GoneTrending

Fargo has officially returned with both murder and flatulence after a months-long-delay due to you-know-what. So it’s great that we’re seeing an understated Chris Rock doing his dramatic thing, and the show was one of the first to tiptoe back into production, but that doesn’t mean that those involved weren’t nervous. That’s more than expected, given our current situation, and Hollywood Reporter caught up with creator/showrunner Noah Hawley and Rock to discuss the process, which involved a lot of protocols and a special note from Hawley to inspire cast and crew this summer.

Hawley knew that he needed to invoke a big gun here, so to speak, so he thought about Tom Cruise, who not only called a head of state to help Mission: Impossible 7 resume production but also plans on filming in space at some point before 2022. You had to know things got a little cinematic, right? For sure:

“Someday in the not too distant future Tom Cruise will go to space. He will bring a film crew with him. He will bring a director and actors. They will shoot a film. Now space, as we know, is an airless vacuum where nothing can live. A hostile void where a suit breach or airlock malfunction can kill, where even the simplest tasks must be done methodically, deliberately. Astronauts train for years to prepare. They drill protocols and procedures into their heads. They know that surviving in space will require their full concentration… Now imagine doing all that AND making a movie.”

Well, the note worked, and Fargo kicked back into gear, even with Hawley unable to join the Chicago set once more. The season appeared to finish filming without substantial incident, but Chris Rock did not hold back on how the experience impacted his thoughts. That’s because Fargo is a show with a lot of intense face-offs and some handshakes and, well, all of those things that crime syndicate members do to intimidate each other.

“You got an intimate scene with somebody — and I don’t even mean sex, I mean just an argument,” explained Rock. “And you’re yelling back and forth and you’re like, ‘Okay, I hope this motherf*cker don’t have COVID.’” Hey, no one can ever accuse Chris Rock of holding back on his true feelings.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

If nothing below suits your sensibilities, check out our guide to What You Should Watch On Streaming Right Now.

We Are Who We Are (HBO, 10:00pm EST) — This week, Caitlin and Fraser strengthen their bond, which doesn’t go over well with the larger group after Caitlin and Sam’s breakup. Meanwhile, Maggie’s exploring the nearby Chioggia Festival during her own bonding experience. This is Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s first stab at a TV series, and it’s an immersive experience with (of course) a sun-drenched, often picturesque Italian setting. This show should tide Euphoria fans who don’t mind more literally euphoric vibes and less nihilism than the Zendaya-starring series.

Whose Vote Counts, Explained (Netflix docuseries) — Are all votes created equally in the U.S.? Nope, and the right to vote goes under examination in this project to take on what’s actually a fairly dysfunctional system within America’s democracy.

Filthy Rich (FOX, 9:00pm EST) — Kim Cattrall returns to TV in a super-soapy turn. She stars as a mega-rich Southern widow who learns that her late husband fathered three illegitimate children and included them in his will. This week, Margaret attempts to reconcile the situation while also capitalizing upon things for herself.

Manhunt: Deadly Games (CBS, 10:00pm EST) — This week, the true-crime anthology series (that chronicles the manhunt involved with the Richard Jewell scandal) digs into the firestorm created by the FBI’s “hero-bomber” theory going public. You’ve heard the story of the fallout from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, now witness the TV dramatization (as opposed to the sensationalized movie version) of one of the most complex manhunts on U.S. soil.

The Third Day (HBO, 9:00pm EST) — Jude Law and Naomie Harris star in this series. He’s playing Sam, who’s fighting for his life in this episode after finding out his secret connection and fearing the islanders’ intentions for him. It sounds stressful but like a thrilling distraction for sure.

Following an in-depth report on his finances published by the New York Times on Sunday, President Donald Trump has responded in his usual manner: angry tweets.

According to the New York Times report, the first of many in an ongoing investigation into Trump’s financial records, the president paid only $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017, which is a seriously low amount for a supposedly successful businessman. The Times also found that Trump has a significant amount of debt and will owe anywhere from $400 to $600 million in 2022 when several loans that he personally guaranteed come due. In short, the report painted a bleak and troubling view of the president’s finances. As usual, the president lashed out on Twitter with his customary accusation of “Fake News,” which caused the hashing #TrumpMeltdown to trend on Monday.

“I paid many millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation & tax credits,” Trump tweeted. “Also, if you look at the extraordinary assets owned by me, which the Fake News hasn’t, I am extremely under leveraged – I have very little debt compared to the value of assets.”

Trump then repeated his claim that he’s the “only President on record” to give up his $400,000 presidential salary, which has nothing to do with his purported debt and low income tax rate. You can see his full meltdown below:

Of course, as always, the most damning evidence against Trump is his own tweets. Diligent Twitter users were quick to discover that the president loved to boast about how much he pays in taxes, even going so far as to criticize then-President Obama for only paying 20% of his income.

As for the allegations of Trump’s mounting debt, once again, there’s always a tweet.

To be clear, that’s Donald Trump referring to himself as the “King of Debt.” You can’t make this stuff up if you tried.

(Via Donald Trump on Twitter)

When I called legendary broadcaster, Doc Emrick to talk about Topps giving him a baseball card, I thought I had the wrong number. The first voice I heard was distant, and seemed to be a woman asking questions. An afternoon Detroit Tigers game is on the radio, not the announcer I was expecting to hear from. And then Doc finally reassures me that I have called the right phone.

“Just a second, sorry,” Emrick says, and I politely and patiently wait for a transaction to finish before we get started.

“I apologize,” he said, laughing. “I got caught in the drive-thru line trying to get a Diet Coke.”

Even if I were upset about the delay, Emrick is as nice as ever about it all. He appreciates me calling, he said, and started asking questions about my area code (716, Buffalo and much of Western New York) and where I’m from. We talk about where I live now, Boston, and how he had a conversation about real estate there once with Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara. Soon we were talking about apartment prices, and his three favorite cities to visit (Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh) while working. We also mourned the loss of a beloved Boston sports bar, which closed this month due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What an awful thing,” he said. “The Bruins get knocked out on the very day they close The Fours. What a curse.”

The half hour that follows is as much an interview as it is a warm conversation between two strangers, one asking questions and the other eager to tell stories and entertain. We were both trying to do our jobs, of course, but its as refreshing a conversation as I’ve had in 2020.

Emrick is as nice as one would imagine, excited about his job, and thankful to NBC for letting him do it from home. He’s also thrilled Topps put him in their Allen and Ginter set, and later he texted me photos of some cards from his collection and another that was made of him. It’s been a rough year for everyone, including NBC Sports’ lead hockey broadcaster. But a conversation with him, I found, will do its best to help make it better.

Uproxx: What has this process been like for you? Remote broadcast has certainly happened before for the Olympics or things like that, but this is the postseason and now you have to do it. What’s it been like for you?

Doc Emrick: It was actually a challenge at first and now it’s gotten to be fun because you realize that the adjustment that you and your partners had to make… there’s one game that Eddie (Olczyk) and I did, the first game, he was in Stamford, I was here and Pierre was in Edmonton. And later on he was back in Chicago because he had to go back there for a few days to repack to go inside the bubble in Edmonton. So I was here, he was in Chicago, and Brian Boucher was in Toronto. So it’s a little bit helter skelter, but remarkably, through technology I don’t understand, it works. And we get on our headsets and practice counting back and forth to determine what the lag is and it’s remarkable how small it is. It’s well under half a second and it’s only a handful of frames. I think it’s 24 frames a second. And it’s well below, a fraction of as second, in terms of the distance we have to cover.

It’s really a wonderful thing that’s enabled us to do play-by-play of sporting events with virtually no delay.

And it sounds and looks and feels the way people are used to with a hockey broadcast. I was wondering if after the first few games you went back and maybe watched the broadcasts you did to see how they compared to what you’re used to producing to see the result?

No, I let them appraise it at the head end and tell me, because it seemed like a normal broadcast. The start of the game as I was seeing it on my monitor and describing it seemed like a normal game that I was seeing it with the naked eye.

The same limitations that I was having in the arena were the same ones I would be having on the screen: which is that the far winger oftentimes is not turned where you can read his sleeve number. If you imagine a right hand shot will be turned and facing you, but if he’s a left hand shot his sleeve will be turned away and his back will, too. So now you have no identification unless he skates a certain way, which you can pick up. Or unless he’s a (David) Pastrnak who has hair coming out from underneath his helmet. Bad example, because Pastrnak is a right-hand shot, but you see the point is that sometimes you do have to wait a little bit longer to identify a player on the far wing.

That is exactly the same problem that you would have in the arena in that even with the naked eye we are usually so far back inside these press boxes that you’d have to wait a split-second longer to pick up a winger. Because you don’t see his back number, which is very large, and his sleeve number is four inches. And so to make the proper identification you don’t want to guess because your educated guess is probably not right. Your best bet is to wait a split second longer. And you don’t like to do that, but it’s the nature of the business.

As Patrick Roy once said when he gave up seven goals, ‘I’m paid to get those.’ And that’s what our job is.

But it’s fun, and I’m honored that NBC has gone to this extreme measure to allow me to do the Conference Final and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Because it’s the most fun to get to be there when they present the Stanley Cup. And to chronicle the sacrifice that these guys go through to get there and how much punishment these guys go through to get their name on it.

How long have you been around Boston?

I’ve been here about two years now.

OK, there was a player for the Bruins when they won in 2011 named Dennis Seidenberg, who actually stayed around Boston a bit then played for the Islanders. I remember asking him a few year after they won the championship ‘How many times have you worn your ring?’ And he held up one finger. They are so gaudy that they don’t wear them very often. And they get their name on the trophy and they get to see it when it’s brought out for the celebration for the banner raising. But they don’t get it for more than one day to have a celebration with family. And their name is not on it at that point, the engraving takes place over the summer. So if they see their name on it, they see it at the banner raising in the fall and then the trophy goes back to the NHL and winds out going on tour 300 days.

So they battle hard to get their name on a trophy they can’t keep and a ring that’s too big to wear, but you never see them battle harder than when they go into this.

There’s a grind in covering the postseason and a routine in being at the arena to experience it. Are you trying to replicate that in some ways to get ready to broadcast from home?

2020 is odd for all of us and not because I’m at home but because the joy of covering a playoff is being close to players and after the pack peels away, going and sitting down next to a player in a dressing stall and asking a question about something you’ve been curious about and all of a sudden you get a story that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise about a player’s background that you can use in your telecast. And there’s no chance of that this year because we have no access to dressing rooms. Any interviews you get with players are all public, which I get with the rest of the media.

There’s hardly any camaraderie with the rest of the reporters you would be with anyway because very few, there’s only one reporter permitted per media source. And so all of the camaraderie you’d have with the print guys and all the other electronic media guys you would normally see. That’s different. The time you get with coaches is limited compared to what it’s been. And that’s not to say it’s wrong, it’s just necessary. And that’s different too.

So what I’m saying is the difference between home and inside the bubble, that’s different but it would not be as gratifying this year to be inside that as it would have been. And I got a taste of that on March 11 in Chicago when we covered them and San Jose. Because the rules were put in place that morning that we could not go into the dressing room. That Brian Boucher could not do any coaches interviews, that he could not do the Inside The Glass position if he had to access it by going into the bench area. That he could not enter the Inside The Glass position through team dressing rooms, because at some places you have to do that.

So we were getting a taste of what it would be like and were we going to complain? No. And we sure wouldn’t complain now because we realize this is what is absolutely necessary to keep these playoffs going as smoothly and wonderfully as they’ve gone.

In April, NBC made a video of a message you gave staffers during a conference call that was really reflective of the moment with the pandemic. What made you want to put that speech together and what was it like to see it reach viewers later on?

I was invited to do that at a meeting of staff just to close off the meeting and Sam Flood, who was in charge of the meeting, thought that would be a good thing to put to video. So five people worked very hard to put that to video and put it out there on one of our past historic telecasts and it was just how I was feeling at the time.

I think we were all missing the sport and looking forward to that time when we would all get back together again. But that was at a time where we had no idea of whether we would get back together again this summer and also the circumstances that would be prevalent at the time. I guess I was just trusting that I would be a part of that and that there would be some risks involved for somebody that was my age.

There was a gentleman by the name of Lamoriello that you may have heard of (Islanders president Lou) who was general manager of the Devils. He used to say ‘Michael, before you make any decision, look in the mirror and look at your birth certificate.’ And so I’ve remembered that, it was probably 15 years ago that he said that, and of course we’ve had a good laugh about it since then. But it was one of the decisions I had to make later in the summer.

NBC has been wonderful to me to do all of this equipment, and they also said ‘do not do anything that you are not comfortable with.’ And the fact that they’ve chosen to let me do these playoffs right until the end from my home is not a tribute to me, it’s a tribute to them.

I’ve been asked by several people to ask you whether you have a list of words or phrases you keep to keep your vocabulary so varied on a broadcast.

No! (laughs)

That’s one of the great myths of all time. I never have anything written down and I never have written words down to use. It’s just my vocabulary. The dogs don’t understand me sometimes. But, yeah.

I had a fifth grade teacher. It’s kind of an old story, her name was Una McClurg. She said that any word you use five times becomes yours for life. And I was actually told by an announcer, he did a year with the Capitals and just recently passed away. His name was Lyle Stieg. When I was just getting into this line of work he was a fellow broadcaster in the IHL and Dayton and I was in Port Huron and he said if you can come up with different ways to say many of the repetitive things that happen in hockey games it will help you because otherwise if every time the puck’s dumped in you say it’s dumped in, you’ll drive people nuts.

So I didn’t write things down, I didn’t write words down. But it’s just how I talk. I tend to use different ways and try not to repeat different ways of the same thing. So that’s one of those myths. I don’t have anything written down. And once I’ve used a word for the night I try not to do it over again.

I try to use “blockered” more instead of “waffle board” these days because in times past the waffle board was a more popular way to describe a blocker a goaltender uses because at one time it was brown, like a waffle. And it had rivets in it that used to look like the divots in a waffle. But then they started to get colored ones so the bright white ones and red ones, they no longer looked like a waffle. It became an archaic phrase so I don’t use it as much anymore.

As you can probably guess I grew up a Buffalo Sabres fan and really fell in love with hockey listening to Rick Jeanneret and Jim Lorenz.

Yeah, as you should! You had two wonderful ones there to listen to.

I think I learned more from Lorenz about hockey doing color than anyone else in my life.

I guess you would! Especially a steady diet of him every night, doing the games. Jim is a wonderful guy.

I think about that when it comes to broadcasting, especially on a national broadcast. Is there a balance you actively consider between educating people and giving them new things to learn or possibly considering, especially later in the postseason, that people watching might be newer to hockey?

Yeah, you try to balance that. And I’ll tell you what Sam Flood tells us, he’s very conscious of this. And he reminds us on the days of Winter Classics, Olympic Games, Game 7s and Stanley Cup Finals. That the audience is going to broader than it ever is for anything else.

So Winter Classics, which are New Year’s Day. Game 7s, Olympic Games and when you get to the Stanley Cup Finals. You’re always going to have a broader audience and you don’t want to talk a lot of shop. Yo want to make sure that you don’t leave anybody out that might be fascinated by this because we know for a fact that a lot of people jump on to these playoffs because of what battles take place and how it’s every other night and all of that lore I was sharing with you earlier that people just love about the playoffs.

So those are special times where we are more conscious of such things like mentioning where a player is from, because it only takes a half second to do it. Sean Coutourier, born in Arizona. It doesn’t take long. Ah, he’s American? Because some people think all of these guys are from Canada or they’re born in Sweden. But you throw that in because not everybody knows that 44 percent of the players are from Canada, 30 percent are Sweden, the rest are the U.S. and so on et cetera.

This year in particular has been fascinating with a pandemic and a national conversation about race and police relations playing out across sports. Some have been critical of the NHL in particular for lagging behind other leagues in addressing some of these issues. I was wondering if that’s something you noticed as well and if it was maybe the Canadian influence on the game or the bubbles being held outside the US that impacted that, or something else like hockey culture making players less willing to stick up?

No, I think they’ve caught up remarkably. And if you look at some of the quotes over the last four months, this is a culture that — I don’t know what was in the past how it compared to others. And one of the things that was always said is that there aren’t many players of color in hockey and it was something that just wasn’t addressed. Well, they’re addressing it now.

You see what Braden Holtby had to say and the comments Bruce Cassidy had, and many of them came during the quiet time where no games had been played and training hadn’t even begun. We can all address the past and the things that maybe we didn’t see or maybe didn’t do at that time, but the present is what’s most important and the present is becoming more vibrant all the time and more active all the time. And I’m very proud of that and to be associated with a game that is addressing it.

It’s been fascinating to see how different leagues are handling these situations and embracing social justice messaging. As someone with a big hockey background working for a site that focus so much on basketball the differences are notable, but I think you’re right that things have changed considerably in recent months.

I think the thing, too, is that it’s a different sort of animal in that we have 13 foreign countries represented in the last eight teams. That doesn’t excuse them by any means. But it does mean it’s a more diverse culture to begin with, and so sometimes these things don’t get addressed as quickly. And they have been addressed now, and they have been by people such as Zdeno Chara from Slovakia. The birthplace does not matter anymore.

I have to ask you about baseball, and getting a card in the new Allen and Ginter set. You’re a huge baseball guy, what’s this mean to get your own card?

I’m 74, and as a bubble gum-blowing youth in a rural Indiana town of 600, LaFontaine. I grew up in that town of 600, I had a newspaper route and was obligated to save a certain percentage for church, a certain percentage for savings and the rest I could spend on what I wanted to spend it on. And I spent it on Topps baseball cards. From 1953 and 57. Now, sadly, before the craze hit which made the value go up my mom asked when I was in college what I wanted to do with those. They were in a cornet case in the basement.

And I said ‘I don’t care, do what you want.’ So she sold them to an antique dealer, and there were Mayses and Mantles and Aarons, Snyders in that. She sold them for $80 and divided the money and we were happy with that. But the crazy didn’t hit for another two or three years, so they had no value to us. And I had no longer wanted to keep them.

So the reason I’m sending you a picture later of those cards is probably in 1985 I started hoping to try to regain some of my collection. All but the really inexpensive ones. And I’ve been able to get a lot of the common cards from those years of my Topps collection. And they wouldn’t want me to say this, but I did collect one year of Bowmans as well. But those are very important to me because they are part of an idyllic youth that I spent in rural Indiana.

We of course maligned them by putting them in bicycle spokes as part of an archaic culture you may have read about or the people at Topps have told you about, probably a person who was bald and grey and about to retire from the Topps company told you what he used to do with them as a kid: he put them in bicycle spokes and they’d make a real clacking noise. But that’s what we did when we were bubble gum-blowing youth in Indiana.

But I love those cards, and I just went down and pulled them all out. They’re in number order and I took a picture of them this morning and I’ll send it off to you.

What did you say when they came and said they wanted to put you on a card?

I was shocked, I had no idea that there would be any value in anything like that. I signed about 50 of those a day. And I’ll tell you what was in the back of my mind. My brother is a big Dodgers fan going back to Brooklyn days. And he’s a very big Duke Snider fan, and twice I found autographed baseballs with Duke Snider’s autograph on them. And one was a little better autographed than the other. And the man who sold me both of them said that Duke had had a long day of signing and was tired. And now I understand what that meant and I decided I would only sign about 50 cards a day because I wanted the signature to be good. And if I just tried to blow through and do all of them at once that somebody wouldn’t get a very good autograph because I was just trying to gun through it.

So it took me about a week to go through all of the cards that they sent me so the signatures are good. I think that they’re legible, I wanted people to be able to read all the letters. That’s one of the things I admired about Gordie Howe’s autograph: every letter in Gordie Howe’s first and last name was just like he was probably taught in grade school.

Yeah, actually I have a Howe autograph from about 10 years ago somewhere in my parents’ house and you’re absolutely right. It’s remarkable how good the handwriting is. Because mine is not. I’m a journalist so I’m allowed to have bad handwriting.

Just like a doctor, right? [laughs]

I have to ask a Pirates question.

Well, we won last night. We’re at about one win for every three games which, for the amount of money that we’re paying players I guess that’s probably it.

That actually leads me up to the question nicely. Is there any hope in the Pirates and what they’re trying to build in the future?

I think there’s at least an optimistic culture. I loved Clint Hurdle, I thought he was a very positive guy. But in any situation after nine years or 10 years a change is needed and I think they’ve gotten that. I think they probably got new direction in the front office, too. But I’ve been a fan since 1959 and I’ve had a chance to be around three world championships. I’m proud to say I know a lot of the guys that played on hose teams and I’ve gotten the chance to meet them. And that means an awful lot to me. I hope that there are people in Pittsburgh that get a chance to say the same thing when they’re my age. I don’t know if that’s going to happen because as you know you need to spend money in order to have a good team unless you want to take a roll of the dice and hope that you’re Kansas City every once ever 50 years.

So I hope for the sake of the fans of Pittsburgh that they’ll get what I’ve gotten in my lifetime, which is three world championships. And a chance to meet some of the guys that are on it.

A blockbuster story from The New York Times on Sunday revealed President Trump paid only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017 and no taxes for 10 of the 15 years before entering the White House.

The extremely low figures are shocking because, according to Forbes, Trump is worth approximately $2.5 billion.

“His portfolio, which includes commercial buildings, golf properties and branding businesses, is worth an estimated $3.66 billion before debt,” Forbes reports. “The president has a fair amount of leverage — adding up to a roughly $1.13 billion — but not enough to drag his net worth below a billion dollars.”

To put things in perceptive, the $750 Trump paid in taxes is what a single adult with no children who earned $17,900 in 2017 would pay.

In 2017, the median income American household brought in $63,761 according to the Census Bureau. The federal income tax cost for this family would be about $8,600 for couples filing jointly, and $11,670 for singles — that’s more than ten times greater than what the President of the United States paid.

Trump’s tax payments provide even further evidence of his duplicitous business dealings and are an indictment of a system that treats billionaires differently than working people.

However, to Trump, it’s simply an indicator of his intelligence.

In a 2016 debate, Hillary Clinton brought up his attempts to stiff the government on his tax obligations, to which Trump replied, “That makes me smart.”

“He’s paid zero. That means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools, and health,” Clinton said. “And I think probably he’s not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are because it must be something really important, even terrible that he’s trying to hide.”

The Joe Biden campaign responded to the tax revelations by releasing a calculator that allows people to compare what they pay in taxes to Trump.

“Do you pay more or less in federal income taxes than our “billionaire” President? Use this calculator to find out,” the site reads.

Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out the blatant inequity in our system that allows Trump to get away with tax avoidance while lower-wage workers foot the bill.

“In 2016 and ’17, I paid thousands of dollars a year in taxes as a bartender. Trump paid $750,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Sunday. “He contributed less to funding our communities than waitresses and undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump has never cared for our country more than he cares for himself. A walking scam.”

The news about Trump’s taxes has inspired many Americans to follow Ocasio-Cortez’s lead by sharing the amount they pay in taxes and how they earned their money.

With 16 years of sobriety under his belt, Dax Shepard has served as a beacon of hope for people in recovery. With a reset of his sobriety clock last week after confessing to a slip with prescription painkillers, he still is.

The actor has been open about his addiction to alcohol and cocaine, and that transparency and honesty has undoubtedly helped many people through their own recovery journeys. But recovery from addiction is not always a one-way, detour-free road. Even people who have been sober for years must be diligent and self-aware or risk relapsing in ways that are easy to justify.

That’s the scenario Shepard described in his recent podcast, in which he announced that he’s now seven days sober. For people who struggle with addiction, it’s a cautionary tale. He didn’t take a drink, and he didn’t touch cocaine. His slide into addiction relapse happened with prescription painkillers—Vicodin and Percocet. He started taking prescription pain pills after a motorcycle accident in 2012, moved to taking pills with his dad who was dying of cancer, and then came a gradual spiral of justifications, lying, gas lighting, and other addictive behaviors that enabled him to abuse those pills without acknowledging he was doing so.

Shepard laid it all out to his podcast partner, Monica Padman, last week. The way he was careful at first to only take the pills his wife, Kristen Bell, administered. Then how he’d save his two nighttime pills, because they made it hard to sleep, only to take them the next day with his morning pills to get the high he wanted. How he’d ask himself if this was a slip, start feeling like he was maybe in trouble, then convince himself he had it under control.

He talked about how easy it was to convince himself it wasn’t really a problem because the pill use felt “manageable.” He knew if he started drinking or doing cocaine, he’d be out of control—he understood those to be unmanageable addictions. But the pain pills didn’t keep him from doing his work or his dad duties or his normal daily life, so it was easy to keep using them.

Then he explained how, after more injuries this year, his painkiller use got “shadier and shadier.” He started buying pills instead of just using the ones he was prescribed. When he started lying to his loved ones and was high at his 16-year sobriety celebration earlier this month—which he called “the worst hour of my life”—he knew he was in trouble.

So in recent weeks, Shepard came clean to Bell and Padman privately and gave them all of his remaining pills. He spoke to a friend he looks up to, who frankly told him that his biggest character flaw was arrogance, that he basically thought he was smart enough to outsmart addiction. He realized the only antidote to that was extreme humility.

Shepard attended an AA meeting and shared the whole story with them as well. He said it was one of the most powerful experiences he’s had ever had.

“So Tuesday really was day one. Yeah. And then, so I went to this meeting and I…man, I’ve known the men in this meeting for seventeen and a half years because I had many attempts before I got going. And I told my whole story and I told it honestly. And I went first and I was crying and it turned into the most incredible, like, 90 minutes I’ve ever experienced, where there was just so much love and there was so much understanding and kindness in unconditional love.

And it’s the only—there’s probably been many others—but it’s the only experience I can remember having that was just grace, the definition of grace, and it was very emotional and it was a really, really surreal kind of experience.

And when it was over, I actually mentally, for the first time in a very long time, felt optimistic because for the last while, a long time, I’ve known intellectually that things are going to get worse, that each encounter with it has gotten more shady and more dangerous, and I recognize that the next go around would be, oh, I can’t get pills, let’s snort heroin. And, you know, and I’ve had a lot of friends that I’ve watched go through this whole cycle.

And I finally have the humility to say I will not be any different, I won’t be special, I won’t be smarter. I will be exactly like everyone else.”

Then he decided to come clean publicly, despite a great deal of fear and embarrassment in doing so. He said he worried about how it affect opportunities for Kristen, how it might impact him financially due to companies that might not want to work with him now, how the bombardment of judgments about what he should have done or could have done might feel, how people who looked up to him for his sobriety might feel betrayed or misled.

He ultimately decided that total and complete honesty was the only way to go. And of course, that authenticity is what his fellow recovering addicts really need to see.

“So if you got more than seven days, you got more than me. So you’re my elder and I look up to you,” said Shepard. “And, you know, onward and upward for all the people who have been along on this whole journey for the last few years. I feel—and this is not to sound cheesy, but I feel the same responsibility to the people who love the show and are with us, because I think it’s such an emotional connection we all have.”

Congratulations on your sobriety and thank you for your honesty, Dax. Onward and upward.

You can listen to Shepard’s Armchair Expert “Day 7” podcast episode here.

The next generation of video game consoles is right around the corner, but that won’t stop the last gen from going out with a bang. Reviving one of its most beloved game franchises — as well as the advertising concept behind it — Activision recruited the help of one of music’s biggest stars to bring back Crash Bandicoot in the trailer for the new game, Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. Atlanta rapper Quavo of the group Migos looks like he’s having a ball in the ad as he trades rhymes with a Crash Bandicoot mascot outside a shoe store.

The concept is updated from the original Crash Bandicoot trailers which featured an actor in a Crash mascot suit — complete with a hole in the middle for his face to poke out and make the whole thing even more tongue-in-cheek — trash-talking Nintendo’s ever-popular mascot Mario as the then-new PlayStation first launched. Of course, since then, Mario has only become more popular while Crash faded into semi-obscurity, but the anthropomorphic marsupial apparently remains enough of a cultural touchstone for the millennial generation to warrant a feature from Quavo (who admittedly does features with just about everybody).

Quavo isn’t the first rap star to help bring back a beloved franchise. Two years ago, Crash’s fellow PlayStation mascot Spyro the Dragon starred in a remastered release of his own original trilogy, announced with the help of Snoop Dogg. At this rate, we can only hope that the next PS1 hero to return is the one best known for his own crafty rhymes: Parappa The Rappa.

With the game dropping October 2, there’s still — ahem — time to pre-order it at the official website for some wild, retro in-game character skins.

Watch the trailer for Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time featuring Quavo above.

Sufjan Stevens contributed some lovely songs to the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, an endeavor that led to what Stevens now describes as one of the worst times he’s ever had.

At the 90th Academy Awards in 2018, Stevens took the stage to perform “Mystery Of Love,” one of his songs from the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack. Stevens and some backing musicians were on stage for a couple minutes, and his performance went over well. Still, in a new interview with The Guardian, he called it a “traumatizing experience” while absolutely roasting the Oscars as an institution, saying:

“Honestly, one of the most traumatizing experiences of my entire life. [It was] a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom [representative of] everything I hate about America and popular culture. […] I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture. I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies.”

This take shouldn’t be too surprising to anybody who has listened and paid attention to Stevens’ new album The Ascension, which is packed full of lyrics and themes about his pessimism towards America and culture more broadly.

A quote he shared about his song “Video Game,” for example, may as well be directly about the Oscars and other award shows: “It’s unfortunate that we live in a society where the value of people is quantified by likes, followers, listeners and views. So many people are seeking attention for the wrong reasons. I think we should all be doing our best work without looking for accolades or seeking reward.” On “America,” meanwhile, he sings, “I have loved you, I have grieved / I’m ashamed to admit I no longer believe,” and, “Don’t do to me what you did to America / Don’t do to me what you do to yourself.”

Read the full interview here, and revisit Stevens’ Oscars performance below.

Spillage Village commune with nature for a spell in their worshipful video for “Hapi” from their new album Spilligion. As the group’s members Benji., Mereba, and Olu ruminate on spirituality and the day-to-day struggles of life alongside Dungeon Family poet Big Rube, a congregation meets to listen to a sermon in the woods, a group of little boys plays, and a family shares a meal.

Spilligion, which the group released last Friday, finds the group as a whole reflecting on the current state of the world; pandemics, civil unrest, racism, and violence, but also on hope, faith, family, friends, and perseverance through the hard times and how our common goals should connect us. They similarly elaborated on such themes throughout their previous singles “End Of Daze” and “Baptize,” both of which have videos filled with quasi-religious imagery as well.

Throughout the album, the group employs the gamut of American musical tradition — including folk, jazz, and gospel — to spell out this interconnectedness and highlight how powerfully history can resonate on the present. After standing out on Dreamville’s Revenge Of The Dreamers III compilation, Spillage Village is set to become a breakout crew on their own, even as individual members 6lack and JID look forward to possible solo releases later this year.

Watch Spillage Village’s ‘Hapi’ video featuring Benji., Mereba, Olu, and Big Rube above.

Spilligion is out now on Dreamville / Spillage Village. You can listen to it here.

If you’ve paid attention to the world of craft brewing over the past decade, you’ve surely noticed a trend in the way bottles and cans are adorned. Instead of simply labeling their beers “Hazy IPA” or “Imperial Stout” with nondescript, boring logo work, breweries have taken to hiring artists and graphic designers to create eye-grabbing labels. To the point where a beer’s label has become a significant part of how it attracts attention.

In the past, this trend led to a range of highly-sexualized labels and subsequent labeling rules. But thanks, in part, to better representation across the beer industry, brands are learning how to navigate the line between edgy and offensive.

This week, the craft beer subscription service Tavour compiled a list of the “most popular beer labels of all time.” Their exact metric is hazier than a New England IPA (isn’t Bud Light the “most popular” label of all time because it’s the best selling?), but the beers they’ve highlighted are all well-known fan favorites. Here are tasting notes (from us and/ or the brewery), along with a little bit about each entry.

Crane Brewing – Guava Weisse

ABV: 4.5%

The Story:

To make this truly unique, tropical sour ale, the folks at Missouri’s Cane Brewing used more than 500 pounds of pink guava (yes, there are different types of guava). This highly popular brew has been made since 2012 and has garnered well-deserved hype while racking up awards along the way.

The label is simple, stark, and incredibly memorable — with an origami-style bird in flight.

Tasting Notes (from The Brewery):

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly you’re tasting with this beer as it’s a hybrid of a sour beer and a saison. It’s tart, tangy, subtly sour, and loaded with pear, peach, and of course guava flavors.

More Brewing Company – Razzimus Prime

ABV: 7.5%

The Story:

If you’re a child of the 80s (or you’ve seen one of the 100 Transformers movies), you’re well-acquainted with Optimus Prime. But you might not know about Rodimus Prime, who had to take over when his predecessor was killed by the evil Megatron. This beer is called Razzimus Prime and we can only assume this super fruity sour beer is ripe to take over if Rodimus meets his demise.

Tasting Notes (from The Brewery):

Made with 50 pounds of raspberries in every barrel, this beer is sweet, tart, and just the right amount of sour. It’s fruity, juicy, and pretty much like popping a fresh raspberry into your mouth in beer form.

Adroit Theory Brewing Company – Evangelion [XII Leliel Edition]

ABV: 10%

The Story:

Adroit makes this eagerly awaited IPA every year. This year is — as the name indicates — the 12th annual offering. It’s hazy, juicy, and pretty hard to find if you weren’t able to grab a few cans when it was released.

The can art is downright terrifying — with a skeleton moth and a very spooky horned demon.

Tasting Notes (from The Brewery):

While every year the brewery drops a new IPA in this series, they’re not all the same. Evangelion [XII Leliel Edition] was double dry-hopped with Mosaic, Sultana, Citra, Enigma, Motueka, and Simcoe hops. This juice bomb is full of fresh, sweet tropical fruit flavors and sits at a potent 10 percent ABV.

Mikkeller Brewing Company – Oh Hi Murk

ABV: 7.8%

The Story:

If you’ve seen the catastrophic movie The Room or the movie about the movie The Disaster Artist, you know all about the mysterious figure named Tommy Wiseau. This beer (and its cartoonish label) is a reference to one of his most famous lines in the original film.

Dry-hopped with Simcoe and Citra cryo hops, this beer is perfect for when you and your friends want to throw around a football for no reason.

Tasting Notes (Mine):

The name “Oh Hi Murk” is not only a reference to The Room, it’s also referencing the hazy, murky, juicy nature of this New England-style IPA. The use of flaked barley and malted oats gives this juice bomb, a nectar-like body that works perfectly with its juicy pineapple, mango, and guava flavors.

Evil Twin Brewing – Do You Have This I Love NY T-Shirt in My Size?

ABV: 8%

The Story:

This Imperial IPA is so named because of its general exclusivity to the brewery’s New York City taproom. It’s a reference to the well-known t-shirts you’ll find at the local airports and pretty much every tourist trap store in the city.

Tasting Notes (Mine):

Made with double dry-hopped Citra and Comet hops, this brew is super fresh, juicy, sweet, and filled with sharp citrus and sweet melon notes. It’s smooth, surprisingly light, and highly drinkable. Just be aware that it’s eight-percent ABV and pace yourself.

Jester King Brewery – Das Wunderkind

ABV: 4.5%

The Story:

This farmhouse ale is adorned with a very creepy, red-haired, steampunk looking character that we can only assume is the aforementioned “Wunderkind.” It’s a very interesting brew made by combining a barrel-aged beer that was fermented a second time with wild yeast together with an un-aged, dry-hopped beer.

Tasting Notes (Mine):

The result of this marriage is a very hazy, unfiltered brew perfectly suited for the warm days of early autumn. It’s light, refreshing, and filled with hints of citrus, mango, pineapple, and subtle peppery spice.

Odd13 Brewing – Hop Hop Troll Troll

ABV: 8%

The Story:

If you’re a fan of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you’re sure to recognize the iconic episode titled “Nightman Cometh” in which the gang acts out the possible perverse story of the Dayman and Nightman on stage. Danny DeVito’s character Frank plays a troll and this beer was made to pay tribute to yet another tremendous acting performance.

The ‘troll toll” in this beer is five whole pounds (per barrel) of Citra and Motueka hops.

Tasting Notes (From The Brewery):

While Frank prefers drinking red wine out of beer cans, we’ll take this hoppy, refreshingly juicy IPA any day. It’s surprisingly easy to drink even with its high ABV and is filled with subtle resin and tropical fruit flavors.

Brouwerij West – Bunny Fuku

ABV: 7.3%

The Story:

There’s a children’s song about “little bunny foo foo” who enjoys scooping up field mice and bopping them on the head. While this is a strangely violent song to sing to toddlers, the folks at Brouwerij West decided to take the whole thing one step further and redub the character “Bunny Fuku.”

This hazy homage to the anti-social rabbit was made with a slew of Nelson and Citra hops.

Tasting Notes (Mine):

Like getting knocked over the head by a psychotic bunny, this beer is ripe with hop flavor. Its hazy, juicy, and full of sweet orange, pineapple, peach, and subtly resinous hops.

Anchorage Brewing Company – The Elk Prince

ABV: 10.4%

The Story:

Triple IPAs are no joke and this royal brew is sitting at a potent 10.4% ABV. This double dry-hopped beer is made with Lotus, Southern Passion, Equinot, and Mosaic hops. The label features an elk wearing what appears to be a wolf’s skull on top of his head.

Tasting Notes (Mine):

You don’t have to be a king, prince, or even a lowly pauper to enjoy this delicious hop-fueled brew. This is truly a beer for fans of the resinous, pine-flavored ingredient. On top of the obvious hop presence, this IPA also features hints of mandarin oranges, papaya, and fresh pineapple.

Trap Door Brewing – Issa Trap

ABV: 5.2%

The Story:

This New England-style pale ale is one of the most well-loved beer labels of all time for a reason. That’s because the can is adorned with the squid-looking Admiral Ackbar who uttered the infamous line “It’s a trap” in The Return of the Jedi. Brewed with double dry-hopped Galaxy, Cashmere, and Citra Hops, it’s an explosion on par with the destruction of the Death Star.

Tasting Notes (From The Brewery):

Double dry hopping gives this beer an added kick of hops while mellowing out the bitterness. It’s highly crushable, thirst-quenching, and full of sweet pineapple, pear, and sharp citrus flavors.