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In the history of great pop culture x sneaker collaborations, The Simpsons and Adidas have created some truly memorable kicks, including this year’s Flaming Moe and Duff Beer creations. Now, a-diddly-didas is upping its shoe game with what might be the coolest-ever tribute to the world’s least cool cartoon character: Ned Flanders.

HotNewHipHop.com offered a sneak peek at the upcoming release, which is described as having “father-like aesthetics,” noting:

The colorway of the shoe is completely based on Flanders’ everyday outfit as we are met with browns, greens, and even some pink on the insole. As for the packaging, we get a picture of Flanders standing outside of his lefthanded-themed store called the “Leftorium.” This is a great way to pay homage to the character and we’re sure Simpsons fans will be eager to cop.

If the green and brown tones (Ned’s signatures colors) aren’t for you, they could make the perfect gift for the god-fearing leftie in your life. Even if you don’t plan to wear the shoes, ScreenRant notes that the box the sneakers come in is its own kind of collectible. It features original artwork of Ned standing outside of his Leftorium—a store created specifically for southpaws—with a sign declaring “Left Handers Rule!”

Sneaker Freaker notes that the shoes, which will retail for $120, are scheduled to be released on October 3, 2021.

(Via HotNewHipHop.com)

During her six-season run on Xena: Warrior Princess, Lucy Lawless became a TV legend thanks to her work in bringing the fierce fighter to life. Even to this day, a whole generation of fans ride still hard for Xena and Lawless, who recently opened up about her time in the career-making role. Turns out, Lawless was never a huge action or fantasy fan, but you’d never know it by the way she took to the part. Via The Wrap:

“Oh yes, I always hated action,” Lawless said during a Television Critics Association panel to promote her Acorn TV series “My Life Is Murder.” The actress said she “couldn’t believe” that action and fantasy became such a defining part of her early career: “I don’t do fantasy, I don’t watch fantasy, I’m not interested in any of this stuff, [but] I found myself in this crazy genre.”

Of course, this news will probably come as a bummer to The Mandalorian fans who have been campaigning hard for Lawless to join the series and replace Gina Carano as the series badass female star. For now, Lawless is very content starring in the detective series My Life Is Murder, which interestingly, just had a collision with her old days as Xena. Renee O’Connor, who played Gabrielle on the hit series, has a guest spot on the next season of My Life Is Murder.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lawless revealed that she’d been trying to get O’Connor on the show since the first season, but things finally worked out where they could reunite under less action-y circumstances.

(Via The Wrap)

During a primetime Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, Donald Trump called Joe Biden withdrawing troops from Afghanistan “the greatest embarrassment in the history of our country.” Trump might be the least self-aware person on the planet, but even by his high standards, this was still a Picard facepalm-worthy admission from the man who, in the same interview, praised the Taliban for being “good fighters” and claimed that they’ve been “fighting for a thousand years.” The extremist group founded in 1994.

“The Taliban, good fighters I will tell, you, good fighters. You have to give them credit for that. They’ve been fighting for a thousand years; what they do is they fight,” Trump said, adding, “The Taliban has circled the airport, and who knows if they’re going to treat us right? All of a sudden, they’ll say – well, frankly, if they were smart, they’d really – and they are smart, they are smart. They should let the Americans out.”

That word soup was surrounded by Trump calling Afghanistan’s former president Ashraf Ghani a “total crook” and advice for Biden (“He should have taken the military equipment, because we have billions of dollars a brand-new beautiful equipment”), but people are mostly in disbelief over his refusal to give a cursory glance to the Wikipedia page for “Taliban.” It’s not the “greatest embarrassment in the history of our country” (he’s done more embarrassing things this year alone), but it’s not a great look, either.

(Via Variety)

In October 2020, Future Islands released their sixth album, As Long As You Are. Since they didn’t get to spend time touring behind that record due to the pandemic, it appears they instead got right back to work on new music: Today, they’ve shared a new song, “Peach.” The tune is carried by an energetic groove, some characteristically evocative vocals and lyrics from Samuel T. Herring, and some synth sounds both meditative and kinetic.

Meanwhile, back in May, the band announced a tour that’s set to kick off in September.

In January, the band revealed they were working on a new album with a photo of them all in the studio, which was different than the remote way in which their previous album was created. In a 2020 interview with Uproxx, William Cashion said of making that album, “I think it just gave us a lot of space to really think about what the song needed. It wasn’t painful as we thought it was going to be. It was good. I think we realized that we could mix like that again in the future if we need to. Sam has been living in Sweden lately, so we know now that we could do the mixing process with him there if we needed to.”

Listen to “Peach” above.

Mike Lindell’s so-called “Cyber Symposium” didn’t go too well for him last week. He began by claiming that the event was hacked, and the situation descended into batsh*ttery from there. He later failed to produce proof of “packet captures” and election fraud, so fellow conspiracy-theorist Steve Bannon apparently turned on his buddy for failing to “bring the receipts.” He then claimed to have been attacked by “antifa” despite an eyewitness account to the contrary, and then he grew increasingly unhinged while yelling at Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham for not covering the Cyber Symposium on Fox News.

Well, what now? Hannity appears to still hold a very special place in his heart for the MyPillow guy because he gave Lindell’s company one hell of a plug on Monday night while covering the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan. Via Media Matters, here’s what Hannity actually said on-air (with audio footage below):

“How would you like to be in Kabul today, as an American, and you can’t get to the airport? Where are you thinking your life is headed? If you’re one of those family members, I bet you’re not sleeping. I don’t even think MyPillow can do it. MyPillow.com. That’s where I go. I fall asleep faster, I stay asleep longer. These are going to be a lot of sleepless nights for so many of our fellow Americans. We’ve got to get them home.”

It’s almost beyond belief, that Hannity is invoking visuals from the fall of Kabul to plug comfy bedding, and one wonders how this maneuvering went down.

After all, Lindell recently grew incensed with Fox News and pulled all his ads from the cable news network after they (according to Lindell, via Wall Street Journal) refused to run his ad spots for his virtual symposium. That’s likely because they saw the Big Lie ship going down and wanted to distance themselves from its history as much as possible, but it also apparently takes away one of Fox News’ biggest advertisers (WSJ says Lindell spent at least $50 million in 2020 and $19 million in 2021 to run ads on Fox News). This, of course, presents the question of whether Lindell is still advertising on Hannity’s radio show, or if this was a pro-bono thing.

Hopefully, Mike Lindell will speak to his webcam on this issue soon.

(Via Media Matters)

So far, the best way to hear Kanye West’s album Donda is to attend one of his stadium listening parties for it, as the album hasn’t actually been released yet (despite what some billboards indicate). Well, another one of those is reportedly coming up, as rumors indicate, but instead of Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, he’s heading to Chicago.

As NME notes, somebody who claims to work on the security staff at the city’s Soldier Field (where the NFL’s Chicago Bears play their home games) indicated that a “major concert event” is taking place there on August 26. They believe the event in question is a Donda listening event, writing on Twitter, “I work for security at soldier field and we recently had an event added under ‘major concert event’ and I’m very confident that it’s for Kanye’s listening party. If it’s true, then Kanye will be performing in Chicago at soldier field on the 26th.” The tweet includes screenshots of what appears to be an app related to the person’s security work.

Additionally, minutes before that tweet, Fake Shore Drive‘s Andrew Barber also hinted at the Chicago event on Twitter.

Neither West nor anybody from his team have offered any public comment on the rumors, so it remains to be seen if the August 26 event is a real thing.

After her stunning self-titled breakout album in 2017, Bedouine has been a staple in the acoustic nu-folk world ever since. Bedouine, aka Azniv Korkejian, followed up her first record with a second song cycle, Bird Songs Of A Killjoy in 2019, and after a year and some change spent on lockdown, she’s got a third record ready to release this fall. Waysides is due out on October 15, introduced today with the tranquil single “The Wave,” which Korkejian explained is a song about a past grief.

“I wrote this about the loss of a close friend, specifically the swell of emotion I try to resign myself to when thinking of her premature absence,” she said of the track. “She was someone who had an uncomplicated relationship with life and living. I often wondered, ‘Why her and not me?’ I was trying to practice the things I was learning, to surrender to the fear and the grief… and the fear of grief. I haven’t entirely worked through it. Writing ‘The Wave’ was a reminder to feel my feelings. At a time of such collective loss I imagine there are people out there that could relate. It feels cathartic to share.”

Check out the new song above and the full Waysides tracklist below.

1. “The Solitude”
2. “It Wasn’t Me”
3. “I Don’t Need The Light”
4. “Easy”
5. “You Never Leave Me”
6. “The Wave”
7. “This Machine”
8. “Forever Everette”
9. “Sonnet 104”
10. “Songbird”

Waysides is out 10/15 via Bedouine Music. Pre-order it here.

(SPOILERS for What If…? will obviously be found below.)

Disney+’s Loki officially launched the MCU’s multiverse. That’s a key storytelling tool that paves the way for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and, maybe (just maybe!) will make Jeremy Renner’s lead character in Hawkeye a more interesting hero than he’s been thus far. For those reasons and more, What If…? lands in a proper place in Marvel Studios’ timeline of films and TV series. Because this is an animated show, as well, the show can be even more daring while most of the MCU actors voice their characters in strange new scenarios. This week, we got to hear Chadwick Boseman’s voice onscreen for his final outing as T’Challa, although he led a very different life than in Black Panther. That seemingly small change led to a domino effect across the MCU.

It’s a novel series, and Marvel can use it to troll the heck out of people, too. That wasn’t the case with Peggy Carter taking the super-soldier serum, but it sure as heck happened this week. T’Challa was revealed to have been taken by Yondu from Wakanda as a child. That puts Peter Quill apparently out of the game, and there’s also an incredible twist here that shades Star-Lord’s reputation as the worst hero in the MCU. Remember this: if Chris Pratt’s character hadn’t lost his temper in Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos may not have acquired all the stones and put an end to half the life in the universe.

In What If…?, however, T’Challa’s wisdom, clout, and grace resulted in him convincing Thanos not to steal the Infinity Stones and, instead, to find another way to reallocate the world resources. So not only does T’Challa prevent the genocidal Snap, but we also got to see Thanos, looking thicc for real (not as a joke), enjoying himself at a bar.

From there, we learned about the Embers of Genesis being able to terraform an entire ecosystem with nutrients, so yep, that means that the MCU never experiences the snap in this reality. That, right there, not only changes everything we know (but only for this show), and we also got to enjoy seeing Thanos holding a dog. Also, Drax the Destroyer surfaced as a bartender and Star-Lord fanboy, and Nebula looked absolutely stunning, compared to her usual miserable state (before Thanos’ kids later beat the stuffing out of him). In short, T’Challa being Star-Lord did wonders for the universe at large.

Let’s just say that people freaking loved the Thanos twist on Twitter.

Disney+’s ‘What If…?’ streams new episodes on Wednesdays.

This past weekend was supposed to be a celebratory one for Lizzo, as she just returned with her first single in almost two years: “Rumors,” with Cardi B. But it was rudely interrupted by trolls, who appeared on her social media pages with hateful comments. The posts pushed the singer to tears and she hopped on Instagram Live to share her thoughts. “For the most part, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. I don’t care,” she said during the livestream. “I just think when I’m working this hard, my tolerance gets lower, my patience is lower, I’m more sensitive and it gets to me.”

Now one social media platform is stepping up to defend her. According to TMZ, Facebook is coming to the defense of the singer by deleting a number of the hateful comments that were posted on her page. Furthermore, the platform is taking the extra step to delete the accounts of multiple trolls. They added that the platform will review additional reports of hateful comments on a continuous basis.

The news comes after Cardi defended Lizzo on Twitter after watching a clip of her Instagram Livestream. “When you stand up for yourself they claim your problematic & sensitive,” the rapper wrote. “When you don’t they tear you apart until you crying like this. Whether you skinny,big,plastic, they going to always try to put their insecurities on you.” She added, “Remember these are nerds looking at the popular table.”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Back in July, there was a disturbance in the Supernatural realm: Stars Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles appeared to be fighting. Ackles had announced he and his wife were working on a prequel to the long-running show. This was apparently news to Padalecki, who fired off a tweet dripping in sarcasm and fury. But by the next day, Padalecki assured the base that things were cool between them. Now, a few weeks later, he’s further clarified what went down.

In an interview with The New York Times (as caught by Deadline), Padalecki said that his pissy-sounding tweet wasn’t actually that pissy. He was simply trying to tell people that he wasn’t involved in the project.

“It was just one of those things that because it was online, and people were assuming I was part of it, I really wanted to just say: ‘Hey, I’m not keeping a secret from you guys. I just don’t know about this,’” he told NYT. “And I should be old enough to know better than to put something out there and expect that people will understand.”

He admitted that social media isn’t always the best place for nuanced communication. “It’s hard to tweet a specific tone. If you write it online, it’s like, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know! They’re going to kill each other! The world is ending!’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘No, no, no.’ [Laughs.] I try to avoid social media as much as possible because of that.”

When he did speak to Ackles following the snafu, he got his answer. “He just kind of explained: ‘Man, it’s not picked up yet. It’s not even written yet.’ He knows and I know how much ‘Supernatural’ means to both of us, and it wasn’t a secret he was trying to keep, necessarily. It was just something that he didn’t feel really even existed yet,” the actor said. “But he has been like: ‘Hey, I’ll let you know what’s going on [going forward].’”

The promised show, entitled The Winchesters, wouldn’t even be about Sam and Dean but about their parents, John and Mary, showing how they met and fell in love. It will be told from the perspective of Ackles’ Dean. Will we wind up seeing Padalecki’s Sam after all? Considering the project was still in the larval stage a month ago, you’ll probably have plenty of time before you find out.

(Via Deadline and The New York Times)