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“Apparently the COVID pandemic is really over,” one person tweeted.

“The end of the pandemic is nigh!!!!!!,” another added, right next to a picture of their free granola sample.

Some even got genuinely emotional. “The sample station is officially BACK after the last several years at Trader Joe’s and I am not kidding when I say that I shed a genuine tear. One of life’s greatest pleasures,” commented one person.

The sample station is officially BACK after the last several years at Trader Joe’s and I am not kidding when I say that I shed a genuine tear. One of life’s greatest pleasures 😭

— Roger Dawley (@rogerdawley) October 1, 2022

Trader Joe’s is certainly not the first to bring back free samples. Costco, Sam’s Club and Whole Foods have previously brought them back using different COVID precautions. But Trader Joe’s fanatics are just a different breed—the store has its own cult-like following, so of course the response to seeing its quirky snacks laid out again is going to get an overwhelmingly positive response.

As CNN pointed out, sampling is a major sales strategy not only for retailers, but for small, up-and-coming brands trying to raise awareness (as a former demo girl, I can also attest to this). The return of this beloved staple also signals opportunities for startup food companies to recover. Basically—a win for TJ’s, a win for startups and a win for sample-hungry shoppers yearning for simple comforts. Win, win, win.

Sometimes the best news is bite-sized.

“The talk” is a moment a lot of parents dread having with their children. Sex is a complicated issue so it’s understandable that parents feel uncomfortable breaching that boundary with their kids and explaining such a delicate topic.

Kadyn Smith, a mom in California, got more than 2.5 million views of a video she posted on TikTok because of her incredible ability to navigate the topic with her 3-year-old daughter, Blakely. Smith told Blakely she was going to be a big sister for the second time and recorded the conversation to post on social media.

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@kadynsmithsmith

😂🥰🤍 #pregnant #momtok #momsoftiktok #toddlertok #toddlersoftiktok #baby

Blakely had a lot of big questions for her mother:

“What is it?”

“Is it gonna come out when it’s big?”

“Is it sleeping?”

“Is it gonna tickle me?”

Then, she got to the biggest one. “How can a baby get in your tummy?” she wondered as she put her hand on Smith’s belly, to which Smith had a great response, “Mommy and Daddy put it there.”

“Did you open your tummy and then the baby got in there?” Blakely asked. “Yeah,” Smith responded.

Smith told TODAY Parents she was totally caught off guard by Blakely’s question. “I had no idea that was coming. You can hear me take a pause,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘uhh.'”

Smith got a lot of love on TikTok for her ability to sidestep the question while providing an answer that satisfied her daughter. “Hahahah every parent completely understood the delay to HOW baby got there,” Lynne Harris-Reginer wrote in the comments. “Good answer mommy goooood answer. Fast thinking, too,” Lillyrae570 added.

Parents shared how their kids responded to the “how did a baby get in your tummy” question.

“When I told my daughter that I have a baby in my tummy, her first response was: you ate it?” Ronnie wrote. “My daughter cried when I told her there was a baby in my tummy. She said I must stop eating babies,” Nokubonga Dube 910 wrote.

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Smith’s answer sounded great to a lot of people’s ears, but what do the experts say?

Parent coach Dawn Huebner, author of “What to Do When You Worry Too Much,” says to be simple and straightforward while also using the proper words to describe our organs. “I’m an advocate of correct terminology,” she told Today’s Parent, “so I’d say something like, ‘Mommies have a special part in their body called a uterus. That’s where babies grow.’”

Robin Elise Weiss, Ph.D., adds that if a child asks the question and you’re unprepared, it’s OK to think on it for a few minutes before returning with a response. She says that’s also acceptable to explain biology in an age-appropriate way. “You can explain that a baby grows from sperm and an egg in the way fruit grows from a seed,” she told Verywell Family.

All in all, Smith did a great job thinking on her feet and showed just how challenging parenting can be. The most important thing is that she listened, rolled with it and gave it her best shot. That’s what being great mom is all about.

Freddie Gibbs is dominating the hip-hop world right now, after unleashing his new album Soul Sold Separately. It features Pusha T, Offset, Rick Ross, and Anderson .Paak and has been receiving a massive wave of praise and appreciation as listeners dig in.

The rapper is giving fans even more. Today he released the video for the track “Dark Hearted,” which is produced by James Blake and was the second single off the record, following “Too Much,” his collaboration with Moneybagg Yo. The new video is animated, showing Gibbs in cartoon form as he drives in a high-stakes car chase involving rabbits, grenades, and even — spoiler alert — a UFO.

Fans know that rabbits are a key image in Gibbs’s music. Another track on his album is called “Rabbit Vision,” which helped lay to rest his old beef with Jeezy: “Me and Jeezy still ain’t spoke in years / But I got love for him / Could’ve talked it out, but I spoke out, I let it get to me / Showed me I could be a f*cking boss, best thing he did for me,” he raps on the track.

Watch the video for “Dark Hearted” above.

Freddie Gibbs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Mitch McConnell may not be a Supreme Court justice, but he’s arguably the one responsible for all the out-of-control, far right rulings the bench unleashed over the summer. He’s why, among other things, abortion is no longer safe and legal across these United States. It’s he who blocked Obama from nominating Merrick Garland. It’s he who pushed through dodgy Brett Kavanaugh and rushed through Amy Coney Barrett. And for his troubles, he’s got a dildo modeled after him.

As per Mashable, the sexual wellness company Dame and the creative agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address teamed up to bring you a limited edition McConnell dildo, under the banner “Get F*cked by the Government On Your Terms.” Only 500 exist, but 100% of the profits go to fighting for abortion rights.

“We wanted to engage in the discourse, raise funds, and have fun doing it,” wrote Dame founder and CEO Alexandra Fine in the press release. “Pleasure is our guiding force and we need autonomy over our bodies in order to enjoy them.”

It’s not clear how long it is — maybe it’s appropriately short — but it only comes in one color: ice blue, presumably like McConnell’s soul. It is currently available for pre-order, which one can do here.

The McConnell dildo comes at a time when Americans are finding out what the GOP really thinks about abortion. Even those who say they want to outright ban it, no exceptions, have been credibly accused of funding at least one themselves.

(Via Mashable)

Whether you loved it or loved-it-after-mistakenly-hating it, there’s no denying that The Wachowski‘s Jupiter Ascending lost a lot of money. With a reported budget range of $176–210 million, the bombastic space fantasy where Mila Kunis played a maid destined for the galactic throne decidedly flopped. As it turns out, that wasn’t a surprise to Kunis.

“When did we know [Jupiter Ascending would flop]? Before we started production, because our production got slashed in half,” Kunis said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And so the original budget was twice as much, and you can do a lot more with a lot more money, and often times those types of scripts have a very good storyline but extraordinary other things. Right before pre-production, for a multitude of reasons with studios and other things, the budget got cut, and the movie was different.”

It’s not clear whether she means that the budget dropped from $210 million to $176 million, or whether the reported budget is drastically far off from the meager 9 figures Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures cobbled together, but what’s clear is that when a budget gets hacked just before production, there’s a good chance the studio is either seeing writing on the wall or self-fulfilling a prophecy. Fortunately, even with the cost-deflated and the box office sagging, Jupiter Ascending remains a gorgeous triumph of high art weirdness. In an alternate universe, we’re getting Jupiter Ascending: The Way Of Water, and there are theme parks where Channing Tatum’s rollerblading space werewolf is the biggest attraction. Oh, to live in a world where Warner Bros. didn’t sandbag it all from the beginning.

(via Happy Sad Confused)

There are plenty of outstanding podcasts covering movie and television scoring, but there’s always room for one more. At least, that’s what Hollywood Records intends to prove when it releases its first slate of The Big Score episodes. The series is a combination docuseries and companion podcast show where composers discuss how they built the soundscapes for shows like Only Murders in the Building and Under the Banner of Heaven. This follows a format featured in shows like One Perfect Shot where the filmmakers themselves roll their sleeves up to deliver the insights, struggles, and triumphs of what they created.

It also seems to be an equal-opportunity series, interviewing composers from all streaming services and studios. Here’s the full lineup according to Variety:

10/6
Siddhartha Khosla
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
Podcast + Docuseries

Jeff Ament
FX’s Under The Banner of Heaven (Hulu)
Docuseries

Pilou
Not Okay (Searchlight Pictures)
Docuseries

10/11
Daniel Pemberton
See How They Run (Searchlight Pictures)
Podcast + Docuseries

10/18
Ian Hultquist and Drum & Lace
Rosaline (20th Century Studios/Hulu)
Docuseries

Amanda Jones
Super/Natural (National Geographic/Disney +)
Docuseries

10/25
Carter Burwell
The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight Pictures)
Podcast + Docuseries

11/2
Daniel Pemberton
Amsterdam (20th Century Studios)
Podcast + Docuseries

11/9
Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest
Reasonable Doubt (Onyx Collective/Hulu)
Podcast + Docuseries

Double the Pemberton? This podcast is wild.

It looks sharp and sounds even better. It’s incredible what the right hands can do with Home Depot buckets and a full orchestra at their disposal.

(via Variety)

It’s totally natural to get all judgmental and smug about the two young cannibals in Bones and All, but unless you’ve ever been put in a position of either eating your fellow humans or dying, you don’t know what you’re talking about, do you? Think about that before you get on your high horse, pal.

The reunion between Timothée Chalamet and director Luca Guadagnino sees the Oscar-nominated actor playing a Clyde-type “eater” who meets a Bonnie-type fellow traveler (star Taylor Russell) and begins a love affair that spans the highways and byways of an America filled with a startling amount of cannibals within a tight geographic area. Along the way they cross paths with the creepily desperate Sully (Mark Rylance) and others who refuse to turn on Incognito Mode when they search for “The Best Ways To Cook A Hand.”

It looks lush and grungy, adding to the budding subgenre of prestige people-eating flicks with Raw and We Are What We Are as its modern foundation. Dripping with romance, it’s a fitting follow-up to Call Me By Your Name, and, don’t be surprised, Guadagnino has already slapped down the jokes drawing comparisons between his new work and Armie Hammer’s (alleged) real life.

The movie hits theaters November 23rd, so plan to take your relatives to it after Thanksgiving dinner.

It’s true that online streaming has made more movies and TV shows (and cat videos) available to the masses than at any point in history. But there’s so much that’s fallen through the cracks. Do you know you still can’t legally stream Cocoon? (There are also lots of masterpieces that are AWOL, too.) Meanwhile, no streamer has Moonlighting, the game-changing ‘80s rom-com-mystery-whatever that made Bruce Willis a star and gave Cybill Shepherd a much-deserved comeback. Now there’s good news…sort of…maybe.

On Monday, Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron dropped a big, tantalizing tease. Over a picture from his hit show, which ran for five seasons, ending in 1989, “Disney and I have put our heads together and come up with a plan. Big announcement Wednesday!!!” But by Wednesday, the news was…not what you might have thought.

After writing, CAT’S OUTTA THE BAG,” Caron wrote that, instead of the show coming to streaming, the “business of getting all 5 seasons of “Moonlighting” starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd ready for streaming has begun!” He added that it will be “an ambitious project” with “[l]ots of moving parts,” and that “it could take quite a while.” He added, “No word yet on where or when you’ll be seeing it — but it’s happening!”

In other words, it seems Caron and team figured out how difficult it will be, with rights issues and whatnot, to get the show online, but was ready to do just that. Maybe referencing Disney in his initial tweet was some kind of clue. They now own ABC, which aired Moonlighting back in the day. But perhaps someone else owns it now.

Anyway, who knows! But at least someone’s trying to make sure people can watch Moonlighting again, especially now that one of its stars had to retire from acting, making people want to watch the show that made him a household name all the more. Anyway, best of luck, and hopefully the next announcement is a bigger one!

Earlier this year, DJ Drama and Jeezy teamed up for a song called “I Ain’t Gon Hold Ya.” Fans were grateful for this collaboration, especially fans of Jeezy, because it broke the two-year hiatus he’s had since his 2020 album The Recession 2. But now they have even more to look forward to because the two acts are unveiling a joint album together.

DJ Drama and Jeezy have announced that they made a mixtape, Snofall, which will arrive at the end of this month. It was announced last night, Oct. 4, in a commercial during the airing of the BET Hip-Hop Awards. Hopefully a new single on is the way. For now, “I Ain’t Gon Hold Ya” is all we have.

Meanwhile, it was just revealed how Jeez squashed his beef with Freddie Gibbs. In an interview, Gibbs explained, “We exchanged numbers and we both got on a plane and that was it. It was one of the most beautiful things ever. I been put it behind me, but I had to see him. And then when you look back, man, it wasn’t really nothing. That was f*cking a music disagreement. I didn’t really have nothing against Jeezy; I looked up to Jeezy.”

Snofall arrives 10/21.

Donald Trump has always wanted people to think things about him that aren’t so. He tells his supporters he won, not lost, re-election in 2020. He straight-up makes stuff up about his political opponents. Not only that, but he gloms onto all the nice things people say about him, no matter how un-true. Last month it was revealed that these days he has aides read glowing tweets about him to his face, so he can bask in the glow of praise, no matter how questionable. Now this.

This latest unflattering fleck of dirt of course comes from Confidence Man, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s epic tell-all about her many, many years of covering the man who dubbed her his “psychiatrist.” The reporter went on MSNBC Wednesday, where she talked about how Trump was a bit down in the dumps after the Jan. 6 riot, particularly when his Twitter account was permanently suspended. Luckily, someone on Fox News was there to pick up his spirits. Hogan Gidley, one of the Trump administration’s deputy press secretaries, was asked if the suspension had “emasculated” his former boss.

“I wouldn’t say emasculated,” replied Gidley. “The most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House is the president of the United States.”

This elated Trump, who, Haberman said, “called his former adviser to tell him he was correct, and had aides play the video of Gidley speaking several times.”

Sounds like being a Trump aide isn’t one of the country’s better jobs.

Trump, Haberman also claimed, had an obsessive habit of “brandishing photos of scantily clad women with whom he claimed to have been involved.” He even “appeared to keep the photos on hand to illustrate his boastful rendering of masculinity.”

But maybe Trump had a reason to overstate his virility. A few years back, Stormy Daniels, the porn star who was paid to keep quiet about an affair they had in 2006, disclosed her rather unimpressed take on his John Thomas. Trump did not enjoy hearing that — but then, who did?

You can watch Haberman discuss her Trump book on MSNBC below:

(Via Raw Story)