Illustration by Craig Scott

The much-maligned Marie Antoinette had shit luck. She got married as a young teen to the impotent king of France, had her head chopped off, and posthumously became a symbol of aristocratic excess and greed. Her famed decapitation was partly the result of her all-consuming passion for fashion, claims Clare Crowston, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, in her book Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. As a big fan of famous French ladies, beheadings, and the clothes people wore back in the day when everyone went to the bathroom in pots, I decided to call her up to learn more.

VICE: Why did Marie Antoinette’s life suck so much?
Clare Crowston: She faced serious challenges. She was Austrian, and Austria was the traditional enemy of France. Her husband was impotent and couldn’t consummate the marriage for many years, so there were no children. She was young and in a very vulnerable position. Her advisors’ strategy to boost her [position] was: Always stay close to the King; if he ever manages to have sex, make sure it’s with you and not somebody else; don’t ask for favors for frivolous reasons.

And how did fashion come into all this?
There is a great line from one of her letters that basically says that she used fashion to give the appearance of having credit. Now, in the 18th century, when people spoke of “credit,” they were talking about somebody’s reputation and credibility. Credit is a great example of the gray market of female power at the time—through credit women could indirectly influence the whole machinery of the royal government. What Marie Antoinette was saying in her letter was that to have credit you have to appear to have credit. She was paying much more attention to fashion than previous queens ever had—they stayed closer to the traditional court dress codes—and she was trying to lead fashion and use her ability to create new styles and dominate fashion as a way to gain attention and to claim some kind of prestige in the eyes of the court.

That fashion sense meant she worked directly with designers, right?
She had a fascinating relationship with a woman named Marie-Jeanne Rose Bertin, who was one of the official fashion merchants to the queen. Bertin sold her these fabulous three-foot-tall hats. She was sort of the original Coco Chanel—the first really famous celebrity stylist. Antoinette relied on her to craft the appearance she was looking for; theirs was a very close relationship.

And presumably this seriously pissed off the common people?
It came to symbolize what the queen was doing wrong: She was spending too much money, she was having relations with the wrong kinds of people, she was focusing on frivolous things. The people said the queen was bankrupting the aristocratic families by encouraging noblewomen to follow her fashions, and that she was also bankrupting the state.

And presumably, as well as upsetting the masses, this also irritated the nobility?
At first it went OK, but as the expenses mounted and the impending bankruptcy of the French state became clear, it attracted more and more negative attention. There were rumors he was not the real father of her children, that she was having affairs with all kinds of people—lesbian affairs with her friends, for example, including Bertin.

As far as sex goes, the clothes themselves she was wearing at the time, were they considered to be racy?
She was wearing clothes that were extravagant more than sexual. But there is a very famous portrait by the artist Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun of Antoinette wearing a very simple chemise. What was shocking about it was its informality: It was a plain white linen dress with a frill around the bust. The queen is supposed to be armored behind stiff corsets and wearing extremely expensive formal wear. This looked like the queen being painted in her nightgown. There might be a sort of sexual component that people felt there, but it was as much a social shock as it was a sexual shock.

Last night, protesters and police held an uneasy truce in Kiev, but this morning the ceasefire was well and truly broken as blood was shed once more in the streets of the Ukrainian capital. The death toll keeps rising. The Kyiv Post is reporting that at least 37 people have been killed – mainly from police gunshots. Yesterday, the country's Liviv region declared independence from central government after protesters siezed the prosecutor's office and the police surrendered.

President Yanukovych is today meeting with EU foreign ministers and the EU will discuss the possibility of imposing sanctions. However, it looks like Russia will prop up the Ukrainian economy by buying €1.4 billion in government bonds. US President Obama didn't think much of this, attacking Putin for Russia's role in the crisis and claiming to be "on the side of the people".

VICE UK’s news editor Henry Langston is on the streets of Kiev. He called us this morning to give us an update on the situation.

VICE: Hi Henry. Things sound pretty horrible out there. What can you tell me?
Henry: I've already seen several bodies, which have definitely been hit by gunshot wounds. One guy was wearing a Kevlar vest but without the armour plate, there was a huge hole in it with blood surrounding it. They draped the bodies in a Ukrainian flag. They were young men, possibly in their mid-twenties. Earlier, some protesters were shot when they were charging towards some police vans.

Can you tell me how the truce broke down? I thought Yanukovych and the opposition leaders were trying the bring some stability to the situation.
At about 8AM, the protesters re-took the parts of Independence Square that police had withdrawn from as part of the truce. In retaliation to that, the police opened fire. I have been shown rounds from handguns. There are lots of worried people; these people cannot fight against AK-47s. They have shields and clubs. We haven’t seen any guns on the protesting side. That said, there are reports that outside of Kiev a large number of weapons were seized by protesters who stormed government buildings.

Kiev's Independence Square

What’s going on right now?
I am currently outside Hotel Ukraine on Instytutska Street [next to Indepedence Square] and there is a sniper firing pot shots. [Sound of a gunshot] Yup, that was another one. There are some barricades near the hotel and there are only a couple of protesters on them – I think they’re basically pinned down. The hotel itself is basically like a makeshift triage centre and a morgue right now. Medics here have counted 15 dead, who they think have been shot by snipers.

In the lobby of the hotel you've got the wounded being assessed and rushed to hospital and a row of dead bodies lined up, covered in shrouds. When the wounded started coming into the hospital, the doctors who happened to be staying there couldn't treat them, had no equipment to deal with serious bleeding.

Young members of the police force have been captured by protesters

I’ve heard reports of the protesters capturing police. Have you seen anything like that?
We saw about 20 captured policemen being brought into one of the protester's tents – this is towards the City Hall and there are a bunch of tents where the protesters sleep. They all looked very young. They were in their very early twenties and some of them were wounded. They were surrounded by protesters who were spitting on them, trying to punch them, but there were other protesters trying to stop that. And there were priests there trying to keep the peace.

A priest blesses a protester

What do you think will happen now? It feels like a line has been crossed. Some people are even talking about civil war.
I think civil war is a dangerous term, but it is scary. People are being killed in the street – it's terribly dark. People thought that line had been crossed back in January when four protesters had been killed. Then things calmed down, the anti-protest law was repealed, the Prime Minister resigned and the amnesty law came into place and that was a good thing. That has gone out of the winow. There is a call for a snap election, but as of yet the government isn’t moving towards that. I think the police need to pull back because the protesters aren’t going to leave – that is pretty damn clear. The only way to remove these people is by force.

Thanks, Henry. Stay safe.

Dead bodies lined up on the streets of Kiev

Follow Henry on Twitter for updates: @Henry_Langston

(Left to right) Unknown girl; Raymond Martinez, 4; Elizabeth Martinez, 3; and Jose Martinez, 8

As if the health threats that come with living in spitting distance of a lead- and arsenic-contaminated industrial site aren't enough of a worry, the impoverished residents of the Jordan Downs housing development have an even more pressing concern: eviction. With an imminent $1 billion redevelopment project slated for the area—one that will see the current 700 units razed and replaced by approximately 1,800 new mixed-income apartments—anxiety is high among Jordan Downs residents and their advocates. They believe the poorest are being strong-armed out of the development to pave way for tenants who will be better able to pay market-rate prices when the project is complete—a scenario that has blighted the legacies of countless other urban redevelopment projects.

“By going around door-to-door talking to tenants, what I’ve found is that they’ve noticed a definite rise in the number of legal notices and evictions at Jordan Downs,” said Thelmy Perez, housing-collective coordinator at Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN). Later that day, following a tip from a resident, Thelmy and I spoke to a mother faced with a Sophie’s Choice between her son and her entire family.

Initially when we knocked on her door, no one answered. As we walked away, the latch clicked and a cautious shadowy figure appeared behind a heavy metal screen door. Thelmy explained in Spanish that she helps residents who have been threatened with eviction, and the woman eagerly ushered us in.

While far from lavish, Maria Espinoza’s unit was immaculately clean and tidy with a glistening floor, clearly mopped a thousand times. The walls were decorated with certificates and prizes awarded to her four children, some of whom had gone through the LAPD Cadet youth program. It’s a home that spoke of a good mother, a diligent mother—the sort that spends hours waiting at after-school programs for her kids. But if Espinoza, 37, doesn’t soon kick her 17-year-old son out of their home of seven years, she and her three other children will all face eviction.

Daniel Encisco's LAPD Cadet certificate

“About three weeks ago, the police called: ‘Are you Daniel’s mother?’” began Maria, in Spanish. Her son, Daniel Encisco, an LAPD cadet, had been arrested for being among a group of people smoking marijuana. Police didn’t find anything incriminating on him, but they said that they saw him toss something aside when they approached. Daniel is on probation for a former marijuana violation. The police searched Maria’s home but found nothing. “He never smokes at home,” she said, before adding that no charges have been brought against him. And yet Maria said that, on the condition that she throw out her son, the police promised to help her secure scholarships for her daughters and help her keep her home. “If he’s here, I know where he is, and I can stop him from doing anything bad. He’s still only a minor,” she said of her fear of Daniel's living elsewhere.

To compound her worries, there’s the issue of Maria’s rent. In October of last year, her tires were slashed—an expense that depleted her meager budget. The housing manager agreed that, because Maria has always been so reliable, it would be OK if she paid her rent later than normal. But when Maria made to pay her rent, the same manager told her that the rules had suddenly changed and that she was being penalized for being late. Months later, she’s still trying to resolve the issue. Every month she takes out a money order to pay her rent, but she said the manager won’t accept it until they’ve decided her punishment: “I haven’t received any paperwork from them, nothing, explaining what I need to do.”

Maria’s story isn’t unique. Sarah Martinez faces eviction at the end of February.

“They told me I had no choice but to agree to a voluntary move-out agreement,” said Sarah, on the walk back to her home through the units, the residents' meeting over. Sarah has lived at Jordan Downs with her five children for nearly a year and a half: “It’s the first stable home me and my children have had.” She admitted that she’s far from faultless, but her story paints the picture of a victim of circumstance more than a deliberate wrongdoer.

In October of last year, a police search of her home uncovered drug paraphernalia belonging to her boyfriend, though she said that no police report was filed and the officer didn’t confiscate the offending item. In addition, a friend she invited over was involved in an investigation for car theft, and Sarah failed to disclose on her housing application a misdemeanor conviction for shoplifting (even though the application only required that felony convictions be listed). She said that because of these incidents, the Housing Authority gave her an ultimatum: either sign a voluntary move-out agreement so that she could remain at Jordan Downs for a few more months, or face an enforced eviction at the end of 30 days. “They said that because of my conviction, I wasn’t allowed an informal hearing.”

“This is a clear violation of her rights,” said Thelmy. “Everyone has the right to due process, and that includes an informal hearing.” Indeed, Sarah felt so badgered into signing that she wrote at the bottom of the form, “I’m surrendering my unit. I’m canceling the informal hearing due to the housing manager telling me that I cannot have an informal hearing.”

Since speaking with Sarah, she and her five children have preempted the eviction and are believed to have moved back into her mother and sister’s two-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood. She can’t be reached, however—her phone is disconnected.

Thelmy believes that these cases are emblematic of a much broader system of tenant harassment. The Housing Authority has recently started clamping down on offenses they previously let slide, and more residents are receiving notices for petty mistakes, Thelmy said. She pointed to statistics taken from a survey she conducted last September: Of 71 Jordan Downs tenants interviewed, 16 of them (22 percent) had received some kind of legal or eviction notice. Many of them, she added, were largely unaware of their rights as tenants.

Thelmy Perez with a band of Jordan Downs residents, including Sarah Martinez, second right

According to Tanuka Loha, program director of Human Right to Housing at the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative, what residents are experiencing at Jordan Downs is a familiar scenario when it comes to urban redevelopment.

“When you have these one-for-one replacement type agreements, one-for-one doesn’t mean like-for-like,” said Tanuka, perched on the lip of the small traffic island at the center of Windward Circle at Venice Beach, Los Angeles, after a day of protests over the Homeless Bill of Rights. Around her, a community of activists settled down for the night with bowls of soup. “There is a real climate of fear among the residents. Somebody we spoke with who signed a voluntary move-out agreement did so because she was worried about potential reprisals if she didn’t. That’s a very serious thing to be saying if you’re a public-housing resident. This is your home; you should feel secure in it. There should be security of tenure, but there isn’t.”

Tanuka pointed to a number of bureaucratic obstacles residents have faced as a series of legal notices has mottled the neighborhood. An on-site attorney from a nonprofit legal firm was brought in to advocate for residents going through eviction, but was removed from his post. Language barriers have been another problem. “There were folks who would go in to speak to someone official about the situations they were facing, and there would be no one there who could speak Spanish. You’re talking about an area where 60 percent of residents are Latino.”

Doug Guthrie, the Housing Authority’s president and CEO, disputed the claims. He said that the plans clearly state that none of the residents will be forced to move as long as they stay in good standing as tenants. “It’s not the highest eviction rate of all our various housing developments, and it's not the lowest," he said. According to statistics provided by the Housing Authority, for the whole of 2013, Jordan Downs had the fifth highest percentage of evictions per unit, with 14 evictions from 700 units, a rate of 2 percent. The development with the highest rate, Imperial Courts, had 15 evictions from 490 units, 3.1 percent. “There’s absolutely no indication that Jordan Downs has been treated any differently to any other site," he said. "In fact, I’d say it’s the exact opposite.”

As proof of his point, Doug highlighted a number of programs and services that were introduced a couple of years ago to prepare Jordan Downs’s residents for the redevelopment process, including credit counseling, educational services, job preparedness, language courses, and social service screenings. “We’ve invested more there than the rest of the housing authority combined. We have no interest in doing any sort of accelerated evictions at Jordan Downs. We’re trying hard to be the least disruptive to our residents. Our goal is to ensure no displacement.”

Thelmy said that she asked the Housing Authority for figures further back than 2013 in order to confirm conclusively whether the eviction rate has increased from years past, but they told her that they did not have the data. Similarly, when I asked for stats going back a few years, I was given figures only for 2013. Thelmy also believes that, were it not for the work of LA CAN advocating for residents, especially from June onward, the eviction rate would have been higher.

“I say this because in the first six months of last year, Jordan Downs had the highest eviction rate of any development in the whole city,” said Thelmy, spotlighting more figures presented to her by the Housing Authority. Jordan Downs had the second highest number of cases of legal action between January and June of 2013—38, compared to 69 for Nickerson Gardens. Yet Jordan Downs had the highest rate of evictions in the same period—nine in six months. Nickerson Gardens had seven.

“It speaks to all the problems with accountability and transparency,” said Thelmy. “The idea that if you’ve got an organization working with residents, it’s not transparent when they don’t give data on grounds that they haven’t run a report. They have the data, so why not run a report?”

At the nucleus of the issue concerning evictions is a caveat (either vague or concrete, depending upon whom you ask) as to whether or not a tenant will be rehoused under the new development: the imperative of remaining "in good standing.” According to a leaflet distributed to tenants last fall, residents will be considered in good standing if they abide by 15 obligations listed on their rental agreement, “at minimum.” Among the 15 obligations, tenants cannot display signs or advertisements of any kind on their residence or housing estate. Residents must also ensure that all persons under their control do not “disturb the rights of other residents of the development to the peaceful enjoyment of their residences or the public areas.” Not listed among the 15 tenets is rent payments—but the leaflet states that “rent shall be paid on or before the first day of each calendar month.”

Fernando Gaytan, senior attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA), is one of those who believe the caveat is vague in its requirements of tenants. “You have this particular population under the microscope, and what you’ve got people saying to them is, ‘You’re going to be OK as long as you’re in good standing.’ But what does good standing mean, exactly? Why and according to whom? Is it different than before? You ask yourself these questions, and it’s clear why tenants might fear displacement.”

Fernando has been helping tenants from Jordan Downs for a matter of months, but during that time, some residents have come to LAFLA expressing concern about the arbitrary delivery of legal notices. “They’ve seen their neighbors get snagged for the littlest things, like trash that may have been blown to their door from elsewhere or for being behind in their rent by a nominal amount, like 54 cents.”

LAFLA has a history of representing displaced tenants. The foundation helped people move from Ujima Village—a redevelopment project that is now a ghost town where 300 units were built on a heavily contaminated site formerly used to store oil tanks. Fernando’s experience allows him the luxury of foresight, and he fears that many of the same issues that have marred other redevelopment projects are percolating through the cracks at Jordan Downs.

“In this particular development, they’re saying that tenants are going to be rehoused one-for-one, but when you really press them on it and when you really get down to the details, there is no one-for-one replacement of public housing, and the currently proposed funding structure will exclude at least 125 families and likely more,” said Fernando. "At the end of the day, they’ll say that we guarantee you one-for-one replacement, but ultimately, lo and behold, not everyone currently there will qualify for the units they plan to create.”

As for Maria, foresight is a luxury she would love but can’t afford. For now, Maria hasn’t agreed to kick out her son—she’s waiting on his March court date before she makes her decision.

@1danross

Fashion Week is like a cosplay convention for the kids who fetishized copies of i-D growing up instead of anime tentacle porn. During the fall/winter runway shows of designers Hood by Air, Eckhaus Latta, and Jeremy Scott at MADE Fashion Week, we chatted it up with a bunch of fashion's lovable weirdos. We asked everyone from musicians like Le1f and Princess Nokia to designers like Luar Zepol a bunch of questions that touched on everything from what food was in their belly to what they were using to cover up their genitals. Things got a little zany, but that's to be expected at event an where people are trying to look like a "post-apocalyptic drug dealer."

A sign near the Labrecque's property in Peace River, Alberta. Photo via Alan Gignoux.

The pages of Karla and Alain Labrecque’s photo albums reek of bitumen. They're so soaked with toxic fumes that just looking at their photos makes them ill. The Labrecque's abandoned their farm near Peace River, Alberta, after emissions from a nearby tar sands operation caused each family member to experience health problems. They were the first of seven families to abandon the area, but others living near the Reno and Three Creeks oil fields are left behind and continue to suffer. The vapours that permeated the Labrecque’s home still cling to all of their old possessions, “right down to pictures or paper, our books, our filing cabinets,” Alain Labrecque said.

After hundreds of complaints from residents and a lawsuit against an oil company, in late January, the industry-funded Alberta Energy Regulator held a public inquiry into local emissions. It took place at the appropriately named Belle Petroleum Centre, and was punctuated by tears and emotional outbursts. Carmen Langer, a rancher living in the thick of Three Creeks’ oil fumes, explained that according to community air monitors “one day of the inquiry we were four times over the [normal] background level of the gas. Everybody went to that inquiry stoned out of their minds and angry.”

After years of toxic exposure, Peace River residents had plenty of anger to vent.

Residents blame bitumen emissions for their seizures and shakes, eye twitches, muscle pain and spasms, numbness, crippling headaches, dizziness, nausea, loss of balance, short and long-term memory loss, slurred speech, slowed thought, loss of hearing, shallow breathing, blackouts, swelling, sinus irritation, metallic taste, no sense of smell, nosebleeds, blood in urine, rectal bleedeing, chronic heart burn, insomnia, inability to stay awake, intoxication, sedation, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, weeping, weight loss, sweating profusely, hot and cold flashes, and bruising. The exact long-term impacts of exposure are unknown, though detected compounds like benzene and toluene may lead to MS, dementia, Parkinson’s, or cancer.

Worse still, those who sought help have only found corruption. Industry and government mislead them, labs skewed air test results, and doctors refused to diagnose them. The Alberta Energy Regulator oversees Alberta’s oil patch and is “100 percent funded by industry”—it essentially allows Peace River companies to regulate themselves. And living in a town where almost everybody works for the oil industry, those speaking out have become outsiders; they are the bearers of an unpopular truth.

“It is just our opinion that we have come up to a wall of systemic, entrenched corruption—people dedicated to misleading us and stifling the truth,” Vivienne Laliberte, a Reno resident forced to leave her home, testified to the AER. “We have not met one person in government, in industry, and the regulator who has demonstrated a functional conscience.”

The Labrecque's

Unlike the sprawling open-pit mines and poisonous lakes that have made Fort McMurray’s tar sands infamous, many of Peace River’s operations use wells to bring bitumen up to the surface of the land. It is heated it in tall black canisters that line the horizon, then pumped into trucks or pipelines. This method is called CHOPS—or Cold Heavy Oil Production with Sand. It is the only method currently used in Reno.

Despite claims from Shell and Baytex that their CHOPS operations meet or surpass all applicable regulations, few regulations actually exist for this method. Local oil producers are legally permitted to vent toxic gas into the environment in any non-explosive amount, including known carcinogens like benzene, toluene, and poly aromatic hydrocarbons. Baytex leaves the hatches open on many of their tanks, despite years of requests from the Labrecque's to close them.

“It is rather appalling to know that 'within regulations' means that they can poison my family,” Karla Labrecque wrote in an open letter to Baytex. The company took over oil wells half a kilometre from her home in 2011. Within a year, according to the ERCB, recorded emissions jumped by about 6000 percent.

Andrew Loosley, Baytex’s spokesperson, said that even prior to Baytex’s takeover of the oil field “all gasses associated with that production in the Reno operations [were] vented into the atmosphere,” as is permitted by “all applicable regulatory guidelines.” He attributed the increase in gasses to the fact that the previous company, unlike Baytex, “was not recording their numbers.”

But around the time of this documented increase, the Labrecque's began to get sick. They initially struggled to identify the source of their illnesses, checking for boiler defects and carbon monoxide in their home. The tar-like smell that hung in the air was an obvious but unsuspected culprit—the family had welcomed their new industrial neighbours without suspicion. “I had this naïve thought like everyone else that the oil industry was strictly regulated, and a nightmare like this taking place was just not possible,” Alain said.

After a few months of exposure, Alain suffered from eye-twitches, back pain, headaches, and muscle spasms. He “would just soak the bed from these toxins at night,” had poor balance and foggy memory, and found it increasingly difficult to operate farm equipment. Karla recalled experiencing “a hollow feeling in the arms, hot and cold flashes, [and a] massive left-side headache,” clarifying that “this is not like a migraine. This is like somebody’s taking a 2-by-4 to your head.” At the height of her illness, she discovered that “if I turned my head too far to the left I could actually make myself pass out.”

Their daughter, then two years old, was unable to keep balance. “She would fall off things—you know, one stair up, she’d fall off it. She’d fall off the couch, she’d fall off the chair when she was just sitting, eating supper,” Karla Labrecque explained.

Alain Labrecque and his children, before they abandoned their Peace River home. Photo via Facebook.

When they spent time away from their home, the Labrecque's felt better. They moved away and learned that half-hour visits to the farm would cause each family member’s symptoms to reappear. Karla has become particularly sensitive and finds herself bedridden for a day or two whenever she encounters chlorine, windshield wiper fluid, vehicle exhaust, or her old, petro-chemical-soaked possessions.

Alain’s uncle, Mike Labrecque, needs a gas mask to make it through the town. “As soon as I’m exposed, I lose—I lose everything. I lose my hearing, I lose my balance, my speech. I don’t stutter as a rule; I don’t. I lose my ability to talk, I lose my ability almost to comprehend,” he told the AER. 

Before abandoning his home, he lived close to Karla and Alain in a forested corner he described as “a park.” He enjoyed his work as a contractor for Baytex, pushing trucks through mud and snow with a tractor. As Baytex’s emissions made him increasingly ill, he struggled to stay awake while operating the vehicle. One day he told Baytex that he didn’t think he could work safely, so they fired him.

“Everything has to be done in a safe manner so we had no choice,” Baytex’s spokesperson Andrew Loosley said.

Alberta’s health services.                                                          

In early 2012, the Labrecque's received a confusing letter from Alberta Health Services. It told them that “chemicals associated with unrefined petroleum products were detected in air samples” but that they posed “no immediate or long-term risk to health or safety” based on Alberta’s ambient air quality guidelines. The letter also advised the Labrecque's to “limit your exposure by closing windows and doors when odours are detected.”

Another of Alberta Health’s suggestions played out like a sick joke: “If you or anyone in your family is concerned about their health, please discuss these concerns with your physician at your earliest opportunity,” the letter said.

Mike had lost a lot of weight from vomiting and diarrhea. He sweated profusely at night, testifying that: “If I lied down… I could watch my chest and I could literally see the water coming out and form little rivers.” His breath was shallow, his voice was hoarse, he had trouble going to sleep and getting up. His speech suffered and he became convinced that he was terminally ill. He thought, “maybe I have cancer or something. ‘Cause I’d look in the mirror and it was scary… I could actually see my bone sockets.”

The Labrecque's abanonded home. Photo via Alan Gignoux.

Mike mentioned the oil wells near his home to a doctor. And after retreating a little bit they told him that he didn't need a doctor, he needed a lawyer instead.

Karla Labrecque sought medical attention and a sinus specialist named Dr. Mel Delacruz became convinced that she was being exposed to an airborne pollutant. When Karla mentioned the oil wells just south of her home, Dr. Delacruz “just told me to move. He said, you are just a small, little bolt in this huge robot and you don’t matter. Move.”

Karla recalled that Delacruz “wasn’t too keen on speaking out” and that he referenced Dr. John O’Connor—a physician who was “dragged through the courts” after linking rare cancers to tar sands mining. When Karla insisted on a blood test to check for petroleum by-products in her body, Delacruz refused. “I'm not even allowed to call for that stuff on a blood test,” she was told. Dr. Delacruz could not be reached for comment.

A few months later, Karla tried again. She demanded a blood toxicity test from the Peace River hospital, alleging that a doctor there also refused to take her blood. When she refused to leave, the doctor called an unnamed government representative to seek permission for the test—a process Karla thought was unusual. Permission was granted, but as the Vancouver Observer reported, the hospital ran a type of blood test that is useless for detecting petro-chemical compounds.              

“The doctors won’t help you with your symptoms,” Three Creeks resident Carmen Langer said. “It’s the Alberta way. I mean, when you’re working for the Alberta government are you going to recognize this issue until you’re forced to?”

The Langer Ranch.

Carmen Langer says he’s seen dozens of tanker trucks roll over in his community of Three Creeks, a 20-minute drive northeast of Peace River . He’s convinced that truckers are leaving the oil field “drunker than skunks” after getting high on fumes while filling up their vehicles. He knows this experience well, he drove trucks for the oil industry and sometimes felt impaired behind the wheel.

“It’s just like drugs or alcohol in your body. And then when you come off it there are the same effects as an alcoholic or a junkie has,” Langer said. So when testifying before the AER late January, he understandably had little patience to offer.

“I'm not feeling well because we got severely gassed Sunday morning at our place,” he told the regulators. “And again this morning.”

Though the AER’s inquiry focused on Baytex’s Reno oil field, Carmen told the regulators that “there’s only one company in that area—I have five here with constant emissions.” Three Creek’s oil fields host the operations of Shell, Penn West, Murphy, Husky, and Tervita.

“The bitumen smell is so strong in your house and in your pillow, in your blankets, in your blinds, in your drywall, your mattress—everything is contaminated. I live in a contaminated environment because of this… I lay on my couch; it smells like bitumen. I go to open my blinds; they smell like bitumen,” he testified.

For more than a decade prior to the Labrecque's becoming ill, Langer has had disputes with local industry. An ex-oil worker, he is extremely critical of how industry operates today.

“As a young guy for me it was a blessing because the jobs were unlimited here … good oil sands jobs,” Langer said. Working for Shell, he maintained facilities, fitted pipes, and served as a safety contractor. Shell trained him to watch for hydrocarbon odours on the job and “to get out of the area” if odours became too strong. “Twenty years ago we couldn’t work in these kinds of conditions, but now I have to sleep in them?” he asked.

Langer’s loud, dissenting voice has brought him some unwanted attention. He claims that he’s been threatened by industry and he is currently the subject of an RCMP investigation. He also worries that he has become detested by some in his community—especially those who aren’t affected.

Different homes get different doses of pollution, he explained, arguing that wind patterns and altitude play a major role in determining who gets sick. His ranch is at a low elevation and traps pollutants until heavy winds disperse them because “emissions are heavier than air,” he said. “As they’re leaving the tanks they’re warm, they go up a little bit, then they cool and they fall into a lower spot… that’s why you could have a neighbour up on a hill a mile away, they would hardly get any of it.”

Langer believes that this uneven distribution of pollutants explains why some residents have a hard time believing those who feel ill. “They think come on, the government wouldn’t do this to you. That’s what the majority of the town thought before this inquiry,” he said.  

Carmen Langer on his ranch.

But despite naysayers, Langer’s activism has helped to make a political issue out of Peace River. When Premier Alison Redford visited the town she met with Langer personally. He asked her to “quit selling this stuff until it’s fixed,” and she promised swift action. Now he’s cynical of the whole affair. He said: “As soon as there’s a ribbon cutting in our town, the rotten sons of bitches run to the ribbon cutting where their name’s prominent and it's good news, but they couldn’t come and face the people here.” He pointed out that as residents of Peace River poured out their hearts at the AER inquiry, Alison Redford was out of the country, promoting the oil sands at the World Economic Forum. “Why isn’t she here listening to the impacts?” Langer asked the AER.

“I have no choice to go anywhere. We’ve lost our total livelihood, we have no income,” he said. Having formerly won awards for their cattle, the Langers “had to get rid of our herd of cattle of eighty years. It was just so gassy. We couldn’t work anymore, we couldn’t get up in the morning to work anymore, and we couldn’t keep our cattle on their feet.” His vet told him to take his cattle and leave, but Langer pushed the government to test his cows for hydrocarbon exposure. When government scientists came to his farm, they tested the cows for venereal disease instead. Langer even believes that they “falsified” their final report. “They never did test for the fat,” he said, adding “[that's] the only place you’re going to find the hydrocarbons.”

Langer also voiced concern over a growing Three Creek’s dumpsite of oil sands waste and a practice called “landfarming” that his family fell victim to seventeen years ago.

Landfarming, he explained, is a practice promoted by government and industry, where farmers are encouraged to do something rather illogical—to spread waste from oil wells across their land. It began with conventional crude wells in Southern Alberta, whose drillings contained phosphates and nitrites that worked well as fertilizers. But since that time the nature of oil extraction has changed and bitumen drillings are much more toxic, so after seventeen years and millions of dollars in remediation costs, little will grow on Langer’s farm.

Expertise

At the AER’s inquiry, two expert witnesses debated about what instrument is best for detecting airborne toxins. One expert said it was air-monitoring standards, while the other said it was a human body.

Using data gleaned from air tests, Dr. Davies, a former DOW Chemical corporate toxicologist, said residents “are not being poisoned by these emissions.” Air tests showed toxins were only present at levels that “would not cause adverse effects among members of the general public” and that symptoms are “stress related” and are “actually being caused by the brain’s interpretation of odour.” Other factors that might inflame symptoms, he argued, included income, employment, and marital status, adding that “if an individual is dissatisfied with the facility, you’ll see a higher prevalence of symptoms.”

This left residents awestruck. Vivienne Laliberte, who has lost her sense of smell, found the presentation to be “condescending,” while Carmen Langer thought it “was a bunch of BS.” Langer explained “we react way before we smell the odour. These carcinogens get into our bodies first, and you feel it before you even smell it. Any of my neighbours will tell you that.”

To the oil companies in the room, Dr. Davies’ perspective was invaluable. Incorporating his presentation, Baytex concluded: “All of the objective science-based evidence indicates that our operations are safe for workers and the public,” and that “an understanding that emissions are not poisoning people may reduce odour annoyance and stress-related symptoms.”

But this conclusion doesn’t really take into account the testimony of Dr. Sears. She believes the emissions are indeed making people ill, that Dr. Davies uses outdated methodology, and that labs throughout Alberta don’t produce useful data because they are allowed to make up their own chemical detection limits.

The Baytex plant. Photo via Alan Gignoux.

She explained that carbonyl sulphide and carbon disulphide were both detected in air samples and that the body metabolizes these compounds into hydrogen sulphide, a neurotoxin associated with “a broad range of quite serious health effects.” Inside your body, hydrogen sulphide slows down your energy metabolism “so you can’t think as quickly, you can’t respond.” This compound also inhibits your body’s ability to detoxify itself from hydrocarbons, which could explain the extreme sensitivities some residents have developed. “Your body can’t get rid of these chemicals nearly as quickly as it would otherwise,” she explained.

She argued that checking for toxins against established safe levels, as Dr. Davies did, misses the big picture—it doesn’t take into account how different compounds interact inside your body, and doesn’t consider that these chemicals can accumulate over time.

Sears also pointed out that labs in Alberta are not standardized, leaving them free to determine how much of a chemical is needed in order for it to be detected in their tests. Chemistry Matters, the lab that Baytex hired, explicitly caters their test results to their client’s needs. The company’s website notes that they use high detection limits “to protect our client’s interests by preventing false positive results.” To Sears, this basically means “telling somebody that something that can harm them is not there.”

“I’m very concerned that your data is not really very reliable and is not very helpful,” Dr. Sears told the AER. “Some of the compounds are not being detected properly.”

But even without labs skewing results, Melina Laboucan Massimo, a Greenpeace campaigner who has worked with Three Creeks, argued that Alberta’s air quality standards are not actually safe—she knows from experience.

Massimo comes from the nearby First Nations community of Little Buffalo, where the government has leased 70 percent of the land to industries without consent from the people who live there. As of 2010, more than 2,684 oil and gas wells have been built around the community. “Even around the time that I was born when the oil industry started popping up there were… miscarriages, issues of pulmonary diseases like emphysema and asthma, so there’s definitely long-term health impacts,” Melina said.

When a massive oil spill occurred in the territory in 2011, nobody from government or industry informed the people of Little Buffalo. Melina recalls that locals were experiencing “burning eyes, nausea, and headaches” because “isobutanes and benzenes would have been emitted into the air.” She found herself “arguing with the government and the companies about ‘why are young children, why are elders, why are pregnant women in the community not being told to leave?’” But the government and industry simply insisted: “We haven’t exceeded the ambient air quality objective of Alberta. These are just noxious gasses that people are breathing in. It shouldn’t be any concern.”

“I think that somebody’s body is a good indication that there’s something seriously wrong. The Alberta ambient air quality objectives are obviously too low if they’re not even detecting [this],” Melina said.

Hope and the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The Peace River hearings are the first real test of the new Alberta Energy Regulator, the only organization which can force local oil companies to pollute less. It is replacing an older oil sands regulator, the ERCB, and employs many of the same people.

“It’s the same people, it’s just a different name,” Langer said, “because the ERCB has such a bad image they had to do something drastic.”

This poor reputation owes mostly to the way that the AER investigates odour incidents. A resident smells something and calls the AER to complain, and the AER then calls the company and asks them if there have been any toxic releases. Whatever the company responds with is taken as truth. I asked the AER about this and their spokesperson Ryan Bartlett simply said that “the Alberta Energy Regulator follows up with every complaint received.”

But Diane Plowman, a resident of Three Creeks, found that “the vast majority of reports that we get back about whether or not there was any abnormalities or unusual events don't indicate that the regulator actually even inspected, went out, visited.” She said that even when community air monitors from the Three Creeks working group have found toxins, the AER often reports that there was “nothing identified.”

Information from the companies then moves up the chain of command. Vivienne Laliberte recalls a phone call to the Ministry of Energy where she spoke to Ken Hughes’ chief of staff David Golan. Golan “assured me that Baytex was no longer venting or flaring in our area, and we had nothing to worry about. I said, David, I’m looking at the flare; what are you talking about? I said, when Baytex tells you something do you check up on it? And he said, no, but the AER does.”

Residents also told the regulator that they were stone-walled when requesting air monitoring results and community complaints. They were frequently told that they should file costly and time-consuming freedom of information requests. “If the emissions were public, why was the data private?” a resident, Donna Dahm, asked the AER.

Ryan Bartlett, the AER’s spokesperson, assured me that “the AER’s structure is specifically designed to ensure strong corporate oversight and impartiality,” because the government has a role in authorizing the AER to collect money from industry. But Melina Laboucan Massimo believes that “there’s so much crossover between government and industry within Alberta that it really compromises the ability for them to regulate.” To her, the AER is “a compromised system.”

And it’s the only system in place.

Most residents are cautiously optimistic that the AER, in their wisdom, will enact a positive change. “I feel that the board was very much so listening to us. They heard it, very loud and clear,” Karla Labrecque said. “We really gotta have faith that these guys will do what’s right,” Alain agreed.

Even Carmen Langer thinks that “something positive has to come out of this.” But ever-the-pragmatist, he clarified that “if they don’t fix the problem, they gave us some pretty good information for a class action, eh?”

Society.

“Take. Sue me. Sue me. Sue me. That’s always what you get from these people. How does the uneducated farmer take on these big industries? We can’t. And they know that. They hold that against us,” Carmen Langer said.

While the Labrecque's are speaking Baytex’s language, suing for an injunction to force the company to shut down operations until emissions are fixed, they believe they will never be able to ever safely return to their home. They’re suing for their neighbours, Alain said, who are “far enough off of the zone that if these regulations are done in time, they can be saved, I believe, before they get too sensitive.” And while life goes on in Peace River, the Labrecque’s abandoned farm is just one scar among many that no lawsuit will heal.

“The destruction to my family and the heartbreak in my community and the First Nations community around us, how’s that ever going to be fixed?” Carmen Langer asked the AER. “I’ve lost good friends over this, I’ve lost good neighbours over this, and how do you fix that? Our community was destroyed by the oil sands industry and a lot of it’s never going to be fixed, no matter what they do.”

“If this particular issue was happening in downtown Edmonton [or Calgary]… this would have been addressed within a month. The fact remains, there’s a small group of residents in Reno, a small group in Three Creeks; we really, at this point, are collateral damage,” Vivienne Laliberte told the AER.

“A society should be judged not by how well it takes care of its powerful and wealthy, but rather how well it takes care of its most vulnerable. Children come to mind and those who don't have the resources to sue. So is there justice only for those who can?” she asked.  

“A society which is prepared to sacrifice its own children for prosperity has no future,” she said.

Photo via Flickr user Poom

Last time, we looked at all the lunacy that goes down on Greyhound buses. Today, we're ranking the most epic Dunkin' Donuts clusterfucks, rated from 1 (Relatively Inconvenient) to 10 (Nightmarish Catastrophe). Those doughnuts make 'em go nuts.

–Florida resident Taylor Chapman did not get a receipt after ordering from Da Dunk and went to the extreme of filming her complaint and posting it on YouTube. Having a customer-service gripe is like winning the food-service lottery for degenerates. The further the store employee bends over backwards to appease her, the deeper she shoves her entitlement. From her lawyer being already “on it" to “I said I want the whole fuckin’ menu, bitch—twice," our beautiful ray of sunshine harasses other customers who could not give less of a shit and eventually spots the “complete cunt sandnigger whore” from the previous day who allegedly neglected to print her receipt. Taylor’s reaction is pretty reasonable: “I hope you’re happy with your little fucking sandnigger self. 'Cause I’m about to nuke your whole fucking planet from Mars. You think y'all are tough, big, fat Arabs bombin’ the Trade Center? I’ll show you tough.” By her own admission, she’s been served piss-covered fries, which is by far the most logical part of the entire racist, privileged, batshit eight-minute tirade. 7/10

–Most of the time when you receive the wrong order it’s pretty infuriating, but you get over it. If you have no understanding of either social mores or common human decency, you might act like 22-year-old Florida woman Alexis Longo and her husband, Jeffery Wright, instead. After receiving the incorrect flavor of iced coffee in the drive-through, Alexis berated and cursed at the employee on duty, who apologized and offered to correct his mistake, but by then Alexis didn’t want coffee—she wanted blood. The couple entered the Dunkin' Donuts and began arguing with the employee. Alexis told her husband to hit the worker as she could not reach him. Naturally, Jeffery let loose with a string of haymakers. Not content with beating a dude who makes $7.79 an hour, Jeff pulled out his loaded 9mm Taurus Slim handgun and pistol-whipped the employee. At one point Alexis yelled for her husband to “shoot him, shoot him!” before the fight calmed down. The couple was arrested. Maybe they should switch to decaf. 8/10

–A Dunkin' Donuts in New Jersey was caught serving up a bit more than just coffee and pastries, if you if you know what I mean. If you don't, keep reading. Twenty-nine-year-old Melissa Redmond was caught taking breaks during her late-night shift to have sex with customers in exchange for money. The investigation, appropriately named “Extra Sugar," by the Rockaway Township Police Department, determined that despite being a “very good” employee, she was taking 10–15 minutes breaks to fuck, suck, or hug in customers’ cars. She was arrested after offering an undercover officer sex during a drive-through transaction. I hope she got to use the “I like my men like I like my coffee” line a few times; otherwise, what’s the point? 6/10

via New Britain Police

–Wilfred Levine, 63, was hanging around drunk in a New Britain, Connecticut, Dunkin' Donuts. Although Dunkin' is one of the most ideal places for a drunk senior to pass out, coffee-shop employees asked him to leave. Wilfred, not one to be thrown out of a Dunkin' Donuts, returned later with an ax looking for the guys who kicked him out, and when they didn't come running, he began to smash up the inside of the store. As police arrived, Wilfred came outside to destroy the store's plate-glass windows. That's about the time he was Tazered by the first police officers on the scene. He faces charges of assault, assault on police, mischief, trespassing, possession of a dangerous weapon, breach of peace, reckless endangerment, and interfering with police. Old drunks are fucking crazy. 3/10

–Oh, look, Florida again. Charles “Chuck” Barry, 48, loved doughnuts but surprisingly was not a cop. Still, Chuck’s father used to be a cop, and Chuck still had the ol' badge. What better way to honor your police captain father’s memory than by rolling up to a Dunkin' Donuts, flashing a .38-caliber revolver and his old shield, then demanding a 10-percent discount? On some occasions he’d declare that he was a US Air Marshal, which is a pretty loose criterion upon which to be given a discount doughnut as it is, especially when you’re faking it. Store manager Michelle Hoeltk became suspicious when he brought his family in and asked for the usual 10 percent off of a particularly large order, so when a sheriff’s captain stopped by for some brew and glaze, she asked him if it was normal for law enforcement to ask for a discount. He told her that they are allowed to take discounts but are discouraged from asking, thus prompting the sheriff to set up surveillance to see who this jerk was. They caught him as he pulled away with his feast. Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco said at a press conference, “[He] could have done something crazy that could have hurt somebody. We're thankful that it was just a cup of coffee." Chuck was charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer and improper exhibition of a firearm. Chuck fucked up. 6/10

@jules_su

Ed Templeton has been a super-obvious choice for Epicly Later’d since the early days of the show. Maybe that’s why it took so long for us to do it. The man is like a skate historian—one benefit of his relatively straight-edge lifestyle is that he has what we like to call “sober memory.” He can recall everything from his life growing up in Huntington Beach, California, onward. He also had no boundaries in terms of how personal he would go for our interview. This episode was a big one for us. Enjoy!

Illustration by Dave Dorman, Wizards of the Coast

If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering, odds are high that you were at some point obsessed with it. Or at least I was, along with millions of others, both as a dorky teen and recently again as a ridiculous adult. For more than 20 years now, Magic has maintained its well-deserved place among the most popular and—in my opinion—complex games in recent memory.

The creator of Magic is a man named Richard Garfield, a game designer with a PhD in combinatorial math. Though Magic is still his most popular design, Garfield is responsible for numerous other paper and electronic games, including RoboRally; Vampie: The Eternal Stuggle; Spectromancer; and King of Tokyo. Currently, Richard is working alongside notorious repeat Jeopardy! champion and writer of funny tweets Ken Jennings on a new game combining trivia with an egalitarian mode of play, wherein anyone, not just trivia buffs, can win.

A few days ago I got the chance to talk with Garfield on the phone about game design, competition, and his poker strategy.

VICE: What are the early elements that define the creation of a game?
Richard Garfield: People say that games spring from two major sources. One is from the mechanics, and the other is from the motif—the artifice of the game. So you look at a game like Clue, and it’s got this murder-mystery feel, and you can legitimately ask yourself, Did the author sit down and try to make a murder-mystery game, or does it have this deductive mechanic in the abstract that looks like chess, and then they decided it would make a good murder-mystery-flavor game? In most games, in general, it works in both ways.

So, with Magic, my game was inspired by the mechanics. I was interested in designing a game in which people could construct their own decks, and that was the root of the game. It wasn’t until months later that I came up with the idea of attaching a magical theme to it. But another game I designed, Pecking Order, which is kind of an abstract bluffing game, has the motif of birds landing on posts, and the better posts are occupied by birds higher on the pecking order. That was inspired by watching some birds vie for posts. I was looking at a game being played by the birds and modeled it into a strategy game.

Oftentimes, the things that inspire me are interesting systems, like evolution, or economics, or of course warfare. As you look at how the mechanics of these things work in real life, that gives rise to natural game elements.

I think the thing that has given Magic such longevity is the collectability aspect—people often become fanatical not only about the game itself but about acquiring the tools.
Right. The game bleeds into real life. There’s this whole world of how you get the cards, and how the cards circulate among people. You see that sort of thing in online games these days quite a bit. Back before the 90s, it was pretty rare to see a game like that, outside of sports with player trading. It was not just how you played your game in basketball or football, but how you manipulated your team, how you chose to trade your players, and who you managed to recruit. With Magic, I was mainly being driven by the idea that, if people could collect their own cards, there would be a huge amount of variety to the game. In fact, one way I viewed it was that it was like designing a game for a vast audience, dealing out the cards to everybody instead of designing a bunch of little games.

And the system continues to shift with each new expansion of the game, and each edition completely changes the game’s landscape. How much are you able to predict those changes when designing a new set of cards? Does it ever surprise you?
In the early days, Magic often shifted in many ways we didn’t understand or expect. It was something that really excited me. It felt like the game was so complicated that there would be no way to predict it unless you intentionally broke the game by making super-powerful cards that would dominate the others. But the whole idea is to make it so that there’s a wide variety of playable decks. There’s just no way you can test everything, and so sometimes the game would move in ways the designers expected and sometimes it wouldn’t. One of the things I really like about games is that many times, once the designer has designed them, people take the ideas beyond where the designer anticipated. If you solve a crossword puzzle, the most you can do is equal what the designer intended. But if you play a game like chess, you can move well beyond. The best basketball player in the world is not the person who invented basketball.

In some ways, the true personality of the game really begins to emerge when you see people who are new masters, and how they see the game differently than anyone else.
And one of the most exciting things in game play is when you have a regime of masters and they’ve taught everybody how to play, but then some young players look at it in a different way and see a different strategy and are able to overcome the old hierarchy. So in chess a player like Fisher comes out and turns the game on its head. 

When you’re play-testing a prototype for a new game, how much attention do you have to pay to limiting certain aspects versus knowing when another sort of aspect should not be limited?
That answer changes based on your audience. When Magic first came out I was interested in keeping it as flexible as possible. We knew there were all these crazy things you could do with some of the cards and ways you could interpret their play, and ways you could put together decks that weren’t any fun to play against, but we wanted to leave maximum flexibility in there. And play groups control this. If I’m playing with you, and you always play a deck that isn’t very interesting, then you would be pressured into changing your deck, or I would be pressured into raising my game and trying to defeat that deck. We didn’t care that there were ways to work around the game that weren’t fun, because people would have fun in discovering them, and then they would make house rules to control them. The games that I grew up with were driven by house rules. Famously, Monopoly is hardly ever played by the written rules, and when you sit down with people you have to figure out what rules you’re playing by. But Magic is a much more networked game than Monopoly, meaning that you would play with me, but then you would go off and play with somebody else, and they would play with somebody else, and there is much more of a demand with Magic that there be a way to be able to interpret the rules. You’ll see that in any game that is played at the tournament level. There was a lot of rules we had to formalize and take control of. A lot of the things I would have published in ’93 can’t be published now because they would do something that wouldn’t be good for the tournaments.

These minutiae of rules really affect people emotionally. People lose their minds.
Passion evolves around any game that moves beyond being a pastime and into becoming a hobby or a lifestyle. Like Magic, or Dungeons & Dragons, or World of Warcraft... or the way many people play sports.

Are there any games that you’ve become that passionate about, personally?
I don’t think there are, for me. I’ve been passionate about games, but I’ve always been very flexible and bored in my view about what constitutes the rules. I like to see people interpreting the game in a different way. I like tinkering with the rules and seeing what happens.

So you wouldn’t say you’re a competitive person?
I’m competitive in that when I play a game I try to win. But in some ways, what we’re skirting around here is there are different psycho-graphics for players. One way I like to divide players up is into innovators and honers.

Innovators are the people who like to sit down to a new game and innovate new rules. An innovator who sits down to chess might get very excited because they are learning all these different strategies, and they’re seeing what their opponent is doing and incorporating it into doing it even better. But at some point they have to start studying opening moves, or in poker they have to start studying odds. It becomes for the innovator more work than it used to be, and less fun.

A honer, on the other hand, what they really like doing is taking this established way of looking at a game, and perfecting it, getting it so that they know the exact percentages, and getting an established method of play perfect. A champion might be able to do both, or enjoy both, but I’m more on the innovator side, where I like to come up with strategies, but then once you have to start to study it, I move on to something else or change the rules.

Part of the success of Magic is that it has ways to satisfy both the innovator and the honer. The innovator is happy because the card mixes are constantly changing, and everything is constantly in flux. And the honer can study the minutiae of the game down to whether you should have four of these in a deck or three, what you should have in your sideboard, when you should mulligan.

Illustration by Kaja Foglio

Do you have a favorite Magic card?
One of my favorite cards is Shahrazad. In a historical sense, of course, Shahrazad was the storyteller of Arabian Nights, and was famous for stringing her stories together and nesting stories within stories, because every night she kept the sultan entertained was a night that she wasn’t going to be killed. And so with the card, when you played it, you would then play a sub-game of Magic, and whoever won that would get a benefit in the parent game. I like cards like that, that mesh well with the flavor they are trying to convey, and also take you out of the game into a new space.

What is your idea of the perfect game?
When I was in my 20s I would have said Go. Now I say poker. Poker is simple. Anybody can play it. Anybody can win. But there’s obviously skill. It’s short, so you can play a hand of poker very fast; you can use it to fill up any length of time. It’s also very flexible. When I was in college we played a lot of dealer’s-choice poker, and there were so many games available; it was constantly changing. Poker is almost more like a game-operating system, rather than just a game. 

I imagine you are the kind of player who likes to bluff a lot.
With all my games I try to take what people expect of me and do something a little different. I bluff when I think I have established a reputation for not bluffing, and I play very tight when I think people expect me to be bluffing. But that’s not atypical. And you’ll see that when I sit down to play Magic. If everybody is playing one of two different types of decks, red/green and blue/white, I will be trying to play a black deck. I want to use the tools other people aren’t using, or find some combination other people haven’t gotten to work. I take pleasure in trying to think outside the box in games. Both math and intuition are very useful. Without an understanding of odds, your intuition doesn’t make much sense.

For more on Richard go to Threedonkeys.com

@blakebutler

Photo by Conor Lamb

I met Daniel “Dapper Dan” Day in early January at his regal brownstone in Harlem, a few blocks from 125th Street. The brown-skinned sexagenarian jogged down his grand wooden staircase and greeted me with a stiff dap. Dan sported a wide-collared Hawaiian print shirt with oversize octagonal gold buttons and matching rust-colored lamb’s-leather vest and pants—all of which were his design.

If you don’t know, Dapper Dan was a hustler who became a fashion legend in the 80s for making bespoke menswear garments at his eponymous boutique in Harlem for black celebrities like Mike Tyson and crack kingpins like Alberto “Alpo” Martinez. His clothes were emblazoned with the monograms of European fashion houses at a time when those companies—Gucci, Louis Vuitton—were mainly producing leather goods and accessories. Eventually, when the fashion houses realized what Dap was doing, they sued him out of business. Even though his boutique was short-lived, the flashy leather and fur sportswear he crafted for the black elite was way ahead of its time and became a pivotal influence on men’s fashion and the aesthetics of hip-hop culture.

I came to Dapper Dan’s home to talk with him about the topic of black masculinity through fashion for a feature that ran earlier this month, in VICE’s annual fashion issue. The conversation I had with Dapper Dan for the piece was long and unwieldy. It covered tons of history, as well as a lot of Dapper Dan’s own personal story. Although I’m extremely proud of the published piece, there was a lot jewels from Dap that just didn’t fit. Considering that, I felt obliged to give you guys a more extensive version of the interview I had with him.

One of the most compelling aspects of our talk was what he had to say about Kanye. At the time this interview took place, 'Ye had just scored his new sneaker and fashion-range deal with Adidas after complaining about his previous deal with Nike in a series of high-profile interviews. My talk with Dapper Dan about Kanye put on display how different their approaches were to realizing their fashion dreams. Dan tried to rail against the machine by making illegal, priceless garments. Kanye, on the other hand, is trying to become one with the machine and remake it in his own image by working with major brands like Adidas. Only time will tell if it will all work out for Yeezy—but, for what it's worth, I think he's on the right track to making history. Dan isn't so sure, however. And maybe that says something about both of us and our respective generations. Or maybe not. Who knows? One thing I am sure of is that this Q&A should give you a good idea of the vast knowledge and history that Dap can bring to discussions on issues of race, masculinity, and fashion. Hopefully, it won't be the last time I get to pick his brain on these topics. 

VICE: Let’s talk about masculinity.
Daniel “Dapper Dan” Day: Masculinity is something that stayed on my mind as I grew up in the ghetto. My whole life, manhood was the only thing that we could truly look forward to. We couldn’t look forward to having money. You know what I mean?

How’d you know what being a “man” was?
As a kid, I was surrounded by my older brothers, my cousins, my uncle, and all these street guys. And I was raised by my father. So there was an idea of manhood that was drilled into my head at a young age. But my personal concept of manhood I had to develop on my own.

How did that start?
Well, the most profound statement a guy ever made to me about this… I can’t give you all the circumstances under which he told this to me. I’ll just say I was in a terrible situation when I was 18 or 19, and he was in the same situation. We were battling this psychological thing. And he said to me, “There’s two kinds of men: One is a man among women and the other is a man among men… Always strive to be a man among men.” That always stuck in my head.

What does that mean?
The way your personality plays out in the group that you hang with determines your place. On the street, you don’t find out who you are until that split second when you have to make a decision. For me, it was when guys tried to kidnap me and shot me in the back.

Whoa. What happened?
The guy told me, “Get in the back of the van and lay down.” The other guy who was with me—he went in the back of the van and laid down...

Damn.
The older guys always told me that there comes that moment when you have to do certain things in your life. Prior to that, I had made a decision when I went into the street that I didn’t care if I died, because you cannot make it in the street unless you have that feeling. Guys get that feeling through drugs and getting high… But the most dangerous guys I ever met in the streets were the guys who didn’t need the drugs.

Do you think it takes a different sort of masculinity to survive on the streets as opposed to anywhere else?
There are different kinds of masculinity. But to me there’s only one true masculinity, and my father is my emblem of that. He went to work everyday, never missed a day but once in 15 years. And he was only late that day, never absent.

What do his actions represent to you?
You might call it vicarious atonement—like how Jesus died on the cross to save humanity. When you see that sort of thing played out in a person’s personality, that’s what I call masculinity. Being a man is being responsible in life to your family and your community and your country. And if you don’t like something about those things, then be man enough to stand up and change it.

In the streets, why do you think “the gangster” is what a lot of young men want to be?
If you want one sentence: It’s the holes in the shoes. When you’re deprived of everything and you see somebody in your community making it and you don’t have that staircase to go up, but you see someone else doing it a different way, [those gangsters] become your first heroes—especially if you don’t have a father. I was fortunate enough to have a father.

What is it about the gangster lifestyle that is so alluring?
It looks like magic, and it seems instant. The other process seems long and played out… You have to go to school; you have to do this; you have to do that. But when you see guys go out and sell drugs and rob, it’s like instant cash and instant gratification. They are overnight sensations. But they offer this distorted concept of masculinity.

What do you mean?
Look at all the gangsters: They all started telling when they got caught. Real masculinity is not being able to inflict pain but being able to take it. And all of those gangsters, as soon as they got busted, they flipped the script.

Speaking of gangsters, what was the crack era like for you in Harlem?
Crack flipped me out. There was a crack house four or five buildings down from my store. The people I saw going in there… I could not believe it. I’d see decent-looking people go in there before work and get their lives destroyed. The drug situation in Harlem was like what you see in Brazil in the favelas. The police didn’t even bother.

How have you seen the approach to masculinity for black men change over time?
Everybody has this concept that all black people in America are pretty much the same. No. We’re tribal. So masculinity might be defined in different ways in different parts of the country. But if you want me to address it as far as Harlem is concerned, I can do that.

Is there anything that makes today different than before in terms of masculinity in Harlem?
Back in the day, the Five Percenters, the Nation of Islam, and other militant black groups defined masculinity. If you were caught outside of their zone, you wouldn’t feel comfortable. So that had a heavy impact on us. Even guys who were not involved in the revolutionary cause would feel uncomfortable if they were not dressed a certain way. It was ironic, because the light-skinned blacks who were always considered uppity went out and got the biggest afros so they didn’t feel like outsiders. And then, when you look around, you’d see that some of the most militant blacks were light-skinned, like Malcolm. You have to remember that the Nation of Islam was recruiting guys straight out of jail, so that’s a powerful influence. Whereas the Panthers had more of an impact on people who were politically conscious and knew how governments work. The Panthers were reaching the college students as opposed to the street guys.

How do you think Obama has impacted the way men dress and carry themselves?
As far as the street is concerned, Obama’s election was like a concert. All around election time, people were wearing the T-shirts, buttons, and all that kind of crap. But to say that it kicked in a certain style? No. A certain feeling? Hell yeah. I’ve never seen so many black people at the election polls in my life. It was like the Million Man March. But did it change how black men carry themselves? I don’t think so.

Photo via Wikipedia.

What do you think about Kanye and his impact?
Kanye is making a mistake. He is begging and waiting for somebody. To people like me who struggled, he’s an embarrassment. He’s got all this money, and he’s knocking on the door. I was dead broke. I told my friends back then, if they weren’t going to let me in the door, I’ll just do what they do better than they do it. And do it for us.

I think the reason he’s looking for support from big corporations is because he wants to do his thing on a massive scale, one that can’t be achieved without the support of players like Adidas or Nike. 
He admitted that he’s an artist, but he doesn’t know how to sell his stuff to the public. That’s his problem. I don’t think he’s in touch. Does he know what excites the people on the street? Or is it just that he wants people to wear something because he’s wearing it? He should study why black designers before him didn’t make it. If he had done that, he would have known what to expect.

If you could talk to Kanye, what would you say?
“Let’s take this little bit of money here and put it over here in a fashion business. They won’t even know it’s us. Let’s nurture it a certain way so we can see how the game goes.” If he comes out with a line with his name on it and fails, then he’s branded a failure. When I was making clothes, people would come to me and I’d say, “No, no. They’re going to control me. They’re going to do it the way they want to do." I’d rather not come out until I can control the elements in the game as opposed to experimenting with my own name. You don’t get a second chance. Not on his level.

The biggest downfall with your business was getting sued by a lot of big fashion companies. Now they’re doing stuff that is so similar to what you did back in the day. How does that feel?
I feel like, Yeah, sucka. [laughs] And you know what? The real impact hasn’t hit yet until all the young people know. When all the young people know, then I’ll feel like, OK, y’all thought we couldn’t do this, and now y’all are copying me.

Who do you think bit you off the most?
The other guys, you can understand. They were established already. But Tommy Hilfiger, his whole style was off our backs. The other guys were already in business. All they had to do was change a little. Tommy Hilfiger, he came in with the whole nine. His whole platform began when he started sending his brother Andy to rap clubs. So he built everything on that. I pick up the paper and I think, Oh ,God, if I was white…

Can you talk about how your story would be different if you were white?
If I was white? Oh, man, I didn’t have to be all the way white; I could have been Jewish... I would have had a clique. [laughs] The only thing that ever held me back was…  Actually, my color didn’t even hold me back. My perception of my color held me back. Reverse prejudice held me back. If I had been more open to dealing with white people and Jewish people, I would have been more successful today. Back in the day I stayed angry, and I didn’t even realize how angry I was. But anyway, that’s my problem. That’s why I’m so happy about my son. He’s growing up in a different world.

Do you think the same limitations are there today for a young black man that were there when you were growing up?
No. First of all, the white guys coming up today are different. The large majority of them are not like their parents. They just have that subliminal prejudice; they don’t even know they’re prejudiced. And some of them have even overcome that! And a lot of the young black guys coming up, they’re not as angry as I was and as distrusting as I was of white people. So it’s a big difference now.

Why do you think you were so angry?
I got tricked. I have to admit it. I got tricked in the sense that those demagogues who needed us to think that the white man was such a devil exploited us to the point where it stunted our growth. I’ve seen guys where it had a more detrimental effect on them than it had on me.

Who would you say those demagogues are?
I’m not going to call out any names. Don’t start that. Are you trying to get me killed? [laughs] But trust me: I know who it is. I tell my children and my grandchildren who they are and to keep their eyes open because people make money off of you believing certain things about other people.

Do you think that has anything to do with Kanye’s perception? Maybe he has learned from stories like yours and he realizes he can’t do it himself, so he’s reaching out to those corporations to realize his dreams.
I think my expectations of what the white power structure would allow me to do was completely opposite to what his expectations are. He expects to get in the door. I expected not to get in the door. His problem is that his expectations are too high.

What’s the sweet spot then?
Russell Simmons, because he hit the right blend. Russell Simmons is a master because he hooked up with that Jewish guy and that was it. That gave him the balance that I didn’t have... I will never allow myself to limit myself to people like myself, again. There’s no growth in that. If you’re white and you don’t have any black friends, you’re missing out. And vice versa. You’re limiting yourself. You need to be gay, straight, white, black, Spanish, English, everything. The more people you come into contact with, the more growth you’re capable of. And I needed to know that when I was younger. I didn’t have anybody to tell me that. All I had were the people who were saying, “Don’t let that white man do that. Watch out.”

It’s different now, though?
My son now doesn’t have to worry about those issues. I don’t want to make him like me. I don’t want him to be like me. I want him to be himself in his own world and just snatch pieces off me and do his thing. It’s more fun for me to see how it all plays itself out.

A lot of dads try to mold their sons in their own image. What stopped you?
It was this one time his cousin was over at our house. And I didn’t like the way his cousin was talking to him, and I wanted him to beat his cousin up. But that’s me; that ain’t him. I wanted him to kick his cousin's ass. And then, his mom was like, “Uh-uh, I don’t want anybody in this house that is against this house. Blood or no blood.” I wanted to kill that little bastard. But my son is different. He didn’t grow up like me, angry at everything. That’s the beauty in him. 

@WilbertLCooper

Ray Nagin, then a New Orleans mayorial candidate, brings a round of drinks to the bar as he works celebrity bartender night at Molly's at the Market in New Orleans, 2002. Photo courtesy of Times-Picayune /Landov

On first glance, Molly’s at the Market, an unassuming bar in New Orleans’s French Quarter, doesn’t look like a renowned media hub. But sit under the bar’s lights drinking long enough and you start to notice, beneath the layer of dust in the rafters, a wood carving of the local news station WWL4TV’s logo, along with a CBS News plaque from 1984, an autographed photo of Diane Sawyer, and a New Orleans Times-Picayune plaque promising, “We publish come hell or high water.”

Sometime in the mid-80s, Molly’s, which opened in 1974, began hosting a “Media Night” every Thursday, where journalists both local and national came to mingle, discuss everything under the sun, grouse to each other, and get their second drink for free. (Never underestimate the powerful appeal free alcohol has on journalists.) Media Night also features a monthly guest bartender, and in the past three decades nearly every notable reporter, editor, author, and politician who's washed up in New Orleans has served drinks to the press. Marc Morial, who was mayor of the city from 1994 to 2002, was a guest bartender in the 90s, though a Times-Picayune article on Molly’s wall notes that slinging drinks was “not his cup of tea.” More recently, City Council member Stacy Head took her place behind the bar in the run-up to local elections.

“My favorite guest bartender was always [legendary corrupt Louisiana politician] Edwin Edwards,” said 32-year-old Jim “Trey” Monaghan III, heir to the superb chain of Monaghan family bars, of which Molly’s is a part. “Edwards is obviously a convicted felon, but also one of the most charismatic people I have ever met. Great bartender.”

Andrei Codrescu, the author and NPR voice, remembers the night Edwards bartended, sort of. “I barely noticed him,” Codrescu told me via email. “I was hanging out with some really bad people. I do remember (dimly) that I was the celebrity bartender one night. I remember Monaghan Sr. looking disapproving as I gave away his whiskey to my friends. Anything other than whiskey straight, the regular bartender took care of.”

Molly's claims to be one of the few bars that claims to have served drinks all through Hurricane Katrina, and during the flooding it became the home away from home for visiting members of the press while the power was down everywhere else. “We had an operating phone in the bar somehow, which was great,” remembers Trey Monaghan. “People from the media—I remember some reporter from Ireland—they were behind the bar calling in to wherever their stations were, filing their stories.”

After the flood, however, the Monaghans halted the tradition of guest bartending because the family felt that both the media and the city government had done New Orleans a disservice. “My family didn’t want anyone coming down to bartend because of how things were handled from the politicians’ side and from the media side,” Monaghan explained. “Right after the storm, a lot of the coverage was just disaster porn. There was bitterness in our mouths about everything. Sometimes certain people come in and bartend and we feel honored, but elected officials who weren’t doing anything to push the city in a positive direction? And people from the media who were pushing out propaganda? I didn’t have time for that.”

That disgruntlement has faded with time, however, and the relationship between Molly’s and the media is on the mend. On the day in 2012 when the Times-Picayune announced it would cut back to publishing an edition only three days a week (the precursor to massive newsroom layoffs), Molly’s gave away free drinks all night to anyone with a Picayune press pass. More recently, Lens reporter Tyler Bridges restarted the tradition of guest bartenders.

On a recent Media Night I turned up to watch former Newsday and current New Orleans Advocate cartoonist Walt Handelsman mix cocktails with his son James (who is an actual bartender). Molly’s slowly grew packed with members of the fourth estate; Gordon Russell of the Advocate and Rich Rainey of the Times-Picayune, reporters at competing papers, shared drinks and stories about stories. American Zombie blogger Jason Brad Berry, whose writing helped bring down the corrupt mayor Ray Nagin, bought me a drink. I met a couple folks I’d worked for but had never even shaken hands with, like the Advocate’s owner, John Georges. And at the far end of the bar making fun of it all, sat satirist Chris Champagne (himself a former Media Night bartender) and local writer and know-it-all Ronnie Virgets, husband to former Times Picayune editor and current Advocate columnist Lynne Jensen, who was (of course) also at Molly’s that night.

When Handelsman came out from behind the bar for a break, he told me how he first moved to New Orleans in 1989 and “came to Molly’s and fell in love with the place.” With a Pulitzer to his to his name for his Times-Picayune work, Handelsman moved away from New Orleans and won a second Pulitzer at Newsday. “But the more I was in New York, the more I wanted to be in New Orleans,” Handelsman said. “And then to top it all off, my beloved Saints—who I weathered many a bad year with as a season ticket holder when they were not good—started playing really well… I had to come back.” In 2013, he finally relocated his family back to New Orleans and himself back to Molly’s.

The unassuming media sanctuary has provided the cartoonist with a lot of inspiration over the years, not all of it useful. “I’d have to do two cartoons on Friday back in the day, a comic strip called Picayune Toons, then also the Sunday cartoon,” Handelsman recalled. “My now-editor Mike Pearlstein and a few other of my media friends were at Molly’s, and I told them I had to go because I had two cartoons due. Then we started talking politics. We’re riffing on the news, killing each other with funny stories. And I was getting these awesome ideas, great ideas, and I’m grabbing bar napkins and writing them down and cramming them in my pockets. I’m writing down punchlines, and I am high-fiving my co-workers, telling them, ‘I’m golden!’ So I get up the next day, grab my pile of napkins, and go to work. And inevitably I’d end up at Pearlstein’s desk wondering, ‘What are these ideas?’ Not even one of them is suitable for the newspaper. I can’t even understand half of them. So there I was at work, stuck at 10:30 on a Friday with nothing. That happened a lot.”

Handelsman then told an inappropriate story of a long-past wild Media Night to Times-Picayune environment reporter Mark Schleifstein, then made me promise not to quote him (trust me, it was great). Schleifstein himself is a somewhat famous figure, having won three Pulitzers and cowritten a 2002 Picayune story package titled “Washing Away,” wherein he described in eerily correct detail the exact ways in which a massive hurricane could devastate vulnerable New Orleans, three years before Katrina hit.

Schleifstein has been a Media Night regular since the 80s. “I remember when longtime Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee was bartending,” he said. “Lee was in the middle of the battle with Times-Picayune columnist James Gill, and so one of the reporters found a picture of Gill and made facemasks. A bunch of people walked into the bar with these James Gill masks on—and then Gill himself came into the bar. Harry Lee drew bullet holes on one of the masks.” The couple times Schleifstein himself bartended on Media Night, his tween daughter—who’s now a producer for Anderson Cooper 360—sat outside the bar’s entrance selling Girl Scout cookies.

Media night’s been a tradition for long enough to accumulate some history like that behind it. But it’s also unquestionably been a great PR stunt. Surveying the scads of positive reviews of the bar on its walls, from local rags to GQ, Trey Mognahan relayed to me a lesson his grandfather Jim Mognahan taught him long ago: “Never pay for advertising.”

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.

Being old is cool because once you hit a certain age you're completely untethered from all social rules, reaching a new clearance level in "fuck it" for every decade closer to death. Turning 40 awards you the Prozac-Viagra yin-yang, 50 grants you the proverbial flatulence pardon, and 60 puts you in the clear for calling bullshit when you see it.

That's why we invited our sweet angel Dottie to come hang out with us at fashion week. You see, Dottie just turned 70, so that means she's been given the go-ahead to ask obviously important but regularly ignored questions like "Why are the models so thin?" "Why does that snuggie cost more than a Fabergé egg?" "Who is that man in the leotard, and, more importantly, where is his penis?"

The Return is a collaboration between photographer Adrain Chesser and ritualist Timothy White Eagle. The aim was to create a mythic portrait of a people, a place, and an ideal, working with a coterie of fierce individuals who traveled nomadically through the western United States. They embodied the ideal of living a symbiotic relationship with the Earth, based on the ways of early Native Americans.

In 2007, Chesser attended a Native American ceremony called the Naraya in Short Mountain, Tennessee, where he met White Eagle, Finisia Medrano, and JP Hartsong. “It was at a time in my life when, due to medical conditions, I felt trapped in a system of employment, health insurance, and Western medicine, that I was dependent upon to keep me ‘alive and healthy.’ When I learned how Finisia and Hartsong were living, I knew that I had to follow them out west to make the photographs that became The Return. My soul needed images of people living wild and free, untethered from society, specifically people whose life experience reflected my own feelings of being ‘other’.”

The Return depicts a loosely banded tribe of people who move between Idaho, Nevada, California, and Oregon. Traveling with the seasons, the subjects of The Return use traditional hunter-gatherer skills along with knowledge of indigenous food crops to follow an ancient way of life known as “the hoop.”

“The subjects in The Return are predominately not indigenous Native Americans. Most carry European ancestry and most come in one form or another from the disenfranchised margins of mainstream America,” says White Eagle. “Most are poor, some are queer, some are transgendered, some are hermits, and some are politically radical. All believe that major shifts are needed in the way modern society interacts with the natural world. And all are willing pioneers, stepping off into uncertain terrain and searching for something lost generations ago.”

The Return will be published by Daylight Books later this year. Click here for more information. 

In the Male Chef kitchen, I’m always looking for new ways to manipulate, play with, and eventually ingest my meals. After running a food blog for some time, me and the rest of my Male Sous Chefs have been invited over to VICE for a chance to explore the rear-end of food culture even further.

I wanted to kick things off by exploring the idea of "food hacking," or finding the fastest and easiest ways to change your cooking habits so you can maximize your life’s efficiency. Bearing this goal in mind, I turned to one of the most efficient environments I could think of: the corporate office. 

All photos by Male Chef

“Food hacking” is not unlike the “computer hacking” that we see in Hollywood movies like The Matrix, but instead of placing your fingers on a keyboard, you're using them to shovel food into your mouth. For this inaugural edition, we spent lunchtime trapped in a cubicle inside of one of New York City's tallest skyscrapers, brainstorming some fun and convenient food hacks where no kitchen is required. 

The first rule of food hacking: stop being so narrow-minded and heteronormative by confining your cooking to a kitchen. At work, start your hacking as soon as you enter the building's lobby. An elevator can easily become an ascending workspace to create an E-Z morning snack. With the help of a piping hot cuppa Joe, a stupid, boring raw egg becomes a hard-boiled delicacy.

A quick tip for your elevator ride up to the office: grab a piping hot cuppa joe at the corner store and stick an egg in it to make a hard boiled morning snack.

No great hacker has ever put their family first. Before leaving the house in the morning, steal your daughter's hairdryer to really "heat things up" without leaving the comfort of your desk. The kids can figure out their own hacks at school.

Here's a cool trick: in the morning, steal your daughter's hairdryer while she's sleeping to heat up the situation without leaving your desk.

Finding cheap and easy solutions to cooking in any environment can be a real challenge, so be sure to scrounge around. One man’s toilet may be another man's treasure. 

Why go out for lunch when you can just mail it to yourself? Outsourcing work makes everyone’s lives easier and the US Postal Service works as a perfectly reliable delivery service without inciting the usual guilt of “forgetting” to tip.

Orders of certain “refreshments” can be hidden within bulk purchases of office supplies. This type of subversive, self-centered behavior is key when hacking food. 

Helpful advice: buy in bulk if you can

Forget to contribute to the office potluck? Put a little South in your boss’s mouth with these quick and E-Z shredder nachos. ¡Muy caliente!

Any successful lunchtime involves making time for recess, so do something creative with your down time. Art is defined as anything you make that can be shared on the Internet, so make sure your camera has a self-timer.

Hiding your food amongst office supplies allows for continuous snacking throughout the day. And, as with anything, organization is of the utmost importance.

Don't forget: organization is key. Don’t limit your hacking to lunch! The more efficient your corporate eating habits are, the more you’ll be able to get done at work. Why waste time by going home to eat dinner with your family? Office sleepovers can be a lot less lonely if you use your quota to print out a special someone.

Lonely at lunch? Photocopy a special someone and hang her on the wall to add a romantic touch to the break room.

Much like in prison, eating between meals at work is almost impossible. Why limit yourself to the traditional means of dining when you have the cunning mind of an adult human being? Heck, the ingenuity of food hacking looks good on anyone’s resume. It might even land you a promotion.

Screencap via Health Canada.

Last week, I wrote a story about why the Canadian government wants to allow small amounts of GMOs that haven’t been approved by Health Canada into our food-supply chain. And in November, VICE reported that Health Canada can't take defective drugs off the market fast enough because pharmaceutical companies have more power than they should.

Since then, I've found out about five other issues, ranging from what could be the world's biggest botched pot deal to accusations from a former employee that the department doesn't do enough scientific testing on new products.

While the department does lots of things (like this and this) to protect Canadians, I think it's worth asking the following question on a regular basis: WTF is Health Canada doing, exactly? After all, this is the department in charge of making sure we don’t put things in our bodies that could hurt or kill us.

So, for those of you who don't have time to keep track, I put together a list of controversial stories involving Health Canada (HC) over the last couple of months:

Questionable research practices

Dr. Shiv Chopra, a former HC scientist of 35 years, is publicly calling on HC to improve its health standards and scientific processes. He lost his job in 2004 after claiming that he was pressured by the federal government to approve drugs that did not have enough data or research behind them.

He told me that when bovine growth hormone came across his desk for the first time in 1988, a recommendation was attached to the application saying that it should be approved immediately because a similar product had already been approved in the United States for Monsanto. Dr. Chopra says he refused to approve the application without adequate research from the company behind the Canadian version of the hormone. Dr. Chopra said during his 35 years at HC, he was “pressured to pass other hormones, products, all kinds of things” without adequate tests.

Dr. Chopra is still fighting his dismissal from HC 10 years ago. HC told me over e-mail that it "would not be appropriate" to comment on Dr. Chopra's dismissal because his case is still pending with the Public Service Labour Relations Board.

Making it harder to access scientific materials

Last year, the Canadian government moved HC's in-house library to the National Science Library on the Ottawa campus of the National Research Council. It also outsourced its materials to a company called Infotrieve. Now, instead of going to the in-house library, HC told me employees can go to “dedicated library workstations” to search the library catalogue and get help from librarians.

A draft report obtained by CBC says staff requests for documents have “dropped 90 per cent” since the library was outsourced. HC says the prevalence of online tools are reducing to need for physical reference libraries. But the report says the sharp decrease in the number of librarians--from 40 in 2007 to six in April 2013—is making it difficult for scientists to find the materials they need. It also says the decrease in requests “is because the information has become inaccessible” either because “it cannot arrive in due time, or it is unaffordable due to the fee structure,” which is CAD $25.65, plus the cost of a courier for print material, and anywhere from $13 to $17 for a scanned document.

All of this has prompted a guy named “Fred” to hide scientific documents in his basement. Researchers in Fred's group can now send him an e-mail and he will bring the requested documents to work with him the next day.

No prescription-tracking technology

Even if HC knows how an approved drug will affect the general population, it doesn’t have an electronic reporting system in place to track the effects of “off-label" drugs, meaning drugs that are prescribed for purposes other than what they are approved for.

A report by McGill University says 11 percent of doctors write off-label prescriptions and 79 percent of those prescriptions lack strong scientific evidence. But, only doctors practising in Quebec are required to report when they prescribe a drug off-label, so that number could be much higher.

A report released by the Senate Science Committee last month says the Minister of Health should encourage the provinces and territories to electronically record prescriptions in order to better track how doctors are using off-label drugs and how they are affecting patients. The report points to the use of antipsychotics for treating children and youth and the elderly in long-term care facilities as an issue that needs “focused monitoring.”

HC didn't respond to my questions about this issue.

Sub-par abortion options

HC is only now considering a drug that has been available since the 1980s and the Canadian Medical Association Journal calls the “gold standard” for non-surgical abortion within the first nine weeks of pregnancy. The drug, called mifepristone or Mifeprex or RU-486, is currently approved by HC to treat certain types of cancer, Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and leukaemia, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.

The pill can be taken at home and induces abortion within a couple of days, similar to a natural miscarriage. This option is already available to women in 57 countries and is listed on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines that are “intended to be available in functioning health systems at all times in adequate amounts…”

The Globe and Mail said HC hadn't considered making the pill available to Canadians simply because the manufacturer hadn’t submitted an application. But, Libby Davies, the NDP’s health critic told the Toronto Star that “the government could have been more aggressive in bringing mifepristone to the market.”

HC said it couldn't speculate on when this drug might be available because the drug-review process depends on how long it takes scientists to assess the information provided by the manufacturer. HC didn't respond to my question about why it has taken so long to review this drug in Canada.

Leaving medical pot smokers dry

CBC reported last month that HC might not be able to provide enough medical marijuana to 38,000 patients once the new federal system—known as the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations—comes into effect in April because the department hasn’t approved enough suppliers yet.

CBC said at the end of January that out of 400 applications, five companies had been licensed to grow and sell, and three had been licensed to grow, but not sell. Today, only seven companies are listed on HC's list of authorized licensed producers. HC told me that it is “monitoring market projections closely,” and Health minister Rona Ambrose told CBC that she expects there will be a “sufficient supply” of pot come April.

@iamrenders

Screencap of the email I received from Twitter.

I created the @TOMayorFrod Twitter account on May 31, 2013, as a response to bizarre and amusing tweets that emanated from the official Mayor Rob Ford account after his chief communications staff abruptly resigned. In the wake of startling revelations about Ford smoking crack on video, the firing of his chief of staff Mark Towhey, and the general disarray of his office, most of Toronto expected Ford to step down at any moment. Of course, that’s not the way Rob Ford operates, so while he proclaimed his intention to stay on as mayor, his official Twitter feed blithely tweeted announcements about spraying for tree parasites and offered reassuring messages like, “More Toronto bands have been added to my 'Hockey Night' playlist on Songza here.” I thought it would be fun to create a similar official-looking account to tweet further updates on how the office coffee pot had been refilled, a new Marmaduke cartoon posted on the bulletin board, and so on. So @TOMayorFrod was born.

Because I designed the account to mimic the official account as closely as possible (other than using the name “Frod” instead of “Ford” and claiming to be mayor of “Torotno”), I always knew that I was skirting Twitter’s rules about impersonation and parody accounts. Many people, journalists included, were often fooled by “Frod,” believing it to be the real mayor’s account, with frequently hilarious results. The similarity certainly provided a powerful angle to the gag: were these drily satirical tweets any more absurd than the equally dry and often oblivious tweets from the official account?

Then, on Wednesday Feb. 19, my fears came true: after nearly nine months of daily tweeting with no complaints or warnings, the account was suddenly suspended. Twitter did not notify me about this, so I filed an appeal through the site, asking the reason for the suspension and what steps I’d need to take to restore it. Meanwhile, the suspension triggered a groundswell of support and disbelief on the Twittersphere, with many people appealing directly to Twitter to reinstate the account. A new hashtag, #FreeFrod, was propagated, and numerous followers altered their avatar and username to include the Frod handle in a spontaneous “I am Spartacus” movement. There were even new “Mayor Rob Frod” accounts created, impersonating my impersonation, right down to the background image.

The amount of support was unexpected and overwhelming. Even the media were contacting me for interviews, which seemed a bit premature to me since I didn’t yet know the reason for the suspension, but apparently the account was even more popular than I realized. And a lot of people suspected that Rob Ford—or someone representing him—had complained to Twitter to have the account taken down. According to Twitter’s guidelines, they only act on complaints about impersonation if they are filed by the target or someone officially representing them. Reporters asked Ford and his staff if they’d been responsible for the suspension. Rob Ford claimed he was not even aware of the account, saying, “I’m sure there’s lots of parody accounts. There’s only one Rob Ford, I can guarantee that.” His chief of staff told reporters the mayor didn’t have a problem with parodies and that while they had “looked into” the account, they did not file a complaint.

Later in the day, I received a reply from Twitter: The account had been suspended because it “may be in violation of Twitter’s policies on impersonation and/or trademark.” They gave me 48 hours to edit the avatar, account name, bio, and background image, and said the account would be restored if I complied and replied to their email. At this writing, I had made the required changes and replied to Twitter; I have not received any further instructions and the account currently remains suspended, though I am hopeful it will be restored. It was notable that the complaint stemmed from a claim of impersonation (rather than, say, anything to do with the contents of my tweets). Since Twitter claims they only pursue such complaints if they’re brought by the subject of the impersonation, were Rob Ford and his staff lying when they said they had not filed the complaint? We already know about Ford’s tentative relationship with the truth.

If that were the case, I had to wonder, why? And why now? The account had been operating steadily for over eight months, had amassed over 7,800 followers, and been the subject of several media stories. Most of Ford’s staff had been well aware of it for some time. His communications chief, Amin Massoudi, had blocked the account from the beginning (interestingly though, he does follow an Olivia Chow parody account). Other staffers actually followed the account, and when I met a former staffer who’d resigned last fall, he told me that for a long time, staffers wondered if the account were actually run by someone in their own office (I revealed my identity publicly in mid-November, putting to rest speculation on who was behind it). So why did no one decide to take steps against the account until mid-February? I suppose the unfolding re-election campaign may have been a factor, but even if the mayor and his staff were indeed behind the complaint, did they really believe that suspending this one account would end my satirical attacks on the mayor? After all, I was already branching out to other social media with the Frod identity, including writing articles “in character” for VICE.

Until the Freedom Of Information requests to the mayor’s office regarding the @TOMayorFrod account are eventually honoured (yes, some people are filing them), we may never know who initiated the complaint. Beyond that concern, though, many people have questions for Twitter about their parody policies, and what constitutes fair use of a public figure’s image and identity for satirical purposes. I believed that by naming my character “Frod” and designating him mayor of “Torotno”, I had made it clear enough that this was not claiming to be Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto. Still, from Ford’s perspective, he could reasonably argue that the appearance of the account was so close to the original, and the difference in spelling so minute, that people could erroneously assume that it was the genuine article… a theory borne out by empirical evidence of hundreds of confused replies on Twitter. While I certainly don’t mind people making fun of me, I also wouldn’t want anyone misled into believing the words of an imposter to be mine. So I figure it’s a fair request, and if the account is restored, it will have a new look that will mark it more clearly as satire. It may take some of the punch out of the account, rendering it a more conventional parody rather than the “is it real?” prank it had been (and for which I make no apologies). It will be a new chapter in the life of “Mayor Frod”, and I will continue this work, whatever new shape it may take, until its namesake is no longer in office. I hope that day will come soon.

Update: As of five minutes ago, we're back!




@TOMayorFrod 

Photographs courtesy of El Nacional

He was standing on a street corner when they shot him in the head. Four people, maybe five, carried him around looking for an ambulance, a car, a motorcycle. The body was slippery; they had to take turns. They lifted him by his arms and legs, with that puzzled solidarity that comes when you’re helping the wounded in riots. One was applying pressure on the wound with a piece of cloth, trying to stop the bleeding. They walked like that for a couple of blocks without finding anyone who could help them. Finally they ran into a policeman who, after hearing one of the young men cry for help, agreed to make a trip to a nearby hospital in the center of Caracas, Venezuela.

Bassil Da Costa, the wounded man, and Roberto Redman, who helped carry him, met each other that evening, February 12, during a Youth Day march organized by students and the Venezuelan opposition. Both Da Costa and Redman are now dead, some of the first casualties of the violence that began after a crackdown on the march. A week later, chaos still reigns on the streets.

Roberto Redman (in the black hat) helps carry Bassil Da Costa's body.

Da Costa, a 23-year-old carpenter, had never participated in a protest before; he lived in Guatire, a suburb of Caracas, and only marched because his cousins were going. Redman, a 31-year-old pilot, attended all the demonstrations he could, and lived in Chacao, the middle-class neighborhood in Caracas where most of the recent protests against the government have taken place. Redman wrote in his Twitter biography that he was a guarimbero, a term officials use to describe protesters. At 6:25 PM, Redman tweeted, "Today I was hit in the back with a rock, hit in the nose with a helmet, breathed tear gas, and carried the kid who died, and what did you do?" A few hours later he was dead—like Da Costa, of a shot to the head.

The details of the two deaths—which have reverberated throughout the international press—has been reconstructed through videos, some of them created by fans, others by professionals. Yet Venezuelans who relied on traditional media wouldn’t have heard about Redman or Da Costa, thanks to censorship of television stations and newspapers by the government. The Venezuelan authorities are so desperate to keep people in the dark about the demonstrations and the violence that they were even blocking images on Twitter to prevent photos of the protests from circulating.

Erick Redman, father of Roberto, marching days after the murder of his son. Via Twitter

Da Costa was two years old when Hugo Chávez led a failed coup attempt in 1992. Redman was nine. It's been 16 years since the deceased president won election for the first time, in 1998—that’s more than half of the both of their lives. They haven’t known a Venezuela without Chávez, and Nicolas Maduro, the country’s current president, is little more than Chávez’s stupider, more brutal heir. They look around at the inflation and shortages of goods, at the country’s staggeringly high homicide rate, and wonder what the hell the people at the top of the country are doing. It’s dangerous to protest in Venezuela, but it’s also dangerous to let things continue. Many banners are scrawled with the slogan "Mom, I went to protest for Venezuela. If I don't come back it means I left with her."

Translated from Spanish by Jose Tomas Vicuña

This past Sunday marked the sixth annual Tranny Awards in Glendale, California. The event gives out awards to people in the transsexual porn industry for categories like "Shemale Strokers Model of the Year" and "Black TGirl Model of the Year."

As I'm sure you know by now, the word "tranny" is considered a slur. Kelly Osbourne, Neil Patrick Harris, and Gabourey Sidibe have all recently gotten into trouble for using it. Frankly, the main reason I decided to go to the awards was the name. I was super-ready to alleviate some of my liberal guilt by being offended on other people's behalf.

But I'm not trans, so I don't get to decide what is or isn't offensive for people who are. The majority of the people I spoke to at the event were not massively happy about the use of the word "tranny" in the name, but they were so excited to be having an award ceremony in their honor that they were willing to not give a shit for the night. Trans porn workers are not a group of people who are honored very often. 

And once I was able to get past the initial weirdness of seeing someone tearfully accept an award while thanking "everyone at FTMFucker.com," the event was actually surprisingly moving. It was like the Academy Awards to these people.

Congrat's to all the nominees and winners.

@JLCT