Tonight, in the With Spandex WWE Raw open discussion thread:

As first announced on Twitter, Raw Women’s Champion Becky Lynch will have a major announcement tonight on Raw.

Just one night after risking it all, Women’s Money in the Bank contract holder Asuka will find out if the reward was worth it, as they will come face to face with Raw Women’s Champion Becky Lynch.

The Man, as confident as ever coming out of her victory over Shayna Baszler at WrestleMania, will certainly be looking to send a message to Asuka, who left WWE Global Headquarters with the contract, and let herknow what they’re up against if she’s considering cashing in on her. However, Lynch will undoubtedly have to keep her head on a swivel in the aftermath of WWE Money in the Bank.

What will happen when The Man comes around? (via WWE.com)

Any guesses on Becky Lynch’s announcement? I’m calling, “I’ve decided to go to Hollywood and make movies like John Cena and The Rock, oh no, I’ve been cashed in on!” Also on the show: Edge “hunts” Randy Orton, because nothing, and we mean NOTHING, ends a feud in WWE these days.

As always, +1 your favorite comments from tonight’s open thread and give them a thumbs up and we’ll include 10 of the best in tomorrow’s Best and Worst of Raw column. Make sure to flip your comments to “newest” in the drop down menu under “discussion,” and enjoy the show!

With Hollywood still in an unprecedented state of flux, it’s always a nice surprise to hear about shows and/or movies that have managed to survive the current conditions unscathed. In a new interview with CNBC on Monday, Disney CEO Bob Chapek confirmed that post-production on Season 2 of The Mandalorian is still ongoing and that “there will be no delay.” Barring any unforeseen circumstances, this news puts the Baby Yoda series on track for its October premiere on Disney+.

Chapek’s confirmation also arrives on heels of The Hollywood Reporter announcing that Temuera Morrison has joined the cast of the second season. According to THR sources, Morrison will be playing the legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett. There’s already a fan theory that Fett appeared in episode 5, “The Gunslinger,” and he was the mysterious figure who found Ming-Na Wen’s character in the closing minutes, so this information has naturally sent Star Wars fans into a frenzy. However, much like Rosario Dawson reportedly being cast as Ahsoka Tano in Season 2, none of this information has been confirmed by Lucasfilm. In fact, Dawson herself has made it a point to note that her casting isn’t official. Yet.

As for Morrison, the possibilities for his casting are wide open considering several characters in the Star Wars universe are based on his likeness. Morrison famously made his debut in Attack of the Clones as Jango Fett, whose infamous skills as a fierce fighter made him the ideal candidate to be cloned for the Republic’s army. These clone troopers were featured prominently in the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars animated series. Of course, Morrison playing Boba Fett makes sense because, according to canon, he’s a naturally grown clone of Jango Fett. However, he could be playing one of the more recognizable troopers from Clone Wars like Captain Rex, who would also bear his likeness. And then there’s always the chance he’s playing both.

Star Wars fans will just have to wait and see until Lucasfilm says otherwise, or when The Mandalorian Season 2 makes it debut in October.

(Via CNBC)

The brilliant Jerry Stiller died on Monday, the latest sad news in a year where it seems we rarely get news that’s any kind of positive. A legendary actor and the father of Ben Stiller, the news of his death drew an outpouring of memories from those who loved his work and interacted with him over a career that spanned decades.

As a tribute to his passing, many people shared their favorite Frank Costanza moments from Seinfeld on Monday. A particularly memorable scene where Stiller made Julia Louis-Dreyfus break several times was hilarious enough that it was featured in an episode’s closing credits, for example. But one scene involving Jay Buhner and George Steinbrenner was particularly popular among baseball fans. Popular enough, in fact, that a position player who retired in 2001 briefly saw his name trending on Twitter as a result.

The clip shared by many sports fans on Monday came from the 12th episode of Season 7, entitled The Caddy. George Costanza is working for the New York Yankees and takes an unapproved vacation, leading the Yankees to think he’s dead. This prompts a visit to the Costanza household by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who often “appeared” on the show sitting in a high-backed chair and a voice impressionist giving his dialogue.

The scene has George’s mother upset over his “demise,” but Frank simply couldn’t focus on his presumably dead son. He needed to ask the Yankees owner why the team traded Jay Buhner to Seattle in 1988, an infamous trade that made little sense to Yankees fans.

“What the hell did you trade Jay Buhner for?” Frank asked, yelling about the 23-year-old right fielder who left New York after a little over a season in the majors. “He had more than 30 home runs and over 100 RBIs last year. He’s got a rocket for an arm. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing!”

The scene is hilarious because no one is funnier while yelling than Jerry Stiller. And a character more concerned about the questionable trade of a young ballplayer than his apparently dead son is the kind of humor that made Seinfeld the legendary comedy that’s still beloved today. It was a television moment that turned a simple baseball trade into an infamous pop culture moment still remembered today.

In later years, the two players recounted just how much that Seinfeld episode made the trade infamous.

Of the many Seinfeld clips that circulated in memoriam on Monday, this one sports fans will always remember.

The only thing more delicious than watching two people put their culinary skills to the test in a head-to-head competition is when those two people are beloved celebrities. Guy Fieri and Bill Murray fit that description to a T. Assuming you love them both as much as most of America and love nachos as much as we do, you’re not going to want to miss the two stars facing off this Friday in a nacho making competition.

Is it all a little random? Sure, but this is the Mayor of Flavortown versus the Mayor of Pawnee in a “nacho off” — it’s practically a can’t miss event.

In partnership with Tostitos, the “Nacho Average Showdown” will see the two icons joined by their sons Hunter Fieri and Homer Murray for a four-way virtual nacho-off in an effort to raise some much-needed funds for the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund (RERF), which seeks to offer aid to the restaurant workers facing financial hardship as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The event will be live-streamed for free on the Food Network’s Facebook page on Friday, May 15th, and viewers are encouraged to show their support by tuning in and donating $10 directly to the RERF, or by simply ordering food from a local restaurant.

If the event didn’t seem star-studded enough, the Murray and Fieri family dishes will be judged by Shaquille O’Neal and actor Terry Crews, with the Food Network’s own Carla Hall acting as the night’s emcee. To watch the Nacho Average Showdown, head over to the Food Network’s Facebook page beginning at 5 pm ET on May 15th. Hopefully, both competitors know the secrets of layering.

The 21st century began on Jan. 1, 2001, but for Disney fans it had been in full swing for nearly 18 years, since the opening day of EPCOT Center on Oct. 1, 1982, when a sleek and optimistic vision of the future debuted in a theme park unlike any other built before or since.

Late last year, Disney started a massive overhaul of EPCOT, which will see more Disney characters and brands added to the park, and update many of its attractions for the actual 21st century – which has arguably proved a fair deal bleaker and less promising than the happy visions Disney conceived for EPCOT.

Disney’s version contained daily flights to space, boundless energy, harmony with the earth and its oceans, pollution-free transportation, and a unifying message of peace and unity among people from every nation. It didn’t quite pan out that way.

But even back in 1982, it was something of a fiction – grounded in the harsh reality of the time, it was nevertheless a Disney wish, and one that got its start in the 1950s, as Walt Disney was readying Disneyland. While even the most devoted Disney enthusiast generally sees rides, shows, restaurants and shops when they go to Disneyland, Walt Disney and his engineers (long before they were “Imagineers”) saw something else: urban planning. So impressive was Disney’s ability to make something out of nothing that James Rouse, designer of the first enclosed shopping center in America said in 1963, “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland.”

An avid traveler, Walt Disney had also spent much time visiting cities around the world – and around the country – and by the early 1960s he was growing concerned about the state of American cities, but eager to explore solutions he saw internationally. His interest became an obsession, and by the mid-1960s he was wholeheartedly turning his company from a film studio into a think-tank devoted to creating a prototype community filled with experimental technology from around the world.

He called the city EPCOT – the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. To help fund it, and to draw even more attention to it, he placed it within the confines of “Disney World,” the gigantic project his company was building in Central Florida. Building the theme park proved relatively easy; but when it come to the “city of tomorrow,” even his closest aides were confounded by the visions and ideas Walt Disney had proposed. “He had come to fear that EPCOT would not be built if anything happened to him,” biographer Neil Gabler wrote in Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination. On Dec. 15, 1966, Walt Disney died.

So, for a time, EPCOT died. Its vision of a future created by corporations and big industries, supported by governments and social unity, was undone by the violence, unrest and distrust of the 1960s. Yet, a decade after Walt Disney, EPCOT began moving ahead.

The idea of a “real” city that housed research-and-development arms of major corporations, staffed by people from around the world, fell away quickly, but at EPCOT’s core was the belief that the ideas and innovations of companies, and the imagination of the people who worked for them around the globe, could serve to inspire the future. These two competing notions of technological innovation and of cultural cooperation were initially proposed as two parks, until, inspiration struck.

“We found that we couldn’t get enough sponsorship for both,” remembers Marty Sklar, who went on to head Walt Disney Imagineering, “so we pushed the two of them together, basically, and that became EPCOT Center.” The building, transportation and management codes that had been created for development of the city formed the backbone of the entire Walt Disney World resort development, so the 43-square-mile complex became known as “EPCOT,” while the theme park would be at its geographical heart – it would be, literally, the EPCOT Center.

Those two sections that were initially separate parks were joined and became Future World and World Showcase. A massive marketing campaign supported what was then the single largest construction project in the world – no small feat, considering a global recession that gripped the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As a company, Disney was undaunted. “EPCOT Center is a celebration of ingenuity, innovation, imagination … and most of all … hope for the future,” the company wrote in its 1982 annual report. “We believe we need optimism in our world because a society just can’t progress without the belief that life will be good, that individual enterprise will bring its own rewards and that the great nations of the world will be guided on the right course with a better informed public.” Disney called EPCOT “the dawn of a new Disney era.”

Instead of single rides, massive pavilions contained long, elaborate attractions that explored key concepts vital to the future: communication (in Spaceship Earth), energy (Universe of Energy), the environment (The Land), transportation (World of Motion), imagination (Journey Into Imagination) and, after EPCOT’s first expansion, the oceans (The Living Seas) and future technology (Horizons). The Wonders of Life added a look at the human body, completing Future World in 1989.

World Showcase opened with nine countries – Mexico, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States – with Morocco joining in 1984 and Norway in 1988. Country pavilions were initially sponsored by private companies, except Morocco, which has always been sponsored by its government. Curious what EPCOT looked like in 1982? Here’s a carefully restored 16 mm film taken not long after opening.

The hopeful vision of the future presented by EPCOT officially became outmoded when the 21st century really did dawn. An enormous overhaul of EPCOT was announced last summer, but construction has been stalled by the outbreak of coronavirus – an outbreak that may best be solved by cooperation among people, innovation led by private industry, and an understanding that our future is shared by everyone. One of humanity’s greatest crises may find its ultimate solution in the ideas, spirit and innovation that Walt Disney left behind, and that led to a theme park – and a vision – unlike any other.

And here’s why.

View Entire Post ›

Back when the remix for her hit single “Say So” with Nicki Minaj dropped, Doja Cat joked that if the song reached No. 1, she would flash fans in celebration, writing: “If ‘Say So’ hits #1 I’ll show you guys my boobs really hard.” A couple of days later, she doubled down: “These boobs ain’t gonna show themselves you guys,” she joked. “Stream ‘Say So!’”

Now, after almost a full day of “Billboard Hot 100″ trending on Twitter in honor of the neck-and-neck race for No. 1 between the remixes of “Say So” and “Savage,” Doja and Nicki celebrated their victory as “Say So” came out on top — but not quite in the way fans hoped for. Even Nicki jumped on the bandwagon of Twitter users jabbing Doja to follow through, wondering, “What time r u showing ur boobs?”

Of course, Doja never actually had any real intention of freeing her nipples in exchange for those streams, even admitting as much during a celebratory livestream on Instagram. That didn’t stop some fans from feeling a little entitled and of course, the jokes came rolling in on Twitter almost as soon as she said it, even jokingly resurrecting the #dojacatisoverparty hashtag originally started by the Barbz before it was announced the two stars were collaborating.

Meanwhile, in a twist, Rolling Stone‘s newer, purportedly more accurate charts list Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix with Beyonce as the true winner. However, until Rolling Stone‘s chart has a similar history behind it to Billboard‘s, it seems Meg will have to wait for her first No. 1 celebration — hopefully, she won’t end up as disappointed as Doja’s “simps.”

See the whole hilarious tweet spree above.

As we continue to adapt to life during a global pandemic, the question of what sex looks like in the time of COVID-19 is weighing heavily on people’s minds — especially as the country begins to slowly open up. It was previously believed that the new coronavirus wasn’t transmissible via semen or vaginal fluid (though rimming was a danger), but according to a recent study out of China, it looks like the jury is still out in regards to semen. Researchers at the Shangqiu Municipal Hospital tested male patients during the height of the pandemic and found that the coronavirus was capable of persisting in their semen, even after they had begun to recover.

CNN reports that of the 38 patients tested, 16% of them had detectable levels of the coronavirus in their semen. A quarter of the patients surveyed in the study were in the acute stage of the infection and 9% were actively recovering. In the research team’s report, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, the team writes: “We found that SARS-CoV-2 can be present in the semen of patients with COVID-19, and SARS-CoV-2 may still be detected in the semen of recovering patients.”

While the study had an incredibly small sample size, the findings are still concerning, namely because if you want to answer the question of whether the coronavirus is transmittable through semen, the answer is, at best: “we don’t know.”

“If it could be proved that SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted sexually in future studies, sexual transmission might be a critical part of the prevention of transmission.” the research team writes. “Abstinence or condom use might be considered as preventive means for these patients… To avoid contact with patients saliva and blood may not be enough, since the survival of SARS-CoV-2 in a recovering patient’s semen maintains the likelihood to infect others.”

Evidence of a virus doesn’t necessarily mean the virus is infectious — though Ebola and Zika were found to be spreadable through semen months after recovery — but the fact that we can’t comfortably say it isn’t transmissible via semen adds another layer of complications to conversations about epidemiology during the pandemic.

After years of ducking the press, and his own manager, actor Robert Iler sat down for a rare interview to talk about his life since The Sopranos ended in 2007. Iler famously played Tony Soprano’s youngest child and only son A.J. on the hit HBO series and then seemingly disappeared, except for a few small roles here and there. But thanks to an invitation from his old co-stars Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, Iler briefly stepped back into the spotlight on Monday by dialing into their Talking Sopranos podcast.

Speaking candidly with Imperioli and Schirripa, Iler revealed that after The Sopranos ended, he told his manager he wanted to take six months off to just play poker and hang out. Those six months turned into years, and Iler found himself battling drug and alcohol addiction while being uninterested in acting work unless he could use it to get out of jury duty. But the young actor is now seven years sober, and he’s not afraid to speak candidly about his struggles and his inability to revisit his golden days on The Sopranos, especially following James Gandolfini’s death.

“I have not seen 80 percent of the episodes,” Iler explained, calling it “torture” to watch Gandolfini now. “He met me when I was 12 … and it was very father figure. He always told me if you ever have any problems, you can call Uncle Tony. He came to my Confirmation in a three-piece pinstripe suit, gave me a kiss on the cheek and a card with cash.”

While he may not want to open old wounds by watching old episodes, Iler did reveal that he’s working on a podcast with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played his sister Meadow Soprano on the HBO series. He also admitted to feeling the acting bug after recently watching the latest season of Ozark, so we could be seeing more of the young actor in the days ahead.

(Via Talking Sopranos, THR)

The NHL is still making plans to restart the 2019-20 season and crown a Stanley Cup champion, and now we know some of the proposals the hockey league is taking seriously as the world hopes to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Hockey was one of several sports that had their seasons interrupted in March and would be in the middle of its postseason under normal circumstances. But as spring turns to summer and the sports calendar’s disruption starts to threaten the offseason, draft and 2020-21 campaign, leagues face tough decisions about whether to cancel the season altogether or find a way to finish things out and safely declare a champion.

According to Newsday, the league has narrowed its two remaining options for a season restart, with one plan involving a brief “regular season” conclusion and another that jumps directly into postseason play and a traditional 16-team playoff.

The first scenario includes 24 teams. Under this plan, the top four teams would play for playoff seeding and the bottom teams would have postseason play-in games.

The second plan would include only 16 teams heading straight into the playoffs, with no regular-season games salvaged.

It’s not clear how the standings for the returning teams in either scenario would be determined or where the games would be played.

The first plan may leave the 25th place Buffalo Sabres and teams worse than them out in the cold, but those squads were all but out of the playoff hunt and would have little incentive to play just to warm postseason-bound teams up. It would be a significant departure from the traditional eight team in each conference postseason format the league has had for decades, but it would provide a period of warm-up play for players who have been off the ice for months and would need considerable time to sharpen their skills.

The report notes that which plan — if any — the league can implement would depend on the timing around when a restart could get off the ground. That would imply the league prefers the 24-team format if there’s time in the calendar year, with a 16-team playoff only format being a last-ditch effort to save the season at all.

Several locations that have been relatively unscathed by the coronavirus pandemic have apparently volunteered to host games, though team owners would undoubtedly want to have their teams playing in home markets if possible. It also seems unlikely that fans would be able to attend any of these games given the risks associated and stakes invested in limiting more interruptions if the season resumes. The league stressed that a decision has not been made, but that “every option” remains on the table.

“I think, as of now, every option we have considered remains on the table,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said via email. “Obviously, some may be being explored more extensively than others. But no decisions have been made.”

Looming over all of this is the ability to test players and what could happen if members of teams or their essential staff test positive for COVID-19 and what measures the league would have to take to ensure safety of those wherever they decide to play. Several members of the Ottawa Senators and undisclosed members of the Colorado Avalanche, for example, tested positive for COVID-19 in recent months and it’s likely others had positive tests that were not publicly disclosed.

Either way, it looks like the season is already over for the Sabres, Devils, Ducks, Kings, Sharks, Senators and Red Wings. But we knew that well before the COVID-19 pandemic actually stopped play.

[via Newsday]