Daily Dose
Daily Dose: 10/10/17
Mike Ditka is living in a fantasy world
2:39 PMThe last time I was at the White House, it was to hang out at SXSL, President Barack Obama’s innovation conference on the South Lawn. Tuesday, I’ll be there to see the Pittsburgh Penguins meet President Donald Trump. Life changes.
finally the NFL shows respect for the troops pic.twitter.com/9A4lURai5J
— Mike Tunison (@xmasape) October 10, 2017
While California has so many perks, the downsides are vicious. Beautiful weather, lovely terrain and generally agreeable people, to a certain extent. But there’s also the ever-present risk of earthquakes and wildfires. Now, in the Northern California wine country, an outbreak of blazes has killed 11 people. Thousands of buildings and acres of property have been damaged since 11 fires started burning. The photos from this disaster are really quite humbling, and officials say it could eventually be the worst in the history of the state.
It always amazes when people expose their own privilege. So when HBO’s Amanda Seales told folks on Twitter that if they’re spending money on Jordans and Nike suits as opposed to a passport that they’re losing, it ruffled some feathers. Why? Because the nonsensical respectability politics that come with this notion that traveling is the only thing that can broaden your horizons are extremely harmful. Not just because how people spend their money is their business, but for very real concerns, otherwise.
You know how people always reference their grandfathers? Typically when bringing up someone with a wildly outdated social view, or a stance that’s so misinformed, you presume they got it from a fake source? Well, Mike Ditka has seemingly become that guy. The old Chicago Bears player, coach and NFL Hall of Famer said in a radio interview that the United States hasn’t seen social oppression in the last 100 years, which is a nice round number to be wrong about on two fronts.
The U.S. men’s national soccer team has another qualifier Tuesday night. Last week, the Americans faced Panama in a game they effectively had to win to keep their chances to get to the next World Cup from being completely distant, and they won. So, in Tuesday night’s tilt against Trinidad and Tobago, the stakes are still high. If they win, they’re in the World Cup. Alas, there’s one problem. The field is absolute garbage. The stadium was flooded by storms, and that’s when all the finger-pointing began. The team isn’t using that as an excuse, though.
Free Food
Coffee Break: Nintendo’s new classic SNES console features a couple of dozen games and is a good enough retro toy for most people to cop and play with on their own, sans adjustments. But some folks always want to take things to the next level, and it turns out that hacking those modules is easier than you might think.
Snack Time: Gilbert Arenas is always involved in some foolishness, and his latest stunt with Mia Khalifa is exactly that. He aired her out over a DM slide, which is so petty and pointless.
Dessert: Here’s the official trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I don’t love it, but it’s just a trailer.
All Day
Behold, the greatest gender reveal of all time
College football player and his squad go the extra mile
5:02 PMIn the year of our Lord 2017 if you’re having a baby, it is your social media obligation to tell the world about it in a fun, creative and spontaneous way. In the past few years, as a party genre, gender reveals have become a huge hit, and the cottage industry around them is booming. Some people use cakes, some people use smoke bombs. After all, it’s a big deal.
Also gaining popularity in the sports world, particularly with college teams, are surprise videos where a key piece of information — like, say, getting a full scholarship — is celebrated by the entire team. They’re fun, they’re real, and in a world where so many things are staged stunts, they’re refreshing.
The latest, from Anthony Llosa, a member of the University of Ave Maria football team, manages to combine both.
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/917439608979308550/video/1
Everything about this is awesome.
Daily Dose
Daily Dose: 10/9/17
OBJ reminds us that it’s OK for men to cry
1:11 PMHappy Monday, folks. Let’s get right to it, because my team was on a bye this week, so that always makes Sundays a bit odd.
supernaw is the greatest last name in sports,
— Tony X. (@soIoucity) October 8, 2017
There was an interesting moment in Sunday’s New York Giants game. At one point, star wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. had to leave the game. As it turns out, he has to have surgery and will likely be done for the season. For obvious reasons, this was an upsetting situation. OBJ was crying on the sidelines, but some people don’t seem to understand that emotion is part of sports. His college teammate and close friend Brad Wing tried to console him, much to the chagrin of mouth breathers across America. It was touching.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Those were the famous words of Rick James, but they are now affecting the Miami Dolphins. Overnight, a pretty wild video of a man snorting white powder while professing his love to a person was released to the public. The man was an offensive line coach in the NFL, the person he loves is a model in Nevada. She says she showed the video to the world because she didn’t appreciate the pushback against protests in the league this year. Chris Foerster has since resigned. What a story.
Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, though some of you call it a different name. For those of you who are not familiar, Christopher Columbus was no hero. His “discovery” of America was really a genocidal colonialist mission that got the wheels turning on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, if you’re keeping score at home. But various cities do make sure to honor those who were here before others arrived. Elsewhere, people are targeting Columbus statues for vandalism, which we’re fine with.
LeBron James is quite the salesman. He’s pitched us everything from sneakers to phones to soda to now … driverless cars? The Cleveland Cavaliers star is now putting his weight behind a new ad campaign that will help ease public fears about getting into cars with nobody behind the wheel. I can follow Bron Bron down a lot of roads, but I’m still old enough to be borderline deathly afraid of these machines. Your boy is not going to be the guinea pig on this, but we’ll let James cook.
Free Food
Coffee Break: Clearly, Dove doesn’t have enough black folks working with its marketing team. Somehow, this company has managed to get one too many racist ads off the ground and now are apologizing for it. To be clear, scrubbing the blackness off your skin is a marketing tactic as old as anything else.
Okay, Dove…
One racist ad makes you suspect.
Two racist ads makes you kinda guilty. pic.twitter.com/hAwNCN84h2— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) October 8, 2017
Snack Time: I want to love Klay Thompson, but every time I look up he’s doing something so corny that I just gotta take a step back. His latest for his sneaker company is a sight to behold.
Dessert: Soccer is such a beautiful game. I’m glad that Egypt made the World Cup, but not as happy as this guy.
Daily Dose
Daily Dose: 10/6/17
Jeremy Lin’s ‘dreads’ create a stir
12:10 PMIt’s been a long television week, kiddos. I didn’t win Around The Horn Thursday, but Friday, I’ll be on Outside The Lines at 1 p.m. EST on ESPN.
a message on self love. pic.twitter.com/HA397QE55y
— Farren Jean Andréa (@FUCCl) October 4, 2017
People keep coming for DeRay McKesson and they keep embarrassing themselves. You might recall when various black folks around the nation started protesting because unarmed people were getting killed by police officers with zero consequences. McKesson became the de facto face of the movement for some and in the eyes of one officer it meant it was time for not one, but two lawsuits. A cop in Louisiana tried on two separate fronts to blame him and the #BlackLivesMatter movement for her injuries and, yeah, that’s not going to work.
If you think killer clowns are just in the movies, think again. There are plenty cases of people dressing up in the playful outfits and trying to pull off all sorts of terrifying stunts, dating back for some time. Thirty years ago, a woman wanted to marry another woman’s husband. So, as all homicidal circus enthusiasts do, she put on a clown costume, showed up at the woman’s house, offered her flowers, then shot her dead right there in the doorway. Now, they’re reopening the cold case from Florida and seeking the death penalty for the alleged killer.
Irony is everywhere. I need not run through all the examples coming out of say, I don’t know, the capital of the United States of America. But in New York, there’s quite the case unfolding. You might be familiar with the Charging Bull statue in the financial district. You also might be familiar with the Fearless Girl statue that was recently installed near it. Well, as it turns out, the company behind the latter statue has now settled a lawsuit in which they were accused of, wait for it … underpaying women.
Jeremy Lin is really trying. When he showed up this season with his latest hairdo, a version of dreads, the confused emoji face came to mind. Of course, we’ve all seen Lin’s hair over the years, and nappy it was not. So, how these locks came about, who knows. But he was doing it as a way to foster some level of unity, or so he thought. One former NBA player, Kenyon Martin, didn’t exactly take to it well, and went to social media to air out his thoughts on cultural appropriation. K-Mart also has Chinese character tattoos, but we digress.
Free Food
Coffee Break: I don’t love everything Steph Curry does, but I do enjoy most of it. He seems like he’s got a pretty awesome life all around, and his family appears to be a ton of fun. Now, he’s got some new shoes out and considering how the past has gone on this, the new joints are super fuego.
The new Curry 4 also includes a ton of personal details.
Go-to phrase: "I Can Do All Things"
Fam names & birth years on the heel: "Wardell 88 Ayesha 89 Riley 12 Ryan 15"
>< : "He Is Greater Than I" icon pic.twitter.com/W4QRW71HLX— Nick DePaula (@NickDePaula) October 5, 2017
Snack Time: If you’re a fan of slapstick comedies from the ’90s, you’re in luck. It appears there’s another installment of Rush Hour coming to theaters. Apparently, the streets really wanted this.
Dessert: Seriously, we need to make ”Milds and the Yak’‘ go platinum. Bang this all the way into your weekend.
All Day Podcast
All Day Podcast: 10/5/17
Dwyane Wade’s personal chef and NIKExNBA
4:24 PMThe microphones took a trip across the country for this week’s episodes, which was more of a hassle with airport security than I care to deal with, but alas. Let’s get started.
Do you like to eat? Everyone likes to eat. So do NBA stars and Hollywood stars. But, unlike you and me, those people typically get folks to cook for them instead of having to do all that legwork themselves. This week, I talked to Richard Ingraham, the lovely couple’s private chef.
His new book, Eating Well to Win, draws on his experience as a chef growing up in South Florida. His love for the culinary arts came through family and home life. He explores a) what it’s like to cook for a famous person and their family and b) the world of coming up as a chef in a world in which the celebrity part might outweigh the cooking part.
Nike unveils new uniforms during the unveiling of the new NBA partnership with Nike on Sept. 15 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Josh Lefkowitz/Getty Images)
Photo by Josh Lefkowitz/Getty Images
In the second half of the show, I took a trip out to Los Angeles to check out the NIKExNBA summit, in which the company unveiled its new NikeConnect app as well as the new uniforms for the 2017-18 season. There were player reps from all 30 NBA teams, and the event felt more like an Apple event than anything else.
Later, I caught up with Cassius’ entertainment editor Cory Townes to discuss the anniversary of the Air Force 1s at an event in West Hollywood. He’s a Philly guy and a sneakerhead with the best of them, never mind the son of DJ Jazzy Jeff, which is a whole separate story.
Either way, gotta love California. Enjoy!
Daily Dose
Daily Dose: 10/5/17
Terrelle Pryor says Chiefs fans yelled racial slurs
3:01 PMAnother busy day in these media streets, kiddos. I managed to get a win on Around The Horn Wednesday, so that was fun. I might also have a couple of other things up my sleeve for the weekend, so stay tuned!
Reminder: My female colleagues and I have run the same number of college/NFL routes as most of our male colleagues.
— Chantel Jennings (@ChantelJennings) October 4, 2017
As we learn more about the murderous man who committed a massacre in Las Vegas, we learn more about ourselves. At this point, we know that he had planned to do that damage and was armed to the teeth to make sure it went down. We now also know that he’d booked hotel rooms overlooking other music festivals, which is further terrifying, considering. There’s a larger question though, beyond the obvious: What are we teaching our children about mass shootings?
I’m sure you watch HGTV. For some of us, it’s an obsession. You sit in your house with your favorite snack and Instagram open, basically with a running mood board on in the background of where you might want to live or play or work or whatever it is that people do on that channel, if you had endless time and money to do whatever you wanted. Alas, that’s not the real world. But all that house-flipping and shiplapping isn’t all it’s cracked up to be on television. Do not get yourself caught up in real HGTV dreamland, because it might actually be a nightmare.
Brunch, at this point, is the biggest social currency in my world. If you have a gang who you brunch with, you either trust those people the most, or hate them so much that you can’t let them go and don’t want them to be talking about you when you’re not there. And in the District of Columbia, the brunch game is EXTREMELY serious. Like, not even joking. But this commentary on the brunch scene here is so far off base I don’t even know what to say. Homey needs some way cooler friends.
When it comes to fans, they’re liable to say anything. There’s sort of an understanding that if you pay to get into a sporting event, you’re basically allowed to say whatever you want to the players, within reason. Now, what that line is to some people, or athletes or ushers or other fans, is never really set. So, when you have a situation like what happened in Boston with the Baltimore Orioles’ Adam Jones, you’re in a different space from say, Kansas City, Missouri, where Terrelle Pryor says Chiefs fans called him the N-word. None of this is entirely shocking, because, well, it’s 2017.
Free Food
Coffee Break: It’s no secret that I love Wiz Khalifa. While I’d go short of calling myself a stan, I definitely ride for the Pittsburgh homey and have done so ever since he was making mixtapes with Rostrum Records. Now, he’s a huge star and on the cover of XXL’s 20th anniversary edition. Check out the interview.
Snack Time: We’re rooting so hard for Kristaps Porzingis around here. The Latvian sensation for the New York Knicks is cool as hell, and his new sneakers are too. Very fresh.
All of @KPorzee's custom adidas shoes for the season feature NY's Statue of Liberty on the right outsole and Latvia’s Freedom Monument statue on the left.
Shot his black pair in detail: pic.twitter.com/mSTGwO3Btm— Nick DePaula (@NickDePaula) October 4, 2017
Up close look at Kristaps Porzingis' adidas Crazy Explosive sneakers for the season, with 'KP' along the heel tab. pic.twitter.com/ksGnllTk7h
— Nick DePaula (@NickDePaula) October 4, 2017
Dessert: Just pop this in your iPod and press play. Ta-Nehisi Coates on his new book.