The cost of living in the United States has gone up so much in recent years that living on a cruise ship has become a reasonable idea for some retirees. When Nancy and Robert Houchens of Charlottesville, Virginia, retired, they decided to sell almost everything they had and live out their golden years hopping from cruise ship to cruise ship.
“We had a 3,000-square-foot home full of furniture…and everything we own now would fit in the back of a pickup truck,” Robert told USA Today.
“We sold all of our estates except for a little condominium we have in Florida, so when we get too old to cruise, we have somewhere to live,” Nancy added. “And we did keep two vehicles, and what we kept is in half of (Robert’s mother’s storage unit), which is, I don’t know, 10×10 or something. We just walked away from everything.”
Life on a cruise ship is stress-free for the couple because their needs are taken care of on the ship. “It’s been great. I don’t cook. I don’t clean,” Nancy told the Miami Herald.
The couple has found that living on a cruise ship isn’t as expensive as some may assume. Even though inflation has driven up the cost of travel in the U.S., it hasn’t significantly impacted the cruise industry.
“It’s much cheaper than a nursing home or assisted living. It was just a good fit for us. It’s a good fit for a lot of people,” Robert told the Miami Herald.
The couple plans their trips differently than someone who is going on vacation. “We look for the best deal, not the destination,” Nancy told Cruise Passenger.
The couple initially planned to spend $4,000 a month living on the ships. “Our original budget was $4,000 a month. This included gratuities. Of course, things are more expensive now, so that budget has had to increase a little. Depending on where we go, we may or may not need the internet,” she told Cruise Passenger.
“Our phone plan covers most everywhere for 25 cents a minute to call with free internet and texting,” Nancy continued. “We have an annual travel insurance plan, and one of our credit cards also has travel insurance.”
For the Houchens, living on board a cruise ship is definitely cheaper than assisted living. According to the 2020 Genworth Cost of Care Survey, the average monthly cost per person to live in assisted living in Virginia is $5,250 a month, which would cost Houchens over $10,000 a month as a couple.
Further, the roughly $4,000 the couple spends a month includes food, and they don’t have to bother paying for a car. They also try to book their cruises consecutively so they don’t waste money paying for expensive hotels when transferring between cruise lines.
Last July, the Houchens celebrated their 1,000th day sailing with Carnival Cruise Line since the 1980s, and they look forward to countless more days at sea with each other and the new friends they’ve made on their never-ending cruise.
“We cruise Carnival because of the people,” Richard told Travel Pulse. “It isn’t the destinations for us anymore, it’s the journey—and the biggest part of the journey is the people.”
Donald Trump once famously bragged that he only hires the “best people.” Well, one of those people may just be a serial killer.
Granted, Trump’s hiring practices have already been called into question thanks to the likes of Rudy Giuliani, this latest pull from the Trump Organization is a whole new ball game. According to reports, Rex Heuermann, the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer was employed by the Trump group to do architectural work in 2018.
A 2018 New York City Department of Buildings filing reveals that the Trump Organization employed Heuermann to work on 40 Wall Street, a property once described as the “greatest deal” the former president has ever made. The filing states that Heuermann was hired for a “renovation of office space on the 17th floor to include minor partition and plumbing changes” of the 72-story Manhattan property built in 1930.
Heuermann’s work for the Trump Organization was first picked up by the real estate news site, The Real Deal, which was unable to ascertain how involved the alleged serial killer was with “one of the most recognized properties anywhere in the world.” The Trump Organization has yet to comment on Heuermann’s employment.
Trump has repeatedly bragged about the property over the years, which he’s called “iconic and wonderful” while touting that it shuts down critics of his real estate acumen.
“They don’t want to talk about 40 Wall Street,” Trump boasted to a South Carolina town hall in 2015.
Jimmy Butler is a popular guy, both stateside and abroad. This week, Butler’s over in China, as he’s in the midst of a gigantic tour of the country that features meeting fans, playing tennis, watching basketball, all stuff that you’d probably expect Jimmy Butler to do while he’s enjoying his summer.
Butler’s been keeping folks abreast of what he’s had going on over on his Instagram account, as he’s made daily posts filled with pictures and videos of what he’s calling “the unexpected tour.” His post on Wednesday morning started with Butler giving a little recap of his day in Taiyuan, which featured him shooting some hoops in front of fans, one of whom threw a shoe at him.
Meanwhile in China, @JimmyButler got hit in the face with a shoe
“Man, what an unreal experience,” Butler said to the camera. “First of all, besides getting hit in the face with a shoe, which was probably my favorite part of the whole thing.”
This can obviously be a pretty nasty situation — there have been a number of folks in the world of music recently who have gotten hit in the face with a projectile while they’ve been performing. Fortunately it seems like Butler was ok, to the point that he was laughing after he got hit by a shoe.
Passages was one of the most-acclaimed films to premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. IndieWire called it a “signature new drama” that’s “both generously tender in its brutality and unsparingly brutal in its tenderness,” while Time Out New York praised the film for being “sexy, sad, and so very French.” The Motion Picture Association is fine with the sadness and the Frenchness, but not the sexiness.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Passages, about a gay couple (Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw, a.k.a. the voice of Paddington) living in Paris whose marriage is tested when one of them has an affair with a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos), has been given a rare NC-17 rating by the MPA.
“There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” co-writer and director Ira Sachs told the Times. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.” The film’s distributor, Mubi, is “deeply disappointed” by the ruling.
“Passages is an honest and groundbreaking portrait of contemporary relationships, both queer and straight. Frank and thoughtful portrayals of sex are essential to cinematic storytelling and in service of representation more broadly. An NC-17 rating suggests the film’s depiction of sex is explicit or gratuitous, which it is not, and that mainstream audiences will be offended by this portrayal, which we believe is also false.”
An NC-17 rating hurts a film’s chance at box office success, but more importantly (and considering the subject matter), it’s a form of censorship. “It’s so 1950s that [the ratings system] still exists,” Sachs said. “We’re talking about a board that is not visible, that doesn’t make its rules known, that exists in silence. We’re talking about a select group of people who have a certain bent, which seems anti-gay, anti-progress, anti-sex — a lot of things which I’m not.”
Passages open in Los Angeles and New York on August 4 before a wider expansion. You can watch the trailer below.
Big Thief is back with their new single, “Vampire Empire,” from the group’s forthcoming 7-inch arriving this fall. (The other track on it is “Born For Loving You.”)
A few months ago, after already playing it at live shows, the band officially debuted it during their performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and it’s gained traction since as fans waited to see an official release.
Lyrically, it explores trying to get out of a bad cycle in a relationship.
“For me, it’s about getting out of toxic internal patterns – leaving the empire of energy drains that obscure pure essence, learning about what healthy boundaries are, and finding the power to implement them for the possibility of giving and receiving (both inwardly and outwardly) unbroken and infinite Love,” vocalist Adrianne Lenker shared about the meaning behind the special song in a statement.
Check out Big Thief’s new track “Vampire Empire” above. Continue scrolling for a complete list of their upcoming tour dates, with more information available here.
07/19 — Kingston, NY @ Ulster Performing Arts Center
07/22 — Chicago, IL @ Pitchfork Music Festival
07/23 — Nelsonville, OH – Nelsonville Music Festival
07/26 — Indianapolis, IN @ Egyptian Room
07/27 — Madison, WI @ The Sylvee
07/29 — Omaha, NE @ Maha Music Festival
07/31 — Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks
08/03 — Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theatre
08/04 — Portland, OR @ McMenamins Edgefield Amphitheater
08/05 — Seattle, WA @ Marymoor Amphitheater
08/08 — Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre Berkeley
08/09 — Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Just when you thought Ice Spice was as big as it gets, the Bronx native has announced a new slate of songs. They’ll be added onto the deluxe version of her breakout EP, Like…?, which she announced during a new interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Speaking with Lowe as part of Apple Music’s Up Next program, Ice also talked up her recent Taylor Swift collaboration, “Karma,” being mentored by Drake and Nicki Minaj, and opening for Doja Cat on her upcoming tour.
The original version of Like…?, which was released in January via 10K Projects and Capitol Records, contained six tracks including Ice’s breakout hit “Munch,” its follow-up “Bikini Bottom,” and the fan favorite, “Princess Diana,” which was later remixed with Nicki Minaj. The EP peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard 200, capping Ice Spice’s rise to near-ubiquitous stardom. Her rise was also aided by her appearance on the PinkPantheress song “Boy’s A Liar Pt. 2,” which has become a staple of her live show.
With her early 2023 run culminating in the Nicki Minaj collaboration “Barbie World” for the Barbie movie soundtrack, Ice has been teasing one new song in particular, “Deli,” sharing several snippets on social media. You can check that out below.
You are surely aware of Donald Trump’s ongoing legal troubles. Yes, his bizarre quotes about cows and ladders are very distracting, but Trump could actually be in hot water. He’s possibly going to be indicted a third time (the latest instance has to do with the insurrection), but through all of that Justice Department stuff, Trump has been ALL-CAPS ranting through the gloom, and don’t ever expect him to stop performing at campaign rallies.
Trump could be in prison one day, and he’d still be trying to hold rallies. If it happens, we will discuss it again. However, Trump is on the actual campaign trail because he either really wants to be president again in 2024, or he simply needs those campaign dollars. Maybe both? He has also been begging Republicans to do anything to save him, but he always makes time to attend to his fawning MAGA public. They still exist, and one of them had a question for him in Iowa on Tuesday night: “I’d like to know how you can help us in Iowa save our farmland from the CO2 pipeline?”
In response, Trump had a lot of words but somehow had nothing to say at all. Word salad incoming, via Morning Joe and Aaron Rupar on Twitter:
“Well you know, we’re working on that, and we had a plan. To totally, uh, it’s… a ridiculous situation, isn’t it? But we had a plan, and we would have instituted that plan, and it was all ready, but if we win, that’s gonna be taken care of. That will be one of the easy things we do.”
You can watch the video below. And maybe save it in case, you know, aliens ever touch down on Earth.
Every year before the Grammys, the Roc Nation Brunch brings together some of the biggest names in music. Some of the biggest artists join together in a special brunch, dressed to the nines at the iconic event organized by Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
While it seems like everybody who’s anybody makes an appearance each year at the Roc Nation Brunch, some of the most prolific acts claim they have never been invited. The latest is Snoop Dogg, who shared his theory as to why he’s never received an invitation during an episode of the F3LLAS PODCAST, with HaHa Davis and BlackBarry.
“I know why they don’t want me to come,” Snoop said. “’Cause I’ma be the sharpest. They know when I walk in, my outfit gon’ turn everything out.”
He continued, laughing, assuring the hosts that it’s all love between him and Jay.
“Nah, it’s all good. I f*ck with Jay — that’s my guy,” he said. “I just ain’t had time to slide through to one of those brunches. Maybe next time we can all go together, we’ll roll up in there together. Just come in there with a linen outfit — I think you gotta have on linen.”
The Justified: City Primeval Roundup is a weekly recap feature where we take the various people, places, and things from the new limited series and score them on a scale from one to five cowboy hats. We play fast and loose with the rules here, similar to the way Raylan Givens handles an investigation. A real loose cannon situation over here.
EPISODE ONE — “CITY PRIMEVAL”
UPROXX
Trying to carjack Raylan Givens in the cold open of a Justified spinoff series
FX
Buddy, that is a recipe for a bad day, especially when Raylan has his kid in the car. Although, I suspect it would’ve worked out the same way if he were alone. It’s kind of Raylan’s thing, this whole “calmly thwarting bad guys who wish to do him or those around him harm” business. We know that. We’ve seen him do it a lot in Kentucky and at least once before in Florida. These two know that now.
This opening section also did something smart, which is turn Raylan’s “loose cannon who shoots first and sometimes plays fast and loose with the Bill of Rights” deal into a liability. Which… it kinda should be in any reasonable world. It’s fun to watch Timothy Olyphant crack wise and toss loose-lipped punks into his trunk but it’s also good to remember how bad that would look in a long piece of investigative journalism in some newspaper.
A lovely start after a long break. Welcome back.
Barry, the guy who got sold out to the authorities by his own mother
FX
Tough, tough week for Barry. Busted for trying to blow up a judge with a car bomb, which he did because the judge slept with his mother after sentencing him to prison, and which he got caught for because the same mother sold him out to the authorities. That’s really just a tough run. He did get that pot roast, though. There is that.
Dumb flaming drinks, generally
FX
Here’s something to think about…
If you order a big loud fizzly sparkly drink at a bar, it looks pathetic. But when you order, say, fajitas at a Tex-Mex restaurant, which are just about the same thing from a presentation standpoint — sizzling, popping, steaming, all of it — everyone looks and is all “oooooo” as the plate hovers past them, jealousy and hunger burning in their eyes and stomachs.
Lots to think about here. There should be an entire college course taught on this phenomenon. The course should serve fajitas during every class session. You know, for educational reasons.
UPROXX
Judge Alvin Guy
FX
Two things are true here:
ONE: The Justified franchise has a long history of colorful judges — please go back and rewatch Stephen Root’s performance as a fiery Kentucky jurist, both to help me prove my point and also because Stephen Root rules — and I was very excited when we were introduced to Judge Alvin Guy, a hot-tempered, mother-seducing egomaniac who was being investigated by the federal government and liked to waive around a ledger filled with potential blackmail. I was actually kind of sad to see him get gunned down so early, even if the misdirect of it all — authorities wondering if he was killed for reasons related to investigations and/or blackmail instead of just your standard road rage fiasco — looks like it’s gonna be fun.
TWO: Keith David, who played Judge Guy, has been in everything over his long career, and I really do recommend you zip over to his IMDb page sometime and start scrolling. It’s a fun way to spend five or ten minutes.
Sandy the Casino Waitress
FX
Sandy:
Seems like a fun lady
Kind of got stranded in that car with the Albanian mark while her psycho boyfriend chased down a judge and murdered him over a parking garage fracas
Is going to be difficult for me if she sticks around this series because I am incapable of saying this name in my head without going full-on Travolta about it
We all have some problems here.
Jukeboxes, generally
FX
See, you think you like a jukebox. You’ll notice it and go “Oh, nice, a jukebox” and go over and pick a few songs and it’ll be a fun time for everyone. But then you remember a few things. Things like, for example, other people getting to use it, too. And those people having different musical tastes than you and playing, to choose an example at random, 15 Dave Matthews Band songs in a row. And things like some people being little punks and shoving a million quarters into the machine to play one song over and over, like in the John Mulaney bit about “What’s New, Pussycat?” This can all go sideways very fast.
My point here is that the music in a bar should not be a democracy. Just pump something in and keep it consistent.
UPROXX
Sweety the Bartender
FX
I don’t have a super great read on this guy yet beyond knowing the following things:
He runs a dive bar that he pours drinks at himself and has a pool table
The bar seems to cater mostly to riff-raff and defense attorneys
He is an old man who goes by “Sweety”
Too early to vault him into the four or five hat section but this is a very promising start.
Clement Mansell
FX
Two things are true here as well:
ONE: What we appear to have on our hands here is an old-fashioned chaos agent, as opposed to the calculated menace of someone like a Boyd Crowder. Very little thought or planning is going on here, and even the stuff that starts out that way — rolling an Albanian hot dog tycoon with his casino hostess girlfriend — gets sidetracked immediately by… well, by chaos. We are about 50 minutes into this whole endeavor and he’s already murdered a crooked judge and marched off with a blackmail ledger. I’m very excited to see where all of this ends up. I hope he gets to use a rocket launcher at some point.
TWO: It is very funny to me that the main antagonist in the original Justified series was a character named Boyd and the antagonist in this new Justified series is played by an actor whose real name is Boyd.
It’s nice when things fit together.
Police dogs that climb trees
FX
Real good news, bad news situation here. Because, like, I love the idea of dogs climbing trees. It would be fun to be out just strolling through a park and see three of them chilling in a little treehouse. But on the other hand, I don’t love something as pure on paper as “dogs climbing trees” being used for police business. Kind of tarnished the fun of it a little.
I don’t know. I’ll think about it more and get back to you.
UPROXX
Raylan Givens
FX
Well well well…
It really is nice to have Timothy Olyphant back on my television screen in a cowboy hat running around solving crimes. I… I don’t think I realized how much I missed that. I’m trying to be careful here not to let my vision get clouded with rose-colored nostalgia glasses but… I don’t know, man. It’s just still really, really good. You could send him to a new city every few years for a new little limited series and I don’t think I would ever complain. Pretty much a perfect match of character and actor.
I touched on this earlier, but it really was nice how the show handled the whole “plays by his own rules but gets results, dammit” of it all at the beginning of the episode. Times have changed a little in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s okay for Raylan to have to deal with that, too, especially now that he’s out of Harlan and no longer in a place where he’s a known entity.
It’ll be fun to see how he navigates Detroit, kind of in a reverse Beverly Hills Cop situation. And, now that I typed that sentence and have it in my head, I guess I wouldn’t hate if Eddie Murphy shows up as Axel Foley in his Lions jacket at some point. I would probably start barking and clapping like an aquarium seal. I’m really not a very complicated person.
Carolyn the Lawyer
FX
Very early but I think we like her. She fights for her clients and she’s got a loser ex and she and Raylan kind of made little heart eyes at each other when she wasn’t cooking him like a sirloin steak on the witness stand. I say all this knowing that I am susceptible to being easily wooed by charismatic defense attorneys who may or may not have one foot in the underworld. You know, the Saul Goodman of it all. I feel okay about it.
Maureen Downey
FX
I could end up being very wrong on this one (I am wrong a lot), but my read on her so far is “female Tim Gutterson” and that is really not a bad place for any character to start out from.
UPROXX
Willa Givens
FX
A few notes here:
I love pretty much any wise-cracking kid in any movie or television show, especially when that wise-cracking kid is paired with the type of hardass character who usually pushes around adults but gets flummoxed by the kid’s shenanigans
Willa is played by Timothy Olyphant’s re-life daughter, Vivian Olyphant, which is cool
I would like to see her kabong a bad guy with a frying pan like Ava Crowder
Moving on.
Calling someone “Slim”
FX
This is just cool. “Slick” also works, especially if the person you’re talking to isn’t tall and skinny. I’m a fan of a well-placed “champ,” too, although that can come off dismissive if the tone isn’t right. It really all depends on the situation and delivery, but it’s very, very cool when it works. Try one of these out this week and see if it flies. Little homework assignment for you.
The first reviews for Oppenheimer are beginning to drop, and so far, the new Christopher Nolan film seems to be racking up almost unanimous praise from critics. Despite clocking in with a massive three hour runtime, Nolan expertly uses every second of film to tell a gripping tale about how brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) created the devastating force known as the atomic bomb.
In true Nolan style, Oppenheimer grapples with the destructive power released on the world as it follows the title character’s journey from scientific discovery to untold horrors. Along the way, an all-star cast buoys this cautionary tale, and the critics are here for it.
You can see excerpts from the first batch of reviews below:
For a literal three-hour movie, Oppenheimer moves pretty well. A big reason is this is a movie that doesn’t stay on one scene very long. A character will be recounting his or her story and we will see brief flashbacks. Sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white (ahem, JFK). A character testifying will set up a scene, then we will flashback for that scene. Which, in a movie that depends heavily on very complicated science, serves as a somewhat effective way to handle exposition about how splitting atoms can be used to create atomic bombs.
It remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.
Paced like it was designed for interstellar travel, scripted with a degree of density that scientists once thought purely theoretical in nature, and shot with such large-format bombast that repetitive scenes (or at least Nolan-esque slices) of old politicians yelling at each other about expired security clearances hit with the same visceral impact as the 747 explosion in “Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one.
So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on.
From a man who has taken us into places movies rarely go with films like Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, Memento, the Dark Knight Trilogy, and a very different but equally effective look at World War II in Dunkirk, I think it would be fair to say Oppenheimer could be Christopher Nolan’s most impressive achievement to date. I have heard it described by one person as a lot of scenes with men sitting around talking. Indeed in another interation Nolan could have turned this into a play, but this is a movie, and if there is a lot of “talking”, well he has invested in it such a signature cinematic and breathtaking sense of visual imagery that you just may be on the edge of your seat the entire time.
There’s an embarrassment of riches to digest, savor, and mull over in this saga, which touches upon the exhilaration of scientific discovery, the fear of inventing something over which the inventor has no control, and the alarming consequences of paving a historic path, especially when it leads directly to Pandora’s Box. At every turn, a superb supporting performance lies in wait from Damon, Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein (who knows how uneasily lies the head that wears the crown).
Its scope comes from Murphy’s haunted performance and the way the movie (with help from Ludwig Göransson’s panic attack of a score) submerges you in the mind-set of its protagonist as though it can create a psychic connection to the past. Robert isn’t an easy character to understand; he’s arrogant, blunt, and aloof and possesses an intelligence about the unseen world of physics that makes him seem half-alien. But Nolan doesn’t want Robert to be relatable. He just wants to explore how his flawed humanity co-exists with his genius in what is ultimately a film about moral slippage and how someone who feels so certain of his own clear-eyed ideals finds himself standing in front of a screaming crowd celebrating the deaths of thousands of people in Japan.
In Nolanworld, we humans can attempt to find meaning in the forces of the universe, or to bend them to our will, but they ultimately rule us. The bigness wins. Until Oppenheimer. The paradox of this film — a three-hour historical epic about the theoretical physicist who unleashed the terrible forces of the quantum realm and became “the father of the atomic bomb” — is that it’s a lot less interested in science and mechanics than most of Nolan’s previous movies, and a lot more interested in people. It’s still vast in scope and meticulous in design. But this is the film in which Nolan ponders the scary proposition that the most powerful force in the universe might be us.
Oppenheimer opens on July 21.
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