Month: June 2021

Is a $1,000 ticket price worth sticking to an anti-vax mindset?

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has prohibited businesses from forcing patrons to prove vaccination — even though that’s the safest way for the country to economically recover from COVID-19 safely — but ornery promoters in the southern state have found a workaround. Even though DeSantis has signed the bill into law and threatened violators with steep fines, instead of barring unvaccinated patrons, show organizers are simply charging them more. An upcoming show for Wyoming-based rock band Teenage Bottlerocket is offering $18 for fans who can prove they got the poke — and charging a $999.99 ticket price for those who have willfully avoided it.

“I’m not denying entry to anyone,” the promoter, Paul Williams, told The Washington Post. “I’m just offering a discount.” The concert is planned for June 26th in St. Petersburg, shortly before DeSantis’ bill goes into effect, but even so, Williams didn’t think it would stir up the national interest and vitriol that it has. “I didn’t know that caring about my community would make me Hitler,” Williams continued, speaking to the influx of threats, spam calls, and anti-vax Facebook messages. One threatening email said this show could be the band’s “last” and further noted “you’re [sic] fans are going to kill you.”

After reporting the threatening email Williams was unfazed in his decision: “We’re still sticking to our guns.” To enter the show in a few weeks at the “discount” price, fans must show their ID and vaccination card. The show is currently sold out of discount tickets — none of the standard tickets were purchased. Read more political background on the story over at The Washington Post.

The Philadelphia 76ers visited the nation’s capital with a chance to close out the Washington Wizards in Game 4 on Monday evening. With Philadelphia leading the series by a 3-0 margin, the widespread assumption is that the top-seeded Sixers will move on but, at the same time, there is something to be said for avoiding a sweep and the Wizards managed to do just that with a 122-114 victory.

The 76ers came flying out of the gate, performing at a level reminiscent of the first three games of the series. Philadelphia took a 16-5 lead at the outset and, with the Wizards missing six of their first seven shots, the tone was anything but encouraging for Washington.

The Wizards did find their footing, though, and much of that can be attributed to the work of veteran center Robin Lopez. Lopez helped to key a 10-3 run late in the first quarter to bring Washington back in touch and, in his first 12 minutes of individual action, Lopez scored 14 points on 7-of-8 shooting to go along with effective defense.

Washington kept hanging around with impressive shotmaking from Davis Bertans and others, with Russell Westbrook finally tying the game on a monster put-back dunk late in the second quarter.

The home team took its first lead of the night in the final minute of the first half and, even with Danny Green converting a three-pointer in the final second to give Philadelphia the lead, Washington’s performance was encouraging. Then, the 76ers took a hit during the halftime break when All-NBA center Joel Embiid was ruled out due to right knee soreness after appearing for only 11 minutes in the first half.

Embiid’s absence, coupled with foul trouble for Ben Simmons, left the door open for the Wizards, and they started well after halftime. Washington scored the first six points of the third quarter, racing to their largest lead at 66-61.

The Wizards weren’t shy, either, as Rui Hachimura picked up a third quarter dunk… only to be called for what appeared to be a taunting technical foul.

Washington extended their lead to 12 by the end of third quarter, and it was an impressive period for the Wizards. They outscored Philadelphia by a 32-19 margin, shooting 50 percent from the floor (and 9-of-9 from the line) while holding the Sixers to just 35 percent shooting with five turnovers.Just as they seemed to be slipping considerably, Philadelphia awakened to begin the fourth quarter. The 76ers, led by seven quick points from Furkan Korkmaz and strong play from Tyrese Maxey, put together a 14-3 run, cutting the margin to 95-94 within the first three and a half minutes.

The Wizards kept control, though, and led for the vast majority of the fourth quarter. Then, the Sixers tied the game on a Danny Green tip-in with 4:05 to go, leaving the stretch run to explicitly decide the result.

The major subplot of crunch time stemmed from Ben Simmons at the free throw line. Washington intentionally fouled Simmons on three occasions and, though it wasn’t a total disaster in that Simmons converted three of his six attempts, the Wizards won the mini-battle by scoring regularly after his misses. When the two-minute mark arrived, the Wizards could no longer foul intentionally but, after a possession in which Philadelphia missed three shots and went scoreless, Washington generated a dunk to take a four-point lead with 1:16 remaining.

Philadelphia’s next possession also resulted in Simmons at the free throw line after a hard foul but, once again, he was only able to split his attempts. That set the stage for the eventual dagger when Hachimura buried a three-pointer to give the Wizards a 118-112 lead with 45.8 seconds to go.

Washington eventually secured the eight-point win, and it was an impressive effort. It must be acknowledged that Philadelphia simply isn’t the same without Embiid, but the Wizards received big-time contributions from Hachimura (20 points, 13 rebounds) and Bradley Beal (27 points) to aid in the win. From there, Westbrook produced a bizarre line, shooting just 3-of-19 from the floor but also grabbing 21 rebounds and dishing out 14 assists. Philadelphia’s scoring was quite balanced, in part due to star limitations, and Tobias Harris struggled to an 8-of-24 shooting night.

The best-of-seven series will continue on Wednesday with the scene shifting back to Philadelphia. In between games, all eyes will be on Embiid’s status, but Washington played hard and well in front of their home fans to force a Game 5.

Storytellers like Jay Z are few and far between.

When he’s not dropping hilarious stories about his superstar peers, like remembering how hard it was to follow up DMX as a live act, or sharing backstories about classic rap songs he actually wrote, then there’s the subject of his incredibly famous family. That was the subject of his latest viral tidbit from an episode of LeBron James’ The Shop: Uninterrupted, when Jay let know that he never learned to swim until Blue Ivy was born. To his thinking, there wasn’t much point before, but once her life was in his hands, his reasoning changed.

“I didn’t learn how to swim until Blue was born,” he began. “There goes everything you need to know. This is a metaphor for our relationship. If she ever fell in the water and I couldn’t get her, I couldn’t even fathom that thought. I gotta learn how to swim. That’s it. That was the beginning of our relationship.”

In the clip above, he goes on to speak more specifically to how small moments with her are how he now celebrates huge wins like finding out he was officially going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Check out the snippet and for more Jay Z stories watch full episodes of The Shop on HBO.

Marina has already let fans know that her forthcoming fifth album will feature the contradictory title Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land, and shared the hypnotizing single of the same name. Along with “Man’s World” (plus its arresting remix featuring Empress Of and Pabllo Vittar) and “Purge The Poison,” that was all the information fans had about the upcoming project, but today the Welsh pop star let fans even deeper into her process.

Sharing a clip of demos on what looks to be her own computer, Marina let listeners hear a small portion of an upcoming single, “New America,” and shared some key lyrics from the track. “F*cked with the food chain / F*cked with the farming too,” she wrote in the post’s caption, and those are the lyrics she’s singing in the snippet as well. As her earlier singers addressed topics like gender inequality in the engineering and production side of the music industry (“Man’s World”) and the title track deals with climate change, so too this song seems focused on how factory farming and human interference into natural ecosystems has wrecked havoc on the earth’s internal balance.

Since the album is out in just a few short weeks, it’s unclear if this will be another single, or if she’s simply teasing the entire project. One thing’s for sure, this will be Marina’s most political album to date — check out the clip below.

Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land is out 6/11 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

While the 2021 NBA Playoffs are proving entertainment to millions, the league is dealing with in-arena issues that are not related to the basketball product. Within the last week, Celtics Kyrie Irving guard was nearly struck by a water bottle thrown by a fan, Wizards guard Russell Westbrook had popcorn dumped on his head, Jazz fans made racist comments to Ja Morant’s family, and Hawks guard Trae Young was spit on by a fan in New York. On Monday, yet another incident occurred during the third quarter of Game 4 between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Washington Wizards.

With 3:40 remaining in the third quarter, play was stopped during live action as a fan attempted to charge the floor (and touch the backboard) before being tackled by security.

The reverse angle shows him jumping at the backboard for some reason before he gets form tackled by the officer on the baseline.

A fan in the upper deck caught the moment he darted from the stands off to the side onto the court, meeting little deterrent until he finally got tackled.

The fan was quickly removed from the area.

And, from there, he was seen being arrested in short order in the tunnel.

The TNT broadcast made sure to pivot away from showing the fan on camera, following the precedent shown by broadcast networks over decades as to not provide spotlight for these individuals. Still, this is a troubling scene, and it is a good thing that the local security personnel were able to prevent a potential disaster. It remains to be seen as to whether the NBA will implement any further measures with this recent uptick in ugly fan behavior, but it is a storyline that no one in the league can be thrilled with as the postseason continues.

UPDATE: The fan has been banned from the arena and charges are being pursued by the Washington D.C. police.

While much of America was enjoying a much more relaxing Memorial Day than the one last year, conservatives were doing the opposite. They were, in short, a mess. Fox News turned a simple Kamala Harris tweet into culture war nonsense. Texan Republicans tried to ram through voter suppression legislation. Matt Gaetz claimed he got scammed out of hundreds of thousands and got tricked into praising Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, and Chuck Woolery tweeted something bizarre about Hitler.

The game show host-turned-far right mouthpiece waited till the day itself to educate people about something he seems to have recently learned, which, as it happens, was largely incorrect, overly simplified, and, in one case, misspelled.

“Critical Race theory is based on Critical theory, given to the world by Marxists from the Frankfort School in Germany,” Woolery wrote. “When Hitler cracked down on them they moved. Yes they moved to Columbia University in NYC and they remain there to this day.”

First off, it’s Frankfurt School, with a “u,” which were a group of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents who were horrified by the rise of fascism across Europe. For another, Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory — the latter of which first emerged in the 1970s in America — are not the same thing, though the latter is partly rooted in the former. There are more issues to take with Woolery’s tweet, but it’s clear he’d either forgotten some key bits of info or didn’t do sufficient research to get it right.

Then there was the Hitler part of the tweet. Was Woolery’s point that…Hitler was right to kick the Critical Theory crowd out of Europe? Who’s the bad guy or guys here? In any case, people on social media couldn’t believe the former host of Love Connection was doing a “gotta hand it to him” about the leader of the Third Reich.

Some wondered if Woolery will learn some other interesting Hitler factoids while he’s at it.

Some mocked his poor phrasing, which suggested some of these philosophers from the ‘30s are still with us, hanging out in New York City.

Others pointed out that Woolery has a strange habit of tweeting weird political stuff on Memorial Day.

And he has other, shall we say, questionable beliefs on top of this.

The Philadelphia 76ers started Game 4 with a hot start, taking a healthy lead early on at 20-12 and it looked like they were well on their way to a sweep of the Wizards. However, with four minutes to play in the first quarter, Joel Embiid got blocked on a drive by Robin Lopez and crashed hard to the floor, causing him to get up holding his lower back/tailbone area and getting up gingerly.

Embiid would stay in for a bit, playing 11 minutes in the first half, but later left the game for the locker room with what most assumed was an issue from that fall. As the second quarter wore on and Embiid did not re-enter the game, there was concern about what he was dealing with, and the official diagnosis from the Sixers was not what anyone expected. At halftime, the team announced that the All-NBA center would not return to Game 4 with right knee soreness.

It isn’t clear whether the knee soreness was an issue from the way he landed — he did have his right leg land just before his left prior to falling — or if it happened at another point after that, but it is clearly bothering him enough to keep him out of action. Without Embiid, the Wizards were able to rally back to take the lead briefly before a Danny Green three gave Philadelphia a one-point halftime edge. Ben Simmons likewise played sparingly in the first half due to foul trouble, but the load will now shift heavily onto Simmons and Tobias Harris to create offensively as they will have to look to close out the Wizards without the services of their MVP candidate, who everyone hopes is being held out for caution and not with an issue that will linger long-term.

The rise of Rico Nasty has been one of the most interesting happenings in rap over the last few years, and the screamo rapper is by no means done breaking down barriers. Covering everything from pop-punk to trap on her debut album, last year’s Nightmare Vacation, Rico let fans know this weekend that they could expect something new by summer of 2021. With a cryptic Instagram post of two prescription bottles in a glowing hand, with the RX made out to Rico herself with “unlimited refills,” the rapper captioned the image: “Rx . This summer ” and tagged the artist, Karli Fetz.

For her part, the artist re-shared the post on Instagram with the following caption: “Dream come true for me. this summer, @riconasty x karlifetz,” they wrote on Instagram. “I can’t tell you much but just know we haven’t even started.” When a fan commented asking it his meant an album was on the way, the artist responded with the eyes emoji, an indication that Fetz knows more than they can say right now.

If you’re still unfamiliar with exactly who Rico Nasty is and what she has up her sleeve as an artist and performer, check out our mini-doc on Rico right here. And keep an ear out for more music coming this summer, which is just around the corner.

Things aren’t so great for Matt Gaetz right now. Since March, it’s been public knowledge that he’s under federal investigation for his ties to an alleged sex trafficking ring. He also claimed he got scammed while buying a pricey boat. But on Memorial Day, he added another ignominious honor to his CV: He, and some other noted Republicans, got tricked into honoring the military service of JFK murderer Lee Harvey Oswald.

It’s all thanks to Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein, who occasionally likes to troll noted rightwingers by asking them to retweet an image of one of his ancestors in uniform. Sometimes he claims it’s his grandpa, sometimes it’s his uncle. But it’s actually Oswald, who served in the Marines before perching inside a Dallas book depository and firing three shots at John F. Kennedy, making him one of four American presidents who’ve been assassinated.

On Monday, Klippenstein did it again, tagging a group of conservatives, writing, “My grandpa’s a big fan of yours and is a veteran, he would be thrilled if you could RT this photo of him for Memorial Day,” seeing who would fall for it. This time his victims were Gaetz, pundit and pardoned ex-con Dinesh D’Souza, and lobbyist Matt Schlapp.

Gaetz was quick to realize his error and delete the tweet. But it had already been screengrabbed and disseminated.

After Gaetz re-tweeted the image of Oswald, Klippenstein changed his handle to “Matt Gaetz is a pedo,” which for a while sat near the top of his Twitter feed.

But Gaetz wasn’t the only one who bit.

To add insult to injury, people pointed out that none of the people retweeting a picture of JFK’s killer actually served in the military themselves.

Candace Owens also got in on it. She didn’t fall for it. Rather, she accused Klippenstein of “photoshopping” Oswald into a uniform, evidently not knowing about his military service.

Again, Klippenstein does this a lot. According to Raw Story:

In 2019, he tricked former Rep. Steve King (R-IA) into wishing a happy Independence Day to his “uncle,” fictional Marine Col. Nathan Jessup from “A Few Good Men,” and then for good measure, changed his Twitter name to “Steve King is a white supremacist” so that phrase would show up on the congressman’s page. And in 2020, he fooled former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell into bidding a happy Veterans Day to his “grandpa” Bill Calley, the war criminal behind the Mỹ Lai massacre.

So you’ll just have to wait and see who falls for this the next time Klippenstein does it.

(Via Raw Story)

One Direction might be over, well, for now at least, but the Directioners live forever. The avid fanbase have mostly turned their attention to the blossoming career of Harry Styles, who has emerged as the de facto star of the beloved boy band, and it was an eagle-eyed fan who first spotted what might be massive news in the greater Styles universe. According to a filing document first noticed by fan account Harry Styles Updates (@TheHarryNews) the British star is liking in the process of launching his own fragrance line.

Harry is listed as the director of the new company, and the account shares the name as “PLEASED AS HOLDINGS LIMITED,” though that title isn’t shared on the paperwork they posted, Page Six did confirm it and noted that Harry’s long-time assistant, Emma Spring, is listed as the co-director. Again, that information isn’t shared in the initial screenshot.

As for the nature of the business, “wholesale of perfume and cosmetics” is on the screenshot, indicating that a Styles perfume, along with, potentially, makeup (!) is going to hit stores soon. As for the title the tweet shared, it also kind of sound slike a placeholder to me, so who knows if we’re going to be getting “Watermelon Sugar” lipstick or “Sweet Creature” eyeliner sometime soon. Oh and while you’re busy jumping in the beauty game, Harry, mind giving us a new song or two as well? Check out the screenshot above and keep an eye out for more news on the Harry Styles Industrial Complex very soon.