Oscar Orozco in the operating room after being shot in the face on January 10, 2014

Three months after being shot point-blank in the face with a tear-gas canister by riot police, union leader Oscar Orozco has successfully undergone reconstructive surgery. But he still has no feeling in his forehead, and his left eye is gone. “Because I am well known,” Orozco told me over the phone, “I am completely convinced that this action specifically targeted me. Their goal was to do me harm, and it was a goal they were able to achieve.”

It wasn’t the first time that Orozco, a chapter president of both the CUT—Colombia’s lagest labor federation—and the electrical workers’ union Sintraelecol, has suffered an attempt on his life. Coming home one evening last November, Orozco’s driver-side window was hit by multiple bullets, the glass lacerating his hand and neck; in the summer of 2012, the armored SUV he and union secretaries were driving in was riddled with bullets in broad daylight. Before that came years of threats and harassment: fake obituaries in his name; pipe bombs with instructions to stop union activity, or else; and suspicious packages in the parking lot of his apartment building. These days, when Orozco travels he’s accompanied by a colleague. “We have to make sure that our union-related work doesn’t allow our enemies the opportunity to harm us,” Orozco said. “It could happen at any moment.”

A mysterious package left on Orozco's lawn. The tag bears his name and the name of the labor federation he is a part of.

Anti-union violence has been endemic to Colombia for decades, with roughly 3,000 organizers killed by assassins and paramilitaries over the last quarter century. In fact, more than half of all murders for union-organizing activity worldwide take place here. But as murder numbers have dropped in recent years, the nature of the violence is changing, and there’s evidence to suggest that the Colombian state is complicit in the repression.

On December 4, 2013, Campo Elías Ortiz, José Dilio Naranjo, and Héctor Sánchez—political activists, members of the oil-sector union Unión Sindical Obrera, and key witnesses in a criminal suit against Colombia’s largest private oil company, Pacific Rubiales Energy—were arrested. The charges against the men stemmed from a massive strike they helped organize against their former employer, Pacifico Rubiales, in the summer of 2011 in Meta, an oil-rich department in the center of the country. Ortiz, Naranjo, and Sánchez stood accused of a number of charges, including conspiracy to commit a crime, blocking roads, and—most incredible of all—aggravated kidnapping and hostage-holding of hundreds of their fellow union members. If convicted, they could face up to 45 years in jail.

Oscar Orozco leading a march

“We weren’t ordering people around or kidnapping them,” Sánchez told me when I met him last month, six days after he’d been released from jail. “It is illogical to say that the three of us kidnapped all these people when there were 1,300 members of the army standing nearby, maybe 200 police, and maybe 200 or 300 members of Pacific Rubiales’ private security force. How could we kidnap all these people?”

A leather motorcycle jacket pulled over his stocky frame, Sánchez spoke with a measure of disbelief at what’s happened to him and his colleagues over the past four months, particularly when recounting the day of his arrest.

“They didn’t want to arrest me at my home, as I live on land right next to Pacific Rubiales. So they made an appointment with me far from home. I was leaving the designated meeting place because no one had shown up when, all of a sudden, two dozen military agents along with 50 police officers appeared. They mounted an operation to capture me as if I were one of the most dangerous men to ever set foot in the country. And there were three trucks there: one from the military, one from the police, and one from Pacific Rubailes, loaned to aid in my arrest. From there they took me to the airport, handcuffed, where a chartered plane was waiting for me—Héctor Sánchez.”

Before we parted ways, Sánchez pulled out a flyer he says was circulated around his hometown by Pacific Rubiales’ separate, business-orchestrated union to defame him. Using innocuous photos pulled from Facebook, the flyer accuses Sánchez and his union of being “poor idiots,” “bandits,” and “sons of bitches” addicted to whores and drugs. “Look at all these guys who are on this flyer,” Sánchez said, pointing at the photos. “They are all my friends, people I work with. Here is Camilo; here is José.” 

A flyer distributed around Sánchez's hometown defaming him and his union as idiots and drug addicts

Of course, if you’re a business person, Colombia is a great place to be. The World Bank ranks the country third in Latin America and the Caribbean—after Puerto Rico and Peru—on its “Ease of Doing Business” survey. The country’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Trade reported a record $16.7 billion in foreign direct investment for 2012. “Improved security in recent years has turned Colombia into a hot spot for foreign investment after a decade-long US-backed offensive battered Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups, reducing their numbers and making it safer to do business in the Andean country,” reads a Reuters article from last summer.

On paper, life for union organizers has also improved. In 2011, Bogotá and Washington signed the US-Colombia Labor Action Plan (LAP), meant to improve the rights and conditions of workers and labor activists in Colombia. Union-related murder statistics are down too—the Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS), a Colombian think tank that tracks this sort of thing, reported that 26 trade unionists were murdered in 2013, compared with more than 250 in 2001 and 2002.

“If you look over a ten year period, the murder rate has dropped,” says Daniel Hawkins, director of research at ENS. “But if you take the bigger picture—attempts at one’s life, arbitrary detention, and threats—Colombia’s rate in participation worldwide has not dropped notably.”

What has changed, he says, is the tactic. Instead of going after low-level unionists en masse, companies are selectively striking at leaders. Since the signing of the LAP three years ago, 73 unionists have been killed, 31 more have seen attempts on their life, six have been forcibly disappeared, and 953 death threats have been issued. The LAP, says Hawkins, “has been a complete failure.”

Hawkins isn’t the only one who thinks so: In October 2013, US congressmen George Miller and Jim McGovern released a report titled “The US-Colombia Labor Action Plan: Failing on the Ground,” which characterizes the much-heralded accord as a toothless agreement with pitifully little impact. “Despite the LAP,” the report reads, “murders and threats against union members and harmful subcontracting persist in Colombia largely unabated... More than 90 percent of cases of violence against trade unionists do not result in conviction.”

Rhett Doumitt, the director of the AFL-CIO-sponsored Solidarity Center in Bogotá told me that it isn’t the laws that are the problem—it’s their application, or lack thereof. “The government passes laws that, if they were enforced, would change things,” Doumitt told me. “But they find a number of ways not to enforce them. What is done in order to create statistics is piecemeal, it’s sporadic, it’s chaotic—and worse, it’s not systemic... What you need is a strong democracy with strong institutions that can uphold the laws in front of national and international capital.”

Until that day comes, union leaders have to seek refuge. In late 2013, Neil Martin and Nathan Miller launched PASO Internacional, a Bogotá-based NGO that offers accompaniment to union organizers and works with both Sánchez and Orozco. The idea is simple: When you’re with an international observer, you’re less likely to be killed. The Colombian government has its own program to protect people like Orozco—the National Protection Unit (NPU), which offers armed guards and bullet-proof cars—but Martin insists that the NPU is inadequate in terms of how many individuals it can protect. “Furthermore,” says Martin, “the way that they decide who is at risk seems to be fairly arbitrary. The majority of these government protective measures don’t go to grass-roots organizers—they are often assigned to politicians and other government representatives.”

Orozco's government-issued armored car, riddled with bullets in the summer of 2012

Case in point: Six months after the first attempt on Oscar Orozco’s life, his government-provided protection was lifted. That’s when the latest round of shootings, death threats, and deliveries of mysterious packages started. The union leader is currently applying to have his protection reinstated, but whether or not he’ll be approved is unclear.

“It has been extremely difficult,” says Orozco of living life as a hunted man. “It has come to the point of breaking family ties. Family members ask me to decide between family life and the union, and the union is my priority on principle. I have dedicated my life to the union and the principles for which we struggle.

“Several organizations have offered to help me leave the region or the country [as a political refugee], but to leave is another form of dying. It is psychological assassination—it is to be removed from your environment, from your setting, your life, your passion, your love.”

Follow Michael Zelenko on Twitter.

A local news report on the killing of James Boyd

On March 16, two members of the Albuquerque Police Department fatally shot James Boyd, a homeless man reportedly suffering from schizophrenia. The 38-year-old wasn’t a terribly sympathetic figure—he had also been arrested a dozen times, usually for violent assaults, including attacks on law enforcement officers—but the details of his death are still troubling. On the day of the shooting, he was confronted by cops for camping illegally and wouldn’t put down a pair of knives, which resulted in a three-hour “standoff.” Eventually, Boyd began threatening to kill the officers and ranting in an unhinged manner about the Department of Defense. Cops first used a flash-bang grenade and beanbags against Boyd, but they didn't incapacitate him, so the police shot an unknown number of live rounds at him, at least one of which struck him. (Officers Dominique Perez and Keith Sandy, who fired their guns, are now on leave. Sandy was previously fired from a police job for fraud.)

Much of this sounds like a the behavior of a man police might reasonably fear, except the (graphic) video shows that Boyd was turning away from police when he was shot. In addition, it's not clear why the cops couldn’t just back off from a man who was clearly mentally ill but not currently wanted for any violent crime. The footage has outraged New Mexicans who are getting tired of the Albuquerque Police Department’s sordid history—hundreds protested the shooting over the weekend, and hackivist collective Anonymous even put down the APD website for a few hours by using denial-of-service attacks.

The reason for the rage is bigger than Boyd: Since 2010 the APD has fatally shot 22 suspects, and in 2012 the Department of Justice began investigating the department because of its unusually high number of police shootings and use-of-force incidents. The APD has also cost taxpayers a reported $24 million on lawsuit payouts in the last few years. Clearly, something is rotten in the state of New Mexico.

In a March 25 post on his Photography Is Not a Crime blog, Carlos Miller noted that the much-touted Rialto, California, police department’s institution of body cameras on all of its officers and the subsequent reduction of complaints against police is well and good, but cameras don’t stop police misconduct by themselves. In 2010, the APD became one of the first departments to put cameras on officers, but obviously that hasn’t helped solve its problems. As Miller points out (using a rather unfortunate choice of metaphor), cameras will not be “a magic bullet to curb police violence.”

Obviously it’s good that we have footage of the confrontation with Boyd—otherwise, accounts of the incident would depend solely on the word of the cops present. But despite the video showing a mentally ill man being shot as he turns away from the cops, the APD is calling this a justified use of force. Filming the police is important, but it’s more important to keep an eye on them and note when they unjustly gun down a marginal member of society.

Onto the rest of this week’s bad cops:

–On Tuesday, a member of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, police department fatally shot 27-year-old DeAndre Lloyd Starks during a narcotics raid. The undercover officer who fired the single, fatal shot at the unarmed Starks for making “a threatening movement” was identified as 32-year-old Mark Wollmershauser Jr., who has been on the force since 2005. Police had a warrant for the raid, and it took place at the relatively “reasonable” hour of 5:22 PM (narcotics raids frequently take place at night or in the very early morning), but they also fatally shot an unarmed man because he didn’t show officers his hands fast enough. Wollmershauser is on paid leave while an investigation into the shooting takes place, as is traditional. Meanwhile, members of the community have planned a candlelight vigil for Starks. One local news report seems keen to stress that Starks had gun and drug charges in his past, as if to say, Don’t worry—he was one of the bad ones.

–Across the pond, a group of eight UK women who formed long-term relationships with undercover police officers are trying to make sure such things don’t happen to anyone else. These women, mostly political or animal-rights activists, are suing Scotland Yard in an effort to make them clarify their policies. They have reason to be upset, as their relationships with undercover police officers went on for as long as six years—one woman even had a child with her officer, who left after his assignment ended, which is completely insane. Law enforcement officials claim that sexual relationships while undercover are forbidden, but so far no charges against any officer have been filed (though prosecutors are reportedly considering bringing them against three of them). The women say this is not enough, and that policies need to be made clear so that nobody suffers the emotional trauma that they have.

–A Holyoke, Massachusetts, woman with cancer was arrested on Friday and held for more than four hours for failing to pay her $5 dog license fee. Technically, the outstanding warrant was over a failure to appear in court, but 41-year-old Ann Musser did go to court in September to settle her non-payment of the fee, but she left after three hours of waiting because she has advanced ovarian cancer and didn’t feel comfortable in an environment that might hurt her immune system. Musser’s cancer makes this overreaction by police even more horrible, but armed government agents coming to arrest someone for a failure to pay for a dog they already possess is fundamentally absurd. (A similar situation happened to a Massachusetts woman on March 8 over another rogue dog license. Maybe the cops in that state should adjust their policies?)

–A Sandusky, Ohio, man says sheriff’s deputies searched his home without a warrant on Tuesday, March 25. John Collins, 26, claims Huron County deputies pushed into his apartment when he opened the door, handcuffed him, and placed him on the floor for 20 minutes, then searched the place, breaking several of his belongings, including his tablet and a memento from his dead son. Johnson says two of the deputies knew him from going to school together, but they didn’t acknowledge that they were obviously in the wrong apartment. He says one deputy began to read his rights and arrest him before the rest of them realized they weren't in the right place and that Collins was not the suspected drug trafficker they were looking for. The deputies apologized and left the apartment, but strangely, both the search warrant and the gag order on the search warrant are under gag order. The Sandusky Register also notes that the Huron County sheriff’s department has a habit of not complying with requests for public information in spite of Ohio’s public record laws. For his part, Sheriff Dane Howard disputes Collins’s account of the event—though he won’t release the search warrant, which would clear a lot of this up.

–On Tuesday, Rahinah Ibrahim became the first person to get off the federal government’s no-fly list after a seven-year battle. One of the artifacts of the post-9/11 war on terror, this list probably has hundreds of thousands of names on it, though you can’t be sure you’re on the list until you’re prevented from boarding a plane. And even if you are barred from a flight, the government’s response is usually a coy “maybe you’re on the list, maybe you’re not.” Ibrahim’s inclusion on the list was a clear mistake, but getting her off of it was still a nightmare. Yet another reason to abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

–Good luck and a quick response helped a sheriff’s deputy save the life of a toddler on Wednesday in Indiana. The mother of 21-month-old Olivia Turnick called 911 because her daughter had turned blue, and Porter County Sheriff's Sergeant Jeremy Chavez was close enough to respond to the call in under a minute. He performed first aid on Olivia, and she soon began crying and breathing. Chavez is our Good Cop of the Week for being close enough to help and reacting fast enough to save a child.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

The attention-grabbing group Sealfie, in downtown Iqaluit, via Twitter.
In a post on Ellen’s blog, the selfie-loving talk show host dramatically referred to the Canadian seal hunt as “one of the most atrocious and inhumane acts against animals allowed by any government.”

It’s great to know that DeGeneres—who I assume spends most of her daily life driving between a Beverly Hills mansion, a Beverly Hills condo and whatever studio she films her show at—still finds the time pass judgment on how people live outside of La La Land. In a weird way, it’s commendable. Where would we be without a talk show host in LA, providing a moral compass on Arctic ethics?

Recently, the Goddess of Selfies was able to generate $3 million dollars in charity through the retweets of a photo featuring herself and some other all-knowing celebs like Jared Leto and Channing Tatum, so it was good to see Ellen stick to her convictions and give $1.5 million to an organization that aligns itself with her beliefs in petitioning the Canadian government to put an end to the hunt of those dewy-eyed, Arctic Ocean puppies.  

But what the frosted tipped, bowtie and blazer adorned deity failed to see in her wisdom, however, is that surprisingly, in this day and age, people who hunt and rely on seals also have access to the internet. Who knew?

In response to Ellen’s hella-ignant, selfie-funded affront on the seal hunt, members of various Inuit communities have taken to social media to take Ellen to task on a way of life she’s now poured millions of dollars into attacking, without really knowing anything about.

Iqaluit resident Laakkuluq Williamson Bathory sparked the “sealfie” hashtag in Canada, a concept that in the past few days has gone viral on Twitter and in the news. It has people posting photos of themselves (often mentioning @theellenshow) with seal meat, seal accessories, and in their sealskin Sunday best. 

“I wanted to it to be a tongue-in-cheek protest to all these very serious animal rights activists,” Laakkuluq told me via Facebook message. “Many of us Inuit use humour to make a strong point instead of anger. I also wanted the sealfie to focus on cultural celebration and positive self-esteem.”

For some further perspective on the subject, I got in touch with Nancy Mike, a member of the Iqualuit band The Jerry Cans (they go seal hunting in one of their music videos) and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, an accomplished filmmaker who’s currently putting the finishing touches on a project that deals with this exact subject. “The film is called Angry Inuk… but this is a working title, we've also considered Phoque You. Seal in French is phoque. We'll see.”

Along with Laakkuluq, Nancy and Alethea organized a group sealfie in downtown Iqaluit last week, as an act of protest, and to show solidarity with the Nunavut seal hunt. I spoke with Nancy and Alethea by phone on Saturday morning.

VICE: How is seal hunting important—beyond the practical and survival uses—when it comes to keeping your culture alive?
Nancy: When someone like Ellen, or anybody who’s a celebrity or is well known, says something like that, it’s attacking us as minority groups because we not only use the seal as a practical thing, we use it to build relationships. We eat the meat, we use the bones or the skin—the bones to make little games for children so they can have fun with it. I don’t know if these words can even explain what I want to say about the importance of seal, because it’s our life. Not only our culture, but our daily living and how we’re taught to be good people and to respect others and respect animals. It’s much more than the practical use of it, not only seals, but any animal we have up here in the north.

Alethea: It’s such a dense subject, but in terms of modern day need—it’s just coming out in the news now, there was a report that was just released stating that Inuit have the most trouble with food security out of any indigenous population in any developed country. So, you know, we’re the poorest population in North America by far. Seven in ten kids go to school hungry, the majority of kids skip meals or go an entire day without food at times. So with that in mind, seal hunting is absolutely critical, literally for the survival of our people still to this day.

As a territory, even our territorial government barely has enough money to operate, to have enough buildings for schools, housing is an issue, we have ridiculously high suicide rates… there have been estimates made that if we were to stop hunting seal and stop eating seal meat that it would take about $5 million dollars per year to import food to replace what we catch on our own. This is still and always will be critically important to sustainable living in the arctic.



Alethea's sealskin wedding attire. Photo via Alethea Alrnaquq-Baril.
What’s your favourite piece of seal clothing, accessory, that you own?
Nancy: A pair of sealskin boots I have that were made by my very good friend from my hometown. Her husband is a great hunter and supports their family with food and sealskin that she prepares by herself—cleaning them, scraping the fat, cleaning them again, stretching them, softening it, sewing it, all those different processes—so they’re very special to me, because I know a lot of work was put into them, knowledge was passed on from somebody else to teach her how to do all those things, it was hunted by her husband, the seal fed her family and others. It's just a great circle of togetherness.

Alethea: It’s just like any other clothes. I’ve got sealskin mitts. I’ve got different kinds of sealskin boots—ones I can wear in the south and ones I can wear in the north. It’s part of my daily life, it’s not like when some people have their one fur coat and that’s their fancy special thing. This is just our daily clothing and so much of it is made from skins that husbands, fathers or grandfathers caught, and we sew ourselves, you don’t have to be rich to own sealskin clothing. It comes with pride to wear them because we’re constantly aware of outside pressure and judgment. But I guess if I had to say one special piece of clothing it would be my wedding dress. I was married in August 2009 in a sealskin wedding dress that I sewed myself. My husband also wore a sealskin vest, and sealskin boots that I made for him as well.

Grade 12 student Killaq Enuaraq Strauss absolutely schools Ellen on the historical and cultural significance of the seal hunt.

If you could tell people in LA to change something about their way of life, what would it be?
Nancy: Instead of living a pretend life, they should come and see what it actually is to live in the north, or to live in such a harsh environment, so they can actually understand, and then maybe they can voice their opinions about these things from their own understanding, not just from other people’s perspectives.

Alethea: Gosh, you know, I’ve been thinking about this issue day and day out for the last five years because I’m making a film on the subject. And I’ve thought about the sealing issue my whole life because I’m Inuk and I live in the north and eat seal meat, and feel judged. And I’m quite judged—verbally and outwardly—sometimes when I travel and people see that I’m wearing sealskin, but I’ve never thought about how to direct people’s lives in LA. I mean, I guess that’s what we’re trying to fight against.

It can also be argued that so much that’s done in cities like LA also affect the north, things like pollution, all the traffic…
Alethea: Well, I mean that’s a very good point because, yeah, we actually do have concerns about our seal population. The level of mercury that’s in their blood and in their livers is very high and affects our health as well. The pollutants that we’re dealing with in the arctic that end up in our bloodstream are very real threats to us, and the seal population. Hunting is absolutely not a threat to the population but all those pollutants are. As would be increased shipping through the northwest passage, uranium plants and coal mining, all that kind of stuff. We do see threats towards the environment in the arctic and animal populations and it’s not the hunter.

For Ellen or Paul McCartney or whoever it may be, hunting seals is a choice issue to pick on. Why do you think they avoid going after something with a bigger impact like, say, the increased shipping or mining?
Alethea: Seal hunting is done out on the open for anyone to see. It’s red blood on the white ice. There are no abattoirs: it can’t be hidden away, you can’t write laws against people coming in and filming seal hunting, as they’ve done with abattoirs with the farming system. We are exposed and we always will be due to the nature of seal hunting, there are no trees to hide behind. So it’s low hanging fruit and unfortunately it’s the poorest people in North America that are affected by it.

What article of seal clothing do you think Ellen would look good in, and what kind of seal dish might she enjoy?
Nancy: I think she’d look awesome in a pair of sealskin, Converse-style shoes that they make nowadays, and maybe a bowtie. And I think that she would enjoy a piece of seal rib that has been boiled with vegetables in it, with a bit of dill pickle on the side.

Alethea: I would never try to force her into sealskin, she’s a vegan, and I totally respect that, for the environment she lives in, it makes sense for her. What I hope to come out of all this is for people to maybe think about a different kind of animal rights activism. One that’s more custom to each environment; one that’s thoughtful and respectful of indigenous peoples in whichever country or region you’re dealing with, because they tend to be at the forefront of defending the environment and the wildlife. 


@ddner

In 1998, the antiretroviral drug efavirenz was approved for treatment of HIV infection. Though the drug was highly effective, patients soon began to report bizarre dreams, hallucinations, and feelings of unreality. When South African tabloids started to run stories of efavirenz-motivated rapes and robberies, scientists began to seriously study how efavirenz might produce these unexpected hallucinogenic effects. 

Hamilton Morris travels to South Africa to interview efavirenz users and dealers and study how the life-saving medicine became part of a dangerous cocktail called "nyaope."

A plate full of muskrat (left) and possum (right). All photos by the author, unless otherwise noted

Last Saturday night in New York City’s northernmost borough was cold, rainy, and desolate. I was wandering around the Bronx with my friend Anna searching for the Andrew Freedman Home, an historic mansion turned hotel where Baron Ambrosia (a culinary video series host and filmmaker whose real name is Justin Fornal) had invited us to dine at his fourth annual Bronx Pipe Smoking Society Small Game Dinner. Siri was doing us a huge fucking disservice, though, bleating out the wrong directions on Anna's smartphone while we walked in endless circles in the driving rain and men disgustingly leered at us. We finally made it to the giant, decrepit mansion that was hosting the game dinner; it's owned by a friend of Baron’s and is a dead ringer for Wayne Manor in its twilight years. 

The night’s dress code was described as formal—specifically “black tie, traditional, or warrior,” where you should proudly wear your taxidermy, bones, mojo bags, and machetes and other large blades—so I wore high heels for the first time in years, along with the only garment I owned that could qualify as black tie, my old high school prom dress. As I desperately tried not to fall on my face on the slippery tiled front porch, I couldn’t help wondering if this was a prelude to a ridiculous shitshow of a night. I wasn’t far off. 

The night's host, Baron Ambrosia. Photo by Rose Callahan.

Baron’s concept for the night was not just an eccentric shindig but also a way to encourage people to not waste the food resources we have—specifically, small game. “It has a small carbon footprint, it’s in your backyard, and it’s yours to enjoy,” he told the crowd later in the night. As someone who grew up (and loved) the wild venison my father used to bring home, I was already behind his vision. In fact, Baron is taking a break from his award-winning video series, like Bronx Flavor and The Culinary Adventures of Baron Ambrosia, to write a game-centric cookbook based off these annual dinners, set to be released at the end of the year. “You may not like squirrel, you may not like porcupine,” Baron said, “but we’re just opening up the discussion that there are protein sources other than beef, pork, or chicken.” It was a valid argument—and a good reason to party. 

A typical outfit that night

The mansion’s interior looked retro chic in a very “this place is haunted and will make you murder your family” kind of way. The attendees—mostly Bronx restaurant owners or beloved borough personalities, all of whom were friends or family of Baron—were dressed elaborately: The men wore giant pieces of fur, elaborate velvet togas, capes, and tuxedos, while the women were dressed in little hats and short party dresses. When we walked up to the check-in, we signed a legal waiver in case the meat poisoned us or whatever—We’re off to a fine start, I thought—and wandered down the hallway to a room booming with loud noises. Inside, there was a bar serving Bronx Pop, beer (both in Red Dog cans and from a keg), and a bottle of tequila. I chose the tequila. “Can we mix it with the lemon-lime soda?” Anna asked.

“I haven’t made a mixed drink yet tonight,” said the man behind the bar. He filled the cup halfway with tequila and topped it off with the lurid green soda. It tasted like a melted frozen margarita. The owner of the soda company, Nicky d'Aragona, immediately deemed it "the Lime Ricky" and plugged it on social media. “This is great!” he said. “We’ve been trying to market it with vodka, but this is much better.” 

Bill Guiles, a badass trapper

On a table by the bar, I spotted several plates of untouched sushi. I read the labels: crickets with brie, raccoon, and mink. The meat looked a bit suspicious—a little gray and sad—though there thankfully wasn’t any odor. No one was touching it, which I interpreted as a bad sign. I quickly turned away to prevent the possibility of someone trying to offer me some and almost ran straight into a man wearing the craziest fur hat I had ever seen, complete with multiple tails and two little pointy ears on top. I asked if I could steal it. He agreed, but warned me that it might be a bit sweaty. I then learned that this guy—Bill Guiles—had the right to wear such furry headgear because he supplied 99 percent of the night’s game. The 68-year-old and has been hunting for as long as he can remember. He traps for sport, conservation, and fur, and his weapon of choice is a .22 caliber rifle. Four years ago, he met Baron at a Native American powwow when Baron approached Bill’s partner and asked what happens to the meat of the animals they trapped; after offering to buy the meat—which they refused—Baron received an invitation to head upstate to hunt with them, which he does every year. Bill’s contributions of the night included raccoon, fox, coyote, beaver, otter, muskrat, fisher cat, marten, and porcupine. 

Jason Engdahl serving beaver tacos

Still wearing Bill’s sweat-laden chapeau, I wandered into the library, which, thanks to its dark wood paneling and ominous-looking portraits on the walls, resembled a room from some cliché made-for-TV murder mystery. Standing beside me was a man wearing a fez who claimed to have popularized the pickleback shot. Another guy was serving up… uh… beaver tacos, which were served on rock-hard crispy tortillas. Baron was flitting from room to room getting everything ready. He looked like his usual over-the-top self, flaunting shotgun shells rolled up in his hair like curlers—he said that he was inspired by distinguished men of yore like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—and sported a pencil-thin goatee. 

The "Stabbing of the Beast" ceremony. Photo by Amanda Fornal

Besides the hors d'oeuvres—which also included shredded fox served with corn bread, raw oysters, rare elk, and a Thai porcupine nam tok salad—there was a sit-down dinner, complete with a “Stabbing of the Beast” ceremony officiated by Trapper Bill and Grammy award-winning hip-hop musician Grandmaster Melle Mel. More game dishes came out to the tables: possum cooked in coconut milk and served with sweet plantains, coyote hinds in chipotle sauce served with cactus leaves, sous-vide otter, fisher cat sliders, Malian-style muskrat fakoye, and jerk-style raccoon. Meat like this “has the ability to take a lot of spice,” said one of the night’s chefs, Jason Engdahl. This is true, because while there were a huge range of aggressively flavored dishes—all from a myriad of cuisines—the game ended up soaking up all the flavors and resulted in a surprisingly tame meal. The desserts, by Whoopies Miniature Dessert Co., were made with Georgian white clay to further drive home the "utilize your resources" theme of the night. “Geophagia is always portrayed in the media as a squalorous form of survival, never as a cultural tradition,” said Baron. “That’s why I saw it as a misunderstood food source, much like small game.” 

Michael Sherman with some jerk-style raccoon

The end of the night was, admittedly, a blur. As the night went on, I was struck not only by the sense of community that was created at these dinners (many of the chefs and partygoers had excitedly participated for multiple years) but also by the fact that the two tenets on which Baron’s shows were built on—serious culinary discussions amid a crazy, surreal aesthetic—could be translated into a party where we were contemplating serious food issues in a totally ludicrous setting. At one point, I stole someone’s fez and was tending bar for a while. Anna eventually succeeded in dragging me out of the mansion, but the night continued with two party favors of sorts: two feet that felt legitimately broken after being shoved into those torturous shoes and the lingering, complex, feral taste of wild game seeping out of my pores.

Kirsten Stamn doesn’t mess with salads. Follow her on Twitter. 

Photo via Flickr user Matt Kowal
The past few weeks have been messy for Health Canada and their clumsy medical marijuana program. The government agency that purports to look after the health of our nation’s citizens announced they would be rolling out a plan that would force the roughly 40,000 medical marijuana patients (who are registered in the government’s system) to destroy the dank buds they had been legally growing at home, and patronize a host of new government sanctioned grow-ops; lest they have their information turned over to the RCMP. That plan was squashed before it could even get off the ground, after John Conroy, a BC lawyer, successfully argued that this new program would limit sick people’s access to medicine so drastically that it’s unconstitutional. A temporary injunction has been granted to Conroy, which means that for now, medical marijuana patients can keep growing at home, while the government contests the decision.

Interestingly enough, while the mandate that would have required medical marijuana patients to destroy their medicine come April 1st has been temporarily halted, the entirety of Health Canada’s new program hasn’t been put on ice. One key change that’s made it through, is that new patients who wish to take cannabis (aka smoke that weed) to deal with their nausea, anxiety, chronic pain, or other ailments, can now receive prescriptions directly from their doctor, rather than go through a bureaucratic application process that would require each new patient to earn Health Canada’s approval.

In an official, and snappily titled Health Canada statement published today (Government of Canada Announces New Steps to Help the Medical Community with Marijuana for Medical Purposes) the agency coldly addressed the court’s overruling of their allegedly unconstitutional plan to snatch medicine away from sick people as such: “Health Canada does not endorse the use of marijuana, but the courts have required reasonable access to a legal source of marijuana for medical purposes.” The statement also addresses the lack of official testing that marijuana has gone through to become a verifiably useful medicine, as Rona Ambrose, Canada’s Minister of Health herself says:

“I continue to hear concerns from health professional organizations that dried marijuana is not an approved drug or medicine in Canada. They want clearer guidance on safety and effectiveness and want authorizations to be monitored. That is why I asked Health Canada to consult with provincial and territorial regulatory bodies, companies licensed to produce marijuana and other professional organizations to enhance information-sharing on how doctors and nurse practitioners are authorizing the use of marijuana."

To be clear, this is the same agency that cannot even recall dangerous drugs that get sold to Canadians by Big Pharma. 11 percent of doctors in Canada already give “off-label” prescriptions, meaning they prescribe drugs in scenarios that are untested, which has led to catastrophic results. Plus, Health Canada whistleblowers have accused the agency of pushing through medicine that didn’t have enough data behind them to be verifiably safe.

Then there’s marijuana, which is at least anecdotally recognized the world-over as being a relatively safe drug with strong medicinal benefits. Obviously no one would want our doctors and government to act on medicinal policy simply based on Joe and Sally’s account of weed being super fucking rad, but clearly the government isn’t all that reluctant when it’s authorizing giant factories to open up on Canadian soil and start pumping out weed. And, if it had gone the way Health Canada had originally planned, these new factories would not only have an exclusive market to the 40,000 patients in the medical marijuana program, but by allowing doctors to directly prescribe weed to new patients, their market would grow exponentially. In fact, Health Canada has estimated by 2024 there will be 450,000 Canadians using medicinal marijuana, which they estimate will create a billion dollar industry.

I reached out to the Canadian Medical Association this morning to get a doctor’s perspective on the power balance shifting from Health Canada to doctors themselves, when it comes to prescribing patients that kush, but they were busy, and bounced me over to the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities in Canada (FMRAC), whose homepage links to this statement: “MEDICAL MARIHUANA: WHAT THE MEDICAL REGULATORY AUTHORITIES HAVE TO SAY.”

Apparently FMRAC’s position hasn’t changed since 2004, when they stated: “The Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada strongly believes that the practice of medicine should be evidence-based, and that physicians should not be asked to prescribe or dispense substances or treatments for which there is little or no evidence of clinical efficacy or safety.” Adding, "For those stated reasons, we strongly oppose the proposed Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations.”

The doctors of this country have an understandable, professional reluctance given that Health Canada has still not authorized marijuana as an approved drug or medicine; yet Health Canada has still managed to kick up a ton of dirt by upsetting patients and threatening them with law enforcement intervention for non-compliance with their possibly unconstitutional program, which of course landed them in court.

Part of the problem doctors are bound to have with medical marijuana is the huge amount of cannabis variants available to weed users: dried buds in strains that vary from sleepy-weed, to hungry-weed, to nausea-evaporating weed. Then there’s the oils, extracts, and edibles (which, so far, are not being manufactured by any Health Canada-authorized grow op). Or how about medication like Charlotte’s Web? A proven cannabis based remedy for child epilepsy, that is gaining legal acceptance in the US, but is still unavailable in Canada.

While doctors seem (at least officially and on the record) very wary of prescribing cannabis to Canadians in any sort of widespread fashion, the fact is that weed is now being grown legally in Canada on large commercial scale, and doctors can directly prescribe it. This alone will likely result in a few weed-friendly doctors operating in a practice near you sometime soon.

Whether or not the regulatory boards are happy about this is somewhat irrelevant, because Health Canada’s plan has passed in a way that should be cause for celebration for medical marijuana patients: it’s easier to get a prescription, you can grow it at home if you want to, or you can patronize one of many new legalized, private grow-ops. Obviously these new private grows can’t be happy about their bottom-line, now that patients can still legally grow their own happy plants, as opposed to being forced to buy from this new industry; and Health Canada certainly isn’t stoked that their somewhat monopolistic plan has been bodyslammed in court.

But despite it being somewhat unintentional, Canada now has better access to medical marijuana than ever before—just in time for 4/20.

@patrickmcguire

The 1965 patent for the first e-cigarette

No one really cared when, in 1963, Herbert A. Gilbert filed a patent for the first e-cigarette, which he called a “smokeless non-tobacco cigarette.” What a difference 51 years makes. Today, the $2 billion industry is at the center of one of the biggest public health debates in history. 

There is a contradiction at the heart of what an e-cigarette is, with both sides saying opposite things. On one side, you’ve got nicotine-addicted enthusiasts who believe e-cigarettes are a safer alternative to tobacco cigarettes and represent the biggest revolution in the health-care industry since penicillin. 

On the other hand, naysayers protest that e-cigarettes are dangerously unregulated, untested, and marketed irresponsibly, especially to teenagers, thus encouraging more people to jump on the smoking bandwagon, which is a shitty place to be.   

The shadow of Big Tobacco also looms over the e-cigarette debate. Some of the more hardcore e-cigarette evangelists think the backlash within the health-care community is part of a "conspiracy.” They accuse Big Pharma of throwing money at nonprofit health groups to release studies that have found no relationship between smoking e-cigarettes and quitting traditional cigarettes. 

Suddenly, it seems like everyone cares about the future of vaping: Big Tobacco execs, public health experts, e-cigarette entrepreneurs, evangelistic vape nerds, local politicians, curious teens, and anxious moms all have something to say about whether these cylindrical puff pieces will be the death knell or saving grace of humankind.

A custom e-cigarette “mod” from Sin City Mods

As e-cigarette culture seeps into the mainstream, the fight for our right to fill our lungs with chocolate-chip-cookie-flavored smoke (it’s a fundamental American freedom, goddamnit) has gone from schoolyard skirmish to full-blown war. 

This battle is being fought in courtrooms all over the country as both the Senate and individual states decide how to regulate e-cigarettes. Tobacco companies recently supported two bipartisan Senate bills prohibiting the sale of ecigs to people under 18. Major cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have all bowed one after the other, domino-style, to tighter restrictions on where you’re allowed to puff on your e-stick. 

Yet in spite of all these clamp-downs, signs of vaping’s rising cultural cachet are everywhere--from Courtney Love’s infamous “It’s a fucking NJOY” commercial to this (actually quite good) electronic music mixtape by a collective of artists and musicians called Vapecru. 

But nowhere is the growing swell of vaping enthusiasts more evident than in e-cigarette forums. Forum users are intrinsically early adopters, mostly because they’re the ones who give the most amount of shits. Dig through these brutal, time-sucking sinkholes, and you’ll find the seeds of what will blow up in a few months. Some of the topics they’re yakking about today will be tomorrow’s headlines; the new gear they’re embracing will be next month’s top sellers. (E-cigarette carpetbaggers, take note.)

Of course, internet forums have always been sites of cultural formation. But what separates e-cigarette forums from, say, forums for Bronies or Scooby Doo fanfic is that the culture growing out of the former is actually important. It has the power to change the discourse—and the governmental policies—around what might be the biggest health issue of our generation.

Right now, the internet’s biggest and most influential e-cigarette forum is the straightforwardly titled E-Cigarette Forum, which has racked up 190,000 registered users. One of those users is Mathew Dryhurst, a San Francisco–based artist who represents the new breed of vapers: Young, technology-obsessed, and just as likely to customize their own e-cigs as they are to build their own synthesizers. E-Cigarette Forum “was the original source of info for me,” Matt said. The site was “where I first learned about modding—transactions for that stuff were mostly happening through forums.”

A British man named Oliver Kershaw created E-Cigarette Forum in 2007, the same year modern e-cigarettes were introduced to US markets via Europe and China. Like many other vape nerds, Oliver has a passion for building and tinkering with things. The 34-year-old dabbled with carpentry and selling furniture online before dedicating himself full-time to building the forum.

At the time, there were scant resources for finding up-to-date information on the infant industry. “I wasn’t sure if people would think e-cigarettes were a stupid gimmick or if they would see that this was the future,” Kershaw told me over the phone.

But Kershaw did know that the forum’s first wave of visitors were going to be looking for a specific type of information: how to smoke weed with the newfangled contraptions. He worried that if e-cigarettes were co-opted by stoners, regulators would try to stamp them out before they got a fair chance to take off. So he decided to set some ground rules: no talking about any other drug besides nicotine, and the focus had to be about “health improvement,” not quitting smoking.

This semantic nuance has become even more important today, as the question of whether e-cigarettes will help people quit smoking or cause more people to start smoking has become hotly contested.

Critics have pointed out that some e-cigarette ads borrow the same glamorizing tactics used by tobacco companies. “It’s a fucking NJOY” is a contemporary echo of Virginia Slim’s “You’ve come a long way, baby.” As Molly Osberg noted on the Verge, other brands position their e-cigs “less like smokes and more like iPads, with TV spots obliquely announcing ‘dreams, opportunities, the promise of new things to come.’” Since e-cigarette marketing is still largely unregulated, these ads can get away with pretty much anything.

But pro-vapers like Kershaw think the anti-e-cigarette backlash (especially surveys that claim teenagers who smoke e-cigs are six times more likely to smoke tobacco too) are part of a larger conspiracy designed to force smokers into making an unfair choice: quit smoking or die.

For vaping evangelists like John Castle, author of Smokeless: An Introductory Guide to the Pleasures of Vaping, e-cigs represent an “escape hatch” from that “gigantic, rotten guilt trip” of a cigarette addiction. As any smoker who has been berated in public by a complete stranger knows ,puffing on smokes has become increasingly taboo. “So online and offline,” John said over email, e-cigarettes are only going to keep getting bigger, “as more and more people discover this technology that finally allows them to achieve freedom from a trap set for them by [tobacco] corporations.”

Herein lies the rub: There just isn’t enough evidence to come down conclusively on whether e-cigarettes are truly a healthier alternative to their analog counterparts. Tellingly, E-Cigarette Forum’s approach to advertising reflects this ambivalence. The entire forum is financially supported by advertisements bought by e-cigarette businesses peddling their wares. Revenue is good enough that Kershaw has been able to hire six full-time staffers to help him run the site. But he’s firm that these ads are “not allowed to make crazy testimonials [about quitting smoking], 'cause they’re all bullshit.”

For now, E-Cigarette Forum is booming. The New Users thread is currently the most popular on the website, and the average age of users has slid from 30 to 20, a sure sign of its trendiness. But Kershaw also knows that his current business model is untenable. “It’s quite possible that in two years time, online sales will be banned,” he said matter-of-factly, “and we won’t be able to put the resources into running the site that we have now without that revenue.” That means no more moderators to verify accounts, kick out spammers, and generally keep an eye on the amount of bullshit that tends to flood internet forums. That means vapers might have to find a new place to congregate. But Kershaw’s got it covered—he’s already bought Vaping.com.

Follow Michelle Lhooq on Twitter.

Illustrations by Nick Gazin

Tom Burke was driving through a sleepy part of Grand Rapids, Michigan—an empty neighborhood full of abandoned warehouses—when he first noticed the vehicle tailing him. “I was like, Why is this car turning left whenever I turn left?” he recalled. “I figured out I was being followed.”

Tom, a 49-year-old who has been active in antiwar and labor circles for decades, had been monitored for months by the FBI, and that morning, September 24, 2010, the Bureau was moving against him and his fellow activists. Agents had raided the homes of some of Tom’s friends, seizing computers and tearing apart rooms as part of an investigation into whether they were planning an armed revolution and providing aid to terrorist organizations. In response, Tom was on his way to an internet café to issue a press release telling the world what was happening, which was about all he could do given the circumstances.

That same morning, he and his wife were served with subpoenas demanding they testify before a grand jury. By December, 23 activists across the Midwest were subpoenaed and asked to answer for their activism. Among other things, they were accused of providing “material support” for terrorism, a charge that can mean anything from providing guns to a terrorist group to providing any sort of “advice or assistance” to members of such a group, even if that advice is “lay down your arms.” (Former president Jimmy Carter warned a few months before the raids that the threat of a “material support” charge “inhibits the work of human-rights and conflict-resolution groups.”)

Nearly four years later no one has been charged with a crime, and an unsealed affidavit, which the FBI used to get a federal judge to sign off on the 2010 raids, even notes that this group of mostly middle-aged peace activists explicitly rejected the idea of providing arms to anyone. The document, released by court order last month in response to requests from the activists, shows that an undercover special agent was intent on luring people into saying ominous things about “revolution” and, sometimes, some of these people indulged her, which provided the pretext for legally harassing a group known to oppose US policy at home and abroad.

The FBI first became interested in Tom and his fellow travelers on the eve of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota, when the bureau that purports to keep America safe sent an undercover agent who went by the name “Karen Sullivan” to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, one of the most prominent groups organizing protests outside the convention. The agent couldn’t uncover any wrongdoing whatsoever, but soon she made her way to another left-wing organization in the Midwest, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a group that includes Tom and a number of other activists who received subpoenas.

Her cover was fashioned to appeal to the bleeding-heart leftists she sought to entrap and imprison—“Karen’s” identity was practically a caricature of a socialist activist.

“She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter,” Jess Sundin, a founding member of the Anti-War Committee who also belongs to the FRSO, said in a 2011 interview with Nick Pinto of the Minneapolis City Pages. The agent told activists she had a rough childhood and spent years on the streets after first her parents and then the military kicked her out for being gay. She laid it on thick, in other words.

“I remember a woman who was really eager,” Tom told me. “She kept bringing up how eager she was about revolution. And you know, on the one hand, people think it's good because we really need to change society, so it's a fine thing to talk about. On the other hand, she was trying to find people she could manipulate into [committing] a crime.”

Her excesses, her going on about revolution a bit too much, were shrugged off as the zeal of a recent convert, but they didn’t go without notice. These were experienced activists who knew that government surveillance of dissident groups had a long, ongoing history—but they were also aware that paranoia can also scare off the genuinely eager and slowly kill an organization. Being a little too green and a little too willing to help out doesn’t always mean someone’s a cop. And why worry if you have nothing to hide?

“We had discussions about her,” Tom said. “The mistake we made is that we believed, well, we're not breaking any laws, so what is she going to report? The raids shook us.”

"Karen Sullivan" along with another undercover FBI agent, who went by the name of "Daniela Cardenas"

Most of the activists targeted by the FBI wouldn't deny they are revolutionaries, but they aren’t naïve either. They are radical enough to not rule out that some future revolutionary period could entail a gun going off somewhere, but they aren’t about to stockpile weapons—they know America is not revolutionary Russia. As a result, the day-to-day activities of the self-described “Marxist-Leninists who believe that capitalism... is inherently a system of inequality, injustice, and war” are pretty mundane. After the 2008 Republican convention, they engaged in routine organizing efforts, attempting to mobilize support for health-care reform and opposition to police brutality. When George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, they put together rallies protesting the verdict.

The FBI affidavit paints a far more sinister picture, with testimony from “Karen” alleging that members of the FRSO—teachers and trade unionists with long-standing ties to their communities; people whose homes she visited and whose newborn children she cradled in her arms—were actively plotting to take over government buildings in an armed revolution, all while aiding terrorist organizations in Colombia and Palestine. But after two years of undercover work, there was never any hard evidence for any of this; the affidavit is based almost entirely on the undercover agent’s testimony—testimony that, at worst, makes her former comrades sound like a couple of leftists after a few beers.

“Commies fighting for national liberation in other countries? We love those guys,” Jess Sundin, who was later subpoenaed, allegedly told the agent in 2009. Another activist allegedly talked about being a “big fan” of terrorist groups, though the affidavit concedes that statement came amid laughter and joking. Those off-the-cuff remarks, however, were presented as damning evidence that these community organizers—eight of whom are women with young children at home—were serious threats to “national security.”

To bolster its claim of “material support” for terrorism, the FBI affidavit makes much of the “solidarity trips” activists would sometimes take to Colombia and Palestine. The FRSO was said to have met with people who have ties to the FARC, a nominally Marxist guerrilla group now fueled by the drug trade that has been fighting the Colombian government for decades. In lieu of direct evidence, the affidavit quotes “Karen” as testifying that, based on her two years of undercover work, “I know… that there are multiple members of the FARC who do not publicly acknowledge their FARC membership and who are members of various unions.” At one point, the affidavit alleges that members of FRSO have provided aid to a pregnant woman who was a member of one such union and was touring the US. The agent also testified that her “experience and training as an FBI Special Agent” taught her that “criminals engaging in illicit activities often attempt to conceal their activities from others in order to avoid being caught.”

In the case of Palestine, the agent actually went on a solidarity trip herself, though she appears to have tipped off Israeli security before the FRSO members arrived, leading her group to be sent back home as they soon as the landed. The affidavit claims that activists provided aid to terrorists because they were on their way to deliver $2,000 to a group aiding the poor, embargoed people of Gaza—which would apparently indirectly help potential terrorists by helping to feed them. A list of questions an FBI agent left behind at a home that was raided suggests the source that money: a “Revolutionary Lemonade Stand.”

To say that all of this combined makes the activists terrorist sympathizers is a pretty drastic reach—in fact, the affidavit mentions that one of them told “Karen” that the “FRSO is not going to send anyone ‘military aid.’”

Unable to uncover hard evidence of any crime, in March 2010 the FBI agent tried to get the others to help her commit a crime. She told them she had been left $1,000 from her deceased father—who, she had claimed earlier, kicked her out of her home for being gay—and instructed that she send it to militants in Palestine. According to the affidavit, an unnamed activist promised to put her in touch with a man who could help her with a “monetary donation to people in his country,” offering to help because it's “such a cool story.” The affidavit doesn’t say if the money was ever sent.

Protests at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota, which is what the FBI was originally investigating. Photo via Flickr user Eric Hanson

So why haul all these people before a grand jury? If the case was so weak, it should have been dropped—and if there were anything to these allegations of terrorism and planning for armed revolution, activists wouldn’t be out on the streets giving interviews to me.

“Grand juries are a great vehicle for investigating political dissidents,” said Kade Crockford, a privacy expert with the ACLU of Massachusetts who has been following the case. “They are run by the government in a non-adversarial process which is secret from the public and immune from many of the constitutional protections afforded to criminal suspects in open courtrooms.”

People who testify before a grand jury aren’t allowed to bring a lawyer into the courtroom and don’t have the right to remain silent—simply refusing to talk can land someone in jail for a year and a half, which serves as a convenient way to jail people with radical politics without having to go through the hassle of convincing a jury to convict them of a crime. Anything you do say can and will be used against you, resulting in a perjury charge if nothing else. And the testimony of witnesses is kept secret, which can sow distrust among activists already prone to infighting.

“All these circumstances make grand juries the ideal vehicle for FBI fishing expeditions into lawful political activity that the government doesn’t like but, due to pesky constitutional issues, cannot outright criminalize,” Kade told me.

From the affidavit, it's evident the activists’ greatest crime was their anti-government rhetoric. Time and again, “Karen” kept asking her newfound friends when they would get around to the revolution here at home. Or were they all just talk? She goaded them and led them down conversational paths designed to produce incriminating quotes. She once asked Jess Sundin if she would be willing to throw down when the time came for “street fighting,” as if these peaceful activists desired nothing more than to make the streets run red with the blood of local small business owners and other patriots. To that, Jess allegedly replied, “If that was my assignment, yeah,” though the FBI admits she then “stated that she did not think a revolution would happen in the next ten years.”

Jess is also quoted as having “welcomed new FRSO members by stating 'we need new fighters,'” as if it were the first time anyone in American politics had used militant rhetoric (“We need fighters,” said President Barack Obama on the 2010 campaign trail).

“Do we support the overthrow of the US government?” another member of FSRO is said to have asked herself. “Oh, yeah.”

Pushed to discuss what she herself “would do during the revolution,” the activist allegedly responded, “Fucking fight and [kill] people.” But, she added, “We are not there yet.” The affidavit also notes that she didn’t even know how to use a firearm, though the fact that she knew someone who could “take her shooting” if she wanted—in Middle America, no less—is presented as if it were a shocking revelation.

Yet another activist supposedly told the informant that “she wanted to build a revolutionary movement in the United States,” a perfectly legal thing to do, “but did not think now was the time to pick up arms,” a perfectly legal thing to say.

Far from planning revolution by way of terrorism, the FBI affidavit itself suggests that, at worst, the FRSO was engaged in some fiery rhetoric—speech, in other words, which is something people are ostensibly allowed to engage in freely. No, you probably shouldn’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theater, but you can go ahead and yell all you want about hating the government and putting that theater under collective ownership after the revolution. At least, you’re supposed to be able to do that.

Another example of constitutionally protected free speech

Suppose the allegations are true, though. Suppose that when the FBI asked an activist, “What do you think of terrorist groups? Do you support them?” the activist had deep down inside wanted to respond with an “I love them” and a “Hell, yes.” If that were the case and the 23 activists targeted by the government were as nefarious as they were alleged to be four years ago, they managed to trick a lot of people, including some elected politicians, who stood by them when all 23 risked prison time by flatly refusing to participate in the grand jury process.

The Chicago Teamsters condemned the raids and demanded an immediate stop to the grand jury proceedings. So did the chapter of the SEIU representing workers in Illinois and Indiana. So did the New York Metro Area Postal Union. So did the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. So did a Bay Area chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. And so on and so on. In all, more than three dozen labor groups spoke out against the harassment of their fellow trade unionists. Instead of sowing division among the left, the FBI had, for once, created solidarity.

Even the politicians joined in. Twelve of the 13 members of the Minneapolis City Council signed a letter in October 2011 stating that they were “deeply concerned about the chilling effects [the FBI’s] activities might have on completely nonviolent and legal activism.” They said they were worried about what it all meant for the “health of our democracy,” adding that the council had recognized the Anti-War Committee as “an important voice of nonviolence and political dissent.”

US Congressman Keith Ellison, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also expressed concern about the raids in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, though he fell short of outright condemning the federal law enforcement harassment of his constituents, a step too far for a liberal Democrat in Congress.

That so many public figures were willing to stand up for a group of self-described socialists shows just how obvious it was to anyone familiar with the case that the raids and subpoenas didn't represent a good-faith effort to arrest terrorists, but rather a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from an investigation that had gone on for more than two years without digging up a damn bit of dirt.

The affidavit itself contains admissions that the quotes within are not based “on a final, verbatim transcript.” Indeed, “certain conversations were partially recorded to save on the battery life of the recording device,” leaving the FBI to patch together quotes. In at least one case, quotes were drawn entirely from memory because the undercover agent “was holding something in his/her hands and was unable to activate the recording device.”

The first questions from a document accidentally left behind by an FBI agent during a raid on an activist's house.

One thing I realized from reading the affidavit is that the activists being spied on by the government knew their radical politics could draw the government’s attention—and the government, bizarrely, tried to use that knowledge against them. Under the subhead “FRSO's Goals and Methods Used to Conceal Activities,” the affidavit makes note of a “UNITY DOCUMENT” that was presented to the Bureau’s infiltrator upon joining the group. It’s meant to illustrate that activists had something to hide, that you couldn’t believe their peaceful veener, but if you give it a more charitable reading it merely suggests that the activists were onto something:

No progressive struggle ever got anywhere in the United States without facing violent repression… Therefore… not only is repression inevitable; we are facing repression every day… If repression is a constant of ruling class policy, then defense against it must be a constant of revolutionary policy…

There is ample evidence that we have been and are either intermittently or constantly under one or another form of surveillance. In general, the smartest policy is simply to assume that we are under some kind of surveillance… Our main line of defense against repression will be secrecy; there is no realistic alternative.

They were right about the surveillance, of course. If anything, they weren’t paranoid enough—and certainly not as paranoid as those powerful people within the FBI who sought to imprison a group of mostly middle-aged peace activists because of some revolutionary rhetoric. The purpose of the investigation, of course, may just have been to discourage activism, but in this case it had the opposite effect: People were inspired by the activists’ refusal to testify against one another in the face of what even four years ago looked to be a clear instance of a law enforcement agency overreaching. But despite the city council's voicing dismay at the subpoenas, the 23 people targeted by the FBI could still be indicted and thrown into jail at any time, as the case against them technically remains open to this day.

As if to remind them of that, last year the Department of Homeland Security arrested Rasmea Odeh, a 66-year-old community organizer who served as associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. The alleged offense that got her arrested, in October 2013, was not stating on her immigration application that she had been incarcerated by the Israeli military in 1969—an oversight that, activists say, would have been forgiven were it a country other than Israel and Rasmea something other than an outspoken Palestinian American activist. The message: If people in power do not like what you are doing, they can find a reason to put you behind bars.

“How long do we have to be presumed guilty until proven innocent?” Tom asked when I last spoke to him. It’s a pretty good question, so I called up the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois, which is handling the case, to see if I could get an answer. Assistant US Attorney Randall Samborn got back to me the next day. “There have never been any charges filed and as a result of that we simply have no comment,” he said.

Charles Davis is a writer and producer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by outlets including Al Jazeera, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

We love Gangsta Boo here at VICE. She paved the way for lady MCs as the only female member of the legendary Southern rap group Three 6 Mafia. Her hard-hitting bars have always enshrined her as a sexy, independent woman you wouldn't want to fuck with. We're super proud to have the opportunity to premiere Boo's latest music video, for the song "Bitchy," which hails from Witch, her collaborative album with fellow Memphian La Chat. The track has a banging beat produced by Three 6's DJ Paul and features a great guest verse by rapper Mia X. Watch the video below and look out for Witch on iTunes in May. 

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003–2013), will be published this spring.

Photo by Timothy Briner

Follow Mossless magazine on Twitter

The vast majority of today’s ads are not good. In fact, advertising sucks more now than it has ever sucked before, which is saying something when you think back to those floating-head abominations of the 1950s. While horrifying and maybe an offense to God, at least they were earnest. Part of the problem is that creativity is a dying concern in the industry. Viral marketing stunts and a click-bait mentality has led companies to prioritize cheap, mindless ads aimed at tricking people into looking at their product over standout campaigns that assume a given brand’s target audience is not brain-dead zombies clicking on anything with tits or a cat in it.

Nobody in the world lives deeper in this dark advertising hole of the internet than I do, but occasionally a spark of brilliance lights up this terrible place and, at least for a moment, makes this ad-critiquing gig worthwhile. Here are some examples of things that did not make me want to poke out my eyes with a Dixie knife.

Bell’s Whisky

Released around the same as the Super Bowl, this South African spot was better than all of the game ads combined. The music is a bit over-the-top, but the ad feels real, as does the warmth it evokes. And isn’t that what a stiff drink is about?

Ad agency: King James, Cape Town

Combantrin Worming Products

Absolutely fucking hilarious. No overproduced digital bullshit, not even a voice-over. Great product lock-up, too. Hard to believe a stodgy company like Johnson & Johnson approved this, but this is Australia. It is one of my favorite commercials of the last few years. Goddamn perfect.

Ad agency: JWT Sydney

Kit Kat

Kit Kat, at least in the UK, has been killing it for years with its long-time agency, JWT London. Of course, when you have a mantra as clear as “Have a break,” the great ads should come fast and easy.

Virgin Active

Gym ads have a well-earned reputation as some of the worst things on the planet, thanks to their tendency to fat-shame or spout bullshit like “non-judgment zone.” But this spot from January, shot in Calvinia, South Africa, is quite unique.

“We had very little time or money, which is always difficult, but sometimes it makes you more resourceful and single-minded," says Karmarama creative director Sam Walker (who also directed). "But when we landed in South Africa there happened to be the biggest biker rally of the year on at the same time. So we went straight from the airport down to the bike festival and started street-casting. The guy we chose in the end was just a guy running a T-shirt company. He had a really cinematic face and a confident, self-assured aura. We just asked him, 'How would you feel about riding a bike at high speed through the desert in your pants?' 'I'd love to,' he said.”

Read more about the shoot, and see some behind-the-scenes shots, at Creative Review.

Apotek Hjärtat (the Heart Pharmacy)

And here’s the best ambient ad of the year so far.

From the ad agency press note:

"To introduce a new line of hair products, the pharmacy Apotek Hjärtat decided to give the subway commuters in Stockholm a bit of a surprise: We equipped the digital screens on the platform with ultra sonic sensors—smart little devices that abled us to monitor the train’s arrival. Upon arrival, the short film clip on the screen changed from beauty pic to hair blowing in the wind. A shampoo truly bringing hair to life."

Ad agency: Åkestam Holst, Stockholm

N-TV News Channel Mobile App

Unmistakable message: Get closer to the news.

You’re in, you’re out, you’re sold. Production budget: about $100.

Ad agency: Havas Worldwide, Düsseldorf

HILTL Vegetarian Restaurant

Images via HILTL

Simply brilliant ads for a vegetarian restaurant in Zurich. For you cultureless people, the campaign references René Magritte’s 1948 painting The Treachery of Images, which features an image of a pipe above the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," or "This is not a pipe."

Colorado Department of Transportation

Government ads, especially in the United States, are always terrible, largely because too many people have to sign off on them. So while on its own this PSA isn’t a great ad, the fact that it got through all the political red tape unscathed is remarkable. It really is a nice low-key (and truthful, if you’ve ever played sports high) way to get the message out without preaching. The other two spots in the campaign are a couple notches lower than this one.

Ad agency: Amélie Company of Denver

Sortere.no

Another government ad, but this one is via Norway, a country with a sense of whimsy. It is the best recycling commercial ever made. Period. Produced by Bacon Production, which also helped create these wonderfully bizarre Dutch fashion commercials featuring Christopher Walken.

Guinness

How do you make an Olympics spot when you’re not an official Olympics sponsor? BBDO of New York and Guinness posted this inspiring ad two weeks before the start of the Games, with the understanding that it would have to be pulled as soon as the festivities started. But of course, rogue postings of the video persisted throughout the Games, going up faster than they could be taken down. Brilliant move. Agency and client also produced one of the best ads of 2013, “Basketball.”

Fit’s LINK Gum

Japan, forever the home of the best cat videos, has been sitting back for a couple years now, watching other countries try their hands at trendy “CatVertising.” Last week, they emerged from the shadows to deliver the coup de grâce to everybody else’s lame-ass cat ads.

It’s the second-best gum ad I’ve ever seen. Here’s the best, from 2012, by JWT New York (warning: It’s quite disgusting).

Burger King

Lastly, there are these 15 seconds of dark brilliance via New Zealand, home of the best ads and PSAs in the world. This particular spot inspired whiny cries of “ageism” and “sexism” on BK’s NZ Facebook. I have no problem with the ad because the comic tone is perfect, but you can go ahead and throw it on the pile of great ads that will never ever air in the “Land of the Free.”

Ad agency: Colenso BBDO, Auckland

See you in three months with more of the best of 2014.

Screen shot via Swedishcrutch.com

Hey, would you like to look at healthy Swedish girls posing with crutches? Maybe because that's the kind of thing you like to masturbate to or whatever? Don't worry, Swedish Crutch has totally got you covered. The girls are fully clothed, but that doesn't matter if the attraction lies in the idea of these girls being either partly immobile or totally incapacitated.

The site is run by a mysterious man living in the south of Sweden who informs visitors that he started the website to share "regular weekly photos of our cast adventures!" I managed to get ahold of one of his models, who, for obvious reasons, didn't want her real name to appear here.

VICE: So how did you become a Swedish Crutch girl?
Anonymous cast and sprain girl: I started modeling when I was 16-17 years old. It was difficult to get paid jobs at the time and this was an easy way to get some cash. They found me on a site called modellbilder.se [a sort of Craigslist for models and photographers].

How were you approached? And is there much money in it?
They just asked me if I wanted to be photographed with a cast on my leg for money. At that time, it wasn't much money at all. I think it was around €20-30 ($27-$40) for a couple of hours. Nowadays, you can get between €50 and €100 ($70 and $140) if you do videos.

What's the process like when you get the plaster put on?
They bring casts in different colors and just... do it.

Who are "they"?
It's usually one man. But once in a while there were two men. They are the photographers. They put on the casts, too.

How genuine do the casts look? Are they real?
I think they’re real. But they're not very carefully made. They just sort of strap on a bandage and some cotton wool, and put two layers of plaster on top of that.

Have you ever been asked to take off your clothes?
Never.

When did you understand why you were wearing casts?
I don't know. All I knew in the beginning was that the girl in the photo was supposed to be hurt and have crutches. I didn't think it was that strange; I've been asked to model nude plenty of times.

The only video currently on the Swedish Crutch YouTube channel.

Do you not mind that someone might be masturbating to photos of you wearing casts?
I think they can [masturbate] to any photo. I've done a lot of art photos where I've been topless and people can jerk off to those, too. I think I choose to ignore what they’re being used for because I think people can get off on anything. As long as I feel that I'm not exposing myself in an uncomfortable way, it's OK.

Has it ever been weird to do this?
No, I can't say that it has. Everything is very appropriate. It can be a bit weird when people walk past and the photographers start hiding their cameras. It seems to be a bigger taboo for the photographers than it is for us models.

Are you in any videos?
Yes, a few. But they basically just film my foot as I'm running around with crutches, so it's pretty chill. They don't really care about your face or whatever, they're more interested in taking close-ups of your feet with the casts on.

Does your family know about you participating in this?
Yes. Some of them think it's good that I get a bit of extra cash. Friends have asked for the phone number so they can do it as well. Others think it's a weird thing, and that I'm a bit crazy. Some people like to discuss the morals around it. But we usually conclude the same thing every time: That I expose myself a lot less doing this than when I model for art projects.

What did you initially think when you were contacted?
I mean, I was around 17 years old at the time and I had just moved to my own place. I had almost no money and went to high school and was supposed to live on my student benefits. So I was extremely grateful that there was a way to get money. I didn't question it at all at that point. And the first time I did it, I just thought it was an idea around the image, that I was wearing casts in the same way as someone would be photographed on a beach with a hat on her head. But when I realized that they were looking for more models for the same kind of photos, as well as using the same models over and over again, I started questioning it all. So I wondered what the photos were being used for, and who's on these websites and what kind of girls are participating in this.

Have your questions been answered?
Some of them. But it's not because I've asked someone about it. The photographers don't have much to do with it, really. They're there to take the photos and send them off to the man behind the website.

Are you in touch with "the man"?
No. No one knows who he is. One of the photographers knows who he is, but he's very careful with not saying anything about him. There are plenty of secrets surrounding him.

Follow Caisa Edyrd on Twitter.

Photos by Elizabeth Vazquez

If you’re in the minority of teenagers without access to pot, you’re liable to do some pretty stupid shit to catch a buzz. Lately, the parent-fear-machine, aka the internet, has been ablaze with warnings about kids smoking coffee grounds. The side effects of ingesting caffeine in this fashion include convulsions, diarrhea, dizziness, hallucinations, vomiting, fever, and a bunch of other scary nonsense that has little to do with the method of ingestion. This potentially fake fad is nothing new; in 2011 a Reddit user outlined his experiences as a bean-head, and a post on Erowid from 2007 summed up the stupidest way to consume caffeine. Obviously, I had to try it out. Luckily for my dumb ass, my friend Elizabeth was there to both capture the magic and call an ambulance if I started hallucinating and shitting uncontrollably.

First we scoured YouTube for tutorials, and after stumbling across multiple videos of grade school-aged children rolling coffee joints using Post-It notes and cotton balls (unfortunately taken down), I realized that it was up to me to blaze the trail. As a veteran smoker, I started with the classic: a spliff.

I pulled out my coffee grinder, cigarettes, rolling papers, a cotton ball, and George W. & Laura Bush rolling tray, and I mixed a hefty portion of ground hazelnut flavored dark roast in with my tobacco. I managed to roll one of my least impressive spliffs to date, complete with a homemade filter, because despite the years of abuse my lungs have suffered in the name of “chillin’ balls”, I still wasn’t quite ready to subject them to something I had just watched a child almost vomit from without the benefit of a barrier.

Out on the balcony, I shouted “TURN UP!”, lit the tip, and took my first drag. I thought I could make out the faintest hint of hazelnut, but beyond the artificial flavoring, there wasn’t much of a difference from a regular cigarette. Perhaps I hadn’t used enough grounds. I rolled a second spliff with twice the fun, and went for a hefty pull, expecting to come up heaving. Surprisingly, the smoke came in smooth, although a bit bitter and lacking in any recognizable coffee taste. I felt stupid and Elizabeth asked if this was supposed to make me hallucinate. I didn’t think so, but I was truly hoping it would help clear a two-day blockage in my lower intestines. I felt a little lightheaded.

As any self-disrespecting toker, I was anxious to kick it up a notch, so I grabbed my vape pen and did my best to clean out the remaining wax before filling it up with some finely milled Turkish coffee my grandmother had given me before going on vacation. I hope she never reads this.

After my first hit I knew I was on the right track; it tasted like burnt chemicals and distinctly reminded me of my misadventures with salvia. Right away I started to feel pressure behind my eyes and a small migraine took hold. In a word, it was unpleasant. My second hit made me cough heavily and washing it down with water barely cleared the bad but boring taste out. The lightheadedness and headache intensified, and I looked down at George Bush’s face for guidance. Predictably, it didn’t help. Elizabeth suggested we go for a walk, and I wanted to up the ante, so we made our way down to the local smoke shop to pick up a crack pipe and a bong. Along the way, Elizabeth commented that I was staggering, although I felt no different besides the headache.

I realized at the smoke shop that there is no legal way of asking for a crack pipe, and after a few failed attempts at alluding to a “glass straw for vaping," the owner asked me if I wanted to use it with wax or shatter. “Neither, I’m smoking coffee.” He gave me a look reserved for liars and idiots. Technically I was only one of those. Finally I spotted the correct pipe and selected a cheap bong and some screens, which he rung up with intense suspicion.

Elizabeth and I made it all the way home before realizing that he’d neglected to put the crack pipe in the bag. I jogged back to the store, and on the way my headache worsened. I found it difficult to keep a steady pace or a comfortable breath. So far this sucked.

At home, I brewed some old school Turkish coffee while I tried my hand at the pipe. Admittedly, I’ve never actually held a crack pipe before, but I have seen most of The Wire, so I dribbled a pinch of coffee into the hole and held a flame under the glass. Within a few seconds I could see smoke pouring from the top, and I sucked in a mouthful. It was terrible, the worst so far.

My tongue felt thick and dry, and my throat begged me to cut this shit out. The headache spiked and my whole body tensed up with uncomfortable chills. I took a forced second drag in the name of science and felt my eyes grow tired. The coffee on the stove started foaming over, and I jumped to take it off the heat. This would be my bongwater.

While we waited for the coffee to cool, I leaned back in my chair and suffered. The taste of burnt crap lingered in my mouth and nose, and I chugged a bottle of water. It helped a little, but I felt anxious and lethargic; a truly annoying combination. While I languished, Elizabeth prepared my bong; filling the base with lukewarm coffee. I went to the bathroom to splash water in my face before tackling the final crucible, and in the mirror I noticed my pupils had dilated too much. I felt my heart pound heavy in my chest. I tried to take a shit but that wasn’t even an option.

It had started to rain outside by the time I got back to the table to hit the bong; the sickly smell of coffee wafted up the chamber. I begrudgingly took a small rip, and to my surprise it was silky smooth. Maybe my body had adjusted to this stupid method, maybe I was addicted. I took another, larger hit and immediately coughed up a thick cloud of smoke. In the middle of my raucous coughing, I gave up.

For the next few hours, I felt like shit. My closest experience was taking one too many Ritalin back when I was 17. That anxious, nauseating, sluggish, unfocused forced concentration was one of my worst early “bad trips," and ended with me laying on the cool tile floor of my bathroom waiting for it to pass. I thought about doing that now, but the bathroom in this apartment was some sort of sticky vinyl. The headache had blossomed into radiating waves of tension, and I felt like throwing up. I wanted to punch that kid on YouTube. After a while, I decided that I would definitely need my good ol’ buddy marijuana to calm my nerves. A hastily rolled joint immediately took the edge off, and the pressure in my head began to dissipate, although the chills and tenseness remained. I curled up into the fetal position in bed and promptly fell asleep.

A couple hours later, around 3 AM, I woke up; my t-shirt and pillow soaked with sweat, but feeling much better and still a little stoned. With a gram or two of coffee grounds having passed through my lungs, I can guarantee that there’s almost no stupider way of getting caffeine into your body. If you’re really hard up for an alternative method, I suggest caffeine tablets, caffeine body soap, a caffeine inhaler, caffeinated mints, or even caffeinated bacon.

There's no way this "fad" is real, but just in case there are actual, real teenagers out there doing this shit: For the love of God, quit smoking coffee grounds. 

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

In 1998, the antiretroviral drug efavirenz was approved for treatment of HIV infection. Though the drug was highly effective, patients soon began to report bizarre dreams, hallucinations, and feelings of unreality. When South African tabloids started to run stories of efavirenz-motivated rapes and robberies, scientists began to seriously study how efavirenz might produce these unexpected hallucinogenic effects. 

Hamilton Morris travels to South Africa to interview efavirenz users and dealers and study how the life-saving medicine became part of a dangerous cocktail called "nyaope."

Illustration by Nicholas Gazin

Most of us have some body part that we’re self-conscious about. I was born with a dangling piece of cartilage that looked like a third ear—it was cut off and now resembles a zit. I think it's our insecurity that makes us so fascinated with other people’s abnormalities, especially when they open themselves up to the bizarre and diverse circus on the internet.

One man, TBoneTheOriginal, exposed himself to all kinds of intimate questions and attracted considerable attention after he threw a post up on Reddit last January titled “I have no buttcrack.” The post included a picture of the jagged scar where a plastic surgeon sewed his butt cheeks together. The operation was necessary, he told curious readers, because several cysts below his tailbone were so severe that the doctor couldn’t just cut them out and let the wounds heal. They had to be sealed shut. The condition, known as pilonidal cysts, is thought to be caused by loose hairs that push into the skin and become infected, causing painful boils.

I contacted TBone, who only wants to be identified as Tim because the internet is full of “weirdos,” to find out why he made his condition known on Reddit, what he thinks of Obamacare, and most importantly, how he poops. We had to communicate via email because Tim said he had bronchitis (can someone please give this poor man some vitamins?), but he did manage to take a picture of his derrière while holding a paper with “VICE” written on it, just to prove he’s not talking out his ass.

VICE: Why did you decide to post your condition on Reddit?
Tim: I decided to post my condition to Reddit on a whim. It was my “cake day” (Reddit birthday), where you traditionally post something out of the ordinary, so I figured why not? I certainly never expected it to blow up the way it did, but I’m glad it happened. I had dozens of people message me and thank me for educating them on a condition that they didn’t even know they had until seeing my post. They said they were too embarrassed to get it checked out, and my post convinced them to get it taken care of.

A lot of Reddit users asked you how you poop? Is it very difficult?
Going to the bathroom can be a delicate procedure because the last thing you want is fecal matter getting into the wound. Believe it or not, it was a challenge to switch from wiping from the back to wiping from the front.

Are there any other activities that you have difficulty doing or can no longer perform?
Mostly any activities that require sitting for long periods of time. One of my favorite hobbies was playing drums, which I sadly don’t do much anymore. Drumming requires long periods of sitting and bouncing up and down. After doing it for 30 minutes or so, the wound tends to get irritated and flair up. Recently, I went on a seven-day hiking trip through the Paria Canyon in Arizona. It wasn’t an easy journey due to having no access to a shower and having to keep the wound clean. I wasn’t even able to get in the river with the rest of the guys I was with because if any of the sand got into the wound, I’d have been screwed. Sleeping on a hard ground wasn’t easy either.

Has the operation affected your sex life at all?
Other than a couple weeks after surgeries, it hasn’t affected my sex life in the least. My wife isn’t bothered by it.

How long have you had the pilonidal cysts? When were you first aware of them?
I’ve had the pilonidal cysts since seventh grade or so, when I first noticed them. They’re hereditary, so I wasn’t surprised to see them after knowing my mother, aunts, and cousins all had them. But since they flair up temporarily and then go away for awhile, I never had them checked out professionally until I was 23 or so.

What did your doctor say when you showed him your cysts?
My doctor was shocked to see my cysts. So much, in fact, that he called someone else into the room and said she needed to see it. I asked him how severe they were, and his response was, “Do you fish? Because if you did, this would be considered wall-mountable.” The wound had to be sewn shut instead of being left to heal from the inside out. The reason for this is because my case was so severe that my doctor had to bring in a plastic surgeon to help close the wound. They ended up removing so much that my tailbone was exposed when they were done. He told me that he had done dozens upon dozens of pilonidal cyst surgeries and mine was by far the worst he had seen.

How far down are your butt cheeks sewn together?
My butt cheeks are pretty much sewn down to right before they curve into my legs. The wound between my legs is still open to this day because it is having a hard time completely healing due to the nature of its location. It is extremely close to my anus, so it’s a sensitive area.

You have said that you delayed seeking treatment because you changed insurance plans? Can you talk about that?
Insurance wasn't an issue until after I already had three surgeries. The problem was that after five years, the wound was still open and needed regular maintenance to prevent infection. Part of the maintenance was laser hair removal to prevent future cysts from forming. So when I changed insurance companies, I was told that the wound was a pre-existing condition and would no longer be covered for a minimum of two years. So the wound hasn’t been looked at by a doctor in over a year, which is why The Doctors TV show provided me with free treatments.

Given what happened with the insurance company, what do you think about Obamacare?
I do not support Obamacare, even with my condition. While it is true that my condition would not be considered pre-existing (and that would have been great), my personal views are that the pros do not outweigh the cons. That said, the end result of my butt cheeks being sewn together wouldn’t be any different regardless of the healthcare system. My case was simply so bad that the doctors had to remove a lot more “meat” than normal. Therefore, the wound had to be sewn shut instead of allowing it to heal like most pilonidal cyst operations would be handled.

Is the operation permanent or could it be reversed?
My plastic surgeon said they could do reconstructive surgery to “give me back my butt crack,” but honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever do it. There’s no guarantee that the cysts won’t come back one day, and if that happened, we’d be back at square one. On top of that, my wife isn’t bothered by it. I’m happy with who I am no matter how ridiculous I look naked.

The cysts are hereditary and some of your family members had them too. Do you ever talk about it with them?
I don’t talk much to my other family members about my condition for sympathy because none of them have had the condition as badly as I did. My wife has been my shoulder to cry on as she has seen me at my worst, so she knows exactly the pain that I’ve been through. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have gotten through the mess without her. I certainly didn’t want someone like my mother to maintain the wound at home. That’s some territory I just didn’t want to cross into with anyone but my wife.

There's something alarming about the fact that the strangest thing in this photo is Tommy Wiseau's limp peace sign. All photos via DJ Stevie V Productions/The Room Monthly Montreal Screening Group.
I became a happier person when I first learned of The Room’s existence in 2008. At that point, Tommy Wiseau’s terrible opus had already turned into a true cult phenomenon, complete with the endorsement of mainstream celebrities like Paul Rudd, David Cross, Jonah Hill and Kristen Bell. Although it had started out as the very definition of a critical and commercial flop, The Room was suddenly relevant.

Unlike so many other disaster art crazes, however, The Room’s newfound popularity was more than just a passing trend. After the Rocky Horror-esque midnight screenings started to spread like wildfire, Wiseau took the film on tour, delighting his legions of devoted fans around the world. Doing everything in his power to keep the machine running, he’s put out multiple editions of the film, including a recent $30 Blu-ray release for everyone who absolutely needs to own a high definition showcase of Wiseau’s face (and, of course, his perfectly framed ass in that shot following one of film’s creepy sex scenes). He’s still talking about releasing a 3D version of the film, as well as adapting it for Broadway.

The most significant development of late, however, is that James Franco will be directing a movie based on The Room co-star Greg Sestero’s book, The Disaster Artist, which offers an insider’s look into the film’s insane production.

So when I heard that Wiseau and Sestero would be present at a special screening of the film at Montreal’s Dollar Cinema, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than by watching this comically terrible film at a grungy theatre located in one of the most depressing malls in the city. Although the event’s organizer Stevie Vecera (aka DJ Stevie V) admitted that the screening had been hastily planned, it was nevertheless sold out.

“It’s one of my favourite movies,” Vecera says. “I’ve been watching it for so long. I just wanted to get Tommy and Greg. I’ve seen them all around the world doing screenings here and there and I didn’t understand why we couldn’t get them here in Montreal.”

I showed up around a quarter past noon to find roughly 200 people already waiting around towards the back of the mall outside of the theatre’s main entrance, extending almost all the way to the Sears Liquidation Centre at the front of the semi-abandoned complex.



Tommy, running through the crowd and high-fiving fans like a young Shawn Michaels. 
Although the advertised entry time was 1 PM, Wiseau and Sestero were already busy meeting and greeting in the cinema’s cramped lobby, surrounded by well-worn couches and piles of reasonably priced t-shirts, posters and DVDs.

As the anticipation grew, a sudden massive round of cheering and applause came from the front of the line. Wiseau himself had burst forward from the theatre and was now running down the line, high fiving as many of his adoring fans as possible, looking like Jay Leno’s ambiguously European counterpart.

The sight of a frantically sprinting Wiseau shocked my system. The gaunt frame, the shades, the jet black flowing locks—it was everything I’d come to expect from pictures and footage I’d seen of the man—but what really caught me off guard was his outfit.

At around 46 years of age (his exact birth date, like much of his background, remains a mystery), Wiseau still dresses like a Russian teenager going to prom. My eyes were immediately drawn to his belts. So. Many. Belts. In my memory, he wore at least a dozen, but it’s quite possible he was only sporting two. At least one of them was completely useless, hanging off his body, suspended only by misplaced confidence.

As he zoomed past, I stretched out my hand, hoping for some palm, but was sadly denied. Upon reaching the back of the line he turned around and kept right on running, this time on the other side, trying to make contact with the few fans he had missed the first time around. He approached again, now letting out a primal scream, and amazingly, I missed his hand once more. I need to work on this.

Soon after the manic episode, the crowd was let inside. I aimed straight for the screening room to secure decent seats. Settling in, I learned that the film was only supposed to start at 3 PM and so it seemed there was more time to kill. It was the perfect moment to get a picture with the ringleader.We Went to the Most Depressing Mall in Montreal to Meet the Stars of ‘The Room’*

He was still in the lobby with Sestero (who was wearing a replica of Ryan Gosling's Drive jacket because, why not?), signing everything in sight and taking pictures with whoever asked for one. To their credit, they charged nothing for autographs or photos.

Before I could process what was happening, Wiseau was posing with me, instructing another random fan to take the shot with my phone, while simultaneously conversing with someone else, asking: “How do you say ‘Ha, ha, ha’ in French?”

The laugh is a strange affectation falling somewhere between an acknowledgement of irony and a stab at some form of genuine human emotion that seemed to elude him. It had punctuated a phone interview I previous conducted with Wiseau, which deteriorated into a half hour diatribe on his part. Based on that experience, I knew the Q&A that was about to start was going to be interesting.

I deferred from asking any new questions, as many others had pressing queries of their own. Early on, someone asked the most important question of all: What is The Room? Wiseau’s answer broke down the film’s lasting appeal in a typically abstract fashion.

“The Room is me, you, everyone. It’s a special place for everyone. That’s the idea behind it.”

Wiseau quickly went into overdrive, taking on even the most smart-alickey of questions with snappy answers, followed often by: “OK. Move on. Next question.” It would have been rude coming from anyone else. From Wiseau, though, it was strangely charming.



The lengthy line of disaster art aficionados in Montreal's most depressing mall.
When the topic of the female lead’s cartoonish cruelty came up, Wiseau was ready with an answer he had seemingly given many times before.

“She is not mean,” he insisted. “She’s just manipulative, like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.”

Sestero, meanwhile, could barely get a word in edgewise, until he was asked about his book, which Wiseau said he supported “50 percent.” He laughed, of course, but it was hard to tell whether he actually felt jilted.

If Wiseau was hurt by the book’s contents, the damage was apparently not significant enough to stop him from making public appearances with Sestero, who had the unenviable task of subjecting himself to the director’s whims.  As the story goes, the actor was even asked to shave his beard mid-way through The Room’s filming, only so that his character could be addressed as ‘Babyface’—Wiseau’s nickname for him on set.

While Wiseau has clearly come to terms with laughing at himself, it’s very much on his own positive terms. Sestero’s book and Franco’s upcoming film may change that.

“It might make The Room too commercial,” Vecera suggests. “That’s what I’m a bit scared of. Maybe it won’t be a cult movie anymore.”

The Q&A eventually wrapped up, but not before Wiseau bestowed upon two audience members some kind of necklace and a semi-religious blessing of good fortune. I had no idea what was going on. I’m not sure if anyone else did, either.

Finally, it was time for the film.

Watching The Room with a big, rowdy group of superfans was clearly the only way to do it. As has become tradition, hundreds of plastic spoons were launched through the air every time one of the inexplicably framed utensils could be seen in the background. Many had also committed the majority of the dialogue to memory and would liberally converse with the characters. One group of guys answered nearly every question posed by frustrated female characters with the answer: “BECAUSE YOU’RE A WOMAN!”

Wiseau and Sestero were long gone before the movie ended, on their way to Ottawa for the next screening. In their wake was a sea of broken plastic cutlery and blissful moviegoers.

When you exit from a run-of-the-mill flick at your local multiplex, you’ll likely find yourself part of a crowd divided over the merits of what was just seen. The Room, however, is entertainingly bad to the point of transcending such subjectivity.

Perhaps audience member Noah Weigensberg put it best: “Something about everyone getting together for the same thing that’s so obscure and frowned-upon by many others really gave me a sense of belonging,”

Event organizer Stevie Vecera says additional midnight screenings of The Room will occur at Dollar Cinema over the next couple of months and that Wiseau and Sestero will be back in the summer along with other surprise guests. For more information, visit the Facebook group page “The Room – Montreal Monthly Screenings.”


@wallygoodtimes

Photo taken in the Torture Museum in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, by Orlando Crowcroft

Retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz once wrote that “all forms of torture are widespread among nations that have signed treaties prohibiting torture.” Italy is no exception. It might seem strange, but there is still no specific anti-torture legislation in that country.

On March 5th, the Italian Senate tried to fix this by approving—with 231 votes in favor and three abstentions—a bill that criminalizes torture. The measure, which will have to be evaluated by Italy's lower legislative body, the Chamber of Deputies, comes 26 years after Italy's ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

While the bill was enthusiastically received by various politicians, many (including its first signatory, Senator Luigi Manconi of the center-left Democratic Party) expressed “serious doubts and dissatisfaction with the text.” The Union of Criminal Chambers, the main association of criminal lawyers in Italy, called it a “bungled solution” and defined the act of introducing torture as a common crime instead of a crime strictly related to police forces as a “big mistake."

Italian police union SIAP also heavily criticized the bill: Secretary General Pasquale di Maria said that it “enforces a serious and absurd imbalance,” but also exposes police forces to the risk of being sentenced to “life imprisonment.” According to Pasquale di Maria, this happened thanks to “the support of certain politicians,” who have no regard for the “hundreds of injured among police forces and citizens,” in order to please the “demonstration professionals.”

But focusing on complaints can often distract us from the issues at hand. In a bid to better understand how we got here, I called Patrizio Gonnella, president of the Antigone Association, an organization for rights within the Italian penal system, and author of the book Torture in Italy.

VICE: What is your opinion on the torture bill recently approved by the Italian Senate? Can we consider this law satisfying?
Patrizio Gonnella: It is still too soon to tell. The satisfying thing is that one more step was made toward this juridical, political, and constitutional goal. For many years it seemed feasible, but in practice it was never accomplished.

The worrying thing is that it’s still considered a “generic” crime—namely a crime that can be committed by anyone, even in a context different to that of legal custody, which is where torture mainly occurs. The parliamentary debate saw references to many different contexts—organized crime or domestic violence, for example—as if torture were just a simple degeneration of private life. But torture in history represents a kind of “justice,” which exists in the realm of extracting confessions for unjustified purposes, or as a manifestation of a punishing power.

It seems like both politics and public opinion dismiss the issue of torture—as if it were something unrelated to Italy.
This is a crucial point in any democracy: No country can consider itself—or can ever remain—immune to the risk of institutional violence. Nobody can do this because torture is part of a democracy’s pathology. In order to be immune to it we have to call things by their proper name, without fear. Living in a strong democracy does not mean removing the issue—it means being able to take on the problem, recognizing it, and dealing with it.

Why did we only get a bill like this now?
The reason behind the absence of such a law can be found in the personalization of politics, based on permanent electoral campaigns and leaders who wander in the pursuit of consensus. Strong pressure is also exercized indirectly and in a concealed manner by big Italian security organizations that include both police forces and some police unions.

Many cases of torture occurred in police custody. Could the approval of a serious law against the crime of torture lead to a reform of the prison system?
The application of case law is crucial in this case. If there isn't a trial or sentence in the next few years, despite the sentencings, this kind of behavior will probably be allowed again and again. If case law is applied on the other hand, attitudes could change.

On an international level, how did the perception of torture change in Western societies after 9/11?
The US has reopened the debate on the matter of torture’s legitimacy. There have been attempts to legitimize forms of “light torture” as well (like those by the US Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney), but in the end both the Patriot Act and the European anti-terrorism legislation did not actually succeed in undermining the internationally codified principles. Things have gotten more complicated since 2001. Clearly there has been an involution within the debate, but it could have been much worse.

The following is an excerpt from Bob Saget's upcoming book, Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian, which will be available April 8, 2014.

The length of this chapter is dictated by the number of lawyers involved with this manuscript. I am not one to name names, much to the dismay of a large sector of our culture. I am of course a rehabilitating name-dropper, a condition I don’t think there is a cure for. But to talk about lascivious things I’ve done and name the people involved is not morally something I am capable of.

I’ll do my best, though. I’m sure someone will say, “Bob, please tell that story where we got all fucked-up in Vegas and we were in that suite together and that one dancer wound up in your room and another dancer wound up in my room.” Sorry, Stamos, I’m not telling it! One of those girls owns a pet store she needs to protect, as well as her relationship with her boyfriend—so no, those kinds of stories are not going to be in this chapter! Oh, wait—shit, what did I just do!? Truth be told, in the end “nothing happened,” as guys in tenth grade say. Although it’s possible Stamos shot B-roll that night.

But alas, I am not currently in a romantic relationship. At this point in time, all of the significant and meaningful relationships I have been in have met their endings. And endings are as important as beginnings. I had to put a few of them down—or they had to put me down, which is why I put them down. People can be so petulant sometimes.

I have nothing negative to say about any relationship I have ever been in. Unless you’ve got a couple hours.

One thing we all share in life is that relationships are tough. Even if you’re fortunate enough to be in a wonderful, long-lasting relationship, you know that it can be hard work at times. It amazes me that anyone is able to last more than two and a half years together. The famous term is the seven-year itch. I went out with a girl once and I ended up with a four-day itch. During a first date is not a bad time to mention that you’re a carrier of some kind.

If you want a relationship to have any chance of lasting, you have to be really honest with your partner and tell them what you want. “What you really, really want. / I wanna, I wanna, I wanna.” You have to be able to Spice Girls–up your relationship. I’m not suggesting ever bringing a third party into your bedroom. I’m suggesting bringing an all-girl band from the 90s into your bedroom.

“If you wanna be my lover / You gotta get with my friends.” The writing was right there on the wall in those lyrics. Nothing to decode.

I don’t know if I’ve made it completely clear, so I’ll reiterate it just once more—I am single at the time of this writing. Although I’ve been receiving some very hopeful texts. I still believe I can find someone who understands me. Isn’t that the core of most good relationships? We just want to be understood. And we must also desire to listen to the other person. What’s that like?

Another way to go is to look for someone who doesn’t speak your language at all. A few years back I went to Ukraine to shoot a TV show pilot about helping guys get mail-order brides. That was the opposite experience. Not one woman understood me there. It was kind of a dream. I got the same kind of reaction that I get when a woman who speaks English listens to everything I say to her: blank stares.

I was amazed how many American men wanted to bring home a bride who spoke no English. On one hand I understand it, but then on the other hand, it’s hard for me to relate; I’ve always been such a head-y person. Obviously not now, with this book and all. With therapy and counseling as tools to help a relationship work, communication is key. With two languages being spoken and neither person knowing the other’s, you are reduced to hoping for good connected sex, and beyond that, a few good meals and perhaps enjoying puppet theater together. What have I been talking about… Sold.

Maybe Jim Cameron was right. An Avatar love relationship may be the perfect one. Communication can be best without words. Words are what mess everything up. Texting doesn’t seem to be helping either. I’m looking for a woman with no thumbs. Also would rule out the possibility of her hitchhiking to get away from me.

Some of the best moments in every relationship I’ve ever had actually required no words. Maybe if I’d never spoken at all, painted my face blue, and just thrown in an “I see you” every couple days, I’d be married right now. That would be a dream. I could say one of my lame jokes, like, “Honey, you’re looking a bit blue in the face tonight.” She would just stare at me with no response.

If there’s one thing that tests a relationship more than anything else, it’s kids. Kids change everything. It’s hard to keep the romance alive through the years when you’re raising kids. There are only so many dead bolts you can put on your bedroom door. Peepholes, security camera, electric fencing... I’m embellishing. I’d never put a peephole in my bedroom door. That’s just creepy.

Then there’s work and the strain it can put on a relationship. It’s a vicious circle. I find that in my hardest-working periods my relationships take a hit—whereas when I’m in between projects, even though I’m always working, I’m more inclined to spend time seeing if this new relationship could be “the one.”

There’s that wonderful period that usually starts when you first meet someone and then miraculously it sustains itself. I haven’t been so fortunate as to have that last for all time. “All time” is a bit dramatic. “All time” means you’re with someone until the end of at least one of your lives. I think a lot of young girls do fantasize about being with their guy forever. But do they understand what that means? Till old age, till one day you’re sitting on the couch with your man watching your favorite TV show—and his eye falls out. I’m ever the romantic.

But if you have found “the one” and you’re both reading this together and you are in perfect sync, you are very lucky. Either you’ve both perfected denial or there is an unspoken agreement that one of you completely controls the other person—and they dig it.

I’m looking for my emotional and intellectual equal. Truthfully, I’ve stopped looking; I’m creating one with my own DNA in a lab. I’ve decided to make a female clone of myself rather than keep looking to meet someone. Because I listen. I’ve heard what all my past relationships were telling me. As we broke up, they all imparted upon me the same wisdom, all saying in their own way, “I wish the best for you.” One of them said that by saying, “Go fuck yourself,” but that was just her way of being playful.

Falling in love is the magic time in a relationship. We all love falling in love. It’s fun. Everything’s more fun when you’re in love. Flowers, chocolates, expensive shoes, diamonds. Until women actually quote Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

If someone’s singing that to you every day in a happy positive voice, your radar should go off. You’ve just been told that you are not this girl’s best friend. Diamonds are. Shoulda noted that when you saw her on Craigslist or JDate.

I think about relationships a lot. It frustrates me that people who fall in love, myself included, can’t cultivate that love and let it grow. I once said to a good friend of mine, “I’m 50 percent responsible in my relationships.” His reply was, “No, each one of us is 100 percent responsible.” He’s right. You can’t blame anyone. Because you were there too. A’ight, I hear you, “it was all my fault.”

I wish it could all be that fun gooey shit it’s supposed to be that fills us all with butterflies and gets our hormones happily raging. But I think the difficulty of modern-day relationships is also partly cultural. People get bored and let in a bunch of bullshit from our reality-show-driven culture and just give up.

Everybody wants everything now—like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka: “I want it now!”—and if they’re not getting what they think fills their bottomless well immediately, they flit off to a better offer. I’ve never done that. When a relationship of mine ends, I need some time to be alone, get back to myself—move back in with my mother. Take her out to dinner: “Freud, party of two, please!”

I know this chapter may be causing blue balls in some of my homeboy fans who thought this was gonna be 15 pages about pussy. What can I say? I’m not great when it comes to having a purely sexual relationship. Oh, wait, they don’t exist, do they? I am so looking forward to my 80s. I am gonna get laid so much in my 80s.

When I’m 84 all I’m gonna do is have sex. Dirty sweaty veiny old-people sex. With the most beautiful, highest-tech machines on the market. That’s right, I got it all planned. It’ll be the year 2040, and I’ll have the hookup! I’ll be getting me some old-man techno pussssayyy!!

Sorry, needed that outburst. Forget everything I just wrote. In 2040 I’d like to be spooning in bed with someone I love. Please submit your applications in double-spaced writing. John Stamos need not apply.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

—An ancient prankster motto

Who said that pranking has to only take place in your little sister's bedroom? In the Male Chef kitchen, my sous chefs and I always do our fair share of horsing around. Whether we're putting sugar in the salt shaker or smearing Vaseline on the handles of each other's sharpest knives, everyone is always down for a good laugh all 365 days of the year.

But when April Fools' Day rolls around, our goofing-off reaches an entirely different level. This time around, we wanted to share some of our most classic mealtime gags, which will have you playing with your food in no time.

* WARNING: IF YOU DON'T HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR, TURN BACK NOW!! ;-) *

A good prankster is always the earliest to rise, and victims don't even need to be conscious for the fun to begin. A little creativity can deface the epidermis of any unsuspecting slumberer and, at the same time, make him the center of attention at any early-morning potluck!

Secretly preparing a brutal brew is a sure way to make sure your victim's day is up in smoke before he even heads to work! Forget creamer for flavoring and just substitute a little menthol!

Quick thinking and a community-college degree in automotive mechanics can work together to create a real "shocking" meal (if you know what I mean)!

Thinking of eating soup for that midday meal? Why not swap your buddy's usual liquid lunch for a heaping bowl of Goya's Mexican Jumping Bean Soup?

Screw fake vomit. On April Fool's Day, you gotta make 'em puke for real with some creative switcheroos!

And nothing stops the cravings of a sweet tooth more than making sure that your roommate can no longer open his jaw!

Your friend may be on the lookout for some real nasty stuff on April Fools', so make sure to beat him to the punch with a good hidden gag!

Plastic wrapping the toilet is "so 2013." Instead, stick a cranky crustacean in that bowl to really pinch up the competition. Keep that lobster in there overnight to make sure that he/she is extra riled up come morning.

Even though you're not putting it on the toilet, save that plastic wrap for the fridge! An impenetrable force field will result in spoiled food and raging tempers.

To save you time, some pranks come ready-made. Place one of these babies on your friend's chair during a crowded dinner to really make him see red!

Simple is always best. Apply this homemade sign to the back of anyone who "eats out" because he's "always on the go." Your friend will be laughed out of every Burger King in town and left clutching an empty stomach.

Of course, the reverse always applies. After a long day of food pranking, you're gonna wanna chow down. Pick up a favorite packaged gag from the store and throw it in the oven at 400 degrees Farenheit.

Happy pranking, and good luck not getting caught!!!

With help from Misha Spivack, Hunter Steinman, John Wilson, Elena Tarchi, Greg, Michele, and Stan.

For more from the Male Chef, visit his food blog.