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The House select committee investigating Jan. 6 aired their final hearing on Monday, during which they dropped a bombshell: Among their criminal referrals was four for Donald Trump himself. They also mentioned that a Trump-backed attorney attempted to sabotage arguably their biggest (or at least most shocking) witness: Cassidy Hutchinson. Now that person has been revealed.

As per CNN, Stefan Passantino, the top ethics attorney in the Trump White House, allegedly advised his then-client, Hutchinson, to give misleading testimony to the committee. Passantino reportedly told her to say she didn’t remember certain details, even if she did.

Instead she got another lawyer, and she delivered the biggest blockbuster of the hearings. Among her allegations were that Trump attacked a Secret Service agent who wouldn’t drive him to the Capital, where violent supporters were poised to storm the building; that Trump knew they were armed but didn’t care because “they’re not here to hurt me”; that at one point he got so angry that he threw ketchup-laden food everywhere; and more. Trump had one of his signature meltdowns over the testimony, as he’s wont to do when cornered.

Passantino denied giving his client terrible, illegal advice. After the allegations broke, his professional biography was scrubbed from the website of a firm where he’s a partner, and that he was on a “leave of absence.”

There were many concerns over witness tampering during the Jan. 6 hearings, and it seems with good cause.

So what happens next? Trump has famously weaseled out of everything; the only time he’s had to pay for his deeds was when he failed to get re-elected in 2020. For now, though, his life at Mar-a-Lago sounds pretty darn sad.

(Via CNN)

The marvel of mushrooms is that they seem to sprout anywhere and everywhere. They’re certainly popping up like crazy these days, especially the psychedelic variety. From new patents and research to underground holistic treatment to self-guided journeys to festival enjoyment, psilocybin — “magic mushrooms” or “shrooms” if you are someone’s 47-year-old uncle — are hot on their way to defining a generation of partyers, healers, and seekers.

And… if this Christmas is any indication, mind-altering mushrooms have apparently influenced loads of interior decorators, too. Because these fungi are freaking everywhere. Not just niche sites like Etsy either — we’re talking Walmart.

Look around this Christmas. There’s a huge swell of mushroom imagery. Notice all those shiny red mushroom decorations? They’re everywhere. But why? Well, there are a few reasons — ranging from “cool and historical” to “incredibly f*cking jaded.”

We will get to both below:

THE HISTORY

Here’s the gist of it:

Centuries ago, the shamans of the indigenous tribes of Siberia and Northern Europe kicked off the Winter Solstice festivities (around Dec 21) by consuming the Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom. Often found growing below sacred pine trees, these are the iconic red and white spotted mushrooms that housed the Smurfs and powered up Super Mario. Though they don’t contain psilocin (which metabolizes into psilocybin in the body), these things still induce a heavy trip.

According to lore and historical sources, the shamans would journey across the tundra — envisioning themselves as animals flying toward the North Star. After the journey, they’d drop through the smoke hole of dome-shaped yurts and share what they learned with their communities.

It’s now widely believed that this might be the foundation of the Santa mythos. When you think about it, metaphorically flying through the winter sky and returning down the chimney with gifts of knowledge is an image not far from the modern Santa (minus the materialism, but we’ll get to that).

So why is today’s Santa so different? Myths and traditions can sometimes be a long game of telephone; absorbing, adding, and losing elements as they pass through time. Add Nordic and Germanic folklore, a 4th-century Turkish bishop called St. Nicholas, and a new marketable Santa drawing by Coca-Cola in 1931 and we’ve basically got modern Christmas without the fungi.

But while this game of historical telephone has altered the original shaman tradition, the red and white Amanita Mushroom was featured heavily in Christmas decor… until the REEFER MADNESS and drug panic of the fifties. The old Christmas postcard above is just one of the thousands where the mushrooms make cameos.

Now clearly, the energy around this sort of imagery and decor is ramped up this year. After decades of being mostly expunged, the whole mushroom-Christmas connection is back with a vengeance. This brings us to…

WHY NOW?

Well, because of shifting cultural mores, basically. Because of mass cultural acceptance. Because all the cool kids are doing it. Because when the cool kids do something, the brands notice. Brands like West Elm stay ready to react to cultural zeitgeists like this. Why?

Because. They. Like. Money.

“It’s become commonplace and is generally believed that the whole ‘Santa Claus’ myth is a folkloric tradition of shamanic travel,” Carl Ruck, professor of Classical Studies at Boston University told Yahoo recently, ” and that reindeer are notorious for liking to eat these mushrooms and become inebriated on them.”

When Ruck says “commonplace,” he’s illustrating that the cultural attitudes around psychedelics are shifting rapidly. Heck, today there was news about a new bill to decriminalize psilocybin in California. Newsweek is covering microdosing!

Times have changed and many concepts once deemed untouchable have now seemed to have entered a state of re-evaluation. Psilocybin use is a prime example, but so too is history itself. By diving a little deeper, the celebrations of events like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and The Fourth of July have all been recently questioned and investigated. Pair both phenomena with Christmas, and there’s no surprise to see mushrooms pop up all around the holidays for their historical and contemporary relevance.

When history meets the cultural zeitgeist meets capitalism — viola! There you have the recipe for a decor revolution!

For months, football fans have yearned for information on the future of NFL Sunday Ticket. For well over two decades, DirecTV held exclusive rights to air the entire slate of NFL action, allowing the service to keep a large subscriber base dedicated to one specific pursuit of professional football. However, reporting has circulated that bidders like Apple, Amazon, and ESPN had interest in acquiring Sunday Ticket’s rights.

On Tuesday, Joe Flint of the Wall Street Journal dropped a bomb that the NFL is now in “advanced talks” with YouTube to secure the exclusive rights.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, was considered a sleeper in the negotiations, and it is worth remembering that Google has virtually unlimited pockets. This would be a major overture from the company to get into the market for the most popular sporting enterprise in the United States, and Flint reports that an agreement could be locked in “as early as Wednesday,” pending approval of NFL owners.

At this juncture, additional details are sparse, but this is a situation worth monitoring closely in terms of pricing, rollout, and any potential changes made in the package’s conversion to a digitally-focused platform. In the meantime, football fans may need to prepare to invest in YouTube’s offering to find their favorite team’s games.

Lily Allen is best known for her audacious music and unruly personality. Her hit is literally titled “F*ck You” and the lyrics are even crasser. However, people often forget she is also the daughter of actor Keith Allen and movie producer Alison Owen. She doesn’t like being called a nepotism baby (or, for short, a “nepo baby”), though, and she shared her thoughts Tuesday on Twitter about how nepo babies are “scapegoated.”

“The nepo babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms,the ones working for banks,and the ones working in politics, If we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity,” Allen tweeted. “BUT that’s none of my business.” She later quote-tweeted herself to add, “And before you come at me for being a nepo baby myself, I will be the first to tell you that I literally deserve nothing.”

Of course, this sparked a lot of conversation about privilege and the industry at large. Why isn’t nepotism in the arts as important as in other realms of work? Allen went all-in with a lengthy Twitter thread that generally ended up making the situation worse. Read it below:

“Look, I seem to have riled people up with my comments about nepo babies. I am nearly 40 years of age and am more than happy, in fact I think it’s important to disclose what a privileged upbringing I’ve had and how that has created so many opportunities for me,

I mention my age because I haven’t always been able to have that conversation, in my twenties I felt very defensive about it, I felt like I worked extremely hard and that I deserved the success that I had,

that people connected to my songs and that the songs came from me, I also had quite a fraught relationship with some of my family members so it felt difficult for me to attribute my successes to them, at the time.

But we all know it’s more complicated than that.
It is quite clear that there is a severe lack of representation in the industry where class and race are concerned. Everyone loses as a result.

I do feel that nepo babies are being somewhat scapegoated here though, there is a wider, societal conversation to be had about wealth inequality, about lack of programs and funding, and I guess that was the point I was trying to make, maybe badly.

I promise you I’m not rooting for an industry full of people that had childhoods that looked like mine.I just really think that we can’t get to a real solution without identifying the real problem, as fun as it is to laugh at the kids of famous people. Nepo babies have feelings.”

Despite what supporting player Edie Falco thinks, Avatar 2 didn’t come out a long time ago and bomb. It just came out and it’s doing very well — not as well as it could be doing, but James Cameron films have a history of sticking around until they’ve made all the money (even if he’s not above flipping off certain fans). Not everyone is interested in returning to Pandora, though. Some Native Americans are boycotting the film based on things Cameron said about a decade ago.

An interview Cameron did in 2010 has recently resurfaced, in which he said something about Native Americans to which some have taken offense. The filmmaker was talking to The Guardian about being against the building of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon (which wound up being built). During the chat, he mentioned that the plight of indigenous people greatly inspired the original Avatar.

“I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation,” Cameron said. “This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar — I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future … and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation … because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”

Cameron likely meant no harm. But his words — especially that last bit — was not well-taken by some.

“James Cameron apparently made Avatar to inspire all my dead ancestors to ‘fight harder,’” tweeted Dr. Johanna Brewer, of Smith College. “Eff right off with that savior complex, bud. And everyone, please go watch a real native movie instead of that badly appropriated blue trash.”

Others recommended different movies about indigenous people they can watch instead.

Cameron has yet to publicly comment on the boycott.

The Chicago Bulls were on the receiving end of a beatdown on Monday as the team lost, 150-126, to the Minnesota Timberwolves. According to a new report by Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times, halftime of that game included “a blowup” between players, which was not the first time that something like this has happened during the 2022-23 campaign.

The report was confirmed by K.C. Johnson of NBC Sports Chicago, who added quite the detail: A few players were frustrated with Zach LaVine, the team’s All-Star guard who is in the first year of a max contract extension that will pay him a little more than $215 million over the next five years.

Earlier in the day, Shams Charania and Darnell Mayberry of The Athletic published a piece that said “the Bulls have held multiple team meetings to try to work out their issues, and that has included one-on-one, face-to-face sitdowns between [DeMar] DeRozan and LaVine,” although they mentioned that the two have “a strong mutual respect for each other.” And while an incident during the Minnesota game was not brought up, LaVine spoke to The Athletic about how this year has gone.

“There’s a certain level of frustration in people trying to figure out what we can do to help right the ship,” LaVine said. “I think with the players that we have, we try to put it on each other to right the ship. We have those type of guys, those type of mentalities where each of us have been number one options on a team before and then we all come together collectively. It’s not going to take one person. It’s going to take all of us as a unit. I think that’s what guys are trying to figure out how to help the group.”

The Bulls went into halftime trailing, 71-65, before the Timberwolves were able to run away with things in the second half. With the loss Minnesota, Chicago fell to 11-18 on the year. It marked the team’s fourth loss in a row and their seventh in their last nine games, and while they’re in 11th place and one game out of the play-in tournament in the Eastern Conference, this season has marked a step back for a team that won 46 games and earned the 6-seed in the conference last year.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water.

There’s a quite a long time between the original Avatar and its first sequel. How long? Long enough that Jake and Neytiri have teenage children. (One of them is 18. Perhaps Na’vi age quicker than humans.) But while most of the film is very impressive CGI, there is a degree of realism there. Cameron really did have his actors, in mo-cap doodads, hold their breath under water for Guinness-breaking lengths of time. He also insisted on casting real kids as the Na’vi kids, though he was worried that by doing so they’d succumb to something he called “the Stranger Things effect.”

What is “the Stranger Things effect”? It’s a term coined by Cameron, made public during an Entertainment Weekly interview, in which kid actors suddenly age a ton between seasons of films, as happened to the gang on the Netflix blockbuster (which Cameron adores). He didn’t want that to happen to his young charges, among them Trinity Jo-Li Bliss (7 when she was cast as Tuk, now 13) or Jack Champion (12 when cast as Spider, 18 now). He worried that if he spent too much time in between shooting sequels, they’d wind up “growing like a weed.”

Had he done that, Cameron said, “you get — and I love Stranger Things — but you get the Stranger Things effect where they’re supposed to still be in high school [but] they look like they’re 27.” He added, “You know, I love the show. It’s okay, we’ll suspend disbelief. We like the characters, but, you know.”

You could argue that CGI could have taken care of all that. But Cameron doesn’t do things the easy way. Perhaps it’s all part of the plan, and the fourth sequel will have Tuk and Spider be much older (provided none of them are killed by Stephen Lang’s now-Na’vi Col. Quaritch). Then again, he did cast Sigourney Weaver as a teenager.

(Via EW)

Twenty-five years ago, James Cameron released his epic “Titanic,” achieving a rare feat in Hollywood: a box office smash that was also loved by critics. “Titanic” won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and raked in $1.8 billion at the box office, making it the third-highest-grossing film of all time.

Even though his film is one of the most acclaimed in Hollywood history, Cameron still can’t help himself from getting involved in the great debate about the film. Did Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson, die unnecessarily at the end of the film?

Specifically, could Jack have fit onto the door Rose floated on instead of getting hypothermia and drowning?

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Cameron has previously dismissed the discussion surrounding the scene. “I’ve never really seen it as a debate, it’s just stupid,” Cameron told the BBC in 2019. “There’s no debate. But if you want to unearth all the dumbass arguments associated with it.”

Around the same time, he noted that Jack’s death was an artistic choice so the size of the door doesn’t matter.

“It was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him,” he told Vanity Fair. “The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”

Regardless of how Cameron feels about the scene, the debate has raged on. “Mythbusters” proved that Rose and Jack could have fit on the door together. But they would have had to fit a life preserver beneath it to improve its buoyancy. Good luck putting that together in the frigid water.

America’s leading science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has also poked holes in the scene’s logic by noting that Jack would have put up more of a fight to stay alive. “Whether or not he could’ve been successful, I would’ve tried more than once. You try once. ‘Oh, this is not gonna work. I will just freeze to death in the water.’ No, excuse me,” Tyson told HuffPost. “The survival instinct is way stronger than that in everybody, especially in that character. He’s a survivor, right? He gets through. He gets by.”

Although, after Jack saves Rose from trying to jump ship earlier in the film, he notes that it’s impossible to think in such cold water.

“To tell you the truth, I’m a lot more concerned about that water being so cold,” Jack told Rose in the film. “Water that cold, like right down there—it hits you like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body. You can’t breathe. You can’t think.”

Even though Cameron dismissed the discussion in the past, he has to be a bit bothered that the pivotal scene in his film is questionable enough to cause a rigorous, 25-year debate. So now he’s launched a thorough investigation into the scene to settle it once and for all.

“We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron told Postmedia while promoting his new film, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

“We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February,” Cameron continued. “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass as Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”

Cameron is doing all he can to end the “Titanic” debate, but no matter what kind of research he shows, the scene he filmed will always have a hard time passing the eye test when someone sees it for the first time. But, that’s not so bad, the scene always passes the heart test which, in art, is all that matters anyway.

And, as we know, Jack’s heart will always go on.

Since it was popularized in the 1950s, the Christmas carol “Little Drummer Boy” has been performed by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and David Bowie, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and more. It’s a sweet, beloved classic that tells the story of a little boy who was invited to go see baby Jesus but had nothing to offer as a gift except his drumming.

But in all of the renditions of this song, there’s never been one quite like this.

For King & Country’s live performance of “Little Drummer Boy” takes the carol to a whole other level. If you like big sound and big drums and big lights, this will be a treat for you.

(And if anyone knows what that funky accordion-piano instrument the lead singer plays is, do tell.)

For King & Country (stylized as “for KING & COUNTRY”) is a Christian rock duo from Australia composed of two brothers, Joel and Luke Smallbone, who we see singing lead here. The platinum-selling duo have won four Grammy awards for their music. Their Christmas album, appropriately titled “Drummer Boy Christmas,” also includes other classics such as “Joy to the World,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night,” as well as two original songs.

If you’d like to hear the studio version of the duo’s “Little Drummer Boy,” here’s the official music video for it. No flashing lights for this one, but it does include an actual little drummer boy:

Dwayne Johnson spent a decade-and-a-half trying to get Black Adam off the ground. Little did he know it would arrive at a fateful time: When it dropped in late October, it had to prove whether the DCEU, as it was run up till then, was worth preserving. The answer was clearly no. Black Adam underperformed slightly but just enough to have new DCEU heads James Gunn and Peter Safran do a massive, already controversial overhaul. Details are still forthcoming, but already Johnson’s semi-superhero is not a part of it — for now.

As caught by The Hollywood Reporter, Johnson took to Twitter (another place going through massive, unsettling changes), where he announced that Black Adam 2 ain’t happening any time soon.

“James Gunn and I connected, and Black Adam will not be in their first chapter of storytelling,” Johnson wrote. “However, DC and Seven Bucks have agreed to continue exploring the most valuable ways Black Adam can be utilized in future DC multiverse chapters.”

Johnson’s post was conciliatory and cautiously hopeful, filled with praise for Gunn and Safran, whom he emphatically wished well. It was also bittersweet. He noted that he’d spent 15 years of “relentless hard work” to make Black Adam, noting that even if it helped decide the fate of the DCEU, the “fan reaction” proves they “did great.”

Gunn and Safran have made some brash, shocking decisions as they prepare a new path for the DCEU, but they haven’t burned bridges. They may have ended Henry Cavill’s reign as Superman, but they want to at least keep him around. Aquaman may be on the chopping block, too, but that doesn’t mean star Jason Momoa won’t be reassigned as a different superhero. Black Adam, though, they may simply bring back. In other words, it’s not good, but it could be worse.

(Via THR)