It's no surprise that politics is on everyone's minds lately. But it's easy to forget that there's more to the political world than what's going on in the White House—take, for instance, the insanity occurring in Australia right now.
On Wednesday, Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull took the floor to call out politician Bill Shorten, the leader of the opposition, repeatedly calling him a sycophant. He even said that "there was never a union leader in Melbourne that tucked his knees under more billionaires' tables than the Leader of the Opposition."
The disses kept coming, so naturally Desus and Mero watched the clip, and were stunned by the PM's savage attack. Yes, there's a lot more to Australia than Vegemite and kangaroos. There are also, apparently, politicians willing to brutally roast each other.
Watch all of this week's episodes of Desus & Merofor free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
An internal report from the Department of Homeland Security has some new estimates about the cost and timeline of Trump's border wall, and they're significantly bigger than previously thought.
According to Reuters, which viewed a copy of the report on Thursday, the DHS now expects that construction of the wall could cost as much as $21.6 billion—a bit more than the $8 to $14 billion number that Trump initially lofted. That's money that the American taxpayers will have to shell out, of course, since the latest plan is to have Congress foot the multibillion dollar bill and then somehow convince Mexico to reimburse us later.
The internal report also expects that the 1,250-mile wall will be constructed in three phases, with the final section completed at the end of 2020, right around the time President Trump will presumably be going up for reelection (those impeachment fantasies are mostly just fantasies, guys).
The report is set to be presented to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly within the next few days, who will then likely move forward with requesting the necessary construction funds from Congress this spring.
Reuters reached out to the White House about the DHS report, but a spokeswoman said that commenting on something that president has yet to see would be "premature."
The Beguiled Sofia Coppola's latest film is a remake of a 1971 thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell. I think Nicole Kidman was born to play a repressed old-timey school marm who's just dying to rip her bodice off for a greasy soldier played by Colin Farrell. Elle Fanning and Kirsten Dunst round out Kidman's "vengeful bitches" in this Confederate South-set fucked up love triangle. The Beguiled is Coppola's return to directing after 2013's tepidly received, Bling Ring and is a tonal departure from her usual urban, broody narratives.
The Blackcoat's Daughter Straight up I see a priest and a weathered old lady with her hair pinned up in a Catholic school and I'm instantly terrified. Throw in a slow, jangly song and some mentions of the devil and I might never sleep again. This moody indie horror thriller about nuns and devil worship starring Emma Roberts is slated for a limited release on DirectTV. Kiernan Shipka aka Sally Draper co-stars.
Personal Shopper Are we ready for K-Stew to have a renaissance? She was good on SNL (and yeah, I found her opening monologue f-bomb endearing) and she's been choosing smart, indie films post-Twilight. I'm not entirely sold on what's happening in Personal Shopper (wait so she's meeting her brother's ghost in Paris? Is he in her iPhone?) But the buzzy flick directed by Olivier Assayas had a lot of people talking at TIFF about Stewart's gritty performance. I say, let K-Stew revel in her moment.
Unlocked Man I've missed Noomi Rapace. She was brutally overlooked post-Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I like that here she's playing a take on Jason Bourne, as a CIA special ops being hunted by who knows who! John Malkovich? Michael Douglas? I mean god help her if her only way out of this is to trust Orlando Bloom who looks like he's slowly morphing into Johnny Depp's Madame Tussaud wax figure. Michael Apted directs this biological terror threat turned psychological cat and mouse thriller.
The Ticket I was all set to talk about Dan Steven's (Downton Abbey's Matthew Crawley) new indie about a blind man who regains his sight and becomes an egomaniacal narcissist obsessed with superficial success, co-starring Malin Akerman as his steadfast but ultimately wronged wife BUT THEN I saw this comment on the trailer's YouTube page and now I can't talk about anything else. LouisMoTionZ writes, "the amount of likes this comment gets, is how long i will go without masturbating ." It's up to 8 likes. And I think Axhiro Madlander speaks for all of us when he replies, "days or weeks?"
There are 62,979,879 reasons Hillary Clinton didn't win the election, but a simple one is: A lot of people didn't want a woman to be president.
For the most part, that feeling was subconscious, snugly cushioned by opposition-manufactured narratives cloaking hidden realities of cognitive dissonance, or, put more simply, "emails." Still, plenty of others would tell you and the rest of Facebook that the presidency is a man's job. That feels too sexist to say out loud. It should.
The reasoning behind the institutionalized sexism that has kept women from the Oval Office isn't usually explained, but the idiotic stereotypes mostly have to do with emotion. Women are too emotional to be trusted with the highest office in the free world. They'll make "rash decisions," possibly while PMSing. They could be signing executive orders, and conducting foreign policy, and condemning private offices and individuals guided by no discernible metric beyond the flow of hormones! Look how emotional I'm getting right now! I'm a triggered snowflake, right? (By the way, the inversion version of this argument, published by TIME in 2015, is that Clinton would be a good president because she's already gone through menopause.)
Here's the ironic part: All of the nonsense behind the misogynistic fear of a female president has been coming to fruition in Donald Trump's first weeks in office. Worried that a woman in the White House would have careening mood swings often spurred by catty arguments? Look no further than Trump's Twitter feed.
The short version of all the women-can't-be-president nonsense is that we'd risk nuclear war once a month. The first time someone told me that joke, I was too young to have a full briefing on periods and didn't get the punchline. In case you don't, it's a biological disparagement of women as erratically unhinged. I'm going to pretend that we all agree misogyny is bad. I don't have the word count or patience to work under any other assumption. Let's also agree that someone who is erratically unhinged should be kept one restraining order's distance away from the White House. Finally, be so kind as to grant me the establishing belief that having public breakdowns about reality television, recklessly condemning businesses in the private sector for personal gain, and using Twitter as if it is a series of text messages to your id is erratically unhinged behavior.
I'm not even beginning to address policy or ideology here (see again: word count, patience). The unimaginable cruelty of Trump signing away human lives with the stroke of a pen—on pieces of paper he may have failed to read—has been well documented. This is not about partisanship; it's about fitness to serve, an issue that has nothing to do with gender. If Trump's first executive orders compelled airlines to provide free alcohol and a human amount of leg room, it would remain deeply disturbing that the president of the United States is struggling so much with the duties of the office.
On the left, there's been a lot of speculation around Trump's physical and mental health. You may find that ridiculous, but it doesn't begin to touch the outrageous and sexist fear-mongering around Clinton's health, which was deliberately manufactured by the alt-right and then adopted by the Trump campaign itself. Trump also claimed Clinton didn't have a "presidential look" or the "stamina to be president"—another stereotype that's ironic in retrospect when you hear reports that Trump was "fatigued" during an apparently contentious call with the Australian prime minister.
While we're on the topic of double standards, the conflicts of interest juxtaposition of the Clinton and Trump foundations alone is like comparing apples to a malignant tumor shaped like an orange. After spending months inveighing against Clinton's supposed coziness with Wall Street, Trump is putting former Goldman Sachs executives in charge of the government; after Trump complaining ad nauseum about Clinton's lax email practices, his own White House staff is reportedly using private email accounts. The list goes on.
Sexism defines a woman's existence with granular intricacy. On a more macro level, it holds back more than 50 percent of the population from equal pay, reproductive rights, and even physical safety. The deep, pervasive nature of sexist ideas is the reason we have never had a female president, and baked into that condemning non-statistic is the grotesque belief that menstrual cycles cast women outside the realm of reason and common sense. "Outside the realm of reason and common sense" sounds like a pretty accurate descriptor of Trump's first weeks in office, or really just his Twitter feed.
The notion that Clinton (or any woman) would be weak, or irrational, or guided by her hormones, was always sexist nonsense. But as a consequence of too many people buying into that nonsense, we've got a president who actually has problems with controlling his impulses and letting emotion overrule reason. It would be funny, except we're all going to be living through it for four years.
Your dog may seem all sweet and innocent, like she loves you unconditionally—but it turns out she's secretly judging you all the time. According to a new study from researchers at Kyoto University, both dogs and monkeys track how humans behave with one another and show more fondness for people who help other people than they do for jerks.
In the experiments, led by comparative psychologist James Anderson, capuchin monkeys saw an actor struggling to get a toy out of a container. The animals watched as he approached another actor who either helped him get the toy out of the container or refused to help. Afterward, both actors offered the monkeys food. When the second actor helped the first actor, the monkeys had no preference for whose food they gobbled down. But when the second actor refused to help, the monkeys then overwhelmingly sided with the first actor and only took his food.
Dogs also showed that they would spurn people who weren't very nice. Researchers had a dog's owner struggle to get a ball out of a container while two actors watched. In one scenario, one of the actors helped the owner, while the other watched passively. In a second, the actor refused to help while the other watched.
When both actors offered the dog a treat, the dogs showed no preference toward who they took it from. However, if the actor refused help, the dogs took the treat from the actor who passively watched. Apparently, according to dogs, being a dick to their owner is unforgivable.
Anderson believes that these animals are having an emotional response to anti-social behavior, similar to one that a human would have. "I think that in humans there may be this basic sensitivity towards antisocial behavior in others. Then through growing up, inculturation, and teaching, it develops into a full-blown sense of morality," he told the Scientific American. The dogs' and monkeys' reactions to unhelpful people might even be a way to correct behavior. If a monkey had a similar reaction to another monkey in the wild, banishing unhelpful behavior from the social system might correct that behavior and make the group better off. Even monkeys want friends, and to make friends they have to be nice.
As for dogs, they've evolved to be such a part of humans' lives that it seems like they are sensitive to human behavior, not just in relation to the dog, but also in relation to one another, so maybe don't go getting into fights with other owners at the dog parks. This study compounds a previous study that proves that dogs also understand human words and even the tone in which they're said.
That doesn't mean they liked to be hugged by people, though. Dogs hate to be hugged.
For as long as I can remember, I've had atrocious handwriting. My own father once called my signature "despicable." For decades, I've wondered, Does my terrible handwriting make me a terrible person? To find out, I decided to get myself analyzed by a professional.
Let's be clear: I've never believed that a person's handwriting can tell us a whole lot about them. But reading up on handwriting analysis, I learned experts in the field know it as "graphology."
Graphologists believe the details of your handwriting reveal hidden truths about you. For instance, graphologists might notice that your handwriting slopes upward, whichsuggests you may be an optimist. Or they might observe that the loops of your cursive Ls are extra wide, which they could take to mean you're an extrovert. You can even find graphology websites that claim Hitler's handwriting reveals both his "extreme concentration and ability to focus intently" (Wow, that sounds good!) and his "megalomaniacal psychopathy (hmm, that sounds less good.). Overall, graphologists seem to have a pretty intense focus on the writing of serial killers or, as they call it, "graphic signs of the schizoid."
It is clearly a very specialized skill.
And that's what's scary about the whole process. Are there hidden parts of my brain that my handwriting will bring to light? Am I a subconscious arsonist? Is there a deep part of my amygdala that's like, "YOU. ARE. EVIL. Start stealing. KILL. Lie about your height on dating apps."? It was time to find out.
The Test
For just $40, I found an online test that promised to provide a three-to-six page analysis "that examines integrity, energy, depth and speed of thinking, level of goals, and determination among 80-plus evaluated traits." This same company links to its 2012 report on TV news vet Diane Sawyer, which revealed a shocking finding: "[Her] handwriting indicates varied responses to stress."Oh shit, I thought: That sounds exactly like Dianne Sawyer.
Despite my reservations regarding its accuracy, I got into test mode: I gathered my pens, stacked a stack of paper, grabbed a glass of water, put my phone on "do not disturb," and set aside an entire afternoon for the exam. Then I clicked on the test, and it was… two sentences long. TWO SENTENCES LONG. All I had to do was write a handful of clauses about the power of handwriting to reveal subconscious truths about myself. I was expecting an SAT-level assessment with numerous sub-sections like, "How you wrote about your family shows that you're a loving son," or, "This section about your career reveals you tried to have sex with a couch when you were 15."
At the very least I was expecting some sort of "quick brown fox"-style situation, but the test didn't even include all the letters of the alphabet! There were no Zs, no Xs, and no Qs! What if how I write my Qs shows that I'm actually not a sad idiot, but instead a cool, collected genius who values friendship?
Nevertheless, I snapped a photo of my test, emailed it in, and prepared to wait a few days as it was "examined and evaluated by a certified graphologist (with computer assistance)." The results came back exactly 36 minutes later.
The Results
I'll be blunt: Right off the bat, this thing was not particularly precise. The six-page report was broken down into several sections including Communication, Stress Level, and Thinking Patterns, each filled with vague guesstimates and pleasant tautologies that could apply to anybody.
For instance, "the short t and d stems in [my] script," revealed that I am "independent and make up [my] own mind." Sure! I guess that's true.
Under Thinking Patterns, they wrote, "The rounded arch formation of your m's and n's indicate your methodical, logical thinking," and, "The wedge formations in your m's and n's are a strong indication of your investigative thinking process." What a compliment! Is it even possible for my M's and N's to have both "rounded arch formations" and "wedge formations"? I have no idea, but I like to think that I'm logical and investigative!
Under Goals, the experts noticed that my "t bars cross the t stem near the bottom, a sign that indicates you may set low goals for yourself," and that's just straight-up wrong. I have only one goal, and it's to be a deposed king, which I think is tremendously ambitious considering I'm not even a regular king at the moment.
For the first 90 percent of the report, all of its findings were innocuous, mostly quasi-astrological blather. It was nice to read but not especially insightful. And then came the final section, Emotional Structure. It devastated me:
"It appears you had built a wall of coolness, privacy and disassociation around yourself to guard against any heartfelt hurts to which you may have been exposed." END OF REPORT. All the rest of the results were like, "You always take your time, except when you rush," and "You are organized." Then, at the very end, they were like, Hey, also, you're an icy nerd who's too scared to love.
I was shocked because… that part seemed spot-on. They nailed me.
To see if I really am an emotionally immature monster, I texted the results to my ex-girlfriends. Not a single one got back to me, which seemed like sure-fire confirmation.
I was not happy to be laid bare by a handwriting analysis. Not happy at all.
Test No. 2
I couldn't trust another impersonal, online exam. So I did some searching and found a graphologist who would complete an in-person analysis. The study of handwriting must be extraordinarily time-consuming, because none of the graphologists, I googled have had time to update their websites since 1996.
In fact, the professional website of the very first graphologist listed in the online Yellow Pages somehow redirected to McDonalds.com. Eventually, I found Dr. B (who asked that I not use her full name after checking out VICE and discovering we use profanity in some articles), an experienced Israeli woman who agreed to do a full, hourlong handwriting analysis for just $200. It was on.
We met at Graphology HQ, a.k.a. a Le Pain Quotidien near Grand Central Station.
Now, did my graphologist size me up like a storefront psychic? Maybe. Did she tell me exactly what I wanted to hear? Maybe. Did I believe every single word she said about me anyway? I absolutely fucking did.
She'd asked me to bring some old writing with me. As soon as she saw my chicken scratch, she said, "Very unique. One-of-a-kind! In my last 30 years, I've never seen anything like it. And I've seen it all." Of course I wanted to believe that I'm unique. Everyone does!
While she examined my notebook with a magnifying glass, she had me fill out another short exam. This one was also about the hidden power of handwriting, but Dr. B. quickly admitted that I could just write whatever I wanted. "Very interesting," she said several times as she decoded my writing. That's right! I knew I was interesting!
She began her analysis on a strong note: "You're a nonconformist. You don't go by the rules." Hell yeah! I do hate rules!
Then she pointed to the strong top and bottom bars of my uppercase Is, which indicate "an extreme level of confidence." RIGHT AGAIN. In fact, some would even call it "overconfidence" because I've never actually accomplished anything and have very few skills.
She continued, "You live in your own world; you're an original thinker."
"You're a creative problem solver, and you're extremely bright."
"You have a very unique way of looking at reality and looking at other people."
Now, look, I recognize lots of people want to believe these things about themselves. But I can't help that I believe them about myself, too! So far, we were in Compliment City, population: This One-of-a-Kind Rulebreaker. But without warning, my handwriting yet again sold me out.
"The other thing that stands out is that you keep a distance from people… a fear of intimacy. You won't let people into your world." I wouldn't admit that to my closest friends. If a girlfriend tried to say that about me, I'd argue with her. But one look at my unreadable scrawl, and Dr. B. found me out. "There's something extreme about your writing. You're trying to hide. You're trying to be invisible… You trust your brain more than you trust your emotions."
I was flabbergasted. I couldn't argue with her.
It's safe to say I'm not thrilled that two separate handwriting analyses suggest I'm an emotional tomb from which no love shall ever escape. But I am pretty shocked both tests pointed to the same tendency to keep a safe emotional distance from the people around me. Before I left I Le Pain Quotidien, I asked Dr. B if she could tell what people's handwriting will look like by the way they act. She said no. "A person can hide. But their handwriting reveals the truth."
Betsy DeVos, the former billionaire GOP donor and charter school advocate who is now our education secretary, attempted to make her first visit to a public school on Friday since being sworn in, but not without drawing unwanted attention from some angry protestors.
In anticipation for DeVos's 10 AM visit to the Jefferson Middle School Academy in DC, some protestors lined the front of the building, holding signs in support of public schools. The small group was reportedly made up of parents, activists, and members of the Washington Teacher's Union, the Washington Postreports.
But when DeVos got to the building Friday morning, she apparently tried to avoid the protestors at the front of the school and opted for a side entrance, where, to her dismay, a few additional protesters were waiting for her. Local ABC station WJLA then filmed an awkward altercation where a couple of protesters physically blocked DeVos and her escort from the entrance. She quickly retreated to get into her government SUV, but not before one protester managed to hurl "SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!" at her—just like Cersei Lannister's walk of atonement in Game of Thrones.
According to the Post, DeVos did manage to get inside the building for the event, which was closed to the media, after the altercation. Although DC Public Schools and the US Department of Education declined to comment, sources from the middle school said many teachers inside were upset prior to the visit.
DeVos was one of Donald Trump's most contentious Cabinet picks, who was narrowly confirmed on Tuesday, and remains a divisive figure among parents and education advocates. Throughout her confirmation hearings, DeVos worried senators on both sides of the aisle about her lack of experience for the role. As a longtime advocate for allocating taxpayer dollars to private schools, opponents fear DeVos could use her new position to reform and undermine public schools.
Imagine an episode of Fear Factor so grotesque and limit-pushing that the least gross part of it is the cacophony of shit on-screen. That's a hint at the experience of watching recording artist Flying Lotus aka Steven Ellison's new movie Kuso. A few loosely-connected shorts make up the film which debuted at Sundance to a steady stream of walkouts and is already being heralded by some as, "the grossest movie ever made." It stars George Clinton, Bus Driver, Tim Heidecker and Hannibal Buress.
I had a chance to watch the film at its midnight premiere at the famed Egyptian Theatre on Main street in Park City. The showing was sold out, the theatre packed with an eager art house crowd and hey, why not, Tim Robbins. Flying Lotus introduced the film, warning that nearly the entire cast was in attendance and any walk outs would be hazed. The warning was unnecessary in the end because despite the outrageously gross cinematic landscape that awaited us, no one walked out of the screening that night.
Yes, Kuso is disgusting. There is a seemingly neverending stream of shit and semen and vomit on screen. There is incest. There is a climax so fucked and graphic I audibly gasped and had to do deep breathing exercises to keep from gagging. But there is also a remarkable freshness in seeing a nearly all-black cast take on a world of mutation and morbid sexuality. Ellison uses shock and awe to to create a visual topography that is at turns nauseating and captivating. Beneath the barrage of bile and bodily fluids though, is a filmmaker inspired by the likes of Jodorowsky and Eisenstein. He even manages to get George Clinton to show his (prosthetic) asshole on screen and yet somehow that's not the craziest thing that happens, not by a longshot.
I sat down with him at Sundance just after the premiere to talk about the reaction and why this is really just a film for movie lovers.
Flying Lotus. Image via Daily VICE
VICE: So last night was a huge deal for you. How did it feel showing that to an audience at Sundance? Flying Lotus: It was terrifying but it was also really just like a big weight lifted off of me cause this was like a big secret on my computer for like a year and a half pretty much so it's nice to finally unleash it and you know, cleanse myself of it too so I can move on. Yeah, it's great. I went through a wave of all of the feelings.
Before we saw the movie, you kind of talked about hazing people who walked out but actually, not that many people left. Yeah not many people left. I was actually told to be prepared for a lot of walk outs just because that's how the festivals go and some people started getting up and moving around, and shifting around and I started becoming real conscious of it and it started freaking me out a little bit but then I did a Q & A after and I saw that pretty much everybody was still there and I was like, 'Oh great cool!' It was fun.
Were you surprised at all with the reaction? I was surprised, yes and no. I was surprised that as many people stayed, to be honest. I was really grateful for that but at the same time, I am a believer in the work, I am confident in what I do, I do think it's a unique piece of art in this landscape of movies and I do believe it's different. For that reason, I feel very proud and I feel all types of ways about it. Like, 'how did this happen?' and 'why did it happen?' But at the same time, I'm like, "fuck yeah, I did that so it's like all of those things at once.
How did it happen? Uh, pot? No [chuckles]. It happened, it all started with this really stupid GIF that was going around of me and Thom Yorke DJ'ing. I remember I dropped a friend off and I saw this stupid GIF on my phone and it was going on so long and I was like, "This is actually hilarious. Yo, I can make shit like that, I got ideas for these little shits, I could make some crazy stupid little GIFs." I came up with this idea that was a five-minute short animation-thing and I hit up David Firth and I was like, "Yo help me make this animation" and it just kinda blossomed. I worked on animation for like five months, and I was like, "Yo this is getting really hard, maybe I should get some live action elements and then Royal happened and I was like, 'now there's twenty minutes of stuff happening so maybe I should just go and get a feature and it just kinda blossomed like that.
Where did the idea for that initial short Royal come from? It kind of just came about from reading a bunch of Japanese comics and getting really inspired by Manga as well as just a lot of Asian cinema. I use that as a huge influence in my toolset, I guess. My biggest influences are from Japan, I think. So maybe that mixed with black characters makes it feel like a strange mashup but I did feel like, while I was doing it, why haven't I seen this before? It's weird that it's fresh. It's weird that it's unique. It's sad that it's unique. It was also sad that it was hard to find black actors to fill in the roles, people were scared to work with me. You'd think in this time where people are talking about diversity and Hollywood that it would be easier to find minorities to be in the roles but it was fucking hard. People are scared if it's not their usual. It's been a funny journey, for sure.
Actually one of the things that hit me right away watching was the fact that we got to see black characters doing things that we never get to see. How important was that to you to make that central? It's hugely important for me to bring the different characters to the screen. I feel like that is part of what I'm supposed to do, part of my journey as a filmmaker is to tell different stories whether they are just a black perspective on things that aren't necessarily hood movies or Tyler Perry movies or Ava Duvernay movies. Love all those people but that whole thing has been sowed up already. There's room for me in this arena so I'm going to do that stuff.
You obviously had the trust of your actors from George Clinton all the way to Bus Driver. How did you eventually get people on board? At first it was just reaching out on Twitter, that was so crucial, being able to DM people like little bits of the movie, like, "This is kinda what I'm doing, you like it or ya don't?"
How much did you let them in on what was coming down the pipe, so to speak? [Laughs] I tried to be as honest as possible because the one thing I didn't want to get was someone halfway onboard and then they like read something and go, "I don't know about this" while we're shooting and then it becomes a big old thing. I tried to be very honest with people, "I'd love to see your butthole on camera, can we make that happen?" We didn't! But still.
Still from 'Kuso'
At first watch, maybe you just have that visceral reaction to all of that stuff that you are seeing but after I left it and went home and digested it, I thought about the setting, the post-apocalyptic setting that seemed dystopian and far away but really, given what's just happened on Friday doesn't seem that far away in reality. It trips me out that there's more relevance with what's happening in the world. It's really scary. Might not be far from that. What's actually really trippy was that around the same time I was shooting, there was like a really strange thing going around LA where people were like predicting this giant earthquake was going to happen and you know, we were like, 'man, what if we are the reason why this earthquake is happening?' like, 'what if we're filming this and it doesn't happen but what if it does and we'll actually get way better production value as we'll go around shooting like decrepit buildings and shit.' That didn't happen though. But I do hope to be there when the big one hits in LA, face my fears head on. I'd hate to be here or something, chilling on the beach somewhere when I hear about the big one hitting LA, I'd be sad. I wanna be there in the thick of it.
I saw a lot of visual inspirations there from Jodorowsky to Eisenstein, what does inspire the visuals in the film? It's hard to say, I feel like at this point we're all bombarded by imagery and influences so it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is but I'm just a fan of cinema. I've seen like a million movies so I just use it all from Jodorowsky to Miike. I use it all.
What about the marriage of music and visuals here? Obviously it's a huge part of what you do, talk a bit about the process of the soundtrack. Yeah the soundtrack and the music and the sound design, it all kind of felt unified to me. I tried to keep it all feeling the same, like even the sound effects. It's a stupid thing but even some of the sound effects are in key with the music. There's like really tricky rhythmic things that happen like weird slap sounds like dsssht… dsssht like on beat and stuff. It's really stupid but I had to. It's really weird, nerdy things that like the producers who like my music will notice in the movies. "Did you do that?' Yeah, I actually did. It was fun to get into that stage, lay it into the process and go back to my most comfortable you know, artform and get into that and really, really dig into it. Even now I'll go back and work on it, on those sounds, it'll be fun.
You've said that this is a movie for your sixteen-year old self. Who was that person? I remember being 16, showing people that normally wouldn't see crazy Japanese movies but I'd be the one showing them like, "Yo, have you seen this? Have you seen that?" so it's for that kid who's trying to be like, "Yo man have you seen this crazy-ass movie?" I'm just having fun you know and I'm targeting the people who are still having fun watching movies.
In its third year since legalizing recreational marijuana, the Colorado dispensaries took in $1.3 billion in legal weed sales, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue.
Recreational marijuana accounted for about two thirds of 2016's haul, ringing in at $875 million in sales, compared with medical marijuana's $438 million, according to the Cannabist. The state took in $199 million in taxes and fees, too, which is usually put toward law enforcement, building schools, and helping the homeless.
This is the third year in a row that weed sales have increased in the state, but the first time they broke the ten-figure mark. In 2014, the state sold $699.2 million, followed by $996.2 million in 2015. Pot prognosticators think that 2017 will break another record, but after that they expect Colorado's kush boom to level off.
The expected downturn is due to a number of factors, including increased competition as more states begin to legalize the drug. Some of those states, like Maine and Massachusetts, won't have their regulations in place until 2018, which is why Colorado will still likely reap the benefits next year. Weed prices nationally have already dipped a bit, signaling an influx of product in the market that might be starting to exceed the demand.
Still the novelty is starting to wear off a bit. According to the Denver Post, the Colorado Tourism Office found that fewer people were visiting the mile-high state solely to get stoned. Presumably snowboarders on vacation will still pick up an ounce or some edible gummies, but the Tourism Office saw a return of the "more usual Colorado traveler" in 2016, instead of those just looking to score legally.
"It was a difficult year," Sally Vander Veer, president of large Denver dispensary Medicine Man, told the Cannabist. "We're still seeing a steady increase in the number of customers and patients, but [sales] numbers are pretty flat."
Aside from, perhaps, a gay bar or an old-school gentlemen's club, one of the only places in the world you'll find a significantly shorter line for the women's bathroom than for the men's is at a Phish show. Within the small community of female Phish fans, it's common knowledge that you could be tripping your face off, wearing some kind of complicated lace-up leotard that takes five minutes to free yourself from, and you'd still probably beat your guy friends out of the bathroom at set break.
It's a blessing to be able to piss in peace, but it's also a bit off-putting to look around at a sea of white dudes and realize that no, this isn't a Trump rally, but rather a community you love and have invested significant time and energy in. I've attended 35 shows, 14 of which were in the past year. Over the course of my evolution from casual fan to this "sorry, I used all my vacation days on Phish" person, I've found myself wondering why there aren't more female fans, and why many of the women I do encounter seem to be there at the behest of their boyfriends. I get that not everyone is down with Phish. As an open fan of one the most obsessively followed yet widely maligned bands in rock history, I am well aware that a lot of people fucking hate the music that Phish makes. But what I don't get is why women, apparently, fucking hate Phish more than men.
During an appearance at a community meeting in Iqaluit, Prime Minister Trudeau was approached by an advocate of electoral reform and asked why the Liberals didn't pull it off.
"Proportional representation in any form would be bad for Canada," Trudeau answered.
The woman told him that she respectfully disagreed to which Trudeau responds with some serious shade towards the much-maligned Conservative Leadership candidate who is running on a campaign focused on Canadian values.
"Do you think Kellie Leitch should have her own party?" Trudeau responded. When the protester told Trudeau that "that's a conversation for another day," he launched into detail about his thoughts saying he prefered the the ranked ballot system.
"Because if you have a party that represents the fringe voices or the periphery of our perspectives and they hold 10, 15, 20 seats in the House, they end up holding the balance of power," said Trudeau.
"The strength of our democracy is we have to pull people together into big parties that have all the diversity of Canada and we learn to get along and we don't learn to amplify small voices, you learn to listen to all voices."
Which is an excuse, I guess?
Kellie Leitch. Photo via Facebook.
One of the main promises that Trudeau and his group of MPs made during the 2015 election was to reform the electoral system in Canada, as many were fed up with the first-past-the-post system.
At the beginning of February, the Trudeau government walked back from the promise to the anger of many people who voted for the Liberals. NDP democratic reform critic Nathan Cullen called the move "one of the most cynical displays of self-serving politics that this government has displayed."
Meanwhile in the Hall of Doom, shortly after Trudeau's comments hit the media, Leitch banged out a response:
"First they dismissed us as the 'comment section,'" reads her Facebook post. "Then they said we were 'angry pajamas.' And now, the Prime Minister has called us 'fringe.'"
"Standing up for our shared Canadian values and our unique Canadian identity is nothing to be ashamed of," it went on to say. "It's something that 2/3rds of Canadians want. It's something that 90% of Conservatives believe in."
She then, like any good Canadian far-right figure, asked her supporters to give her money.
Lead photo: Prime Minister Trudeau in Iqaluit, photo via Facebook.
For the past couple weeks, the news cycle has fixated on the protests and court battles kicked off by Donald Trump's sweeping executive orders on refugees, immigrants, and travelers to the US from seven Muslim-majority countries. And rightly so, given the impact these actions have had on the communities they've targeted. But in background, the 115th US Congress has quietly kicked into gear, passing its first two significant Trump-era measures and sending them to the president on Monday for a signature.
On their face, these House joint resolutions may seem a little niche. One nullifies a late Obama-era Department of the Interior rule that would have cracked down on pollution coming from coal mines. The other nullifies a Securities and Exchange Commission rule, also put into place near the end of Obama's tenure, which would have forced oil, gas, and mining companies to be more transparent about their deals with foreign governments. These moves, which Trump is likely to sign if he hasn't done so already, represent the beginning of a potentially major push to cull regulations, giving a freer hand to corporate America in all kinds of ways.
"Rules" are regulations adopted by various executive branch agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. Often they constrain certain kinds of economic activity in the name of safety, the environment, or some other public good. They don't generally require congressional approval but can be challenged in court—one prominent example of a simple rule with far-reaching effects is an Obama Labor Department decision to mandate overtime pay for salaried workers making less than $47,476 a year that later got struck down in court.
Rolling back rules is an old Republican desire, but it's historically been tricky to do so by legislative means. These two repeals slid through quickly and easily through thanks to the little-known 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows Congress to nullify any rules submitted to the Federal Register within the previous 60 legislative days using a joint resolution, which only takes a simple majority that cannot be filibustered, but can be vetoed by the president. It's essentially a tool a recently victorious party in control of Congress and the White House can use to cancel moves made by a lame-duck administration. The rarity of those circumstances means that CRA has only been utilized once before, in 2001, to repeal a late Bill Clinton rule on ergonomics in the workplace. (Congress passed five joint resolutions using the CRA since then, but Barack Obama vetoed all of them.)
While Trump has continuously talked about slashing regulations, and recently demanded in an executive order that for every new regulation, federal agencies identify two that can be eliminated, experts like Tom McGarity, an administrative law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, say that the coming assault on regulation is something Congress wants badly independent of Trumpian rhetoric.
"We have a Tea Party ascendant in the Republican Party," McGarity told me. "If we had the same Congress as we had now, and George W. Bush in the White House, it'd be the same [situation]."
Thanks to the peculiarities of how "legislative days" are counted, the CRA gives Congress the right to quickly repeal up to 214 Obama-era rules, about 50 of which are considered "major" by the Congressional Research Service, issued since June 13. This raises the question of what sort of rules the GOP-dominated Congress will prioritize and just how many of these rules it intends to eliminate in the coming weeks.
Republican leadership has said they plan to target three rules in addition to the two axed this week: A Labor Department rule requiring companies to report alleged or known labor violations from the past three years when bidding for government contracts valued at more than $500,000, a Department of the Interior rule to control oil- and gas-drilling emissions, and a Social Security Administration rule blocking disability aid recipients with mental health issues from owning guns. As of this week, there were almost 40 additional joint resolutions utilizing the CRA floating around Congress. More than 20 distinct rules were in the crosshairs and about a half dozen of these resolutions had passed the House.
According to McGarity, Republicans are targeting rules that hurt some of the party's key interest groups. The two already struck down obviously benefit oil and coal companies, while the three likely to be wiped out are obvious concessions to big business, oil companies (again), and the gun lobby. The GOP isn't so much anti-regulation as pro-business.
"Some of these rules help industries, so they're not going to get rid" of them all, says McGarity. "And to the extent that some of these help the industry, but hurt the environment or consumers, the consumer groups aren't going to be able to persuade a Republican Congress to push through a joint resolution."
McGarity and other observers initially suspected that only about a half-dozen rules would be killed in the end thanks to the fact that each joint resolution could take up to ten hours of debate in the Senate, eating up valuable bandwidth. However, given the speed with which these first rules were chopped, McGarity thinks he underestimated the tricks they could utilize to minimize floor debate time, for instance potentially forcing early-morning votes without a quorum and without dissenters to take issue with that. The House has also passed an act that would allow votes on batches of rules, rather than one rule at a time. McGarity cautioned that it's too early to say for sure how Congress will proceed, but told me he now suspects that they could churn through all of the rules leadership chooses to prioritize—more on the order of ten to 20.
It's unclear whether Congress will pursue this rule-slashing campaign beyond these priority targets. Skeptics note the energy that would take for legislative Republicans might not be worth it. McGarity and others think they'll likely look toward more traditional legislation for wide-ranging, but hard-to-pass, regulatory reform. (The House has also already passed an act that would give Congress the right of approval or rejection over any new regulation with more than a $100 million economic impact, which would potentially make life hard for any future Democratic administration.)
Even if Republicans only succeed in killing a dozen or so late Obama-era rules and slowing the promulgation of new regulations, that'll still have a substantial impact on the nation. The CRA bans agencies from enacting future rules similar to those struck down by Congress without the legislature's express permission. That means Congress could be invalidating classes of rules indefinitely. (McGarity describes this as a "scorched-earth approach" to culling rules.)
Observers like McGarity fear that congressional measures aimed at slowing or adding oversight to rule-making could so gunk up already complex mechanisms for their creation and approval as to de facto rule out substantial new rules in some fields for upwards of a decade. (To be clear, moves to slow or freeze rules won't affect all rules. Minor rules on issues related to public health and safety likely slide through unopposed no matter what: Think regulations on synthetic canniboids or toy safety standards, which recently passed despite Trump's moratorium on new rules.)
Most of the effects of slicing rules and regulations will be invisible in the short-term, only becoming apparent over years or decades. The GOP's quick moves to axe red tape will likely be great optics for its base, but McGarity cautions that this hack-and-slash campaign could come back to bite America in the future.
"The next time we have a Bhopal-like [gas leak] in this country," he said, reflecting on one rule facing the axe that was created in response to a 2013 explosion at a West Texas fertilizer plant, "people are going to regret [this.] We're going to get a whole lot of noise about, 'Where was the EPA on this?' And they're going to say, 'Well, we can't do [anything about this] because Congress overturned our similar [new] rules.'"
Will Baker, formerly known as Vince Li, who beheaded and partially ate a man on a Greyhound, has been given a full discharge.
Baker, a diagnosed schizophrenic, had been living on his own since November but was still being monitored. His doctors believe that Baker knows it is his medication that keeps his illness at bay and is confident that he will continue to take it.
In 2008, Baker was traveling from Edmonton to Winnipeg when he suddenly started stabbing Tim McLean with a large knife while the bus was near Portage la Prairie. The bus was pulled over and the passengers evacuated as Baker decapitated McLean. Baker, after attacking people attempting to rescue McLean then proceeded to eat portions of McLean's flesh.
Baker said that he heard the voice of God telling him to kill McLean. One witness described Baker as being calm during the attack saying, "there was no rage or anything. He was like a robot, stabbing the guy."
After a standoff, Baker surrendered to police and faced a charge of second-degree murder. Baker plead not criminally responsible due to mental health issues. When he put in the plea Baker said only three words to the court, "please kill me."
The diagnosis was accepted by the court and Baker was sent to the Selkirk Mental Health Centre. Over the past nine years, Baker has been treated for schizophrenia and gradually was granted more and more freedom as the treatment furthered. This included supervised walks outside, unsupervised day passes and finally culminated in him being granted full release.
"The review board is of the opinion that the weight of the evidence does not substantiate that Mr. Baker poses a significant threat to the safety of the public," it reads.
McLean's mother, Carol de Delley, posted on Facebook after news of Baker's release was made public, saying she wasn't going to comment.
"I have no words," she wrote.
Lead image: Will Baker, formerly Vince Li, pictured in Portage La Prairie on August 5, 2008. Via John Woods/The Canadian Press.
Calculated posts and polished Instagrams are par for the course for DJs and musicians on social media. But when a DJ dares to stray from the usual fodder, as recent events would suggest, they're often inundated with negative responses telling them, in so many words, to stay out of politics. Recently, Dubfire, Seth Troxler, and Guti have become the latest to bear the brunt of naysayers and hecklers after publicizing their political views online.
But if you're the kind of person who's probably said aloud: "I don't believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party, only the techno party," take the headphones off and listen closely. In today's abnormal climate, to have a problem with DJs using their platform to fight for freedom and the betterment of others is nonsensical. Being angered by them leveraging their visibility by defending and upholding the civil liberties we all deserve is to be on the wrong side of history.
Michelle-Lael Norsworthy is ready to go to the hospital.
She spends Thursday drinking clear fluids; no solid foods allowed. She downs a bottle of bowel prep like the doctor told her to, staying home in her tiny Bay Area apartment all day to deal with the results. She doesn't complain—she's effectively been waiting for Friday morning, when she will have gender confirmation surgery, for more than two decades.
"I gave and shed more blood on the journey to the table than I will shed or give during the surgery itself," Norsworthy tells VICE.
During the three decades she spent in the California prison system, she struggled to live as a transgender woman housed with men—men who attacked her, knocked out her teeth, and gang-raped her.
"There were no gray areas in prison," Norsworthy says. "You fuck up, you die. It was a constant walk on eggshells."
It was a fight that brought her to prison in the first place: In 1985, she shot an acquaintance during a spat in a bar parking lot after—she claims—he threatened her. He died six weeks later, and she was convicted of second-degree murder. His death, she insists, "haunts her to this day." At the time, Norsworthy still identified as Jeffrey; she transitioned while incarcerated and began presenting as a woman in the 1990s.
Transitioning as a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) inmate was a constant test of Norsworthy's ability to advocate for herself. In 1996, she says, she began requesting hormone therapy, but it wasn't until a prison therapist diagnosed Norsworthy with gender dysphoria that she began taking hormones, in 2000, and got on the road to feeling more like herself.
Her physical struggle ran parallel to her battle with the CDCR. Norsworthy began to spend hours in the law library, learning how to file grievances. That, she says, is how she got her first bra. If the prison rejected a grievance, she'd file again until she won. She started helping other inmates, too.
"It really has been trans women who have led the charge in the courts when it comes to healthcare for trans people in and out of prison," says Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney and national expert on transgender rights who represents Chelsea Manning. "As advocates and trans people, we owe a lot to people who've been in the most vulnerable situations and who have put a lot on the line. Michelle is a part of that history."
Released on parole in August 2015, Norsworthy, now 52, is still learning to navigate life on the outside. Getting out after spending most of her adult life in prison was "more like time travel than culture shock," she says. She jokingly calls her cellphone her pocket phone, and when she grocery shops at Safeway, she finds it bizarre that human cashiers have been replaced by machines. "I was catapulted into a future world."
One of the toughest battles she's faced since her release, far more dizzying than high-tech supermarkets, has been navigating California's Medicaid system, Medi-Cal. Norsworthy spent months filling out paperwork and trying to find the right health insurance to continue her hormone treatment, she says, before identifying a surgeon who would take the insurance and perform her surgery.
This wasn't a bureaucratic hurdle she expected to face as a free woman. In April 2015, federal district judge Jon Tigar ordered the state to schedule, perform, and cover the expense of Norsworthy's operation. At the time, she was still incarcerated and had been refused parole five times. (She was serving a sentence of 17 years to life in prison.) California prison officials had repeatedly denied her appeals for surgery, in spite of her doctor deeming it medically necessary for her well-being. Tigar's order was a game changer, setting a precedent unseen in other states and forcing the CDCR to change its policy.
"Her case paved the way for medically necessary gender confirmation surgery in California prisons," said Penny Godbold, a disability and civil rights lawyer who began corresponding with Norsworthy while she was incarcerated.
Then, just a few months later and to her great surprise, the state released Norsworthy on parole. Though her case was to be heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—the same body that just rebuked Donald Trump's immigration order—her release cut that process short. Still, the lower court's decision was a powerful, if not all-encompassing, win for trans prisoners.
"Even if there had been a great Ninth Circuit decision upholding the order, prison is terrible," says Strangio. "Our clients are dying in prison. I still consider it a win when you get someone out. It was still a net positive for trans people in custody."
Shiloh Quine, a transgender woman housed with men in California's Mule Creek State Prison, was the first to benefit from Norsworthy's case. Quine won a suit against the CDCR in 2015, the settlement of which included what the state calls "sex reassignment" surgery, which she underwent in January. As part of the deal, she was to be transferred to a women's prison to fulfill her life without parole sentence.
While Godbold celebrates Quine's settlement, she and other advocates are "not happy about the number of denials" being issued by the CDCR in response to requests for gender confirmation surgery. As of December 31, 2016, California Correctional Health Services, which handles all of CDCR's medical care, had received 64 requests from prisoners for the procedure, according to Joyce Hayhoe, the provider's communications director. Of those requests, 51 have been processed, and just four of those have been approved for surgery.
"There's a pretty strenuous process that we have to go through to make a determination," Hayhoe tells VICE. "That doesn't necessarily mean that [those who are denied] may not be considered in the future."
To be approved, Hayhoe says, applicants must have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria; must have undergone hormone therapy for at least a year; and must exhibit "mental health stability" for at least one year.
Though progress has been made for trans people in and out of prison, a lot of work lies ahead.
"I'm concerned that under the Trump administration things will get worse, but it's not like they were okay at all under the last administration," says Strangio. Citing an uptick in murders of trans women of color in recent years, and policing that he says disproportionately impacts the trans community, Strangio notes that "high-level legalistic change doesn't always trickle down."
Norsworthy is ready to keep pushing for the rights of trans women. After her surgery, she looks forward to opening Joan's House, a nonprofit she's working on to provide supportive housing for trans women in San Francisco, and plans to partner with Healthright 360, a network of medical clinics in California.
"I want to bring this fight to Trump," Norsworthy tells me. "If I could get five minutes with him, I bet he'd give me a donation."
How do you like your meat salted? In 2017, there's surely only one answer: the Salt Bae way. Seasoning just isn't seasoning anymore unless it has dusted the bronzed forearm of Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe, Internet sensation and co-owner of steakhouse chain Nusr-et. In a world that is trying to reduce its consumption of dead animals, he appears to be on a one-man mission to make meat sexy again.
For those not yet familiar with Salt Bae (where have you been?), it was the nickname given to Gökçe after his Instagram videos shot to viral fame last month. People all over the world fell for his tight t-shirts, "extra" meat slicing skills, and theatrical manner of salting.
Let's face it, you haven't lived until you've seen the video of him caressing marinade into an animal carcass as though it were a cherished lover, roses protruding from where its anus once was.
It's hard to look at CrossFit as anything other than a sweat cult formed from packs of jocks. It's universally considered the go-to activity for dicks, or people too buff to have better hobbies. This perception can drive a person to the point of blind rage. Fuck, it's those vanity batons with their dumbells again, you think. Fucking CrossFit.
But, then again, I, like you, have never given CrossFit a fair shot. I knew I hated it; I just couldn't place my finger on exactly why. So when a friend of mine said he was attending a European CrossFit competition called the Battle of the Beasts, I figured I'd give it a chance.
The competition was held in a massive hangar in Colchester, a biggish town in England that you wouldn't visit without a very specific purpose. The corridor to enter the event was clogged two by two with swollen frames, edging along on cleft-chinned calves. Inside, a thousand or so fans were milling athletically about to the tempo of the familiar, but unnameable gym music. Every man, woman, and child had shoulders that could support a man, woman, and a child.
It was easy to separate the real fans from the wannabes, because most of the CrossFit faithful wear gym gear with the "CrossFit" logo on it. It occurred to me that this was akin to a football fan wearing merch that simply said, "Football! Just, generally!"
The day is split up into five punishing 20-minute workouts, where men and women compete to extract as much exercise from their bodies as is inhumanly as possible. Each workout consists of a selection of exercises designed to find a weakness in your overall fitness. The freaks that progress to the semi-final, then on to the finals, have to do another two "bonus" workouts.
Waiting for liftoff, I sipped on the only alcoholic drink in the arena. Unlike most sporting events, this one did not have a selection of booths where one could buy beer and hotdogs to enjoy from the bleachers. The people here were interested in reaching peak human fitness, a goal hindered by pounding back beer after beer. I sipped mine in silence.
The seats were all pointed at an old school gym apparatus, which could easily be misappropriated for mass hangings. Some of the CrossFit competitors entered the arena topless, showing that each of their six-packs had spawned a subsidiary six-pack. Here we go, I thought, choking back my desire to scoff.
Then they began, and that scoff never took shape. Each exercise looked like torture, whether competitors were wrenching an unnatural amount of metal above their heads orbench pressing their body weight. Managing one "rep"—meaning, one unit of suffering—would take you or me years and years of striving. Our single creaking attempt causing a repetitive strain injury somewhere made-up sounding. These weirdos heave themselves through it a metric jillion times.
On and on they went, seesawing their weighted limbs through the same movements. They jumped on and off and on stuff in the least convenient way. They lifted their body weight up again and again, until agony stretched across their faces, until pushing the planet down seems more practical. Soon, all their muscles were vibrating together in a polyphonic request for a lie down.
In real life, the extent of their self-inflicted, life-force-draining slog was hard to mock. It just doesn't come across in a photo or a promo video. Just watching them was exhausting. We didn't have the lung capacity to cheer through the whole workout, nor hands muscular enough to keep up the supportive applause. Halfway in, I had to stop supporting them and start mentally pleading for them to stop.
After 20 long minutes, a klaxon sounded, and the Crossfitters crumpled on the floor. They lay strung out on endorphins, retching smiles up to the roof. They'd driven their souped-up systems too far, way past the point of what seems to be healthy or beneficial.
But that was just their first workout competition of the day—one out of a potential seven. CrossFit is the stuff of labor camps run off aspiration. It's not a sprint. It's not even a marathon. It's a sprint to a marathon to some other feat of human endurance that, like childbirth, is physically incomprehensible to those who haven't done it.
Watching the competitors, it seemed that the whole thing wasn't about showing off as much as it was about collectively reaching a new level of human fitness. CrossFitters are not a race of vindictive GM super jocks. Sure, they can walk on their hands with more ability than most people can walk on their feet and climb up ropes with freakish speed. It doesn't make them bad people. In fact, the way they all cheer their flagging opponents through their last few agonizing reps is kind of sweet. The CrossFitters were just nice, normal people who wanted to exercise to the death, if only their bodies would allow it.
To be sure, they are pretty cultish—but there are worse things to worship than all-around fitness. Maybe I got low-key indoctrinated. Maybe the motions of the competitors hypnotized me. Or maybe it is actually possible to like CrossFit without being a dick. Take it from me—I went looking for a decent reason to hate them, and I just couldn't.
Leaving a CrossFit event, you can't help but think about the physical potential of your own body. It even inspired me, a committed sloth, to half-heartedly consider joining a gym for weeks after.
Admit it, you vengeful fucks: everyone loves a good revenge story.
Not only is it a time-honoured pop culture tradition going back centuries (think Carrie or most Shakespeare plays), but it's a concept that seems to be hardwired into our brains. While research has found that exacting revenge in the real world tends to amplify the original wrong, contemplating it is actually downright pleasurable, causing increased neural activity in the caudate nucleus (the part of the brain responsible for processing rewards).
So, collected for your reading pleasure are stories from people who have managed to inflict a righteous pwning in the real world, and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes messy. Sometimes juvenile. They may be less grand than Hamlet, but trust us: your caudate nucleus will thank you.
Disclaimer: The following contains bad, no-good behaviour and is no way to treat fellow humans.
"I had total access to her Facebook account"
I worked with this girl for awhile who made my life hell. She was the daughter of some rich ambassador and born into all this privilege but her parents had eventually insisted she get a job, so she ended up working the front desk at this hotel with me. She would come in high, hungover as fuck, or out-of-it in general. Sometimes she would abandon me right as we were getting slammed. We would have these massive lineups and I'd be going crazy, and she'd be on a computer in the back, apartment hunting, or one time I just found her passed out on the suitcases in the bell office. She was also on Facebook basically all the time.
She'd often leave her shit logged-in at work, so one day I requested that Facebook send her password to her email, and wrote it down. Which meant that for the next two or three months, I had total access to her Facebook account. I'd set her privacy settings to "Only Me" so that nobody ever responded to her posts. Just week after week of no "likes" or "comments." Then when that stopped being fun, I'd slowly crop her profile picture, a bit each day, until she wasn't even in it anymore.
Best of all, I'd randomly change her birthday so she'd be getting random birthday wishes, like, two or three times in the same month. The best part about that is you can only change your birthday so many times, and eventually it got locked-in on the wrong day. Like it or not, she's a March baby forever now. It really wasn't that great of a revenge, but it made me feel a little better.
—Bryan*, 30
"I traded our shoes"
My first year in uni, my roommate spread mean rumours about me. So the day before I moved out, I traded our shoes (we had a pair of the same ones; hers were a size larger and mine were just a bit snug), and spat in her hand cream. Sometimes revenge is a dish best served with a generous helping of bodily fluids.
—Kate, 26
"They ended up calling the cops"
Back when I was in university, I ended up being part of a prank war/revenge cycle that went on for four years.
I was pretty close with a couple of guys on my floor, and we all used to get just wasted and do stupid shit in the dorm. There were these girls we were all friends with and, one night, in the first or second week there, we all got really drunk at three in the morning, and decided it would be a good idea to spray entire bottles of ketchup all over this one girl's door. It didn't go over well. She wouldn't talk to us for awhile after that. And then a couple nights later, we woke up to find that our door had been covered with tampons dipped in Kool-Aid to make them look used. It was all in good fun. We didn't retaliate immediately—we just knew we wanted to get them back somehow.
Fast forward to fourth year. Us guys all lived in a house together. We were still good friends with these girls, and we used to throw a lot of parties, and one morning we came down to find that one of our favourite paintings was gone. Someone had just taken it off the wall. We had a lot of art—most of which we'd found in alleys or on the street because we lived in a really hip neighbourhood. We were so pissed-off. We were like: "Who the fuck would come to a party and steal a painting?" Then we went to a party at their place a couple months later, and there it was, just hanging on the wall. And we thought: "OK. I guess this is still on."
So we waited until basically the end of fourth year, and spent a long time planning this final act of Prank Revenge. We knew we wanted to go all-out, but for the longest time, we didn't know exactly what to do. Until one night, one of the girls passed out at our place after a party. So we took her house keys and made copies of them. And we waited until one of their birthdays, when we knew they'd all be out, then went to their house with garbage bags and stole basically everything they had. All their kitchen appliances, all their schoolwork. We took everything off the walls. We flipped over couches and made it look like they'd been robbed, and left a really creepy note in red ink. Something along the lines of: "You took what's ours. Now we've taken what's yours." The only thing we left was the painting.
I'll admit it was a pretty harsh final act. Because this was months later, and so they thought they'd straight-up been fucking robbed. They were all crying. They ended up calling the cops and everything. They were really upset. One of them came over to our house and was saying: "I can't believe this. We were robbed." While we're all sitting there with all these garbage bags full of their shit. They found out pretty quickly that it was us, and they did try telling us that the cops were going to want to talk to us, but it ended up all being bullshit. On the bright side, they eventually returned our painting, and so we returned their stuff to them. They never did get us back for it.
—Simon, 29
Photo via Flickr user Jazz Guy
"She ended up putting on 20 pounds"
There was this girl at the bar where I worked that we all hated. She was just the worst. She would come in and be really demanding, sit and play fucking Keno for hours on end, verbally abuse the staff. She had to be escorted out a bunch. And worst of all for the bar industry, she never tipped.
One night she asked for a drink recommendation, and I served her a vodka paralyzer made with heavy cream. From then on, that's all we served her. She'd throw back seven or eight of them a night. She ended up putting on 20 pounds. I guess we'll never be sure if it was just because of us, but anytime she came in after that, we all had a good laugh. Then we'd serve her another paralyzer.
—Kalen, 30
"It took me a full minute to realize what I was looking at"
Once I had to write up a guy at work for a safety violation. He was super choked, and the next day when I opened my lunchbox, I discovered that he'd taken a shit in it. I was so sleep-deprived, it took me a full minute to realize what I was looking at. Worst of all, I dropped my work phone in it. I know you're looking for funny revenge stories, but trust me: it's a lot less funny when you're the victim.
—Jon, 29
"I'm not sure what she was so butthurt about"
When I was in my mid-twenties, I decided to do one of those solo voyages of self-discovery, and ride a motorcycle around New Zealand. I lived out of a backpack for six months and anytime I needed money, I'd swing into the closest town and pick up some agricultural work. It's easy as hell to get. There are whole areas of the country that basically run on foreign agricultural workers, especially around harvest time.
I'd spent a couple of weeks on this orchard near Napier/Hastings—this place where you could rent a trailer for a portion of your earnings, and stay onsite while you picked apples for harvest. And one day, the orchard manager ran over my motorcycle with her car. Bent one of the turn signals all to hell. She apologized profusely, said if I got an estimate from a mechanic, she'd pay for the damage, etc.
Around the same time, I'd taken off for the weekend, and been paid in the interim, so owing to some kind of weird clerical mixup, I'd accumulated a week's worth of charges for this trailer that hadn't been deducted from my pay—probably $100 or so. And when I'd come back on Sunday, one of the owners gave me this bitchy look and said: "Oh, you're back. Are you planning on actually doing any work?" Even to this day I'm not sure what she was so butthurt about. Maybe she thought I wasn't planning on paying them back. In the end we smoothed everything out, and agreed I'd start again the next day, and they'd take the trailer rental off of the next week's wages. Everything was settled.
But then, I take the bike into a mechanic, and when I come back with the estimate—again, about $100—this orchard manager gets all weird. I wake up on Monday morning to a note stuck on the door of the trailer with $10 taped to it, and some blather about how I was trying to cheat her.
And I remember thinking: "Fuck this." I rode up to her while she was giving an orientation to a bunch of new hires, tossed the money at her, and told her she could keep her fucking $10. Then I covered the entire inside of the trailer with this bottle of sunflower oil to attract ants (the place had a serious ant problem) locked the thing from the inside, tossed the keys in the nearest ditch, and drove off without paying the rental bill—but not before leaving a note inside that said "Are you planning on actually doing any work?"
Coincidentally, the bill for getting a locksmith out there would have worked out to about $100.
(Top photo: A mural in support of same-sex marriage in Belfast. Photo: Niall Carson PA Archive/PA Images)
Across the street from Redeemer Central Church stands Kremlin, a busy Soviet-themed gay nightclub in Belfast's small but proud Queer Quarter. The proximity of the two meeting houses is an emblem. Northern Ireland, a country that still bears the scars of healed religious and political divisions, and where the church and state are entwined, is the only place in Western Europe where same-sex marriage remains outlawed.
Following the national referendum that saw equal marriage rights granted in the Republic of Ireland in 2015, and the passing of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 by Westminster, the Northern Irish LGBT community has been left behind. And this despite both public and majority parliamentary support.
In 2015, marriage equality was put to the vote for the fifth time. Backed by the nationalist Sinn Fein and other left-leaning and centrist parties, plus a small number of progressive unionists on the right, the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly voted by a thin majority to legalise gay marriage. But the motion was ultimately blocked through the use of a "petition of concern", a veto introduced under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to protect the rights of minorities.
Ironically, that very same veto is today being used by unionists, led by the majority Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to deny the rights of the minority LGBT community.
Aside from a handful of reformists, the unionist political class of the right – including both the DUP and the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party – stand in staunch opposition to marriage equality. Certain members of the DUP – which has strong ties to the socially conservative, protestant Free Presbyterian church – have made no bones about their view of homosexuality in the past.
Veteran DUP member Maurice Mills MBE believes Aids is God's punishment for sodomy, and once said that Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for Louisianans allowing an annual gay pride parade. While Mills' comments may not represent the official party line, they illustrate the extremity of the DUP's opposition to LGBT civil liberties, the majority of which have only been passed by Westminster during periods of direct rule. As it stands, with the DUP being in the majority, there is nothing stopping the veto being exercised indefinitely.
"There are too many stories out there about what this would mean for faith groups and churches being forced to carry out same-sex marriages, an end to the institution of marriage and so many other lies" – John O'Doherty, director of The Rainbow Project
Today, the UK statelet stands at a crossroads. Next month's assembly elections will determine who holds parliamentary power. At this crucial time, campaigners are determined to galvanise public support. An Ipsos Mori poll conducted last year showed that nearly 70 percent of the electorate favour equal marriage rights.
"Our hope is that we can encourage soft supporters of the DUP to vote for an alternative and prioritise human rights over the party's divisive 'orange or green' campaign strategy," says Danny Toner, a campaigner and founder of the Gay Say. "Hopefully we can encourage some of the 45.1 percent of the eligible electorate who did not vote in the last election to understand the power of using their vote to prevent a return to the status quo at Stormont."
The DUP has made great efforts to present marriage equality through the prism of the country's orange and green sectarian divide. The party depends on loyalty to deep-seated unionist ideology and appeals to religious conservatism to curry support on the issue. However, the tide of public opinion, even amongst unionists, appears slowly but surely to be turning. "There are tens of thousands of people in working class unionist areas who are affected and appalled by this entrenched position. The task for the left is to mobilise them along with the majority of society who are for LGBT rights," says Gerry Carroll of People Before Profit, who last year won the party's first assembly seat.
With the elections looming, the recent Renewable Heat Incentive scandal may have weakened the DUP's hand. If the party were to lose enough seats in Stormont on the 2nd of March it may also lose the power to veto, since the petition of concern currently requires at least 30 signatures, putting gay marriage in closer reach.
If the results of a recent poll come to bear, the DUP will hold a post-election majority, but there is other recourse. Two legal challenges have gone before Belfast's High Court, with delayed judgments now expected in the coming weeks. Whatever the outcome of these tandem cases, they will undoubtedly be appealed, turning them over to the UK Supreme Court and potentially pushing any resolution years out.
In principle, Northern Ireland could – like the Republic – hold its own referendum on same-sex marriage. However, the country's LGBT community does not support this route to legislation, for a number of reasons. John O'Doherty, director of The Rainbow Project, believes that such a plebiscite could open old wounds, with votes being cast according to orange and green party lines. Rather than the public voting on the vague concept of "gay marriage", he feels it's necessary for a detailed legislative proposal to be put before the house and debated so that parliamentary democracy can prevail.
"We feel very strongly that this needs to be debated, and done so on the basis of reality, not innuendo and falsehoods. There are too many stories out there about what this would mean for faith groups and churches being forced to carry out same-sex marriages, an end to the institution of marriage and so many other lies," he says. "We feel that actually having the legislation published and properly debated by the house is an important step in this campaign so that the public, and pundits and journalists, have a proper opportunity to reflect on what is being proposed."
WATCH: The Orlando episode of VICELAND'S 'Gaycation'.
As part of a broader same-sex marriage campaign, the Project is collaborating with parties from the left to the centre, including Sinn Fein, to jointly bring forward a private members' bill. In Westminster, such bills are largely tokenistic, with very low pass rates. In Stormont they have historically had more success; but, passed or not, at the very least the bill will further publicise the issue and may impact future legislation.
In 2015 John McCallister, then an independent unionist MLA, proposed a radical shake-up of Stormont with his Assembly & Executive Reform Bill. The bill called for a move away from the cross-community power-sharing mechanism that many believe keeps Stormont in deadlock and reduces Northern Ireland's parliament to tribalism. In its original iteration the bill would have removed the need to win the support of at least 40 percent of declared unionists and 40 percent of declared nationalists, in favour of a simple weighted majority of 60 percent of all votes – regardless of their community designation.
The proposal also called for the petition of concern, the DUP's marriage equality trump card, to require signatories from at least three parties. In effect this would have abrogated the DUP's power to stonewall the passing of equal marriage rights. Ultimately the bill, which successfully introduced an official opposition to Stormont for the first time, was heavily watered down before being passed last year. "It's only a matter of time before we see this reformed. It was of its time in 1998, but community designation looks and sounds like it belongs to a different era now. It puts too much power in the hands of one party," says McCallister.
With the election less than a month away, Northern Ireland faces the real prospect of coming back under direct rule. If electees reach a power-sharing stalemate and the assembly is suspended, Westminster may see no choice but to reimpose itself if secondary elections also prove unsuccessful. This would make the Tories responsible for ensuring the extension of UK civil rights to Northern Irelanders; indeed, virtually all LGBT rights in the country, including employment protections and civil partnerships, were introduced under direct rule.
Even so, there are no guarantees. Of the 18 Northern Irish MPs sitting in Westminster today, 10 are unionists, eight of whom are DUP members allied to Theresa May's cause. Earlier this month all eight backed the Article 50 bill, paving the way for the UK government to pull the Brexit trigger.
Whatever the outcome of next month's election, there is little doubt that the chorus of public support is rising, and LGBT groups continue to campaign in concert. No matter the route to legislation, a time when every man and woman in Northern Ireland is legally entitled to marry whomever they so choose is now a matter of when, not if.
