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ANITA SARKEESIAN'S EIGHT POINTS FOR FIXING VIDEO GAMES

Though the personal cost's been high, the work that critic Anita Sarkeesian's put into highlighting the ways in which video game makers deal women a discriminatory hand has been hugely valuable. Changes are happening, all the time, illustrated just recently by the makers ofTowerFall. And at a New York University talk this week, she outlined eight key points for progressing the medium away from stereotypical shortcomings and towards a more even representation of the sexes.

Her recommendations are:

> Not to have just a single female character in a cast of several, whose personality is summarized simply as "girl."
> Underwear isn't armor, so let's not dress our warriors as sex objects quite so much.
> As an extension of that point, allow for female characters of different shapes and sizes, rather than always sleek-figured and long-legged.
> Don't focus on the butt. At least no more than you would any in-game male characters.
> Include more female characters of color. (To be honest, this applies to both sexes, as this wonderful piece on Kotaku, "Video Games' Blackness Problem", explores.)
> Animate women appropriately, so that they're not all jiggles and wiggles.
> Ensure that the noises a female character makes when experiencing pain are just that, rather than something more, let's say, "orgasmic."
> Include female enemies, and don't have them overly sexualized, either.

All fine points. No arguments from me. But you can bet that, somewhere else on the internet, dudes are going crazy over this.

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THE BRINGER OF THE "WU-POCALYPSE" IS A RIGHT GOOD LAUGH

The man who seemed to threaten all-out war on Boston-based developer Brianna Wu, founder of the independent Giant Spacekat studio, promising a "Wu-Pocalypse" ( as we covered here), was just having a laugh. C'mon guys, it was hilarious. No, really.

"Jace Connors," who crashed his mom's car and subsequently claimed that Wu had tampered with the vehicle, is actually 20-year-old Maine funny man Jan Rankowski. As revealed in a Buzzfeed interview this week, Rankowski was simply trying to get a rise out of the handful of keyboard warriors still pursuing the Gamergate agenda that the industry, foremost its press, is corrupt. But how the worm did turn, as those same angry young dudes rounded on Rankowski for daring to troll them—and now he's afraid.

That's right. A guy who, for a joke, had a woman fearing (again) for her life, is now being attacked by Gamergate's still-active antagonists himself. He told Buzzfeed: "I didn't take this situation seriously, but I see what it means now to be in the other person's shoes. What her life must feel like. I have this newfound respect for the people who are having to deal with Gamergate, Brianna Wu and Anita [Sarkeesian]."

Unless Jan's been forced from his home for his own safety and subjected to endless days of threatening social media messaging, I doubt he really knows what the women at the epicenter of Gamergate's hate campaign have really been through. But what the hell: If a lesson's been learned, it's one less dickhead for the sane to concern themselves with.

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THERE'S A NEW TRAILER FOR 'BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT'

Watch it above, if you like. Arkham Knight is the third Batman game from Rocksteady, following the excellent Asylum and City. It'll probably be brilliant, even with Scarecrow as, seemingly, the Big Bad. Bit dark though, isn't it? I mean, I know that's the point; but wouldn't it be great if someone did justice to those Adam West-era scraps, using Arkham's free-flowing combat system? Knight is released in June, fingers crossed.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/rGo8ke7-zlM' width='560' height='315']

THERE'S A NEW TRAILER FOR 'THE EVIL WITHIN'S "THE ASSIGNMENT"

One of the scariest games of 2014 just got a little bigger. 'The Assignment' DLC is available March 10.

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THERE'S GOING TO BE A NEW 'GUITAR HERO,' PROBABLY

A franchise previously thought buried might be in line for a revival, as Kotaku reported a few days back. Said to be a "more realistic" take on the tap-along-at-home rhythm action game that sold a shitload of nasty plastic peripherals now uglying up your wardrobe, publishers Activision may announce the title as early as June's E3, most probably as a current-gen-only affair. No fresh riffs for you, 360 crew.

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SOME NEW GAMES CAME OUT

Dragon Ball: XenoVerse (pictured above) is a beat 'em up aimed exclusively at fans of the long-running Japanese manga series—a series that I have no idea about whatsoever. Wikipedia tells me that the first Dragon Ball game came out in 1985, and that XenoVerse is the 15th fighting game based on the comic—"XV" makes sense. But properly comprehending the considerable story elements of this Dimps-developed 3D brawler—nutshell: Time's gone wrong, and a bunch of (what appear to be) franchise regulars are adversely affected—is impossible for an absolute beginner like me.

Focusing on the gameplay rather than the deep lore attached to its plot doesn't do XenoVerse many favors. Visually it's a cartoon come to life, rich in endearingly comedic sound effects and dazzling special moves. But it plays like a relic, with fussy menus, one-dimensional combat, and a camera that's never happier than when it's putting a mountain between you and your target. Your (user-created) character can fight in flight as well as down in the dirt, but the native controls for adjusting your height never feel right, and essential in-battle consumables are annoyingly trapped behind a couple of button presses.

Dragon Ballers of some years' standing will likely relish the opportunity of putting themselves into the game beside its parade of magnificently maned magical pugilists. But those cold to the adventures of—let me see—Goku, Nappa, Trunks, et al. will wonder what the actual fuck is going on with all this silliness, before closing the application and getting back to chasing llamas on Alto's Adventure.

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Equally old school of feel but much easier to understand narratively is the first episode of Resident Evil Revelations 2, "Penal Colony." For the first half of Capcom's new four-parter, you control series stalwart Claire Redfield as she's kidnapped from a works social and dumped on an island prison where, this being Resi, all manner of fucked-up experimenting's been going on. Teaming up with another new arrival in this hellhole, Moira Burton, you fight with gun, knife, and crowbar (and flashlight but, really, use the gun, yeah?) to reach a radio tower and issue a frantic SOS.

The episode's second half sees Moira's dad, Barry, answer the call (several months later, mind you) and he soon enough runs into creepy child detainee, Natalia (I'm sure there's more to her than meets the eye, to be revealed in future episodes). The pair navigates the same grim corridors and bloody basements as Claire and Moira, but there's a sting in their tale: towards its end, a new breed of enemy reveals itself, the Revenant. Which are not nice at all, especially when encountered in numbers while lost in a forest, in the middle of the night.

I'll confess to jumping once during Revelations 2's campaign right near the beginning of Claire's half, a mean ol' mutant man pops up from behind some shelving, and I may have accidentally streaked my jeans. But for the most part this is straight action-horror fare, more in the vein of Resident Evil 4 than earlier installments. Barry's armed to the teeth and takes out his enemies with ease; Claire has to be stealthier, but even with limited firepower there's nothing to really challenge anyone's progress through this first chapter, on regular difficulty at least. Once those two hours are done, there's Raid mode (information on that here) to pass the time until chapter two, "Contemplation," arrives on March 4.

Also out right now is god's-eye puzzler Pneuma: Breath of Life, which you can read all about here, and Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! has just landed on Steam. If you never played the original Abe's Odyssey, released for the PlayStation in 1997, get right on this. It's a beautiful update to a bona-fide classic.

CVG IS FINALLY, OFFICIALLY, COMPLETELY DEAD

Tried accessing the CVG website today? It's finally gone the way of the magazine, which closed back in 2004, and since yesterday its URL redirects straight to GamesRadar, Future's priority games site. I used to read CVG a lot in my teens, and would regularly click to its site in the years since the print side of the publication shut down. While the writing's been on the wall for the CVG for some time, writers from across the games press have unanimously trashed the transfer, which has seen previous URLs point to "scumbag-tier clickbait articles" and a great many pieces simply lost to the ether.

Having all the URLs to my past CVG work redirect to random clickbait list articles on GamesRadar is the final insult.
— Chris Scullion (@scully1888) February 27, 2015

Seems like CVG links aren't just directing to GamesRadar, but specifically to scumbag-tier clickbait articles. Slow clap for Future.
— Matt Lees (@Jam_sponge) February 27, 2015

Tried a CVG link for an interview with the late Bubble Bobble designer Fukio Mitsuji. Got redirected to GamesRadar clickbait. Sad day, man.
— Nick Thorpe (@HKT3030) February 27, 2015

Dear @GamesRadar FUCK OFF. Seriously. Linking all old CVG links to CLICK BAIT? You sicken me
— Amarielle (@AmarielleEU) February 27, 2015

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Tonight at 10PM, HBO is airing Killing Cancer, our special report on the cancer researchers working tirelessly to come up with a cure for the disease at the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. In the report, we take a look inside the world's most cutting-edge cancer research labs and the doctors working with them. We also speak with cancer survivors who owe their recovery to the Mayo Clinic's revolutionary work in the cancer treatment field.

VICE co-founder Shane Smith has dealt directly with the pain of watching a loved one struggle with cancer. In honor of his mother, who recently survived the disease, Shane has established a gift-matching campaign to help the Mayo Clinic continue forward with their groundbreaking cancer research.

Every donation made from today until April 28 will be matched by Shane, up to a total of $500,000. What that means is that, if everyone donates now, the Mayo Clinic could recieve a million dollars by the end of April.

Head over to the Mayo Clinic donation page, contribute, and then get an in-depth look at the research you're supporting in tonight's Killing Cancer report.

The third season of our HBO show premieres March 6, but you can watch episodes from the second season right now, for free.

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Photo via Facebook

I can't think of a scene where I would feel more out of place than a swingers' club. I've always imagined these dark orifices with potbellied 40-year-olds doing coke and lots of people wearing annoying hats. But I've also felt equally intrigued by it. I wanted to know what happens inside those dingy walls, where failing marriages gasp for air and people try to reclaim their sense of sexual adventure.

I decided to go this Valentine's Day, and went on Tinder to try to find some company to help curb the weirdness. In the spirit of polyamory, I set out to find two dates who would be down with the whole situation and go with me.

But before any of that, I had to make sure the club I chose was safe and not some kind of nightmarish rape dungeon.

According to a few message boards, the least sketchy swingers' club in Montreal is a place called L'Orage. L'Orage literally translates to "Storm" and didn't seem that rapey, the front page featured a photograph of some guy happily biting a girl's butt by a couch. Innocent enough, right? This year's Valentine's Day theme roughly translated to "Chocolate and Titties Night," and featured couples and single women only.

Finding two girls who would be into me, into each other, and into a club where strangers bork each other under blacklights was a daunting task. After having no success, I ran into one of my old Tinder matches, Rose, at a bar and explained my predicament.

"Why don't you just take me?"

Two days left and halfway there, I met up with Marika, an artist who had just arrived in Montreal and had a general "fuck you" attitude about her. We got along well, and left the café to get pizza before sharing a 12-pack in my living room. During a lull in the conversation I popped the question, and she said yes without missing a beat.

We all agreed to meet at my place at 7:30 PM on Valentine 's Day. Rose showed up two hours late with a bottle of wine and asked me what was wrong. I was visibly anxious, pacing back and forth and checking my phone every five seconds as I hadn't yet heard from Marika. Rose was amused by the whole scene but told me to get over it. "We can find someone else on Tinder," Rose said. "Let's fix this."

About an hour later, a beautiful message surfaced out of the vast sea of rejection and confusion. Her name was Daphnee. "That actually sounds really chill. I'm at a house party right now but I can meet you guys there in like an hour."

We'll take it.

We hopped in some guy's Uber jeep and sped over to the club. He dropped us in a kinda seedy part of town, with boarded-up windows and a church with homeless people passed out in front of it. We followed the sound of cheap techno into the soft glow of the club's lobby. We walked past a group of disgruntled couples lining the wall and up to the reception desk. A stressed-out bald guy with glasses in a vertical-striped dress shirt waved his hands annoyed at us, and told us it was at capacity.

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This was the least creepy swingers' club in Montreal. Photo by Stephen Keefe

After telling him we had emailed the owner, he scrolled through his iPhone as a candle in a jar flickered beside him, then reluctantly waved us through.

What followed was a sad and confusing assault on the senses. The club, about the size of a backyard swimming pool, was packed wall-to-wall with 60-year-olds twitching awkwardly to obnoxious techno music. Middle-aged blonde women danced in cages, twisting side to side with dead eyes and botoxed foreheads. It smelled like department store perfume and old clothes. I wondered if this is what hell was like.

There was a visible shift when we walked in the room. A sea of gray hair turned to stare at us, like balding vampires they had sensed our youth and life. A 60-year-old man in a Hawaiian t-shirt and fogged-up glasses turned and grinned at us, gyrating his hips like a geriatric Steve Urkel. These weren't married couples rekindling the excitement—these were people trying to complete their bucket list right before they kicked the bucket.

In the far back you could make out silhouettes writhing on each other, like some kind of erotic silent film behind a wall of dimly lit beads.

It felt like we had just walked into a retirement home where someone had spiked the punch with ecstasy. We stood there, stunned for a second, and went to the bar to silently get a drink. The bartender was a middle-aged woman with fake everything, she told Rose matter-of-factly that if she showed her tits, she got a free drink. Rose was already taking off her shirt before the bartender had finished, and handed me her beer so she could put it back on.

"No, no, no, you have to keep it off for at least the whole song."

Rose stood there reluctantly as the only girl in the whole room with her tits out, holding her beer and waiting for the obnoxious Calvin Harris remix to finish. The couple beside us—a golf dad with wispy grey hair and his heavy-set wife—had caught our scent and were chattering and cooing in our direction.

We escaped back to the dance floor before they could talk to us about Facebook and tried to get lost in the music, or something. We were quickly surrounded by more men in Hawaiian shirts and women stuffed into tiny, kinky outfits. Neon lasers from the DJ booth glanced off their leathery skin as the men slowly converged on Rose. She was the youngest woman in there by at least 15 years. We shuffled from side to side in wide-eyed fear as we felt them surrounding us like a slow-moving school of jellyfish.

We then beelined it towards the back room, clutching each other and our beers. The stressed-out front desk guy was now serving as back-room bouncer, and told us we had to finish our beers before going in. We knocked them back, got a nod from the bouncer, parted the beads and walked in, holding our breaths.

We saw eight or so beds, at different heights and sizes, placed around the room. Naked and half-naked bodies were fucking like rabbits. The room had a puke-orange glow from these weird floating easter-egg lamps on the side. A soft chorus of smacking lips, genitals, and moans drifted towards us. Bowls of condoms sat on bedside tables throughout the room, like complimentary snacks in a hotel lobby. It smelled like latex, perfume, and dank butthole.

To my right, some guy was aggressively and rapidly fingering his wife's bum as she was bent over into the sheets. On the next bed was this giant Amazonian woman with a tiny latino husband, who was climbing all over and biting her. In one corner, this guy with a potbelly and goatee was with a heavily done up brunette in her 30s, who we suspected was a sex-worker. Towards the middle of the room, couples shuffled around together, watching the various beds like they were browsing through Bed Bath & Beyond.

A massage table was unoccupied, so Rose brought me there, undid my belt and went down on me. She took off her top and was in this black lace thong that she'd bought specifically for the occasion. I was very much aware of my semi-nakedness and could feel the browsers' eyes on me, like my dick was on display. Every so often a man would appear out of the soft glow and grab Rose's ass, but there wasn't much I could do in my state.

The big bed right beside the entrance was freed up just then, so we relocated and started fooling around as the rest of our clothes came off. A reasonably attractive couple kept glancing our way, and I glanced back with a smile. They made their way slowly to the side of the bed and started taking each other's clothes off and making out. We heard a soft chatter of Russian coming from them.

It was clear what was about to happen so we went for it. A small crowd of couples and lone men had encircled the bed to watch our foursome.

After about 20 minutes, we kneeled on different corners of the bed, pretty tired and somewhat drunk. Just then I got a call from an unknown number and ducked under the bed to answer it.

"Hey, it's Daphnee. I'm inside, where are you?"

I peered out from behind the bed and saw a silhouette of a young girl talking on her phone on the other side of the beads. She came inside and I covered my balls with my boxers as she walked up. Even though we were in a sex room, I was meeting this girl for the first time and wanted to be polite. She strode forward with bouncing red hair, dressed in a leather jacket and introduced herself.

"Yeah thanks for coming, this is... um..." and gestured over to the older woman who had just fellated me.

"Yana," said the Russian lady, leaning up from the bed to shake her hand.

"Alex," said the Russian guy, politely doing the same.

We all stood there as some guy, still fully clothed and wearing running shoes, banged his wife beside us.

"Do you guys wanna go get a drink?" Rose suggested, straightening up slightly.

Rose took her tits out for another song and we started chit-chatting by the bar. Yana sipped on her beer and smiled bashfully once in a while as Alex and I made small talk.

"No. Yeah, Montreal's really a different city in the summer," I told him. What the fuck was I talking about? This guy's wife had just been deepthroating me and now we were talking about weather and traffic like we were pals at a barbecue. I asked if they minded having their picture taken with us.

"No, we don't care," said Alex, "Yana, we are now famous!"

It was 2 AM and the retirement-home dancefloor had thinned out. The couples grazing around the bar weren't looking elsewhere, probably because they had swapped. The DJ was a bit younger and bobbed his head slightly looking out at the sad scene. I wondered what had happened to his life that he had ended up here. We got bored and all went back to the back room.

The sex around us had become so seemingly normal. It was no longer weird to see bare asses and wrinkly balls flopping around. I felt strangely comforted seeing the guy in the running shoes beside us, like seeing your neighbour walking his dog at the same time every day. (What was still odd were the single men—those who hadn't found anyone to swap with, or whose wives were gone with someone else—circling the room.)

We turned to each other and started having a threesome. A few single men lurked around the fringes of our three-way, testing out our receptiveness. One giant black guy walking around with a strap-on black dildo was consistently close by. I never looked up at him. I was having one-on one sex with Daphnee when this guy in a maroon dress shirt who looked like Gilbert Gottfried walked over to Rose and started petting her. She scrambled away and lay beside us. I started fingering her, somewhat for protection, as all three of our heads were clumped together and a crowd gathered.

Speaking with Daphnee later, she told me that at this point she felt her head getting stroked. She looked down at both my hands in horror and realized some other guy was stroking her head while we had sex. By the time she reeled around he had vanished.

It was 3 AM, and a lady came around and politely told us they were closing soon. She was going around to all the beds and speaking with whoever's head was visible.

We scrambled to put our clothes on, passed through the crowd, and got into a cab outside. Rose and Daphnee were chatting and bonding as I stared out the window. My head was still screaming with the intensity of what I'd just gone through, and I wondered how I would readjust to the real world. Dark flashes of flesh, black dildos, and floating easter eggs skipped through my mind. We had endured, explored, and broken through myriad sexual boundaries in the span of a few hours. Now we were supposed to go back to the world of deadlines, mindless thank-yous, and French toast brunches.

They dropped me off by my place and kissed me goodbye, and I walked up to my room. I was on way too high a gear to sleep, so I sat on my bed and played four hours straight of computer chess until the sun rose. I fell asleep to the sun filtering through my window and the smell of wine slowly fermenting out of the still half-open bottle. What a dark, creepy, amazing place, I thought.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Follow Stephen Keefe on Twitter.

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'Discotropic' (2015), by Niv Acosta. Performance: The New Museum. Courtesy the artist. Photo by the artist

This Tuesday I attended the preview of Niv Acosta's alluring new sci-fi/classical fusion dance performance Discotropic. The work is featured in Surround Audience, the third iteration of the New Museum's much-awaited Triennial, which opened this week and runs through May 24. Featuring four dancers—one of whom is Acosta, attired in a billowing black headdress that was somehow both ephemeral and dense—Discotropic is a radical queer exploration of past imaginations of the future. As I stood on the sunny seventh floor of the museum, watching the performance, a series of thoughts swirled through my head: What is the future of queer art? How will its arrival within contemporary museum space change it, and conversely, how will we queers change the museum? And how can I get a headdress that fierce?

The press materials accompanying the Triennial describe the museum's desire to "explor[e] the future of culture through the art of today." Acosta's work, with its focus on yoking together disparate theoretical and movement traditions—ballet, contemporary, voguing—produces a work of dance situated at the intersection of celestial motions, the theories of astrophysics, histories of radical disco manifestoes, and race relations, with its unlikely inspiration coming from the politicized appearance of a holographic black body in a galaxy far, far away.

A Native New Yorker, Acosta was born in May of 1988. From a young age Acosta was fascinated with dance, though as he aged it gave way to an infatuation with scientific study—at one point, he even found himself contemplating a career as a rocket scientist. However, the call of performance remained strong, bringing him to the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angles, where he focused in dance and choreography. Discotropic, with its focus on science and movement, brings together Acosta's diverse interest in a provocatively unique way. It is a complex examination into cultural construction and space that manages to be both universal and deeply personal. After the preview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Acosta at the Whole Foods on Second Avenue, where we drank lemonade and chatted the afternoon away.

'Discotropic' (2015) trailer, by Niv Acosta

VICE: How do you define yourself as an artist? How do you relate to your own work?

Can you tell me more about Discotropic? What was the inspiration for the piece?

Diahann Carroll. I watched that Star Wars Holiday Special and found the eroticization of her relationship as a holographic image to a Wookiee troubling. Could you speak about the perversity of that for a minute, how that scene specifically inspired you?

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'Denzel Again' (2014), by Niv Acosta. Performance: New York Live Arts. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ian Douglas

How do you want to be consumed as a performer?

I try to make the labor very visible because I think it is important to express that we arrived at this place with much work, not just levity and fun and just trying to put on a cute dance.

Well, it is a cute dance.

So how has working with sci-fi enabled you, as an artist and as a person, to be more fully embodied?

So you are using the language and freedom inherent within sci-fi and disco as a ward against the dominant arts-culture ideology that doesn't create or hold the space for you to be yourself within it?

In the piece, I loved watching you dance with the fabric. It looked like an appendage of your body. Why did you use fabric in this way?

Your movements, the structural posing, the music itself was also very classical, which was not what I was expecting at the start. What draws you to working with classical music and forms?

How do you envision an audience member walking out of this? What do you want me to understand? What is the shift you would like to induce inside my consciousness?

In closing, what would you recommend people read? Is there a specific book or a specific author that you found particularly captivating or grounding for this piece, something that could maybe help us find and discover our own tools that enable us to express ourselves freely?

Discotropic premieres to the public this Friday at 7:30 PM and 8:30 PM, at the New Museum in New York. Surround Audience runs at the New Museum through May 24, 2015.

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

Cry-Baby #1: Alan Becker

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Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A guy didn't like his haircut.

The appropriate response: Wearing a hat.

The actual response: According to police, he trashed the salon.

Last week, 47-year-old Alan Becker got a haircut at the the Loft Salon in Stamford, Connecticut.

According to police, Becker wasn't too happy with the haircut he'd been given, and became "belligerent" and shouted obscenities at staff.

Once he found out the haircut, which, to my untrained eye, would look fine if he'd just push the pube-y bangs off his forehead, was going to cost him $50, he allegedly became more enraged and kicked a hole in the wall, before throwing a wreath and a candle out of the door. Presumably, Becker had not asked how much the cut was going to cost prior to getting it.

"He was just very irate about his haircut," Stamford Police Sergeant Kelly Connelly told the Hartford Courant. "He did not like the way that it was cut."

The salon's staff allowed Becker to leave the store without paying in order to get rid of him, but he came back shortly after, and began demanding that the salon fix his haircut.

Worried for their safety, employees called the police, who tracked Becker to his home and arrested him.

He was charged with third-degree criminal mischief and breach of peace.

Cry-Baby #2: Julian Anderson

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Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A baby girl was crying while a guy watched Jerry Springer.

The appropriate response: Changing/burping/feeding/holding the baby.

The actual response: He allegedly hit and shook her.

On Monday, 25-year-old Julian Anderson took a seven-week-old female relative of his to the emergency room of a hospital in Aurora, Illinois, as she had a fever.

While treating the baby, hospital staff noticed injuries on the her face and back. Suspecting abuse, they called police.

Police came to the hospital and questioned Anderson, who reportedly told them he had squeezed and shook the baby.

He admitted that he did this because the baby would not stop crying while he was trying to watch The Jerry Springer Show.

Anderson was charged with various counts of felony battery, as well as child endangerment. He will also have to face two outstanding warrants that he had at the time of his arrest.

:( :(

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A guy allegedly shot someone in the butt because they wouldn't roll him a cigarette and some women attacked a guy because he asked them to be quiet during a screening of 50 Shades of Grey.

Winner: The alleged butt shooter!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

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Memory is something I've always struggled with, even on the most basic level. I forget to do the simplest of daily tasks on a regular basis—whether it's brushing my teeth or leaving a cup of tea to go cold. I forget people's birthdays; significant ones, too, like my sister's (despite the fact it's four days before mine) and those of my numerous ex-girlfriends, before they were my exes. I also forget things that are supposed to be landmark events—family vacations and arguments, for example—and important firsts, like days at school, kisses, and awkward fingerings in arcades.

There's one place where my memory doesn't fail me, though, and that's the cinema. I think about films in the same way I'd imagine an addict plans their next fix. I'm obsessive and fastidious when it comes to my addiction. I remember exactly where I saw films and where I was sitting, thanks—in part—to the calendar I keep in Excel to help me keep track. Yes, I keep an Excel spreadsheet of almost all the films I've seen on the big screen. If you don't believe me, here it is:

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The times that films have connected with me are tattooed onto my brain. I remember sitting in the second row for Jurassic Park: The Lost World in a multiplex, being amazed by what I was watching, only to turn to my uncle at the end of the film and see that he was sound asleep. I remember watching The Emperor's New Groove (third row, aisle seat) on a 35mm print so bad I can still picture the scratches, and consoling my father after seeing Frances Ha, where we sat in the sixth row, slightly to the left of center.

It was at the theater where a film changed my point of view on the person closest to me: my mother. The movie in question is Barbara Loden's Wanda.

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Loden was the wife of Greek-American director Elia Kazan, perhaps best known for On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and East of Eden. He was the man who made James Dean and Marlon Brando famous. Loden was an ex-model turned actress playing a bit part in Kazan's Wild River when they met. That's not to say Kazan was the real success story here; in making Wanda, Loden would become the first woman ever to write, direct, and star in a film, and one that was novel for its time (1970), in that it would take us deep into the psyche of an ordinary woman.

The film opens with Wanda waking up, hungover, on her sister's sofa, with two other men sleeping on another. This clearly isn't her home, but it's somehow obvious she has none. Wanda leaves and walks across a desolate quarry to get to where she needs to go, the factory where she works as a seamstress. She asks meekly if there's any work for her. There isn't. She also wonders why she wasn't paid her full wages. She just wasn't. She makes no protest.

What Loden does next is shocking, even by today's standards. When confronted by her ex-husband and a judge, Wanda shrugs off responsibility of her children. She doesn't want to be their mother. Loden never tells us why. She just walks out of the court, and their lives.

You think life couldn't get much worse for Wanda, but it does. She meets Norman, played with a brutish aggression by Michael Higgins, a petty thief who brings her into his life and proceeds to abuse her for almost the entire time they're together. The first night they meet he takes her back to his motel room and demands she goes to get him two hamburgers, an order she messes up and gets punished for. He hits her, shouts at her, and generally degrades her. But she has nothing else, so why not stick around?

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Wanda and Norman eventually hit the road together, and fuck me is it bleak. You think your family trips to the beach were brutal? They have nothing on this.

The two of them drive through the exact middle of nowhere—a place not often used in films, for obvious reasons. Yet here it makes total sense. The pair are nobodies, so why should they be somewhere significant?

On the road, Norman continues to verbally abuse Wanda, before forcing her to help him rob a bank. The plan is, as he's robbing the place, she'll park up outside and, when he's made a break, drive them away. Except there is no driving away. Norman gets done in by the police, setting Wanda free of him. Only, when she sees what's happened she isn't happy. The one thing she chose to be a part of has failed. And now she has nothing.

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Those in my generation were taught that things only get better by people like D:Ream and Tony Blair. Well, for Wanda, they don't. Loden ends the film with Wanda drinking a beer and looking up past the table in front of her, as though she's searching for something. That something turns out to be the camera. The last shot is a freeze frame, with Wanda looking down the lens. It's an obvious homage to Truffaut's The 400 Blows, but her face is giving off any number of messages. It could be one crying out for help, or telling us to leave and never look back. It could be Wanda asking for us to just remember her, or not to bother mourning her at all.

The act of watching this film shook me. The first time I saw it I had a heavy flu, so it hit me as a kind of fever dream, half realized memories caught on grainy 16mm film. The second time seeing it, at the ICA (eighth row on the aisle), confirmed to me its beauty and tragedy. This was a film that poured from Loden's soul.

It made me think about my mom, because the central relationship between Wanda and Norman had reminded me of the one I share with her. Not in the sexual sense, but in their cloying co-dependency on one another.

As for a lot of people, my dad wasn't around when I was younger, and that left a void. I also hated school—especially the people in it—and my body. My mom knew all this, of course, and she knew that obsessively watching the same movies over and over wasn't always good for me, but that it gave me something.

They filled—and continue to fill—some kind of void in my life. She understood my obsessive relationship with films because she had the same obsessive relationship with me. Wanda left her kids, but my mother never left me. In fact, all she wanted was to figure out the best way for me to grow into a person. In the end, I'm thankful she let it be films.

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Lots of things have been going on at all those Fifty Shades of Grey screenings you've desperately been trying not to think about your mom going to. There were three arrests after a fight broke out at a screening in Glasgow. Staff cleaning a cinema in an unknown location found a number of soiled cucumbers on the back seats. And now a woman in Milton Keynes, England, erotically soiled herself so badly that everyone had to be cleared out of Cineworld because the overpowering smell of her feces was so bad that nobody could breathe.

You may laugh, but: Have you ever been so aroused in your life that you shat and vomited at the same time?

More to the point: Have you ever brought someone else to such agonizing levels of ecstasy that they released every possible fluid out of every possible orifice in one symphonic orgasm? No. You haven't. If I were you, I'd spend the weekend thinking about your entire approach to sex, because you're clearly not as arousing as a flickering celluloid image of Jamie Dornan with his junk tucked neatly between his legs. He just made someone vomit with desire. What have you ever done with your life?

But with respect to your inferior sex game, the Milton Keynes Citizen reports the woman in question was extremely drunk, which goes some way to explain the "shitting and vomming out of both ends like a grotesque Catherine wheel" thing. One moviegoer told the paper: "She lost control of everything, including all bodily fluids. The whole cinema stank."

After the packed screening was evacuated, attendees were offered refunds to see the show again. However, some were disappointed that their much-anticipated plans had been ruined.

"I'm not sure of her age, but she was so drunk she couldn't move," another wide-eyed audience member said. "She practically had to be carried out. And the mess she left behind was just disgusting. There was no way they could clean it up there and then—it would be a specialist job. So the film was stopped and everybody had to leave."

Which begs the question: Who is the specialist to whom you turn when someone gets so drunkenly aroused at Christian Grey that her or she evacuates every bodily fluid? Who specializes in that?

Anyway, the attendees were clearly disappointed that their plans for an evening of Fifty Shades/M&S Meal Deal for two/six minutes of missionary intercourse were so derailed by a distressed woman copiously vomiting on herself, with one audience member saying: "It was so disappointing. We'd really been looking forward to seeing it after reading the books."

There has been a lot of criticism of Fifty Shades of Grey: that it glamorizes abuse, blurs the line of consent, and conflates deep psychological control and anal exploration with the fairytale of romantic love. That it is badly acted and appallingly written. But when you think about it, ejecting every single fluid your body can possibly hold all at once—in a high-gracing arc, out of every orifice available to you, presumably while screaming in some sort of muffled agony—is possibly the greatest, most visceral review of all time.

Thank you, anonymous vomit woman of Milton Keynes. Also, please can you think about replacing Claudia Winkleman on Film 2015?

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

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Protesters rally against the P6 bylaw in 2013. Photo by Simon Van Vliet

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre announced this week that the city would drop all of the pending cases against protesters resulting from its use of the controversial bylaw P6, following a court ruling.

Nearly half of Quebec's student population went on strike to protest rising university tuition during the "Maple Spring" of 2012. The frequent, occasionally massive, rallies led the city to create the P6 bylaw, banning protesters from wearing masks and requiring organizers to file itineraries to the city ahead of the demonstrations. Thousands ended up being arrested during the protests.

On February 9, Judge Randall Richmond ruled in favour of three self-represented defendants arrested on March 22, 2013 who asked that their charges be dismissed by the court. By choosing not to appeal, the City of Montreal acknowledged that the ruling basically tore apart the prosecution for nearly all P6 cases.

A city official confirmed to VICE that, based on the Richmond decision, 245 additional cases were dropped on Thursday, and that 1,700 more cases will be dropped in due time. Last month, the city's prosecutors had already abandoned the prosecution against 83 defendants.

In his ruling, Judge Richmond wrote "the trivialization of breaches of the law by senior SPVM officers" was "appalling." Notwithstanding such harsh criticism by the judge, Mayor Coderre claimed the Richmond decision was only a "technical interpretation" of the bylaw and that it highlights a mere "problem with evidence."

After a thorough analysis of the bylaw's content and form, the judge concluded that the charges did "not correspond to any offence established by applicable law" and added that, even if there had been an actual offence, "false testimonies on the statements of offence renders them legally worthless as proof of the disputed facts."

Projet Montréal Councillor François Limoges, vice-president of the Public Safety Committee, says it shows that the "bylaw was poorly written."

"It's not just a matter of application," Limoges insisted in an interview with VICE. He said that P6 not only opens the door to police arbitrarily targeting specific groups mostly for political reasons, but also that it is so vague that it remains open to all sorts of interpretations.

"Apparently, the police and the judiciary don't have the same interpretation," Limoges noted.

This decision renders the bylaw mostly ineffective. Meanwhile, approximately 80 percent of all P6 charges laid by Montreal police (SPVM) since the bylaw was modified in 2012 have been dropped, despite the relentless efforts of police officers and city prosecutors to process the 3,400 cases resulting from at least 24 mass arrests. Only a yet unspecified number of people have plead guilty and paid their individual $637 fine.

Rally against P6 in Montreal on April 22, 2013. Photo via Simon Van Vliet

Having dropped over 2,000 charges so far, that's $1.2 million in fines that the city will never see. On top of the combined costs of massive police crowd-control operations and the administrative costs of processing thousands of cases at municipal court, the city has spent over $100,000 in legal fees. The City of Montreal has also been hit with several class action lawsuits asking for $21 million in compensation for hundreds of protesters arrested under P6.

For Limoges, this underlines the argument that the whole process might be nothing more than the Coderre administration's "ideological fight at the taxpayers' expense" to enforce a useless bylaw "that infringes on fundamental freedoms."

Mayor Coderre has been adamant about P6 still being valid and said he would give instructions for the SPVM to keep on applying it, presumably in accordance to the law.

The question everyone asks now is: what's next?

For the past few months, trade unions, student unions, community groups and environmental activists have been working towards province wide anti-austerity and anti-oil movements in the spring.

In the past few days alone, the Coalition opposée à la privatisation et à la tarification des services publics organized dozens of actions across the province, including street protests and occupations in Montreal.

Additionally, even the police union is in open conflict with the City of Montreal, regarding a pension reform imposed by the provincial Liberal government as one of its first austerity measures. Last June, several on duty police officers even participated in an illegal protest where a bonfire was lit in front of City Hall.

Nonetheless, it is likely that police will want to shut down the annual anti-police brutality protest coming up on March 15—which has often resulted in clashes between police and Black Bloc types.

To get around the technical issues raised by Judge Richmond's recent ruling, SPVM officers could use article 500.1 of the Quebec Highway Safety Code instead, as they have successfully done in the past. This article, introduced in 2001 after a truckers' strike in Quebec, prohibits any "concerted action intended to obstruct in any way vehicular traffic on a public highway, occupy the roadway, shoulder or any other part of the right of way of or approaches to the highway."

Another option would be for the police to go back to using Criminal Code provisions against unlawful assemblies and riots, but this has proven very difficult for the Crown because it puts a much heavier burden of proof on the prosecution. New legislation at the federal level, such as the high-profile C-51 anti-terror bill or more obscure bill C-639 designed to amend the Criminal Code for "protection of critical infrastructures" might eventually provide police forces with new repression tools at the criminal level.

At the municipal level, "P-6 has been defeated, for now, by street protesters who defied it, and by self-represented radicals who fought it in the courts," as activist Jaggi Singh, charged twice with P-6 tickets, stated in a February 25 press release. This is undoubtedly an important victory, but the battle for the right to protest in Quebec is far from over.

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Two independent films came out this week with complementary takes on the violent consequences of restlessness. Writer/director/co-star Michael Levine's Wild Canaries centers around a single apartment building, with an engaged Brooklyn couple embroiled in what may or may not be a murder mystery involving their landlord. Andrew T. Betzer'sYoung Bodies Heal Quickly takes place on the road, with two brothers on the lam after accidentally becoming murderers. Levine plays his tightly scripted scenario for laughs, while Betzer crafts a loose, uncomfortable mood piece.

In Wild Canaries, Barrie (Sophia Takal, an accomplished filmmaker in her own right) and Noah (Levine) have their premarital woes amplified when an elderly neighbor gives up the ghost and Barrie suspects foul play. There's a playfulness to her paranoia at first, but schemes that start out that way have a tendency to get serious. Still, the descent down this particular rabbit hole is rarely less than charming. Levine deftly toes the seriocomic line, making us sure nothing underhanded has actually occurred in one scene and making us question that certainty in the next.

Just as urgent as the possibility that Barrie and Noah are living near a killer is the fact that they're having trouble living with each other. She's a little flighty, he's kind of a dick. This comes through in the form of her chiding him for not taking her seriously and him scoffing at her refusal to focus on more pressing matters, like the fact that he's paying the rent by himself. You often wonder whether their relationship can survive the supposed plot they're mixed up in, to say nothing of whether it even should.

The destructive waywardness of bored rural youth is at the fore in Young Bodies Heal Quickly. Betzer's pleasingly lo-fi drama opens on two brothers knocking the hell out of an abandoned car with baseball bats for the sheer joy of it before upping the ante with a BB gun. Unfortunately, shooting a donkey proves uneventful. So, when that gets old, they set their crosshairs on two girls, which naturally leads to a fight. In one of those tragically stupid moments that set off so many movie plots, someone dies in the ensuing skirmish. Then the brothers (simply credited as Older and Younger) do what any confused adolescents would do. They run away.

Thus begins an itinerant lifestyle consisting of getting into trouble, fleeing to a new spot where they can lay low, then getting into trouble and fleeing again. This tapers off once they settle down with their hermetic father in the second half of the film, which is also where Young Bodies Heal Quickly loses what little narrative momentum it had. The milieu is lean in dialogue, but rich in lackadaisical atmosphere, giving the vibe of a thousand afternoons misspent killing time and brain cells.

This is captured via grainy Super 16mm cinematography courtesy of Sean Price Williams, the indie world's unofficial director of photography of choice, whose vivid lensing is largely responsible for the film's alluring, hazy atmosphere. Older and Younger never feel like more than ciphers, though it's debatable whether they're even meant to, so the burden is often in Williams to make the mundane feel unique. And he delivers time and time again. Betzer's treatment of the material is appropriately freewheeling, not unlike a more focused Harmony Korine, and the early sequences in particular serve as a corrective to bloated American indies trafficking in the same cliches as their studio counterparts. It isn't quite sustainable as far as crafting a narrative goes, but it is admirable.

BothYoung Bodies Heal Quickly and Wild Canaries are centered around acts of violence, which leads them down two distinct, yet equally chaotic paths. Levine embraces that dysfunction, unafraid to go off the rails when the occasion calls for it. While the rails barely even factor into the equation for Betzer, as his narrative completely dissolves by the end of the film. Maybe Young Bodies might have benefited from the sense of control that keeps Wild Canaries in check, but as a counterpoints to each other, both indie films are worth a watch.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

A nasty gut bacteria called Clostridium Difficile (or C. Diff) is reportedly attacking patients who've recently been to the doctor at a rate of nearly 500,000 infections per year according to a paper published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. If you get it, you may soon be dealing with the three worst words in the English language: painful, deadly diarrhea.

We hear about stuff that can kill us all the time, of course, and it's hard to tell how worried we should be about individual maladies—remember Ebola? With so much health-related white noise in the news, how concerned should we be about C. Diff?

The short answer: If you've taken antibiotics lately, or you know someone who has, you really should be a little concerned. That's what Elizabeth Hohmann, a gastroenterologist who is also a pioneer in the treatment of C. Diff infections, told me.

I interviewed Dr. Hohmann to figure out where "pooping yourself to death due to a C. Diff infection" should slot into my buffet of medical fears. She didn't exactly put my mind at ease, but she did remind me about the exciting news that fecal transplants are coming to a hospital near me.

VICE: How scared should we be about getting deadly diarrhea?
Elizabeth Hohmann, MD: A little bit more worried than we were before that paper was published. I think the key finding of the paper is that there's even more of this than we thought and an even greater appreciation that it can be a fatal disease, especially in fragile old people.

Why are people at risk after going to the doctor?
Most people get C. Diff after antibiotics are given for another illness. They kill a lot of those beneficial bacteria in our intestines, which can create fertile ground for C. Diff to grow up, take hold, reproduce, and create toxins and bring about the mayhem that it does. I think this is yet another wake up call about antibiotic abuse. When we don't need antibiotics we should not be using them.

Is it considered an "antibiotic resistant" bacterial infection?
That's a tough question actually. It's an anaerobic bacterium, meaning it doesn't grow in the air, so it's actually very difficult to assess its sensitivity to antibiotics. To grow it you have to keep it in a strict environment with no air present. Unlike bacteria you just throw on an agar plate and grow it in a 37-degree incubator, it's actually quite a thing to assess.

But it's related to that issue, right?
It's certainly a product of antibiotic overuse.

What are some of the symptoms people deal with?
Basically diarrhea. Abdominal pain, cramping, sometimes fever, nausea, vomiting. But the first signal is diarrhea.

But obviously not everyone with diarrhea has it.
It gets complicated because a lot of people on antibiotics, like for sinusitis, get antibiotic-associated diarrhea that's not C. Diff. So a lot of doctors think, Oh, it's just antibiotic-associated diarrhea. It's gonna go away, and then it gets worse and worse and worse.

Would you say this report came out to correct those misdiagnoses?
[That] and nobody wants to talk about it. And patients who have this are sometimes treated like pariahs! I've had patients who told me, "Once it got out that I had this no one wanted to come to my home." It's a spore-forming bacteria, which is why doctors and hospitals get agitated about it.

Oh God, is it really that contagious?
No. I take care of patients with C. Diff all day long some days. I'm a perfectly healthy person though, and I'm like bathing in it probably, around all these people with diarrhea, but I don't get sick. Because it's not enough to just be exposed.

So you have to be exposed to it to get it, and on antibiotics. Anything else?
Another thing that makes people more susceptible is having no stomach acids. A lot of people are on these powerful medications [like omeprazole] that really knock out your stomach acid. I ask them, and they don't even know why they're on it.

So other than antibiotics, how are you treating it C. Diff?
After that, you start talking about things like fecal transplant. Really, it's taking poop from a healthy person and putting it into the colon. You can do that by an enema. You can do it by colonoscopy. You can use a nasogastric tube. Or you can do with—as we have made—a capsule. You can make one from processed stool, and give it to people as capsules.

But just to be clear, people who think they might have C. Diff trying to give themselves fecal transplants...
Bad idea. Very bad idea. It needs to be medically supervised. You need the right kind of screening for the donor, and a medically safe form of administration.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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It is February 9 and Bill O'Reilly is having a conversation with Jimmy Kimmel. Not quite right. Rewind. It is February 9. There are noises coming from Jimmy Kimmel's face, and Bill O'Reilly is briefly acknowledging them. Closer. There is no truth in the universe; there are only presidents and terrorists and Bill O'Reilly. Better.

O'Reilly is talking at Kimmel about Brian Williams, the NBC anchor who recently admitted to having fabricated a story about his helicopter getting hit with an RPG while reporting on the Iraq War in 2003. Williams has dramatically recounted this story on multiple occasions.

"I can see, when you come on a show like Kimmel, or any of the late-night shows, you don't wanna be a DWEEB," O'Reilly says.

Bill O'Reilly's DWEEB has 18 B's on it. His DWEEB is its own paragraph. He is shoving DWEEB's head in the toilet and taking one bite of its sandwich and throwing the rest in the trash as the word leaves his mouth. There is no place in O'Reilly's America for "dweebs" or "fags" or "vegetarians." America was built on greasy-palmed men riding in tanks and getting hand jobs in the backseats of Cadillacs. He won't tolerate anything less. This country won't tolerate anything less, won't tolerate haters, won't tolerate resistance of any kind, not from liars or women or foreign countries or the one extra button you have to press at the ATM to have instructions shown in English.

His every thought seems like it is careening toward a GODDAMMIT and a brick through a window. He is a trumpeting rallying cry for the deranged, for the heckling mutants in SUVs, for an America that doesn't need a man who's right but one who doesn't care if he's right. Because if you never have to be right, all you have to do is pretend; everything can be noise, a neon billboard, a big suspender snap and a long motherfucker of a drag from a cigar. He is the specific brand of American defiance where there is no folding, only re-raising. In America you don't make retractions, you fight for the lie on which your huckstering, pull-my-finger sham of a career is predicated. You don't resolve, you don't contemplate, you are smashing beer bottles and asking who wants a piece of you and peeling out of the fucking parking lot.

Bill O'Reilly is rubbing the back of the anti-intellectual right wing that is comforted simply to be in the room with someone who seems marginally more enlightened than they are. "Come with me, children," he is saying. He is a parent showing you on Christmas morning the half-eaten chocolate chip cookie and telling you that Santa was here, that the reindeer were here too; that texting is ruining America, kids don't clean their rooms any more, and "terror savages" are knocking at our door. The difference is that you believe it, and he maybe believes it too, or maybe not, who cares, really? It's not about what he's saying but about his conviction, how airtight his belief seems in these half-truths. The difference between myth and bullshit is volume.

A week ago, a report in Mother Jones alleged that O'Reilly's death-defying account of his experience covering the Falklands War was nothing more than a dick-swinging tree-house fantasy. He said he nearly died of a heart attack in the center of a violent mob. Video recordings show only a single man punching the side of a car.

He has said this about his time covering combat: "I've been there. That's really what separates me from most of these other bloviators. I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I've seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven't."

And still, none of this matters, really. O'Reilly is invincible. His ratings have skyrocketed since the controversy began. There is no "scandal," because it was always a scandal, a hoax, this make-believe America where John Fogerty is blasting through the clouds and Honest Men are on the front lines and Mickey Mantle is rounding the bases in slow motion. Bill O'Reilly is a pestilence to reason, an objection to the concept of critical analysis. He is the spirit child of the segment of America that won't stand for nuance or patience.

He's not playing chess; he's not even playing checkers. He is a man who delights in knocking over a Jenga tower in the middle of someone else's game, because what kind of game is Jenga, even? I bet it's European. He is a menace, a cultural malignancy, your uncle's racist Facebook status, the king of the Costco book table, a self-aggrandizing carnival barker, a man who has confused honesty with recklessness, with not giving a fuck.

He is the Venn diagram intersection of Men's Wearhouse and the Cheesecake Factory.

His sex fantasies allegedly involve filling a woman with wine and rubbing her stomach with a loofah mit. He is a man so square he called Billy Joel a "hoodlum." He is a can of condensed chicken broth. He is reduced-fat mayonnaise. He is the Venn diagram intersection of Men's Wearhouse and the Cheesecake Factory.

Who O'Reilly actually is, how much of his persona and ideals have been twisted for the sake of showmanship and ratings, means almost nothing. He is a referendum on the taste of the populous—our need to believe that there are Good Guys and there are Bad Guys and nothing in between. That the enemy is right over this hill, and the only way to stop them is through brute force and solemn "we won't stand for this" from atop a pile of rubble with six firefighters standing next to us and a flag blowing behind them. Grudges against him and his ideals are "jihads"; his opposition doesn't object, it "demonizes." People who don't believe in God are "militant secularists." We must "confront evil" and launch "holy wars" and put "boots on the ground to eradicate this cancer of ISIS and radical Islam before it destroys us."

He is a fraud, the guy at the bar trying to show you a card trick. He is not the Godfather, he is the thug wrapping the corpse of some half-baked segment in a piece of carpet and tossing it into the river. He is saying that you can accomplish anything you want if you just Be All That You Can Be. It's that easy. He is counting talking points on his fingers, speaking in short sentences, enunciating like he's speaking to a toddler, telling people to shut up, telling people it's Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays, and for another thing the immigrants are taking your jobs, can't you see it? He is the irresistible idea of FEELINGS > facts. Because feeling is easy, feeling is an impulse, feelings are from your balls, and everyone has balls, right? You're not some kind of pussy, are you? He is telling stories to wide-eyed women about his high school athletic career, how his dad had a nothing job making no money in a nothing town but he made it. Bill O'Reilly started from the bottom and now he's here, cackling at your minuscule 401(k), you pathetic little rodent.

Sitting next to Kimmel, O'Reilly says this: "The internet, and you know what it is, it's a sewer. And these people delight in seeing these famous people being taken apart. And I just think it's wrong." He turns from Kimmel, he is looking at the audience now, and then directly into the camera, at us, at Democracy, at every blue-blooded man who has ever lived, really. He wants your donations, not in money but in TRUST and AFFECTION, in a loyalty he can peddle to advertisers. He is talking about "famous people," he is talking about Kimmel, and Williams, and America itself, the most delicate celebrity of all. But really he is talking about Bill O'Reilly.

"We're human beings just like everyone else. Yeah, Kimmel makes a lot of money, not me so much, but so what—this is America. We've earned it."

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Photo by Sylenius via

Something way scarier than the Singularity is already happening inside our computers, and it could change our lives sooner than you think.

"No one would have believed," said H. G. Wells once upon a time, that "as men [everyone was men in those days] busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

At first glance, the announcement of a new face-detection algorithm by Yahoo and Stanford University last week may not look like a big deal. For years, it's been pretty simple to detect faces in images. If you have a smartphone or camera, they can probably do it when you take a picture. The trick, devised by Viola and Jones about 15 years ago, is to look for some easy-to-spot features in an image. A bright patch between two darker patches might be a nose. A dark band above a brighter band might be a pair of eyes above some cheeks. If you see those and a few other features near each other in the image, there's a good chance you're looking at a face. It works pretty well, as long as you're looking at a face the right way up, without anything hiding it.

The new system, the Deep Dense Face Detector, uses something called a convolutional neural net (CNN). What makes these neural nets special is the way they build up a mental picture of the world.

Suppose you have a baby AI and you want to show it the difference between cats and lizards by feeding it a load of images from Google. Most AIs would look at the images, compare each image to a very abstract idea of what a whole cat or a whole lizard looks like, and pick the closest match. Their entire understanding of the world is two objects—cat or lizard.

When an AI based on a convolutional neural net looks at the same images, it doesn't just file them as "cat" or "lizard"; it breaks them down. It spots common features within the images—things like scales, legs, noses, eyes, ears. When you show it an image it hasn't seen before it doesn't just try to classify the whole thing as "cat" or "lizard"; it scours the image for features, picking up clues—a tail, a patch of fur, the shape of a paw—and puts those together before making a decision as to what it's seeing. It has a deeper understanding of the world, and that's what people are talking about when you hear reports on "deep learning" in the news.

So what does this mean for spotting faces? Well, the old system had a pretty rigid idea of what a face looks like, and needed a portion of the image to match it. DDFD can learn more about the different parts of a face and deal with them even if they're turned around, partly covered or missing. That means you could be caught in the background of a photo, turned away and partly out of shot, and this thing could still spot your face.

In practical terms, that means the number of opportunities for your image to be captured, flagged, and analyzed just increased massively. Face detection isn't the same as face recognition, but Facebook is working hard on that problem. When you combine that kind of technology with the petabytes of image and video data being captured and uploaded daily, the implications are mind-boggling.

We're getting near the point where a camera could identify and Google you on site. Facebook is working to automatically recognize and tag users in photos, but there's no reason the same technology couldn't be applied to YouTube videos in time. You could be caught in the background of some guy's holiday clip walking into a coffee shop with your secret lover, and suddenly find yourselves tagged, the video appearing under a search for your name on Google and sent to your friends' feeds. CCTV could track you through cities, camera to camera, allowing authorities to build up profiles of where you go and whom you meet with. Journalists covering protests could be identified on sight by police.

So how do we survive in this brave new world? Weirdly, fashion could provide the answer. Several years ago, Brooklyn artist Adam Harvey came up with the concept of " anti-face." Just as a zebra uses black and white stripes to help break up the outline of its body and fool predators, stylists can use bold patterns of hair and makeup to disrupt the features that face-detection algorithms look for.

All this raises an interesting question about our lives in the future. In 2015, we're still trying to deal with the many problems of online privacy, of how to keep our personal information safe online. By 2020, those problems could be spilling out into everyday life. Today, we worry about our misjudged tweets going viral, but tomorrow it could be comments we make to our friends on the street that come back to haunt us. We're on the edge of redefining what it means to leave your house, and that's a lot scarier than any far-off Singularity.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='a-brooklyn-cherry-magnate-killed-himself-after-police-discovered-a-pot-farm-in-his-factory-227-body-image-1425074878.jpg' id='31668']

Photo via Flickr user WindyWinters

Dell's Maraschino Cherries is a nondescript brick warehouse on Dikeman Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It's one of those quiet buildings you'd walk by every day without noticing; the only way some neighbors know Dell's there is because of the viscous syrup that leaks down the sidewalk and into the gutter, which has historically caused neighborhood bees to turn the color of cough syrup.

After the recession, the business was veering dangerously toward the red. But instead of throwing in the towel, 57-year-old owner Arthur Mondella invested $5 million over the course of five years, which ultimately meant he could churn out twice as much fruit. To celebrate, according to a press release from last October, Dell's came out with a new logo, label and website—all intended to reflect "the many recent changes the company has undergone and its vision for the future."

"We felt we had to do something to kick-start sales," Mondella told the Daily News about his company's reinvention in November. "We are looking to get our name out there to show people it's a different company."

On Tuesday, police found out just how different the Dell's of today was from the factory Mondella's grandfather and father founded in 1948. Officers had obtained a warrant to look for evidence that he was polluting the water in Red Hook. But they found a shady-looking set of shelves held together by magnets and detected the smell of weed.

Mondella promptly excused himself to the bathroom, where, after screaming "Take care of my kids!" to his sister, he shot himself. He left behind a community of bewildered Brooklynites, three daughters, and up to 1,200 pot plants.

On Friday, Crain's reported that Mondella's sister has announced the factory will continue to supply restaurants like TGI Friday's, Olive Garden, and Red Lobster with cherries. Mondella's mother was apparently working on a computer and smoking cigarettes when a reporter from the outlet arrived at Dikeman Street.

Police still don't know who else had access to the 50-foot-by-50-foot area that held the marijuana plants, as well as 120 grow lamps and 60 different strains of seeds. "In theory it could have been him and outsiders," one source told the Daily News."This is a secreted part of a large factory that was designed so a large number of employees won't know."

Although it's unclear who was helping Mondella package and sell the pot, the New York Times noted that the growing area contained a copy of "The Encyclopedia of Organized Crime."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

In the bitter cold and under the cover of darkness, legendary musher Lance Mackey and his young team of Alaskan huskies unceremoniously arrive at the historic gold rush town of Dawson City, deep in Canada's Yukon Territory.

"This is probably the smallest crowd that's ever welcomed me to Dawson," he says in a scratchy drawl. At 4 AM, the halfway mark of the toughest sled dog race in the world is desolate—a far cry from the gang of fans and media wandering around during the day. A handful of bleary-eyed race officials take note of Mackey's arrival.

I ask how his dogs are holding up after traversing a 726-kilometre polar hellscape.

[body_image width='2000' height='1327' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077273.jpg' id='31678']Dog yard in Braeburn, Yukon. Photos by Patrick Kane

"They're doing great for a bunch of babies," he says. "They're a very young team and I'm proud of them."

"And you?" I ask.

"I'm a little worse for wear," he says.

He takes off his gloves to reveal nine digits; his left index was amputated years ago because of complications from cancer. His fingernails are dirty and oil stained. His hands stiff, cold, and calloused. It appears that he's suffered mild frostbite. I wonder if it's safe that he continue in these brutal conditions, but if anyone's going to tell Lance Mackey to throw in the towel, it sure as shit isn't going to be me. He struggles to make a fist.

"That's just mushing," he says.

[body_image width='2400' height='1708' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425076270.jpg' id='31671']Legendary musher Lance Mackey shows his worn-out hands at the checkpoint in Dawson City. "I'm a little worse for wear."

The Yukon Quest 1,000-Mile International Dog Sled Race runs annually between Whitehorse, Yukon and Fairbanks, Alaska. In mushing circles, The Quest is considered much tougher than the more widely known Iditarod. Mackey has won both races four times each. If there's a Wayne Gretzky equivalent in dogsled racing, it's him.

Quest mushers glide along the Yukon River overtop jagged jumble ice, between narrow alpines and up lung-sucking mountains—and most of the time, they do this in total darkness. Sunlight in this part of the world is limited to seven hours a day and this isn't exactly a nine-to-five gig. Stories of mushers having mild hallucinations of being chased by wolves or caribou are not uncommon after several nighttime runs.

[body_image width='2400' height='1492' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425076961.jpg' id='31676']The aurora borealis over the dog yard in Braeburn, Yukon.

But there are chances for reprieve along the trail. Mushers must stop at nine checkpoints to sleep a few hours, eat a hamburger, and use an actual toilet. It's here at the checkpoints where sleep-deprived volunteers and journalists hurry up and wait for dog teams to arrive. It looks like the morning after a college keg party: sleeping bodies are tangled and contorted on fart-saturated chairs; there's a duo parked in an idling Nissan Pathfinder having an epic make-out sesh; people are huddled over laptops which are surrounded by cheezies and beef jerky; someone is cursing the slow internet connection.

It's a crazy way to live for two weeks, but this is paradise compared to what the mushers endure on the trail. Most people would think running a dog team through such a formidable landscape at temperatures lower than -40 Celsius is batshit insane, but then again, mushers aren't like most people.

[body_image width='2400' height='1602' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077362.jpg' id='31679']A handler sets up camp on the outskirts of Dawson City.

[body_image width='2400' height='1672' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077678.jpg' id='31683']An Alaskan husky in Dawson City

[body_image width='2400' height='1615' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077734.jpg' id='31684']The view from Eagle Summit between central checkpoint and mile 101 checkpoint.

At the checkpoint in Pelly Crossing, Yukon, musher Brian Wilmshurst hums a tune by CCR and checks the quality of his dog's poop.

"Hmm, that looks a little runny sweetheart," he says to one. "We'll have to keep an eye on that." He carries on humming and feeding his pooches. The steam emanating from that rank dookie instantly freezes into a zillion icy pooticles that cling to my nose hairs.

In this case, a little diarrhea is no cause for concern. All dogs are monitored closely by a dedicated group of 11 veterinarians from four different countries who volunteer their vacation time to ensure the health and safety of all dogs throughout the race. And so far, there are no major injuries.

[body_image width='2400' height='1685' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425076575.jpg' id='31672']Vets check dogs at the dog yard in Braeburn.

[body_image width='2400' height='1602' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425078005.jpg' id='31685']A handler for musher Kristin Knight-Pace welcomes her lead dog into Dawson City.

[body_image width='2400' height='1747' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425078075.jpg' id='31686']Food is "dropped" off to teams in advance of their checkpoints.

"We examine the dogs at checkpoints and give full body exams," says head Veterinarian Nina Hanson. "We look at their hydration, their mucus membranes, their skin and coat, we listen to their hearts and lungs, and we look at their feet—their feet are really important since they will be going 1,000 miles on them," she says.

Yes, dogs have died in past races and dogs will likely die in future ones. This is the one thing that animal rights activists smugly hang their hats on while tweeting from afar in their cozy jammy-jams. But for anyone who actually attends the race and watches closely, it's apparent that the care of the dogs is priority number one. At checkpoints, the mushers rest only after their teams are attended to. They massage the dogs' legs, lay down straw for bedding, feed them, cuddle them, and leave them with handlers who monitor the team while they rest. To mushers, these are not just dogs—they are family.

[body_image width='1896' height='2400' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077450.jpg' id='31680']Cosimeau, one of the Quest's volunteers, shows off his beard in Whitehorse.

[body_image width='1793' height='2400' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077614.jpg' id='31682']A "Quester"—fan of the Yukon Quest—shows off his link hat at the start banquet in Whitehorse.

The pack of 26 dogsled teams that launched from the starting line in Whitehorse a few days earlier has thinned out substantially over the first four days. The frontrunners have a 36-hour lead on the teams in back. Only 17 mushers make it past Eagle, Alaska, the fifth checkpoint of the race. Nine mushers scratch from the race because of the bitter cold and the ruggedness of the trail. "I'm scratching for the safety of my dogs," is the quote given by just about every musher, and rightly so. Aside from one or two curmudgeonly purists whining about mushers who drop out, scratching is respected and applauded. Pulling the plug on a race is no easy decision for a musher, but when it's for the best interest of a dog team there's often no hesitation.

[body_image width='1200' height='791' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425078213.jpg' id='31688']A view of Dawson City, Yukon.

[body_image width='2400' height='1671' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425076754.jpg' id='31674']Brent Sass hugs an old friend before he leaves Dawson City.

[body_image width='2400' height='1588' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425078147.jpg' id='31687']Musher Mike Ellis pushes his team up Eagle Summit.

By the time I reach the checkpoint in Central, Alaska, 35-year-old Brent Sass has a commanding lead of the race. Sass is a loveable and happy-go-lucky type with a huge desire to win The Quest. Last year, Sass had the race in the bag until he fell asleep at the sled, fell and hit his head on a tree, knocking him unconscious for several hours. He was rescued from the trail. This year, he wears a chipped yellow skateboard helmet. His closest competitor, Allen Moore, the defending two-time Yukon Quest champion, is ten hours behind but gaining on him steadily.

A group of officials, vets, and race organizers sit inside a smoke-filled roadhouse waiting for Sass' arrival while listening to Bob Seger. A stunning portrait of John Wayne gives a constant reminder that we are in God's Country, and that God will shoot you dead if you come looking for trouble.

[body_image width='2400' height='1545' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077558.jpg' id='31681']A Siberian husky belonging to UK musher, Rob Cooke, waits for the start of the 2015 Yukon Quest.

And it seems that out on the trail trouble is brewing: Sass' GPS indicates that he isn't moving. A few hours pass and Allen Moore gains three, then four, then five hours on Sass. Still no movement. Race officials whisper to each other in the corner of the roadhouse, wondering if he had another accident. Two hours more pass, and finally someone pipes up, "He's on the move!" Sass' GPS tracker begins to inch toward Central and there is a collective sigh of relief in the room.

When Sass reaches the checkpoint, we finally hear what happened back out on the trail.

"I stopped for a quick nap but when I slipped into my warm sleeping bag, I dozed off and woke up ten hours later," he says. Moore glides into the checkpoint as Sass finishes his story. Nobody says it aloud but the words, "Holy hell, we have a race on our hands!" is exclaimed in the eyes of the crowd at Central.

[body_image width='2400' height='1614' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425078602.jpg' id='31689']Kristin Knight-Pace leaves Pelly Crossing, Yukon.

[body_image width='2400' height='1750' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425078666.jpg' id='31690']Alaskan huskies jump with excitement at the start line of the 2015 Yukon Quest.

At the final checkpoint before the finish line in Fairbanks, Sass and Moore prep their teams. The previous night, Moore managed to overtake Sass and is the new leader by just two minutes. This is one of the closest races in mushing history. Moore, the elder statesman, is methodical and strategic.

"This is my home turf and I've been training all winter on this stretch of trail," he says. "My plan is to get a good start, pull back when I need to, and finish with a sprint."

Sass, representing the next generation of musher, is more heart than method.

"Gosh, these dogs," tears well up in his eyes. "They're just the best and I'm so lucky to have this amazing team," he says.

It's a fascinating contrast between the two mushers. Both are well-liked and genuinely sweet men. Moore, however, is much more respected while Sass is much more popular. Both are fierce competitors.

At 1:34 PM, Allen Moore leaves the checkpoint and exactly two minutes later, Sass follows him. Five hours into the homestretch, Sass gains on Moore and overtakes him. It seems that Sass' ten-hour nap on the trail outside of Central has paid off. His dogs run for nine hours at speeds of seven and eight miles per hour. Moore's team drifts further back. He just can't keep pace. At 11 PM, the Fairbanks finish line is packed with cheering fans. Sass rounds a corner and crosses the line, runs to the front of his team, drops to his knees and hugs his lead dogs, Basin and Sound. Cameras flash around him. Overwhelmed with emotion, he's finally named the 2015 Yukon Quest champion over the PA system. Heart has won over strategy this time around.

[body_image width='2400' height='1663' path='images/content-images/2015/02/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/27/' filename='mush-em-all-tracking-the-toughest-dog-sled-race-in-north-america-678-body-image-1425077214.jpg' id='31677']Brent Sass hugs his lead dogs, Basin and Sound, at the finish line in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Several checkpoints back, the race is still on. Vancouver rookie, Damon Tedford, has made his way into fourth place, passing former champion, Hugh Neff. Further back of them, veteran Mike Ellis collapses with exhaustion after reaching Eagle Summit, one of the mountain crossings along the trail. He's fine, he just needs a breather.

Lance Mackey, meanwhile, has slid way back of the pack and only two other mushers are behind him. He's been travelling alongside rookie, Kristin Knight-Pace, for a few days now. At checkpoints they share stories and laughs with volunteers. On the trail, they encourage each other to keep pushing through the icy landscape. It's not so much that Mackey, the world's greatest musher, is helping a rookie finish a race so much as it's the rookie, Knight-Pace, helping an old fart continue moving forward. The two unlikely mushers form a unique friendship.

At the finish banquet a night after Mackey and Knight-Pace complete the race, Mackey is awarded the Sportsmanship Award and the Challenge of the North Award, which is given to the musher who most exemplifies the spirit of the Yukon Quest.

"I love this sport, I love this race, and I love the people in it," he says at the podium, choking back tears. It's a special shoutout to his new buddy.

"More importantly, I love the lifestyle."

[body_image width='800' height='458' path='images/content-images/2015/02/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/28/' filename='cpac-attack-the-five-types-of-people-you-meet-at-the-conservative-circus-227-body-image-1425085543.jpg' id='31697']Thursday marked the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual hoedown for aspiring Republican politicians and activists that is also, incidentally, the most wonderful event of the political calendar. More than 10,000 conservatives have made the pilgrimage to the Gaylord Convention Center this year, gathering in an End Times hotel-city to plot their takeover of Obama's America.

Founded in 1973 in response to liberal hippy movements, CPAC is still seen by conservatives as their own Woodstock, a red-state bacchanal where they can take refuge from Obama's America. In reality, it's a lot more like Comic Con: part trade show, part media spectacle, and attended by people who have a hard time getting laid in the real world. But what makes it interesting, apart from the obvious appeal of watching white dudes in bowties lose their shit over Sarah Palin, is that it brings the full cornucopia of the conservative movement, drawing out all of the lunatic elements of the right-wing fringe. Here's a sampling of the cast of characters.

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/02/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/28/' filename='cpac-attack-the-five-types-of-people-you-meet-at-the-conservative-circus-227-body-image-1425083704.jpg' id='31694']

A Santorum selfie. Photo by Bloomberg/Contributor

College Republicans
While CPAC brings out conservatives of every variety and stripe, the vast majority of the people who attend the conference are college kids, on loan from Southern state schools to shake Scott Walker's hand, attend activist "boot camps," and grind up on each other at sweaty happy hours hosted by the gambling lobby. Young people make up between two-thirds and one half of the CPAC audience, according to the event's organizers, giving the conference a spring break vibe, except without the sun or the girls.

In a party that has had a difficult time appealing to the youth, this overwhelming presence of wide-eyed twentysomething activists sets up a weird tension. Unlike the graying war hawks who put together the event, and host panels like "America's Future in the Age of Jihad," the College Republicans are refreshingly libertarian. And not the DC think tank kind of libertarians, but the kind who want to legalize heroin and prostitution and hate George Bush almost as much as they do Hillary Clinton. This explains why Rand Paul has won the CPAC straw poll for the past two years, and why his father won it several times in previous years. Needless to say this irks some of the conference's more serious attendees, who sneer as the aspiring John Galts stumble through the hotel lobby on their way to ask Grover Norquist what it's like to go to Burning Man.

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CPAC mascot William Temple poses with his fans. Photo via Facebook

A Guy in A Hat Being Interviewed
Since the advent of the Tea Party media has done a very good job of making Republican politics seem like a costume party, giving the impression that conservatives are otherwise average people whose desire to repeal Obamacare has turned them into John Adams impersonators and cowboy Ronald Reagans on stilts. The truth is there are really only two or three guys who actually show up in Tea Party outfits—they are just the only people any reporter wants to interview. The guy pictured above, for example, has been at every CPAC I can remember, dressed up as Button Gwinnet, an obscure Founding Father from Georgia, his home state. As the outfit suggests, he is something of a rabble-rouser; this year, tried to organize a walkout of Jeb Bush's speech, with limited success.

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/02/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/28/' filename='cpac-attack-the-five-types-of-people-you-meet-at-the-conservative-circus-227-body-image-1425085222.jpg' id='31696']

Pediatric neurosurgeon and long-shot 2016 candidate Ben Carson evangelizes to the right-wing flock. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

The Candidate
Apart from getting loose and lewd with the Young Americans for Liberty, the primary purpose of this year's CPAC is to audition candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. A parade of suspects have come out at CPAC, revving up the base with red meat speeches and charming the Tea Party talk radio hosts camped out in the hallway. And while most haven't officially announced their candidacies, shit is definitely starting to get real. Already, Scott Walker has compared Wisconsin's union protesters to ISIS, Ted Cruz has demanded his rivals show him how they've bled for the cause, and the whole clown car has piled on Jeb Bush.

A handful of other, less believable White House hopefuls are also here, looking for a break out moment that will boost their book sales and keep pretending that they have a chance at winning something. None have managed to stand out yet, but Carly Fiorina definitely wins the award for best effort. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO, who sits on the board of the organization that puts on CPAC, is everywhere this year, shuttling between panels in a hive of staffers and speechwriters tasked with making her seem like a credible candidate. So far, though, no one seems to have noticed.

[body_image width='800' height='458' path='images/content-images/2015/02/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/28/' filename='cpac-attack-the-five-types-of-people-you-meet-at-the-conservative-circus-227-body-image-1425085560.jpg' id='31698']

At CPAC, all is forgiven. Photo of Oliver North by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Convicted Criminals
In addition to being the preferred spring break destination for conservative youth, has also become something of a nursing home for the GOP's historical relics. Newt Gingrich was back this year, with new warnings about terrorists, as was John Bolton, a former US Ambassador to the United Nations who is always threatening to run for president.

Disgraced Republicans can always find a second act here, welcomed back into the fold as heroic survivors of the liberal conspiracy. Amazingly, this is even true if you, say, sold arms to terrorists and then used the money to try to overthrow another country's government. Former Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, of Iran-Contra infamy, was back at CPAC this year, espousing his views on what kind of commander in chief should be leading the US military, to wild applause.

[body_image width='800' height='472' path='images/content-images/2015/02/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/28/' filename='cpac-attack-the-five-types-of-people-you-meet-at-the-conservative-circus-227-body-image-1425085725.jpg' id='31699']

Photo by Old Sarge via Flickr

Someone Who Wasn't Invited
For all its charitable forgiveness, CPAC organizers are also the mean seventh grade girls of the conservative movement. They are always beefing with someone, withholding invites from groups and people who don't align with hawkish stance on social issues. In the past, CPAC has turned away gay conservatives, atheists, and people who hate Islam, among others, causing some internal strife among the conservative rank-and-file.

Whoever got snubbed usually manages to show up anyway, and will wander around telling anyone who will listen about the CPAC scam. In previous years, Breitbart News has even hosted its own parallel conference for groups too fringey for the conservative fringe. Organizers, apparently eager to avoid these type of incidents, have made an effort to be more inclusive this year: The atheists got a booth, as did the Islamophobes, and the Log Cabin Republicans are even allowed to speak on a panel, provided it's about Vladimir Putin and not about being gay. This year's party crashers are the Democrats, including a team of trackers from Super PAC American Bridge, who have been lurking around the main ballroom, trying to catch someone saying something stupid.

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No, there's probably never been a president with a criminal streak like Frank Underwood's, but that's not to say that criminal activity has somehow steered clear of The White House altogether. Far from it, since the first residence was constructed there in 1800, the place has seen dozens of crimes that can be reliably documented.

Easily the most interesting crime ever to occur at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, was the 1859 murder of Philip Barton Key, a DC district attorney and the son of Francis Scott Key, author of the national anthem. He was shot dead by his girlfriend's husband, who happened to be New York Congressman Dan Sickles. Sickles shouted "Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my home; you must die," before somehow firing a lethal shot right into Key's groin. But while that nightmare occurred within earshot of President James Buchanan, it was actually just outside the White House in Lafayette Square, and not technically on the grounds.

The rest of the items in this history occurred somewhere in the White House Complex, the principal structures of the White House and its surrounding grounds. Obviously when you compare the president's house to a park-and-ride lot in Camden, New Jersey, it's going to be relatively crime-free. Still, three types of crimes seem to happen there: Fun stuff, political stuff, and a category I'm going to call "Look at Me! I'm Doing Something Illegal in the White House!"

Fun Stuff:
Any gay stuff that happened in the White House before Washington DC's sodomy law was repealed in 1993 was a crime, and gay stuff may indeed have happened.

The author C. A. Tripp famously dug up compelling evidence that Abraham Lincoln had sex with his chief body guard David Derickson in the White House when his wife Mary Todd was away. In fact, prominent Mary Todd biographer Jean H. Baker endorses that interpretation of history. The penalty if they'd been caught would have been up to ten years in jail. Lincoln's immediate predecessor, James Buchanan, was almost certainly gay, but he was a lonely man most of his life, and there's nothing to suggest that Buchanan ever had guests in his White House bedroom.

It's not clear than any other presidents committed the crime of butt sex in the White House (OK, maybe Nixon), but plenty of non-presidents have boned in the Lincoln bedroom. In the 1980s, a lobbyist named Craig Spence bribed a Secret Service agent with a fancy watch in order to let him take his "friends" who were sex workers, on tours of the White House, and it's doubtful that they just wanted to look at the antiques.

Before Spence committed suicide he told the Washington Times, "All this stuff you've uncovered, to be honest with you, is insignificant compared to other things I've done. But I'm not going to tell you those things, and somehow the world will carry on." According to press at the time, he was the go-to guy among Reagan and Bush staffers' for prostitutes and cocaine.

But he didn't introduce cocaine to the White House. That appears to have happened during the Carter Administration. Dr. Peter G. Bourne, Carter's Drug Czar, told reporter Ronald Kessler that there was a "high incidence" of marijuana use among the Carter's staffers, "as well as some use of cocaine."

Political Stuff:

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Right out of the gate, let's dispense with Watergate—Nixon, 1972—and the Iran-Contra scandal—Reagan, 1986. Both have a lot in common: They were fairly large conspiracies involving illegal activity; they were both almost certainly planned in the White House; and you've probably already read about them in a high school history book. So we don't feel the need to rehash them here.

Instead, let's look at some of the more obscure political crimes, of the kind Underwood would be proud of. Back in 1980, a somewhat low-impact document theft occurred, when a mole, whose identity was never discovered, pilfered a debate briefing book and gave it to Reagan before the big presidential debate. The incident was dubbed Debategate, but it's not clear that the documents actually helped. Conservative columnist George Will, who was helping Reagan prepare, said he peeked at the document, but found it boring and worthless.

Similarly, during the Bush Administration, Leandro Aragoncillo, a Filipino-American who worked in the vice president's office before moving over to the FBI, allegedly snuck out with some documents he stole from Dick Cheney, and handed them over to Filipino politicians who were running for office. It was a weird case of espionage that embarrassed the government of the Philippines. Aragoncillo is still in prison.

In more interesting political crimes, the antics of Clinton's staffers during the so-called "Vandal Scandal" of 2001 was a collection of pranks so extensive it may have bordered on actual vandalism. Democrats eventually confirmed that they pried the "W" keys off all the White House keyboards, to spite the incoming president who, they felt, had stolen the election from the outgoing vice president. They steamed presidential seal stickers off glass surfaces. They mislabeled doors with things like "Office of Strategery," and "Office of Subliminable Messages." In a Bush Administration report on the damages, a Time Magazine cover featuring a picture of Bush that they'd scrawled "Oh shit!" on was considered "obscene graffiti." No one was charged, and the ensuing investigation was arguably more costly than the mess.

But on the subject of the Clinton Administration, if you'll forgive a momentary lapse into conspiracy theories, some people think Bill and Hillary are at the center of a scandal reminiscent of the Doug Stamper subplot on House of Cards. In 1993 Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, who had reportedly been very close to Hillary Clinton, apparently shot himself in the head. It took a three-year investigation to rule Foster's death a suicide, and the ambiguity of the whole thing has left conspiracy-nuts obsessed, trying to prove—it seems—that Hillary had him whacked, and then used her White House clout to keep it under wraps, forging a bizarre suicide note, hiding police photographs, which really did mysteriously disappear, and generally running a very cinematic Washington DC murder coverup scheme.

But now, let's return to things that definitely did happen.

"Look at Me! I'm Doing Something Illegal in the White House!"
In 1974, Robert Preston, a private in the US Army, managed to steal an entire helicopter from Fort Meade, and then fly it the thirty miles to the White House, with Maryland State Police helicopters chasing after him. He hovered around for a while before White House security shot at him, forcing him to land. If you're wondering what the name of this particular crime is, it is "wrongful appropriation and breach of the peace." No one was seriously hurt, though, and the President and First Lady weren't even home that day, so no harm done.

The best way to commit a victimless crime at the White House (now that sodomy is legal) is to just sneak some drugs in. Weed is newly legal in Washington DC, but when Snoop Dogg smoked it in 2013, while doing a "number two" in a White House bathroom, it was still illegal. The same was true when Willie Nelson and Fox News pundit Bob Beckel, got high in the White House in the 1970s. The high can't be all that great with all that heavy security around, but a lot of the time, that's not why people do drugs in the White House.

David Cross once did a tiny bit of cocaine at a White House Correspondents Dinner (which only gets honorable mention here, because it happened at the Hilton). Afterward, he explained it like this:

The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn't about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president.

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(NOTE: This article has been edited to reflect the fact that David Cross snorted cocaine at the Hilton, not the White House)

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today: Avalanches pummel villages in northern Afghanistan, an Islamic State video appears to show the destruction of ancient artifacts in Iraq, Arizona police discover more than two tons of pot and a drug tunnel to Mexico, and elephants are being trained to sniff out weapons and poachers in South Africa.