Everyone knows how to do a cannonball, or at least everyone who spent his summers splashing around in his local pool trying to impress girls. But does the world's easiest dive become a legitimate sport if you add a gang of German adrenaline junkies, a dose of acrobatic skills, and a 30-foot-high diving platform to it?

Splash diving is a freestyle discipline in which your task isn't to slice elegantly into the water without disturbing the surface but the opposite: the bigger the splash, the better.

It sounds easy, but it's not. Just like any other sport, splashing has its own established rules. To find out more, I got in touch with splash-diving champion and holder of several Guinness World Records, Christian Guth.

VICE: One could say you are one of the founders of the sport—how would you define splash diving?
Christian Guth: I have been practicing splash diving for a decade now, and it's still hard to define. The closest traditional sport to splash diving is probably Olympic diving, only we do it freestyle and splash on purpose.



How did the sport get started?
It all started with a bunch of friends hanging out at the local swimming pool in Bayreuth, trying to get the attention of some local ladies. We had a diving platform at our disposal, and we wanted to set ourselves apart from regular divers. One summer afternoon it crossed our minds to try a cannonball dive from the platform, and when we found out that it hurt much less than it seemed, we got hooked. We started adding different variations of somersaults and twists, and little by little we found out that it was not just a hobby—it could be a new discipline.

It really doesn't hurt?
Well, splash diving is like boxing. When you get in the ring for the first time and get hit with two well-aimed left hooks from the local champion, you will probably be crying about it for the rest of the week. But by your 20th match, you will probably know how to avoid the blow or to block it, and if you get hit you are better equipped to take it. It is the same with splash diving—with a bit of training you can get your body ready almost for anything.

Can you make a living out of splash diving?
For the first five or six years I didn't really, but it's been a couple of years now that I am trying to pay the bills with splash diving. I took a class in event management in order to combine a sport that I love with work, and I can now say that in the summer months I live like a king. In the winter, it is a bit trickier. From time to time I have to take a part-time job or freelance to be able to pay the rent.

How many splash divers do you think there are?
If I had to guess I would say something between 500 and 1,000, but you'd have to separate those who take part in competitions from those who just love splashing around at a local pool, without ever having heard it is actually a sport.

How do you score in splash diving? I suppose the amount of water you splash out is what matters.
Exactly, but it is not just about that. Even though it's a freestyle discipline, it is mandatory for every contestant to announce his or her dives in advance.

There are four dives: In the first one you are not allowed to perform any acrobatic figures, because it is all about the splash. Every other dive has its own degree of difficulty depending on the number of somersaults, twists, and positions. For example, a double somersault with half twist and a board position during the landing has a degree of difficulty of 2.7. This number is multiplied by the sum of marks from six judges. The highest and the lowest marks are discarded.

The judges assess three parts of the dive: takeoff, overall execution, and landing. For different freestyle elements (handstand, palm flip, or a grab) you get a different mark—from one to ten—from every judge. And of course, the more you splash the better. Points for each dive are added and the diver with the highest score wins. It is quite simple, really.

Photos by Thomas Hjelm

In 2007, the Miami Dolphins played the New York Giants in the first regular season NFL game to be hosted at Wembley Stadium. From what I remember, the contest was a dud: miserable weather and two mediocre teams who could barely move down the field. The next week, when England lost to Croatia in soccer (ending the team's chance to qualify for Euro 2008), Mark Lawrenson pinned the defeat on the NFL, claiming the players had churned the hallowed turf into an unplayable mess.

As convincing an argument as that was, it didn’t deter us from inviting the NFL back; the international series has been held at Wembley every year since. Some games have been good, some have been bad, and most, regrettably, have been hosted by Colin Murray. Three games will be played this season, the first of which took place yesterday, with the Miami Dolphins beating the Oakland Raiders 38–14.

To try convincing Brits they should care about a sport that—to an outsider, at least—seems to revolve around timeouts and advertising, this Saturday the NFL hosted a "fan rally" on Regent Street. With the faint hope there'd be free Coors Lite and giveaways of the kind of food that gives you renal failure, I went along to see what sort of Brit likes American football.

The NFL was actually pretty big over here during the late 80s and early 90s. Its popularity was fuelled by extensive coverage on Channel 4, and the capital even had its own professional team. The now-defunct London Monarchs played in the now-defunct NFL Europe, and their games would often attract 40,000 fans to the now-defunct old Wembley Stadium. Eager to dress up like sentient wardrobes and clatter into other men, these fans started amateur teams all over the country.

I’ve been into the sport for the best part of a decade, and a few veterans I’ve played with—guys who tend to look like battered fire hydrants—told me a team called the London Ravens once had 100 hopefuls show up to an open tryout. (The Ravens are also now defunct.)

Turning up at the Regent Street event, you’d never guess the UK had such a rich history with the game. There didn't seem to be too many genuine fans in attendance whatsoever. In fact, it mostly looked as if passing tourists had just picked up an old jersey from the nearby Lillywhites and ventured in after realizing Piccadilly Circus doesn't really offer all that much besides Union Jack–branded gear.

These guys were the first people I came across who seemed to have any sort of allegiance, with both of them representing their amateur team, the Durham County Presidents. Being the old guard of the British amateur game, they were keen to regale me with stories about the glory days.

"In the 80s, it was bigger," said Mark, the guy on the right. "I remember when I was young, seeing it on Channel 4. Dan Marino. Miami Dolphins. That was it. I've been playing ever since." 

I thought this duo was pretty typical of the British fan, and their assertion that the UK game attracts "every shape, size, color, and creed" is something I can attest to. It’s one of the true benefits of a contact sport with no links to private education.

Despite the enthusiasm, the fan rally was quickly beginning to take its toll. It takes a special kind of event to make a street best known for midnight iPad launches seem any more like the apex of commercialism, but it looked like the NFL street party could be the thing to do it. Regent Street resembled manufactured fandom repackaged as a children's party. People lined up to get their faces painted, there was an inflatable something-or-other at every turn, and it probably wouldn't have seemed too out of place if the cheerleaders had started making balloon animals. 

In short, it satisfied every hackneyed joke a high-school student could make about corporate America, and, as a fan of the game, that was kind of a bummer.

I asked the Durham County guys about the NFL’s interest in helping the grassroots game grow, and they all seemed to suggest the league couldn’t really care less. Surrounded by breakdancers and bouncy castles—all soundtracked by the kind of prog rock only fictional dads in bad TV comedies listen to—I couldn't help but agree.

Trying to up my positive mental attitude, I went looking for more fans and soon came across this guy, Boris from Switzerland. The game is (comparatively) huge there and I’ve heard some players even get paid. 

"You need passion for this game because it’s not very famous, so you really have to get into it," said Boris, before he got into a wrestling match with his teammate, leaving me no other option but to move on.

As it looked like he’d spent more time on his outfit than your average bride, it was obvious this guy was American. Captain Jack had traveled from the States with his accomplice, "Raider Pimp" Ben. It was hard to get a decent shot of either, as passing Spanish school groups kept latching onto them for photos.

In a brief spare moment, they told me about their love for the Raiders. "We’re there every game at five o’clock in the morning, getting ready to barbecue for the tailgate," said Ben.

Hearing about that game-day tradition made me acutely aware of my surroundings. He we were, on a muggy Saturday, standing in the middle of the West End while Ben, a fake sex trafficker, talked about early-morning barbecues in the Bay Area. Tailgating, as crucial to American football as shoulder pads and concussions, seemed like a depressingly unattainable fantasy standing between Natwest and a branch of Accessorize. 

I soon stumbled upon these girls near Oxford Circus. Were they the latest group to emigrate to the dark pit of Raider Nation? Is this a new breed of British American football fan? Or were they all just really into SpaceGhostPurrp and that whole Raider Klan thing he's got going? Unfortunately, it was none of those things: they were merely employed by a promo company for the day.

All five were very friendly and clearly doing their best at what they were to do, but I did feel like warning them they probably weren't going to have a lot of luck. I don't want to insult my fellow British hand-egg players, but it's not a sport you get into to look cool. Socially, playing American football in the UK is akin to extensively quoting The God Delusion on a first date. In the past, I’ve felt my football helmet was basically a metal fedora.

When I asked the girls what they thought of the crowd at the fan rally, I think one was being kind when she said there were some "interesting characters" in attendance.

These guys wanted a plug for their team. If the NFL won’t help them out, I will. Shouts to the London Hornets.

As the day passed the proceedings continued to lack any real identity. The NFL has billed this as a "home" game for the Raiders, but the only indication of any Oakland advantage was a few more silver and black T-shirts dotted throughout the street.

Resigning myself to the fact my favorite sport will likely forever be a novelty in the UK, I made my way down Regent Street, past the Sports Lobster—whatever the fuck that is—and headed for home. But on the way out, I noticed some guys handing out fliers.

The trio were recruiting for the London Warriors junior team. For those familiar with the British league, they need little introduction. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, their senior squad is the British American Football equivalent of Man City, only without the financial backing of a billionaire and anywhere near the same amount of fans, media coverage, or international merchandising revenue. 

Raymond, Reece, and Mohammed explained why they don't care about any of that: "When we’re training, we see the senior team together, like a family. That builds us up."

The results speak for themselves. Two weeks ago the senior Warriors team won the BritBowl (the British equivalent of the Super Bowl) for the second season in a row, and their success can probably be linked to their "academy"-style setup. "The coaching at the younger age means we play at a higher level. You have to be willing to put your work in."

Obviously that work ethic doesn’t end at the sidelines. I can’t think of many other sports where teenagers would give up their Saturday to recruit players to their team, but the desire to raise American football from beyond the fringes makes some youngsters go beyond the call of duty. When I was their age, I spent my Saturdays playing Madden and teaching myself how to roll spliffs. It’s little wonder my junior team was so shit.

Hopefully this same level of dedication will stretch to other amateur clubs. While I spoke to a lot of people who'd played the game, most were just fans. They either got into the NFL through friends, television or video games. A lot of them were older and few believed it would ever reach the lofty heights of our traditional national pastimes, like football, rugby and televised darts.

But we can still dream; perhaps things might be different if more British NFL fans finally get around to suiting up themselves.

Follow Jack Blocker and Thomas Hjelm on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Chris Devers

On Wednesday, prosecutors released security footage from the Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart where 22-year-old John Crawford III was fatally shot by police on August 5. Also on Wednesday, a grand jury decided not to bring charges against Sean Williams, the officer who killed Crawford. This all seems depressingly normal: A black man is dead for little or no reason, everyone agrees it’s a very, very sad thing, and you can’t help but think that he wouldn’t be dead if he were white.

The August 5 incident began when Crawford picked up an air rifle in the store and aimlessly fiddled with it as he spoke on a cell phone to his girlfriend. Unbeknownst to him, police officers Sean Williams and David M. Darkow were on the scene after responding to a call from a man named Ronald Ritchie, who told 9-1-1 a black man was waving a gun and pointing it at children. The full surveillance footage does not match up with that account, and Ritchie has now changed his story. The final two minutes of footage show Crawford being seemingly unaware that police were there, as he chats on his phone. And police in turn gave him no time at all to drop the rifle before shooting. Crawford’s last words—heard over the phone by his girlfriend—were “It’s not real!”

Currently, Crawford’s death is being treated as a tragedy by the authorities, but a mostly unavoidable one. According to the grand jury, the cops responded appropriately considering what they heard from dispatch—who, Williams’s report says, told them that Crawford was waving around a real gun. Even if Crawford failed to obey their “repeated commands” to drop the weapon, however, the surveillance footage shows that he didn’t have any time to do so before the cops opened up.

Though the grand jury declined to bring charges, the Department of Justice is now investigating Crawford’s death. But precedent—such as the time 13-year-old Andy Lopez was shot by cops in California for holding a fake gun, and the officer who killed him was not charged with anything—suggests that the shooting was indeed “reasonable” according to the standards by which police shootings are officially judged.

It’s hard not to wonder what’s to blame here: Ritchie’s inaccurate 9-1-1 call, hyped-up fears over active shooters, the Walmart employees’ leaving an unpackaged air rifle out on a shelf. But while we’re breaking down the tragedy piece by piece, we should ask the question Albert Butler asked on the Root last month: “Ohio is an ‘open carry’ state. So even if Crawford were carrying a real, fully loaded rifle, why would that raise any alarms? How could that possibly be a reason to kill him?”

Whether you like it or not, in many places around the country it’s legal to walk around brandishing a gun. And if you want to preserve that right—and gun rights in general—you should be outraged about Crawford’s death. The NRA should be all over this cause, just as the group should be praising the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and their armed protest. In America, you shouldn’t be a police target if you’re black; neither should you be one if you are legally carrying a gun.  

Now on to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-The authorities in South Carolina released dashcam video Wednesday of a state trooper shooting a man after asking him to show his license. The September 4 incident took place in a gas station parking lot after Levar Jones was pulled over for not wearing a seat belt. In the video, Jones can be seen getting out of his car, then trooper Sean Groubert shoots him four times as he reaches back into the vehicle for his ID. Jones raises his hands into the air as Groubert fires his final shot, a disturbing echo of the “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” gesture made by anti–police violence protesters in Ferguson. Thankfully, Jones will be OK—or as OK as you can be after being shot—though he suffered a hip injury from one of the bullets. He can even be heard in the dashcam video speaking to the trooper, saying “What did I do, sir?... I can’t feel my leg. I just grabbed my license, I don’t know what happened.” Groubert’s conduct was so staggeringly over the top that he has already been fired, and faces up to 20 years in prison for aggravated assault and battery.

-On Tuesday, video of New York Police Department officers throwing a pregnant woman onto the ground belly-first was released by a local police watchdog group. The Saturday incident, filmed by a bystander, allegedly started when the cops stopped by the woman’s 17-year-old son, John Lemos, for possessing an illegal knife. The boy’s mother objected to her son being arrested and yelled, after which a cop put her on the pavement, straddled her, and allegedly Tasered her in the stomach. The unborn babe is fine, but the woman reportedly had a burn on her stomach, and now has a summons for disorderly conduct. Lemos, who received several facial contusions during his arrest, was charged with possessing a weapon and resisting arrest.

-A federal judge decided that Anderson County, Tennessee, sheriff’s deputies do not have immunity from a civil rights lawsuit over an invasive 2010 drug search. Back then the officers, under the watchful eye of a doctor, medically paralyzed Felix Booker in order to conduct a cavity search for cocaine. They found the drug, but the search was thrown out for being unconstitutional (and also probably for being incredibly horrific and terrifying). With this court ruling, Booker’s lawsuit against the cops and the doctor will be allowed to move forward.

-Speaking of lawsuits: A 51-year-old woman who was shown on video being punched repeatedly by a member of the California Highway Patrol in July has reached a $1.5 million settlement with police. The puncher, Daniel Andrew, will be allowed to resign instead of being fired for hitting Marlene Pinnock about 15 times then tossing her into a psych ward.

-Several witnesses told the local media that on Monday, El Paso, Texas, police prevented three men from rescuing a woman trapped in her car, which was stuck in a drainage canal. The woman, 64-year-old Constance Manzanares, had drowned when ambulances came an hour and a half later. It’s understandable that police would be concerned over bystanders wanting to risk their own lives to rescue someone, but threatening people with arrest if they tried to help (as the reportedly did) seems downright bizarre.

-Our Good Cop of the Week this week is Pittsburgh detective Jack Mook, who is the sort of person who shames the rest of us through kindness. Mook owns a nonprofit gym to help kids get off the streets and recently completed the process of adopting an 11-year-old and a 15-year-old who he met there. Can someone make a TV movie about Mook? It’ll be like season four of The Wire except everything works out in the end.

Previously: A Court Ruled That a SWAT Raid on a Barbershop Was Totally Ridiculous

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

If you aren’t submerged in the over-the-top world of Toronto politics, you may not know what FordFest is. But for those of us who live and breathe the ongoing carnival of municipal elections in Ontario’s capital, we’re very familiar with the public party that Rob, Doug, and the rest of the Fords throw for their constituents. There’s carnival games, free burgers, free Ford T-shirts, and of course, the Fords. During the last FordFest, there was a physical altercation between Ford Nation-ites, and a group of LGBT protesters. It was a sad scene.

Over the weekend, my editor asked me to visit FordFest myself, for my very first FordFest experience. September’s event was held in Etobicoke, Rob Ford’s stomping grounds. After battling Toronto’s hellish traffic and construction, I finally arrived at the event, which was held next to a Sears outlet off 401 West in a spread of green grass. Ford supporters had already clogged the crosswalks donning Ford-centric T-shirts and signs as I idled at the 20-minute wait for the left turn into the parking section (it’s free, like everything at FordFest).

Once I parked, the fun began. So here’s how it went:

6:00 PM: Entering the Worship Tent

I walk speedily to what my photographer and I refer to as the Worship Tent—wherein Doug Ford is standing in the centre surrounding by adorers shaking hands. I push my way through the crowd to get my first glimpse at the baby-faced mayoral candidate. Nearly every person has some form of camera out paparazzi-style trying to get their own photo for social media that will surely attract a dollop of likes and comments. I hold my notebook up near my face fighting through the folds of the crowd. It’s surprisingly quiet except for the cheesy music—it’s the kind of neutral pop and rock you’d hear in any retail store.

Two little blonde girls, clad in pink, push one of my legs screaming: “I want to see Doug!” It’s slightly terrifying that children under 10 have the capacity to understand what’s going on here. “Wait your turn, you’ll get to see him,” their mother reassures them. Those who get their photos return through the crowd triumphantly, smartphones in hand showing off their prize. I think I’ve seen enough of this clusterfuck.

I walk off into the more sparsely populated area of the event to chat up Ford supporters. I meet a guy named Frank Acri, a resident of Rexdale who claims to be a personal friend of Rob Ford. He claims to have been a supporter of the Ford family since 1995, and tells me how “heartbroken” he was when he found out about Rob’s cancer.

“It’s very sad that Rob had to pass at the time. We’re in very good hands with Doug.” He tells me how when his own father died, Rob was the first person at the funeral. As he rests his “Ford For Mayor” sign on his shoulder, he tells me how the Fords are all about family, and that’s important to him. It’s a common sentiment here—many of the people here are with significant others and children.

As I walk away from Acri, the associate of a guy running for a council seat taps me on the shoulder. He’s with Anthony Internicola, who is running for Ward 40 in Scarborough, Norm Kelly’s seat. He’s with his wife and two young daughters wearing a black cowboy hat. I ask him how he feels about Doug taking over for Rob in Toronto’s mayoral race.  He says it doesn’t make a difference to him, and that they’re essentially the same person when it comes to policy.

“It’s good in a sense because it shows that the family’s united and that’s what we stand for over here—sticking by family no matter what through the hard times and the good times,” he says as one of his daughters clutches his hand. For him, a big part of supporting the Fords is also about transit policy. He calls the transit plan Doug put out earlier in the week (which spelled a couple station names incorrectly) “fantastic.” He isn’t a fan of Olivia Chow’s, which focuses more on above-ground transit, saying that it will make congestion worse. He says, “I know Ford is going to win.”

Everyone here seems pretty positive that Doug is going to win the October 27 election despite poll results that placing John Tory is in the lead. There’s no point in trying to tell them otherwise. Children are running around the lawn eating big white clouds of free cotton candy and waiting in long lines to get on the carousel or the Go-gator—a kid-sized rollercoaster that looks like a deranged, yellow alligator. This whole thing is starting to feel inherently American (and I would know since I am American, after all). Have I unknowingly transported into my home country? Everything is in a red, white, and blue colour scheme and they’re even giving out free burgers. I can’t decide if this is making me homesick or just nauseous.

My photographer and I go up to a trio of people wearing “Ford For Mayor” shirts that were signed by Doug Ford. They’re visibly excited about the fact that the mayoral candidate wrote on their clothing. I talk to who they say is the best speaker of the group, a guy named Robert Taylor who lives on Dufferin Street. He’s a bristly, thin fellow with salt-and-pepper hair covering his face and head, blue collar through and through. Taylor talks about how Rob has always fought for the “little man” keeping taxes low in the city. As for the other candidates, Taylor says, “Olivia Chow to me is no better than a communist… John Tory has no right to be in this race.” OK.

7:00 PM: “King Ford is coming!”

I walk over to the left side of the stage where a cover band is playing Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” The crowd is waiting for their shining star, Rob Ford, to appear, presumably against his doctor’s orders (chemotherapy patients and large crowds are not a good mix).

I find my photographer pushed up against the caution tape separating the crowd from the security guards readying for Robbie’s arrival. A group of people with Caribbean accents surrounds me when they see my notebook. They don’t want to give me their names, but they do want to rant. One lady shouts, “King Ford is coming!” She also calls Rob the Obama of Canada. Hmmmm, that’s food for thought.

A guy in a baseball cap calls the Ford family The Fordashians. Another dude clutching a Rob Ford bobblehead talks about ramming through the caution tape like a bull when his favourite politician appears. This is too bizarre. I’ve never even been to an event where a Ford was present, so this was starting to reach overload levels for me.

7:30 PM: Haters, addiction, and cancer

Rob finally takes the stage in all his alabaster-hued glory. I look back from my spot a few people back from the front to a sea of people—the sun is going down and children are perched on their fathers’ shoulders. A guy behind me whistles so intensely that I feel his breath through my hair. It’s so crowded I can barely move and when Rob starts talking, the speaker near me is turned up so high my ears start ringing.

“I love you Ford Nation, I love ya!” he exclaims. FordFest is at its peak, erupting at the long-awaited sound of their dear leader. He talks about the haters, and personifies his addiction in an unsettling mafiaesque metaphor by saying “I took that guy out the back and I took care of him,” then talks cancer. Rob says his doctor approached him two weeks ago to tell him he was going to face a “guy” worse than his addiction. “I said, ‘Who is that guy?’ And he said, ‘cancer.’ I said, ‘Really, eh?’ I said, ‘You know what, go tell cancer that I’m going to put him where I put that guy in the mirror three months ago!”

The crowd explodes in approval. In fact, after every word Rob speaks, someone yells back in approval. “Yes!” “That’s right!” “Oh yeah!” Some of them even finish his sentences. They’re entranced, and there’s almost this religious aura to the entire thing. I’m not going to lie—it’s creepy. 

By the end of the speech, Rob has turned from alabaster to a warm shade of pink. After spewing dubious statistics, he introduces who he says is Toronto’s next mayor and his best friend: his brother Doug Ford.

Doug starts out by praising his bro and talking about how he was working even when he was in the hospital, which gets the crowd really riled up. He repeats the same mantra as Rob and urges people to get out and vote. While the crowd responds to him, you can tell that Rob is the real superstar. Regardless of what people today have tried to tell me, Doug is a different person. He talks of the Fords’ strategy over the years in politics:

“We told the truth and we were ourselves, and we fought against the special-interest groups and the privileged few and we turned the power to the people,” he says. This seems a bit incongruent with the fact that Rob lied about smoking crack for all those months and with the fact that the Fords are “the privileged few”—they’re filthy fucking rich, people. Doug ends his speech near 8 PM with an obligatory, “God bless the great people of Toronto!”

At that point, ‘You Can Go Your Own Way’ by Fleetwood Mac blares on the speakers following the closing of Doug’s speech.

8:15 PM: I drink the Kool-Aid.

I thought it would just be irresponsible to not try the free food offered at FordFest. I get in line and wait for a half-hour for a burger. I chat up a guy behind me in line wearing a “Everything is better in Texas” shirt who is doing his best Elvis impression for me. FordFest volunteers warn that they’re running out of burgers. Fuck. I make it to the front just in time. My photographer and I walk to the condiment tables, now completely in the dark and demolished by the previous hours. We hold a bulk-sized ketchup bottle upside-down and shake for a minute to get out the last drops on our naked burgers. I bite down. It’s tasteless, all texture (though if you listen to Joe Warmington, the Fords’ unofficial media mouthpiece, you may have thought the “delicious… steak” burgers were the greatest culinary achievement in Toronto history). The meat quality tastes American, like almost everything at FordFest. We do one last round of the event before walking to my car at the end of the parking lot.

We pass a pile of fragrant vomit adjacent to my parking spot—finally someone understands how I feel.


@allison_elkin
@beccalemire

Photo by Brendan Jaccarino

Fancy Lad Skateboards co-owner and only pro, Colin Fiske, shocked the skateboard world last week when he released a 57-minute-long skateboard part. To put it into perspective, the average part is around three to five minutes. We live in an age of hyper competitive and curated skateboarding, where skateboarders film months, sometimes years, for what will end up as a handful of tricks in a big-budget skate video. In this landscape, Colin's part—and his whole outlook on skateboarding—is a welcome throwback to a simpler, some might say more fun, time.

Over the past five to seven years I’ve found that responses from skaters to questions about chasing the "Skate Dream” have shifted from going on adventures with pals/seeing the world, to being rich and famous and the best. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… it’s just a different outlook than the one I came of age with. A more jockish outlook. At the tail end of the 80s and through the 90s, very few people aspired to be professional skaters. There wasn't any money in it, and so the Dream back then was simply to avoid growing up for as long as humanly possible, while also seeing as many wonderful places as you could (generally on a budget that consisted of change found in couch cushions and ashtrays).

So it was refreshing to have a chat with Fiske, who was one of PJ Ladd’s backup skaters in the most successful skateshop video of all time, Coliseum’s PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life. I’d never spoken to Fiske before, and I made a poor assumption that the Boston bike messenger surviving on food stamps would be somewhat bitter about missing the chance at living the Dream that his PJLWHL co-stars PJ Ladd, Ryan Gallant, and Jereme Rogers did. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Twelve years after Wonderful Horrible’s release, Fiske’s dream remains as pure and wonderful as ever: “The dream was just to get tricks on video and blow other people’s minds," he said.

I can think of nothing more mind-blowing than an hour long solo skate part (aside from mailing Julien Stranger a ransom note and your toenails, of course).

VICE: You just put out the first—and more than likely last—57-minute solo skate part. What the fuck? What’s the thinking behind it? Do you have a terminal disease?
Colin Fiske: Yes, Chris. My cells are mutated. I’m not proud that I went and did something like this. There is no excuse, really. Kids: this is not OK to do.

But seriously—what were you thinking?
There’s no real reason that I did this. All these parts are like on one hard copy each in existence, so I saved it in the web all in one, with some movie clips that I think are really cool, too. We have tons of footage on VHS tapes around the house, and we had this one other video which got lost and no one ever got to see it. I wanted to take all the footage I had left and put it in one spot, so I just sat down and edited it all together. That’s not even all of it. I couldn’t filter out enough of those wallrides where I touch my hands on the walls.

Did you expect people to sit and watch all 57-minutes in one shot?
Oh, fuck no! I didn’t even make it for people. I don’t really think ahead. I didn’t review it or anything. I just put it together and didn’t go back because I’m not about to watch it for a full hour. I just immediately put it on YouTube, but after having watched it again I can see there’s a lot of shit that I shouldn’t have put in there because I can’t sit through it. Like I said, my god, how many times have I touched the wall with my hands? And there are so many repeat tricks. But I guess that’s one of the joys of YouTube; you can just skip around.

Was your 57-minute opus in any way a commentary on the nonstop ultra-short webclips that the internet is inundated with daily?
I didn’t actually have that on my mind when I did it, but you can think of it that way. Did you just use the word inundate? I don’t know what that word means. Truth is, I just want hard copies in VHS or DVD of videos because it’s so much easier on my brain. Every time I go near the computer my eyes or brain swell. I literally feel it swelling and it’s no fun. I watch the shit anyway, but every time I do I try and think of a way out.

So you’re not on skate-porn tube sites, like Hellaclips, every day?
Fuck no. I don’t watch skate videos at all. I have to limit my time on the computer so I only go on the BoneDeth BMX and Animal Bikes websites, both of which are just BMX shit. It’s just what gets me psyched. I'll watch a skate video if somebody sends one to me because I love skateboarding, but if it’s on my own, I just watch BMX stuff.

When did the fascination with BMXing begin?
I BMXed before I skated. I always BMXed, but then three years ago I bought an all black BMX off craigslist for 300 bucks. She fit real good, and because my muscles are bigger than when I was a kid, I was just immediately better at it than before.

Are you considering a pro BMX career? You do realize pro BMXers make even less than unemployed bike messengers.
I can’t do tricks and I'm not about to start. I jump a lot of shit—trash bags, whatever. I can’t table top, though. I can’t 360, but I do want some pegs. I bet I can do handrails. I wanna get on those rails.

Are you still a bike messenger? Ever gotten doored?
My body is covered in scars. Yeah, I was doored a long time ago. I got my third eye open now though so that doesn’t happen any more. I've been doing that job since 2005, I think—best job I've ever had. It's fun being a bike messenger because it’s pure—no need to video the stunts. I went through a car window once a few summers ago. All these pedestrians were looking at me laying on the ground with their stupid eyes. I was laying there, side open, leg bone out, clavicle snapped, just chilling with some dude holding my blood in. I radioed a dispatcher to send a kid to finish my run. Ambulance dudes show up, scissor my clothes off, and right as they did it started to hail on me. I looked up at everybody's dumb looking eyes and I could not stop giggling. They couldn’t stop Bob [Burnquist], they can’t stop Fiske.

What’s the story about you sending your toenails to Julien Stranger?
I vaguely remember that. People tell me it happened, so it must have happened. What I can make of it was the free boards stopped coming so I sent a ransom note and I drew a picture of a bloody toe. The Big Lebowski was on my mind the whole time; I was just thinking about how funny I was. But I guess it turned out to be not so funny on that end... On my side all my friends think it’s great. I can see how that sort of thing might upset someone though. No hard feelings, Julien. Thanks for the boards, guys.

What was Julien’s reaction?
I didn’t ever talk to Julien again. I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked to him. He was like a shadow government for me that was sending me boards. But I am really grateful. They sent me a shitload of boards when I was a kid; it was awesome. But sometimes you just overstay your welcome, and when you’re a kid you don’t realize it. Tony Vitello told me Julien was really weirded out by it and he humored the idea of calling the cops on me, though obviously he didn't.  

What happened with you and Heroin Skateboards?
I am a child. Fos is a child. It’s simple. I just sent him my parts edited up and he didn’t like the music so he dismissed me. No hard feelings. He’s got Gou Miyagi now. Gou is a nasty agro righteous fellow. But I am still down for Fos.

Do you think there’s a curse to PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life where everyone who was in the video will eventually go crazy?
All skaters are crazy. In fact, I think all people are insane. Who isn’t? Children pretend, grown ups pretend... they have linked gluten to schizophrenia. I don’t fuck around with gluten. I've tried schizophrenia, but that shit didn’t take with me. 

Who were you riding for when PJLWHL came out?
I never actually made money from skateboarding. I never had cash in hand. The only money I ever made was $1000 from that PJ video, and Fos gave me some money for food when I was in Europe for three weeks, but that’s it. I maybe made $2000 from skating. What was your question?

Doesn’t matter. Let’s keep talking about this. You’ve made $2000 in 12 years from skateboarding. Have you given up the Dream?
No, no, no. The Dream is always there. I got plans. I got this one trick that I have to build a special board for… it’s going to blow your mind.

But when that video dropped and everyone was getting scooped up did you think you were going to get scooped up too?
No, I never had that idea. Never once have I had that thought. That was never the Dream. The Dream was just to get tricks on video and blow other people’s minds, and it doesn’t matter whose. If it’s just people near you or the whole world; whatever happens, happens.

Never any aspirations to move to California and be a big-time pro?
I went to California for a little bit but I wasn’t good enough. I was hanging around with tons of people who were way better than me. I understood that. I think maybe my diet was wrong. I ate a shitload of candy. I can’t fully blame it on that. But the reason I got so much footage is that I went filming with my friends and it was always a good time. It was never stressful like filming for a company, or for work, or with people you didn’t know.

When Wonderful Horrible Life was being filmed were you all one big crew?
Yeah, we were just one crew. We went on a bunch of road trips and laughed the whole time. Nobody knew anything. When you’re young you don’t know anything. You’re not smart—all you know is skateboarding. So we just laughed the whole time. And no one did drugs back then. Nobody. No drinking, smoking, or anything. I think that’s why we did so well.

Were you shocked by the success that video had at the time?
The success of the video was probably just fake hype from Arty and Matt [owners of Coliseum Skateshop]. It was just them talking it up and sending out promos. They kept going on websites, chat rooms, and message boards under different names and saying it was the best video and talking it up.

Come on. You’re downplaying it. Everyone, everywhere loves that video.
But maybe they were sneaky enough to make everybody believe it was the best video. And because they kept talking about it, everybody kept talking about it. But yeah, it was a good video.

Got a good PJ Ladd story from back then?
Yeah. We shared a moment one time. You know he’s really elusive and doesn’t really talk about anything, but we shared a moment. Him and I were skating the financial district all night and we were going to get water and I had crashed on a crack. I was on the ground in pain in the middle of the street, and I turned around and PJ is on the ground writhing in pain, rolling on the sidewalk because he had also crashed on a different crack at the exact same time as I did. We really shared a moment there. I saw him laugh and I was I like, ‘Yeah. Sick. I’m friends with PJ.’ I haven’t talked to him in years, but that was the height of our friendship right there; we both fell on a different crack at the same time. It was a good time.

What’s next for you? An even longer video part?
As for our company, Fancy Lad, it’s doing great and we have a new video coming soon. And our new boards will come equipped with flint drilled into the tails and held with the strongest glue made from the best horses in America. We’re calling them Pony Tails. And for me, I have a few stunts in mind that I’ve been thinking about doing for two years. Hammers. I have to get to them. I have one 25-foot gap on a bike with a downhill run up onto a flowerbed. As soon as I get a bigger sprocket, I can do that. It’ll be the biggest gap I’ve ever done and I’ll wreck a bunch of flowers, too, not that I’m into wrecking flowers—but it so happens that I’ll run through a bunch of flowers on the landing. The other trick I’ve been toying with is switch casper slides. But my foot kept slipping off because the nose is curved, so I got my man in New York who's going to make me a special skateboard without a nose or a tail. It’s just a flat part and I’ll put griptape on the bottom side of the tail and I’m going to do a switch casper slide firecracker down this seven-stair that I know. It’s going down. So that’s it. One trick. I don’t have future plans. I have two tricks and then after that happens…why stop?

Just think of another two tricks.
Yeah, exactly.

Follow Fancy Lad on Blogspot and Instagram

More stupid can be found on Chris's website and Twitter

Photos by Jeff Cheng

Whatever happens next, last night is going down in Hong Kong history. Following a full week of student strikes, an estimated 200,000 protestors poured into the city’s financial district surrounding government buildings as part of Occupy Central. Their demands, at their heart, are relatively simple: They want to be able to vote for whomever they want, rather than from a selection of candidates hand-picked by the national government in Hong Kong.

On Sunday morning, residents began gathering in droves at the news that police had blocked off roads to either side of the Legislative Council, preventing more people from returning to the student sit-in from the night before.

This peaceful standoff endured for some time. But around 6 PM, people began pressing toward the police-manned barricades chanting, “CY Leung [Hong Kong’s chief executive], grow some balls!” and raising their hands in the air to indicate their nonviolent intentions.

The cops acted quickly, aiming pepper spray at the eyes of those on the front line and lobbing teargas canisters into the crowd. Panic ensued, as a confused and blinded crowd tumbled over each other and legged it away from the clouds of stinging smoke.

Protesters use umbrellas to protect themselves from tear gas

Throughout the night teargas was used 87 times in different areas of the city, according to police, along with repeated baton charges in a relentless attempt to disperse the demonstrators.

“They gave us no warning,” sobbed Grace Chan, a 19-year-old who had turned up alone despite warnings from her parents. “This is how our government treats us. We’re unarmed; we just have umbrellas and goggles [to protect against pepper spray and tear gas]. How can they do this to us?”

Police inside clouds of tear gas

After the initial shock of such force being used in one of the safest and nonviolent cities in the world, kids showed undeniably bravery and determination, retreating calmly when teargas was fired but returning as soon as the toxic clouds cleared. Rumors that the army had been deployed and that rubber bullets were being fired led to tense moments of an almost eerie silence, with some students swearing passionately that they were ready to die.

The “umbrella revolution,” as it’s being dubbed on social media, soon spread to the key commercial and tourist districts of Causeway Bay and Mongkok. The crowds seemed to be winning, with police tactics proving ineffective at getting the protests to disperse for good.

Police hold a sign warning protesters of their intentions

By Monday morning the rows of heavily armed riot police retreated to loud cheers from the masses. Half the city had been brought to a solid standstill. Most banks and schools were closed, bus routes were blocked, and roads usually buzzing with merchants stood empty. Tens of thousands of protestors remained, many now using their umbrellas as a tool to shield them from the sweltering sun.

Relative calm ensued. Litter was picked up, people avoided sitting on the grass, and pathways were cleared for passing shoppers. Mounds of supplies arrived in the form of water bottles and individually wrapped biscuits; signs reading “We are very sorry for the inconvenience but we need democracy” were hung up over signposts, motivational speeches were made from every corner, and singing and chanting carried on into the night.

The authorities don’t seem to have an answer for the situation. CY Leung has publicly begged the demonstrators to go home and not to cause any more disruption. At a press conference earlier today, Hong Kong’s Chief Secretary Carrie Lam defended the police decision to use “necessary force” to disperse last night’s crowds.

Student leaders and Occupy Central organizers, meanwhile, have urged protestors to hold out until October 1, Chinese national day, when the next stage of civil disobedience will be announced.

“I will stay for as long as it takes,” said Jackson Tsung, a university student who has not showered or eaten warm food since Friday. “I am scared about what will happen to me, but what’s the point in living if we can’t live in a place we can call home?” 

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The email from my father, entitled “Grandma passed away,” arrived at 8 AM on a Monday. The profundity with which I did not care about said email could not be overstated. Another email, which I received at the same time, informed me that my existence as a “social media influencer” rendered me eligible to redeem a Klout perk, the perk in question being unfettered access to the first episode of ABC’s Selfie before other, less influential, plebes got ahold of it. I opened the Klout email first, in spite of the fact I had no desire to watch the first episode of Selfie. I just found it more interesting than my father’s.

After eventually reading his message (a matter-of-fact account of where my grandmother was born, and where and when she died, coupled with a photograph of her looking pained alongside my half sister), I immediately typed a response. “The profundity with which I do not care about this information cannot be overstated,” I began, then promptly deleted, not out of tact but because I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction of knowing I had read his email. Because I don’t speak to him, nor did I speak to my (now-deceased) grandmother. Because begrudgingly being related to someone does not mean you owe them anything, up to and including mourning their “passing.”

I’ve never been close to my father’s side of the family; time has only estranged us further. People always assume the lack of intimacy and love I have for them is a personality flaw, the byproduct of sociopathy or narcissism. I am, however, neither a sociopath nor narcissistic. (Well, OK, I’m somewhat narcissistic, but that’s to be expected—this is, after all, the Age of the Selfie.) I am, rather, a pragmatic person who fails to see the joy in flailing a dead horse, familial or no, when the corpse of said horse has spent decades stinking up her emotional barn.

Despite our blood ties, I do not feel the need to speak to my father, nor his (now-deceased) mother, nor his sister, nor my half-sister, because doing so has always been a soul-sucking ordeal. They are profoundly damaged individuals, the presence of which in my life depresses me to no end. I don’t think I’m alone in this line of thinking, but the combination of confusion and disgust potential mourners gave me when told them I viewed my grandmother’s death with indifference made me feel monstrous. This feeling, however, is nothing new, and nothing I should feel monstrous about. It’s logical.

When I was a child, the only thing I ever prayed for was the death of my grandmother. The hatred I had for the woman was intense enough that, while I was raised in a non-religious household, I felt the need to beg a God I didn’t believe in to smite her. Her death, as of last Monday, proved that sometimes prayers do come true, so long as one’s willing to wait 20 years for them to come to pass. Do I feel as though I should feel bad about the prayers I made as a frustrated preteen? Of course. Do I actually feel bad about them? Of course not.

“She was a pretty miserable person,” my mother replied when I texted her the news of my grandmother’s death. She was, indeed, miserable. In a way, miserable was all she was. The sort of person who relished the opportunity to make everyone in her vicinity feel as profoundly unhappy as she did, my grandmother constantly complained about physical ailments, loved yelling at retail employees (a particularly memorable incident involved a vocal dispute over a ten cent overcharge at Kmart), and threatened suicide when she didn’t get her way. The woman was infantile, an elderly child, who I had the unpleasant experience of growing up around as a biological child.

My first memory is of walking into the ocean, being dragged into the undertow, then being dragged out by my grandmother and viciously spanked for the inconvenience of making her get her hair wet. I was three years old. Her childlike solution to the problem made sense, given the childlike way in which she interacted with the world. When I, as a ten-year-old, was given the task of watching my sister, I shook her undeveloped head when she cried, wanted nothing more than to shut her up. The difference between the actions of my grandmother and I, however, was that I was an actual child. She was merely an emotional one.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

I know plenty of people who have either forgiven, or chosen to ignore, the unforgivable, unignorable faults of miscellaneous family members because “blood is thicker than water,” “family comes first,” and “insert third additional trite saying here.” I know a girl who still Christmases at the home of a mother who used to beat her. A person who stays civil with a brother who used to molest her. And so on.

My grandmother never beat me, other than that time at the beach. She never locked me in a closet. She was more of a lock herself in the closet kind of gal. She never really did anything despicable enough to warrant my prayers for her “passing,” yet I resented her nonetheless.

My father never beat me either, nor fingered me, or whatever else fathers do to solicit the hatred of their children. But he did once dangle me over a third floor balcony upside down, despite my pleas to stop, because he thought it was funny. He did punch a hole in the hallway wall, which my mother promptly covered up with a Sears portrait of my (now-deceased) sister and I. He did write phrases like “blood money” and “fuck you” in the subject line of the child support checks he gave me to pass along to my mother after a session of weekend dadding. He did impregnate a woman named Prandy. Prandy. With a P. And so on.

These actions, as well as the actions of my grandmother, in and of themselves are not inexcusable. The constructive criticisms I made afterward, however—the pleas for them to recognize what they had done, and why they had done it (mental illness, natch) and to seek assistance—always fell on deaf ears. It was always Koester v. World. You were with them, or against them. The fact that they could be in the wrong was impossible. I, after bloodying my head against a wall for decades, gave up. Years later, I was told one-eighth of my DNA died. And I felt nothing.

There is something to be said for reaching a limit, understanding a person’s a lost cause, and walking away. Is it selfish? Perhaps. But making you waste your time on their horseshit is pretty selfish in and of itself, ain’t it? If someone’s gotta be selfish, it may as well be the one without the problem.

Juvenile as the sentiment may be, I never asked to be born. (I did, however, ask for a side of ranch dressing.) Nor did my father actively, as far as I could tell, want to procreate—rather, he seemingly found it necessary as a virile, married man. He created life, sure, this life. By fucking my mother. La-di-da.

Coitus is the most self-indulgent act one could possibly participate in that creates the least self-indulgent result, human life. Popping off in a broad is no more of a commitment than paying a $30 bar tab—arguably, it’s even less of one. He made me, because he didn’t know any better, and his mother made him, in between suicide attempts, for the same reason. Should any of us be here? No. Is it OK that the less damaged ones amongst us ignore the more damaged? Yes. Because why should we not?

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Photos by Jake Lewis

The British "freshers" week experience is now such a well-defined ritual that it's almost impossible to talk about it without veering into cliche. Here's an explainer for Americans: You wear a shit T-shirt, drink yourself just shy of a stomach pump, and sleep with anyone. For those who enjoy loud noises and organized fun, it’s a hoot. For those who don’t, it’s not.

That said, my freshers week was five years ago now, and since then a lot has changed in the world of higher education. Fees have blown up to £9,000 ($15,000) per year from the £3,000 ($5,000) I’ve just started paying back and universities are taking advantage of this by squeezing in record numbers of students. Even if the rituals are the same, I wondered, are the students themselves any different?

I decided to go and take a look for myself, choosing as my case study a King’s College London event that I attended when I first started there half a decade ago. The event in question? A four-legged "pajama pub crawl." Nothing gets you ready for three years of reading Jacques Lacan like being publicly bound to another humiliated teenager as rugby players feed you Jägerbombs.

The crawl started at the uni halls (dorms, for Americans), which we couldn’t get into. So Jake the photographer and I sat around until we saw a fleet of drunken 18-year-olds come sailing down Borough High Street. We joined in at the back of the group, where a few eyebrows were raised at Jake’s presence until we managed to pass him off as a post-grad who just likes to document everything he does because he's a bit weird.

Accepted into the fold, and literally strapped to a group of strangers, I could start to judge the differences between freshers then and now.

The author making friends

BOOZE

When I was at uni, it was the medical students who always went the hardest. The arts and humanities crew might have been the ones with posters of famous heroin addicts on their walls, but most of their nights consisted of smoking bad weed and trying to shame each other with obscure techno YouTube rips. While that was going on, the medics were out inhaling pitchers of Woo Woo, smoking like chimneys, making life hell for traffic cones, and still managing to stroll into class on time the following day.

Most of the people on this pub crawl were medics, and it seems not much has changed in the boozing stakes. In fact, one girl I was with had to pretend to be drunk thanks her Herculean tolerance. The preferred drinks were also the same: anything sugary and guaranteed to make your 9 AM lecture on advanced physiology absolutely unbearable.

In terms of drinking games, my freshers week mostly consisted of “pennying,” where you have to chug your drink if someone dropped a penny in it. Universities cracked down on that wild pastime a few years back. At some point in the last half decade, the banter brigade’s chosen method of competitive drinking appears to have morphed into standing in a line while older students bark orders at you.

I wasn’t sure I was having fun, but apparently screaming is a good way to make me throw alcohol down my throat really fast. My nerve eventually broke when one fresher called me “fucking shit” for "not doing it properly." His new BFF agreed, telling me gravely that I should return to the dorms and stop slowing everyone down. Little did he know that I escaped dorm life long ago for the squalor that awaits them both upon graduation.

DRUGS

There were no drugs to be found at my original freshers week. Everyone knew "someone” back home in Colchester, or wherever, and pondered very audibly whether they’d deliver “if we ordered enough.” Unsurprisingly, though, we failed to lure a dealer into making a 120-mile round trip to central London.

This year was much the same, but instead of putting a safe amount of distance between them and their bullshit, a few claimed to have numbers for local dealers. I doubt they did, but I understood their motives: Before you've taken any drugs, the guy with the MDMA number is the Party. After you’ve taken drugs, the guy with the MDMA number is the one who has to walk around the party collecting cash before waiting in a parking lot for 45 minutes for someone to turn up with eight bags of aspirin and mephedrone.

The only thing I was offered was co-codamol. I’m allergic to codeine and I was there for work. I politely declined.

SOCIAL AWKWARDNESS

Being there reminded me of the needless stress I caused myself over freshers week by trying to reinvent my entire personality. Many of those present appeared to be playing a character they'd dreamt up for themselves over the summer—art girl, dorm drug dealer, a lad's lad (UK for "bro," basically)—despite not really knowing exactly how that character should behave.

Those who didn't seem to have a character in mind compensated by attempting to make others feel small. It’s simple division tactics: Have a go at someone for not downing three shots of tequila and it diverts attention from you. Give off signs of social awkwardness, however, and watch your downfall begin.

I declined a pint and a shot. My punishment? A thump on the back from a "rugby girl" who then pushed my nose into the ground and told me to lick up the beer I’d just spilled. Did I lick it up? I'm ashamed to say that I did.

MUSIC

As is custom for freshers events, “Mr. Brightside” seemed to be playing relentlessly, along with a load of sexy late-2000s radio pop. I quickly grew tired of the tunes, but that’s fine—it’s not like the pub crawl was really about the music. No one wanted to dance, as dancing would have distracted from the drinking. And during freshers week, drinking is how complete strangers find other complete strangers to live in apartments with them in second year. There's a lot you need to know about someone before you can trust them to be on the same lease as you.

CLOTHES

After consulting my case study notes, it seems clear that pajamas and bits of rope are gonna be fucking huge this year.

SOCIAL MEDIA

During my original freshers week, the digital cameras came out at pre-drinks and didn't go away until they'd documented every girl-on-girl make-out session and instance of public vomiting. It didn't matter if you were actually having a good time just as long as there was plenty of evidence to suggest that you were.

Nowadays? There were still photos, of course, but everything on this particular night was carefully curated; people were swapping Instagram handles and carefully arranging each shot.

At one point—because of the whole being-tied-together thing—I was dragged into the boys' toilets. As I tried to divert my eyes to anywhere other than the wall of teenage penises—difficult, when you're strapped to three of them at a urinal—a girl eagerly jumped in for a group shot on her iPhone's dedicated selfie camera.

The author getting involved

LADS

When I arrived for my first year, lads were fucking everywhere. Thanks to a school career spent marauding their way up to the top of the social ladder, they naturally gravitated right back up there again at the beginning of freshers. To sleep with a rugby player would ensure you'd be treated like royalty at Walkabout Wednesdays for at least the next month.

With this new bunch, however, the lads were nowhere to be seen. The banter bus was empty, save for a few of the older guys (the ones enforcing the drinking), who were just as I remembered. And shutting down their come-ons had exactly the same effect: immediate alienation from the group.

But perhaps that's a good thing. Maybe this next university generation will pump out nice, friendly boys who can hang out with you without getting all weird and unresponsive when it becomes apparent you're not gonna have sex with them.

ROMANCE

When I did this pub crawl five years ago, I spent most of my time texting a paranoid boyfriend, trying to stave off the inevitable demise of a distinctly average long-distance relationship. My friends, on the other hand, spent theirs getting fingerbanged and keeping tallies of how many freshers they'd swapped saliva with. If you didn't end the week with an STD test and a debilitating sense of guilt, you probably hadn't done it right.

Astonishingly, for drunk, terrified 18-year-olds, there was no sexual tension at all this time round. It was as if the desperation to make friends was completely distracting them from their own libidos.

But just as I’d given up hope—as Jake and I sat eating pizza next to the dorms, which is about as hopeless a pose as there is in life—girls and boys began awkwardly strolling past in pairs, the groups of singletons lagging behind shouting and laughing at their new friends, presumably distraught that they wouldn't be having any sloppy, subpar sexual experiences themselves.

In many ways, I had exactly the same freshers experience as I'd had before. Once again, I'd come out of it with no friends, mild tinnitus and a furry blue tongue. Once again, I managed to avoid some teenage penises. And once again, I had been humiliated.

However, not everyone is as bad at being a fresher as me. Some take to it naturally and enjoy it. And good for them. But from what I saw, the freshers experience is largely still just as strange and terrifying to many as it was five years ago.

Trends change and drinks vary, but for that one week virgin freshers will probably always be the same. Anxious, drunk and desperate to have the time of their lives.

Follow Hannah Ewens and Jake Lewis on Twitter.

David Cameron photo via Flickr

As UK Prime Minister David Cameron did the pre-Conservative Party conference media rounds on Sunday, he tried as hard as he could to draw attention away from yet another Conservative member of Parliament defecting to UK Independence Party or the sex scandal involving one of his ministers and focus on a vote-winning policy announcement.

Given Cameron is one half of a Downing Street double-act which has employed a phone-hacking supremo to run a press operation and decided to cut the rate of income tax for millionaires during an unprecedented decline in real wages, it was easy to let one’s imagination run wild when speculating about what he was going to propose. Would it be tax breaks for fracking under elementary school playgrounds? Sending Royal Air Force bombers to help with the badger cull? No one knew.

In the end he outlined something altogether less bizarre but still predictably vindictive. Speaking on the Marr Show, the tired-looking Prime Minister outlined how, should the Conservative Party win the next general election, 18 to 21-year-olds would not be able to claim housing benefits or jobseeker’s allowance (JSA). Instead, they would be set to receive a “youth allowance”—set at the same level as JSA. In order to continue receiving this new allowance after six months looking for work, claimants would have to accept an apprenticeship or traineeship. Failing that they would have to accept mandatory “community work,” all of which sounds a lot like existing workfare programs—being made to work for your unemployment, and therefore basically doing work for massively less than even the minimum wage.

Cameron spoke of how such measures were part of his broader vision to “abolish youth unemployment” saying, “We shouldn't be offering that choice [unemployment] to young people…we should be saying, ‘you should be earning or learning.'” 

At first glance you might think he has a point and that the ambition of abolishing youth unemployment is a commendable one. After all, getting more young people into work, education, or training has the benefit of not only reducing the number of people stewing at home with nothing to do, but also addressing Britain’s “skills gap”—the gap between how qualified people are, and how qualified they would ideally be for the needs of the economy. And while “abolishing unemployment” might sound like rhetorical hype, it is actually an achievable goal.

The problem is that Cameron would force people into the “choice” of earning or learning by taking away all other options, not by making either of those options any good.

Under the Conservatives, full employment would be achieved in much the same way that the coalition has got “record numbers of people” into work over the last several years—by making unemployed young people join Britain’s army of “working poor.” That army—which accounts for over half of those living in poverty in the UK and which grew by 500,000 in 2013—is one that subsists by earning the minimum wage. As I wrote last week, it is that same minimum wage which, if we’re going to call it what it is, should be known as “the poverty wage.” If you are over 21 and working full-time, it has been independently calculated as $1.50 an hour less than what is needed to meet your most basic requirements to live in the UK. If you are working full-time and live in London its $3.25 an hour less than what you need. 

But the story gets even worse if you are one of those under 21-year-olds that Cameron wants to force into work. For 18 to 20-year-olds, the minimum wage is $8.30 an hour. If you are under 18 its $6.16. That’s less than half than what is objectively viewed by experts as the bare minimum needed to live in Britain today. That means that many of the very poorest among Britain’s 6.7 million “working poor” will also be among the youngest. While young people have spent much of this government’s time in office rioting against tuition fees, their friends who didn’t go to college have in many cases been getting an even rawer deal.

So, the earning is not great, but what about the learning? Cameron intends to create three million more apprenticeships from the savings made by his proposed reforms, to suck up those young people no longer languishing on unemployment and turn them into skilled workers. But apprenticeships pay even less than the minimum wage for 16-year-olds: $4.44 an hour. While you might argue that apprentices have the bonus of also learning on the job, the truth is that it is impossible to do one without help from your family. Otherwise to choose an apprenticeship is, again, to choose to have the hours of a worker with the spending power of an unemployed person.

Apprentices earn at least some money, rather than just borrowing it, which is what students have to do. Looking back, the only reason I went to college was because jobs paid so little to school-leavers. The idea was that a degree was an investment in time that I’d get back later with the better prospects. What’s become clear in recent years however, is that the graduate dividend—the amount that graduates earn over the course of their careers compared to non-graduates—is not what it once was. The average amount graduates can expect to earn on leaving university fell by an incredible 11 percent between 2007 and 2012.

That’s part of a broader story which is seeing the pay of the young fall even quicker than the rest of the country. While the average pay-packet when inflation adjusted has fallen by six percent since the financial crisis, that figure is 12 percent for those in their 20s. What is more the costs of going to college are rising more sharply than just about anything else—well, apart from house prices—right at the same time as pay is falling. Added up this means that for many going to college and getting yourself in tens of thousands of dollars of debt is looking an ever less smart choice. While the alternatives don’t pay well, they don’t come with decades of debt repayments either.

Being a young adult is often thought of as a time of being care free and enjoying the springtime of one’s independence. Increasingly however, that vision is more appropriate for Britain’s millions of relatively affluent retirees who enjoy low-interest rates, still-increasing house prices, and a the afterglow from a welfare state that historically offered much, much more than it does now. But rather than being envious of the old, maybe we should learn from the society they grew up in.

Between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s—the peak of the post-war’s “long boom”—real wages in the United Kingdom doubled and the option of “earning” or learning was a real one with a growing higher education sector that catered for increasing numbers of working class students by offering grants. It’s that same period which offers the only example in British history of all but “abolishing” unemployment: the UK did not see it exceed 2.6 percent for the two and a half decades between 1945 and 1970. 

History offers something of a solution then—falling poverty through rising wages and state funding for those who choose learning. Instead, the government is demanding that young people choose to “earn or learn” while doing nothing to guarantee earnings that are worth turning up for and forcing those that want to learn into debt, which isn't much of a choice at all.

Follow Aaron on Twitter

An Arsenal fan complaining after they beat Crystal Palace on the opening day of the season

Arsenal Fan TV Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving
After drawing a home game with Tottenham that they clearly should have won, it’s hard not to feel that we’ve been here before with Arsene Wenger. The repeated injuries to key players, the dominance, the pretty play in front of the opposition, the concession of a shit goal—it leads us back to the same old debates. Is Wenger really soccer's last romantic? Or just an old man left behind by history? We’ve been here a thousand times. So instead, let's talk about Arsenal Fan TV.

Arsenal Fan TV had its first big hit at the start of last season with this now-legendary “shape up or geehheeehhhh” interview, but since then there’s been a constant array of wallopers, bells, lengths, balloons, and rockets lining up every week outside the Emirates to have their say. None of them are remotely rational. One wonders whether, after that first taste of fame, the producers have hunted down interviewees on the basis of who looks the most likely to burst into tears and self-immolate while daubing “Wenger out” in his own blood over the Dennis Bergkamp statue.

This tactic is presumably what leads them to people who say things like "they bantered us off for 90 minutes with shithousery." And also to this belter, who sighed and grimaced his way through his post-Spurs interview on Sunday.

To be fair to the channel, however, it does a decent job of showing Arsenal fans how they really are. We can say what we like about them, but no other set of supporters in the country does as well at having one uniform identity across their entire fan base, which in today’s globalized era is truly remarkable. They might U-turn, knee-jerk, and revise with all the ideological consistency of a paper shredder, but they also do it with the discipline of a Roman legion. Who decides whether Mikel Arteta is great or shitty this week? Do they have party whips? Fuck it, I don’t want to know. But it’s impossible not to be impressed by it.

Wayne Rooney Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried
Rooney may have scored in the win against West Ham, but the big story was his sending off. His attitude, general lack of vision, and wastefulness have all contributed the idea that he’s holding the team back, but hacking someone down needlessly to almost throw away a game was the most obtuse example yet of his regression. He can’t even foul someone properly at this stage. And why foul him anyway? There was plenty of time left, United was winning, they had defenders back, and it was Stewart fucking Downing.

Rooney had already gone from hero to being almost reluctantly cheered, and now a sizeable majority of United fans want him out. Unfortunately, the chances of getting rid of a player in the midst of a severe decline on nearly $500,000 a week are slim indeed.

Alex Ferguson has been reproached—rightfully—for not leaving much gas in the tank for his successor. But you can't say Fergie didn't do his best to jettison Rooney. After a wonderfully Machiavellian skewering on his way out, along came a new manager with a grudge, the knife was sharpened, the bodyguard had been bought off, and Rooney was standing with his back to to the door on a high balcony admiring the view.

Unfortunately, David Moyes chose to give him a new contract, before Van Gaal handed him the captaincy and declared him undroppable. Ferguson also appeased him to an absurd degree for years. All three are very different characters, yet all stuck religiously to Rooney as the centerpiece of the team. The photos he has saved on his hard drive must be truly special.

Eliaquim Mangala's wonderful own goal versus Hull

It's Official: There's a Worldwide Center-Back Crisis
Foreign imports from anywhere outside the big few leagues, even if they play in the Champions League, are like supermarket wine aisles: Almost all of the people judging the quality of the product seem to be doing so on the price alone.

On that basis, it was nice to see $52-million man Eliaquim Mangala put in a hilariously shitty performance against Hull this weekend—not quite up there with Jon Walters versus Chelsea, or Jonathan Woodgate's Real Madrid debut, but certainly belonging in their company. After the hangover of a brilliant World Cup, we've all come to the realization that everybody stopped making decent center-backs in about 2004, and people are starting to panic. How else does David Luiz = $80 million make any sense?

Other positions are disappearing from the game, of course—the midfield general, the touchline-hugging winger, the pure poacher—but the loss of commanding defenders is more bizarre, because nothing has replaced them. Maybe it’s related to the loss of the hard man—Liverpool’s toughest defender flouncing out of the ground in a huff after not being picked for the derby was surely a sign of the times. Four years ago, people were saying John Terry had lost it and was on the way out. Now, he’s the best defender in the Premier League. What happened?

Jagielka's derby rocket

We're Already Being Spoiled with Amazing Goals This Season
This weekend, we saw two games settled by a late 30-yard volley off the underside of the bar, and a majestic overhead kick. They’ll be added to efforts from Angel Di Maria, Nikica Jelavic, and others to add up to an already-impressive Goal of the Season longlist.

It's a shame then that we've all been spoiled slightly by sites like 101greatgoals and their ilk. Jagielka’s volley should go down in legend, but we’ve long seen the same thing happening in the Indonesian League or the Paraguayan second division once a week, if we’ve been bothered to click the link. Sure, it’s still not comparable to being in the moment (it was a late equalizer in a derby, after all) but there should still be something to appreciate in a great goal for a great goal’s sake. At the moment, it seems like the only way Graziano Pelle’s goal is likely to be remembered is if we all recall it as the only decent thing he ever did after he pulls an Amr Zaki and moves to FC Utrecht or Reggina in disgrace after 40 appearances and four goals.

Screengrab via the BBC

The Scottish League One's Where the Real Action Is
A rare detour now to the Scottish third tier, where Peterhead traveled to take on Dunfermline. The game will live long in the annals of history, because by halftime, Peterhead had managed to reduce themselves to eight men and were denying reports that their manager had been arrested.

It’s not uncommon for a player to lose it, but it usually comes in derbies, World Cup finals, or relegation deciders. To completely lose the plot in a standard early-season game between two mid-table outfits is rare. For an entire team to collectively and totally lose it is another thing entirely. It is a thing of beauty, like sisters who shave their heads when their siblings gets alopecia. One man snaps, and the rest gleefully follow him into an orgiastic bloodbath out of self-destructive solidarity. James Redman’s two-footed tackle later produced both a tribute act and a brawl, with Peterhead three men down at halftime. Emboldened by their rage, and playing in a classic 4-3 formation, it took a screamer and another man down to injury to finally finish them off.

As so often in Scottish soccer, however, it’s not so much about the game, but the game after. Premier League soccer players in England might have to give out bland, corporate drawl on Twitter, but in Scotland, nobody gives a shit. Strikers react to abuse regularly, club captains become embroiled in lengthy historical debates with rival fans, and in the case of Andy Rodgers, produce a great brand of post-match analysis. Having not taken any part in the game, the Peterhead striker decided to take to Twitter to calmly discuss his thoughts on the match, his opponents, and the inhabitants of the town of Dunfermline:

Shhhhhh, no more tears now... MT @Andy_Rodgers: at least I'm not J Falkingham. horrible cheating shitebag of a boy! #wank #badguy #shitebag

— Michael Thomas (@michael1885) September 27, 2014

“@Andy_Rodgers: And as for the town and people of Dunfermline......wow!!!! Absolute creatures!!!!” @DougieT4

— Beau Breckenridge (@bbreck12) September 28, 2014

We thought “‘#headsgone” was a great soccer hashtag. But “#wank #badguy #shitebag” is surely going to top that list for a long, long time.

Follow Callum Hamilton on Twitter.

Dylan Carlson has been the only constant member of the band Earth since 1989, blending influences ranging from English folklore to Ennio Morricone to Cormac McCarthy into a style of doom music that is completely his own. Earth has released eight full-length LPs but their most recent, Primitive and Deadly (out now via Southern Lord Records), shows the band continuing to evolve. No huge moves, though. Just the progression of a darkness that has pushed Earth's career forward since 2000. In other words, they still sound like the noise ringing in your head after you wake up from a horrible dream about meat and blood and a far-off city on fire.  

The first two Earth albums paved the way for the drone doom of Sun O))) and Boris; their third, 1996's Pentastar: In the Style of Demons, showed off Carlson's roots in early metal and stoner rock. But thanks to his affinity for guns, heroin, and legal trouble—as well as the suicide of his friend Kurt Cobain—Carlson dropped off the map. 

He hardly touched a guitar until the early 2000s, when he began playing with drummer Adrienne Davies and introducing other musicians into the mix. The new lineup changed Earth's sound entirely. 2006's Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, is a nod to both Neil Young and the spaghetti Western film score composer Ennio Morricone, and 2008's The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull is a cinematic soundscape of dilapidated Americana with songs named after lines from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Their last two albums, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I and II, reflect Carlson's love for English mythology.

I caught the band last week at St. Vitus in Brooklyn. They were as heavy and disciplined as ever, strictly adhering to the core tenet of their disciples, Sunn O))): "MAXIMUM VOLUME YIELDS MAXIMUM RESULTS." Carlson has been outspoken about his lifelong interest in English folklore and mythology—he’s discussed past experiences of faerie sightings and even made a crowdfunded solo record of folkloric songs in 2012—so I decided to sit down with him and Davies to talk about the band's evolving sound and how these influenced have shaped Earth's philosophy.

VICE: This record reminds me of some of the really early Earth material. I feel like you’re returning to your roots.
Dylan Carlson: Definitely. After I started doing my solo thing, which was heavily influenced by British folklore and folk music, I wanted to leave Earth free to do whatever it was gonna do next. Then I found myself—for whatever reason, midlife crisis or whatever—going back to the music that inspired me during Earth’s formative years. The music that made me want to do this in the first place was hard rock and heavy metal. As weird as we’ve been, I’ve always viewed us as that kind of band. There weren’t any other bands on Sub Pop wearing Morbid Angel shirts in their photo shoots.

We did a tour of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand as a three-piece, so right then we’re not dealing with the cello and the trombone and that kind of stuff. One of the songs I started writing in Perth was "Even Hell Has Its Heroes," around the time we went to Bon Scott’s grave. AC/DC was the band that made me want to play rock 'n' roll in the first place, so it seemed fitting.

The folk element crept in a bit because the song "Rooks Across the Gate" was originally for my solo project, but then Adrienne really liked it. The lyrics were based on a folkloric trip I took to Suffolk, and it’s also kind of a murder ballad. It was originally a folky tune and then I redid it as an Earth song.

I was gonna ask if your work on the House of Albion stuff had you writing lyrics that were mostly influenced by folklore.
Definitely. "Rooks Across the Gate" is based on an East Anglian tradition, so that one’s specifically folkloric. [Guest vocalist] Mark Lanegan came up with his own lyrics for "A Serpent Coming," and I really liked the lyrics he came up with—the title Primitive and Deadly came out of that song. It was a good title for a number of reasons. A, it sounded like a Scorpions record. B, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light was a very introspective, quiet album. This one was a "storming out the gates" record.

Adrienne, you’ve said in the past that there’s a real "physical embodiment" to Earth, and a visual element to the music. Can you elaborate?
Adrienne Davies: We always try to make music that’s very evocative and emotional, especially now that we have vocals. Music that can take you out of reality and transport you to another one. It’s almost a meditation in a strange way—not consciously forcing the audience to do it, but hopefully influencing them. When I play music with Earth, I experience it that way. It’s very soothing and transports me somewhere else.

I like how the influence of occult themes and esoterica ends up leading you to make music that has a shamanic or ritualistic effect on people.
Carlson: There was a shamanic tradition in every culture. In some cultures it’s been totally exterminated, but in others it’s very present. I always find it weird how that term automatically connotes "someone in the Amazon," or something. I think the traditions are the same everywhere—they just have different outer manifestations.

It’s a very human thing.
It’s what humans do. We alter our consciousness and attempt to deal with the world in the best way possible.

Davies: We honor our dead and communicate with our elders, and so on.  

Carlson: I think in the old days, everyone did it to some extent. And we’ve kind of abandoned it for technology.

If someone wanted to read some texts in that vein, what would you recommend?
To start with, Religion and the Decline of Magic by this guy Keith Thomas. It came out in 1971. It’s a long, tedious book, but it’s the first book to really talk about English cunning folk. Another book came out somewhat recently called A Grimoire for Modern Cunning Folk.

There’s always been a separation among historians about "high magic" and "low magic." High magic was what John Dee did for the Queen of England, whereas Arthur Gauntlet was low magic because he did it for some lady around the corner—but they were using the same techniques.

Davies: There's also Jonathan Strange and Miss Norell, which is fictional, but about the history of magic and our relationship and interpretation of magic. It’s very cool.

Carlson: I’d start with the Keith Thomas one. It’s extensively footnoted and has a ton of references if you want to get deeper into it.

Primitive and Deadly album cover

What’s the significance of the album art? It’s notably different from the past covers.
In the past we’ve done more artwork covers, and Hex was old found photos. This time I wanted a photographic cover. We worked with Samantha Muljat, the art director at Southern Lord, and she shot the photos. I wanted something that evoked the title. It’s an alien landscape, but not necessarily another planet—more like another realm or spirit world. Also definitely has an 80s metal vibe to it. I wanted a metal cover.

Do you think future songs will continue to reflect your early metal influences?
I’ve got a few songs I’m working on that are definitely a similar vibe to these. We’ll see what happens. It’s definitely continuing in the harder vein.

You both have a minimal and deliberate way of playing. It's very disciplined. Do you find yourself doing that consciously or is it just the way you’ve evolved?
It’s just how we work now. My songwriting hasn’t changed much over the years. I’ve matured, obviously, but the main way I write is all theme and variation. It starts on a riff and then just variations on that riff.

Every once in a while I’ll set myself up and try to do a real structured song. "Old Black" was a A-B-A-C structure, and there are a few songs on this album where we worked with vocalists and were put in a verse-chorus situation that we wouldn’t have done otherwise. Except for "Rooks," they were all written and then vocals came later.

Davies: When I was first playing with Earth, the goal was just to be as unobtrusive as possible and to let the guitar shine. That was how I developed my restraint and use of space—less is more. But on this album I’ve been able to be a lot less restrained and more ballsy.

Carlson: It’s all about creating an arc, even if it’s instrumental music. I’ve always approached songs with the idea that there should be an arc rather than just repetition.

It’s pretty cinematic.
Yeah, film was a huge influence, especially when I first started.

Davies: I always loved the really slow-paced movies where things culminated very slowly into some sort of huge climax.

On that note, were there any really unusual influences or things that have happened in the past few years that have shaped this record?
Carlson: The Angels era and the impetus for my solo project were inspired by a number of personal experiences I had in England of an "othernatural" nature. And then, during the Angels era I was chronically ill and—near expiring, I guess you could say. That was obviously a big influence on the whole situation.

This record definitely reflects the fact that I’m healthy and excited by life again. I’m in love with somebody, engaged, and going to get married. This isn’t what someone would expect from an Earth record. And I’m really fortunate to still get to work with Adrienne and maintain a friendship over the years.

Davies: If nothing else, we’ll always have the music.

Carlson: At least my midlife crisis is helping the music progress.

Cropped, low resolution version of the famous Bat Boy cover. Original image is property of Weekly World News

Every supermarket checkout stand in America is boring and prosaic these days. Sure, there's plenty of news about Lindsay Lohan and Brangelina, but in the 80s and 90s there was an outlet for ridiculous, made-up stories called Weekly World News. Early on, its headlines were just fake enough to not be considered fraud, but just true enough to grab your attention.

They often relied on existing myths and conspiracies, like the lumberjack who kept Bigfoot as a love slave. Sometimes they would co-opt religious imagery, as when a giant Jesus went all Godzilla on the UN. But nothing had the staying power of Bat Boy.

Bat Boy was easily the paper's greatest contribution to pop culture. According to a Washington Post article titled "All the News That Seemed Unfit to Print," the writer Bob Lind was inspired to write the headline "Bat Child Found in Cave" when he saw an image that artist Dick Kulpa had created almost by accident. But the Post didn't talk to Kulpa about what was in his head when he accidentally birthed part of America's cultural imagination. So I did.

I wanted to know why he inserted this ghoul into the nightmares of every American who shopped for groceries in the late 20th century. Instead of a feisty old retired yellow journalist, he turned out to be a friendly cartoonist who still occasionally puts Bat Boy into his work. He did have some choice words for The Onion, though.

VICE: Hi, Dick. How did you get a job at Weekly World News?
Dick Kulpa: I started out as a freelance illustrator working long distance from Akron, Illinois, and I produced drawings for these guys. Nine artists were in contention for this, and they all fell by the wayside. I did something like 85 drawings over the course of a year, many of them with under 24 hours notice. When they discovered I could write headlines, I was invited to try out for the staff, and I did, and within two days I was hired full-time. 

What were your contributions, other than Bat Boy?
My natural capabilities are in story editing and editorial. I used that throughout my life as my tool to express myself. But there’s a difference between artists and editorial artists. I used to rewrite scripts sent to me by comics magazines years ago, and it was something because I had to pop up the punch lines, etc, and make it so a reader, when they read it, gets a payoff. That was my calling, basically. I could come up with all sorts of story ideas of this nature, and did. That was my value. Those people on that staff were top-notch people.

OK, so how did you create Bat Boy?
One of the editors needed an image of a space alien baby, and so I designed it, and when everybody saw it they said, “Wait a minute, this is more powerful than we’d thought.” I’d drawn a Star Trek comic strip years before, so I loved the pointy ears on Mr. Spock. And I also did another comic strip featuring a character, Officer Jaws, and I loved his teeth. I had total leeway. I don’t think staff knew what I was doing at the time. In this particular case, it took almost a whole day, because the computer kept crashing. That was 1992. The fifth time it crashed, I’d vowed to end the project if it crashed again. Fortunately it didn’t. 

It looks like it's made of clippings of an adult in a costume, plus animal parts and a baby head. Am I right?
The image is all baby. We enlarged the eyes and did wonders in these computer programs. Even then, in 1992, there were no add-ons. I worked in concert with the retouch department and designed this character. In this specific case, it was absolute and they followed my detailed instructions to the letter. So that’s where Bat Boy was born, but it wasn’t called Bat Boy originally.

Drawing courtesy of Dick Kulpa

Did you put part of yourself into Bat Boy?
I was here for four years and the only place I drove was from home to work and back. I changed from being an out-and-out party animal at congressmen's homes, to almost a recluse here. Bat Boy says what I was thinking. Like, What the hell am I doing here? Not intentional, but it just came out that way subconsciously. 

Did that primal expression stay alive as the character of Bat Boy developed over time? 
I have no connection with Bat Boy anymore. The character was handled differently as the paper went through phases. And the new ownership handled it differently than I would have expected. More power to them, if that’s what people take an interest in. To me, Bat Boy was a brat who wanted to bite the head off anyone who came close to him. 

Do you resent what it became?
It’s a corporate character. And they’re gonna do with it what they please. Bat Boy in its heyday was immensely popular and sold thousands of t-shirts.

Why do you think Bat Boy became so influential?
The face just connects. People see themselves in him. I imagine millions of people who may feel the same way that I do. They see emotion in the face. When you look at Pixar movies, which are so wildly popular, you see the emotion. They really capitalize on characters. And Bat Boy does that with his face. It says, “Get me out of here!”  Look at the shape the world is in. Maybe it needs Bat Boy to straighten it out. Maybe he reflects the deep down feelings of millions, if not billions, of people on this planet. With everything, we’re slaves. I think it’s more true than it was then. I see these kids suffering, working these nickel-and-dime jobs with no insurance. In my day, we could move up. I see these kids working these same jobs five years later. I worked at restaurants too. I’m a caricature artist. I appear at restaurants. 

Are you influenced by the fine arts? 
The Scream, that famous scream artwork, from umpteen centuries ago or whatever. Bat Boy could be compared to that, but the scream picture didn’t enter into my mind. 

Did you ever feel bad about creating hoaxes?
We never did treasure hunts or treasure maps, for example, because someone would go spend half their fortune trying to find it. What we did was, in its own way, political. We didn’t really want to capitalize on any hoax. But if we wanted to run a story about Osama bin Laden and his love affair with his goats... what did that do?

We want to feel good about something, and Weekly World News made people feel good. 

So you were genuinely proud to work there?
It was a marvellous experience, for a number of reasons. It wasn't just whether [people] believed the stories, but [that] they enjoyed the stories. We had newspapermen who were respected in their own industries. They weren’t kids, they were real reporters. So many people looked at Weekly World News and just assumed things. The bells and whistles were the sellers and enablers—the substance is what counts, and everybody wants substance. 

But take me, for example: I still have nightmares about the Weekly World News issue where Satan's face appeared above the White House.
Satan’s face above the White House? That was attributed to Jim Johnson, he was the re-toucher in residence there. He did some great stuff.

But he scared me. 
As a kid, when was the first time you watched The Wizard of Oz with Margaret Hamilton as the witch? She said she felt bad that she terrified kids. Young kids are extremely impressionable because they’re seeing things for the first time. Now they see blood, murder, violence, gore, and all kinds of stuff on TV that they shouldn’t see.

Fair enough. What do you think of The Onion?
You’ve got Coca-Cola and you’ve got Sam’s Club coke. Weekly World News was Coca-Cola, and The Onion is Sam’s Club. Maybe I should say it was Discount Beverage. The trouble with satire politics is this: If you take a side, if you are a progressive, if you are a liberal, if you are conservative, you wipe out half your readership immediately. So me, I’m not partisan. That’s what I grew up with. I might click on John Boehner, or I might click on Obama. I don’t care who.

What are you up to these days?
My greatest character ever was created six years before Bat Boy. And it was known as Gangbuster. The new book that I’m working on, which is a graphic novel, features Gangbuster at his finest. It says, “Well, why is Gangbuster picking on gangs? Street gangs? There’s all kinds of gangs out there!” And it was originally planned, when I first released it, that I would do just that. I was gonna sic Gangbuster on the Ku Klux Klan. 

Are you worried about the DC Comics character with the same name, and the same overall mission?
Theirs appeared in 1987. My Gangbuster appeared in 1986. We don’t see that Gangbubster anymore, do we? Let’s just say, two phone calls and a letter. And when you can prove first use with [the dates on] newspaper articles, that pretty much sums it up.

Note: We weren't able to confirm Kulpa's implication that DC Comics surrendered the trademark of its Gangbuster character. 

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter