Hello Collectors,

This column is my almost-weekly column in which I, Nick Gazin, share news and reviews and photos and links related to comics, illustration, fine art, and nerd things. I hope everyone has fun at San Diego Comic Con without me. I am almost 30 and have been dreaming of going to SDCC my whole life. Will I ever go? I hope so. This year I'll be staying home though and feeling depressed about how uncostumed all the people around me are. 

Ines Estrada made this great little drawing. 

Rising star Heather Benjamin has a new book out on Desert Island Books. 

David Lapham, creator of the as-yet finished masterwork Stray Bullets has been selling cheap commissioned art of his beloved characters. It's not the same as having the story of the abandoned comic continue, but it's great to see him make these characters live again, if only for an image at a time. 

Here's a good portrait David Lapham did of a teenaged Virginia Applejack.

Here's his Last Supper peopled with the cast of Stray Bullets.

I curate a weekly comic feature for VICE and this week's was by Melanie Gillman. You can read it here. You can check out her work here. 

Johnny Ryan keeps being awesome, Joe Matt keeps on being a whiner and a wiener. 

ALSO! On Wednesday I was in a Secret Walls mural competition at the MLB Fan Cave. Lamour Supreme and I teamed up to do a nine-foot-by-seven-foot mural against two other guys, and we won. It was totally awesome and we were on the news. 

They made us these official All-Star Games jerseys with our names on them and everything. I think the Mets colors are colossally ugly, but I was still psyched. 

Here's Lamour Supreme and me doing our mural. The painting will be at the Fan Cave art gallery, which is at the MLB Fan Cave I guess until the end of July, and then it will be tossed into a landfill somewhere. 

Check out Lamour's site here.

Here's the piece by the guys we were competing against, Rimix and Seeone. 

ANYWAY! Here are some reviews of books!

Bazooka Joe and His Gang
Abrams Books

If you've been either living under a rock or just busy living your life, you might not be aware that Abrams Books teamed up with Topps to release fun little books collecting and telling the stories of their best trading-card series. They've already released books for the Mars Attacks cards and the Garbage Pail Kids cards, which were both great. Bazooka Joe is the Mickey Mouse of Topps, and while this book is very good it's not as interesting to me as the previous two. 

The Mars Attacks and Garbage Pail Kids cards books were presenting art that was familiar and, at one time in most kids’ lives, contraband. When I turned seven a kid named John Marco gave me the birthday present that his mom had bought for me, and then he sneakily handed me a stack of Garbage Pail Kids cards held together with a rubber band. That was my present from him. 

Trading cards are currency for kids. Comics are too, but trading cards more closely resemble paper currency. When you're little they're some of the few objects you can own and carry around with you and trade because they're so cheap that you're parents don't care what the hell you do with them. 

The thing is, though, that no one I knew ever kept Bazooka Joe comics. You read them and then tossed them out. I have no nostalgia for these comics. That said, this is a great book if you have even a passing interest in Bazooka Joe, the one-eyed little boy and his stupid-ass friends. 

The best thing about this book is that it shows you what the prizes that they advertised actually looked like. They would seriously mail children giant hunting knives. 

I got too far away from the focus of this review. If you like books about pop culture from a long time ago, you should get this book right now. It's a lot of fun to look at. 

Journal
Julie Deplore
Koyama

Oog. I thought this was by Julie Doucet at first because the cartoonist's name is similar and the cover looks like it could be by Doucet. It's not by Julie Doucet, not even hardly. 

This is an illustrated diary that's drawn with colored pencils. There are a couple of good drawings in here, but most are not that great. I think the point of view is overly sentimental and self-adoring. I don't think that the person who made this is very interesting—or at least not interesting enough to publish. 

I did a lot of drawings similar to this when I was a teenager, but the problem is that I was an idiot when I was a teenager, and I'm really glad that my super involved sketchbooks were never published. This is a great diary but a bad book.

Willliam Shakespeare's Star Wars
Ian Doescher
Quirk 

Do you think the author's name is pronounced "doucher"? I can guarantee you that everyone calls him that and has for his entire life, and that is what drove him to making the only Star Wars book I turned my nose up at.

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #91

@NicholasGazin

Welcome to a special George Zimmerman trial edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

- The American news media, purveyors of truth and your only source for all the developments in the exciting life of Justin Bieber, continues to call George Zimmerman white. From the moment Trayvon Martin died at Zimmerman’s hand, news outlets across the nation have repeatedly referred to him as an overzealous white male neighborhood watch member who was overcome with racial animosity.

This creates a really appealing narrative, in which a white guy shot a black kid because racism. Battle lines can easily be drawn based on such a story: black people get on board with the story that Trayvon was killed by a white oppressor, and white people can comfortably defend Zimmerman’s right to protect himself from a dark-skinned hoodlum.

It’s a hell of a lot simpler to create this clean, uncomplicated tale of racial tension than it is to correctly identify Zimmerman as the product of an interracial marriage between a white father and Hispanic mother. To deal with that complexity, the New York Times and others have adopted the rarely used phrase “white Hispanic” to describe the killer. That’s pretty clever, because Zimmerman is white and Hispanic. Put those two words together, and you get a brand new race! Since important media types are throwing around this term, I assume it is now the proverbial “new normal,” and I'm going to start using it too, never mind how it is totally contrary to the way we all normally think about race.

My father is white, and my mother is black, so I suppose I’m now “white African,” but isn’t a white African a South African of Dutch descent? OK, what if I called myself “white black”? Is that accurate, or does that sound too much like a really bad punk band’s name? Did I mention I’m Jewish? How do I work that in? My grandfather on my mom’s side was part Native American, so I guess I need to add that to the mix. Next time I have to fill out a United States Census form, I’m going to list myself as “white Jewish black Native American,” or “Confused” for short.

I’m probably missing something in my heritage, but I bet we’re missing a few pieces of the puzzle for George Zimmerman too. I guess the next time a guy who looks white shoots a person who looks black, we should do thorough genealogical examinations of their backgrounds to be sure we’re exploiting them appropriately.

Oh, and congratulations to Barack Obama for being America’s first “white Kenyan African Hawaiian ex-smoker with a mole and huge ears” president. That’s quite an accomplishment! RACIST

Photo by Flickr User GageSkidmore

-Disgraced ex-prom queen and noted converter of oxygen into carbon dioxide Ann Coulter receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for contradicting herself completely in her latest column. First, let me give Ann credit for her frustration at the media’s labeling of George Zimmerman as white. She’s helping expose a real troubling aspect of the way the United States covers the news. After briefly touching on that subject, she takes a sharp left-turn into Crazy Town — which happens to be my favorite late 90s rap-rock band:

“There were at least eight burglaries in the 14 months before Zimmerman's encounter with Martin. Numerous media accounts admit that 'most' of these were committed by black males. I'm waiting to hear about a single crime at Twin Lakes that was not committed by a black male.”

This is her rationale for racial profiling and vigilante violence—it's OK to stalk people and then shoot them as long as they're the same race as someone who has recently committed a crime. I’m not saying her stats are wrong, but I am saying that no number allows you to demonize an entire section of the population. As a person of color, like Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, I don’t want to walk down a suburban street and feel like there’s a target on my back because someone who looks vaguely like me enjoys stealing flat screen TVs.

In the United States, the answer is always to shoot the problem away, be it at home or abroad. According to Ann Coulter's brain, extreme poverty, decaying educational institutions, de facto segregation, and systemic nihilism aren't problems that need to be tackled, we just need to stop "criminals." And one legitimate way to stop criminals, apparently, is to take the law into your own hands and walk around with a gun.

Excuse me while I go start a petition to get Ann Coulter to watch The Wire. RACIST

@YesYoureRacist’s Ten Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @alexxzzhang: "I'm no racist but the three black men sitting in lawn chairs on corner of Tyron street are making it hard."

9. @kiedoherty: "Not racist but why do black girls feel the need to shout when there next to each other"

8. @416_ms24: "I'm not racist... But all I'm saying is, if a man of a certain race is looking suspicious, I'm locking my doors"

7. @justbeingpiechy: "Im not racist but that ni**a cut me off!!!!"

6. @roadmiles58: "If the blacks riot on travon case blame the ni**er holder and Obama they bused over liberals to fuel this incident"

5. @mohamadmirza95: "I'm not racist but sometimes my mind is racist"

4. @itshaipha: "I am really sorry and not a racist but how do asians wear contact lenses"

3. @devinmmmm: "I'm not racist but I can't stand Indian people..."

2. @shutupced: "happy 4th of July to all u Obama lovers have fun having a Ni**er in charge of ur country(:::"

1. @teapartynation: "Are we living in a post racial America or an America beset with liberal racism? #teaparty#zimmerman"

Last Week in Racism: Johnny Depp Plays Native American in Movie, World Shrugs

@dave_schilling

When you don’t have health insurance, the thought of getting injured is scary. It's difficult enough just dealing with all of your current neuroses. Plus, when you finally do crack and need to be picked up again, they force you into a healthcare system that is broken itself. I used to wish health issues like this could be simpler, until I saw Dr. Easy.

Dr. Easy is the first narrative foray by the Shynola Film Collective, who are known for their Radiohead, Queens of the Stone Age, and Cold Play music videos. In the short, the eponymous Dr. Easy is a robot programmed to diffuse tense situations and prevent causalities. The robot uses a vast database of human records, artificial sensory detectors, and deductive reasoning to work it’s magic. Some suspension of belief is required, but mostly in how quick the robot is able to access years of your medical, police, and phone records. For example, I rarely updated any of my information and I can imagine Dr. Easy crashing when I would try to explain my dogged and complicated medical history. Regardless, since this robot can also read your hormonal output, he’s got a pheromonal advantage over humans.  

Artificially intelligent robots with human senses seem like a logical place for robot technology to go and one that many, many other sci-fi stories pursue. However, what this short does so perfectly is present a dislodged moment in time where the audience is left unaware of culture surrounding the use of robots in these situations. Running like a procedural, the film allows one of Dr. Easy’s cases to unfold naturally in front of the camera. The Doctor isn’t proving anything. It is simply doing its job.  The desperation and nervousness coming from the humans is what imbues the sense of unrest and tension in the short.  Unlike human police or medical professionals, Dr. Easy does not feel empathy and unfortunately cannot replicate the human tenderness needed in certain situations regarding the psyche. On the other side of that coin, it doesn’t succumb to many of the moral failings and weaknesses of humans. The doctor has the best bedside skills, but pretty terrible bedside manners. The film ends somewhat abruptly, but not without inciting a slew of important robot/human relationship questions that force us to confront our own insecurities regarding technology.

At the end of the day, if an ambulance ride costs me $1200 in NYC, I can’t begin to imagine what an in-home robot visit would cost. Dr. Easy seems like way better company than NYC’s ambulance drivers though. See for yourself below.

The Shynola Collective is comprised of three dudes: Jason Groves, Richard Kenworthy and Christopher Harding. They’ve been making pretty stellar videos for a couple years and Dr. Easy is their first narrative short, which was adapted from the opening chapter of Matthew De Abaitua’s 2007 novel The Red Men. The crew is currently planning a feature version of Dr. Easy. The short has a pretty badass pedigree with Warp Films and Film4 as producers, visual FX from Jellyfish, and cinematography from Barry Ackroyd (The Hurt Locker, United 93).

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial calledPRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously -  'The Bowler'

George Laraque: NHL fighter and giant teddy bear. via

Stephen Harper hasn’t even called for a byelection and already the Green Party has announced that George Laraque will be a running for a seat in Parliament in the Montreal-area riding of Bourassa.

If you’ve never heard of him then let me tell you, he is a multifaceted man. He’s an ex-NHL heavyweight fighter, a vegan, an animal rights activist, a charity-supporter, a karaoke-singer, and a spokesperson for a variety of products like a juicer and an alcoholic energy drink (which he got in trouble for, but redeemed himself by apologizing, saying that he didn’t know the content of the commercial). Laraque owns a vegan restaurant in Montreal—where my editor once contracted food poisoning—and he is the Canadian sales rep for Super-Glide, a company that sells synthetic ice pads. He’s also written an autobiography about his struggles with racism growing up playing in a white-dominated sport.

Laraque grew up in the Montreal area, his parents emigrated from Haiti before he was born, spent his childhood playing sports and dreaming of the NHL. When he finally made it, he became a six-foot-four, 250-pound enforcer spending a almost 1,200 minutes of his 12-year career in the penalty box for teams like the Oilers, the Penguins, and the Canadiens until he retired in 2010. That same year, Elizabeth May appointed him Deputy Leader of the Green Party, most likely out of the fact that he’s this giant teddy bear of a man with a charming smile, and outspoken personality. He certainly doesn’t shy away from attention; in fact he seems to thrive on it since he’s down for almost anything, i.e. his TV commercials for TekSavvy, Octane 7.0 (see below), and JuiceXtra.

A commercial with sexed-up girls where Laraque shows up in the last ten seconds. via

Here, Laraque gets reaaaally excited and just makes a fool of himself.

On Tuesday morning I received a text from the Green Party (yes, I know) announcing that Laraque would be running for a seat in Parliament. This didn’t come as a surprise to many people out there since, his Twitter account has been hinting at big news coming soon for a while now. He has also mentioned before that Elizabeth May wanted him to run in the 2011 elections. At the time he was heavily involved with a project to build a children’s hospital in Haiti, so Laraque turned it down.

Well, the hospital is still on the go, but the right time seems to have come for May to make her move putting Laraque in the fighting position for candidacy in the Bourassa electoral district. The previous representative, Denis Coderre who’s been in office since 1997, resigned last month when he announced he would be running for Mayor of Montreal.

So, how can Laraque win? The district has a Haitian population of 17.5 percent, which may very likely work in Laraque’s favour. Mix that with his charming smile and his big personality and he might actually have a chance.

But, Laraque isn’t a politician. He has no experience in Canadian law-making; he has no experience in any sort of political scene besides showing up with May at Green events, showing his face and saying a few words in his deep, calm French accent. It seems weird to me that such a huge man who used to tear up the NHL’s biggest fighters, like Tie Domi, is now running for a seat on Parliament with the Green Party.

Laraque says he doesn’t like to fight, yet here he is wooping Domi’s ass. via

Elizabeth May has put Laraque at the forefront of her party’s image right from the beginning. To her, he’s just a puppet: big and strong, good-looking with a nice smile and loud voice. He’s a poster boy, who she hopes will win her more votes while she continues to stick her nose to the grindstone and try to get things done.

Since Laraque has jumped the gun by announcing his candidacy before Harper has even called for a byelection, it’s difficult to imagine his chances. What we do know, is that he’s a fighter, so if things get dirty we just might get to see the old Laraque where he throws down his gloves, jersey’s his opponent and throws some punches.

I bet that would get him some votes.

Follow Ken on Twitter: @kjrwall

For other recent news about Canadian politics:

The Canadian Government Is Not Bothered by PRISM and the NSA

It's Been Three Years Since Toronto's G20 Protest

The Liberal Party Sends Out Interns to Fake-Protest, Too

On the 30th of June, exactly one year after the Egyptians voted for Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi to become their first-ever democratically elected president, millions of protesters filled central Cairo and town squares across Egypt demanding his dismissal.

The Defence Minister, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, promptly issued Morsi with a 48-hour deadline to heed the protesters' demands or face military intervention.

Was this another Egyptian revolution, a military coup or – as some feared – the beginning of a civil war?

With the clock to the army's deadline ticking down and the whole country poised to see what would happen next, VICE went to Cairo to find out.

(Photo by Tom Johnson)

Last Friday, a nail bomb exploded outside a mosque in the West Midlands town of Tipton. The blast came about an hour after the funeral of army drummer Lee Rigby – the latest in a broad series of attacks on Britain's Muslim community since the soldier's murder in May outside his barracks in Woolwich, London.

Britain's Islamophobes haven't just been leaving nail bombs around ex-industrial towns in the Black Country. Since Rigby's murder in late May, aggression towards the Muslim community has included: an Islamophobic social media free-for-all, attempts to pull off hijabs in the street, phoned-in death threats and various attacks on mosques, ranging from racist graffiti to arson and petrol bombings.     

But do I blame Rigby's two alleged murderers – both Muslim – for this swollen wave of anti-Muslim sentiment? No. The bigotry existed well before the murder, it's just that the climate is now far more conducive for those who spout it to leer their way out of the woodwork, confusing Sikh temples with mosques and repeatedly spelling Qur'an wrong on Twitter. It was against British law to be Muslim until 1812, but the community has never been viewed as anything but "the other" in this country.   

It was 9/11, of course, that spurned anyone on the righter-wing of things into tarring all Muslims with the same brush as the plane hijackers. And, ever since then, the anti-Muslim sentiment from Islamophobic "patriots" has been on the up. In the UK, that's evident in the rise of the EDL and other far-right drinking clubs. But, at the same time, grassroots Muslim voices have been silenced, replaced by so-called community leaders jockeying for the best position from which to catch any stray breadcrumbs falling from the government's funding table.       

Police after the nail bomb attack in Tipton. (Photo by Assed Baig)

The media have been complicit in this, defining which characteristics make a "good" moderate Muslim and an evil "radical" Muslim. A good Muslim is one who will criticise members of the Muslim community and tell reporters that radicalisation has nothing to do with British foreign policy or feeling disenfranchised within the UK. The bad Muslim is the character who speaks out, protests, points out the flaws in the UK's foreign policy and generally does anything that might provoke a sneering op-ed in the Telegraph or the Mail. 

There's a huge difference in what the media-appointed Muslim community leaders say on TV and the genuine feeling on the streets of areas like Tipton, Birmingham and Bradford. Those on our screens are compliant and apologetic; they cosy up to the people in power in the hopes of earning their ear. Meanwhile, on the streets, there is a growing sense of frustration and anger.

On Friday, I asked some young Muslims in Tipton what they thought of the nail bomb attack. "It's the goreh," they replied. "Goreh" is a commonly used word for "white people", but – said in a specific way – can quite easily be translated to mean "the racists". I then brought up the topic of the proposed EDL rally in Birmingham (which is ten miles away from Tipton) on the 20th of July. 

"They want us to stay at home while these racists attack us. Forget that! I ain't staying at home," one teenager told me. There is a history to this opinion; since the EDL started to bring their rallies to the streets of Birmingham, the police and local Muslim leaders have actively discouraged Muslim youth from demonstrating against the far-right group. The clear mistake here is that, instead of allowing them to air their frustrations, it orders them to bottle it all up – allowing one group to protest while silencing the other.
 
The police have called the Tipton attack a terrorist incident, which – after talking to local resident Amar Khan – makes perfect sense. "If that bomb had gone off when there were people there, there would have been some serious casualties," he told me. "There would have been 300 to 400 people at the mosque for Friday prayers." (For other theories, Tommy Robinson – ever the pragmatist – suggested it could have been a sectarian attack between Sunni and Shia Muslims, "after all they bomb each others mosques worldwide" [sic].)

A Muslim solidarity demonstration for Lee Rigby after his murder. (Photo by Jack Delf)
  
However, that marks perhaps the first time in memory that police have dubbed white-on-Muslim violence in the UK as a terrorist attack. For example, after a homemade explosive device was left near a mosque in Walsall at the end of last month, police said they did not believe it to be an act of terrorism. I challenged West Midlands police via Twitter about why they believed this, and the next day they conveniently removed the line from their statement. But the implications are obvious – if a Muslim does it, it's terrorism; if a non-Muslim does it, it's "just" a crime.  

And these incidents are rarely even described as hate crimes, let alone terrorist acts. A paint bomb attack on a mosque in Belfast, windows smashed at a Brixton mosque, arson at an Islamic boarding school in Bromley, an arson attack that destroyed an Islamic centre in north London, swastikas sprayed on a mosque in Redditch and Muslim graves daubed with graffiti in Wales are just some of the incidents that have taken place since the Woolwich attack. They are premeditated attacks designed purely to terrorise a specific community, yet never adequately described as such – at least not in the same way as an attack carried out by a Muslim.    

Again, the media are complicit. Journalists are happy to throw "Islamist" around, but seemingly fearful of the term Islamophobe. A criminal's religion is only ever mentioned if he is Muslim. Muslim women are blanketly "oppressed" if they choose to wear a hijab. Imams are extremists, mosques are a threat, minarets are a sign of the increasing Islamification of Britain and there's apparently always a "secret" Sharia court hosting a barbaric trial and cutting someone's hands off somewhere in a Poplar housing estate.

And while mosques continue to be attacked and the wider Muslim population vilified in the press for the acts of a minority, the community must endure with an increasingly contrived sense of dignity and honour – a "shut up and deal with it" approach for fear of adding fuel to an already roaring fire. 

(Photo by Henry Langston)

Of course, that's sparked growing frustration within Muslim communities. I hear it when I go to the gym, while I'm sitting in the park and while I'm walking down the street; Muslim politicians are unrepresentative – they forget their roots as soon as they make it to Westminster, acting as the voice of British Islam without once considering the authentic opinions revolving around the country's streets. For instance, where was Sajjad Karim's statement echoing the outrage from his constituents when, post Lee Rigby's murder, Twitter users were posting messages like, "Drag their children out of the mosques and kill them," or taking it upon themselves to physically attack places of worship?  

And how does the government propose to deal with this? I'm yet to hear David Cameron make a statement about the Tipton mosque attack – an attack that, were it an hour later, could have potentially maimed hundreds of people. Imagine if the situation was reversed, if a Muslim had attacked an Anglican church; there would be an expectance heaped on the Muslim community to apologise and condemn the actions of the individuals who carried out the attacks. The same is not expected when Muslims are attacked: there is no Cobra meeting, no sense of urgency, no care. Muslims, it seems, are expendable.

The more the government continue to do this, the more of a problem it will become. For years they have bombed and murdered innocent Muslims abroad – Muslims who look like Muslims in this country, Muslims with the same names as Muslims in this country, Muslims who wear the same clothes and speak the same language as Muslims in this country. Again, imagine the white British outrage if Cameron were to send troops to wantonly massacre half of the innocent ex-pat community in the Costa del Sol and just treated it as necessary collateral in the hunt for a couple of genuinely extremist Christians.      

The Muslim community only makes up 4.8 percent of the UK population. They're an already victimised minority and the persecution is steadily getting worse; since the Tipton attack counter-terrorism police have been visiting mosques in the West Midlands, telling them to be vigilant and report anything suspicious. We have to remember that it's the Muslim community who are the victims here, not the marauding armies of racist, ill-informed thugs waving St George's flags on Britain's streets.       

Follow Assed on Twitter: @AssedBaig

More Islamophobia in the UK:

Moronic English Fascists Marched On Parliament in London

We Photographed a Drunk EDL Hate Mob Attacking Police Last Night

The BNP Utterly Failed to March Through London This Weekend

We know we’re tough on Rob Ford when it comes to his social media presence. For example, I took the time to meticulously pick apart Rob Ford’s official Facebook photo albums to let him know his photographer was clearly sabotaging him. And of course, being the responsible and reactionary Mayor that he is, Robbie got a somewhat better photographer. Then we showcased a brilliant piece of code, made by Marc Ellison, that scraped Robbie’s Facebook page for all of the deleted comments his staffers did not think were appropriate for public consumption.

Unfortunately, Robbie’s staffers do not have the same level of control over the Twitter responses that Rob’s official Twitter account, @TOMayorFord, receives from his constituents. If you think we’re harsh, the city of Toronto in general is much, much worse. Here's a sampling of what Rob Ford and his staffers have to deal with in their Twitter mentions on a daily basis.

Here’s Rob Ford politely alerting the people of Toronto that—due to the city’s unprecedented flooding—there would be a special garbage pickup for all the nasty flood trash that no one wanted rotting away in their hallways anymore. It's quite honourable that during such a stresful time, Rob was able to fire up his laptop and slap together a tweet. Plus, it seems like a pretty innocent and good-intentioned message, right? Well, some people took this opportunity to hate on Robbie, and his presumed weakness for yummy snacks.

HARSH! Although the image of Rob Ford chomping his way through the city of Toronto, Pacman style, swallowing up garbage bags and all of the soaked comic book collections ruined by the flood definitely makes us chortle and chuckle and slap our knees with excitement, this is very mean-spirited. Not cool. Imagine Rob's face when he read this response?

Here's Rob Ford doing his best Captain Planet impression. Coming from the man who rides around in a giant SUV, Rob's environmental conservation advice doesn't necessarily have the most authenticity. But, I guess it's one of those "do as I say (not as I do)" situations. Despite dealing with a citywide power issue, Rob was still able to hop onto the information superhighway and address the people of #Toronto with a "Thank You." Let's see how his followers responded to this one...

Oh come on! First of all, I didn’t even know you could vaporize crack. But evidently, as far as this person is concerned, the most unfortunate consequence of losing power is having to resort to analog means of drug consumption. I mean, who wants to hoover crack rock with a regular ol’ pipe and lighter, when you have the much healthier option of vaporizing that white stuff? Sounds like a no brainer to me.

Rob has seen a lot of ups and downs lately—namely being fired, then rehired, then almost fired again, while also facing a crack cocaine scandal. But of course, somehow, he always emerges as the victor, leaving a string of unhappy individuals in his wake. Here we see Robbie taking time away from his intense schedule to share his deepest feelings of relief with his Twitter followers. Unfortunately, the illegal aliens living within Ford Nation do not want to see Robbie win.

:(

Here’s a fun-loving Robbie tweet. Not only is Rob sharing his love for funky web design (it’s well known that Rob Ford was a major proponent of mid-90s Geocities and Angelfire web design, according to a super official VICE Canada survey) he’s letting his followers know about the joyous Woofstock festival that touches down in Toronto twice a year. One has to wonder, though, if Rob really is writing these tweets himself. Does he use 'funky' often in conversation, or was his social media rep feeling particularly quirky that day? Hard to say, but  as you are probably learning by now, the sardonic and hateful people of Toronto took this tweet as an open door to blast the Mayor.

Not only is Rob’s vocabulary being called into question here, this follower has also posed a deeply existential question to Rob himself. Does Rob have any idea what he is doing? Whoa man, deep. Rob must have given this response a lot of deep thought, while tabbing between cute puppy Tumblrs and the GIF subreddit.

This picture. Sigh. I didn’t realize that you could hotwire a flip phone to work with Twitter. What the hell, guys? I guess, much like Barack Obama's specialized BlackBerry, you can get a cell phone to do anything as a political leader. Terrible photo aside; this is just a simple good-times tweet to celebrate Robbie’s born day. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh I see where you’re going with this one! While it’s hard to believe that the Ford staffers hot boxed the top floor of City Hall with crack vapours, before cutting the cake and taking a crappy cellphone photo for all of Rob’s Twitter followers, it wouldn’t be completely unbelievable given the framing and lack of colour correction displayed in this official Rob Ford photo.

Rob hates “Gypsy Moths” as much as the next guy, but you would think that in light of Sun News’ recent Gypsy scandal that they would pick a less racist name for these pesky bugs. Oh well kill ‘em all, right Rob? Whether or not you are personally affected by the Gypsy Moth epidemic that has been plaguing the City of Toronto, it’s valuable information. I think. How did the people respond?

Well, there you have it. This individual couldn’t even ponder the consequences of Gypsy Moths for half a second before calling for Rob’s head. Clearly Robbie has upset the internet users of Toronto very deeply.

Despite reversing the perfectly fine, five-cent charge for plastic bags, Robbie is concerned where all of these environment-destroying sacs end up. Interesting.

Leave it to Toronto’s most prized pandas to reuse the “Rob loves to eat stuff” joke from earlier on in this article. Oh well, how could we blame you for rehashing a punch line, pandas? It’s an exciting accomplishment that you’re able to tweet in the first place. Welcome to Canada!
 

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire
 

Previously:

Rob Ford's New Music Video Includes Our Photoshopped Image of Him with a Pipe

We Spoke to a Former Crack Addict about Rob Ford

Rob Ford Has a Terrible Photographer

US Marshals make arrest during a 2011 operation targeting gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Officers made 129 arrests and seized nearly $20,000. Photo via Flickr account for the US Marshals

During a July 9 traffic stop in Meridian, Mississippi, police found $360,000 stashed in a secret compartment in the car. Though that’s perhaps an eyebrow-raising amount of money, readers of that linked article might notice something odd—the driver was let go, but the money was kept by the cops. The unnamed individual may or may not get that cash back, but whether they’re charged with a crime is not necessarily the point. If you have a suspicious amount of cash—sometimes much less than 360 grand—the cops can seize it, and it’s on you to prove that the money isn’t connected to a crime. This is the intersection of civil law’s low burden of proof for prosecutors and criminal law’s aggressive reach. And it’s done a lot to fund bad police policies.

One example of cops using asset forfeiture aggressively comes from a report by a Fitchburg, Massachusetts, newspaper on local motel owner Russell Caswell, who battled the government for three years over his right to keep his own motel. Authorities made 15 drug busts there between 1994 and 2008, but Caswell was never charged with any crimes. Having successfully managed to keep his property, Caswell now intends to lobby for changes in the civil asset forfeiture laws that brought him dangerously close to losing his livelihood.

Although state laws regarding asset forfeiture vary, thanks to the practice known as “equitable sharing” local and state police keep up to 80 percent of the profits from selling off the property they seize from criminals, as long as federal law enforcement is involved in the case, however tangentially. And in civil forfeiture cases, like that of Caswell, the owner of the property’s guilt is not the issue debated—if the property was used for crimes, it can be seized. The Justice Department’s asset forfeiture fund was at $1.8 billion in 2011, and it gave away nearly half a billion dollars to local police departments. If the law changed, a lot of that money would disappear, and we all know how much government agencies cling to money.

With rewards like that, who wouldn’t prioritize drug crime, when that’s the only kind of investigation that will bring in new patrol cars and help maintain expensive SWAT teams? You could use that money to buy football tickets and home furnishings, as a district attorney in Georgia did. Cops in Pittsburgh bought $10,000 worth of Gatorade, officers in Bal Harbor, Florida, took trips to LA and Vegas and rented luxury cars, and other DAs and police chiefs have bought everything from tanning salons to booze for parties.

Such headline-ready corruption sticks out, but those examples aren’t the biggest issue with asset forfeiture laws in the US. The system is an endless feedback loop of drug busts that result in seized property leading to more more funding for fancy cop gear that is used most often for drug busts. These absurd policies that incentivize police to prioritize drug arrests because that's where the money is have got to end.

Now on to this week’s bad cop stories:

- Authorities haven’t released a lot of detail related to July 10 raids on several homes in Dayton, Ohio, because they say the warrant is sealed. What is known is that the Ohio Organized Crime task force —which included FBI and SWAT officers—raided the wrong house on that day. Three residents who had moved in the week before were cuffed, and an unnamed man reported that he woke up that morning with a gun to his head. They’re waiting for an apology that has yet to arrive.

- On Tuesday, a US Park Police SWAT team raided the Fairfax County, Virginia, home of libertarian activist Adam Kokesh, looking for an unspecified weapon. The charges against Kokesh currently relate only to his possession of ‘shrooms while in possession of a gun, but the catalyst for the raid was clearly a video Kokesh made which appears to show him loading a shotgun near the Capitol on July 4. (Kokesh had previously been planning an armed protest march on DC for that day.) Kokesh’s roommates say the cops used too much force and disorienting flashbang grenades—you’d think that if Kokesh was that crazy and dangerous, the cops would have arrested him on the street, as they have before, rather than engaging in a risky SWAT raid.

- In February 2012, 28-year-old Dustin Theoharis was shot 16 times by cops in Washington state because they thought, wrongly, that he was the parole violator they were looking for. Now, having just finished his 12th surgery, and facing injuries that will affect him for the rest of his life, Theoharis is suing the Washington Department of Corrections for $20 million (King County has offered to settle with him for $3 million). The DOC, for its part, still claims that its officer “used appropriate force and followed the proper procedures in a dangerous situation” while shooting the wrong guy more than a dozen times.

- Former Minneapolis SWAT team leader and police sergeant David Clifford was sentenced to three and a half years in prison Thursday over an April assault on a bar patron that left the other man needing three brain surgeries.

- Michigan police raided a medical marijuana “service center” called Hydro World twice in seven days earlier this month. No charges have been filed against owner Danny Trevino, who said he would fight them if they appear.

- A Crestview, Florida, SWAT team thought it prudent and not at all risky to serve a drug warrant at 3:30 AM on Tuesday, in a house that contained a child. Three people were arrested on meth charges, and the child was removed.

- The NYPD had the self-awareness to blanch over reports from the past few months that one of its cruisers was spotted blaring Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars.

- Our good Cops of the Week story: In 1970, Angela Basore, then four years old, was rescued from a house fire in Orange County, California, along with her two siblings by police officers Harlan Lambert and Jack Jakobsen. This week Basore finally met and thanked those men in person after contacting them through Facebook. Lambert, who was the first black police officer in Orange County, said he “cried like a baby” when he saw Basore’s first message. It’s pretty much impossible to snark about that.

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

Previously: The Police Can Legally Kick You out of Your Home

Hip-hop is having a renaissance right now in the city of New York, where it seems like every other day a new MC rises up out of the five boroughs with an even more unique style and approach to the music than what we thought was possible before. Motley crews like the A$AP Mob, the Beast Coast, and World's Fair have given us a reason to love rhymes again. We've written a lot about this stuff, but sometimes words don't do it justice. So, we've linked up with scene insider Verena Stefanie Grotto to document the new New York movement as it happens in real time, with intimate shots of rappers, scenesters, artists, and fashion fiends.

This week, Verena wasn't in New York City. Instead, she was in London with Harlem-bred rappers A$AP Ferg and A$AP Nast. Verena's pictures highlight the energy of an A$AP Mob show overseas and and showcase what it's like shopping with the Trap Lord in London's Soho shopping district.

Photographer Verena Stefanie was born and bred in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. The small town is not known for hip-hop, but they do make a very tasty grape-based pomace brandy there called grappa. Stefanie left Bassano del Grappa at the age of 17 to go and live the wild skateboarding life in Barcelona, Spain, where she worked as the Fashion Coordinator for VICE Spain. Tired of guiding photographers to catch the best shots, she eventually grabbed the camera herself and is now devoted to documenting artists, rappers, style-heads, and more. She recently directed a renowned documentary about the Grime scene in UK and has had photo features in GQ, Cosmopolitan, VICE, and many more. 

Check out her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

@VerenaStefanie

Previously - Action Bronson and Harry Fraud Passed Out Pot at the Noisey Rap Party

It's not often that ancient Chinese texts about divining the future and social media meet. It's even less common that they meet in the form of a giant light show that takes place on the facade of a former Olympic venue. But this is what takes place in artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwei's installation, Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube.

The piece was unveiled last month at the Beijing National Aquatics Center (known as the Water Cube) and uses a computer program to translate the I Ching and the collective mood of the Chinese people, through the emoticons they use on the microblogging site Weibo, into a real-time light display on the building's blistered exterior.

Read more about this at The Creators Project.

July 12 is probably the biggest date in Northern Ireland’s political calendar. Each year, hundreds of Orangemen and loyalist marching bands descend upon Belfast to parade around the city in commemoration of a Dutch Protestant defeating an English Catholic in a battle that took place over 300 years ago. As with everything that involves religion in Northern Ireland, the parade rout—and the Twelfth in general—is a deeply contentious issue. To the loyalists, it’s an important celebration of Protestant traditions; to the republicans it’s a bit like if the Afrikaans marched through the streets of Johannesburg celebrating apartheid.

The main parade travels from Belfast city center to a park on the outskirts of the city and back again. After that, various local bands split off into smaller parades to return to their respective communities. It is these return routes to the North and East of the city that have historically caused the most tension, as they involve the loyalist bands parading through republican areas. The largely republican Ardoyne district in the North has been a flashpoint for the past decade, with last year’s riots seeing police attacked with bricks, Molotov cocktails, and gunshots, leaving 20 officers injured.

Tensions have been running particularly high during the lead up to this year’s Twelfth. The Parades Commission, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of last year, banned the Orange Order from marching through Ardoyne after last-minute talks failed to produce a compromise. This is a huge source of contention for the loyalist community, who are already concerned about the “erosion of their culture” after the removal of the Union flag from City Hall last year and the ensuing riots.

Helpfully, the republican community has also been enraged recently, after a republican protest against the Orange Order’s Tour of the North resulted in Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly being taken for a ride on the hood of a police Land Rover. Northern Ireland Culture Minister Caral Ni Chuilin was hospitalized after trying to come to the aid of her colleague.

So, with both sides on the verge of a fight and the PSNI more tooled up than they’ve ever been following last month’s G8 conference, I went to Belfast to see if everyone couldn't just put centuries of animosity aside and get along.

Bands from all over Northern Ireland and Scotland assembled at Belfast City Hall, while a short service took place at the city’s war memorial. Once that was finished, it was time to begin the march.

The morning parade was very family-orientated; the streets were lined with people in deck chairs, nobody was drinking, and this guy went around handing out Union flags to children, like a chuckling loyalist Santa Claus.

As the parade moved along its designated route, things grew increasingly raucous. I met these two, who had come over from Scotland. I asked Cook, the one on the right, why the Twelfth was so important to him. “I’m just over for a party with my pals, really, that’s about it," he said, working his way through a bottle of Buckfast at 11 AM.

After a two-hour march in the July heat everyone was pretty exhausted, so it was time for a rest on the grass. On the stage, various Orange Order officials gave speeches about the importance of the event, but most people seemed more interested in sunbathing than hearing about how great William of Orange was.

Which isn't that surprising, I guess, given they've probably been hearing the same speech over and over since they were kids.

After exploring the park a bit more it became clear the Orangefest crowd was made up of two distinct factions. On the one side, you had the Presbyterian types who set up marquees and bunting and gave off a sort of Jubilee garden party vibe.

And the second was the younger crowd, who took their shirts off, got their faces painted, and gave off more of a Gathering of the Juggalos vibe. Like this guy, whose Buckfast and Carlsberg with a vodka-based chaser made me think he probably wasn’t an expert on the Twelfth.

Unlike David, whom I met lining up for sandwiches outside a marquee. He seemed nice, so I asked him about the history of the Orange Order and the Twelfth. We had a perfectly nice, normal conversation until I asked him if he thought the event was worth the yearly clashes in places like Ardoyne.

“Little pockets like Ardoyne are always separate, always divided, and always annoy and irritate people. How can you share a future together when you don’t share the Orange Institution? Why are you stopping the institution from traveling up the traditional route that they’ve been doing for centuries—you know, what’s your game?”

I believe their game is called "being Catholic."

Later, I came across this merch stand, which was selling CDs of the various bands playing at the march. This one contained such party starters as “God Save the Queen,” “UDA All the Way,” and “Heroes of the UVF.”

But if music isn’t you’re thing, you could still join in the harmless fun by purchasing a toy assault rifle—I’m not sure if this is the exact model that was used in the Battle of the Boyne, but hey, if it’ll shoot Catholics, it’ll do, right?

After two hours, it was time to hit the road again for the march back to City Hall.

The return march attracted a much larger, rowdier crowd than the morning parade. The footpaths were spilling over and every bus shelter had at least five shirtless men jumping around on top of it.

The crowds on this part of the route were the most drunk by far—which was probably because a group of them (not pictured) decided to break into that bar in the background and make off with a king's ransom in rum and sambuca.

Once the North Belfast bands had split off from the main parade they marched up Clifton Street toward the Ardoyne. A number of police checkpoints had been set up to ensure that only the bands—and not their supporting crowds—made their way toward the republican community.

As the march approached the Ardoyne it met protests from local republicans. The police had cleared the roads to allow the parade through, and the bands seemed to revel in provoking the republicans by playing loyalist anthem "The Sash" as loudly as they possibly could.

I met these two at the protest and asked them why they were so mad. “We’re sick of this, every year they march through here and every year there’s trouble," they said. "They never show us any respect.” A few minutes later a group of around 20 protesters split off and ran toward Fredrick Street; I followed to find out what was going on.

When they got to the bottom of Fredrick Street they met a small group of loyalists. Both sides faced off in a shouting match and then all hell broke loose. Police cones, stones and cans were thrown from both sides.

This loyalist got too close to the republican side and was knocked out by a punch. Two of his bandmates dragged him away from the fray while the rest continued to return fire on the republicans.

After five minutes of scuffles and stone throwing, the police finally arrived and got to work separating the rival factions, like sheep dogs with massive batons.

Police lines formed to block off the street and within ten minutes the two sides had been separated.

After the republicans had dispersed, the remaining loyalists demanded that the police let them continue up the street to rejoin the parade. The police weren’t going to let that happen, though, as the main part of the loyalist parade had reached the roadblock ahead and were engaged in a stand off with heavily armored cops.

For whatever reason, the police seemed keen to keep their promises and deny the loyalists access to Ardoyne.

When I arrived, the loyalists had climbed on top of police Land Rovers and were throwing projectiles at police lines. The officers responded with water cannon blasts that knocked the loyalists off the Land Rovers into mid air.

The enraged crowd fought back with Molotov cocktails, ceremonial swords, bricks, and bottles—at one point even a wooden cabinet was hurled at police. In East Belfast, a similar situation had developed involving the returning parade, police, and local republicans at the bottom of the Newtownards Road. Both riots continued late into the night.

When the dust settled and the crowds were finally dispersed, more than 30 police officers were injured along with the MP for North Belfast, Nigel Dodds. He was negotiating with police when he was struck on the head by a missile thrown from the loyalist side. After collapsing to the ground he was hit with a blast from the water cannon before he could be removed from the fray.

After the rioting, the Orange Order cancelled plans to protest against the Parades Commission’s decision to ban them from Ardoyne. However, large groups of loyalists gathered in North and East Belfast on Saturday and Sunday night, clashing with police. Four hundred extra police officers have been drafted in from the rest of the UK, bringing the current total of mutual aid officers to 1,000.

The police chief constable has called the Orange Order “reckless” over its emotive language and call for protests, while the Orange Order have criticized the PSNI for failing to protect marches from attacks by republicans in East Belfast.

Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness has said responsibility for the attacks on police rests on the Orange Order—as usual in Northern Ireland, everyone is blaming each other.

Follow Matthew (@matthewfrancey) and Lewis (@rankin_lewis) on Twitter.

More stories about sectarian tension in Northern Ireland:

Loads of People in the UK's 'City of Culture' Really Hate the UK

Belfast's Flag Riots Are Setting My Hometown On Fire Again

God Save Belfast

A video demo of the BigBrain project. Based largely in Montreal, scientists created a highly-detailed cross-sectional map of the human brain. Researchers can quickly zoom to any region they like for further analysis.

Your brain is a complex and marvelous creation. One hundred billion interconnected nerve cells, entangled in a bewildering network of 100 trillion synapses. These connections are where all of your memories are stored, from your first awkward sexual fumble in Grade 8 band camp to last week’s awkward sexual fumble with the weirdo you brought home from the after-hours you should have never been at in the first place.

That’s an incredible amount of neural data to be packed into 1.5 kilograms of mushy tissue. The storage security of all that information is surprisingly resilient—even when it’s challenged by massive amounts of liquor, hard drugs, or your many failed attempts to pull off an ollie 900.

But your mental data doesn’t always survive the abuse. Derek Boogaard, an enforcer with the New York Rangers, spent his whole career taking vicious shots to the head. In the weeks before his death, already heavily addicted to opioid painkillers, Boogard descended into wild fits of mania and depression. He overdosed on booze and pills and died just shy of his 29th birthday.

Boogaard’s family donated his brain to medical research. When it was examined, scientists found the tissue within was severely degraded—it was literally full of holes. He’d become a victim of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease mainly affecting people who sustain repetitive brain injuries, a consistent profile for an athlete who got his head bashed in at regular intervals by Matt Carkner.

The symptoms of CTE are memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, aggression, depression, and dementia. If this list of maladies sounds familiar, that’s because it’s shared with a whole host of other brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s Disease.

The structure of the brain, at a macroscopic level, has been known for a long time. But changes that affect our thinking patterns always begin at the cellular level. That’s why Canadian scientists have built a new map of our favourite organ from the ground up—almost cell by cell.

I spoke to Dr. Don Stuss, the President and Scientific Director of the Ontario Brain Institute, about how impressive and important this project really is: "This new model is a move from the macro to the micro level. This has enabled us to map—from the cellular level, from the basic core of what brain function is—to the macro level, like you'd get in a hospital scan... It's a phenomenal amount of work to achieve this"

The massive amount of brain power that's been put into developing the “BigBrain” project in the first place is an international collaboration, and as is often the story with multinational projects—like WWII—the Canucks got called in to do the dirty work. In this case, the intrepid folks at the Montreal Neurological Institute got their hands on a fresh brain, donated by a 65-year-old woman, with which they modeled their virtual brain map.

To start, they embedded the entire brain in a block of paraffin wax. Then came the hard part: using a microtome (a device much like a deli meat slicer, except equipped with a diamond-tipped blade), the entire block was sliced into segments 0.02 millimetres thick, like a gruesome smorgasbord of brain carpaccio. Each slice—some 7,400 in all—was numbered, fixed in a chemical brew to outline the cellular structures, and then digitized into a huge database via a flatbed scanner manned by hapless undergraduates.

7,000 of these thin human brain slices were used to create the BigBrain.

The highly-detailed digital images of each slice were added together to create a 3D map of the entire brain, at a resolution 50 times greater than what’s been previously achieved. The final result is BigBrain—a collaborative online tool. A researcher who's interested in looking at, say, the upper 1\10th of the amygdala now merely has to log into BigBrain and feed in some spatial coordinates. A few moments later, a hi-res map of just that section of grey matter pops up on screen. That means that a doctor in Marrakesh, who has discovered an abnormality in a particular section of a patient's brain, need only access the server in Montreal to see how the diseased variant differs from the digital display model. This is a very cool development in the collaborative world of science.

Having an instant brain reference model could lead to a renaissance in how we diagnose and treat neurological disorders. Once it's discovered that a particular disease is closely linked to a specific change in structure, in a particular region of the brain, a patient need only have an MRI scan done of their own noggin to see if they're carrying that particular defect. That would allow doctors to make a sharp diagnosis, quickly.

The BigBrain project is yet another example of the power of Big Data. Ten years ago, when computing power was expensive, scientists had to be very selective about what they were looking for. This approach was thorough, but it was easy to miss important details. Nowadays, a Samsung Galaxy is powerful enough to run nuclear weapons simulations, so researchers are scooping up all the data they can get their hands on. The challenge is to design smart software to separate the digital wheat from the virtual chaff.

Canadians are especially good at this sort of thing. Around 2000, when the Human Genome Project was nearing completion, the major challenge was storing and processing the immense amounts of data that were being generated. Fifteen years ago, when the thought of a one-terabyte hard drive was the stuff of a madman’s dreams (today’s list price: $100), researchers looking to comb through large amounts of information needed to design smart algorithms to look for meaningful patterns in the huge swaths of 1s and 0s their projects were generating. That kind of thinking was pioneered at places like The Centre for Applied Genomics at Sick Kids hospital in Toronto. Good thing too, because as computing power has skyrocketed in the last decade, those kinds of smart algorithms—which are getting more powerful and effective day by day—are finding new kinds of patterns.

An unexpected bonus of Big Data is that these algorithms are finding patterns by themselves that no one specifically intended to look for. As the amount of data that we generate goes stratospheric—consider a pair of Google Glasses constantly measuring your heart rate and temperature, for example—scientists will begin to see trends they never anticipated. For example, say in five years, when Rob Ford is still the duly elected mayor of Toronto, health authorities detect a big increase in body temperature among hundreds of revelers at Ford Fest, his honour’s annual BBQ. Suddenly, dozens of members of Ford Nation fall violently ill. Medical algorithms trace the confluence of those data points back to party and the mayor’s brother Doug is brought in on charges of spiking the steak sauce with the city’s finest crack cocaine. Hey, it could happen.

The idea here is that as more data floods into our servers, we will begin finding connections between things we once thought were totally unrelated—by sitting back and letting machines do the work for us.

We can only hope the next generation of Derek Boogaards who are suffering from severe brain trauama will benefit from the knowledge brought by BigBrain and Big Data, to ensure they stay healthy enough to let the blood blossom forth from their opponents when the gloves fly off.
 

Paul Tadich is a science journalist and a huge nerd who would love to take you to a dark tavern and talk to you in earnest, yet gentle tones about quantum vortices. You can visit his blog at paultadich.com

More science-y stuff:

Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy

The Great Brain Data Pain

Sucking Up Radiation From Outer Space in the Chilean Desert

“I'll squander the hours I should be working trolling the internet for pictures of women whose leg warmers have been spattered with semen. You could call this my kink.” – Lewis “Teabag” Miner, Home Land

Legwarmers piss me off in a way that other types of “let’s forget it never happened” fashion fads don’t. Because unlike “mandals," jean-skirts, or zip-off cargo pants—which are all disgusting but fulfill a purpose—legwarmers don’t do shit to keep you warm. Sheathing your legs in tubes of yarn while your feet dangle out in the cold is like popping mittens on your elbows. So why are these frumpy, outdated, and fundamentally absurd excuses for socks the source of so many boners on the internet?

Legwarmer smut ranges from short YouTube clips of girls slipping them on and slowly rubbing their legs together to full-blown porn videos of girls—or g-string-wearing guys—fucking with their (surely very toasty) legs thrown high in the air. You can also find scores of pictures on foot fetish sites of pouty models with their legwarmers spread open. The commenters are always far more interested in the length and furriness of the legwarmers than the gaping pussies staring them in the face.

A mysterious YouTube star who only posts videos of herself in the same pair of red legwarmers.

The first and most obvious explanation for a legwarmer obsession is podophilia—aka foot fetishism, one of the oldest kinks in the book. An insane number of famous people purportedly have a “thing” for feet: Andy Warhol kept a mummified foot by his bed. Goethe’s girlfriend nicknamed his dick “Mr. Nicefoot.” And considering the album cover of Ludacris's sophmore album, he loves feet as much as he loves chicken and beer.

Of course, enjoying a quick toe nibble from time to time isn’t really a fetish—it’s built into our neurology. Scientists believe our fondness for a good toe sucking has everything to do with the fact that the areas detecting sensory input for your feet and genitals are right next to each other in your brain. In fact, the acclaimed neuroscientist and phantom limb specialist V. S. Ramachandran wrote about one his patients—an amputee—who actually used to come in his phantom leg when he had sex. The lucky dude explained that his orgasms were “much bigger than it used to be because it’s no longer just confined to my genitals.”

But under the large umbrella of foot fetishism, legwarmer porn skews more towards the weirder side of the spectrum—the side where you’d also find, like, guys buying sweat-drenched socks off eBay, and rednecks watching girls in stilettoes rev up stubborn trucks. (It’s called “pedal pumping,” and it’s amazing.)

 
One of eBay’s many sweaty sock hawkers.

The weirdness of legwarmer porn, however, isn’t as overtly creepy as sweaty socks and pedal pumping. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite—dudes who are into legwarmers seem obsessed on an Etsy-scale with cuteness and softness. “I prefer when they just bunch up at the ankles, leaving the cute feet exposed ;)” confessed a leg warmer lover I found on Reddit’s r/Feet. Another confessed that “if legwarmers look soft and the feeties are peeking from under it, I just can’t hold myself.” Yet another told me that, “Depending on the color, they can make feet look sexier, like a bright orange, for instance.” You can almost hear them squealing over thread counts.

In my last attempt to really get into the heads of leg warmer filth fans, I turned to the novelist Sam Lipsyte, whose book on post-collegiate loserdom, Home Land, is centered on a guy who spends his days trolling the internet for pictures of women wearing semen-splattered leg warmers. Why did he choose these stupid socks as his protagonist’s erotic fixation? “Flashdance meant a lot to me,” quipped Lipsyte, “Though I’m more directed to the knee.” Well, at least he doesn’t jack off to sock puppets. 

@MichelleLHOOQ

More stuff from Michelle:

Finally, a Pastor Who Wants Women to Give Blowjobs

My VICE Internship Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About Having a Dick

Hunting R.L. Stine at the Year’s Biggest Thriller Conference

Click through to the next page for more images from Tim Freccia & Gerald Slota.

Ten years ago Shaun Smith was an enforcer for one of the biggest crime families in Liverpool and embroiled in a war against a rival drug gang.

Shaun introduced urban terrorism to the British underworld. He sprayed up houses with machine guns, tortured people, and used homemade napalm to firebomb his enemies.

Today, after a spell of five years in prison for firearms offences, he is trying to transfer those skills to the legal economy by working as a debt collector in the northern English satellite town of Warrington.

The world knows Valeria Lukyanova as the girl who turned herself into a real-life barbie doll. Controversy has surrounded her every move since her computer-perfect visage went viral last year.

However, what most of the world doesn't know is that Valeria is not a real girl at all, but a time-travelling spiritual guru whose purpose is to save the world from the clutches of superficiality and negative energy.

Valeria, AKA Space Barbie, gives us exclusive access to her world to show us how physical perfection truly is the best medium through which to deliver life-changing philosophy to the human race.

Watch the film at VICE.com soon.

JAPAN. Asakusa. 1998. Two members of the Yakuza, Japan's Mafia. The Yakuza's 23 gangs are Japan's top corporate earners. They model themselves on American gangster fashion from the 1950s.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, like Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers, so becoming a member is a gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

Bruce Gilden is most famous for his New York street photography. These days, that term might conjure up the idea of plonkers with DSLRs taking photos of Supreme-clad youths posing on street corners. But Gilden's signature style of in-your-face street portraiture reveals far more about the world we live in than that. He's taken photos of everyone from NYC locals to Haitian hurricane survivors to Japanese Yakuza members. We spoke to him about having thick skin, the state of modern America, and why Haiti is still his favorite place to shoot. You can see more of his work in VICE here.

VICE: "Street photography" is a term that’s become overused these days, and its meaning has changed somewhat. How you would describe what you do? Is that a term you're happy with?
Bruce Gilden: You know the Fifth Amendment? I plead the Fifth Amendment: "I can’t answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me." Anyway, I’ve been called—and I would call myself—a street photographer. But, in reality, what is a street photographer? Does that mean anything that’s taken or done in the street? To me, street photography is where you can smell the street, feel the dirt. Maybe that’s a bit of an unfair definition, but that’s what I feel.

I think it’s a very urban thing for me: my style is street photography all the way through, but are my pictures of Haiti really street photography? Even I have trouble defining that as such. But maybe they could be, because it’s about style. I can get really parochial about this. A good photograph for me is one that works in the frame and has strong emotional content.

HAITI. Port-au-Prince. Cemetery. 1988.

Your style of photography is very up-close and personal, which I imagine could cause problems. How do those dangers and risks compare to those taken by other photographers who are, say, embedded in a warzone?
Well, look, when you’re embedded somewhere—or you’re allowed to be somewhere to take photographs—it’s always easier in some respects. People are mistaken about one thing: the closeness. If you work close and have a flash, that doesn’t mean that people are going to get more or less upset at you than if you were 12 feet away. You need a good bedside manner. What I mean is that you have to be comfortable, you have to know yourself. I look everybody in the eye. If you weren’t comfortable and you’re ten feet away and weren’t using flash, someone could look at you and say, "Wait a second, that guy’s taking a photo of me and he’s sneaking it!" 

People assume something that isn’t always correct. Now, I’m close to people, I use a flash. Sometimes I’m so close that people don’t even think I took their picture—they’ll say, "He didn’t take a picture of me, did he?" But the thing is, as far as having problems, you can have a problem whenever you raise your camera.

So you don't run into many problems?
I haven't had that many because I’m comfortable in doing it. Having said that, you always have a little fear in you: somebody could physically attack you. It’s not easy to lift a camera and take pictures of people who you don’t know. You don’t know how they’re going to respond, and that’s true whether you’re ten feet away or three. Maybe he’s walking with his lover and he doesn’t want a picture of him because his wife might see it. You never know.

Now, having said that, I play percentages at everything in life. If I feel the percentage is on my side, I’m comfortable. If I feel they’re not on my side, I’m not comfortable. For example, seven or eight years ago I went to Lima, Peru. I went on the street in one barrio and there was nobody about. I left. I never took my camera out of the bag, because I knew in two minutes it was very possible that someone would be coming down the street with a machete saying, "OK, give me your camera." I trust my gut. That doesn’t mean you don’t make mistakes, but if you’re comfortable, people feel it; if you’re uncomfortable, people feel it.

1984. USA. New York City.

Apart from Lima, are there any other areas you found particularly challenging to work in?
I wouldn’t call it challenging, but a little annoying. In Paris, you’ll always have one person who comes over and gives you the, “Why’d you take the picture, why’d you take the picture?” Sometimes we’ve had cops come over. And this isn't going to a war  or working where people are doing heroin on the streets—which I’ve already seen—or dealing with lowlifes, I’m just talking about ordinary people here. Parisians tend to be a little “intellectual” and it becomes a whole exercise for them, so it gets me a little flustered. What I mean by "flustered" is that I don’t have much respect for it. I just say, "OK, get a cop." I’m not going to get into a whole dialogue because, for me, I don’t agree with their premise. I do agree that you could ask me why I took a photo, but it depends how you ask me. You don’t treat me as a piece of shit; I’m not going to take it. You have to have a tough skin to be a street photographer.

That makes me think of your project in Japan with the Yakuza. How did you become familiar enough with them to shoot those photos?
I felt comfortable taking those pictures. That was the main thing—not the access. Some of the people I photographed may or may not have been Yakuza, and I didn’t know if they were or weren’t. I took the pictures because I felt comfortable. A few times I was able to take pictures because I was introduced to a couple of people. In all my time in Japan I was only with the Yakuza for maybe five days, and when I say five days I mean an hour, maybe, per day. But I never felt threatened when I was with them.  

Even when I wasn’t introduced and saw them on the street when I was alone, it felt right. I never even had to ask myself, “Should I take this picture?” For example, I went to the Yasukuni temple—the big right-wing temple that celebrates WWII. I didn’t know anybody and I was taking pictures of the right-wing political groups. Then one guy came over and, because he spoke English a little bit, asked what I was doing for his boss, who was curious. So I explained to him and everything was fine. They were gentlemen to me. Same with most of the people in the book in Japan. I didn’t know those people and I didn’t ask anything. They didn’t even enquire, they were cool.

HAITI. Port-au-Prince. September, 2011. Hut city across from the presidential palace that was first constructed by survivors of the January 2010 earthquake.

You mentioned Haiti before, which is somewhere you’ve been back to again and again. What is it that draws you there?
There are several reasons, I guess. The first time I went to Haiti was in 1984, so I would have been 38 years old. I’d never been to a country like that in my life and I picked Haiti because there was a direct, non-stop flight from New York—three and a half hours. Today, Haiti is the second poorest country in the world and, at that time, I don’t know what the ranking was, but it was the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Another reason I chose to go there is that they had a Mardi Gras and, historically, people were able to photograph there. When I arrived I remember saying to my ex-wife, "Where have I been my whole life?" because, when we were driving in from the airport, all these people were running in front of my car near the soccer stadium and I said, "Wow, this is unbelievable." 

I fell in love with the country from the beginning. I love the Haitians. I’ve been there 22 times now for a total of a little over a year of my life. I just feel comfortable there. It’s not that there are shots appearing everywhere you go—you have to work for your shots, you have to think about it. There is only a certain amount of time that you can photograph around the abattoir or outside the cemetery, then you have to find something else that works for you. My last three trips to Port-au-Prince, I started to photograph the makeshift structures that people lived in after the earthquake. In the last of these three trips, I shot in color.

USA. Detroit, Michigan. March 2009.

Another project I was interested in was Foreclosures. As someone who’s spent so much of their career photographing the "everyday American," what did that project mean to you? And what do you think about the state of America these days?
At the origin of the project, in 2008, Magnum was able to get some money for eight or ten of us photographers to spend two weeks somewhere in America. We were thinking possibly that Obama’s time would be like Kennedy’s time, comparing it to the Magnum: America in Crisis book that we did in the past. At that time, I really knew nothing about foreclosures, even though I'd done a two-day story for the New York Times on a guy who would buy houses from homeowners whose properties were underwater. 

I was going to go to Miami and do work on the Jews, the Cubans, and the Haitians, but my wife said to me, "Why don’t you do a project on foreclosures?" So we looked up where one of the highest rates of foreclosures was, and one of them happened to be in Fort Myers, Florida. So I went to Fort Myers and what I saw and what I heard from the people there made me really angry at the system, because the whole foreclosure thing is totally legalized thievery orchestrated by the government, the banks, and Wall Street. Then I continued working on this project in Detroit, Fresno, California, and Reno, Nevada until 2011. I have a book on that coming out in September.

Do you ever, like some other photographers, have an agenda or a political angle in your work?
My pictures are me. Whatever I take a picture of, it’s me. It’s about how I feel and I don’t have to think about it. You’ve got to photograph yourself because, if you know yourself, no matter how different what’s in front of the camera is, you’re still going to be able to smell the street or feel the dirt in the photograph. There are a lot of things wrong with this world, and I feel that, so that’s what my pictures are about. I always liked the underdog—the guy who’s not the average person—and I see a lot of pathos out there.

Click through to see more photography by Bruce Gilden.

USA. New York City. 1984.

HAITI. Port-au-Prince. 2011. Near the bus station on Rue Dessalines.

JAPAN. Tokyo. Asakusa. 1998. Matsuri festival.

USA. New York City. 1986.

HAITI. Port-au-Prince. 2011. After a funeral.

USA. California. October, 2010. An incompleted housing development outside of Fresno. Construction came to a hault due to the housing bust.

HAITI. Port-au-Prince. Football stadium, early evening. 1990.

JAPAN. Tokyo. 1999.

USA. Las Vegas, Nevada. November, 2011.

USA. Paloma Park, Florida. October 2008. Foreclosed house.

Previously: Chris Steele-Perkins Can't Let Go of England

More VICE Loves Magnum:

There's More to Stuart Franklin than the Most Famous Photo of the 20th Century

Jonas Bendiksen Takes Photos in Countries That Don't Exist

Peter Van Agtmael Won't Deny the Strange Allure of War

Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

Peter Sunde, smiling because he loves encryption. via WikiCommons.

The breaking news surrounding the state of internet surveillance—which we now know includes more than just the United States—has been flowing through the newspapers and blogs at an incredibly rapid rate. Given that most of the media chatter is focused on the spy-drama of Edward Snowden himself, rather than the implications of what he revealed, it’s been hard to come to any sort of conclusion regarding the ways in which one can avoid being completely monitored by government agencies.

One way that you can protect yourself from programs like PRISM, however, is through encryption. While many would argue there isn’t a lock on the planet that can’t be broken, encryption (at the very least) adds another barrier of security that will make your communications harder to monitor. Given that much of the world is up in arms about the reality of online surveillance, many companies who traffic in encrypted communication services are seeing a boom in their usage. The encrypted search engine, DuckDuckGo, has been seeing “record numbers” of users post-NSA leaks. Then there’s Seecrypt, an encrypted messaging and voice call app for iOS and Android, whose own chairperson says that their usage “just exploded” after the world discovered what the NSA was up to. The creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has even launched his own start-up, encrypted messaging service called Silent Circle.

And then there’s Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Along with a software designer and a coder, Peter is working on developing Heml.is (Hemlis means 'secret' in Swedish), a “beautiful and secure” encryption-based messenger that aims to put the power of encryption into a user-friendly package. After news broke that Microsoft has been cooperating with the NSA, over $137,000 USD was raised for Heml.is—150% of their target.

I spoke with Peter over email to discuss the Heml.is project, why encryption is necessary in today’s world, and what the future of secure communications holds.

VICE: When did you decide to go full steam ahead with Heml.is?
Peter: After the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden. We've been talking about doing something new and had different ideas—one of them doing some sort of messaging system. When the NSA leaks came out, we just felt it was exactly what was needed—and we want it ourselves!

How did Edward Snowden's revelations change your understanding of government surveillance in 2013?
It didn't change them—that's the problem. It cemented the estimation we all had, which was much worse than positive people want it to be.

Do you think there is any benefit to the government being able to wiretap digital communications?
No. Our governments are doing it all wrong. They need to make sure that people don't want to commit crimes, rather than wiretapping the people in order to find those who committed them. Putting the same effort into more sane things, like better education, better healthcare, better welfare, better way of life for all, would be cheaper and give greater results against criminals. Terrorism has turned into an excuse of doing whatever the government wants, but really doesn't affect the extremists. They're already avoiding the wiretapping using simple tools. The only people that get caught in the web of the wiretapping are the regular people.

As someone who has already gone through the rigors of the justice system, how long has surveillance been a concern of yours?
It's always been a concern! When someone watches what you do, you change your behavior because of that knowledge. In school I hated when teachers watched over my shoulder at what I was doing, and I think it's part of the same thing. I want my privacy.

How do you foresee encryption becoming a bigger part of day-to-day online usage in the near future?
Encryption needs to be there, but it is in itself not the solution for anything. The solution would be to make sure we don't need encryption. I see the encryption as some sort of defensive move against a very aggressive behavior that we should not tolerate. But in the meantime, it's like using a condom—we haven't found the cure for certain diseases yet, so we have to protect ourselves best we can.

What encryption based online services do you think are already successful?
VPN services are doing well in protecting their users. PGP has been really successful technology wise, but not in terms of users using it. I have been interviewed thousands of times; I've met one journalist that had a PGP key. It's a shame.

The official, Apple-esque, infomercial for Heml.is

What are the major hurdles in turning the average web user onto encryption?
Getting the user base, due to both marketing competence and having a good enough user experience and user interface.

Is that why Heml.is is being marketed as “beautiful?”
[Yes,] that's the main issue with tech solutions! If the every day user who doesn't understand (or doesn’t care, or want to care) about encryption doesn't start using the service, the people that want to use it can't talk to them and it will ultimately fail. To get people to use important technology, you simply have to make it more attractive than anything else to get them to care enough to move over. Few people would buy a really ugly car—even if it were super fast. They'd rather buy the car that looks fast and is slow as hell.

Why should the average person, who has nothing to hide, want to use Heml.is?
It's not about having something to hide or not, it's about having the right to privacy. Today’s wiretapping means that the government knows everything about you. Who you vote for, your religious beliefs, who you flirt with, what sexual preferences you have, and so on. It's none of their business. And learning from history, we see that future governments might be more interested in that data than the current ones.

Take Europe for instance, where more and more extreme right-wing parties are getting into power. In Norway, the anti-immigration party is now the second biggest one and will probably be part of the government in the next election. I am pretty sure they're interested in who's helping illegal immigrants and so on. We need to think long-term. The data is stored once, and could potentially be kept forever.

Given the revelations that Microsoft has been cooperating with the NSA, do you think the public opinion of the world's most popular software is going to change?
You mean that Microsoft makes popular software? It's more forced-upon-you software. But yes, it gives a great opportunity to make sure that people use the better solutions out there. Microsoft, Apple, and the other software manufacturers have way too much power over your every day life and freedoms—so it's important that we break their oligopoly. If that could be done, it would also be much harder to monitor people as the better solutions would all be open/free software right now, which we as people can understand much more about.

Are we seeing a tipping point in software development right now? It seems like there is a rush to get open, encryption-based products onto the market.
I am afraid that it's going to stall. People are already giving up… they don't feel they can fight the government. In the USA, you have a two-party system, where both parties are actually quite close to each other—especially when it comes to digital issues. The software development going on outside of the big corporations are almost always using encryption and more privacy-aware solutions than the corporate versions. So most of the tech solutions are already there, but we have an issue on getting them to the everyday desktop user.

What will it take for services like Heml.is to become the common means of communication?
I'm not sure we want it to be "the common means" of communication. We need to have many solutions, and not just a few instances that we trust immensely. Take The Pirate Bay. The worst thing that The Pirate Bay did was becoming as powerful and dominant as it is today. Because of that, no one creates a high functioning competitor and we lose out on both better technology as well as putting all of our eggs in one basket.

What else needs to change online for the internet to be a more open, free medium?
There's a lot! I think it's a big article in and of itself… But with the way the internet is growing right now—with cloud services, and very few global internet operators—we're definitely seeing that we're growing the wrong way in terms of free and open services.

Well, thanks for doing your part.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

More on surveillance and encryption:

Hiding Your Calls and Texts from Big Brother

Canadians Should Be Concerned about the NSA and PRISM

The Canadian Government Is Not Bothered by the NSA and PRISM