IKEA Monkey

Over the past few days, Rebel Wilson has dug herself a deep hole of inaccuracy and defensiveness, after making a comment about being the “first-ever plus-sized girl to be the star of a romantic comedy”—referring to her meta rom-com Isn’t It Romantic? (out in January). This was an obvious wrongheaded, revealing…

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New Zealand’s film classification board successfully lobbied to get a content warning added to the beginning of A Star Is Born, after multiple viewers reportedly complained about the film’s shocking ending. Spoiler ahead.

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From the runways of tony fashion capitals to the wilds of numerous television networks, Tyra Banks has made it clear that the world is her oyster in which to flail around wildly, break open the shell, slurp up the globe-sized oyster, pretend to die from food poisoning, get back up within seconds to manically assure us…

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California faces a series of serious and deadly wildfires today (and, really, all this past year), with blazes in areas across the state already consuming more than 100,000 acres of land. Among the areas affected, THR reports, are a number that have been used in the past for film and TV production, including ranch…

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We’ll be very honest with you here, dear readers: When we woke up this morning, we were not expecting to spend several hours of our day tracking down the identities of the guys who sang one of the most irresistibly annoying ear-worm jingles of our generation, a song that’s been used as audio poison by such intentional…

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The Scarlet Knights had a big play, I swear.

Rutgers scored a touchdown against Michigan, and not just any touchdown, a really long touchdown.

Isaih Pacheco scoring that touchdown was highly unexpected, due to the recent nature of both teams. This is easily the longest offensive play Michigan’s allowed all season. Previously, they’d only allowed one play over 50 yards and none over 60 this year. For Rutgers, they’ve only had one play since 80-plus yards since 2014. They haven’t had a play over 50 yards yet this season.

For these reasons, this play deserves a breakdown.

Rutgers offensive coordinator John McNulty has shown some interesting creativity in spots this season when his team is hilariously out-talented.

On the 80-yard play, Rutgers uses Michigan’s trademark aggression against them.

Basically, the Scarlet Knights get everyone flowing to their left besides two players. Rutgers leaves defensive end Chase Winovich (red box) unblocked, and they take care of him with motion by one of the players out of the backfield. They get the bonus because safety Tyree Kinnel rotates down hard into run support as well. Pacheco makes a cutback move, and it’s all over.

From the end zone angle: my God, look at this hole and note how safety Brad Hawkins is apparently calling things out. But he’s too late actually pursuing the play and reacts a beat late.

From there, Pacheco ever so slightly uses the ref as a screen to bust out on the second level.

And a big shoutout goes to Pacheco for finishing the run.

Pacheco was basically the entire offense for Rutgers.

The running back has been primed for a breakout all season, and this was it against arguably the best defense in college football.

“It was a huge moment. The line did a great job. It was outside zone, I saw the hole, and tried to take advantage of it, make a couple guys miss, get up field, and get on the scoreboard,” Pacheco said after the game.

He had 142 of Rutgers’ 193 sack-adjusted rushing yards, 80 of which came on this play. Rutgers certainly didn’t win, but on this play they showed they can score a touchdown against Michigan at home. That’s something they didn’t do the last time these two teams met at the birthplace of the sport.

It finally happened. The Minnesota Timberwolves have traded Jimmy Butler to the Philadelphia 76ers to put one of the most turbulent player sagas of the season behind them. The trade was outlined on Twitter by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe.

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What is a correlated parlay?

Did you see the spread for the Michigan at Rutgers game?

It’s 38 points.

That is a huge number for a conference game, much less one on the road.

But Rutgers is terrible, and Michigan has been vaporizing teams in the last month. And it has a history of killing Rutgers, like the 78-0 nothing score in 2016.

Combined with the over/under, though, this game gets really interesting. The over/tnder is 44.5 points.

This sets up a classic correlated parlay situation.

What is a correlated parlay?

A correlated parlay is a parlay wager (a combination or two or more bets, all of which must win in order for the parlay to win) in which one bet is highly correlated to the other.

In this case, you could parlay Michigan -38 and the Over 44.5. There are very few combinations by which Michigan could cover the spread and not go over 44.5.

The combinations are 39-0, 40-0, 41-0, 41-1, 41-2, 42-0, 42-1, 42-2, 43-0, 43-1, and 44-0. And three of those involve the super rare 1-point safety scenario.

The chance that one of those combinations hit is extremely small. All other combinations of Michigan covering involve the game going over.

You can even do the reverse, too, if you want, taking Rutgers and the under, because the chance that the game stays Under the total of 44.5 without Rutgers covering is extremely small.

Except most casinos won’t allow you to combine these particular wagers. For a reason.

Go ahead, try it. In Vegas, they’ll tell you no. Most of your online sportsbooks are also going to decline it.

Your local bookie might, if you’re a career loser.

The reason is that they are too correlated. The reason why books offer parlays is because they are hard to hit. Making the events strongly correlated, as opposed to independent events.

So now you know what a correlated parlay is, and can impress your friends at the water cooler.

The sunken spa is a unique feature

Have a nomination for a jaw-dropping listing that would make a mighty fine House of the Day? Get thee to the tipline and send us your suggestions. We’d love to see what you’ve got.

Location: Sacramento, California

Price: $809,000

One of the most enduring qualities of midcentury design is how often the interiors can surprise. From the street, many midcentury homes appear long and even at times boring; on the inside, however, light-filled rooms and post-and-beam ceilings make you look twice.

Take this four-bedroom, three-bath in Sacramento, California—a home highlighted in the Sacramento Bee in 1974. The exterior looks inviting, but inside the 3,298 square foot structure is where this home really shines. The focal point is a circular “Roman” atrium that functions as a central cathedral-ceiling courtyard with cement floors. Instead of a traditional Roman pool to catch rain water, the original owners installed a sunken hot tub and the main living room, dining room, and kitchen all surround it.

The atrium’s large windows at either end flood the interior with light and the bedrooms all have sliding glass doors that provide access to the surrounding deck and garden. The home also boasts a koi pond, outdoor shower, mature redwood grove, and zoned high-efficiency heating and air.

Take a look at the photos below and act quick, 3913 Winslow Court is on the market now for $809,000.

“Oh my God. I get it. I get it.”

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THOUSAND OAKS, CA—In the hours following a violent rampage in California in which a lone attacker killed 12 individuals, including a police officer, and seriously injured at least 12 others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Thursday that there…

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If you are a dude figuring out how to pop the question to your significant other, and she’s an active gal who is training for a marathon, let me offer you some advice: don’t propose during the race.

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Most 2018 midterm voting stories so far have been about long lines, broken machines, and other polling station nightmares, but at least there's one unbearably sweet thing to come out of it all: This adorable video of a 77-year-old Texan tearing up over Beto O'Rourke.

On Tuesday morning, Pamela Aguirre showed up to her polling place in El Paso, Texas, to cast her vote for the Democratic Senate candidate hoping to unseat Ted Cruz, dressed in a "Beto for Senate" shirt and wheeling her oxygen tank alongside her. While she was there, she happened to run into O'Rourke himself standing in line, MSNBC reports.

MSNBC caught up with Aguirre a few hours after the surprise encounter, and her emotional retelling of the whole story is enough to melt even the coldest of hearts.

"We think he’s pretty important, and we’re honored that he was here," Aguirre said, as her eyes welled up with tears. "He represents everything Donald Trump isn’t."

“We want him to win, and we’ll be watching the TV tonight with him,” she continued. “He’ll be someplace in the city. But it’ll be just so much. It will mean that, my gosh, we all still have a chance to have a decent country and decent values with decent relationships with other people."

Give the whole video a watch above and let the overwhelming sweetness of an elderly woman in a beanie talking passionately about the world soothe you, if just for a moment. Hopefully she's happy with the results of Tuesday's election. If watching her cry tears of joy can hit that hard, let's hope we never have to see her cry actual tears of sadness. The world could not withstand it.

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Thanksgiving and other food-centric winter holidays are nearly upon us, which means it’s almost time to scrape the sides of all your best mixing bowls to eke out the maximum possible amount of batter, filling, frosting, or other edible mixtures—either savory or sweet (we’re open to all). But which spatula does the…

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It’s hard out here for a man. At least it seems that way, based on the societal tendency to celebrate them for doing minimally heroic acts like actually texting you back, not body-shaming, and not sexually harassing anyone.

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“I guess the worst part of the play was their confidence in it.”

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President Donald Trump on Saturday used his final Florida campaign event before next week's elections to implore supporters to send Republicans to the governor's mansion and the U.S. Senate, claiming that allowing Democrats to win either office would bring ruin to the state he also calls home.

In collaboration with creative agency Sagmeister & Walsh, Kurzgesagt explores what beauty is and how it makes people happier. This Atlantic piece is a good companion piece that summarizes some of the research done about beauty’s connection to happiness.

The usual markers of happiness are colloquially known as the “Big Seven”: wealth (especially compared to those around you), family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values, as outlined by London School of Economics professor Richard Layard in Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. According to the Goldberg study, however, what makes people happiest isn’t even in the Big Seven. Instead, happiness is most easily attained by living in an aesthetically beautiful city. The things people were constantly surrounded by — lovely architecture, history, green spaces, cobblestone streets — had the greatest effect on their happiness. The cumulative positive effects of daily beauty worked subtly but strongly.

See also Richard Feynman on Beauty.

With midterm elections just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about money. Class war, mostly, but money generally, and the relationship people in my life have to it.

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Mexicans love a good fiesta and we also sure love to eat—fortunately, the two are never mutually exclusive. Día De Los Muertos (Day Of The Dead) is one such food-filled Mexican holiday that has gone through its fair of changes; what was previously a celebration held at the beginning of summer is now a three-day affair…

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Every year at this time, all the Halloween curmudgeons come out of the woodwork to whine about how trick-or-treating should only be for "the little ones" and how it is VERY BAD MANNERS for teenagers or even just "older kids" to go trick-or-treating. It's a thing many people seem to take great joy in policing and being extremely smug about. I always see loads of people on social media bragging about how they turn teenagers away when they come to their door, as if they are performing some kind of helpful service to the world. Why? I'm not sure. I proudly trick-or-treated well into high-school and had a fantastic time doing so, and I would never begrudge any other teenager that good time.

There are far worse things teenagers could be doing than dressing up in ridiculous costumes and going door-to-door in pursuit of Snickers bars. I know, because I did them.

It's become such a thing over the years that some areas have even started banning older kids from Halloween. Chesapeake, Virginia, instituted an ordinance that would send kids over the age of 12 to jail or fine them for trick-or-treating.

"If any person over the age of 12 years shall engage in the activity commonly known as "trick or treat" or any other activity of similar character or nature under any name whatsoever, he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be punished by a fine of not less than $25.00 nor more than $100.00 or by confinement in jail for not more than six months or both."

This is some bullshit. You don't even get really good at trick-or-treating until you are at least 12. That's when you get to go with a huge group of all your friends, without a parental chaperone, get your strategies and maps together for targeting the houses that give out full size candy bars and avoiding the ones that give out bags of pennies, toothbrushes or Jack Chick comics. I loved trick-or-treating as a teenager. It was a fun, silly, exhilarating time -- and it didn't cost any money to do it (outside of whatever you needed for your costume). What's wrong with that? Why not be glad that they're having fun and that they don't feel like they're "too cool" for something like that? They're not hurting anyone. They're not going around robbing three-year-olds of their Twizzlers, so calm the fuck down. Three-year-olds probably can't even eat Twizzlers. [Ed note: Girl, meet a three-year-old they can eat THE WORLD.]

As teenagers, they might have some spare money to buy candy for themselves if they want, but it's not just about the candy, it's about the experience. It's about fun. Even if they don't dress up, because they decided to go last minute or whatever, give them a break. Ask them what they're supposed to be anyway, and maybe you'll get some hilarious answers. Pull the stick out of your ass and have some fun. It won't kill you.

People have been shitty about the KIDS TODAY ever since the advent of hills one could walk down instead of up both ways. Everyone loves to complain about how all the kids just stay at home doing social media to each other these days, instead of playing outside until the street lights go off or whatever. They act like there's something wrong with the kids themselves, as if they are simply not as good at being kids as all the non-kids once were, but this has less to do with them than it does with the fact that teens have been largely chased out of public life. What the hell else are they supposed to do?

I saw this happen in real time. It started in the late '90s with a push to get kids "off the streets" and to combat "loitering." We couldn't even hang out at local parks anymore without the police driving up to check everyone's IDs and kick out anyone who wasn't over 18. These days, even malls are implementing curfews for teenagers. Coffee shops became places for adults to quietly do their work rather than places for weird kids to gather and talk about all the poetry they're pretending to read. All the other shit we used to do is either illegal or absurdly expensive. Movies, live music, etc. -- even diners barely ever have bottomless cups of coffee anymore. If I were to try to live the life I lived as a teenager now, as an adult, I would be flat broke.

So just let teenagers have Halloween, ok? Let them get dressed up and have a stupid, silly, exciting night without parental supervision, that doesn't cost them anything other than their costumes. It's important to have those experiences for as long as you can because once you're actually an adult, there's no way you're getting away with it. Don't make them grow up so fast and then whine that they're growing up so fast.

And please, don't hand out bags of pennies. It's just cruel.

Hey what's this? It's your OPEN THREAD.

[WTKR]

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President Donald Trump said he wants to order the end of the constitutional right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born in the United States.

The 14th Amendment guarantees that right for all children born in the U.S.

Trump made the comments to “Axios on HBO”...

Mike Pence is a disgusting POS, anti-Semite!

But before we get to that, please permit a brief anecdote about the time I, Yr FDF, lost my shit at a PTA meeting. The topic was the outside Christian group hosting "Bible Study and Pizza Club" which had invited all the students to join them, without mentioning it to the parents at the tiny, non-sectarian girls middle school my daughter attends. Naturally, I asked the principal if they would also be pulling a van with tinted windows into the driveway for "Taking Candy From Strangers Club." The room went dead silent. I explained that Jewish kids face the Pizza-n-Bible Talk come-on everywhere they go from Evangelicals looking to bring them to Jesus. So if they were going to bring in scalp hunters, they could at least give me a heads up so I could tell my 11-year-old why this activity is fundamentally dangerous for her.

Next to me, another mother was getting agitated. There was heavy breathing, and pursing of lips. Did I not understand that her kids, as Catholics, were also targets, she snorted? Why did I think being Jewish meant I got to veto Bible Club for Christian girls? So then I splained to her about evangelical churches that dress their kids up as Orthodox Jews and spend their summers door-knocking in Jewish neighborhoods up and down the East Coast to bring us to Jesus. And I splained how Jews for Jesus uses former Jews who have converted to Christianity as a lure to target Jewish kids specifically to "perfect" them in Christ. And I splained how people whose family tree has been aggressively pruned get a little touchy about a bunch of fake Jews whose only goal is to separate them from their family's religion. So maybe don't "All Faiths Matter" Me, Lady!

And for the rest of the year, we never made eye contact again.

Which is kind of a roundabout way of saying that American Jews really, REALLY don't like Jews for Jesus. It's about the only thing most all of us agree on. You may have heard the expression, "Two Jews, three opinions," and that's usually true. Except when it comes to Jews for Jesus, where the opinions are, 1) lock the door and text all your neighbors that those bastards are back again, 2) tell them if they don't get off your porch, you'll call the cops, or 3) round up Yitzy and the boys to let those J4J momzers know they need to leave the neighborhood NOW.

Jehovah's Witnesses are fine. Mormons don't bother us since they quit posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims into their faith. But so-called Messianic Jews who have discovered Jesus and want to share him with our kids induce a potent mix of fear and panic in the hearts of American Jews.

Which brings us back to Mike Pence, who took time out of a rally last night in Michigan for House candidates Lena Epstein and Mike Bishop to honor the memory of the Jews shot praying in their own synagogue in Pittsburgh. Introducing Loren Jacobs, as a "leader in the Jewish community," Pence handed the lectern over to him for a "blessing."

Hmmm. We don't usually see a "rabbi" wearing a prayer shawl and no yarmulke, but go on.

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God of Father my Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the messiah, and my God and Father, too.

So, that's not a rabbi. Because, you know, the whole Jesus thing.

ARE YOU NOT COMFORTED, JEWS? Do you not feel honored?

Actually, not. Like, not at all. Particularly since Pence's fake rabbi believes that the shooting victims are currently burning in hell.

For his part, Pence claims he had no idea Jacobs wasn't a real rabbi. He just checked to make sure the guy was circumcised, and figured he was kosher.

Okay, fine. Pence didn't make any representations about the fake rabbi's penis. He just blamed the only real Jew at the event, Lena Epstein, for getting some off-brand rabbi on the cheap.

Oooooh, girl! You were probably headed for an asskicking anyway. But now your mom's gonna have to find a nice Chinese mah-jongg group to play with, because Mrs. Finkelstein and Mrs. Goldfarb will be giving her the fisheye for a long time. And I know we're all showing up at schul this weekend for a service to honor the dead, but ... maybe you want to sit this one out. Pretty sure the Jew who invites the J4J freaks to the party is going to be lonely in the pews. But you keep banging that drum about being the victim of religious intolerance. Maybe your community will forgive you by Yom Kippur.

OR MAYBE NOT.

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When it comes to airports in the United States, there are definite winners and losers. Some offer amazing places to eat and flights that are almost always on time, while others have tons of delays and one Hudson News where you can grab an overpriced bag of Chex Mix to ride out that 8-hour layover.

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LOUISVILLE, KY—Baffling fast food consumers nationwide by implicating the diners themselves in some unknown but vaguely fishery-related practice, seafood chain Long John Silver’s launched a new nationwide ad campaign Tuesday featuring the cryptic tagline “You Are The Bait Now.” “I’ve seen a commercial that was nothing…

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Although Halloween music is a deeper and more diverse topic than one might initially expect—see, for instance, our brand-new Power Hour on the topic—the Halloween novelty song is still a pretty tight market. When it comes to modern successors to “Monster Mash,” there are really only two credible offerings on the…

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