There was something lovely about seeing people talk anew about the brilliance of The Kids In The Hall last week when the iconic Canadian sketch group made their return with a new season (available on Amazon Prime) a mere quarter-century and change after their previous finale. There’s a real sense of pride and humanity that swells when you realize other people like the thing you like (and have liked your whole life). That they get it. Kids In The Hall is now and forever a thing built for a specific audience with specific tastes. Never mainstream or conformist. That’s part of their charm. Part of why the new documentary about the troop, Comedy Punks, is so perfectly titled. And perfectly timed, too, coming out a week after the new season (the doc is also on Amazon Prime) to keep that conversation going, reminding fans that the Kids are back while, at the same time, illuminating their origins, feuds, reunions, and overall us against the world ethos.
Last week, we ran an interview with Dave Foley to share some of his thoughts on those same topics. This time, we’re talking with Mark McKinney about the show, the doc, creative ambition, not trying to force fan-favorite characters into rotation, and the absence of regret over the Kids’ long hiatus.
Hello.
I don’t know if you’ve been told, but I’m in a car.
That’s a pretty great mode of transportation.
Yeah. It’s one of my favorites.
Well, I do remember that you guys have fucked them in the past in Car Fuckers [a 2008 one-off sketch that seems impossible to find on the internet now].
We have fucked the automobile. That’s right. Directed by the Russo brothers.
Was it? I did not realize that. Honestly, now I really think Marvel had a missed opportunity. They should have put that on the poster for the Avengers films, “from the people that brought you Car Fuckers.”
Exactly, please note that I asked, “Where are they now?”
You really wrecked their career actually. Nice job.
Sorry. I feel bad, but there are two of them. They should be able to forage together something.
So the show is tremendous. It’d be weird if I was doing this and I had no affection for you guys, or your work. What is this for? Is this a Superstore DVD extra?
[Laughing] I am stealing that. I’m going to find a reason to put that on my Insta. Attention, Superstore DVD extra: Kids In The Hall.
So, the Comedy Punks doc is also great. You had mentioned there that you, yourself, don’t have any ambition. I thought that was funny because you can’t really tell. You’ve done a bit. Was that just an off-the-cuff joke, or is that something you honestly feel?
Well, I don’t know. What is ambition? Maybe it’s not competitive ambition. I have creative ambition, a lot of it. I mean, I’ve done a ton of stuff. But in a way, I don’t have a plan. I’ve never tried to scheme my career. And I think collectively, the Kids In The Hall have. And I think individually, I’m probably on the low end of ambition, of business ambition in the troop, but maybe not creative ambition. But it was also a bit, so I don’t know. But it’s something I noticed the other day when I was watching it at the Hot Docs Festival. I sort of went home going, “What did I mean by that? Am I talking to myself?”
I think for me it goes back to the beginning. I think I said this in the doc. But the Loose Moose Theater was a theater in Calgary that myself and Norm Hiscock, one of the eventual Kids In The Hall writers went and saw when we were 20 years old and trying to find a way to write comedy. You could have a theater sports team and be on stage the next week if you signed up. And I would never have been able to think my way on stage. It had to be like that. “Well, we’re doing it.” “Oh, we are?” I would’ve been too self-conscious. I have too strong a belief in orthodoxies, in systems, and stuff like that, too much of a WASP-y respect for law and order and meritocracies and hierarchies. You know what I mean? I would’ve tried to find my way nimbly through them. I’m much, much better when I’m forced into a reaction or an unselfconscious choice.
You all did a great job of weaving in the classic and the new. Going in, was that a concern? Not wanting to just give people a bunch of older material. Giving them a bit of new stuff. Was that part of the challenge that excited you?
Oh, very much so. I wanted this to be the Kids In The Hall, 30 years on. What would we write now? Old characters had to be apt. They had to fit. Otherwise, we weren’t going to be interested. It didn’t feel like that’s what this was about. This was like, holy cow, we got this amazing chance to stand on our feet in a television format as opposed to stage or something. And I wanted to see what that was for myself.
The characters that worked were bizarre. I didn’t sit down to write the Hotel La Rut characters again. I just found myself in a moment of COVID sloth, being too tired to get up and get my iPad. And I started muttering to myself in that language and Scott liked the idea. So we did it.
So there was no whiteboard with like, “Okay, we’ve got to do this character?”
No, no, no, no. We’ve never worked that way. Had we worked that way, we would be very successful, we’d be huge. But no, we never worked that way with an imperative on the material.
As you’re doing this and seeing the results, do you feel regret that you guys weren’t able to get more movies out to follow Brain Candy or to be able to otherwise capitalize on it? Obviously, there are a billion, different reasons why something like that didn’t come together, but I’m curious.
No, I think more like a kind of a radical acceptance that really the secret sauce of Kids In The Hall is the exact kind of contrast and bracing contrast that makes writing a single narrative movie kind of almost impossible. We wrote an original idea for Brain Candy. I think the Pythons were very smart to riff off the Arthurian legends and the Bible because everyone can contribute to that. Do you know what I mean? It’s the unifying force.
We kind of pulled back and forth over the threads of the story of Brain Candy. And that actually pointed the way to a revival. You know what makes us work? It’s a Scott monologue, followed by a weird piece by me, followed by a Dave and Kevin classic, followed by a Bruce. It’s the gumbo of that, that is the Kids In The Hall. I think now maybe if there was ever a window, we could go back and do something. An archetype.
‘Kids In The Hall’ and ‘Comedy Punks’ can both be found on Amazon Prime
Robert Smith has been teasing The Cure’s next record for a bit; they haven’t released an LP since 2008’s 4:13 Dream, though they’ve had some fun live singles and collaborations. A couple of months ago, the “Friday I’m In Love” singer told NME: “I know what it’s called – it’s called Songs Of A Lost World. It’s got artwork, it’s got a running order, it’s almost done! They’re so slow because of vinyl, but it might come in September. I’d rather it just came out. I can’t stand the anticipation.”
Yesterday, he finally gave another update at the Ivor Novellos, where he received the Icon Award. “We will be releasing a new album,” Smith told NME. “I get fed up of saying this now! We will be playing from October and the new album will be out before then. We walked on [stage at the Ivors today] to a bit of new music, actually. Hopefully no one recorded it!”
He continued: “Reeves [Gabrels] our guitar player has come over from America for the day just to finish a couple of solos, I’ve got to finish a couple of vocals. Essentially it’s a 12-track album. It’s there, it’s kind of half-mixed and half-finished. It’s a weird thing. It’s kind of evolved over the last two years. It hasn’t always been a good thing to have been left alone with it. You pick at it, like picking at seams, and everything falls apart.”
George Miller has directed four movies since 2000: Happy Feet, the dancing penguin movie; Happy Feet Two, the sequel to the dancing penguin movie; Mad Max: Fury Road, arguably the best movie of the 2010s; and Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Idris Elba as a genie who grants Tilda Swinton three wishes. The man is a legend.
Three Thousand Years of Longing follows Dr. Alithea Binnie (Swinton), a solitary academic who purchases a trinket in a grand bazaar in Istanbul, as one does. Inside is a Djinn (Elba) who “offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom,” according to the official plot summary. “This presents two problems. First, she doubts that he is real and second, because she is a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes gone wrong.” To satiate her, the Djinn tells stories from the past, which apparently involves spiders, swords, and lots of screaming.
Three Thousand Years of Longing premieres at the Cannes Film Festival today, May 20, before hitting theaters on August 31. If I had three wishes, I would use my first one to make it August 31 today, and spend the second on hurrying up production on Furiosa.
Blueface and DDG have a strong respect for one another, and it goes without saying they both like to have a good time. The two young rappers join forces on the new video for their collaboration “Meat This” to remind us of their proclivity to enjoy life. Blueface and DDG find themselves in the company of many women at the club or collecting stacks of money and gold to fund their expansive lifestyles.
“Meat This” kicks off the lead-up to their upcoming full-length collaborative project set to release later this year. Though there is currently no name for the project or set release date, the union makes sense as Blueface and DDG previously traded verses on the remix to the latter’s Platinum-certified record “Moonwalking In Calabasas,” in addition to “BGC” and a snippet that has been titled “Rich Guy.”
Blueface has been enjoying the success of the November release “Chose Me” featuring the bubbling sensation Blxst, as it topped Triller Global Charts earlier this month. As for DDG, he tapped Gunna back in February for “Elon Musk.” With Blueface last putting out a project in 2020, and DDG 2021, this is an exciting new direction for the two.
America has a lot on its plate right now: A baby formula shortage, surging COVID cases, monkeypox, and an ongoing grappling with racist rhetoric that continues to spark mass shootings. You’d think at least one of those problems would be forefront in the mind of Ted Cruz, a United States senator, but nope. He wants to know how Pete Davidson is getting all them girls.
During the latest episode of the Verdict with Ted Cruz, the Texas senator just could not fathom how Davidson is dating celebrities like Kim Kardashian, and more specifically, Kate Beckinsale. Turns out, Cruz has quite the crush on the British actress, and things got real weird real quick when he started describing her skin-tight outfit in Underworld. Via Mediaite:
“Pete Davidson! All right. How come that dude gets all of these like hot women?” Cruz asked. “Pete Davidson was dating Kate Beckinsale. I mean, you’re talking Underworld, you’re talking like, super hot vampire in black leather trench coat.”
“But really? The SNL dude?” Cruz questioned in mock disappointment.
As for how the conversation got started, Cruz and his co-host Michael Knowles were complaining about “toxic feminity.” (Go ahead and roll your eyes at this one.) Knowles cited Amber Heard, Jada Pinkett Smith, Megan Markle, and Kim Kardashian as examples of the term that’s not a real thing, which brought Davidson into the mix.
More grossly, the discussion opened the door for letting everyone know that Underworld is Ted Cruz’s in-flight movie of choice when he’s fleeing his state in the middle of a natural disaster.
The Duffer brothers knew that this would be the last season of their hit Netflix series, probably because Netflix has no more money, so they knew that they had to make it worth it for the fans who have been waiting nearly three years for the final season. Because of that, they have made the final episodes of Stranger Things longer than your average movie. One could say almost…too long.
The first seven episodes of the final season will hit the site next week, with most of the segments clocking in around 75 minutes, or about 9 episodes of Old Enough, for reference. Episode 7 will be 98 minutes, while the final two episodes, which are set to air in July, will be much longer: Episode 8 at 85 minutes, and the series finale at 2 hours and 30 minutes. That is one minute longer than Avengers: Infinity Warfor those of you keeping track at home.
In an interview with The Wrap, the brothers revealed that it was inevitable for the finale to be uber long so that the series could wrap up nicely. “The more we were writing, the more we realized we need more time in order for these reveals to land, in order for these storylines to work,” Matt Duffer said. “Partway through we knew we needed to ask Netflix for nine episodes instead of eight and as we started shooting we realized, Oh these are mega-long episodes.”
Netflix already dropped the first eight minutes of the season to get fans hyped, in addition to recap videos for those of us who cannot remember anything that happened in the previous season which happened several lifetimes ago in 2019. It seems like they really needed to make up for lost time by making the final seasons multiple hours long! Good luck planning your bathroom breaks.
Last week’s 10 things that made us smile post included a disproportionate number of dogs, and this week’s post includes an unusual amount of music. Not sure how these things happen exactly, but I’m gonna go ahead and blame The Algorithm.
I love music. How could anyone not love music? Humans have made music since time immemorial, in every culture around the world. Few things unite people like music can, without having to speak one another’s languages, without having to say a word. We hear a well-performed piece of music and we are transformed, like magic.
In this week’s list, we have music being played and enjoyed by young and old as a reminder of the wonderful things humans can create. We need that reminder in the face of destruction that we are builders of beauty when we choose to be.
We also have sweet reminders of the bonds between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren. And we have “spicy purritos,” just because it made me smile.
Hope this week’s list of 10 things makes you smile as well.
1. This graduating dad and his proud daughter taking his picture are a whole mood.
It’s graduation time from now till mid-June, with all the relief and pride and sense of accomplishment that goes along with it. Congrats grads—but especially this grad dad.
2. Awesome marimba band plays Vivaldi’s “Spring” from “The Four Seasons.”
Nothing like a bit of Vivaldi played by The Goede Hoop Marimba Band to bring joy to any day #WednesdayMotivationpic.twitter.com/lTeNOF5XDZ
We shared a different awesome marimba band video recently, and this one has similar energy. So much joy. So much fun. Such great music.
3. The vets call the mad kitties “spicy purritos.” SPICY. PURRITOS.
My friend Liz is a vet tech, and they call the cats they have to wrap up so they donu2019t claw the vet u201cspicy purritosu201d nI thought everyone needed to know
— Chelsea M. Cameron (@Chelsea M. Cameron) 1652495611
Yes, everyone did need to know this.
4. Mama sloth reuniting with her baby sloth is a big ol’ awwww moment.
baby sloth reunites with its mompic.twitter.com/T1qnkxPFla
The 80’s was the best decade #80s #80skid #oldschool #genx #parents #funny #family #foryou #fyp
I know I’m dating myself here, but this video is 100% my childhood. The cassette tape struggle was so real, and I think I still have scars on my shins from those dang bike pedals.
There’s also a Part 2, worth watching purely for the reminder that we really used to have ashtrays everywhere.
8. Five-year-old piano prodigy rocking the Mozart on the ivories is reverse aging goals.
On the other end of the age spectrum, holy moly. This is Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani, a 5-year-old piano prodigy from Italy, playing Mozart.
His parents are both professional musicians and his mother says he started playing when the pandemic shut everything down. Now here he is winning international music competitions. She tells Italian media that he does take plenty of time for school and play and television, so don’t worry that the kid is being forced to practice for hours. Kid just has some serious musical chops.
9. She plays piano for her 93-year-old grandpa who has Alzheimer’s and he loves it.
Speaking of piano and aging, this is so sweet. Alzheimer’s is rough, but that thumbs up is so sincere.
10. This joyful “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” cover, just because it’s so fun.
This one is certainly worth unearthing for the sheer happiness of it all. One of the best songs ever made, truly, and one we all love to sing along with friends. The simple truth of that line, “Life goes on, brah.” Reason #472 to thank the Beatles.
Hope that got your toes tapping and brought a little pep to your step as you head through the weekend. Come back again next week for another roundup of joy!
In February, Australian band Gang Of Youths released their highly anticipated new album Angel In Realtime, the follow-up to 2017’s Go Farther In Lightness, and excited every indie rock-loving millennial in doing so. They promoted the LP with introspective, vulnerable singles like “Spirit Boy” and tons of late-night television performances.
Today, they’re back with a new EP Immolation Tape, exciting every indie rock-loving millennial even further with their own rendition of Wilco‘s “A Shot In The Arm,” about which they said: “Just wanted to chuck it out there for a laugh.” In the EP, the group strips down songs to their bare bones, making them more intimate and visceral. The lyrical content has always been heavy, with “The Man Himself” watching singer Dave Le’aupepe grapple with the loss of his father, who tragically passed away in 2018 from cancer, as he tries to imagine what his future looks like without him by his side.
Check out the tracklist and artwork for Immolation Tape below. Listen to “A Shot In The Arm” above.
Gang Of Youths
1. “In The Wake Of Your Leave”
2. “Forbearance”
3. “Spirit Boy”
4. “A Shot In The Arm”
Immolation Tape is out now via Warner Records.
Gang Of Youths is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
A new Netflix special has some of today’s best comedians paying tribute to the all-time greats in standup. Recorded during the Netflix Is a Joke festival, “The Hall: Honoring the Greats of Stand-Up” has Dave Chappelle (who had an eventful festival), Pete Davidson, Jon Stewart, John Mulaney, Chelsea Handler, and Jeff Ross showing their appreciation for George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, and Robin Williams.
In a clip released online (watch it above), Mulaney explains what made Williams so special, and why he’s misunderstood. “People like to theorize that comedy all comes from a place of pain and sadness. And people like to talk about comedians as if we do what we do because of some inner darkness,” he said. Mulaney thinks this is “especially thrown around” when discussing the late standup, but “with all due respect, f*ck off with that sh*t. Have a little respect for a brilliant artist who was just more talented than you.”
Mulaney called making people laugh “incredibly fun” and added that “being a comedian is not a psychiatric condition.” There are “very f*cked up” comedians, but that’s true of every profession. “There are depressed people who don’t even have the decency to be great comedians,” he joked. “Why don’t you pick on them for a change?”
“The Hall: Honoring the Greats of Stand-Up” is available now on Netflix. You can also watch clips like this of Robin William on YouTube, maybe with your headphones in if you’re somewhere that people might look at you funny if they hear loud cussing coming from your phone or laptop.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — More shows should just plop cute little dogs into the action
Are you guys watching Better Call Saul? I hope so. It’s such a good show and it’s screaming toward the series finale that will smash it into the beginning of Breaking Bad and it’s all fun and exciting and sometimes they’ll just toss out callbacks to characters named Spooge for no reason other than to delight fans who pay attention or are good at googling. All in all, a treat to watch on a week-to-week basis.
It is also, increasingly so as we get to this timeline mashing, stressful. Lord in heaven, is it ever stressful. Nothing ends well for any of the characters we know from Breaking Bad, so their dooms and/or struggles are becoming real. And it’s even worse with the characters whose fates we don’t know, your Kim Wexlers and Lalo Salamancas, who have burst onto the scene and made us care about them — sometimes when we know they’re evil — and who we know are not around come Breaking Bad. It’s a problem.
Thankfully, Better Call Saul appears to have stumbled across a good way to cut this tension a bit in recent weeks. It’s a diabolical strategy, really. Just when everyone is on the edge of their seat with concern for various lawyers and/or violent cartel figures, blammo, time for a cute little doggy.
AMC
The adorable little guy in this scene is named Little Bear. He belongs to a sweet German lady whose husband was the mastermind of the superlab Gus Fring would eventually build. I love him very much. I was also, like most of the viewing audience, deeply concerned that he would bark at an inopportune time and meet his demise at the hands of Lalo Salamanca, which would have caused me more internal turmoil than I would like to admit. Like, could I put “puppy murdering” past Lalo, a charming sociopath whom we have seen murder something like a half dozen people? No. Would it have altered the calculus of my appreciation of Lalo? Probably. Am I glad I did not have to confront this in any substantial way? I think you know I am.
So, great. One cute little doggy plopped into the action, unharmed and happy and all of it. Awesome. Love it. More shows should plop little dogs into the action for little-to-no reason. Give Logan Roy a corgi next season on Succession. Give Paul Giamatti a chihuahua on Billions. I am not joking about any of this. The people need and deserve it.
And Better Call Saul is delivering. A lot. In this week’s episode, one week after we met Little Bear, Saul and Kim checked in with the crooked veterinarian who we’ll see many times later for various crooked reasons. At the beginning of the scene, he was treating real patients. Specifically, this patient, a little guy named Fernando who had a persistent tummy ache.
AMC
There is good news and bad news in all of this. The good news is that the show has found yet another way to slice through the tension of all the lingering doom, in addition to its various hijinks and shenanigans that sometimes involve spray tans and fake mustaches. The bad news is that I am now very concerned about Fernando’s digestive issues and would appreciate it if the show followed up with him at some point just so I know he’s okay.
It’s a reasonable request.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — I need to know more about this
Getty Image
Tom Cruise is running around Cannes for the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick. This is exciting for a bunch of reasons, some of which are related to Top Gun: Maverickapparently being super good and me getting very excited that I will be able to see it soon, others of which are related to the thing where a bunch of wild stuff usually happens when Tom Cruise is promoting a new movie. That picture up there — one of my favorite pictures ever, for reasons I can’t fully explain — is from when he was promoting a Mission: Impossible movie. It’s one of his tamer moments. He might fly into a premiere with a jetpack someday. He might be 83 years old when it happens. Tom is a lot.
Which brings us to the first of two notes from Cannes. This comes from the terrific Rachel Handler at Vulture, who, while lamenting that he was mostly boring during his press conference, added this.
To give Cruise some credit, there were two, possibly three interesting moments during the chat. One was when Cruise referred to his ex-wife Nicole Kidman as “Nic” (!) while telling a story about how he and Stanley Kubrick and Kidman worked together to find the tone of Eyes Wide Shut. Another was when he admitted to being so obsessed by the theatrical experience that he goes out incognito to see every movie that comes out in theaters: “I put on my cap and I sit in the audience.” At one point, he claimed to “remember every take” he has ever done. “I remember everything,” he reiterated, terrifyingly. Later, when the interviewer asked Cruise about his dangerous stunt work — “Why do you do it?” — Cruise replied, “Nobody asks Gene Kelly, ‘Why do you dance?’”
“I remember everything.”
This is somehow both deeply fascinating to me and something I do not doubt, even a little, not for a second. I bet Tom Cruise could tell you what he had for lunch on any day in the last 20 years. I bet he could recite entire paragraphs from books he read in high school. I bet he could describe own birth, in broad strokes at least.
The second thing is less about Tom Cruise being an enthusiastic maniac than it is about the audience at Cannes being, well, also enthusiastic maniacs. From a report from Variety about the premiere.
The festival crowd joyously interacted with the film during the screening, cheering and gasping at stunts. An overwhelming response came when Val Kilmer, who starred as Cruise nemesis Iceman in the original film, appeared in a scene with Cruise. The screening ended with a five-minute standing ovation from the crowd.
The first time I read that I kind of glossed over “a five-minute standing ovation.” But then I stopped and thought about it and… five minutes is so long to be just standing and clapping. For anything, but especially for a movie. Start clapping right now and see how long it takes for it to feel weird. If you get to 45 seconds I’d be shocked. Five minutes! That’s so long. Set a timer and see how long that is. This is the behavior of people who are unwell. Clapping for five straight minutes. It’s madness.
My working theory is that everyone was bored after one minute but they were all waiting for someone else to start wrapping it up. One big game of chicken. I bet Tom Cruise could give something a five-minute standing ovation. Anything, up to and including the chef at a hibachi restaurant. You could see that. Be honest.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — Good for you, Margot Robbie
warner bros.
Hey, let’s check in with Margot Robbie, one of the most talented and interesting people in Hollyw-… aaaaaaand, yup, she’s going to star in some sort of Ocean’s Eleven prequel thingy.
Robbie will star and produce a new Ocean’s movie that will be helmed by Jay Roach, who directed the actress to a best supporting actress Oscar nomination with 2019’s drama, Bombshell.
Details on the script by Carrie Solomon are being kept in the vault but it is known to be an original Ocean’s Eleven that is set in Europe in the 1960s.
I’ll just say it: This is cool. Just the idea of Margot Robbie cruising around Europe in an old convertible with her scarf blowing in the wind while she and her crew — which, let’s say, for fun, includes like Walton Goggins and Edi Patterson — on their way to rob a casino in Monte Carlo. Just that sentence. That’s already one of my six or eight favorite movies ever. This is good. I like it. It would also be okay if someone made an original heist movie with all of those things, but hey, reboot the Ocean’s franchise every 15 years for all I care. I’m not a complicated man.
In additional Margot Robbie news (a fun phrase to type), Kyle Buchanan from The New York Times has some piping hot gossip about the upcoming Barbie movie that is being directed by Greta Gerwig and will star Margot Robbie as… uh, Barbie. Obviously. Anyway, look.
And, by the same token, Margot Robbie is not the film’s only Barbie. Issa Rae and Hari Nef play different Barbies…
Details about the plot are being kept secret, but this news opens up even more questions. Questions like, what’s going on here? And what does this mean about other cast members, like Kate McKinnon, Will Ferrell, and Rhea Perlman? Will the entire cast be made of alternate versions of Barbie and Ken? Will this be a multiverse deal, only more Everything Everywhere All at Once and less Doctor Strange 2?
We find ourselves in yet another Two Things True At Once situation, as we do almost every week at this point. The true things here are:
Too many things are multiverses now and it all gets confusing if you miss a tiny piece somewhere and find yourself sitting in a theater one day like… “But why are there so many Spider-men in this?”
This movie sounds awesome
The lesson here is that Greta Gerwig can do what she wants. And so can Margot Robbie. And maybe the two of them should make a heist movie. Starring Margot Robbie as Barbie. Let Barbie rob a casino. I am not crazy.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Let me host Celebrity Jeopardy
ABC
Well, guess what: Celebrity Jeopardy is coming back. Again. Soon. Which is fine. People get really excited about it because it gives them a good excuse to post quotes from the old SNL Celebrity Jeopardy sketches. Which is also fine. I get excited about it because I have a good excuse to post that screencap of Andy Richter sending CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer straight to hell via trivia contest. We all have our things.
ABC has ordered new “Jeopardy!” primetime spinoff series “Celebrity Jeopardy!” The show is set to premiere as part of the Disney-owned broadcaster’s fall slate, airing alongside “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune” on Sundays.
Notably included in the announcement for “Celebrity Jeopardy!,” which came alongside ABC’s reveal of its fall 2022-2023 schedule on Tuesday, was this line: “A host will be announced at a later date.”
I do not know how basketball players can concentrate on the game when famous people have courtside seats. Imagine you are spotted up in the corner for a three and you catch a glimpse of, like, Beyoncé out of the corner of your eye. Just sitting there about eight feet away. Looking exactly like Beyoncé. It’s a miracle more people don’t get distracted and get hit in the face with the ball sometimes.
I bring this up now for three reasons:
Guy Fieri sat courtside for the Warriors playoff game this week
I could not concentrate on even just watching the game on televising because he was just sitting there — again, looking exactly like Guy Fieri — at the top of the screen while everyone on the court was playing basketball like any of it was normal
It would be really funny if a dude did get hit in the face with the ball one time and they asked him about it after the game and he was like “Yeah, I looked over and saw Guy Fieri in the front row and I kind of blinked out for a second”
I think that’s all I have on this one.
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From Kelly:
Brian
BRIAN
I need to be sure you’ve seen this. I thought you might have been the one to make it at first. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something on the internet scream BRIAN quite like this. I’m so happy for you.
This is what Kelly sent me.
The final dance in Dirty Dancing, but they’re dancing to The Muppet Show theme tune. pic.twitter.com/ldfjmm5JoQ
Yup, I love it. A perfect piece of internet content. I’m impressed at how well it all matches up. And a little mad I didn’t think to make it first. But mostly impressed. And a little mad. There are a lot of things happening here.
The main thing I want you to know is that I had people send this tweet to me five different ways in one six-hour period this week: email (thank you, Kelly), tweet, DM, text, and Slack message. This was really kind of delightful. It cracks me up that I’ve curated my stupid brand in such a way that a bunch of people saw it and were like “I gotta send this sucker to Brian.” The internet is weird and bad sometimes but other times it can be pretty cool. This is one of those times. I’m so proud of all of us.
A crash in Dallas left a highway scattered with raw eggs after the driver of an 18-wheeler struck a bridge Monday morning.
Wow, I guess the cleanup crews really had to scramble to clean this up.
I assume this job was pretty hard and not just some sort of boring and over-easy task for everyone.
I hope they had en-oeuf people to handle it all.
I’m sorry. I’ll stop now.
(I’m not sorry.)
(I might not stop.)
The big rig was hauling nearly 30,000 pounds of eggs on Interstate 30 near downtown Dallas, according to Metro Video, when the driver struck the overpass. The force of the crash split the trailer’s roof open and jostled the eggs out of their containers, sending hundreds spilling to the concrete below as the truck careened to a stop. The driver was uninjured in the collision.
I know this is serious and there is damaged property and a traffic nightmare and real human inconvenience in all of this but…
… like…
… I would pay something like $30 for a ticket to sit on the overpass and watch this truck get ripped open like a tuna can and send 30,000 pounds of eggs flying through the air. I know this can be construed as a personality flaw. I know it’s childish. But I feel okay about it.
Workers with the Texas Department of Transportation’s Dallas division also assessed the bridge for any damage. As the sun came up, workers were using heavy equipment — including a front-loader and flatbed trailer — to clean up the dozens of boxes and other material strewn across the lanes.
WFAA reporter Susanne Brunner, tweeting from the scene, said the eggs appeared to be Eggland’s Best brand, which the company estimates was valued at $90,000 worth of eggs.
Honestly, big shoutout to Susanne here. Imagine getting this call and being like, “Sorry honey, you’ll have to grab dinner on your own tonight, there’s a massive egg spill on the highway and I need to be on the scene.” That’s kind of cool. Some of her colleagues are out there reporting on house fires and murders. She’s tweeting from the scene of an egg fiasco. This is journalism to me. Good for Susanne. Good for all of us. I’m glad we could find the sunny-side in all of this.
I’M SORRY.
(I am still not sorry.
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