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One plus side — or possibly not — of quarantining has been getting back in touch with people you may haven’t seen in ages, not over the phone but over some form of webchat. These video sessions, on Zoom or Google Hangout or just over your smartphone, can be awkward affairs, filled with fumbled conversation and connection woes. Perhaps some end up resembling the rap session had by Paul Rudd and his long-lost cousin on the most recent SNL At Home.

The actor and ageless timelord graced Saturday night’s episode by feigning a not terribly encouraging chat with a family member played by Heidi Gardner. The two hadn’t spoken since they were kids, and it was clear they no longer had much in common. “Do you still go swimming?” and “Do you still do coloring?” were some of the questions she had for him. To be fair, the only thing he could ask her is, “Do you have coronavirus?”

She did not and, offended that he would ask such a question, she poked fun at his celebrity. Why wasn’t he in that star-studded “movie that Wonder Woman did,” aka Gal Gadot’s thoroughly mocked “Imagine” video? Was he not famous enough to be in it? Apparently not. She also reminded him that he didn’t win the Golden Globe earlier this year for Living with Yourself, and wondered if the person who did win it — Ramy Youssef for Rami — may take over his Ant-Man duties. In any case, it’s a reminder that maybe you don’t need to reconnect over Zoom with everyone.

Tonight’s episodes of The Last Dance will bring Dennis Rodman to the forefront as the documentary introduces the most unique individual from those Bulls teams by looking into his time as their greatest rival with the Detroit Pistons before joining Chicago for the second three-peat.

By the time Rodman arrived in Chicago, he had quite the reputation on and off the court. He was the best rebounder in the world and an elite defender, but he also was one of the NBA’s biggest partiers. Rodman had a special affinity for Las Vegas, where he would skip off to whenever he could to enjoy some long nights of drinking and partying. In this week’s episodes, Michael Jordan will tell the story of Rodman requesting a midseason Vegas vacation after Scottie Pippen returns.

However, as former Bulls center Joe Kleine explained on Sirius XM radio, Rodman jetting off to Vegas was a constant concern of the Bulls, to the point that they never had actual off days in order to keep him from going to Vegas and coming back too hungover and out of shape to function. Kleine explained that they would always have what he called “the most BS film session for 30 minutes,” and that he was finally told by Steve Kerr and others that it was simply to force Rodman to be in town.

It’s a pretty incredible story and sets the stage well for what we’ll see in Sunday night’s episodes about Rodman, Phil Jackson, and how the two had an interesting bond as Jackson was the rare coach that understood Rodman and knew how to work with him rather than try to make him fit in. While he was willing to give Rodman his January vacation after Pippen came back, he also ensured that didn’t happen when they needed Dennis around by working in team film sessions to keep him nearby.

Celebrities: They’re just us! The majority of Americans have been quarantining for a month-and-a-half now, hoping to avoid and lessen the powers of the still rampaging coronavirus, and that includes the rich and famous. Some of them — to help out and, surely, to stave off boredom — have even produced home content. SNL has done two “At Home” episodes, musicians have played concerts from their living rooms, and then there’s random miscellany — like, say, Michael Madsen’s new Reservoir Dogs-themed video.

Madsen has had a long and varied career — do you know that he’s a published poet? — but he’s most famous for his films with Quentin Tarantino. And of those, he’s most famous for Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s feature debut, in which the actor played Mr. Blonde, arguably the most psycho of the thwarted bank robbers. The most memorable scene finds him alone with a random cop he’s kidnapped, who he proceeds to torture to the strains of Stealers Wheels’ classic “Stuck in the Middle with You.”

It’s this scene that Madsen recreated as COVID-19 content. The video finds him taking a tour of his home while the Stealers Wheel song plays, encountering each member of his family, all of whom have a big, bloody bandage over one of their ears. Finally someone relieves him of his smartphone, revealing him dressed up once more as Mr. Blonde, aka Vic Vega, aka the brother of the far sweeter criminal Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

The message, as in many of these videos: Stay home. Fair enough! You can watch the video above.

(Via THR)

Sunday for Animal Crossing: New Horizons players brings another chance to invest some of their well-earned money into a marketplace that can have big returns if you buy enough stalks. For those not playing, turnips are a food item that can only be purchased on Sundays from the traveling salesperson Daisy Mae. But they’re not really to be eaten: they act like something of a stock market, and players buy and then sell them back at a profit depending on their sale price throughout the course of the week. It takes a bit of effort to make a big profit, but it’s certainly possible if you have the money to invest and the patience to find a good deal.

The risk is that if you don’t sell them at all by the following Sunday they will rot. There’s no limit to how many turnips you can buy, but getting them all sold (and finding a place to store them) is often a challenge. You could always, of course, turnips at a low price, fill your entire town with them, and then sell them over the next few days for maximum profit. But that would take hours of work on a single Sunday and require even more work to actually sell them and make a profit. No one would ever be so foolish to attempt such a thing, right?

The video above is from YouTuber Tom Fawkes, who apparently is absolutely going for it. Not only did he buy as many turnips as possible, but he filled his town with them. Every square inch. Turnips. This is too many turnips! Fawkes has clearly gone insane with mad turnip related power as he looks to corner the Animal Crossing stalk market. He will either come out of this with more bells than one could possibly imagine or he will end with a massive loss. It’s a huge gamble that according to the product description of his video is worth 23 million bells.

23 Million Bells worth of turnips. I’m either making bank or bankrupting. Either way, it was funny.

We’ll definitely need to see how he did selling these and check on how the markets treated him. If his Nook’s Cranny is only selling below the price he bought them at — say, 46 bells per turnip or something — he will have to search for an island with a better deal. And with the number of turnips he actually bought, he’ll probably have to do that several times over anyway. Then again, there’s a chance his local shop will pay out huge bells for all of those turnips and it won’t be a big deal. Only one way to find out, I suppose.

At the very least, it made for a very funny video for those that know how crazy the feat was.

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DaBaby‘s release of Blame It On Baby on April 17 came with reactions that were not entirely favorable, but sales of the album have surged in the weeks since it hit stores. So much so that it actually came in at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts. With the feat, the album becomes DaBaby’s second No. 1 album following 2019’s Kirk.

DaBaby’s No. 1 positioning comes as a result of a first-week sales total of 124,000 equivalent album units, with 110,000 being streaming equivalent albums units and 12,000 being album sales. The first-week sales total of 124,000 is also the second-highest in DaBaby’s career, coming behind the 146,000 equivalent album units Kirk put up in its first week. Lastly, DaBaby helped extend the streak of consecutive weeks with a hip-hop/R&B album at No. 1 to eight weeks, the longest since the nine-week run between Dec. 2, 2018 and Feb. 2, 2019.

Looking at the rest of the chart, The Weeknd’s 4-week streak at No. 1 came to an end as After Hours landed at No. 2 with 55,000 equivalent album units. Staying at No. 3 for another week, Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake posted a total of 54,000 units. Rounding out the top five is Fiona Apple at No. 4 with Fetch the Bolt Cutters — an album that marked her first appearance on the Billboard 200 in eight years — and Lil Baby’s My Turn drops down a spot to No. 5.

Other notable placements on the Billboard album charts include Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding at No. 6, Roddy Ricch’s Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial at No. 8, and Tory Lanez’s The New Toronto 3 at No. 10.

Read our review of DaBaby’s Blame It On Baby here.

[via Billboard]

We are now over a month into there being no live sports to watch in the United States, and as such, fans are flocking to anything new in droves. The Last Dance on ESPN smashed previous documentary ratings on the four-letter, drawing over 6 million viewers to the premiere of the first two episodes, and the WNBA Draft from two Fridays ago drew its highest audience since 2004.

As such, the expectation was that this past weekend’s NFL Draft would do big, record-setting numbers. The NFL Draft has become a huge event even in non-pandemic times, but with everyone at home and sports fans craving live broadcasts, the virtual draft figured to be a huge draw. Sure enough, all three days of the Draft set new record-highs in viewership for ESPN, as their co-broadcast with the NFL Network was a huge success — with major props deserved by the production crew, host Trey Wingo, and all analysts involved in what was an incredibly smooth weekend of remote broadcasts.

The first round averaged 15.6 million viewers, a new record and 37 percent increase from last year’s draft, and viewers kept tuning in for the next two days, with 55 million total viewers across all the various platforms.

It’s a huge number and the Saturday 4.2 million for the fourth through seventh rounds might be the most ridiculous one. It’s not exactly a surprise, but it still shows just how desperate folks are for something to watch that’s new — or at least has some new information in it.

The NFL Draft-A-Thon was also a success and helped raise $6.6 million for COVID-19 relief programs.

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