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You should absolutely set aside 10 minutes today to read Bloomberg Businessweek‘s story on John Schnatter, the disgraced Papa John’s Pizza founder who stepped down as CEO after blaming declining sales on NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem… then was fired as chairman after using a racial slur during a sensitivity-training conference call. What a life he’s lived. A terrible, greasy life. Kind of like his pizza.

Schnatter is now “seeking to clear his name,” senior writer Devin Leonard writes in the lengthy profile. “He says his exit was orchestrated by some of the company’s former officials, the NFL, and possibly even the Democratic National Committee.” There are lawsuits, full-page ads in newspapers, and the following sentences: “I’m Papa John! This is not going to blow over.” But my favorite section is during a tour of his Kentucky house:

[Schnatter] leads me through a door back into the house. We head to his gym, a cavernous room decorated with wall-to-wall memorabilia documenting his rise as a pizza mogul, and to an old-timey movie theater where he watches football. Then we climb the circular staircase up to the foyer, the centerpiece of which is a 16-foot-tall sculpture of two eagles descending from the sky, mating. “It just speaks to me,” he says, gazing up at it. “I think it’s badass.”

You read that correctly: Papa John has a sculpture of two eagles having sex in his mansion. I, too, love art. This is the most I’ve been haunted by a home tour since Dilbert dork Scott Adams showed everyone his toilet. We may never recover.

Here it is:

Eat the rich > eat Papa John’s pizza.

(Via Bloomberg Businessweek)

The Green Bay Packers will go into Sunday’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs without the services of their starting quarterback. Multiple reports emerged on Wednesday morning indicated that Aaron Rodgers contracted COVID-19, and as a result, the Packers will start second-year signal caller Jordan Love against Patrick Mahomes in Arrowhead Stadium.

Subsequent reporting indicated that Rodgers is not vaccinated against COVID. When asked earlier this year whether he received the vaccine, the reigning NFL MVP said “yeah, I’m immunized.”

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s news, it became obvious that immunized meant that Rodgers was … something, but he certainly did not get the vaccine. A report from Rob Demovsky of ESPN adds some details to what is going on here, and indicated that Rodgers follows league protocols when he is at the team’s facility by masking up. However, he also tried to get the NFL to give the thumbs up to a treatment other than getting the vaccine, which did not work.

Rodgers, 37, petitioned the NFL to have an alternate treatment that he underwent before he returned to the Packers that would allow him to be considered the same as someone who received one of the approved vaccinations, sources told ESPN. After a lengthy back and forth, the league ruled that Rodgers would not get the same consideration and would be considered unvaccinated.

There are some obvious questions to ask here, like what treatment that isn’t a proven safe and effective vaccine did Rodgers try to get approved and whether or not the Packers and the NFL let Rodgers ignore some of the protocols for unvaccinated players this year, the latter of which appears to be true to some extent. The one thing we do know: Because he is unvaccinated, Rodgers will miss at least the next 10 days, meaning he is out against Kansas City and could miss next Sundays game against Seattle.

According to Chris Fedor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland Cavaliers forward Lauri Markkanen is sidelined indefinitely after entering the NBA’s health and safety protocols.

Fedor reports that Markkanen is “expected to miss a handful of games” and unlikely to travel with the team during its two-game road trip against the Toronto Raptors and New York Knicks. Markkanen joins fellow Cavalier Kevin Love in health and safety protocols. The veteran big man is also out indefinitely. Fedor says Cleveland’s entire roster is vaccinated.

First and overwhelmingly foremost, the goal is for Markkanen to be healthy and make a safe, smooth return to the court in due time. His absence, however, further jeopardizes the Cavaliers’ already shaky wing depth, which is vastly secondary to Markkanen’s well-being but a subplot nonetheless.

Despite serving as a power forward and center for much of his career, Markkanen has started each of Cleveland’s eight games at the 3 and provided viable on-ball defense as he hopes to rediscover his jumper.

Fedor says Dean Wade is” likely to enter the starting lineup” in place of Markkanen. Although Wade has previously flashed some capability as a rotation forward, he’s not someone who should be tasked with starter’s minutes and Markknen’s floor-spacing — albeit, off to a slow start thus far — helped stretch a rather cramped front-court. Wade takes triples, but won’t command the respect of Markkanen.

When healthy, second-year wing Isaac Okoro would supplant Markkanen, but he’s listed as day-to-day while dealing with a hamstring issue and will miss Wednesday’s contest against the Portland Trail Blazers. The Cavaliers’ other current options at small forward are Dylan Windler, who’s struggled to healthy in his NBA career, and Lamar Stevens, who is better suited as a 4 playing at the back-end of a rotation.

All of these recent absences are disappointing developments for a Cavaliers team off to a 4-4 start.

Odds are, if you grew up listening to hip-hop, then you also grew up listening to The Gap Band, because the funk/R&B group’s music was a staple of hip-hop’s samples and style almost since the genre’s inception. Hits like “Outstanding,” “Yearning For Your Love,” and “I Don’t Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance (Oops!)” have been the foundation of fan-favorite songs from contemporary artists like Tyler The Creator, seminal storytelling from pioneers like Nas, and the inescapable jams of superstars like Bruno Mars. So the news that Gap Band co-founder Ronnie Wilson has died at the age of 73 definitely comes as a blow to hip-hop adherents everywhere.

Wilson founded the band in 1974 with brothers Charlie and Robert (Ronnie was the oldest) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, naming it after three streets in the historic Greenwood neighborhood in honor of the Tulsa massacre. The group was one of the most prominent funk and R&B bands throughout the ’70s and ’80s, remaining favorites of Black dads and uncles who drive Cadillacs to this day. Songs like “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” and “Early In The Morning” are considered classics of the genre and inspired both early G-Funk hits and more recent funk revivals, with Charlie, in particular, becoming a go-to feature artist for rappers like Aminé, Guapdad 4000, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Tyler The Creator, and more. Charlie is now the last remaining member.

Ronnie’s wife, Linda Boulware-Wilson, announced his death via Facebook Tuesday evening (November 3). “The love of my life was called home this morning, at 10:01am,” she wrote. “Please continue to pray for The Wilson, Boulware, and Collins family, while we mourn his passing. Ronnie Wilson was a genius with creating, producing, and playing the flugelhorn, Trumpet, keyboards, and singing music, from childhood to his early seventies. He will be truly missed!!!”

Far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene made it known earlier this year that she was done with masks, and she even shredded a memo from Nancy Pelosi on the subject. That’s about the same time when she received her first fine for flouting the mask mandate, which left her paycheck $500 lighter. Since then, she’s been merrily earning $2,500 subsequent fines, and at this point, her total has nearly reached the Median Household Income of the constituents that she represents in Georgia’s 14th congressional district.

That’s nuts, but yeah, Greene has willingly parted ways for over one-fourth of her $174,000 annual salary because she’s such a COVID conspiracy theorist. The Hill was the first to report that total, which CNN confirmed via a letter from the House Sergeant at Arms. It’s a bizarre case of Greene putting her money where her mouth is, literally. Via CNN, she’s done this thing 20 times already and counting:

Greene has been fined 20 times for not wearing a mask. After receiving an initial warning in May, Greene was fined $500 for her first offense, and $2,500 for each subsequent offense, which is in line with House rules.

Greene has appealed at least one of her fines, but it was upheld. Greene was seen by CNN not wearing a mask on the floor Tuesday. The fines come from Greene’s salary.

She’s refusing to yield to the mandate and almost seems proud of losing all that money, as Greene previously boasted when she hit the $25,000 mark in fines. In response to the $48,000 news, Greene defiantly tweeted, “Why do I get fined for not wearing a mask when I’m sitting in a chair on the House floor the same as people eating unmasked at a restaurant?” She also complained about how “Democrat members don’t wear masks in the members gym when they work out” and “None of us do & no one should.” Then she fired off a tweet about how much she works out, which she believes protects her from viruses (or something like that).

(Via The Hill & CNN)

After nearly nine years as a band and three full-length studio albums, Montreal-based post-punk group Ought are calling it quits. After putting out the 2018 LP Room Inside The World as their latest piece of new music, Ought have announced they are breaking up as a band.

The band announced their split on social media, thanking fans for all their support:

“To everyone who supported us, came to a show, and cared about us: We are no longer active as a band. When we started Ought in 2012 we had no greater aspiration than to play and write music together, and the fact that we were able to tour the world to such an extent and share so many rooms with so many of you has meant the world to us. We send lots of gratitude and love to all those we met and worked with along the way.”

Though the band is no longer active, fans of Ought can rest assured that there will still be some new music on the horizon, even if it’s in the form of a different project. Ought’s Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy are teaming up with U.S. Girls’ drummer Evan Cartwright for the brand new project Cola, which just signed to Fire Talk Records. Cola’s debut single “Black Curtain” dropped today in tandem with Ought’s breakup and features similar lo-fi vocal treatment and discordant guitar chords.

See Ought’s full breakup announcement above and listen to Cola’s debut single “Black Curtain.”

Squid Game is Netflix’s biggest series ever (according to Netflix), but it’s also bringing attention to other shows on the streaming service.

Once subscribers finished Squid Game, they were directed to other Netflix titles that might appeal to the interests of someone who watched all nine episodes of a violent dystopian series in a weekend. Something like Alice in Borderland, a Japanese series about “an aimless gamer and his two friends [who] find themselves in a parallel Tokyo, where they’re forced to compete in a series of sadistic games to survive.”

Viewership for Alice has mightily increased since Squid Game premiered in September. “We were thrilled to see that many members who discovered and watched Squid Game also started discovering Alice for the first time,” Michael Smith, Netflix’s product innovation manager, said at the Tokyo International Film Festival on Tuesday (via Variety). “Our service picked up on this connection and started recommending Alice to more members who hadn’t already seen the show.”

The result was what Smith describes as a “sizable uptick in global viewing” for Alice. “It landed back in the top ten series ranking in more than fifty countries around the world, more than nine months after its initial launch,” he said.

If Squid Game could also direct people towards the 1996 Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!, that would be swell. Not enough people talking about Mars Attacks! these days.

(Via Variety)

The video for Philly soul singer Pink Sweats’ new single “Nothing Feels Better” hearkens to a simpler time when making a love connection was as simple as passing a note in class. The first single from Sweats’ upcoming follow-up to Planet Pink, “Nothing Feels Better” details the euphoric feeling of real love, with the singer promising, “Forever I’m yours / just know that I’m all in.”

The colorful visuals in the accompanying clip reflect those feelings, casting the singer as a student who makes a bid for his crush’s heart by scrawling a love letter and sending it her way. Throughout the video, the classmates also pursue their various passions, from rollerskating in the hall to dancing in an empty classroom, drawing a parallel between the romantic love of the song and the sense of fulfillment that comes from chasing any other dream.

A year removed from his shimmering debut, Sweats is preparing to release a new project, Pink Moon, in early 2022. He also intends to promote Pink Moon with a tour beginning this Friday, November 5 in San Diego, California, and running through December 16 in Dallas. You can find out more about the tour here.

Watch Pink Sweats – Nothing Feels Better video above.

Pink Sweats is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Streaming on Twitch is not easy. It requires a severe amount of dedication, effort, and a little bit of luck to make a living wage of some kind doing it. One streamer based in the United Kingdom named SquidGame, whose real name is Lydia Ellery, has been at it for years now. She’s been slowly building up a community and has reached the status of Twitch partner. She’s also been uploading gaming content on her YouTube channel for 10 years now under the names “SquidGaming” and “SquidGame.”

Unfortunately for Ellery, many people who have never heard of her have been attacking her online as of late because of her username in light of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game. Ellery recently talked to BBC News about how the explosion in popularity for Squid Game has been leading to her being harassed, having her Instagram account banned, and losing out on job opportunities.

“I’ve received a lot of hate from the fans and I’ve been turned down for work because of it [the name],” she told the BBC.

…

“I started getting abusive messages from people. People were getting angry with me because they were mega fans… and thought I took the account from the show.

“I had to turn off notifications on my Instagram because it was just constant. My phone has been flooded.”

Ellery’s situation with her account name is getting so bad that she’s considering changing her username on all her social accounts, in part because it’s making her job more difficult. When someone uses a search engine to search “SquidGame,” they used to find her Twitch channel. Now, they’re directed to the TV show. It’s hard enough to build up a community on Twitch, but having to compete for attention from an extremely popular Netflix TV show is too much for anyone that isn’t in the class of extremely popular streamers like Ninja or TimTheTatman.

As the investigation into the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust continues, the attorney for the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is now suggesting that a disgruntled employee deliberately sabotaged the gun used by Alec Baldwin. Jason Bowles made the morning talk show rounds on Wednesday where he attempted to seed a theory that someone slipped live ammunition into the film’s props without Gutierrez-Reed’s knowledge. Here’s what he told TODAY via The Daily Beast:

“We know there was a live round in a box of dummy rounds that shouldn’t have been there,” Bowles added. “We have people who had left the set, who had walked out because they were disgruntled. We have a time frame between 11 and 1 approximately, that day, in which the firearms at times were unattended, so there was opportunity to tamper with this scene.”

Ammunition was kept in a prop truck on set, according to Gutierrez-Reed’s second attorney Robert Gorence, who said the vehicle was “completely unattended at all times, giving someone access and opportunity.”

According to Mediaite, Bowles repeated the claim on Good Morning America, but he also took the extra step of highlighting the fact that Assistant Director Dave Halls was the last person to touch the gun before it was handed to Baldwin, and then Bowles said this:

Somebody put that live round or live rounds in that box. When you do that, you can only have bad intentions because you’re going to confuse the rounds if you’re the armorer and they appear very similarly. The dummy rounds look like a regular live round…We’re afraid that could have been what happened here, that somebody intended to sabotage this set with a live round intentionally placed in a box of dummies.

Adding an interesting wrinkle to this new narrative is the fact that Baldwin has begun pushing back against numerous reports, and remarks by the Sheriff’s department, that the Rust set was “unsafe.” Baldwin recently retweeted a Facebook post that called the growing reports of a dangerous work environment “bullsh*t.”

(Via The Daily Beast, Mediaite)