Justin Trudeau, leader of Canada's Liberal Party. Photo by Flickr user Joseph Morris

More coverage of Canada's election on VICE:

Final Election Polls Shows Canada's Liberal Party Could Win a Majority

Officials Warned to Be on the Lookout for Voter Suppression Tactics in Canada's Election

What Canada's Election Means for Science

Here Are the Election Ads You Didn't Know You Needed

As you've probably heard, Canada is at the end of one of its wackiest, and most depressing, elections ever. Or maybe you haven't heard. You Americans probably have your own stuff going on. It's cool. We don't mind.

To catch you up, this election has been a slow-motion car crash between Canada's two traditional ruling partiesthe Liberals and Conservativesand the traditionally socialist New Democratic Party (NDP). First, we watched the NDP squander their lead by campaigning as the political equivalent of alcohol-free beer. Then, a good chunk of the campaign was dominated by a debate around banning the niqab, with the Conservatives teaming up with a Quebec separatist party to stoke some anti-Muslim fervour. Towards the end, it came out that a presumptuous senior staffer on the Liberal side was actively trying to help the Canadian oil industry figure out how to lobby his boss, in the event that he becomes prime minister.

Enthralling as it might be to watch a lion maul a clown, Canadians have had to endure three months of this circus, and it's getting a little old. Although, come to think of it, your campaigns last two years, so I guess we're lucky on that front. But, bullshit aside, the outcome of Monday's election is going to mean a lot for our southern neighbors, and especially for whichever wang you Americans pick to be your next president. So we've put together a little guide to get you up to speed.

The Basics

What's the deal with Stephen Harper?
For the past nine years, the prime minister has been Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party. He is, irrespective of his politics, a bit of a dick.

After beating a scandal-plagued Liberal government in 2006, Harper quickly set to work in remaking the government in his image. He cut taxes and downsized government, slashing red tape wherever he could find it, all in the hopes of kick-starting Canada's natural resources sectorwhich worked pretty well. Obviously, that corresponded with a shit environmental policy that saw Canada quickly withdraw from the Kyoto Accord, and fail to adopt any meaningful CO2-reduction plan since.

Harper blew up Canada's foreign policy by replacing the United Nations-approved glad-handing and pensive chin-stroking with a lot more slamming fists on desks, yelling at douchebag foreign dictators, and funding opposition groups in countries that have shit governments.

The Conservatives also aggressively re-worked Canada's justice system. On the one hand, they cracked down on crime, domestic violence, and pedophilia. On the other, they jacked up penalties for drug possession and implemented a slew of mandatory minimum penalties that have managed to stuff the country's already-full jails to the point of crisiskind of like your prison system.

One of Harper's most controversial accomplishments was the passage of something called Bill C-51, often dubbed "Canada's Patriot Act". The law expands law enforcement's ability to detain terrorism suspects without a warrant, allows the government to takedown so-called 'terrorist propaganda,' gives Canada's spy agency the power to use force to 'disrupt' threats, and expands information sharing amongst intelligence-collection services.

Harper also hates the media. VICE Canada had a whole saga of trying to ask him a single question which, in the end, cost us about $9,000.

But one of Harper's grossest policies, and hands-down the worst aspect of this election, is his obsession with the niqab. His government introduced a policy that forbid would-be citizens from wearing face-coverings when they take theentirely symbolicoath of citizenship in Canada. The courts here told Harper's government that policy was super fucking illegal, but he nevertheless promised to ban it again.

Doubling down, mostly out of a hope that aggressively secularist Quebecers and subtly racist Albertans would dig it, Harper promised to open up a tipline to allow citizens to report their fellow countrymen for "barbaric cultural practices" (like public female genital circumcision, apparently) and opened the door to banning the niqab at government offices.

The niqab became arguably the most talked-about issue of the whole campaign, which is roughly akin to going to a public library only to find out that it only has Stephen King books. All sorts of Canadians, and a few foreigners, have taken to the foreign press to pen their protest editorials about Harper. Columns in the Atlantic, the New York Times,Esquire, the Guardian, the New York Times again, the Independent, the Economist, and a bunch of othersall basically tripping over themselves in histrionics, calling our prime minister a racist autocrat. Coming to Harper's defense was Republican strategist and closet Canadian, David Frum, who blamed the "political and media elite" for the "imbalance between the furious rage against Harper and the puniness of the micro-transgressions that ostensibly provoked that rage."

We're sorry for taking up so much of your newspapers and magazines, by the way. We know that you'd rather be reading thinkpieces about Donald Trump. But this is a big deal for us, because someone might actually beat Stephen Harper.

Who are his opponents?
Going into this election, the NDP were the odds-on favorite to win, for the first time in Canadian history. The party, still somehow a member of the Socialist International, trucked themselves to the political center with aggressive vigor in recent years. Unfortunately for the NDP, though, it appears to have sunk their campaign.

The party was hoping to capitalize on the popularity of their leader, Thomas Mulcair, who kind of looks like a bear. He's pretty much what you'd imagine when you think of a Canadian politicianill-fitting suits, that retired lumberjack body that keeps you warm in the winter, and a French last name that non-French speakers are incapable of getting right.

Unfortunately for the NDP, it jettisoned all its beliefs in the process. They decided to campaign on a $15 dollar minimum wage, which we understand is all the rage right now in America (the Canadian federal government, however, only has the power to set wages for a tiny fraction of the workforce, so Mulcair's promise would have only affected about 100,000 people) and subsidized daycare. A handful of their other promises, like a national pharmacare strategy, never had quite the same sizzle as some of their bigger, bolder and sometimes crazy ideas of decades prior, like free post-secondary education or creating a federal Department of Peace.

So Mulcair's star began to burn a bit less brightly as people failed to get excited about his lackluster campaign, just as Justin Trudeau's giant wall of lightbulbs got switched on. Trudeau is the 43-year-old son of Canada's former pirouetting prime minister, and the leader of the Liberal Party.His party has historically been a big tent for self-styled centrists, money types from Bay Street (which is our quaint answer to Wall Street), and English Quebecers who are terrified of separatists.

Conventional wisdom was that Canadians didn't trust Trudeau, seeing as the scion has virtually no experience doing anything except for politics, and a habit for saying moronic things that made him look like a rubelike that he admires China because they have the luxury of a dictatorship and that Vladimir Putin invaded the Ukraine because of hockey.

But somewhere along the way, Trudeau started talking about all these crazy ideas, like raising taxes on the wealthiest one-percent, and spending money on paving roads, like a goddamn socialist. And it resonated with people. If the most recent polls are correct, Trudeau is on track to win bigmaybe even a majoritywith Harper a distant second, and the NDP in a even-more-distant third.

WATCH: VICE Meets Tom Mulcair

Okay, but what does it mean for America?
While Canada is generally irrelevant, the next government will make a big difference on three fronts: the fight against the Islamic State, the environment, and moving oil around.

When it comes to fighting the crazed terrorists in Syria and Iraq, only Harper supports military intervention. He's been sending Canada's rapidly-aging fighter jets to occasionally rain hell down on ISIS, and he's kicked in roughly 70 special forces guys to train Kurdish fighters. If either Mulcair or Trudeau get elected, they say the bombing is going to stop immediatelybecause reasons, or something. Trudeau and Mulcair both want Canada to take in tens of thousands of additional Syrian refugees, however. Harper is promising to let in just 20,000.

On the environment, Harper's re-election would basically mean that Canada goes to the Paris climate conference next month and is a useless prick. Thus far under the Conservative administration, Canada has actively tried to torpedo any CO2-emission reduction deal, because it doesn't want to have slap any regulations on oil producers in Alberta. The NDP and Liberals both want to head to ink a deal in Paris and then figure out how to implement it later. Specifically, the NDP wants to set up a federal cap-and-trade system that could be configured to work alongside American carbon markets, like the one in California, while the Liberals want to leave it up to the provinces to figure out.

On energy, both Trudeau and Harper support Keystone XL, while Mulcair opposes it. Harper's lobbying efforts, obviously, have gone pretty badly thus far, so he's hoping that Trump gets elected and approves the deal. Trudeau, on the other hand, is convinced that he could convince Barack Obama to approve the deal. Mulcair is deadset against it, and would rather refine more oil at home.

Right, so who is going to win?
While Trudeau is riding high in the polls, it's going to depend on a lot of things. Low voter turnout helps Harper, so if Canadians can't pull themselves away from Degrassi reruns long enough to vote, you might see him eek out a victory. If the Liberals win a minority governmentless than half of the 338 seats in the House of Commonsthey're going to need to rely on the opposition parties to actually govern. Otherwise, we're going to have another election sooner, rather than later, like some sort of boring, cold version of Greece.

The most interesting scenario will be if Harper manages to bang out a minority government. Both opposition leaders have basically committed to forming a coalition and ousting Harper, if that happens. And while people are almost always full of shit when they tell you that this arcane Parliamentary process will be "super interesting," this arcane Parliamentary process will be super interesting.

The last time the opposition parties tried to form a coalition, Harper basically locked the doors to Parliament and trolled the Liberals until they backed down from the plan. Conceivably, he could do the same this time around, meaning boring old Canada might just have a badass constitutional crisis on its hands.

If you want to follow along, we here at VICE Canada are holding an election night live special featuring a dunk tank. Because, in the end, we're still Canada.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Matilda Wnek and Rosa Robson of Beard

I've been sitting with Matilda Wnek, one half of the London-based sketch duo Beard, for less than a minute when her comedy partner, Rosa Robson, approaches our table holding a sorry plastic stick with shrapnel from a popped balloon on the end. "I'm so sorry that that's happened, sweetheart," offers Wnek in a mothering voice. "We'll get you another one." With that, Robson's bounce is restored and she skips back into the adjacent park to continue playing with the animals and rolling in the grass. "I'm sorry, what were you saying?"

Beard began life some four years ago as a response to a "lot of dark film and literature that we liked, and us just being stupid together," Wnek explains. "We thought, What would happen if you put that together? We hadn't really seen that done before." 'Dark and stupid' is a fitting description of their work, but it's just a beginners' guide to what you get from these two unusual women.

Part of the journey to this point of uncompromising surrealness has been learning to let go of the impulse to be seen as "a fun sexy gal," as Wnek puts it, and to keep any nod to "normal culture" out of the equation. Beard's resulting showThe Grin of Loveis a haunting visual circus that makes you feel wholly interfered with.

"A dark, serious frame with moments of play" is how Wnek characterizes her and Robson's work. "There isn't very much commercial media that really makes room for play so we really wanted to try and make that work."

As masters of ceremony the two share an odd on-stage rhythm. Robson is charming and childlike, and when speaking about her work refers back more than once to being "honest" and "free" in her performance. Wnek on the other hand has a sinister and calculating glarethe sort you can imagine causing a child some kind of unseen psychological trauma.

The Grin of Love begins with two white-sheeted figures silently figuring out their audience through a series of playground games; the pair play everything from grandma's footsteps to kiss-chase. If you ever wanted to re-animate some of your most crippling childhood nightmares, just sit in a dark room with two ghosts while one forcibly French-kisses you and the other audibly giggles at you from a platform. This, presumably, is the liminal point Wnek talks about where darkness meets play. It's as funny as it is horrifying.

Related: Watch Stand Up Comedy... On Acid!

Beard's brand of comedy may sound unique, but they aren't alone on the London comedy circuit in their pursuit of this unusual, uncomfortable kind of performance. Letty Butler and Lucy Pearman comprise the two-piece LetLuce, and their show Sea Men (A Naval Tale) was lauded at the Edinburgh Fringe for its off-the-wall eccentricity. They, like Robson and Wnek, self-define as modern clowns, an idea that seems to be at the heart of a new female-fronted movement in British comedy.

"I don't know this for sure but I think a clown is basically an idiot," says Pearman. "Either a character or real person who isn't afraid of looking fucking stupid. I feel like a clown every day and it's not out of choice. The difference is on stage it's good when people laugh, but in real life everyone just feels embarrassed for you when you drop a jar of mustard in the street or fall off your bike."

For this type of physical comedy to succeed, a special kind of empathy has to be established with the audience, one that, as Pearman says, "doesn't lean on categories or punch-lines." It seems to be about not being afraid to look foolish, and instead to embrace that as a way of bringing an audience onside as an ally.

Lucy Pearman and Letty Butler, a.k.a. LetLuce

"When you study clowning you're told it's about freedom," says Wnek, "and recovering a lot of the sense of play that children have." At that moment Robson flutters past with a plume of pigeon feathers arranged into her hair. "No, take those out of your hair, honey. Those aren't clean." No one could accuse Beard of not being married to their art.

"It implies you have the weight of social and commercial pressures off your back," says Wnek. "The most important thing about our work is literally to clear a space in a room where you can do an hour of entertainment that people can respond to joyfully, without worrying about being part of an industry that only exists to make money.

"Sometimes you see a comedian doing a joke and it's just leaning on cultural references that form part of billion dollar enterprises, but we think that's wrong. We think you should build a joke from the bottom up."

Libby Northedge and Nina Smith, a.k.a. Twisted Loaf, tick a lot of the same boxes with their onstage personas. Theirs is another show of largely joke-free material, propped-up by frantic physical performances and bloated, absurd characters.

"Clown is a style of performance where the audience see the vulnerability of the performer and we ask them to laugh at us," says Northedge. "That is at the heart of clowning. The comedy circuit in London has really welcomed alternative acts with more nights becoming available to gig at and therefore the media has picked up on this renaissance."

This "renaissance," as Northedge puts it, almost has the feel of an underdog story about it; if being funny is fashionable then these women are finding a way of making people laugh that strips away most of what that word means, leaving behind something rebellious and defiant of the norm. It also feels quintessentially female, although of this there is no consensus among its protagonists.

Roisin and Chiara

"Perhaps the more traditional female comic narratives are resonating less and less with our generation," offer the young duo Roisin and Chiara. "That's probably why we are all shifting the form away from more conventional comedy incarnations like stand-up/straight-sketch, but without maybe even realizing it."

Twisted Loaf is more forceful in its rejection of the idea of a gender-driven movement.

"Funny is funny whether you have a cock, a cunt, or anything in between," says Northedge. "We are women so our experience of life is from this. If you want to intellectualize it then maybe it could be seen as a female thing, but it's not something we bother to think about."

"What it is is insignificant," argues Wnek. "I don't think we all fall under an umbrella movement at all, because we really aren't the same. There's probably some cunt booker out there who would think they couldn't have Beard and LetLuce on the same bill because we're too similar, but that doesn't matter to us."

By now Robson has tired herself out and is sitting with us, quietly fingering the boiled egg her friend has ordered for her into her smiling mouth. Looking at her there is something purely happy in her eyes, a kind of optimism about life that usually fizzles out when a person reaches five years old and realizes for the first time that the world is basically shit. As long as that continues to burn, I feel confident that British comedy will be in safe hands.

LetLuce is performing its show 'Sea Men (A Naval Tale)' at the Soho Theatre in London from October 28 to October 31.

Catherine (left) with his cousin Carla, both guevedoces.

Puberty is a difficult time for everyone. Some, however, have bigger issues than zits and embarrassing cracks in their voices. Jonny spent the first few years of his life living as agirl. Then, at the age of 11, he suddenly grew a penis.

Jonny is one of asmall group of people in the Dominican Republic known as guevedoces, who appear to be female at birth but grow up to become male. He was recently featured inthe BBC Two documentary series Countdown toLife, which explores the way in which our time in the womb impacts our lives. I spoke to the show's presenter,Dr. Michael Mosley, about his experience with the guevedoces and what he learned while making the series.

VICE: Hi, Michael. Where didyou get the idea for this series?
Dr. Michael Mosley: The first nine months of life is largely unexplored territory.Until recently, it's been quite difficult to explore but modern technologymeans we can visualize things much better and have a deeper understanding of what's going on. Wethought it would be interesting to dive into that slightly mysterious time andlook at what happens, as well as what can go wrong. It's just nine months butthe things that happen then will play out for the next 30, 40, 50 years.

How did you first hear about the guevedoces?
I actually came across them when I was at medical school in the 1980s. The guevedoces were first identified by a researcher from Cornell in the1970s. I remember hearing a talk and thinking, That is amazing! Can itpossibly be true? I fancied the idea of making a documentary but never found areason. For this series I said, "We have to do it." It's such a fascinatingstory.

Does this phenomenon only occur in the Dominican Republic?
Other groups have been identified around the world. The thingabout the people in the Dominican Republic is that they are very accepting,whereas in other groups these people are regarded as abnormal and badlytreated. In the Dominican Republic the attitude is very much, "Hey ho,sometimes girls turn into boys. That's the way things go." It's remarkable howtolerant they are.

Dr. Michael Mosley

How much do we knowabout why this happens?
We know a lot now. It's quite strange and very compelling, theidea that you start to approach puberty and change from being a girl to a boyand grow a penis. The reasons for it go way back to the womb. We know that upto about six weeks we're neither male nor female. It's only then that, if youhave an XY chromosome, the Y chromosome releases testosteroneand aparticularly potent form of testosterone called dihydrotestosterone.

If youdon't get that, you become a girl. What happens in the guevedoces is they lackthe enzyme that converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, so when theyare born they look like girls. They have testicles but they are hidden insidethe body and they have what looks like a vagina. When they hit puberty, theyget this surge of testosterone and that alone is enough to make them grow apenis and start to look like boys.

How do these children tendto cope with the change?
Quite often they have seen it in a cousin or something. Itoccurs in a relatively small number of families and in about one in 90children, so they know it might happen. Quite often you have early signs. Themums say things like, 'She was always a bit tomboy-ish.'

Still, they getteased. One of the boys could see why his schoolmates were a bit surprised whenhe went from being a girl one day to a boy the next. But on the whole there's alot of acceptance.

In the documentary, yousee the families treat the children as girls right up until the point wherethey start to look like boys, even when they know the change is coming.
Completely. In some cases, they decide to remain girls. Theygo off and have plastic surgery. They say, "What the hell, I've been a girlthis long, I'll keep being a girl." We primarily interviewed people who haddecided they were a boy and that's how they wanted to be. But I was aware of anaunt of one of the children we interviewed, who had decided she wanted to stayfemale.

What have we learned fromstudying the guevedoces?
The researcher who went down in the 1970s did all sorts ofinvestigations. She noticed that the older males didn't really have prominentprostates. With most blokes, their prostate gets bigger with age and that leads to all sortsof problemslike the inability to urinate. In fact, there is now a drug that mimics what happens naturally in the guevedoces and is used to treat benignhypertrophy (enlargement) of the prostate. It also turns out to be quiteeffective in treating hair loss.

Related: Watch our documentary 'The Struggles of One Black Trans Man'

Do you think theguevedoces can tell us anything about how we see gender in our society?
What it shows is how unbelievably complex it is. One of thethings we explored in a later case is transgender childrenboys who are convinced they are girls from an early age, and vice versa. I do thinkthere is something genetic that happens in the womb for these kind of thingsand it's not an obvious voluntary or social thing.

It used to be that peoplewould think that this was somehow a kind of mistake and you could tell themthey were being foolish, but the evidence is very, very clear. When you take a child who is transgender and try to force them to stay as they are, this leads tovery high rates of suicide. People are born with different urges. We can'tjust try to ignore that and pretend we are all the same and live according to a straightforward and obvious gender rule.

I can see why this is aprime example of how what happens in the womb can have dramatic consequences onthe rest of our lives.
What you see from all this is that things kick off at variousstages in the womb and they will alter your life in different ways. In the caseof the guevedoces, it makes a big difference. It's a similar case to Mati's, the transgender child we featured in the show; her life is hugely shaped bysomething that happened very early on.

You've said that makingthe series had changed the way you think about gender. How?
I guess I've thought for some time that the hormones in thewomb are likely to influence not just how you come out physically but also whathappens to your brain. I'm not saying that men and women definitely havedifferent sorts of brains but there's quite a lot of evidence.

I worked on aprogram with Professor Baron-Cohen at Cambridge and he has this idea aboutempathizers and systemizers. Systemizers like data and collecting it andempathizers are more in touch with feelings. Broadly speaking, blokes tend tofall into the systemizers group and women into the empathizers. He believes,and there's quite a lot of evidence, that hormone exposure in the womb caninfluence that. But it's a very controversial area. Gender politics is hugelycontroversial, for the obvious reason that it's often being used to put downwomen.

What was the mostsurprising thing you learned when making this series?
A whole range of things. In the first program, I looked at theeffect of diet in the first few hours of conception and what a big differencethat can make. I absolutely loved meeting the family with six fingers. I wasreally pleased to finally make a program about the guevedoces, something thathad fascinated me for a long time. I just enjoyed meeting so many unusual andinteresting people. I thought before I started it that I knew quite a lot. Itturned out to be the opposite.

What do you hope peopletake away from watching your show?
That there is this wonderful undiscovered period of your lifethat you can't remember anything about but went on to shape the rest of yourexistence. I hope a bit of fascination and tolerance.

Thanks, Michael.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

Officers using excessive force arrested 1,118 people during the G20 Summit held in Toronto in 2010. This is the biggest mass arrest in Canadian history. Photo by Franois Pesant

Throughout this last decade, photographers have witnessed and captured the changing nature of the country. They've seen the forests and our pristine waters disappear to make way for the oil industry. They've documented the militarization of the nationwhether it be violent repression of protests during the G20 or increased security in the capital. They've captured the faces of those being discriminated against and their fight to have their rights respected from the missing and murdered Indigenous women to religious and ethnic minorities.

Their photographs painted a new picture, one that Canadians needed to take into account in order to make an informed decision on Election Day. And so, in a bid to spread awareness, we took to the streets of Toronto and Montreal, wheat-pasting large prints of some of the most striking images of what Canada has become and reclaiming the public space as a forum for discussion thanks to the participation of some of the country's foremost photographers. Tony Fouhse contributed an image of a Leopard Tank stationed in front of Parliament, that is part of his "Official Ottawa" series. Franois Pesant shared a photo of a woman being charged by mounted police in Queen's Park during the 2010 G20 Summit. Marta Iwanek provided a moving portrait of an elderly couple, one of whom is battling dementia, the other acting as a prime caregiver, despite his old age. Ian Willms supplied pictures from his long-term documentation of the evolution of the Tar Sands in Alberta. Laurence Butet-Roch showed a scene where Indigenous children are seen playing next to a toxic petrochemical plant in Southern Ontario. Rafal Gerszak shared his sobering take on the Highway of Tears where many Indigenous women have gone missing, without generating much official outrage.

It's our hope that upon seeing these pictures, passersby feel the need to get more details, do more research, and get the information they need to cast their vote.

Laurence Butet-Roch is a member of the the Boreal Collective of photojournalists.

In the summer of1982, Eugene Fischer, a 42-year-old Miamian in the import and exportshipping business, watched as two tugboats guided his barge into a dock at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. Minutes later, a crew hired by his clients, RandyLanier, Ben Kramer, and George Brockwho at the time went by the alias "TommyAlonzo"opened secret compartments inside the ballast tanks at the bottom ofthe barge that stabilized the vessel at sea, as Fischer recalled in an interview.

"We unloaded 150,000pounds of marijuana right under the noses of the US Coast Guard," Fischer told VICE."One third went to Randy, one third went to Ben, and one third went to George.Back then, a pound went for $200 wholesale, so the entire load was worth $30million."

For supplying thebarge and handling the logistics of bringing the weed in from Colombia, whereit was harvested, the trio paid Fischer a little over $1 million in cash. Byhis own account, which is bolstered by 28-year-old news reports and court documents, Fischer ended upbringing in several more loads of 100,000-pluspounds each in places like New Orleans, Louisiana,and Redwood City, California, during a five-year period. Lanier, Kramer, and Brock would thentransport the weed to Florida, New York, and other parts of the country by truck.

"Gene was very crucial to the operation because he owned theequipment," Lanier recalled to VICE in a phone interview. "He was also the one payingoff the people that cleared the vessel through US Customs."

For perspective, that's at least $150 million worth of Colombian potthat hit the streets of America just as Ronald Reagan was ramping up his war ondrugs.

The pot empirecrumpled in 1987 when the four men were indicted in southern Illinois federalcourt for being a criminal drug enterprise trafficking in marijuana. At thetime, it was the largest marijuana trafficking case in American history, accordingto the online resume of Michael Carr, the assistant USattorney who prosecuted Fischer and his associates. They were convicted a yearlater. Their indictment alleges Kramerand Lanier cleared about $60 million in drug profits, while Fischer and Brock made$30 million.

Thanks to the federal"drug kingpin" statute enacted during the 1980s, the quartet received harshsentences. Fischer, Lanier (who was the 1986 Indy 500 Rookie of theYear) and Kramer (a 1984 world offshore powerboating champion) were hit with life sentences. Brock, afternearly 20 years on the lam, went in for 15 years. (Kramer wasalso convicted of more serious crimes, and got sentenced to 19 years in state prison formanslaughter in 1996. He was accused of orchestrating the execution-style slaying of hisboat racing rival Don Aronow in 1987.)

In July 2012, afterserving 25 years, Fischer won his release following a bruising battle withfederal prosecutors. Ever since, he's been on a mission to help prisoners insimilar predicaments get released early.

As the US government prepares to release 6,000 nonviolent federal prisonersthis fall, Fischer's ordeal, along those of the inmates he's trying to help,sheds light on how hard it is for nonviolent marijuana traffickers servinglong-term or life sentences to win back their own freedom. Criminaljustice reform may seem within reach these days, but while lawmakers debate andfederal bureaucrats make tweaks at the margins, there are plenty of drug warprisoners getting lost in the fray.

People like Fischer are trying to help them sooner than later.

Four states havelegalized marijuana for recreational use and 23 states and Washington DC have approved pot as medicine. So it makes no sense to keep people incarcerated for long periods of time fordealing weed, regardless of the amount, said Anthony Papa, a spokesman for the Drug Policy Alliance,a New York nonprofit organization seeking to end the drug war.

"We definitely get alot of requests for help from people facing life in prison for marijuana," Papasaid. "I don't think the quantity should matter, especially today. For sure,they should not be in prison for life."

Fischer said publicperception about marijuana usage has dramatically shifted since the 1980s whenprograms such as DARE cautioned parents and children that pot was the gateway drug to harder, deadlier illegal substances. "Today all the good marijuana is grown domestically inlarge part because some states have legalized it in some form," he said.

While he wasincarcerated, Fischer said he never stopped fighting for his release. Duringthe first 23 years of his sentence, he filed dozens of appeals to get a timereduction and all failed, according his federal case's court docket. He said he finally caught a break in 2010, when he filed a civil lawsuit against the US governmentalleging the feds owed him $9.2 million from accumulated revenue at the BellGardens Bicycle Club, a California casino owned by Kramer and Lanier that wasseized following their arrests.

Fischer insists hewas never a partner in the casino, but that federal prosecutors listed him as aco-owner on forfeiture documents offered a plausible claim against Americancoffers. According to a January 10, 2011 order written by federal administrativejudge Christine Odell Cook Miller, the US government kept a 55 percent equitystake in Bell Gardens after it was seized; in 1999, it sold its shares.

Fischer claimed in court documents that the money the government derivedfrom the sale "exceeded the $30,000,000 forfeiture against him" and "that theexcess proceeds realized by the United States from the forfeiture saleconstitute an improper taking that entitles him to money damages."

He apparently convincedMiller, who denied the federal government's request todismiss Fischer's complaint as frivolous. Ratherthan have him take the case to trial andpotentially draw undesirable publicity about Bell Gardens, the US Attorney'sOffice for the Southern District of Illinois offered him his freedom instead, Fischer claimed. (A spokesperson for the Southern IllinoisUS Attorney's Office declined comment.)

"I dropped thelawsuit and got my release," Fischer told VICE. He was freed on July 16, 2012. Oneof the first things he did was to get in touch with Lanier to help him win anearly release. (He went free in October 2014.) "He got out by doing the exact same thing I did," Fischer said.

"I followed the sameavenue as Gene," Lanier said. "It was an ingenious way to get out of prison. Wewere both handed natural death sentence by having to live the balance of ourlives in prison. Luckily, things turned around for us."

Helping Lanier get out inspired him to help other prisonersserving long sentences for marijuana trafficking, Fisher said. Now a 75-year-old activistliving in Tamarac, Florida, Fischer started a nonprofit group last year called Voices of theWar (VOW) with four women who advocate for the release of prisoners convicted ofnonviolent drug crimes. Every Sunday, Fischer and a woman named KristinFlor host an hour-long program on Blogtalk Radiothat focuses on human rights for incarcerated convicts. He travels toCalifornia and Washington to speak at marijuana conferences and seminars abouthis drug war experiences.

Flor, a 40-year-oldfrom Kent, Washington, told VICE she became an activist following the death ofher father, Richard, in 2012 while he was serving a five-year sentence for marijuana trafficking. His Montana medical marijuanadispensary was raided by federal drug agents. At the time of the raid, her dad was taking 32 typesof medication, Flor said.

"During the fourmonths he was in prison, he had undiagnosed colon cancer," she claimed. "Theprison autopsy showed he only had three of his meds in his system, he hadbroken bones, osteoporosis, and dementia."

She met Fischer abouta year ago when they were both volunteering for Human Solutions International,another nonprofit that helps inmates with nonviolent drug offenses. Theyformed VOW to help people servinglong-term or life sentences for marijuana trafficking. Earlier thisyear, VOW joined dozens of prisoner advocacy groups in successfullypetitioning the US Federal Bureau of Prisons to grant clemency to Larry Duke,a 68-year-old Vietnam Veteran who was convicted by a Dallas federal jury in 1989of conspiring to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana. Duke wasreleased in March.

Fischer and Flor saidsome of the inmates they are helping include:

• Craig Cesal, a truck driver and mechanic who in2001 was convicted in a Texas federal court of knowingly and intentionallyconspiring to possess with intent to distribute approximately 610 kilograms ofmarijuana. Fischer said VOW is trying to find a lawyer to represent Cesalpro-bono, and also filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) withthe US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to obtain documents from Cesal'sinvestigative file.
• Thomas Geers, who in 2013 started a 20-year term inFlorida state prison after serving 22 years in federal prison for hisinvolvement in a marijuana-smuggling operation. As the Orlando Sentinel reported, prosecutors alleged his scheme "involved dummy corporations, phony names and a mythical religious retreat on 250 acres of secluded Madison farmland." Geers was arrestedin 1984, and Fischer said VOW and Geers'ssiblings are lobbying Florida Governor Rick Scott to grant Geers clemency.
• Bill Dekle, a 65-year-old ex-Marine and former pilot who wassentenced to life without parole in 1991 following his conviction for importingmarijuana. VOW isstarting a letter-writing campaign lobbying the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) togrant Dekle a compassionate release. (That's a process by whichinmates may be eligible for freedom on the grounds of "particularly extraordinary or compelling circumstances whichcould not reasonably have been foreseen by the court at the time of sentencing,"such as a terminal illness that can't be treated in prison.)
• Kenneth Kubinski, a 68-year-old former Vietnam vet whowon three Purple Hearts who has been serving a life sentence since 1993.Prosecutors accused Kubinski of being the leader of a large-scale conspiracy todistribute hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and tons of marijuana over a periodof several years. VOW istrying to help Kubinski find a pro-bono lawyer to work on his appeal.

Watch the VICE HBO documentary on America's incarceration system, featuring President Barack Obama's first-ever visit to a federal prison:

"We are working withthem and their families to find ways to get them out," Flor said. "For some, weare trying to get compassionate releases."

She also raises moneyfor prisoners' commissariesthe accounts inmates use to pay for goods insidebyselling raffle tickets and hitting up dispensary owners in Kent fordonations.

Fischer,who was his own jailhouse lawyer, doesn't hesitate in ascribing broader significance to this work on behalf of convicted drug offenders.

"I believe this is the mostimportant thing in my life now," he said. "We are starting a movement."

Francisco Alvarado is a freelance investigative journalist based in south Florida. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia

Read: Once and for All, Marijuana Is Not a Gateway Drug

Richard Branson added another potential scene to his inevitable biopic this afternoon when he posted an embargoed document onto the Virgin website showing the UN may be on the verge of calling for a global decriminalization of drugs.

The document, titled "Decriminalisation of Drug Use and Possession for Personal Consumption," uses evidence-based study to assess the impact of drug decriminalization. It concludes: "Member States should consider the implementation of measures to promote the right to health and to reduce prison over-crowding, including by decriminalising drug-use and possession for personal consumption."

This is corroborated by evidence from Portugal, where decriminalization has reduced drug-related deaths and new HIV or hepatitis infections.

A statement attached to the document on the Virgin website outlines how the document was sent to a select few media companies including Virgin and the BBC, and how Branson decided to overlook the embargo in light of fears external pressure could lead to a last minute retraction of the UN's statement.

"As I'm writing this, I am hearing that at least one government is putting an inordinate amount of pressure on the UNODC . Let us hope the UNODC, a global organisation that is part of the UN and supposed to do what is right for the people of the world, does not do a remarkable volte-face at the last possible moment and bow to pressure by not going ahead with this important move. The war on drugs has done too much damage to too many people already," says Branson in the statement.

According to Branson, the paper was due for release yesterday at the International Harm Reduction Conference in Malaysia.

Booze has been an essential part of Canadian democracy since the country was founded in 1867 (hi, John A). Now, it's more of a necessity for enduring an election season, especially one that happens to be the longest campaign in recent memory.

If you hadn't already heard, we're going to inform and entertain your eyeballs with our election-night extravaganza, Election Circus. But for a thoroughly turnt viewing experience, there's also a drinking game that will highlight some of what can be expected in the final hours of this dumpsterfire of an election.

Photo via Flickr user Brian Burger

When you walk into your polling location today, there will be a sign informing you that you are not allowed to take a picture inside the voting booth.

That sign is bullshit and you should selfie away just to spite it.

Boring legal background: Elections Canada, which runs the show, is governed by the Elections Canada Act. Section 163 of that act maintains that "the vote is secret," then section 164 adds that voters shouldn't yell out who they voted for, or show anyone their ballot. These rules stem from an archaic effort to stamp-out vote-buying in the days of yore when a bottle of whiskey was handed-off in exchange for a vote, and where the vote-buyer would want to take a look at the bribed voter's ballot to ensure they followed through. Secondarily, the ban is supposed to stop someone from pressuring others in the polling location to vote a specific way.

Elections Canada maintains that language in the act forbids photo-taking, even though the law was obviously written before camera-phones were a thing.

"If people were allowed to show how they voted, it could lead to coercion (being forced to vote a certain way) or vote buying," the Elections Canada website reads.

This, despite the fact that there hasn't (to the best of my knowledge) been a straight-up money-for-votes case in decades. Enticing someone's vote through bribes or threats is, obviously, illegal. To think that the only thing stopping dastardly ne'er-do-wells from rigging an entire election is their inability to confirm how their rubes actually voted is... wrong.

Basically, maintaining a ban on taking a picture of your ballot to stop vote-buying is kind of like banning gun holsters to stop gun duelsa great idea, in 1864.

And this isn't just one of those anachronistic laws on the books that nobody is going to bother with. If you take a picture of your ballot, Elections Canada is going to try and fuck you up.

In 2013, blogger and pundit Parker Donham tweeted a photo of his ballot when he went to the polls in the Nova Scotia general election. Elections Nova Scotia (which is separate from Elections Canada, but maintains the same rule) sicced the RCMP on him, and threatened the Cape Bretoner with a $5,000 fine. He's asked the province to repeal that part of the law.

And like a goddamn maniac, Donham did it again.

.@ElectionsCan_E I just voted. Here's how: pic.twitter.com/KLaMlX0pnP
Parker Donham (@kempthead) October 19, 2015

Obviously, tweeting a photo of your ballot can be considered an act of free expression, and therefore protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The government is allow to restrict that freedom if there is a clear and necessary purpose to the law. Here, there obviously isn't.

This nonsense is unconstitutional. So go out there and break the law, Canadians.

(Full disclosure: I voted at an empty advance poll and the kindly election workers who were loitering over me gave me cold feet on my own ballot snapshot.)

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Photo courtesy Jake Wright/The Canadian Press

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is going to be your new prime minister, and he will have the backing of a majority government. Hol-eeee shit, hope he's ready.

And for many of you, the more important news: Stephen Harper is no longer going to be the prime minister of Canada. Reports said he was stepping down, but he did not resign in his concession speech.

"The people are never wrong," he told supporters Monday night.

As of 11:45 PM EST, the Liberals have won or are leading in about 190 ridings. The magic number for a majority was 170. The Tories trailed far back at about 100, while the NDP had an anemic 35.

The result comes not as a great surprise, as the Liberals had been leading in most polls over the past few weeks, but was a huge reversal from the start of the campaign. The NDP looked poised to move from the opposition to the government side of the House, but Tom Mulcair's campaign fell as flat as Michael Ignatieff's did in 2011.

Mulcair will probably need to shave his beard and go into hiding after tonight.

A number of prominent Conservatives lost their seats including Chris Alexander, Paul Calandra, and Julian Fantino.

While few predicted a Liberal majority was in the offing, the early results from Atlantic Canada suggested some kind of gross red metaphor was gonna be a thing as the Liberals took all four provinces handily.

The narrative you are going to read about elsewhere (and OK, here) is that appears that Trudeau was underestimated by both his NDP and Conservative opponents throughout this campaign.

The Liberal leader proved an aggressive debater who stood toe-to-toe with Harper's experience and glued-on hair and his gambit to move to the left of the NDP seemed to win Canada's "change vote."

Anyway, legalized weed could be a thing soon!

Follow Josh Visser on Twitter.

This looks like nice cake, but you never know when something has a shitload of THC in it. Photo via Flickr user KRebaud

Welcome back to Florida Stories, a column where staff writer Allie Conti tells us some of the lessons she's accumulated in her decades of living in the Sunshine State and making her parents sad. If you have a Florida Story you'd like to share, email her here.

In the spring of 2014, I had just started working as a reporter in Broward County, the suburban basic wasteland that sits on top of Miami. Mostly, I wrote about weedback then, people were certain Florida was about to legalize marijuana via a constitutional amendment, and there was a never-ending supply of pot bros who wanted press for their chronic-based business plan.

That's when I got an email from a man I'll call Santiago, a 50-year-old who, he told me, used to be a radio DJ and a cocaine trafficker. He was apparently one of the good cocaine traffickers, thoughhe reinvested in the neighborhood rather than build a mansion on Star Island. He'd pass out ice-cream-truck money to the local kids, and even brought an alcohol-free, family-friendly hip-hop festival to the area using his DJ connections. When he was caught and sent to prison for a decade, he became a vegan, and when he got out, he married a woman with dreadlocks and had a kid.

Previously: How I Learned You Should Never Touch a Ouija Board Someone Leaves on Your Porch

Santiago seemed like a nice guy, but more importantly for my purposes, this seemed like a slam-dunk 500-word feel-good story: a Robin Hoodesque protagonist, major hip-hop players on the periphery, drugs, prison time, redemption. Naturally, I agreed to chat with him, and we set a date to drink Starbucks in Hollywood's Young Circle and go over his newest business venture, which had something to do with hemp cakes. Health food wasn't the most exciting topic in the world, but it was better than having vaping explained to me again.

When I got to the meeting spot, he ordered a cup of black coffee with light hazelnut syrup and exactly two ice cubes, then led me outside to a van with blacked-out windows. His wife and young daughter were sitting inside, which made it seem less likely that I would be kidnapped. Once we were comfortable, he handed over a couple of blueberry cakes for me to sample as he told the story of how he went from being a kingpin to a family man.

On Broadly: Should Pregnant Women Totally Avoid Alcohol?

He made for an engaging narrator, and the hemp cakes were really good. I was on my third when Santiago asked me how I felt.

"Uh, healthy?" I replied. It took me a few seconds to realize there had been a huge miscommunication, and that I had basically just eaten a bunch of drugs.

Then I realized that Santiago was probably more confused than I was. I explained that I thought we had been talking about health food, because medical marijuana wasn't legal yet in Florida. He wouldn't email reporters about an illegal THC edible business, right? Turns out that's exactly what he was doing.

"You want me to write about how you sell weed out of a van and put it in the newspaper?" I asked. "You just spent ten years in prison for selling a different drug."

"Medical marijuana is going to happen, and people are going to be smoking blunts in the streets," he told me. "We're just getting there first."

Santiago started the van and said he was headed home with me in tow. A few minutes later, his family and I went inside their apartment, where I was presented with a business proposition. "If you write about us, we'll write you into the business," he told me. "If we work together, we can take this to the top."

At this juncture, I should point out that I was very, very high, the kind of high where navigating routine social interactions is a task on par with working out differential equations in your head. Having a drug dealer proposition you about doing something that was super-duper wrong from a professional-ethics perspective and also a wait-could-I-get-sent-to-jail-for-that perspective was far from routine.

Watch: LARPing Saved My Life

Santiago began packing some more cakes into a doggy bag along with some regular weed. His very young daughter was scribbling with crayons at the kitchen table as I finally figured out how to force my mouth to make sentences.

"I'll think about it," I said. "There would be a lot of ethical concerns."

Then Santiago's daughter came over and gave me what she'd been working on. It was a family picture of her, her parents, and me in front of a house. Jesus Christ.

I looked at the clock and realized I had another problemit was already 4 PM, and I had another interview in an hour, at the Paul Rein Detention Facility in Pompano Beach, where I was trying to force a guy awaiting trial for welfare fraud to talk to me.

I said I would consider joining their weird hemp cartel, packed up my samples, promised to put the little girl's drawing on my fridge, and got the hell out of there, on the verge of an anxiety meltdown. Should I throw out the approximately $500 worth of weed I'd just been handed? What would happen if any of the cops there smelled the pot stench on me? Was I sober enough to talk my way into a visit with the inmate I was there to interview, then actually interview him?

Surprisingly, everything worked out OKmy claim that I was the inmate's friend was unchallenged, the inmate himself talked with me enough for my piece, and the subject matter was juicy enough that I went on Fox News and talked to Greta Van Susteren the next night. (By then, thank God, the high had worn off. I don't think I could have handled Fox News otherwise.)

Unfortunately for Santiago, medical marijuana lost at the ballot box in Novemberconstitutional amendments require 60 percent of the vote, and it only mustered 57 percent. I'm not sure if that led Santiago to scrap his edibles business, or if he's still going around in his van and selling illegal cakes.

I did end up writing a tiny story about him (he was an interesting character, after all), and as far as I know nothing happened to himhe didn't get arrested, but he didn't become rich or famous either. He called me several times after the piece came out to see if I was interested in trading more press for equity in his business, and I kind of just stopped answering the phone, because I was terrified. Sorry, Santiago.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photos by Florin eprdea

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Florin eprdea works in IT, but he also has a passion for photography. His first project, My Rear Window (titled after Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film) illustrates Romanian student life seen from the window of a room in Bucharest's university campus. I got in touch with him to find out how he started photographing his neighbors and what they think about this.

VICE: How did the project start?
Florin eprdea: My girlfriend is a med student and I spend my weekends in her room, on campus. One day I was on her balcony, photographing whatever caught my eye,when I noticed a girl on the balcony across from me. She was dusting a blanket.And I thought: What if I start documenting the students' lives? All photos weretaken from the same balcony, the one in my girlfriend's dorm room.

You showed me your favorite photograph . Tell me why you like it so much.
I like the contrast between their poses. He is standing, stretching, looking out; meanwhile she is all curled up in a corner, reading. I always look for them when I walk around campus, I check out thebenches, the bars. They're stuck in my mind.

Do the people who appear in your photos know theyhave been photographed?
I posted the album on one of the students' groups on Facebook. I am guessing they have seen it. People were talking around uni in the first days after Iposted them.

Did anyone complain about you invading theirintimacy?
Nobody complained, even though I was a little worried about this. I thought a lotabout it, at the beginning. Then I concluded that none of the photos puts them in abad light. They are decent, nice photos.

What was your girlfriend doing while you weretaking photos at her window?
She was studying for exams.

Photo by Maria Jefferis/Shot2Bits

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE's website thought it would be amusing to employ a 44-year-old who used to own a home computer that operated with 5k of memory and whose "games" were loaded from cassettes.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use Urban Dictionary, "meff" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for tramp (meff = meths = methylated spirits). It also means someone who looks odd; someone who doesn't fit in.

MEFF 2: DESIGNED AND DIRECTED BY HIS RED RIGHT HAND

Why can't she see it? It's right there on the middle of my chest.

Maria stands in the bedroom doorway. It's no longer pitch black but not yet light. There is a low, clotted cream light in the room.

"Don't forget you're taking the squirrel to school this morning. Bye bye. See you this evening."

She disappears, leaving me staring at the unreasonably large spider squatting on my sternum. Its fat, fleshy legs span at least seven inches. It doesn't move but it swells and falls with a breathing motion. Why is there a huge flesh-colored tarantula on my chest? Why the fuck is there a huge, hand-shaped, flesh-colored tarantula on my chest?

I'm just about to scream when I realize the hand-shaped arachnid is actually just my hand. Every night my sluggish blood retreats as far into my body as it will go, meaning I wake up as a writhing head on a torso in a bed strewn with useless, heavy limbs.

As well as the dead hand on my chest, my other hand is behind my head; I can barely feel it. I reach over and pick the hand up off my chest so I can take a closer look at it. I scratch myself on the back of the head. I manage two seconds contemplating the fact that I've woken up with three arms before letting out a panicked shout.

My son darts into the room like a grinning velociraptor holding a stuffed Bagpuss: "Dad?"

And then, suddenly, I'm wide awake. My game face snaps into place. I jump out of bed and ruffle his hair with the correct number of hands: "Let's get you some fruit!"

Ever since the run in with the street-drinking sandwich man I've been avoiding thinking about my promise to myself. I've been ignoring the fact that I said I'm going to get Fight Club fit by my next birthday. And now two weeks have shot by and I've done nothing other than feel anxious and eat too much fried chicken. As of today, there are only eight months until I turn 45.

I drop my son off at school and walk home chiding myself: "Look at yourself. A grown man. Afraid of his own wanking spanners."

It's time to stop procrastinating and get down to the gym.

Despite what I may have said in the past, it's not like I haven't been to the gym before. In fact, I've tried it on for size at several points previously. Probably my most successful run was 20 years ago when I was working late shifts in a bonded alcohol warehouse in Welwyn Garden City. My local gym was a miserable, magnolia-painted room with a couple of exercise bikes, a broken rowing machine, crash mats, and some free weights. It was an afterthought, tucked away at the back of the corporation swimming pool and squash courts. It was nearly always empty, which meant I never had any fear when removing the front of the wooden box that the stereo was kept in using the screwdriver head on my Swiss Army knife. I did this so I could replace their only CDThis Is Trance: Disc 2with one of my own, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet. I used to find that if I cycled really hard for the duration of that album, no matter how hungover I was beforehand, I would always feel much better afterwards.

One day I was near to the end of my routine ("B-Side Wins Again") when a work colleague walked into the room. He stopped at the doorway, threw his head back, and sniffed the air suspiciously. He walked into the center of the room and repeated the process. He ambled over to where I was cycling furiously, sniffing like a bloodhound.

He stood there staring at me incredulously until I had to stop cycling: "What do you want?" I snapped at him.

"Doran... it smells just like sherry in here," he said suspiciously. There was a tedious pause until the penny dropped. He started chortling: "Have you come in here to cycle off a bottle of sherry?"

"No!" I said indignantly. "It's actually more like three bottles."

He sized me up as if actually seeing me for the first time: "Do you come in here every day to sweat off sherry?"

"No," I replied. "Sometimes it's whisky. Look, I'm nearly done, do you fancy tagging along to the Ludwick? There's time for five or six schooners before work if we crack on."

The only thing that links my current gym in Hackney to the one in Hertfordshire is the default music. Trance. Except now it has become gym trance; the kind of EDM you will hear in no club, no bar, no home and on no radio station. You will never hear this music anywhere except in a modern gym. And this time round I cannot locate the box where the stereo is kept. I have a suspicion that the actual music is played from a laptop stored off site, out of town, possibly in an entirely different country, protected by men wearing mirror shades carrying handguns.

Because the entertainment on offer in the modern gym is serious fucking business and not to be taken lightly.

The gymmy gym, your gym, anyone's gymis neither real nor a dream. It is hyperreal. You know how some people think life is essentially a very complex computer simulation; a bit like The Matrix but with better clothes and music? Well, I don't think that at all. Until I'm in a gym, that is, and then I think, Actually, now that you come to mention it...

The gym is the most hyperreal zone that most people are able to enter on a daily basis. To get into my gym I have to wait outside on the pavement until a sensor detects my presence and then circular glass panels slide back automatically allowing me to step inside a kind of round, airlock-shaped space. When the doors slide shut behind meand only when the doors slide shut behind methe second set of doors in front of me slide open, allowing me access to the foyer. At the desk I have to scan my membership card before being handed a brightly colored wristband (different colors are used at random during the week, so there is no way of telling which color will be used on any given day). Once I am wearing the wristband I then have to scan my card again to get through a turnstile which allows me access to the changing rooms. After depositing my bag in a locker, I secure it with a key which is attached to a bracelet. I have to wear this on my wrist as well as the brightly colored wristband.

Then, and only then, can I enter the gym, where occasionally there will be a member of staff looking out for wristbands at the door. (Sometimes there will even be a sweep of the rooms by staff to make sure there are no interlopers.)

And it is just as difficult to leave. When you want to exit the gym, there are wristbands and bracelets to take off and turnstiles and airlocks to walk back out through.

In my experience it is actually easier to get into France via the Eurostar than it is to get into my local gym. What are they afraid will happen? Are they scared that suddenly the complex will be overwhelmed by throngs of unruly school children, all desperate to pile in and start lifting weights? Is there a genuine threat of an entire chapter of Hell's Angels barging in to do jazzercise without paying?

There is no logical reason for it to be so difficult to get in, and yet there is an important reason for it. This is actually what an illusionist would call a misdirection. All of this palaver is designed to distract you from the fact that you're passing through a permeable membrane into a different zone of reality; an altered state. You should not be aware of how objectionable the place you are entering truly is.

READ ON VICE SPORTS: Vladimir Putin's Workout Regime Is Shit

Imagine you are in my gym with me now.

There are designated spaces where the fighters and boxers train. There is a large room full of free weights and machines for the bodybuilders. There are a few studios for the various dance and spin classes. But I am in the room with all the cardio machines, where all the other fucked and bewildered people go. There are 14 running mills, four rowing machines, eight step machines, 10 cross trainers, and 16 exercise bikes of various types all facing one long wall in a rectangular shaped room. Along this wall there are four widescreen televisions tuned into different channels. They are always switched on and always in your line of sight, no matter where you stand.

The first screen always shows rolling news from the BBC. Since I joined this gym over two years ago, I have seen nothing but horror on this channel. Beheadings in Syria. Stabbings in Tel Aviv. Dead children in Gaza. Popular grandfathers in Essex shanked to death in road rage attacks. Entire villages coming to terms with their loss. There is always a crowdthey could be in any city, any countryand they are always under attack from riot police. Constant terrorist explosions in France. Constant refugee death by drowning. Constant earthquake; no one saw it coming. Constant Iain Duncan Smith's face. Constant George Osbourne's face.

Constant school massacre. Constant school massacre. Constant school massacre.

(And you think to yourself, Should I phone the school? I mean, I know he's fine... but should I phone the school anyway?)

The crappy auto-captioning makes a mockery of this already debasing conveyor belt of human misery. All the information you are given is stripped of even the most cursory notion of dignity, as if these words are being composed on the trot by Allo Allo's two British Airmen.

For five minutes every two hours, light relief is provided by a story on astrophysics. This usually concerns some new anomaly they have discovered in the deepest, oldest, furthest away recesses of the Hubble Deep Field at the edge of the known universe. Yes. Thanks for that light relief. I feel so much better now.

(I can tell you exactly which week I did my induction into this gym. It was the week of May 22, 2013. And I know this because all I looked at for my first hour on the treadmilland most of my trips back to the gym over the following seven dayswas the bloody hand of the cretinous and cowardly Michael Adebolajo, captured seconds after he'd attacked Lee Rigby. And all the time a strident voice over a psychotically EQ'd trance beat urged me to, "Work it! Work it!" before informing me: "We're all in the club!" Except we weren't in a club. We were trapped in a little bubble of Hell which had risen all the way up to the surface.)

The second screen is usually MTV or another non-stop pop video channel. I'm pretty sure that only two videos exist in 2015. Megan Traynor's "All About the Bass" and Charlie XCX (with Rita Ora)'s "Doing It." At all other times this screen is just full of a random assortment of pumped, ripped, waxed, oiled and buffed hard bodies in shorts or bikinis grinding mercilessly away.

The third screen is always a cookery show. An everlasting montage of courgettes being dicedthe knife a blur of steel; the purple haze of flamb as a wok throws off a mushroom shaped burst of flame; gaping mouths shoveling in forkfuls of cake, masticating all the way into a fat-faced forever.

The final screenperhaps the most abject of the bunchalways features a confused-looking middle-aged couple as part of a reality TV show, trying to get a foot onto the property ladder. Cameras follow them as they are dragged from one decrepit property to another on rough-looking housing estates by some sadist with bright white teeth dressed in pastel-colored clothes. It is clear that they will never be able to afford to buy one of these houses, and even if they could it would cripple them financially forever. So what is this fucking program all about?

Come on. Meet me halfway. Don't make me spell out how fucked up this is and don't insult your own intelligence (or mine) by claiming this is all somehow coincidence.

WATCH: 'Nest of Giants,' our film about Iceland's history of pumping out the world's strongest strongmen.

My friend Philly Kev ran an idea past me recently. I don't really watch much TV, but the few TV shows I like, I'm obsessed with. For example, I've watched each and every episode of The Walking Dead probably three times over. But Kev said he couldn't get down with that show and gave me a reason which chilled me as much as watching some biter get its head cleaved open by a lump hammer. He floated the notion that there is a time of great violence coming and that perhaps shows like The Walking Dead were a tool in helping prep us for dark days ahead; days when it would be beneficial for us to be able to view our former friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers as less than human. Beneficial for us to regard the idea of killing them brutally with whatever is at hand as completely normal.

Kevin has a lot of interesting ideasI'm not sure to what extent he actually believes in this one; you'd have to ask him yourself if you wanted to know for sure. Personally, even if it were true, I'm not sure that The Walking Dead has the kind of reach which would make it an effective social programming tool anyway. If you want to change the way large numbers of working class and middle class people behave or think, you could do worse than starting in a gym. And better still, make going to the gym a costly but aspirational necessity, so that folk will pay a lot for the privilege. How else are you going to get ready for that marathon? Strap them into machines and pump them full of anxiety about Islam, lung cancer, pedophilia, bikini bodies, Jeremy Corbyn, rising house prices/the imminent housing crash, bulimia, migrants, muscle tone, earthquakes, anddear fucking Christthe start of the very universe itself.

Get them in. Sign them up. Tenderize them.

And of course every fiber in your body is screaming: "Go home. It's safe there. You don't need to deal with all this shit." But that is not the answer. The answer is to get fit enough to progress to the weightlifting room where there are no television screens, just brick walls and machinery.

John Doran's MENK column for VICE was reworked into the acclaimed memoir, Jolly Lad, which was published this year by Strange Attractor.

Previously MEFF 1: What Were the Skies Like When You Were Young?

Still from the trailer for 'The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth'

Forget Fallout 4, forget Halo 5, forget Star Wars: Battlefront, and stick The Taken King up your ass. There's a dank, dark, dripping corner of the gaming world that's looking forward to one game this year, and one game only: The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth.

Afterbirth is the official expansion to Rebirth, a rollicking, randomly-generated rogue-like released last November to huge critical and commercial success. Packed with blood, babies, and bodily fluids, it's the latest brainchild of Super Meat Boy maker, indie legend, and sleeve-tattooed horror fanatic Edmund McMillen.

I gave Ed a call to find out a little bit more about Afterbirth, and peek behind the shit-covered curtains of one of the indie scene's biggest success stories.

This interview contains spoilers.

Ed McMillen, photo via Wikipedia

VICE: It's been almost a year since the launch of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. How have you been since then?
Ed McMillen: It's been an interesting year for me personally, because my wife and I are having a baby (which has since been born). So it's been a very new kind of experience in terms of getting my life in order for that, and trying to work on games while that's happening.

But Rebirth was pretty effortless, because it was the first time I've ever just done design before, where I got to just direct, tune, and have a good number of very competent and trustworthy people around me.

The Isaac games are well known for their scatological and Satanic content, and you're clearly a guy who understands the language of horror. How much of an influence has horror cinema and literature had on your career?
Huge. My two biggest influences growing up were the Catholic side of my family and the fact that I saw The Toxic Avenger and Evil Dead II when I was like six or seven. Take those things, mash 'em together, and you basically get me.

My mom was a single mom, so it was pretty easy for me to be like hey, I like the way this cover looks, and then she would just let me rent it. So I was alone in my room watching The Toxic Avenger when I was seven.

Seeing movies I probably shouldn't have been seeing moulded me in many different ways, and I always thought it'd be cool to make a game that might be that to somebody, like, "Maybe I'm not old enough to be playing this."

You once said that really good art should upset some people. How successful do you think the Isaac games have been in achieving this? Have they upset many people along the way?
I don't think they've upset anybody. And I don't know if that's a failure or an achievement on my part.

It's definitely pushed me to go a little bit further. My latest little game, Fingered, is all about stereotyping the way people look in different ways, comparing it with the criminal justice system, and talking about the death penalty, and I thought that would get a lot of pushback.

But the only pushback I ever get is from guys on my side of the street, but extreme left, insane people, who don't think you should be allowed to say what you wanna say.

My non-gaming girlfriend plays Rebirth on the Vita constantly. Have you noticed or been surprised by the cross-gender appeal of the Isaac games?Yeah. I have. It's very appealing to women for some reason, and I don't know why.

When I originally created it, one of the driving forces for me was the fact that my wife played it. She likes games, but she's not big into the hardcore stuff like Spelunky, and never really got that into anything I had been working on, but with Isaac she went in deep.

She was 120 hours in before that game even came out, and she was the reason why I made the DLC for it, because she was done and I wanted to see her keep playing it.

A lot of female friends who don't normally play a lot of games seem to get hooked in and play it a lot, and yeah. I have no idea. For whatever reason it does definitely seem to speak to women.

Ed's cabinet of Isaac-related curios, via his Twitter account.

Why do you think the Isaac games have such a devoted cult following?
I don't know. I hope that the reason it's done well is because I've achieved something artistically. To make this really out-there, honest, and weird game that I really wanted to play. Someone asked me recently if I had written the story the way I did because the Bible can be interpreted in different ways, and that was one of the things that I definitely set out to do. But I don't think many people see the themes in that way. I mean, what's so appealing about a naked abused child crying on shit? I guess the real appeal is the fact that you can play it endlessly.

So you think it's more of a gameplay thing, rather than the themes or aesthetics?
I think it is, but I'd prefer if it wasn't. I dunno. Maybe there are just a lot of people out there who like the stuff that I like. Which seems weird. To this day, I don't get it.

What do you think the most annoying enemy in the game is?
Envy, by far.

I reckon it's the little red spiders. I've been doing a lot of Lost runs recently, and they seem to fuck me up the most.
It's interesting.

Have your feelings toward the indie scene changed much over the last five years?
When I started making indie games in like 2003, the scene was made up of like 36 people, who talked to each other and would meet up at GDC (Game Developers Conference) and stuff. We loved each other, talked about bullshit, and everything was great.

By 2008 or 2009, when it boomed and a lot of developers started getting picked up by larger studios and getting publisher deals, it was huge. World of Goo was huge, Braid was out, Castle Crashers was out, and you saw it start to eat itself.

I don't know if it was the polarization of big indie and little indie, but way back at my first IGF (Independent Games Festival) in 2004, there was this game in the finals that had a publicly known multi-million dollar budget sitting alongside us, with no budget. And the indier-than-thou mentality got really extreme once everyone started succeeding, and you saw indie developers start fighting over what they felt was "right."

It moved away from the games, making games, and moved more toward who was bigger, who was doing better, who was doing more for the world and the community, and it just turned into fucking high school. Everybody was competing, like, who was better than who, and what was a game, and "let's grab our pitchforks" and it just got worse and worse over the years.

I feel like I haven't been seeing so much of that stuff since the weird Gamergate stuff died down, and I like to think people are mellowing out now, but the past three years have become so frightening as an artist that I don't want any part of it and I don't consider myself a part of it. I don't participate in anything, because I don't feel like I'm welcome.

Article continues after the video below

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Ed McMillen wearing a 'Spelunky' T-shirt, via The Binding of Isaac (Brasil)

What makes a great indie game? Do you have any favorite titles of the last few years?
Spelunky has to be at least in my top ten best games of all time. I love that game so much. It's such a game developer's game. I think Braid is a fantastic game, World of Goo, and Cave Story is phenomenal too.

All of the games I mentioned succeed on so many levels when it comes to doing something and saying something different, but a great indie game is something that not only brings something new to the table, but everything about the game embodies what it is.

World of Goo is (designer) Kyle Gabler in every fucking way. His sense of humor, the way he acts, the way he carries himself. Every aspect of the way Dan Paladin looks is embodied in Castle Crashers. And I feel like the most special indie games have that going for them. And of course, they're even better when they're well-tuned, polished, playable games that make you feel smart and challenge you.

Right, let's talk Afterbirth. You've got a very open relationship with the fans via Reddit and the Isaac blog. Have there been any pros or cons to this level of transparency?
I've always said I'd never develop a public beta, because to me it would feel like painting a picture with an outline, but blocking out the lights and the darks, and I wouldn't want to show anyone that because nobody would be able to see where I was going with it. But getting feedback from players and trying to make an expansion that caters to the way people play feels very OK and appropriate to me.

There was a Reddit thread with a thousand item suggestions for Afterbirth, and I actually thought I'd get better ideas than I did. I went through all of them and came away with ten. And out of those ten, I'd say five are the actual designs people suggested, and the other five are heavily modified versions to make them work in the game.

But it was cool, like hey, let's brainstorm with a thousand people on Reddit, someone's bound to say something awesome! I'd never done anything like that before, and I wanted to make Afterbirth an expansion that people really want.

'The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth,' release date teaser

The PAX Prime gameplay footage was great. Greed mode especially looks like a lot of fun, in a sadistic kinda way. What was the inspiration for that?
The inspiration for greed mode was greed. I tried my best to fold that theme back in on itself as much as possible throughout. I've been testing it out extensively now, and I can tell you that every single death was because I got greedy, I tried to save up my money for an item I really wanted, and disregarded my health. You get more interesting, hectic, and heart-pumping setups, and the daily runs complement that as well. There are real consequences to your actions.

Given the fact that The Binding of Isaac is not the most mainstream of titles, how would you convince new players to pick up Afterbirth?
Play the game. Do four runs. And I think by the forth run, you'll understand how and why it's appealing. When I put Isaac out, there weren't many other games like it, other than Spelunky. Reviews were meh, I think IGN gave it a seven, and most people just thought, Oh it's just a randomly generated Zelda. And I had to plead my case in interviews, like, give it a chance. You'll understand that it's actually really fun when you die, because then you get to do a whole new build. And maybe the next run could be totally insane.

Which aspects of Afterbirth are you most excited and proud of?
Most of it, actually. I'm really proud of greed mode, and the daily runs, those are the two things that stand out the most. I'm proud of actually having made over a hundred new items that feel new. There's a new familiar called the Multi-Dimensional Baby. It mirrors your movements, and whenever you shoot through it, it doubles your shots and turns them into these weird flashing black and white things. Every little item does something new that people will have a fun time messing with. And I have an idea of the items that people will be like, "Oh, this is the greatest." There's a shitload of new dice; it's good stuff. There's a lot of ways to break the game.

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A screenshot from 'Afterbirth' via Steam

Have you had any thoughts on where to take Isaac post-Afterbirth?
Isaac embodies me more than any other game that I've worked on, so it's easy for me to keep with it. I'm still just blown away that something so strange could be so popular and so accepted overall, that it's hard for me not to see it as a really special thing that I wanna keep going with.

I really enjoyed working on Fingered, and I'd hope to do more small things like that. I think it threw a lot of people when I put a game out that I'd only worked a couple months on. I'm really proud of it.

I don't think I have another big expansion in me, though. We've talked about the possibility of creating an expansion that consists of a level editor type thing, so I can hand it off to people like, if you wanna keep this thing going, then build a community full of people and make your own levels. Beyond this, there's no point going any further unless it's a full sequel and a whole new experience.

What's going on with the PS4/Vita release for Afterbirth?
It'll get a release, hopefully this year. (Nicalis founder) Tyrone (Rodriguez)'s working on it now actually. The PAX Prime demo gameplay you saw was from PlayStation, so we're just jumping through the hoops with Sony.

Cool. And finally, can you give rabid VICE-reading Isaac fans a cheeky little exclusive Afterbirth spoiler?
Sure, let me open up my handy-dandy Afterbirth item list. (Long pause) Ah, wait. Can I be vague about an item?

Ed, you can be as vague as you like.
OK. There's a new familiar that levels up as you do things. It's kind of like a Meat Boy, but more realistic as far as being able to max it out. And if people like that, that's something I'd like to do more of in the future.

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth is out on Steam on October 30.

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Similar practice in India. Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Ranveig

A political science professor at Tarleton State University has resigned in a new weird kind of disgrace: Dr. Jeff Justice admits to having his students watch while he suspended himself in the air from hooks through his chest.

By all accounts, the loss of Dr. Justice comes as a blow to Tarelton State, where he seems to have been a well-liked, knowledgeable educator. One of his reviews on Ratemyprofessor.com indicates that he is, "not too bad, smart, but weird."

According to a statement he wrote explaining his departure, the hooks-in-chest incident occurred back in April in the front of his home. Members of the press have, he claims, repeatedly approached him asking if he had plied minors with alcohol, and seemingly to put the rumors to bed, he clarified in a statement: "What did occur on that night was I attempted to harm myself in the presences of several students."

Adding to the mystery however, he went on to explain that while he doesn't remember why he did it, "this incident was caused by the accumulation of events in my life that resulted in me entering a state of severe depression."

An October 14 police report appears to be the origin of the claim that he offered alcohol to minors. The report says several students went to Justice's house, and that they "did drink scotch." Later in the evening, the students reportedly "witnessed Prof. Justice put spikes in his chest with ropes attached so that he could hang from a tree in his backyard," and that it was Justice's way of "praying to the sun god."

It seems he was doing a version of a ritual called "Mandan," which comes from the traditions of certain Plains Native Americans who perform it on young boys as a rite of passage into manhood. Alternatively, it's sometimes called, "suspension" by body modification enthusiasts, and is practiced all over the world.

Related: Check out VICE Serbia's documentary on this exact thing.

According to the report, once the ritual was over, Justice asked the students to keep quiet about the whole body-piercing-and-sun-god-worshipping thing because, "he had lost friends from it before." The anonymous student quoted in the police report claims Justice "told us he loved us for experiencing it with him."

According to Texan News Service, Justice was very active in Boy Scouts, including participation in the Order of the Arrow, a sort of overachievers club within the Boy Scouts. According to Ratemyprofessor.com, Justice frequently regaled students with Scouting stories. So far, no public information about his status with the Boy Scouts has apparently been issued.

In his statement, Justice calls the incident "a low point in my life," and claims that he has since been able to "overcome the embarrassment of my actions that night." He also wrote that his anxiety and depression required a "more aggressive treatment plan."

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'Coming Out Like a Porn Star.' Book cover design by Jamee Baiser

On the cover of the forthcoming anthology Coming Out Like a Porn Star, Jiz Lee emerges from a pastel pink vulva, t-shirt rising seductively, pants sunk to the ankles. It seems to be a metaphor: The genderqueer porn star (who prefers the pronoun "they") emerging from the depths, in porn and in life.

To date, Lee has starred in over 200 porn films and websites, earning respect as a queer porn legend. "Porn is one of the best things I've ever done, but there were so many stigmas I didn't know how to tell my family about it," Lee said in an email. "That's how I began asking others their stories."

Coming Out Like a Porn Star, which will be released October 20, features over 50 stories from some of the biggest names in pornJoanna Angel, Stoya, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, Conner Habib, and many moreall telling the tales of when they came out to their family, friends, and loved ones as porn performers. "While there have been articles on porn performers telling their parents, or being outed at their vanilla job, the mainstream media usually sensationalizes stories that only further stigmatize," said Lee.

Read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Porn

This book, by contrast, seeks to share an honest portrait of porn, with some contributors citing its liberating features and others denouncing it on moral grounds. As Lee writes in the book, "If we are to overcome these cultural roadblocks and gain rights for sex workers, it is precedent that we create a dialogue that stands firmly on the fact that people who chose to perform in porn are no different than anyone else," positive or negative experiences and views included.

I spoke to some of the book's contributors about their coming out experiences, the changing sexual culture, and what they hope the book can achieve.

Photo by Rishio

MILCAH HALILI

VICE: When did your career get serious enough that you felt you had to "come out" as a porn star?
Milcah Halili: When people were reading my interview is intergenerational. I appreciate that this is going to be a historical document and it already is. Words can live on, it kind of creates an immortality and just a snapshot of the times.

Sex workers work in fantasies. They are creating fantasies and acting out fantasies and making creative sexual expressionsbut this book is more in the reality, it's not fantasy or a fiction. It's always fun to look into the closet. I love the cover of Jiz coming out of the vulva. It's like you're trying to look inside the vulva into the secret, behind the scenes of the pussy.

Coming Out Like a Porn Star will be released on October 20. Pre-order your copy here.

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Still from the film 'Twins.' Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Try to spin it any way you want, but being short sucks. You can't reach things, it's a hassle to find clothes that fit, and people feel like it's OK to make comments about your height bordering on hate speech. Those of shorter stature who also happen to have a penis seem to fare even worse than their female compatriots for a litany of reasons. Put plainly, it blows to be a short guy.

It makes sense that we've been culturally conditioned over tens of thousands of years to correlate height with strength, virility, and survivability. What once factored in as legitimate component in defeating other predators in our angsty hunter-gatherer days is now more or less a non-issue when it comes to one's survival. Unfortunately for our diminutive male friends, society hasn't shaken those vestigial prejudices about their worthto the point that being a short guy can actually contribute to depression.

Recent research on military men at Camp Pendleton showed an increased risk of depression for the guys who stood 5'8" and below. Valery Krupnik, the clinician at the helm of the study, stated that the physical demands of a career in the military likely play a role in these cases of depression. "When people find themselves outliers for reasons beyond their control, like physical attributes, they face a challenge in addition to all the challenges average people face," Krupnik told LiveScience.com.

As for civilians, the data doesn't paint a pretty picture either. The average male in the United States, according to the CDC, stands just over 5'9". Those falling below that benchmark will face a variety of hurdles, ranging from career prospects to dating partners, all of which can plummet a guy's self-esteem.

Daniel Freeman, a clinical psychologist at Oxford who has studied the effect of height on paranoia, told me that among those who are taller, "the chances of feeling anxious or depressed tend to be a little lower. Greater height is also associated with a slightly lower risk of suicide."

In fact, for every two inch increase in height in men, the risk of suicide goes down 9 percent, according to a Swedish study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status, education level, and prenatal factors, the researchers still found a "twofold higher risk of suicide in short men than tall men."

Watch: VICE visits the Kingdom of the Little People, a theme park for dwarfs.

The reasons for this probably have something to do with the fact that shorter people face microaggressions every day, in all aspects of life. "The taller you are, the more likely you'll do better at school," said Freeman. "Being tall is also associated with career success. It has been estimated that a person who is six feet tall is likely to earn over 100,000 ($150,000) more during the course of a 30-year career than someone who is five foot four."

Being a short guy basically rules out being an NBA player (average height, 6'7"), a ballplayer (average height, 6'2"), or a footballer (average height, 6'0"). Of the 43 presidents in US history, only 13 have stood 5'9" or shorter, and only six were under 5'8". There are a handful of short men in the entertainment industry, but most of them lie about their height through subterfuge and cinema trickery; those who are honest about their stature have either made it part of their personal brand or are so fucking good that it doesn't matter.

There's some debate as to why tall people make more money than shorter folks. Some say it's the social conditioning taller children get as their peers subconsciously look up to them that helps to propel them into pathways towards leadership roles later in life. Others attribute the difference to the self-confidence boost tall folks enjoy in their day-to-day lives.

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But that's what the scientists are saying. To see how it all shakes out, I spoke with a number of short men to see if their life experiences squared with the cold numbers.

Mark Steffen, a 5'6" man in New York City who has been clinically diagnosed as Bipolar-I, thinks his height plays a role in his being taken seriously in the workplace. "I've noticed that people don't really listen up when I talk in meetings. Then, when I get very stern and 'take no prisoners,' people will agree, then come up to me after and say that they didn't know I could be so forceful. It's nice that I've found a way to be effective, but it sucks that I have to be a dick in order to get people to listen up."

That kind of constant trivialization can weigh on someone, and Mark said his height actively contributed to battles with depression he faced over the years. "When you're actively trying to dig yourself out of a hole and do the things you know you should do, you have this extra layer half of the time of self-doubt."

In Los Angeles, Ely Henry, a 5'6" (OK, more like five foot five and a half) guy who has been diagnosed with dysthymiapersistent depressionshared a similar story. "When I was younger, I had to compensate. Spoke louder, more frequently; wanted to make my voice heard," he told me. "I felt like being smaller made me need to fight harder to be taken seriously. As I've gotten older I've come to peace with it. Now it's just a bummer getting things from high shelves."

The most depressing thing, of course, is that it's something out of his controland, Henry added, "when you really look at it, it's not something that generally even affects me. Like with most superficial issues, anyone that cares about how short or tall you are is an asshole."

But not every short guy I spoke with found his stature to really affect his mood. Jordan Rock, who is 5'6", says he's generally been very happy and actually appreciates how being short shaped him into the man he is today. "Being a little kid and not being able to easily reach things likely thought me how to problem solve, overcome challenges, think outside of the box, and deal with the cards you're dealt."

While there's still plenty of evidence that short guys get the short straw in life, stories like Rock's show that it doesn't always have to be a bummer. Did you know Gandhi was only 5'4"?

Across the board in scientific study, height has an association with various markers of success and happinessbut that association is relatively small, explained Freeman, the Oxford psychologist. "It is obvious that you can have great success whatever your height. It's just that greater height confers a bit of an advantage."

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and Twitter.

Read: The Funniest Sketches from Every Guest on the 'SNL' 40th Anniversary Special (Almost)

Eddie Murphy traded in his red leather jacket for movie stardom in the 80s and hasn't looked back at stand-up since. At least not until Sunday night, when the legendary comedian treated an audience to his first live stand-up set in 28 years during the Mark Twain Prize ceremony honoring Murphy. He even busted out that Bill Cosby impression from Raw after deciding not to bring it back for Saturday Night Live .

The 54-year-old comedian rehearsed the short stand-up set in front of Arsenio Hall and Chris Rock before the show, the Washington Post reported, and the pair rooted him on from backstage during the performance.

"That fucker is killing," Rock reportedly told Hall.

The Mark Twain Prize is the top honor for humor in America. Previous recipients have included Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, and Bill Cosby himselfthough that was before the godawful stories came out.

Vincent Asaro is escorted by FBI agents from their Manhattan offices in New York after his arrest last year. Photo by REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

In Martin Scorsese's 1990 gangster classic Goodfellas, mafia associate-turned-informant Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) breaks the fourth wall and stares right at the camera as he delivers testimony against his former pals.

"We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges," he says, walking off the stand. "Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now, it's all over."

In real life, Hill's account of his involvement in organized crime helped land 50 convictions of high-level gangsters, including James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke (played by Robert De Niro). But no bona fide mobsters ever got put on trial for carrying out the 1978 Lufthansa Airlines heist, during which a record $6 million was stolen from JFK Airport, as dramatized in the movie.

Until now.

On Monday morning, that storied American subculture of payoffs, whacks, and half-joking, half-murderous lines made a startling return to Brooklyn federal court. The first day of the trial against Vincent Asaro, an 80-year-old longtime member of the Bonanno crime family, made for an incredible spectacle at a time when depictions of the mafia's power are increasingly relegated to reruns of The Sopranos and throwback Hollywood blockbusters.

Arrested last year, Asarowho has a history of mob-related convictionsis accused of taking a direct cut from the $6 million in cash and jewelry stolen that night in 1978. He is also charged with the late 1960s murder of a man believed by the family to be an informant named Paul Katz and burying his body at Burke's old house in Queens.

For his part, Asaro denies all allegations, and has pleaded not guilty.

According to an account provided to the feds by his cousin-turned-informant, Gaspare Valenti, Asaro kept his own involvement in the heist secret for years, while the rest of the organized crime world around him faltered. Valenti agreed in 2013 to wear a wire to get an admission out of Asaro after Valenti himself was convicted of racketeering. As recorded by the wire, Asaro reportedly said out loud that "We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get... Jimmy kept everything."

In 1978, the Bonanno family, one of the famous "Five Families", reportedly controlled the turf of JFK Airport. They apparently gave their blessing to a group of Lucchese familyaffiliated crooks, led by Burke, who allegedly went on to order the ritualized killings of those involved because Burke believed were attracting too much attention by flaunting their new wealth. (Burke was ultimately convicted, in the 1980s, of a college basketball point-shaving scheme and murdering a drug dealer.) At the time of the heist, Asaro was just a low-level Bonanno soldier; once he received his cut, prosecutors claim, he gave a briefcase full of gold and diamonds from the heist to Joseph Massino, the former boss of the Bonanno family, as a sort of tribute.

Prosecutors say Asaro later blew his cut on a growing gambling addiction. After becoming a mafia capo in the following years, he was actually demoted back to soldier due to his "his gambling problems and failure to repay debts to those associated with organized crime," according to the feds.

But by 2013, when most of the Bonanno crime family was either behind bars or wired, Asaro had apparently reclaimed his position as captain and even won a spot on "the panel" that oversaw Bonanno family affairs. When he was arrested the next year, the "made men" who placed him back on the Mafia food chain, including his own son, Jerome, were also thrown in handcuffs for crimes unrelated to the Lufthansa heist.

In her opening statement on Monday morning, federal prosecutor Lindsay K. Gerdes argued that Asaro had a "long history of borrowing money from people and never paying them back." In his defense, Asaro's lawyer, Diane Ferrone, claimed that the feds had no evidence that anyone saw Asaro commit these crimes, and of course, that he should be seen as innocent until proven guilty. She urged the jurors to make their decision based on "what the government does not have."

Soon Sal Vitale, a former underboss in the Bonanno family and Massino's right-hand man, took the stand on the eighth floor of Brooklyn federal court. Better known as "Handsome Sal," Vitale's hours-long testimony was a stunning primer in the Mafiahow it functions, how it kills, and, of course, how it profits.

"Money goes up, orders go down," was how Vitale put it at one point.

"Scores," as Vitale described them, are "anything to make money that's illegal." Inducted "soldiers" are known as "goodfellas" or "made men" who "earn money for the family and do what they're told." "Captains" are usually in charge of ten soldiers, he added, and underbosses oversee the captains.

The boss himself? "He's God," Vitale said.

Eventually, Vitale pinned the crime directly on Asaro, who was sitting silent in the courtroom, suggesting he was in a car with Massino when Asaro handed them a briefcase full of diamonds and gold from the Lufthansa vaults. The goods were apparently later sold on Canal Street in Chinatown.

Check out our documentary about the connection between organized crime and right-wing politics in Japan.

In the early 2000s, Vitale served as a government informant and was later set free after serving seven years in prison. He now lives under federal witness protection ("I'm still in danger," he told the court on Monday), and during his testimony he casually mentioned 11 murders he played a part in. His list of crimes also includes extortion, gambling, loan sharking, intimidation, and an array of other offenses.

In the coming days of the trial, Joseph Massino is set to testify, as well as Valenti, the cousin who set this series of events in motion. Asarowhose concealed forearm tattoo reads "Death Before Dishonor"is not currently expected to testify.

Even if these aging gangsters are clinging to the remnants of a once-prominent criminal underworld, on Monday morning, the machinery of the Mafia was described in the present tense. For the duration of the trial, at least, all these grisly slayings and money-making schemes are no longer confined to the dustbin of history.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Image courtesy of Starz

Last Saturday, the 12,000-square-foot Hammerstein Ballroom was at standing room only capacity for a screening of Starz's new horror series Ash vs. Evil Dead, a continuation of the series of three classic Evil Dead movies from the '80s and '90s (along with an ambiguously connected quasi-reboot from 2013). The half-hour show's jokes and goreoften combined to ridiculous effectcome at a rapid pace, so the crowd was cheering more or less constantly the whole time.

Afterward the lights came up and Kevin Smithwearing a hockey jersey with his own face on the frontintroduced the cast and crew for a fan Q&A. Smith, who by all rights seems to be a massive Evil Dead fan, asked Campbell to appear in his Mallrats sequel. Bruce Campbell, being Bruce Campbell, said yes.

Despite what its title may imply, Ash vs. Evil Dead is more of an ensemble deal than the earlier Evil Dead movies, where Bruce Campbell's headstrong hero Ash Williams is pretty much the sole focus of the films. But despite the fact that the whole cast, including Xena: Warrior Princess's Lucy Lawless, and the films' legendary director Sam Raimi were sitting in on the panel, nearly every question was directed at Campbell. Several of the people asking them were cosplaying as his most iconic character.

Campbell is the king of the nerds, or at least a particular kind of gore-loving nerd that's slightly more self-aware than most. Whether he's playing Ash in the Evil Dead series, a mummy-hunting retirement-age Elvis Presley in Bubba Ho Tep, thief-king Autolycus in Xena and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, or even the P.I. sidekick Sam Axe in USA's upbeat procedural Burn Notice, Campbell's outsize personality and unapologetically hammy presence have a way of slyly breaking the fourth wall to remind viewers that at its core, acting is all just a fun old game of make believe. His audience love to wink along with him.

He brought that same energy to the Comic Con panel, affectionately bullying the fans who had lined up to ask him questions, as if to point out how ridiculous it is that they lined up to ask some schmuck about pretending to be a cool guy who kills undead creatures with a shotgun and a chainsaw duct taped to the nub where his hand once was. One who brought up Evil Dead's debt to the Three Stooges' physical comedy got lightly harangued for not actually knowing the Three Stooges' work. Another asked for dating advice and Campbell responded, "Do you have any karate moves?" No one laughed harder than the guys getting roasted.

The day before, I met Campbell for lunch at a Midtown restaurant full of executive types, and I found him just as ridiculously charismatic one-on-one. Then again he's not afraid to admit that on some level, the Bruce Campbell at conventions and interviews is just another character he plays. "If they knew Bruce Campbell," he explained, "they would know the Bruce Campbell they think is Bruce Campbell is nowhere. I know how different I am from every single one of these characters. But people have their perceptions, and I'm not gonna mess with that. You can think of me as whoever you want, whoever you think I am."

Campbell's commitment to not messing with his fansoutside of a good-natured "making fun of you in front of thousands of people" wayhas a lot to do with why they're so insanely committed. That quality comes from being a fan himself. "When I was a kid I wanted to meet Shatner," he told me. "Where the hell was I going to meet him? Nowhere!"

And unlike Shatner, who for a long time would loudly, publicly complain about only being known for being Captain Kirk, cult celebrity suits Campbell perfectly. "I'm actually grateful that I'm well enough known to work," he said, "but not well enough known that people are going through my trash. I burn my trash anyway. I'm in southern Oregon. I'm in the woods. You have trash, you've got a burn pit."

Bruce Campbell and a fan. Image via Flickr user LostinTexas

Campbell also has none of the reluctance that some actors have to giving his fans what they want. Ash vs. Evil Dead is packed with fan service, from Ash's catchphrases (the first episode contains a prominently placed "Groovy") to Raimi's beloved 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, which has followed Ash from his first fateful trip to a demonically possessed Michigan cabin to medieval times, and back to the present day.

One of the reasons why Evil Dead has resonated with fans as strongly as it has, for long as it has, is because it's never been ashamed of being a straight-up horror flick. It wears its B-movie roots proudly, with its frequent on-screen kills, flying buckets of blood, and complete disinterest in probing its hero's psychology, simply establishing that he is, as Campbell puts it, "mostly an idiot who rises to the occasion."

"Relatability," he said, is Ash's number one quality. "There's no steely-eyed this or steely-eyed that. He's the one who's responsible for all this happening again! I mean he's directly responsible!"

Which is totally true. After unleashing an invasion of undead ghouls in Army of Darkness by blanking on an important spell he's supposed to recite, in Ash vs. Evil Dead he lets loose yet another demon horde on rural Michigan after wastedly reading aloud a passage from the cursed Necronomicon Ex-Mortis in order to impress a chick who likes poetry. Everything that goes wrong in Ash vs. Evil Dead is literally all Ash's fault.

"How many directors would do that with their lead guy?" Campbell asked proudly. "Anyone who dies in any of the Evil Dead movies is directly because of the lead character!" He's even fought the network to make sure they didn't make Ash seem more competent than he's supposed to be. "We got a note from Starz about Ash's tactics. He made a mistake with a gun," not lowering it when passing the barrel by someone on his side. "We were like, wait a minute, there's no mistake. He doesn't know what he's doing. He was trained at S-Mart in the sporting goods department! What does he know about that?"

Director Sam Raimi attacks Campbell with an undead doll for an Ash vs. Evil Dead scene. Image courtesy of Starz

As excited as Campbell is to be playing Ash again, the role's slapstick physicality has become "worse" with age, as he put it bluntly. "The recovery time's longer. The ability to get hurt is more random. I got injured on Burn Notice. I kicked a stunt guy in the face and I wasn't stretching, and I blew my hamstring. Try blowing your hamstring sometime. You literally can't walk. It's amazing. You're hamstrung."

Campbell, who helped the Coen Brothers shoot the short film that would eventually be turned into their debut Blood Simple, is also the only cast member from the film Fargo to also appear in the TV version, where he takes on the challenging task of playing Ronald Reagan during his campaign for president without sliding into caricature. "You gotta be a little careful with Ronald Reagan," he said. "The trick is, you just make him like a real guy. I had to drop the Johnny Carson imitation and just make him a character. Just a guy running for office who believed what he said."

During his Comic Con panel, Campbell jokingly expressed a bit of pessimism about his track record as a TV star. "Every time I star in a series it lasts one season," he said, referencing his runs on the short-lived The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Jack of All Trades, both of which were action-adventure series featuring a steampunk influence. Meanwhile, Campbell said, "Every time I'm second fiddle it goes on for fucking ever."

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But maybe Ash vs. Evil Dead will be the one to break that streak. If nothing else, he and Raimi will go out on their own terms. He said that he and Raimi extracted promises from Starz that the network wouldn't mess with the tone that the Ash vs. Evil Dead carries over from the movies. "We told Starz, don't go promoting this like 'serious horror is here.' No. Horror is here, and you'll get plenty of it, but let's not take this quite so seriously." The show also has all the abundant amounts of blood spatter that fans have come to expect out of the Evil Dead franchise. "The gore the merrier!" Campbell exclaimed over his salad.

Besides, Campbell knows not to let the whims of "Bruce Campbell" dictate those of Ash Williams. "I heard a funny story about Burt Reynolds," he told me, "from a guy who directed one of his later movies in the '80s." During a scene after his character's been shot, he said, "Burt's supposed to be wounded, but after the director calls action Burt is like running through the woods. The director calls cut and goes over there. He has to run 200 yards over to him and he goes, 'Burt, OK, that was good but you know you've been shot, so I think we need a little more of that.' OK, action. Burt goes just tromping through the woods. Cut.

"The director goes running all the way over there and he goes, 'Burt, I thought we were gonna do it a little more' and Burt goes, 'Would Clint Eastwood be limping along? Would John Wayne go limping along? Burt had gotten bigger than the character. You have to be careful of that. The character still has to rule the persona. When the character says you're dying, you better fucking die."

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