Something a human being said about food that they were going to eat.

Though Reddit claims to be "the front page of the internet," it usually hits the news because of its nurturing attitude toward the asinine or the evil. Be it white power, radicalized sexism, or advocacy on behalf of gamers (a.k.a. radicalized white power sexism), it's hard to find a group Reddit's mods won't drag their feet about banning.

Reddit users correctly complain that focus on controversial subReddits, like the now-defunct Coontown or fatpeoplehate, ignores the real Reddit experience. That real experience is a millions-strong audition to be that day's avatar of Reddit's ideal user, best personified as a generically-masculine college bro who worships video games, cops, and acoustic covers of pop songs with equal blank ferocity.

Reddit thrives on the obliteration of nuance, sacrificing everything for convenience. Memes make humor about reassurance rather than surprise. The only measure of worth in the Reddit abyss is based solely on whether or not something confirms a user's narrow set of biases. This is further warped by a kind of contrived condescension20-year-olds calling kids "little ones" or "little shits"that feels like a relic of an older internet.

All photos via Imgur

A perfect summary of the site's ethos, a large subReddit network called sfwpornnetwork, contains a multitude of sub-boards of "cool" images to be consumed fleetingly. They're called things like "knifeporn," "megalightporn," and "humanporn." with everything posted within there to provoke an "awesome" from whoever's looking at it.

The more mundane the page, the more startling the toll this culture is taking on the the innocents trapped within. Take food: how has Reddit changed the eating habits of its users?

Reddit's food section has the usual internet food tropes of pig-corpse excess and recipe-book photography. However, many of the users' own cookery attempts have developed an aesthetic all of their ownone that surpasses guys called gimmedemboobs presenting what looks like an improvised prison lasagne as their take on food-blog staple cast-iron pizza (though there's plenty of that, too). An embodiment of Reddit's baby-man spirit has emerged through the medium of photos of their weird food.

Reddit's communal, studied, folksy laziness is exemplified on r/food, where the indulgent, greasy lifestyles hinted at by cookery photo galleries invert the carefully-honed, horn-rimmed Stepford aesthetic to which most food blogs aspire.

The first thing you notice about Reddit's amateur cookery, even before the general wetness of all the food, is the background presence of alcohol. Somehow alcohol and cookery have fused together in Reddit chefs' minds as some facsimile of adulthood, and the results are never subtlelike this "cheesy taco soup," for instance. Several of the posts I've linked here are from the r/drunkencookery subboard, not because alcohol is more prevalent there but because that is purely about presenting your own food, away from all the restaurant Instagrams and Serious Eats hasselback potatoes.

Aside from booze, the ubiquity of which I cannot stress enough, my favorite background trope is awful Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 soundtrack-core being played on giant flatscreen TVs. Though being grown up is clearly important to these men, they are doing adulthood on their own warped terms.

Because Reddit is where context goes to die, it's also interest seeing how the never-flagging trend of re-contextualizing fast food is interchangeable with just piling one junk food on top of another. There are two basic ideas of re-contextualizing food here: what their parents made but bigger, and what they can get in a fast food place but more gross.

Traditional gender roles also emerge as a theme amid all this bleak cheese melting. Be it a man treating himself to some dude-food 'cause the "little lady" is away, directing "his woman" to make food that will kill them, or one lamenting that he is still single despite managing to not cremate a salad. Seeing "why am I still single" hints underneath images like this tells you everything you need to know about life in this cathedral of diminished expectations.

Some intersection of the access to the Food Network, over-generous parents, and the aforementioned diminished expectations means that many users present copious photographs of the making (and often burning) of a basic meal as a tutorial, complete with the writing style of a parent who has logged onto their child's Facebook to vet their friends.

Want to read about food that's actually edible? Try our food site, Munchies.

The confidence with which sweaty, charred food is billed as having a "nice crust," and TV-chef staples like shocking in ice are combined with brazen, bizarre mistakes, speaks to how completely food media's mission to make everyone feel like experts regardless of skill locks in with Reddit's priorities.

Some posts go above and beyond this aesthetic and, indeed, the limits of human reality. This post, even if you disregard the coffee tequila and winking blunt ashing, seems to feature pictures of an alien landscape instead of food. Meanwhile, the accumulated cosmic doom in this post, where a guy actually has a machine to check his blood alcohol level to prove how drunk he is to you, totally eclipses an episode of True Detective or a Thomas Ligotti book.

There are many different kinds of hell in Reddit's amateur cookery; it's difficult to find one post to summarize it all. After all of my studying, though, if I assembled a 20 person team of set-dressers, writers, and sociologists I still couldn't come up with this post. It is a perfect piece of machinery wherein every one of the interlocking gears of sweatiness, confidence, self-pity, conspicuous alcohol, and every other trope one might come across while trawling these posts interlock and work in unholy motion.

The crucial element here is that all of this is presented with the expectation of praise. Every single image you've see linked here was earnestly created for the express purpose of seeking congratulation. This is what happens when you potentially gamify every waking moment: reality can't take it any more. So next time you hear about how Reddit is basically good aside from the prominent hate groups, take it with a pinch of salt.

Follow Sean McTiernan on Twitter.

Don't do drugs, kids. If only so your dad doesn't freak out and get arrested. Photo via Wikipedia

A Nova Scotian dad is facing charges after he allegedly confronted a woman for supposedly giving his 13-year-old daughter "molly." Stephen Sampson, who is from Dominion, Cape Breton, allegedly entered the woman in question's home without her consent while in possession of a weapon and threatened her.

Sampson alleges that the woman he approached had bought a bottle of rum for his daughter and her 14-year-old best friend, and then proceeded to offer them a drug to "sober them up," which he he referred to as "molly," while she partied with the teenagers in her home.

"Then this girl introduced four lines of molly, which is a highly dangerous narcotic. It's a mix of all kinds of dangerous drugs," Sampson told CBC.

Sampson is probably referring to MDMA, which in certain circlessuch as among teenagers, American EDM ravers, and dadsis sometimes referred to as "molly." However, his description of the substance as being a concoction of "all kinds of dangerous drugs" is a bit misleading since, ideally, MDMA isn't supposed to contain any other drug.

"One was tearing off her clothes trying to release whatever was in her skin; the other had a bloody nose," Sampson said. "My daughter, she was scared she was dying, so they told me everythingwhere they were, what had happened."

To me, those symptoms suggest meth, bath salts, research chemicals (or some combination of the three) rather than "MDMA" or "Molly" as reported.

Since no charges have been brought against the woman Sampson allegedly confronted for supposedly assisting his daughter and her friend in getting fucked up, there is no indication the drug the girls took has been tested by police to confirm its identity.

Cape Breton police did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the case.

Sampson will be appearing in court on November 25.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Illustration by Wren McDonald

Last weekend I went to a party in the kind of loft that has a 'zine library in the living room where a TV might have been. I was there with a friend-of-a-friend who had recently graduated from an Ivy League law school and was about to start a job working for a giant corporate firm and defending CEOs from sexual harassment claims, or something. Needless to say, he was a pariah at the party, and people kept politely excusing themselves as soon as they reached the "what do you do?" point in their conversations with him.

Eventually we were exiled to the roof, where I ran into someone I hadn't seen since college and who, incidentally, had graduated from the same law school as my friend-of-a-friend and taken a similarly soul-deadening job to pay off his massive student debt. As I listened to the two of them talk shop, I imagined I was looking through a blurry pane of glass at some alternate future version of myselflike many of the young, broke, and verbally inclined, I've often had a fantasy where I say "fuck it," pack myself off to law school, and eventually land a six-figure job that, whatever its flaws, will at least put me on solid financial ground. Would that be selling out? Probably, but at least you'd be getting a pretty good price.

Previously: When Should You Start Thinking About Buying a House if You're Young and Broke?

Is law school actually a ticket to upper-middle-class respectability, or a get-out-of-jail-free card if you've wasted four years studying something useless? When you're stuck in a rut and dreaming of richesor at least being able to afford to live aloneis going back to school a good plan?

Andrew Hanson, a senior analyst at Georgetown's Center for Education and the Workforce, told me that the number of people with grad degrees has always been increasing, and it exploded in the 90s. Now almost 10 percent of the workforce has an education beyond four-year college. "If you look at the average case almost always worth it," he said. "But there's always some risk involved. That's the thing. There are no guarantees anymore."

Every educational path has its pitfalls, even if you're going to a bona fide school and not something like Donald Trump's fake "university." As the lawyer-to-be who came to the party with me once said, "The thing about going to law school for big law is it completely desensitizes you to humanity." Is there a better way? I surveyed a few popular postgrad plans in search of an answer.

Though molding young minds sounds like a good, even cushy, gig in the abstract, the realities are brutal.

Academia

I did many, many unspeakably stupid things when I was 21, but the dumbest of all was almost getting an advanced degree in Biblical Hebrew. Ultimately I decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life analyzing Deuteronomy. And though I often wonder what my life would have been like had I stuck with it, the fact that I even had these doubts is proof that I shouldn't have tried to get a PhD. Studying something for almost a decade and then talking about it for the rest of your life takes an incredible amount of passion. But even for people who really love their areas of study, the current state of academia sounds designed to produce misery for those entering it.

According to a Georgetown report authored by Hanson called "The Economic Value of College Majors," just over 25 percent of people with undergrad liberal arts degrees pursue a higher education in that field. If I had gone down that route, my job today would probably be teaching, with the hopes (?) of encouraging another 21-year-old into a graduate program where their only job prospect upon graduation is... teaching. And though molding young minds sounds like a good, even cushy, gig in the abstract, the realities are brutal. A 2014 report from the Modern Language Association found that only 60 percent of people who graduate with PhDs in the humanities will be able to find tenure-track positions. The rest will likely end up teaching classes while hoping a position opens up (or just quit the field entirely). And that's an extremely tough route to take.

According to an article in the Washington Post, the national adjunct professor pay average is $2,700 per course. And that's before taxes. That means that people often have to cobble together schedules at several different universities, like my undergrad classmate Michael, who decidedunlike meto take his English degree to its logical conclusion.

Watch: Inside America's Lucrative Divorce Industry

My old friend was offered a financial package at his PhD program that required him to work as an adjunct. He got his master's degree and dropped out of the program to see what work was available. Turns out, not very much.

"It was shortly after the 2008 recession, and the only work I could find outside of teaching was temp work," he told me. One of those temping assignments involved showing up to a mud run and spraying people in the face with a hose. "And the following day I had to show up and teach analytical reading and writing skills. It just seemed like there was a disconnect there."

He never taught more than three classes, while also grading essays online and tutoring, in addition to his temp work. "It was easily over 50 hours of work between everything in order to survive," he said. "And I was still barely making it. I distinctly remember having $7 in my bank account even though I was working all the time." Eventually, he couldn't take it anymore, and got back into a PhD programthis time for a slightly more practical version of an English degree, scaling back on his ambitions because he doesn't ever want to face unemployment again.

"Right now the job market in my field is good, but that could easily change," he said. "I know a lot of people who are stuck in a sort of adjunct hell."

But Hanson, the Georgetown analyst, said this isn't the experience for all PhD studentsit just depends on what your degree is.

"If you get a PhD in economics, the unemployment rate is basically zero," Hanson explained. "You're basically guaranteed a job, and you're guaranteed high pay. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be working in academia, but you could be in the government sector or a think tank. There are just so many jobs out there."

Business School

The idea that econ majors are so valuable made me think. I'm definitely not good enough at math to get a PhD in that area, but could I manage to pull off an MBA? Business school has the reputation of being a giant kegger with some math thrown in, which sounds pretty fun. But there are 13,000 of these institutions, which means that there are an unbelievable amount of wannabe sharks earning those degrees. Does a relatively normal person have a shot when competing against people who think Wall Street is a motivational movie?

The answer, remarkably, is "maybe." Or at least, that's what I heard from Stacy Blackman, founder and president of Stacy Blackman Consulting, which coaches students who want to get into top MBA programs. She told me a story she's heard a million times about a teacher with a liberal arts background who wants to head to the famed Wharton Business School but doesn't have any heavy-hitting math classes under her belt or any real experience to speak of. So long as she has smart essays, good recommendations, and a solid score on the GMAT (like the GRE for business folks), she'll be let in to Wharton and allowed to attend as long as she takes one calculus class and earns a score of A- or higher. Blackman added it's enough for an applicant to take an online calc class and get an A to prove themselves competent.

"Details change, but that's the idea," Blackman said. "They do not want a class full of math brains. There are plenty of people who do not have that background but have other things to contribute100 percent you do not need business or math to get in, and they take and truly want all types."

The data suggests that, unlike humanities programs, business school is pretty much always a good idea (at least financially). According to Forbes, the median salary for an MBA holder is $100,000though that number varies from school to school; graduates of Jerry Falwell's religious business school tend to be less sought-after than Columbia alums.

"I think the evidence is good that there's a ton of jobs out there and a high demand for those leadership skills and whatnot," Hanson added. "The wages are really high, the employment opportunities are really high. But again, it depends on the program. If you get into one of the most elite programs, you're going to be making six figures for sure, but other MBA programsmiddle tier or lower tieryou probably won't be."

Law school is a really miserable experience, and you absolutely should not do it unless you actually want to be a lawyer.

Law School

This all kind of sounded too good to be true. If all I had to do in order to get admitted to Wharton and make bank was take an online calc class, I would definitely study hard enough to get an A. So why wasn't everyone doing this? Well, there's the fact that not everyone wants to work in business. The money sounds good, but I can't imagine being happy at that sort of job any more than I can imagine a profitable career in Biblical Hebrew. There's a reason so many people would rather chase after the fantasy of tenure as a liberal arts prof than transform into a young executive.

Which brings me back to my lawyer friend with the soul-crushing, high-paying job he was discussing on that rooftop.

As in academia and business school, it's extremely important to go to a good school if you want to be a lawyer. Hanson said that only two-thirds of JD graduates today are even working in the field.

"If you're in a very low-tier law school, it's probably not worth it to go, because you're probably going to have a hard time getting a job," he told me. "But if you're in a middle or high tier, you should be fine."

It's also important to note that showing up for classes by no means guarantees you can pass the bar. For instance, between 2010 and 2014, the New York state passage rate among first-time test-takers hovered right around 75 percent. So while almost anyone could find a law school that would accept them, not everyone is going to come out prepared to make a bunch of money.

That fact is compounded by a trend that began in the 80s. According to Hanson, a lot of companies have found it more efficient to just hire an in-house lawyer rather than get billed by a firm whenever they need legal work. They can pay those in-house lawyers less and get away with it because the field is so saturated with lawyers looking for any work they can get. And between 2003 and 2013, 12 major firms have collapsed entirely, causing one New Republic writer to claim we had entered "the last days of big law."

And while the annual salary for attorneys was just over $130,000 in 2013, a slew of recent graduates told me that they'd estimate only 10 percent of people from top-tier schools can make anything approaching that right out of the gate.

"It's a bit antiquated to say that like all these dopes are getting handed 200k a year," one told me.

"I'd just add that law school is a really miserable experience, and that you absolutely should not do it unless you actually want to be a lawyer," said another.

"And as to whether anyone can do it, absolutely," a third friend added. "Anyone can, and some real idiots are good at it, too."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of 20th Century Fox

This week NASA announced that they had evidence of free-flowing water on Mars. That would have been news to astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon), the main character of The Martian. Abandoned onMars, Watney finds himself badly in need of an ample supply of water in orderto grow food. He's got Martian dirt. He's got dried astronaut poop. But he needs water,so comes up with a clever technique to make H2O by burning hydrazine,only he gets the details a little wrong. Cue the explosion.

Watney survives this disaster and plenty of others in thisfeel-good pro-science, pro-NASA love story between a man and his spacepotatoes. If, somehow, you're too callous to be lured in by hominid-tuberosumromance, then rest assured there's plenty of physics, chemistry, moreexplosions, all kinds of nerdy heroism, and lots and lots of smart people ofall ages, races, and genders getting together to, as Watney says, "science theshit" out of all their problems.

The Martian, closely adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is the latestinstallment of an old genrescience-fiction competence porn. These are stories featuring highly skilled individuals or groups (often scientists) who navigate or pacify hostile environments through their wits and talents. The genre hails from the "golden age" of science fiction, but has tendrils stretching back into the 18th centuryand maybe even to Shakespeare. Nearly every heist movie, spy movie, or action flick features characters who are good at fighting, shooting,lock-picking, driving, or whatever aerial acrobatics it takes to get into thesecret locked vault of doombut most of the time the focus isn't on problem-solving. Examples of recent competence porn match-ups include Tom Hanks and crew or Sandra Bullock versus space (Apollo 13,Gravity); Liam Neeson versus arctic (The Grey); Robert Redford versusocean (All Is Lost).

There's no high concept here. The movie isn'ttrying to present a realistic exploration into the psychology of a man maroonedon an alien worldand thank goodness. The Martian just works as anenjoyable take on a classic genre, adapting the "marooned sailor in space"story, sometimes called Robinsonade, without falling into the trap of smug self-satisfaction at thecleverness of its heroes. Here are three of its best features: First, RidleyScott's Mars is beautiful and alien. I never got tired of the landscapes. Second,the teams of people back on Earth and on the spaceship (the rest of Damon'screw) are funny, diverse, and all well-imagined. They aren't the protagonists,but they matter to the story, doing a little to undermine the white-guy-saviorproblem. Third, the movie uses humor to poke fun at itself, including ahilariously meta bit involving Sean Bean.

Matt Damon is also really good. He knows justhow much to milk the emotions of being alone on an alien world. He lets hisMark Watney be vulnerable, but the character's irreverence keeps the scenes,even the ones in which he's literally the only person on the planet, rollbriskly along. Watney does break down both physically and mentally, but thischaracter study never takes over the movie.

Compare that to Castaway, which skips ahead four years justas Tom Hanks's character was becoming interesting and figuring out how to liveon his deserted island. That movie was not about survival, but the mental deprivation that comes with extreme isolation. The Martian is about the body, and how it can survive when thrown into the wilderness.

Since its origins in the 18th century, competence porn has always been concerned with contrasts between civilization and the wilderness. RobinsonCrusoe is the most famous early example of the genre, but there's a hugearray of both "real-life" and fantasy survivor texts. RobertMarkley, a literature professor atthe University of Illinois who has written about both 18th-century survivalistfantasies and Mars, sees the natural connections between Crusoe's desertedCaribbean island and the alien world. He told me, "Robinson Crusoe is aquintessential fantasy story about survival. Defoe's great achievement is thathe makes fantasy look like reality."

The Martian works much the sameway. These survival stories feel real, even though of course both depend onsequences of luck and circumstance that could never happen. (It's worth noting that many people think a Mars expedition would be a terrible idea, period. Markley told me, "Anyrealistic story of a Martian expedition should be called, 'The Donner Party,'" afterthe famous 19th-century California expedition that, according tolegend, resulted in cannibalism.)

On VICE: Taxi to Mars:

The Martian is a frontier movie, and a very American one. These survival fantasies often reflect their origins. Robinson Crusoe's mastery of the island reflects a sense of 18th-century Englishness. Swiss Family Robinson, as my friend the writer Arthur Chu pointed out to me, depicts a Northern European family as "the master engineers of civilization in 'darkest Africa.'" Scott's film is seemingly aware of these pitfalls and avoids them: Watney makes fun of himself and is aided by a diverse crew, including a female commander; back on Earth, China comes to the rescue at a critical moment. Venkat Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is half-Indian, half-African-Americanhe reveals his father was Hindu and his mother Baptist at one pointwho leads the rescue mission. A hyper-nerdy (and perhaps intended to be autistic) African-American mathematician comes up with the critical innovation to make that rescue possible.

This diversity is nice but merely icing on the cakewhich is, of course, the actual doing of deeds, the conquering force of competence. In the theater where I watched the film, when the key moments of the rescue took place, the audience gasped, sighed, and then clapped. What better reaction could a filmmaker hope for?

Follow David onTwitter.

The Martian is intheaters nationwide today.

'Star Wars: Battlefront' comes out in November

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell: OK, in the absence of a massive, cosmic scrolling-text intro, I'll begin by saying that the Jedi Knight series and in particular, Jedi Academy, are the best Star Wars games ever made, because they are among the very, very few to make lightsaber combat fun or challenging. True, JA lacks the grand narrative arc of a Knights of the Old Republic, and for much of it you're basically just trotting from room to room, murdering Dark Siders and pushing buttons. But I challenge you to dwell on such trivialities while somebody's swinging a blade at your head. Especially if you've forgotten which hotkey activates Force Speed.

Sean Cleaver: It seems like a galaxy far, far away now where the saga of Kyle Katarn graced our computers. I loved the early games like Dark Forces and Jedi Knight. They were fun to play and still kept the familiarity of the Star Wars universe. Those in-house engines from LucasArts were great, too: "Jedi" for Dark Forces (and the much underrated Outlaws) and "Sith" for Jedi Knight. But if we're going with a big hitter straight away, it's got to feature dogfighting, and that can only mean 1994's TIE Fighter.

Okay, so I know X-Wing was first and it was great, and the graphics are horribly dated, and it has a complete lack of Admiral Ackbar. But there has never been a more fun or challenging licensed combat game than TIE Fighter. Firstly, you're the bad guy. You're the kamikaze laser fodder dressed in black plastic and put into a shieldless yet highly responsive craft. Then there's the thrill of that combat, of being able to violently steer your ship, dodging fire that will destroy you in an instant, and lining up a soon-to-be-dust A-Wing in your crosshairs. I dare say that nothing has ever come near it, with the exception of Elite and maybe another Star Wars game we're sure to mention.

EE-T: Hah, that takes me back. One thing I always liked about the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games was the micro-managerial stuffrerouting power between your ship's systems, or bossing your wingman around. In theory having that weight of tactical considerations pressing down on you during a dogfight isn't fun at all, but it really added to the illusion of the cockpit for me, and I loved the idea that you could "cheat" the combat balancing by funneling all energy into your shields while your ship self-repairs, and suchlike. Not that I was ever talented enough to pull that off in practice.

Regarding playing as a bad guy, it was nice to get insight on some of the key events in the chronology from the other side. Actually tracking down the Bothans who are passing info about the Death Star to the rebels, for example. I think that exploring events from movies or books in different forms is something plenty of licensed games get wrongfor example, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, where you're basically in charge of a watered-down B-team who follow behind the main cast, re-enacting many of the same battlesbut in this case I found it quite compelling.

Still, I stand by my choice of Jedi Academy. Lightsabers, dammit! It's amazes me that so many Star Wars games either leave them out or reduce them to glorified police batons.

A screenshot from 'Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy'

SC: Well, before we age ourselves too much and end up with nostalgia for the old Wire Frame cabinet, we should probably talk about the Nintendo era, because arguably, during the late 1990s, two of the best Star Wars games were released on their platforms: the N64's Episode I: Racer and the GameCube's Rogue Squadron II.

Before these games, Star Wars on consoles was a fairly drab affair. There was a terrible Game Gear and Master System game, the SNES's "Super" series from JVC and the 32X port of Star Wars Arcade (although Dark Forces was PS1 as well). But there seemed to be a lack of fun in those, and at a time when the new movie, The Phantom Menace, was making waves for being rubbish, LucasArts took the best bits of it and made something awesome with Racer. As far as racing games go, I'd say it's definitely on par with, if not better than Wipeout.

Of course the Rogue Squadron series did something that no one else has truly matched in getting the controllers precisely right for the games and giving fans what they wanted. Rebel Assault tried it and failed but Rouge Leader on the GameCube specifically made an incredible space arena come to life. OK, I know it's not got the lightsabers, but it does have the Millennium Falcon, which probably gives us our first real challenge here. You are a believer in the Force, and I tend to shoot first.

I mean, the Millennium Falcon! That is the surely the best non-Jedi thing, apart from being one of the Fetts, which no one has truly nailed.

Related, on Motherboard: Can You Watch 18 Hours of 'Star Wars' Unboxing or Will Your Eyes Simply Explode?

EE-T: I'd forgotten about Racer. Careful thoughI'm a big old Wipeout fan, and generally upend tables at the suggestion that any other hover racer has it beat. You're right, though. It was the best thing to come out of The Phantom Menace by miles, fight scene choreography aside, and as for Rogue Leader on GameCubeman, what a gem. I cut my pilot's teeth on the Colony Wars series from Psygnosis, so would have preferred the RS2 campaign to be a little more open-ended (and just plain longer), but the handling is marvelous and no other developer has captured the look of Star Wars as closely, from engine glare to the texturing on cockpit struts. DICE will raise the bar yet again with the new Battlefront, I guess. I hope they add in proper space combat at some stage, preferably not for a hefty fee.

As for Fett-themed games, I had the misfortune to play Star Wars: Bounty Hunter on the GameCube, which stars Boba's dad Jango. It's not an irredeemable game, but it's fairly graceless and clunky: You jump and somersault like somebody's physically rotating the character model with their hands. Star Wars 1313 could have been good, as dangerous as it is to judge a game on the strength of an E3 demo: Cutting a long story short, it began life as more of a generalist action-adventure, but Lucas asked the team to make it a Boba Fett game after a few years in development. There would have been a jetpack, open-world bounty hunting and everything. Alas, it's one of many promising projects LucasArts managed to screw up somehow. I wonder where the IP would be if the publisher had been a little less prone to mismanagement or executive reshuffles, and less constrained by the wider politics of the Lucas empire. In their defense, it's not like every Star Wars game is forgettablejust, er, most of themand individual development teams must shoulder some of the blame for project misfires.

Anyhoo, I'm straying from the topic. I'll see your Rogue Squadron and raise you a Knights of the Old Republic. That's probably the top Star Wars game "objectively" speaking, right? Certainly it's the most frequently serenaded. And you could argue that BioWare's own, very obviously Star Wars-y Mass Effect series wouldn't have existed without the formative experience of that company working on KOTOR. And how about That Twist?

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Related: Watch VICE's film on the kids who remade Indiana Jones shot for shot

SC: It's the Star Wars game I hear the most about and quite possibly one of the most readily available now it's on PC, Mac, Xbox, and iOS. It's certainly the game that nailed BioWare's place as one of the great RPG studios. Playing a bit of Sith's advocate here, it isn't a game that's aged well when you hear the dialogue. It also was, as you say, incredibly superseded by how great the Mass Effect series was. I can't recall anyone else tackling a Star Wars-based RPG before it or even after it.

Yes it has a great twist which allows you to actually have a consequence with your choices, but it takes a long time to get there. In my mind, a great Star Wars game is one that can give you repeat business for hours on end over many sittings, and while KOTOR is a lengthy game, it's hard to have that replay value that, say, the LEGO Star Wars games provide. If I'm really being an evil Sith overlord, I could say that in places I prefer the freedom and more personalized story that you got out of Star Wars Galaxies, once it was fixed of course.

KOTOR is no doubt a terrific game. But out of all that we've mentioned so far, it's probably the hardest to get into if you were to pick it up now, and one that certainly suits fans of a genre rather more than fans of Star Wars.

You've mentioned the new Battlefront, so we should point out Battlefront II for the Xbox, PS2, and PC. That was a great game that really nailed both the casual space combat and the ground shooter sections with a story that spans both movie universes. Although once we leave that, we get on to some dodgy entries, unless we talk about strategy.

A screenshot from the iOS version of 'KOTOR'

EE-T: Yeah, KOTOR hasn't aged as well as somecertainly, modern audiences are more attuned to the Mass Effect blend of slick on-foot action and stat-massaging than KOTOR's approach, which is obviously more redolent of BioWare's older top-down RPGs. You could also say that KOTOR II is the more sophisticated piece of writing, because it moves away from the rigid light/dark, Jedi/Sith binaries of the movie trilogy. Still, I think KOTOR remains the high water mark for Star Wars storytelling in video games, which is perhaps more an indictment of other Star Wars games than praise.

Battlefront I agree is brilliant, though a lot of what it does well derives from the Battlefield seriesthe main objective mode is a straight-up Conquest homage. I remember it most fondly for how it lets you fly into and fight inside some of the franchise's most recognizable capital shipsas colossal and intricate as video game environments have become, there's something inimitable about how Battlefront combines small with large-scale combat. Also, it's one of a handful of Star Wars games that, like Racer, burrow into the prequel trilogy and are stronger for the experience. The technology of the Clone Wars era is never more worthwhile than when you're deploying it in Battlefront, for my money. I'm a bit sad that there won't be any droidekas in DICE's reboot.

SC: The expectation for the new Battlefront is probably overwhelming if you're a Star Wars fan, and a video game fan that knows what DICE can do. From my experience so far, it looks like the game does a lot of key Star Wars tropes well, but the lack of a story or end goal may not grip the fans of the franchise, but we'll have to wait and see.

I have to give a mention to the strategy titles as Empire at War was excellent and when you have an RTS that allows you to build a Death Star and blow up planets, you're on to a winner. And we'd be remiss to not acknowledge the success of the LEGO gamesa fun and endlessly playable way to access the movies for every age and level of geek.

We could probably do an entirely separate debate for the worst Star Wars games as well. But if there's anything we've discovered, it's that the midi-chlorian levels are highest in the classic games: the Jedi Knight series for first person, X-Wing and TIE Fighter for space combat and KOTOR for role playing.

Star Wars: Battlefront is released for PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One on November 20. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is in theaters on December 18. The 32X version of Star Wars Arcade was ace, and I won't have a bad word said against it.

Follow Edwin and Sean on Twitter.

Photo via Fox 31 Denver/handout

A 48-year-old Colorado man has been accused of "hunting" young men off of Grindr, keeping them in his home as sex slaves, and even branding them with a tattoo of his own name. Before Sean Crumpler was arrested on 12 charges that include human trafficking for sexual servitude, sexual assault on a child, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, some alleged victims told police that there were as many as 12 mensome underageliving in his Aurora home.

"As far as this kind of thing, where he is luring kids from California and using online dating websites, it's like 'Holy crap,'" FBI victim specialist Anne Darr told the Denver Post. "We've never seen this before."

The case, while horrifying, serves as a reminder that, even though popular narrative suggests that sex-trafficking victims are typically women, a disproportionate number of LGBT youth are homeless and therefore forced into survival sex.

The investigation into Crumpler began back in July, when a missing teen from California texted his parents asking for his Social Security number and birth certificate so that he could travel to Canada. A detective at the Long Beach Police Department traced the phone number to Crumpler, who was already on the sex offender registry in the state for soliciting sex acts, according to records from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

The detective started looking into the man who owned the runaway's phone. He found that back in May, another cop with the same department had responded to a sexual assault report against Crumpler made by a 16-year-old runaway that pointed to an incredibly dark scene.

According to an affidavit, the 16-year-old recounted that his Facebook had been hacked and spammed with nude pictures. He told the cop he was ashamed and wanted to run away from home, so he contacted two friends who said they could help him get to Colorado to live with Crumpler, who would give him room and board in exchange for sex.

Eventually, they met up with Crumpler at a hotel room in California. When the victim went to use the bathroom, he returned to find his two friends and the older man naked on a bed. They all had sex, and then went to dinner, where the victim mentioned his age, according to the affidavit.

The following day, Crumpler allegedly picked up another boy from Grindr who was 18 years old and had been kicked out of his house.

"This is what I like to call hunting," Crumpler allegedly told the group as they prepared to meet the new boy at a McDonald's. Eventually, the entire group went back to Aurora, Colorado, together, where the group sex acts continued.

Victims later told police that Crumpler was HIV positive and never used condoms with any of the young men.

Eventually, the 16-year-old was able to identify Crumpler from a piece of mail and called the police. But by June, detectives weren't able to locate him, and the rape charges were dropped because the alleged victim had stopped cooperating.

But all of this was enough for the Aurora Police Department SWAT team to obtain and execute a search warrant. Photos taken in the search revealed there was some order to the house: A list of chores with names attached to it featured mundane directives like "trash" and "clean room."

Officers questioned several people found at the residence who all relayed similar stories of meeting Crumpler on Grindr. Several of them mentioned that the the IT specialist kept his five-bedroom, seven-bathroom home stocked with alcohol and weed, even though he never got intoxicated himself.

A 23-year-old who used to live with Crumpler told a local Fox affiliate that the young men would spend their days watching Netflix, playing video games, and making online porn. He also said they were all branded with the word Sean and a bird to " away all the other 'sugar daddies' when they are out partying or at the club."

On September 16, Crumpler was let out on $100,000 bond, although a judge recently acknowledged that it was a mistake (and a violation of state law) to release him without also issuing a protection order. That judge, John Scipione, also denied Arapahoe County prosecutors's requests that Crumpler's passport be confiscated because he owns a hotel in Thailand. He's also still allowed to use the internet, although only for work purposes.

The preliminary hearing in the case is set for November 23.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Sean Crumpler Affidavit

Photo of Barack Obama tweeting via Wiki Commons

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we'll be using cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in being a better cyber-citizen. Today, we discuss how to not totally fuck yourself over if you're a politician on Twitter.

Case Study: Earlier this week, NPR gleefully reported that Twitter offers a guide to public officials seeking elected office. Though the social media platform offers tips for musicians, members of the media, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations through its media portal, the site's guide for politicians is no mere online FAQ: It's a 136-page-long PDF.

"The best way to earn a voter's support," the guide reads, "is no different today than it was a century ago: a simple handshake and a look in the eye. But it is hard to scale such retail politicking to the entire voting public." Make no mistake, this is a guide for older, less tech-savvy people who need help understanding basic stuff like what a tweet is and why a tic-tac-toe sign makes words turn blue.

On one hand, this guidebook is hilarious to people who use the internet a lotit breaks something our generation innately understands into such rudimentary steps that it feels like a manual meant for, like, aliens. But many politicians really, really need some tips. Case in point:

What We Can Learn: Even if politicians choose to stay hands off and let their staffers handle the day-to-day business of tweetingthus avoiding any Ed Ballsesque snafusit makes total sense that a politician might want to know things like what a hashtag is, or where on the screen their profile photo might appear. Though it can seem corny to acknowledge it, social media has democratized online communications and given elected officials and other public figures a direct line to the public. Sometimes this means kids tweet "Fuck me daddy" at the Pope, but sometimes it can be used for important reasons, and politicians should understand the rudiments of the online world.

But the manual didn't cover everything a politician should know about Twitterthere's some pretty important stuff left out.

Watch: Can Anyone Stop Greece's Volcano of Burning Garbage?

Case Study: Once upon a time, people thought Anthony Weiner could be president someday. The New York Congressman from was young, handsome, and a fiery speaker. Then, in 2011, he became embroiled in an incredibly embarrassing scandal that started when he apparently accidentally tweeted a shot of his bulge rather than sending it by direct message. He denied everything until a second, more graphic, photo leaked, seemingly permanently derailing his political career. You would think that at the very least he'd be more discreet in the futurebut a year ago, Weiner's Twitter doings were in the news again after his official account faved a picture of a comely young woman. Gawker called him out on his transgression, and then everyone close to Weiner probably smashed every electronic device near him with a hammer.

What We Can Learn: Everythingliterally everything, from the people you follow to the tweets you favorite to the accounts you have in specific follow listson Twitter is public by default. If you're a public figure and someone decides to make you look like an ass by using the internet paper trail that you've created for yourself, then it's your own damn fault.

Case Study: There's no way of getting around it: This is an incredibly bad tweet. In addition to inadvertently trivializing what is an extremely serious issue for millions of young people, the whole thing had an air of Steve Buscemi on 30 Rock trying to trick teenagers into thinking he's one of them.

What We Can Learn: As tempting as it might be to try to buddy up to the youth by using emoji, saying your financial bailout plan makes you "the plug," or that your foreign policy is as good as "shower time, Adderall, a glass of whiskey, and Diesel jeans," young people on Twitter do not want a cool friend. They are not retweeting Toronto City Councilman Norm Kelly (a.k.a. @norm) because they have suddenly decided he is awesome. They are retweeting him because the anachronism of an old man tweeting about man buns and pretending to like Drake is funny. Politicians deal with serious stuff, and it's OK for them to be serious rather than hip, jokey, and ironic. Even if it gets attention in the short term, in the long term stuff like this can only make you look like a fool.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user POTIER Jean-Louis

According to people who are often cited in sentences that begin with "according to..." the niqab debate has become a very important part of the federal election campaign, with the governing Conservatives using it to clobber the helpless New Democrats all across Quebec and Ontario.

This debate is stupid and we all hate it. So here are a list of things you should know in order to yell factually correct things at your Uncle Ron when he brings it up at Thanksgiving Dinner in the hopes that we can burn this debate. Burn it with fire.

And while this guide is intended to equip you with the rhetorical flamethrower needed to deal with Ron's bullshit, you should probably hear from an actual woman who actually wears the niqab, and why she thinks all these white dudes telling her to strip is utter fucking nonsense.

"That oath isn't just a formality, it isn't just a frill. It is a formal requirement under the law of becoming a Canadian citizen. If you don't take the oath, you don't become a citizen," Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, speaking to VICE in June.

Yeah, except there is no legal requirement to show your face during the ceremony where you become a citizen. All would-be citizens are required to actually sign the oath of citizenship, which is the legal part of becoming a citizen. For the oral exam part of the ceremony, you may as well be reciting "Hypnotize" by Notorious B.I.G. ("I swear to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada that I will keep rappin bout blunts and broads, tits and bras, mnage trois, sex in expensive cars.")

"There is a valid security concern about who is taking the oath of citizenship," Brian Lilley, writing in The Rebel.

There is no security risk in allowing someone to cover their face during a citizenship ceremony. By the time you've gotten to the point of the ceremony, you would have already faced years and years of paperwork, interviews, background checks, and intense scrutiny by citizenship officials, including more than one instance where you would need to remove any face covering you otherwise deem necessary. That whole process takes at least six years. You would have to be a very committed terrorist to hide a hat-bomb (or whatever) at your citizenship ceremony.

"The notion that this practise is rooted in a religious obligation is counter-factual. This is a tribal custom that dates from pre-medieval times that is now being amplified by political movements in a handful of countries," Defence and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney talking to Daily VICE in September.

Oh gosh, I'd hate to have a custom amplified by a political movement. This line of argument is honestly one of the most confounding of this whole debate. Of course the niqab is a tribal custom. So is circumcision and the Pope. OK, fine, nothing in the Qur'an explicitly requires the niqabjust like nothing in the Bible requires you to be such a sanctimonious ass about other people's faith. The entire point of faith is that it is a series of rules based on a book that nobody can seem to agree on. Islam has a long history of vigorous scholarly debate on a variety of political, moral, and theological issues, which is why there are so many divergent sects of the religion. Some of those sects determined that a face-covering would be required to meet the standard of modesty demanded by the Qur'anwhile others, surprise, merely recommended (not required) it. A 2014 study from the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (who themselves oppose the niqab) interviewed 81 women who wear the niqab and found that not a single one admitted to doing so out of any sort of fear or coercion.

"We should not allow that to interfere with the unifying, common grounding of equality before the law when people become citizens," Kenney continued in his Daily VICE interview.

There is no particular tradition involved in showing your face during a citizenship ceremonyor, hell, to citizenship ceremonies themselves. The United Kingdom only began doing the celebrations for new-citizens in 2004. Our's is a fair bit older, dating back to 1947, although virtually everything about it has changedthe oath, the structure of the ceremony, and the requirements. While the ceremonies have always been before judges, there's nothing inherently legal about them.

There has never been any concerns about showing your face at a citizenship ceremony before. Seriously. I have spent the past two hours pouring through newspapers dating back to the turn of the century. I can't find anything.

The most concrete language I've been able to find anywhere about the dress code for citizenship ceremonies dates back to when Kenney was immigration minister and comes from a Government of Canada website:

"The appropriate dress for candidates at a citizenship ceremony is business attire, but they may choose to wear a traditional dress."

So take that for what it's worth.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Fire Engines Manager Angus Groovy. All pictures Hilary Morrison

By the late 1970s, punk was already showing signs of stagnating. Supposedly radical teens were spending increasingly more time moussing their mohawks and searching for that perfect safety pin for their leather jackets; the Sex Pistols had already said "fuck" on live TV; Sid Vicious had spat on hundreds of fans. Punk had reached a point where saying shocking things and dressing like a weirdo was no longer original. It had become the status quo.

Enter stage left: post-punk, a provocative and playfully experimental new genre that held on to the original DIY spirit of punk.

In London, John Lydon's Public Image Ltd emerged from the ashes of the Sex Pistols; Gang of Four came together in Leeds, and Joy Division in Manchester. Up in Scotland, too, there were many exciting post-punk bands surfacingThe Scars, Fire Engines, Josef K, Orange Juice. Their history, however, has been somewhat glossed over. Which is why filmmaker Grant McPhee has made The Sound of Young Scotland: The Big Gold Dream, a documentary about the post-punk bands associated with the country's two key indie labels: the Edinburgh-based Fast Product, and the Glasgow-based Postcard Records.

The story of Scotland's post-punk scene begins with Fast Product, the indie label founded by Bob Last and his partner Hilary Morrison in 1977. The couple were, in some ways, Scotland's answer to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, with their lo-fi aesthetic and their let's-stand-out-from-the-crowd attitude. In the early days of the label, Bob sent Hilary down to London with their first release, a fuzzy recording by The Mekons, in the hopes of pricking the ears of the people at Rough Trade. It didn't pan out. Rough Trade told her it was the worst album they'd ever heard. But it didn't matter, because back up north a scene was beginning to take shape, and Fast Product was at the center of it.

I called up Grant McPhee to ask about what it was like for young Scottish post-punk bands in the late 70s, how Fast Product was a precursor to indie labels like Factory and Creation, and how these important labels have been unfairly ignored in the many, many retrospective coffee table books.

VICE: Hi, Grant. What is "the sound of young Scotland"?
Grant McPhee: It probably refers to Postcard Records harassing him one day.

Lastly, for people new to the Scottish post-punk of that period, where's the best place to start?
You would need to choose a different band from each city, so I suppose if someone was gonna listen to a post-punk band from Edinburgh from the late 70s/early 80s I would play them something by the Fire Engines and something by The Scars. I think they both really sum up the Edinburgh sound. And for Glasgow, it would have to be the early Orange Juice singles.

Follow Oliver Lunn on Twitter.

A 9mm glock, one of the guns reportedly used in Thursday's mass shooting in Oregon. Photo via Flickr user Bill Bradford

The 294th mass shooting in America this year happened Thursday in Oregon at Umpqua Community College. A 26-year-old man with six guns killed nine people and wounded several more. I'm not including his name because he doesn't deserve to be named or rememberedhe deserves only to be forgotten. Local Sheriff John Hanlin said as much on television: "I will not name the shooter. I will not give him the credit he probably sought."

This man deserves to be erased from history while we mourn and remember and celebrate the victims and the survivors. But so many of us already know his name because journalists are talking about him and his past with family, friends, and mental health professionals. They do this with the best of intentions, of course: Something horrific has happened and people are hungry to learn who did it, and why. It's instinctualit's human natureto ask these questions, and it's part of the news media's most basic relationship with the public to try to provide answers. But in naming mass killers over and over and showing their pictures day after day and diving deep into their personal history, are we journalists somehow aiding and abetting these horrible people?

For over three years I co-anchored the 3 PM hour at MSNBC, and in that time we covered more mass shootings than I can remember. Over time, I began to wonder what impact I was having. Was I somehow making things worse? Journalists cannot pretend to be a simple window on the worldwe are a camera and we impact the world by the things we choose to focus on and how we crop the images. I think it was while covering my fifth or sixth mass shooting that we had on a psychologist who told us that the media figures are often unwitting partners for these killersthey feel left out of society and plan a spectacularly horrific killing that lets them go out in a blaze that they know will be memorialized on TV; they know their name and their image will be wallpapered across the internet for days, if not years. They'll join the roll call of infamous mass killers, a list many troubled young men have memorized.

As the expert shrink explained all of that, I realized that I could no longer participate in saying the names of these deranged mass killers over and again because that meant I was participating in the last part of their plan.

There is a tricky set of issues for journalists herenews cannot function if fully draped in advocacy or activism, and there is a basic human need for information that we must fulfill. It is necessary to report the name of the killer within 24 hours of the incidentthat's part of news media's basic contract with the public. But, for me, after that initial period, repeatedly naming the killer and showing his picture and diving into his background means providing a sort of celebrity for America's worst sort of losersa perverse sort of fame that they covet. It means participating in a kind of killer porn that draws viewers in but does not truly inform them.

The narrative is almost always the same: His classmates say he was a loner. His family says he had mental issues. He acquired the gun legally so no laws could've stopped this. He had a lot of anger toward the world. Meanwhile, somewhere the next boy is watching and dreaming of his face and his name acid raining down on America.

When we covered the 2014 shooting at Ft. Hood, which was my seventh or eighth shootingor maybe it was my ninthI vowed to be different. I refused to say the killer's name after the first day. I refused to name past killers; I'd just refer to the cities they happened in. And I asked that we do more about the victims and less about the background of the killer.

I couldn't be part of some maniac's plan.

When the press trains its lens on the life story of the killer, that casts the situation as a personal failing, as something that one individual unleashed. But the situation is also one that sits in the midst of a slew of societal issues. Fixating too deeply on the biography of a killer nudges us away from discussing the American problems that fuel these killingsthe prevalence of guns, and the ease with which almost anyone can get one, and the way the NRA and Congress protect gun manufacturers from responsibility for how their products are being used.

When we cover mass shootings without discussing America's troubled relationship with guns, we are covering a tree and ignoring the forest all around it. The media can serve America better by talking less about these killers, by naming them less often, by not making them into perverse sorts of celebritiesby erasing them. That alone would not stop mass killings, but it would serve the public better.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

Screen grab via Angry Beavers opening credits

In 2001, Nickelodeon's slapstick cartoon series The Angry Beavers was facing cancellation after four seasons on the air. "We were significantly over budget, behind schedule, and had generally worn out our welcome office and seeing Norbert and Daggett stuffed animals. I said to him, 'Wow, those are really cool, where did you get those?' And he replied, with no irony, 'Toys-R-Us.' He had to go buy his own toys, and he created the whole fucking thing."

Those creatively involved with The Angry Beavers feel like the showand its never-to-be-seen final episodewas ahead of its time, especially taking into account the meta, no rules approach of recent cartoons such as Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Animation has, in a way, caught upbut not necessarily Nickelodeon. "I think Spongebob Squarepants broke that network," Wright says on Nickelodeon's mega-hit cartoon, arguably the only colossal success the channel's had in animation in the last 15 years. "They wouldn't know a good show with relatable personalities from a bad show where people just spout catchphrases and scream at one another at the top of their lungs."

As it turns out, though, Dag and Norb might be on the road to hooting and hollering yet again: VH1 recently reported that a massive, Avengers-style crossover film starring the Beavers and other characters from the Nicktoons universe (yes, including the Hey Arnold! kids) is in the works. (Those interviewed for this article, including the voice actors themselves, had not yet been informed of the film's existence.) So maybe it's for the better that "Bye Bye Beavers" has stayed "lost": sure, the episode sounded like a trip, but it also would've provided a finality to the Beavers' story that may not have been necessary in the long run.

Follow Larry on Twitter.

Pictured: 2015 federal election. Photo via Flickr user Ben Watts

It's been tough to keep track of all the federal candidates whose fuck ups have caused their campaigns to implode during this election. But the latest batch is too absurd to ignore:

Conservative MP Julian Fantino, a former Toronto police chief, has been charged with assault with a weapon for allegedly using his baton to spread ketchup on another man's buttocks during a police raid that took place four decades ago.

Construction worker John Bonnici, 62, testified to the incident before a justice of the peace this summer. He told the Toronto Sun Fantino and a handful of other officers entered 123 Gothic Ave. on Aug. 31, 1973, and roughed him up. Apparently that included one of the cops pouring ketchup on his ass, which he claimed Fantino smeared with his baton.

Fantino allegedly quipped: "You look like you're enjoying this, Bonnici," to which Bonnici said he replied, "not as much as you are, Fantino."

The charges against Fantino, which also include assault causing bodily harm, were privately laid (they didn't come from police). A justice of the peace can issue a summons to notify a person accused of a privately laid charge to answer to the charge in court.

Fantino's lawyer said the allegations are "without foundation."

Meanwhile, Rick Dykstra, Conservative incumbent in St. Catharines, has been accused of buying bottle service for a bunch of teenage girls at a nightclub last month. Several of the girls, believed to range in age from 16-18 years old, then tweeted about their night out with the 49-year-old politician, including a "family photo" and an endorsement:

"Thanks for the bottle service last night @RickDykstra #voteDykstra #Mansion."

NDP hopeful Ethan Rabidoux, running in Perth-Wellington, has raised some eyebrows on account of his novel The Officer: Love, Loyalty, Revenge. The book's troubling themes include murder, rape, teenage sex, STIs, and abortion, according to the Ottawa Citizen.

Here's an excerpt (remember, Rabidoux is a grown-ass man):

"As Dylan stood to get the fetal pig, Ashley bent over her desk to flip through her notebook. Her shirt hung low and he gazed upon what seemed like heaven and the Promised Land rolled into one. She was wearing a black bra with pink hearts on it. Probably a matching thong too, but he would never know."

Two BC-based Liberals resigned this week over offensive posts made on social media.

Victoria candidate Cheryl Thomas referred to mosques as "brainwashing stations," on her Facebook page, where she also made anti-Israel comments and mused about the idea of a non-white Santa.

"You can't have a brown guy with a beard sneaking into your house in the middle of the night! You'd be calling the bomb squad!"

Fellow Liberal Maria Manna, running in the nearby riding of Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, called the explanation behind the 9-11 attacks "the lie" on her Facebook page. She has since stepped down.

Lastly, Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney pissed a lot of people off last night when he attempted to dismiss Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi's stance on the niqab ban.

"It seems to me that it's the mayor and people like him who are politicizing it. I don't think this should be an issue of contention," Kenney said.

It wasn't long before #peoplelikeNenshi starting trending on Twitter, with Nenshi himself tweeting, "Let's just assume @jkenney means 'thoughtful people,' shall we?"

Or maybe he meant beloved politicians who haven't been accused of crime and/or being a creep: they're a rare breed these days.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

In my imagination, working in a casino consists of little more than watching people walk in, serving them a drink, then waiting as they lose a load of money and finally stumble out while trying to figure out what to tell their spouse. I wanted to know if that was actually the case so I called up a few friends of mine who work in casinos.

Turns out it isn't quite as straightforward as it sounds. As a casino worker, you need to maintain incredible focus and remain completely alert while everybody around you is getting plastered. You also need to be able to react to situations quickly and keep a smile painted across your face even when you're talking to dickheads of unfathomable proportions.

All the stress aside, you at least get to see a lot of weird and wonderful things. Casinos attract charactersfor better and for worse. That means dealing with everyone from gambling addicts certain that their next spin will make them rich to eccentric millionaires to tragic old men who bet their pension away a day at a time to opportunistic teens who put their last tenner on the blackjack in the hope of a few free beers. Apparently, a lot of seemingly sane people really lose it when they see their money going down the drain.

I got six casino workers to tell me their best anecdotes. Each of the stories below is told by a different person.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Nuts

A lot of gamblers have various superstitions and routines that they religiously stick to while betting. For instance, some will only make bets with their left hand, while others start swearing or chanting little mantras before placing a bet. I once saw a man who would throw salt into an ashtray every time the dealer spun the wheel. It was to ward off evil spirits, of course.

While waitressing in a Bucharest casino, a high roller asked me to bring him something to eat, but I could only do that after the wheel stopped spinningotherwise I might jinx it, he said. I waited patiently and then went to get his order. When I returned to ask if he'd also like a drink, I saw that the guy had rammed his hand down his pants and was fiddling with his junk.

I thought I was hallucinating but it was obvious that everyone around me had noticed it, too. Seemingly, it was his good luck charm. Every time the wheel spun, the guy put his hand in his pants and had a right old fiddle.

Eat It

As the "eye in the sky"the guy who watches the security cameras all nightI've seen some seriously strange things. The maddest of which happened in a casino in Nairobi, Kenya. A customer came to the roulette and spread his money across two-thirds of the numbers. Pretty good odds you'd reckon, but he lost anyway. When that became clear to him, he flipped. He grabbed the money before the dealer could take it and started running. A security guard cornered him pretty quickly but as soon as he realized he didn't have a chance of escaping, he put the bills in his mouth and attempted to swallow them.

Immediately, another guard intervened. The two tackled this guy and forced him to spit the cash out. Without thinking twice, the guards put them straight back on the roulette tableall crumpled and soggy. The dealer called the cleaner and she came with an electric fan. Once it had dried up, the money was straightened out and put right back into play. I haven't a clue what happened to the guy though.

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Miss Camel Beauty Contest'

A ROYAL FLUSH

For years, I've worked with surveillance for cruise ship casinos. One morning at about 6 AM, the casino I was working in was empty except for one American woman playing the slots. This woman was cleaning up; she'd already won a few thousand dollars. At some point she realized she needed the bathroom, but was convinced someone would steal her winnings if she left. Some players are a bit paranoidthat's just the way it is. Even though they know that myself and my colleagues are monitoring the TV screens.

So, instead of just going to the toilet, or even calling the attendant, she went behind the slots, pulled her trousers down and laid one out right there. After, she sauntered back to the slots relievedtwo meters away from her own shitand continued playing as if nothing had happened. When the slot attendant came by to see how things were going, he smelled something dreadful. He clocked it pretty quickly and asked her what had happened. With a completely straight face, she feigned innocence and claimed she vaguely remembered that there was someone walking around back there.

Anyway, we got the whole thing on CCTV. When I wrote my report, it took all of my strength to remain professional and not just scribble down "she took a massive crap behind the slots." When the news came out, security went into her room to ask about the incident. Upon hearing what had happened, her partner requested to be moved to another room immediately. Presumably that was the end of their holiday.

On the Rocks

Back in 2009, I was working at the opening of a casino in Bucharest. It was all very glamorous and the owners were expecting a lot of cash to be thrown about. I was pretty experienced at the roulette table, so my manager was counting on me to man that position for the night. Five minutes after the doors opened, three men sat themselves down and handed me a massive wad of cash to change into chips. This got me a bit flustered, but I tried to collect myself for the first spin. With my hand trembling, I dropped the ball in but it flew straight back out and got wedged under the door to the kitchen. I began sweating profusely. I smiled and apologized as the waiter returned the ball.

I gave it another spin but the exact same thing happened. This time, however, it landed at the feet of the drummer on stage. "Fuck," I muttered under my breath. The men were staring at me confused, one even asked if I was a beginner. I tried to shrug it off by making a joke about using too much moisturizer. Thankfully they laughed and I slowly began to feel slightly more in control. As the waiter handed me the ball again, I noticed that half of the casino was looking at me, praying for me to fuck up. People always say that "the third time's the charm" but that's obviously not true because the ball flew out and landed in one of the gamblers' whiskey glasses, splashing booze all over his tux. I'd been preparing for the grand opening for five months but I couldn't even spin the wheel.

Big Brother

One night, while working as a croupier, a gambler was down about 50,000 . I'm sure he was soberhe'd stuck to soft drinks all nightand he didn't seem like he was on anything stronger. But out of the blue, he started talking to the security team through the CCTV cameras. He was staring right into the lens and swearing, shouting about there being magnets in the balls, how it was all rigged and a massive joke. He noticed the cameras were swiveling and this just made him even more paranoid: "So now you are staring at me. You're watching! You took my money and you're just laughing at me, right?"

He grabbed an ashtray and started trying to smash the camera with it. Obviously by this point, security came into the room. I feel a bit sorry for the guy, the people watching behind the cameras were pissing themselves laughing.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

ULTRAVIOLENCE

I used to be a casino receptionist in Bucharest. One day, this massive guyalmost seven feet tall with a beer gut to matchdecided to kick off at 8 AM in the morning. I should've known he was trouble when he came in, he had this really intense look on his face. When he signed in to our computer, I noticed a yellow mark next to his name. Yellow ticks mean one of two thingseither you're a high roller or an aggressive cheater. He could have been either. He was allowed to play, but only on the condition that I notified the security staff. The chap was barely sat down before he started throwing massive sums of money around. He was placing heavy bets all over the table. After a few consecutive losses, his mood turned and he threatened to throw a metal ashtray at the dealer.

Having been asked to calm down, he was switched to another table, where he tried the same tactic of ridiculous spread-betting across the numbers. He stayed there for a while, won some money, and began to relax. When the dealer changed, so did his luck. Before long he'd lost all his winnings, which didn't go down well. Right as I entered the room, I saw a security guard holding the staff door open while my manager was yelling at the dealer to run for his life. I've never seen anyone move that fast and I don't think the dealer looked back until he'd reached the kitchens. Everyone else in the room followed, just as frightened.

It turns out this guy was so pissed at losing that he managed to remove the top of the roulette tablewhich is incredibly heavyand subsequently threaten to murder everyone in the room. Security bolted in and managed to drag the guy out. Somehow he got back in and started begging me to let him play again and promised that he wouldn't kick off. He assured me that he wasn't a bad person, he just can't think straight when he's on a losing streak. Fair enough.

At a glance, tiny Penobsquis, NB looks like any other southern New Brunswick village: corn fields and pastures. Woods. A couple houses and fading motels. More woods. The rectangular columns of the potash mines. Yawn.

But if you find yourself Sunday-driving down more scenic old Route 114, you'll notice something bizarre along what was once the Trans-CanadaHighway: a freaky figure that will sear itself into your nightmares for eternity.

This stark statue of an emaciated racehorse is the sole reminder of Animaland that's visible from the road. The effigy of Blow Hard the Race Horse lured tourists to the now-defunct theme park from the early 1960s until the sweet retro sign was finally taken down in the mid-1990s.

Photos by Anica James

Animaland billed itself as a "sculptured zoo" of giant, cement animals - a rinky-dink Maritime roadside attraction much like Mystery Crater, Dinosaur Land, or present-day Magnetic Hill and Mastodon Ridge.

Animaland's impressive brutalist concrete menagerie remains, albeit abandoned for over two decades. A lobster with jagged wire antennae, climbable claws, and a rough concrete slide down the tail. A mouldering yellow giraffe arching its 10-foot neck, staring impassively. Further into the park on an overgrown trail, two 8-foot fighting black bears look are so realistic that my friend totally panicked, seeing them through the fog. A massive albino moose peeks over a sea of cat-tails. The sculptures' once-friendly faces are peeling off in huge flakes. Mould and moss have clouded their wide, cartoon eyes. The quaint, log-cabin-style out-buildings are shuttered and collapsing, and spooky urban legends abound about the place. The overall vibe is, to put it mildly, incredibly fucking eerie.

It's a playground that could've only been conceived in a simpler time, when parents were totally cool with letting kids climb precarious 15-foot-high sculptures made of concrete.

Pull over and walk down the ATV trail adjacent to the Timberland Motor Inn and Restaurant, and you'll find there's more to Penobsquis than meets the eye.

Animaland was the brainchild of serial-entrepreneur-turned-sculptor Winston Bronnum.

Winston was the sort of kid whose grandmother once had to stop him from trying to fly a homemade airplane off the chicken coop. As a young man, he left the family potato farm in New Denmark, NB to work in Ontario on bridges and hydro dams.

He came back to the Maritimes "after his marriage went south," according to his nephew, Wayne Nagy, 62.

"Working for him was like working for Burt Bacharach. He had unique sense of humourgreat personality and very disciplined."

Enterprising and energetic, Bronnum found it impossible to sit still. By his nephew's account, he'd stay up all night carving wooden animals in his studio. Carving, working, drinking, and playing his fiddle consumed most of Winston's time until a catastrophic fire ripped through his wood shop, destroying all of his tools and supplies.

Bronnum took the only logical step: he started using the skills he'd observed as a tradesman to build giant, concrete animals. In this unexpected artistic niche he found his obsession for the next 30 years.

The idea of charging admission to see the animals was pure opportunism. In Ye Olde Tymes before iPads and Netflix in the backseat, parents needed a place to stretch their legs and temporarily silence Junior's screaming on long car trips. And like a scaled-down Penobsquis version of Walt Disney or P.T. Barnum before him, Bronnum wrung the tourist trade for as much as it was worth.

"He charged tourists at the gate to watch him work in the studio, and salespersons had to tape a dollar bill up on his office cabin wall before he'd negotiate deals," recalls his nephew, William Nagy.

"He was a little cranky," says Patty Ackerman, who's been working at the nearby restaurant since 1975. When he wasn't attending to visitors, Bronnum would hang out in the old-timey lounge and drink Aquavit with Patty's father, Bill MacIntyre.

But Bronnum's real devotion was to the park. He was always looking for new ways to expand: printing postcards and souvenirs. Rigging up the whales so that they spouted water from their blowholes. Installing a pool. Experimenting with new sculptures. Keeping live deer, rabbits, chickens, and, at one point, a lobster tank.

Constant, minor innovations and the flow of tourists en route to Fundy National Park allowed Animaland to turn a slim profit through the 1970s. But as years passed, Bronnum found it increasingly difficult to keep out vandals. Nagy says Bronnum was tormented by hoodlums stealing from the canteen, clogging the toilets, deer-jacking, and trashing the place. Eventually, he resorted to sleeping at Animaland while his wife and kids stayed at home.

"Break-and-enters were Winston's low mood points," says Nagy.

Visiting Animaland now requires roughly zero break-and-entering skills. It's easily accessible from the shoulder of Route 114. Bizarrely, the workshop, too, remains intact, in a creaky storage barn filled with miscellaneous hoarded junk.

Old mattresses, fake flowers, golf carts, a corroded stretch limousine straight out of Silence of the Lambs. A wall-sized, airbrushed mural of the Shediac Lobster, Bronnum's magnum opus completed just a few months before he died. Hand-pencilled plans and diagrams, tools, and bags of cement mix rest alongside the workbench. Tendrils of vines are infiltrating the shed underneath the doors, and a thin layer of white dust coats every surface.

Bronnum passed away in 1991, before the twinning of the Trans-Canada Highway sounded the death knell for many of Penobsquis's small businesses, including Animaland.

He remained preoccupied with his art until the end of his life. "A week before he passed away," in 1991, recalls Nagy, "he asked the nurse if he could use his wood-carving chisel to cut his toenails."

While it's sad to contemplate the failure of Bronnum's ahem, massive artistic undertaking, his legendary status within the genre of Atlantic Canadian Giant Animal Art survives beyond Animaland.

Tourists still stop and snap selfies with Bronnum's creations at various tourist spots across Canada, including the World's Largest Lobster in Shediac, NB, Jumbo the Elephant in Saint Thomas, Ont., and this moose (featured memorably in the Trailer Park Boys episode "Gimme My Fuckin' Money or Randy's Dead") in Cow Bay, NS.

And there's another way to look at the decline of the roadside attraction. Even though Animaland is now more an offbeat explorer's gem than a family destination, it's still an object of curiosity for local dog-walkers, observant drivers intrigued by the statue of Blow-Hard, and bored local teens.

Through the windows at the Timberland, Patty Ackerman says they see people going in "all the time." And so, in a way, Animaland lives on, a decrepit memorial to 1960s kitschand Winston Bronnum's strange, cemented vision.

Follow Julia Wright on Twitter.

Voter apathy is an issue that plagues young Canadians, so when I saw that student groups in Ontario had released a series of get-out-the-vote music videos, my first thought was: that's nice.

Upon closer review, however, one has to wonder if these well-meaning kids are trying to embarrass their peers into voting. Because the only reaction I foresee is viewers cringing while simultaneously slamming down on their laptop's mute button and/or ripping out their earphones.

Let's start with "I'm Gunna Vote," which comes to us from the Carleton University Students Association. If the idea behind doing a music video is to stay relevant to the young people, it's unclear why the students chose to parody "I'm On A Boat," a song that was popular in the summer of 2009.

Clad in a mix of formal wear and T-shirts bearing maple leaves, a group of about 15 students bounce around school grounds chanting, "I'm gonna vote, I'm gonna vote, everybody look at me 'cause I'm voting at a poll. I'm gonna vote, I'm gonna vote, take a good hard look at the motherfuckin' vote."

What? Not trying to split hairs here, but when people refer to "the vote" it's a figure of speechnot something you can physically see, let alone take a good hard look at.

"Take a picture trick, I'm gonna vote bitch," declares the young blonde lead, all hard as fuck, whose black cocktail dress and tendency to over enunciate cuss words do her no favours.

I had higher hopes for University of Guelph's students, who decided to lip sync to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" instead of performing their own version of the already-brilliant song. Who cares if the lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with democracythe students holding ballot boxes and riding around on horseback with Canadian flags gets the message across. Things take a sharp turn into terrible, though, with a completely unnecessary EDM sequence during which everyone busts out selfie sticks (because they inexplicably want more evidence of this moment).

Seriously kids, how are you letting Blue Rodeo be cooler than you?

Who needs the Fair Elections Act? These music videos are enough to deter anyone from wanting to go near a ballot box ever again.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Hopefully he wears this snazzy jacket again! Screenshot via YouTube

VICE Canada will be grilling Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau in front of a live audience in Toronto next Monday and you can watch the whole thing on Facebook or our website.

The event, which will take place at the Great Hall, will be MC'd by Damian Abraham, host of VICE Canada's original series Canadian Cannabis and frontman for the seminal punk band Fucked Up.

Trudeau, who is increasingly looking like he's in a two-man dogfight with Stephen Harper to be prime minister after the October 19 election, will take questions from VICE staff, including VICE News Canada Managing Editor Natalie Alcoba, Parliamentary Correspondent Justin Ling, Quebec Correspondent Brigitte Nol, and VICE Canada's Head of Content, Patrick McGuire.

There will also be ample time for questions from the audience.

The whole thing will take place from 5:30 to 8PM EST.

The livestream of the event will be available on the Daily VICE hub and on VICE.com's Facebook page.

VICE Canada is in talks for a similar event with NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, while the Conservative Party has ignored multiple requests for a one-on-one interview with Stephen Harper.

Aaron Mat, left, with Jordon Gabriel. Image via "BC Is Burning"

In a year set to be the world's hottest on record, summer 2015 brought North America one of its worst wildfire seasons ever. Scorching temperatures and severe droughts, coupled with El Nino, created the perfect conditions for turning the woodlands into tinderboxes. Blazes across Western Canada and the US scorched millions of hectares and forced thousands of people from their homes. Experts tied the fires to human-driven climate change and warned the worst is yet to come.

British Columbia, home to North America's wettest climate (the rainforest on Vancouver Island), was one of the hardest-hit areas. An unusually mild winter gave way to BC's earliest fire season in recent memory. Record-breaking temperatures in the ensuing months kept the flames at peak levels, consuming over 304,000 hectares and covering half the province in smoke.

BC Is Burning

For our new documentary, "BC is Burning," VICE hit the Wet Coast to investigate the wildfires' causes and impacts. We heard from firefighters battling some of the toughest blazes they've ever faced, scientists investigating the role of climate change, nature experts tracking how the fires affect the province's rich ecology, and residents trying to protect their homes.

While many echoed BC Premier Christy Clark's view that climate change fuels the wildfires, critics said the government hasn't done enough to prevent their spread. This includes fire suppression techniques like prescribed or controlled burns, which remove the dead trees that would otherwise act as fuel, and helps the forest regenerate with the new plant life that grows in their place. It's a significant issue for First Nations communities, who traditionally used controlled burns to help manage their wooded areas, but today live under provincial bans.

At a recently burnt fire zone where new greenery was already starting to peek out of the charred ground, VICE spoke with Jordon Gabriel, a forester with the Lil'wat Nation in the Lillooet River Valley. In this edited excerpt, Gabriel talks about living near the wildfires in a changing climate and concerns that government policies are curbing his community's ability to protect itself.

VICE: This area is pretty burnt out. What happened here?
Jordon Gabriel: The fire started in April, earlier than usual. Within two hours, because there was so much more heat this year and with the temperatures so high, the wind picked it up and it got to be about one hectare in size. The good thing is they had an excavator to help contain it. If they didn't catch it, then it would've went into the big timber right up the mountain because it was so dry this year. Lots of fires were going.

How does it compare to other years in terms of severity?
It's pretty up there. Between one to ten, it'd probably get up into the ten range. This year is the first time I noticed lots of the communities under water restrictions. I mean, with all the water that we have around here, that everything is water restricted, shows it was a really hot, dry year.

Yeah, that's what strikes mewe're in a coastal region, but yet it's on fire.
We usually get as much rain as both communities, we should be able to help each other.

Follow Aaron Mat on Twitter.

If you want to know what Arcade Fire thinks of the Canadian election, how California farmers deal with a massive drought, why flying a bird simulation VR is totally bonkers, what it's like riding along on a Paul Walker memorial rally, or how rad chef Matty Matheson is at reading our culture headlines, Daily VICE is where you should focus your eyeballs.

Six days a week, with episodes in both English and French, Daily VICE (and VICE Du Jour) gives viewers a look inside the entire VICE universe, bringing together original reporting that goes beyond the headlines of Canada's news, exclusive dispatches from foreign correspondents, inside looks at upcoming stories from all of our verticals, and interviews with everyone from politicians to Peaches.

The show, created in partnership with FIDO, is now available online. Check out the latest episode below and visit the Daily VICE and VICE Du Jour hubs for ongoing election coverage and VICE exclusives.

Photo via Flickr user michael_swan

Over the course of the election campaign, there's been lots of accusations of politicians saying one thing in English and another in French.

Well, this is probably the first instance of a politician saying one thing in English, and another in Mandarin.

In a statement from multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney, posted to the Conservatives' Chinese-language website, the Conservatives issued some pretty feisty challenges to his political opponents that don't quite translate to what the party says in English.

The statement was written in Chinese the written version of Mandarin, as we learned today. VICE Canada had the statement translated and has clarified some of the language for style.

"Historically, the relationship between the Conservative Party and Chinese community is not only very close, but was established earliest, in comparison with all the other parties," the statement from the minister reads.

Kenney then goes after the Liberals and New Democrats with some pretty aggressive language.

"In terms of the closeness, the Liberals could probably argue that they also maintain a close relationship, for in the time of Pierre Trudeau, Canada established diplomatic relations with China. But we all know, that's the result of the general trend of the world politics at that time; later, under Jean Chretien, they even sent a delegation to China, and we also know, that was for trade and business purposes," the statement reads.

"It could also been said that the New Democrats are also very close with China, since the wife of the venerable former NDP leader Jack Layton is Chinese-Canadian, while the wife of MP Peter Julian is also Chinese-Canadian, there is no reason not to be close with the Chinese community," the statement reads.

"The intimacy between the Conservative Party and China, comes from the genuine good will of the Conservatives," reads the following paragraph.

VICE reached out to the campaign for Kenney to ask about the statement. When it comes to the dig at the NDP, a spokesperson for Kenney said in an email that "this just points to the fact that the NDP has established personal ties with China/Chinese community because of these personal relationships. There is nothing negative implied here. It's just setting out the context for the compare and contrast piece that follows."

The NDP is not mentioned anywhere else in the statement.

No English-language statement comes close to the shade delivered in Chinesecertainly nothing on the Conservative website suggesting that the Liberals only want to talk to the Chinese for their money or that the NDP's primary relationship to the Chinese community is through marrying their women.

Kenney's statement focuses heavily on the Harper government's decision to apologize for the Government of Canada's head tax on Chinese immigrants. The policyintroduced by John A. Macdonald in 1885charged each Chinese immigrant $50 to enter the country.

"The first important thing our Prime Minister Stephen Harper did was to apologize to the Chinese community, on behalf of the Government of Canada, for the discriminatory policies and head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants set by the Liberals back in 1885," the statement continues. "It might be because of the historical racist and discriminatory laws were passed by their ancestors, the Liberals have been refusing to apologize to Chinese-Canadians during their governance."

When it comes to the head tax, the Kenney camp said simply, of the Liberal's refusal to apologize for the head tax: "That's a fact."

The Conservatives don't repeat that head tax line too often in public.

One statement from last week noted the head tax in passing, while criticizing the Liberals' immigration record. Immigration minister Chris Alexander went down that road in a rant following an interview with VICE Canada.

But for the Conservatives to suggest that the Liberal Party has refused to apologize to the Chinese community because of Macdonald's actions is a step beyond what they've said in English and, frankly, confounding.

Macdonald, while currently regarded as a bit of a Liberal, was the head of what was 19th century version of the Conservative Party in Canadahe was defeated by Liberal Alexander Mackenzie in 1874. Both Liberal and Conservative governments of the time hiked the fee, before finally stopping Chinese immigration altogether in 1923, under a Liberal Governmentthat was repealed decades later by a different Liberal administration.

Kenney's statement accuses the Chretien and Martin governments of discussing an apology for the head tax, but that they were "filled with misgiving and fear" and backed down. The statement says they were "afraid."

Read the full, unedited, translated statement below.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

---

The close relationship between the Conservative Party and the Chinese community

In this year's federal election, or rather, in every federal election especially the most recent ones the Chinese community in British Columbia has always been among the most hotly contested ridings for all the political parties, which of course is the undeniable result of the growing number of Chinese immigrants and the more important role they become to play in the political circles.

However, this is only for the most recent years after all, if we go back to review the history, we could realize that the relationship between the Conservative Party and the Chinese is not only very close but also has been established the earliest in comparison with all the other parties.

In terms of the closeness, the Liberals could probably argue that they also maintain a close relationship, for in the time of Pierre Trudeau, Canada established diplomatic relations with China, but we all know, that's the result of the general trend of the world politics at that time; later, under Jean Chretien, they even have sent delegation to China, and we also know, that was for trade and business purposes.

It could also be said that New Democrats are also very close with China, since the wife of the venerable former NDP leader Jack Layton is Chinese Canadian, while the wife of MP Peter Julian is also Chinese Canadian, there is no reason not to be close with the Chinese community.

But the intimacy between the Conservative Party and China, (if view the political party as a human being) comes from the genuine good will of the Conservatives. Please recall with us together: Since the beginning of 2006 under the Conservative government, the first important thing our Prime Minister Stephen Harper did was to apologize to the Chinese community, on behalf of the Government of Canada, for the discriminatory policies and Head Tax imposed on Chinese immigrants set by the Liberals back in 1885. It might be because of the historical racist and discriminatory laws were passed by their ancestors, the Liberals have been refusing to apologize to their own people during their governance.

In fact, whether to apologize for the head tax to the Chinese community was discussed several times under Chrtien and Martin, but filled with misgiving and fear, they listened to some Chinese members inside the party and they didn't want, were afraid of make a formal apology. It was Harper who broke the ice in 2006, when he first came to power he spoke sincerely to all the Chinese people the phrase: "Canada, apologize".

In addition, Prime Minister Harper has visited China twice. It is worth mentioning that in early 2012, the Federal Ministry of Health announced the establishment of the Advisory Council on Traditional Chinese Medicines, which improved the status of Chinese medicine practitioners in the Canadian society. Two years later in November 2014, Harper visited China and included the tour to Hu Qing Yu Tang Chinese Medicine Museum into his agenda. If it's not for the deepest respect to the Chinese community and traditional Chinese medicine, what could it be?

In terms of the "earliest", I think, anyone who is familiar with the Canadian history should know this name: Douglas Jung.

Douglas Jung joined the Conservative Party in the early 50s (since the Liberals have passed discriminatory policies towards Chinese immigrants, Mr.Jung declared that he would not join the Liberals). In 1957, he was elected MP representing the Conservative Chinese in Vancouver, thus became the first Chinese MP in Canadian history. The federal government named a Grade A office building in downtown Vancouver after him. He also has spoken several times at the United Nations as the representative of Canada.

In his first speech in the Parliament, Douglas Jung pointed out that Canada should become a bridge between the nations in the Asian-Pacific region. This also laid foundation for the later Liberal Government's establishment of diplomatic relations with China and the close economic and trade relationship with Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The Conservative Party had four Chinese members (Alice Wong, Wai Young, Chungsen Leung and Michael Chong) and another Chinese Senator Victor Oh.The Conservatives never dare to forget the Chinese immigrants' contribution to Canada and the five outstanding Chinese conservatives also have proved that, through their efforts, Canada has become more peaceful and beautiful.

On the other hand, only with the support of the Chinese community could the Conservatives win the election and continue to lead the country to its prosperity.

By Jason Kenney

Minister of Multiculturalism

I do not know if all dogs go to Heaven, or if only some go, or, for that matter, if Heaven even exists. I do know, however, that when they leave this mortal coil their corpses remain, far too large to flush down toilets like goldfish and too precious to throw away like trash.

What, then, does one do with the deceased body of their closest, most faithful companion? If you live in Los Angeles, you cannot bury it in your backyard to do so would be illegal. You can, however, bury it amongst over 40,000 other dogs, cats, hamsters, horses, birds, pigs, sheep and Christ knows what else at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park and Crematorium.

Founded in 1928 by a celebrity vet, the graveyard formerly known as the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery isn't technically in Los Angeles (rather, it's in Calabasas, a San Fernando Valley deep cut and home to the Kardashians, and the Cheesecake Factory corporate headquarters), but its client list reflects the proximity thereof: The lion from the MGM logo, the Little Rascals' dog, Hopalong Cassidy's horse, and Rudolph Valentino's beloved mutt Kabar (who is, naturally, rumored to haunt the cemetery) all decay within its walls.

One of the oldest animal burial grounds on the West Coast, it is filled with nearly a century's worth of dead pets. Walking amongst the graves, you are struck by the differences that emerge between decades, especially when it comes to names. In the '20s, for example, no one batted an eye at the existence of a dog named "Big Dick." Nor did they care in the '30s when pets went by "Spook," "Nig," "Tar Baby" and I cannot believe I am typing this "Swastika."

People no longer name their animals racist epithets. Or if they do, they're not burying them in Calabasas. Now, people give dogs names like "Gucci." A brand name today and a racial slur in the '30s are, apparently, tantamount to the same thing in that people feel comfortable yelling both in public.

The newer graves are meticulously attended to and doted overpinwheels and chew toys and photographs surround tombstones that bear epitaphs like, "My best friend. My heart. My love. My life. My everything" and "If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever."

"You understood me more than any one person," reads the tombstone of a dog that lived a mere seven years. The more estranged we become from our fellow humans, the closer we get to our pets we may not know the names of our neighbors, but we do know that Brownie Mama is "mommy's little baby!" This closeness makes their eventual loss that much harder to bear, and explains why modern pet graves are far more sentimental than their vintage counterparts. Pet names aren't the only things that reflect changing times.

No one puts flowers on the tombs of dogs named Sambo; their owners are all dead and buried themselves. A woman in a long black veil doesn't drop tear-soaked roses on Rudy Valentino's dog's grave once a year. You think you'll be forgotten when you're gone? Tell that to Sir William Shakespeare the kitty, who died in 1953 and realistically was last visited in 1954. Gucci the dog, however, has been dead for five years. And he's still getting treats. The treats, however, will end when his owner's life ends. I wonder if anyone will mourn her death.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.