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For months, Pennsylvania’s sitting lieutenant governor John Fetterman has been relentlessly, mercilessly trolling Dr. Mehmet Oz, his opponent for the state’s vacating Senate seat. Oz has struggled to return fire, all while flailing in the polls. But on Tuesday, the former TV star’s campaign tried to step up their attacks, and only succeeding in seeming like heartless ghouls. What they said was so revolting that Fetterman took a break from dragging him to sincerely take him to task.

It all began with a much-mocked video Oz recorded in April in which he did some supermarket-shopping for a vegetable tray, which he called “crudité.” The video came back in the news recently, prompting a whole new, even bigger round of derision. In response, Oz’s senior communications advisor told Insider, “If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.”

But if Oz couldn’t keep it classy, Fetterman could.

“I had a stroke. I survived it. I’m truly so grateful to still be here today,” Fetterman tweeted hours after the quote went public. “I know politics can be nasty, but even then, I could *never* imagine ridiculing someone for their health challenges.”

It’s not the first time Oz has dared to attack Fetterman over his health issues. Fetterman had to put on in-person campaigning on hold in order to recover from his stroke, which he suffered in May. That didn’t stop Oz, who’s a doctor, from making fun of him for not being on the road, even enlisting a Lost meme that earned him scorn from the show’s co-creator.

Oz has Trump’s seal of approval, and he may be trying to emulate his nasty, there-is-no-bottom style of campaigning. Then again, Trump already seems to have buyer’s remorse.

A few weeks ago, Will Sheff, also known as the leader of Okkervil River, announced his new LP Nothing Special and unveiled “Estrangement Zone.” Today, he’s back with the release of the title track. It’s a twinkly, vulnerable ballad with a powerful accompanying music video.

Upon the announcement of the album, he said, “When I was just a kid, I got caught up in the dream of being a rock and roll star. Like so many other young people, I fell in love with the idea of being called to this glorious path outside of ordinary life. And I ended up in a band with people who felt this same call — especially our brilliant drummer Travis Nelsen, who was like a brother to me. We would trade tales of hilarious antics and outrageous excess and tragic death like they were almost scripture. Travis and I fell out painfully, and he died in the early weeks of lockdown. I think a big part of Nothing Special centers around grieving for him, grieving for everything my friends have lost, grieving for the rock and rock and roll myth, and trying to open my eyes to a more transcendent reality.”

Watch the video for “Nothing Special” above.

Nothing Special is out 10/7 via ATO Records. Pre-order it here.

Recently, it was reported that R. Kelly wanted to ban jurors if they had watched any portion of the 2019 doc series Surviving R. Kelly, which was denied. Now, the Chicago Tribune has reported today that the prosecution’s top witness was Charles Freeman, who became friends with Kelly after doing merchandise for him in the 90s. Around 2001, Kelly asked him to “recover some tapes.”

Freeman was allegedly told he would get a “reward” for the video, the contents of which he claimed to not know at the time. Derrel McDavid, one of Kelly’s co-defendants, had described it to him as a “performance tape,” and if Freeman got it back, “they would take care of me.” In August of that year, Freeman signed a contract saying if he recovered the tape he would get $100,000 plus expenses, and McDavid allegedly told him he could earn $1 million for the job. But he said that McDavid emphasized that they “need the originals and make sure this is the actual evidence tape… It would look bad if we gave you a million dollars for a tape and it’s not the tape that we want.”

Freeman said that one of the tapes showed Kelly “with a young lady having sex.” He said he still had copies of the tape as recently as 2019 and turned them over to the authorities upon learning that cops were looking into him. When asked why he didn’t turn them over immediately, Freeman answered, “Because the police wasn’t going to pay me a million dollars.” Read more about the situation here.

Republicans are no strangers to rank hypocrisy, but it’s not often that they lambast Democrats while doing the same thing. Such was the case Tuesday when Rick Scott — the former governor of Florida, who once mixed up the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance — decided to drag President Joe Biden for vacationing in Delaware…while vacationing from a yacht in Italy.

The sitting senator slammed the president for doing a kind of working vacation a whopping 2 ½ hour drive from the White House. (He’s scheduled to announce his decision on student debt cancellation on Wednesday, for one.)

“Another week of President Biden vacationing in Delaware vs. working at the White House,” Scott tweeted. “If he loves to travel so much, I’ve got some suggestions as to where he should go next.” He then offered a poll with three choices. Hold on to your sides, they might just split: They were all “The Southern Border.”

There’s one little issue. Scott is chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. And his party isn’t doing so hot, with one under-performing congressional candidate after another getting into constant, creative hot water. Where was Scott while Dr. Mehmet Oz’s staff was saying grossly insensitive things about opponent John Fetterman’s health issues? As per Axios, he’s chilling on a luxury yacht in Italy.

Perhaps Scott forgot where he was. Whatever the case, people were happy to remind him about throwing stones at glass houses — especially when one’s glass house is quite a bit larger and swankier.

It’s not the first time Scott has been credibly accused of hypocrisy. Last year, he dragged Biden’s then-named “Build Back Better” plan, only to get called out for supporting Donald Trump’s super-pricey tax cuts, which only helped the wealthy anyway.

(Via Axios)

Four-year-old Matthew Hoobler went to his first major league baseball game on August 14 and sat in the first row with his father and 2-year-old brother at Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field. The Block Club Chicago reports the family was there to see the visiting Detroit Tigers, the dad’s favorite team, play the hometown Chicago White Sox.

During the TV broadcast, the announcers caught the boy eating a large hot dog when, oops, it slipped out of the bun and fell to the ground. The boy reacted to the mishap by giving himself the ultimate facepalm.

“Oh, the horrors!” and “Oh, the humanity,” the announcers exclaimed when the frankfurter hit the floor. Video of the dropped dog went viral, with more than 2.3 million people seeing it after it was shared by the White Sox.

u201cAbsolutely brutal ud83eudd26u200du2642ufe0fu201d

— White Sox Talk (@White Sox Talk)
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Reporters at Block Club Chicago tracked down the family and learned they lived in the suburb of La Grange, Illinois. After their identities were discovered, The Wiener’s Circle, a legendary hot dog stand on Chicago’s north side, invited the boy for all-you-can-eat dogs and lessons on how to safely hold one in a bun taught by Chi-town’s dog-eating experts.

The Wiener’s Circle is known for being a raucous place for people to chow down after a night out in Chicago. The staff is famous for hurling insults at customers or “curbside abuse,” as they call it. It’s also notorious for the $20 “chocolate shake” that offers a lot more than dessert.

u201cWeu2019ve crowdsourced pops via @Twitter and will be providing all you can eat hot dogs for his ud83cudf2d-less boy and his best buds. Pops is clearly an @tigers fan, maybe we should make him dress up in a 1919 black Sox uni? @shane_riordan @fromthe108 @ronnychiengu201d

— The Wieners Circle (@The Wieners Circle)
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Little Matthew learned the art of eating a hot dog from the best in the business. He even managed to learn how to hold a dog upside down.

u201cWe will be hosting the young lad and his family today, and working on his hot dog holding form. Da kid is apparently an expert on the digestive system, so look for him to drop some scientific knowledge for our fans lateru201d

— The Wieners Circle (@The Wieners Circle)
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He also showed off his famous facepalm.

u201cCheyenne taught young Mathew how to properly hold a hot dog upside down without it droppingu2026more to follow!u201d

— The Wieners Circle (@The Wieners Circle)
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Young Mathew did sone Q&A with Cheyenne in da relish room, and showed off his facepalm 🤦‍♂️ signature move! https://t.co/GbaPjQCabt pic.twitter.com/LF3xIAfna1

— The Wieners Circle (@TheWienerCircle) August 22, 2022

Matthew’s dad, Rob, told Block Club Chicago that although his son gave a dramatic facepalm after losing his dog, he didn’t mind it all that much.

“He’s a bun fan. He likes the bun more than anything. So we got him a dog, and the rest is history,” Rob said. “When he started chomping at the bun, there wasn’t enough to hold the dog in place.”

Rob never even considered picking the dog up off the ground, even though the White Sox charge $5 for one.

“A lot of people in the comments mentioned the five-second rule,” Rob said. “Maybe at home, but not at a major league stadium.”

The Hoobler drop wasn’t the only major league hot dog debacle highlighted by The Wiener’s Circle this week. A viral video with nearly 10 million views shows a man taking a hot dog, turning it into a straw and drinking his beer with it at a New York Yankees game.

u201cThe most environmentally friendly, edible straw known to man. @OfficeHrsLive and @VicBergerIV please do something with this!u201d

— The Wieners Circle (@The Wieners Circle)
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The controversial move has been applauded by some and angered others. “Arrest this man,” Nicolas Heller, posting as newyorknico, wrote on the original clip, which was later shared by Jomboy Media.

The Wiener’s Circle applauded the move, noting that a hot dog is the “most environmentally friendly, edible straw known to man.” It also tastes a lot better drenched in mustard.

When the summer of 2022 began, prices at the gas pump were pretty dire. Hitting a record nationwide average of $5.02 per gallon on June 14, gasoline became a bigger chunk of every family’s budget and was particularly painful for people who had planned summer road trips to save over flying.

But since that peak, prices have steadily dropped to an average of $3.89 per gallon as of August 23. In fact, the price of gas has fallen every day for 70 days straight, which is the longest consecutive downward streak since January of 2015, according to Bloomberg. Prices vary by location, of course, but that prolonged drop is great news for our pocketbooks.

u201cBREAKING: Gas prices have FALLEN for 70 straight days u2014 according to AAA, the national average is now $3.89/gal.u26fdufe0fu201d

— Jon Cooper (@Jon Cooper)
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Why are prices dropping, though? It depends on who you ask.

The Biden administration has touted the president’s policies for the price decline, but the reality is a lot more complicated. Every president is quick to take credit for lowering gas prices and every political opponent is quick to blame them for rising gas prices. Unfortunately, our penchant for partisan side-taking tends to push us to follow suit.

But presidents actually have very little control over gas prices or the factors that influence them. Global crude oil prices, which have the greatest influence on prices at the pump, are mostly out of a president’s control.

“No administration really has a lot of sway over gas prices,” Andrew Gross, a spokesman for the AAA, told Factcheck.org. Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, told Politifact, “By far the biggest driver is the price of crude oil, which is driven by supply and demand factors. A strong global economy, which presidents can influence slightly, is likely to increase demand and drive up prices.”

The global economy and crude oil prices have been affected by all kinds of things, from the COVID-19 pandemic driving down demand in 2020 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, causing instability in the global energy market. President Biden has also released record amounts of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to mitigate the price spike, but gas prices have been up all over the world, and even with our prices remaining higher than average, our gas prices are still lower than most of the world.

The truth is complex. Lower gas prices are certainly good for our individual, immediate bottom line, of course, but focusing solely on our own savings ignores a host of other implications. For instance, higher gas prices can cause people to drive less, which is actually a positive for the environment. On the other hand, people who can’t afford those higher prices but who have no choice but to buy gas suffer disproportionately from higher prices, making price fluctuations an equity issue as well. Sometimes low gas prices can be a bad sign, as was the case during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And despite the long streak of falling prices, industry experts and former government officials say that prices could go back up again. So for now, let’s just say yay that prices have been falling for a while, celebrate saving some money and keep working on ways to lessen our dependence on oil and gas so these prices aren’t as big a factor in our lives.

Elephants are truly fascinating creatures. They have the largest brain of any land animal and almost three times as many neurons as a human. They use tools, have extraordinary memories and are empathetic.

Elephants are even known to mourn their dead in a manner similar to humans. Or, just maybe, we mourn the dead just like elephants?

A new video taken at the Shendiao Wild Animal Nature Reserve in China shows a 25-year-old male elephant named Shan Mai proving that elephants are not only smart but can be courteous, too.

In the video, which has been seen more than 2 million times on Twitter alone, Shan Mai finds a shoe that was dropped by a child. He then locates the kid outside of his enclosure and returns the footwear. After giving the shoe back he waits for a beat anticipating the tip of a small handful of hay. It’s like they made a trade.

u201cThis elephant was up to the… tusk ud83dudc18 The animal returned a childu2019s shoe after it fell into its zoo enclosure in eastern Chinau201d

— NowThis (@NowThis)
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Many people replied to the tweet by praising the elephant’s intelligence and compassion. While others made the point that something so magnificent shouldn’t be behind bars in a zoo. “Aww the poor thing. Wish he was in the wild though,” daffodil wrote.

The video serves as a reminder of how incredible these animals are and why humans must work to protect them. According to the WWF the number of wild elephants on the planet has been cut in half over the last three generations and only 40,000 to 50,000 currently live in the wild.

Since the 1933 original film, King Kong has been both a menace and a secret sweetheart — a giant ape who has repeatedly terrorized New York City and even messed up some dinos and other freaky fare. He’s too big for the small screen, especially the latest iteration, who had to be made even larger so he could believably give Godzilla a what-fer. And yet one streamer is now looking to bring the hairy titan to the small screen.

As per Deadline, Disney Branded Content is in the early stages of developing King Kong (sure to be retitled later), a Disney+ series that will explore the big guy’s origin story. It’s being developed by James Wan’s Atomic Monster, with Paper Girls’ Stephany Folsom writing the scripts. Deadline says it both “brings the classic monster story into the modern age” while also exploring the “mythology of King Kong’s origin story and the supernatural mysteries of his home,” which is a little confusing, since origins stories tend to be set in the past.

This won’t be the first time Kong has made it to the small screen, though previous efforts have been animated. This will be live-action, and it will presumably feature the current version of the character, who debuted in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, which was made in part so he could be absorbed into Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse and duke it out with Godzilla.

This new show will presumably answer some burning questions, like: How did he get so big? Are there other apes of such magnitude? If not, did they die? And why does he have a thing for tiny human women? Whatever the case, let’s hope it’s a mite better than this instantly forgotten straight-to-VHS cartoon movie released the same year as the 1998 remake of the Kong sorta-knock-off Mighty Joe Young.

(Via Deadline)

Lil Tjay has had a tough year so far. In the early morning of June 22, the rapper was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery after being shot multiple times. He regained consciousness and doctors removed his breathing tube a week after the surgery. Now, a mere two months later, he’s already emerging back into the rap world.

A new billboard in the Bronx today was spotted on Tuesday that reads: “I’M BACK. — Lil Tjay.” That’s all it says, but it’s an exciting message, especially coming from someone who nearly died not so long ago.

Lil Tjay’s shooting caused a stir in the hip hop world. For one, it sparked a controversial reaction from Tekashi 69, the troll-ish Brooklyn rapper who went from dominating the city’s brash street scene to being branded a snitch after testifying against some of his gangbanging cronies. He responded in the comments of an Instagram post about the shooting with a pair of crying emojis — one laughing, one sobbing. 6ix9ine, though, has always been known for mocking other rappers’ misfortunes, including taunting King Von’s friends after the Chicago rapper’s death and trolling Young Thug after his recent racketeering arrest — the same charges Tekashi himself narrowly dodged having to testify about.

John Boyega has been very vocal about his, shall we say, not-always-pleasant experiences in the Star Wars-verse. For one, he was hurt to find his role, as reformed Storm Trooper Finn, wound up not being as big as he hoped after The Force Awakens. For another, he — along with Kelly Marie Tran — became targets of racist attacks from the worst realms of Star Wars fandom. Still, he was heartened earlier this year when Disney finally learned their lesson.

When the spin-off Obi-Wan Kenobi bowed earlier this summer, one of its supporting players, Moses Ingram, became the latest non-white Star Wars actor to suffer racist attacks. This time, though, the Star Wars team was ready. Lucasfilm passionately defended Ingram, with star Ewan McGregor going so far as to say those who attack Ingram are “no Star Wars fan in my mind.” That meant a lot to Boyega.

“That’s the peace that I felt,” Boyega said on a recent appearance on Sirius XM’s Tell Me Everything With John Fugelsang. “Moses Ingram being protected makes me feel protected. Do you understand what I’m saying? It makes me feel like, ‘Okay, cool. I am not the elephant in the room.’ Because when I started, it wasn’t really a conversation you could bring up. You know how they went through it. It was kind of like, ‘Let’s just be silent.’ It wasn’t a conversation you could bring up. But now to see how blatant it is, to see Ewan McGregor come and support…It, for me, fulfills my time where I didn’t get the support.”

When asked if he was bitter that the company didn’t roll out the big guns for him, Boyega replied, “It doesn’t make me feel bitter at all. It makes me feel like sometimes you are that guy. And my dad taught me that. Sometimes you’re not the guy to get the blessing and sometimes you are Moses, you know, you lead the people to the mountain, but you see the destination. You don’t get to go in, you get others to go in. And that’s where you get your happiness from.”

In other words, Boyega’s happy that the company evolved since his Star Wars stint: “And for me to see other people accepted, and then at the same time to see that the studios now are like, ‘Okay, cool. This is not an elephant in the room conversation. We need to support our Black client.’ It’s fantastic.”

Boyega also noted that he’s “good” not playing Finn anymore. Besides, he’s found other things to do.

You can watch the actor’s Tell Me Everything With John Fugelsang appearance in the video below.

(Via Deadline)