This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

33⅓ is a series of books dedicated to the most incredible musical albums ever made—one book per album, one author per book. Over recent months, we've been running excerpts from their in-depth essays. This week, Scottish novelist Alan Warner introduces German rock band Can's 1971 album Tago Mago. Here's chapter one:

I thought "Halleluwah" on Tago Mago was the funkiest and the most athletic thing I had ever heard. And I hated sports. You were excited before you even put on Side 2, Disc 1 of the vinyl record. Excited on account of noting that timing numeral: 18:32 on the inner cover of the gatefold sleeve. The thrill which came with this weird generosity of another Can song lasting nearly 19 minutes; a whole side of the record! To hell with "Bohemian Rhapsody," which you had once briefly believed was the longest song in the world.

The first seconds of "Halleluwah" are the bars of bass charted by snare drum shots. One of those great bass lines which, as Miles Davis once said, asks a question of itself and then answers itself:

Bah bum ba bum
Bah bah bum?

Damo Suzuki's orgiastic: "Mmoohh!" before the bass answers itself:

Bah bah be bah bum
bumbumboo

then the shuffling run and groove of that drum-lock pattern—we are off for nearly 20 minutes: " Can anybody see this snowman ...?" (can they?)

Even just a minute in, you sense something changes inside the music, an enriching of structure, a deepening of intensity, I might have thought of it back then; now I know it is just a tape edit at 1:03, from one stretch of recording tape to another. These magical thresholds of edits will later become clear to me.

Before two minutes, Damo Suzuki sings that celebrated "chorus" which possibly begins: " Searching for my..." something or other. (Attempting to quote vocalist Damo Suzuki's actual lyrics is—as we now know—a fraught or even nonsensical process. Even Damo admits some "words" are sounds or syllables called out in a sort of polyphonic reaction to the music, some are even nonsense phrases, mixing German, Japanese, and English—while some are actually heavily accented but relatively straightforward English from which many track titles are derived.)

The drums begin to run and to swerve all over the song. When I was younger I thought they were fantastic tricks of drummer Jaki Liebezeit but they are in fact further overdubs on top of the beat on this section of an edit. The drum sound is especially lovely: acoustically rich, vivid, and close to your ear, like Ginger Baker's drums on Cream's Wheels of Fire; the sticks and bass drum pedal hitting the skins sound as if they are in the room with you—not at all like the electronic drumming of 1980s pop music where the strange musical intent was to make a drum set sound not at all like a drum set—even though a drum set sounds so good. Eighties recording was an economic thing, of course; recording drum sets to sound good is time-consuming and thus expensive. Today hardly any new recordings I hear have a really good drum sound in rock music—and even in jazz only sometimes.

You know how "Halleuwah" goes. Through the basic groove, short wave radio abstractions weave between left and right speaker—a variety of Stockhausen bleeps, Ligeti and Webern squeaks, and post-serial blips—a distant guitar solos as if from the balcony of an alpine chalet far across a mountain valley. A chattering percussion overdub actually stops the song which momentarily fades out.

There is a 25-second cocktail jazz interlude: dreamy vocals, plucked or strummed guitar, and electric piano—perhaps even verging on being out of tune—all clearly pasted in to the overall recording tape; then the swinging bass and drums are back, keyboard sounds, percussion, tape distortions, bowed cellos, or violins complain. It is nearly eight minutes in and Damo—who we have forgotten about—suddenly reappears. " Oh!" he exclaims. A series of Irmin Schmidt's distinctive keyboard trills burble behind the singer's gamine obscurity, those classically trained fingers rattle the keys for impossible duration and consistency.

At nine-and-a-half minutes we get another chorus refrain where Damo yells the title, " Ha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la-la-la la ooh-vah." This leads into a long and coherent guitar solo, in some ways the first consistent instrumental statement within the ensemble playing, all the more powerful for having been anticipated by abstract sounds for ten minutes. The guitar playing is pitched between jazz and rock, closer to jazz really—a warm valve-heated sound seeking out chordal harmonics and musical phrases which count and tell a thematic story within the framework of the song, rather than the burning rockish speed runs of, say, "Paperhouse."

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There follows a keyboard excursion, the downbeat becoming far more pronounced, building to the climax where tension is released and the intensity drops. Just when you thought it was over, the band explode into another keyboard attack but this one is extremely intense, the bass a plodding anchor, the drums and cymbals begin to slash, sometimes desperately in the crazed, sudden momentum; the organ-like sound is run through different effects, it does not try to phrase or operate in relation to a song—"playing us a tune"—it is just a machine, ascending out of control, the sense of riding the back of a shining orca with leather reins attached to its teeth—the excursion cannot last and at 16-and-a-half minutes the music breaches a summit and resumes with Damo's harmonizing vocal until...

It is inevitable for writers writing about music that we must resort to image, simile, and metaphor. So you are going to get guitars playing on balconies across a mountain valley, and you are going to get keyboard solos compared to a killer whale rodeo. It is not something I am proud of, it is a tradition, a trope, a linguistic attempt to seize the myriad impressions and sensations which affecting music can throw at us. We resort to common poetry to describe the impossible, the same way scientists and physicists must when attempting to explain their most recondite flights. These images are variations of the pathetic fallacy but there is a tradition to it and sometimes the metaphors are apt. I like to avoid this plump fancifying but I cannot.

At least fanciful metaphor-blown ways of writing about music and anthropomorphising sounds, avoids those deserts of dry academic terminology, and of having the deep self-importance to quote from Theodor Adorno when we are talking about rock 'n' roll, man! More woeful are note-by-note transcriptions of solos which fail to communicate the unique and impossible-to-transcribe tones, the subtle inflections which define the individuality of very good rock or jazz musicians. You can transcribe a Hendrix solo but it's not really a Hendrix solo. The recorded sound IS the transcription. Rock music is aural, not intellectual.

When I was 15 (unlike when I began to listen to Public Image Ltd's Metal Box and Joy Division at around the same time), I developed this slightly melancholy awareness of being a retrospective, second-hand listener to Tago Mago. I often thought to myself in those months of 1979/80: "Long-haired hippies in the '70s must have loved this," or I thought, "What did long-haired young people back in the early '70s make of this; it must have sounded really exciting to them back in those times?"

"Halleluwah" seemed like a natural stoner song. I imagined it was recognized as a sort of sign for those generic long-haired people to begin rolling their cigarettes of contraband, leaning back, and smoking—a reluctant or willing girlfriend nods her head. Her beads jangle—I saw this happening in '70s rooms with bright wallpaper and posters. Radical days and thoughts. I started to contemplate what this music would have DONE to them—the psychic disruption which "Aumgn" or "Peking O" might have imparted upon a marijuana-addled mind, or the blissful pleasure the top and end themes of "Paperhouse" may have disbursed to those post-flower power children.

For some reason I did not imagine these vinyl-induced cerebral revelations unfolding in the metropolis of London. Perhaps for my own reasons—the sense of my own appalling provincialism—they were happening in smaller towns in northern England, Hatfield and Coventry, Derby and Carlisle, between 1972 and 1976 – and surely also in unpronounceable towns and cities in Germany or France, the geography of which I was unsure—this place called "Europe." I knew every small town had its natural crop of home-grown freaks and it was to this imagined and scattered tribe that I bequeathed the exclusive previous use of "Tago Mago."

Then there were the legendary past concerts which Can must have played, like one in Berlin in 1974 when they played from 8 PM until 3 AM the following morning! All seemingly lost in time, like Roy Batty's tears in the rain. In some ways Tago Mago and other Can albums were merely teasers, relics which spoke of an awesome moment in history when this band had played live and which I had missed. I had missed it all. Despite the joy and celebration there was a sadness sealed deep within my listening.

"Halleluwah" seemed to tell a story to me about the 1970s, yet it also retained for me a contemporary statement of the musical athleticism Can were capable of. At the age of 14 or 15 when I first started to listen to Can, some form of athleticism was important: who is the loudest (in fact the Who were the loudest), who is the fastest, who is the best drummer in the world, who is the craziest singer? For me, musicians replaced the sportsmen and women and the soccer players who almost all my male contemporaries were aficionados of.

For me, Can were my immediate heroes. They allowed me to be different from my peers because I believed I had discovered them alone—which was largely true—and they gave me a sense of a teenage individuality and superiority. No matter what was said about AC/DC's Angus Young, I knew he couldn't touch Michael Karoli. Even though I listened to Deep Purple drum solos (that forgotten feature of rock—when will Radiohead play a drum solo?) up in the bedrooms of pals, Ian Paice was not as exotic as Jaki Liebezeit doing those impossible drum things on "Mushroom." Wrong in a way. Iain Paice was and is a technically brilliant drummer. Angus and Michael very, very different types of guitar players trying to do different things, but Michael would still have jammed with him.

Side 2, Disc 1. The sound of that outdated phrase I used back there is not just nostalgic, to me it belongs in another era. It is such a precise and almost militaristic cataloguing of data. The dematerialization of the music object—by which I mean the vanishing of mass vinyl, cassette, and now CD into an invisible download format and the iPod—means many things. What is being lost is that sense of the vinyl record as the object which enshrined and celebrated the recorded moment—and then of course we enshrine the actual vinyl which we have owned for 40 years, the covers now worn shiny by our once-youthful fingers. Music was so much closer to our physical hands then. You had to select the cover sleeve from your small collection of albums, slide out the inner sleeve, remove the vinyl record from the paper sleeve, place it on the turntable, lift the needle on the record player—ease it across to the glistening run-in of Side 1 or 2 or 3 or 4—or in the case of a seven-inch 45 rpm single, swing it further over onto the A-side or B-side. All these terms have largely melted into air with the advent of the download and iPod.

In some ways the download is a purer relationship with the actual music, but the ritualistic, particularly male fetishism my generation bestowed upon our vinyl and what these chunks of plastic have come to mean to us is, I am afraid, largely what this book will be about: that physical connection to the object as we bent reverently—or when drunk, not so reverently—over our "stereo" and then laid the stylus needle down on the vinyl.

Then the music began. Sometimes there was more than just myself in the bedroom; Bob might be there, or Kenny, or beautiful Teresa. Things moved so quickly then; you changed in a matter of months. By later 1980 we ourselves played in our wee local bands: The Psychedelic Pixies; The New Antiques; The Krasnij Ocjabre Collective (the what?). We might say to one another, "Hey. Shut up. Listen to what the drums do here," or "Check out the guitar," or "Listen to what the fucking drummer is doing here. He's brilliant." Or maybe, "WHAT is the drummer/bassist/guitarist doing here? I can't work it out."

And it was not just the music. The record sleeve in its 12-inch by 12-inch ergonomic perfection became a mode of communication in itself; its artwork and even its notes and credits concealed and revealed mysteries. Or in those days of limited information before the internet, the cover art concealed the facts and sent me astray.

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"I had an orgy once with Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé, and Marilyn Monroe," John confessed. "Brad Pitt was there too, but just to videotape."

I had approached the middle-aged teacher randomly in New Orleans for a project I do where I collect dreams from around the world. John wasn't like most of my subjects: From a young age, he has regularly been able to "wake up" inside his dreams, controlling their content with an almost godlike omnipotence. Some of his favorite activities, besides sex, include flying, fighting terrorists, and talking with his father who died several years ago. His waking life in the classroom, he admitted, "just can't compete."

Recent studies have shown that the phenomenon, called lucid dreaming, has been experienced at least once by 47 to 82 percent of people. For most of those individuals, lucidity is rare and fleeting, but psychologist Dr. Joe Green insists it doesn't have to be. Lucidity, the therapist claims, is a skill that can be learned and perfected. It's a skill that Green has used successfully in his therapy practice for decades. "If people are motivated," he told me in a recent interview, "almost anybody can have a lucid dream."

Determined to see for myself, I bought the book A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming—a compendium of lucidity techniques. Within a week, I had the first real lucid dream of my life. It lasted for less than a minute, but it was intoxicating. I had a taste of what felt like an almost Buddhist enlightenment, a total transcendence of reality.

A month later, I found myself sitting in a Hollywood café across from Field Guide author, Jared Zeizel. I wanted to learn more about how to wield my new power. We began the interview, of course, by looking down and touching our own hands—a simple test to determine whether or not we were dreaming.

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VICE: How can someone learn to lucid dream?
Jared Zeizel: Well, the first thing that I always tell people is, you have to start writing down your dreams every morning. After a while, you'll start noticing patterns. Maybe you're often dreaming of clocks, for instance. If that's the case, what you want to do is, every time you see a clock in the waking world, just take a moment and ask yourself, "Am I dreaming?" It's called a reality check, and if you do that enough during the day, you'll start to train your mind. Eventually, you'll ask that question in the dream world and go lucid.

What reality checks do you do?
I've got a few different checks. In high school, I had a lot of dreams about zombies, so during the day, I'd just rehearse those dreams in my mind, and know that if I was seeing zombies, there was a pretty good chance that I was dreaming.

What other checks do you use?
I do a lot of things with locations. It's very common to dream of your home, or your childhood home especially. So, anytime I'd walk into my home, I'd ask, "Am I dreaming?" So, that's become a common trigger. Also, post-apocalyptic settings—if I see something like that, I do a reality check right away.

One of the problems that I have is, after becoming lucid, I get too excited and that wakes me up. Do you have any advice?
For whatever reason, we've found that just spinning in a circle helps ground you in the dream. Another thing I like to do is to find something tactile and really concentrate on the sensation of it. Often I'll use my hands. I'll push my finger through the palm of my hand and I can actually feel it going through my flesh and coming out the other side. It's a very strange sensation. Basically though, you want to do whatever you can to calm your excitement. You can take a moment to focus on your breathing or just count backwards from ten.

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Jared Zeizel in the real world.

Once you're stable in the dream, what are some of the things that you like to do?
Sometimes I like to summon my evil alter-ego, Dark Jared, and have a conversation. I love to fly. Sex is always fun. Oftentimes, I'll continue the narrative of the dream already in progress, sort of like a video game. Sometimes I like to try to find this orchard where the trees have all these different dream fruits that taste better and sweeter than anything I've ever had in my entire life.

It's amazing that the mind is able to generate pleasure and perfection so far beyond what's available in this world.
That's a great way to look at it.

Dream sex would seem to be another example. Can you talk a little about how that works?
Let me start by saying that there is not a lucid dreamer I've met who hasn't had sex with a dream character. Sex and flying are probably the two most common activities. I think there should be no shame or embarrassment about it, but I also think it's important to be mindful that these dream characters are representations of parts of yourself.

What implications does that have for you?
Well, I just like to take a moment to talk to the dream character before or after the sexual encounter.

How does that conversation generally go?
I've found that, a lot of times, dream characters are very open to sex. But, sometimes they seem more disconnected from you. You'll ask them for sex, and they'll shrug and be like, "Whatever." Sometimes, though, they won't be up for it. This kind of calls into question whether or not you should be raping your dream characters. I think there's an argument that says it's all in your mind, and you're not harming anyone. But, I also think, if you're using lucid dreaming for self-exploration, you might want to take a moment and ask yourself if you really want to commit an act of harm on your inner psyche.

So, who are these people—acquaintances, celebrities, people you've never seen before?
They can be all those things. Celebrities are common. There's a fantasy to being with them. And, I think they can also represent something else in our subconscious, whether it's aspiration or self-worth. The only way I'd ever get with a celebrity in the waking world is to achieve massive success. So to get with them in a dream can be very validating.

I s there a memorable connection you've had with a particular celebrity?
The most memorable relationships I've had with dream characters tends to be with recurring dream guides. Those haven't been sexual relationships, though. Going back to the whole Dark Jared thing, I've had dreams where he was trying to convince me to have sex with my dream guide. It just felt disrespectful, though.

What guide was that?
She's this middle-aged woman who feels like a friend from years ago, or a maybe from a past life. She's dressed like she's from the 1700s. And she always appears to help me out, or give cryptic advice.

What other guides do you have?
Most recently, I've been seeing this giant bear a lot. He's old, very grizzled looking, and his fur is gray with a tint of purple. He usually appears when there's chaos. I see the bear, and I follow him, and he leads me away to a calmer place.

So, it's clear that you can form these meaningful friendships with dream characters. Have you ever fallen in love with one before?
Probably several times a year, I fall in love with someone or something in the dream. When you wake up you still feel all these emotions towards this thing that only exists in the dream world.

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Jared Zeizel picking his dream fruits

I've had that happen a few times too. And, what's fascinating to me, is that you basically fell in love with a part of yourself, right? It suggests that we're really complete beings, who are capable of generating all the love we need. Yet, through some design flaw, we just can't access it without an intermediary.
I love the idea of dreams being a mirror reflection of ourselves. When you're looking on the surface, everything seems separate from you, but in reality, everything you see is you. The act of separating it can be beneficial, though, to making positive changes in yourself. That's what I've found with Dark Jared. He takes on my dark characteristics and I become, essentially, Light Jared. And, I can really feel the difference between us.

That brings up another interesting question. In a lot of the dreams that I've collected, people seem to have a reduced sense of conventional morality. Do you feel like the same person in dreams that you are when you're awake?
Yeah, when I think of any number of negative acts or horrific things that I've done in dreams, they definitely don't feel as bad as they would in this world. I remember having a dream where this guy was attacking my girlfriend and me. He was a massive man, probably eight feet tall. Anyway, I became lucid and because it was a dream, I was able to make my punch so much stronger, and I beat him up. At one point, he was on the ground crying. When I woke up I felt really bad about it, which is interesting to me because he was attacking us, and I certainly didn't feel bad about it in the dream. He brought it on himself.

Well, if all the characters in your dream are you, maybe you were just feeling that guy's sadness.
Right, and when I came into this world, instead of being separate entities, we both came back together.

Is there anything you haven't tried in a lucid dream that you've always wanted to?
Thomas Peisel, one of the other writers of the book, always turns into a various animals. He'll turn into a jaguar or a wolf. He can feel himself running on two legs, and then slowly transforming until he's running on four. He's just able to go so much faster using four legs instead of two. He loves it. He also turns into birds. I think that's something that I'd want to explore.

Ever since I got involved reporting on psychedelics research, I've been fascinated by mystical states of consciousness. People have said that when they smoke cigarettes in dreams, it feels just like real life. I'm wondering if it's the same with drugs. Do you have any experience with that?
I smoked some pot in a lucid dream once. I was with Thomas and we were just floating on clouds, touching the treetops, and passing a joint back and forth. It was very relaxing. I've also heard of people who go into a lucid dream and meditate there. There are masters who meditate in a dream, and then end up in another world, and then meditate again. They keep going into deeper and deeper worlds. But, I wonder if you just get a drug in the dream world, can you bypass the meditation step?

I've also been thinking if it would be possible to replicate a near-death experience in dreams—you know that tunnel of light, or visions of angels, or like in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, those horrific monsters that represent enlightenment. What if you create the idea of God in your mind and merge with it?
That would be exciting. What happens when you merge with another entity? Going with the assumption that there are other beings in the universe and if there is a god or gods, I do feel like if there were a way for them to communicate with us, it would be through dreams.

It seems like your book is part of a larger trend towards taking dreams more seriously. What do you see for the future?
Yeah, it's been getting more popular over the last couple years, probably because of Inception and Waking Life. Twitter has also helped in a weird way. There are a surprising amount of teenagers talking about dreams and lucid dreaming. It's been around for thousands of years. Indigenous cultures were really into it. And then, slowly, it just sort of disappeared from Western culture. And now, most people, even really smart people often totally ignore dreams. As little kids, growing up, when you have a nightmare, the parents always say, "Don't worry. It's just a dream."

What would you say instead?
I would say, "It's part of you." Dreams often provide a direct line of communication to your subconscious and your inner self. Sometimes it's just the garble of the previous day, but other times, it's really important. Especially with nightmares. Those tend to be deep-seated fears or anxieties. You can keep pushing away or ignoring it, but it's not going to go away. I would probably tell a kid, "What you're seeing is all in your head, so you have full control in dealing with it. But, also listen to it, because it might be telling you something you really need to know."

Follow Roc's latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

America, we have our Benghazi candidate. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina endeared herself to the right wing by invoking that most beloved of conservative hobbyhorses, positioning herself as the GOP's response to the Democratic heir apparent.

"Like Hillary Clinton, I too have travelled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe. But unlike her, I have actually accomplished something. Mrs. Clinton, flying is an activity, not an accomplishment," Fiorina told activists at the Iowa Freedom Summit Saturday. "I have met Vladimir Putin and know that it will take more to halt his ambitions than a gimmicky red Reset button," she boasted. "I know Bibi Netanyahu and know that when he warns us, over and over and over again, that Iran is a danger to this nation as well as to his own, that we must listen."

And then the kicker: "Unlike Hillary Clinton, I know what difference it makes that our ambassador to Libya and three other brave Americans were killed in a deliberate terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11 and that the response of our nation must be more forceful that the arrest of a single individual a year later."

It was a ballsy move for a potential candidate whose name is so far down the list of Republican 2016 favorites that most voters don't even know who she is, much less that she's thinking about running for president. But it worked: In a party desperate for female faces, Fiorina might be the Mitt Romney–Hillary Clinton hybrid conservatives have been waiting for.

Fiorina's origin story is a good one: Stanford-educated wanderer who ends up working as a secretary, then, with a little hard work and ingenuity, ascends the corporate ladder to take over Hewlett Packard in 1999, becoming the first woman in history to run a Fortune 20 company—a glass-ceiling milestone Time magazine described as "arguably more important" than "America's women winning the soccer World Cup." The parallels to Clinton and her own glass-ceiling-breaking are obvious—they even picked matching memoir titles.

But for Fiorina, unlike Clinton, the summit proved harder than the climb. Her career at HP was mired in corporate soap operas, during which time the company's stock lost more than 50 percent of its value and thousands of employees lost their jobs. Fiorina, meanwhile, became a CEO celebrity and an outspoken cheerleader for outsourcing, developing a reputation as an autocratic manager and generally terrible boss. She was eventually forced out in 2005, leaving HP with a $21 million golden parachute and an unenviable legacy. (InfoWorld listed Fiorina as one of "Tech's All-Time Top 25 Flops," calling her the "anti-Steve Jobs.")

Five years after being ousted, Fiorina attempted a comeback, running for Senate in California against veteran Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer. This initial foray into electoral politics was a disaster, highlighted by what's known as the "Demon Sheep Ad," a breathtaking piece of incoherence that compared Fiorina's primary opponent to a demonic sheep. It's one of the worst/best political advertisements of all time, and it put Fiorina on national radar, at least until Boxer obliterated her in the statewide election.

If Fiorina does decide to run for president, this is the record she will have to spin for voters: a controversial career as a real-life Bill Lumbergh, and a Senate campaign that reached its zenith by dressing a man up as a farm animal. But judging by her speech in Iowa and the elated response from right-wing activists, the idea of a Carly 2016 campaign may not be quite as ludicrous as it sounds.

Conservatives have always fantasized that the president is just "America's CEO," and Fiorina, despite her very mixed record as a business executive, seems to fill that role, at least for the kinds of people who show up at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a right-wing circus that exists mostly for the economic benefit of the state's Tea Party cottage industry. In addition to her Benghazi drum-beating, she staked out territory as a fervent opponent of abortion—"liberals believe that flies are worth protecting," she told the audience, "but that the life of an unborn child is not"—and a free-market conservative. Recently, she even went so far as to write an op-ed for the Washington Post defending corporate victims like Royal Dutch Shell, the 11th-biggest company in the world, against Greenpeace's "climate-change pressure campaigns."

The truth is, Republican voters have fallen for a lot worse. Herman Cain, for example. Or Fred Thompson. In time, Fiorina will almost certainly meet the same fate as these other Republican one-night-stands. But as the only potential female candidate in a vast sea of old, mostly white men, she's uniquely positioned to bash Hillary Clinton from the right—a priceless trump card that could give this Benghazi lemon more juice than anyone imagined.

Follow Kevin on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of Wikicommons.

Back in 1888, New York got slammed with an actually historic blizzard. Known as the Great White Hurricane, the mid-March storm buffeted the city with over two feet of snow and winds approaching 50 miles per hour as temperatures dropped toward zero. The storm knocked out services across the city and killed well over a hundred New Yorkers who tried to step out into it.

And according to some accounts, it left thousands of birds in the city and dozens of cattle in other outlying, harder-hit northeastern towns frozen solid in trees and fields, dead where they stood.

Compared to 1888 (or really, any given winter's day in Chicago), New York's apocalyptic tempest was a dud. However it still managed to kick up some nasty, cold winds in the city. And other towns, like Boston, did suffer the clobbering New Yorker's so panickedly feared.

Yet it doesn't take the end of the world to hurt the animals that call major cities home.

"[Animals] can suffer from things like frostbite just like people can," explains Dr. Kristen Frank, a veterinarian and staff internist at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "They can start getting hypothermia ... just like a human. And it doesn't have to get to negative forty degrees for that to happen."

Birds have been known to drop from the skies in lesser blizzards, and cities like Boston and New York have pretty sizeable feral and stray populations (mainly kittens). So it's fair to wonder whether, in the blizzard's aftermath, we're going to find some tragic squirrelcicles a la 1888.

Fortunately for animal lovers, it's unlikely that many animals died in Monday night's storm. It's actually unlikely that even the doomsday event we were all expecting would have hurt too many.

"Feral cats," explains Frank, "can often find shelter on their own to stay warm."

It's a natural animal instinct, and just finding a place that blocks the wind and keeps off a bit of the cold can be enough for a furry critter to hunker down and sleep off the worst weather.

Case in point, even with domesticated, outside animals, consider the freak weather it took to down thousands of cattle in South Dakota in 2013: In October, farmers had moved their animals into summer pastures, totally unshielded from the elements, thanks to the rare 80-degree weather they'd experienced that fall. Sensing something strange in the environment, the cows started moving themselves toward shelter, and made it up to 12 miles. But the sudden weather shift came before they could reach a shielded area. As it'd rained just before the snow, many cows sank into the mud, then froze into the ground, and if they didn't freeze first they were slowly crushed or drowned, trapped in ditches, or hit by cars while fleeing across the local roads.

That's the recipe for mass animal deaths in a winter storm: an unseasonable and rapid temperature shift (in 1888, the Northeast was experiencing spring showers days before the blizzard) coupled with a lack of adequate, accessible shelters for animals to flee to.

Unlike in the vast and open plains of South Dakota, there are tons of nooks and crannies in east coast cities for animals to hide within. And since 1888, we've developed tons upon tons of services for strays. Shelters stayed open throughout the city all night Monday and into Tuesday, and organizations like Animal Control & Care of New York City spent a good amount of time educating people about how to protect feral animals temporarily or report them to 311 for pickup by animal care agents as weather allowed.

Even the most ill-adapted of outdoor zoo animals were covered against tragedy, with animal keepers working through the storms to monitor their charges and man generators as needed, providing heat and making sure that shelters were secure and foodstuffs were accessible.

"It would be more personal pets that I would be concerned would get into [a dire] scenario," says Frank. "They're not used to fending for themselves or surviving in that kind of environment."

Most city dwellers keep their pets indoors at all times, and animal care organizations distributed tons of warnings urging people to move their outdoor pets inside or instructing them on how to set up a secure shelter. But there's always the risk of negligent or waylaid owners leaving their pets exposed to the elements. Those are the animals at risk in any blizzard, although if they die it won't be a collective misfortune witnessed across the city like the birds of 1888 or cows of 2013.

But here's the big irony: One of the greatest modern threats to animals in storms might be our bids to mitigate them than the bad weather itself. Animal welfare organizations warn of the fairly common phenomenon of pets, strays, and wild things alike getting irritated after contact with or licking up and then dying from deicing salts or anti-freeze. So if you do come across any dead animals in the blizzard's wake, it was probably poison, not cold, that killed the beast.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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When people see the image of a human fetus, they often associate it with abortion and the warring political perspectives that come with that issue. But to artist and entrepreneur Lily Su, the image of an unborn baby symbolizes ultimate comfort. After creating a series of light boxes featuring images of developing embryos, she moved on to sculpting her ideas in soap. The unexpected new medium allowed customers to interact with her art in ways that aren't permitted in traditional art galleries (a Basquiat canvas wouldn't be of much use to you in the shower). The result was a life-size 12- to 13-week-old soap fetus measuring 2.5 inches incased in an amniotic sac.

In 2012, Lily launched an Etsy shop, Yours in Soap, to sell her Castile creations, which included other pieces like human feet, the male form, and realistic-looking fruit. A few months later, the now extinct site Regretsy featured the fetus soap as an item that "Rick Santorum probably bought his wife for Mother's Day." This brought a lot of positive and negative attention to Yours in Soap from angry people who mistakenly thought Lilly's product had a political agenda.

Offended customers messaged Lily urging her to take her products down because they felt she was "degrading humanity." But she was already pushing forward with new ideas in the art-soap field, like her recent collection of 3-D-printed soap jewelry.

I recently met with Lily to talk about her controversial soap, deformities, and 3-D printing.

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VICE: What is your background in art?
Lily Su: I started really young in Beijing. Since I was four, my parents wanted me to play piano, dance, and study art. I always thought I was going to be a product designer or architect, because it was something practical plus it had the art aspect. I did architecture for one semester at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I didn't feel like I fit in. So I transferred into sculpture.

Why'd you start working with soap?
Before I went to college, the first $500 I had in spending money, I used to try and start a soap business. Around that time I saw a lot of soap projects that you could do that were pretty cheap. I bought five-gallon tanks of oil and mixed that with lye to make traditional soaps.

It's kind of a strange material to work with. What do you like about it?
At first I did soaps because I thought it was a viable business. During my last semester I was working in a gallery, and I could feel there was an uneasiness because there was a security guard standing there saying, "Don't touch that." I would see students come in during the deinstallation and stuff the projects in their backpacks. There are times when people want that interaction between a stranger and their piece, but that just doesn't happen because people are uncomfortable. I essentially took my already working projects and made them in soap, because with the ability to remelt and pour, you can make anything, especially with the resin and silicone stuff I was already doing.

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How did the idea to do a fetus-shaped soap come about?
At the time I was working with the idea that through birth we were all connected and the idea of infinite comfort visually. I researched more about birth, and I found this encyclopedia of birth deformities. I saw a few that really interested me, like the "cyclops baby." When I started to make the deformities through soap, I realized that through the casting process there are a lot of ways to imitate deformities very naturally.

What was the initial response to your soaps?
In general, people like it because it is different. But, I have had people who are really freaked out about it. When some people think of fetuses, they automatically think of abortion. I just think it is something cute. I had people who messaged my Etsy shop and told me to take it down because it is offensive to portray humans in this form. I like the idea of just being in the comfort of your own home and taking the soap in your hands and realizing that we all came from this, we were all this size.

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What are you working on now?
I have been trying to expand my product line, but nothing seems to be as viral as the fetus soap. In 2012 I got interested in 3-D printing, and I really wanted to bring CAD modeling into sculpting. The soap jewelry I am working on is about turning the shower into a performance art space.

Follow Erica on Twitter.

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The Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar are one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in the world. Mojib is a 29-year-old Rohingya refugee who lived in camps in Bangladesh for 22 years and came to Australia by boat in 2012. He is now living on a temporary protection visa in Brisbane. He sat down with VICE to share his story.

The Rohingya have been living in Myanmar for centuries. There were four million of us but lots of people have left. Before the coup in 1962—which was the beginning of Military rule—we enjoyed lots of citizenship rights. But in 1978 the government launched the Nagamin Dragon Operation—a campaign of mass arrests, torture, and rape. Many people fled to Bangladesh.

In 1982 the government cancelled the citizenship of all Rohingya people. I was born in Myanmar in 1984. In 1990, the government held its first democratic election since 1960. Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won 392 of the 492 seats. The government refused to recognize the results and launched another wave of persecution against the Rohingya people, many of whom were Aung San Suu Kyi supporters.

My father had been arrested but was let free after paying a large bribe. Later, he was told to appear at another government office. His friends told him not to go because many other people had gone and not come back. My two elder brothers who were in high school were kidnapped and taken into forced labor. The military raided my home, took our livestock and crops, and beat me and my mother. I still have the scar on my forehead. I was six years old.

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So our family decided to flee across the border to Bangladesh with just the clothes and food we could carry. My married sisters stayed behind. I spent the next 22 years in refugee camps with no water, no security, and no electricity. We lived in small huts made out of tarps and bamboo—it was either very hot or very cold.

Living like that is a life of limbo. People have no hope. They are in darkness; there is no access to proper education, there is no future, there is no opportunity. We were still very grateful to the Bangladeshi government because they gave us shelter. We were an extra burden on a poor country, but the local authorities running the camps made life even more difficult.

We couldn't go out of the camps. Sometimes refugees get arrested—without any charges—and have to pay bribes. The camp authorities insult and abuse the women and girls. There is no security or stability. In 1997 my two sisters and sister-in-law, with her two babies, were taken by force back into Myanmar by the Bangladesh government. It was a forced repatriation of refugee people and many families were split up.

Around this time I ran into trouble with authorities when one of them stole my phone. When I asked for it back, false allegations were made against me and I was asked to pay a bribe and confess to these allegations. I was told if I didn't, my whole family could be kicked out of the camp or sent to jail. My family and I decided if I stayed and paid the bribe the harassment would continue, so I decided to leave Bangladesh for Australia.

In 2012, I fled the camp and met a man in a nearby town. He arranged to send me by boat to Malaysia. I was in Malaysia for one month until I found someone to arrange for me to get to Indonesia. From there, I met another man who arranged for me to come to Australia. The whole journey took six months.

I would describe the journey from Indonesia to Australia as being between life and death. The boat was too small for the waves and many times we thought we would drown. By day four the boat was filling with water. There were 43 of us on the boat—some Bangladeshi, some Iranians, and some fellow Rohingyas. After five days we were intercepted and taken on board a Navy vessel.

It wasn't until I came to Australia that I learned the good in humanity.

The Navy personnel treated us so well. After what I had experienced in Bangladesh, it was beyond my imagination. The Navy took us to Christmas Island. I spent a month there and then was transferred to Darwin Detention Center, then to Scherger Detention Center in North Queensland for nearly two months. Then I was released.

It wasn't until I came to Australia that I learned the good in humanity. I felt my heart beating for the first time and it has not stopped. I feel relaxed and secure knowing no one will attack me and I won't face any false allegations. As a human I now have respect and dignity.

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I last spoke with my sisters in Myanmar two weeks ago. They were hiding in a mountain, surrounded by military personnel. My sister told me this might be the last time we would speak, as they might all be killed.

It's not a life. For my sisters, death would be a release. Everyday they are witness to violence. People go missing and they don't know what has happened to them. There are no aid agencies, no way to make a living. They live in extreme poverty under the threat of rape, arrest, beatings, and murder. Anything they own can be taken away, their villages burnt. There is no international or local media. The Myanmar government is eliminating an ethnic group systematically and hiding their violence from the eyes of the international community.

There are two reasons the government persecutes us. One is religious and another one is for political advantage. They want to pit the Buddhist majority against the Muslims. If people are busy thinking about how to kill and eliminate the Muslims, they are not paying any attention to the lack of progress and development in the country.

If you convert to Buddhism, you are safe and have citizenship, so the Myanmar government becomes popular to majority groups. They present these issues as religious issues. They say the only problem in Myanmar is the Muslims. The move toward democracy in Myanmar has changed nothing. The government is claiming to be democratic, but what kind of democracy allows the government to kill innocent people?

I came to Australia hopeful to get refugee status and become a permanent resident but my claim was rejected. I am not a citizen of any country. The Myanmar government says I am not Burmese, I am not Bangladeshi, and I'm not Australian. My lawyer says the government is very strict on boat people so they won't grant anyone permanent residency unless the government policy or government itself changes. So, in a way, I am still in limbo.

As told to Lauren Gillin. Follow her on Twitter.

Images by Michael Hili

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From 'Antony and Anish Take Afghanistan' by Scott King. Illustrations by Will Henry. Published by JRP Ringier, Zurich

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Scott King earned his stripes as art director on 90s mags i-D and Sleazenation, and had a knack for producing whip-crack zines and artworks satirizing the pretensions of the press, the laddish nationalism of Britpop, and the bleak, Fosters-fueled monotony of UK suburban life. Hogarth via DTP, if you will.

King's latest graphic jaunt has taken him and his readers to Afghanistan, where, with illustrator Will Henry, he lampoons Britain's love of dumping massive public artworks in towns whose guts were ripped out by the successive governments. King's beef is with the use of public art to gloss over economic problems, citing examples like Antony Gormley's sculpture Angel of the North in Gateshead and Anish Kapoor's Temenos sculpture, 40 miles down the road on Middlesbrough docks.

The small picture book, called Antony and Anish Take Afghanistan, is somewhere between a Commando war comic (jingoistic thrillers in gray newsprint, all black-and-white pics of Fritz and Hans copping it—your elder brother might have been into them) and a Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

The plot goes something like this: In a last ditch effort to turn round the fortunes of a war-torn Afghanistan, Barack Obama commissions Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley to build a series of enormous public artworks. It's a success: peace breaks out and, all of a sudden, Kabul has the best boutique hotels in the northern hemisphere. GDP growth accelerates off the charts. Organic cafés, independent coffee roasters, and vintage poster stalls spring up in the new "Creative Quarter" and the country's fixed wheel bicycle production helps power an economic transformation.

It's a funny, sharp little tale. We caught up with him to find out more.

VICE: Hi Scott, can you explain the concept behind the book?
Scott King: The book stems from an idea that I had to make "sculptural transplants" of public artworks by Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor to Afghanistan. A fantasy idea in which I imagined myself as the head of a United Nations-commissioned "think-tank" that would donate existing public artworks from the UK to Afghanistan. The idea being that, if the work of these two sculptors can be used to "regenerate" poor areas like Gateshead, Middlesbrough, and Stratford, then surely it might help to re-generate a poverty-stricken, war-torn, and economically broken country like Afghanistan.

I had someone make me images of huge public sculptures "transplanted" into the vast planes of Helmand Province, but it didn't really work. It just looked too trite, easy and flippant. This led to me thinking more about the scenario of Anish and Antony being deployed by the UN to "save" Afghanistan, rather than the actual images of what they might do there.

I imagined what might go on behind the scenes and I thought that this could only really work as a sort of graphic novel or cartoon. I was very lucky to then work with an artist named Will Henry—he took my sketches and words and turned them into this very concise fantasy.

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Angel of the North, image via

What made you interested in the work of Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley?
I'm significantly less interested in their work than I am in the way that they, as artists, have been "deployed" in this country to create totemic artworks as tourist attractions, or as focal points for areas that the government has deemed to be in need of "regeneration."

There are other artists who have been involved in similar schemes, of course: Damien Hirst appeared to almost appoint himself as the savior of a small part of North Devon by erecting "Verity" on Ilfracombe harbor, then there's the still (or never) to be built White Horse at Ebbsfleet by Mark Wallinger.

So, what I'm really interested in is the role of public art and how or why it is commissioned, but Anish and Antony are the poster boys for British sculptural gigantism, which is why I chose them as the subject of the book.

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What are your main criticisms of their work, in the context of public art projects like the Angel of the North and Temenos?
I'm not sure—though I may be wrong—that any of these areas that have been lucky enough to become permanent host to a gigantic Gormley or Kapoor genuinely benefit, though the artists that created them certainly do. The artists might convince themselves and others that the work they've created is for the public, but it's also a gigantic advertisement for their own careers. Antony Gormley talks about Angel of the North almost as if it is an ancient earthwork—like it has been and will be there forever.

These enormous public sculptures are indelibly tied to the artists' own "legacy." The industrialists of early to mid 20th century Manhattan were obsessed by being seen to be the "author" of the tallest and most expensive new skyscraper and if you read anything at all in the press about newly commissioned public artworks they are only ever reported in terms of scale and cost: There are easy parallels between these artists and the industrialists that covered Manhattan with skyscrapers. So, what I object to is the conceit that somehow these public artworks are a "gift to the people."

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What's your criticism with the way public art has been deployed in the past 20 years?
To use "think-tank" language, I think that huge public artworks built in poor or post-industrial areas are a "band-aid solution." The various bodies who are responsible for the commissioning of these monuments see them as "beacons of positivity," I'm sure. They see them as a focal point or a hub around which new industries will be created, and to a degree, I'm sure they are.

But Middlesbrough, the site of Temenos, has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the UK—so does Stockton-on-Tees. Stockton (along with Middlesbrough) was one of the five chosen towns for Kapoor's Tees Valley Giants project, a scheme, now possibly abandoned, that was intended to create "The World's Biggest Public Art Project." Why? Even if these sculptures do somehow radiate the hope, ambition, and positivity that their creators believe will attract "upstart" businesses to their immediate vicinity, how many jobs could they possibly create?

These big artworks have been deployed in areas that have suffered from having their industries decommissioned in the 1980s. What's the harm in making a depressed place a bit more jolly with some public art?
There is no harm in that. But as I said, I think these artworks are—if the above is true—deployed as short-sighted solutions. Tourist distractions, if you like.

What do you make of the idea that regeneration and new businesses spring up as a result of these new structures?
Well, maybe new businesses will spring up in and around these artworks. I really hope they do. Boutique coffee shops might yet save the day.

Check out the book here.

Follow James on Twitter.

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Look at Alex Schubert's Instagram , blog, and buy his books.

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Winter Storm Juno, the alleged "historic" blizzard of apocalyptic proportions, mostly missed New York City, which got less than a foot of snow. Still, the region's public transportation system shut down in preparation for what was supposed to be a dangerous snowfall, and conditions were notably more brutal in New England.

That meant a lot of Americans were spending their Tuesdays trapped inside their houses and apartments, which in turn meant they had more time to devote to everyone's favorite hobby: masturbation. According to data released on Pornhub Insights, the smut giant's equivalent to FiveThirtyEight, Pornhub's traffic increased by a whopping 20 percent in New York yesterday. But who can blame them?

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Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user MormonMenMissionaries

Yesterday, Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City tried to call a culture-war truce, announcing at a rare press conference that they are willing to support anti-discrimination laws for the LGBT community as long as those laws also protect people who say they oppose gay rights for religious reasons.

"It is one of today's great ironies that some people who have fought so hard for LGBT rights now try to deny the rights of others to disagree with their public policy proposals," said Elder Dallin Oaks, a member of the church's elite Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, citing recent instances where religious opponents of gay marriage—including a Mormon Olympic liaison and the CEO of Mozilla—lost their jobs ostensibly because of their beliefs.

It's an attempt by the church to square two different sides of the cultural debate and adapt to the rapid countrywide shift in attitudes about LGBT rights. But while the announcement may be historically significant, gay rights leaders say that as a matter of policy, it could be a wolf in sheep's clothing, allowing anyone to legally discriminate against gays in the name of religion.

The announcement also won't change the Mormon belief that the only acceptable sexual interactions are between husband and wife. A top Mormon official affirmed the church's opposition to same-sex marriage at the biennial LDS conference last year, saying that "while many governments and well-meaning individuals have redefined marriage, the Lord has not." Church leaders reiterated this Tuesday, saying that support for anti-discrimination laws would not alter LDS doctrine. "This commandment and doctrine comes from sacred scripture and we are not at liberty to change it," Sister Neill Marriott said at the press conference.

In recent years, the church has made efforts to soften its tone toward gays while maintaining its doctrinal stance that homosexuality is wrong. The LDS website mormonsandgays.org, launched in 2012, lays out this new, gentler message: "The experience of same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people... The attraction is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them."

The position leaves gay Mormons in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between their religion and a life of celibacy or heterosexual marriage—a struggle that received lots of attention this month thanks to the TLC special "My Husband's Not Gay."

The show followed a group of Mormon men who identify as SSA—or same-sex attracted—but are married to women because they refuse to act on their sexual desires. The men openly talked about wanting to bone dudes, worrying their wives with plans for "camping trips" with their bros, and even designed a danger scale to assess how tempting certain guys were to them. Despite all this, they claimed they aren't gay because they eschewed the "gay lifestyle" for a more traditional home with a wife and kids.

Obviously, all this promotes a dangerous idea to people struggling with their sexualities; it's like saying that an immutable characteristic can be cured through sheer force of will. (The American Psychiatric Association recommends that medical professionals refrain from offering gay reparative therapy on ethical grounds, because it can cause harm to patients.)

So while yesterday's announcement might seem like a big concession for gay Mormons and their families, the church's expectations about homosexuality remain deeply flawed. "The new Mormon position is like the candy with the razor blade in it that your mom warned you about on Halloween," says Brooke Hunter, a Mormon apostate who identifies as a lesbian.

"I do hope this move helps bring legislation into being. But the LDS Church isn't showing compassion or humanity. They want to codify their right to discriminate against LGBT people."

Follow Allie on Twitter

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Early last April, a letter arrived at Betty Caw's neat, pebbledash terrace house directly opposite Glasgow's towering Red Road flats. "The regeneration of North Glasgow is continuing at great pace and with that in mind I have some exciting news," began a single page on council headed paper signed by Gordon Matheson, leader of Glasgow City Council. Five of the six Red Road multi-story flats, the letter said, were to be demolished live as part of the opening ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

But the planned demolition never took place. After a week insisting, in the face of public outrage, that blowing up the 1960s-era flats was "a bold and dramatic statement," Glasgow City council finally announced that the plan was being shelved. It was a bold and dramatic statement all right—and an amazingly crass one, the kind that would get you asked to leave a dinner party. The Commonwealth Games would not begin with a bang.

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Photos by Andrew Perry

Now, more than nine months later, Betty Caw and her husband, Alec, still look out every day from their living room window at the vertiginous Red Road flats.

"No one knows when they will come down," says Betty, who spent more than two decades living in the buildings. The multi-story towers, covered in red clay colored tarpaulin emblazoned with the Glasgow Housing Association logo, dominate the view from the couple's second floor window. "We had good times in those flats, good memories. Now I just want to see the back of them."

The Caws moved into the Red Road towers in 1968. When architect Sam Bunton's vision of a city in the sky was completed the following year, Red Road was the largest high-rise development in Europe. The tallest of the eight towers was 31 floors. The modernist development—partly inspired by frequent visits to Marseille by Glasgow corporation functionaries and plans bought from Algeria—housed 5,000 people.

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"For ten years it was good," says Alec. "Then the drugs moved in and it was downhill from there." After raising three children in the towers, the family moved across the road in 1990. By then Glasgow authorities' neglect of the Red Road had left the flats run down and unstable, both socially and architecturally. "We were glad to get out," says Alec.

Glasgow Housing Association says it is on track to have all the Red Road towers demolished and the site cleared by 2017, but nearby residents complain that since the Commonwealth Games balk little has been done.

"Nobody has contacted us to give us a date or anything. We only get what we read in the papers," says Betty and Alec Caws' next-door neighbor, Rose Bambrick. A pair of West Highland terriers nip around her ankles.

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The Red Road flats were celebrated when they were completed decades ago, but now Bambrick says they are "an eyesore. It's like living in a war zone country."

Directly underneath the hulking, 30-story buildings sits the Springburn Alive and Kicking Project. The community center, which serves some 200 pensioners and disabled people from across Glasgow, is housed in a former primary school. The function room is filled with the smell of soup. Photographs line the walls.

"Nobody knows what the plans are for the area," says a staff member who asks not to be named. "We have been here for twenty-six years. We don't want to leave. We love this area. Hopefully we'll get a refurbishment and can stay."

Outside, in the fierce wind that rushes between the towers, a sign pinned to a padlocked gate warns: "Demolition in progress—keep out."

The Red Road towers were scheduled to come down long before last summer's Commonwealth Games. Two have already been demolished. The five that are currently empty look like skeletons on stilts, shimmering in a winter's late afternoon sun. The asbestos that riddled the buildings has been manually removed ahead of demolition. Thirty of the workers who built the flats contracted Asbestos-related illnesses.

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Finlay McKay

Former Red Road residents complain about the pace and cost of the protracted demolition. "It has been going on for 12 years," says Finlay McKay, a 46-year-old firefighter who grew up in the Red Road flats. "How much money has been spent to demolish them and they are still sitting there? It must have been millions and millions. Surely it would have been cheaper just to upgrade them."

"For all these houses that they are demolishing, we have massive homelessness. Surely if you were homeless and had the choice of living up there"—McKay points up at the high rises—"you'd take it instead of being on the street."

McKay now lives in another part of Glasgow, but he has fond memories of growing up in Red Road. He takes me to a former BMX track, now overgrown with weeds and high grass, and a flat stretch of grass near the road where kids used to play soccer. They called this "Little Wembley."

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Little Wembley

During the media storm that followed the proposed demolition last April, national and international television crews gathered on a small hillside overlooking the towers that used to serve as Red Road's summer sunbathing spot and a sledging slope in snowing winters.

"It was fantastic living here. You had everything you needed. Two pubs, bingo, shops, chippies, everything you needed was on site," says McKay.

McKay thinks it is wrong to blame the flats for the anti-social behavior that increasingly took place in them as the initial tenants moved out and were replaced, often by single people and troubled families. "You have to deal with the people. You can't blame the building for the people," says McKay.

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Glasgow academic and artist Mitch Miller agrees. "Steel frame buildings of that size are great in Manhattan where there is money invested in maintaining them. In a windy cabbage patch in North Glasgow, run by a bankrupt corporation, it is a different story," says Miller, who spent three years as "resident illustrator" on the Red Road Cultural Project.

Red Road did work in the early years, says Miller, who believes that too much focus—in Glasgow and nationally—has been placed on high-rise housing developments that have failed, rather than those that have succeeded.

"The story of Glasgow high rises is not a universally grim story. They got some of it right," says Miller.

Finlay McKay, for one, will have mixed emotions when the Red Road flats do eventually come down. "Whenever I am up here it still feels like home. It still feels safe even though they look so sad and pathetic now."

Follow Peter Geoghegan and Andrew Perry on Twitter.

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The main road running through Tasiujaq, Quebec. Photo via Wikipedia

Civil proceedings have been undertaken in the case of a 17-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted while she was handcuffed in the back seat of a police truck.

In September 2011, the only police officer on duty in Tasiujaq, Quebec, an Inuit community of roughly 300 inhabitants and three police officers, received a call to remove a heavily intoxicated young girl from a family party. According to court documents obtained by La Presse, the teen's hands were cuffed behind her back and she was put in the back seat of a police truck next to Joe Kritik, who had also been arrested for an alcohol-related disturbance that night. Kritik, 25, a repeat sex offender with four prior sexual assault convictions, was not cuffed.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/84TbbRT2Cis' width='500' height='281']

The Kativik Regional Police Force (KRPF) officer, who had one month of policing experience and wasn't even allowed to carry a gun, then left the two alone in the locked truck while she gathered information on the arrest of the 17-year-old. When she returned, Kritik was laying on top of the girl, pants down.

Despite telling the constable that she had been vaginally penetrated, the victim did not receive a medical exam, a standard procedure in sexual assault cases. Nor were her parents contacted. Instead, CBC reported that the young girl was put in a jail cell where she spent the night. The officer was suspended the following day and she has since resigned from the police force. Joe Kritik eventually pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and was sentenced to 39 months in prison.

The victim, who cannot be named because she was a minor at the time of the incident, has now filed a civil lawsuit against the police officer, the KRPF as well as the Kativik Regional Government. She is asking for a total of $400,000 in damages, citing "an incredible lack of concern for the safety of the plaintiff" on the part of the arresting officer and "a serious lack of professionalism and gross negligence" on the part of the KRPF. The lawsuit even claims that the officer slammed the door of the victim's jail cell on her face and broke her tooth.

According to La Presse, the lawsuit also alleges that the victim, now aged 21, suffers from post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts stemming from the 2011 incident. Her father told La Presse that his daughter has not recovered from the incident. "Before this happened, she got along well with her family. Now, she has severe mood swings. She gets angry, breaks objects. Other times she is just sad."

An internal investigation by the KRPF cleared the officer in this case of any criminal wrongdoing. But this comes amid concerns of how police deal with issues in aboriginal communities and there are growing calls by aboriginal leaders for independent investigations into police abuses of power.

In a recent interview with VICE, Native Women's Association of Canada vice-president Dawn Harvard said, "There is a tremendous power imbalance, and it's very, very concerning." She says that these isolated cases tie into a much larger history of systemic oppression in aboriginal communities.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/F0cPsmAXx8s' width='640' height='480']

Earlier this week the upper right corner of the United States lost its shit as a "crippling, potentially historic" blizzard headed toward the Northeast. While the national media covered that underwhelming storm with a gusto previously reserved for missing airliners and Middle Eastern crises, just a week earlier a less publicized—but perhaps equally important—snow event occurred in Lubbock, Texas.

It doesn't snow very much in Lubbock, so when a thin blanket of the white powder covered the Texas Tech University campus, it was reassuring to see students respond, as if by instinct, in the only way students should when their campus is covered in a light dusting—by building a massive snow penis at a highly visible spot on campus. It lasted for about a day before the university bulldozed it.

The video is pretty hilarious. The driver of that backhoe shows real determination. He doesn't just topple it; he lowers the plow straight down and then steamrolls the nuts for good measure. Why not seed that patch of earth with road salt to make sure no snow phalluses ever grow there again?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/AiAvLKMjTDI' width='640' height='480']

Though the mighty womb broom is gone, its legacy lives on in Twitter form at @TechSnowDick. I spoke to the guy behind it, a sophomore bio major who was kind enough to DM me from class. According to him, "none of the students complained, at least while we were making it. Most students would walk by and take a picture and laugh."

[tweet text="Freezing my balls off out here. Literally, they're gone." byline="— Texas Tech Snow Dick (@TechSnowDick)" user_id="TechSnowDick" tweet_id="558803327555629057" tweet_visual_time="January 24, 2015"]

There was nothing political about it, either, he said. "The snow dick was not meant to be disrespectful to anyone. It was just for fun."

Of course it was meant to be fun—when life gives you a blizzard, you make a dick. Snow rods belong to a venerable tradition of phallic, site-specific sculpture. What makes a better Instagram post than a little snow beej, a throbbing snow erection, or a snow cock that's peeing out little snowflakes?

Below is a brief roundup of some of the best examples of frozen dicks that exist online. Take note, and try to top them next time it snows in your town.

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[tweet text="There is a giant snow penis outside my hall how am I supposed to react to this? Y pic.twitter.com/OhIjSGThHw" byline="— Natalia (@StupidityGalore)" user_id="StupidityGalore" tweet_id="559410266170212352" tweet_visual_time="January 25, 2015"]

[tweet text="My brother and his friend made this wonderful snow penis today:) pic.twitter.com/cENwzAn281" byline="— preston (@P_stones)" user_id="P_stones" tweet_id="544263411698524160" tweet_visual_time="December 14, 2014"]

[tweet text="Staying Classy #canton. #snowpenis someone spent a considerable amount of time on this before 9 am. pic.twitter.com/5XU71i79Pp" byline="— Elliott R Plack (@talllguy)" user_id="talllguy" tweet_id="433988113577549824" tweet_visual_time="February 13, 2014"]

[tweet text="The Snow Penis Collage pic.twitter.com/tPsp7UI19Q" byline="— Ibbs (@Captain_Ihab)" user_id="Captain_Ihab" tweet_id="306159839128727552" tweet_visual_time="February 25, 2013"]

[tweet text="Just incase anyone wanted to know what an 8 foot snow penis looks like. GROW UP JUSTIN pic.twitter.com/wo6iBAVu8D" byline="— Justin Delhotal (@Delblackout)" user_id="Delblackout" tweet_id="306942764757708800" tweet_visual_time="February 28, 2013"]

[tweet text="Return of the snow penis at 621 #snowday pic.twitter.com/8HnvcnaX0E" byline="— Bethany Freese (@bethanyfreese)" user_id="bethanyfreese" tweet_id="322433576626946048" tweet_visual_time="April 11, 2013"]

[tweet text="Praise the penis All hail snow penis Let us merry round and sing the song of our people. pic.twitter.com/xvchXFSDqr" byline="— reckless (@EvilArtistplz)" user_id="EvilArtistplz" tweet_id="533397029238472704" tweet_visual_time="November 14, 2014"]

Follow Peter Lawrence Kane on Twitter.