Every weekday afternoon, News O’Clock will have the latest in news and pop culture for your ears. It’s what you want to know, when you need to know it.

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Coachella is “a way of thinking, not a destination,” one YouTuber said.

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“We’re telling you that no one should be out here because it’s dangerous, but we’re sending you out there and we’re not giving out any masks.”

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If you don’t know what an “OnlyFans” is then this post is for you.

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Though we continue to live in a world where the supply of fresh Jeopardy! episodes slowly dwindles, the ones currently airing offer insight into the fickle nature of trivia knowledge. While many of the contestants on the syndicated show possess a wide range of interests and command of large quantities of trivia, sometimes a good old fashioned pop culture question is the difference in a game.

Monday’s edition of Jeopardy! was yet another example of that, as contestants were tripped up by a Final Jeopardy! question deemed easy by a lot of viewers. In fact, some predicted what the answer would be well before the question ever hit their screens. The Final Jeopardy category on Monday was Recent Movie Songs, and given that the show was recorded a few months earlier it certainly limited what “recent” releases are. Given that the biggest recent movie song was Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper singing in A Star Is Born, many people flat out guessed it would be the answer.

Here was the Final Jeopardy clue: “In October 2019 this song, a duet, was still in the top 10 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary Chart after spending a year on the chart.”

Twitter was flooded with answers about “Shallow” and how many predicted the answer to the question before it was even read after the commercial break.

Even some former contestants who often play along on Twitter knew it right away.

But it was far from a gimmie for those playing. Only contestant Ben Sonday had the right answer. Andrew Cramer knew it was a Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper song, but didn’t have the name. And champion Felicity Flesher got it wrong, calling it “Into the Deep.” It’s likely a nod to one of the song’s lyrics — I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in — but it was incorrect.

Fittingly, knowing the answer wasn’t enough for Sonday to win, wagering just $401. Cramer, meanwhile, had enough left to beat out Flesher, who would have easily escaped if she could come up with “Shallow.”

It just goes to show you: one person’s ubiquitous earworm may be another person’s undoing on Jeopardy! Gotta be prepared for everything while on stage.

If your pre-coronavirus life consisted of near-daily hikes, weekend camping trips, and any other excuse to spend an excessive amount of time outside, you’re probably having a tougher time in quarantine than us homebodies. Especially if you don’t have a backyard. But while trailheads, beaches, and national parks remain closed to the public, you can still enjoy the outdoors — so long as you’re keeping socially distant from others. In fact, you can do it tonight.

Pack some snacks, gather your housemates, bundle up, and take a drive out to a dark and secluded place away from the city to catch the Lyrid Meteor shower this very evening. From about 12 AM to 4 AM you can enjoy a meteor show that should produce about 15 meteors per hour, according to Earth Sky. It’s not exactly a jaw-dropping amount, but it’s a great excuse to take a long drive and get some fresh air, and it’s not like you have anything else to do tonight.

Tonight’s near new moon will also improve viewing conditions a great deal, as the shooting stars won’t have to compete with the bright light of the moon, so if you’re feeling lazy it is possible to catch some activity from the city, but the show won’t nearly be as brilliant. To best view the Lyrids, head to a dark area away from light pollution and look towards the southwest early in the night. As the hours approach dawn, turn your gaze directly overhead. The meteors will be emanating from the constellation Lyra, which, if you’re unfamiliar, looks kind of like a juice box. You’ll want to fix your gaze towards that general area to catch the most activity.

If you’re feeling creative, this is a great time to grab that camera and tripod and capture some time-lapses of the night’s sky show.

While The Last Dance is nominally about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, the 10-hour documentary goes much deeper into the history of the team’s major players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, and will continue to follow that trajectory as it bounces back and forth from the 97-98 season to the past that shaped that last team.

The next episode will feature the Bulls-Pistons rivalry of the late 80s and early 90s, and also introduce Dennis Rodman to the documentary for the first time, with some fantastic stories surely to come out of his involvement and his teammates’ remembrances of The Worm. After that, we’ll get to the first three-peat and, eventually, Michael Jordan’s first retirement after the 1992-93 season.

Jordan’s retirement to play baseball in the minor leagues for 18 months before returning in 1995 remains a hot topic for many, with speculation about exactly why he chose to step away from basketball. After the murder of his father, Jordan decided to pursue his first sports love of baseball, but there are some that believe there was more to it. The “secret suspension” theory is popular among some corners of the internet, but former teammate Steve Kerr believes Jordan was simply emotionally exhausted from the constant scrutiny and spotlight that followed him as the world’s most famous athlete (and, arguably, person), as he told Rachel Nichols on The Jump.

“Make no mistake about it, he faced all kinds scrutiny, but it was different,” Kerr said. “I will always maintain that the reason he really went and played baseball was because he was fried emotionally from the scrutiny that really only he felt. Just watching him, by the time I got there, watching the life that he led compared to everyone else, it was insane. And so, I think he had had enough and just stepped away for a little while, then came back and was ready to roll.”

It wouldn’t be surprising if this was the case, with his father’s death only adding to the emotional weight he would’ve had to carry. It’ll be interesting how much The Last Dance dives into that decision and how much Jordan speaks on it, but we’ll just have to wait a few weeks to find out.

The anti-vaxxer movement is starting to have a very negative impact on people’s health. Their belief in the false notion that vaccines cause autism has led to a decrease in the number of vaccinated Americas.

Last year, this created the largest measles outbreak in the U.S. since 1992. Back in 2000, it was believed that the disease had been completely eradicated in the U.S.

The health problems caused by the anti-vaxxer movement have led many to fear how they will respond to COVID-19. Health officials warn that life many not completely return to normal in the United States until a COVID-19 vaccine is administered to the entire population.

Over 70 potential vaccines are currently in the works across the world.

via Alpha / Flickr

However, there is some hope that the current crisis will change some anti-vaxxers’ minds.

Haley Searcy, a former anti-vaxxer, told CNN she has changed her mind about vaccines because of the pandemic. “I was just as scared of vaccines as I was of the diseases they protect against,” she said.

“Since COVID-19, I’ve seen firsthand what these diseases can do when they’re not being fought with vaccines,” said Searcy. A big reason for her change of heart is her mother.

“My mother has a lung disease, so if she gets COVID-19 there is no fighting it,” she added. “I learned as much as I could to speak out against misinformation in the hopes that I could convince more people to stay home and follow social distancing so that she won’t get sick.”

“So many lives are at stake, including people I care about who are very vulnerable,” Searcy said.

Searcy’s dear of vaccines stemmed from a lack of knowledge on the subject. “I wasn’t actively looking for vaccine information but the more I learned, the more I realized it would help and the easier it became to recognize the lack of science in anti-vax arguments,” she said.

The modern anti-vaxxer movement was born in 1998 when a fraudulent paper authored by Mr. Andy Wakefield alleged a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. The paper was later redacted.

Since, there have been over 140 peer-reviewed articles, published in relatively high impact factor or specialized journals that document the lack of a correlation between autism and vaccines.

Last year, another study of over 650,000 children found there is absolutely no evidence that vaccinations cause autism.

Lynette Marie Barron, who runs an anti-vaxxer group called Tough Love, says around half of its members would take a COVID-19 vaccine. She told CNN the split is “like a 50/50, which I wasn’t expecting,” with some saying they were “so scared” of the virus that they would get a vaccine if it were available.

She says that others, like herself, “don’t care” and “wouldn’t if you paid me a million dollars.”

It’s telling the way people behave when in a crisis versus everyday life. Some anti-vaxxers probably get a kick out of pumping themselves up by pretending they know more than the experts. But now that vaccines are a matter of life and death, some are smartening up and listening to science.

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Epic and Google have apparently squashed their app store beef and have made it easier for you to get Fortnite on your mobile phone these days. The maker of Fortnite has officially put the massively popular battle royale game back into Google’s Play Store after a year-plus absence over in-game purchases.

Fortnite had always existed on Android devices, but getting it on your phone or tablet required a workaround because of a dispute between Fortnite maker Epic and Google. The game could be downloaded from outside the Play store — directly from Epic’s website — because the game maker didn’t want to give Google a cut of any in-game purchases.

Here’s the full statement from Epic about the decision to put the game back into the Play Store:

After 18 months of operating Fortnite on Android outside of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a basic realization:

Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.

Because of this, we’ve launched Fortnite for Android on the Google Play Store. We’ll continue to operate the Epic Games App and Fortnite outside of Google Play, too.

We hope that Google will revise its policies and business dealings in the near future, so that all developers are free to reach and engage in commerce with customers on Android and in the Play Store through open services, including payment services, that can compete on a level playing field.

It’s an interesting dispute from a business perspective: it’s much easier to get other apps and software on your Android phone than say, an Apple device that’s essentially locked down with the exception of things available in Apple’s app store. But in avoiding Google’s Play Store, while entirely possible to do, it’s making things much harder for gamers who want to play Fortnite on their Android device. and those that don’t know it’s possible to download it outside of the Play Store missed out altogether.

Well, problem solved now.

[via Polygon]