Month: April 2021

In the latest virtuoso move to promote his hit song “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” Lil Nas X posted a lo-fi remix of the track to YouTube channel Friday evening. According to his Twitter, it’s his birthday, and it seems he has given us all this gift in celebration. The video, which has the full title “Lil Nas X - MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) but it’s lofi and something you can study to lol,” is honestly perfect. It sounds exactly like something you’d hear on Lofi Girl’s channel; if it ever gets slipped into the rotation on the channel’s iconic “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” video, I wouldn’t bat an eye (ear?). Lil Nas X’s video even has five anime drawings of iconic looks from the rapper, clearly taking inspiration from the famous anime girl that is the face of ...

Princess Anne and Prince Edward paid a heartfelt tribute to late dad Prince Philip in interviews that aired after his death Friday — with Princess Anne declaring “life will be completely different” without him. “To have someone that you confide in and smile about things that you perhaps could not in public — to be able to share that is immensely important,” Prince Edward, 57, added of their father in the chats with ITV.  In the prerecorded segments, which were scheduled to be aired upon the royal patriarch’s death, Princess Anne, 70, reflected on her father’s life as a young man and his legacy. “Without him, life will be completely different,” she said. “But from society’s perspective, he was able to keep pace with the kind of technological changes tha...

Transformers are some of the most iconic toys around — an action figure and a car! All in one! A true bargain! But as modern Transformers toys have gotten more complex, they have also become an absolutely huge pain to actually transform from car to robot and back again, often requiring multiple shame-filled trips back to the trashcan where you threw it in a fit of hubris. Hasbro is finally fixing that problem. Not by making the toys simpler, but by making them a lot more complicated and expensive in the form of its new $700 Optimus Prime Auto-Converting Programmable Advanced Robot, which thanks to the power of real robotics technology (in the form of 27 servo motors and a mobile app) can actually transform all by itself. The new Transformer is almost breathtaking in its complexi...

If you think the royal family has drama, wait until you hear about Prince Philip’s side of the clan. The late royal consort, who died Friday at 99, came of a family of Greek aristocrats who led dramatic and colorful lives in the 20th century — including three sisters who were married to Nazis and a mom who was honored for saving Jews during the Holocaust. Philip was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and his wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg. His older sisters were Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cécilie and Sophie. The prince would stay close to his mom, who came to live at Buckingham Palace in her final years, while he had a complicated relationship with his sisters — who weren’t even invited to his wedding. Here...

“We both think that she is too young for that now, as she has never met any young men of her own age,” George wrote. But he added: “I like Philip. He is intelligent, has a good sense of humor” and “thinks about things in the right way.” Elizabeth was said to have written to Philip three times a week while she toured South Africa. By the time she returned to England, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark had renounced his foreign titles and become Lt. Philip Mountbatten, a British subject. The gesture pleased his future father-in-law. The engagement was announced on July 10, 1947. Articles about the coming marriage pushed reports of food and coal shortages off the front pages. Sales assistants sent ration coupons to the princess (even the royal family was living within limits) so she could h...