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Terry Francona managedthe Red Sox to two World Series titles during his eight-year tenure in Boston. He led Cleveland to anAmerican League pennant in 2016. But his stint as the manager for the Birmingham Barons boasts a claim to fame that may rival his otheraccomplishments:
He taught Michael Jordan how to play Yahtzee.
After Jordans first retirement from basketball in 1993, he signed a minor league contract with the Chicago White Sox and was assigned to the Double-A squad in Birmingham.
We played a lot of Yahtzee. Was he competitive? Hes competitive in everything.
Ill tell you a story. We were in Zebulon, North Carolina. This is the first time hes back in Carolina to play baseball, so its a big deal. Everybody wants to talk to him. Some pretty big-name guys were there.
This was before they built the clubhouses there, so we were out in this trailer. After the game, me and the coaches were in there playing Yahtzee. Michael came by and saw us and said, Hey, what are you guys doing?
And I said, F, man, werent you ever a kid? Were playing Yahtzee.
Well, teach me.
Sure, Mike. Any time.
No, teach me now.
So I had to run out and tell all the media that Mike was in the cage, working with Barney on his swing, while we taught him how to play Yahtzee. We played the rest of the season. Do you know how many games of Yahtzee you can play on a 12-hour bus trip?
Read anentire oral history of Michael Jordans baseball career at Complex.
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Drake "More Life" Features The Weeknd, OVO Sound Radio 39 Canceled ?
More Lifeapproaches. Drake"s first project since Views, More Life is, according to Drake, a playlist, not an album; he wants you to be very clear on that, if not the distinction between the two. And its coming sometimesoon? We think its soon, but since it was announced in October of 2016, its been subject to several delays. As with all things Drake, the anticipation for the record is already reaching fever pitch, as we wait to see what the biggest rapper (and, potentially, pop star) in the world drops next. From what weve seen, heard, and inferred, its going to be an interesting project; Drake seems to be playing with a lot of disparate elements this time around, and as he proved on songs like One Dance, hes a master at pulling different threads and weaving together something cohesive. With the pressure off for commercial successViews was, after all, Americas favorite album last yearhes free to try something new. With less than a week to go until its potential release date, heres everything we know about More Life.
Release Date
According to Oliver, Drakes manager, More Life is set to drop on the next episode of OVO Sound Radio. So, in short, its set to come out soon. OVO SoundDrake and co.s Beats 1 radio showhappens biweekly, which likely means the day to watch is Saturday, March 4.
Still, all Oliver said was that its happening on the next episode of OVO Soundhe declined to set an actual date. The radio show doesnt necessarily happen on a regular schedule, so the date of the show, and More Lifes release with it, are subject to change. Theres a strong possibility that the release date will move once again (More Life was initially announced with a December release date).
Regardless, if it doesnt come out this coming weekend, prepare for it to drop on a Saturday, and Beats 1 will be the place to hear it first.
Album Art
More Life was first announced at the tail-end of October, with scant information accompanying the announcement. It was a playlist, would have original music, and the announcement came with the premiere of four new songs. Additionally, though, was the unveiling of the More Life cover arta photograph of Drakes father, Dennis Graham, writing on a notepadwhich has been just about the only constant as the project has developed since it was announced.
Features
The prevailing logic surrounding More Life is that, while Drake calls it a playlist, its going to be an album-length collection of new Drake songs. However, it also looks like Drake wants to play with new sounds, and put some new people on in the process.
First up, is the projects only confirmed guest, Giggs. The baritone Grime MC has been the subject of effusive praise from Drake in the past, and his presence on More Life was recently confirmed when Drake talked to DJ Semtex for a career-spanning interview. We kinda got into this thing where it would be like, Yo Ill send you something, and then hed send it back and hed kill it, Drake said of their relationship. Me and Giggs had like 3 or 4 songs, ones for his project, I got two on More Life, and then another one just kinda there.
From there, its nothing but speculation. Members of the OVO crewPartynextdoor chief among themare the most likely to pop up, but appearances from Bryson Tiller, the Weeknd, J. Lo, and Young Thug all seem like possibilities. Drake also likes to keep his ear to the ground, which could mean the addition of some artists youve never heard before as well. Theres also speculation that hes working with rising Atlanta rapper SahBabii, but whether any collaborations between the two show up on More Lifeis anyone"s guess.
Producers
The big production news Drake dropped is that More Life will be executive produced by Oliver, his manager. Drake described it as a full circle moment for us, in the interview with Semtex. Oliver had so much input on So Far Gone, so I was like, Man it would be nice to do something with me and you again, so I gave him that task and hes at home piecing it together. Its a partnership that has paid off well in the past, especially if Drake is name-checking his breakout mixtape, and a promising sign for the upcoming project.
One of the few snippets to emerge from More Lifecame fromMurda Beatz, who played a collaboration with (a very English-sounding) Drake in public.
Additionally, Drake has made it clear that his longtime right-hand man, Noah 40 Shebib, will be involved. 40 is obviously always involved, he mentioned in the same interview. If we assume that other regular Drake collaborators will also be in the fold, expect beats from Boi-1da and OVO stalwart Nineteen85, as well as white-hot names and past collaborators like Frank Dukes and Metro Boomin.
Release Strategy
Following the release strategy of Views, and continuing Drakes partnership with the most valuable company in the world, More life is going to be an Apple Music exclusive and premiere on Beats 1. Taking it one step further though, Drake intends on structuring More Life after his OVO Sounds show on Beats 1. This has some interesting implications. OVO Sound is a place for OVO premieres, but its also a place for curationwhere Drake, a voracious consumer of music, can show off what he listens to. For fans, that platform hints at what Drake might sound like in a few months, or points to which artist he might remix. In this case, it likely means that Drake is going to be trying out some of the stuff he normally likes to put in front of his listeners.
Expectations
Drake hasnt taken an artistic risk in a little while.Views featured some new sounds, but it was a conservative record for the most partit sounded like our expectations for Drake, and had several surefire hits stashed in its pockets. The last time we saw a real stylistic departure from him was on If Youre Reading This Its Too Late, which he was also careful to classify as something other than an album. If thats any indication, More Life is an opportunity for Drake to try some new things on for sizewe already know hes pulling from grime for at least one or two tracks, but it seems likely that this is going to be an experimental record of sorts, and one that tries to recapture some of the critical acclaim he never picked up on Views.
Elon Musk has been known to keep only few books on the shelf behind his desk at the SpaceX factory floor in Hawthorne, Calif. Most of them are basic books on rocket design. The remaining one is Einstein, the biography of the great physicist, by former TIME editor Walter Isaacson. There"s an odd push-pull in a man like Musk, who is humble enough to own a space launch company and yet still keep his how-to-build-a-rocket-ship books on display, and ambitious enough to make it clear who his role model appears to be.
It was that ambitious dimension of Musk that was on fullest display this week when he announced that late next year, SpaceX will send two astronauts around the moon, venturing further into space than human beings ever have.
"Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind," a statement on the SpaceX site said. Invoking Apollo had more resonance than it seems. If the mission flies when promised, it will occur close to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission, which was a similar swing for the fences that NASA launched in Christmas week 1968. musk knows rockets, but he also knows marketing, and this is not likely to have escaped his notice.
The question, of course, is whether he can really make good on his promise. And the answer is uncertain.
Let"s stipulate that SpaceX is in many ways the wnderkind company people believe. It was the first non-governmental body to send a spacecraft to orbit and recover it intact. It has made multiple successful cargo runs to the International Space Station, and has pulled off the dazzling feat of landing the spent first stage of its Falcon rockets upright, on four legs, on a floating barge in the Atlantic, rather than simply letting it tumble back into the ocean as generations of expendable rockets have done. The company is also scheduled to begin carrying astronauts to the International Space Station in 2018though that schedule has slipped from 2017 and could slip some more.
But the moon is another matter. In some ways Musk has kept things easy. His company has already selected the crew two so-far unnamed passengers who are being described as paying tourists, not astronauts, though they will still undergo what Musk describes as "extensive training." That training, however, will be mostly be about how to manage emergencies and survive the physical rigors of flight; the spacecraft will be doing all of the flying automatically.
The mission will also be the simplest moon journey possible a so-called circumlunar trajectory, in which the ship simply swings around the far side of the moon and allows lunar gravity to fling it home, rather than settling into orbit. Orbiting the moon is not only more difficult but vastly more dangerous. If your braking engine burns too long as you slow down to settle into orbit, you"ll crash into the surface of the moon instead. If the engine fails to fire when it"s time to speed up and head home, you"ll become a permanent satellite of the moon, forever imprisoned in orbit. It was that dark scenario that had a lot of planners inside NASA arguing for a circumlunar trajectory for Apollo 8, but the orbital advocates won the day and the crew eventually made 10 circuits of the moon before coming home.
Musk"s boast that the crew will travel farther from home than humans ever have is legitimate, but is actually less than it seems. The current distance record is held by the crew of Apollo 13, who similarly made a single swing around the moon in their crippled spacecraft, arcing out to 248,655 mi (400,171 km) before returning. Musk plans to go 300,000 mi. (483,000 km) or more, but a wide turn in space is a little like a wide turn in a car: It"s actually easier than a tight turn.
The two biggest challenges Musk faces are the business of getting off the ground and getting back to Earth. The first part requires him to have the right rocket for the trip, which he doesn"t yet. SpaceX"s space station runs have been made with the company"s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket which, as its name suggests, has a cluster of nine first stage engines. Part of the company"s business plan has always been affordability and scalability, which means not spending R&D dollars building bigger engines for longer missions. Rather, just bundle the ones you"ve got.
For a deep space mission to the moon or Mars, the company plans to use its still-in-development Falcon Heavy set for its first unmanned test flight this summer which uses three nine-engine clusters at its base. Twenty-seven engines lighting and firing at once means a lot more moving parts and a lot more vibrations than a rocket with fewer engines has. Those vibrations that can be killers, since if they vibrate at the right or, really, wrong resonance, they can shake the entire machine to pieces.
Finally there"s the business of reentry. Reentering the atmosphere from Earth orbit is relatively speaking an easy thing to do, a matter simply of using your engine to pump the brakes, slow down and then fall out of the sky. A spacecraft returning from the moon is traveling 40% faster than an orbiting spacecraft, effectively slamming into the atmosphere. Surviving that impact requires hitting a narrow "entry corridor" just 2.1 degrees wide lest you enter two steeply and burn up or too shallowly and skip off the atmosphere and bounce off into space forever. Even if you do hit that bullseye, you don"t then simply ride the reentry fire down to landing as an orbiting spacecraft does. Partway down you actually have to climb back up to bleed off some speed and g forces, before heading back down again.
That so-called "skip entry" was in some cases the most hair-raising part of the Apollo 8 mission, since no crew had ever attempted it before. Even though it was successful, it wasn"t much fun for the crew, who pulled a load of nearly 7 g"s or seven times earthly gravity. A lot has changed in the 50 years since that mission flew, but basic physics haven"t, which means that SpaceX"s paying tourists will experience that same crushing force.
None of this means that Musk can"t make good on his moon boast. The Saturn V had only had two unmanned launches and only one of them was successful before it carried astronauts. The skip entry had never been tried before at all, but Apollo crews eventually flew it nine times giving SpaceX engineers more confidence that they can do it too.
Most important, Apollo 8 and all the Apollos that followed were exercises in audacity in the best, most bracing way possible. That is another legacy on which SpaceX proposes to build, and for that the company deserves applause.
Drake Previews New Song from "More Life" Live at Amsterdam
Drake and The Weeknd have always had a complicatedrelationship. From linking up in 2011 to their rumored falling out in 2013, complete with subliminal disses on both sides, the two musicianshave always had a connection whether through their shared Canadian heritage or their similarly moody, R&B-infused music.
Recently, it seems as though theyveall but mended fences and renewed their friendship. Drakemade a cameo in The Weeknds music video for Reminder, last week, and Weeknd returned the favor in spectacular fashion when he dropped byDrakesBoy Meets World Tour on Saturday. The twoshocked the crowd and Germany, as The Weeknd performed his recent hits The Hills and Starboy. Check out the video below.
Giventhis sudden reunion, and the fact that Drake is prepping the release of his playlist project More Life, the question many have had on their tongue is: can we expect another Drake-Weeknd collaboration to be on the tracklist?
Its a rumor that HNHH addressed earlier this yearwhen they listed 12 artists who could potentially feature on More Life. The article says the chances are low given that the two arent on good terms, but as can be seen by the latest developments, things have made a drastic changefor the better.
a new song called "Free Smoke," which is rumored to be on his upcoming playlist "More Life."Click here to read more
SOHHalso reported that the duo were back in the studio thismonth, and posting pictures of themselves together live the one below. The OVOXO caption is a combination ofDrakes OVO and The Weeknds XO record labels.
OVOXO
A post shared by The Weeknd (@theweeknd) on Feb 16, 2017 at 10:59am PST
With these context clues, The Weeknds cryptic tweet quoting Drake, and the fact that online threads have been throwing around a potential song title (Remember, My Love), wed say the chances of seeing The Weeknd joining the More Life party are high. Well know for sure when it premieresthis Saturday (March 4) on OVO Sound Radio.
LISTEN: Drakes Full & Uncensored More Life Interview
Drake sits down with DJ Semtex for the full and uncensored version of his "More Life" interview.
(VIDEO) Louis Tomlinson Fight At LAX Airport With Paparazzi! - March 2017
With 2016 single "Just Hold On," Louis Tomlinson established himself as the third member of boy band One Direction to launch a solo career. Even as the remaining four members move on and tease projects that may arrive in the coming months, the group still maintains that they are on hiatus and not officially broken up.
"No one knows the answer right now," Tomlinson tells Rolling Stone of how much longer the break will last. "Everyone"s just enjoying a schedule that"s not as relentless and exploring solo projects."
While tabloids have long reported on tension between 1D"s members, which was formed after the original five members delivered solo auditions for the x-factor, tomlinson says that they are still all friendly and close. Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Liam Payne and even former member Zayn Malik showed up to watch Tomlinson make his stage debut as a solo artist at The X-Factor in December, a performance that also happened to follow news of his mother"s death.
"I think that"s what it"s all about," he adds. "People love to write what they want to write but there"s no bitterness."
As for what"s to come now that his collaboration with Steve Aoki is out in the world, Tomlinson has not made any plans to release more solo music. His move to dance-pop was surprising for many given his penchant for folkier, rock-leaning tunes as one of the main songwriters for his boy band. "I wanted to do something that was different enough to One Direction, but not too far away that it"s going to alienate the One Direction fans," he explains.
Malik was the first member of One Direction to release solo music, having left the band in early 2015 following creative disputes and anxiety issues. He released his debut album Mind of Mine last year. Horan followed suit last fall with his folk-y, acoustic "This Town." Styles will appear in the Christopher Nolan film Dunkirk this summer, while Payne has not yet revealed his future plans, though he did announce a solo contract with Columbia.
Saturday Night Live (11:30 p.m., NBC) Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures) hosts with musical guest Father john misty.
also on tonight . . .
Say Yes to the Dress (8 p.m., TLC) In the Season 15 premiere, Grammy-nominated rocker Elle King needs a dress.
Ransom (8 p.m., CBS) A couple in France are forced to turn to Eric and his team for help after their daughter is abducted from a train.
Detroit Steel (10 p.m., History) Adam buys himself a little more time on the 1979 Ford Bronco, but pleasing a Bronco expert isnt easy.
Dr Jeff: Rocky Mountain Vet (9 p.m., Animal Planet) Dr. Jeff and Dr. Petro work to save the leg of a beloved husky. Also, a pig spay becomes complicated.
