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Sunday was a big sports day with the NFC and AFC Championship games in Green Bay and Kansas City as well as seven NBA games on the schedule, but in the morning a lot of the conversation on social media was about the debut of the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla Vs. Kong movie.

Because the title of the movie is literally Godzilla Vs. Kong the trailer sparked a lot of conversation about who would win in the fight — along with some who think this will be a Batman Vs. Superman situation where they ultimately team up together, but that’s not super important. The trailer shows the two legendary monsters going toe-to-toe in a number of situations, like on an aircraft carrier that Kong is sleeping on to in the city, and it shows them having pretty even battles.

With the Nets off on Sunday, Kevin Durant had some time to watch the trailer and develop thoughts, and is among those that had some very strong thoughts on the trailer, including noting he has no idea how Kong would stand a chance in this fight.

The trailer certainly seems to indicate that Kong will, indeed, put up quite the battle and could win — especially since he can apparently block Godzilla’s blue fire attack — but Durant is having none of it. He did note that Godzilla is getting up there and in need of load management, but make no mistake, this is a GOAT and Kong should be no challenge.

He even has some conspiracy theory takes on how they’re rigging this movie to make it even possible for Kong to have a chance.

There’s also an entire thread of tweets in which KD is appalled at the notion that people think Batman’s a trash superhero, and now I really want Durant to just start a movie review podcast that never discusses basketball but talks about movies like they’re sports. He clearly has a passion for this and is always ready to embrace debate.

For much of November and December, the Republican party was busy either asserting voter fraud in the 2020 election or keeping quiet, hoping not to enrage outgoing president Donald Trump. That changed on January 6. After the failed MAGA coup, which resulted in five deaths, much of the GOP suddenly gained some nerve, belatedly standing up to Trump and his cronies’ baseless fraud claims. But there’s still a handful pretending as though there’s something to these assertions, and lately they’ve been going on news shows and humiliating themselves. One of them is Rand Paul.

The Kentucky senator went on ABC’s This Week, where he became increasingly agitated when host George Stephanopoulos kept grilling him on his position. It started with the host asking his guest to say if he believed the election was stolen. It was a yes or no question, but Paul gave a longwinded answer anyway, suggesting that the dozens of failed lawsuits followed by Trump and his minions were unfairly thrown out and that “the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur.”

But Stephanopoulos wasn’t having it. “I have to stop you there,” he said. “No election is perfect. But there were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court, all were dismissed. Every state certified the results.”

Paul seized upon the fact that a disturbingly large number of registered Republicans still believe the election was stolen, despite the complete lack of evidence to suggest why, and even after numerous Trump associates admitted there was no proof. Stephanopoulos still stood his ground, outright saying “they were fed a ‘big lie’ by President Trump and his supporters.”

After that, Paul tried to make it a partisan issue, saying liberals have been calling people like him liars when “there’s two sides to everything.” But his host wasn’t having that either. “Sir, there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state,” Stephanopoulos replied.

And so there you go: Rand Paul refused to say the election wasn’t stolen but he also refused to say it was stolen, and he said he won’t be “cowed” into, well, taking a stand on either.

One of Paul’s first public critics was fellow senator and former presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar, who cracked, “As I listened to Rand Paul, George, I just kept thinking, man, this is why Joe Biden won.”

Even fellow Republicans thought he was making things worse.

Some took issue with his belief in equivocation, even if the two sides aren’t equal.

Others had some helpful examples about how “both-sides-ism” is bad.

Meanwhile, around the same time Rand Paul was asserting voter fraud, fellow Republican Chris Christie was essentially telling people like him to finally shut up already.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Tom Brady is headed to his 10th Super Bowl, as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will get a home game against either the Chiefs or the Bills after traveling to Green Bay and taking down Aaron Rodgers and the top-seeded Packers.

Brady had a rather wild game, throwing for 280 yards and three touchdowns, but he also had three interceptions in the second half that allowed the Packers to hang around and make it a tight game. Early on things were great for the Bucs, as they rolled up 21 first half points, 14 of which came as they targeted Packers CB Kevin King who had a rather disastrous outing. First, it was Mike Evans who got behind King in the red zone and then Scottie Miller managed to beat him on a backbreaking long touchdown to end the first half (that also ruined first half under bets in horrific fashion).

King wasn’t alone in having a rough night in the Packers secondary, as they were far too willing to bite on play-fakes all game, never more apparent than on this touchdown to Cameron Brate who was uncovered in the end zone.

Rodgers had some answers, but struggled to consistently find holes in the strong Bucs defense, particularly in the second half, as they got pressure on Rodgers an awful lot to keep Green Bay from capitalizing on Brady’s three interceptions. Still, Rodgers finished the day with 346 passing yards, three touchdowns and one interception (which led to the Miller TD before the half. He threw some darts and dimes as he tried to will the Packers back into the game.

The Bucs would take a 31-23 lead late in the fourth quarter, but Rodgers had plenty of time to try and find a game-tying touchdown. After a dime to Marquez Valdes-Scantling set them up near the red zone, Green Bay would get to a first-and-goal from the 8 and it seemed like we were certain to get at least a critical two-point conversion attempt with the game on the line.

However, after two failed pass plays, Rodgers threw another incompletion on third down when many felt he should’ve tucked it and run — although Devin White was spying him and almost assuredly would’ve run him down short of the goal line. On 4th and goal from the eight with just over two minutes to play, Matt LaFleur made the rather stunning decision to kick a field goal to go down five, rather than letting Rodgers play for a touchdown and, if they failed, still having Tampa pinned deep and just about the same situation on their hands if they got a stop.

It was a rather dumbfounding decision in the moment and one that will surely haunt the Packers and LaFleur for some time, as Brady and the Bucs never gave the ball back, thanks in large part to a third down pass interference call on King, who was caught grabbing Tyler Johnson’s jersey.

There was plenty of uproar about the DPI flag, which was somewhat warranted given all the jersey tugging and hand contact allowed during the game, but that stretch and pull of the undershirt made it too obvious not to call and the Bucs were able to run out the clock and end the Packers Super Bowl dreams. The loss was brutal for Green Bay, who had to have felt they had ample opportunity. The end of the first half TD looms large, as does their inability to turn the Brady turnovers into consistent points and punish those mistakes. And on top of all of that, they’ll have to stew over the field goal choice inside the 10 that will yield an awful lot of conversation and frustration for the next year.

The Bucs, meanwhile, have to feel great to escape a rollercoaster Brady game, with some of his best throws of the season but also some of his worst. The defense looks the part of a championship unit and was without their starting safeties for most of the game and still had as much success as they did. Now, they’ll await another high powered offense in the Super Bowl at home, as they’ll face either Josh Allen and the Bills or Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs.

Morgan Wallen has become the first artist to spend multiple weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts in 2021. The singer’s second album, Dangerous: The Double Album, held on to the top position on the charts for a second week, selling 159,000 equivalent album units in the week ending on January 21. Of that number, 133,000 units came from streaming and 22,000 from pure album sales.

Wallen’s second effort is now the first country album to spend two consecutive weeks at No. 1 since Chris Stapleton’s Traveller in 2015, and the first country album to spend its first two weeks at No. 1 since Luke Bryan’s Kill The Lights effort, from the same year. Dangerous also becomes the fourth album within the past 12 months to earn 150,000 units or more across multiple weeks, joining Taylor Swift’s Evermore, Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die, and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake.

It’s not Wallen’s first album to accomplish this feat. Dangerous did the same, setting the record for the biggest streaming week ever for a country album, blowing past the record of 102.26 million streams that Luke Combs’ What You See Is What You Get set in October 2020.

(via Billboard)

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It’s been over half a week since Donald Trump left office, and things are already different. His successor, Joe Biden, was quick to repeal some of his more damaging (or simply absurd) acts, and he’s vowed to finally use federal powers to really combat the still-rampaging pandemic. Then there’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases, who repeatedly earned the previous president’s scorn for refusing to whitewash COVID-19’s destructive powers. He’s spent much of the last six months muzzled by Trump, but now that Trump is gone, he’s doing press again. And he has some chilling stories about his own nightmarish 2020.

Among the outlets Dr. Fauci spoke with was The New York Times, and they asked him about, among many other things, the death threats he received, by people unhappy that he trying to save their lives during a once-in-a-century pandemic. When asked if he was ever shot or confronted, Dr. Fauci said he wasn’t, but that he once received a letter sent to his home office. And when he opened it “a puff of powder came all over my face and my chest.” Thankfully, it was nothing. But it still left some scars:

That was very, very disturbing to me and my wife because it was in my office. So I just looked at it all over me and said, “What do I do?” The security detail was there, and they’re very experienced in that. They said, “Don’t move, stay in the room.” And they got the hazmat people. So they came, they sprayed me down and all that.
Did they test the powder?

Yeah. It was a benign nothing. But it was frightening. My wife and my children were more disturbed than I was. I looked at it somewhat fatalistically. It had to be one of three things: A hoax. Or anthrax, which meant I’d have to go on Cipro for a month. Or if it was ricin, I was dead, so bye-bye.

Dr. Fauci said he has no idea if Trump ever found out about the incident, and he never told him about it either, even though Trump spent many of his rallies railing against Dr. Fauci. Who was I going to tell? What good would it be to tell anyone? Also, it was under F.B.I. investigation, and they don’t like you to talk about it.

That said, Dr. Fauci was clearly furious about how, some decades into his career, he had become a target of violent people who’d been fed misinformation about the coronavirus. He said he started getting Secret Service protection as early as late March, mere weeks into when the pandemic went next level in the U.S. That they were endangering not only his life but his family’s life as well got him so mad that the normally unflappable Dr. Fauci even dropped a mild cuss word into an NYT interview:

It was the harassment of my wife, and particularly my children, that upset me more than anything else. They knew where my kids work, where they live. The threats would come directly to my children’s phones, directly to my children’s homes. How the hell did whoever these a*sholes were get that information? And there was chatter on the internet, people talking to each other, threatening, saying, “Hey, we got to get rid of this guy. What are we going to do about him? He’s hurting the president’s chances.” You know, that kind of right-wing craziness.

Elsewhere, Dr. Fauci talks about knowing early on into the pandemic that Trump was going to always downplay its severity. He took particularly umbrage with his obsession with questionable miracle cures, like the infamous hydroclorothiazide.

[I]t was clear that he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, “Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?” or, “Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.” And I would try to, you know, calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this stuff really works.”

He would take just as seriously their opinion — based on no data, just anecdote — that something might really be important. It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative-medicine-type approaches. It was always, “A guy called me up, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.” That’s when my anxiety started to escalate.

In another interview, with Ted Koppel for CBS News, Dr. Fauci said that, despite all this, he “got along very, very well with him, and that it was the more loyal members of his staff who were the ones who got into his face. Still, the relationship sounds surreal. Trump would curse him out in his rallies, threatening to fire him, whipping his supporters into chants of “Fire Fauci.” Trump would get mad that Dr. Fauci had consistently higher approval ratings than him. “And then,” Dr. Fauci told Koppel, “when I would see him in the Oval Office, he would act like everything was fine.”

(Via The New York Times and CBS News)

SZA’s 2021 is already off to a great start and it seems like things will only get better for her. Fans of the singer are completely in love with her latest single, “Good Days,” as it recently cracked the top-10 of the Billboard singles chart. According to a post on her Instagram story, it looks like an exciting remix to the track with Frank Ocean could be on the way.

SZA reposted a screenshot of fan’s tweet that said, “Good days by SZA ft. Frank ocean would literally cure corona.” She captioned the photo and said, “Imma ask [watery eyes emoji] lol.” If the remix becomes a reality, the song would be Frank Ocean’s first new musical contribution in nearly a year.

SZA’s tease about the “Good Days” remix comes after she asked fans to submit videos to her that would possibly appear in the song’s music video. The request resulted in a Gmail inbox filled to its capacity after the email she provided received nearly 2,500 videos. She did clarify that the video would not entirely be composed of videos that her fans sent, adding, “it’s PART of the video .. jus part.”

More recently, the singer set up a phone hotline that she said would be used to “TALK CRY OR WHATEVER” with fans. You can read her post about the “Good Days” remix above.

One of the next hosts of Jeopardy! played in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday, as the show has enlisted a group of guest hosts while it searches for its permanent replacement following the death of Alex Trebek. It’s unlikely that Aaron Rodgers stops playing football soon enough to be that next permanent host, but another option may have talked their way out of the chance if you believe a report about future guest host Katie Couric.

According to Page Six, a source said Jeopardy! producers were “immediately worried” about comments she made on Bill Maher’s HBO show about Donald Trump. Couric spoke about Trump supporters and the dangerous rhetoric they believe in the wake of a MAGA coup attempt at the US Capitol that left five people dead.

“But I also think some of them are believing the garbage that they are being fed 24/7 on the internet, by their constituents, and they bought into this big lie,” Couric said during her January 15 appearance where she discussed Trump’s ban from Twitter and various GOP lawmakers who have amplified his rhetoric of election misinformation. “And the question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.”

That “deprogram” comment has apparently raised eyebrows among people in charge at Jeopardy!, which Page Six notes attracts an audience with an average age of 64.2.

The source said, “The ‘Jeopardy!’ audience is very conservative. And the show has always steered clear of politics.

“Katie’s comments so soon after she was announced as a host are very concerning to the producers. They are worried there will be a backlash against her. There has already been some complaints.

“Jeopardy viewers are quite a traditional bunch, and there’s fears she might be too polarizing after this. At the very least, she already appears to have ruled herself out of becoming the permanent host of the show.”

It’s worth noting that what Couric said wasn’t particularly inflammatory, just merely something that can be seen as anti-Trump. Whether that’s actually enough to disqualify her from a role she hasn’t even auditioned for seems tough to imagine, as so many other factors are at play here. But Jeopardy! has been careful about this process to say the least, and the current guest host, Jeopardy! GOAT Ken Jennings, has already apologized for past tweets that were long viewed as insensitive ahead of his new episodes airing.

Jennings later got in trouble for defending Bean Dad, you know, back when that guy was the main character of Twitter for a day before Trump incited a riot in Washington. The point here is that things move quickly these days, and by the time Couric is guest hosting Jeopardy! we may all be concerned with something else entirely. But the report is a worrying one for those who want to see her take the stage, thrive and replace Trebek permanently.

[via Page Six]

The first half of the NFC Championship game between the Bucs and the Packers in Green Bay was quite the rollercoaster of emotions for those with any sort of investment on the first half side or total. The Bucs marched for a touchdown on their opening drive and then the two teams traded touchdowns early in the second quarter to make it a 14-7 game, and for those with the first half Over, things were looking very good.

However, from there, a Bucs red zone stand forced a field goal and those that got the total at 24.5 early in the week were in for a sweat in the final five minutes. Both teams got big stops, first the Packers forcing a punt and then the Bucs picking off Rodgers — which felt like death for Under bettors — at midfield.

The Packers defense stood tall and forced a 4th and 3, where Bruce Arians initially sent the punt unit onto the field before calling timeout and then sending Brady and company back on the field with 13 seconds left. Brady found Leonard Fournette for a first down and then, rather than try a field goal from 56 yards in the cold, they called a four verts that, somehow, the Packers were not ready for to get a touchdown to Scottie Miller and a 21-10 halftime lead.

It was a Jets-ian blitz that left everyone in 1-on-1 coverage on the outside and that means Brady was always going to find Kevin King, who was a disaster in the first half, giving up the first TD to Mike Evans and then this one to Miller with some of the worst man coverage technique you’ll see, as he simply stares into the backfield while Miller runs by him.

For those with the Under 24.5 like yours truly, it was a horrific end to a half that saw us feel every emotion possible when betting, from despair to excitement to abject horror as that pass flew threw the air. My condolences to all on the first half Under. Invoices will be directed to Kevin King at the Packers facility on Monday.

Master P is back with plans for a new venture. The famed entrepreneur recently announced that he and Richard Patterson, CEO of Trion and a former engineer at Tesla, are working on a Black-owned supercar line. The vehicles will be built under the brand name, Trion Supercars, with the first model, The Nemesis RR, serving as the first completed design. The new line will also become the first Black-owned supercar manufacturer in the United States. Master P shared the news about his latest endeavor in a statement shared by Rolling Out.

“Richard Patterson is a genius,” he said. “He has created the blueprint for the next era of supercars. It’s time for us to change the narrative for our culture by offering economic empowerment with this partnership.” He added, “The Nemesis RR is about the superb performance, head-turning appearance, and technical innovation that creates the blueprint for the next era of supercars.”

Master P’s entrance into the luxury automobile industry comes after he debuted his line of Uncle P’s food products in 2020. He launched the brand with the intent of creating food products for Black people by Black people. The line includes rice, beans, grits, pancake mix, syrup, and oatmeal and with every purchase, a donation will be made towards charities assisting both the youth and the elderly in Black communities.

You can watch Master P and Patterson discuss The Nemesis RR in the post above.

(via Rolling Out)

On Sunday afternoon, Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were in frosty Green Bay, Wisconsin to take on the Packers in the NFC Championship game. It is Brady’s first visit to the NFC title game, having won nine AFC titles and lost in another four trips to the AFC Championship while with the New England Patriots, and he’ll have to takedown a fellow living legend in Aaron Rodgers to reach a 10th Super Bowl.

There are few things that the Brands love to do more than come up with a social media post that is tangentially related to the big sporting event of the day because it provides an opportunity for easy engagement that all of us crave. This is typically done if they have some connection to a team playing or a player as an ambassador, but sometimes they’ll just force it. An entity I was not expecting to go for the cheap pop of sports ball engagement on Sunday was the Minions Twitter account, but they went for it with one of the strangest, creepiest posts you’ll see all day, and an explanation is needed.

They then followed that up with a bit of a more traditional “who you got” type post but I still demand to know why a Minion was photoshopped into Tom Brady kissing his son, with the caption “squeeze us like a deflated football Tom Brady.”

I fear this image will be seared into my brain forever and I demand some answers as to why we were subjected to such a fate.