Chores are the bane of domesticity. Dull and repetitive tasks have already been farmed out to robots in industrial workplaces, so why not our homes, too? On a small scale, they’ve already arrived, just not quite in the way film and TV promised. For…
As the college kids begin to head home for Thanksgiving, the ladies of “Saturday Night Live” and host Cameron Diaz laid down some raps explaining what it’s like to be a “Back Home Baller.” Decked out in furs, giant hoop earrings and chains, they praised running the washer with only one sock in it, eating tacos made by mom and “getting free wifi like a dope-ass hoe.” But most importantly, “bowls, all types of bowls.” Watch the Thanksgiving anthem above.
When you pay extra for courtside seats, kisses from JaVale McGee come standard.
On Friday, the Denver Nuggets center ended up in the stands while chasing a loose ball during a game against the New Orleans Pelicans. Though he didn’t recover the ball, McGee did get a kiss out of the deal. His momentum caused him to stumble into an empty seat between two fans, where he stopped to make sure they were OK. Just before rejoining the game, McGee planted a kiss on one woman’s cheek:
After the game, McGee told reporters the woman was his “boo.”
JaVale McGee dove into the front row and kissed a fan during the Nuggets game: http://t.co/Fq8667G4po pic.twitter.com/iEFXcf9FkT
— USA TODAY Sports (@USATODAYsports) November 22, 2014
CBS noted that the game was McGee’s best of the season so far, with 14 points, eight rebounds, three blocks … and one delightful old-lady smooch.
The endearing stunt is just one of many for McGee, who has earned a bit of a reputation for his goofy antics. In 2013, overcome by an urge for donuts, he sent a tweet inviting people to meet him at a nearby Krispy Kreme, where he treated his fans.
Watch the video, below.
The gates to Jurassic Park are finally reopening.
Universal has released a 20-second teaser trailer for the upcoming “Jurassic World,” Colin Trevorrow’s sequel. The film takes place 22 years after the first “Jurassic Park” in a new theme park on Isla Nublar. The foreboding trailer shows a grave-looking Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, a few running dinosaurs, and features a minimal take on John Williams‘ iconic theme.
The full trailer will premiere during Thanksgiving Day football at 9:00 p.m. ET, according to the film’s official Twitter. Check out the full teaser above.
“Jurassic World” opens on June 12, 2015
A credentialed member of the media was arrested in Ferguson around 11:40 pm Saturday night.
I grew up in a small town less than an hour from Ferguson, Missouri and since the shooting of Michael Brown, extreme police reaction to protesters, and now the wait for Grand Jury results, I’ve been recalling a Midwestern childhood where fear of the Otherness surrounding St. Louis was pervasive. You were told to be careful because They shot tires out on cars driving into the city, looted the car and killed the passengers. They.
After driving through an hour of cornfields, you passed the suburbs with fancy department stores, followed by the extreme poverty of East St. Louis, and then the city itself. A gauntlet of polar opposites before you even arrived, and every time we made within sight of the arches I’d be glad nobody got shot that time. My favorite thing to do in St. Louis was to stand under the Arch looking up, and spin around until falling down. It was like being in a giant eggbeater. Eventually I recognized the rumor of St. Louis snipers as an urban legend to instill fear and separation between black and white, like the doctor who worked for my dad telling us about the time Mars got too close to the earth, scorched a wide swath of it and that’s where black people came from. My parents were furious, but I don’t think that’s why they took us to Africa.
We went to South Africa to visit my uncle who was a missionary, and my optometrist dad was donating vintage eyeglasses that weren’t vintage yet. It was toward the end of Apartheid, and I remember sitting atop a tower overlooking mining city Soweto with its heartbreakingly tiny homes, while being served tea and biscuits. After camping in a wildlife sanctuary, Johannesburg was the opposite. Gunshots rang out in the street and unrest was a constant. Bathrooms had signs indicating a color code, and I remember thinking: “Well that’s some bullshit.”
That fall, I was riding to school with a neighbor kid and just as I fired up descriptions of my summer in Africa, seeing herds of every animal imaginable running wild, he asked: “Why would you go visit a bunch of ……” And that was the first time I heard the word. There was such a sense of separation and otherness in this boy, he had been taught to dismiss an entire continent with one racial epithet. To this day he may still believe They shoot at you from under the bridge if you try to get into St. Louis. Or that They’ve scraped off onto the planet from Mars. Or that they have no equal protections under the law.
I have hesitated to write about something I’ve been so far away from for so many years, because let’s face it, the world is not waiting for another think piece on Ferguson. But the ripping apart of a city, a heartland and a country must stop.
South Africa changed. I won’t recognize it when I go back. North America can change too once we realize that in every conceivable way, They are Us. We are Them. And no one here scraped off from Mars.
(RNS) Jews exclaim “Next Year in Jerusalem!” at the conclusion of the Passover seder, an acknowledgment that Israel is their spiritual home. But since the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem in 586 B.C., most Jews have lived outside of Israel.
Today, Diaspora Jews, as they are called, account for 8 million of the approximately 13 million Jews worldwide; the remaining 5 million live in Israel.
Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, ponders this split in his newly-released book “At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews.”
In the Diaspora, writes Wolfe, Jewish life can more easily embrace universalism — applying Jewish values to make the world a better place, for Jews and non-Jews alike. In contrast, “Jewish particularism” describes the defensive, inward posture of Jews in Israel.
“As it increasingly becomes clear that the Diaspora is not a disaster and that the security offered by statehood has proven to be precarious, the lost universalism that has been so much a part of Jewish tradition may well be prepared for a comeback, this time on firmer soil,” Wolfe writes in his introduction.
Some readers and critics have responded with a collective “duh” to Wolfe’s assertion that Diaspora is good for the Jews. And they take issue with his “particular” vs. “universal” approach to Judaism.
Yes, the Jews of the Diaspora for most of history lived in danger. Centuries ago, the Jewish population of Europe was forced into ghettos and killed in pogroms. Only two generations ago, the Holocaust wiped out most of Europe’s Jews, convincing the U.N. that the survivors could not live safely in the Diaspora and should be granted a state of their own.
But today most Diaspora Jews live in North America, where they feel safe and free and take pride in their contributions to the societies that have accepted them.
“Even the staunchest American Zionists do not claim that Jews cannot live secure, authentic, fulfilling lives in the United States,” wrote Peter Beinart in his review of Wolfe’s book in The New York Times. “To the contrary, America’s most prominent Zionists — people like Alan M. Dershowitz, Abraham H. Foxman and William Kristol — also tend to be passionate believers in America’s hospitability to the Jews.”
Speaking at a book talk at Washington’s Brookings Institution on Tuesday (Nov. 18), Wolfe agreed that the terms “particularist” and “universalist” are undefinable, overlapping and, in general, “hopeless.”
But he added that he still finds them useful: “There really are two basic different kinds of Judaism that have persevered throughout Jewish history since the Book of Deuteronomy was written.”
One type of Jew sees the dispersal of Jews around the world as God’s punishment. The other sees the Diaspora as a positive thing, “because a relatively enlightened religion associated with Judaism can be spread to the world as a whole, and not just confined to the Jewish people.”
The Holocaust and the creation of Israel in 1948 turned the tide toward the particularist vision, but it’s time to turn the tide again, Wolfe argued, and this will benefit Jews and non-Jews alike, both inside and outside Israel.
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, which studies issues facing Israel and the Jews worldwide, found much to praise when called upon to critique the book at the Brookings discussion. He admired Wolfe for standing up to those who consider Jewish life outside Israel less authentic, and for calling out Diaspora Jews who use their devotion to Israel as a shortcut to developing a more full and meaningful Jewish identity.
But Kurtzer said it was simplistic to suggest that Zionism is particular and parochial and the Diaspora is universal and moral, and he argued that for all Jews, looking deeply into Judaism and its moral teachings is the key to embracing others — the universalism for which Wolfe seems to long. He pointed to the Bible, which starts with God creating not a Jew, but a person, and later charges Abraham and Jewish people to be an example to others.
“This moral challenge,” Kurtzer said, “runs through particularism and not around it.”
WASHINGTON — The incoming speaker of the Nevada State Assembly told his colleagues Sunday morning that he will not be leading them in the new year, as he continues to face a firestorm of criticism over his history of bigoted remarks.
Assemblyman Ira Hansen (R), who was recently elected as the legislature’s next speaker, sent an early-morning email to his caucus announcing his intentions, according to Nevada journalist Jon Ralston.
“Politics of personal destruction win. I need to step down,” Hansen wrote in the email. “I hope that you all know that the Ira that you have known through these years and weeks is the real Ira and not what the media is painting me to be.”
“You are a great group that can hopefully do great things and my staying will harm the caucus,” he added. “I wish you all the best. Thanks for hanging tough through these difficult past days. If this were just about ‘me’ I would fight this out to the bitter end, but it is going to harm all of you.”
Hansen has had a column in The Sparks Tribune, a local Nevada newspaper, for 13 years. The Reno News and Review recently examined all of his columns — many of which were not online — and published a number of excerpts from his writings last week.
“The lack of gratitude and the deliberate ignoring of white history in relation to eliminating slavery is a disgrace that Negro leaders should own up to,” Hansen wrote in one column.
“Today, when Army men look at women in the ranks with ‘longing in their eyes’ it very well may constitute ’sexual harassment,'” he wrote in another. “The truth is, women do not belong in the Army or Navy or Marine Corps, except in certain limited fields.”
Hansen also wrote at one point that he proudly keeps a Confederate flag on the wall of the room where he writes his columns.
The Nevada politician immediately came under intense criticism for his writings. The Reno-Sparks NAACP called on the state’s Republican caucus to reconsider its choice of Hansen as speaker.
Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) distanced himself from Hansen, saying, “I wholeheartedly disagree with Assemblyman Hansen’s past public statements on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. This abhorrent kind of speech is unacceptable.”
Hansen released a statement later on Sunday confirming that he was stepping down as speaker-elect, maintaining that he was the victim of “character assassination“:
For the greater good of the State of Nevada and the cause I support it is necessary for me to withdraw as Speaker Designee. The tens of thousands of people who both read my columns and listened to my radio shows through two decades in the media know this has been a carefully orchestrated attack to remove a conservative Republican from a major leadership role in State government. The deliberate character assassination and the politics of personal destruction have totally distorted my views and record. Ultimately, this whole attack has very little to do with my views. The powers that be are planning a massive, more than one billion dollar, tax increase and I stood in the way as Speaker. I have already served two terms as an Assemblyman without any of these vicious attacks. It was only when I had risen to leadership that this smear campaign occurred. That is the real reason for this and it is vital the public understands that.
It’s unclear whether Hansen will also resign his seat in the assembly, in addition to giving up the speaker post.
Next year, Republicans will be in control of both chambers of Nevada’s state legislature and the governor’s seat for the first time since the Great Depression.
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President Barack Obama issued a statement Sunday on the death of four-time District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry.
Acknowledging his “at times tumultuous” public life, Obama praised Barry for his civil rights contributions and decades of service to Washington, D.C.:
Michelle and I were saddened to hear of the passing of Marion Barry. Marion was born a sharecropper’s son, came of age during the Civil Rights movement, and became a fixture in D.C. politics for decades. As a leader with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Marion helped advance the cause of civil rights for all. During his decades in elected office in D.C., he put in place historic programs to lift working people out of poverty, expand opportunity, and begin to make real the promise of home rule. Through a storied, at times tumultuous life and career, he earned the love and respect of countless Washingtonians, and Michelle and I extend our deepest sympathies to Marion’s family, friends and constituents today.
Barry died early Sunday at the age of 78. His family did not release a cause of death.
He first became mayor in 1979, serving three terms in office. In 1990, Barry was infamously arrested on drug charges as part of an undercover FBI investigation. He decided against running for re-election after his arrest, and ultimately served six months in jail after leaving his post. Barry was again elected mayor in 1994, and served until 1999. He also served three tenures on the D.C. city council, and was the representative for the city’s Ward 8 at the time of his death.
MOSCOW (AP) — Vladimir Putin has said he won’t remain Russia’s president for life and will step down in line with the constitution no later than 2024, according to an interview with a Russian news agency released Sunday.
Staying in office beyond that would be “detrimental for the country and I don’t need this,” he told the Tass news agency. Putin, 62, has effectively led Russia since he was first elected in 2000. He stepped aside after two four-year terms to abide with constitutional term limits, but retained power as prime minister and was elected president again in 2012 to a six-year term.
Putin said his decision on whether to run for a fourth term in 2018 will depend on the situation in the country and his “own mood.”
Throughout the interview, Putin described efforts at home and abroad that he said were aimed at trying to undermine his rule.
He said the Western sanctions against Russian individuals and businesses over Ukraine were an attempt to punish his friends and were “driven by a desire to cause a split in the elite and then, perhaps, in society.” But to the West’s chagrin, Putin said, Russian society remained consolidated behind him.
He described Russian laws that restrict foreign funding of non-governmental organizations and foreign ownership of media organizations as necessary to prevent outside interests from influencing Russian politics.
Putin acknowledged that not all Russians support him, which he said was fine as long as their criticism was constructive and they didn’t violate the law. But he said his government would crush anyone who tried to weaken the state, describing them as “bacteria.”
“They sit inside you, these bacilli, these bacteria, they are there all of the time,” Putin said. “But when an organism is strong, you can always keep back the flu because of your immune system.”
He said it was wrong to see U.S. newspapers as independent just because they were able to criticize President Barack Obama, suggesting he saw the media as a political tool.
“How can it be independent if it works together with the political opponents of the White House chief?” Putin said. “There is no independence; there is full dependence and the servicing of certain forces.”
Putin said Russia also has such critical newspapers and sometimes he has to read them because his press secretary brings him “all sorts of filth.”
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