesadilla (kind of like a grilled cheese).

The release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch coincided with sweeping stay-at-home orders across the United States, and the result has been people putting some serious time and energy into their island homes.

Sometimes this has meant collecting preposterous amounts of turnips to sell on the stalk exchange, while others have gotten very creative with how customizable the virtual island world is. The Detroit Lions used Animal Crossing to unveil their 2020 schedule, while SNL turned the adorable game into something much more sinister.

Others have taken an unbelievable amount of effort to recreate moments from pop culture in the game, with the most recent examples being YouTubers pascal and dclemente recreating Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s infamous cold open in which Jake Peralta has a lineup sing “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys to identify a murderer. The results are truly incredible.

I don’t even want to know how much time it took to make these happen, but I’m very glad that they exist because they are some spectacular works of art. The use of reactions is a really nice touch and both put some serious effort into bringing the scenes to life — the first one with a character that looks a good bit like Andy Samberg is some real detail oriented stuff.

(h/t Kotaku)

Even before the planet was besieged by a highly contagious virus, many have joked, despairingly, about how perhaps we’ve been living in the worst timeline. Others have wondered if we’re stuck in a malfunctioning simulation à la The Matrix. As it happens, when Patton Oswalt went on The Joe Rogan Experience Tuesday to promote his new stand-up special, and, as caught by The Hollywood Reporter, the two wound up talking about the second possibility, with Oswalt wondering if maybe one of the first film’s most villainous characters might have had the right idea.

Rogan was the one who brought it up, saying the grim state of affairs right now has him wondering if we are being controlled by some artificial intelligence, which has been making things so cartoonishly awful in order to bring humans “deeper into the hive.” Oswalt took that idea and ran with it:

“What if the AI knows that eventually it does have to unplug us and let us see that we’re in the protein pods? ‘That’s going to freak them out, so let’s make this fake reality so fucking insane and awful. We’ll have Trump be president. We’ll have this virus.’”

In the original 1999 film, Keanu Reeves’ lowly computer programmer and hacker Neo discovers the reality he knows is a lie, and that the truth is that all of humanity is enslaved to computer overlords who keep them in pods, feeding them a collective dream that resembles our own (alleged!) real world. At one point, one of Neo’s new colleagues, Joe Pantoliano’s Cypher, turns turncoat, selling out our heroes to the dastardly machines so that he can be plugged back into the Matrix and obliviously live a fake but nice life where he can eat steak instead of slop. He’s a bad guy, yes, and his plan luckily didn’t work. But, Oswalt wondered, is he that wrong?

“There’s a very strong case to be made for Cypher’s character, like, ‘No. Plug me the fuck back into this,’” Oswalt said. “‘I’m nude with atrophied muscles, hairless in a jagged wasteland of radioactive slag, or I can be in this world where I have a nice job, where I eat a steak and marry someone … ‘Can I just live in this — I am fine with it. Morpheus, who the fuck are you helping?! Why are you dragging us out?! The machines aren’t trying to kill us.’”

Oswalt went even further, wondering if humanity was part of the problem to begin with. “’And by the way, you guys fucked up the earth. We’re doing the best we can for you guys. We could have just let you all die in the wasteland, but instead, we found a way so that you can live.’” He continued:

“People always miss that line where [Agent] Smith (Hugo Weaving) says, ‘You know, when we first did the Matrix, it was just flat-out paradise, and you guys couldn’t handle that and you rejected it.’ … Probably the first version of the Matrix, everybody could fly and orgasms lasted three months and you could just eat all the chocolate you wanted. And people were like, ‘No! I want a goddamn cubical job!’ And the machines went, ‘OK. I guess they want cubicles. Give ’em that. We tried to be nice.’”

Alas, we’re still all stuck in this reality, with a pandemic that won’t be going away any time soon, and which has, in fact, put production for the fourth Matrix on pause. We won’t have another Matrix any time soon, but at least we have franchise co-creator Lilly Wachowski winning the internet on Sunday.

(Via THR)

Not many comic book movies underperform in this superhero era, but one that did was Justice League, the DCEU’s attempt at their very own Avengers. The super-production ran into a lot of trouble, and the version that stumbled into theaters in the fall of 2018 was noticeably not long, misshapen, and anti-climactic. Since then calls for the “Snyder Cut,” which restores something like original director Zack Snyder’s vision, has been a nerd clarion call — and one that was belatedly heard Wednesday, when it was revealed that version would be making a belated appearance on HBO Max. Many were excited, not least of them Kevin Smith.

ComicBook.com reached out to the filmmaker and peerless comics super-fan to see how he was taking the news. And, well, he was predictably stoked. “So happy that Zack gets to complete his vision!” Smith told the site. “Many thanks to the folks at HBO Max for making this happen, but the passion of fandom is the unsung hero here! Congrats to all the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut folks for never losing faith!”

Also excited: two of its stars, Henry Cavill and Jason Momoa. Superman and Aquaman, respectively, both took to Instagram to celebrate news they had long publicly hoped would come true.

“Now, I know there have been two camps over the whole Snyder Cut thing and whether it will ever happen for a while,” the past and possibly future Clark Kent wrote. “Just remember, we all get to have more Justice League now, it’s a win win.”

Meanwhile, Momoa was so stoked he misspelled “you’re welcome.”

Of course, Smith, Cavill, Momoa, and everyone else will have to wait awhile; the “Snyder Cut” won’t be ready for the service until 2021. But when it drops there will be almost twice as much of it as there was in 2017, with a running time approaching four hours, the film divided into sections/episodes à la prestige TV. Considering how much footage from the trailers that never made the theatrical cut, a Justice League that’s longer than a single series of Fleabag seems about right.

There were many issues that plagued Justice League during production, not least being the tragic loss mid-shoot of his daughter Autumn, which caused him to drop out. He was replaced by no less than Joss Whedon, but he was unable to bring to the film what he’d previously brought to the first two Avengers outings. In any case, we’ll find out what happens next year.

By the end of the month, most of the states across the country will finally lift lockdown restrictions on restaurants and reopen for in-person dining in a limited capacity in some form. But due to the need to rehire staff, stock supplies, and extend staff hours to keep up with new and potentially costly sanitization standards, many restaurants simply won’t be able to stay afloat, especially after several months of losses on the books. According to Bloomberg, a recent industry forecast by OpenTable indicates that one in every four U.S. restaurants will go out of business as a result of the coronavirus quarantines, even after lockdowns have been lifted.

Restaurants that are part of the National Restaurant Association estimated a total loss of $30 billion in sales in the month of March alone and a loss of $50 million for the month of April. With only 75% of restaurants expected to weather the upcoming storm, expect your favorite local restaurants and small businesses to be hit the hardest. Conglomerates will have a financial firewall to protect them; one-off restaurants won’t.

The study by OpenTable surveyed 20,000 restaurants operating in OpenTable’s network in order to get a clear picture of the challenges that restaurants face countrywide as they reopen. It compared data from the 2019’s number of reservations to help explain just how dire the situation is. Despite being open for take-out, businesses are reporting a drastic drop in receipts, with recent reports from reopened states showing a decline of just over 70% compared to the year prior.

In an effort to offer some aid, OpenTable is providing resources to help restaurants navigate the reopening process and manage confusing new regulations (all of which are being implemented on a state-by-state basis). Gift card fees are also temporarily being waived so that restaurants can see greater profits. (It should be noted that while this shows some good faith on the part of OpenTable, their business model revolves around restaurant reservations and they have a vested interest in restaurants being able to open as quickly as possible.)

The resources offered by OpenTable include tools to set up online waitlists and systems for customers to be notified when their table is ready to avoid crowding, as well as an interactive app that will allow restaurants to visualize new social-distancing-accommodating floor plans and table layouts. But for the most part, the resources offered essentially amount to common sense advice like “spread the word on social media,” or tips for keeping work areas clean.

Unfortunately, the wave of damage to the restaurant industry is moving rapidly. Just last week, David Chang announced the permanent closure of two restaurants, Momofuku DC and Momofuko Nishi, explaining on his Instagram, “When we looked at the investments needed to make our restaurants the safest places to dine and work — new systems and personal protective equipment for our teams — it became clear that not all our restaurants would be able to bear those costs.”

According to Eater, where they recently asked “Is It Safe To Eat At Restaurants Yet?”, those costs will likely include diminished capacity, expenses connected to contact tracing, automation of certain parts of the user experience (to create a more “touch-free” experience, and rigorous cleaning efforts. For restaurants, operating on famously thin margins, that’s a lot to bear.

Mind you, David Chang has a Netflix show and is a seven-time Beard Award winner. If he’s closing properties, it speaks volumes of the difficulties independent businesses will face coming out of the shutdown. If ever there was a time to order takeout and buy gift cards from the restaurants you love, this is it.