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Cry-Baby of the Week: A Woman Drove Her Car Into a Couple Because They Took Her Parking Spot

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Kimberly Pankratius

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Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A couple took a woman's parking spot at Walmart.

The appropriate response: Finding another parking spot. Maybe honking at the spot thieves, depending on the circumstances.

The actual response: She drove her car into one of the people who stole her space.

Last Saturday, a couple named Julie and Christopher Weakly went to their local Walmart in Lincoln, Nebraska.

While parking, they allegedly took a space that 36-year-old Kimberley Pankratius (pictured above) had been waiting for. The couple say they were unaware that Kimberley had had her eye on the spot.

According to a police report obtained by ​the Smoking Gun, Kimberley wound down her window and yelled at the couple, calling them "douchebags."

Julie says that she and her husband ignored Kimberley and walked toward the store. As they were walking, police say, Kimberley drove her PT Cruiser directly at the couple, hitting Julie with the wing mirror hard enough to break it from the car. 

Kimberley fled the scene, but was tracked down later by police. She was arrested and charged with assault and use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony. 

Kimberley told police that she "felt really bad" about the whole thing, and claimed she'd been trying to scare the couple, rather than actually hit them with her car.

The police report does not specify why she appears to be wearing one of those gown things they give you when you get your hair cut in her mugshot.

Cry-Baby #2: Ft. Lauderdale Police Department

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The incident: A 90-year-old man gave out free food to the homeless.

The appropriate response: Congratulating him.

The actual response: He was arrested. Twice.

Since 1991, 90-year-old Arnold Abbot has been feeding the homeless of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for free. He started doing this in memory of his wife Maureen, who died in an accident.

Last weekend, while he was giving out food, Arnold and two other volunteers were arrested and charged with "breaking an ordinance restricting public feeding of the homeless."

The ordinance blocking the feeding of the homeless was put in place last Friday. The city has also recently passed a bunch of other laws aimed at shitting on homeless people. These include a law banning people from leaving their belongings unattended, tighter laws on public pissing, and a law to stop people from panhandling at medians.

Arnold has announced that he intends to sue the city for his right to give out food to the needy. "I will fight them as long as there is breath in my body," he said.

He says, in the meantime, he will continue giving it out, despite it being illegal. On Wednesday, he went back out to give food to the homeless. After serving up "a chicken and vegetable dish with broccoli sauce" and a "cubed ham and pasta dish with a beautiful white onion celery sauce," Arnold was once again accosted by police, who again charged him with violating the ordinance outlawing the feeding of the homeless.

"One of the police officers said 'Drop that plate right now!' as if I was carrying a weapon," Arnold told ABC News

"Thank God for Chef Arnold, I haven't eaten all day," said Eddie Hidalgo, a local homeless man who also spoke to the news channel. "He feeds a lot of people from the heart."

Arnold faces up to 60 days in jail, as well as a $500 fine.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Winner: The pumpkin woman!!!
Previously
​A guy who allegedly shot someone over dog poop vs. a woman who complained to her local paper because a pumpkin carving kit contained sharp edges

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on ​Twitter.


You Can Control the Models in This Fashion Shoot

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​Fred Perry polo, Tommy Hilfiger skirt; Denim Is Everything shirt and sweatshirt

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

PHOTOGRAPHY: ​Edmund Fraser
​STYLING: ​Rhona Ezuma

Make-up: ​Athena Paginton using Mac
Hair: ​Yusuke Morioka
Assistant: Daniele Roversi
Interactivity: ​Hooplr
Models: Kit at Models1, Benji at Elite, Edwardo at AMCK, Elle at Select and Tom Kiblawi

All jewellery by Ambush


Levi's top, Casely Hayford joggers, Palladium boots

ZDDZ London top, Peter Jensen skirt

Joyrich jacket, Hall of Fame T-shirt, Nike shorts, Gourmet trainers, Ambush ring

Alex Mattsson shirt and trousers​, Nasir Mazhar hat, Nike jacket; Imo Land T-shirt and shorts, Billionaire Boys Club shirt, Palladium boots

ZDDZ jumper and snood, Helen Lawrence skirt, MCM backpack, Vans trainers

ZDDZ jumper and snood, Helen Lawrence skirt, MCM backpack; Billionaire Boys Club T-shirt, Levi's Shirt, Casely Hayford cardigan, MCM backpack, jewellery model's own

Ashish jeans, Danielle Richards top, American Apparel bra, Vans trainers

What's the Difference Between Porn and Prostitution?

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Image courtesy of Adult Verified Video Chat

Porn stars get paid to have sex. Prostitutes get paid to have sex. But porn is legal, and prostitution is not. And now porn stars are letting fans pay for the chance to have sex with them on camera. What is going on?

On November 1, the website ​​​Adult Verified Video Chat​​ announced that it was auctioning off the chance to appear in a scene with popular porn actress ​​Dillon Harper​. While the ​auction page doesn't blatantly state that the winner will have sex with Harper, it is implied by certain requirements. The winner must undergo industry-standard, third party testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as well as submit two valid forms of government-issued identification in compliance with​​ ​2257 regulations​, part of the US's stringent record-keeping stipulations imposed upon pornographers.

In fact, there are quite a few rules for entry. A spokesperson for Adult Verified Video Chat told VICE that the age requirement for the auction caps at 50 because "that was one of Dillon's requests." The winner also has to provide his or her own transportation to Las Vegas, where the scene will shoot in late January.

It's the second adult film role auction that Adult Verified Video Chat has hosted; the ​first​ gave bidders a chance to star with squirting queen Cytherea in August, and a spokesperson for the site said they hope to start hosting multiple auctions per year.

While at first glance the concept of someone bidding thousands of dollars (the Harper auction's opening bid was $2,500—and hasn't changed, at the time of publication) to have sex with a porn star in front of a video crew might seem like prostitution, adult industry experts say it's not.

"If Tom Cruise auctioned off the ability to appear in his next movie, what the winning bidder gets is the opportunity to star in this movie. That's what they are winning," Las Vegas-based adult industry attorney Marc Randazza told VICE.

Randazza explained that the differentiation between pornography and prostitution generally refers back to a 1988 California Supreme Court case, People v Freeman. The Freeman decision basically found that although porn performers are ostensibly paid to have sex, they really aren't; first, they are paid for appearing in a film.

Another basic tenet Freeman established is the direction of payment. Porn stars aren't doing prostitution, according to the California Supreme Court, because they are paid by a third party rather than by the person they are having sex with. OK, so then wouldn't that cover garden-variety pimps and madams? Well, no.

Apparently, professionalism plays a big role in the legal differentiation between paying for sex and paying for the chance to have sex on camera.

Randazza told VICE that people have tried in the past to justify prostitution by throwing in some cameras, but it just doesn't work that way.

"I get a call once a month from somebody who decides that they have found the magic way to harness the power of Freeman to run a brothel," Randazza said, "And it's always a guy wearing a fucking undershirt who should be on Jersey Shore or who looks like the guy who did the 4Chan murder. It's always some creepy dude."

In order for that special blend of Freeman and constitutional freedom of expression to apply, a person has to be able to show that a paid sexual performance was for the purpose of distribution—and not just for jollies.

"It goes down to the intent of the act," said Randazza, "If I say to you, I will pay you $1000 to come over and have sex with me and will throw a video camera in the room to prevent you from being charged with prostitution, then it's clear what that is."

But not only is it perfectly legal to bid for a role in a porn shoot, it might be the new crowdfunding model—used by both journalists​ and Hollywood ​filmmakers​needed to raise porn stars' deflated incomes back up to pre-recession levels. Adult Verified Video Chat spokesman Randy Johnson (a pseudonym) told VICE that the economic downturn forced into the industry a new, and constantly growing, influx of performers willing to do anything to make ends meet.

"These new performers are happy to do the job that is being done by veteran performers at a rate less than standard," Johnson told VICE. "This hurts the rates of veteran performers because production companies can work with new talent at a lower rate, forcing veteran talent to look for fun new creative ways to increase their revenue stream."

The mainstream porn scene might have taken some inspiration from freakier porn crowdfunding site OffBeatr, which lets users fund projects like adult My Little Pony-sex comic book Poni Parade.

But even crowdfunding isn't bringing in the kind of big bucks that porn performers saw in the past. Cytherea's winning bid was only $3,500, which doesn't seem like much for knocking boots on camera. But according to Mike Kulich, co-founder of porn startup site SkweezMe.com, that's now considered an "outrageously high number."

"The average boy/girl scene rate nowadays is less than $1,000 unless you are a brand-name performer with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers," Kulich told VICE, "What Adult Verified Video Chat is doing is providing a great service to the women of our industry not only as a marketing tool, but offering them the ability to rake in the monetary equivalent of four professionally shot scenes in one shoot."

Kulich said compensation has also fallen due to piracy and the fact that a majority of porn consumers simply aren't paying for it; instead, they're getting off by watching videos on "tube" sites that aggregate existing content.

Like anyone who works in media, porn actors are increasingly becoming entrepreneurs. As big name studios shutter and cheap talent floods the industry, performers are turning to in-person appearances at conventions like this weekend's ​Exxxotica Expo​ in New Jersey, and to selling content and other material online.

"What we provide is just that a way for talent to connect with their fan base via private one-on-one video chats, purchasing custom videos, or articles of clothing that performers have worn in popular video scenes," Johnson told VICE, "Also, we do one thing 95 percent of production companies never do: we give them the right to post their scene on their own website or use it for future sales."

Follow Mary Emily O'Hara on ​Twitter.

The Supreme Court Probably Has to Decide on Gay Marriage Now

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By most estimations, it looks all but inevitable that gay marriage will be legal in all 50 states sooner rather than later. To use a lazily constructed metaphor, America, at times, can look like a train with its brake lines cut that's speeding toward Civil Rights Station. Its arrival is seems like as much of a guarantee as your parents remembering to DVR this week's Modern Family. In fact, it's hard to believe that anyone who exists outside of the realm of a YouTube comment section actually considers it an issue. 

But the movement took a big hit yesterday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld gay marriage bans in four states. Federal Judge Jeffrey Sutton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote in support of the 2-1 decision that the court system shouldn't implement social change. "When the courts do not let the people resolve new social issues like this one," he penned, "they perpetuate the idea that the heroes in these change events are judges and lawyers."

The decision is significant because it's the first time since the Supreme Court overturned the Defense Against Marriage Act in 2013 that an appeals court has approved bans on same-sex marriage. It also means that the Supreme Court, which declined to take up the issue last month, might have to finally make a decision on whether gay marriage should be legal.

The four of the cases considered by the Sixth Circuit court have a lot in common: The states voted overwhelming in favor of banning same-sex marriage, but resident gay couples are suing to receive benefits from ceremonies performed out-of-state.

Ohio
The Buckeye State passed its Defense of Marriage Act in 2004. Since then, the state hasn't really changed it's mind. A Washington Post poll from 2012 showed only 52 percent of Ohioans believed in same-sex marriage. In 2013, a couple who had gotten hitched in Maryland sued Ohio for not recognizing the marriage. One spouse wanted to appear on the death certificate of the other, who had been diagnosed with ALS. The suit was combined in May with that of four same-sex couples that wanted to appear on their children's' birth certificates. On November 6, the 2-1 appeals court decision said the marriage ban was constitutional and threw out the cases. The most recent public opinion poll, by SurveyUSA, shows that only 43 percent of people in Ohio think gays should be able to get married. Rather than roll with the times, this state is slipping back into the Dark Ages.

Michigan
It's been kind of confusing for gay couples in Michigan. First, the state passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in 2004. But then a district court said that wasn't okay and appealed it, which meant that more than 300 couples got married the next day before the Sixth Circuit put a stay on the decision. And now the judges have determined that all those gay marriages are invalid. Support for the idea is dropping in Michigan, too, it seems. Only 47 percent of voters say they would vote for it today as opposed to 51 percent last year.

Tennessee
More than 80 percent of voters approved an amendment banning same-sex marriage here in 2006. That's kind of a humongous margin. Still, four couples married out of state sued, saying that the ban violates their "right to travel" as laid out in the Constitution. Opposition to gay marriage is still stronger in Tennessee than almost anywhere else in the country. A 2013 poll found that 61 percent of the people in that state were against it as compared to 43 percent nationally. Wowwww.

Kentucky
In 2004, more than 75 percent of voters approved Amendment 1, which banned same-sex marriage. A decade later, a federal judge said that violated the right to equal protection under the law, although the governor appealed which put the case in the hands of judges like Jeffrey Sutton. About 55 percent of people in Kentucky still think that two dudes definitely shouldn't be able to get married.

While that all looks grim, the appeals court decision means that the Supreme Court will probably have to eventually decide if gay marriage is a constitutional right. By not taking cases from other appeals courts, the justices have quietly allowed same-sex unions to be granted in 32 states plus the District of Columbia. But, t he Sixth Circuit's decision deviates from four other federal appeals court rulings. In September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg suggested that the much-awaited Sixth Circuit decision could be the tipping point.

"So far, the federal courts of appeals have answered the question the same way—holding unconstitutional the bans on same-sex marriage," she told an audience in Minnesota. "There is a case now pending before the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Now if that court should disagree with the others then there will be some urgency in the court taking the case."

So some good could come of yesterday's decision. Maybe. 

Crop Tops in Football: An Investigation

VICE News: VICE News Capsule

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The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today we talk about Libya's deepening political crisis, an environmental group's claim that a Chinese delegation went on an ivory shopping spree during an official visit to Tanzania last year, the deaths of dozens of pilot whales off New Zealand's coast, and a rebel official in Ukraine's eastern city of Donetsk who says the region can generate enough power without Kiev's help.

Gay Men Declare Taylor Swift the Queen of Pop

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Taylor Swift called her first true pop album 1989, but the album has been selling like it's the early 2000s. This week, Bill​board reported that the record sold 1.287 million copies in its first week of release—the most albums sold in one week since consumers bought 1.322 million copies of Eminem's The Eminem Show in 2002. (Earlier in the week, music insiders predicted Swift would top Britney ​Spears's 2000 record for most records sold by a woman in one week, but to the delight of Britney stans, Swift fell short of Oops... I Did It Again's 1.319 million copies.)

Swift's transition from mainstream country star to would-be pop diva has led many pop fans and gay men to call Swift a term typically reserved for Spears and Madonna, the acknowledged queen of pop. This week on gay Twitter and Facebook, Swift earned praise from that rarely praiseful, normally salty sphere of social media.

[tweet text="Taylor Swift Proves That Pop Music Needs Her With Her New Album 1989: http://t.co/iXZ3p2wsss for @xojanedotcom ALL HAIL THE NEW QUEEN OF POP" byline="— Tynan (@TynanBuck)" user_id="TynanBuck" tweet_id="527181626191908864" tweet_visual_time="October 28, 2014"]

[tweet text=" @tyleroakley taylor swift is the new queen of pop" byline="— Irrelevin (@aurosan)" user_id="aurosan" tweet_id="526782849413021696" tweet_visual_time="October 27, 2014"]

But the passionate gays who helped push Azealia Banks's debut album to number three on the iTunes chart haven't much like Swift—though that may be changing.

Over the summer at the Be​lvedere, a luxury clothing-optional hotel on Fire Island, I met a twink and budding drag queen named Nigel who worshiped Swift. Wearing nothing but a towel on a balcony overlooking the water, Nigel bounced around, singing "Shake It Off," and described how he lip-synced the song when he performed in drag the first time the previous weekend.

"I prefer Speak Now," he said. "Red is a good album. 'All Too Well' is deep. Like, girl, did you just lose your virginity?"

But Nigel couldn't understand why so many gays disliked his gay icon, his Cher. After all, Swift mostly sings about bad boys and breakups, and as Nigel pointed out, "All gay men do is break up."

If you're a country artist and your name isn't Dolly or Shania, your songs probably rarely play at dance music–heavy gay bars. In my time in those places I only heard one Swift song ever play (the dubstep-influenced "I Knew You Were Trouble"), and even then that was rare. (That song also wasn't taken too seriously, and the pretentious video was mocked by critics as a Lan​a Del Rey ripoff.)

Similarly, when Swift announced her first full pop album with the widely played, and widely mocked, "Shake It Off," few gay bloggers thought Swift would rise to the level of Spears or even Selena Gomez. As Bradley Stern wro​te on his popular blog MuuMuse:

Even when Taylor Swift announced (via global livestream on Yahoo, as one does) that her next endeavor would be an "80s inspired" pop record (the musical equivalent of incorporating florals for spring—groundb​reaking!), followed immediately by the debut of her horn-heavy, hater-shaking, and incredibly irritating lead single "Shake It Off," it certainly didn't seem like Taylor could be taken too seriously as one of this year's top pop contenders. And then "Out ​of the Woods" came bursting out in screaming color, and everything changed.

On "Out of the Woods" and "Blank Space," her new album's best track, Swift sounds like a natural pop singer. The repetitive choruses are as catchy as the best Madge singles and come across as poppy without in-your-face dubstep drops or the overt cuteness of "Shake It Off." 

Throughout the album, Swift also sings about the subject she sings and writes about better than everyone else: short relationships gone awry. Against a sweet melody, she mocks her image with boys: "Got a long list of ex-lovers / They'll tell you I'm insane." On "Wildest Dreams," she aches with world-weariness even as she starts a new relationship: "He's so bad but he does it so well / I can see the end as it begins." 

Swift's lyrics have always mined that vein, but 1989 finally matches her melancholy with the pop sounds gay men love. After years of experimenting with pop on country albums, Swift is finally a pop star. If you don't believe me, just ask gay men—we know what we're talking about, trust me.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on ​Twitter. 

Washington DC's Billion-Dollar Dystopian Fiction Farm


Brony King M.A. Larson Wrote a Novel About 'Pink Princess Culture'

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His fans mostly know writer M. A​. Larson for the scripts he has written for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the cult phenomenon that gave birth to the Brony movement, but soon the world may know Larson more for his debut novel, ​Pennyroyal Academy.

Like the Brony movement, the novel shatters our perceptions and preconceived notions of entertainment for girls. The comedy takes aim at "pink princess culture" while telling a heartfelt story about a girl who enrolls in a boot camp–like school where princesses and knights learn to fight witches and dragons. The book also explores the same ethos of friendship, acceptance, and playfulness that has made My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic a global phenomenon. Such is the buzz around the novel that prior to the book's publication, Reese Witherspoon even ​purchased the book's film rights

I recently sat down with Larson to discuss his new book, race in children's entertainment, and (of course) what he thinks about the Brony movement. 

VICE: How did Pennyroyal Academy come about?
M.A. Larson: I've been writing for kids' animation since I moved to LA, about eight years ago. All the advice I was getting was have your own show, so I was constantly trying to think of new ideas. 

I was walking back to Cartoon Network from somewhere one day, and I was thinking about Princess Peach from Mario Kart: Oh wait. She's a princess! That's so weird. Then I was thinking about other princesses, like Cinderella. What if Peach and Cinderella lived together, like The Odd Couple? That spiraled into what if all of the princesses in the world lived in the same place, like Melrose Place.

It was called Princess Boot Camp at that point, and it was a straightforward parody of the pink princess culture set in a hardcore military-style boot camp, but I worked on it for six years after that.

Wow. How did the novel change throughout your writing process?
One of the biggest things that influenced me was a book called The Uses of Enchantment. It's from 1976, by this guy called Bruno Bettelheim, and it's a psychoanalytic look at the Grimm's fairytales. One of his major theses is how important it is that fairy tales had those dark elements—and that kids read the darker, more violent, scarier parts because it helps them develop their emotions and deal with their own anxieties. I realized that my idea, as a parody, didn't have any of that. So I aged it up, cut out the parody, and tried to create a more realistic, three-dimensional world with characters who were actually going through things.

In the last few years the world of young-adult literature and TV has gotten more diverse, but most mainstream media for teens and kids is still really white. What do you make of this?
I thought about this with Pennyroyal Academy, because the world I was going for was the actual world that Brothers Grimm wrote about. I wanted it to be a realistic medieval Germany, with dragons, witches, and fairies—and medieval Germany is pretty white. But when I was writing it, I didn't want it to look like that. I probably copped out, but I just tried not to specify [races], so whoever was reading it could put whoever they wanted in that role. 

I know what you mean, but why can an audience imagine dragons in medieval Germany but not black characters? 
That's a really good point. I don't know, but I do think those divisions are breaking down. Hopefully we'll open it up further too, where kids of certain ethnicities or sexual orientations will find plenty of protagonists that they can connect with, whether they're the same ethnicity or sexual orientation or not. There are so many things that we as humans have in common that we go through: the anxieties and fears, the insecurities we have to work through, the friendships. It's what My Little Pony is all about.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/iJJ94uw05KQ' width='420' height='315']

How did you get your start on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic?
I knew Lauren Faust, the creator of the show, because I wrote an episode of her previous show, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. With My Little Pony, I had low expectations. My impression of it was just girls sitting around brushing these toy plastic things' hair, but as soon as I read Lauren's bible [the mythology and backstory of the show], I was like, "This is not that at all." These are six distinct, discrete characters who are all really interesting.

Did the Brony phenomenon surprise you?
Totally. I'd been writing for cartoons at that point for five years, and I always thought of it as writing into the void. I would write these things, and nobody would ever watch them—and if they did, I'd never know about it. I always tried to entertain myself, but never really had any anticipation that anybody would care.

The first time I really knew about Bronies was this story meeting, when Lauren showed me a video of 30 Russian teenage boys who looked like they were at a day camp out in the forest. The video comes to two of them with guitars, and there's like ten guys singing the song "Winter Wrap Up," from season one of My Little Pony, with these thick Russian accents. I was like, "This is Russia? This is insane!"

What do you think is driving the Brony movement?
This is just my theory—and I'm sure they'll tell me if I'm wrong—but there's so much kids' animation now that's so cynical and postmodern. I can't watch most of it because it makes me insane, but this show is just so sweet and nice. I think for a lot of people that's just refreshing. If you go to the conventions, you can see that spirit of community and happiness, just joyousness that you don't see a lot in normal society. I love going to these conventions because it's so happy, and that's part of what I tried to capture in Pennyroyal Academy as well.

Follow Hugh Ryan on ​Twitter

The Film That Made Me... : 'Pulp Fiction' Was the Film That Made Me Realize I'm Not Cool

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This post originally appeared in VICE UK.

The best thing about being a pre-teen in the mid-90s was also the worst: 85 percent of your pop cultural knowledge was based on guesswork. You lived in imagined worlds. You were constantly aware of the emerging tip of all things thrillingly adult, but, pre-internet, there was no easy way of getting past the BBFC and discovering for yourself that nothing was so frightening, sexual, subversive, or dirty as you hoped and imagined it to be.

So you constructed home movies in your head, based on mysterious jokes told at Sunday lunch, weird quips caught as you leaned over the banisters holding your breath, a four-second flicker of an advert that blared, black and red and rude, until a parent picked up the remote control and said, "Well, I think that's quite enough of that."

You'd go to the cinema to watch The Lion King, see posters advertising other features on other screens, and wonder what Kalifornia could possibly be about, and how it could contain anything so dreadful that you had to be 18—a grown-up—to spend an hour and a half looking at it. I remember being horrified by a report I'd seen on the early evening news, about a gang in a seaside town that had tortured a girl and removed her teeth with pliers because they'd watched Child's Play 3. I knew that movies could make you do things.

For me, film was always an immersive experience. Having wept through every trip to the cinema since I saw The Little Mermaid, I never doubted that those journeys had the power to change our very nature—for better or worse and, sometimes, for sexier or cooler.

So I was too young—far too young—to watch Pulp Fiction when it came out in 1994. I was nine years old. But I couldn't escape the bootleg posters at the market, where I became entranced by Vince and Jules's synchronized gun work, and Mia Wallace cooing, "Girls like me don't make offers like this to just anyone." Because I was a precocious child, I'd read op-eds and style guides about it in the Sunday supplements, looking up "auteur," and later "gimp," in my parents' cracked, red, finger-crushing Chambers Concise

Pulp Fiction was cool. If I could glean that as a friendless child who lived in middle-of-nowhere Dorset—a child whose parents were so anxious about me being corrupted by sex and swears that they refused to let me watch Neighbors—surely you could feel that cool from space. I was also dimly aware that it was for boys. It had drugs, guns, cool music, and sexy girls. (There was no way that it was made for women, because no one mentioned marriage, or a makeover scene.)

I'd already managed to talk to a boy on the strength of a manufactured fondness for Point Horror. But if I was ever going to be a cool, sexy grown-up dazzling adult men, Pulp Fiction was my only hope. If I focused on that, maybe one day everyone would forget my vocal and passionate advocacy of the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

When I finally managed to see it, I was 13 and spied it in a video cabinet belonging to the parents of my sleepover host. I'd decided to be enthralled before anyone pressed play on the VCR. I knew what was coming, but reveled in it all the same. The five-dollar shake, the tap dance, Esmeralda, Zed's chopper, the ludicrous studiedness of it all.

"Heroin's coming back in a big way!" I quoted blithely, looking around to check my edginess had been noticed, and hoping that no one would mention the time I'd been sick after drinking a mug of warm vodka with Pepsi. When I first watched Mia Wallace take a syringe full of adrenaline to the heart, I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood, then looked at my screaming companions scornfully. "This is tame! What's wrong with you?"

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/s7EdQ4FqbhY' width='640' height='360']

The 1994 trailer for Pulp Fiction

Some of the girls I knew struggled with it, but came around when it turned out that I was right about the boys. Pulp Fiction was an exotic, acquired taste, like olives or red wine or semen. We could learn to love it if we kept swallowing, and the people we wanted to impress would find us fascinating and precocious. (At the time, we didn't know that the people we wanted to impress—17-year-old boys—were not a difficult market to crack.)

I knew that I could never be the prettiest, or the sexiest, girl in the room, so I decided I could be the most terrifyingly hip by purporting to enjoy and endure dirty, dismal things.

Pulp Fiction allowed me to cultivate a bored blood lust, which eventually led me to Bret Easton Ellis, blaxploitation, Russ Meyer, Misty comics, and the Vipco Vaults. These are all cherished parts of my sentimental education, but it took me a long time to learn to value them, instead of desperately flinging them at every middle-aged man who walked into the video store I worked in during my mid-teens.

It's only now that I realize if you're 16 and you work in a shop, and a load of men keep coming in, they probably want to look at your bum in jeans. And really, that you should chase them out with a broom rather than being frightened that they won't be pleased with your interpretation of Reservoir Dogs.

It's no secret that parts of Pulp Fiction have not aged brilliantly. But the film—or rather, my idea of it—burrowed its way into me during my formative years in a way that means I can only feel affection for it, as if it's a birthmark shaped like a slice of pizza, or a friend I've known since nursery who always wets herself in my bed when she's pissed. To me, it will always be the visual rendering of pure cool—even though I now know it's a child's drawing of cool.

As I entered adolescence, it was my shorthand for all that was shocking and adult, but it's a film for teenagers. It's splashy and slick, graphic and grainy, and about a quarter as clever as it thinks it is. (I've just had a horrible flashback to being 15, sucking a really weak and badly rolled joint, screwing my eyes up against the smoke and saying, "Ultimately, it's an ultraviolent triumph of redemption over retribution," and my face is now taut with shame.)

I think 13-year-old me would be horribly sad about what I've become. All she wanted was to be cool, and I couldn't manage that for her. These days, there are hardly any drugs or dance contests in my life. I don't impress strange men by necking warm tequila in car parks and then starting debates about I Spit On Your Grave. I stay in, drinking Baileys, as I cheer my way through Pitch Perfect and Whip It. But being edgy was exhausting. Staying blank faced and bored in the face of on-screen masked sodomy made me feel strained. I got tired of ennui, and if it wasn't for Pulp Fiction, there might be some left lurking in my system.

I no longer like anything just because I feel I ought to like it, and it reflects the sort of person I should be. If you construct a personality out of material designed to be seen from the outside and not felt from within, it's going to crack. I'm made out of softer stuff now, and it yields better. I'll never stop loving Pulp Fiction, but I'm happy to leave it in my past. I've seen enough fake blood to keep me going for another 20 years.

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Heroes, Martyrs, and Myths: The Battle for the Rights of Transgender Athletes

Comics: Vigilante

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Mapping the Terrible Lost Nightclubs of London

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Caesars nightclub in Streathamone of London's most famous closed drinking arenas

This post originally appeared in VICE UK.

It might be hard to believe it in the age of The Warehouse Project, fluorescent wristbands, and WKD wingmen, but nightclubs in England haven't always been gleaming cathedrals of youth culture, packed to the sprinklers with hordes of young people having the best night of their lives, as the world's biggest DJs earn more for a b2b set than the rest of us make in a month.

They were often grim, seedy places with reputations for cas​ual violence, low-level gangsterism, carpeted dancefloors, and pla​yboy promoters wearing suits at the dance. Think of the bar where Trigger and Del Boy do their "pla​y it cool" routine, then add guns, speed garage, and cigarette stains, and you've basically got the vibe.

Nowadays, most big clubs look like playgrounds for young adults full of happy, pouting people in baseball caps and white tees. Back then, they looked like what they were: iniquitous dens of silk, sweat, perfume, blood, and Hooch. Even the bouncers had gold teeth, Valentinos, and dreads. 

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Garage Nation at The Colosseum in Vauxhall, 1999

But a part of me has always been fascinated by the seedy, sticky world of the London clubbing culture I never really got to experience, bar a few ludicrous attempts to get into such places in my mid-teens. When a friend showed me this urban75 ​forum thread detailing some of London's lost, dreadful clubs, I found myself through the looking glass of a time before student promoters, SIA licenses, snapback techno, and Funktion-Ones. An era in which clubs were still called things like "Sinatra​'s" rather than "something studios." A time when you were more concerned about leaving with your life than a promotional Uber credit.

Intrigued by the dark nostalgia at play on the forum, I began researching some of the places getting namechecked, reading about the stories of door-staff ​shanking punters and Gary Lucy be​i​ng famous enough to get on the guest list. I wondered what happened to these clubs, if they were still operating under new management, or if they'd all become burrito stalls.

With the help of Google Maps and some of the wonderful, accidental poetry from the forum, I tried to map the sad demise of London's lost, terrible clubs. Each photo shows the club as it is today, while the memories are laid out in text beneath.

Manhattan Lights, Muswell Hill


Manhattan's, Palmers Green

Melanie's, Hendon


The Irish Fighting Barns of Kilburn


Broadway Boulevard, Ealing


Twilights, Sydenham


Cheeko's, Archway


Cheeko's, Archway (again)


The Elbow Rooms, Angel Islington


Blue Orchid, Croydon


Flamingo's, Woolwich


Eros, Enfield


Cinderella's, Purley


Dingles, Fulham Broadway (exact location unknown)


Cheekee's, Staines


Caesars, Streatham

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Soda Is Following in Tobacco’s Shady Footsteps

The State of House Music in the Home of House

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House music is now global music. After its birth in ​the l​ate 70s in Chicago it quickly spread to other scenes across the world, midwifed by DJs like the late Frankie Knuckles, before reaching mainstream Top 40 radio stations. It's been at or near the top of the charts in Europe and elsewhere since the 80s, and in the past few years it's come back in the United States in a big way.

Today, nearly every pop or R&B act includes at least one "dance" or "electronic" track on their albums as a radio single to capitalize on the scene's still-growing audience. It might not sound like house in the traditional sense—it might be brostep, raunchy techno, or ​the poppy stuff the UK spits out like nursery rhymes—but it's clearly electronic and definitely danceable.

But what is house music like in Chicago, the birthplace of house? Is it as ubiquitous here as it is everywhere else? I attended a house night in Chicago to find out.

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Every Sunday, Smart​ Bar, an institution that plays host to a wide array of dance music, hosts Queen! for local house heads and members of the nightlife industry. Former Smart Bar talent booker Nate Seider created the night two years ago with DJs Garrett David, Michael Serafini, Derrick Carter, and Knuckles. The party begins at 10 PM, but, as Smart Bar general manager Lenny Lacson told me, "It doesn't really pop off until 2 AM."

Unlike many cities' EDM scenes, Chicago's house community remains contained without excluding people from participating. Like many things in Chicago, the scene thrives on its seamless integration into one's regular life. House heads are everywhere and they are nowhere; for them, house music is what they've always known and loved. This year, at ​a public remembrance and celebration of Frankie Knuckles's life in Chicago's Millennium Park, I watched throngs of locals celebrate the legendary musician's life. The city underestimated how many people would attend, and the crowd spilled over to other areas of the park.

Yet few venues feature a weekly dance party dedicated to house. More often, promoters create monthly or destination events—the sort of events that generate less of a risk than a weekly residency. Queen! stands out as one of the only house-oriented nights in the city. 

"The party has been on its own island for years now," said Lacson. Minor competition has popped up here and there, but those nights quickly died and Queen! has kept on spinning its diverse tunes. "There's nothing hard about the night at all. It's your typical Chicago house music," he said. "It can be gay house, it can be soulful, some acid. The core part—definitely house." 

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Like the best club nights, Queen! attracts bros and freaks, queens and divas, beauties and aging goths, as well as normal boring regular folks.

Smart Bar shares its sub-neighborhood, Wrigleyville, with Wrigley Field (home of the Chicago Cubs) and ​sports ​bars filled with everything most hip house lovers loathe: excessive Big 10 culture, fratty men, and puddles of vomit. Wrigleyville, a part of Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, is located on the city's North Side. Still, the club offers such weird and great music that people will move heaven and earth, or at least travel a couple of miles, to get to Queen!. When I went to the party in September, that trek meant a 45-minute bus ride and two trains.

You come to a thing like Queen! to be seen, of course, and many club-goers were decked out in slashed, pinned-together pants or elaborate wigs or glittery makeup. Like the most elegant Victorian gowns, the best outfits could stand out from hundreds of feet away.

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One such vision was Jack Collier, a.k.a. Chemise Cagoule. "It's an old English term for a medieval dress that the Catholic Church put out and it only left available holes where it was necessary to procreate and not have pleasure during sex," Collier explained. Slinking across the room throughout the night, full of grace, Collier wore knee-high lace-up combat boots, black half-leather pants, and a silky, drip-patterned button-up. The club night attracts members of Chicago's art scene, so I wasn't surprised when Collier told me, "I just graduated with my degree in fashion and music and shit." 

Collier told me he came out here for the hosts—Jojo Baby and Sissy Spastik, veterans of the scene—and his friends. "Jojo's my hero and a total idol of mine anyway. I would only aspire to get to that level," Collier said. "Here is just a really good concentration of what fashion could be and a really good representation of what's going on in Chicago. No one's doing what Jojo's doing in the world. No one's doing what Sissy's doing. It's another one of those events where I wish, when people thought of Chicago, they thought of this."

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Not everyone here looked carved out of one of Lady Gaga's ribs. As I danced, two bros in their early 20s—genuine, real bros—slid up to me. The first, Justin, told me he came to the city from the suburb of Elmhurst. The second, Anthony, lived around the corner. They often attend parties like Queen! to find out about the after events that usually take place in lofts or desolate buildings in parts of the more industrial corridors of Chicago's West Side.

"I just came here to dance and party," said Justin, who wore a Chicago Bears hoodie and looked as blonde and corn-fed as most of the men who move to Chicago from Wisconsin and Indiana after college.

So what is the house music scene in Chicago? Well it's nothing like how we imagine scenes anywhere else—but that is a compliment. Many club-goers—including Anthony, a 40-year-old Latino manused the word nonjudgmental to describe the scene to me. Anthony's been a house head for all of his life and considers Queen! an important night.

"I've been here from the beginning," Anthony said. "That probably won't change."

"Do you come here every Sunday?" I asked.

"Not every Sunday."

"Oh, OK." I started to turn away.

"Well, actually," he leaned in. "Mostly, yes."

Anthony doesn't work in the music or nightlife industries, and he's too old to be properly called a club "kid"—but he was still here, and I could see him being here ten years from now. The biggest music fans I know (regardless of genre) have "normal" or "boring" lives in offices—they come home to their families and go to bed early—but the music meant something to them when they were younger, before they had adult responsibilities. If you love something deeply enough, the love never truly goes away.

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I Went to a Silent Speed-Dating Night

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Photos by Lily Rose Thomas

This post originally appeared in VICE UK. 

Last week, a press release dropped in my inbox announcing the arrival of a new concept speed-dating night called "Shhh." In a nutshell, it's silent speed-dating where talking is banned. Supposedly it will create "a deeper, instantaneous connection" between lonely people looking for love (or a fuck). My immediate reaction was exhaustion. Londoners, not satisfied spending their entire weekends photographing street art in parking lots or eating cronuts in onesies, seem to have roped their love lives into the endless quest for novelty.

Chit-chat aside, I had some reservations about the "full-on" nature of the Shhh experience. Even in my most intense relationships, the idea of someone fixing me with some dreamy, thin-lipped pout-gaze does something to my acid reflux. But then I am also very conscious of dying alone. So off I went.

The press release boasted that this was for "people who want to find deep connections, without the mask of predictable conversations." Already, my throat was drying. I love predictable conversations! Small talk is my foreplay. I want to know what supermarkets you have in your hometown. I want to mull over the day's precipitation.

I would be boarding the love train at the Jam Tree in Clapham, which is called that because the cocktails have little blobs of jam in them, which is precisely the kind of thing that has seen Clapham essentially secede from the rest of London and become a kind of caliphate run by Time Out.

I bought myself a beer. Enter Adam Taffler, the heavily lip-bearded ringmaster of this circus of solitude. He summoned the men into the room with his whispery voice; it sounded like paper. The dating games were about to commence.

While I was hoping to get straight down to some eye-ballin', Taffler wanted to get our juices flowing with some office-away-day-style exercises. He got us all to stand on one side of the room before telling everyone who has had a one-night stand to walk to the other side of it. Off we trotted, leaving three little mice all by themselves on the other side.

"Notice who is around you," said Taffler, rubbing their vanilla sex lives right into their boring faces. The rest of us looked on, relieved. In this shaming exercise, I found myself lying a lot. Nudist beach? 'Course I bloody did! Sex outside? Who hasn't! And off I scuttled, betraying my uptight comrades like a sexually advanced Judas.

Light ritual humiliation out of the way, we got down to the good stuff. To the soothing tones of Zero 7 we shuffled around the room in a sort of rehabilitation exercise for dead-eyed commuters. Taffler managed to simulate a sort of "Mindfulness while changing lines at Green Park" atmosphere, and soon got us to train our gaze up each other's bodies towards the eyes.

Once we'd all had a good gander at each other's dick and tits, things got a little more "hands on." We were asked to get in a circle and give the person in front of us a back massage. A rather frisky lady in a wrap dress got right to work on my tight shoulder knots. (I'm not gonna lie. It was very sensual.) I laid my own clammy paws on the bloke in front of me and gave him my signature spine thumbing.

Back rubs complete, I was feeling relaxed and ready to get gazing, but there was yet more finger fun to be had. Taffler asked us to close our eyes and try to connect a digit with a member of the opposite sex, while he cranked up Pachelbel's Canon to full volume. I opened one eye and spotted a young girl with one arm folded across her body, eyes open purposefully trying to get a purchase on the finger of the hot blond in the room.

For me, there was a lot of rejection. Taffler asked us to thank our partners a lot, and there was much hugging. I didn't get the hugging memo and was routinely left hanging for a high five. At one point, I also miscalculated the end of a game and was left blindly pivoting round the room with my index finger in the air.

Say what you like about Taffler's methods, you couldn't deny the good vibes. The room was rippling with the kind of warm awkward laughter you get when someone gets their head trapped in the tube doors.

Though these flirty games felt like a cross between a GCSE drama warm up and a pilates class, there was an intimation that this was rooted in science. Taffler would sometimes defer to his assistant "science guru" who was quite unconvincingly nicknamed "the Doctress," but later admitted he was just "sort of making it up," which made me wonder why the Doctress was even there. The daters of the Jam Tree gave no fucks either way about science; they were just there for the whacky.

After the end of the first half, we were advised to hush our beaks until part two kicked off, so daters legged it to the bar to order large white wines in Parseltongue. By the time the bell rang, I'd sunk two pints of Kronenbourg and was ready to eye-fuck the living daylights out of a stranger.

The first customer in my one-stop love shop was a kind looking bloke in a T-shirt that read "Boom!" Earlier in the event, I had forced him to do the Macarena in one of Taffler's "mirroring" exercises.

He seemed to be finding the whole thing a right laugh until I fixed him with my glassy booze gaze. Looking for meaning, I ended up transfixed on the fleshy bits in the corners of his eyesthe pink, wet bits that look like the skin of peeled fishwhile his eyebrows tried to engage me in conversation.

After a sobering minute, number 12, a zany character, used his paper for a game of noughts and crosses. The next one burped and blew it towards me. I don't think the next guy realized his face was twitching at the mouth. Or maybe he was just chewing a hangnail.

The surprise of the night was a cologne-soaked man in a suit who somehow managed to look me in the eye and lick his lips without grossing me out. I was absolutely sure he was excellent in the sack. As he rotated round the room, the Mexican wave of giggles from the girls suggested more knicker twitching was occurring. Double ticks for the lip-licker.

Just as I was starting to feel more loose in the hoose, the playlist took a cruel turn. On came "How to Build a Home," and an adorably smart guy in his mid-20s sat down in front of me. He smiled; his eyes were straight-off-the-bat good guy vibes. He looked like a nice, normal, attractive bloke politely asking for love. He looked like someone who deserved my respect, and I felt really cross with London as a city for putting us both in this humiliating position. I wondered if he wanted to build a home with me. Then I felt sad for not wanting to build a home with him. Then I wondered who the fuck I was going to build a home with. Was I drunk? I don't know. But suddenly, I felt more profoundly single than I have ever felt in my entire life.

After the staring, it was back to awkward mingling where I checked with Rachel, 29 (who was giving it all a go after giving up on Tinder), to see if I was drunk. She wasn't sure, but she said she felt tipsy, commenting, "It's just way too intimate." No one was giving her the horn, she said, "because their anxiety was very palpable, which makes me feel on edge."

Talking to Taffler, the organizer, afterwards was refreshing because he seems to feel genuinely passionate about what he does. Apart from hisfrankly inexcusablepaisley pants, he's a nice guy trying to address, in his own gimmicky way, a vain, cold dating culture.

I suggest to him that however good your eye-gazing, like any dating concept, attraction still boils down to desperation and bangability. He called me shallow. Then I asked Taffler if he's banged loads of bad bitches because of his great eye game, to which he replied, "I looked into some people's eyes and I felt full," with a smile on his face, so I took that as a "yes."

Shhh dating appeals to what Taffler calls "people who want to broaden the envelope of human experience." Even though I didn't find a man to broaden my envelope, I still felt a big feeling, which is something. The only problem was that it was the overwhelming feeling of being alone. It was like I'd flipped a lid off something and was now about to emotionally congeal like warm hummus at a picnic. 

Any single person in London is bullshitting you if they don't admit they're operating somewhere on a sliding scale of loneliness. It all boils down to how readily they'll expose themselves to the kind of visceral vulnerability that comes with speed dating and intense eye contact. In an age where we all pretend we're not looking for the real thing, there's something perversely pleasurable in airing your clean, single laundry, letting your status wash over you instead of pretending you're too busy for love, or too successful, or were just having too much fun to have noticed.

If joining Tinder acknowledges a socially acceptable discontent with flying solo, then taking the same feeling by the horns in public can't be bad for us. There is certainly something admirable about metaphorically writing "looking for love" on your balls and then exposing them to a room full of people, even if you do need a novelty dating concept to do it.

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The Film That Made Me... : 'King Ralph' Is the Film That Taught Me the True Depths of Human Cruelty

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Some people will try and tell you that Hostel III is the most wantonly stomach-churning film ever made. Movie nerds might point to Driller Killer as a film that plays particularly fast and loose with mortality. More cerebral types might dig up some or other holocaust film that's sadder than Jerry Sadowitz holding a SAD lamp over a Mike Leigh housewife with seasonal affective disorder. But really, they're all wrong. If we're talking in terms of sheer-putrid moral turpitude, the winner is always going to be King Ralph. It makes Triumph of the Will seem like Patch Adams dancing the Macarena in Teletubbyland. It's a colostomy bag exploding on the windshield of civilization. And the most damning thing about it? That no one has ever seemed to notice.

King Ralph is its own Stanford Prison Experiment. It taught me at a young age that your auntie, your mum, your local pries—anyone, basically—can be converted into Belsen guards dishing out shower-time to an out-group who have been de-personed. And that society will simply turn a blind eye to whatever these people do if the facts fit the dominant narrative.

If I were to tell you that I was opening my screwball comedy with footage from the human atrocity exhibition that was the Hither Green train derailment: the panic, the anguished gasps turning to agonized groans, the grown men shitting themselves in fear as they see their girlfriends crushed into Marmite, well, you'd probably feel like I was making a mistake, wouldn't you? You might tell me: "Think again, Gav. The Hither Green train derailment is just not good comic fodder. Yes, Robin Gibb survived and he went on to light up our lives with an array of funky disco hits. But really, the people of London will not thank you for this." 

Well, nobody told that to the guy who wrote King Ralph.

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The trailer for "King Ralph"

The storyline in brief: Ralph's great-great-great-granddaddy supposedly fucked a cocktail waitress on a Royal Tour of Boston in 1898, leaving him as the sole heir to the throne after the entire Britsh Royal Family, about a hundred of them, are brutally killed. For some reason, the people who made King Ralph decided that they must be sacrificed before John Goodman can become a buffoonish fish out of water. Which is why the film opens with them lining up on a metal balcony for a family photo. A close-up makes it clear that the Royal photographer has left one of the cables for his lights in a puddle of water. They are all about to be electrified to death the moment he closes the shutter. He closes the shutter. Whoopsie.

Their death-agonies are captured forever in a full-colour photograph that is the final held close-up of King Ralph's opening death-montage. This is a bit like when Ed Gein kept the vaginas of his victims in a box on his bedside dresser. It's a bit like when Ted Bundy would walk down the street, with the head of a woman he'd killed in a tote bag. The gruesome snuff image swirls onto our screen, followed in turn by spinning newspaper headlines.

Royal Family Dead!!!
Cut to the UK Enquirer:

God Save The King (Funeral Today, Set The VCR)!!!!
Cut to The British Post:

Search On For Heir (Could He Be John Goodman, Cos That Would Be Well Funny)!!!!!
Cut to The London England News Chronicle:

Turns Out It's John Goodman!!!!!!!!
Because it is John Goodman.

Yes, 1991 was long before the man from Roseanne could just swan into the latest Coen brothers, do a brilliantly gruesome character-acting mini masterpiece, beat his walking stick against the backs of carseats and collect another Oscar. Back then, the guy had to work night and day to earn his comic crust, drenching himself in humiliating fatso-LOLs. Which, in King Ralph, means him clocking in to play a slobby travelling salesman and boogie-woogie piano player who will soon install a bowling alley in Buckingham Palace, embarrass himself by being overfamiliar with the Finnish King, and try to drink the finger-bowl after his langoustines.

In the film, there isn't a single moment where King Ralph deigns it worthy to consider the mingled olfactory cortege of carbonized flesh, piss, and formaldehyde resting in the Windsor mortuary the day after the accident. He never delivers a stirring monologue in which he envisions vividly the corpses overflowing from a mobile refrigeration unit. He does not talk of the soft toys placed on the coffins of Royal children—a favorite Ninja Turtle here, a Winnie the Pooh blankie carted endlessly round the house there, as they are, one by one, lowered forever into the earth, John Taverner ringing out crystalline as the sods are softly relaid before a grieving nation.

When Ralph is wearing his crown in the bath and he drops it, there is no haunted look in his eyes that suggests he has recently been in contact with a police officer who had to match a hundred Royal dental records to grimacing charred cinder-jaws. Indeed, nothing about his demeanour suggests he has recently had a coroner describe what happens to a human ribcage when 10,000 volts contract your muscles so sharply they tear limb from limb. Emotionally, Ralph and his courtiers display all the grief of bedposts. "One death is a tragedy. A thousand are a statistic," said Stalin. That seems to be the cast of King Ralph's view, too.

Big Momma's House 2 has its flaws, sure. But whatever they are, it doesn't begin with footage of dead teenage partygoers being fished out of the Thames after the Marchioness Ferry Disaster. This is, I feel, a sensible artistic decision. Yet King Ralph shows no such instincts. Instead, after letting the streets run red with blood, it mainly focuses on Goodman's attempts to woo a young blonde. Which is striking a blow for the rights of fat men everywhere to bang premium totty, but that is about all the social conscience it displays.

Eventually, when it looks like he may get to put his spotted dick in her bread 'n butter pudding, Ralph gives up the throne. He realizes king-ing is not for him – it's love that matters. And that his butler Cedric—a role Peter O'Toole's obituaries unfairly omitted while carping on endlessly about Lawrence Of Arabia—has a dirty secret. He's actually the A-1, genuine, most-related throne-holder. He's just been trying to avoid taking on the mantle because he's a bit shy about being a king. In other words, he's the ideal king—he has Great British reserve in spades. Plus: he's Peter O'-fucking-Toole.

King Ralph upends your moral instincts, and does it with such cheerily unblinking certainty of its own rightness that it pierces all our carefully-assembled social niceties, all of those subtle-sinister good-mannered affirmations that lead us to believe we could never take up arms, that we could never eat our neighbor's dog, that Bosnia "wouldn't happen here," that Rwanda was a one-off. John Gray's Straw Dogs could not have painted a bleaker picture of the prospects for human progress.

Here, the Americans who made King Ralph delivers a bop on the nose to the very idea of the Enlightenment, and a crowbar to the jaw for the so-called "special-relationship," America, it says, does not see you leetle UK peoples as worthy of the fullest sense of a "right to life." British deaths are not worth mourning. There is, philosophically, no leap to be made between Rambo going after row after row of Vietnamese with a bazooka like he's playing human Space Invaders and a film that dispenses with everyone unfortunate enough to be called "Windsor" as if they were wheat in a thresher. 

The implications are profound. We in Britain remain happy to kill the shit out of brown men in the tribal areas of Pakistan down the end of a Harrier's night-sight. But we haven't yet woken up to the corollary of that. The fact that we too are about a 30 percent difference in GDP away from being the sorts of stick figures you see in black 'n white down a US drone camera, seconds from missile-strike.

And what will happen when America finally unloads its washing machines of death upon us? John Goodman bouncing his arse around at the funeral, banging out "Good Golly, Miss Molly".

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Haitians Are Hooked on the New York Lotto

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It's commonly known that ​low-income households buy a disproportionate number of lotto tickets, a fact that contributes to the reputation of lotteries as being a regressive tax on the poor. What's often not mentioned when we talk about the lottery is that some state-run lottery systems have international appeal—for instance, Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital plagued by a level of systemic poverty unimaginable to the average Manhattanite, is addicted to an idiosyncratic version of the New York Lotto. 

Walking around the city recently I shuffled through slums, jumped over cholera-infested stagnant water, and climbed piles of rubble still left over from the 2010 earthquake; but no matter where I went, a borlette—a shop where bookies sell lotto tickets—was on every corner. These are typically coated with blue, yellow, and white paint faded by years of intense sun. A wire mesh screen separates the bookie from his or her lineup of regular customers. The memo pads strewn about chaotically are considered critical tools for those who play, since they track weeks of picked and winning numbers—even though these past drawings have no effect on future results. Outside the shop, there's always a chalkboard with the most recent New York Lotto numbers.

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Born in the slums of Port-au-Prince in 1969, borlettes quickly spread across the country. Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, then the country's dictator, legalized them soon after their inception; the government now requires owners to pay a licensing fee and use official betting slips, but doesn't provide much else in the way of oversight. Bookies operate independently, but competition for clients has resulted in several conglomerates to form across the city. Today,  the lottery is so popular in the country that some Haitians buy daily tickets right ​off their cell phones.

For years, the bookies provided three games to customers: Midi, a low-stakes Haitian lottery system; the Dominican Republic Lottery, which runs on weekends; and Pick Four, a game based off the numbers drawn in the daily Venezuelan national lotto. After widespread corruption was unveiled in Venezuela, Haitians turned to New York to get their daily dose of risk and dreams.

And when people say they're dreaming about winning the lottery, they're not kidding. Many Haitians actually decipher the messages from their previous night's slumber to decide what numbers are going to be lucky for them that day. No borlette is complete without a  ​tchala, a reference dictionary that catalogs the content of dreams and provides corresponding lucky numbers. Dream of Mardi Gras? Then 37, 11, and 17 are your keys to wealth. 

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I asked Augustan, who was in line to pick up his daily ticket, how he chose his numbers. Pointing at the tattered tchala on the wall he said in French that the key to success "depends on the person... There are some who [use their] dreams." He and the the bookie chuckled about the topic. While Augustan rarely uses his dreams to decide his lucky numbers, it's still a respected practice ingrained in Voodoo culture.

Augustan said that he's "really an amateur" but still buys tickets once or twice a day. While Midi is cheaper, the New York Lotto is where the big bucks are made. Borlettes charge $10 for a New York Lotto ticket—just about all of an average Haitian's disposable income for the day. A dollar or two goes to the bookie, and a small percentage is redistributed through the Ministry of Education, but the majority goes into payouts.

Despite the hokey ways Haitians pick their numbers, borlettes are a serious force in the Haitian economy. It's been reported that Haitians spend up to  ​$1.5 billion a year on lottery tickets, almost a fifth of the country's GDP. One bookie I spoke to said he sells over 100 New York Lotto tickets a day. Many residents don't have easy access to banks or financial education, so it's perhaps natural that gambling has become it's own form of investment in Haiti—albeit a dream-based, highly unstable form of investment.

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So how is this New York Lottery money getting funneled into Haiti without consequences? It's not—and that's the catch. Bookies appear to simply be using the Empire State's namesake and numbers; they set their own jackpots and payout structures, which most of them conceded when I asked them about it.  

That's not to say that people don't win money. A bookie in Carnape Vert, a hilly slum neighborhood leveled by the earthquake and now stuck in a state of perpetual transitional housing, was eager to insist that he makes big payouts frequently. He shuffled through a legal pad full of chicken scratches to show me that he had people win $600 and $3,000 just in the last week—a lot of money in a country where the per capita GDP is less than $900.

For Haitians who don't randomly become wealthy, there aren't a lot of options. Swathes of Port-au-Prince are still in ruin. A couple years ago, Sean Penn's charity paid for the demolition of the already  ​partially collapsed national palace. Now the site, along with several government buildings around it have been left in a perpetual state of despair, an unfortunate symbol of how bad things have gotten here.

On one walk through the city, I approached a neighborhood to the north of the palace, near the historic Iron Market, which was completely in rubble. Crushed cinderblock consumed acres of land, the occasional spine of a building was left standing, a few tarps bearing the USAID logo hanging from it made some form of a shelter—inside, smeared shit and rusty cans indicated squatters had lived here at some point, or still did.

Walking out of the structure, I squinted to see a functioning street past in the distance: At the corner of the street was a borlette with a line stretching out the door.

Tourists in Thailand Are Traveling to See Suffering Burmese Migrants

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The entrance to an encampment near the Burmese border. All photos by Eloise Baro

In March of 2013, a section of the Ban Mae Surin refugee camp in Thailand burned down in a catastrophic fire. The refugees' huts sparked like tinder, and 37 people succumbed to the flames. Hearing of the disaster, sympathetic Western traveler—colloquially called "voluntourists"—showed up in droves, offering money and lending hands to clear the damage. A voluntourist encampment sprung up across from the charred remains of the refugee village. Despite its commitment to aiding migrants, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees is decidedly against the growing fad of refugee tourism throughout Thailand, a country that boasts more than 20 million tourists a year, attracted by the country's pristine beaches and jungle highlands, as well as more than 130,000 refugees and half a million stateless people, many of them having fled the decades-long civil war in neighboring Burma. Some of the volunteers at Ban Mae Surin "were there starting up their barbecues, stripping down, and swimming in the river," recalled Iain Hall, of the UNHCR in Thailand. "It was disrespectful. This kind of tourism—it's not good to see. These are human beings, not animals in a zoo."

The following summer, I traveled to Thailand as a student and tourist myself. A military coup had taken place in May and, among many other things, had exacerbated the country's migrant situation. The Thai junta, led by General Prayuth Chan-ocha, had announced plans to start sending refugees back to Burma. Currently, the Thai and Burmese governments are beginning to discuss repatriation programs while the Thai junta tightens refugee-camp security. Travel to and from the country's eight camps continues, but leaving to search for work beyond the communities' walls has become dangerous and difficult for residents. People in numerous camps, including Mae La, the country's largest—it was established 30 years ago outside a town called Mae Sot and is now home to about 50,000 refugees—will soon be asked to go back "home" to Burma, and if the government has its way, the encampment may close altogether within a matter of years. If anything, the need for the international community to pay attention to these camps is greater than ever.

A view over the Mae La riverside encampment

After an onerous, twisting bus ride from Chiang Mai, one of the most popular tourist spots in Thailand, I arrived one night in Mae Sot, about 35 miles from the Mae La camp. Famished and drenched from the rain, I headed straight to a café and arts cooperative called Borderline, which provides jobs for refugee women, as well as a market for their handicrafts. That night, the place was so packed with refugee children (Burmese Karen, by their telltale woven bags and the white clay paste spread onto their cheeks) that there was no place to sit down. A handful of expats excitedly circled about, setting up sound equipment on a makeshift stage. A 25-year-old American guy, clad in a muscle tee and sunglasses, jumped up on stage. "Good evening, Mae Sot!" he shouted theatrically, to the glee of his audience—his Karen students, it turned out, at a nearby school for migrants. The concert was ostensibly a showcase for the musical stylings of his pupils, but as far as I could tell it was his show, him wailing along to synth-y mall punk with the occasional student singing backup. "Man, I love performing in Thailand," he proclaimed as I scarfed down my curried potatoes. "We're rock stars up here, right, boys? And none of you even know what I'm saying!"

Later that night, I met a friend down the road at Exppact Café/Bar, a popular tourist haunt, owned by former political prisoners from Burma. "We started Exppact to generate income for ourselves, and to educate people about the situation in Burma," Thiha Yarzar, a former refugee and one of Exppact's founders, told me. The bar was filled with foreigners, mostly Western teachers and some aid workers, and a few Thai and Burmese patrons. Some of these expat teachers had been barred from entering their camps in recent months, a result of the coup's crackdown on unauthorized entry and exit from the camps. Their schools sat vacant, the teachers unable to teach. Though founder Yarzar has respect for many of the volunteers in Mae Sot, he's troubled by how well-intentioned aid funds are often spent. "Some people visit Mae Sot as tourists, and they see something and come back to Mae Sot with a pile of money. 'I will set up a migrant school!' they say. And then they get a big salary—and almost all of the money goes to their salary." As I finished my beer, Exppact's evening band, a trio of teachers with a Danish lead singer, started up, crooning their newest song, whose chorus, "Where were you during the coup?" mingled merrily with the crowd's chatter and the rain outside.

A Burmese Karen refugee sells crabs at her makeshift shop

I stayed the night at Picturebook Guesthouse, which provides lodging to tourists and volunteers while employing migrant youth to provide them with hospitality training. The guesthouse is run by Youth Connect, a nonprofit that prepares young refugees for the workforce, and the proceeds from Picturebook help fund Youth Connect's education programs. When I asked Youth Connect's director, Mickey Goggin, why the organization chose to build a guesthouse over some other businesses, he laughed: "This is Thailand, man!" The tourism industry has been strong since hippies began visiting the country in the 60s. "It's a reliable market. And even in tough times"—the recent political violence and coup, for example—"there's still a high demand."

The next morning, after speaking with so many people working with refugees and migrants, it occurred to me that I could sneak into a refugee camp myself—but for what real reason, I wondered, other than to say that I had? Part of me worried I was succumbing to the lust for exoticism in a foreign land, a been-there-done-that feather in my adventurer's cap. But I, like many tourists, also had a genuine desire to learn something about the history and sociopolitical dynamics of the place I was visiting, and to get closer to those dynamics than was possible in Mae Sot's expat bars. How to do this without turning a human being into a spectacle?

I boarded a covered-truck taxi north from Mae Sot, on the one north-south road that, cutting through the gentle green border hills, connects various tourist centers and passes by several large refugee camps. Two young men chewing betel nuts loaded bags of rice into the truck—headed, I later found out, for one of the camps. Next to me, a fellow northbound passenger kept falling asleep, laying her head on my shoulder until a pothole jolted her awake.

A refugee at the Friendship Bridge, which connects Thailand and Burma

Across from me sat a French couple clad in flip-flops and tank tops, resting against their rucksacks, the man jotting away in a notebook and his companion scanning through yesterday's photos. They were traveling north to Mae Sariang, they said, a hill-tribe region known for scenic views and cultural tourism. They told me that, a few days before, they had paid to visit a refugee encampment along the river border with Burma, just outside of Mae Sot, where ring-necked Kayan women with intentionally elongated spines pose for pictures and sell their wares. "We didn't stay long," the French woman said. "It felt really bad," her boyfriend added, "just sort of standing there, looking around."

As we spoke, Mae La appeared to our left, a fenced-in, dense collection of thatched roofs beneath towering green hills. Guards, newly instated by the junta government, stood at the access roads and by the random holes in the fencing. You couldn't really see people inside the camp, just the undulating mantle of thatch. Baro took out her camera and, after hesitating for a moment, began taking pictures.

I got off the truck, feeling emboldened to slip into a vast territory of migration that also held, for me, great moral uncertainty. But I was instantly stopped by the hiss of a guard, who waved his finger. No one in, no one out. I walked the perimeter for a while, relishing the fresh air and mountain vistas, then sat with the guards, who pitched rocks at stray dogs and laughed. After the last of the dogs had slinked away, the guards helped me flag down the next southbound truck toward Mae Sot. Even though they are part of an anti-immigrant junta, I was thankful to them in a way, not just for flagging me a ride but for helping me make my decision—to visit the camp, or not?

Yasmani Tomas, the Next Cuban MLB Star, Is Already a Legend

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