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Point guards have long had the ball rolled to them in late game situations trying not to start the clock until the last possible moment to save as much time as possible, but in recent years it has become far more popular to do so in the middle of action to burn clock while the shot clock remains at :24.

Ja Morant does it as much as anyone, and on Wednesday he took it to a new level in the midst of a Grizzlies blowout of the Hornets in Charlotte. After a LaMelo Ball three made it a 96-67 Memphis lead in the third quarter, Morant had Jon Konchar drop the ball at his feet on the inbound and simply stood there over it as the clock ticked and ticked and ticked with no one from the Hornets coming to defend him. Eventually Terry Rozier would come force him to pick up the ball but not before 31 seconds worked off the clock from the time Ball’s three went through the rim.

In this game, it was more a merciful move than anything, as it got both teams a half minute closer to the final buzzer with the game already decided in the third. That said, it’s an incredibly funny visual of Ja standing by himself over the ball waiting to see how long he could get away with it, while the Charlotte crowd got increasingly mad at him for it.

Colin Farrell had a great 2022, and rightly so. He deserves every accolade he gets for The Banshees of Inisherin (and any he gets for The Batman, After Yang, and Thirteen Lives as well). Emma Thompson ain’t doing too shabby either. She scored raves last year for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, as a lonely woman who gets to enjoy the company of a young sex worker. The two happened to share the screen — albeit not in the same scenes, alas — in 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks, about the making of the film Mary Poppins. But in a new chat, it’s clear they have a rapport — so much so that things got a little risqué.

In a new dual interview with Vanity Fair, the two delved into the similarities between their two characters, both people dealing with loneliness. It gets pretty heavy (in a lovely way). But the pair knew to temper the heaviosity with some jokes, even some sauciness. After Farrell talks about how lockdown “imposed an aloneness on people who had never experienced aloneness before,” Thompson suddenly and dramatically shifts gears:

Thompson: Are you having good sex at the moment, Col?

Farrell: What, love?

Thompson: I said, are you having good sex at the moment?

Farrell: Oh, God. That’s a different Zoom, darling. Email me.

It wasn’t the first time they turned the heat up during their chat. When asked about the first time they met each other, Thompson remembered it fondly.

Thompson: I think there were two things before we started shooting. You and I had a dinner together, just the two of us, in a little restaurant and I remember you were looking very-

Farrell: Scruffy?

Thompson: Sexy. You had your shirt undone. I think you had one button undone that was, I felt, going a little far.

At another point, Farrell simply got amusingly frank about his youthful drug period. Thompson mentions first seeing him in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report but can’t remember the name, referring to it as “Scott Frank’s thriller.” (The Queen’s Gambit auteur co-wrote the screenplay.) But when Thompson asked what it was called, he drew a blank:

Farrell: F*ck. I should know that, shouldn’t I?

Thompson: Jesus, you were in the f*cking thing!

Farrell: I blame drugs!

It’s a lovely chat, in which the two ruminate on loneliness and insignificance. “We’re just here for a bit, then we die and we’re gone,” Thompson muses at one point, after she talks about how “unbearable” it was watching Farrell’s sweet nincompoop character in Inisherin systematically stripped of his blissfully stupid happiness.

You can read the full dual interview over at Vanity Fair.

White Reaper’s Asking For A Ride is approaching rapidly, with unrelenting momentum and increasing anticipation. The singles “Pages” and “Fog Machine” captured the powerful, invigorating energy they’re known for, and now their newest single, “Pink Slip,” does the same.

“Pink Slip” is driven by infectious, heavy riffs and a catchy melody, both reminiscent of early 2000s pop punk. In the music video, two band members hilariously battle each other in chess while shredding on their guitars.

In White Reaper’s interview with Uproxx last month, Tony Esposito discussed his confidence as a songwriter.

“I’m definitely confident as a singer, but I think lyrics are always tricky ’cause you worry about enunciation or that sort of thing, because for the longest time with our band specifically, they’re like, ‘I don’t know what he’s saying, but it sounds cool.’ I think the lyrics are always gonna be troublesome, because you’re always looking for something better,” he said. “And it was with ‘Fog Machine,’ the last line of the chorus is, ‘Left me hanging in the first place.’ We were banging our heads against the wall trying to find something better than that, ’cause like none of us absolutely loved it.”

Watch the video for “Pink Slip” above.

Asking For A Ride is out 1/27 via Elektra Entertainment.

The Weeknd is giving his fans deja vu. January 2022 welcomed Dawn FM, his immersive fifth album, and January 2023 finds The Weeknd pulling more from his Dawn FM vault. The record-breaking artist was asked last week how he felt about Dawn FM‘s impending one-year anniversary, and he responded, “i feel istheresomeoneelsemusicvideo-ish.”

Today, January 4, he took his tease one step further.

“Is There Someone Else? Video drops on the 1 year anniversary of Dawn Fm … back at it,” The Weeknd posted along with a 21-second clip. Dawn FM dropped on January 7, 2022, so the full video can be expected this Saturday.

Prior to this “Is There Someone Else?” development, The Weeknd closed out last year by contributing “Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)” to the Avatar: The Way Of Water soundtrack and subsequently making the shortlist for Best Original Song at the 2023 Oscars.

That momentum carried over into the beginning of this year, as The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” surpassed Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” as the most-streamed song in Spotify history (3.332 billion).

The Weeknd has also drummed up anticipation for the 2023 leg of his After Hours Til Dawn Tour by posting a recap of his 2022 North American leg. “We’re just getting started…,” he tweeted on Tuesday, January 3.

Watch the video below.

This article originally appeared on 09.20.17

And even if you don’t know who Petrov was, he might be the reason you’re alive today.

In the 1980s, Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air Defense Forces. He was in charge of watching the computers at one of the Soviety Union’s nuclear early warning centers. If the Americans wanted to start a nuclear war, Petrov would be one of the first to know.

At this time, the United States and the Soviet Union were embroiled in the Cold War. Each had stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and a nuclear war, though horrific, often seemed imminent.

Suddenly, in the early morning of Sept. 26, 1983, a siren started to scream. If Petrov’s computer was to be believed, the Americans had just attacked the Soviet Union.

The word “LAUNCH” appeared in bold red letters across Petrov’s computer’s screen. Then it happened again and again — five missiles in all.

Petrov need to react. If a nuclear attack really was incoming, the Soviets only had a few minutes to save themselves and launch a nuclear counter attack of their own.

It was Petrov’s job, his duty, to alert his superiors — but something seemed off.

Petrov sat there, trying to figure out what to do. If the Americans were attacking, why were there only six bombs? Why not the thousands they were capable of? Why weren’t there corroborating reports from ground radar? Plus this particular computer system was new and unproven. It could be a malfunction.

Did Petrov really think this was enough evidence to potentially start a full-scale nuclear exchange? Kill millions of people? It was a heavy weight to bear.

“Nobody would be able to correct my mistake if I had made one,” Petrov later told the BBC.

After a few pregnant minutes, Petrov made his decision.

He picked up the phone and, though he couldn’t know for sure, told his superiors it was a false alarm. His level-headed thinking may have saved millions of lives.

He was right. It was a malfunction.

For his efforts, Petrov’s reward would be a long time coming. In the immediate aftermath, he actually got reprimanded by his superiors. It wouldn’t be until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the world learned just how close we all came to destruction and the one man who saved it.

Petrov reportedly died on May 19,2017 in a home outside Moscow. The news was not widely reported.

If you want to hear Petrov describe the incident in his own words, check out this interview with Petrov from the BBC.

Every professional and collegiate basketball team has a dedicated group of equipment managers whose main job is to ensure, at minimum, everyone has the right uniforms and their shoes for the game.

Ideally they also have the proper warmup attire and other gear as well, but the jerseys and shoes are the only real necessities. On Wednesday night we learned what happened when that doesn’t happen when Texas A&M visited Florida and realized before tipoff they had left their game jerseys at the team hotel.

The result was one of the only true delay of game penalties in basketball history, as they quite literally could not start the game until they went and got the jerseys — although some threw out the idea of just playing shirts and skins like it was pickup ball. That meant Florida started the game with a 1-0 lead before the opening tip by hitting a technical free throw, which provided the odd visual of something other than a 0-0 score on the scorebox when they jumped it up at midcourt to finally start the game officially.

If the game ends up being decided by one, it could be the rare game lost by the equipment staff rather than the players.

January is traditionally and infamously a dumping ground — a time for the studios to get rid of movies in which they have no confidence, all while most viewers catch up with 2022 releases. Instead the new year is kicking off with a bang, at least for the multiplexes. Not only are people seeing Avatar: The Way of Water in droves, but a silly-looking horror film has scored better reviews than most of 2022’s offerings: M3GAN, about a killer high-tech doll. This isn’t a toy like Annabelle, Chucky or The Boy. (Remember The Boy?) The titular murderer looks pretty real. But is she played by a real person or is it some CGI-person-animatronic hybrid or what?

The answer is…well, we’d tell you but then we’d have to kill you. Also we don’t know. What’s more, the cast and crew are prohibited from revealing exactly how they brought the homicidal doll to life. In a new interview with Total Film (as caught by CBR), director Gerard Johnstone was asked whether she/it was a mix of CGI, animatronics, and a real actor. Johnstone could only say that they took a “multi-tiered approach.”

The film’s IMDb page does credit someone — child actor Amie Donald — as playing M3GAN, which suggests that she’s at least partly real, or perhaps she was just did mo-cap like most of the cast of Avatar 2. At some point the secret of M3GAN will be revealed. But for now, embrace the mystery.

M3GAN hits theaters on Jan. 6.

(Via CBR)

Remember Kari Lake? At one point she was an anti-Trump news anchor. Then she reinvented herself as a small-time Trump clone. Last month her bid to become governor of Arizona ended in magnanimous defeat. She responded by making like the former president, simply — and without evidence, and despite being humiliated in court — crying voter fraud. Now, some two months after losing, she’s going as far as to declare herself the winner.

As per Mediaite, Lake went on the far right streamer Real America’s Voice, where she caught the gang up on her failed attempts to prove widespread voter fraud. “I mean, with President [Donald] Trump, they did this, they did this in the middle of the night, and our movement was so big and so powerful that they couldn’t just do this in the middle of the night,” Lake asserted. “They had to pull out all the stops and do this in broad daylight. So everyone saw it.”

Lake, who has filed appeals after losing a court case claiming voter fraud, then made a bold declaration about herself. “The way we get it changed is we get a — the real governor, the duly elected governor, myself, in there to work with lawmakers to change our laws, put some teeth into the laws, and frankly, we need to recall every one of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors,” she said.

Despite Lake’s baseless cries of election malfeasance, Arizona has already moved on without her. The real winner, Katie Hobbs, was sworn in on Monday without a fuss. Will Lake ever accept defeat? Probably not. But what she’s already been doing is sounding ever kookier, including vowing some veiled revenge on the “evil bastards” who turned her into another of last year’s failed MAGA candidates.

(Via Mediaite)

The Hold Steady are back with the announcement of their ninth studio album, The Price of Progress. Arriving in March on the band’s label, the record is their first since 2021’s Open Door Policy. The lead single “Sideways Skull” is out now; it’s a fiery anthem packed with vivid, witty lyricism from the intriguing kickoff: “She ordered me Newcastle / And handed me a Marlboro.”

“‘Sideways Skull’ is a rocking song about rock and rollers,” frontman Craig Finn said about the song. “In this case, they’ve been taken out of the game for a bit of rest, but still keep their dreams alive as they discuss past glories. We loved the big sound of this when Tad Kubler brought it into the band, and the studio performance of it felt especially joyful. We’re happy to put this forth as a first look at The Price of Progress, and the album’s title even comes from this song.”

Listen to “Sideways Skull” above. Check out the album artwork and tracklist below.

1. “Grand Junction”
2. “Sideways Skull”
3. “Carlos Is Crying”
4. “Understudies”
5. “Sixers”
6. “The Birdwatchers”
7. “City At Eleven”
8. “Perdido”
9. “Distortions of Faith”
10. “Flyover Halftime”

The Price of Progress arrives on Positive Jams on 3/31. Pre-order it here.

Drake started the year off by making his directorial debut with TVGucci’s “Bora Bora” music video, depicting a lavish party and overflowing wealth. “I visit Bora Bora ’cause I’m bored,” TVGucci flaunts in the hook. Drake’s next collaborative offering with Popcaan figures to deliver the same vibe.

Popcaan posted a teaser video to his Instagram today, January 4, which Drake reposted to his Instagram Story. In it, Popcaan lights one up, Drake cruises the ocean on a jet ski, and bikini-clad women walk around under palm trees. Popcaan’s “We Caa Done” featuring Drake is expected to drop on Friday, January 6, giving it six full months to morph into an undeniable summer jam.

Popcaan has been an OVO artist since 2019. During the Jamaican dancehall artist’s Unruly Fest in December 2018, Drake made a surprise appearance and announced to the audience that Popcaan was “officially” signing with his OVO label.

Popcaan dropped his Fixtape project in August 2020, and Drake was the featured artist on tracks “Twist & Turn” and “All I Need.”

Popcaan fans have been waiting for his Great Is He album, and the release date appears to be drawing nearer. Yesterday, January 3, he shared the cover art and tweeted alongside it, “New year, new gear, new blessings, new money, new music!”

In 2022, Popcaan released potential Great Is He singles “Skeleton Cartier,” “One Way,” “Next To Me” featuring Toni-Ann Singh, and “Set It.” He also featured on Burna Boy’s triumphant afrobeats album, Love, Damini.

Burna Boy is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.