Category: Worldwide

It’s hard to keep track of all the controversies and, perhaps, crimes that were associated with Donald Trump during his presidency. The man talks a lot, you know, and has a habit of rambling about things he perhaps should not. That hasn’t changed after two impeachments and leaving office in shame, as was evidenced by a new report that detailed Trump talking about an unconfirmed report that he had a very particular kink.

As the Washington Post reported, Trump actually spoke to sitting Republican senators and rambled about his first impeachment regarding his efforts to pressure Ukraine into helping him find information about Joe Biden. He also, uh, talked about that “golden showers” thing that reportedly appeared in a Russian dossier that made waves earlier in his presidency.

The story details Trump’s persistent control over the Republican party in spite of, well, everything. And it includes details about how active he is in the political scene while still essentially in exile at Mar-a-Lago. While he’s still debating another presidential run in 2024, Trump is actively endorsing candidates in other elections and fundraising at various events.

Including at a National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) event detailed in the story. Where he talked about the Big Lie that he still claims he won the 2020 presidential election, which he did not. He also decided it was the time and place to address the rumors that he likes to be urinated on.

“It was all phony s—, okay. All phony stuff,” he said of the Democratic impeachment efforts and the investigation of his ties to Russia.

Unprompted, he brought up an unsubstantiated claim he had interactions with prostitutes in Moscow before he ran for president.

“I’m not into golden showers,” he told the crowd. “You know the great thing, our great first lady — ‘That one,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that one.’ ”

The story made it sound like a greatest hits of things he hates and other grievances. He railed against windmills, for some reason, and praised the president of China. But it’s still very strange, no matter how much you know about Trump by now, to think of a former president commenting on a very specific sexual fetish. Even if it’s not something he’s actually, you know, into.

[via Washington Post]

The resignation of Jon Gruden from the Raiders earlier this week for racist, homophobic, and misogynistic emails sent to former Washington executive Bruce Allen has led to plenty of discussion about the ways those who are powerful in the NFL talk behind closed doors and what needs to change in the overall culture of professional football.

Some, like Chargers coach Brandon Staley, have used the Gruden situation as an opportunity to recognize their role as a leader to provide a welcoming atmosphere to those groups and why it’s so important to build trust and earn that trust in all of your actions. It is a great time for some introspection from many in football, and the circumstances of this week made what happened on Fox’s Thursday Night Football pre-show stand out to many even more as another example of things that shouldn’t be happening.

After an Erin Andrews interview with Devin White, whose love of horses led to the two of them doing the interview at a horse stable, they threw it back to the Fox studio crew for what became a very awkward transition as Terry Bradshaw made some comments about Erin Andrews’ appearance in the interview that left some viewers feeling uncomfortable.

Some felt it was simply an awkwardly worded compliment, but plenty felt Bradshaw’s comments came off as inappropriate.

It’s certainly wasn’t Bradshaw’s finest on-air moment as, if nothing else, it was a very awkward transition.

Banksy has remained relatively quiet in the plague years, with just a handful of new works popping up in 2020 and 2021 thus far. But one of his most famous works from earlier in his career is still making headlines, this time for being sold for much more “destroyed” than it was worth intact.

The commodification of, well, everything has certainly made things interesting during a pandemic-aided period of rapid value appreciation across all sorts of markets. The trading card industry is as hot as ever, for example, and art is no exception. But the recent sale of Banksy’s infamous shredded painting is certainly notable. According to the New York Times, the retitled piece that was infamously shredded after a sale in 2018 sold for a record for the artist’s work.

The Banksy painting that sensationally self-destructed three years ago after selling for $1.4 million at auction was resold by Sotheby’s Thursday for 18.6 million pounds, or $25.4 million, a record for the artist.

That work’s “destruction” shocked observers in 2018 after it was remotely ran through a shredder built into the artwork’s frame by the artist himself. As the Times pointed out, though the statement Banksy was trying to make with the painting was that value in art is entirely subjective and, sometimes, temporary, many expects correctly predicted that the shredding and subsequent attention it was given only made the painting significantly more valuable. And popular.

The artwork, which started as a spray-painted canvas from 2006 called “Girl With Balloon,” had been the last lot of Sotheby’s equivalent “Frieze Week” sale in October 2018. Immediately after being bought in a telephone bid, for $1.4 million, an alarm went off in the salesroom. Sotheby’s staffers and the audience at the auction gasped as the painting slid through its elaborate gold frame and shredded, then jammed halfway through. It was carried out via a remote-controlled mechanism hidden in the frame. Sotheby’s declared afterward that it had been “Banksy-ed.”

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“Love Is in the Bin,” with its shredded lower half dangling under the frame, was displayed behind a protective glass screen at Sotheby’s. It had been offered for sale by an unidentified European collector. It was exhibited for 11 months next to revered old masters at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany in 2019-20. During that period, the Staatsgalerie said, it attracted 180,000 visitors, about double its usual attendance.

Banksy’s work is all about getting attention, of course, so that was certainly achieved by the viral fame that piece got in the aftermath of turning most of it to very expensive ribbon. But despite his best efforts, all that paper has only gotten more valuable to observers in the years that have passed.

October 14th would have been George Floyd’s 48th birthday. Floyd, whose life helped galvanize millions of Americans within the Black Lives Matter movement, was killed at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25th, 2020.

On Wednesday night, hip-hop’s reigning diva Queen Erykah Badu had a tour stop at the Minneapolis Armory venue in the city. The gracious Badu invited George Floyd’s family backstage —including his sister, his uncle, and aunt — to celebrate and honor his life at the stroke of midnight,

As she counted down the final minutes to midnight, Badu recorded a video tribute to Floyd on her Instagram story, panned the camera to show his family members, and stated the following message:

“People of planet Earth, we’re about four minutes away from George Floyd’s birthday. He would’ve been 48 years old and I’m here with his family now. It seems like we have a moment of peace right now. And we know that your life is not in vain. Thank you for your spirit and your sacrifice so that we can move on the way we should — be where we supposed to as a people.”

To learn more about or to donate to the George Floyd Foundation and their legacy mission of “activating our communities to challenge the root causes of racial inequity and end the systemic violence affecting Black Americans,” you can visit www.georgefloydmemorialfoundation.org/.

When Adele releases music, it’s expected to break records. An example of this came on her 2015 album, 25, through its lead single “Hello.” At the time of its release, the song broke a record by going No. 1 in 102 countries on iTunes. BTS would later surpass this when their “Blac Swan” record went No. 1 in 105 countries. Six years later, Adele is back in action as she just released “Easy On Me,” the lead single to her upcoming album 30, and to the surprise of no one, the singer is back to breaking records.

Adele reportedly broke the record for the fastest song to reach No. 1 on iTunes’ US chart with “Easy On Me.” According to the Twitter account @chartdata, which delivers weekly Billboard chart updates and often reports about unique occurrences on various music charts, “Easy On Me” reached No. 1 in just three minutes to break the record. The previous record-holder for this achievement was Ariana Grande whose “Positions” track hit No. 1 on the US iTunes charts in under ten minutes. iTunes or Apple has yet to confirm the new record.

The release of “Easy On Me” comes after Adele finally confirmed that 30 would be her next album title and revealed it would arrive on November 19. In a message she shared on social media, she described how the upcoming release was a close friend to her “throughout the most turbulent period” of her life. She ended the message by writing, “I’ve painstakingly rebuilt my house and my heart since then and this album narrates it. Home is where the heart is x.”

30 is out 11/19 via Columbia. Pre-order it here.

The 2021 WNBA Finals series between the Chicago Sky and Phoenix Mercury got underway this past Sunday, and so far, it’s proven to be an exciting matchup. The Mercury won Game One with a satisfying 14-point win while the Sky game back strong to win by five in an overtime thriller. The Finals series has fans, like fellow Phoenix athletes Chris Paul, Jae Crowder, and Devin Booker, excited for the next matchup. This also includes Chance The Rapper who hopped on Twitter to make a bold claim ahead of Game 3.

A little over 24 hours before tipoff for game three, Chance took to Twitter to make a strong promise for the game. “When the Sky clenches the victory in game 3 tmw I will be getting tatted to commemorate the victory,” the rapper wrote. Even if the Sky win on Friday, Chance’s tattoo will be a bit of a premature celebration as the team will still need an additional win to get their hands on the WNBA Finals trophy.

Chance’s comments come shortly after he released his Magnificent Coloring Book film concert, a movie that he recently admitted made him “super thirsty” to perform again. He added during the interview with Billboard, “I’m saying to myself ’I can’t wait to perform this particular song now. I’m looking at it as a performer, but also as a filmmaker.”

You can read Chance’s tweet above and tune in to game three of the WNBA Finals on 10/15 at 9 PM EST.

A newborn baby saving an entire animated film production from unprecedented disaster? Sounds a bit like the plot of a Pixar short, doesn’t it?

Something (sort of) like that actually did happen during the making of “Toy Story 2.” (There are a several retellings of the story out there, from an in-depth interview on The Next Web to the simplified, animated version in the “Toy Story 2” extras shown below.)

Here’s a basic rundown of what happened:

The film was well underway when an unnamed Pixar employee who was trying to delete unneeded files accidentally applied the “remove” command to the root files of the film. Suddenly, things started disappearing. Woody’s hat. Then his boots. Then Woody himself.

Pixar folks watched characters and sequences disappear in front of their eyes. Obviously, this was … not good.

Oren Jacob, the associate technical director of the film, got on the horn to the systems crew with a panicked “Pull the plug!” They did. Were they able to stop the bleed? Nope, 90% of the movie was gone. Surely there was a backup system, though, right?

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Yes! But unfortunately, no one had been checking to make sure the backups were actually working. Oopsie. And as luck would have it, the backups were not working, and hadn’t been for a month. Nearly all of “Toy Story 2” had gone bye-bye. Big honking oops.

Jacob called the film’s supervising technical director, Galyn Susman, to deliver the bad news. Imagine making that phone call. No, thank you.

But this is where the story gets good.

Susman just happened to have been working from home because she’d recently had a baby. (That’s right, she was directing one of the most iconic animated films to date while also creating and birthing human life. Respect.) And it just so happened that she had backed up the film on her home computer so she could work on it while taking care of her newborn, Eli.

“As a mother who wanted to see her children, I needed to have a computer at home,” Susman says in the animated recreation of the mishap. “And so I would copy the entire film onto my computer.”

Jacob and Susman wrapped the computer in blankets to protect it, seatbelted it in to the backseat of Susman’s Volvo and drove it to the Pixar studios. (Remember, this was 1998—clearly this process would look much different today.)

“Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room,” Jacob told The Next Web.

It worked. The film was recovered. (The simplified version makes it sound like this was an instant fix; however, the in-depth version clarifies that there were tens of thousands of technical files that employees had to pore through one by one in a lengthy, arduous process. But still, their bacon was saved.)

Babies and work-from-home moms for the win, am I right?

How Toy Story 2 Almost Got Deleted: Stories From Pixar Animation: ENTV

www.youtube.com

However, this story has a perfectly ironic ending, as the version of the film recovered from Susman’s computer ended up being almost completely scrapped anyway. When the Pixar bigwigs took a look at the movie, they decided it simply wasn’t good. The film ended up being rewritten and remade into the delightful movie we know and love today.

Bless the Pixar people for their dedication to greatness—and for learning their lesson about routinely checking backups the hard way.

An anonymous Twitter user with the handle BusinessmanLego is getting a lot of love for pointing out a sad fact of American life: The phone call has been nearly killed by scammers.

We can all remember a time when getting a phone call from a number you didn’t know would be exciting. A long-lost friend could be getting in touch. It could be a new opportunity. You may have won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.

But now, a call from an unknown number is most likely from a scammer or an autodialer. They’re distracting, annoying and feel like harassment. The fact that they’ve become so common seems like another example of how so many of our institutions have stopped working in the best interests of the public and have kowtowed to special interests.

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I love that there was a period of time when it was like ‘grrr someone should fix these robocalls’ and then they nev… https://t.co/yadzeW6zOl

— Lord Businessman (@BusinessmanLego)
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A lot of people feel that robocalls have basically ruined the concept of the phone call.

Our leaders have failed.

Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore.

People never used to ignore phone calls.

@behaviorben @BusinessmanLego Ignoring a ringing phone was like ignoring a knock at the door. Hard to believe, now.

— Mortal Trash (@trashymortal)
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It seems like we’ve all sacrificed a great mode of communication and our sanity for a few opportunists to make a buck.

It’s not just calls.

OK, now this was funny.

@JennyBwood @BusinessmanLego Jenny I know your number. It’s 867-5309.

— Jamison Malkovich 🇺🇦🇮🇹🇺🇲🌊🌊🏖️🍺 (@redhorse6531)
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Now, here’s a solution: We could charge people for unsolicited calls.

@google_result @BusinessmanLego This is a great idea and would solve the problem. Wouldn’t even need to be 20c, cou… https://t.co/LDOdHJDWvM

— Jason Harris 💉💉 (@LMCBoy)
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America has been plagued by robocalls over the past few years. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission identified them as the No. 1 complaint in 2020 and Americans are on track to receive 48 billion this year.

How does this happen?

Robocalls usually begin abroad in counties such as India, the Philippines and Mexico. Scammers route their calls to smaller U.S.-based telecom carriers who are happy to pocket their fees. The calls are then funneled to the largest carriers who send them directly to your phone.

In 2019, Congress passed the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (or TRACED) Act but the shadowy audio-dialing industry has been able to keep ahead of the law. Fortune says that blame can also be placed on big businesses for their “tacit support for robocalling” and federal agencies whose “foot-dragging” has allowed scammers to get off scot-free.

What can you do to stop auto-dialers?

1. Talk to your phone company. Most major telecom companies have call-blocking tools that can help shut down scammers on their end.

2. Register your number on the Do Not Call Registry. This won’t stop illegal scammers but it will save you from hearing from bothersome legitimate telemarketers.

3. Block spam calls from your smartphone:

iPhone—iOS 13 has an app called Silence Unknown Callers, which blocks any callers that aren’t in your contact list, you haven’t been in contact with or haven’t texted, and sends them straight to voicemail. Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers

Android—To turn on Block Calls From Unidentified Callers, tap the phone icon on the bottom of your screen. Tap the three dots on the top right of the screen, then: Settings > Blocked Numbers. Enable Block Calls From Unidentified Callers by tapping the toggle switch on the right.

Google Pixel—When you receive a call from any number, tap Screen Call on your home screen and Google Assistant will answer it for you. If the caller responds, you’ll receive a transcript of their response.

Matt Amodio’s time on Jeopardy! (for now) is done. At least until the next Tournament of Champions. But the Ph. D student still has plenty of people talking about his $1.5 million, 388-day run on the show as Jeopardy! champion. Given just how consistent he was in cruising past contestants to build up that historic run, many were shocked when he ran into trouble during Monday’s episode.

Some, in fact, went as far as to speculate that Amodio intentionally lost, especially when he didn’t come up with the correct answer to Final Jeopardy! But in writing for Newsweek, Amodio made it clear that he wasn’t tanking, and gave new details about his very successful run on the show and what it meant to him.

“I wasn’t being fed the answers when I was winning and I didn’t throw the game when I lost. It’s just a competition, I was doing well and then I lost. There’s nothing more to it,” Amodio said. “My buzzer was working fine. The only thing that wasn’t working was my brain at full capacity. The theories don’t upset me, people think all sorts of crazy things. But I do have the power not to acknowledge them.”

Other past Jeopardy! contestants have stuck up for Amodio in the days since he lost his 39th appearance on the show, dismissing the conspiracy theories in the process.

Many who have appeared on the show in the past had the same take on the performance: sometimes you just have a bad day. And Amodio admitted he felt “off” when he filmed game 39, and that was certainly a factor in the result.

“I gradually saw that I wasn’t remembering things that I really should have been able to remember, and I was mis-reading clues in front of me. As that was happening, I began to see where the path ahead of me was leading,” he said, recalling the performance where another player found all three Daily Doubles and ended up with the victory. “I’m quite pleased with how I kept steady throughout. I don’t think my emotions or confidence played that much into it, what I did feel was that there was evidence that my mind wasn’t working at full capacity.”

He was also very complimentary of his opponents, though, both on Twitter and in the Newsweek piece about his experience.

“I didn’t lose a game of Jeopardy!” he said. “There were two people who fought hard to win, and one of them won. It was a poorly timed downturn for me, because I was up against two of the best and they did a great job capitalizing on that.”

Amodio said he has very boring plans for his winnings, but many fans are already eager to see him return to the tournament and see what he can do against some serious competition in the next few months.

[via Newsweek]

Adele let fans know that her new album, 30, would be dropping in mid-November. And as listeners eagerly awaited the first single, she previewed a track on Instagram Live that sounded like it might be kicking things off. Now we know that to be true, “Easy On Me” is out now and officially the lead single for her new era. Check out the song and video above and expect a lot more Adele coming your way in the next few weeks. As rumors initially began to mount that new Adele was coming at the end of 2020, fans eventually learned that the album wouldn’t be coming until 2021.

But, Adele seemed happy to take her sweet time this year, too. It wasn’t until October that billboards began to pop up, indicating that the album might, in fact, finally be here. Since she last released music back in 2015, with the gargantuan album 25, six years have passed. In that time, Adele ended her marriage and also lost a significant amount of weight, two massive life changes. Since she usually gives us plenty of epic heartbreak material, it seems likely that going through one of the biggest kinds of romantic pain will yield more material than ever before. So stay tuned and check out “Easy On Me” above.