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Bitcoin Is Unsustainable

Teens Are Shitting in Hotel Swimming Pools for Sport

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No evidence that these people are currently doing—or ever have done—a shit in a pool. It's just a stock photo. Photo by Joe Shlabotnik via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We want teen news and we want it now. Teen news thrills us. We live to know what teens are doing. What brave new taboos are they challenging and breaking? What cool new clothes are they wearing? The teens: what are they listening to? Is it the next big thing? What about apps? Teens like apps: what apps are teens using these days? Teens, you are the lifeblood on which the innovation in this country feeds. Teens are brave and dumb and vital. There is no change without teens. There is no evolution. Without teens we are stagnant. Without teens we are death. What are teens doing? What are those pesky teens up to?

Teens are shitting in swimming pools for sport.

Now, I am not a judgmental man. We've all secretly thought about shitting in the sea, haven't we? It's rare we get to shit in new and exciting ways, as a species. Shitting, on the whole, is a necessary daily chore, the tired dumping of waste from the receptacle of your butt into the waste disposal unit of a toilet. Yawn. Boring. But surrounded by warm, soft, salty water? The giddy, thrilling privacy of the waves crashing against your body? If we are ever going to level up the way we shit, this is how we are going to do it.

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That said, teens are dropping brown bombs in swimming pools, which is a whole different conceptual kettle of shitting fish. Here's The Mirror's report on it, because... I guess they did a hard-hitting investigation into how and why teens are shitting for fun?

I don't know. 2k15 is, if I'm being honest, an extremely confusing year:

Dozens of holidaymakers have fallen ill after teenagers deliberately pooed in the pool in a sick Inbetweeners-inspired "logging" trend.

Tourists have been confined to their rooms and put on drips after becoming seriously unwell at a holiday village in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

They are doing this, the shitting teens, because of a sequence in popular teenager film The Inbetweeners Movie 2, where Inbetweener Neil—the sweet simple Inbetweener—dropped a turd down a log flume and it hit Inbetweener Will—the nerd Inbetweener—directly in the face. Years and years of evolution. Thousands of hours of schooling. Our teens are shitting in swimming pools because the monkey idiot shat in the face of the geek.

Again from The Mirror:

Last week, a British woman was paid £2,000 [$3,155] in compensation after she fell ill while staying at the same resort in Egypt in 2014.

Travel companies have now threatened to fine those caught pooing in the pool.

Travel expert Nick Harris, of lawyers Simpson Millar, said the number of affected holidaymakers in Egypt over the last few weeks ran into double figures.

Essentially, what I am getting from this is: 19 people had diarrhea in Egypt and it's a trend now. Like: someone took a shit in a pool in Spain, and one in the Dominican Republic, and that's a trend now. That's all it takes for a trend to happen. Extrapolate the data. It's possible that only three turds happened, three shits in three separate pools across three continents. But that's a trend, for teens to enjoy. That's a trend piece. An IRL meme, if you will.

Will it be in this week's New Yorker? It will not. "European Teens Are Detoxing Their Buttholes Over the Warming Jets of a Communal Swimming Pool, and Here's Why You Should Too": no. But it's something to talk about, isn't it? Something for us to pearl-clasp over the inexorable spiralling downward trajectory of the world's teens.


WATCH: Teenage Riot, the VICE documentary about teenagers rioting:


Teens don't know what they are doing, and we don't know what teens are doing. That's the truth at the root of all of this. Are teens shitting in swimming pools? It is very possible. Teens have done amusing shits in swimming pools before, and they will do it again. It is a trend? No. Is everyone on holiday at constant risk from cryptosporidium and e-coli from a thousand bobbing teen shits? They are not. Are teens actually so bored of having constant, unerring access to the internet and the ego-ruining feedback loop that is their notifications center—are they so bored of this that they can only ever truly feel alive when voiding their bowels into the chlorinated water of an all-inclusive resort swimming pool in Sharm el-Sheikh? That the only thing they can get close to feeling an emotion with is their butthole as it gulps one huge warm mouthful of water up after shitting completely into the deep end?

Do modern teens not know that shitting in public is actually quite bad for their reputation, and that people will talk about them at school if they shit in a swimming pool, coining nicknames such as—random examples, absolutely not based on real life—"Shitty Joel," or "Joely Shits-His-Knicks," or "Joely-Joely Brown Pants," or, say, "Turdbuster"? Apparently not. But the point is that teens are an unknowable, constantly moving force, a pack of sharks in gloomy water who know exactly where the 100 emoji is on any given keyboard, and people trying to understand teens are just blind old men trying to climb out of a well of un-knowledge.

Anyway, the last teen trend that apparently happened was when teens were summoning the devil using pencils and paper, and the next trend will be something stupid—I don't know: "Teens have a weird new trend: being hit very hard by cars!" Or: "Teen trend alert: trendy young things are drinking their own piss—is YOUR child at risk?"—that we'll all get worried about.

It's just planking all over again, isn't it? Planking, but for wet shits. And as night follows day, it will fade into oblivion again, and teens will forget it ever happened, and the teens will die and be reborn as adult humans, and they will be replaced by a whole new crop of teens—each more stupid than the last, the teens, doing ever more wacky shit—and the only constant that outlives teen craze after teen craze is the fact that nobody—not one single person working today—nobody in the media actually understands teens.

Anyway, in short: teens may or may not be shitting in a swimming pool in some vague approximation of fun. If you do this yourself in some hedonistic effort to capture your own fun youth again, the vapors of which are floating ever quicker toward the heavens, then good luck and I hope you get arrested.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

The Comedian Who Crashed Kanye's Glastonbury Performance Is a Complete Hack

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Lee Nelson on stage at Glastonbury. Screen shot via the BBC.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's quite galling just how far the Jenga tower of British entertainment has fallen. The mess of wooden bricks—of vloggers with publishing deals, of teary X Factor contestants, of puerile non-comedy—strewn all over the floor, awaiting an angry father to come along and step right on them while trying to go for his morning shit.

Lee Nelson (real name Simon Brodkin, a former doctor) is a frontiersman of our dumbing down. He is a dog shit cowboy, and his 2010 BBC Three series, Lee Nelson's Well Good Show, was his very own Deadwood, South Dakota. It was a tremendous Hoover Dam of slurry, a furiously classist mash of total garbage, featuring a comically obese man called "Omelette" whose back he would ride around on like a cruel little boy on a wheezing old dog.

Wikipedia describes the character Lee Nelson as a "happy-go-lucky chav." His catchphrase is "quality," spoken in an accent/manner not dissimilar to a Mastodon fan doing a bad Ali G impression while taking the piss out of hip-hop "because it's not real music." He also had a character called Dr. Bob, whose whole schtick was basically a silly voice and visual gags about man boobs.

Lee Nelson's Well Good Show ran, somehow, for two series, ending in October of 2011. Its successor, Lee Nelson's Well Funny People, ran for one series in 2013. And that was about it from him—until Saturday night.

Lee Nelson interrupting Kanye West at Glastonbury.

During the Glastonbury headline slot of American motormouth and rapper Kanye West, Nelson ran on stage in a T-shirt emblazoned with "Lee-Zus," then bounced around for about five seconds, clearly unsure of how to actually do anything funny, before being bundled off by a flustered looking stage-hand. It was a stunt enjoyed by no one.

Had the stage been invaded by anyone other than Lee Nelson, I imagine it would have been more well received—though only marginally. But because it was him—this man who won't go away, who won't leave us alone with his dangerously shit banter and awful, terrible gags—it was untenable.

There is something socially-horrendous about unfunny people doing and saying unfunny things. Being in the presence of an unfunny peer, one who constantly swings and misses, makes a special type of sweat secrete from your glands, a special kind of chesty unease. So how to cope when you're not just enduring these people at the pub or a party, but when the trailers for their terrible TV shows make you feel uncomfortable in your own home?

What are we to do with our lingering mass of unwanted funny men and women? Where do we put the Lee Nelsons, the writers of Coming of Age, the past-it Ben Eltons?

Being "out of touch" is no excuse. By rights, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse should be long consigned to the gag cemetery, but their sketch show Harry & Paul remains one of the only examples of the format still working on modern British TV.

One of the most famous instances of a show reviled by many, while still managing a degree of ratings success, is Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, which ran—astonishingly—for an entire decade. It was a flagship BBC Three program, the life and times of four friends in Runcorn, Cheshire.

Ralf Little was lucky enough to play Antony Royle in Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash's much-lauded The Royle Family, so has at least one BAFTA-related notch on his belt. Sheridan Smith has skyrocketed into being gloomy-but-stoic northern woman du jour in some high budget dramas. But what of Natalie Casey and Will Mellor? People unable to shake the stink of a bad comedy, unable to break free from the amniotic sack of shit jokes about condoms and adult diapers. Where do they go now?

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We only have ourselves to blame for this. Lee Nelson is the Kevin we need to talk about, and he's not alone. We need to talk about Russell Howard's Good News. We need to talk about why all of the BBC's flagship panel shows—Have I Got News for You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, etc—have decreased in quality or been canned.

We haven't spoken up enough. We've allowed our selfish torrents-streaming-Netflix culture, one of immediate gratification, to stir panic and stupidity in the upper echelons of TV programming—a stupidity that feeds right into the shows they end up commissioning, into what comedians think the public wants, into people like Lee Nelson running on stage in the middle of a Kanye West show for no real reason other than temporarily getting back in the news (which worked, obviously).

Mind you, what do we expect from Nelson, a man who does a minstrel show of a poor person? Do we expect quality? Do we expect nuance in his actions? Of course not—he is a terrible comedian who was given too big a break, and now we can't get rid of him. He will never make the transition to serious actor; he will never be anything more than a cheap jokester, a middling prank co-ordinator. He exists in a dire limbo, a shameless, self-aggrandizing, social media-driven grasp for re-relevance. Thirty years from now, he will dress up as Queen Victoria and photo-bomb Prince George at the next big Royal Wedding, and still nobody will care.

And it is us who are to blame for all this. We're not doing enough to stop it from happening, to stop TV channels from becoming a Dignitas for people's careers. We must start cutting them off at the source. We must set fire to any and all student comedy nights that occur anywhere in the UK. Together, we can beat this.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: A Rare Event: Talking ‘Yooka-Laylee’ with the Team at Playtonic

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All screenshots via Playtonic.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It is, after too many years, a good time to be a Rare fan. E3 2015 brought news of Sea of Thieves, a new online pirate adventure that looks like the first proper Rare title in ages, not to mention a new compilation, Rare Replay, collecting several of the developer's greatest hits (notably including a good chunk of their N64 heyday) released later this summer.

In the middle of everything going on in LA for E3, though, something maybe even more exciting to gamers who can fondly recall Rare's glory years of Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and Conker's Bad Fur Day happened online, away from all the glittery press conferences. The Kickstarter for Playtonic's new 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee ended, netting its small team a little over £2 million [$3 million] in crowd-funded finance. That's not a small bit of change—Playtonic's success is huge, with Yooka now holding the record for the most successful British game on Kickstarter.

Playtonic is a team made up of creative sorts who once worked for Rare. The company's project director Chris Sutherland was lead engineer for the Leicestershire legends, character art director Steve Mayles designed both the stars of Banjo-Kazooie and the Kong family for the Country series, and MD and creative lead Gavin Price was a designer on titles including Viva Piñata and, again, Banjo-Kazooie. It's no surprise whatsoever, really, that the forthcoming Yooka-Laylee bears more than a passing similarity to the N64 classic that VICE Gaming claimed was more important thanMario 64.

The reaction from the team when the Kickstarter countdown hit zero? "Easy," says Playtonic writer and editor Andy Robinson. "We should do another one."

Despite their success, the through-line in my conversations with Playtonic is their small team mentality. Price repeatedly points out to me the virtues of working outside a massive corporate environment, a sentiment echoed by the rest of the office. Appropriately, when I meet Robinson and veteran ex-Rare composer Grant Kirkhope at the LA Convention Center, home to E3, we sit out in the open, on the cement floor in a small pocket of hall space not dominated by massive booming publisher booths.

Robinson is kind enough to let me take a very early build of Yooka for a spin, the result of three months' work. What I'm shown isn't nearly complete, at a stage that would never have been seen at the Sony or Microsoft presentations. Enemy detection is yet to be implemented, the move sets for the two characters—the chameleon Yooka and bat Laylee—are not fully programmed, and "win" and "lose" states are entirely absent.

"I don't even think this one in particular is a real environment," Robinson tells me, as I'm zooming around a jungle setting that will look familiar to anyone who's been seeking out news on this release since its campaign began in May. "It's just something I asked for to get some nice screenshots, really."

The honesty is refreshing. More importantly, the lack of completion shown here isn't anything to worry about, since the game has only been in development for a short time. Still, while I've only barely played Yooka-Laylee, it's already looking and feeling incredibly promising. That combination of snap, fluidity, and responsiveness that Rare perfected in the 1990s is evident, even in just a few months' work, and everything points to us being on a receiving end of a real treat when the game comes out in, hopefully, October 2016.

That quirky Rare humor is already present as well. Despite the short lead up time to Yooka's first public US showing, Robinson points out a cheeky idle animation added for the bat and lizard duo, and the audio is already stuffed with plenty of the requisite "eek"s and "rurr-rurr"s you'd expect from a jaunty game about a couple of gibberish-speaking animals.


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So Yooka isn't really a game yet, and it already feels fun. That's the whole appeal of a platformer in the first place, right?

"You can give a six-year-old a controller for a Mario game or a Rare platformer," says Robinson, "and you'll see them have fun even though they're not completing the objectives, and are probably just running into a wall. They might not leave the first area, but they'll be having a brilliant time because they'll be jumping around doing moves, picking up stuff, hitting things. [These games are] like the 'riding a bike' of video games. Anyone can have fun riding a bike."

For Price and the rest of the team, this is a natural way of operating that dates back through 15-plus years of work at Rare. In the days of N64 development, teams were much smaller than today's monster triple-A projects, and imaginative ideas more commonplace—a basic tenet that Playtonic is returning to.

"I think it's creative ownership," Price tells me. "We don't have to suggest something and discuss it with two other guys, then they go away and discuss it with their two managers—none of this elongated chain of command or Chinese whispers."

That is, obviously, a huge advantage of independent game development. If anyone on the team is interested in adding anything to Yooka—whether big or small—they easily can.

"When you see like the kind of things we devote high production values to, it's sometimes totally at odds with what people are doing in the triple-A industry where people are all, 'Oh no, these box-ticking features have to be made,'" Price says. "We spend time, ages, pouring love into a particular character or animation or a dialogue which, you know, once players get into, they sometimes remember for their whole lives. You can remember some of the best bits from those games you used to love when you were a kid."

The various ingredients of Yooka have been slow cooked over the years, says Price, "so all the best ones come through." Each bit has gradually come together through casual conversations the team has continuously had, even before they'd decided to form Playtonic.

Very early gameplay footage of 'Yooka-Laylee.'

The first whiff of this happened in 2012, when something called "Mingy Jongo" burbled up online. Banjo-Kazooie fans were quick to jump to conclusions, for fairly obvious reasons, but as it turned out the would-be project was really just the first inkling—Robinson says it was never more than a conversation—for what would eventually evolve into Yooka-Laylee.

"We don't have any plans or designs now that have come through from that time," Price says. "But it was the message that fans were giving us at that time which we've carried forward, and was the driver for us in the background while we were doing our other jobs to come together and do Yooka-Laylee formally."

Playtonic sounds like a fun place to work—a bit reminiscent of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart gets a glimpse of Mad magazine's office in New York. (And the team makes frequent reference to said cartoon, using it as a sort of guiding star.) Regardless, given their small office space, everyone at the studio gets their own sense of ownership over every aspect of the game, and the team as a whole spends a lot of time joking around while in the process of coming up with new ideas.

Trowzer, Yooka's slithering, pants-wearing equivalent to Banjo's mole Bottles, is one example. Price shows me a picture of the character as he was originally envisioned, drawn on a Post-it note: silly hat (fez, optional), wearing one pant leg, sock inexplicably on the end of his tail. The drawing itself is pretty funny, and indicative of the kind of quirkiness you'd expect to see in a classic Rare game.

The original Trowser, as drawn on a Post-it.

"[Banjo] games are remembered for having a lot of personality," Robinson explains. "I have no doubt that working the way that we do, you know, bounding off of each other and everyone being very open, that that's the way to bring more personality into this project. And if you can have a whole cast of characters like that, and the game's fun to move about in, you've won half the battle."

Yooka's gibberish voice acting is good for a laugh, too. Project director Sutherland—who also voiced several of Banjo's nonsensically-spoken cast, a duty he's reprising on Yooka—tells me that coming up with different sounds for each character results in the team sitting around the office squawking and making weird noises at each other, until something sticks.

"It's a bit different from conventional voiceover work, but you're trying to capture the feel of the characters from just a few noises—into a fraction of a second," Sutherland explains. "You're trying to sum up a character in just one noise that you make, so it's 'Guh-ah!' or 'Ree!' or something like that. Just trying to compact it all into a little space. So that's kind of a challenge, actually."

Just like in the Rare days, Playtonic has created a game for themselves to see what jokes they can sneak past censors. (I mean, come on: Trowzer the snake?) Pulling out Banjo on the N64 again, I'm quite surprised to see a gag about Grunty's favorite party trick being a strip-tease, so these guys have a long history of this sort of thing.

"We'd rather do a kind of a multi-layered, clever kind of humor which can appeal to people on different levels, and see what we can get away with," Price says. "It used to be a challenge, like: 'What can we get past censors' eyes?' We always wanted to be the one that got the team told off. It's so much fun trying to get that stuff past them—we had a reputation when Microsoft bought Rare [in 2002]."

"It's like, two different generations of a family can watch The Simpsons, or watch a Pixar movie or something like that," Robinson adds. "The adults will get some jokes and find it funny, and it'll be the same for the kids."

Sutherland mentions the team had even considered originally announcing Yooka-Laylee as a match-3 puzzle game before they officially debuted the actual game at EGX Rezzed in April. "We decided not to do that, you know, just because we thought we probably wouldn't get out of it alive," he laughs. "Fifty percent of people would get the joke, and the other 50 percent of people would've stabbed us," adds Price.

Compared to Playtonic, the final days at Rare under Microsoft's direction sound grim. Price mentions that Yooka's character artist Mayles was stuck making Xbox avatar shirts before leaving the company. While the team acknowledges that triple-A development is the way that it is for a reason, everyone involved with Yooka is thankful to be where they are today.

"I think we all feel like game developers again, for the first time in many years," Sutherland says. "In our previous job we'd just been pigeonholed into these kind of almost minute tasks of being in a small part of a really big thing, and the fun was just going out of it, really."

But what makes a platform game, specifically, so appealing to work on? Mayles explains that, maybe more than any other type of game, the genre is just about using your imagination.

"They're just so much fun to do, there's so much variety. And no idea's too crazy to work—it's limitless," he tells me. "You just have so much fun creating those games. We really enjoyed playing those games ourselves, and that's it really."

Price adds that platformers also have a certain essence that people gravitate toward: "They're very accessible, but they're difficult to master. So it's like everyone can pick up a pad and start playing with it and start doing something productive. And then it gets its hooks into you and you have to go and find everything that's collectable, you have to ace every single level. It really gets under your skin, a platform game does."

Unlike other third-person games, you don't have to conform to reality either, Robinson reflects. "If Playtonic was working on an Uncharted series game, they couldn't have [Nathan Drake] have a trouser-wearing snake as some friend, no matter how fun that is." Kirkhope is in agreement: "That's the best thing about this—you don't have to ask [about anything]. You don't have to fly it up on the chain to some adminisphere—that's what we used to call it."

Having taken a good long break from Banjo-style compositions, Kirkhope is having fun composing tunes for Yooka, splitting the workload with Rare's other legendary composer, David Wise (you might've heard this one of his). Kirkhope's method hasn't changed in the years since the N64, though. "I still plunk around on the piano keyboard until I find something—it's no different now," he laughs.

On Motherboard: Unbeatable 2D Platformers Are All the Rage

Yooka-Laylee is certainly Banjo in spirit, an answer to so many fans wanting more of that essential Rare magic. But what if Rare themselves were to reboot a series last seen in 2008 with the Xbox-exclusive Nuts & Bolts? Kirkhope isn't sure that a new Banjo game 'proper' is something he'd want to see. "I almost feel like, with Banjo-Kazooie, you already know the moves. What can you do that's new with them? We'll have to see. If it ever happens."

Rare actually did show a new Banjo of sorts earlier this year when they demoed a Kinect-controlled flying game at SXSW in March, though its basic design makes it unclear whether it's something actually in production (particularly given the assuredly studio-wide effort for Sea of Thieves).

Either way, Playtonic is hitting all the right buttons already. "It's got all the Banjo-Kazooie feel," Kirkhope says of Yooka-Laylee, and I can only agree with him. Your move, Microsoft.

Follow Steve Haske on Twitter.

Post Mortem: Human Pelts: The Art of Preserving Tattooed Skin After Death

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Photo courtesy of Geoff Ostling

In 2009, retired school teacher Geoff Ostling was showing his tattoos at a seminar at the National Museum of Australia when he was approached by a curator with an unusual request: Would he be open to donating his skin for posthumous display at the museum? Nearly all of Ostling's body is covered with floral tattoos, the result of a creative collaboration between him and Australian artist eX de Medici.

There are currently no other tattooed skins on display at the National Museum of Australia, but they do have a collection of 18 other works by eX de Medici, who is now so acclaimed she no longer does tattoos (a different artist is completing Ostling's " body suit"). And while Ostling is still very much alive, he's agreed to donate his skin when he dies. A future visitor to the museum will be able to view his taxidermied body presented as a work of art.

The collection, study, and display of tattooed human skin is a practice that goes back hundreds of years. Modern tattoos preservation is mostly for the sake of saving art: Aside from Ostling, Irish performance artist Sandra Ann Vita Minchin plans to have her back tattoo, a recreation of a 17th Century Dutch artist's work, preserved and auctioned to the highest bidder after she dies. There's also Tim Steiner, who has given consent for his large back tattoo to be preserved by a German collector after his death. In the past, though, preserved tattoos were often saved for criminologists to study.

Dr. Gemma Angel, a tattoo historian and anthropologist in the United Kingdom, told me that "whilst today the focus is often on the artistic value or iconography of tattoos, during the time when these tattoos were being collected, scholars were more interested in deciphering their meaning, and trying to establish a taxonomy of symbols that could tell them something about the individual's usually 'criminal' psychology."

Photo courtesy of Geoff Ostling

The largest collection of human skins is at the Wellcome Collection at London's Science Museum, which has over 300 individual tattoo fragments. Angel notes that there are other substantive collections that similarly display preserved tattooed skin: "The anthropology department of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle has around 56 pieces, very similar to the Wellcome Collection, dating from the 19th Century. The Department of Forensic Medicine at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland has 60 tattoos, and the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal e Ciências Forenses (INMLCF) collections in Lisbon, Portugal, contains 70 specimens. And there are many more examples of smaller collections in London, Berlin, and Austria."

Tattoos over the back of a left hand. Photograph © Gemma Angel, courtesy of the Science Museum, London

A tattoo typically outlives a person's body only by as long as burial or cremation arrangements will allow, so for a tattoo to be preserved after someone's death, special care has to be taken. In most cases, Angel explained, "the skin would simply have been cut away from the cadaver using a scalpel. Depending upon the degree of decomposition and atmospheric conditions, this is a relatively straightforward operation. Skin decomposes very quickly, so in most cases removal would have taken place during autopsy."

There are two main methods of preservation: dry and wet. The former, which is most prevalent in older specimens, requires scraping on the reverse to remove connective tissue. Angel explained that "after the skin has been scraped, it is stretched and pinned out to dry. It may be treated with various chemical compounds before or after this stage, or both. The skin shrinks as it dries, leaving a characteristic 'frilling' around the edges." With wet preservation, the skin is extracted in the same way, and kept in either glycerin or formalin alcohol.


For more on tattoos, watch VICE's visit with Valerie Vargas, the tattoo artist known for doing the prettiest "lady heads" in the world.


As fascinating as it is, public exhibits of preserved tattooed skin are rare and controversial. That's in part because it's unclear whether many of these skins were acquired ethically. The preserved skins in the Wellcome Collection, for example, were all purchased from a single mysterious individual.

"As is often the case, the museum acquisition records are sketchy," Angel explained. "The seller called himself Dr. La Valette, but there was no registered medical professional by that name at the medical school during that time. In all likelihood, he was using a pseudonym—there had been one or two public scandals surrounding the use of human skin excised from cadavers to make souvenir items at the Paris medical faculty, as well as experimental tattoo removal on inmates at La Sante prison, so it makes sense that anyone in possession of such a large collection of preserved tattoos would be wary of revealing his identity."

There are other horrendous examples of acquiring tattoo specimens, like Ilse Koch, the wife of Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch, who became infamous for having tattooed prisoners killed and turning their skins into lamp shades.

The preserved tattoo "Roses and Daggers," part of the Wellcome Collection. Photograph © Gemma Angel, Courtesy of the Science Museum, London

Even with the most ethically sourced of specimens, it's impossible to escape the fact that displaying a tattoo posthumously also means displaying someone's actual skin. While many argue that skin donation should be treated like all other organ donations (Ostling certainly did when I spoke with him), it's worth asking whether the sight of someone's preserved skin provokes the same response as, say, their preserved liver.

Scientists are fascinated by growing their own human skin. Read more about it on Motherboard.

"Today, it's an important part of medical ethics that objects of human remains are treated with the appropriate respect, and in the UK, recent changes in the law require museums to have a public display license for human remains," Angel noted. "Since most collections of human remains belong to universities, and not all universities will have a public display license, it would be illegal for curators to allow unlimited public access to their collections. This is one of the reasons why access is usually restricted to the research community and medical students."

Photograph © Gemma Angel, courtesy of the Science Museum, London

This restricted access means that some of the most impressive collections of preserved skin are rarely seen. The Medical Pathology Museum at Tokyo University, for example, has an extensive collection of preserved tattoos, including many very large, almost full-body skin fragments with tattoos of traditional Japanese themes—but the exhibit is not open to the public and access is rarely granted.

One of the few Americans to get a good look at this collection is, oddly enough, Don Ed Hardy of Ed Hardy fame. Hardy first visited in 1983 at the invitation of Dr. Katsunari Fukushi, who was at the time responsible for the collection, which was started by his father Dr. Masaichi Fukushi. According to Hardy's memoir Wear Your Dreams: My Life in Tattoos, the collection included more than 3,000 photographs of tattos (along with extensive notes and records from the elder Dr. Fukushi) and over 100 tattooed human skins. Hardy notes that Dr. Fukushi had acquired these skins by working in a charity hospital, and by offering people money "to finish their tattoos on the condition he could harvest the tattoo when they died."

Many of the dried specimens in the Medical Pathology Museumare are framed like wild animal hides; others stand upright on styrofoam mannequins. An even more exclusive part of the collection is a set of wet specimens kept submerged in chemical tanks in a lab room that was captured in photos of a later visit by Hardy.

Photo courtesy of Geoff Ostling

Ostling has also visited the Medical Pathology Museum, as part of the filming of the 30-minute documentary Skin, which featured Ostling's quest to get everything in place for his museum donation. It turns out that this is no small task.

Upon Ostling's death, the first step is to freeze Ostling's corpse. He likened skin removal, which needs to happen within 24 hours of his death, to removing wall paper: "very easy to do, but not easy to do well. You have to be careful to not tear it, but after it's tanned and preserved it will last for a very long time." He says he has "every confidence" in the taxidermist he's chosen. Unlike the Tokyo collection where the tattooed skins—even the full body suits—are missing their extremities, heads, and genitals, Ostling wants his skin display to "stand complete."

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

The Secret Footwork History Behind RP Boo's Pivotal New Album

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The Secret Footwork History Behind RP Boo's Pivotal New Album

Corporate Pride in NYC

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With the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states, New Yorkers had a big reason to celebrate Pride this past weekend. However, not everyone in the Big Apple's queer community was stoked on the festival itself, which has evolved from its roots on the margins to something more mainstream.

Photographer Sam Clarke attended the Pride Parade in Manhattan's West Village, as well as the Dance on the Pier event in Tribeca where Ariana Grande performed. Sam had this to say about the increasing commodification of Pride that he saw firsthand:

"The NYC Pride march and accompanying festival has turned very straight and mainstream, with corporate sponsors like TD Bank and MetLife (probably places that once fired people for being gay) hashtagging their brand #foreverproud and #metlifepride on the Pride experience. When did it become OK for corporations to put their logos on the blood, sweat, and tears of what this march represents?"

Happy Pride, New York. See Sam's photos below.

See more photos by Sam Clarke here.

VICE Shorts: I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Home Base'

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Thirteen is considered, by many cultures, a harbinger of luck—good and bad. Personally, I don't know where I stand on the number, but the recent record-breaking juggernaut Jurassic World has made me re-examine it. The film earned $1 billion in just 13 days, becoming the fastest to do so in film history. While breaking the record for the highest grossing opening weekend with $208,806,270, the dinosaurs simultaneously set the single day IMAX record of $13 million on Friday, June 12, 2015. Now, I know what you're thinking: Friday, June 12th is not significant. But if you look at the history you'd discover that on January 11, 2013, Universal said the film would be shot in 3D and released Friday, June 13, 2014. Interesting. Well, after much plodding, the execs finally relented to destiny and moved the film 13 years after the film's director Colin Trevorrow (born September 13) directed his first film entitled Home Base. Coincidence?

Surprisingly funny despite its sexist overtones and poor production quality, the cleverly-titled short documents the pursuits of a bitter ex-boyfriend as he tries to reach home with his cheating ex's mom. (Is that still a thing people want to do?) Wavering between campy melodrama and funny air sex, Home Base sets the tone for Trevorrow's following films. His second movie, Safety Not Guaranteed, a quirky romance between a journalism intern and a grocery-store clerk who built a time machine, is as gratingly cheesy as that description implies. If examined, a path can be drawn through Trevorrow's filmography from a man done wrong by a woman, to traveling through time and space to fix something with a woman, only to end up in the present with dinosaurs, who are poorly raised and maintained by an uncaring mother figure. The parallels are spooky. Compound that with the knowledge that the only documentary credit to his name is entitled Reality Show, about "an eccentric millionaire who bankrolls his own amateur reality show" and dupes female contestants into fulfilling his sexual fantasy, you start to wonder. Did something happen with his mother or his childhood girlfriend, or both?

I can't quite place my finger on what it is about his brand of offbeat vanilla romance that seems to connect with audiences. Is it his stock male characters who always follow through on what they say, never failing to save the day? Or his women who bring nothing but trouble only to faux-realize their independence by serving as a revenge fuck, falling for the older, awkward loner protagonist? Perhaps it's his most recent narrative innovation, where a woman realizes her maternal instincts while running in high heels from dinosaurs through a jungle. Or could it be something more... supernatural? Whatever it is, you've got to hand it to him. In spite of their cliché conventions and corny lines, Trevorrow's films are destined to succeed.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.


Mr. Pregnant Is an Incredibly Weird Los Angeles Comic Who Might Just Be a Genius

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Image via Mr. Pregnant's YouTube Channel.

One of the most fascinating people in the Los Angeles stand-up comedy circuit is a man named Atelston Fitzgerald Holder the First, aka Mr. Pregnant. He's primarily known for his YouTube channel, where he's amassed 60,000 subscribers. His three most-viewed videos, "Big Girls Don't Cry" (six million views), "Big Belly Man" (five million views), and "MANBOOBS" (two million views), all involve him being shirtless, wearing fake teeth, and making the viewer very, very, uncomfortable.

If you look at more recent videos on his channel, you'll notice a sharp increase in video length and a massive decrease in views. The new videos follow a strange path wherein Holder has lost the fake teeth, put on a shirt, and begun engaging in long, philosophical monologues, the type that use a whole lot of big words without ever quite going anywhere. These videos are fascinating despite—or maybe because of—the fact that you can't quite figure out what the hell he's talking about. Others, such as "A Comedian Called Me Weird and Mentally Retarded," find him crying to the camera, telling himself, "Be a man, man!" They, too, can make the viewer feel deeply uncomfortable, but in a totally different way.

Years before I began doing comedy, I had seen a couple Mr. Pregnant videos, loved them, and forgot about them. Much later, upon moving to Los Angeles, my roommate at the time took me to an open mic at this space called Echoes Under Sunset. After a procession of white guys got up on stage and talked about being sad and jerking off (in my experience, this is pretty much the only thing you see at open mics in Los Angeles), Mr. Pregnant took the stage. An eccentric man with a thick West Indies accent, he enthusiastically told strange, bad jokes like "I watched the Today Show... yesterday!" Another bit involved him unscrewing the top of the microphone, then exclaiming, "Now that's what I call an open mic, man!" to silence, then yelling, "WHY ARE YOU NOT LAUGHING, HUH? That's a funny joke, man! That's a clever joke!" I was crying laughing. There was something enigmatic, almost Kaufman-esque, about his whole schtick.

Mr. Pregnant is a comedian's comedian's comedian. You're never totally sure if you're laughing with or at him as it's not quite clear whether he's a brilliant comic or a deeply unstable human being. Mr. Pregnant describes his work as satire, couching his arguments in rhetoric so thick and intellectual that it's sometimes hard to figure out what the hell he's actually talking about. At first, it seems like he's full of shit, but the more you think about it, you're forced to wonder if Mr. Pregnant is on to something. Even after talking to him, I'm still not totally sure. But that's what I love about him. He's never boring and he's always confusing, and that's what makes Atelston Fitzgerald Holder the First a goddamn genius.

VICE: Would you label yourself a comedian or an internet personality?
Mr. Pregnant: In the context of mediums, yes. But it's really the same field under the same umbrella. But it's real satire, sarcasm, slapstick, also sketch. I mean it's really the same as stand-up under the umbrella encapsulating comedy. It's just different branches of humor.

I remember seeing you on Best Week Ever.
On VH1, right?

Yeah.
A lot of networks, a lot of networks!

Are you still doing Mr. Pregnant stuff?
I do it periodically, but I've branched out into different avenues.

With Mr. Pregnant, you were usually shirtless.
Yeah, usually shirtless. None of these ideas were actually preconceived. It's not a predetermined scenario where you see—let's say lonelygirl15, she was like one of the prototype. She was probably one of the conception of YouTube celebs. All of these things were just inadvertent stages where I didn't have a t-shirt on so I'm topless. So that's the kind of ingenuity by itself. And then the fake teeth were because I had a gold cap.

I took the teeth off years ago. I was self-conscious so I put the Halloween teeth over it. And the part was just me in my idiocy. The epitome of idiocy!

Did Mr. Pregnant affect your real jobs at all?
Well, I never actually had a real job. My situation is very peculiar. I get jobs by people seeing my work: these news sites, these corporations, venture capital firms, private equity firms, huge investors. They see my work online and they come and offer me contracts. So this is why I started with all of these news sites, by me writing for myself.

Photo courtesy of Mr. Pregnant.

Have you always written?
Yes, but on a much more mediocre level. Once I started to do research, I began to realize that there were things that I was doing instinctively... not instinctively, intuitively. I realized I had these ideas in my mind but I never put into consideration to put these things on paper.

When did you start doing stand-up?
I've been doing stand-up my whole life. I stopped doing stand-up when I migrated to the United States.

Where did you move from?
From the West Indies. I grew up in different places. I grew up in the West Indies, in London. So I lived in different places. When I came to the US in my mid-20s, I started doing stand-up and I was naïve. I didn't have the a mainstream mentality. The audience would laugh at me, so I took it personally.

I honestly believed that I was not legitimately funny because people were laughing at me. I didn't realize that this is a profound gift in itself because every comedian aspires to have that capacity to evoke laughter. I was unaware of this. My naivete had convinced me that I wasn't capable of being funny. So I dropped comedy completely, and for over a decade I did everything else but stand-up.


Related: Watch someone who is not Mr. Pregnant try to do stand-up comedy on acid.


So when was that?
Probably between 1999 until 2008. For at least eight years. That whole gap was all sorts of comedy but stand-up. And then one day, someone very close to me told me, "You need to be yourself. Stop trying to hide it. Be you. Be what you are."

And you're very much yourself. You do something that's very polarizing.
Yeah. So me doing comedy was me coming to terms with who I am because I know I'm eccentric, I know I have a kind of weird, goofy personality. I know I'm perceived as a character. So I stopped hiding that.

You can be a little abrasive if people don't like a joke, which I love.
Yeah. I just embrace it. I just say, "Listen. I need to be honest with myself." So I prepared myself. I knew when I came to LA and I knew when I started doing stand-up work again that I would be perceived as a character. So I made my mind up to accept myself for who and what I am.

It's a situation where you're so much more self-aware than they might perceive, and that's a testament to the strength of the character.
The reason I'm perceived as a character is because I've traveled...I've been to 45 US states. I just came from London.

What were you doing in London?
I was on a business trip.

What was the business trip?
Oh, that was related to the private equity firm.

Have you done that your whole life?
No. This is a fictional scenario now. Yes, it's really a fictional scenario.

What does that mean?
Meaning that, when you share this story it sounds unbelievable. It sounds like a scene you would read in a movie. So I have these billionaire philanthropists. They'll call me up and they'll say, "Hey, can you come to this country? We have a project for you. We need some ideas. We need some brainstorming ideas. We need some concentration." So they'll pay for all that stuff and what I do is just sit in a meeting for an hour or two among a bunch of philanthropists.

Photo courtesy of Mr. Pregnant.

What do you do at the meetings?
Well, in terms of the ideas of what we discuss, the intricacies of what is being discussed, that I cannot disclose. So that's just one tiny area of what I do. And then I write for all these news sites.

What are the news sites that you write for?
I write for the Harlem Times. The Harlem Times is based in New York. I write for an international news site called NewsBlaze and I write for a site called Ask a New Yorker.

Is it weird being in an important business meeting with somebody who has seen you shirtless with fake teeth, like shaking your man-boobs?
I think that's the number one reason I get all this work. I could transition from discussing atoms, meteorites, and all of these different intricacies in this complex field and then transition to something that is perceived as slapstick but it really is not slapstick. So that's where I come in. They say, "This here is the idea. We need philosophy. We need psychology. We need language, power of persuasion, or we need rhetoric." So that's kind of where I come in sometimes, to infuse these devices.

What do you have going on after this?
Today? Uhhh, in terms of entertainment? Comedy?

I mean like, after this interview. You said you wanted to do it before 9:00 AM.
Oh, I have a project to do for the Harlem Times. I have a research development to do for the Harlem Times and then I have to write an "About" page for two startups, two entrepreneurial programs that are about to be launched under the umbrella with an investor. So I'm doing some writing for them, like their About pages and some basic stuff—just kind of putting what they're trying to do, their portfolio, that sort of stuff. And once that is done, comedy yo! Back to the comedy! Don't forget to mention I kill onstage.

Follow Brandon on Twitter.

This Is How London, Ontario Responded After I Called It a Racist Asshole

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London, Ontario. Photo via Flickr user Ken Lund

A few weeks ago I wrote this VICE article about the four years of racism I experienced in London, Ontario while attending Western University, from which I graduated last June.

It was published on a Friday afternoon in early May, and while I thought it would do well, I didn't really expect much else. But when I woke up the next day, I had over 200 new Twitter followers, over 100 tweets, dozens of Facebook messages and friend requests, and a flooded inbox.

At first I didn't believe it, and I went through them all, trying to reply—they just kept coming in. My computer and phone crashed twice.

But the biggest surprise was that the overwhelming majority of responses were positive.

Many people had emotional responses to the article, saying they felt sick after reading its content. Others said it struck a nerve, as they or their friends had very similar experiences.

What I found most surprising was how many people—especially young white men—were apologetic for what I went through, and for trivializing racism. A man we'll call "Tom" sent me this email:

"I just wanted to thank you for writing the Vice article about how racist London truly is. It's all to [sic] easy for me to pretend like this is not the case but your article makes it very clear that this is a real issue that needs real attention. Thanks for taking my head out of the sand."

And one from "Nick:"

"I don't mean to sound like a self-pitying white kid, I'm just trying to understand your experience and how I can help change it. If the answer is to just fuck off, I'll be glad to do that, but if you have any advice it would be greatly appreciated ... I would also like to apologize on behalf of some of my douchbag [sic] friends who you've probably encountered at Western. They are dumb and ignorant."

My personal email inbox especially became a virtual confession booth of sorts. People were pouring their souls into my inbox and sharing their own experiences of racism in London.

While the fiery pit known as the comment section brought on a lot of thoughtful discussion and interaction, not everybody felt like joining hands and kumbayaing. In typical white privilege fashion, critics dismissed my experience because—wait for it—they hadn't witnessed or experienced it themselves.

One white critic said the following: "This article could be written about pretty much any city in North America. Btw it's not safe to live in London if your [sic] black? You are making a mountain out of a mole hill."

Another white critic made his point using a series of angry block paragraphs. "This article bothers me because some of the stories are clearly made up...I struggle to believe that some guy introduced her to 'his only black friend,'" he wrote. He also adds that he "just want[s] to make sure people read it cautiously, because it's spreading fast, and damns my city, where I've never seen (nor do the stats suggest) racism to be any different than in similar cities."

As I mentioned in my article, only a very small fraction (about ten to 25 percent) of hate crimes committed are reported; there are still no quantifiable statistics on the amount of implicit and explicit racism that black people experience. Even if there was a way to quantify that information, there would be too many instances per day—per person—to keep track of.

But in writing the article, I knew that no matter how much evidence I presented, there'd still be people who deny it and accuse me of reverse racism and whining. I could shit facts all day, retrieve my memories using my magical fucking wand, throw it in a pensieve for people to re-live, and they still wouldn't believe me.

Despite the resistance, my article went viral. Local news channels and radio stations covered it, some of which asked me to do an interview. Emerging Leaders in London asked for my advice on how to hold a discussion panel on racism in London.

However, even with the increased attention, no local politicians reached out to me, and when I reached out to them to see what they had to say, I didn't get much. The only councillors to take the time to write back and speak to me were Ward 3's Mo Salih, who I interviewed for the original article, and Ward 12's Harold Usher, the first black person ever elected to London city council. Due to Usher's work priorities, we weren't able to do an interview. He was London's only black councillor until Mo Salih was elected for the Ward 3 seat this year (but not without a good old London initiation first). I also reached out to Matt Brown, London's mayor, but never got a response. Honestly, I was hoping for some Brian Bowman shit but hey, we can't have it all.

Thirteen days after the original article, Salih did put forward a motion at the Community and Protective Service Committee that allowed the London Diversity and Race Relations committee to report back on recommendations needed to address the racism in the city. The points made in my article influenced those recommendations, and a town hall will be in the works for this fall.

Disappointingly, I also didn't receive any response from Western's president, Amit Chakma. I did, however, get a response back from Larissa Bartlett, Director of Equity & Human Rights Services at Western, who read the article weeks ago (although she didn't write to me until after I asked for comment from the university). She said her team will be reaching out to the University Students' Council and its clubs to discuss new models of education and support for students who are facing or vulnerable to racist behaviour. My inbox shows no new messages about progress on this, and nothing from local politicians besides Salih. The general lack of institutional response or personal outreach gives me the impression that they don't want to put in the hard work to address the issues I brought up. That silence will absolutely cause more harm to London's black residents and students.

Some of the kindest people I've met are from London. As polarizing as it sounds, I love London, but London doesn't love me back. London can be a safe place to live as a young student, but sometimes it can be an emotionally and physically dangerous place for someone like me. It can surprise you with it's progressive and stance on race and LGBTQ issues, but it can also transport you back to the 1850s. Challenging that binary doesn't mean I think the city is the Alabama of Ontario. It means that parts of the city's population is suffering and attention must be paid. By trying to dismiss it by saying that "every city is racist" or that "it's not that bad" does everybody—black or white—a great disservice, on an educational and safety level.

People lose their shit when you talk about race; they want to pretend that colour isn't an issue. They want to pretend that history has long passed and today's a new day full of sunshine and multi-coloured unicorns. That may be the case for many of the white people who think I'm full of shit, that what I experienced isn't real. That's fine if you believe that, but don't try to silence us because we make you uncomfortable. You have the luxury of reading my article, imputing an oversimplified, unqualified solution, and walking away from it. I have to keep living it. That's the difference.

But the fact that so many people in London took the time to send positive vibes says that I was wrong—something can be done for the city and its racism problem. It also says that there are more mature, understanding, and open-minded Londoners than I gave credit to, people who are willing to acknowledge their own privilege, identify their city's race issues, and work towards repairing it, even if it's simply by reading an article or having a discussion with their friends. It would just be nice if London's leaders did the same. Those in power have the ability to reach more people, and hold the voice of credibility. If they can't acknowledge the hardships of some of its most vulnerable citizens—let alone an article by one of its previous residents—not only are they dismissing an opportunity to implement anti-racism programs and education, but they also fail to learn more about how to protect those groups from hate crimes and other racial attacks.

Follow Eternity Martis on Twitter.

$500K Offered to Catch Prince Edward Island’s Potato-Tampering Terrorizer

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A beautiful bounty of brown (and red) gold. Photo via Flickr user United Soybean Board

Months after distressing reports emerged of someone inserting metal needles in Prince Edward Island's famous potatoes, the industry has raised the stakes, offering a $500,000 reward to help catch the culprit.

With the potato tamperer still at large, Islanders are spinning theories about the motive.

The case came to public attention last October, after workers at Cavendish Farms in New Annan, PEI, found needles in potatoes they were processing. The potatoes were traced to the neighbouring Linkletter Farms in Summerside.

Those potatoes never made it to grocery stores, but consumers in four Canadian provinces found more needles in the following months, prompting immediate recalls of potatoes from two companies. The most recent documented case, in neighbouring Nova Scotia, came in May of this year, though the exact origin of the potatoes was not released. In all, there were about a dozen cases of tampered potatoes found throughout Atlantic Canada in May.

The PEI Potato Board responded initially by offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrator. They raised the sum to $100,000 shortly after, and again to $500,000 on Monday.

The increased reward will be available until August 15, upon which the board will drop it back to $100,000. The industry is also making efforts to beef up security, using $1.5 million of federal funding to purchase metal detectors.

Prince Edward Island's potato industry, the largest in Canada, adds over $1 billion per year to the economy of Canada's smallest province. Potatoes are the largest cash crop on the island.

Sgt. Leanne Butler, media spokesperson for the island's RCMP division, told VICE that the police have assigned a dedicated team to the case. They're hoping that the increased reward will encourage more people to come forward with information.

"We received tips from the public when it was $100,000," she said. "We're hoping now that we will get even more."

She said the tips have ranged from trivial to substantive, but stressed that any information, no matter how seemingly unimportant, could help them make a break in the case.

Butler said that the police are keeping an open mind about what might have prompted the tampering, and won't say whether they've ruled out any theories. Those who live on the island are throwing around rumours of their own. Is it a disgruntled employee? Teenagers playing a sick joke?

Potato fields are unguarded, and anyone could sneak in and dig up potatoes to tamper with. PEI is the same place where locals pride themselves on selling potatoes on the side of the road in unmanned veggie stands, leaving a bucket of cash for passers-by to make their own change, so the idea of guarding thousands of acres of fields is a non-starter culturally, let alone logistically.

Susan Harvey, the owner of Harvey's General Store in Crapaud, PEI, suspects that it's someone trying to "hurt the potato farmers."

One report even suggested that many suspect a dispute between Big Potato and local environmentalists over irrigation might be at the root of the crimes.

There are circumstantial links between two of the main targets of the tampering and the irrigation issue. The president of Cavendish Farms appeared before a committee last year to press for the right to dig deep water wells, while environmentalists have supported retaining an existing moratorium. Gary Linkletter of Linkletter Farms also called on the province the reexamine the moratorium, according the National Post.

The former president of the PEI organic co-op, Alexander MacKay, told VICE that two RCMP officers visited him this spring to ask if he knew who might have been involved. Even though he doesn't think the environmentalist theory is credible, he understands that the police are just doing their jobs.

"They're not getting any hints," he said. "Maybe someone mentioned something to me. We're a small island."

Harvey, the general store owner, says that some people on the Island are scared to buy potatoes, but that it hasn't hurt her business. People know that her store gets its potatoes from a small farmer who hasn't been touched by the case.

"We get potatoes here twice a week and we can't keep them in the store," she told VICE, adding her spuds come from a farm just down the road.

Bernice, an employee at Jay's General Store in Morell, PEI, says that she won't hold off eating local potatoes just because of the needle scare.

"We mostly always peel our potatoes and mash them," she said. "So if they're gonna be in it you'll see it."

Follow Arthur White on Twitter.

I Tried Really Hard to be the Most Basic Person at Glastonbury

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I Tried Really Hard to be the Most Basic Person at Glastonbury

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Activists Are Planning to Burn American Flags in Brooklyn on Wednesday

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Image via Jennifer Parr/Wikimedia Commons

Disarm NYPD, a political action group with the expressed aim of taking firearms away from the NYPD using "direct action, organizing, education, and other tactics" has announced on Facebook that it will be staging American flag burnings in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park on Wednesday at 7:30 PM. The event has been unambiguously named "Burn the American Flags," in case the plan wasn't clear.

The event sprouted from a Confederate flag burning that was supposed to take place last weekend, but was delayed due to shitty weather. When they regrouped and announced a new date, Disarm NYPD had replaced the Confederate flag with the American.

In the wake of the Charleston tragedy, similar groups have staged Confederate flag burnings, like the one last weekend in Chicago's Lincoln Park, but Disarm NYPD argues that the American flag should be treated no differently. According to their Facebook post, "However, the Confederacy lost the war the American flag has unceasingly, from the first day it was ever hung, represented the exact same thing." [sic]

According to a comment on the Disarm NYPD event page by a user named Rey Lal Salam, the flag is symbolically tied to the police. "Those are the flags on the back of NYPD cars, that's the flag on every prison and court in NYC," Lal Salam wrote.

When it comes to desecrating symbols, abusing the American flag is a move that alleged Charleston shooter Dylann Roof used himself. Roof was photographed spitting and stomping on one American flag, and lighting another one on fire. Meanwhile, he seems to be among those enamored with the Confederate stars and bars.


Want Some In-Depth Stories About the Charleston Shooting?

1. Why Some People Think Dylann Roof is Getting Special Treatment
2. What Racists Think of the Charleston Shooting
3. Should Dylann Roof Be Considered a Terrorist?
4. Bree Newsome Gets Arrested for Climbing a Pole and Taking Down a Confederate Flag

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Why Google's Neural Networks Look Like They're on Acid

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Why Google's Neural Networks Look Like They're on Acid

Notorious Canadian Killer Luka Magnotta Puts Up Dating Profile: Wants ‘In Shape, White’ Guy

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Luka Magnotta. Photo via lukamagnotta.com

Convicted killer Luka Magnotta is seeking a single, white "emotionally stable" male for a long term committed relationship.

Magnotta, who brutally murdered and dismembered student Lin Jun in 2012, has joined prison dating site Canadian Inmates Connect in search of his "Prince Charming," the site announced Monday on Twitter.

"Seeking single white male, 28 [to] 38 years of age, white and in shape," the 33-year-old writes in his dating profile. "One who is loyal, preferably educated, financially and emotionally stable for a long-term committed relationship.

"If you think you could be my prince charming, send me a detailed letter with at least [two] photos," Magnotta writes. "Only those I deem compatible will receive a response. Serious inquiries only please. All unsolicited mail will be discarded."

On his profile, the former porn actor and sex worker displays photos of himself in a white popped-collar shirt. His profile does not disclose what crime he was convicted of.

In May 2012, Magnotta killed and dismembered Jun. Police said it wasn't a random act and the two men knew each other.

Magnotta posted a video of the murder online called "1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick," showing Jun being tortured, stabbed with an ice pick, and dismembered.

He then mailed Jun's body parts to government offices in Ottawa and schools in Vancouver. Jun's head was later found in a Montreal park.

Jun, 33, was a computer engineering student at Concordia University. His friends described him as quiet and hardworking.

At trial, Magnotta pleaded not guilty, claiming he was in a psychotic state at the time of the murder and was not criminally responsible. He did not dispute that he killed Jun.

At his trial, five mental health experts testified that he had borderline personality disorder or borderline traits.

Last December, a 12-member jury found him guilty of murdering Jun.

Before the grisly murder, Magnotta was suspected of killing kittens and posting videos of their deaths online, an animal rights group told CBC's the fifth estate.

The videos showed someone feeding a kitten to a python, drowning a kitten in a bathtub, and placing two kittens in a plastic bag and vacuuming the air out.

Magnotta is expected to be released in 2037, his bio states. He's currently serving a mandatory 25-year life sentence for murder and is not eligible for parole.

Canadian Inmates Connect is a website for inmates in search of pen pals, the site states.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.


Photos of Toronto’s Trans* March During Pride

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This past weekend thousands of trans* folks and allies took to the streets of downtown Toronto as part of the city's annual Pride Week celebrations. Toronto's Pride has become known as one of the biggest in the world, attracting eccentric crowds this year despite the gloomy weather. And with the recent legalization of same sex marriage in the United States, this year's celebrations come with extra joy.

(The asterisks in Trans* is meant to show that the term is inclusive to other non-binary folks who identify as such. "Binary is for computers," after all.)

Before the Trans* March got started, many gathered at an informal memorial service. People paid their respects for those who have died with false names on their graves and whose true identities have been forgotten. Only months ago, the Toronto trans* community gathered to mourn the death of Sumaya Dalmar, who died under mysterious circumstances, while some in the US have called the rash of recent trans deaths an "epidemic." The memorial served as a reminder that Pride is still about fighting for rights and addressing serious issues faced by these communities.

Speakers and sign-language interpreters shared some of their stories before starting the walk among drumming and chanting and plenty of spirit.

Every year, Pride Week is filled with events and parties around the world to celebrate and embrace diversity of identity, gender, and sex and to break the boundaries commonly associated with them. The past few years leading up to this Pride, in particular, have seen an increased visibility for trans* communities with celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, and Laura Jane Grace making headlines. A shoutout was even made to Jennicet Gutiérrez, the woman who spoke out last week at the White House for LGBTQ immigrant rights. This has been a good year for trans* people—if it's possible to say that, said one of the speakers before the end-of-day concert began at Yonge Dundas Square.

Follow Jackie Hong and Sierra Bein on Twitter.

What We Learned About Cooking Corn from KoЯn Fans

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What We Learned About Cooking Corn from KoЯn Fans

I Was a Phone Psychic Without Psychic Abilities

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Photo by Flickr user Paris on Ponce & Le Maison Rouge

In sixth grade, my best friend and I each paid $3 to a woman wearing a size-too-small horse sweatshirt for palm readings at the state fair. She ran her long, fake fingernails along the lines of my palm, informing me I loved music and would marry a man in uniform. My mother later scoffed at this news, asking, "Who doesn't love music?"

Mom was a believer, but of the discerning variety. She had taken me and my brother to see a man with ESP years earlier. He had audience members use a variety of blindfolds and masking tape to cover his eyes, and then he would read aloud from books by running his hands along them. He hypnotized a shy woman to parade around as a chicken. He didn't make predictions, but he obviously had something special that we marveled at.

I did not have that special skill, which is why it's so astonishing that I briefly worked as a phone psychic.

I'd heard about the job through a friend of mine, who worked in Human Resources for one of the most prominent phone psychic companies in the world. She knew that I'd learned to read tarot in college and that I often booked events and comedy clubs. Sometimes I was accurate, but mostly, I was entertaining. Once, at a New York Fashion Week party in SoHo, I read the cards for a nonbeliever who edited what many fancy fashion folk refer to as "the Bible." He was making fun of me when I leaned in and whispered, "Don't cheat on your wife."

He confessed that he'd just shared a cab with the potential mistress and they were planning to tryst within the week. Thirty minutes later, he'd emptied his pockets and placed all of his cash into my tip jar. The event planners paid me $200 an hour and I made even more in tips. Later, I brown-bagged a beer taken from the party while waiting for the subway, feeling like I'd fooled them all.

So I applied to the phone psychic job, more curious than optimistic about landing the gig. For my first "interview," I received a phone call from an older woman. I was supposed to tell this complete stranger about the life she was currently living and where it would take her. I shuffled my cards while she concentrated, wondering how the hell such a connection could occur over my iPhone. I told her what I'd told my friends and party guests: "Imagine I'm winding a music box. When it feels ready to play, tell me to stop."

"Ooh, I like that," she cooed.

I don't know why reading tarot worked well enough for people to pay me, but I imagine it's because the human race loves fiction.

I learned to read tarot using the Celtic spread, which offers interpretations on the recent past and near future. I flipped over the Disc and Cup cards, and told the woman over the phone that a Capricorn man was sucking her dry. This was the strongest detail I'd provided and it absolutely dazzled her. At that point she broke her character as interviewer and revealed that a Capricorn man had, indeed, drifted in and out of her life over the last 30 years. The next day, she approached my friend in HR and said, "You're so lucky to be friends with someone like Angela."

I was dumbstruck. Reading tarot is a combination of looking at the cards, their placement, and using intuition. I don't know why it's worked well enough for people to pay me, but I imagine it's because the human race loves fiction.

Your iPhone is basically psychic—it can tell if you're depressed.

In my second interview, I read for a man. I laid out his cards and interpreted a blonde woman who was about to completely fuck him over. After years of reading strangers for quick cash, I knew better than to tell someone that a person he cared about was going to take advantage of him. So instead, I described a blonde woman who was very strong and all business. He excitedly told me, "That's my partner!"

Being a half-ass psychic, I wondered whether he meant business partner or sex partner. He soon revealed she was both—and they were starting a company together. My intuition/magical powers told me this woman was about to leave him high and dry, but common sense told me that news might offend him and blow my chances of landing this job. Fortunetelling has no solid ethics, so I told him what I believed he wanted to hear. And I got the job.


Related: We Gave Bullshit E-meter Readings to Complete Strangers


The company that hired me boasted they only hire two out of 100 potential psychics. I felt excited, nervous, and mostly terrified I'd be exposed as a fraud. I was confident enough dealing with strangers at parties whom I'd probably never see again, but now I had an entire corporation to report to. They let me pick my psychic name and I did my best to choose something less stripper, more gypsy (which I'd love to reveal but cannot due to an ironclad NDA).

I was collecting $1.99 per minute to tell them what I saw in the cards, which was, by and large, bullshit.

My first shift was on Valentine's Day, which was like learning how to Parkour without first learning how to walk. The service would link to my personal phone with the caller from their 800 number, so I was able to work from home. That night my phone rang constantly with needy, single callers. The majority of these lonely hearts asked about people they hadn't even met yet from online dating sites. They were spending $3.50 a minute to obsess over someone they'd never even kissed. I was collecting $1.99 per minute to tell them what I saw in the cards, which was, by and large, bullshit. They were never going to meet, let alone, love these strangers. By the end of my evening I felt infected with desperation and insanity (which makes sense considering my employers had classified me as an "Empath," a skill that was added to my profile).

After Valentine's Day, it only got stranger. Callers asked about lost jewelry and I'd instead tell them about their children or partners, which only pissed them off. HR called and told me to stop doing that—if someone wanted "remote viewing," I was to tell him or her to call a psychic who had that skill listed on their profile. I was, and still am, impressed by how seriously my employer treated "real psychic powers" instead of just racking up minutes. But I also noticed that bad reviews never made it to my profile or anyone else's, which sickened me.

Minutes turned to hours easily, thanks to a few regulars. My favorite was an eccentric opera singer in her mid-60s who believed she could still give birth, and bragged that every young man she encountered wanted to put that bun in her oven. She often asked which of her priceless paintings she should sell to cover the bills. I dangled a rose quartz pendulum over a circle surrounded by the answers "yes," "no," and "maybe." I listed the titles of her artwork to "my spirit guide," a term I loathed but the callers loved. The crystal swung back and forth and I would report the answers to her as minute after minute robbed her of valuables. Several times, I told her I needed to hang up because we'd already run an hour over the end of my shift. She seemed so eager to blow her inheritance on the sound of my voice when a Magic 8 Ball could've delivered comparable results. She and several other clients invited me to visit them and suggested over and over that we exchange real phone numbers.

Most of the callers were terribly lonesome. They didn't want to know their futures as much as they wanted hope. I started the job feeling like a therapist and ended it feeling more like a prostitute. Except instead of sex, there was crying. Instead of revelation, there was blabbering. I was a pay-per-minute substitute for what might actually fill their voids. There was no way I could give them what they needed. I encouraged some to seek therapy or go to church, but HR told me to stop pushing therapy on people who were seeking a psychic. Eventually, we had a mutual termination of my online psychic profile.

More on psychics: I Had My Tea Leaves Read by Kim Kardashian's Psychic

It's been about five years since I've taken money for telling someone his or her future. If a friend asks, I'll read their tarot for free because that's really what I think it's worth. I can't tell you dates, I can't see faces; I'm no good at finding lost treasures or interpreting your dreams. I can only ever provide about five to ten minutes of interpretation and the rest of the time is spent fluffing the info, teasing it out of each person to appear larger than it actually is.

Maybe that's because I believe I've seen the real thing in a few people, one of whom I visit every few years. I won't go to her more than that because she gives so many specifics that it almost takes the fun out of life. She's told me I'm with one of my soulmates (which I found quite tolerable—this idea of several soulmates for each of us) and she's also said I'm an Indigo Crystal Child, which is her explanation for what makes me psychic.

I googled "Indigo Crystal Child." It's a nice idea: spirits from other worlds coming to this planet to save it. It sounds like the sort of well-illustrated children's book fantasy you could buy for anyone's baby shower, no matter their faith. But of all the things my trusted psychic has said, this one shook my faith in her. Maybe I just lack self-esteem. Maybe my third eye is cloudy (as she has insisted). Maybe I should drop this aversion and take more yoga, try another juice cleanse, reread The Alchemist, until I can look you in the eye and say with pride, "Hi, I'm Angela. I'm an Indigo Crystal Child, and I'm one seriously legit psychic."

But probably not.

Follow Angela Lovell on Twitter.

Shujaiya Dust

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Construction workers reclaim rebar from bombed buildings in Gaza's Shujaiya neighborhood, which Israel destroyed during 2014's Operation Protective Edge. All art by Molly Crabapple

"We accepted the sorrow, but the sorrow didn't accept us."

Ibtisam* sat in the dust, laughing, her broad, witty face framed by her flowered hijab. In her 45 years living in Gaza, she'd seen so much sorrow that laughing is the only real response.

Her husband had died during the second intifada from a stress-induced asthma attack she believes was triggered by the sound of a tank firing. He left her with four children to raise, which she did in a four-family home surrounded by olive trees, chicken coops, and a garden where she grew thyme.

That home is gone now—along with the rest of the Shujaiya neighborhood—due to Israeli shells and bulldozers during Operation Protective Edge , which hit Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Operation Protective Edge was Israel's third full-scale military incursion into the strip since Hamas took control in 2007. During their bombing campaign and ground invasion, Israeli forces killed over 2,100 Palestinians, according to the United Nations, 70 percent of them civilians, including nearly 500 children. Eleven thousand more were injured. A June 2015 UN report found evidence of war crimes.


Portrait of Ibtisam

While all Gaza suffered during the war, Shujaiya endured a unique decimation. One Gazan translator, a thin, sarcastic man in his 30s, struggled for words to describe what he'd seen there. He finally settled on one: hell. Will I die here? he remembered wondering during Protective Edge. Will I be left in the sun, swelling like a balloon, with no one able to pick up my corpse?

The devastation extended to industry and infrastructure. Israel destroyed water networks, universities, sewage pumping stations, and over 100 businesses, according to a report initiated by the Association of International Development Agencies. The main fuel tank of the Gaza power plant lay in ruins, and lack of spare parts left 25 percent of the population without power. Hospitals sank into darkness, Gazans could not locate their loved ones, and food and water grew scarce.

The war destroyed 18,000 housing units, leaving 108,000 Gazans homeless.

Ibtisam said that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), offered her no help, but the humanitarian organization Islamic Relief came to her rescue. She now lives with her kids in a trailer provided by Gaza's Ministry of Workers after selling the rubble of her former home for 700 shekels (about $185). With only a widow's pension and one son working as a day laborer, she was forced to wrack up debts to feed and clothe her children. Some days, the whole family lives on bread alone.

"We want to tell the world we're the same." Ibtisam said. "We don't want wars. We don't want blockades. We don't want peace just for a month, but for forever."


Portrait of Gazan translator

Nearly a year after the end of Protective Edge, little has changed in Shujaiya. A few houses have been patched up, but many more are nothing but rubble. Piles of prescriptions fluttered in front of the destroyed Ministry of Health. Everywhere homes lay collapsed like ruined layer cakes, the fillings composed of the flotsam of daily life: blankets, cooking pots, Qu'rans, cars. In one pile of dust I saw a child's notebook, abandoned. "My uncle collects honey," the nameless child had written on the first page.

Graffiti adorned many houses: "I Love Gaza" scrawled next to a heart pierced by a rocket, "I'm Still Here," AK-47s sketched by a fighter, a mural of a bleeding man pulling down the barrier between the West Bank and Israel to look at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site. For all the attention Banksy won painting on Gazan rubble, this art is far sharper. Banksy can come and go, but these artists are trapped here, in what many call an open-air prison. Defiance bleeds from their every line.

I watched as construction workers straightened rebar in front of the bombed out el-Wafa hospital, once a rehabilitation center for paralyzed adults. During Protective Edge, the Israeli army shelled the medical facility, knocking out the power and forcing nurses to carry disabled patients down pitch-black stairwells.

The ruins of El-Wafa Hospital, in Gaza's Shujaiya neighborhood

Rafiq, 30, is an engineer working for one of the companies hired by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to clear rubble. Clearing bombsites is always a technical challenge, but Israel's blockade, which limits importation of construction equipment and materials, has made it much harder. Donkeys hauled loads of rubble. Workers straightened rebar with crude hand tools and rocks. Sometimes Rafiq's crew found unexploded bombs, which they had to call the police to disarm. Worse were the bodies. Once, Rafiq stumbled across a dead child, still clutching his school bag. Another time his crew dug out a mother whose head had been crushed while she was shielding her baby, her long hair tangled in the dust.

Shujaiya wasn't supposed to be like this. After Israel and Palestinian armed groups called a ceasefire in 2014, donor countries gathered in Cairo and pledged $3.5 billion dollars to rebuild Gaza. But the high of good PR fades fast, and as of April 2015 donors had only given a quarter of what they promised.

To deal with the lack of funds, the UNDP divided ruined homes into three tiers, depending on the amount of damage. According to sources working in rubble clearing, only owners of homes with minor damage have seen cash or materials. According to Gazans I spoke to, the help offered was rarely enough to fix what has been destroyed.


Related: Israel's Radical Left


Ibrahim Abu Omar, 57, is one of the many Gazans who has taken rebuilding into his own hands. He served my translator and me tea in the concrete shell of what would be his new house. The gray box took ten months for his family to build and cost $15,000, which he had saved working as a truck driver. He recently took out another $12,000 loan. Despite this, the home is nowhere near finished. The shell sat next to a twisted pile of rebar left by a private company he'd paid to clear his land.

Ibrahim remembers every conflict going back to 1967's Six-Day War. He remembers the lemon trees his father planted when he was a boy. He remembers 2006, the year of Hamas's election and Israel's subsequent blockade. "Everything was destroyed after that," he said with a sigh.

During Protective Edge, he had to flee his home with nothing but the clothes on his back, running with his family through the streets till he found a UNRWA school where he stayed for weeks. He returned to find both his home and his son's neighboring house completely gone. So that Israeli soldiers did not have to move through the streets, where they would be exposed, Israeli tanks cleared paths by firing into housing units. What shells started, bulldozers finished. Ibrahim's house lay crushed under the rubble of his son's.

After the ceasefire was declared, Hamas's charitable movement gave Ibrahim's family $2,000. The money quickly disappeared on food and other essentials. When he began to rebuild, Gaza's municipal government demanded $2,500 to register the new house and connect it to the power grid. This was one of many stories I would hear of the municipal government using the destruction of people's homes to extract fees or back taxes.

If you're with Hamas, you have a good life. If you're not... – Ibrahim Abu Omar

At least they gave him some money initially, however. Ibrahim said that none of the NGO's swarming Gaza gave him a shekel, though UNRWA did stop by to take photos.

I asked him what he thought of Hamas. He laughed, then looked nervously to the side. "If you're with Hamas, you have a good life. If you're not..." Ibrahim had been employed by the Palestinian Authority, whose dominant Fatah party has spent the last decade in an occasionally violent struggle with Hamas. Even now, employees of the PA living in Gaza told me that, despite receiving salaries, they don't show up for work—though they nervously declined to spell out the reason.

Meanwhile, Israel maintains its blockade on building materials coming into Gaza, claiming that it wants to prevent them from being used by Hamas to create tunnels into Israel and Egypt. According to Israeli human rights group Gisha, Israel has only allowed about 1.3 million tons of construction material to enter Gaza since September, which is merely a fifth of the 5 million tons experts estimate are needed to repair the war's damage. However, Israel has only allowed about 1.3 million tons to enter Gaza, or a fifth of the amount . This trickle is so inadequate that Oxfam has estimated it will take 100 years to rebuild— assuming Israel doesn't invade Gaza in the intervening century.

Ibrahim gestured to buckets of cement and explained that because of the blockade, he's only able to purchase cement in a weight meant for walls, not ceilings. He mixed it with water to make it light enough, but worried the roof will cave in after a few years.

"There are no engineers. No one's watching. The house falls down and no one cares." He gave a disgusted shrug. "What can you do?" It's an expression I heard over and over again in Gaza.


A boy digs through the rubble of his former home

A few hundred yards down, two boys dug at the rubble of a collapsed multifamily dwelling that once was home to 80 people. Their grandfather, Ouz Abu Mohammed al-Ejla, owned a small construction business that had employed the boys' dad. But the company's tools and vehicles lay buried beneath layers of shattered concrete. The boys poked at the dust with shovels, more out of habit than belief that there was anything they'd be able to salvage.

"Don't cry about someone who lost his money. Cry about someone who lost his work," al-Ejla told me. He was a towering man, handsome even at his age, with high cheekbones. The war has exacted a brutal toll on his family. His son had been shot in the ankle. His wife lost her baby. When the family finally fled the bombs, she was so ill her daughters had to carry her. The family lived crammed for weeks in a single room of a school, starving on canned fish and beans. Because of overcrowding, fights broke out with their new roommates. The women had nightmares of glass, dust, and shaking walls.

After the war, Hamas gave al-Ejla $2,000 for rent, for an extended family of 80 people. It was gone after just two months.

We're contractors. We can build houses... We don't need help. Just give us money. – Ouz Abu Mohammed al-Ejla

Al-Ejla set to working on repairing a building for his family to live in, buying second-hand materials and fixing up bathrooms, doors, and entire flats. While he was working, a UN employee approached him and suggested he register for aid. UN employees assessed his building to have $17,000 of damage.

But Al-Ejla told me that when he went to the UN office to collect his check, they claimed he was only promised $10,700, and they would pay him in two installments. Worried that he'd never see any money at all, he agreed to the lower amount and continued working, cementing, and roofing with his sons, paying $2,000 out of his pocket that UN officials assured him would be reimbursed. The first check, for $4,000, came, along with a plaque bearing the joint logos of the UNDP, the Arab Monetary Fund, and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa. It proudly proclaimed that these groups generously contributed money to rebuild 600 housing units affected by the war.

That was the last he heard from the UN.

When I asked al-Ejla about the plaque, he threw up his hands in contempt.

"We're contractors. We can build houses." al-Ejla said in his booming voice. "We don't need help. Just give us money. The cement for these walls cost $6,000 alone."

Other NGO programs proved just as frustrating. Al-Ejla and his family waited in line for hours for help that turned out to be coupons for cheap plastic water jugs, 30-year-old rice, and cheese "a cow wouldn't eat."

"I don't care about politics, just my family, so why do I get this?" al-Ejla asked.

A man sits in the ruins of his home in Gaza's Shujaiya neighborhood

According to Israeli politicians across the spectrum, Hamas is the cause of all these woes. Because Gazans elected Hamas in 2006, and the group later seized control of the strip in 2007, they are fair game.

Hamas itself isn't much of a threat. It has ineffectual rockets—since 2007, rocket and mortar attacks have killed 44 people within Israel. Hamas's municipal government is so broke that many civil servants have gone months without pay. Before most of the smuggling tunnels were destroyed, they were more like the besieged residents' economic lifelines.

But Israeli politicians are more concerned with Hamas as a PR construct—one that lets them recast aggression as self-defense.

Israel invokes Hamas to justify its hundreds of ceasefire violations, its restrictions on Gazans' movement, and the blockade that devastates Gaza's economy, grinding residents' future as fine as Shujaiya's dust.

Whether or not Hamas is at fault, Gaza suffers. Despite having no proof that Hamas leadership was involved, the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in the West Bank provided Netenyahu with Operation Protective Edge's justification. In the days after the kidnapping, Israel launched airstrikes on Gaza, and arrested hundreds of Palestinians, including most of Hamas' West Bank leadership. When Hamas retaliated with rockets, Israel had its excuse for open war.

On the sea's horizon, I could see gold pinpricks—the lights of Israeli gunships. Then, I heard the growl of fighter jets.

On my last night in Gaza, I saw that sort of misattributed revenge take place on a smaller scale.

A Salafist group opposing Hamas shot three rockets into Israel. They landed in a field where they burnt a small circle in the grass. Israel holds Hamas responsible for any rocket attack coming from the strip, even those launched by its enemies. The drones buzzed more loudly than usual above our heads that night.

I sat on the balcony of my apartment, overlooking Gaza's beach, where during the day, little boys hawked boat rides and couples smoked shisha. A year before, Israeli shells killed four children on that beach. A week after my visit, Israeli internal investigation would absolve the army of any wrongdoing.

The drones grew louder. On the sea's horizon, I could see gold pinpricks—the lights of Israeli gunships. Then, I heard the growl of fighter jets.

These were common sounds, on a common night, in that uncommon, besieged, and defiant city.

By midnight, the shells began to fall.

Follow Molly on Twitter.

*Some sources declined to give their last names.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: ‘A Confederate Flag Turned Me Gay’ Is an Actual E-Book That Someone Self-Published

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Want to know what racist skinheads think about the Charleston shooting?

Move over, T-Rex—here comes Confederate flag erotica. Occupying a previously untapped intersection between racist symbols, marriage equality, and right-wing conspiracy is A Confederate Flag Turned Me Gay, a new 20-page e-book.

It all starts with a warm memory of the unnamed narrator sticking his penis into a glory hole adorned by the Stars and Bars in the bathroom of his local gym. Flash-forward to present time and our protagonist is the webmaster of Sexy Rebel Hoes, a site that has the tagline: "Babes So Hot They'll Make the South Rise Again." Though his online fame means he's something of a ladies' man—our narrator tells us about countless women "riding on [his] big throbbing cock and screaming the name of Robert E. Lee while saluting the good old Stars and Bars," none of them have given him the kind of orgasm he found back at the Confederate Glory Hole. That is, until he's paid a visit by a mysterious (and well-hung) Leo Dick.

Written under the pen name LeRoy Ned Malone, and dedicated to "all the horrible bigots in the world," A Confederate Flag Turned Me Gay features gems like this:

Honestly, I wanted him to leave so Busty Betsy could flip me over and give me a proper fucking, but as an entrepreneur, I had to be willing to listen to new ways to make money. Besides, there was something pretty damn exciting about hearing a sales pitch while getting my butthole sanitized.

And:

For the next ten minutes, I pummeled him like a jackhammer while he shouted the name of General Robert E. Lee. As much as I knew it must've made the great leader spit in his grave, it made me hornier than ever before.

Want some more in-depth stories about the Confederate flag?

1. Smiling Faces, Terrible Racists: The Dangerous Culture of White Possession in the Carolinas
2. Portland's Sons of the Confederacy Are Fighting for the Soul of the Confederacy in the Pacific Northwest
3. Why Some People Think Dylann Roof is Getting Special Treatment
4. What Racists Think of the Charleston Shooting

A Confederate Flag Turned Me Gay by LeRoy Ned Malone is available on Amazon for 99 cents.

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