Saturday’s cold open on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live saw Kate McKinnon swap her Rudy Giuliani impression for one of a much more trustworthy member of Donald Trump’s orbit: Dr. Anthony Fauci. The sketch detailed the country’s forthcoming vaccine rollout and reflected on the way two administration scientists have been portrayed publicly in a year where the very health of the nation has been severely politicized.
“We’re doing this vaccine World War II style. We made England go in first, see what’s what. Then we swoop in there at the end and steal the spotlight,” Fauci said. “Tom Hanks will make 10 movies about it, and when it’s all over you can kiss any nurse you want.”
The sketch is framed as Fauci and Deborah Birx addressing the public on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN program. Blitzer, describing himself as “an inside man with an outside name,” threw it to the doctors to go through who will get the vaccine based on priority. First would be frontline workers, of course, followed by anyone named “Mildred, Horace, Blanche, Mabel or Walter” according to Birx.
Fauci also had to deal with the adoration of his adoring fans, much to the contrast of Birx, who never quite seemed to live down the press conference earlier in the year where Trump suggested people inject themselves with bleach to cure coronavirus.
“Remember when Trump said to inject bleach and I did a stanky little face?” Birx, played by Heidi Gardner, said. “And I almost whispered ‘no.’”
Fauci, meanwhile, explained that simply being an adult and stating basic medical information clearly has made 2020 a very interesting year for him to say the least.
“Any other year I’m a two,” Fauci said between catching bras apparently thrown by lustful women. “This year, I’m a 10. I don’t know.”
Perhaps the most fitting joke of the sketch is that once the vaccine gets to the majority of Americans, Fauci hopes to go back to being much less of a household name. In a year where many Americans have had to learn plenty about disease and healthcare and preventative hygiene, getting all of this behind us and not having to think about Fauci and Birx as notable figures worth parody is as good a pitch as any for a vaccine rollout.
Zach Braff has been in the public eye for nearly twenty years now, since the debut of Scrubs in 2001. To his credit, in all of that time, Braff hasn’t stirred that much controversy, save for three times: (1) His Punk’d appearance, in which he understandably reamed out an 11-year-old he thought had spray-painted his new car; (2) The backlash to the initial wave of adoration for his directorial debut, Garden State; (3) The backlash to Braff’s decision to crowdfund half the budget for the spiritual follow-up to Garden State, 2014’s Wish I Was Here.
At the time, Kickstarter was a relatively new phenomenon, mostly used by those who could not otherwise afford to fund dream projects. Braff — a relatively wealthy actor coming off a nine-season run on a popular sitcom — endeavored to use Kickstarter to fund half the budget for his film. The thing is, it worked. Within three days, Braff had blown past his Kickstarter goal and eventually raised $3 million. Soon thereafter, however, the wave of backlash had completely destroyed the goodwill of the original campaign. Twitter users, bloggers, and entertainment writers (including myself) took the entire idea of crowdfunding millions of dollars for producing studio movies to task as something that felt like multimillionaires asking people on the Internet to give them their lunch money.
In any respect, Wish I Was Here was a solid movie for those who love Garden State (and I include myself in that demo), but it was poorly received at the box office, earning only $5.5 million (like Garden State, however, it also had a very good soundtrack). This week on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, Braff — who took a break from his own podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends to appear elsewhere — spoke to that controversy.
“I think I was the first known actor/director to [crowdfund] a movie, and it was so successful, and we funded beyond what we asked for in 24 hours” Braff told Maron. “That there was instant backlash saying that you as a known entity should not be using this. This should be for people who have no other means. I, unfortunately, or fortunately became the face of the debate: Should people who have fanbases be allowed to participate in crowdfunding campaigns?”
Asked by Maron where folks landed on that debate, Braff said, “Well, no one really does it … and not many people have done it since because of the amount of antagonism there was for the very idea.” In other words, Braff was the first (and last) major figure to crowdfund a multimillion movie.
Braff believes (I think rightly) that the backlash also hurt the film, and that fans dismissed it because it was that crowdfunded movie. “It was a bit of a bummer, because I was really proud of the film, and not a lot of people saw it,” Braff said.
It is a bummer, and though I was critical of the idea at the time, I do commend Braff for taking it on the chin as well as he did.
Deiveson Figueiredo (20-1-1) retained the flyweight championship after a majority draw against Brandon Moreno (18-5-2) in an instant classic in the main event of UFC 256 from the UFC Apex in Las Vegas.
Figueiredo and Moreno traded stiff shots to open the bout before the champ locked up the challenger for a takedown. Moreno fought him off, opting to stand and trade blows. For every heavy-handed body shot Figueiredo landed, Moreno countered with a swift hook followed by a head kick attempt. The two kept a blistering pace as Figueiredo consistently walked down the challenger through the end of the first round.
Figueiredo opened the second with a spinning heel kick to the body, but Moreno kept coming forward with shot after shot. Moreno caught Figueiredo with a body lock, slamming him to the ground. Figueiredo countered and as they returned to their feet, traded a slew of punches before continuing their chess game. Figueiredo hurt Moreno with a flurry of shots, but the challenger went right back to the body lock and took Figueiredo to the ground. Moreno’s right eye was a source of interest between rounds, as he was in clear pain stemming from a huge shot toward the end of the round.
Moreno and Figueiredo threw some bombs to open the third as the pair flew around the Octagon trading massive blows. Moreno locked up the champ again, pushing him against the cage, but was unable to take him to the ground. Figueiredo found his range, consistently connecting on massive left body punchs, but Moreno kept coming forward. Figueiredo dropped Moreno with a nasty low blow that Joe Rogan called “one of the worst ones ever.” The referee took a point from Figueiredo before they started the action again. Back on their feet, Moreno landed a big overhand right to close the round.
Moreno and Figueiredo traded shots again to open the championship round, with the champ connecting on a jaw-smacking hook before the challenger put together a big body-head combo. Moreno stunned Figueiredo with a head kick, then took the champ to the ground. Exhausted, Figueiredo threw everything he had in the middle of the fourth before Moreno hurt him with another big right hook. Figueiredo walked down Moreno as the challenger continued to pour jabs to his head.
Figueiredo traded shots with Moreno, finding his spots in the final round and stunning the challenger with a big overhand right. Moreno developed a massive bump on his left forearm after blocking a handful of gigantic kicks from the champ. Figueiredo took Moreno to the ground late, dropping heavy hands before the end of the round.
After Figueiredo (20-1) dispatched Alex Perez within two minutes at UFC 255, UFC president Dana White announced his intentions to turn the champ around just 21 days later at UFC 256.
Moreno was 4-0-1 in his last five bouts with the knockout at UFC 255, three decisions and a draw. Figueiredo has been dominant since losing the only fight of his career in March of last year to Jussier Formiga. After missing weight in his initial bout with Joseph Benavidez in February, Figueiredo submitted Benavidez to win the division crown in July. Figueiredo has to be upset with himself as that low blow cost him an outright win, but given this was a fight of the year contender, we’ll see if we get a rematch in 2021 to settle the score after the majority draw decision — something some prominent UFC fighters watching from home voiced support for.
Charles Oliveira (30-8) earned a decision victory over Tony Ferguson (26-5) in the co-main event at UFC 256 from the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, likely earning a future lightweight title shot.
Oliveira was aggressive in the first round, opening up shots at Ferguson before picking him up and slamming him to the ground. Oliveria dominated the former interim champ, hyperextending his arm, but somehow not earning the tap before the round ended.
In the second, Ferguson clearly favored his left arm and found his way to the ground yet again. This time, Ferguson was much more composed, keeping Oliveira in check and simply biding his time to get to the third round and final round. The third was much of the same for Oliveira, who picked up Ferguson, slammed him and worked with ease on the ground en route to a decision victory.
Oliveira won last seven bouts dating back to 2018, with his last victory coming in a submission win over Kevin Lee in March. With Khabib Nurmagomedov apparently stepping away from the sport after his last victory, the lightweight division is wide open, with Conor McGregor fighting Dustin Poirier in January, former Bellator champion Michael Chandler signing with the promotion and Justin Gaethje certainly looking for another shot at gold.
Ferguson returned to the Octagon after suffering the first TKO loss of his career in May against Justin Gaethje. Previously, he rode a 12-fight win streak, with his last loss coming in 2012. A former interim lightweight champion, Ferguson was forced to relinquish the belt after suffering a torn LCL in a freak injury on a television set in 2018.
The top young knockout artist in all of boxing is at it again. Edgar Berlanga, a 23-year-old Brooklyn native, fought Ulises Sierra on Saturday night in Las Vegas in the undercard of the Shakur Stevenson-Toka Kahn Clary bill. Berlanga stepped into the ring looking to pick up a Round 1 knockout for the 16th time in his career. The thing that makes this so impressive is that this was the 16th professional fight Berlanga’s ever faced.
The past isn’t always a good indicator of the future, but in the case of Berlanga-Sierra, it was. The super middleweight fight did not get out of the first round, as Berlanga dropped Sierra three times to earn a first round TKO. Berlanga threw bomb after bomb during the bout, with the finishing sequence coming via a left hook to the side of Sierra’s head and a right that caught Sierra right between the eyes.
At 2:41, this was nearly the longest fight of Berlanga’s professional career — he needed 2:45 to knock out Cesar Nunez at the end of 2019. The longest Round 1 KO streak to start a career is 21 by Ali Raymi, so while he’s climbing the ladder, he still has a bit of a way to go. Still, if The Chosen One keeps it up, he just might be able to break that record.
LSU and Florida met on Saturday night in a makeup of a game postponed from earlier in the season due to COVID-19, and with the Gators locked into the SEC Championship game and the Tigers backing up a title run with one of the worst seasons in recent memory in Baton Rouge, few expected this game to get too weird.
However, in the fog in Gainesville, that was exactly what happened as the two teams were tied at 34-34 with just over two minutes to play following a Florida field goal drive. Overtime or a Florida walkoff win looked like the most likely possibilities as with 1:51 to play, the Tigers were stopped on third down and seemed in need of a punt. However, defensive back Marco Wilson decided it’d be a good idea to pick up the LSU player’s shoe and huck it downfield, which was not subtle at all and drew a flag for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.
Naturally, following the penalty, LSU, suddenly blessed with new life, pushed the ball into Florida territory and set Cade York up with a 57-yard field goal attempt. LSU was without timeouts and was going to need to run a scramble drill to get the kick team onto the field and get the field goal attempt off before the clock went off, but the Gators called timeout with 21 seconds left to give them a chance to answer a make — or have great field position on a miss. York came out and banged it through with no trouble.
Florida would drive it to the LSU 34 and set up their own game-tying attempt, but Evan McPherson just pulled the 51-yard kick wide left by inches, giving the Tigers a rather stunning upset win and taking the Gators out of playoff contention.
To add to the insult of losing at home just before the SEC Championship game, the Gators got to see LSU’s kicker taunt them on their home field with a Gator Chomp.
The long, weird road LaMelo Ball took to becoming an NBA player came to an end on Saturday night. Ball and the Charlotte Hornets took the floor for a preseason game against the Toronto Raptors, and the No. 3 pick came off the bench in what was certainly an up-and-down performance. The down stemmed from his scoring — Ball had zero points in 16 minutes on 0-for-5 shooting.
His scoring was always going to be something that took some time. The stuff that Ball can do, though, that got him drafted so high was also on display. The 6’8 guard ripped down 10 rebounds, the most among everyone who appeared in the game. And like his older brother Lonzo, LaMelo’s got unreal feel for the game, which meant that he was able to produce a handful of highlight-reel passes that sometimes led to assists.
Ball only had four assists on the night, but as you can see in the above video, some of the passes he busted out speak to the basketball IQ that you just do not see out of 19 year olds. There are going to be plenty of growing pains for both Ball and the Hornets throughout this season, but the highs are going to be quite high, and at the very least, Twitter will end up being abuzz with their highlights on a near-nightly basis.
As for the game, Charlotte was unable to kick off its preseason with a win. Toronto came out on top, 111-100, behind 16 points off the bench by Matt Thomas.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, and the results of that election will be made official on Monday when the Electoral College votes in the manner a record-shattering number of Americans determined back in November. It’s all pretty cut and dry, despite the sputtering and nonsensical legal battles Trump has lost in several states at at the Supreme Court.
Despite that, Trump has continue to rage against his dying chances of crying fraud and then throwing out millions of legally cast votes. And that’s caused a number of his most faithful supporters to descend once again on Washington D.C. for a rally in support of Trump somehow remaining president despite, well, reality getting in the way.
The MyPillow guy was there spouting a completely nonsensical conspiracy theory, as he is wont to do. And the latest bit character from the Trump circus, former Rudy Giuliani voter fraud witness Melissa Cerone, was also there. Perhaps better known as the “wine lady” because many people thought she showed up drunk to the hearing where she baselessly claimed all kinds of fraud and conspiracies, Cerone has found herself parodied and lampooned in the days since she and Giuliani went viral in Michigan.
And Saturday, she was at it again, though she had much less to say as much as she just wanted to get a nice shot for her Instagram feed. Mostly, it seems she just wanted to complain about what’s happened to her as much as Trump losing the election.
Melissa Carone is speaking at the Rally for President Trump but she’s not saying much of anything pic.twitter.com/VQe2j8q2es
The things that have been said to me have been terrible,” she said, getting a “we love you” chant from the crowd in return.
“I will not give up this fight. I will keep exposing the fraud that I saw. And we will win this,” Carone said, appearing to read notes off of her phone. “We will take it back. This was a stolen election.”
There really wasn’t much of interest she said, as like many Trump supporters in his cult of personality their platform can be summed up in a number of baseless claims and hot takes. “Donald Trump is the best president we’ve ever had,” she said, for example. There are also, apparently, nameless senators trying to tear her down?
“I will not stand down to these senators,” Carone said, sounding remarkably like a Cecily Strong impression of, well, herself. “I won’t.”
Finally, though, her speech ended the way all great orators conclude their remarks: by asking everyone to say ‘cheese.’
“I want to get a picture with everyone,” she said. “Can you put your flags up?”
It probably won’t be enough to get on SNL again, but at least it’ll get some likes on Parler.
Juicy J is undoubtedly a legend in the rap game for what’s been two careers in one thanks to his time with Three 6 Mafia and his solo career which launched in 2013 with Stay Trippy. Through it all, the Memphis rapper has given fans an assortment of classic records over the years. A key part of Juicy J’s career has been his producer tag ad-libs, which help add life and energy to his songs.
Speaking about that producer tag, he revealed that Logic helped create it. The Memphis rapper called Logic his “best friend” in a recent interview with HipHopDX before explaining how the No Pressure helped create the tag.
“We hang out all the time. We was in the studio and he was just talking,” Juicy J said. “He’s like, ‘Man, what did Juicy J say? Shut the f*ck up.’ We was just being funny. And I said, ‘Hey.’ I stopped it. I told the engineer, ‘You recorded that?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Man, I’m using that as my producer tag because that sh*t is hard. You talking is.’” He added, “We didn’t say, ‘Hey, Logic, go in the studio, I mean go in the booth and do this.’ He just said it and it was recording.”
He went on to say that Logic was surprised that Juicy J used the tag. “He say he didn’t think I was serious,” the Memphis rapper said. “He said, ‘When you said you was going to use that as a tag, I didn’t think you was serious.’ He’s like, ‘Man, that sh*t sound hard. I’m hearing my voice every f*cking where.”‘
The news comes after Juicy J and Logic connect for their “1995” video.
Nobody likes to lose a paying gig, least of all actors working on one of the most popular shows on television. However, being killed off is one of the hazards of working on The Walking Dead, which has killed off more characters than almost any show in television history. “No one is safe,” the show’s creator, Robert Kirkman, has often warned, and that has proven to be true even for some of the most show’s longest-running and most popular characters. More than 25 “series regulars” have been killed off in 10 seasons, not to mention numerous other recurring characters. Some actors have left the show of their own volition (Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, whose characters are both still alive) and some knew from the beginning that when they’d be killed off (Jon Bernthal, Scott Green),
The deaths of some other characters, however, not only came as a surprise to the actors but left some of them less than pleased with the circumstances surrounding their death. Though they obviously knew coming in that they could die at any time, they still felt burned by their exits.
Here are five such examples:
5. Laura (Lindsley Register)
AMC
Register is an example of one of those recurring characters who managed to rack up 20 episodes of the series, and although few people knew her character’s name by the end, everyone probably recognized her face. She was a high-ranking member of Negan’s Saviors before being absorbed by the Alexandrians, and she was killed by Beta in a clash that left her with a broken neck. It wasn’t clear, however, that she had died until she appeared in the In Memoriam section on The Talking Dead. Register revealed that she was “disappointed” she didn’t get to have another confrontation with Negan, but she said she was “thrilled” to die while fighting one of the show’s best villains, Beta. Fans were upset about Laura’s exist, and Register clearly appreciated how upset they were that she’d been killed off, retweeting some of their tweets, like these two:
Jesus’ death, which came during the ninth midseason finale and coincided with the introduction of the Whisperers, was one of the show’s better kills, in part because it was so surprising. No one saw it coming because Tom Payne’s character still figured into the comic series. Payne, who has since gone on to star in the Fox series Prodigal Son, wasn’t upset about being killed off. He thought that The Walking Dead did him dirty by not taking better advantage of him while he was on the show. “I was kind of frustrated with what I had gotten to do on the show and I was kind of a bit bored with it,” Payne said of his role as Jesus. “If I wasn’t being given anything, I was kind of ready to go.” Instead of being disappointed by his death, Tom Payne was relieved.
3. Madison Clark (Kim Dickens)
AMC
One of the most surprising deaths in all 17 seasons of The Walking Dead universe was the exit of Kim Dickens’ character, Madison, in the fourth midseason finale of Fear the Walking Dead. No one, it seems, was more surprised by it than Kim Dickens herself. She was the nominal lead of the series, and while she took her exit well, her statements over the years have made it obvious that it wasn’t her decision and she wasn’t that pleased with it. “They saw my disappointment,” Dickens said of her reaction when she was told she’d be killed off. “They saw what I disagreed with about it.” She said that the decision “shocking to me and it was disappointing. It was heartbreaking.” The one upside, however, is that the Fear producers are now open to the possibility of bringing Madison back, and apparently, there are even discussions of that.
2. Andrea (Laurie Holden)
AMC
One character who exited The Walking Dead many, many seasons ahead of schedule was Laurie Holden’s Andrea, who was killed off at the end of season three. Unfortunately for Holden, her death became practically a necessity for the series, after the character assassination the writers pulled on Andrea, which turned TWD fans against her so harshly that they had to kill her off. It wasn’t that Holden had an issue with her death itself; she thought that showrunner Glen Mazzara did her character dirty long before she died. “I think the departure from book Andrea to the screen was a mistake. I mean, it’s not like I couldn’t pull it off. I think the whole stuff that they wrote about Andrea and the Governor was complete and utter nonsense. I did the best that I could to tell that narrative and to justify it where Andrea kept her heart.”
In fact, Laurie Holden had an eight-year deal on the series, but in spite of that, she learned the night before that she was being killed off. “I got the call at 10 o’ clock the night before, while I was shooting, from the showrunner who is no longer a part of The Walking Dead, saying that they couldn’t write the episode and that he was killing my character. So, we all got the script, [and] everybody on the set was sobbing. I felt like I got shot. None of it was supposed to happen the way it did.”
1. Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs)
AMC
No one got done dirty worse than Carl Grimes, who was supposed to make it to the end of the series, but who inexplicably was killed off in a painfully anticlimactic fashion in the eighth season. It’s still not entirely clear why Carl was killed off the series, except that then showrunner Scott Gimple thought it might inject some juice into the flagging ratings. Riggs took it hard, saying that it was “devastating” to lose something that was such “a huge part of his life,” but he was much kinder than his own father, who reacted with anger. “Watching Gimple fire my son 2 weeks before his 18th birthday after telling him they wanted him for the next 3 years was disappointing. I never trusted Gimple or AMC but Chandler did. I know how much it hurt him.”
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