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Lil Nas X has had a big weekend. First he dropped his new single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” alongside a barn-burning video, which climaxes with him seducing Satan before snapping his neck and taking his horns. But there was more: He was teaming with the viral company MSCHF to create a line of Nike Air Max 97s that have been dubbed “Satan Shoes” — not only due to their crimson design but because, well, they also contain a drop of blood in them. The shoes have drawn a mixed response. One of the naysayers? Nike itself.

As per The New York Times, the shoe giant put out a statement distancing themselves from the shoe and from the young rapper himself. “We do not have a relationship with Little Nas X or MSCHF,” the statement read. “Nike did not design or release these shoes, and we do not endorse them.”

Though the Consumer Product Safety Commission has yet to weigh in on the line’s legal issues, MSCHF appears to be rolling full steam ahead anyway, with a limited number of the redesigned shoe — 666, of course — being sold for the high, high cost of $1,018.

As for the blood, it’s just a drop, mixed in with the ink that comprises the shoe’s air bubble. And where did it come from? From the MSCHF’s small staff, who each contributed enough to fill the large-ish order. (When asked who procured the blood, one of MSCHF’s founders, Daniel Greenberg told the Times, “Uhhhhhh yeah hahah not medical professionals we did it ourselves lol.”)

As for Lil Nas X, he responded to the controversy with a sarcastic video, in which he begins to apologize for helping create “Satan Shoes,” only for it to abruptly segue into the climax of his new video, right when he’s begun to gyrate in the Devil’s lap.

(Via The New York Times)

Eric Trump doesn’t get the attention Don Jr. and Ivanka attract on the regular, though not for lack of trying. He doesn’t have the, uh, magnetism of his older brother, nor does he try to pretend he’s a normal person, like his oldest sister. Eric is just…there. So when he makes the occasional Fox News appearance, as he did on Sunday — the same weekend his father was making a fool of himself by ranting at a Mar-a-Lago wedding — it tends to be a combination of ridiculous and underwhelming.

Eric spent his Sunday yapping on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with host Maria Bartiromo, one of the network’s most fervidly pro-Trump hosts. He wasn’t there to talk about himself. He was there to talk about his father. And he spun a tale so tall that it’s even ludicrous by the standards of Trump nonsense: That his famously distracted dad, who liked to post for unconvincing photo opps of him signing papers and whatnot, was some kind of hard worker.

“I don’t even know where to begin. It’s heartbreaking to us,” Eric told Bartiromo. “I saw how much time and effort my father put into the job.” Sure, his dad was pretty much always “on the clock.” But he was usually rage-tweeting or holding bizarre pressers aside helicopters. The actual gruntwork seemed to be few and far between.

Eric also said “my father” a lot.

Others pointed out that Eric Trump is not exactly a great get, even for Maria Bartiromo.

Others did think Eric loomed large over his more popular siblings: He’s done some truly bad stuff.

Eric also made a couple whoppers. One of them was that his father had “fixed” the problem of immigration, which has seen a surge since the inauguration of Joe Biden. “They’ll leave a 30-yard gap where people are pouring in. I mean, I just don’t understand it. My father had fixed this problem,” Eric said. “Illegal immigration was not a problem anymore. That’s the most humane form of immigration where you don’t have people making this dangerous trek, and literally it shows you what bad policy can do to a country.”

Eric, of course, didn’t mention some of the, let’s say, not exactly perfect issues that cropped up around this issue when his father was in power.

You probably know this by now, but there’s a really big boat stuck in the Suez Canal in Egypt. It’s a really important waterway, and on Tuesday a boat called Ever Given got its 220,000-ton self wedged into the side of the canal, effectively blocking anything from getting past it. The plight of the big boat has made for a lot of memes, and video games have been no exception to that trend. Like this SimCity reference, which is outstanding.

And while it’s a serious issue that will cause real harm in the world, perhaps the reason so many have gravitated toward making memes out of this moment because it’s an international crisis that’s understandable to basically anyone who sees a picture of the boat. Unlike an invisible pandemic killing 500,000 Americans or a financial crisis started by complex credit swaps, a big boat blocking the path of other boats is pretty easy to grasp by comparison. There’s some comfort in that, even if it is a worrying situation likely to cause chaos for weeks on end.

But while others try to solve that, someone put the boat stuck in the canal in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Matt Velloso spotted on TikTok a Microsoft Flight Simulator mod that put the Ever Given into the very realistic-looking Flight Simulator, which apparently uses Microsofts Bing mapping tools to create very lifelike locales.

The visual is just from a user mod, so it’s not really clogging up virtual shipping channels in the rest of the game’s larger universe. But it’s an impressive feat that looks basically like all the other images we’ve seen of the stuck boat in real life. Hopefully the memes will subside and this vessel will become unstuck and everyone can go on with their lives very soon. Until then, expect to see a lot more about this boat as they try to get it out of the way using every possible method they can muster.

[via The Verge]

We’re coming in on three months since Donald J. Trump was booted from much of social media, including a lifetime ban from his favorite spot, Twitter. We still hear from him time and again. He’ll call into Fox News. He’ll send out “press releases” that are essentially a tweet or two. And now it looks like he’s fallen so far from grace that he’ll rant incoherently during wedding toasts.

TMZ procured a video of the 45th U.S. president getting on a mic to wish the best to a pair of newlyweds who decided to hold their big day at Mar-a-Lago, his resort home and what was considered until earlier this year the “Southern White House.” Except he didn’t have a lot to say about the happy couple. He just used it as a chance to ramble and moan about his successor, current president Joe Biden, and to re-air some more election 2020 nonsense.

Trump treated a room of revelers — in a place that had a COVID-19 outbreak just last weekend — like they were rally attendees, there to listen to whatever was on his mind. So what was on his mind? China, of course. He talked about Iran sanctions. And the border. “The border’s not good, the border’s the worst anyone has ever seen it,” he told people present to celebrate a marriage. “Look, it’s a disaster. It’s a humanitarian disaster from their standpoint, and it’s going to destroy the country.”

After bringing the party way down with gloomy predictions, Trump then asked the crowd, “Do you miss me yet?” Then he talked about getting 75 millions votes, which is still a smaller number than 81 million acquired by his rival, and the “strange thing” of absentee ballots, most of them for Biden, finally being counted at night.

A part of Trump’s brain belatedly remembered that he was speaking at a wedding, and he took a sharp pivot to briefly wish the newlyweds the best. Who knows what the two thought about a failed incumbent prattling on for two minutes about how their future is doomed, but lucky for us, one guest had the foresight to record the whole thing, so we can all see how the big guy is doing in retirement.

You can watch the full video above.

(Via TMZ)

For much of 2020, the album charts have been ruled by Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album. After its release in January, the album spent its first ten weeks at No. 1, a feat that no other album accomplished in music history. Unfortunately, all streaks come to an end and Wallen’s album was knocked out of the top position by Justin Bieber’s Justice.

Bieber’s return to No. 1 on the album charts is backed by 154,000 units sold, comprised of 119,000 streaming equivalent album units and 30,000 pure album sales. The singer is now the youngest solo act with eight No. 1 albums, at the age of just 27 years and one month. Elvis Presley previously held this record after his album Roustabout topped the charts when he was just 29 years and 11 months old. The youngest act overall with eight chart-topping albums is still The Beatles, whose 1965 album, Yesterday And Today, went No. 1 when all four members of the band were less than 26 years old.

Elsewhere, Lana Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over The Country Club arrived at No. 2 on the chart. This is the first time in nearly three months that the top two albums on the Billboard 200 are both debuts.

Justice (Triple Chucks Deluxe) is out now via Def Jam. Get it here.

The last week and a half has seen yet another brutal round of mass shootings, from the killings at three spas in the Atlanta area to the massacre at a gas station in Boulder, Colorado. There have been dozens of such shootings in the last five years alone, and each time they occur, there’s renewed talk about passing gun control legislation…which invariably gets severe pushback from conservative circles, whose argument is to once again do nothing.

One of those out to take down gun control legislation is Lindsey Graham, long one of the GOP’s brightest lights, and now one of disgraced former president Donald Trump’s still-ardent supporters. The senator from South Carolina went on Fox News, where Chris Wallace grilled him on a number of issues, including to get assault weapons out of the hands of citizens who use them to commit mass murder. Graham wasn’t having that, and he painted a grim portrait of what would happen if Senate Democrats attempted to change gun laws.

“I would challenge Senator Schumer to bring the assault weapons ban to the floor of the United States Senate. It won’t get 50 votes, much less 60,” Graham told Wallace. He then launched into a volent fantasy. “I own an AR-15. If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last one that the gang will come to, because I can defend myself.”

Graham then fell back on another common GOP line: that it’s not about wide access to assault weapons that is causing more mass shootings than in any other developed nation, but that it was really about “mental health.”

It wasn’t long before a lot of people on social media were dragging Graham for retreating into violent fantasy rather than trying to make reality more safe.

Others pointed out that his idea, of shooting roving gangs with an AR-15, is kind of selfish.

In fact, maybe there’s already a natural disaster plaguing South Carolina.

Graham did clear one perilously low bar, though: He agreed that the sweeping bill passed by Republican in Georgia last week — the one that seeks to make voting more difficult — had one detail that in particularly seemed needlessly cruel. That would be making it illegal to give food and water to people standing in long lines while voting, which would be even longer in part because of this new bill. “Well, all I can say is that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” Graham told Wallace.

Speaking of Georgia, though, Graham has yet to be punished for illegally attempting to get rid of some Biden votes in the state.

Boosie Badazz’s has gained plenty of attention in recent years as a result of his social media antics. While they tend to receive a big reaction, it’s not always because of harmless internet fun. One example includes his transphobic comments about Dwayne Wade’s daughter, Zaya, last year. But now, the rapper is back in headlines for his online activity which came as a result of a music video shoot for his and DaBaby’s recent collaboration, “Period.”

Last week, Boosie posted a video to Instagram where he called for an individual to appear in the upcoming music video. The catch was they had to let the rapper “slap the f*ck out of them” for the oddly specific price of $554. The Louisiana native quickly found his stunt man and on Saturday, a video of the scene landed on social media.

The clip shows Boosie delivering the devastating blow to the individual, but as promised, the rapper delivered the cash to the man when it was all said and done. Afterward, he posted the video of the harsh slap to his Instagram page which apparently led to it getting deleted. In response, the rapper hopped on Twitter to send a message to Mark Zuckerberg, writing, “@zuck u just a racist.”

This not the first time Boosie has called the Facebook founder a racist. Last year, the rapper’s Instagram was deleted after he repeatedly posted explicit content on his page. “This is discrimination,” he said during a December interview on VladTV. “Something is wrong, somebody must be mad because I said their name wrong and they chastise me. […] And my Black people are starting to tell me that ‘Boosie, this man is a racist. He knows you affect the Black community and make them smile every morning.

You can watch the video in question above.

So far there’s only been on person who’s ever played Luke Skywalker: Mark Hamill, of course. But if there had to be another person to take his place in future Star Wars movies, many fans seem to feel Sebastian Stan is the man for the job. And now we have an answer from the actor who plays the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: maybe, under one condition.

On Friday, while promoting his latest Disney property, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, Stan appeared on Good Morning America and was asked about the fan attempt to turn him into the younger Luke Skywalker. Basically, Stan made it clear that the job is Mark Hamill’s to keep until he says otherwise.

“If Mark Hamill called me, personally, to tell me he feels inclined to share this role with me, then I will believe it,” Stan said in a moment that happens around three minutes into the video. “Until then, I won’t believe it.”

Hamill himself (do you get it?) has mentioned Stan in this context before, all the way back in 2017, with a joking post on Twitter.

Since then, it should be noted, Hamill has reprised his role as Skywalker (spoilers ahead), playing a younger self with the help of some CGI in the final episode of The Mandalorian‘s second season. That effort drew some skepticism from fans about its realism, but adding Luke to the show’s canon was a big deal in and of itself. Whether it would be easier for everyone involved if they simply gave that role to a younger, willing actor like Stan is still up in the air. But Stan has made it clear here: until Hamill gives up the reigns, the Jedi is his to play until further notice.

[via THR]

It’s been 14 years since Maya Rudolph left SNL, but it’s not like she’s been gone. She’s been a frequent returnee, especially once they tapped her to play Vice President Kamala Harris. It almost feels like she’s always been there in some fashion, which was the idea of one pre-taped sketch on what was only her second-ever hosting gig.

It was called “The Maya-ing,” a spoof of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s The Shining, and it found the performer wandering the storied halls of Saturday Night Live, staring at old photos, from Derek Jeter to, well, Kevin Spacey. Memories were some replaced by ghosts, with Rudolph discovering a lavish bar suddenly occupying the main stage, tended by Alex Moffat doing a spin on Joe Turkel’s helpful bartender from the Kubrick.

Rudolph wasn’t alone. She was soon joined by other former colleagues. Tina Fey played “Gloria Zelwig,” billed as the first female on the writing staff (though a Google search only turns up other articles about this sketch). Kristen Wiig made a cameo as the two Shining twins, while Rachel Dratch popped up as the old, decaying woman in the bath tub, although she wasn’t dead — the water was just out in her apartment, so she swung by her old gig.

“The Maya-ing” wasn’t the first time that night that Rudolph addressed her lengthy stint at SNL. The opening monologue found her rallying together Season 46’s new cast, namely Punkie Johnson, Lauren Holt, and Andrew Dismukes. She tried to impart some wisdom but only wound up reciting the plot to The Breakfast Club, while Johnson struggled to contain her laughter. You can watch “The Maya-ing” above and Rudolph’s monologue below.

The Indiana Hoosiers had a couple of boosters spend a lot of money this offseason to get head basketball coach Archie Miller out of Bloomington, paying his $10 million buyout and funding the search for a new head coach after another dismal season. The Hoosiers have been connected with some big names, most notably Brad Stevens who has publicly shut down rumors a number of times since the job came open, as well as former Ohio State coach Thad Matta, current Ohio State coach Chris Holtmann, Loyola Chicago coach Porter Moser, and others.

However, as they repeatedly failed to land an established or rising star thanks in large part to the apparent dysfunction among power brokers in Bloomington, a familiar name continued to emerge as part of the search. Mike Woodson, who played under Bob Knight in the late 70s at Indiana, has been a candidate for the last two hiring cycles, and it appears the former Hawks and Knicks head coach and current assistant in New York is on his way back to Indiana. Numerous reports have stated that the two are deep in talks and that Woodson is expected to accept the job once the formal offer is presented.

Matta, who had reportedly not been able to take over as coach due to an issue with his physical — a report the school denied — will still be joining the program as an associate AD.

It’s an interesting hire, if for no other reason than Woodson has never coached at the collegiate level. He spent nearly a decade as an assistant in the NBA after his playing career ended before serving as head coach in Atlanta, building the Hawks into a perennial playoff squad, and then had three seasons in charge of the Knicks, before returning to being an assistant in L.A. and then back in New York. Woodson has a very good track record of building teams into competitive squads, and that’s what Indiana needs right now. Still, he’ll have to adjust to life as a college coach, with all of the other things that come from that away from just simply coaching the team, and how he recruits will be as big of a factor in whether he’s successful as anything else. We’ll soon find out how that works, but his NBA experience could be helpful and the Hoosiers, who love sticking with their past, have someone with deep ties to the program.