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Dolly Parton’s long lasting marriage with husband Carl Dean is about as famous as any of her greatest hits. As the story goes, one wholesome first date at a McDonald’s led to tying the knot in 1964—and the two have been together ever since. Fifty-six years and counting.

Sure, perhaps Parton and Dean’s compatibility is simply a one-in-a-million act of fate. But even if the stars did perfectly align to bring them together, odds are considerable effort was still required in order to help their relationship through the inevitable ups-and-downs of life.

So just what has been the secret sauce keeping that spark alive? In a word, humor.

In an interview with ET Canada, Parton credited their shared “warped sense of humor” to be the key to their long union. In fact, she considered it a saving grace for any couple.

“I think humor, honestly, is one of the best things when you’re married like that,” she told ET Canada. “Even if you have a problem, if you have a great sense of humor, if you say something you can’t take back [you] usually have some crazy way of getting out of it.”

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Remaining playful with one another has allowed Parton and Dean to avoid disagreements turning into full blown fighting, which she shared in an exclusive interview with Hollywood Life was a rule she made with Dean years ago.

“Once you start [arguing], it can become a habit, and that just goes on. So, if there are times that things get a little tense, or we get a little sideways here and there, we just kind of walk off and come back later and make some joke,” she shared with the outlet.

Parton’s sentiments are echoed by renowned relationship experts John and Julie Gottman. The Gottmans have long touted the power of what they call “repair techniques,” which are statements or actions made by either or both partners to “diffuse negativity and keep a conflict from escalating out of control.”

The Gottman’s dedicated years of research shows that the ability to quickly dissolve any conflict is the stand alone indicator as to the success of any marriage. In other words, conflict is inevitable, but what healthy couples have, whether they’re entirely conscious of it or not, is the ability to repair after conflict, and repair quickly. Hence why these techniques are called the “secret weapon” of emotionally connected couples.

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Humor, aka a “willingness to turn toward another’s sense of silliness,” is considered to be a particularly potent repair technique. Which makes sense—think about how just one funny cat video can quickly brighten our day and soften those hard edges. In a similar sense, when our partner suddenly makes us laugh, suddenly we realize that maybe there doesn’t need to be an all out war regarding whose turn it is to empty out the dishwasher.

Of course, humor can backfire when it comes from an insincere or condescending place, but when used mindfully it can help remind us that our partners are not our enemies. Quite the opposite in fact—they’re meant to share this wild and crazy roller coaster of a life with us.

So, take it from psychologists, or the “I Will Always Love You” singer herself—when it comes to a relationship that stands the test of time, laughter can be the best medicine.

There’s a prime market for crime documentaries and it’s typically moms. This is totally based on personal observation and not hard data. Flexing your sleuthing skills on a case that’s already solved and being aired on multiple networks is easy. Doing it when you’re faced with a situation in real life is a bit harder and should likely be left up to the professionals.

But what happens when you’re face to face with someone that is accused of kidnapping a baby? Well, two women in Indianapolis put on their detective hats when alarm bells went off after buying toys from a woman who was in front of a gas station. Shyann Delmar and Mecka Curry’s hunch led them on a wild ride fit for a Lifetime movie.

December 19, Kason and Ky’air Thomas, 5-month-old twins were in the backseat of their mother’s running car in Columbus, Ohio when she ran inside to pick up a Door Dash order. In the short amount of time it took her to retrieve the order and return to the car, Nalah Jackson had hopped in the vehicle and taken off with the boys inside.

Jackson left Ky’air at the Dayton International Airport the following morning but the hunt was still on for his twin brother Kason. When it comes to missing children, the clock is ticking immediately for a safe recovery. Unlike adult missing persons, the FBI steps in from the moment an Amber Alert is placed for children of “tender years,” which is considered 12 and under. So there was no shortage of people looking for Kason and Jackson.

Delmar purchased toys from Jackson in front of an Indianapolis gas station and gave the woman, who claimed her name was “Mae” a ride to the dollar store when the woman began to act strangely, according to News5 Cleveland. Because the passenger began behaving in an odd manner, Delmar recorded her and exchanged numbers before dropping “Mae” off at the store.

u201cA photo is worth a thousand words. nnThe IMPD is thankful that Kason Thomas was found earlier this evening.nnWe would like to thank the IMPD Officers and Detectives who worked to track down the baby and suspect.nnWe would like to thank community members who helped in locating himu201d

— IMPD (@IMPD)
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Something felt off to Delmar and when she was surfing social media, she got her first clue. Delmar told News5 Cleveland, “I was scrolling on Facebook and saw a mugshot, of this girl with… blonde hair, and I’m like… she looks familiar.” After her grandmother informed her that it was possible for the woman in the mugshot to be someone else, Delmar contacted her cousin Mecka Curry who ultimately helped find the child.

Once the two cousins started working together, they devised a plan to help have the woman apprehended. Since Delmar had exchanged numbers with the woman, when she called to ask if Delmar was interested in buying more toys, that’s when the women’s plan was set in motion. They were able to get the woman in the car but their attempts to alert the police resulted in them getting the runaround as the police stations didn’t believe them.

Eventually someone listened, Curry told New5 Cleveland, “Now the police know what kind of car we in, the police know who we got in the car, the police know what to do, they know where our location is,” and the plan worked. They got pulled over with Jackson being none the wiser on who alerted the police as she was being apprehended. But the baby wasn’t with Jackson so the cousins went off of their only clue.

Jackson dropped a bus schedule in the backseat of Delmar’s car so the ladies retraced the stops on the schedule looking for a snow covered vehicle that had not been touched. The idea was, if Jackson abandoned the car, it would be covered in fresh snow. They were right. The two saw the abandoned car and looking in the window they saw Kason’s legs. He was rescued just in the nick of time because Indianapolis was supposed to reach sub zero temperatures that night.

Of course the family is beyond grateful that these ladies didn’t ignore their intuition and wouldn’t stop until they followed their gut completely. Kason made it home just in time for Christmas to be reunited with his twin brother and both of his parents.

Watch his family’s reaction to this incredible rescue below:

Ed Reed is becoming a head football coach. According to a report by Brett McMurphy of The Action Network, Reed, the Hall of Fame safety who is most well known for his time at the University of Miami and as a member of the Baltimore Ravens, will head to the HBCU ranks and take over at Bethune-Cookman.

Shortly after the report, the school’s athletic department confirmed in a tweet that Reed and the university agreed in principle to a deal that will make him the 16th head coach in program history.

Reed has some coaching experience under his belt, as he worked as an assistant defensive backs coach under Rex Ryan with the Buffalo Bills in 2016 and has been the chief of staff at his alma mater since 2020 under two separate head coaches, Manny Diaz and Mario Cristobal. He is a Hall of Fame inductee for his collegiate and professional careers, the latter of which included a Super Bowl, a Defensive Player of the Year award, and eight All-Pro selections, with five of them coming as a member of the first team. Reed was included in both the NFL’s All-Decade team and the NFL 100th Anniversary All-Time team.

Bethune-Cookman, which competes in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, has been in search of a head coach ever since it parted ways with Terry Sims at the conclusion of the 2022 season. Sims was hired in 2015 and led the program to a 38-39 record, but after spending their first five seasons in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, the Wildcats have struggled in each of their two years in the SWAC, going 2-9 with a 2-6 record in conference play in 2021 and 2022.

After Playboi Carti hinted that new music might be on the way, social media has been abuzz, wondering when his next project will drop.

The rapper took to Twitter on Christmas day with a simple caption, “love all my supporters, it’s time,” leading fans to speculate about him dropping a new album. Twitter users have been sharing all kinds of conspiracies regarding the rapper’s forthcoming project, including a theory that his message on Twitter was a sign that fans will get an album before the year’s end. The album will be Carti’s first album since the release of 2020’s Whole Lotta Red.

Carti and his team have neither confirmed nor denied a release date for the project, but fans will be waiting on the edge of their seats.

During an April interview with XXL, the rapper outlined his ambitions for his forthcoming album and opened up about his personal life. Carti said that he initially had plans to name the project Music. “I was about to name my album Music because that’s where I’m at, you know what I’m saying? Music,” Carti said. “That’s all it is at this point.”

The rapper also shared that the album is inspired by changes in his life and some of his vices. Ultimately, Carti hopes his next project brings “peace to the world.“

Playboi Carti made waves with 2020’s Whole Lotta Red, leaving fans wanting more. Luckily, they won’t be waiting too long. During an interview with XXL earlier this year, the Georgia rapper recently opened up about the direction for his third upcoming studio album.

Throughout the chat, the rapper outlined his ambitions for his forthcoming album and opened up about his personal life. Carti revealed that he initially had plans to name the project Music.

“I was about to name my album Music because that’s where I’m at, you know what I’m saying? Music,” Carti said. “That’s all it is at this point.”

The rapper also shared that the album is inspired by changes in his life and some of his vices. Ultimately, Carti hopes his next project brings “peace to the world.”

“Love. Sex. Drugs. Changes in my life,” he continued. “I’ve been rapping about going to rehab. I want to go to rehab because I think I’m bipolar. I want everybody to feel free. I want this album to make everyone feel free. I hope this album brings peace to the world, honestly.” He added, “I’m in love with what I’m doing. Like I told you, you can’t put a genre alternative [on me]. My little brother told me that all the time.”

You can read the entirety of Carti’s new interview with XXL here.

In the last week, George Santos, an incoming Republican representative for New York City, has belatedly come under scrutiny, which is to say people have caught him lying about everything from his heritage to where he lives. Now there’s a report about Tom Cotton, the mildly notorious GOP senator from Arizona, that raises questions about how much time he spends in the state he represents.

The report, from Arkansas Times, explores how much time Cotton and his family, namely his wife and two kids, spend in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they moved to several years ago. It doesn’t appear to be much. Most Senators tend to make numerous trips to D.C. but spend most of their time in their home state. Indeed, many try to spend as little time in the nation’s capitol as possible. Cotton appears not to do that. Instead, his office paid for zero trips in 2021 and none between January and September.

What’s more, those who live in the apartment complex where he’s registered to vote don’t recall him walking down the halls or borrowing brown sugar. “You’ll never see him,” says his next-door neighbor, who says he’s only spotted him a few times in the last three years. He says he sometimes hears noises late at night but never during the day.

Another neighbor, who lives across the hall, says they’ve never seen anyone entering or leaving the unit. There was that time last year when she heard children during the weekend. They used to think it was being used as an Airbnb.

But what of Cotton’s social media accounts? Every now and then he posts pictures of him in the Wonder State, but only infrequently. Sure enough, he can go several weeks without posting posts confirming that he’s at home.

It’s not even clear if his family lives there or in the D.C. area. Cotton’s wife has voted absentee 11 times since 2016. The last time she voted in person was back in 2014. She’s listed as a lawyer in four different states, none of them Arkansas.

Cotton came to prominence during the summer of 2020, when he penned an op-ed for The New York Times in which he recommended sending the National Guard to New York City to squash Black Lives Matter protesters. He wasn’t a strict MAGA hardliner; he was among those who came out against Trump’s voter fraud claims, which did before the Jan. 6 riot, which he later condemned. Then again, he was also one of a mere handful of senators who voted against a bill meant to help stop attacks on Asian-American citizens during an uptick in hate crimes.

(Arkansas Times)

As it turns out, you, me, and just about everyone else you have ever met in your entire life has used the incorrect term when we consume multiple delicious nuclear orange cheese crackers. According to Carter Karels of NoleSports.com, a representative for the Cheez-It Bowl gave a quick rundown on the proper pluralization of “Cheez-It.” Apparently, when I consume half a box of them while I watch a sporting event on my couch at 10:30 p.m., I am not eating “Cheez-Its,” I am eating “Cheez-It crackers.”

This was shocking to a number of college football fans, who, like most people on earth, just call them Cheez-Its.

It should, of course, be noted that “Cheez” is not the correct spelling of that word, even if I love the product dearly. Anyway, all of this comes on the same day that Cheez-It announced that four college football players — two of whom are playing in the bowl game that is officially sponsored by the company — signed NIL deals with that will put them in hotel rooms that are completely packed with branded stuff. It is, as you can guess, a shocking amount of red and orange and yellow.

There is no word on whether or not it is required that multiple little bits of baked cheese be referred to exclusively as “Cheez-It crackers” as part of the NIL deal.

A ’70s blaxploitation film icon from classics like Foxy Brown and Coffy, Pam Grier found new life in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 Jackie Brown. Since then, it’s much more than just boomers who understand what an important figure Grier was for Black women in film.

She’s now the focus of the fourth season of TCM’s The Plot Thickens podcast and Grier settled in with Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield to talk about her legacy and ongoing ambitions. Among them, Grier revealed that she’s scheming to be on the big screen with Cardi B and expressed her reverence for other Black women who are crossing over from music to the silver screen.

“I’m writing something for me and Cardi B,” Grier said when asked about being a touchstone for today’s cross-generational icons. “I love Cardi and ‘WAP.’ I love Megan Thee Stallion. I told her, ‘You and your artistry are beautiful. People are gonna punk you because a stallion is a male horse, but there’s some really foxy mares!’

“She’s really good. She went to college,” she said about Megan, before expanding into her thoughts on other stars. “You got to have your goals. You’re gonna have haters, you’re gonna have jealousy, but just do your art, do your passion from your heart. She [Megan] and Lizzo and Nicki Minaj and some of the others, they know — you gotta make your own style. You get to hire people later. But you come up with your own stuff, then you just draw people like a magnet, so collaborators make you greater and greater. I want them to find that.”

Grier, who also played music with Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, also cited working with Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson as moments that shaped her into a well-rounded artist and added one last bit of advice for Cardi, Meg, Nicki, Lizzo, and others: “But any kind of artist, you’re like a musician, and you don’t know if you’re gonna be heard 40, 50 years later. This music may not be passed on by other artisans. But it’s nice if your music is still played generations later.”

Some of the artists mentioned here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

When The Hangover came out in 2009, its main trio were already well-known. It just made instantly made them much, much more famous. Bradley Cooper had been knocking about for years. Zach Galifianakis was a big time cult comic. As for Ed Helms, he’d already been a Daily Show correspondent and part of the ensemble of the American The Office. Still, the latter, at least initially, didn’t adjust so well to going from famous to mega-famous.

“It was a tornado of fame and a lot of buffeting,” Helms recently revealed on the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “It was very overwhelming. But I also — I feel very lucky on that as well because, I had — my public persona had risen gradually and we had, like, when I was on basic cable on The Daily Show, we had what [Stephen] Colbert liked to call ‘toy fame.’”

What does Colbert mean by “toy fame”? It’s the kind of notoriety in which you can still go out and be a regular person. Helms had experienced something a bit more than that when he left the Comedy Central show for NBC. “I was on The Office for a couple of years before The Hangover. And that was another ratchet up cause that’s network television,” Helms explained. It didn’t help that his character, Andy Bernard, had some catch-phrases, “which of course ups the ante with public recognition.”

But The Hangover “was a whole new level,” he said. “I really was reeling a lot of the time, like in the aftermath of The Hangover, just kind of like get, like how I was handling my — I was getting scripts for all these different kinds of projects. ‘Like what do I do? I dunno,’” Helms recalled. “I was kind of spinning out and panicking about different things. Like, ‘Well, what kind of a career do you want?’

“I definitely felt a lot of anxiety and like identity kind of — just turmoil,” Helms said. “And I will say one of the — one of the craziest things about a — about a like massive jump into fame like that is — and this is what I think people who have never dealt with that or been close to it, just can’t understand is the just total loss of control of your environment.”

How did he get through it? With a little help from some friends who were going through the same thing, namely Cooper and Galafianakis.

“If it wasn’t for those guys, I don’t think I would’ve stayed sane,” Helms said, “but we all had each other to kind of be like, you know, I don’t know, just to commiserate and measure ourselves… and I think we kept each other from drifting too far. And being too unprofessional.”

You can listen to Helms’ full Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend episode here.

(Via Mediaite)

Not all dads are home improvement weekend warriors, but for those who are, Home Depot is where it’s at. Like, literally, it’s where everything is at. It’s where they get tools, parts, materials—everything from honking huge sheets of wood to the tiniest little nuts and bolts. If you need it, Home Depot has it. If Home Depot doesn’t have it, it probably doesn’t exist.

For DIY dads, Home Depot is a second home and as much as I hate to stereotype, there are some common characteristics these dads share. I know because I’m married to one. And nowhere is this stereotype summed up as succinctly—or hilariously—as in the 33-second rap song YouTube gamer Welyn created using the Home Depot theme song.

I mean, just check out the opening lyrics:

I’m talkin’ propane on the gas grill

Open flame, hold the pan still

In flannel, it’s plaid, still

Never question the dad skill

I’m in the backyard…

You really just have to hear it—and watch head-bobbing cat jamming out with it.

The song is available on Spotify and I’m pretty sure my kids have listened to it a hundred times. They call it “Dad’s Theme Song” and they laugh hysterically every time they sing it.

The rest of the lyrics:

Tool belt, big truck, and a backpack

Workin’ on a house and I flip it like a flapjack

Phillips head with a tread, hammer with a napsack

Got a creak in the knees, even got a bad back

Never back-track; two measure, one cut

Got a big beam, bolts and a lug nut

Screws and a tool kit, thinking of what does what

Hit ’em with a ‘sport’ when I’m beatin’ ’em at putt-putt

(Heyyyy, sport!)

It’s 33 seconds of perfection, truly. The home improvement dad theme song we never knew we needed.

You can follow Welyn on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.