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Kelly Ripa has outlasted the departure of multiple Live! co-hosts at this point. There was, of course, the late Regis Philbin who retired and passed the baton to Michael Strahan. Later, Ryan Seacrest occupied the slot for six years but will soon be replacing Pat Sajak on Wheel Of Fortune. This led to the seemingly fine development of Ripa’s husband and former All My Children co-star, Mark Consuelos, stepping into co-host duties. However, this quickly turned into too many sex-life stories, which might make you miss Ryan Seacrest.

Well, never fear because Seacrest decided to visit Kelly’s SiriusXM podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera, where a very un-sexy story re-surfaced. Ripa requested that he retell a story that he first told on Live! about four years ago. You can see that previous, lovely exchange above, where Seacrest animatedly revealed how he was horrified to clog Kris Jenner’s fancy toilet.

Naturally, the Kardashian matriarch has a super-electric toilet with all kinds of bells and whistles. It’s a black throne that’s difficult to see in a darkened powder room, and Seacrest couldn’t figure out how to operate the thing, so it either malfunctioned, or something else (even grosser) was happening. And this is how Seacrest mimed his inner debate on if he should reach in and scoop out his own poop. Kelly Ripa’s reactions are *chef’s kiss* here.

This was definitely a story that needed to be retold. Via Page Six, this is how that went: “I’m thinking to myself, ‘What do I do?’ Do I stick my hand in there?! Do I say, ‘Hey Khloe, don’t tell Kim and Kourtney, but can you help me out over here;’ Or do I just tell Kris, ‘I think your toilet has got a problem?’”

Seacrest was “panicked” after the water had “overflowed up to the seat level.” Then he attempted to quickly tie up the story: “It began to settle down, but I quickly got out.” Ripa wasn’t done with him yet, though. She told her audience that Seacrest had to “retrieve” what was in the toilet, and then came a “ladle” joke from a co-host. At which point, the situation devolved into complete chaos, and Seacrest insisted that there was no “ladle” but a “toilet ring cleaner” that helped him out. Whew.

For the extra-curious, Kim Kardashian has confirmed that Kris’ toilet is a bit of a nightmare. After Seacrest initially told the story on Live!, she visited the show and explained how Kris made her guest bathroom into an overly complicated affair. Hopefully, Ryan has some closure after the rehashing, too.

Kelly Ripa has outlasted the departure of multiple Live! co-hosts at this point. There was, of course, the late Regis Philbin who retired and passed the baton to Michael Strahan. Later, Ryan Seacrest occupied the slot for six years but will soon be replacing Pat Sajak on Wheel Of Fortune. This led to the seemingly fine development of Ripa’s husband and former All My Children co-star, Mark Consuelos, stepping into co-host duties. However, this quickly turned into too many sex-life stories, which might make you miss Ryan Seacrest.

Well, never fear because Seacrest decided to visit Kelly’s SiriusXM podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera, where a very un-sexy story re-surfaced. Ripa requested that he retell a story that he first told on Live! about four years ago. You can see that previous, lovely exchange above, where Seacrest animatedly revealed how he was horrified to clog Kris Jenner’s fancy toilet.

Naturally, the Kardashian matriarch has a super-electric toilet with all kinds of bells and whistles. It’s a black throne that’s difficult to see in a darkened powder room, and Seacrest couldn’t figure out how to operate the thing, so it either malfunctioned, or something else (even grosser) was happening. And this is how Seacrest mimed his inner debate on if he should reach in and scoop out his own poop. Kelly Ripa’s reactions are *chef’s kiss* here.

This was definitely a story that needed to be retold. Via Page Six, this is how that went: “I’m thinking to myself, ‘What do I do?’ Do I stick my hand in there?! Do I say, ‘Hey Khloe, don’t tell Kim and Kourtney, but can you help me out over here;’ Or do I just tell Kris, ‘I think your toilet has got a problem?’”

Seacrest was “panicked” after the water had “overflowed up to the seat level.” Then he attempted to quickly tie up the story: “It began to settle down, but I quickly got out.” Ripa wasn’t done with him yet, though. She told her audience that Seacrest had to “retrieve” what was in the toilet, and then came a “ladle” joke from a co-host. At which point, the situation devolved into complete chaos, and Seacrest insisted that there was no “ladle” but a “toilet ring cleaner” that helped him out. Whew.

For the extra-curious, Kim Kardashian has confirmed that Kris’ toilet is a bit of a nightmare. After Seacrest initially told the story on Live!, she visited the show and explained how Kris made her guest bathroom into an overly complicated affair. Hopefully, Ryan has some closure after the rehashing, too.

WARNING: Spoilers for Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher below.

Mike Flanagan has gifted horror fans chilling adaptations and beautifully moving originals on Netflix for half a decade but his final masterpiece — for this streamer at least — is a deliciously macabre ode to the father of Gothic literature: Edgar Allan Poe.

In The Fall of the House of Usher — a title borrowed in name and theme from one of Poe’s most lauded short stories — Flanagan wields the poet’s Victorian-era symbolism and prose to spin a dark, twisted tale of greed, moral decay, and the absolute corruption of absolute power.

Its cast — a lineup of Flanagan regulars including Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Henry Thomas paired with fresh additions like Mark Hamill, Bruce Greenwood, and Mary McDonnell — serves as walking cautionary tales, garbed in Fendi bodysuits and Gucci loafers, and equipped with the kind of self-aggrandizing God complexes to justify the gleeful anticipation of their imminent, very painful, demises. Roderick Usher (Greenwood), the family patriarch and CEO of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company, narrates his family’s fall from grace, skipping back in time to relive each of his children’s gruesome deaths in order to build up an even more sinister central mystery surrounding his success and that of his sister, Madeline (McDonnell).

The end result: an episode-by-episode amalgamation of Poe’s best-known works viewed through the prism of modernity. Flanagan touches on everything from AI to the opioid epidemic, splattering his morbid parables with Poe Easter Eggs that feel most satisfying when they’re discovered before the bodies begin dropping. To that end, we’ve done a bit of detective work to spot some of the most important references to Poe’s works in Netflix’s latest horror hit that make watching the show so much more interesting.

The Fall of the House of Usher

This short story written by Poe in 1839 is the frame Flanagan used to build his ghastly tale. In it, an unnamed narrator visits an ailing friend named Roderick Usher who recounts the decline of his health and sanity. His twin sister Madeline, also suffers from an affliction, which the siblings blame on the house itself, and his tale ends with their violent deaths and the destruction of the family legacy holding them hostage. Though Flanagan has expanded on Poe’s work — adding family members and narratives beyond the original — the story of two siblings effectively destroying their bloodline and themselves is pretty central to the Netflix series. In having Roderick narrate the downfall of his house to his old frenemy, Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumby) — a nod to a brilliant French detective Poe often featured in his writings — Flanagan starts fans at the finish line, running them back through generational traumas and tragedies before ultimately arriving at where this terrible tale truly began.

The Raven

The Raven is likely Poe’s most famous work of poetry and that ominous feathered harbinger pops up plenty in The Fall of the House of Usher. He’s often gleefully cawing at Roderick’s mounting misfortune with the Usher patriarch even reciting bits of Poe’s poem to him as the creature perches on a ballast and stares blankly in the face of his misery. Lenore — Roderick’s granddaughter and the only child he seems to love — borrows her name from the woman at the center of this poem, whose death the narrator mourns. The name of Gugino’s character — Verna — is an anagram of Raven, which seems to hint that the seemingly supernatural figure might somehow be a stand-in for concepts like death and fate.

The Pit and the Pendulum

One of the more grisly deaths doled out to the Usher kids thanks to their father’s misdeeds belongs to Frederick Usher (Thomas) the bumbling, coked-up first-born son whose erratic behavior only becomes more disturbing as the show goes on. After his wife’s accident, Frederick spirals, taking control of her medical care at home in an attempt to torture the truth from her. His preferred method of abuse is to drug her and pull out her teeth — a callback to Poe’s Berenice in which a man plagued by obsession keeps his wife’s molars in a tin can — but he faces his own harrowing end when a building demolition goes haywire. In Poe’s short story, a prisoner of the afterlife narrowly escapes death by tricking rats into chewing through his bindings before a giant swinging axe can cut him in two. In Flanagan’s version, Frederick isn’t so lucky.

Masque of The Red Death

Another Usher sibling doomed to die a particularly nasty death is young Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), a 20-something playboy interested in positing his father’s fortune into a nightclub empire. In Poe’s short story, Prospero is a Prince who holds a carnival-like masquerade for his wealthy friends as a terrible plague sweeps through the countryside. A red-robed figure in a death masque wanders the party as his guests begin dropping like flies. The same happens in Flanagan’s version, although Prospero throws his bash in an abandoned pharmaceutical lab with hazardous chemicals stored in the water reserves. Instead of turning the sprinklers on to signal the start of a massive orgy, acid rains down on his guests, burning through skin and fat until only charred bodies remain. Sounds like a party Poe would love, tbh.

The Pym Reaper

It must be said: Pym Reaper is a terrific name for a character in a Gothic horror story based on Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. And, while much of the man’s backstory remains a mystery, he’s based in part on the author’s only finished novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In the book, Arthur Pym was an explorer who sailed the world, adventuring to remote territories and surviving terrible tragedies. Mark Hamill’s Pym probably did the same, which is why when Verna comes to him with a deal, he’s the only member of the Usher circle who has the courage to simply walk away.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Poe’s fictitious detective Auguste Dupin investigates the brutal, bloody murders of a woman and her young daughter in this Gothic whodunnit that also serves as inspiration for the show’s third episode. Siegel’s Camille L’Espanaye borrows her name from one of the victims and while the setting for her gruesome end is different — she heads to her family’s lab hoping to prove her sister’s science experiments have failed — the culprit is the same. In Poe’s original, Camille and her mother were killed by an orangutan brought back from Borneo by a sailor hoping to sell him on the black market. In Flanagan’s retelling, the chimps Victorine (T’Nia Miller) has been testing her heart device on are the ones who, well, go apesh*t.

The Black Cat

Ravens weren’t the only supernaturally-touched animal Poe loved to spin a yarn about. In another short story, he wrote about a man who killed his cat, only to buy another before going mad with guilt. The same happens to Kohli’s Napolean in The Fall of the House of Usher — albeit in a luxury high-rise apartment with a balcony that’s just a bit too easy to topple over.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Another renowned Poe masterpiece, The Tell-Tale Heart recounts the ramblings of a madman who, after harboring an obsession with an old man’s eye, kills him and stuffs his body beneath the floorboards. When the police come looking, it’s his own thumping heart that drives him to confess. In Netflix’s version, Victorine — a name pulled from yet another Poe writing — accidentally kills her partner and is plagued by a similar beating sound that eventually costs her her sanity.

Cask of Amontillado

One of the more satisfying deaths in The Fall of the House of Usher belonged to Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco). The smarmy, greed-driven exec tried to blackmail a young Roderick and Madeline before meeting his end thanks to a bottle of sherry, some masonry tools, and a dangerous delusion of his own invincibility. Poe’s tale sported those same themes, telling the story of Montresor, a man who swears revenge on a man named Fortunato after repeated insults. During a carnival, he lures his enemy to the catacombs with the promise of better sherry before changing him up and entombing him in his family’s crypt as the bells on his cap jingle. Another fun fact? Rufus Griswold was a literary critic whom Poe had a long-standing feud with so he’d undoubtedly appreciate the changes Flanagan made to this one.

Tamerlane

Tamerlane is the title of another Poe poem, this one about an ambitious man willing to sacrifice love and happiness for power and prosperity. Samantha Sloyan’s character does the same on the show, spurning her himbo husband Bill (Matt Biedel) — a name nod to another real-life Poe enemy, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — to see her Goop-inspired empire Gold Bug to fruition. The name Gold Bug is an Easter Egg tied to a short story about treasure hunting in South Carolina, but Tamerlane’s terrible end on the show pulls inspiration from William Wilson, a story about a man tormented by his doppelganger via the use of mirrors.

Netflix’s ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ is currently streaming.

WARNING: Spoilers for Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher below.

Mike Flanagan has gifted horror fans chilling adaptations and beautifully moving originals on Netflix for half a decade but his final masterpiece — for this streamer at least — is a deliciously macabre ode to the father of Gothic literature: Edgar Allan Poe.

In The Fall of the House of Usher — a title borrowed in name and theme from one of Poe’s most lauded short stories — Flanagan wields the poet’s Victorian-era symbolism and prose to spin a dark, twisted tale of greed, moral decay, and the absolute corruption of absolute power.

Its cast — a lineup of Flanagan regulars including Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Henry Thomas paired with fresh additions like Mark Hamill, Bruce Greenwood, and Mary McDonnell — serves as walking cautionary tales, garbed in Fendi bodysuits and Gucci loafers, and equipped with the kind of self-aggrandizing God complexes to justify the gleeful anticipation of their imminent, very painful, demises. Roderick Usher (Greenwood), the family patriarch and CEO of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company, narrates his family’s fall from grace, skipping back in time to relive each of his children’s gruesome deaths in order to build up an even more sinister central mystery surrounding his success and that of his sister, Madeline (McDonnell).

The end result: an episode-by-episode amalgamation of Poe’s best-known works viewed through the prism of modernity. Flanagan touches on everything from AI to the opioid epidemic, splattering his morbid parables with Poe Easter Eggs that feel most satisfying when they’re discovered before the bodies begin dropping. To that end, we’ve done a bit of detective work to spot some of the most important references to Poe’s works in Netflix’s latest horror hit that make watching the show so much more interesting.

The Fall of the House of Usher

This short story written by Poe in 1839 is the frame Flanagan used to build his ghastly tale. In it, an unnamed narrator visits an ailing friend named Roderick Usher who recounts the decline of his health and sanity. His twin sister Madeline, also suffers from an affliction, which the siblings blame on the house itself, and his tale ends with their violent deaths and the destruction of the family legacy holding them hostage. Though Flanagan has expanded on Poe’s work — adding family members and narratives beyond the original — the story of two siblings effectively destroying their bloodline and themselves is pretty central to the Netflix series. In having Roderick narrate the downfall of his house to his old frenemy, Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumby) — a nod to a brilliant French detective Poe often featured in his writings — Flanagan starts fans at the finish line, running them back through generational traumas and tragedies before ultimately arriving at where this terrible tale truly began.

The Raven

The Raven is likely Poe’s most famous work of poetry and that ominous feathered harbinger pops up plenty in The Fall of the House of Usher. He’s often gleefully cawing at Roderick’s mounting misfortune with the Usher patriarch even reciting bits of Poe’s poem to him as the creature perches on a ballast and stares blankly in the face of his misery. Lenore — Roderick’s granddaughter and the only child he seems to love — borrows her name from the woman at the center of this poem, whose death the narrator mourns. The name of Gugino’s character — Verna — is an anagram of Raven, which seems to hint that the seemingly supernatural figure might somehow be a stand-in for concepts like death and fate.

The Pit and the Pendulum

One of the more grisly deaths doled out to the Usher kids thanks to their father’s misdeeds belongs to Frederick Usher (Thomas) the bumbling, coked-up first-born son whose erratic behavior only becomes more disturbing as the show goes on. After his wife’s accident, Frederick spirals, taking control of her medical care at home in an attempt to torture the truth from her. His preferred method of abuse is to drug her and pull out her teeth — a callback to Poe’s Berenice in which a man plagued by obsession keeps his wife’s molars in a tin can — but he faces his own harrowing end when a building demolition goes haywire. In Poe’s short story, a prisoner of the afterlife narrowly escapes death by tricking rats into chewing through his bindings before a giant swinging axe can cut him in two. In Flanagan’s version, Frederick isn’t so lucky.

Masque of The Red Death

Another Usher sibling doomed to die a particularly nasty death is young Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), a 20-something playboy interested in positing his father’s fortune into a nightclub empire. In Poe’s short story, Prospero is a Prince who holds a carnival-like masquerade for his wealthy friends as a terrible plague sweeps through the countryside. A red-robed figure in a death masque wanders the party as his guests begin dropping like flies. The same happens in Flanagan’s version, although Prospero throws his bash in an abandoned pharmaceutical lab with hazardous chemicals stored in the water reserves. Instead of turning the sprinklers on to signal the start of a massive orgy, acid rains down on his guests, burning through skin and fat until only charred bodies remain. Sounds like a party Poe would love, tbh.

The Pym Reaper

It must be said: Pym Reaper is a terrific name for a character in a Gothic horror story based on Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. And, while much of the man’s backstory remains a mystery, he’s based in part on the author’s only finished novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In the book, Arthur Pym was an explorer who sailed the world, adventuring to remote territories and surviving terrible tragedies. Mark Hamill’s Pym probably did the same, which is why when Verna comes to him with a deal, he’s the only member of the Usher circle who has the courage to simply walk away.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Poe’s fictitious detective Auguste Dupin investigates the brutal, bloody murders of a woman and her young daughter in this Gothic whodunnit that also serves as inspiration for the show’s third episode. Siegel’s Camille L’Espanaye borrows her name from one of the victims and while the setting for her gruesome end is different — she heads to her family’s lab hoping to prove her sister’s science experiments have failed — the culprit is the same. In Poe’s original, Camille and her mother were killed by an orangutan brought back from Borneo by a sailor hoping to sell him on the black market. In Flanagan’s retelling, the chimps Victorine (T’Nia Miller) has been testing her heart device on are the ones who, well, go apesh*t.

The Black Cat

Ravens weren’t the only supernaturally-touched animal Poe loved to spin a yarn about. In another short story, he wrote about a man who killed his cat, only to buy another before going mad with guilt. The same happens to Kohli’s Napolean in The Fall of the House of Usher — albeit in a luxury high-rise apartment with a balcony that’s just a bit too easy to topple over.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Another renowned Poe masterpiece, The Tell-Tale Heart recounts the ramblings of a madman who, after harboring an obsession with an old man’s eye, kills him and stuffs his body beneath the floorboards. When the police come looking, it’s his own thumping heart that drives him to confess. In Netflix’s version, Victorine — a name pulled from yet another Poe writing — accidentally kills her partner and is plagued by a similar beating sound that eventually costs her her sanity.

Cask of Amontillado

One of the more satisfying deaths in The Fall of the House of Usher belonged to Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco). The smarmy, greed-driven exec tried to blackmail a young Roderick and Madeline before meeting his end thanks to a bottle of sherry, some masonry tools, and a dangerous delusion of his own invincibility. Poe’s tale sported those same themes, telling the story of Montresor, a man who swears revenge on a man named Fortunato after repeated insults. During a carnival, he lures his enemy to the catacombs with the promise of better sherry before changing him up and entombing him in his family’s crypt as the bells on his cap jingle. Another fun fact? Rufus Griswold was a literary critic whom Poe had a long-standing feud with so he’d undoubtedly appreciate the changes Flanagan made to this one.

Tamerlane

Tamerlane is the title of another Poe poem, this one about an ambitious man willing to sacrifice love and happiness for power and prosperity. Samantha Sloyan’s character does the same on the show, spurning her himbo husband Bill (Matt Biedel) — a name nod to another real-life Poe enemy, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — to see her Goop-inspired empire Gold Bug to fruition. The name Gold Bug is an Easter Egg tied to a short story about treasure hunting in South Carolina, but Tamerlane’s terrible end on the show pulls inspiration from William Wilson, a story about a man tormented by his doppelganger via the use of mirrors.

Netflix’s ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ is currently streaming.

Joel McHale is firing back at Chevy Chase after the veteran actor recently trashed his time on Community.

Last month, Chase appeared on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast where he had some not great things to say about the hit NBC series and his cast. The National Lampoon actor’s behavior on set is well documented as well as his infamous ouster during Season 4 for allegedly making racist remarks to Donald Glover. Chase’s latest remarks only added more ashes to the already burnt bridges.

“Everybody had their bits, and I thought they were all good. It just wasn’t hard-hitting enough for me,” Chase said. “I didn’t mind the character. I just felt that it was… I felt happier being alone. I just didn’t want to be surrounded by that table, every day, with those people. It was too much.”

When PEOPLE asked McHale to respond to those remarks, he did not hold back.

“He stopped hurting my feelings in 2009,” McHale said about Chase. “I was like, ‘Hey, no one was keeping you there.’ I mean, we weren’t sentenced to that show. It was like, ‘All right, you could have left if you really wanted that.’ But yeah, you know Chevy. That’s Chevy being Chevy. I wrote about this in my book, but I was like, ‘Hey, the feeling’s mutual, bud.’”

As PEOPLE notes, McHale’s 2016 memoir, Thanks for the Money, does mention the “tension between the two and the often-uncomfortable things Chase allegedly said on set, including racist terms and jokes about sexual assault.”

(Via PEOPLE)

Despite debuting 17 years ago, Taylor Swift has never been more popular. Most of this year has seen her reset the bar for what is possible for a stadium tour with her ongoing The Eras Tour, a three-plus-hour fever dream. And when she isn’t selling out stadiums herself (several times over), she’s been the main attraction at Arrowhead Stadium and MetLife Stadium just by simply attending Chiefs games to support her rumored boyfriend (?), Travis Kelce.

What more could she possibly do? Well, for starters, release a concert film that runs nearly as long and generates over $100 million in advanced global ticket sales. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour will enjoy a full-fledged theatrical release on Friday (October 13), not to mention the newly announced early-access showings on Thursday (October 12). According to those in attendance at Swift’s Los Angeles premiere for Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the movie’s runtime is two hours and 48 minutes, which means some songs from the tour’s setlist didn’t make the cut.

Uproxx’s Philip Cosores was among those selected to experience Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour before millions of Swifties flood AMC and Cinemark theaters and relayed what can be expected. Read his full review here.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is in theaters 10/13. Find more information here.

The Boston Celtics were extremely aggressive this offseason in seeking out roster upgrades on the trade market after a disappointing Eastern Conference Finals loss to the Miami Heat.

Recognizing the need to have a more dynamic offense, they traded Marcus Smart to Memphis as part of a three-team deal to land Kristaps Porzingis, adding the kind of frontcourt scoring threat they have not had in the Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown era. However, giving up Smart meant getting rid of one of their top perimeter defenders, and when Jrue Holiday came available after the Bucks traded for Damian Lillard, they sent Robert Williams III and Malcolm Brogdon to Portland to add his services.

The result is one of the best starting lineups in the NBA, with a robust six-man rotation featuring Brown, Tatum, Holiday, Porzingis, Al Horford, and Derrick White, offering Joe Mazzulla flexibility to go big or small as he sees fit based on opponent. The moves made Boston the co-favorites to win the NBA title this year alongside the Bucks. To get there, health is a necessity, particularly with regards to Porzingis who has had his fair share of injuries in his career. However, health is a concern for every team looking to win at title, so we want to focus on the big question beyond health facing the Celtics this season, as well as the player who figures to hold the keys to them reaching their goals.

Biggest Question: How Big Is The Drop-off With The Bench Unit?

The top-6 in Boston is arguably the best in the league, but the rest of the bench is less of a certainty. Boston won’t need its bench unit to be great, but they will need to have enough production to simply not give up the advantage they figure to have most nights with the starting lineup. How Mazzulla staggers his starters will be interesting to watch, as he could completely avoid running out full bench units (or lineups with just one starter), but in doing so there is always the tradeoff of having less time on the floor with your absolute best group. As such, there figure to be plenty of regular season games with a more traditional platoon system that feature lineups that feature some combination of (the newly extended) Payton Pritchard, Luke Kornet, Oshae Brissett, Sam Hauser, Jordan Walsh, and others as the majority.

That’s not the most inspiring list of names, but it’s important to remember the goal here isn’t to have one of the league’s best second units, it’s just simply to not be catastrophically bad. We saw a year ago with the Nuggets how a top-heavy team going from having one of the worst bench units in the league to simply being average can change a team’s trajectory. After years of hilarious on/off splits for Nikola Jokic, Denver was able to basically be a net neutral in the postseason without their star, which made them a buzzsaw overall. Boston has the chance to be the same type of squad if this bench can figure out how to be a fairly average group. If they struggle to do so, Mazzulla will have to do more tinkering with staggering starters and have fewer minutes featuring the full starting group, which takes away some of what makes this team so terrifying on paper.

X-Factor: Playoff Jrue Holiday

You could go in a number of directions here, as Porzingis is going to be heavily relied on, but my concerns there are more about health than how he fits in. What I am fascinated by is how Holiday fares once the Celtics get to the playoffs, because in Milwaukee he was always sensational on defense but struggled to be an efficient scorer when the postseason rolled around. In 40 playoff games with the Bucks (including the title year), Holiday shot just 39.2 percent from the field and 30.4 percent from three on nearly 18 shots per game. Being that inefficient on high volume is not what you want out of your lead guard, and I want to know how much of that was circumstance in Milwaukee and how much of that will carry over in Boston.

Holiday’s skills as a distributor and creator for others should be a huge help to a Celtics team that can bog down in the halfcourt, provided Holiday leans into that role. With the Bucks, he would go on some wild adventures on the ball, dribbling into bad shots and contributing to Milwaukee’s halfcourt issues in the postseason rather than relieving them. However, he was on a team that needed someone to do that (which is the biggest reason they traded him for Lillard) and didn’t have as many offensive weapons as this Celtics team does. Tatum, Brown, and Porzingis should be a better offensive fit around Holiday than Giannis, Khris Middleton, and Brook Lopez, particularly because all three are capable of spacing the floor as opposed to just two of them. If that allows Holiday to feel like his job is simply to be a table-setter and secondary scorer, rather than trying to take on the burden of lead shot-creator on the perimeter, then it’s possibly he becomes a more efficient postseason player. That, however, is far from a guarantee given we have a pretty big sample size of what Holiday is as an offensive player in the playoffs.

The most difficult part of this evaluation is, we won’t be able to learn much of anything about it during the regular season, because Holiday is typically fantastic offensively over the 82-game schedule. It’s in the postseason things get sticky, and we’ll just have to wait until April and May to find out if things can be different for him in Boston.

Travis Scott fans are familiar with waiting. Nearly five years elapsed between Astroworld and Utopia. It was a roller coaster of teases and will-he-won’t-he before Utopia arrived in July, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. And then, there was somewhat of a false start for the supporting Utopia — Circus Maximus Tour. (Not to mention, the show that never was at Egypt’s Pyramids Of Giza.) The tour was initially announced in early August, but ticket sales were delayed for reasons unknown until the end of the month.

Finally, Scott’s Utopia — Circus Maximus Tour opener was staged on Wednesday night (October 11) at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Teezo Touchdown is serving as the opener. They will stay in North Carolina through the weekend with back-to-back shows at PNC Arena in Raleigh on Friday (October 13) and Saturday (October 14).

See all of the remaining dates here, and check out Scott’s opening night setlist below (courtesy of fans in attendance via setlist.fm).

1. “Hyaena”
2. “Thank God”
3. “Modern Jam” (with Teezo Touchdown)
4. “Aye” (Lil Uzi Vert cover)
5. “Sirens”
6. “Praise God” (Kanye West cover)
7. “God’s Country”
8. “My Eyes”
9. “Butterfly Effect”
10. “Highest In The Room”
11. “Mamacita”
12. “Circus Maximus”
13. “Delresto (Echoes)”
14. “Mafia”
15. “I Know ?”
16. “90210”
17. “Meltdown”
18. “Topia Twins”
19. No Bystanders”
20. “Fe!n”
21. “Fe!n” (Played again)
22. “Antidote”
23. “Sicko Mode”
24. “Goosebumps”
25. “Telekinesis”

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

A The Daily Show clip from the Jon Stewart days about Israel has recently resurfaced. In the video, which you can watch above (via Mediaite), Stewart attempts to have a calm conversation about Israel and Hamas, but every time he tries to bring up the conflict, he’s interrupted by then-correspondents Jordan Klepper, Jessica Williams, Michael Che, and Jason Jones.

Once the shouting stops (including Klepper calling the host a “self-hating Jew”), Stewart resumes, “That was, that was weird. Anyway, what I was, what I was saying was last Thursday saw the start of a new ground offensive launched by Israel…” Let the overlapping screaming resume. Stewart tries one more time. “Just merely mentioning Israel, or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policies, is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas,” he says. Stewart is then accused of being “a Zionist pig.”

Eventually, he gives up.

The segment was relevant in 2014, and it’s still timely now.

While the nine-year old sketch was clearly meant to parody the discourse about Israeli-Palestinian conflicts from the last decade, it holds a new relevance in light of Israel’s war against Hamas and the atrocities they’ve committed. The war has also caused a firestorm of political commentary as the public grapples with Hamas’ murders and kidnappings, plus the recurring historical quagmire between Israel, Palestine, and the Gaza Strip.

“If you’d like to see how absolutely nothing has changed in the conversation around Israel & Palestine despite decades of violence, here’s Jon Stewart doing a bit that could literally air today without a single change,” @Cooperstreaming wrote on X (where so much misinformation spreads, leading to more shouting at strangers), while @erinoverbey added, “This old @TheDailyShow sketch by Jon Stewart about the difficulties of critiquing gov’t policies when it comes to atrocities & conflict btw Israel-Palestine is once again, sadly, very timely.”

(Via Mediaite)

In his review of Taylor Swift’s new The Eras Tour concert movie, Uproxx’s Philip Cosores noted it “comes as close as possible to capturing the magic of her live concert.” As that praise implies, though, some things are bound to be lost in translation when capturing a spectacular concert experience on film, a medium inherently less broad and immersive than a real-life performance.

The movie’s setlist actually fell victim to this in part: The movie was filmed at the August 3 to 5 concerts at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and those concerts featured 45 songs each. The film, though, only includes 40 tracks.

What songs from Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour were cut from the movie?

Because we know the setlists of the concerts and the songs that appeared in the movie, that’s an easy question to answer. Per Just Jared, songs performed during the concerts but not included in the movie are “The Archer” (from the Lover era portion of the set), “‘Tis The Damn Season” or “No Body No Crime” (Evermore era; Swift performed different songs on different nights), “Long Love” (Speak Now era, although it appeared later in the movie), “Cardigan” (Folklore era), and “Wildest Dreams” (1989 era).

Find the full movie setlist here.