Back in 2014 when Lorde was a newly minted pop star on her way to selling 3 million copies of her first album, she made her Chicago debut at the Aragon. “Can you go back to being a kid?” she asked. “Where does it stop? It’s something that keeps me up all the time.”

She was all of 17.

The New Zealand...

Every single day that goes by, it becomes more and more clear that Vladimir Putin has something BAD on Donald Trump, something that would hurt him with his base more than any of the five million embarrassing things that have come out about Trump since the campaign. There is no other explanation for why he is so submissive every time he talks to Putin. Maybe Putin has proof Trump has a micropenis or something, oh wait that’s Stormy Daniels, ALLEGEDLY, oh wait, it could be both. Or maybe there really is a pee tape, though we are starting to doubt it was captured at Moscow Miss Universe in 2013, but we’ll analyze that another time. But again, it’s something that would hurt him with his base. Put it this way — they wouldn’t care if he watched some hookers pee, they’d care if the hookers peed on him and he called them “Mommy.”

Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin on the Obamaphone this week and said “OMG CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR VERY REAL ELECTION!” This is something he should not have done, for the very simple reason of RUSSIAN ELECTIONS ARE FUCKING FAKE. They stuff ballot boxes, and the “opposing candidates” are mostly for show. They’ve been doing this since time immemorial, and one of the main reasons Putin hates Hillary Clinton so much is that she called Russia on its election fraud shit back when she was secretary of State. And lest you think “well maybe they ran a clean election this time!” no, they did not run a clean election this time.

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s national security team specifically told him not to congratulate Putin when they spoke this week, but he “did it anyway.” He’s going rogue! He thinks he’s good at being president now! He’s finally speaking his mind, according to the New York Times! You know, because he was such a shy little boy before!

And what’s on his mind, apparently, is “KISS KISS KISS VLADIMIR PUTIN YOU ARE MY REAL DAD AND I MEAN THAT IN A BDSM KIND OF WAY”:

President Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers Tuesday when he congratulated Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on his reelection — including a section in his briefing materials in all-capital letters stating “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” according to officials familiar with the call.

Oh very nice, not only did someone feel the need to write it for him IN ALL CAPS, probably underlined and circled with glue and glitter, but when Trump ignored it, somebody in the White House was so alarmed/horrified by our wanna-be dictator congratulating an actual dictator on his “election,” they ran off to the Washington Post to make sure America knew about it.

Here is what Trump did not talk about with Vladimir Putin:

Trump also chose not to heed talking points from aides instructing him to condemn the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain with a powerful nerve agent, a case that both the British and U.S. governments have blamed on Moscow.

Great. Just great. Russia, our greatest geopolitical foe (you were right, Mitt Romney in 2012, sorry about that), is murdering people on the soil of the United Kingdom, our greatest ally, and Trump is either A) pretty much OK with that or B) too much of a beta cuck to say something about it to his puppet master Uncle Vlad.

Hey, remember that time Trump congratulated Turkish leader Erdogan on his very good “election” where he consolidated ALL THE POWER? Remember how excited Trump is that Xi in China is now dictator for life? Remember the hilarious #jokes he told about how he wishes America would try that sometime, like maybe with his ugly orange shithole face?

It’s pretty clear Trump wishes America had “elections” like they have in strongman countries like Russia and Turkey and China. Then he’d never have to contend with the fact that, no matter what kind of Electoral College hokey pokey Russia and Cambridge Analytica pull for him, the great majority of the United States of America fuckin’ hates him.

But that’s not America dude, so suck it up and deal with it. Or curl up into a ball and resign, if you’d prefer, because we’d definitely prefer that.

Of course, this is all of a piece with every action Trump has taken or not taken toward Russia since he accidentally became president. He jizzes code word level classified intelligence on Russian officials, he refuses to implement Russian sanctions almost unanimously passed by Congress, and when he finally starts implementing them, they are WUSSY CUCK sanctions that don’t hardly sanction shit.

As for Republican reactions to Trump’s sexxxychat phonetime with Vladimir Putin, do you really want to read a bunch of horseshit about Marco Rubio saying it’s bad how Trump and Putin can’t stop making out but Rubio is more concerned with who leaked this news, or Bob Corker being all “it’s FINE you guys it’s FINE” or John McCain being GRRRR ARGH on Twitter?

No you do not, ergo this post is over.

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT HERE.

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[Washington Post]

The Smashing Pumpkins are currently gearing up for a big reunion tour (most of them, anyway), one that’s intended, at least in part, to show that decades out of the spotlight have really mellowed and matured its members’ frequently fractious public personas. That “Boy, we were all such crazy kids, huh?” image—which…

Read more...

Some awkwardness will be avoided at the White House Sunday night as President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump won’t be anywhere near each other when the highly anticipated 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels airs. While the commander in chief will be back in the White House Sunday night, Melania Trump is scheduled to stay behind in Mar-a-Lago.

A U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan has proposed a plan to arm homeless people with shotguns in a bid to reduce crime.

Republicans have struggled mightily at the ballot box since Donald Trump took office. They lost a U.S. Senate seat in dark red Alabama last December and a House seat in heavily conservative western Pennsylvania earlier this month. In those races, the usual rhetoric about abortion and immigration did little to buoy Republican candidates, and even a recent tax cut failed to rally GOP voters. So, to reverse that trend, Republicans are turning back the clock to 2016.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Did I mention the Shed? That thing I did? ICYMI, I fooled the world by making the shed I live in the best "restaurant" on TripAdvisor with a ton of bullshit reviews.

Bizarrely, it's changed my life. Over the past few months, thousands of new followers have flocked to my social media accounts, dozens of drunk men have requested photos with me in south London pubs, and I can barely walk through the village I grew up in without family acquaintances waving at me. But how long will this last? I'm no real celebrity, just a moonfaced con man from Redditch, England.

For ideas on how to prolong this new life, I browse some famous people's profiles. Among the self-promotion and motivational quotes, I see photos of new trainers, tickets to special events, delicious meals, high-class hotels, and bespoke clothing, always accompanied with captions like "thanks, @nandos!" or "big up @nike you absolute legends." It seems that one way to maintain the high-life is to use your status to request nice stuff, publicly thank the brand for sending you that nice stuff, and then be left with both nice stuff and a sense among your followers that you're someone worthy of receiving free stuff. It's ridiculous and gluttonous, and I want in.

To do that, though, I need to make myself more brand-friendly. I need an endorsement, a friendship with someone whose fame far eclipses my own. I rack my brain for ideas and a prophet appears: Mr. Brand himself—star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the Trews, and those prank calls on Andrew Sachs's answering machine. Unfortunately, I don't know how you go about making friends with Russell Brand, so I have to find another way to convince brands and followers that I am.

How do I do that? It's actually quite simple.

Setting Up a Playdate with Russell Brand

Meet Ryan.

I find Ryan by asking friends if they know anybody who looks like Russell Brand. And Ryan does, sort of, doesn't he? That's all I need: the bare minimum. That, and Photoshop, and a few photos of the real Russell. Then, what's to stop me from taking a selfie with Ryan, doing a quick face-swap, and posting the photo on Instagram?

I contact Ryan, and he's up for it. The wheels are in motion.

But even with my fake Brand in tow, I can't just post photos from an All Bar One, can I? I need to be in the kind of hangout you'd expect to see a celebrity in. The Groucho, say, or one of those terrible upscale Mayfair clubs where Rihanna and Bieber and Drake drink bottles of champagne worth more than a first-class transatlantic flight. How do I access one of those? Easy: by inventing a Russell Brand PA to arrange things.

I jump onto GoDaddy, gobble up the available www.russellbrand.co, and create an email for Russell's brand-new member of staff, Ben Mather. I fire out a slew of emails, and sure enough: perfection.

I find a hotel that touts itself as popular with celebrities, therefore, making it "cool," according to its website. After some back-and-forth, we have ourselves a £400 [$568] to £500 [$710] suite to hang out in this Wednesday.

The Big Day

Arriving in west London, my day begins like so many influencers' does.

A grateful coffee with a dash of humble brag.

Before long, I unleash my first post:

Quick disclaimer: The photo above isn't the one I actually uploaded because we had to go back and buy licensed images of Russell Brand to be able to include them in this piece without getting sued for copyright infringement—but it's close enough!

Of course, it looked a little different before the rendering magician, Chris Bethell, got his hands on it.

Importantly: Are people going to buy it? I only get one shot at this. Are my followers going to think that I'm a man who could actually be hanging out with the Russell Brand for a day? Or that I'm a man sad enough to pretend that I am? It's a dangerous toss-up.

I post the photo. Two minutes of silence follow, then vibrations.

My Insta DMs are full of messages from people buying it, but they haven’t seen anything yet.

Sure, I can trick people into believing that Ryan is Brand with the protective guise of the internet, but how do I fool a hotel that Russell Brand is in the house? I tell Ryan, who's nearby, to lay low in his sunglasses.

I enter the lobby and am accosted by a busy lady. "Is it Oobah?" The hotel representative introduces herself. "I've been speaking with Ben. Do you know Ben?" I almost forget, before my brain clicks into gear: the PA.

I nod. She asks me what time Russell will be around, and I answer vaguely, so she hands over the room key. I thank her, turning to disappear.

"I follow you boys' antics on Instagram!" she says. "It looks like you've already been with him?" She stares at my story. My world is falling apart as she analyzes the photo. "Very cool!" She disappears, and I get into the elevator, heart thumping.

Next, I get to the room and see:

They've gone all out, buying Brand—who, famously, is a fan of sexual intercourse—a range of sex toys—just what you need during an interview scenario. I almost feel bad, but then remember this has all been laid on free of charge for someone in the 1 percent of people globally who could actually afford this suite.

Instagram must see where we're at.

I dump myself onto the presumably very expensive bed, disappearing into its vastness like a chihuahua in a jacuzzi.

This room seems to have legitimized our day and attracted another type of onlooker.

This attention is good, but I yearn for more.

It's now that I remember something I've forgotten: Ryan! I sprint down to the street to get him. With a voice forged far from Essex, I must keep Ryan silent and at a distance from hotel staff. We pace through the lobby without breaking a stride.

My social media followers are really going for this, but that's not enough. I want to be clothed and cobbled—wined and dined. I need a post that invites brands to come forth for just that. But it must be flawless, so I pick a Brand face and try to recreate the precise angles.

We post another picture on Instagram.

I wait silently, staring at my phone and praying for a DM to appear. After a little while... bingo. I exchange addresses with the company and a present arrives.

Novelty Street Fighter socks from the kind people at Stance. This is perfect. But I don't just want to be the envy of the internet; I want to be a fun fella, too. So I tell Ryan to hand over the socks...

And slip into something a little more comfortable.

Which, of course, becomes...

All filled up on fun, I'm hungry now.

I call around the press offices of various fast-food companies, requesting that they send some food to our suite. While Pizza Hut, itsu, and KFC nibble on the bait a little, there's one winner. One form sheer volume. One for the big occasion.

Doms. Offering a £120 [$170] order in exchange for "a post of you and Russell enjoying your Dominos"? Sounds like a joke, but within 30 minutes...

We have a feast! Now for the crucial post…

Does it matter that a quick google search for Russell Brand would tell you he's vegan? Or that he's missing his very visible right arm tattoos in the post?

Nope!

Nine slices of pizza and a cookie down, I'm filled and satisfied. Time to hit the town. I run upstairs, grab Ryan, and we disappear into the night. Looking for somewhere to have fun, I fire out messages left, right, and center, to Wembley, the O2, and places that are usually too expensive for me to afford.

I spot two men standing outside of a pub, drinking, and I head over, holding my phone. "I'm FaceTiming with my friend Russell Brand!" I tell them, apropos of nothing. They look amazed.

"Wave to Russell!" I say, showing them the faceswapped video of Ryan waving.

"Is that for real?" one asks, waving back to the screen. "You're friends with Russell Brand?" I quickly put the phone away. "Yeah, I wind him up, making him wave at people on the street when we're on calls together."

"That’s insane!" they respond.

I feel validated.

I'd previously made the decision to keep all posts exclusive to Instagram to avoid too many replies, but after that encounter, I fear nothing. So I fire off a tweet.

The likes rack up from colleagues, peers, and industry people. This is the kind of company I want to keep. And if that wasn't enough, an email has hit my inbox that clinches it. A VIP invitation to a party that only the likes of Russell Brand could grace.

VIP tickets to Elbow at the O2 Arena. The mark of both a true influencer and a friend of Russell Brand.

As I head back from the O2 Arena, reading messages from friends and colleagues asking what I'm doing with Russell Brand, I'm astounded. Whether the fake PA, the tailored photos, the completely off-Brand selection of cheese pizzas, beers, and socks we enjoyed, or the simple fact that a Google search would have told you that Russell Brand has a gig in Hull this very night, there have been so many opportunities for people to call bullshit on this story. But they didn't. Evidently, the power of celebrity is strong.

Now, there's nothing stopping me from getting free socks and going to see Elbow every night of the year! Nothing! Apart from...

The Cease and Desist

I wake up to a cellphone pressed into my temple, vibrating. "Is this Ben?" says the stern voice on the other end. "How long have you been working for Russell because I’ve been working with him for ten years."

I bumble, and she cuts me off: It turns out that the VIP Stereophonics tickets I requested may have given the game away. "You've registered the domain name russellbrand.co?" I stay silent. "I'd recommend that you stop whatever it is you're doing. And if you continue to send messages as his PA, you can expect legal action from Russell's agent. Goodbye."

Before publishing, I try to go to Brand for a comment on the whole ruse but receive only a message telling me I can't use his image to get free stuff—which is tricky because I've already done it.

Unfortunately, I can't comment any further on this matter.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Oobah Butler and Christopher Bethell on Twitter.

Thanks to Liam Clemson for help with photo retouching.

DISCLAIMER: We do not recommend that you try to replicate this tactic. If anything, it takes way too long to convincingly Photoshop pictures of celebrities' faces onto preexisting photographs, and nobody has time for that.

President Obama finally got a Republican-controlled Congress to fund his domestic budget. All it took was Donald Trump in the White House to get it done.

In the $1.3 trillion spending bill that President Trump reluctantly signed on Friday, lawmakers did more than reject the steep cuts in dollars and programs that Trump proposed for domestic agencies a year ago. Across much of the government, Republican leaders agreed to spending levels that matched or even exceeded what Obama asked Congress to appropriate in his final budget request in 2016—and many of which lawmakers ignored while he was in office.

The Department of Health and Human Services received $78 billion, nearly identical to the $77.9 billion Obama sought and almost 20 percent more than what the Trump budget called for. Ditto for the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, which got $1.5 billion more than Obama’s final request and nearly $12 billion more than the reduced level Trump sought. Obama-era priorities like Head Start and Pell Grants drew increases, too.

Congress eliminated none of the 18 independent agencies Trump wanted to scrap, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And several of the programs he wanted to zero out won huge increases instead. Take the TIGER grants, an infrastructure program created by Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package. Congress had allocated $500 million to it each of the last several years, despite annual Obama requests to boost it to $1.25 billion. Trump’s budget called for axing it entirely, but lawmakers went even higher than Obama, giving $1.5 billion to TIGER. Or the Community Development Block Grant, a federal housing program that had been receiving $3 billion from Congress annually. Obama actually proposed cutting its funding by $200 million in 2016, while Trump called for chopping it altogether. In the end, it received $3.3 billion—a 10 percent boost.

The spending spikes all contributed to this week’s unexpected display of Democrats celebrating legislation enacted under complete GOP control of Washington. And the victories for a president who has been out of office for a year were not lost on conservatives. “This could have been written by President Obama and liberal Democrats,” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said Thursday night on Fox News, hours before he consented to a vote on a 2,200-page bill most of his colleagues hadn’t had time to read. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska accused his party of hypocrisy. “Every Republican would vote against this disgusting pork bill if a Democrat were president,” he said in a statement.

The domestic spending increases were set in motion a month ago, when Trump signed a budget agreement Congress approved so that he could get the dramatic spike in military spending he had prioritized all along. Lawmakers on the House and Senate appropriations committees—in negotiations with party leaders and the White House—decided exactly how the money would be spent. But the details of the domestic spending sparked a new round of complaints among conservatives who lamented the return of a big-spending Republican governance they once campaigned against.

And Trump took notice. First, as my colleague Elaina Plott reported, he vented to colleagues about insufficient funding for his southern border wall and the lack of restrictions for so-called sanctuary cities. Then, he bemoaned that he was forced to “waste money on Dem giveaways” in order to secure a 10 percent jump in defense spending and some additional funding for border security. Trump tweeted Friday morning that he was considering a veto even after the bill cleared Congress, but his advisers talked him down. By early afternoon, he had signed the omnibus, but not before delivering a rambling speech in which he vowed never to approve such a bill again, called for a line-item veto that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in 1996, and reiterated his demand for eliminating the Senate’s legislative filibuster—a step that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly rejected.

Trump’s evident despair over the legislation helped salve frustration among Democrats who were unable to secure protections for young undocumented immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Instead, party leaders were gleeful at what they had won. “This spending agreement brings the era of austerity to an unceremonious end and represents one of the most significant investments in the middle class in recent history,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proclaimed in a press conference.

In addition to winning increases in domestic spending, Democrats were able to preclude the inclusion of dozens of the same restrictive policy riders that Republicans had tried to add while Obama was president. The legislation retained funding for Planned Parenthood, for example, despite years of Republican promises to prohibit it. “We don’t have the House. We don’t have the Senate. We don’t have the presidency,” Schumer said, “but we produced a darn good bill for the priorities that we have believed in.”

Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma is the Republican chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee responsible for the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services—by far the largest subsection of the domestic budget. When I interviewed him on Friday, he initially conceded that critics had “a fair point” in saying that the spending bill largely fulfilled Obama’s domestic wishes. Cole put the onus on Trump and the Republican leadership, which agreed to the trade of significantly higher domestic spending for the increase in defense money. By virtue of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, Democrats had leverage, and they used it, he said. “We ended up spending a lot more money than we wanted to because the Senate rules put the Democrats in the game,” Cole said. “They’re not going to give their votes away for free.”

But Cole went on to argue that the spending allotments domestically did not so much reflect Democratic priorities as they were “congressional priorities” that lawmakers in both parties backed. Republicans used the higher budget caps to steer money toward programs that they had historically supported, like medical research at the National Institutes of Health, Native American programs, or the college preparatory initiatives Gear Up and TRIO. “There's a lot more money for NIH than Barack Obama proposed in any budget,” Cole said. “There's a lot more money for Native American programs than he ever proposed.”

He continued: “To say this is the Barack Obama domestic budget is just not true. To say that we're spending more domestically than we wanted to do is true. But we did that in order to get the defense spending.”

As Cole noted, no presidential budget “survives contact with Congress.” Power of the purse is one of the few remaining powers that legislators on Capitol Hill guard jealously, and even Obama did not secure all of his priorities when Democrats controlled the House and Senate early in his term. But the degree to which a Republican-controlled Congress rejected out of hand most of the proposals for a Republican president is stark, and it can be explained by a couple of factors.

For one, just about everyone in Washington understood Trump’s budget—both in his first year and the one he presented in February—to be a reflection not so much of the president’s wishes as it was those of Mick Mulvaney, his conservative budget director. Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman, has little pull on Capitol Hill beyond the hardline House Freedom Caucus that he helped to found. By the time he released his second budget earlier this year, Mulvaney acknowledged himself that it was little more than “a messaging document.”

Beyond a few big-ticket items like the border wall and added defense spending, Trump made little personal effort to insist on the cuts his budget proposed, and nor, for the most part, did his lieutenants. “I don't think they were as deeply involved at the subcommittee and committee levels as Obama or Bush,” Cole said. “This administration will probably get there, but it may take a while.”

Republicans on and off Capitol Hill also said the Trump administration was hobbled throughout the budget process by a dearth of appointees in key positions to advocate for its priorities on the granular, programmatic level. “They’re just basically not staffed up to do this work,” said Bill Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who for two decades served as a top GOP staffer on the Senate Budget Committee.

Hoagland said the Trump administration was “somewhat irrelevant” in the budget process. It’s a reality that may explain why a Republican president unhappily signed a spending bill that fulfilled his Democratic predecessor’s wishes as much or more than his own.

The smartphone video that went viral last year showing a United Airlines passenger being dragged out of an overbooked flight prompted several large airlines to vow to end or dramatically reduce the number of passengers denied a seat.

The nation’s airlines have made good on that promise.

The country’s...

They'll hit menus on March 26.

The father of Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, says it was “God’s plan” for him to have a baby with his own stepdaughter. Errol Musk, 72, described the 10-month-old baby boy he had with Jana Bezuidenhout, 30, as “exquisite”. He married her mother Heide when Jana was four but told The Sunday Times he did not consider her to be his stepdaughter because she had been raised away from the family for long periods of time. Jana Bezuidenhout, 30, who had a child with her stepfather Errol Musk He had two children with Ms Bezuidenhout’s mother before divorcing after 18 years of marriage. He said Jana had contacted him last year after splitting up with a boyfriend. “We were lonely, lost people,” he said from his home in South Africa. “One thing led to another — you can call it God’s plan or nature’s plan.” Two months later Jana told him she was pregnant. After assuming the father was her ex-boyfriend, Mr Musk demanded a paternity test only to discover it was his baby. “Jana is a delightful girl and a wonderful mother. She said I had changed her life,” he added. Elon Musk railed against his father in a recent interview Credit: Reuters His story may explain months of hostility between father and son, who have reportedly not spoken in more than a year. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Elon Musk – who is though to be worth about $20 billion – described his father as a “terrible human being” but stopped short of talking about specific examples. In quotes | Elon Musk “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” Mr Musk senior, who is a millionaire and made his fortune through engineering, disputed that characterisation but has admitted shooting dead three intruders in his home in South Africa. He was charged with manslaughter but said he was acting in self-defence and was acquitted.

President Donald Trump pushed back Sunday morning on reports that he has struggled to find attorneys willing to represent him in the Russia investigation, tweeting "many lawyers and top law firms" want to join his legal team.

An out-of-control Chinese space lab is expected to fall to Earth within days, according to the latest estimate from the European Space Agency (ESA), which is monitoring its descent.

Let’s talk to the Big 12 ref about his guns, which once took over social media during a title game.

On January 9, 2017, a star was born, in the form of a jacked referee officiating the national championship between Clemson and Alabama. His name is Mike Defee, a Big 12 referee since 2006 and a college football ref since 2001.

Twitter was abuzz about his arms on that Monday night, and rightfully so.

All the attention caught Defee off-guard, especially given that this wasn’t his first high-profile game.

“I was completely taken aback,” Defee told SB Nation via a phone interview. “The very nature of what we do is, we’re just trying to be invisible, so that no one knows you’re really there. And to have had that happen, I was just blown away.

“My appearance, the way I dress, has been consistent for a number of years. And I’ve worked a lot of big games. I worked the Rose Bowl prior to the national championship, I worked the semifinal of the Cotton Bowl: Alabama and Michigan State. It’s just funny in today’s society, all it takes is one person with Twitter, or whatever, and all of the sudden, it gets out there.”

So, how does he stay so fit?

Defee lifts every week, and he mixes in cardio three times a week, varying between running, going on a StairMaster, or spinning.

“I mix things up,” Defee said. “As you get older, you can’t sustain the kind of intense workout load that you can when you’re younger. So I’ve learned to manage that as I’ve gotten older. I’m 56 and so on average, I try to be in the gym about four days a week. From a lifting perspective, I kind of rotate body parts.”

Monday

Chest

Bench press:

• 135 pounds X 20 reps
• 185 X 12
• 225 X 8-10
• 250 X 6-8
• 275 X 4-6
• 225 X 8-10
• 205 X 10

Incline press:

• If barbell, 3-4 sets X 8-10 reps, 205 pounds
• If Smith machine, 3-4 sets X 10 reps, 225 pounds
• If dumbbells: 3-4 sets X 10 reps, 80-100 pounds

Pec Deck or fly machine: 4 sets X 10 reps, 190 pounds

Shoulders

Military press: 4 sets X 10 reps, 135 pounds
Dumbbell lateral shoulder flies: 3 sets X 10 reps, 30-35 pounds
Dumbbell horizontal shoulder flies: 3 sets X 10 reps, 25 pounds

Tuesday

Legs

Smith machine squats: 4 sets X 10-15 reps, up to 225 pounds (Defee’s lower back injury keeps him light here)
Incline leg press: 6 sets X 8-10 reps, up to 720 pounds
Leg extensions: 3 sets X 10 reps, 150 pounds
Leg curls: 3 sets X 10 reps, 110 pounds
Calf raises: 4 sets X 15 reps, 210 pounds

Wednesday

Biceps

Standing bar curls: 3 sets X 10 reps, up to 135 pounds
Single arm dumbbell curls: 3 sets X 10 reps, 45 pounds
Preacher curls: 3 sets X 10 reps, 80-90 pounds

Triceps

Brain crushers: 3 sets X 10 reps, 125 pounds, and 10 close-grip press reps immediately following
Tricep extensions: 3 sets X 10 reps, 60 pounds
Overhead rope: 3 sets X 10 reps, 80 pounds
Tricep dips: 3 sets X 10 reps

Thursday

Back

Behind-the-neck lateral pull downs: 3 sets X 10 reps, increasing from 140 to 160 pounds
Front lateral pull downs: 3 sets X 10 reps, increasing from 150 to 170 pounds
Narrow grip seated cable rows: 3 sets X 10 reps, increasing from 130 to 150 pounds
Barbell shrugs: 3 sets X 10 reps, 225 pounds

Friday and weekends

“Rest periods for me, relative to workouts,” he said. “In the offseason, I’m usually working at home or on my ranch.”

How about all that time on Saturdays spent chasing football players around? How many steps does that take?

“In a given game, 7,000 to 8,000 on average. Other positions usually do more!”

But we didn’t just talk about gainz!

Defee gave me a glimpse of what it’s really like to be a referee. He refs part-time, working as the manager for an electrical construction and maintenance company in Southeast Texas.

How did your referee career start?

“I actually got into officiating football relatively late age,” Defee said. “I was about 33, 34 years old, something like that, and my son had moved into playing for the [high] school. And I actually used to play a lot of golf, and one of the guys I played with was a high school referee and he’d been after me. He thought I’d as much as I enjoyed football, I’d like that.

“So I came into it, and really, really enjoyed it, and found out that I didn’t know near what I thought I knew as a fan. My knowledge was a conglomerate of Friday night, college, and NFL football, and what I really thought I knew was dramatically different. So I started going to clinics to try and get better because I didn’t even want to cost anyone the game because of my incompetence. And through that pursuit, I ended up meeting a number of people that liked the way I worked and my approach to football, and helped me get into small college football in 2001, in the Southland Conference.”

How big of a jump was high school reffereeing to college?

“The one thing I think most officials coming out of Texas have an advantage, is that Texas high school football is played under NCAA rules, one of the few states — there was always one other state I can remember, they were NCAA rules. From that perspective, it was pretty straightforward. But the dramatic difference was size and speed of the game, they’re dramatically different. And it was equally as big moving from the Southland Conference up to the Big 12.”

Is crowd noise ever a factor for you or your crew?

“The truth is, you’re aware that there’s noise, there’s emotion. But if you’re going to work at an elite level on a consistently high basis, high-level of performance, you have got to learn how to focus and concentrate.

“Every down, every [official on the field] has a different pre-snap routine. So when a play’s over with, there’s a sequence of events that takes place, taking you to the next snap. You work the play, you do your tees, you get to the dead ball, and you work your pre-snap routine, and it’s just one play at a time.”

The score isn’t much of a factor in refereeing, either?

“There’s many, many times I walk off the field and couldn’t begin to tell you what the score was. I’ll have to ask guys ‘hey what was the final?’ I may be generally aware if the score’s close, potential for overtime, something like that. But other than that, the score is just irrelevant to me.

“One of the common comments I get from people that see me work games is, ‘oh man you have the greatest seat in the world in the game. They don’t really understand that you don’t watch the game, we watch each position. We work elements of a play, or aspects of that given play. So you don’t really, it’s not like you’re watching the game as a fan, you’re just working.”

Defee is lighthearted about how quickly his guns went viral.

“The thing for me was, and I talked to a lot of officials, I did not want that to overshadow the work of the crew in that game,” Defee said. “Because I thought the crew in that game did a really, really nice job.

“The other thing is, it brings positive attention to officiating, and it’s great, because it’s really rare that we get a whole lot of positive feedback.”

Everybody knows that when your NES cartridges aren’t working right, the best way to fix them is to hold the open end up to your mouth and give a gentle little puff to clear out any dust particles. If that doesn’t work, you give a mighty blow like you’re trying to kill the three little pigs, possibly while moving the…

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Man, LeBron James is a damn missile. Look where he takes off for this dunk. He goes through and over Joe Harris like Harris is made of warm air:

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Even if you don’t typically use them to dry your hair, hair dryers can be useful to have around to handle a number of different tasks. This week, New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner made waves on the web by sharing one more: crisping chicken skin.

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Six minutes and 20 seconds: it took only about the length of a TV news mini-segment for 19-year-old to murder 17 people with a semiautomatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last month.

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What’s the hottest game on Twitch? Is it an eSport like Overwatch or League Of Legends? Try again. Is it Drake and Travis Scott playing Fortnite with superstar streamer Ninja? That was last week, pal. Is it an Austrian man dressed like he’s at a renaissance faire playing three recorders at once? You bet your ass it is.

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Party on, Sister Jean!

Loyola Chicago beat — nay, destroyed — Kansas State 78-62 to nab a spot in the Final Four. And as you might imagine, their fearless leader and biggest fan Sister Jean was preeeetty excited.

Yessssss! Even if, for some horrible reason, you’re not a Loyola Chicago fan now — it’s impossible not to break out in a grin watching that video.

And the team was excited for Sister Jean too, even giving her a piece of the net!

But it wasn’t all celebrating — Sister Jean also had to get to work, creating a new bracket to replace the one that had Loyola losing in the Sweet 16, which was quite possibly the only think Sister Jean has ever done wrong.

The Ramblers have been incredible to watch all tournament, and Sister Jean has only added to the fun. So as Loyola approaches the Final Four — and maybe a national championship — Sister Jean has a lot to be happy about.

And thanks to her, so do we.

Many students at the March for Our Lives rallies across the country were wearing a price tag that read $1.05. The reason? That’s how much they say each student is worth to Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. The organizers of the march say they got the number by calculating the amount the National Rifle Association donated to Rubio, divided by the number of students in Florida.

Renée Zellweger, a woman of many talents, has strapped on a wig, shimmied into a gown, and done something fun to her eyebrows; and now here she is, as Judy Garland.

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My friend Helen Rosner loves crispy poultry. She evangelizes dry-brined turkey and fried chicken given an extra turn under a heat lamp. Others may have been surprised when she turned her hair dryer loose on a roaster in the hopes of sucking just a little more moisture from the bird’s skin before it got properly cooked. I was not.

Happy snow day, I am using an astonishingly expensive hair dryer to remove all moisture from a chicken to maximize skin crispiness when I roast it. pic.twitter.com/ngtzmoOSHf

— Helen Rosner (@hels) March 21, 2018

Hello, gorgeous pic.twitter.com/pIFyganrBM

— Helen Rosner (@hels) March 21, 2018

Here, pretty much, is the recipe. Plus: Roast the bird on a bed of rough-chopped veg to help airflow. And I prefer cast iron but it doesn’t really matter. https://t.co/pLli3OQy0w

— Helen Rosner (@hels) March 21, 2018

Hell of a lifehack, Hels.

Update: Helen has added a full write-up and recipe for hair dryer chicken (or Roast Chicken à la Dyson) at The New Yorker.

Tags: food   Helen Rosner

Chinese state media will be getting more propaganda now that the Communist Party has announced it will be in direct control of broadcasters and the regulators of everything from movies and TV to books and radio programs.

We still have questions about the logistics of the dog-friendly screenings for Wes Anderson’s new film Isle Of Dogs that have been taking place across the U.S. this week—Do the dogs bark when they see the other dogs on screen? Can dogs even eat popcorn? (Yes, according to the American Kennel Club)—but as long as they…

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There's a new drug epidemic happening in Indiana that will make you wonder, Have we just run out of ways to get high? According to a local news report, smoking bug spray has become a major issue in Indianapolis. On Wednesday's episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts talked about the bizarre new drug craze that may make you mildly suspicious of everyone you see at your local sporting goods store.

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

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In the immediate aftermath of the Florida school shooting earlier this month that claimed the lives of 17 innocent teenagers, I was struck with two very grim premonitions. First, that the NRA social media manager would take a nice long six-day weekend (sure enough, they stopped tweeting on February 14, the day of the shooting, and didn’t post until February 20), and second, that the conservative media machine would soon mobilize to do what even a few years ago seemed fairly unthinkable: outright attack the underaged survivors of the brutal massacre. To my disappointment (but not my surprise), that second one has also come Extremely True. It’s not that I’m Nostradamus or any shit like that, it's just that the conservative script for these things has become just that depressingly predictable.

Way back in 2012 when the Sandy Hook shootings happened, everything felt strangely similar yet very different. Having a president capable of demonstrating even a basic level of empathy went a long way, but outside of Alex Jones (who was a vastly more fringe character back then) and some anonymous online morons, there wasn’t much of an effort to malign the survivors of the shooting or their families. To be honest, after a year of the 2016 campaign and another year of the Trump presidency, that low-ass bar feels like some Andy Griffith–style nostalgia.

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As has been covered on many occasions by writers more journalistically inclined than I, there is now a pretty well-trodden path from the online fringes of the far right directly to the cable news network our demented big boy in chief spends 60 percent of his waking hours watching. Hell, if the conspiracy theory about an antifa rebellion can make it to Fox & Friends, who’s to say what won’t break through? What starts as trolling and genuine dumbass credulity in the darkest corners of the web all too often makes this journey to the mainstream, and watching this occur in the weeks following the Parkland shooting has ended up being a pretty great, and terrible, case study.

While the first to jump on any “crisis actor/false flag/soros plants” sort of theory always ends up being a MAGA mondo-weirdo on Twitter, they are usually joined by fringe right-wing sites like realpatriotnewseagle2016.info or some URL like that. From there these theories make the leap to the right wing’s most beloved blue checkmark accounts, who lend them just enough air of legitimacy to be discussed by real people.

Last Friday, actor James Woods—who once sued an anonymous Twitter user for calling him a cocaine addict, and continued the suit after the user died—tweeted out a photo of teen activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg, comparing his anti–gun violence armband to that of the Nazi SS, and suggesting he don a brownshirt and jackboots to complete the look. Putting aside for a second that this is a child—one who saw 17 people gunned down mere weeks ago—the comparison is absurd on its face. But since nothing matters anymore and tribalism is our new law, the post did bigass numbers in the form of 14,000 retweets. And though Woods seems fringey, he's followed by lots of people, including Donald Trump, Jr.

Woods’s post is far from an aberration. Former CPAC keynote speaker and convicted campaign finance fraudster Dinesh D’Souza celebrated the failure of a Florida gun control bill with taunts like, “Adults 1, kids 0.” Last week, a Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives named Leslie Gibson said of Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez, “There's nothing about this skinhead lesbian that impresses me and there is nothing to say unless you're frothing at the mouth moonbat.” The right-wing cartoonist Ben Garrison published a cartoon that smeared Hogg as a ventriloquist’s dummy controlled by CNN, which was in turn controlled by the “Deep State.”

This is what the conservative media machine is built to do, so much so that I doubt anyone could really stop it at this point even if they wanted to. A political alliance that is built solely around “triggering the libs” and vicious (usually fact-free) attacks on political opponents is really only capable of a single play in the playbook. Engaging on a factual level about the roots of gun violence in America is a losing game for conservatives, so the only course of action is to vacillate between pompous rhetoric about the Second Amendment and slandering anyone who might disagree. Fox News hosts in the days since have brought on such mainstream conservatives as Ben Shapiro (who was a televised commentator and pro-virginity activist at the age of 17) to claim that these kids are being manipulated by the DNC. This is the GOP now.

I am by no means saying that because the Parkland teens are minors they are beyond reproach. If conservatives and gun lovers want to engage in a debate with these kids, I fully support that—but engage with them on the issues, the facts. Instead, the dominant trend online and even on TV is to impugn these survivors’ credibility—to say they are Soros puppets, doing it for their 15 minutes of fame, doin' it for the Vine, or whatever else. Discussing common sense ways to lower gun violence across groups that all (hopefully) abhor is one thing, calling a group of children dykes or Nazis or agents of the Deep State is uh, entirely another.

While Trump is primarily a symptom of the GOP rot rather than its cause, his ascension to power has undoubtedly accelerated this decline. He is after all the man most responsible for the birther movement, a thoroughly baseless and vitriolic campaign against a black president he hated with a passion. Vitriol against his enemies in the face of facts is his MO: In 1989, he took out newspaper ads calling for the deaths of the “Central Park Five,” a group of black and Latino teens who were later convicted of rape—then, during the 2016 campaign, he insisted they were guilty even though they had by then been exonerated by DNA evidence and released.

This kind of mindset is mirrored in the Republican Party and its supporters today. Show them statistics about how gun control ended mass shootings in other countries. They will say it didn’t. Nothing matters.

So where do we go from here? Will there be a breaking point where conservatives finally say that they have gone too far? What would that even look like, if not the young survivors of a mass shooting? To be honest I have no earthly clue, and I am not particularly hopeful that it will get better any time soon. Conservatives, who constantly are crying to allow the free marketplace of ideas to win out, are unwilling or unable to simply allow these kids to voice their own beliefs. They also seem genuinely convinced that no sane person, even one who just lost 17 friends to gun violence, would ever be pro-gun control. Or maybe they’re full of shit. Who knows. But if we ever emerge from this collective fugue state we have found ourselves in, I hope we never let these assclowns forget what they said about these kids.

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The idea of an illegal casino usually calls to mind some shady warehouse filled with high rollers, cigar smoke, and ritzy cocktails, or maybe a tightly-patrolled, Michael Clayton-esque hovel tucked into some city alleyway. If you're looking to run a den of iniquity right under the cops' noses, the very least you could do is find a cunning way to disguise it—a crucial first step one illegal gambling room in Texas apparently skipped before opening up anyway.

Last week, police raided a betting house masquerading as a Zumba studio in a Houston strip mall, local ABC affiliate KTRK reports. Instead of, say, putting up a few posters of suburban moms in neon workout clothes, or even just investing in an actual sign, whoever ran the joint did the absolute bare minimum they could to disguise it.

If any curious Houstonian hoping to get in a fun, upbeat workout to Jason Derulo or whatever had actually walked into the place, it'd take about half a second to realize no one was going to teach them how turn a squat thrust into a dance move. There was no front desk, no full-length mirrors, no vibrantly dressed instructor all hopped up on endorphins. Instead, the place was packed wall-to-wall with bootleg slot machines.

The closest thing to a class schedule was a poster with the word bonos (bonds) hand-scrawled at the top, listing a few hourly specials for the joint's big spenders.

Understandably, the cops saw right through the ruse. They stormed the joint last Wednesday, seizing thousands of dollars in cash, confiscating 40 motherboards from the illegal machines, and arresting one lonely gambler inside, according to the Harris County Constable Precinct 5's Facebook page.

There's no word on exactly how the cops found out something fishy was up with the bogus dance studio, but the bars on all the windows probably didn't do the place any favors. Who knows—maybe if the person who ran it remembered to slap an E at the end of "ZUM BA DANC," it'd still be in business.

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I’ve bought a couple of these PetFusion cat scratcher lounges for my cat over the years, and I can confirm that it’s probably the only thing on Earth that he actually likes. It also has a ridiculous 4.8 star review average from nearly 6,000 customers, and it basically never goes on sale. Today’s $40 price tag is a…

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