[body_image width='1818' height='1228' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='st-georges-day-and-patriotism-2015-101-body-image-1429797098.jpeg' id='49060']

Photo by Nick Davie

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

What's the most English thing you've ever seen? The most English thing I've ever seen is an England fan's reaction to an England goal. It was the Scotland-England game in 2013, and due to reasons, my friend and I were sat right in the heart of the England Ultras section, just a few rows over from that fucking oompa band. I'll give you an idea of what the England Ultras section is like: a tiny man twice my age and half my height nearly actually punched me for not singing "God Save the Queen" with enough gusto, despite the fact that I was actually singing "God Save the Queen." He had to go for a quick pint before kick-off to calm down. And people say we have no pride in our country.

Here's what happened when Kenny Miller, an unapologetically Scottish man, a man flippant in his Scottishness, scored a goal against England: A man five rows in front of me tore his England shirt off and threw it at the pitch. He had an England flag tattooed on his scalp, the man, an England flag tattooed so inelegantly that the edges were blurred, that the black ink had disintegrated into green. He ripped the England shirt off his back in one smooth, practiced, furious motion, and threw it with all his might, where it just flapped open and glided to the ground. "Boo!" said the man. "Argh!" He strained his flabby torso in an act of distant aggression, and that's when I noticed his back was littered with further patriotic tattoos: bulldogs and Bobby Moore, further St. George's crosses with ornate borders. "Argh!" he was saying. "Fucking!" Imagine: Imagine being so in love with your country that your base reaction to Kenny Miller scoring a goal against it is to rip your England shirt off to reveal that your skin is literally more patriotic than an Umbro shirt that is essentially a repurposed England flag.

And that is the most English thing I have ever seen.

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='st-georges-day-and-patriotism-2015-101-body-image-1429797354.jpeg' id='49066']

Photo by Javier Izquierdo

Let's have some word association fun on this, England's birthday. What is the image that comes into your head when you see this word: patriotism? I'll tell you what comes into my head: it's a slightly graying St. George's cross blu-tacked up between a window and some net curtains; it's a coach full of men traveling for upwards of four hours to go to an EDL rally; it's the English flag tattooed inelegantly onto the scalp of a man who is just furious at Kenny Miller. The underlying subtext is: anyone who vocally loves England and hates anyone who isn't from it. English patriots are men who book time off work to watch England away matches and spend their spare time calling LBC phone-ins to reiterate their human right to still say "nog." The soundtrack to English patriotism is hundreds of men with low voices saying weeyyyyyyyy.

Is patriotism a dirty word, now? Is it a sullied concept? Because it's hard to think of patriotism without tying it, white hand in white hand, to the more core sections of the right wing of this country. Anyone who has ever sincerely said the words "Why isn't St. George's day a national holiday?" has some really vocal opinions about halal. Anyone who thinks Good English Boys should be able to go to school today in a red and white outfit has almost certainly donated to Children in Need over Comic Relief because "at least the money goes to British kids." The Venn diagram of people who think the national anthem should be sung in schools and people who demand Spanish waiters brings them a "full English" when they're on holiday is essentially a circle.

[body_image width='720' height='481' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='st-georges-day-and-patriotism-2015-101-body-image-1429797344.jpeg' id='49065']

Photo by Chris Bethell

But there is plenty to love about England, and the racist associations of patriotism shouldn't stop people from doing that. Firstly, and arguably most importantly, is Greggs the baker. When people ask me about my hometown, all I can tell them—with no little pride—is that it has four branches of Greggs to serve a population of just 90,000. There is a sit-down Greggs, and a Greggs that is open until 3 AM. There is a Greggs beneath the new Tesco so you can eat three hot sausage rolls before you do your big shop. There is one Greggs that you can look out the window of and see another Greggs from. There is no need for that. And yet: is there anything more English than a girl in a minidress—no coat, mascara dribbling down her face after a bad night at Yates's—eating two sausage and bean melts in quick succession in the frigid October rain? She has spent her cab money on a box of Ribena. One of her mates is getting off with a lad even though she's just been sick in a BT phonebox. Nothing makes me feel more at home.

Carbohydrates are hardwired into our cuisine. The English have available to them constantly a huge array of crisps. There is a certain kind of crisp we refer to collectively as "fancy crisps." A crisp, inherently, cannot be fancy. A crisp is a slice of the cheapest vegetable fried in the worst oil and made to taste like a prawn. But you best know if your mum gets the Walker's Sensations out then someone respectable is coming round for tea.

For more UK pride, watch our documentary on Royal Wedding obsessors:

I once explained the concept of a chip butty to an American girl. "It's chips," I said. "In a bap." "What's a chip?" she said. A chip is a fry. "What's a bap?" A bap is a cob, or a barm cake, or a bread roll, or whatever the fuck you call it according to delineated and invisible linguistic ley lines that dissect the country. "Ew," she said. "So it's, like, a carb sandwich?" Yes. We eat those.

Our language is beautiful and global. Collect a handful of people from various far-flung places in England and ask them this question: "What did you call them shoes you used to wear in PE class when you were in primary school? You know. You know the ones." The correct answer is "plimsolls," but someone is always willing to raise their fists in defense of "daps." We colonized all those countries and forced them to speak our language so now we don't have to learn French in school. Not a single fucking one of our regional accents make sense. What aliens came down from space and taught everyone in Birmingham to talk like that.

Someone always collapses at a British summer wedding. You've Been Framed is essentially one of the greatest archives of English culture in existence. It's granddads tripping over trampolines and falling into paddling pools. It's dads spraying a hose at your mom so hard she falls through a plastic table. It's someone's uncle accidentally booting an oblivious toddler in the face while trying to do a rabona. If someone has gone to the trouble of making, icing and putting candles in a cake, there is a dark and constant 20 percent chance that someone will drop it or fall into it. We cannot mark a death without a warm tin of lager.

WATCH: The VICE documentary Young Reoffenders, about some youths in Oxford who who just want to have fun, get pissed, and fight:

Pubs that do karaoke. Pubs that have lifelong barmaids called Sandra. Pubs with tarpaulins for smokers to huddle beneath when it's raining. Pubs that clearly haven't paid to have licensed Sky for the matches and are just patching the game in through a complicated series of cables set up by the landlord's son, who has a GCSE in IT. Pubs with dogs on the roof. Pubs where there is a man in a 40-year-old leather jacket who has been medically fused to the fruity machine. Pubs with high arcs of diarrhea up the wall of the gents that you remember being there last time you were in that pub, which was a month ago. Pubs where men groan at you if you stand and wash your hands after taking a piss. Pubs where a man with a holdall full of duty-free cigarettes comes in and sells a load of weird looking Camels to everyone propping up the bar. Pubs where everyone bounces their glasses off the bar in time to "Is This the Way to Amarillo" when it comes on the jukebox. Pubs where there is a very dark story about why they don't have a pool table any more.

There is no town in the north of England that doesn't have a barber called "Ali Barber's" that offers £10 Dads 'n' Lads specials and a hairdresser called "Hair to Eternity" where hard nans get their rinses done. There is no town in the north of England that does not have a locally famous tramp. There is not a single picnic in England that hasn't at some point been thrown into chaos by the presence of a single wasp. There is a singularly English terror inspired by wasps. We cannot deal with wasps. We have a little bit of time for bees, but we cannot deal with wasps.

In the last ten days one of your mates has held a four-pack of Coronas up to you and said "Where's the nearest park?" This has happened to you. This has happened because of the desperation of British weather; we cling onto vapors of sunshine, go desperately puce in the sun, huddle on narrow cracks of summer heat outside pubs on moderately hot days. We talk about rain like it is important. We anticipate snow but nothing about our infrastructure can deal with it. Trains in this country are derailed by wet leaves, as though wet leaves are a rare thing that don't happen every single autumn like fucking clockwork. Have you ever seen an Englishman try to drive a car up a hill in the snow? I would recommend it. It is brilliant. They just cannot understand why they are sliding backwards.

[body_image width='1000' height='666' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='st-georges-day-and-patriotism-2015-101-body-image-1429796367.jpg' id='49053']

Photo by Nicholas Pomeroy

Proper cheese. Fly-tipped sofas. Queuing up for Alton Towers in the rain. Your mom has a big purse with a load of disposable ponchos in it, so you wear them, looking for all the world like a dick too small for its condom, desperately hoping the drizzle won't stop you going on Nemesis. Fry-ups and Wetherspoons' Curry Club are both unique to our tiny island. There is no other country on earth where cafés have blurry polaroids of the exhausted-looking men who have just completed their "Gutbuster Breakfast Challenge." The French do not do Gutbuster Challenges. There is no such thing as an "... and eight slices of toast!" addendum in Denmark.

And it's beautiful around here, too. Not just rolling hills and bleakly gorgeous murder moors and tiny quaint villages where well-dressing is a thing: our cities are clots of chaotic planning, ruined by war bombs, scarred with gravelly tower blocks so monstrous they become handsome. Get high up and look down on an English city and just bathe in its angular chaos. Stay on the ground, nursing that Corona in a tiny park as the sun sets, as blue bleeds into orange, as jet trails cross the sky. Go to a farm and look at a cow. Cows are everywhere. We have loads of cows. Have you ever spent a few minutes just chilling with a cow? Go and have a go on a cow.

Walls with concrete and broken glass on the top to stop children scrabbling over them, worn smooth from children scrabbling over them. Teenagers drinking cider on park benches. Teenagers throwing stones and doing basic sex acts. Hard dogs. Big Sports Direct mugs. Local heroes. Sunday Sport headlines. Nik Naks Turned My Bellend Orange. Sex With Greggs Pasty Boiled My Bellend. This is England, and we keep hurting ourselves on the bellend. We are a nation ruled by our liquids: tea for soothing and for everyday, pints for suffering and celebration, rain to give us something to talk and to worry about.

Even the "Keep Calm and Have a Ruddy Gin!" teatowelification of modern British culture has roots in England's self-effacing history: we have humility, we have a sense of humor, we cannot as a nation ask someone if they want our seat on the train without getting really fucking awkward about it.

[body_image width='1280' height='920' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='st-georges-day-and-patriotism-2015-101-body-image-1429797418.jpeg' id='49067']

Photo by Bill Kerridge

The strange, English national psyche. When you say you love your country, you're also saying "I'm still really proud we won that World War." When you say you're English, you're also saying "because I still know people who call that Londis on the corner 'the Paki shop.'" But it's possible to like your country without wearing a Union Jack suit and standing for days outside the hospital the Duchess of Cambridge is about to give birth in saying things like: "I hope if it's a girl they call it Diana." It's possible to be proud of where you're from without sitting bolt upright in bed each morning and chanting "Rooney! Rooney! Rooney!" as part of your morning ablutions. You can love England and not be a dick.

There's a lot that's bad about England: it is a dirty, grey country seemingly littered with sex rings, with a feudal class system and a ham robot for a Prime Minister. It is having a very loud chat about migration at the moment, despite being the wealthy benefactor of years of colonial rule. It's still inexplicably economically reliant on the monarchy and people are willing to send death threats over vague plans to put more women on our bank notes. There are a lot of people walking among us who get joyful to the point of arousal over the idea of bringing back hanging. The weather is properly shit. K***e H*****s has somehow been allowed to happen. England is a shithole.

But it's our shithole. It's the NHS and chip butties. It's pebbledash semis and not being bothered by drizzle. It's inhumanly portioned café breakfasts and a really good night out. It's wearing shorts in March because there was the tiniest threat of sun. It's a country where even the supermarkets have a class system. It's the pathetic, doomed hope that our football team will do well in a tournament this summer. It's acid house and flight paths and crazy golf and Hooch and not having to queue at a fucking tabac to buy cigarettes. It is joyriding and Diggerland. It is a vivid, vibrant place where everyone has an opinion about Yorkshire puddings. Don't let men with scalp tattoos who are mad at Kenny Miller be the only ones to love it.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='1396' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='fashion-cat-fashion-cats-mansion-104-body-image-1429815867.jpg' id='49154']

Look at Antoine Cossé's blog and Twitter.

[body_image width='2048' height='1139' path='images/content-images/2015/04/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/08/' filename='i-was-assaulted-on-the-street-but-i-still-walk-home-alone-at-night-408-body-image-1428519885.jpg' id='44278']

Photo by Flickr user Anders Eriksson

I was jumped once, in a lily-white neighborhood in Washington State. It wasn't even particularly late, and it was on a well-traveled boulevard. I had my headphones on and I didn't notice the man until he was right on top of me. I escaped thanks to luck, and thanks to his confused, probably drug-addled condition.

Over a decade later, I remain unafraid to walk alone. Nothing like that incident has happened again. I used to reside in a "dangerous" neighborhood, where I was constantly told I was foolhardy for traversing through it solo after darkness fell. But traverse through it I did, both sober as a judge and drunk as a skunk. I'd wander home at two, three, four in the morning, fumbling to fit my key in the lock when I eventually reached my destination. Time and time again, nothing would happen. I'd enter my apartment, shut the door, and pass out unscathed.

Were I to have cowered in my apartment during that period instead of indulging in walking and observing, one of the few joys I have in life, I would have let my old assailant hold one over on me; I would have let him win.

I spend a lot of time alone. I'm used to it. In the past, it was less of a choice (I was an unpopular only child raised in an orchard on the edge of town), but now my isolation is deliberate. I have friends, am an in-demand conversationalist, and could choose to socialize any night of the week. However, I'd rather wander by my lonesome, up lightless hills and down shadowy streets listening to my carefully cultivated collection of Jon Brion bootlegs. Socializing does not make me feel safe. Isolation does.

I walk alone at night. I do so most nights of the week. Whenever I relay this information to another party, they are usually aghast. I'm a broad, they delicately remind me. I've been attacked before. Shouldn't I be scared?

It is impossible for a woman to ever truly be safe, even if she were to lock herself up and throw away the key.

Being a woman means being told, from infancy, to fear the unknown. Meanwhile, the known is far more fearsome. More women are attacked and raped by men they know than men they don't. This is a statistical fact.

We are nevertheless told to fear the phantom hands and dicks of strangers because it's easier than explaining that, more often than not, the most insidious characters lie right under our noses. How do you explain to a girl child that, when her father's friend Jim makes her sit on his lap, he might have ulterior motives she's too young to understand? It's far simpler to make her fear a man she's never met, a man who's never plied her with candy while telling her she'll make a "beautiful woman" when she grows up.

"Be safe," people invariably tell me whenever I leave a place on foot around midnight. At best, the words sound like a challenge; at worst, a threat. Regardless of their intent, they are meaningless. It is impossible for a woman to ever truly be safe, even if she were to lock herself up and throw away the key. Windows can be broken, locks jimmied. I could be lying on my couch, minding my own beeswax while wearing a burqa, but if a man with a hard-on and a grudge against the fairer sex deems it necessary to violate my personal space, he will do so, and there is nothing I could do to stop him. I'm five-foot-two and slight, with no upper body strength to speak of. I don't own a gun, I don't own mace. I'm easily incapacitated. So what, then, is the point of "being safe"? Or, for that matter, living in fear?

I've been raped, sure, but by someone I loved, not a stranger in the night. When it comes to physical conflict, I'm passive-aggressive. I just lay there and get hit. I've been hit in public, I've been hit in private. In both environments, no one batted an eyelash at my being battered. This is, for the time being anyhow, the world we live in. I cannot change it, so what's the use in being afraid of it? By allowing myself to live in fear, I'm depriving myself of the ability to live, period.

I am, instead, afraid of the things I should be afraid of—the fact that there will be no Social Security when I'm old. The idea of living in a studio apartment, oppressed by student loan debt, for the rest of my life. The rise of the police state. Dying before I get laid again. These are still fears, sure, but fears I can carry with me outside of my apartment, fears I can allow to sit in the back of my mind when I'm out doing whatever I can to avoid their presence. I don't wallow in them. Yes, they're fears, but I'm not scared of them.

So now, even though it's around midnight, I'm taking a walk around a dirt track near my apartment while listening to Olivia Newton John's "Xanadu," my safe song. I'll look over my shoulder periodically, surveying the territory, but what (and who) is behind me won't matter. The things that do aren't tangible. I consider this fact more a comfort than a terror.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

The man known as Megwin began uploading comedy videos onto his YouTube channel in the mid 2000s, and since then, he's become a digital sensation and an odd sort of international celebrity. Recently, VICE Japan caught up with Megwin and treated him to a feast of salamanders, fermented herring, and a pile of chili peppers from Mexico. We're proud to say he completed his challenge with a face full of snot, sweat, and tears.

[body_image width='640' height='426' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='three-former-cia-officers-want-to-help-you-apply-interrogation-techniques-to-everyday-life-113-body-image-1429798774.jpg' id='49073']Activists doing guerrilla theatre in the US. Photo via Flickr user Brooke Anderson.

Get the Truth, a new book by three former CIA officers, explains how to apply counterterrorist interrogation techniques to everyday life, from figuring out if a colleague has lifted some cash from your wallet to getting the best deal on a used vehicle. But before you get ideas about waterboarding the guy who runs the car lot down the street, know that authors Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero believe in "non-adversarial" techniques—torture, they figure, just doesn't work.

As protests grow across Canada against Bill C-51, the bill's supporters might do well to read Get the Truth. It maintains the best way to elicit confessions is by displaying empathy with subjects, and to keep them in "short-term thinking" mode, where the consequences of revealing deception seem to dissipate. The authors acknowledge the torture overseen by their former agency, as revealed in books such as Ali H. Soufan's Black Banners—which they take up directly—and in Guantànamo Diary, published in January by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who remains in detention after 12 years at the US base, presumed guilty without ever having been charged with a crime.

Houston, a 25-year CIA veteran investigator and polygraph examiner, now runs the behaviour analysis firm QVerity, which has trained Ontario Provincial Police officers on the detection of deception, something covered in the authors' previous book, Spy the Lie. I spoke with him on the phone from his North Carolina home, and while he danced around certain subjects—"I can't comment on the agency's approaches to things ... Sources and methods are dangerous grounds"—he offered assurance that successful interrogation can and should be carried out while adhering to fundamental principles of justice—a phrase that needs no air quotes.

VICE: The foreword opens with the image of a high-value detainee possibly involved in orchestrating the September 11 attacks, and it mentions that the book should answer the question of "what approach and techniques give you the best possible chance of succeeding when you walk through the door" to talk to this person. Why did you choose to frame the book in that way?

Philip Houston: Well, [here's] the gorilla in the room whenever it comes to the concept of getting to the truth or interrogation: is the approach the agency took [after 9/11] the right approach? And we were trying to set up a mindset of let's look forward. What might be the best approach? And not just there, but for anyone in general. If you could apply these techniques in that kind of a mode, where on Earth couldn't you use them?

[body_image width='3346' height='2231' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='on-the-piss-with-the-morningwood-rovers-edmontons-footy-mad-english-ex-pats-981-body-image-1429812954.jpg' id='49146']

[body_image width='640' height='473' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='an-open-letter-to-the-woman-who-asked-me-to-kill-her-cat-451-body-image-1429802274.jpg' id='49097']

Please lady, I don't want to die. Photo via Flickr user Irita Kirsbluma.

Dear lady,

I've been house-sitting and pet-sitting across Canada and Europe for about ten years now, ever since a neighbour asked me to look after her cats and plants for her holiday. Since all of my pets have long passed, I look forward to those weeks when I get to have endless kitty schmoopie-boopies and doggie snuggley-cuddles, and yes, I talk in those mushy baby voices to the pets because it makes me feel ALL THE THINGS.

And even though some homeowners have passed me a cool couple hundred-something for a job well done, I never ask nor expect to be paid. I do it because I always want to have a Lil Bub and a Doge all up in my grill.

So when you found me on a housesitting website and asked me to look after your two fat-bellied-felines who love tummy rubs and snuggle time, I said, "No problem."

The first time out, you failed to mention one cat had a serious history of constipation. When I rushed the snugglebum to the vet, you failed to pick up your phone or even answer your emails. The goddamn vet was faxing (FAXING!) and calling your hotel, and I actually tried to contact your tour guide, yet still you were AWOL. When I finally reached you days later at midnight on the phone, you said, "Oh yeah, I heard a ringing in my room, I didn't know what that buzzing sound was."

Telephones: They've been confusing since 1876.

Then why weren't you answering my emails, lady?

"Oh, I never set up my email account before I left."

I thought my lesson was learned: you're a useless space cadet. But then I thought, you're annoying, like Shia Labeouf in Transformers, but relatively harmless, like Shia Labeouf at a cabaret night. So when you asked me earlier this month to return for a couple weeks while you took your second holiday of 2015, I cheerfully agreed because the snugglecats have itchy tummies and THOSE TUMMIES AIN'T GONNA SCRATCH THEMSELVES.

But when I arrived to grab the keys, before I'd even closed your front door behind me, you totally blindsided me.

"Yeah, one cat's not doing so well. I have a plane to catch, so I've made an appointment for you to take the cat to the vet to be euthanized," you said.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, lady. You wanted me to help execute your cat?

Before I burst into tears (it was an ugly cry, there was snot), I told you flat out that it was extremely irresponsible of you to leave such an important decision until the day you were flying away. This should have been handled by you before I arrived. It should not fall on me to handle such a traumatizing job. This was not only a display of neglect for your pets, it was also a complete lack of social graces/a soul. You had known for weeks that I was returning, and not once did you contact me to give me any warning that you were considering this before my arrival.

And what kills me is you actually tried to make me feel guilty for having an emotional response!

I'M NOT A ROBOT. MY EMOTIONS DON'T JUST SWITCH OFF.

I'll intellectualize the situation when I've had time to process my emotions, not mere seconds after you've told me the cat I've cared for and loved is less important to you than catching your flight. I appreciate that you have a busy life and things need to get done, but in my defence, I don't care.

How dare you attempt to dump this responsibility on me and wash your hands of it. Who do you think you are? Better yet, who do you think I am? I am not your scullery maid/guillotine, here to do your dirty work for you. FOR FREE.

And in case you were wondering, I did hear you on the phone to your neighbour, asking him to come do the deed. "Yeah, she's freaking out and crying, can you just come here and do it?"

I have taken care of cats with diabetes, cats with renal failure, cats with severe food allergies, three-legged cats, dogs with behavioural problems.... and not once did their owners ask me to kill their pets.

Once I had a moment to "intellectualize the situation," I talked with many other pet owners about this incident. They—people with hearts that beat in their chest—were all shocked and appalled by the mere suggestion that a stranger might handle the euthanization of their pets. It is completely outrageous, traumatizing, obscene, uncivilized, and inhumane.

That's why I filed a complaint with the housesitting website. Minutes after emailing them that first complaint, they called me back from their head offices in the UK and talked me off a ledge. They emphatically agreed with me that it's not the housesitter's responsibility to euthanize a pet, and they would never expect a housesitter to actually agree to this job. They told me they had never encountered an incident like this during their time in business. They told me they would investigate the matter and even suggested they could remove you from the website.

But did they? Nope. You're still on the lookout for your next housesitter to exploit and demean.

But, lucky me, you did delete the positive reference you left for me on my profile, one final act of spite that suggests you were more technically proficient that you let on. You acted beyond the realm of civilized society, and I got punished.

You do not deserve any love from your pets, and I fear every day for the well-being and safety of your remaining cat. She will likely die alone in a cold, antiseptic vet office, surrounded by strangers, while you throw money at your problems and dye your hair another shade of Fake 'n' Bake.

I hope you die alone and that your cat feeds on you, nibbling your fleshy fingers down to the bone.

Signed sincerely,

Christine

The other day I found myself thinking about a comment left on an old piece I'd written for VICE. I don't remember the exact wording, but the gist was that the commenter wanted to leave one of his shits outside overnight to freeze, then use that shit as a weapon to stab me to death.

Which got me wondering whether anyone had actually tried to murder someone with poop before. They must have, right? I mean, people get angry and lash out with whatever they have handy all the time, and poop is basically a concealed weapon that we carry constantly. But I'd never actually heard of an instance where someone was assaulted with it. I've heard of people using their teeth, boobs, fists, knees, feet, dicks, elbows, and heads as weapons, so why not poop?

I decided to do some digging, and it turns out my hunch was right. People have definitely tried to kill each other with shit. What follows is an (almost certainly incomplete) chronological history of poo as a weapon.

[body_image width='654' height='380' path='images/content-images/2015/04/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/17/' filename='brown-death-a-history-of-poop-as-a-weapon-111-body-image-1429298297.jpg' id='47236']

POOP AS AN EARLY CHEMICAL WEAPON

Despite the fact that people throughout history haven't been too clued up when it comes to the spreading of disease through poop and other bodily fluids, there have been quite a few examples over the years of people using shit as a kind of primitive biological weapon.

The earliest example I can find is the Scythians, a central Eurasian nomadic people who were around from about the 9th century BC up until the 4th century AD. One of their specialties during warfare was the use of poisoned arrows which, according to the book Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, were tainted with a mixture of viper venom, viper corpses, human blood, and shit. The arrows, if they wounded a person, could cause gangrene and tetanus (from the blood and shit), as well as other infections from the vipers. "Even people who are not wounded by the poison projectiles suffer from their terrible odor," noted Strabo, the Greek geographer.

A little while later, during the middle ages, the feces of bubonic plague victims was flung over castle walls with catapults in an effort to infect those inside.

In 12th century China, a slightly more advanced version of the shit catapult was used, which Stephen Turnbull writes about in his snappily title book Siege Weapons of the Far East (1): AD 612 - 1300. The weapon, which the author calls an "excrement trebuchet bomb" was a type of explosive device made from hemp string and filled with gunpowder, human shit, and poison, which was lit with a hot poker, before being flung at the enemy.

This tradition, of people who lack options using their shit as a substance to humiliate and infect, has continued through to today. Last year, the LA Times reported that there has been a fivefold increase in prisoners at the Los Angeles Men's Central Jail flinging their shit and other bodily fluids at officers. "Inmates sometimes mix the waste with fruit jelly so there's a better chance that it will stick to their target," The paper wrote. "Tapatio hot sauce packs a sting. Milk cartons are used as containers, and sometimes as launchers to force the substance out through a narrow crack."

EARLY 1940S, PARIS, MILITARY SHIT SPRAY

Who Me was a top secret weapon developed by the Office of Strategic Services (a now defunct US intelligence agency) during the Second World War.

Though the weapon didn't actually contain any feces, Who Me was heavily inspired by human poo, so I am including it here. The actual weapon was a foul-smelling chemical that was sent to members of the French Resistance in small atomizers.

The aim of the device was to spray it on German officers in order to humiliate them in front of their colleagues by making them smell as though they are unable to control their bowels. "Imagine the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever-and that gives you a taste of the Who Me quality," Pam Dalton, a cognitive psychologist told New Scientist in 2001.

Who Me ultimately proved to be unsuccessful, as it was, obviously, impossible to deploy a chemical that foul-smelling without also tainting everything around it with its scent, including the person who sprayed it.

It's not entirely clear if the weapon was ever actually used in combat. But if it was, I would imagine its victims received the minor annoyance of their Nazi lives.

[body_image width='1470' height='531' path='images/content-images/2015/04/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/17/' filename='brown-death-a-history-of-poop-as-a-weapon-111-body-image-1429298972.jpg' id='47237']

1950S, NORTHERN CANADA, THE INUIT SHIT KNIFE

There is, as far as I can see, only one documented case of someone using a frozen shit knife like the one the commenter hoped to stab me to death with.

Wade Davis, an anthropologist and ethnographic researcher from Vancouver, Canada, has several times told the story of an Inuit elder who fashioned his shit into a knife in order to escape the Canadian government.

Wades says the story was told to him by a family he met while in Arctic Bay, an Inuit community in Northern Canada.

Back in the 50s, the Canadian government forced Inuit people into settlement camps in the high arctic area. The Arctic Bay family claimed that their grandfather had not wanted to be relocated, and had decided to defy the government's orders and stay.

The family, fearful of the repercussions the grandfather might face if he refused to cooperate with the resettlement plan, took away the man's tools and equipment before leaving him behind in his igloo with nothing but two dogs. They did this, the story goes, in the hopes that the man would feel he had no choice but to join them up north.

"You must understand," Wade explained in a 2007 Ted Talk, "the Inuits did not fear the cold, they took advantage of it."

"He simply slipped outside, pulled down his seal skin trouser, and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade," Wade added.

Once the shit knife was sufficiently set, the man is said to have butchered a dog with it. He then, according to the TV series Canada: A People's History, skinned the dog, used its skin to make a coat, its rib cage to make a sled, and fashioned a harness out of its guts.

After feeding himself and the living dog some of the dead dog's meat, the man attached the gut-harness to the other dog, holstered the poop-sword in his belt, and sledded off into the night.

Related: Poop can be used to make wine, too!

1960S, VIETNAM, PUNJI STICKS

During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong made use of a simple but effective (and gross) weapon known as punji sticks.

The punjis were made by sharpening bamboo sticks, which would then be dipped in human shit (or sometimes poison from plants or animals.) The caca-encrusted spears would be placed in the ground and concealed with foliage or under a trap door, and left for the enemy to fall on. The sticks didn't generally kill the people that fell on them, but they were, I would assume, not the funnest thing in the world to be stabbed with.

[body_image width='1000' height='498' path='images/content-images/2015/04/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/17/' filename='brown-death-a-history-of-poop-as-a-weapon-111-body-image-1429299159.jpg' id='47239']

2009, RUSSIA, SHIT CANNON

Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov, a Russian inventor with approximately 200 patents to his name, filed a patent in 2009 that was titled "Method of Biowaste Removal From Isolated Dwelling Compartment."

Which, in non-patent-title-terms, is a device that would allow tanks to fire human shit.

The idea is that, when a soldier in a tank needs to shit, they would do it into a special type of shell casing which contains enough room for their poo, as well as an explosive charge. They would then place the shell into the tank's gun and fire it at the enemy, coating them in said poo.

This is handy for two reasons: Firstly, it would get rid of human waste from the tank, which is an enclosed space that soldiers are often forced to be in for long periods of time. Secondly, it would coat the enemy and their surrounding environment in poop, something the inventor described to the Guardian as "additional military-psychological and military-political effects."

[body_image width='898' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/04/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/17/' filename='brown-death-a-history-of-poop-as-a-weapon-111-body-image-1429300238.jpg' id='47242']

IV photo via Wikimedia Commons.

2014, ARIZONA, SHOOTING THE SHIT

Last year, 65-year-old former nurse Rosemary Vogel of Chandler, Arizona, was charged with first degree attempted murder after an incident in which she injected fecal matter into her husband.

Her husband, Philip, was recovering from heart surgery at Chandler Regional Hospital, when nurses heard an alarm from his IV pump, indicating there was a problem with it. When they entered the room, the nurses found Rosemary fiddling with Philip's IV line. Upon inspection, they found a brown substance in the line. After being tested at the hospital, the brown substance was found to be poop.

When Rosemary appeared in court, her husband came along to defend her. "There was some psychological break that morning," he testified. "It was totally out of character." Rosemary, who claimed she didn't remember the incident, plead guilty.

The judge, saying he believed Rosemary had suffered a mental break that day, took sympathy on her, and sentenced her to weekends in jail for one year.

This is not the first time someone has been accused of injecting feces into an IV. In 2005, Stephanie McMullen of Wilmington, Delaware (who, weirdly, is also a registered nurse like Rosemary) was accused of doing it to her two-year-old son. And in the mid-90s, Kathy Bush received national attention for intentionally making her daughter sick by putting crap in her IV. Then, last year, a woman in West Virginia was allegedly caught on camera doing the same thing to her nine-year-old.

There have also been other attempts in recent years to use feces as a poison that weren't done intravenously. In the mid 1980s, an outbreak of an intestinal parasite in Edinburgh was traced to someone intentionally putting infected shit in an apartment building's water tank. And in 2010, a teen in California poisoned her mother by putting dog feces and insecticide into her food. The mother survived.

And that's everything I've been able to find about people using poo as a means of hurting another living thing. I hope reading this served as a valuable use of your time.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Today's video - Guilty pleas in the murder of Inuk woman Loretta Saunders, your first look at a VICE News exclusive on the struggle of Russian dissidents, a preview of the new Noisey series Under the Influence and its look at the history of hardcore, and the convenience of Colorado pot in part four of the new Canadian Cannabis episode.

Exclusive: Canadian Cannabis: Cash Crop, Part 4

ABOUT DAILY VICE
Over here at VICE Canada, we've been working like crazy to bring you DAILY VICE: the first mobile show in the VICE universe. Now, after plenty of relentless R&D, we're finally ready to let you all in on our newest creation.

From Monday to Friday, DAILY VICE will bring you the top news and culture stories from across our network. You'll also get a first look at our newest documentaries before they hit the internet at large. And, every Saturday, we'll take a closer look at one of the week's top newsmakers.

DAILY VICE is the best way to keep up on all of our best stories while you're commuting to work, waiting for a doctor's appointment, or any other time you need a roughly six minute diversion from your ordinary life.

DAILY VICE is a Fido customer exclusive. If you're with one of those other providers you can access DAILY VICE here for the month of April. After that, only Fido customers can continue watching with the DAILY VICE app. Learn about the app here.

Browse the video archive

View the French Content

[body_image width='640' height='467' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='the-no-fap-movement-wants-to-be-the-new-crossfit-but-for-your-dick-226-body-image-1429824374.jpg' id='49227']

Very scary stuff. Via Flickr user hansol.

In the days of yore, calls for masturbatory abstention were the sententious dictums of people like John Harvey Kellogg and priests, the latter of whom were probably into their favourite choirboys even then. While anything derived from piety is reason enough to be ignored, the ramblings of holy shysters might have actually been correct, but for decidedly different reasons.

Not even God could have predicted the proliferation of porn in our daily lives. But is absolute masturbatory abstention really the answer? Well, where porn is concerned, probably.

Once upon a time, long before video streaming, I was a 10-year-old boy who pretended to be sick so that I didn't have to go to school, and I wound up watching televised figure skating live from the Nagano Olympics. What happened next is what happens to this 27-year-old boy in a man's body when he's choked his chicken for the seventh time that day.

Given that my hand and dick go together like peanut butter and jelly, and that I've had to reformat my computer more times than I care to admit—"... because I've downloaded too much music, mom..."—I've relied more on my spank bank to shave the palms than I have porn.

Unfortunately, some people are adept at avoiding computer viruses while watching porn—or at least know how to reformat their own computers.

NoFap is an internet phenomenon whose roots are firmly planted in pornography addiction, an affliction whose veracity is contentious among psychologists, neuroscientists, and sexologists. Porn addiction may not have made it into DSM-V but there's mounting evidence that it exists and a growing number of men suffering from erectile dysfunction, among other symptoms.

Alexander Rhodes, founder of NoFap.com and the NoFap Reddit community, unintentionally created a community to reverse internet porn's deleterious effects. A recovered porn addict, he experienced porn-induced erectile dysfunction, as well as delayed ejaculation while having sex. Moreover, his pornography addiction devolved into seeking out novel, shocking forms of porn.

"I had my first full sexual interaction at 19 and I could barely get hard," said Rhodes, 25. "I was completely detached from the person in front of me and I didn't know how to connect with them. My sexuality was destroyed. I could connect to a computer screen but my brain didn't know what to do with a person. I had to imagine porn and objectify the person in front of me. Naturally that creates problems in a relationship and that's how it went for the next four or five years."

He eventually refrained from not only watching porn, but also masturbating, and claims he successfully rewired his brain. But it wasn't without its trials.

"If it was as easy as quitting porn and not using porn, websites such as mine wouldn't exist," he said. "It's typically more complicated than that."

Recovery invariably requires no porn—not even the soft cable TV stuff my 13-year-old self beat his meat to on Friday night after everyone went to sleep—and no masturbation. The theory posits that the brain's neural pathways recede to original form, and the years of building up to needing tentacle porn just fade away.

Like Rhodes, Noah Church is a 25-year-old recovered porn addict and author of Wack: Addicted to Internet Porn. He experienced the gamut of sexual dysfunction, but managed to travel the hard—or flaccid, depending on how you look at it—road to full recovery. Like Rhodes, it required absolutely no porn and no masturbation.

"Once people with PIED (porn-induced erectile dysfunction) quit, they realize not only did porn have an impact on their sexual function, it had an impact on a lot of other aspects of their lives like their relationships, emotional health, motivation, ambition," said Church. "I recognized the fastest way to heal and recover sexual function was not to masturbate at all. Masturbation was still linked to porn, and porn likes fantasy, so it wasn't an option for me anyway. I wanted to have sexual experiences with women, and masturbation would just hold me back. I went five months without any orgasm."

How does abstention help one recover the ability to pop wood? According to Church's book, dopamine receptors need time to repair after being overloaded with pixels of the horizontal mambo.

"If you're overloading dopamine receptors all the time by watching hours of internet porn, those receptors shut down and numb themselves," said Church.

"They reduce the number of receptors that take that dopamine signal because they've been damaged by overuse.

"The other more shocking porn is how people climb up the ladder of severity. Porn is extreme these days in ways it wasn't 20 years ago. That's because the audience is desensitized and needs more extreme content to get off. There's more demand for that," said Church. "As we abstain from porn and masturbation, those receptors 'resensitize' and achieve equilibrium. The feelings I get around women now feel different than they did when I was using porn. I didn't feel that primal attraction that I do now."

Twenty-eight-year-old Ricardo gave up porn a couple of years ago after watching it regularly for 12 years, and while his cock never ceased to function, he says his meat beat manifesto escalated into what he considered disturbing territory.

"Guys talking about their porn habits escalating, that's what happened to me," he said. "When I started watching porn I was into girl-on-girl and then, all of a sudden, I would look at gang bang and gang rape porn. When I came across a group of people talking about that, I was in the same boat. That spoke to me and I wondered 'How much more could this intensify?'"

Before he gave up porn, he wasn't exactly Casanova, but now he has a serious girlfriend. In fact, not only had NoFap encouraged him to stop watching porn, it also taught him the benefits of infrequently hanging out with Pam and her five sisters.

"The sensations [in my cock during sex] are more noticeable and the release, of course, makes it 10 times more powerful," said Ricardo. "I've felt more confident and calm talking to women. It's helped me make eye contact—that's always been hard for me—and I've found everyday interaction easier, not just with attractive women, but with everybody."

He's decided to only ejaculate during sex and is even considering a popular NoFap challenge called Hardmode, which calls for a moratorium on ejaculation. He thinks he can do 90 days, but admits he'll have to run that one by the girlfriend first.

Ricardo has come to believe in the power of harnessing the male seed. Not all Fapstronauts are porn addicts, though. Some believe semen retention can make them better men. Porn was Ricardo's impetus, but now he exults the virtues of masturbatory abstention.

It's also an ancient practice. Devi Ward is a tantra educator, specializing in Tibetan tantra, and says that frequent masturbation should be encouraged, however, ejaculation should be avoided.

"Orgasm and ejaculation are two separate parts of the nervous system," she said.

"Orgasms become stronger and more powerful than your wildest dreams if you can regulate ejaculation."

Ward notes that occasional ejaculation during sex promotes bonding.

The orgasms denoted by Ward have spiritual connotations, which confuse this atheist. However, tantric practitioners can achieve multiple, total-body orgasms. But there is a caveat: yoga.

According to the Taoist tradition, said Ward, erectile dysfunction is a byproduct of expelling more semen than the body can replenish.

Rhodes himself has not masturbated since November 2013, but he does have ejaculatory sex regularly. He emphatically states that people should have their own reasons for abstention, and that it isn't necessary for everyone. He and Church both liken porn to cigarettes: While obviously harmful, it shouldn't be outlawed. As a smoker, I can't help but nod my head in agreement.

"The transmutation effect from not masturbating is real," said Rhodes. "I don't objectify women as a means to achieve orgasm. I see them for being the beautiful people they are. I see people for being better people. I have a newfound appreciation for human connection. My friendships and romantic relationships are much deeper. Even with strangers, I feel an ability to connect with them that I've never had before."

Porn occupies a very peripheral place in my life; I only use it to help me sleep after a night of uppers because the torrent of depressing epiphanies about making better life decisions obstructs access to my mental palm vault. But maybe I'll heed the NoFappers' advice about porn and try harder.

[body_image width='914' height='594' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='in-defence-of-south-dublin-body-image-1429701798.png' id='48467']

All photos of Dublin by Darragh McCaus. Smithfield, North Dublin.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Opposing windows face north and south. Along the Liffey there's Custom House Quay where the tech giants and startups are; Dublin's current great economic hope. Beyond that is O'Connell Street, and statues of long-dead heroes overwhelmed by the presence the Spire, a chrome monument left over from the Celtic Tiger—the days before the recession. Beyond that is Temple Bar, cobblestoned streets, and the green, plastic twee that we present to outsiders. I'm at a party on the top floor of a flat in the center of Dublin's corporate wasteland. It's a going-away party: Another childhood friend is leaving the city for somewhere a young person has a decent chance of getting a job.

Lights and noise blaze in the distance, but the buildings closest to us are empty. They're offices which were never used, ones that have since been taken over by bad bank NAMA. There's something disjointed about a church turned into a brewery, a fallen bank turned into the city's first 24-hour Starbucks. This is a city that doesn't always make sense, with all the botched rebellions and the poor investments, the cultural bandwagons we've jumped. It's a beautiful view, but jarring. To live here is to be on top of the city but to gaze out headlong into its failings.

[body_image width='1200' height='824' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='in-defence-of-south-dublin-body-image-1429701287.jpg' id='48459']

I grew up in Ranelagh, a South Dublin inner suburb which has in recent years become so fashionable that nobody my age can rent there. It's in Dublin 6, the less-grandiose cousin to Dublin 4, where the old money and the rugby players are. It's full of shops selling juice cleanses and dog clothing. It feels like an unreal Dublin, one which stands in oblivious contrast to parts of the Northside, the inner city and the suburbs where the recession's effects are more visible.

I remember Celtic Tiger Dublin pre-2008, back when I attended a grind school in the center of town. The students were an odd mixture of aspiring doctors and lawyers trying for straight As in their exams, and hardboiled "bad kids" who'd been kicked out of their previous schools and spent class hours getting high in the park. It was an expensive place to study, and for all our pretensions to indie refinement my friends and I remained Celtic Cubs. In school we moved through swarms of Juicy tracksuits and popped polo collars, kids who were minor Middle Eastern royalty and kids whose parents were tax exiles. There were rumors of a helipad on the roof, or a girl whose dad owned a chain of luxury hotels.

[body_image width='1200' height='835' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='in-defence-of-south-dublin-body-image-1429701549.jpg' id='48465']South Dublin

In a fictional book series parodying South Dublin culture, the character of teen rugby lothario Ross O'Carroll Kelly—(his initials, ROCK, allude to moneyed boys' school Blackrock College)—seduced fake-tanned girls and shrieked "AFFLUENCE!" from his car window driving through less privileged parts of the city. Satire was never far from reality: the Tiger-era media, a heady mixture of investment advice, and pictures of Irish models (their agency, "Assets," was across the road from my school and several of the Popular Girls were on its books...) lulled us into believing that Dublin was the new New York.

We duly adopted Frankenstein accents, inflected American mixed with English stately home, but with the signature slurred "t" of Dublin 4 and 6. "Focks sake, loike. They turned me away from the Wez for being plastered. It's a total mare, roysh?" "The Wez", also known as "The Wesley," is a rugby club which doubles as a school disco on weekends.

[body_image width='1200' height='735' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='in-defence-of-south-dublin-body-image-1429701304.jpg' id='48460']South Dublin

The economy crashed just as I graduated, casting nihilism over the summer of cheap mojitos and "legal pills" which followed (the head shops, which were everywhere, were about to be closed and outlawed). Suddenly it became apparent that we weren't just going to take gap years: Most of us were going to end up emigrating.

Not that I'd planned on hanging around: From age 12 and by all evidence already a precocious little monster, I had read Brideshead Revisited and let it go to my head, and now I had a conditional offer to study English literature—so lofty, so delightfully useless!—from the University of Cambridge. The main thing I learned from this was that you only get a full picture of your home town from the window of a departing plane.

Moving away made me appreciate Dublin, right from Freshers' Week where I fielded IRA jokes and Famine jokes and weird comments about Thatcher and Bobby Sands. Suddenly I was expected to be nationalist, to defend my homeland against drunk jokes from Northern kids. And suddenly I had to explain to people that no, Dublin was not backward, and no, we don't speak "Irish" all the time, we are not leprechauns or Peig Sayers or Father Teds or even Mattress Micks. And yes, we did have shops like Tesco and Topman, although it only landed here in 2007 (before that I remember men pulling up in cars to scream "fag" at any guy in skinny jeans I briefly dated).

I ended up reading mostly Irish writers throughout my English education, many of them emigrants in turn. It took leaving Dublin for Joyce and Beckett to craft our Irish literary canon. Perhaps it is only by being away that you willingly become a Dubliner. You make peace with the contradictions, which today are the Georgian tenement buildings and the vacant business parks, the suburbs full of middle class families who blew their savings on second homes in Bulgaria; the Googleplex versus the tower blocks around the quays.

[body_image width='1200' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='in-defence-of-south-dublin-body-image-1429701333.jpg' id='48461']

After college I went home, humbled, fell back in love with Dublin and a new guy. Then we broke up, and in a small city you see your ex everywhere you go. So I left again for London. It was on and off like this for several years (with Dublin, not the ex). I worked in London for a year, then went back and forth a bit, freelancing. Every time I returned someone else close to me had left, and some new economic horror had dawned. For a while every job was an internship, every party a recession rave. The feeling of powerlessness bred transience and detachment from the city in the other South Dubliners I grew up around.

Contrary to this, every Londoner I met seemed to dream of the day they could leave for somewhere quieter. London burned me out, too. Walking through Bishopsgate and over London Bridge every day taught me to appreciate the space on Dublin pavements. I'd go out at night in Hackney and get death stares from goth-y fashion students and remember how, in the queue at the Workman's Club back home, you'll always end up talking to strangers, how nights in Dublin could end with tins by the canal next to the statue of the poet Patrick Kavanagh and with a load of people you didn't know an hour ago. I could cycle into town without the prospect of death by Zone 1 traffic. I could smile at little dogs in the street without the fear of creeping out their owners. Dublin is friendly like that.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='in-defence-of-south-dublin-body-image-1429701361.jpg' id='48462']

I feel rather guilty defending Dublin, when there is so much that is obviously wrong with it. If you get sick, or pregnant and want to abort, or if you lose your home in Dublin then you're fucked. Catholicism still lurks in Irish law, denying us human rights. So much about this city is inbred, corrupt, blathering platitudes even as it steadfastly refuses to change.

Related: The debate over abortion rights in Ireland.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/7mGgt_Zt3oU' width='640' height='360']

But I think change is now being forced upon us. We've lost the old snobbery that traced through parts of South Dublin: These days it's OK to be on the dole, live at home or work for free and part-time in Dealz. Desperation will breed out of us the wariness of ambition, the urge to shoot people down and mutter "the absolute state of you." Many of us will have lived as Dubliners both in Dublin and abroad, something which profoundly alters how you view the city. We will no longer sell ourselves short, or make ourselves look small. We will learn and grow, but remain friendly, because the prize for coming from Dublin is that, whether you stay or go, you'll still somehow eventually know everyone who lives there.

Back at the top of the tower block, I hug my friend goodbye. Her flight is in the morning: Maybe she'll be gone forever. Or maybe she'll be back in Dublin soon. Each would seem as likely as the other these days. As we leave I look out on a skyline once dominated by cranes, an era long gone which left behind only empty buildings. They block out the lights behind them. They are relics now, blinking between memory and experience.

Follow Roisin Kiberd on Twitter.

[body_image width='620' height='465' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='what-on-earth-did-they-take-from-that-vault-372-body-image-1429817863.jpg' id='49157']

A photo from the scene of the crime. The thieves bored through a concrete wall to get to the vault. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Police

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's the story that's winning hearts and minds nationwide: At the beginning of this month, a group of men broke into a vault in London's Hatton Garden and raided 72 safe deposit boxes.

The area, just behind Farringdon tube station, is best known as the capital's jewelry quarter, begging the question: Why keep your jewels there? If I was hiding diamonds, I wouldn't put them in one of the places most likely to be targeted by diamond thieves. I'd bury them in a cute little chest in a cemetery, beneath the grave of someone with a name I found funny. (Get ready to smell precious stones, Seymour Cox!)

Another odd thing: The alarm reportedly went off as the drill juddered its way through a wall, yet the police opted not to respond. What is going on? I wanted to delve deeper into the situation, so I got on the phone to the director of a private security company (who wanted to remain anonymous) called Athena Intelligence. I spoke to him about the audacity of the heist, the loot, and why things may not be as black and white as they seem.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='what-on-earth-did-they-take-from-that-vault-372-body-image-1429818025.jpg' id='49159']

Some of the raided safety deposit boxes. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Police

VICE: Hi. Have you ever come across a case like this before?
The Director of Athena Intelligence: To be honest, it's not really what I get involved in—that's the police's job. Private security tends to get involved in the prevention as opposed to the aftermath of it. And in this case it obviously failed.

Seems weird that they could get a 20-inch hole through a wall in central London without anyone realizing.
Well, there's a number of possibilities, you know. The first being that they were inside the building when it had closed for the weekend and, from there, they dropped down the lift shaft. Also, I think it was three or four holes they cut to create a corridor wide enough to get a man through. The diameter of the drill wasn't wide enough to get a person through, so they needed three or four circles next to each other. They had to do that same task multiple times, which is not a quiet job.

How could you achieve something like that without alerting the whole street?
I don't know how noisy the street was and I don't know how good the sound insulation is in the vault, but regardless of that there would be noise throughout the building. How you could achieve a heist like that without alerting the security guards in the building is beyond me. I don't know how that could be done. It's possible there was an inside man who was either voluntarily enlisted or forcibly enlisted to assist.

The alarm went off but the police chose not to respond. Why do you think that is?
That's another strange one. I think that the alarm went off, which is monitored by the alarm company, who then contacted the police as a matter of protocol. Now, the police will respond based on the alarm company's recommendations. If the alarm goes off and the alarm company says, "Look, there's just work going on in the building, don't worry, we've had problems with this bloody alarm for the last couple of weeks," then they would make it a lower priority, and with tight resources it wouldn't be worth dispatching an officer to the scene.

It's almost Hollywood-esque, this crime.
It is a fascinating crime. The sort of thing you could make a film of in the future. It was phenomenally done. I do operations planning for tasks all over the world, and you need detailed advanced reconnaissance to make sure you have the right tools for the job. So that was an extraordinarily well-planned job. The other thing you need to consider is that there's no chatter in the UK criminal network. Generally people cant keep their mouth shut, and the lack of chatter in the UK network might indicate that there was a foreign involvement, possibly not EU.

Why do you think they went for this location in particular?
I was thinking about this. Firstly it's been done twice before. I don't know how recently that was, but it's been done twice before, which makes me wonder why anyone would bother leaving anything with them in the first place. If you look, there were almost a thousand boxes there, and they only did 72 boxes in the period that they were there. Once you're in, you can open these boxes pretty easily. So why they only did 70-odd boxes is a mystery to me. I just wonder whether people have thought, Was there a specific box being targeted for a reason by this gang? And were the rest of the boxes just a distraction? Were they going for specific boxes rather than just randomly opening boxes before they ran out of time? I wonder whether that's been raised or investigated, because, to be honest, if I'd spent all that time and effort getting in there, I'd take more than 70 boxes.

[body_image width='1024' height='1365' path='images/content-images/2015/04/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/23/' filename='what-on-earth-did-they-take-from-that-vault-372-body-image-1429818078.jpg' id='49160']

The damaged entrance to the vault Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Police

Depending on how much time you have, 70 could be a lot of boxes to sift through.
It depends on whether they've managed the situation. All the same, what we still haven't seen or heard much of is from the victims. Not a lot of people seem to have come forward and said, "That's my box." I wonder what was in those boxes, is all.

Are heists harder to pull of now than they were in the past?
I think so. With technology, forensics and all the prevention technology around, it makes it very difficult to do and get away with, and if they're going to do it, they need to be extremely well informed and well qualified, for want of a better word. And they've got to have a plan for getting rid of the cash. They cant just turn up in Marbella with a load of cash—they're going to start triggering all sorts of alarm bells that way. So they've got to get rid of whatever it is they've taken. That's why I'm not sure they went in and blindly opened whatever boxes were in there. Some of those boxes would probably contain mortgage papers—stuff that's only of interest to the people concerned. Not all of them are going to be full of diamonds and cash and drugs, or whatever. I wonder whether it's a specific box targeted for a specific reason, and of course that would have required a further level of intelligence. Given what they've demonstrated, I don't think that would be beyond them.

Do you think, with your expertise, that you'd be able to pull off a stunt like this?
[Laughs] Firstly, let me say, it's not something I'm involved in or would ever want to be involved in—we only work on the right side of the UK law. But that level of planning is almost military; it's so detailed. They've had a lot of intelligence that's allowed them to be in the right place at the right time with the right logistics and have the drill plan in place as well. It's been done with military precision. With the right intelligence I'm sure it could be done by a lot of people, but it would take top tier intelligence and top-notch support on the ground.

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Europe's Most Notorious Jewel Thieves'

Don't you think making a getaway in a white van—like they did—is a bit clichéd?
It doesn't mean they've kept it, though. It could be a decoy. I'd be amazed if they kept that vehicle and didn't switch it out somewhere very close to the scene.

What do you think the culprits are up to now? Opium dens in Marrakech?
I think they've probably split up. If they've got any sense they would have gone their own ways without letting each other know where they were going, while having a simple means of getting together in the future. Their job now would be to launder whatever they've taken—and that might not be cash or gems or what have you; it could be anything, we just don't know—without drawing attention to themselves and surviving on the profits. Again, the assumption to this is that this has been a heist for financial gain, and this might not have been the case.

What else could it have been for?
It could have been somebody with papers or documents or hard drives or anything from that place that needed to be taken, and in order to mask the theft of that particular item of interest they've stolen from all the other boxes which are inconsequential to the operation itself. Maybe it was a foreign intelligence operation?

@joe_bish

More stuff about this kind of stuff:

We Went On Patrol with Central London's Undercover Anti-Pickpocketing Unit

How Does a Child Turn into a Bank Robber?

I Made Friends with a Guy Who's Robbed 60 Banks

Farmers in Western Australia are facing large numbers of feral camels invading their property and destroying water infrastructure in search of a drink. Patrick Hill, landowner and Shire President of Laverton in WA, told VICE how a 500-strong herd of extremely thirsty animals recently strayed onto his land.

"They smash all the water structures and let all the water out and it doesn't fill their demand," he said. "They panic, start climbing over each other in a frenzy for the last drop of water—trampling each other to death."

Australia's feral camel plague can be traced a long way back—they were first shipped over as transportation in the 19th century from Arabia, Afghanistan, and India. But with the arrival of the combustion engine, the need for camels evaporated—resulting in hundreds of camels released into the outback. Since then, their numbers have multiplied to over 300,000, warranting their current label as a "shoot-on-sight" pest.

But why kill them? As lakes and creeks dry up in warmer seasons, the camels migrate in search of water—leaving a trail of destruction behind them.

To help alleviate the problem, the Federal Government ran the Australian Feral Camel Management Program from 2009 to 2013. As part of the program, $19 million dollars was contracted to an organisation called Ninti One—a research group that assists remote communities. With the funding, Ninti One conducted the largest camel cull in Australian history— reportedly destroying over 160,000.

"The job wasn't finished," says Ross Wood. He's a representative of Goldfields Nullabor Rangelands Biosecurity Alliance—a group responsible for small-scale culls of camels encroaching onto pastoral land in WA. "The camel shoot wasn't really successful, it was never properly completed," Ross told VICE. "They still build up into enormous numbers, trashing inland waterways, indigenous waterholes, eating native plants—you name it."

As you might imagine, shooting the camels and leaving piles of rotting carcasses across the Australian outback isn't the best possible solution to the camel plague. According to Patrick Hill, the rotting bodies can cause real dangers to managed cattle. "They like to chew on the bones," he said. This can poison them.

Instead, some are arguing landowners should educate themselves on how to better integrate the animal into their business. Chris O'Hara, owner of Calamunnda Camels and representative of the Australian Camel Industry Association, told VICE how utilising the animals could turn great profits.

"We've got large amounts of protein being shot and left to waste in large piles," Chris told VICE. "Camel blood, the urine, the milk, the meat, the hide—it's all superior to other farmed and managed animals. It's had to adapt to Australia's harshest environments, so its body has learned how to protect itself for millennia."

Camel milk in particular is one byproduct going to waste, despite fetching up to $40 in America for just one liter. Being extremely rich in vitamins and minerals, it was referred to as "pure nectar" by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. But landowners are beginning to catch on, with one milking farm now operating in Perth Hills in WA, and another opening last year on a Sunshine Coast farm in Queensland.

However, as Patrick Hill pointed out to VICE, if it was as easy as some people say to cultivate camel byproducts, than pastoralists would do it. "It's easier said than done, there's a lot of work involved," he said. "The camels drive most cattle away, they always take precedence over them—and basically it's just not economic."

But the domestication of camels alongside cattle may still be a possibility. "We have a biosecurity issue that has to be managed," Chris O'Hora said to VICE. "The best way to manage it is to shoot the camels. But if you shoot a hole, something else will fill it. You're removing the problem, but not solving it."

Follow Jack on Twitter: @jack_callil

Image via

Canadians all live in igloos, snowshoe to work (at the maple syrup factory), have moose for pets, wear jean on jean, worship hockey, and are just generally really sorry. That about sums Canadians up, eh? Los Angeles-based comedy writer and displaced Canadian Rob Cohen was sick of battling these lame (but, sadly, sometimes true) stereotypes. And he hated that no one (besides his fellow "California Canadians") knew anything—or even cared—about his beloved homeland. So he decided to make a movie that would explain The True North.

In Being Canadian, Cohen travels across the country, seeing the sights and interviewing Canadians about, well, what it means to be Canadian. Celebrities like Mike Myers, Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short chime in, and answer important questions like "What is Canadian food?" and "Is our politeness covering up something sinister?"

There's beer. There's Tim Horton's. The War of 1812 comes up. A lot. Being Canadian is a loving (and, of course, self-deprecating) exploration of all things Canadian. VICE spoke to Cohen in advance of his film's world premiere at the Hot Docs documentary film festival to discuss his take on Canadian identity.

VICE: When did you decide you had to make this movie. Was there a moment?

Rob Cohen: I always, in the back of my head, felt some concern—certainly on vacations early when I was with my family outside of Canada. But once I moved to the States, and every job that I worked on, or TV show or something, every time the same questions started to come up in the writers room, it sort of grew. I guess the straw that broke the polite camel's back was when I started talking to other Canadians down here [in the States] and they had the same issues. I just thought, sort of jokingly, someone should make an instructional manual on what it means to be Canadian. I would say probably like 10 years ago is when the germ of this movie actually started, just in my head.

But you'd been living in the States for a long time at that point though, right?

Yeah. I mean, it was more suffering through it and not knowing how to deal with it. As the clan of secret California Canadians kept chatting, it sort of grew and then went from like a joke to me just deciding to do it.

Did you ever feel a bit sad about the fact that you had to make the movie?

No, honestly. It's sort of one of those comedic frustrations. It happened all over the world, not just in the U.S. It was more like if you knew you were Superman and you couldn't tell anybody, and you would just sit there at the table like "Mhm, yup I would love to help open the sugar but I, I can't."

It was more like, again, a polite frustration. Canada's not perfect, no country is, but I just thought this is something that I would love to do, just to make, but also maybe selfishly, to shut some people up.

How long did it take you to make this movie? You interview the Barenaked Ladies when there were still five of them in the band.

Yeah. The movie, it's misleading, because it took seven years from the beginning to completion, but there were huge chunks of time in between when we weren't working on it for eight months, or six months here and there because we all had other jobs.

But did you actually cross the country in 10 days like the film depicts?

Yeah, we did.

And was that your first time really seeing most of Canada?

No, I mean, I'd seen Canada growing up there, mainly the west. I'd never been to New Brunswick, I'd never been to Nova Scotia. My experience of the Maritimes was zero. I'd only seen bits of Quebec, but it was great. It was really—it was such a selfish thing for me because I knew I had this mission with the movie, but at the same time, I got to personally see the country that I truly missed and was, and am, so proud of, but also get to see these new areas. New Brunswick just blew my mind. [It's] so beautiful.

Canadians love to celebrate themselves. Like you say in the movie, we're always pointing each other out and specifically telling Americans that, you know, "So and so is actually Canadian". And this film celebrates a lot of Canadians, everyone from Alanis Morisette to William Shatner. But you also try to celebrate Canada itself, the country, and it comes across as kind of a tougher sell. Canada seems hilariously sad in comparison. Like what does Canada have? The Beachcombers, curling, the RCMP.

It's not meant to be sad. It's sort of, there's definitely some tongue-in-cheek element about this. We wanted to pick the silly things like The Beachcombers—I grew up loving The Beachcombers.

What I was hopefully doing, I don't know if it was successful, but this whole movie is supposed to be our love letter to Canada. We love Canada. I love it so much. I miss it. The producers, who are Canadian, we all were selfishly excited because we got to go back to the place we love and talk about this country. But we also wanted to not make ourselves seem too fancy. It's not like we're re-writing the legacy of Olympus. So that's why we picked a few things that are sort of near and dear to Canadians hearts and non-Canadians would think they're super lame. I think our secret weapon would be to under-play the cool stuff. I think hopefully in the film there will be a lot of Canadians in the audience kind of nodding like, "Totally." They'll be like, "Littlest Hobo? What is that?" That was sort of part of the plan. It's all done with great love and affection.

Canadians clearly have very ingrained identity issues. We explain being Canadian by comparing and contrasting ourselves to Americans, which is really messed up.

Do you think any other country has that same kind of identity crisis? I can only think of maybe Wales, being so close to England. But even so, probably not. Do you think that's unique to us?

To me, I could imagine maybe North and South Korea, but they're still Korean. I just think Canada is in this weird spot because we are, like I say in the movie, we are these aliens. I walk around L.A. all the time, even yesterday, [I] was talking to somebody about the hockey playoffs and I said, "Sorry," or whatever, "Sorry about the Kings," and they were like "Are you Canadian?" And immediately the conversation shifted from the Kings to me, almost how could I keep this a secret? I think we're like the stealth country, but in a great way. We're sort of the bits and pieces of Britain and the U.S., with a little French thrown in. I can't think of another country that's really as awesome and massive and powerful as we are that [is also] this person at the back wall at the party sort of.

I loved when someone said we're the "Hey guys, wait up" country.

Exactly. Oh my god, when Mike [Myers] said that I was losing my mind. Because it's so true.

But it's great. I think it's—I love the fact that we know how great we are and we don't need to be trumpeting it all the time. That makes the country even cooler.

After I saw the film, I spoke to someone who was kind of shocked that our identity was such a big issue. She said something to the effect of, "I just think of Canada as a little bit of everything for everyone." Like that is Canada's identity. Stop fretting about it. Do you think that's good enough? Can that be it?

I think, honestly, in the movie, there's no right or wrong answer. This is sort of how we chose to present this story, and it's not saying this is the Bible on what it means to be Canadian, but I think to be American means different things to Americans. If you're from Texas it might mean being big and loud and rich, and being from Louisiana you're laid back and [in] Seattle you're into coffee. It's whatever people want. I think that the great thing about Canada is we could [say] "We're polite," or we could [say] "We're this," but I think we've found an easy way to almost elegantly not have the conversation by saying, "Well, we're like the U.S. but cleaner" or whatever. Because it's a way that we have found people outside of Canada can process it easier. But within Canada it's a little more provincial. I grew up in Alberta, so I was always hearing about Quebec, the crazy people in Quebec, or the Newfies, or whatever. I think Canadians are so—in my experience—so comfortable knowing who they are that it's almost like an effort to explain something that they feel doesn't need to be explained.

Finally, and this is very important, is it true that Milhouse from The Simpsons was modeled after you?

That is true.

How did that happen?

When The Simpsons first started I was a [Production Assistant] there and they needed to send drawings to Korea, where the animation was getting done, to explain what characters should look like, because the Korean animators were not understanding and sending back these drawings that were wrong. So they just took pictures of people that were around the show and said this is so-and-so, this is so-and-so. So they sent a photo of me, unbeknownst to me, to Korea and said make this guy Milhouse. A lot of the characters on the show are based on real people, but I found out about it afterwards when one of the writers brought me into his office and said, "I've got a surprise for you."

So his personality traits were not based on you, it was just your actual physical appearance.

Yeah, just my physical look. I mean, I hope so.

Being Canadian screens Saturday April 25 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

How do you get in the right headspace to pull off a complicated BMX trick with an equally complex name like Uprail Abubaca Fakie Downrail? Canadian BMXer Chijioke Okafo encourages rookies: there is no right mentality, ignore everyone, and psych yourself into the trick. Ok Chijioke, whatever you say!