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Ariana Grande has been around for 28 years, and for most of them, she’s been pursuing a career in entertainment. She was in the Broadway musical 13 as a teenager and landed a role in the Nickelodeon series Victorious not long after that. Her roots go even deeper than that, though, as was shown on The Tonight Show yesterday when Jimmy Fallon surprised Grande with video of her first ever singing gig.

Fallon explained that Grande’s first gig was singing the national anthem at a Florida Panthers game when she was 8 and that, thanks to Grande’s mother Joan, he had footage of that performance to show. “Oh my gosh, are we going here,” Grande asked as Fallon set up the clip. The video shows a fresh-faced Grande singing the last few lines of the song, absolutely belting it out before ending the song and letting a big smile spread across her face.

Grande was looking for her shot at fame even years before that. The singing clip was preceded by Grande telling a story about how she called Nickelodeon when she was just four years old. She managed to get through to Universal Studios and expressed her interest in auditioning for All That or The Amanda Show. While that call didn’t end up being fruitful, Grande, as aforementioned, went on to become one of the network’s big stars.

Check out clips from Grande’s Tonight Show interview above and below.

It can be hard to live up to the standard set by your parents, especially if one of them made their name in your industry. But up-and-coming New York rapper Turbeazy is both following in his father’s footsteps and blazing his own path.

Turbeazy remembers going to his father’s concerts as a kid; formative experiences that gave him his first exposure to hip-hop. When his dad became a DJ, Turbeazy took advantage of the moment, feasting on a fully fleshed-out collection of rap records that also helped to influence his career choice.

“At school, I used to freestyle,” Turbeazy says, “and one day somebody told me I should rap, so I ended up going to one of these kids that somebody put me on to that had a studio.”

Thanks to a laptop his mother gave him, Turbeazy kept recording, even while in the Army. When he got out, the education continued with classes that helped him forge a career as an audio engineer at Manhattan’s Fight Klub Studios.

When he records now, Turbeazy is sure to keep one foot in the past, allowing the influence from his father’s career and record collection to find its way into his music.

“In order to move forward, you gotta be able to know and acknowledge the past,” he says. “I still feel like that needs to be represented. It’s something that I was raised to appreciate, coming from a household of an artist and a person who was deep into hip-hop culture. I love and appreciate how far music has evolved.”

While Turbeazy is forging his way forward, his journey hasn’t been without challenges.

“When I was in the Army, nobody really wanted me to rap,” he says. “They thought it was funny. I had a few supporters, but when it was time for me to leave, they were saying, ‘You should re-up and stay in the Army. You can be a good soldier.’ I was like, ‘I want to go to school. I want to be a rapper.’ People were like, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’”

He also remembers being rejected when he tried to pass somebody in the industry a flash drive of his music. It’s something that could discourage someone, but Turbeazy turned it into fuel, telling us that it made him “want to go harder.” And so far, that persistence is paying off. Turbeazy’s profile is steadily increasing and he has songs racking up tens of thousands of plays on platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud. The way Turbeazy sees it, staying positive and dedicated, especially when the goal seems so far away, is the only way forward.

There exists in modern pop culture a certain strain of thinking that holds that celebrity gossip obsession can actually be a righteous pursuit, so long as one engages in it with a sufficiently feminist mindset. That if we can just channel our need for scandalous news about the wealthy into the deification of powerful women, concerning ourselves with their hair and their makeup and their dresses and their personal relationships will become good and just. That it will be a necessary correction of the previous generation’s brand of celebrity gossip, which was misogynist and bad.

The feminist branding is a figleaf, of course, for the same thousands-of-years-old human impulse to worship power and gawp at shiny clothes and pretty people, about which we’ve only recently learned to become ashamed. This phony humanism’s pretense is revealed in the way we force certain public women into our own ideas of cool iconoclasm, no matter who they actually are or what they actually do. Like rebranding a white octogenarian judge “The Notorious RBG” to make her sound more like a dead black rap star. Are we depicting them differently because it’s more honest, or simply because it flatters us? Maybe screaming “leave Britney alone” isn’t the best method of leaving Britney alone.

This mass rebranding exercise comes this week for another public figure too dead to complain, Diana Spencer, the former Princess of Wales and current subject of the new movie Spencer, from Chilean director Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight (CBE, one of the co-creators of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire). Larraín and Knight focus their depiction on just one supposedly-representative weekend in the life of Princess Diana: Christmas weekend 1991, when Diana and Charles were on the rocks and at odds over Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. They were attempting nonetheless to keep up appearances, for the sake of the traditional Christmas celebration at the family’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, next to the house where Diana grew up.

I should note that the movie simply expects us to come prepared with all this background information, about Sandringham, about the rocky marriage, about Charles’s affairs, as the film makes no attempt to convey it here other than through occasional title cards that read “Christmas Eve” or “Christmas Day,” and vague allusions to affairs an hour into the film.

Spencer bills itself as “a fable from a true tragedy,” which is maybe another way of saying “a montage of fashion shoots with the sheen of artistic merit.” Throughout the film, Larraín and Knight are constrained by competing impulses: to worship the princess on the one hand, because she is beautiful and a princess with many fine clothes, but on the other to acknowledge that the monarchy is a monumentally silly institution. Because for one thing it is, and for another it has to be in order to position Diana leaving it as iconoclastic.

They attempt to marry these conflicting desires by depicting Princess Diana, played by Kristen Stewart, as a reluctant princess, thoroughly skeptical of all this monarchical silliness. She just wants regular middle-class things! Going for drives and eating KFC and placing word art above the hearth! (Okay I added that last one myself, only the first two were in the film). Perhaps I’m missing some necessary context here that the movie fails to provide, but: wasn’t Diana Spencer the daughter of a viscount? Someone who grew up on the grounds of a royal estate? Did she not marry one of the world’s most Howdy Doody-looking ass dorks presumably on the basis that he was a prince, because some part of her was so enamored with the idea of becoming a princess and living that princess lifestyle?

Spencer treats Diana as if she was kidnapped into all this, being held against her will. It depicts her life as such a demeaning, excruciating, maddening spectacle that you wonder why she doesn’t just leave. That Diana was a prisoner is a perspective meant to flatter that actually flattens. Surely the real Diana had more agency than this. Surely she did more to rebel against stultifying traditions than cry, puke, and be late to dinner. Surely she had a personality beyond Spencer‘s corny notions of beautiful songbirds in gilded cages.

Spencer‘s most laughable motif is its running comparison of Princess Diana to Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded by Henry VIII in 1536 when he figured that would be easier than getting a divorce. Spencer‘s Diana reads a book about Boleyn, who also appears to Diana in visions, Obi-Wan Kenobi-style (though, unlike Kenobi, Boleyn never offers any useful advice). In one early scene, Diana arrives at a formal dinner wearing her new necklace of pearls, a symbol of Diana’s oppression based on the rumor that Charles gifted an identical set to his mistress. Diana imagines herself as Boleyn over soup, conflating her pearls with the headsman’s ax until she begins to choke. When she finally can’t take it any longer she snaps the strand holding the pearls and they cascade around her, raining down dramatically onto the table and into the soup. Which Diana then eats, crunching on the pearls presumably in some attempt at magical realism, delivered with all the ostentatious but thimble shallow symbolism of a European perfume ad. She’s eating the pearls! Isn’t it just fabulous?

Larraín and Knight try mightily to inflate this marital squabble into something with larger implications, but mostly it seems like what Larraín has here is a kink, a fetish for photographing tragic wealthy women (Spencer seems to assume that because Diana died tragically she must’ve lived tragically too). Between Spencer and his last English-languge film, Jackie, it seems nothing excites Larraín more than the idea of a rich woman looking sad in ten thousand dollars worth of taffeta. Doubly so if the rich woman is played by a petite American actress making bizarre and ostentatious character choices.

Where Natalie Portman played Jackie Onassis in a grating accent that sounded like New England debutante by way of a porn star, Kristen Stewart manages to outdo her for conspicuous effort. She’s rarely without pursed lips or furrowed brow, delivering all her lines like she’s hyperventilating, heavily exhaling or inhaling words through her bottom teeth in a clipped stage whisper that’s as hard to understand as it is to listen to. What are you saying? Why are you whispering? Can’t you just talk? Spencer might be our first ASMR biopic.

That the press is obsessed with her, that her husband is mean to her, that her children have trapped her, these are all things we’re merely meant to infer. All we actually see is Diana crying, Diana puking, Diana cutting herself, Diana obsessing like a narcissistic teenager while ignoring perfectly good advice from people around her. Sean Harris as the devoted royal chef is miles more compelling than Diana the self-pitying brat depicted in Spencer. Spencer forces Diana into victimhood, seemingly under the belief that that’s the only way we can relate to her. It’s all based on the faulty assumption that the press being obsessed with her was bad, while us being obsessed with the press being obsessed with her is good.

Or maybe that’s giving Spencer too much credit. Maybe Larraín merely gets off on the image of a woman kneeling over a toilet in a dress worthy of a museum. No shame if that’s your kink. For me, there’s simply a low limit to how long I can be huskily whispered at in a cretinous accent.

‘Spencer’ opens only in theaters November 5th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can check out his film review archive here.

The Philadelphia 76ers will once again withhold money from Ben Simmons and put it in an escrow account. According to a new report from Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Philly is fining Simmons his $360,000 game check from Thursday night’s win over the Detroit Pistons, a game in which he did not play, and plans on continuing to levy fines against Simmons moving forward.

The Sixers’ reason, per Wojnarowski, stems from two things. One is that Simmons, who has said that he is not mentally ready to compete, is not meeting with team physicians to talk through his mental health status. Instead, Simmons is only meeting with mental health professionals who are available through the Players Association. Wojnarowski reported that Simmons is meeting with team physicians regarding his back.

Additionally, the team is withholding money from Simmons for basketball-related reasons. While he is participating in some activities, Philly appears to want him to expand on what he is doing right now.

Simmons has been showing up regularly at the team’s facility for some daily basketball activity with coaches and individual teammates, but the Sixers will begin fining him again for failures to participate in other requirements, such as strength training, film study and some presence at team practices and game-day shootarounds, sources said.

Despite the ongoing situation with Simmons, the Sixers have been on a tear to start the year. The team is in the midst of a five-game winning streak and boasts a 7-2 record, which is the best in the Eastern Conference.

In hip-hop, it’s always been something of an accomplishment to reach double digits in your album catalog — something only a handful of well-established, super-successful rappers have accomplished in the forty or so years the genre’s been at the forefront of American pop culture. One of those artists is Rick Ross, who crossed that milestone two years ago with Port Of Miami 2. While absolutely no one would blame him for wanting to take a break, it’s clear Ross just flat-out loves to rap — a fact evidenced by today’s announcement that his 11th studio album, Richer Than I Ever Been, is coming next month.

Scheduled to release on December 10 through Maybach Music and Epic, the promo for Richer Than I Ever Been will kick off next Friday, November 12, with the lead single “Outlawz” featuring 21 Savage and Jazmine Sullivan. Ross shared the cover for Richer Than I Ever Been, which features photography by veteran hip-hop shooter Jonathan Mannion, on Instagram. Mannion himself also posted the cover, explaining the concept in his caption: “They can’t even see you, Rozay,” he wrote. “You are in a whole other stratosphere in this moment. Honored to sync up with you for this, our 5th, album campaign.”

Richer Than I Ever Been is due 12/10 via Maybach and Epic.

Click to download here.

The Many Pussies of Newark

Pod Yourself A Gun returns for a new season of tiddies, meat, parody songs, and plenty of slop for the piggies. Comedian, host of the Sitdown Podcast, and genuine Italian-American Mike Recine sits down with Matt and Vince to talk about the premiere episode of the first half of the sixth and final season of The Sopranos, “Members Only.”

Much like podcasting, no one really retires from the mob, which Meadow’s favorite violent homophobe, Eugene Pontecorvo, learns the hard way after inheriting a small fortune from his aunt and asking Tony if he can move to Florida. When his request is denied, he sends himself to that great big Florida in the sky with pee pee dribbling down his leg. As the guys point out, it’s a real Death of a Salesman type situation, but with more piss.

As noted on the pod, it seems like David Chase’s way of reminding the dummies at home yet again that Tony is not a good guy who should be emulated. Watching him eat sushi does make sushi look really appealing though. Imagine how the wasabi could really activate a powerful nose whistle that would demand the respect of your peers.

Beyond the episode recap, we get a Bada B story parody of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” and Mike reveals that Idris Elba used to be a door guy at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York. To all our door guy listeners, hang in there. Maybe you too can be an international sex symbol one day.

Tell us all about it in a five-star review on Apple Podcasts

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Email us at [email protected]; leave us a voicemail at 415-275-0030

Support the Pod: become a patron at patreon.com/Frotcast and get more bonus content than you could ever want, AND if you sign up for the Pod Yourself a Shoutout tier, you can bask in the glory of hearing your name on the podcast. Like this week’s newest members: Big Pussy, Hairy Pussy, Weej, Smiley, Chicky, The Wino, The Egg, The Babbler, Horse, Smelly, Goan Fishin’, HTML, Simpson, The Clocksucker, Girthy, Big Percy, Kafka, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kingo, Carl the Fog, Raiders, The Zit, and Uncle Jesse.

-Description by Brent Flyberg.

Not too long ago, QAnon cheerleader and far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene earned a side-eye from Steve Bannon (of all people) when she claimed to be “the most effective member of Congress this session.” She did so after advocating for a government shutdown and after harassing fellow congresspeople, and being stripped of her committee seats, and she’s at it again with her grandiose claims of being able to effect great change, pretty much by herself.

Greene has suddenly declared that she’s appalled by conditions in jails. She even announced, “I am also beginning a plan for real prison reform.” That happened at the end of a lengthy tweet thread after she visited January 6 insurrectionists who were waiting in the D.C. jail for trial. Greene has not spoken about jail conditions prior to her visit with MAGA rioters, but her perspective has completely changed.

Among other declarations in the tweet thread, she said the following:

– “I’ve never seen human suffering like I witnessed last night.”

– “We then were taken to another section of the jail and entered the Patriot wing. I was greeted by men with overwhelming cheers who rushed out to meet me with tears streaming down their faces. They have felt forgotten & hopeless.”

– “It was like walking into a prisoner of war camp and seeing men who eyes can’t believe someone had made it in to see them.”

– “I’ll never forget hearing their screams. This was in a different part of the jail, not the J6 part.”

– “Virtually no medical care, very poor food quality, and being put through re-education which most of them are rejecting.”

– “I am committed to ending this political war and seeing that our justice system is never used against Americans as a political weapon ever again. I am also beginning a plan for real prison reform. Our nation is broken and our people are divided. It’s time to fix it.”

You can read Greene’s full rant on jail conditions below.

So… will this tweet thread and newfound interest in prisoner welfare actually go anywhere, or will this be another instance of Marjorie claiming to be the most productive member of Congress (without actually doing anything)? Take a guess.

A week after Latto ran roughshod over an impressive LA Leakers freestyle, the Atlanta native returns to give a high-speed tour of her hometown in the patriotic “Soufside” video. Shouting out the streets, businesses, and landmarks she grew up around, Latto delivers a boastful, assertive, and lyrically dextrous verse, name-checking Southlake, Pointe South, Rex Road, Riverdale, Lovejoy, and more as she cruises through Atlanta in a convertible and posts up outside the Southside Discount Mall (we call ’em swap meets in LA) with a massive crew.

The new track marks a return to the trap-inspired, bass-heavy sounds that first helped Latto make her name — y’know, before she changed it — after her last single, “Big Energy,” threw longtime fans for a loop with its pop-friendly beat. While it’s nice when artists can show versatility, rap fans are often skeptical of big stylistic changes, and here, Latto shows a powerful understanding of how to switch lanes while remaining anchored to her signature sounds. This gives her room to evolve without losing touch with her day-one fanbase, which is often the first step on the road to rap royalty. Give her another couple of years, and Latto just might go from “Queen Of Da Souf” to the ruler of the rap game (pun intended).

“Soufside,” along with “Big Energy” and “The Biggest,” are all set to lead up to the rapper’s second full-length studio album, which is due in early 2022.

Watch Latto’s “Soufside” video above.

Eternals marks a lot of first for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s the first film to feature an on-screen sex scene, the first to cast a disabled woman in a lead role, the first to be directed by a woman of color, Chloe Zhao and is the first to prominently feature a same-sex couple. However, while this all seems pretty undeniably incredible and proves just how much of a milestone this film is, not everyone is quite as pleased with the studio.

Despite being due to release in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait on November 11, the film has ultimately been banned from theaters following Disney refusing to make edits requested by the nation’s local censors. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the primary focus of the edits was eliminating the overt inclusion of the MCU’s first same-sex couple — Phastos (played by Brian Tyree Henry) and his onscreen husband Ben (Haaz Sleiman) — and a scene in which the pair share a kiss. While Marvel’s parent company, Disney, has come under fire in the past for both censorship on their Disney+ streaming service as well as altering promotional material for other countries, refusing to make these edits is a big step in the right director for the brand — and Eternals star Angelina Jolie is proud.

“I’m sad for [those audiences]. And I’m proud of Marvel for refusing to cut those scenes out,” said Jolie. “I still don’t understand how we live in a world today where there’s still [people who] would not see the family Phastos has and the beauty of that relationship and that love. How anybody is angry about it, threatened by it, doesn’t approve or appreciate it is ignorant.”

While Disney simply doing the right thing might not seem like a drastic course of action, it is worth noting that the studio “expected to face a kickback by censors in the Gulf, where homosexuality is still officially illegal and films containing anything related to LGBTQ issues are frequently pulled from release” and still elected to ignore the requests and lose out on profits from those countries. The company faced a similar situation last year, when the Pixar title Onward was banned in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia over a single-line referencing a lesbian relationship.

Regardless, the film is still scheduled for release in the United Arab Emirates on November 11, and is available in North American theaters as of today.

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 — This is fuel to me

There are very few things in this world that bring me more joy on a day-to-day basis than the years-long, constantly bubbling feud between Vin Diesel and The Rock. I cannot get enough of it. I could read an article about it right now. I would stop typing this paragraph and go read it and smile the whole way through. I know it’s a petty impulse on my part. I know it’s a little ugly. I do not care. Shoot it into my body with a machine gun. I need the bullets to live.

The history here is well-documented, sometimes by me, but here’s a short version. The Rock and Vin Diesel made Fast Five together. It was a good movie. Then they had a falling out on the set of a subsequent Fast & Furious movie, which The Rock, bless his drama-loving WWE-trained soul, spilled out all over Instagram like a scorned teen.

“Some [male costars] conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are too chicken s—t to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses. When you watch this movie next April and it seems like I’m not acting in some of these scenes and my blood is legit boiling — you’re right.”

Perfect. Beautiful. The fallout was… I don’t want to say “fast and furious” because that’s too on the nose, but let’s say “swift and intense.” Everyone started typing a lot. Tyrese got emotional. The Rock and Jason Statham were spun off into their own mini-franchise because my two beefy dads can’t be in the same room without shooting smoke out of all the holes in their faces. I consumed it all while cackling like the Joker.

Things reduced to a simmer for a while. Tempers cooled, business interests took hold, a ceasefire was negotiated. Kind of. A stray shot would sneak through every now and then. At one point, Vin Diesel said this, which was really quite funny.

“I protect everybody including Dwayne. I protected Dwayne more than he’ll ever know. And it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to know. But he appreciates it. He knows it. Dwayne has only got one Vin in his life. Dwayne Johnson only has one big brother in this film world and that’s me.”

Please do picture The Rock reading this quote in his personal gym one morning and becoming so angry that he whips a 50-pound kettlebell at a mirror. And it gets better because Vin sat down for a profile for Men’s Health — a magazine The Rock 100 percent subscribes to — earlier this year, back when F9 was coming out, and he said… well, this.

“It was a tough character to embody, the Hobbs character,” Diesel says. “My approach at the time was a lot of tough love to assist in getting that performance where it needed to be. As a producer to say, Okay, we’re going to take Dwayne Johnson, who’s associated with wrestling, and we’re going to force this cinematic world, audience members, to regard his character as someone that they don’t know—Hobbs hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s something that I’m proud of, that aesthetic. That took a lot of work. We had to get there and sometimes, at that time, I could give a lot of tough love. Not Felliniesque, but I would do anything I’d have to do in order to get performances in anything I’m producing.”

FELLINIESQUE.

I promise to you — and I would never lie about anything related to this situation, just out of respect — that I shouted a little when I read that. And so, apparently, did The Rock, because he sat down for a profile in Vanity Fair — a magazine Vin Diesel 100 percent subscribes to — in October and responded to a slew of things Vin said point-by-point, all leading up to this paragraph.

“You know, I’ll tell you this,” he says eventually. “One part of me feels like there’s no way I would dignify any of that bullshit with an answer. But here’s the truth. I’ve been around the block a lot of times. Unlike him, I did not come from the world of theater. And, you know, I came up differently and was raised differently. And I came from a completely different culture and environment. And I go into every project giving it my all. And if I feel that there’s some things that need to be squared away and handled and taken care of, then I do it. And it’s just that simple. So when I read that, just like everybody else, I laughed. I laughed hard. We all laughed. And somewhere I’m sure Fellini is laughing too.”

I am vibrating right now. I am so excited that I’m vibrating. And it gets better, somehow, because The Rock, bless his jacked and/or shredded heart, will not let it go. He’s out promoting his new Netflix movie Red Notice right now, and, well…

“People were asking me about that and they just, they find a way, and you know, what’s interesting is, you know, these Vin diesel jokes, which play great by the way to the audience, which is always a good thing… because it’s really, it’s all about them.”

“But, people think these jokes come from me and they actually don’t. I mean, you’d be surprised at how many people come to me with ‘I got a great one.’ I’m like ‘okay.’ ‘I got another great Vin Diesel joke.’ ‘I’m sure you do.’ Always funny.”

I need this to continue forever. We all do. Things have been weird out there for a while now. A pandemic is still raging and our government is a chaotic mess and people are all a little frayed around the edges. We need one pure thing that will never let us down. We need The Rock and Vin Diesel to keep feuding in the press. They need to keep this up. Forever. For the people.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — TOBY SOPRANO

The thing I like about David Chase is that he made a piece of art that is pretty much universally regarded as a masterpiece of its generation, one that altered the trajectory of an entire medium in ways we’re still experiencing 20 years later, and he is still just as cranky as all heck about it. I mean that. I like it a lot. There’s something charming about the world pointing at someone and saying “That man is a genius” and that man throwing up his hands and saying “feh” to all of it. I hope people interview him once a month until the end of time and I hope every interview goes kind of like this one in the Hollywood Reporter went. Part of me thinks he secretly loves it.

But we’ll get to that. I promise we will. It’s going to take us a minute to get there, though, because this also happened in that interview and it altered the trajectory of my entire week. Look at this.

Your father’s business partner had a kid who you knew, who was your age, I believe.

Yeah.

And he had a cousin. Who was that?

Toby Soprano.

This is where the Soprano name came from?

Right, yeah. But I don’t know that Toby was connected. He might have been, I don’t know. He had a Cadillac.

Toby Soprano.

Toby.

Toby Soprano.

I can’t stop thinking about this. I can’t stop saying out loud, just a little bit most of the time, like three in a row under my breath and then a fourth one very suddenly bursting out at a higher volume. It’s… it’s fascinating to me. Tony Soprano, perhaps the defining character of fictionalized crime of the past quarter-century, a towering figure in the television landscape that lesser imitators have been trying to recreate ever since he was introduced, was based on some dude David Chase kind of knew named Toby. He had a Cadillac. I suspect I am taking this information with me to the grave. Toby Soprano.

Back to David Chase. He was asked, once again, for probably the 10,000th time since the show ended, what happened in the final scene and how he felt about the ongoing worldwide reaction to it all. And he said this.

I had no idea it would cause that much — I mean, I forget what was going on in Iraq or someplace; London had been bombed! Nobody was talking about that; they were talking about The Sopranos. It was kind of incredible to me. But I had no idea it would be that much of an uproar. And was it annoying? What was annoying was how many people wanted to see Tony killed. That bothered me.

Which is great and perfect in about four different ways. One of the ways it was perfect is that the casual reference to “what was going on in Iraq” reminded me of maybe my favorite quote by anyone ever, delivered by Alex Trebek in a 2014 profile in The New Republic.

Fact: When Trebek shaved off his moustache in 2001, he did it in the middle of the day, himself, without warning the “Jeopardy!” producers. Renee was alarmed to come in and find him mid-shearing. He just felt like it, he says now. “And it got so much press, I couldn’t believe it. The wars with Iraq or whatever at that time, and people are all in a stew over my moustache. I have one response: Get a life.”

“People are all in a stew over my mustache” has been living in my brain ever since I read it for the first time over seven years ago. It’s not going anywhere. And now it’s been joined by Toby Soprano. What a remarkable sequence of events we have on our hands here. Everything just coming together organically, at least in my haunted funhouse of a brain. It’s fun. We have fun.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — Jason Momoa is battling COVID, presumably with a sword or trident

Good news and bad news, ladies and gentlemen. Bad first: Jason Momoa, Duncan Idaho and Aquaman himself, apparently contracted COVID at the Dune premiere in London. That’s a bummer, just generally, because Jason Momoa rules and I do not want him to be sick and/or unhappy, but also specifically because it puts a small hold on my plan to put him in every movie.

This brings us to the good news, though: Jason Momoa appears to be handling COVID better than any other human has ever handled being affected by a disease at the center of a year-long global pandemic.

“I got hit with COVID right after the premiere. There was a lot of people I met in England, so got a lot of aloha from people. And who knows?” how he got it, Momoa said Friday.

The Hawaii native added that “either way, I’m doing fine.”

How fine? Hmm. How does “hanging out with his quarantine bro, a professional skateboarder who is just doing skateboard tricks all over the living room and stuff” sound?

Momoa said that he’s isolating with his “roommate,” skateboarder Erik Ellington.

“Everyone wants to know how COVID is going, it’s going pretty good,” he said in another update, as he filmed Ellington doing tricks on his skateboard through the house. “Yeah, we’re having a ball,” Momoa said with a laugh.

Jason Momoa is living a more thrilling and exciting life while infected with COVID and quarantining at home than most of us live on the vacations we planned out months in advance. In some ways, I suppose, this is upsetting. In other, more substantial ways, it feels, like, cosmically correct. Let’s focus on that second part. Good for Jason Momoa.

I mean, not that he caught the thing. Just, like, for the rest of it. Guy seems to have things figured out.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — I will watch this show

Two things are true here:

• Sofia Vergara is set to star in a cool-sounding new show from the producers of Narcos
• That picture up there is not Sofia Vergara but is a promotional picture from Narcos that I love very much, so there’s that

Details, via Variety:

Titled “Griselda,” the series chronicles the real life of savvy and ambitious Colombian business woman who created one of the most profitable drug cartels in history. A devoted mother, Blanco’s lethal blend of charm and unsuspecting savagery helped her expertly navigate between family and business leading her to become widely known as the Black Widow and the Cocaine Godmother.

This sounds great. Griselda Blanco was the focus of one of the Cocaine Cowboys movies. She was wild, man. I will almost certainly watch this show when it comes out, mostly because I tend to watch shows like this. That’s why I’m typing these sentences. To bring it all to your attention.

Actually, I lied. I’m typing these sentences for two reasons. The first is the one I just mentioned. The second is the thing where Narcos comes back this weekend and I wanted another excuse to show you some of the show’s promotional images over the years. Yes, again. I know. They’re just so good. Like, look at the classic ones of Pablo Escobar, illustrating the “at first I was like / then I was all” meme better than any two images on Earth.

Or this more recent one, where it looks kind of like this guy found a large package of cocaine on the ground and decided in that moment to become one of the world’s biggest drug kingpins.

Or this one of Scoot McNairy and his mustache standing in front of a flaming truck for the season that is about to start.

The point I’m sauntering casually toward is that I have very high expectations for this new show with Sofia Vergara. Expectations for the quality of the show, sure, fine, but mainly expectations for the promotional images. Show me Sofia Vergara with a machine gun in her hands riding on a speedboat filled with cocaine and handsome men. That would be a nice start.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — I know we’ve all probably seen this by now but sometimes things still need to be discussed

So here’s what happened: The other night, I was minding my business, scrolling through my phone like a good little mindless content zombie, and I saw this tweet.

What happened when I saw this can only be described as a kind of gasp/laugh combination that lasted a number of minutes, which was awkward because there was another person in the room who I could not explain it all to because of all the aforementioned gasping and laughing. It was a real problem.

Also a problem: Figuring out what to do with this information. My first instinct was to try to learn nothing else about it at all, to just have this one pure thing and keep it that way forever. But I’m a curious man. Too curious. Curious enough that I was reading this article before the gasping and laughing even stopped.

In The Love Trap, David Birtwistle, a personal trainer of Too Hot To Handle fame, must choose one of eight women to date, without accidentally selecting one of those planted in the house to “trap” him.

First of all, hilarious. They got a retread from another lunatic dating show and they gave him a shirt and put him in a room with beautiful women and trap doors. Give everyone a raise. Everyone involved in this in any way. Even me, just for typing this.

The other women and even presenter Joel Dommett don’t know who they are, and the audience (although none of the contestants) only finds out if they were real or fake once they’re eliminated.

Ah yes, the eliminations.

THE ELIMINATIONS.

It was hard to concentrate on much else in this episode once it became clear that a woman, inevitably wearing high heels and a bodycon dress, would have the ground disappear from under her once David decided she wasn’t for him.

All correct. I cannot imagine actually trying to watch a full episode of this show, especially after I knew the gimmick. It feels like it would get old fast. Unless they do other weird stuff to the people who get eliminated. Like, for example, just off the top of my head, shooting them out of a cannon. Again, I’m not the expert. I wouldn’t have even thought of this show. But I do think I deserve that raise.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Leroy:

Is Lazlo yelling “bat!” and Roy Kent yelling “whistle!” the same joke, and if so is there a third instance of this joke, it makes me laugh every time.

Hmm. It kind of is the same joke, Laszlo yelling “BAT” on What We Do in the Shadows before he turns into a bat and Roy yelling “WHISTLE” on Ted Lasso instead of blowing an actual whistle. But you’re right, it is a good joke. There’s something about charming people yelling random words with purpose that just works. Give me more of it.

As to the second part of the question, I… I can’t think of another example. I know there are plenty. I’m blanking and it’s infuriating me, especially since I just did that whole thing about how my brain has stored “in a stew over my mustache” for seven full years. If you can think of some, tell me. And Leroy. Tell us both. We’re struggling here.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Barcelona! Kind of!

“I was taking my son, Milan, for a walk in the park and I got him a little ice cream. We sat on one of those park benches and we were just minding our own business. And then two huge wild boars came from the back and ambushed [us] and took my purse!”

See, the thing about this quote right here is that it’s incredible even before you know who said it. Some lady was in a park with her son and — out of nowhere — two giant wild boars stole her purse. That’s wild! But it also brings us to the best part…

It wasn’t just a regular woman.

It was…

I’m thrilled to report…

Shakira.

We actually discussed this once before, weeks ago, back when it happened. But now she’s talking about it in a new profile for Glamour magazine. And, continuing a promise I made to all of you back then, I will always update you anytime there is more news about wild boars stealing Shakira’s purse.

And I was like, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” and screaming, because they were taking it away, with my phone in it, my car keys, everything! Like they could understand me! And people were just watching and they weren’t doing anything!” she says, laughing now over the incident in which luckily no one was hurt. “

In the defense of these frozen bystanders, if I saw two giant wild boars run up and steal a purse from international music superstar Shakira and go tearing off with it, I… I think I would be frozen solid, too. That’s a lot for any brain to process. Too much, honestly. These people should be commended for not just passing out on the spot. Leave them alone, Shakira. They’re doing the best they can.

“They started digging inside my purse… Obviously my son’s sandwich was inside the purse, so that’s why they were so interested. So they took the sandwich and walked away and left my purse. It was wild.”

It says a lot about me that I read this paragraph and my initial takeaway was “I wonder what kind of sandwich it was.” Like, I was angry that the writer didn’t get clarification via follow-up. Journalistic malpractice, I thought, and kind of still think, even now, days later, with many opportunities to get over it.

What did we learn here? Two things, I think:

• Be careful around wild boars
• I should not be allowed to interview Shakira

But I guess we all already knew both of those.