If you’re reading this, you’re (probably) a human, which means you (probably) experience ranges of emotions and feels in your life. In other words, you are likely a Bon Iver fan.
Following a five-year hiatus, Bon Iver recently announced plans to release their new record 22, A Million on Sept. 30. The band also celebrated and promoted the album by releasing two tracks on various streaming services: “22 (OVER S∞∞N) [Bob Moose Extended Cab Version]” and “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠ (Extended Version).” And yes, we promise those are sincere and real track listings. (In truth, we kind of dig them.)
But if you’re eager, you can check out the album in its entirety now. SPIN Magazine has made their stream of Bon Iver’s set at the Eaux Claire Music Fesival, where all of 22, A Million was performed and made available to the public. The band also played older tracks “Minnesota, WI” and “Beth/Rest” during an encore. Prepare to stroke them chin pubes–hard.
If you’ll allow us to go all Zagat’s on you for a minute, it was only a few months ago that Larry Wilmore “killed” at the Whitehouse Correspondents’ Dinner with his “burns” that “really went there.” Really, no one was spared. This is part of the reason the world will miss Larry Wilmore’s show
He roasted the President on his drone usage by comparing him to Steph Curry—both rain bombs from long distance. He owned former NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams by comparing himself to Lester Holt—both were black men who replaced white dudes pretending to be newsmen. And went after then-Republican presidential nominee Ted Cruz—“Even OJ Simpson said, ‘That guy is just hard to like.’ ” Wilmore wasn’t just a guy happy to be there. His mission was clear: He wanted to be the funniest man in the room and call out many of those running in Washington circles, be it media, politicians, or activists. He succeeded.
How strange, though, that so many seemed surprised by Wilmore’s vitriolic satire? As if he wasn’t delivering those same goods on a, yes, nightly basis on his Comedy Central show? His White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech served more as a showcase of his goods than a coming-out party.
By now you’ve likely heard the unfortunate news: Comedy Central has canceled Wilmore’s The Nightly Show. According to CC President Kent Alterman, the show “hasn’t resonated with our audience.”
“We’ve been monitoring it closely as for a year and a half now and we haven’t seen the signs we need in ratings or in consumption on digital platforms. We’ve been been hoping it would grow,” Alterman told Variety.
“I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity,” Wilmore added in a statement. “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”
We, too, are quite saddened and surprised.
Within the past months, Wilmore’s show had taken a step; the wandering hands and awkward pauses the show debuted with had long faded away. In their place was a confident host who on any night could score 40 points on his own or set up team members with excellent shots to shine; he often did both. Take for example his team labeling the show’s coverage of the 2016 president election as “Blacklash 2016: The Unblackening,” casting Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as Godzilla creatures destroying all of us in their pursuit of power. Not only is that hilariously incendiary, it also feels accurate.
Few shows running could feature a segment that had military veterans giving the finger to Donald Trump, sideswipe USA Today, expose Trump acolytes manipulating media narratives, then kick it to a correspondent spoofing that very same thing? Sure, it was out of the Jon Stewart playbook, but from a wholly different and underserved perspective. Then, lest you think he was beating up easy targets, he could poke fun at the “overcelebration” to Michelle Obama’s highly regarded speech at the Democratic National Convention and the women subsequently obsessed with getting themselves “a house that slaves built” as a result.
Wilmore was never afraid to call in reinforcements. Or, rather, allow friends of the show to use the Comedy Central platform to get something off their chests. Like when rapper Mac Miller walked from backstage like a spirit possessed his soul to rant about Donald Trump. Or when he brought on acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to drop the mic on not-at-all acclaimed flat-earth theorist B.o.B.?
A cynical person might view these cameos as plays at virality—and they are viral hits—but what late-night show host isn’t chasing that in 2016? Better question: How many late-nigh hosts could do so without kitschy sketches and carnival games featuring celebrities? How many hosts are aiming to entertain and inform? Not many.
Really that’s who Wilmore was — and will always be: A serious, for-adults comedian unafraid to tell it like it is. The show’s best segment involved three to four guests accomplishing the radical achievement of just having a conversation. Most times, like adults. And like adults that involved the conversation reaching uncomfortable tensions and bruised feelings, but it never devolved into a shouting match of right vs. wrong.
Champions of the Internet often say they love the technology because it allows individuals of various backgrounds to hold discourse. Whether you personally believe that happens or not is up to you. But that ideal was very much happening on Wilmore’s show. Bill Nye the Science Guy discussing with a younger generation how the universe would flip upside down if we learned life came from Mars—while they responded, cool, but Trump still might be President so….
And maybe we’re blowing this out of proportion, but where else could former late night host Arsenio Hall casually relay the story of what he told Trump and what people really thought of his hair: “They don’t think your hair ain’t real, they just think it’s fucked up.”
So, yeah, Larry Wilmore’s departure stings within the late-night circuit. It comes too soon. He never placated, he never deferred, and he never pandered. It was a show for adults that in a previous era would be gifted more time necessary to grow its audience. But that’s not the era we’re in unfortunately. The world will miss Larry Wilmore’s show.
Say what you will about Hello Kitty, but the freakishly big-headed cat has the power to leave small children drowning in their own tears. It’s what reportedly happened in Chicago recently, when the Hello Kitty Cafe, a fancy, bright pink food truck, came to Oak Brook.
According to The Chicago Tribune, the entire Hello Kitty-themed menu— featuring sugary treats such as macarons, cookies, cakes, and other things that turn kids into little monsters — sold out in record time, crushing many of the approximately 2,000 people who had waited up to five hours in line. (One woman drove for five hours just to wait in line for another five.)
It didn’t take long before some of the die-hard fans turned ugly, focusing their attention on Facebook to give the proprietors a piece of their mind. Comments range from…
Poorly organized!!! Waited in line for 4 hours and you just let us all stand there without notifying the people In line you are about to sell out!! Poorly done Sanrio!!!!!
to…
All my 11 year old wanted was a tshirt! We wasted over 2 hours in line and walked away without any thing.
Photos of sad kids were also reportedly posted, including one of a young girl giving her goodies to a crying child.
It wasn’t until the next day that the Hello Kitty Cafe used the phrase “while supplies last” on Facebook and Twitter:
From the comments, it seems like more adults got their feelings hurt than the kids they dragged out of bed before dawn. Dear Parents: we’re pretty sure no child wants a bow-tie shaped water bottle that badly.
You know what most people don’t want to eat? Prison food. And while the cuisine will likely never find its place on the Food Network (“Duuuuude! ‘Riding the Chain to Flavortown’ would be such a money show, amiright?”— Guy Fieri) expectations are particularly crushed for pampered celebrities sentenced behind bars. But celebrities eat just like us in prison!
The latest sub-zero-star review comes from former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, who says he sustained himself on nothing but oranges for the first week of his 15 day sentence to avoid moldy prison food (orange really is the new black). But two weeks is just an eye-roll for most of these celebrities who had to endure a much longer reprieve from the private-chef meals they grew accustomed to.
Photo by Flickr user Keith Allison
1. Martha Stewart: Even though she dropped 10 pounds by avoiding bad prison food (that her daughter described as worse than airplane food if you can imagine!) while she was in the clink for insider trading, she likely had access to above average food at Camp Cupcake, including a salad bar. Still, Stewart hated prison food so much that she reportedly swiped eggs from the dining hall and made egg salad to share with her prison friends.
2. Teresa Giudice:The RHONJ starand cookbook author claims inmates were served expired food and maggots — in addition to beans and franks and other cafeteria-style food stuffs— during her year-long stint in the slammer for multiple fraud charges .
3. Ja Rule: The rapper is one of the only celebrities who didn’t hate prison food. While serving time for gun possession and tax evasion, Mr. Rule says he ate “pretty decent” behind bars because he got crafty in his dorm, making things like lasagne and cheesecake. He says he didn’t really eat prison food at all. Still, how about we try not to go back for seconds, eh?
Photo by Digo 015 via Wikimedia Commons
4. Lindsay Lohan: After violating probation for a DUI in 2010, LiLo served 14 days in solitary confinement, where it’s reported she was allowed to order outside food and have special items delivered to the jail that weren’t available to other inmates. Nonetheless, the ginger jailbird recalls her experience as “jarring”.
5. Paris Hilton: The pampered socialite told Larry King that the food she was offered during her 23-day lockup for violating probation was horrible: “It was jail food; it’s not supposed to be good. Lunch was basically a bologna sandwich. They call it mystery meat. It’s pretty scary. Two pieces of bread and some mayonnaise.” Raise your hand if you think she actually took one bite of that.
6. O.J. Simpson: America’s most controversial criminal has literally been through thick and thin behind bars, tipping the scales at a whopping 300 pounds. Inmates say he’s addicted to commissary junk food, which he reportedly piles into his fat face while binging on TV. Simpson has claimed he wants to shed weight to look good for the ladies (swoon), but new reports have surfaced accusing Simpson of hiring a prison “servant” to cook him fried chicken in his cell, which is not at all legal. But, hey, this is O.J. Simpson we’re talking about.
7. Oscar Pistorius: The Olympic athlete turned model prisoner is said to be sustaining on a diet of chakalaka, which is a canned vegetable relish popular in South Africa, where he’s currently serving a five-year sentence for killing his girlfriend. The 28-year-old is reportedly laying off prison food out of fear someone will poison him, even after prison officials offered to let him cook the food himself.
8. Lauryn Hill: The former Fugees frontwoman ate like a queen while serving 3-months in prison for tax evasion. Her introductory meal is said to have been barbecue pulled pork with a side of carrots, peas and sweet potatoes, with an array of juices to wash it all down with.
9. Lil’ Kim: The best thing about prison for this pint-sized rapper? Nope, not blackmarket filler injections — food. When Bravo’s Andy Cohen asked her the question, Lil’ Kim, who served a year for lying to a grand jury, replied: “They made good food…they made me a triple-layer cake out of Oreo cookies.”
Photo by Flickr user BeautifulPlanningMarketing&PR
Last week, the DEA rejected a five-year-old petition signed by two governors to change marijuana’s status from a “Schedule I” narcotic, the same category as more dangerous drugs like LSD and heroin. The decision essentially puts the federal government at odds with the 25 states (and the District of Columbia) that have legalized at least some form of medical cannabis use. Here’s everything you need to know about the decision.
By retaining the Schedule I classification for cannabis, the DEA has reaffirmed its previous position that there is “no currently accepted medical use” for the drug and that it has “a high potential for abuse.” In his letter explaining the decision, acting DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg wrote that marijuana “does not have a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”
“The FDA drug approval process for evaluating potential medicines has worked effectively in this country for more than 50 years,” he wrote. “It is a thorough, deliberate and exacting process grounded in science, and properly so, because the safety of our citizens relies on it.”
“If the scientific understanding about marijuana changes — and it could change — then the decision could change,” he added. “But we will remain tethered to science, as we must, and as the statute demands.”
One reason for the lack of rigorous scientific testing on the drug, of course, is the federal government’s restrictions on obtaining it, which are exacerbated by its classification as a Schedule I narcotic, creating a cyclical, Catch 22-type scenario. From the Washington Post:
For instance, last fall, a Brookings Institution report slammed the federal government for “stifling medical research” in the area of marijuana policy. As a Schedule 1 drug, it’s much harder for researchers to work with marijuana than with many other controlled substances. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called on the government to move marijuana into Schedule 2 to facilitate more research into medical uses.
Forbes notes that many common, over-the-counter drugs like aspirin and caffeine come from plants that, if ingested in a different form, have side effects that range from gastric bleeding to death. Even the drugs that contribute to, and arguably created, the current opiate crisis in the United States are categorized as Schedule II because they have “currently accepted medical use in treatment.” Those drugs, which include oxycodone and morphine, kill over 16,000 people per year in the U.S.
There is some good news from the DEA’s announcement. Before the announcement, U.S. researchers looking to examine the medicinal effects of weed could only obtain it from one source, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, which grows weed under a contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA. As Nature notes, the application process could be time consuming, and the university’s cannabis often had lower levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than the weed used by regular consumers. But now the DEA is allowing any institution to apply for its own right to grow marijuana.
“It’s an incredible pleasure to see the DEA let the science speak for itself,” Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, told Nature.
Others, including Dr. Sunil Kumar Aggarwal, a New York City-based physician who studies the effects of marijuana in hospice care, also praised the DEA’s decision.
DEA will allow universities to apply to grow marijuana, three government officials said.–NIDA monopoly finally gone https://t.co/2FTfpPblr4
And John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times that the decision “will create a supply of research-grade marijuana that is diverse, but more importantly, it will be competitive and you will have growers motivated to meet the demand of researchers.”
But not everyone is as optimistic, including CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta
“Will this decision make it significantly easier for scientists to study the medical benefits of marijuana?” he wrote last week. “The answer sadly is: unlikely. And this is a missed opportunity that could further delay potential therapies to countless people.”
Gupta argues that while, in theory, the loosening of restrictions on researchers access is a good thing, it’s still mostly an empty gesture because of the drug’s continuing status as Schedule I. From CNN:
Potential researchers typically go to the DEA first, as it grants the license to begin scientific research. Even if a license is granted, to study a Schedule I substance, institutions must have heavy-duty safes and high-grade security systems installed, which can be expensive. There is also the more subjective consideration of getting approval from your academic institution to do the research on a Schedule I status substance in the first place. Even if individual faculty members want to do that research, the university leadership may not want the hassle or the potential fallout of bad press.
Gupta also notes the hypocrisy of the DEA’s decision to keep the drug Schedule I, which the agency’s former chief administrative law judge, Francis Young, disagreed with publicly in 1988. From Young’s petition:
“In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.”
Twenty-eight years later, Gupta writes, not much has changed. Last year, in an editorial accompanying a study showing the, for now, limited effectiveness of medical marijuana, Yale School of Medicine professors Deepak Cyril D’Souza and Mohini Ranganathan wrote that accurate testing of the drug will require increased standards and governmental encouragement.
“Evidence justifying marijuana use for various medical conditions will require the conduct of adequately powered, double-blind, randomized, placebo/active controlled clinical trials to test its short- and long-term efficacy and safety,” they wrote. “The federal government and states should support medical marijuana research.”
To do that, declassifying marijuana as a Schedule II drug would be a great place to start.
There’s something familiar about Trump. The hair. The self-importance. The misogyny. The up-failing ways of a man given too much status and too little grey matter.
He bears a striking resemblance to Futurama’s Zapp Brannigan, a character creator David X. Cohen has described as “half Captain Kirk, half actual William Shatner.” His motives are uncannily similar to the Donald’s: Defeating pacifists, bullying the weak, climbing as high as possible with minimal effort.
Billy West, the prolific voice of animated characters including Zapp, put his gifts to work on making America laugh again. Using the hashtag #MakeAmericaBrannigan, West recorded Zapp’s voice saying Trumps actual quotes. It’d almost be unbelievable that these are actual quotes, if West hadn’t included the year and place where Trump said them.
This tweet from Undt Type resurfaces a post from 2014 on Codementor about Easter eggs. The anonymous source claims to have stuck Alfonso Ribeiro’s smiling face — a dapper star of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air — into the code of a financial application still being used by three large banks. May he watch over our student loans and guard us from overdraft charges.
If you’re a Neutral Milk Hotel fan, you’re familiar with Jeff Mangum’s dreamily, occasionally pleasantly almost-monotone voice and simple acoustic guitar riffs. You’ve swayed to “Two Headed Boy” and probably have some kind of late nineties coming-of-age memories with “King of Carrot Flowers” as the soundtrack.
Ready to have all of that shat — I mean, ska’d — on? Enter Skankstral Ska Hotel, with their album “In the Aeroskank Over The Checkered Pattern,” the ska cover band we didn’t know we never needed. It’s like a muppet got its paws on a drum machine. It’s bad. It commits, but it’s bad.
That not enough for your sadistic musical choices today? Then may the gods forgive us: here are five more horrible covers of otherwise great songs.
Limp Bizkit owes Wham an apology. Instead of George Michael’s taut denim booty, we get Fred Durst and the Goatee Gang swinging their gaudy chains toward a camera that’s on the ground. And a lot of screaming. And scratching.
You know Don McLean’s wistful ode to Americana. You know Madonna. But do you know her cover, featuring a techno beat and a lot of writhing around in a cami and low-rise jeans? There are goths, ballet dancers, kaleidoscope effects, and a Moody Man. Watch the video at your peril.
Billy Idol covered “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground and it’s weird as you’d think. This song just shouldn’t be covered by anyone, ever. True, Billy Idol struggled with heroin himself, so he almost gets a pass. Almost.
Okay, this is a tough one, because Lacey Sturm’s disclaimer at the beginning of this video is endearing. She doesn’t want to just be an entertainer. She wants to offend and inspire, just like Kurt Cobain! But sometimes when you shoot for the moon you land in a key you can’t quite reach. Or something. Curiously, Flyleaf’s cover of “Smells Like Team Spirit” might actually capture some essence of being a teenager, because it’s awkward as awkward as pinning a corsage on a satin dress.
Vanilla Ice’s cover of “Play That Funky Music” comes SO close to working. For Vanilla Ice, at least. If you listen and don’t watch the video, you’ll get less nauseated. Well, it’s okay until he gets to 2:40 and chants “Go white boy, go white boy, go!” And with that, we’re out.
We had great ambitions for this post. Then thought: you know what? Fuck it. Who needs this anyway? We’re knocking off early for some burgers, some beers, a few laughs. Yeah, fuck it.
Most people know you shouldn’t use an iPad to take a photo anywhere, much less right next to the dolphin pen at SeaWorld. One woman didn’t know this but now she does, thanks to a quick-thinking dolphin that ripped the device from her hands and dragged it into his tank.
The woman quickly retrieved it and tried to walk away like nothing happened, but let’s face it: That iPad—and the woman’s day—are likely ruined.
Playful dolphin at SeaWorld in Orlando grabs woman's iPad right out of her hands while she's taking a picture. pic.twitter.com/oUbXWtTi69
The Fresh Toast staff had some internal debate about the dolphin’s smiling reaction, which you can see in the screenshot below. My initial take was that the dolphin was cool and good, and had earned the right to be happy; my editor and a fellow writer felt that he was being smug.
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Either way, he taught the woman—and all of us—a valuable lesson: never trust a dolphin.
