Month: April 2021

Even though it ran longer than even most Martin Scorsese movies, the “Snyder cut” of Justice League seems to have gone down pretty well. It got (mostly) good reviews, a lot of people watched it, and there was nothing like the furor that descended upon another Zack Snyder picture: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. That one grossed a pretty penny back in 2016, but it was roundly criticized for its relentless doom and/or gloom. But we now know that it was almost a teensy bit doomier and gloomier.

According to /Film, Snyder and co-writer Chris Terrio appeared at Justice Con over the weekend, and they got to talking about that title, which was also a sticking point for many, earning widespread social media mockery upon its reveal. Thing is, Snyder and Terrior agree: It’s not a great title, and it wasn’t theirs. Not that their attempts at naming their epic superhero grudgefest was much better.

“I remember when there was a back-and-forth that I had with the studio, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was like the only title that [Warner Bros. liked],” Snyder told the crowd. “The whole ‘v’ instead of ‘versus,’ it was like this crazy negotiation. I was like, ‘Guys, can’t we just do something like Son of Sun and Knight of Night, or something that’s a little bit more poetic?’ And they were like, ‘Absolutely not’ [Laughs]. I was like, ‘Is it a court case?’”

But there were other title ideas, which admittedly were less pretentious than Son of Sun and Knight of Night. One angle execs considered was not calling it “Batman v Superman” at all. Instead, they thought about prematurely leaning into the ensemble team that wouldn’t assemble for another year. They thought about calling it Justice League: Foundations or Justice League: Rising — an attempt, Terrio said, to “suggest that this movie was going to be the beginning of the Justice League, even though it didn’t really look like it.”

Terrio has already talked about how he doesn’t like the title they went with. “I did not name the script,” he recently told Vanity Fair. “In fact, I found out what the movie was called along with the rest of the world on the internet. I was not consulted on the title of the film, and I was as surprised as anyone. I would not have named it Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I don’t know exactly who named it, but I suspect it was the studio and I suspect it was marketing, to be honest with you. It might have been the first step toward creating ill will for the film…I heard it and I thought, it just sounds self-important and clueless in a way. Tone-deaf. The intention of the film was to do something interesting and dark and complex, not quite as Las Vegas, bust ’em up, WWE match as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

Still, imagine a timeline in which you walked up to a movie theater cashier and uttered the words “Son of Sun and Knight of Night.”

(Via /Film)

Stephen Curry entered Monday night’s nationally televised tilt against the Philadelphia 76ers in the midst of a sensational hot streak. After missing five games in late March, Curry scored at least 30 points in ten straight appearances, and he converted ten three-pointers or more in three of the previous four games. With that in mind, it would’ve been fair to suggest that Curry was due for something of a cooling period but, after a barrage of ridiculousness against his brother Seth and the 76ers, observers will have to wait a bit longer for Steph to return to Earth.

Curry led the Warriors to an upset victory over Philadelphia, prevailing by a final score of 107-96 on the road. Along the way, he knocked down ten three-pointers once again, and he walked off the floor after a 49-point performance with a newfound buzz in NBA MVP discussions.

Prior to the fourth quarter, Curry’s performance was an exercise in consistency, as he scored 11 points, including a trio of three-pointers in the opening period. The final connection came at the first quarter buzzer.

Curry followed that up with nine points in the second quarter, reaching 20 at the half, but he obviously wasn’t done just yet. Curry did have his coolest shooting stretch of the night in the third period, but he still managed to score nine points and, in playing the entire 12-minute quarter, he was key in Golden State taking a five-point advantage.

Then, the fourth quarter arrived and Curry was, well, ridiculous. The two-time NBA MVP connected on all five of his three-point attempts in the closing period, making dominance look effortless.

Not only did Curry stuff the stat sheet with 20 points in fewer than seven (!) minutes of court time in the fourth quarter, but he put the game away with his brilliance.

When the final buzzer sounded, he racked up 49 points on 14-of-28 shooting, with 10-of-17 from three and 11-of-12 from the free throw line, adding five assists along the way. Fittingly, Curry’s showing ended with MVP chants reigning down while he was at the free throw line… on the road in the house of an MVP candidate in Embiid.

The win brings Golden State to just 29-29 on the season, and that type of team performance does not usually yield MVP consideration to a particular player. In this case, though, the Warriors are staggeringly better when Curry is on the floor, and this recent stretch of 30-point games, coupled with shooting that no player in history can match, might vault him back into the discussion. At the very least, Curry put on quite a show on Monday, and the Warriors picked up a needed win in the process.

Kobe Bryant completed a 20-year career with a single team, appearing in more than 1,500 games for the Los Angeles Lakers between the regular season and the playoffs. In that two-decade run, he amassed five NBA championships, 18 NBA All-Star appearances and a laundry list of accolades, and Bryant’s connection with the Lakers organization and fan base remains legendary. With that as the backdrop, there has plenty of speculation that Bryant almost ended up with the Los Angeles Clippers back in 2004, and that was a topic discussed recently by Lakers owner Jeannie Buss.

Buss joined All the Smoke with Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, and she was asked just how close Bryant came to landing with the other NBA tenant of STAPLES Center.

“I never had that conversation with Kobe, but there was a game where he wore Clippers colors,” Buss said. “Not even the jersey, the colors. Very subtle. And I’m like, ‘He loves challenges,’ and that would have been a huge thing. I do think that was something that was very possible.”

In 2016, Bryant himself acknowledged that he was “very close” to signing with the Clippers in free agency, so it isn’t as if this is a mythical tale of some sort. In fact, it didn’t seem certain in 2004 that he would stick around with the Lakers, though Los Angeles ended up trading Shaquille O’Neal to the Miami Heat between the 2003-04 and 2004-05 seasons. Whether that was the move that directly paved the way for Bryant re-signing is up for some debate, but he did put pen to paper almost immediatly after Shaq was dealt.

Imagining Bryant in a uniform other than that of the Lakers is jarring, which Buss, Barnes and Jackson all acknowledge in their discussion. That is especially true when considering where the Clippers were in 2004 (coming off a 28-54 season), but Bryant would win two more titles with the Lakers and retire as one of the greats of all-time. The free agency of 2004 remains an all-time “what if” but happily for the Lakers, it is just that, a hypothetical.

America’s ethnic wealth gap is a multi-faceted problem that would take dramatic action, on multiple fronts, to overcome. One of the ways to help communities improve their economic well-being is through financial literacy.

Investopedia says there are five primary sources of financial education—families, high school, college, employers, and the military — and that education and household income are two of the biggest factors in predicting whether someone has a high level of financial literacy.

New Orleans Saints safety, two-time Super Bowl Champion, and social justice activist Malcolm Jenkins and The Malcolm Jenkins Foundation hope to help bridge the wealth gap by teaching students about investing at a young age.

“It’s projected that by 2053 that African Americans will have on average a negative net worth, with Hispanics being right behind,” Jenkins said according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “How do we begin to chip away at that? The earlier you can get kids focused on saving money and investing and understanding how to make money, the better off you are.”

So Jenkins and his foundation are giving $40 investment account deposits to 1,000 students in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Louisiana. The Ogontz Revitalization Corporation will donate an additional $10 per student, bringing the total to $50.

The accounts are run by Goalsetter, a Black-owned family banking, and financial literacy app.

The students will not be able to withdraw the funds until they are 18 but can add to them all they like. In addition to the ability to save and invest, the Goalsetter App offers an engaging way for kids to learn about money.

The app provides five years of financial literacy tools, kid-friendly educational games, and fun quizzes.

via Goalsetter

There’s no better way to learn about a subject than by doing. Which, when it comes to finances, can be nearly impossible if you’re underprivileged. These accounts give kids the ability to watch their financial seeds grow over the years and create a habit of saving that will hopefully last throughout their lifetimes.

“Malcolm is saying, ‘I want you to know that this is for the long term. You’re going to be saving for your future because you do have a future and it’s a future that we’re going to help to prepare you for,’ ” Tanya Van Court, founder, and chief executive of Goalsetter, said.

Jenkins believes that financial literacy shouldn’t aim for stability but go the extra mile and focus on building wealth.

“I was always taught that if you work hard and that if you save your money that that creates financial freedom and financial stability, and that’s not how it works,” Jenkins told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“That’s not how you gain freedom. It comes through investing. It comes in making good decisions. It comes from estate planning. Life insurance,” he continued. “All of these different financial tools that are out there to create wealth for people. It’s really about creating that education as early as possible so you create the next generation of financially stable people.”

Most of what we hear about climate change are the challenges and potential disasters it will lead to if not mitigated. What we hear less about are the odd ways in which it’s already altering our world—sometimes in big, visible ways.

Since satellites began recording Arctic sea ice levels in 1979, scientists have expressed concern about the melting ice. Not only does the planet rely on Arctic ice for regulating weather patterns, but wildlife who call the Arctic their home rely on it for survival. Polar bears are considered vulnerable to the impact of climate change, and though their numbers are holding fairly steady overall, their movement patterns are changing as their icy habitat melts.

At the same time, the movement patterns of their southern cousins, grizzly bears, are also changing. Grizzlies can be found as far south as Wyoming and up north in Alaska. But as global temperatures rise, grizzlies have moved farther north, even going as far as the high Arctic.

With polar bears moving south to find land and grizzly bears moving north to find colder temps, the two are crossing paths. The birds and the bees habit applies to bears, and since polar bears and grizzly bears share similar DNA, they are able to breed.

And they have. Hence the hybrid species known as the “pizzly bear.” Also known as “grolar bear”. Also known as “polizzly.” (If we have to deal with a climate emergency, we can at least take a moment to appreciate getting the word polizzly out of it.)

In all seriousness, though, the emergence of the pizzly bear hybrid is a sign of climate change’s impact. The first pizzly bear was officially identified in the wild in 2006, though people who live in the Arctic had reported sightings of the strange-looking bear prior to that.

As the Associated Press reported at the time:

“Northern hunters, scientists and people with vivid imaginations have discussed the possibility for years.

But Roger Kuptana, an Inuvialuit guide from Sachs Harbour, North West Territories, was the first to suspect it had actually happened when he proposed that a strange-looking bear shot last month by an American sports hunter might be half polar bear, half grizzly.

Territorial officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid — possibly the first documented in the wild.”

Since then, eight more pizzly bears have been identified in the wild, and as of 2017 researchers had determined that all of them sprung from one female polar bear who had mated with two different grizzly bears. However, it’s unknown how many of the hybrid bears may actually exist.

Prior to their discovery in the wild, researchers knew that polar bears and grizzly bears could mate because they had already done so at Osnabrück Zoo in Germany. That zoo had kept their polar bears and grizzly bears in the same enclosure, and in 2004, two pizzly bear cubs were born. (Unfortunately, one of them was shot and killed in 2017 after she escaped from her enclosure.)

Rare Hybrid Bear of Polar Bear and Grizzly Bear

www.youtube.com

Larissa DeSantis, a paleontologist and associate professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told The Independent that climate change “was definitely playing a role” bears cross-breeding. DeSantis studies the dietary habits of bears and how the climate crisis is impacting them.

“We need to study the effects of hybridization on these bears,” De Santis said. “Most of the time hybrids are not more vigorous than either of the two species, as grizzlies and brown bears have unique adaptations for their particular environments. However, there are a few examples where hybrids can be more vigorous and better able to adapt to a particular environment, particularly if the environment is deviating from what it once was. This requires further study and careful monitoring. Time will tell if these hybrids are better able to withstand a warming Arctic. These hybrids might be better suited for a broader range of food sources, like the grizzly bear, and in contrast to polar bears which are hyper-specialized.”

DeSantis says there is evidence that the pizzly bear hybrids are fertile, and there have been matings between a hybrid and a grizzly.

“This new type of bear is more resistant to climate change and better suited to warmer temperatures,” said DeSantis. So we may see more of these hybridizations, which would be kind of cool from a biological standpoint and a bad sign from an ecological standpoint. Hard to celebrate a new species when it’s a result of a crisis.

They sure are cute, though.

For years, Kobe Bryant’s signature sneaker line was among Nike’s most popular, both during his playing career and after his retirement. Over the past year-plus since his tragic death, Nike has continued to release Kobe retro releases to great fanfare, but it appears 2021 might be the last year for Nike’s Kobe line.

According to Brandon Dunne of Complex, Nike’s deal with Bryant expired on April 13 and a renewal deal has not been reached with Bryant’s estate, which could signal the end of Nike’s Kobe line of signature sneakers. It’s still possible the Bryant estate will work out a new contract with Nike, but that the deal ran up without a new contract being worked out would seem to indicate there is a very real difference in what the estate wants and what Nike is offering. Nick DePaula of ESPN confirmed that report and said that, for now, Nike’s Kobe line is done.

What comes next is a matter of waiting to learn whether Nike will come forward with a new deal, if the Kobe estate will look elsewhere (like Adidas, which was the first sneaker company he had a signature with), or if they will simply move altogether to no longer allow for Kobe sneakers to use his name anywhere on the marketplace.

That last option is always a possibility and would be a more than respectable one.Immediately after his death, Nike removed Kobe merchandise from its website to avoid looking as if they were profiting off of his passing and to prevent others from doing the same by reselling Kobe sneakers and clothing. However, the chase for Kobe retros has still been tremenous and the way they’ve been moved on the secondary market at massive markups has, even more than the normal sneaker marketplace, felt wrong as Kobe fans are often priced out by resellers and others who use bots to gobble up available pairs before many can get them at retail.

Remember when some people used to spread baseless voter fraud lies on the regular? It’s been a while since we’ve heard much of that, in part because most of those making those claims were either threatened with lawsuits or are in the midst of being sued. About the only one still going strong is Mike Lindell, aka the MyPillow Guy, who has bet his company and fortune on byzantine 2020 election conspiracy theories, which have even gotten him sued by one of the voter machine companies he’s accused of malfeasance. But now he’s escalating this beef even further.

According to Bloomberg, Lindell is countersuing Dominion Voting Systems Inc., which has been among the parties involved in his nonsensical voter fraud claims. Previously, after months of telling him to shut up or lose everything, the company finally sued him for $1.3 billion. But Lindell is going a few notches further, suing them for $1.6 billion.

“Dominion’s purpose is to silence debate; to eliminate any challenge to the 2020 presidential election; and to cancel and destroy anyone who speaks out against Dominion’s work on behalf of the government in administering the election,” read the legal complaint, doubling (tripling? quadrupling?) down on unfounded accusations that they flipped votes intended for Trump, handing them to current president Joe Biden.

But Dominion isn’t blinking. “This is a meritless retaliatory lawsuit, filed by MyPillow to try to distract from the harm it caused to Dominion,” a company lawyer said in a statement.

Lindell isn’t the only Trump loyalist who’s been sued over election fraud lies. Lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sandy Powell have been served papers as well, as have commentators on Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN. But none of them have tried to engage them in a game of Chicken.

How does Lindell find time to do all this? Last week he oversaw a disastrous debut of his new “free speech” social media site, while a 48-hour telethon saw him getting owned again and again by prank callers, one pretending to be former president Trump.

(Via Bloomberg)

Rumors linking Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens to the Indiana Hoosiers probably could have ended when the university tabbed former Hawks and Knicks head coach Mike Woodson to lead the program. However, another log was thrown on the fire over the weekend when Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that Indiana lobbed a seven-year, $70 million offer in Stevens’ direction, only to see him turn it down to stay in Boston. On Monday, though, Stevens denied that any such offer took place.

“First of all I was never offered a package,” Stevens told reporters on Monday. “That’s all news to me.”

Later, Stevens again said “I was never offered that” and “I don’t know where that came from,” while continuing to insist he’s enjoying coaching the Celtics — early in the Indiana coaching search when rumors swirled, he explained how he’s become a full-on Masshole and wasn’t leaving Boston. On one hand, this is the only move for Stevens, especially as his Boston team is rounding into form after impressive recent play. The quickest way to make the story go away, potentially once and for all, is to attempt to pour even more cold water on it, and a full-on denial like this does the job.

On the other side, it is an oddly specific report from one of the leading reporters in the basketball world, and Wojnarowski doesn’t just throw things around lightly. Beyond that, a $70 million offers at any level, much less for a college program, would create shockwaves for anyone. Needless to say, it won’t surprise anyone if Stevens is the top name on the call sheet at Indiana should Woodson not pan out, especially if it coincides with anything resembling a downturn with the Celtics.

The Houston Rockets arrived in Miami on Sunday ahead of their Monday game against the Heat, and their first night in Miami proved to be a scary one for guard Sterling Brown.

The team announced in a brief statement that Brown was assaulted by unknown assailants on Sunday night and suffered “facial lacerations.”

“Last night, Sterling Brown was the victim of an assault. He had no prior knowledge of or interaction with the assailants. He suffered facial lacerations but will make a full recovery. Sterling is not playing tonight because of his prior knee injury.”

As noted, Brown was already ruled out due to a knee injury and further details of the assault are unknown at the time, but the good news is Brown is expected to be OK. It is not the first time Brown has been injured in an off court incident outside his control, as he was tased by Milwaukee police outside of a Walgreens over a parking violation and then had his ankle stepped on and injured by an officer while playing for the Bucks. Brown settled a civil rights lawsuit with the city for $750,000 last November.

If any further details on Brown’s assault are reported we will update here, but for now the hope is Brown will make a quick and speedy recovery.

The Indiana Pacers started the 2020-21 season tremendously, thanks in part to the tremendous play of Myles Turner who emerged as an early DPOY frontrunner and was raining threes at a career-high clip. However, the Pacers cooled off considerably, particularly during a portion of the season with their top wing scorers out due to injury, and now Indiana sits at 26-30, ninth in the East with a three game cushion on 10th and two games back of eighth.

They will likely reach the play-in tournament, but being the 8-seed rather than the 9-seed offers a much easier road of only needing one, not two wins to make the playoffs. The road to getting to that spot got much tougher on Monday when an MRI revealed that Turner has suffered a plantar plate tear in his right foot that will put him on the shelf indefinitely.

Turner has averaged 12.6 points, 6.5 rebounds, and a league-leading 3.4 blocks per game this season, cooling off from three after a hot start. Losing Turner puts a serious damper on hopes of a late push from Indiana to jump into the top 8 in the East, as it leaves a big frontcourt hole to fill on the roster. In a season that has been filled with unfortunate injuries to key players around the league, Turner is the latest to join the list and the Pacers will continue searching for answers in a frustrating season.