While Alcoholics Anonymous is the most well-known method of recovery for addicts, unconventional recovery coaches like Bob Marier have split from the pack to work inside of a non-religious, non-anonymous, much more controversial space. Marier is most famous for his work helping the former crack-smoking and heavy-drinking mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, get clean. In our documentary Rob Ford's Sobriety Coach: Inside the Manic Life and Work of Bob Marier, we spent time with Marier to get an inside look at his unique process.

Sweet, sweet chronic. Still from The Dark Grey Market.

It's been a very good year for stoners.

With the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada is the closest it's ever been to weed legalization. Toronto, the nation's most populous city, is experiencing an explosion in the dispensary scene and is poised to be become the new Vancouver. A couple weeks ago, stoners in Toronto were celebrating "Chronica" by lighting up joint-filled menorahs; the same weekend Prince of Pot Marc Emery and his wife Jodie flew in to "budtend" at the grand opening of 416 Medicinal Health Centre. Premiers and corporations are debating the best ways to distribute legal weed to the masses, with some experts predicting revenue potential to be in the neighbourhood of $5 billion annually.

But the road to legalization hasn't been an easy one—in fact, just a few months ago, we had a PM spouting nonsense about how weed is "infinitely worse" than cigarettes. Here's a look at how we got where we are:

Election 2015

Unsurprisingly, weed became a federal election issue, with each of the three major parties taking a different stance in the leadup to the Oct. 19 vote. Trudeau promised to legalize it, which naturally offended the tough-on-drugs Conservative government of the day. Former PM Stephen Harper, while speaking on the campaign trail, said Trudeau's policies would allow weed to get into the hands of kids (it's already there), and that weed is worse than cigs.

"There's just overwhelming and growing scientific and medical evidence about the bad long-term effects of marijuana," he said in a statement that serves as a great reminder of how lucky we are that this delusional clown is out of office.

Trudeau countered that prohibition is a failure and young people are currently getting weed from dealers, so regulating and controlling it makes more sense.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair meanwhile said he supported the decriminalization of marijuana but wouldn't go as far as to guarantee legalization.

Canada's unlikely weed hero. Photo via Justin Trudeau.

Legalization

About a month after his big win, Trudeau issued a mandate letter to Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, ordering her to work with Health and Public Safety ministers to "create a federal-provincial-territorial process that will lead to the legalization and regulation of marijuana." On a recent visit to Vancouver, though, the pair said they're still very much just getting the ball rolling.

"I am not going to commit to a timeline because we want to ensure that we approach it in a comprehensive way, ensuring we speak broadly with other levels of government," Wilson-Raybould told the media.

Meantime, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said this month she'd like recreational pot to be sold in LCBOs, a view echoed by Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger and liquor store unions in BC.

Trudeau has said he doesn't expect legalization to be a big cash grab for the government, but rather wants revenue from its sale to go toward addiction and support programs.

Enforcement

When it comes to weed laws, cops in Canada are all over the place. The Vancouver police told VICE they haven't laid a charge for simple possession in "many, many years." On the flip side, in Saskatoon, where charges are laid in nearly 80 percent of weed-related stops, Inspector Dave Haye said "we will charge on a leftover roach if we can." The schizophrenic approach toward dispensaries is much the same. Vancouver has more than 120 dispensaries that the city is now trying to regulate; 13 of them were targeted by Health Canada earlier in the year with letters calling for them to cease all operations or face legal consequences. Nearby Nanaimo is policed by the RCMP, which recently raided three pot shops and ordered them to shut down—a trend we've seen repeated in Saskatoon and Halifax.

In short, we really need JT and his team to weigh in on this stuff soon because it's a goddamn clusterfuck as it stands.

Courts

The courts in this country sometimes end up being the voice of reason.

In Hamilton, Ontario, for example, a CBC investigation found that courts try to drop more than 80 percent of weed possession charges, many of which are diverted through drug education programs.

This year has also seen a couple of colourful decisions from judges who seem fed up with prohibition.

Clifford Dawson, 34, an Innisifil, Ontario man who grows marijuana to treat his spinal condition was handed down a $10 fine after being arrested at gunpoint in a sting that cost millions. A Quebec judge recently went a step further, issuing a $1 fine to a man who possessed 30 marijuana plants. In releasing his decision, Judge Pierre Chevalier slammed Canada's "ridiculous" marijuana laws.

Dispensaries are as common as Starbucks in Vancouver. Photo via Vancity Weed.

Vancouver's Grey Market and Dispensaries

Vancouver is ground zero for weed in Canada. This summer, city council took steps toward regulating the 120 or so dispensaries that exist by making them apply for city-issued licenses at a cost of $30,000 for retail shops and $1,000 for Compassion Clubs.

Approved spaces will not be able to operate within 300 metres of schools, community centres, or other dispensaries. So far, only 11 of the 176 applications submitted have been approved.

VICE Canada host Damian Abraham visited BC to to scope out the dispensary scene, talk to black/grey market growers and producers of THC concentrates like shatter, which saw a rise in popularity this year and can cause explosions when made at home labs.

With legalization on the horizon, there's been an influx of dispensaries in Toronto (it's estimated there are around 40 here right now.)

Dabs may make you green out, but they won't kill you. Photo via Flickr user Steven Schwartz.

Shatter

Shatter aka dabs is an extremely potent THC extract that will get you fucked up (take my word for it). Producers use butane to turn buds into a waxy, toffee-like substance, which is then heated with a blowtorch and inhaled. While doing dabs will definitely get you super high, it will not kill you, as some law enforcement agencies seemed to think. Vancouver police had to apologize in November after sending out tweets warning parents about the "dangers of 'Shatter.'"

"We cannot lose any more young people to senseless overdoses," they said, before later acknowledging that they were completely wrong.

Edibles

In June, the Supreme Court deemed it legal for Canadians to possess weed edibles, including treats, oils, capsules, and tinctures; a month later, Health Canada OK'd licensed producers to sell cannabis oil. But the rules around edibles are still murky. Vancouver, as part of its attempt to regulate pot, recently banned the sale of all treats, including brownies, cookies, gummies, ice cream, drinks, etc. Victoria is looking to do the same. The rationale is that kids can easily get into these things not realizing they're medicine. However, US-based studies have shown that children are far more likely to be poisoned by things like diaper cream than chronic. And of those who've ingested edibles, no one has died or suffered long-term damage as far as we know. Civil rights advocates argue it's not fair to force medical marijuana users to either smoke their drugs or to make their own alternatives.

Vaping

Using e-cigarettes to get high (in public) is kind of a no-brainer, and a lot of people seemed to figure that out in 2015. According to one study, 41 percent of weed consumption was done with a vaporizer or vape pen.

The Ontario government made it legal to vape weed in public for a day (Nov. 25) before changing its mind when people seemed alarmed that the laws would allow medical cannabis users to blaze in front of kids, in restaurants, at church, in movie theatres, etc. The Ministry of Health says it's working on a revised version of the new rules.

The Future

The weed industry is changing rapidly in Canada, with new developments cropping up almost daily. There's no telling what we'll be talking about a year from now, but if Colorado's success story is any indication, it'll probably be how we should've gone ahead and legalized this shit a long time ago.

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R. Kelly poses at Music Choice on July 14, 2015 in New York City. Photo by Donna Ward/Getty Images

Yesterday, R. Kelly walked out of an interview with Carolina Modarassey-Tehrani of HuffPo Live, after the journalist questioned him about the repeated allegations that Kelly is a systematic abuser of underage girls.

Four minutes into the interview, Modarressy-Tehrani cut to the chase: " computer and download it."

As Modarassey-Tehrani pushed him, Kelly got more and more defensive. "Fuck that," he said after she asked him what he might say to fans who were conflicted about him. At one point, Kelly proclaimed, "Any other negative things come out of your mouth, I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna go to McDonald's—hopefully the McRib is out—I'm gonna go to Chicago, I'm gonna play some basketball, and I'm gonna record my new album."

The final straw was Modarassey-Tehrani's question, "What do you say to the fans who don't want to buy your music?" Kelly got up, saying, "This interview is over."

To be fair, it seems that at this point, R. Kelly's entire career is more or less over.

Two years ago, R. Kelly was undergoing something of a renaissance. Despite the very public and persistent allegations that the singer had raped or otherwise sexually assaulted underaged girls, Pitchfork offered the artist, then 45, a headlining slot at its summer festival. Coachella had enlisted Kellz to perform his massive "Ignition (Remix)," backed by indie rock titans Phoenix, to rapturous reception. That fall, Saturday Night Live and the American Music Awards each invited him to perform to even bigger televised audiences. Kelly's 13th solo album, Black Panties, dropped in December of 2013, and received mostly positive reviews.

And then, just as they have now, the allegations against Kelly reared their head. Shortly after Black Panties' release, the Village Voice ran an interview between prominent music writer Jessica Hopper and Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago Sun-Times reporter who originally broke the rape allegations against Kelly and has been relentlessly covering the story ever since. DeRogatis estimated that more than two dozen of Kelly's alleged victims had come forward for interviews with him. Of the hundreds of pages of allegations on file in the Chicago court system, DeRogatis explained, Kelly has never stood trial for rape. Each case was settled out of court, and the details of the settlements are sealed.

"The saddest fact I've learned is: Nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody," said DeRogatis, pointing out that Kelly's victims were exclusively "young black girls, and all of them settled. They settled because they felt they could get no justice whatsoever. They didn't have a chance."

Along with the interview, the Voice published a document dump of everything DeRogatis had against Kelly. According to former Village Voice music editor Brian McManus (who is now on staff at VICE), the piece received four million unique views and was a turning point in the decline of Kelly's image.

In 2014, Kelly stepped down as the headliner of the Fashion Meets Music Festival in Columbus, Ohio, following public outcry over the past sexual assault allegations. A fellow FMMF act, Saintseneca, went so far as to drop out of the festival in protest. In a statement on their site, the band wrote, "We feel his selection as a performer ignores his very serious allegations of sexual violence and assault." This year, Kelly's appearance at the Houston Free Press Summer Fest drew local protests, with one protester telling local media, "I just can't believe he's gigging anywhere after what he's done."

Perhaps most crucially, Kelly's 14th solo album, The Buffet, released earlier this month, has sold an unimpressive estimated 39,000 units, and debuted at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 200 list. With a few exceptions, most music outlets ignored the record entirely, instead heaping praise upon albums by Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign, both of whom can be looked at as Kelly's musical heirs.

For an artist as huge as R. Kelly, being snubbed is a bigger slight than being panned. Though Kelly remains a part of the public conversation, his recent press tends to center on his alleged crimes rather than his music. Indeed, it appears that Kelly's chief reason for going on HuffPo Live in the first place was to raise awareness of the fact that he had an album out at all.

It seems the public has hit a breaking point, and is finally asking the question that DeRogatis has been demanding all along: namely, "Why the fuck are we still listening to R. Kelly?"

In December 2000, though, R. Kelly had been a bona fide superstar for the better part of a decade. Fresh off the heels of his fourth chart-topping solo album, TP-2.com, he seemed invincible. That same month the Sun-Times ran the first of many stories exposing R. Kelly's alleged abuse of young girls, digging up two lawsuits against him with hundreds of pages of gruesome testimony. At first, the story fell on deaf ears: the Associated Press picked it up, but not many other news outlets bit. The allegations became a footnote in Kelly's career, alongside murmurings of impropriety surrounding his quickly-annulled marriage to a then-15-year-old Aaliyah.

But in the years since the story broke, more and more women came forward claiming that Kelly had sexually abused them as minors. An anonymous videotape was dropped off at the Sun-Times that showed Kelly having sex with, and urinating on, a girl who appeared to be underage.

On June 5, 2002, in what was the most widely-publicized incident of Kelly's career, the Chicago police and prosecutors announced they were charging Kelly on 21 counts of child pornography. (Six years later, on June 13, 2008, a Chicago jury found Kelly not guilty on all counts.) A second lawsuit was filed 2002 by another woman claiming Kelly impregnated her while she was underage and then forced her to have an abortion. The case was settled out of court.

Kelly's alleged crimes, though heinous, don't exist in a vacuum. According to data aggregated by the National Center for Victims of Crime, 40 to 80 percent of those who sexually abuse children "have themselves been victims of sexual abuse." And, sure enough, in his autobiography, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, Kelly writes of being sexually abused as a child.

The son of a single mother in a very busy household on Chicago's South Side, Kelly was exposed to sex at a young age. In Soulacoaster, he recalls watching adults having sex through a crack in the door as early as the age of eight. He also claims that he was repeatedly sexually abused by a female relative ten years his senior, writing: "Every time she did it—and she did it repeatedly for years—she warned me about what would happen to me if I snitched. No matter how many times it happened, I knew I could never tell anyone."

Context or no, for DeRogatis and many others, there's little conflict about the decision to not listen to R. Kelly's music. As he told Hopper, "If you're listening to 'I want to marry you, pussy,' and not realizing that he said that to Aaliyah, who was 14, and making an album he named Age Ain't Nothing but a Number—I had Aaliyah's mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter's life was ruined, Aaliyah's life was never the same after that."

And it would seem, after a decade of wavering, that the public is starting to agree with DeRogatis. The public outrage over Kelly's alleged crimes have finally consumed his public image.

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Why would a Canadian province want to do this to itself...? Photo via Wikimedia.

The plot to nuke Alberta was hatched in the Middle East.

However, it didn't originate as the thoughts of a radical jihadist nor a Bond villain dead set on taking over western Canada. No, it was dreamed up in the head of an oil man.

An American named Manley L. Natland was off on an expedition trip in what was then Southern Arabia, in the late 1950s, when the sun caught his eye. It was gorgeous and the image shook him to his core. It affected him so much that several years later he found himself waxing poetically about it in a paper he wrote in 1962.

"One evening as I sat watching a spectacular sunset from a small hill overlooking a flat, endless sea of sand, the sun looked like a huge orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth."

The sun reminded Natland of a massive nuclear explosion, and a little radioactive lightbulb popped up over his head. He had a brilliant idea: finally, a solution to the problem of how to get the oil out of those pesky oil sands in Alberta.

"As a synthesis of these thoughts took place, it became so apparent to to me that the energy released by a nuclear explosion deep underground could be used to produce oil," he wrote.

Natland believed that an underground explosion—a goddamn nuclear explosion—would effectively create an underground well and melt that tricky bitumen into a slurry making it far easier to extract. One hundred nukes or so would do it.

These thoughts most likely would have been written off as the ramblings of an over aggressive prospector with a hard-on for that black gold, but Natland was a well-respected geologist with Richfield Oil.

He also assumed that this would create a self-contained atmosphere that wouldn't allow radiation to escape, and thus eliminating any chance of irradiation of the land and geology—admittedly a considerate thought, but one that doesn't win much credence with modern day experts.

"The environmental impact of underground nuclear explosions depends on the geology of the soil, and how deep these explosions are carried out. With these experimental tests there would have been at least some risk of a serious release of the radioactivity," said Arjun Makhijanil, the President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, when VICE asked him about the decades old idea.

"The oil would have been contaminated with radioactivity without a doubt because you're talking about basically putting the explosions in the places where the oil sands are in order to transfer the heat directly to the oil sands."

It was a different time then, and the massive damage that could occur to the surrounding groundwater and the dangerous possibility of the radiation venting wasn't very well known. Still though, there is no way around the basic premise: Natland wanted to nuke Alberta. The Social Credit Party, Alberta's governing party at the time, was interested in what Natland had to say— most likely after hearing the ring of a cash register—and decided to move forward with the idea. The parties then headed out and started to collect research in anticipation of that wonderful day they would explode the oilfields.

The proposed plan was dubbed Project Cauldron, which was quickly changed to Project Oilsand—a name they described as "less effervescent." It was thought that Project Cauldron might freak out the public.

While the idea may seem asinine nowadays it's important to remember that hindsight is 20-20. The industrial utilization of nukes was something actively being explored at that time. It was an honest, albeit misguided, scientific endeavor. Project Oilsands wasn't alone, it was included as a program with Operation Plowshare, the umbrella term for United States development of nuclear weapons for peaceful usage. In total, 27 projects were performed under the Plowshare name.

Plowshare was proposed as an operation that would find peaceful uses of the atom bomb, which sounds all fine and dandy, but wasn't entirely that innocent. Lewis Strauss, the United States Atomic Energy Commission Chairman, said that Plowshare was to "create a climate of world opinion that is more favorable to weapons development and tests." Essentially Plowshare was an attempt to normalize nuclear weapons for Americans society.

"What happened was in 1953, the Soviets tested a thermonuclear bomb. Prior , the United States did a test at Marshalls Island that evaporated the island. Eisenhower was going to make a speech about the horror bomb." said Makhijanil. "He told his advisors, give me something good to say, and 'atoms of peace' was derived from that. In my opinion, that was a sort of fig leaf to cover the horror of the atomic bomb. "

Fast forward to Alberta, where Project Oilsands got as far as the initial testing phase. The plan was to place a nine kiloton nuclear bomb 372 meters underground, just below the oil sands deposit at a location 100 kilometers south of Fort McMurray. The project had received all the relevant approvals from both the provincial and federal government, and once testing concluded, it would be game time for the bomb and Fort Mac would of been known as a boom town for a very different reason.

At the last minute, the whole endeavour was ruined by Minister of External Relations Howard Green, who strongly opposed both Canadian nuclear testing and the country's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The Diefenbaker government put a halt to all nuclear testing in Canada before any significant projects got underway.

The US phased out Operation Plowshare in 1977 after public backlash, but the effects of the tests remain. Earlier this month, the US government paid $5.5 million to people who are suffering from medical problems arising from Project Dribble, a 1964 underground nuclear test in Mississippi similar to the one proposed in Alberta. Workers have been diagnosed with cancer, well water was contaminated, and the list of nasty shit that occurred is lengthy.

So yeah, probably for the best that Alberta never got the chance to nuke itself.

The current extraction of oil sands isn't ideal—not in the least. It is an extreme pollutant, and the process wastes an incredible amount of energy, but it's arguably the best method that we have. Companies are investing in finding both a cleaner and more energy efficient manner of extracting the oil sands. Hopefully, with modern technology we can find a process that pleases both the capitalist and environmentalist in us.

Or we can just say screw it and nuke the shit out of Alberta for that sweet, sweet oil.

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Sergei Polonsky, eccentric Russian ex-billionaire . Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Sergei Polonsky made his first million dollars at 23 in the booming Russian property market of the 1990s and is responsible for building Europe's tallest skyscraper. A deeply strange and unpredictable man whose ego knows no bounds, Polonsky is something like Russia's answer to Donald Trump. But where Trump decided to get really into Twitter and then run for President, Polonsky was charged in 2013 for ripping off investors in Russia and never willingly came back to his homeland, instead building a fugitive empire in Cambodia's tropical coast.

During his time in the small Southeast Asian nation, Polonsky purchased a string of beautiful islands (one of which had a forest of stone penises erected on it), served time in Cambodian jails twice, embroiled himself in an all-out war with a Russian herpetologist, and developed a quirky self-help philosophy centered around entrepreneurship and spirituality.

Polonsky, who considered the 2013 charges completely trumped up, defiantly enjoyed his playboy lifestyle in Cambodia. In a post to his personal LiveJournal in March, he even wished Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a happy birthday and invited him to Cambodia so they could "look each other in the eyes" and "hunt barracudas."

But in May of this year, Polonsky was finally arrested and deported to his home country. Although the magnate now sits in a Moscow jail awaiting trial, he won't be easily forgotten in Cambodia.

Today, Polonsky's island empire is under military and police occupation. According to one source who used to work for Polonsky but declined to be named, of all the gear on his private island of Koh Damlong, "only the walls" are left, with the rest looted by police and random sailors. But perhaps in an even sadder state is Polonsky's massive headquarters on the rocky outcrop of Koh Dek Koul.

I made multiple visits there to interview Polonsky before his arrest and deportation. During these visits, the massive lair buzzed with activity from Polonsky's at least 30 full-time staffers. Polonsky's countless legal cases and real estate projects kept them busy working across several time zones.

Almost every room on Koh Dek Koul had flatscreen TVs blaring Russian news, while Polonsky's extensive library featured a copy of The Prince and the Cambodian criminal code—the operation had an air of the headquarters of a guy a Roger Moore-era James Bond might have been hunting, down to the pool overlooking the ocean, complete with a giant fake shark fixed menacingly above a Jacuzzi.

Polonsky's shark-adjacent jacuzzi. Photo by the author

When I visited the place six months after Polonsky's deportation, the Angkor-styled mansion was being slowly overtaken by jungle, similar to the ancient Cambodian temples it imitated.

Rotting garbage lay around everywhere, a giant section of a wall was caved in, and Polonsky's office gear and collection of oriental curios seemed to have disappeared.

Polonsky's rotting deck chairs. Photo by the author

This is the story of Polonsky's adventures in exile, and what's left of his crumbling empire.

I first met Sergei Polonsky in December 2014 as a journalist covering his antics in Cambodia. The eccentric oligarch had permitted the press to observe "business trainings" he was holding on Koh Damlong, some 34 miles off the Cambodian coast. His fans had each paid at least £1,600 to join their hyperactive hero on the ten day seminar to "Pimp Business" and "Pimp Personality."

We were ferried by speedboat through the silky waters of the Gulf of Thailand to the island, where Polonsky awaited his followers wearing nothing but grey sweatpants, welcoming them nonchalantly to his abode.

I interviewed Polonsky a couple times during the trainings and afterwards, but my most striking memory of the man's mystical aura was during this seminar, when he led a flock of over two dozen bumbling Russian admirers through the island's thick jungle for a strange, almost cultish gathering.

Polonsky's headquarters. Photo by the author

Polonsky's devotees arrived at a small clearing on a cliff, where a bonfire was waiting. An extended Q&A session with Polonsky began, in which the exiled oligarch delivered rambling responses on everything from business to religion with gusto, enrapturing the crowd despite the mosquitoes buzzing about.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" he yelled, bare-chested, into the darkness at one point. The participants were in awe.

"I believe he is a genius," attendee Natalya Ganina told me.

"He does things and doesn't care what other people say," she continued, speculating his boundless energy came from "the cosmos."

Surrounded by fawning admirers, Polonsky was clearly in his element.

The charismatic oligarch clearly enjoyed imparting his wisdom to his fans, who he made play business games, the losers of which were forced to run around a large tree on the other end of his private island as punishment.

At times, his ego seemed limitless. "After God, developers were the first to build up the earth," he once remarked to me at his private island's bar. He's also infamous in Russia for once saying that anyone who doesn't have a billion dollars can go to hell (though he claims the quote was taken out of context).

Polonsky has suffered a series of blows since the financial crisis of 2008, during which the property market crashed and sent the oligarch's real estate company in the red to the tune of nearly £600 million. On top of his massive debts, Polonsky has claimed he's been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars by his business rivals in Russia, as well as gotten screwed by his own lawyer while restructuring his company to alleviate said debt.

"I've been robbed of $1.1 billion , you understand?!" he exclaimed during an interview I did with him in his breezy bungalow on Koh Damlong during the business trainings.

Polonsky's pier. Photo by the author

Perhaps as a way to relive his past glories as a developer, in 2014 Polonsky began pouring cash in a massive idealistic scheme he dubbed "Project Archipelago." The idea was to transform a string of eight private islands Polonsky had bought from the government into an interconnected tourism hub that would rival Angkor Wat.

"Here there wouldn't be any nationalities, there wouldn't be any religious dogmas, there would be no warlike aggression," Polonsky told me in his bungalow again, gushing about the project's potential to unify a divided planet.

Koh Damlong was the only island in the plan that saw significant development, with several dozen elegant wooden bungalows built in harmony with the jungle.

Less tasteful were the dozens of oversized stone penises interspersed around the island, sometimes clustering into mini dick-forests. They were supposedly set up there for an epic party in 2012 aimed at building "a portal to an astral plane," according to his former partner. Polonsky blamed the partner – more on him soon – for putting the dicks up, but there's no question that they remained erect under Polonsky's sole watch.

The aforementioned "dick forest" on Sergei Polonsky's island. Photo by author

Yet there remained two major hurdles on the path to building Polonsky's peculiar paradise.

The first, obviously, was that he had criminal charges in Russia hanging over his head. In November 2013, Polonsky came remarkably close to being sent back to his motherland following an extradition request from Russia.

Around 30 Cambodian cops tried to arrest the wily oligarch, but he fled into the thick jungle of the island of Koh Rong and was only arrested after being chased for hours. He was released after two months and Cambodia's Supreme Court eventually ruled against sending him to Russia due to Cambodia's lack of an extradition treaty with the country.

The second major obstacle came from a dispute with his former business partner Nikolai Doroshenko, a Soviet-trained herpetologist with deep roots in Cambodia who had helped develop the islands.

Their relationship soured in early 2013, when Polonsky spent his first stint in a Cambodian prison for allegedly forcing Cambodian sailors off a boat at knifepoint, for which Polonsky was released in April 2013.

Polonsky was convinced the whole thing was a setup on the part of Doroshenko. "He helped the sailors write the statement about me to police," Polonsky told me in January as we spoke atop his 98-foot yacht. "When I was sitting in prison he sold my islands."

The Doroshenko family, for their part, claim that Polonsky has orchestrated a beating on a member of their family as well as rigged an exploding Land Rover near their home. Doroshenko has directly accused Polonsky of trying to murder him and his family. (For what it's worth, Polonsky has offered to take a lie detector test to prove he did not try to harm the Doroshenkos.) They also used Polonsky's wealth and eccentricity against him, claiming he massively corrupted Cambodian courts and spreading embarrassing pictures of the playboy's antics, like one of him posing almost naked and another holding up what appears to be two marijuana joints.

Polonsky was either drunk or high "from morning until night" when they worked together, Doroshenko told me in a February interview in his home base of Snake House, a hotel/zoo filled with hundreds of snakes and crocodiles. He also said Polonsky's Archipelago project was his idea in the first place.

As we cruised the open sea, Polonsky called Doroshenko a "scoundrel."

"The court! Where is the court, the laws?!" he said, scanning the horizon with his binoculars. "On this beautiful day, I don't want to hear about it."

To Polonsky's glee, Doroshenko was jailed in March for allegedly forging signatures in order to take control of one of Polonsky's islands. With Doroshenko finally in jail, Polonsky's island dream was one step closer to reality.

The deck of Polonsky's yacht, now seized by the Cambodian police. Photo by the author

But all was not well in Polonsky's coastal kingdom – his high-profile feud with the Doroshenkos provided plenty of negative publicity for Sihanoukville, the nearby tourism hotspot located on Cambodia's coast. The bad publicity spurred a shakeup within Cambodian police, who vowed to crack down on foreign "mafia."

" operated with impunity, which gave carte blanche to everyone else," said Douglas McColl, vice president of the Sihanoukville Tourism Association. McColl attributed that impunity to Polonsky's "shitloads of money."

Things were quickly heating up for Polonsky.

In March, high-level Russian and Cambodian officials discussed Polonsky's potential extradition in a public conference. Not long after that, Polonsky temporarily ran out of funds to pay his many staffers in Cambodia, according to current and former employees I spoke with who declined to be named.

On May 8, in a last-ditch effort to demonstrate the benefits he brought to Cambodia, Polonsky donated £3,300 to the Cambodian Red Cross, whose head is the wife of Cambodia's strongman Prime Minister Hun Sen.

It did nothing. On May 15, military police stormed Polonsky's yacht moored off Koh Damlong, arresting him, many of his senior staff, and even his two hairless Mexican dogs, Flint and Pharaoh. (Both are safely in Russia, according to Polonsky's wife, after journeys worth their own separate article.)

A sunburned Polonsky was sent to the mainland and then to Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh by helicopter wearing only board shorts and flip flops. Two days later, he was in custody in Moscow.

Polonsky's front door, post-arrest. Photo by the author

Cambodian police claimed Polonsky's arrest was for an invalid passport and had nothing to do with Russian pressure – a somewhat absurd assertion given that high-level Cambodian authorities were just happening to be reviewing Moscow's latest extradition request the day before his arrest.

Mysteriously, Polonsky's long-awaited deportation did nothing to end his 14 cases against the Doroshenkos, who are being forced to respond to Polonsky's charges in Cambodian courts despite the fact that man suing them is being forcibly held in another country.

Meanwhile in Moscow, Polonsky is also in limbo, awaiting his trial behind bars.

Naturally, he hasn't strayed far from the limelight. He has managed to propose to his girlfriend with a ring he made out of scrap, undergo a psychiatric exam, request a saxophone so he could play music, and release a book of poems.

His fate is uncertain. According to Polonsky's spokesperson Ilya Rosenfeld, the notorious official Oleg Silchenko, who was Polonsky's original investigator and was blacklisted by the United States for his involvement in the death of imprisoned accountant Sergei Magnitsky, is still pulling strings behind the scenes.

Still, hopes for Polonsky are running higher after Russia's chief business ombudsman vouched for his innocence in October.

Regardless of his chances at freedom, Polonsky has now taken up the mantle of a martyred entrepreneur shackled by a biased Russian justice system.

In video of an impassioned courtroom rant delivered in August that I managed to obtain, Polonsky said he met several businesspeople languishing in jail on swindling charges despite being "wonderful" people with children.

"These tales are the destruction of Russian business, do you understand, your honour?" he told the judge, taking on a typically proud and indignant tone later in his speech.

"I... you know, I don't feel as if I have to prove or explain something to these gentlemen," Polonsky said.

"My words are encased in concrete. That concrete is created in Cambodia, from Cambodia to America... I have projects in England, in France, in Chernigov ."

"My projects are the best in the world."

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You had one job. Photo via Flickr user Bryce Edwards.

A Manitoba man has been charged with impaired driving for allegedly operating a Zamboni machine while hammered.

Cops in the rural town of Sainte-Anne, southeast of Winnipeg, said they received complaints about a dude driving "erratically" on an ice rink during a minor league hockey game on Saturday night. According to police chief Marc Robichaud, the Zamboni was bumping into the boards, prompting concern.

When confronted by police, the driver, in his 30s, didn't go quietly, as he's now facing charges of impaired driving, refusing a breath sample and resisting arrest.

Robichaud told media the man was new to being a Zamboni operator so it's feasible that he thought cruising the rink wasted was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Or maybe he's a Deaner fan.

Regardless, this hoser is not alone in breaking drinking and driving laws in a spectacularly Canadian fashion.

A Huntsville, Ontario man was charged with impaired driving Saturday night for allegedly drunkenly driving his snowplow into a ditch off Highway 11. He was found by cops with an open container of booze on him.

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Collage by Marta Parszeniew

As 2015 slams the brakes on, editors the breadth of the land put their feet up on the desk and just serve you some reconstituted yesterdays: top-10-20-30-50-100 countdowns of stuff that happened over the past 12 months. But as you grind your way through one end of year music supplement banging on about Courtney Barnett's gimlet-eyed observations or hymning Kendrick Lamar's post-Ferguson consciousness after another, your eyes go oblong and there's a sense of intense, giddying deja vu. Haven't we seen it all before? In every other magazine/paper/webzine/cereal box? Like, every year? Forever?

Slice through the crap: This is The Only Top 43 Albums of the Year Countdown You'll Ever Need.

43: Band flagrantly echoing New Order, and doing a slightly better job of it than...

42: New Order.

41: "Came out of the clubs" via the press office of Sony/BMG.

40: The position of the Blur album had they released it in 2005.

39: Whatever replaced the Future Brown record.

38: Helm.

37: Canadians making Canadian Music.

36: Band who really had no idea what their debut album was meant to be about, glad to have it clarified by feature writers who also have no idea what it's about, for a public who seem to have bought it despite neither reading the features nor listening to the lyrics.

35: Decidedly average Norwegian pop ruthlessly promoted by insanely rich Norwegian Culture Board via endless free journo trips to Bergen.

34: Artist "shows a deep knowledge" of alt.country consisting of the same five alt.country records the writer knows.

33: Have you heard? There's this great new band called Iron Maiden and they're totally stoked that cool people are getting into them.

32: Angry band who have previously traded off of being labeled as "the sound of recession Britain," then "the sound of post-Riots Britain," then the "sound of austerity Britain," but now are struggling to maintain their pissed-off literate-punk fanbase as "the sound of weak GDP growth, artificially low interest rates and unemployment falling at a decelerating rate Britain."

31: Collaboration between over the hill band and even older old-timers where the younger ones tragically think the older ones have some cult cache with the kids, while the older ones tragically think the younger ones are still relevant to the kids.

30: Actual bullshit.

29: Fetty Wap.

28: Modish future RnB whose author's astonishing handsomeness surely can't much longer disguise the fact that this is basically Peabo Bryson with fingering.

27: The wrong Future record.

26: Writer furiously tapping out disapproval of life choices of teenage millionaire while stuffing Tesco pastries in own downturned mouth in Walthamstow bedsit.

25: Boldly written up as "the future of ," somehow implying that a movement dreamt up in a rushed editorial meeting could have a future beyond the few dozen fashion-gullibles trying it on for half a season.

24: Woman whose schtick is that she wants to be a computer.

23: Computer whose schtick is that it wants to be a woman.

22: The album that stuck in the editors' minds because it was on repeat in the office the day the reviews team were retrenched, and in its blissful downtempo electronica seemed to capture the soft melancholy of the endings/new beginnings motif inherent in putting a bunch of 22-year-old minimum wage interns in charge of a national publication.

21: Older band who've released a dire album that the same publication will spend years discounting, downgrading and otherwise erasing from history in order to preserve the classic canon of great albums on which the band's legacy rests, but it's placed quite highly right now to keep all those obsessive fans on-side.

20: Miley Cyrus.

19: Sorry, but this late in the year not many writers have still got one more decent synonym for "synthy" left in their bags.

18: Pop person whose star has been fanned less by her music and more by the fact that she represents an Instagram-friendly lifestyle brand ambassador magazines want to have on their cover to flog more shit to their audience of impressionable 16–25 year olds.

17: Something "ethereal" and "soaked in reverb."

16: Ominous point in human history where people voting for Drake as a joke meet people voting for Drake because they are deadly serious. This is basically how the Nazis got into power.

15: People voting for Jessica Pratt who thought they were voting for Natalie Prass.

14: "Slayed the festivals."

13: Actual position of the Blur album given that they've released it at a point where people neither view it as a desultory little coda to an otherwise impeccable career, nor as a brilliantly raw comeback by a written-off-for-dead act, but instead as a decent little bit of product to jazz up the obligatory mid-set greatest hits transition between "Beetlebum" and "Trimm Trabb" that we all know far too well nowadays.

12: Father John Misty or John Grant.

11: Vince Staples or Earl Sweatshirt.

10: Five years ago this would have been "shiver-inducing." Now, that moment is medicalized/Wikipedia-ized as "ASMR."

9: Oldie who has made the same album a lot of times, but has "escaped his comfort zone" now by adding a few wisps of electronica in post-production.

8: I think this was a mix on Soundcloud. No, I don't know what sSundcloud is, but that's basically all the intern listens to, these mixes. I have no idea. I think it's a website. It's like Spotify for teenagers. It's like Snapchat for horrible music that sounds like someone gargling megabytes in a bin. You can't put it on your iPod, basically. I know. I downloaded the app, though.

7: You never got round to this record. Yet you had every chance to hear this record. The world made it so easy for you. It's literally three clicks away. So why are you so useless at popular culture? When exactly are you gonna learn that the maximized absorption of commonly-sanctified cultural artifacts will preserve you from death and unhappiness?

6: The position of the Blur album had they released it in 2009, back when people were PSYCHED.

Numbers 2–5: Records that were OK. No one went mad for them, but no one disliked them much either, so they swum through the middle course, whereas intense records that some people were truly passionate about but others really hated all ultimately failed to make the cut.

Number 1: Coldplay (Q), Robert Pattison (NME), Sven Vath (Mixmag), Neil Young (Uncut), Neil Young (Mojo), Neil Young (Classic Rock), Neil Young (Home & Garden), some bloke humming transcendentally over distorted tape loops of concrete being laid (The Wire).

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The North Pole Village—in Tennessee. Photo by Janet Donaldson via Flickr

When it comes to the quantity and duration of Christmas decorations, there are two basic schools of thought: The first involves as much face-time with tinsel and LED-icicle lights as possible, and dictates that the tree be set up the day after Thanksgiving and removed sometime in late March, when its needles are long since brittle and you've started getting dirty looks from the neighbors; the second involves more restraint, decking the halls a week or two before Christmas and removing all traces of the holiday on New Year's Day.

Neither of those approaches is applied at the Inn at Christmas Place, a holiday-themed hotel deep in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Because at the Inn at Christmas Place, it's Christmas all year round. Situated across the street from The Incredible Christmas Place, which bills itself as the South's largest Christmas-themed store, the hotel offers twice-weekly concerts by a singing Santa, boughs of (fake) holly in the guest rooms, and workshops on topics like elf-level present-wrapping. It's not exactly religious—just for Santa super fans.

While that seems perfectly charming in December, what's it like to work in such a place in June? What does it do to the Christmas spirit? The Scrooges of the world might view the whole endeavor as gross excess, a temple to consumerism—but to hear Dwight McCarter, the Inn's guest relations manager, tell it, there's nowhere on earth like his hotel. Just in time for the (actual) Christmas holiday, VICE spoke to McCarter about what it's like to dwell in perpetual Yuletide.

Mr. and Mrs. Clause at Christmas Place. Photo by Janet Donaldson via Flickr

VICE: Could you tell me a bit about the history of the Inn at Christmas Place?
Dwight McCarter: The Inn at Christmas Place opened June 15, 2007. We're into our ninth season. The original concept came from our Incredible Christmas Place retail store that's celebrating its 29th year. We had so many people saying, "We love it over here, we wish we could spend the night," and the more we heard that, the better it sounded to build a Christmas hotel for our guests who'd been shopping at the store for a long time, and for other folks coming into the area.

Did you work at the store before the Inn existed? How did you get involved?
The general manager and myself, we've known each other forever, and have ridden horses together over about every trail in the Great Smokies that you're supposed to be on—and several that you're not. I had planned to be here for about six months, and work a couple days a week, but I helped carry the furniture into place, and I've been here ever since we opened nine years ago.

There probably is no such thing, but what's a "typical day" like at the Inn? What's the mood like?
There's just an aura about this place. There's a sense of well-being and contentment, of safety and happiness. Christmas doesn't just happen on December 25th for us. We have families visit who maybe had a loved one deployed overseas, or are rallying from an illness, and they celebrate Christmas with us all throughout the year.

But do you ever get all Christmas-ed out? Like do you get Christmas fatigue because you're doing it all the time?
No, because where I sit, my desk is right inside the front door. Every day it's new, when you see people who are walking in for the first time, especially children, when you see the smile and look of wonder and amazement in their eyes, it's fresh. And then we have folks who have stayed with us 15 times, 20 times, 25 times, 30. When they come back, it's like a family reunion.

It sounds like you have a lot of regulars. Do they come mostly come from the region, or all over?
We draw from all 50 states and several foreign countries, but we draw a lot from Ohio and Kentucky and the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

Photo courtesy of the Inn at Christmas Place

Since it's Christmas all year round, what's different at actual Christmastime?
We're always decorated inside, but this year, we have ramped it up outside: We've decorated about 30 to 35 trees, put up roughly half a million more lights outside. For the first time since we've been here, we've done a wonderful new design down by our sign. It's a penguin family.

What about fresh evergreen decor? That must be hard to get all year round.
We don't do the fresh stuff inside. We have four ladies in our decor department who keep us looking fresh, keep all the lights on, keep us dusted, keep our bows properly fixed, but nothing live inside.

That sounds beautiful. Is Christmas your busy season, or do you get more business during non-Christmas months?
The week after Christmas, from December 26 through the end of the year . Everybody's out of school, and our local ski lodge up in Gatlinburg, about nine miles from us, will be making snow, and all the outlet malls are running massive after-Christmas sales.

The quietest times are Sundays through Thursdays in January, February, and March. It's quiet and peaceful and you get to catch your breath and get ready for the coming season.

Does it ever feel weird to be celebrating Christmas in, say, August, when it's hot and humid?
It really doesn't! One thing we do here is we celebrate Christmas the entire month of July as well, when can use the outside and the outdoor pool. When you've been here, it's just the way is it, really nothing weird about it at all.

Santa will be here, and we'll show you how to build the perfect gingerbread house and tie the perfect Christmas bow. We'll do face-painting with the children, and have movie and popcorn night with movies like White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street. By July, everyone's run down by the heat.

Santa and his mailbox at the Inn at Christmas Place. Photo by Janet Donaldson via Flickr

Has working at a place like the Inn at Christmas Place changed your personal experience of Christmas, how you celebrate it at your home with your family?
I think it has. My wife and I have realized how important every opportunity we have to gather our children and grandchildren is; how wonderful it is to spend time with them over the holidays, but also at any time of the year. It's caused us to slow down a little. We get so busy and so caught up in life, that sometimes we forget to live and to do what's important.

Do you ever field weird, special requests at the Inn?
Santa's here on Thursday nights and Saturday nights, and on occasion, I'll appear as a shepherd or one of the wise men. Back about five years ago, Santa and I, as a wise man, helped a young man propose to his fiancée downstairs before one of Santa's concerts. She said yes, and they were married a short time after that. They've had a son, and they named him Nicholas, after Saint Nicholas, and they've come back to see us ever since.

What's the best part of your job?
The best thing is being able to help our guests decide on what they want to do while they're in the area, and listen to their stories of how they came to be here and what it means to their family. The toughest part is when you have folks come in, and you can see that they would just give anything to stay, but from a Biblical standpoint, there's just no room at the Inn.

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Daisy-May Hudson and Renee Stevenson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

100,000 children and young people will be homeless across the UK this Christmas, living in hostels and cheap hotels rather than in the safety and comfort of a home they can call their own.

Having spent time in a homeless hostel alongside my mum and 13-year-old sister in 2013, it's a situation I am all too familiar with. Living as hidden homeless either in a friend's house, on a sofa, in a car or in a hostel, is extremely stressful in its unstable and temporary nature; but for all those growing up in a hostel at a time when their hormones are unstable as well, it's doubly distressing.

As part of their Christmas campaign to raise awareness and funds for these families, UK homeless charity Shelter introduced me to Renee Stevenson – a 17-year-old student who found herself without a home two years ago.

I spoke to Renee about our shared experiences of being part of the UK's hidden homeless, how she coped with that time, and how she's getting on now.

Daisy: Hi Renee, it's so lovely to meet you. To begin, can you tell me what actually happened? How long ago were you made homeless?
Renee: So this was a couple of years ago when I was 14. I'm 17 now.

How was that? My sister was 14 when we were made homeless too and that's such an impressionable age. What did it feel like and when did you first find out?
Well, my mum and dad were going through a divorce at the time. His name was on the house, he wasn't paying the mortgage and, long story short, he basically wrote letters to the court saying he wasn't living in the house any more and that he wanted it to be repossessed. That meant we'd be evicted, so I kind of knew things were happening. Me being the eldest, I had to take that responsibility and shield my brothers and sisters from knowing what was happening because they were way too young at that time.

I think my mum and myself tried to forget about it for quite a long time, even though we knew it was going to happen, so we ended up packing away all of our stuff like the week before the eviction because it was just so surreal. I was just thinking, 'this is our whole life and we've just packed it away in less than a whole week.'

So you had to pretty much turn up to the council with your stuff in boxes and bags?
Well we had a lot of help from friends and family and they helped us put our stuff into storage. Then we went to the council and they said, 'Well we don't have any place for you right now, we need to assess you to make sure you haven't made yourself intentionally homeless.' Why would you do that? Who would make themselves homeless? So we had to stay at my mum's friend's house and we were thinking, right we're not going to be here for long because she has a family of her own, so we're just staying here for the examination process. They dragged out that process for such a long time.

WATCH: The trailer for Daisy May-Hudson's film, Half Way

How long?
We ended up staying for over a year at my mum's friend's house.

How many were there of you in that house?
It was me, my two sisters, my brother and my mum and then her a bed and breakfast. I had this impression that being in a bed and breakfast is going to be like a hotel, but when I got there it was just a shock. We had one room. It had a bunk bed, a double and a single for all of us to stay in. It was such a weird experience because it was kind of a relief to be there after being in someone else's house for so long. And I know it should feel like that everyone should have the right to housing but when I was in that room, I felt at least it's just us. At least they can be kids.

When you're put in that situation, you become grateful for everything. It's weird. I remember when we got moved into our second hostel, because we had our own kitchen space it was like they'd given us a mansion. What are some of the difficulties of sharing a room?
Well during that time when we were in the bed and breakfast, I was going through my And obviously I'm the oldest and I've got younger siblings and it was just really difficult to find my own space to do my homework and all that kind of stuff. So the majority of the time I would wake up super early in the morning, go to the school library in before school and then when school finished I would go to the school library again. I think the only reason why I put so much focus on education is because it was like an escape. Everything else was changing all the time: where we were living, our routines. I think education was the only thing that stayed consistent.

What do you think a teenager should be doing at 14?
You know, going out to the cinema and having fun and just being naive. Not being stupid, but not having to know so much at that age.

How do you think you changed?
I feel like I became more responsible. I think I became more grateful as well, which makes you older, because when you're younger you take things for granted. Even in high school I heard people talking about having problems I would think you know what, you're still naive and you're still in your child bubble. And I'd wish I was there still! I was forced to learn about all these grown up things, like the law. They're legally allowed to keep you in a bed and breakfast for six weeks, so when they finally placed us in that bed and breakfast we thought, okay, this is the home stretch. But all the people that we spoke to had been in there for longer than six weeks. I think what made me older was seeing my mum break down. That was really hard, because she's such a strong woman, you just think if this is breaking her, this is serious stuff. She always was strong for the other kids and when she broke down it was just to me, and it was shocking.

They suddenly rely on you for support. I was the oldest. I was actually old enough though to take on the responsibility and I think my 14-year-old sister, although she grew so much, we almost babied her and it upset her more to not know what was going on. For mums as well, they feel that their job is to provide for us, and to put a roof over our heads and when that's taken away through no fault of their own, they feel ashamed.
Yeah, she felt she'd failed us.

And did she talk to you about that? What did she say?
That broke my heart. She always used to say, 'I've failed you guys.' And you always think, you've raised such amazing kids don't ever feel like you've failed us because you've given us so much.

Gosh, you're going to make me cry.
Sorry.

No, it's so fine. Don't worry I feel like that too, it will get better.
Yeah.

So you still don't have a permanent home at the moment?
No, at the moment we're in temporary accommodation, still. It's a private landlord but it still works through the council.

Basically, the council are paying housing benefit to private landlords.
And the rent is absolutely crazy. Like it's – for the house we're in right now – £437 ($650) per week and its not an amazing place. We're grateful for it because it's a roof over our head but to pay £437 per week, it's impossible! For my mum to be able to work the hours to pay £437 a week for this place plus look after children, it's not possible.

Is she working?
She's not working at the moment but the issue that hurts me the most is that people tarnish everyone with the same brush. My mum used to have a good job. It's only because my dad ran his own business, and he wanted my mum to stay at home and look after the kids and be a housewife. She of course wanted to be at home with her kids so that was a decision that she made. She's not a "benefit scrounger" like the media portray us all to be. Everyone just looks at you the same way and it's like, you have no idea what people have been through in order to get themselves in that situation. We were living in a house that was decent, we had a good home, why would we give that up? People are so naive and so judgmental. You only realize what it's like once you've gone through it, to be honest.

What does it mean to have a home?
To have people who love you, to have people that are always going to be there for you. I still don't feel like I'm in a stable home right now, but it is a home because we have each other. But I won't feel stable until my mum can afford to have a house of her own and we completely get off this benefit system. I don't trust it and how badly we've been treated. I don't feel like anything could last. I feel like it could just be taken away and it's scary because we can just be back at square one again.

I was telling someone recently that 100,000 children are going to be homeless this Christmas which is crazy. Especially when Britain sells itself around the world as this superior "developed" and democratic nation. Well, we're the country's dirty little secret. I try and tell the fact to as many people as I can and it really shocks them, especially the idea of hidden homeless and that there are whole families living in hostels and bed and breakfasts.
I just feel like and society makes you feel like it's your fault and you've put yourself in this situation.

People are just one bad month, one job loss, one paycheck away from homelessness when wages flat line and private rent is unaffordable. It's just ordinary people.
People come to the council broken and you can see that they have just lost everything, and they've come here as a last resort and they're pleading to find somewhere to lay their head at night. And you just think, how can you be so heartless? How can you be so heartless to just look at someone and think well, you're just another person? Do you not see us all as human beings? Do you not see that they're in pain? Do you not see they need help? And it's like they don't care.

And who do you blame? Who do you get angry at?
The government. Some people think the government are really good because they always seem to be building up new houses and flats, but they're not for people who need it. And the councils. When you threaten them with something, that's when they want to move. Other than that they'll just leave you. They'll play these mind games because they believe that everyone in those circumstances doesn't know any better. And it's the harsh reality that quite a few people don't. They don't know how they're supposed to be treated, they don't know their rights and so they get taken advantage of and they just sit there and they deal with it. It's so corrupt. I don't understand how they can take advantage of the needy and the weak and the people who don't know how they're supposed to be treated. It's not stopping, it's not slowing down. I remember when I first got involved in Shelter, it was 80,000 children that were going to be homeless that Christmas. Now it's 100,000.

Follow Daisy May-Hudson on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The political left are a notoriously miserable lot, so you could be forgiven for forgetting that, on the face of it, it's had a pretty good 2015. On the face of it. In Greece, what's been called the most left-wing European government since 1991 won not one but two general elections. New anticapitalist parties are owning respectable poll shares in France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany. In the UK, the Labour leadership was taken by Jeremy Corbyn, an Old Labour veteran on a mission to take the party back to its radical working-class roots. In the United States, there's been a surprising surge for the Bernie Sanders campaign, with hundreds of thousands of Americans eager to vote for a self-described democratic socialist. And while the left is losing ground in Venezuela and Argentina, there have been enough successes to show that where it puts the effort in, it really can win.

Except for left-wing politics, gaining power in elections isn't really the point; the point is to actually make things better. And things aren't getting better. Everything we hate is still very much around: the swamping inequality, the murderous wars, the general sense that we're all living in history's most complex torture device. For all its victories in local and national polls, the anti-austerity left hasn't been able to stop austerity; the internationalist left hasn't been able to stop imperialist adventures or to stop people drowning in the Mediterranean; the counter-hegemonic left hasn't been able to find any convincing narrative beyond the one bequeathed to it by the authoritarian right.

In general, the hard left tends to be a slow learner; that's why there are still thousands of people who think selling newspapers on university campuses is a productive revolutionary activity. But if we were to try to pick up a few big lessons from what happened in 2015, these might be a good start.

RESPECTABILITY DOESN'T HELP ANYONE

Photo via Wiki

Near the beginning of the year, the left learned an exciting new word: "Pasokification." Named for Pasok, the Greek socialist party, previously part of the pro-austerity governing coalition, it referred to the process by which an old, boring, staid centre-left establishment would be suddenly hollowed out by a new and insurgent group like Syriza. But something strange happened to Syriza as it rose to take power: It began to exhibit what could be called a second stage of Pasokification, in which it started to horribly morph into its predecessor. Some of this might have had something to do with the fact that many of the young and daring Syriza politicians were in fact exactly the same people as the old guard they'd displaced, canny Pasok operatives jumping from one sinking ship directly into another.

In January of this year, Syriza stormed to victory on a radical anti-austerity platform, while Pasok was reduced from the 160 seats it held in 2012 to 13, making it the joint-smallest party in Parliament. In September, Syriza renewed its mandate by promising harsh cuts but financial stability, a steady and responsible management of the economy that would limit the country's debt at the small price of any hope for the future. When the old coalition was in power, they were kept from capitulating entirely to Greece's creditors by the strong pressure from the Left; with the radical Left in charge, there was little to stop the banks getting everything they wanted. In its bid to be seen as a respectable party of government, Syriza became, well, just as bad as all the other respectable parties of government. There are already signs of a similar process taking place elsewhere: In Spain, for instance, the new leftist Podemos party spent most of 2015 inching steadily rightwards, scrapping its demands for universal basic income and a "citizens audit" of public debt, and replacing them with vague liberal platitudes. Instead of filling voters with new confidence, these capitulations have instead had them abandoning the party in droves. This desperation to seem responsible is an affliction common to new parties; in the end, it makes them entirely useless.

MAINSTREAM PARTIES CAN'T HELP US EITHER

Photo by saulalbert

Despite the fears of a habitually jittery establishment, the pattern of Pasokification hasn't really repeated itself in the English-speaking countries: While the center-left is still in freefall, there's nothing from the outside rising to take its place. Instead, leftists have attempted to work within established parties: Jeremy Corbyn taking a landslide victory in the Labour leadership race; Bernie Sanders fighting a private insurgency within the Democrats. After all, if left parties can be comprehensively shifted rightwards, why can't the reverse happen too? But as Corbyn's experience shows, this doesn't really work. There's too much money at stake, and a core culture that can't be changed: Whoever has the leadership, we won't build socialism by voting in some Labour MP who looks like they should be working at Foxtons.

Corbyn claimed to simply be embodying the Labour party's core values, but on those points where he really does differ from Labour tradition, the party's opposition has been vicious. The most damaging internal rifts have been on Trident and Syria: these are points of principle. The Labour party has always been bloodthirsty—it's a party of war; long before Iraq and Afghanistan its MPs scrapped their proletarian internationalism to cheerlead for World War One, later Labour governments were happy to brutally repress decolonial struggles on the fringes of Empire. Labour has an ingrained culture of dropping bombs on people from a great height; on this front, it won't budge an inch. Meanwhile in America, Sanders is trying to smooth over this problem by trying to out-warmonger the warmongers, making a big show of his support for the US air war in the Balkans and angrily denying any suggestion that he's a pacifist. It's an uphill struggle: Hillary Clinton has the total destruction of Libya to brag about; all he has are a few votes for military action.

BEING ANTI-AUSTERITY ISN'T ENOUGH

Photo Chris Bethell/Oscar Webb

Every so often, there's a big anti-austerity protest in the center of London. "Not one cut," they chant, marching through a socially-engineered hellscape full of empty houses made of money and rough sleepers hiding behind the bins. 'Not one cut,' they chant, stumbling blindly, like someone whose blood is steadily draining out through thousands of lacerations. It's too late; the cuts have happened. Anti-austerity parties have taken control of national governments, but austerity carries on. This might have something to do with the blank negationism of the movement—opposing austerity has come to function as a substitute for actually doing anything about it. Opposing austerity has become like opposing the sunset: You do it at the end of the day, as the light grows dimmer; nothing changes but it makes you feel better about yourself.

Labour were nominally anti-austerity: They opposed the Tory cuts, they were passionately against them, but they voted for them anyway. Syriza were anti-austerity: They opposed the total wreckage of Greek society even as they carried it out. With the financial bodies that govern the world utterly committed to our current path directly into the abyss, the idea that a government could end austerity and balance out the wealth a bit, while keeping everything else fundamentally the same, isn't reasonable, it's deluded. A return to nice postwar social democracy would be far harder to achieve than the total revolutionary reconstruction of the state. If we're serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.

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The holidays wouldn't be the same without a "war on Christmas." The annual embittered pleas from evangelicals to "keep Christ in Christmas" have now become as much of a holiday tradition as caroling or "planning" to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Waiting all year to find out what fabricated moment of anti-Jesus discrimination has virally incensed Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh (Starbucks cups? Bet you didn't see that one coming!) now fills me with the same narcotic anticipation as freshly wrapped presents did when I was a child.

While I admire their enduring tenacity and ceaseless creativity in keeping this up each year, I can't help but wonder if at some point in their pursuit of a homogenous holiday if they ever stop to wonder: Would Jesus celebrate Christmas?

Considering that the holiday wasn't even developed until centuries after Jesus's death, and went through endless mutations, and has been protested by Christians as often as it has been protested by atheists, it's difficult to know how J.C. would feel about his birthday bonanza.

The first challenge with answering this question is just determining which Christmas and which Jesus we are talking about. The gospels alone present us with four, sometimes conflicting, versions of Jesus. Then there are the gnostic gospels, which are also wildly different. And Christmas itself was an appropriation of several pagan holidays, many of which centered around debaucheries that incensed the Puritans, who eventually whitewashed and monetized it beyond recognition.

Culture warriors would likely phrase the question "does Jesus celebrate Christmas?" since they believe he's alive and well in Heaven—yet in Heaven, time does not exist so perhaps the tense doesn't matter. Anyway, for argument's sake, let's simply ask: Would the Jesus of the Bible endorse Christmas in 2015?

Former teen heartthrob and current evangelical icon Kurt Cameron believes Jesus would have no objection to the pagan imagery and commercialism of modern Christmas, an argument he laid out in his 2014 film, Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas. Rotten Tomatoes famously ranked it as the worst movie of all time (something Cameron ascribes to an atheist conspiracy), yet Saving Christmas still functions as an instructional tool for Christians in need of rebuttals to their Wiki-obsessed relatives who say that Christmas has more to do with Dionysian orgies than with Christ.

"I look at what Christmas is and I think: This can't be what God wants," says Christian White at the beginning of the film, as he pouts in the garage during his family's Christmas dinner. Playing an uptight, bespectacled Woody Allen-type (read: Jewish), White is disgusted with the non-Biblical Santa Claus and Christmas trees that dominates what he thinks should be a Christian holiday. Playing his self-righteous brother-in-law, Kirk Cameron spends the film explaining to White how all of the supposedly "pagan" elements of Christmas all lead back to the bible. It's a message to all Christians that ultimately says, "Relax, you won't go to Hell for any of this."

Cameron goes through some impressive mental gymnastics to connect Jesus to the Christmas tree—it's a symbol of the Tree of Life from Eden, he says, and the cross Jesus was slain on—and Santa Claus—the original, 4th century Saint Nicholas literally fought for Jesus to be declared a deity, not a man, at the council of Nicea, Cameron claims. Despite there being no historical evidence of the former, and the latter is a historical footnote that only illuminates the barbaric politics involved when Christian beliefs were being established, these two are the strongest rebuttals that Cameron has for White. The rest is a lot of smug grinning and vaguely related historical facts that don't really answer any questions.

At one point, the writers of the film seemingly gave up on constructing a fact-based rebuttal to White's argument that Jesus wasn't born in December (some astronomers believe it was probably in June, but no one is certain), and just had Cameron say "the early Christians had plenty of good reasons for celebrating Jesus birth on December 25—and none of them have anything to do with the Winter Solstice. Last time I checked, God made the Winter Solstice when he set the planets on their orbit around the sun."

Well, that answers that, then.

Image via Flickr user Waiting For The Word

Due to its lack of sound reasoning, Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas provided little help in answering whether Jesus would celebrate Christmas. Wanting to ground myself in a more historically sound perspective, I called upon a resource that I can safely assume Kirk Cameron would not approve of: Religious studies professors from non-Christian universities.

"Would Jesus celebrate his birthday? There's nothing in the gospels to indicate that he did that," said Hector Avalos, a former child preacher who is now a religious studies professor at Iowa State University. "If you take the Gospels as representing Jesus's views, he never said 'celebrate my birthday,' he said 'remember my death.' Nowhere in the New Testament is there a celebration of the birthday of Jesus, nor an instruction to celebrate it."

The story of Jesus's birth was only mentioned in two of the four gospels, Luke and Matthew. Atheists and historians are fond of pointing out that the details of this event—the virgin birth, the manger, the shepherds, the three wise men who followed a star and brought gifts to worship the infant king—were all familiar plot-points of mythology stories in the area that predated Jesus by hundreds of years. This theme of Christians merging other faith traditions into their own would continue with the invention of Christmas.

"Something to keep in mind is that for at least the first hundred years or so, Christianity was just another Jewish sect, so any traditions that developed were in that Jewish matrix, which was also influenced by Greco-Roman culture" said Samuel Boyd, associate professor of religious and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Boyd noted that there is some historical evidence that early Christians were observing Jesus birth in the third century, but that "Christmas doesn't seem to take off as a holiday until the fifth or sixth century."

By this time the Roman empire had stopped feeding Christians to lions and adopted the faith as the official state religion. In order to avoid a cultural whiplash, Christmas was molded after the pagan traditions each region celebrated around the Winter Solstice, all of which centered around communal feasts and drunkenness throughout the darkest time of the year.

"Around December 25th there were many cultures that celebrated the birth of the sun," said Avalos, explaining that daylight increases following the solstice. "And in order to not compete with those celebrations, they thought you might as well start celebrating the birth of Jesus."

So worshipping a sun god quickly transformed into worshiping the son of God.

While the theme of Jesus's birth consumed the Winter Solstice holidays, the hedonistic traditions of booze, large meals, live music, and goodwill revelry continued unabated. For hundreds of years Christmas celebrations more closely resembled Mardi Gras or Halloween than the wholesome, family-friendly image of Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas.

Image via Flickr user Waiting For The Word

So much was the infamy of Christmas's bacchanalian reputation that Puritan party-pooper Oliver Cromwell—attempting to rid England of all pagan influence—banned all practice of the holiday in 1652. Across the pond in Massachusetts, a similar prohibition of Christmas was implemented a few years later by the Puritans who settled the land.

But does any of this mean that Jesus would have opted out of Christmas?

"I find it difficult to see Jesus in Puritanism at all, or vice versa," said Andrew McGowen, dean of the Berkeley School of Divinity at Princeton University. "They didn't want Christmas. They didn't want parties. If you look at the gospels, Jesus is criticized for being a drunkard and a glutton—he was a bit of a party animal. He was criticized for going to parties that people think he should not have gone to."

If you're judging by today's standards, there are plenty of tropes in 21st century Christmas that wouldn't sit well with the Jesus of the bible—particularly the institution of high-price gifts that dominate the holiday season. Throughout the gospels Jesus is condemning materialism and the love of money that drives it.

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal," he says in Matthew 6:19, followed by the line "You cannot serve God and wealth," a few verses later. So much was his distaste for riches that in two separate books of the bible Jesus ties eternal salvation to first abandoning all the money and possessions you have.

Another common theme of the Christian holiday today is the gathering together and communing with family members. Though as hard as it may be for Evangelicals to swallow, Jesus does not appear to have been much of a family man. Multiple times throughout the bible Jesus instructs his followers to abandon their families and follow him, and on more than one occasion, he is profoundly rude to his mother. Before pious reformers like Clement Clarke Moore (author of Twas The Night Before Christmas) retooled the holiday around children and presents, Christmas debaucheries were no place for wives or children.

Ironically, it could be argued that Jesus would sooner approve of the pagan Christmas than the Christian one.

Romans engaging in a winter festival known as Saturnalia. Painting by Antoine Callet.

Jesus's miracle of turning water into wine so that a wedding celebration may continue would surely have been a welcome parlor trick at any Yuletide festival. A Germanic holiday of heavy drinking and feasting, Yule centered around a large fire and was often the first meat-based meal of the year for the people (who partied indoors while ghost-zombies roamed the countryside during the Wild Hunt). And judging by the last supper, the miracle of feeding thousands with two fish and a bread loaf, and the dining with tax collectors and prostitutes, Jesus was all about large dinners with a cross-section of people.

Though, again, the biggest factor that puts Jesus at the pagan party is the same thing that keeps him out of Mike Huckabee's vision of Christmas: Class warfare.

Nearly every Winter Solstice celebration contains some version of role swapping the rich with the poor. During Saturnalia, slaves would rule over their masters for a day. In England, a beggar would be crowned "The Lord of Misrule" and would be put in charge of the festivities; and peasants would demand entry into the houses of the upper-class, whose owners would offer the best food and booze they had.

It's difficult to imagine any Fox News conservative opening up their homes to a mob of drunken poor people demanding to be let inside and treated like guests. Though this was a central theme in Jesus's teachings.

In addition to instructing the rich to give all they own to the poor, Jesus constantly prophesied that one day the economic classes would exchange places.

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh," Jesus said in the book of Luke. "But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep."

"So those who are last now will be first then, and those who are first will be last," he adds in Matthew.

Then again, throughout both the pagan and Christian traditions of Christmas there is a general theme of living in the moment, of appreciating what you have, and who you are surrounded by. This is a worldview that Jesus most certainly did not share. Over and again he spoke of this life as an ephemeral right of passage, one whose sole purpose is to determine whether you will enter Heaven or Hell at the time of your death.

"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It's better to enter eternal life with only one hand than to go into the unquenchable fires of hell with two hands," he says in Mark 9:43. "And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell."

As Monty Python's The Life of Brian teaches us, it is foolish to try and say with any certainty who Jesus was or what he was all about.

"Some people believe Jesus was a political and social revolutionary against Greco-Roman power," said Boyd, citing a position that would make Jesus an adversary of pagan traditions. "Others say the gospels show him working within Greco-Roman society more accommodatingly. It's difficult to pinpoint where Jesus fits as a historical person."

Ultimately, Christmas is just like Christ himself: An idea whose message is historically vague and culturally incestuous enough that it can be molded into whatever you need it to be. A drunken orgy of masks and music? Sure. A period of sober reflection and pious worship? Why not. A family affair drenched in capitalism and gingerbread cookies? Have at it. The spirit of Christmas is in the public domain, free to use it however you please. And if Kirk Cameron says it's Jesus-approved, what higher authority could you ask for?

Josiah Hesse is the author of the historical fiction novel Carnality: Dancing on Red Lake. The book traces the history of evangelicals in America throughout the 20th century. Follow him on Twitter.

Southeast Texas got a rare deluge of snow on December 24, 2004. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

Christmas in prison is not normally cheerful. We are away from our homes and loved ones, and the holidays are just reminders of that.

Even the guards don't want to be there. Only the most dedicated security hounds, the cranks with no one to go home to—and those too inexperienced to know how to get the days off—remain on duty. And there are not many of them, either, which makes for restricted activity on the unit. There is no recreation, craft shop, school, church, work, or other diversions.

On Christmas Eve, 2004, everyone in the W.F. Ramsey Unit, 3 Wing, in Rosharon, Texas, was in a foul mood.

A church group of kindly citizens had come in the night before, sharing cheerful jokes, Gospel, a lot of singing. Gave us each a bag containing soap, shampoo, toothpaste, cookies, pamphlets.

I was thankful for their concern, but the main message I kept feeling was, "You ain't home."

Down the run, an argument was growing loud. It was the usual debate over one another's manhood. Unrest is common during the holidays—whoever said prisoners squabble most in summer is wrong; we fight more during Christmas.

I took refuge from the gloom by flicking on the Friday evening news. The anchors had abandoned their Christmas coverage of shopping malls to talk about the weather, which was cold, wet, and getting colder.

The reporter took a camera out into the TV station's parking lot to show a single snowflake on a dark car. Interesting.

Could it snow all the way down here, south of Houston? I had seen some dustings of snow at home in San Antonio, and while serving in the Army, I saw a few flakes in such exotic stations as Fort Knox and Fort Hood. But I hadn't seen much of it or very often—and for just one instant, I felt a warm excitement.

After the news, I joined my friend Dill for some chess.

"How do y'all deal with this cold up in Indiana?" I asked him, while setting up the board.

"Nothing to deal with," he said. "Texans don't seem to know about things like closing doors—the wind just blows right through places here. And you! You don't have sense enough to put on a coat. Of course you think it's cold."

"Checkmate," I said. Dill isn't so good at chess, unlike talking.

Raindrops started tapping on the windows—maybe frozen rain. Dill got up to look outside.

"It's snowing," he said. "It's snowing!"

We all went to the window—and I saw a pea-sized speck blowing by on the wind. A bit of Styrofoam from the chow hall, maybe? But then I saw another.

Most inmates there had never seen snow. The wing became immaculately quiet.

Heavy snow fell through the night. I stayed up to watch it; the stuff wouldn't let go of me.

The next morning, I was up and ready and eager to get outdoors and see what all the fuss was about with snow. Outside, the walkway was swept clean. I left the crowd of shuffling inmates, walked out into the snow, and reached down into it. It was about eight inches deep.

A few flakes continued to fall, and for a moment, looking down, feeling it in my palms, I forgot where I was. A snowball smashed into the back of my head. Scooping a handful myself, I searched the laughing inmates for the culprit.

Then a guard called me by name, saying, "Get off the grass!" I suddenly felt cold.

The snow stopped falling by daylight, after we ate. We were outside again, hurrying to a nearby building that houses the showers. I was just starting to enjoy the warm water when another snowball smacked into my chest. Someone called out my name, and I saw my friend Ron with an armload of snowballs, chucking them at Dill and mostly missing. I got in some good hits.

The rush on Ron turned into a general free-for-all snow-brawl. Holiday spirit, thanks only to the unexpected snowfall that broke our ceaseless life-in-prison, had finally joined us down south at Ramsey.

Guards arrived, responding to the ruckus. They received a few shots and even returned some.

Then, one of them said, "GET SOME CLOTHES ON!"

Back to reality.

E.J. Chappelle is a 50-year-old inmate at the Ramsey Unit in Rosharon, Texas, where he is serving a sentence of life in prison for a murder he committed in 1987.

You're free now, Sebastian! Photo via Facebook.

For all the year's trials and tribulations, the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows, there was never a Stephen Harper too far away.

While everyone dreads the flurry of end-of-the-year Stephen Harper lists, 2015 proved itself particularly relevant for Stephen Harpers—between stagnant oil prices, unrest in the Middle East, and a federal election, Stephen Harpers had their hands full.

So we put together the seven most important Stephen Harpers of 2015.

#7: Interim Stephen Harper

Pinstripes ain't nuthin' to fuck with. Photo via.

Interim Stephen Harper's election as leader of the Stephen Harper Party came as a bit of a surprise. She ended up besting Rob Nicholson and Diane Finley, stalwarts of the party. Evidently, Interim Stephen Harper has to break with the more traditional Stephen Harper positions, and she's done a pretty good job of that so far—coming out in favour of an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, being generally supportive of resettling scores of Syrian refugees, and the like.

She's been pretty popular thus far. Some may even start asking her to stick around and be the full-time Stephen Harper—although the party constitution technically forbids it.

New Year's resolution: Don't let them find out that you were born in Kenya.

#6: American Stephen Harper

Like someone blasted a scrambled egg with a shotgun full of doll hair. Photo via Wikimedia.

Certainly one of the crazier Stephen Harpers, American Stephen Harper has rocketed to the front of the pack in the Republican presidential primary, and caused a fair amount consternation here at home. But, like watching an elderly relative struggle to grasp the lineage of a mixed-race child, it can be uncomfortably amusing to watch.

While this Stephen Harper doesn't have much of a hope of becoming president, he—like several other Stephen Harpers—has done much to ratchet up anti-Muslim sentiments in the West, with comments like "You're going to have to watch and study the mosques," " total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," and, in a less hateful moment, "I had great relationships with the Hispanics."

Hopefully American Stephen Harper will go away in 2016.

New Year's resolution: Make America great again.

#5: Bearded Stephen Harper

This does not make you cool. Photo via.

Not a great year for Bearded Stephen Harper, who took a more traditionalist Stephen Harper route during the federal election, and wound up coming in a dismal third place.

Rumblings are already beginning from his supporters that the long knives may come out for this once-liked politician.

New Year's resolution: Make an example of the plotters looking to ascend to the throne.

#4: Stephen Harper

I dropped a fish thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis big and was like: "I hate fish." Photo via.

Coming in at number four, this Stephen Harper had a really mixed year. He looked poised to form another majority government at the beginning of the year, only to screw it all up during a marathon election campaign that saw some of the ugliest forms of identity politics slither out of this Stephen Harper's eyes, drenching the general population in a sort of sludge.

But, Canada wiped off that sludge. And this Stephen Harper is relegated to the $0.99 Prime Ministers bin at the local convenience mart.

New Year's resolution: Buy all the Stephen Harpers from the $0.99 Prime Ministers bin at the local convenience mart. Create a little museum.

#3: Alberta Stephen Harper

Rush hour traffic, amirite? Photo via.

Alberta Stephen Harper won big this year, ousting Boring Stephen Harper and ending decades of rule for the establishment party in Alberta.

But the trend for 2016 is definitely downwards for Alberta Stephen Harper's government. Tanking oil prices, rising unemployment, and a shit sandwich of a debt situation means that Edmonton is going to have to preside over some sincerely bad times in the following year.

So enjoy your final moments of 2015, Alberta Stephen Harper.

New Year's resolution: Do not let Alberta descend into the savagery of the Thunderdome. We cannot let that brutality return.

#2: Stephen Harper's Empty Desk

The numbers represent the seats that Stephen Harper isn't sitting in. Image via.

When Stephen Harper lost the election in October, but held onto his own seat, he must have been pissed. I mean, really pissed.

Because not only are you no longer prime minister, losing out on all your perks—driver, free Alanis Morissette concerts, and your one free assassination—but now you have to keep representing those mouth-breathers back home in Calgary.

So rather than do that, Stephen Harper has decided to hang out anywhere else, and instead leave an empty chair to symbolize all of our unfulfilled hopes, dreams, and desires or something.

New Year's resolution: cosy up to that cute bench over there.

#1: New Stephen Harper

There'll be no prorogations, just friendly crustaceans, under PM JT. Photo via.

It was obviously a big year for New Stephen Harper, who took over for the other Stephen Harper in October.

New Stephen Harper has moved fast on a plethora of election promises, and has the sky-high poll numbers to prove it.

This despite the fact that virtually every public word uttered by New Stephen Harper is part of a non-sensical trainwreck of verbiage, latched together in order to inspire the most vague patriotism possible instead of substance or depth.

Nevertheless, 2016 will be the year of New Stephen Harper.

New Year's resolution: Say "engagement" more often.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

These cows really want that rogue butcher to fuck off. Photo via Flickr user Michael Gil.

Canadian criminals were up to their usual nefarious activities in this year. But every now and then though, crime veered from its usual notorious path into WTF territory. Here are a few crime stories that raised an eyebrow or two in 2015.

Cops Return Woman's Stolen Car, Also Gift Her Cocaine, a Crack Pipe, and Weapons

Calgary mom Courtney Pickering got way more than she bargained for after the cops returned her stolen car back in August. Any relief she may have felt upon picking it up at the lot quickly evaporated when she reached into reaching into the glovebox, where she found four pieces of ID, none of which belonged to her. She also discovered a baggie of what was probably cocaine in the cup holder, and a crack pipe on the backseat.

Did I mention the knife in the front passenger door and the pipe on the floor?

The cops searched the car again and said it was actually good to go this time, but the next day, while rooting around under the driver and front seats, Pickering pulled out a man's flip flop, a hammer, and a pellet gun.

Naturally, she filed a complaint.

If you're going to break into a Timmy's at 4 AM, at least grab some doughnuts to go with that black sludge—I mean, is that really worth going to jail for on its own? Photo via Flickr user Ruth Hartnup.

4 AM Caffeine Cravings

Who here among us hasn't felt the longing for a hot cup of joe before the sun rises, only to realize nothing is open for another three hours? Back in November, a man in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, decided to take matters into his own hands and allegedly broke into a Tim Hortons around 4 AM apparently with the sole motive to get his caffeine fix.

His plot was foiled when two employees showed up to open up the store and "discovered a male inside who was trying to make himself a coffee and an iced cappuccino." He ran but was arrested in a parking lot nearby, and, luckily for the good folks of Parrsboro, the mess he left was cleaned up in time for the morning rush.

Stolen Bodily Fluids

Toronto police were called in to investigate reports of a package containing "a quantity of bodily fluid samples" stolen from the west end in October. According to the cops, the package was stolen from a courier's vehicle, but things took a weird(er) twist when the apparent owner of the package, Public Health Ontario, said none of its fluids were missing.

The saga ended a few days later when it turned out the package, which contained two blood samples and a nasopharyngeal sample, had simply been sent to the wrong facility.

A bovine heart, like that pictured here, is closer to the size of a human head than a human heart. Photo via Flickr user Tess Watson.

He(arts)

Toronto police cordoned off a section of Ryerson University's downtown campus after a bunch of organs, including a heart and two brains, were found by a garbage can in November.

After causing small panic, the university sent out a tweet saying the heart probably came from a cow, and the campus paper discovered the organs were discarded props from a photography student's project.

Burn the Baby Monitors

The OPP in Middlesex Centre, Ontario, said someone was rocking their kid to sleep in July when the the internet camera used to monitor the room started to play "eerie music and a voice could be heard indicating the parent and child were being watched." The internet provider later said the home's router was hacked, which is slightly better than a priest saying the camera was possessed, I guess. Either way, I'd cleanse both the camera and router with fire.

And in similar web-tech creepiness (and also in the same month), someone hacked into a Toronto couple's webcam, used it to take photos of them cuddling and then sent the photos to the female half of the couple via Facebook.

Don't Steal Cars, but Definitely Don't Steal Cop Cars

The RCMP in Surrey, British Columbia, made the easiest arrest ever when a man allegedly try to jack an unmarked police vehicle with two undercover officers sitting inside. It didn't go well for him—the cops even mocked him on Twitter.

Porker Stealing

The OPP in Norfolk County, Ontario, were called in to investigate the theft of about 500 pigs (that's around $90,000 worth of swine) from a local farm over a few months. The owner, who raises "several thousand animals," notified police in June after they noticed that a bunch of animals had gone missing since April 21. Who even has the time to steal 500 pigs over three months, anyway? Where would you even keep them all? Does black market bacon really taste better? (Probably.)

Oh don't worry, he is fucked now. Photo via Facebook.

Fuck Harper

The RCMP fined Albertan man Rob Wells $543 in August for displaying a giant neon-pink sign that read "FUCK HARPER" in the back window of his car. The fine was for distraction, not for voicing his displeasure with Canada's then-prime minister, but Wells vowed to fight the charge and file a complaint against the ticketing officer "for political harassment."

"Harper supporters are very offensive to me, so being offensive is not illegal in this country," Wells told CTV at the time. Wells made his first court appearance in November, and according to the CBC, said his case was being bumped up to provincial court.

Numbers

An alleged Alberta drug dealer was busted in December after his clients kept trying to reach him at the wrong number—a number that happened to belong to a cop. Trevor Dennis was arrested by the RCMP after far too many of his prospective clients called a similar phone number belonging to RCMP Cpl. John Spaans trying to score.

Silence of the Lambs, Cow Edition

The RCMP in Alberta are looking for a rogue butcher (or butchers) after two cows were fatally shot and carved up in December. The suspect(s) made off with premium cuts of beef, leaving the bodies in a field to rot and get picked on by other animals.

Acting Corp. Jim Countryman told VICE cattle are one of the primary sources of livelihood in the area, although he didn't know if there was a black beef market the bovine killer(s) could tap into. "I have no idea what the motive of this is," he said.

Apparently, cow hunting and carving isn't exactly unusual out west - in British Columbia, six cows were also killed and had strips of meat cut off of them earlier in the year.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter

Late last month in Central California, an alleged burglar died a grisly, torturous death when he got stuck in a chimney. It was far from the first such case, but the horrific twist in this situation was that the homeowner lit a fire while the would-be burglar was in there. When he heard screaming, the homeowner called the authorities, but the torrent of heat and smoke had already killed the poor guy.

In a rarity for these kinds of stories, there weren't any Santa Claus jokes in most of the news coverage. It's morbid, but it's only natural to think of one of the most famous cultural figures in the world when a story like this comes along.

There's something tantalizingly physical about the image of Santa exiting a fireplace, having just used the chimney as a doorway. Most of the Santa legend is Christmas Magic. Sure, he can shift time, and pilot a flying-reindeer aircraft, and carry 7 billion people's gifts in one bag, and live forever. But he does not teleport into your house, kids. For that Santa uses the filthy old chimney.

But chimneys are death traps. They have been for hundreds of years. This was particularly true in 18th and 19th Century Britain, when it was in fashion to hire a chimney sweep whose "climbing boys" or "apprentices" did most of the actual work. Henry Mayhew's account of the short, horrible lives of pre-Victorian chimney sweeps, Of The Sweepers of Old, and The Climbing Boys, is a compendium of torture and death. In one story from 1813, a boy gets wedged in a chimney, and his master hears him say "I cannot come up, master; I must die here." The ensuing rescue attempt is unsuccessful.

According to Mayhew, "among these hapless lads were indeed many deaths from accidents, cruelty, privation, and exhaustion, but it does not appear that the number was ever ascertained."

"Sometimes these accidents were the being jammed or fixed, or, as it was called in the trade, 'stuck,'" Mayhew wrote. It might seem weird that "stuck" was a trade term, but according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this use of the past participle adjective of the word "stick" didn't technically mean "unable to go any further" until 1885. So it's possible that getting jammed in a chimney is where we got the word "stuck" to begin with.

Remember inHow the Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch was climbing down that Whoville chimney and his feet started moving slower than his body, and he got bunched up? That's a real way to get "stuck," and it can kill you.

1834 magazine via Google Books

It's hard to see in the diagram above, but while Figure C is a kid in the proper chimney-sweeping posture, Figure E is a kid who is fucked. His knees are up around his abdomen, and he can't move, which makes him vulnerable to what's called "positional asphyxia," a condition in which the contortion of your body prevents the normal in-and-out motions of your diaphragm. In other words: if you don't get out of that position, you're going to die from lack of oxygen. And, in a chimney, there's not enough room to get out of that position.

But the good news is that chimney sweeps seem to be getting better at not dying in chimneys. Until the early 20th century, there were still cases of maintenance people getting stuck, and occasionally dying in chimneys, but there are few reports of that sort of thing more recently.

Designers have been turning chimneys into better conveyances for smoke, if not people, for hundreds of years. That means, if nothing else, they require fewer children to be directly sacrificed in the name of maintenance. Also, typical designs have at least one bend or elbow, and as many as three. This can slow down, or completely halt a person's descent. Secondly, the flue—the hatch right above the part where you put logs—needs to be a little narrow to ensure that smoke moves quickly. Any given flue will be about a tenth the width of the actual fireplace opening. That means unless you're climbing into a castle, you're generally not going to make it through the opening at the bottom, which makes the whole sneak-into-the-house-like-Santa plan a nonstarter.

But people still get stuck, and they still die.

In 1977 in Los Angeles (a seemingly disproportional number of these cases seem to occur in California) a mentally challenged 14-year-old kid named Robert Thompson got lodged in the chimney of a halfway house under circumstances no one will likely ever know. A medical examiner said the cause of death was probably either starvation, or our old friend positional asphyxia.

It's still a mystery what Robert was doing in there. As with many victims of chimneys, Robert Thompson's misadventure, or possible murder, will probably never have all the details filled in. However, last year a guy named Leo Wan wrote about his experience getting stuck in a London chimney. In his case, he was just being a goofball, sitting with his legs dangling into the chimney as if it was a jacuzzi, and he accidentally fell in. His fall was slowed down by a well-placed bend, but he kept slipping and got stuck. He was saved when he managed to call an ambulance on his cell phone.

It's good to have proof that being stupid around a chimney really can be your undoing, because history is full of bizarre missing persons cases in which people go missing, and then much later, bodies turn up in a chimney, and since they're dead, they're unable to explain how they got there. For instance, in 1928, a six-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man in Australia somehow disappeared together, and wound up dead and in a chimney. The story doesn't say why.

Like with any other weird cause of death, people will grasp at straws trying to explain away the mystery. In 1978, a guy in Los Angeles found a dead body in a chimney, and police speculated that "the guy was high on angel dust or something." In 1998 a 12-year-old boy in Sacramento, California wound up dead in a chimney, and the report mentioned "Tourette's syndrome and attention deficit disorder," as if the poor kid twitched his way into that chimney.

But of course, Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of thieves, and maybe that's why burglars seem to get into more chimney trouble than anyone else.

In Florida in 1986, a burglar tried to get into an empty house via the chimney and got stuck. The neighbors heard screaming on the night of the attempted break-in, but they couldn't tell where it was coming from, and went back to bed. Two days later, workers heard a tapping sound, but just went about their business. Finally two days after that, the owner got home to a house that smelled like rotting flesh.

In 1989 in New York, a burglar tried to break into a Middle Eastern restaurant, and actually almost succeeded. However, he got hung up on some unexpected plumbing inside the chimney. He wound up having his chest constricted by the tight squeeze, and was found dead of asphyxiation the next day, his legs dangling in full view of the morning crew when they came to work. The following year, also in New York, two burglars wound up stuck at the bottom of a chimney in a grocery store. It's not clear whether they were trying to get in or out when they got stuck, but their bodies were found a week later. Yep, someone noticed the smell.

Of course the majority of newspaper reports about burglars in chimneys have happy endings. Burglars get stuck, and then freed, and then they go to jail. If we're lucky, they even repent, promising never to steal again, or they're weird liars who claim they were just looking for their glasses. Occasionally reporters can resist writing hilarious Santa Claus jokes, and occasionally, they can't.

Yes, that is a Joan of Arc joint, and yes, you are a vapid fucking amateur of a joint roller compared to this dude. All photos courtesy Cody Crosby/Codyvangogh.

Cody Crosby has taken the simple act of rolling a joint and elevated it to an art form. The 28-year-old Ottawa man, who posts his work to Instagram and Facebook under Codyvangogh, is a dishwasher, but his true passion lies in creating "designer cannabis products"—he's fashioned smokable versions of Elsa from Frozen and the Powerpuff Girls, as well as cats, dogs, and dinosaurs, among other things. Crosby (no relation to the hockey player) talked to VICE about his evolution from average pot smoker to joint roller extraordinaire, and how he hopes to have his products on the legal market one day.

You know you've always wanted to get stoned with your favourite childhood cartoon characters.

When did you first start rolling joints?
It was probably when I was 17, when I first started smoking weed. The guy who got me to do it, one of the first things that he ingrained into me was that it's important to know how to roll a joint yourself, that you're not always trying to get somebody else to do it. I was pretty good at it back then. I didn't really start rolling, like, crazy things or creatively until about eight months ago. Before that though, I was always trying to raise the bar rolling cross joints and that sort of thing. I love learning new ways to roll.

A joint modeled to look like a woman Crosby saw at a party.

How did you go from rolling regular joints to all these crazy designs?
I guess the first time that I rolled one, there was a girl at my work who was leaving and so we were going to have a small party afterwards. I was going to roll something special for it. So I started rolling a cross joint and put a tulip at the top and kind of realized that that looked like a person, And I had these blue papers that matched the dress of the girl that was leaving, so I added the blue papers on as kind of a dress to the joint and put a little bun in the hair. And then I guess the reason I kept up with it is largely just 'cause a lot of new cannabis products are designed to be quick, efficient, discreet—that kind of thing. You don't really get to enjoy the smoking experience. I was always really fond of just sitting in a circle with my friends passing around a joint, so this kind of takes it back to that. So the first one was just kind of on a whim, and then I just kept up with it to encourage people to keep having sessions with me.

So do you actually sell your joints, or just smoke them with your friends?I would like to sell them. I really want to do it properly through dispensaries. I've got boxes ready, everything like that. But the big thing is, you need about a month ago. They said they weren't giving them out at the moment, but hopefully with legalization coming up, that'll be a thing again. Like, for close friends and stuff, I roll a few for birthdays and things, and then sometimes people will give me their weed to roll and pay me to do that. But I'm really trying to work my way into a position where I can make them available to anybody who wants them.

Where do you get inspiration for your designs?
I try to avoid doing, like, stoner things, really. I think you gotta try and make it appeal to everybody, and I would like to get non-stoners interested, and maybe people who still think of weed as on the same level of cocaine or heroin, to maybe convince them that it's not so crazy, that there's some cool things that you can do with it and that it can be a lot of fun. Also, I try to roll things that will get people asking questions. I think the ship in the bottle one is a really good example of that. I don't really explain how I do it or anything, I just kind of throw it out there and leave it up to their imagination. I always try to take it a step further, kind of get people asking questions, and just trying to appeal to them more than just a stoner audience.

How are you even supposed to smoke this?

I've lately been looking for new ways to make my joints more interactive. Many of them lately have included props that are removed before smoking so you can keep as a reminder of the sesh, like the hats and swords you see on a few of them. The ship in a bottle requires you to break the bottle, and the interaction with the extendable joints is pretty self explanatory. More recently I tried to roll a recorder and that was one of my biggest failures because I finished it all and it looked really good but no sound came out.

What's your favourite roll that you've done?
My favourite one is probably, I think actually the Best Buds Forever, it's a tip trick, but I think that was the first one that really took off. I'm also kind of proud of the Tyrannosaurus. One thing I have a big problem with is, like, getting pictures of the joints actually burning, and we got some really good photos of that one after a lot of people criticized that it wouldn't smoke. I love rolling Disney princesses. Some of those haven't turned out to be my best work, but it's just one of my favourite things to roll.

A joint tip that looks like filigree is definitely better than your I-rolled-up-the-nearest-cardstock-shittily filter.

Dinosaur joints are very necessary.

Why?
Usually, that's where I'll experiment with a lot of things, or I won't always know what I'm going to do when I start it so I have to figure things out. It lets me play with colour a lot too. There's not a lot of variation in the types of coloured papers you can get so you're rather limited in your palettes. So it just lets me try out a lot of papers and get a feel for what they'll look like when they're rolled up, that kind of thing.

How do you paint your joints?
I'm always trying to find new ways to add colour to them, but I also want to do it safely without too many health concerns. Food colouring seemed like a good way to do that, and I looked into it a bit and I couldn't... There's really no research on what happens when you smoke food colouring. But I baptized a few basic joints in food colouring and didn't notice any problems, so I started colouring them with that. People didn't respond especially well to that so I've tried to avoid food colouring more recently and stick to using the coloured papers. The big coloured papers are Juicy Jay's, the flavoured ones, especially the watermelon and cotton candy papers that are blue and red. You can also get licorice papers, which are brown. It's not an enormous palette, so often I'm looking for things that I can roll in those colours. And more recently, I've been trying to make things kind of like, statue-esque, without as much colour. Yeah, colour is one of the toughest things to do safely.

How burnable are your joints? I was looking at some of them and thinking, "How's that even going to light?"
Usually, I put a filter in at one end so you can hold it and typically just light it at the other end, opposite the filter. A lot of the characters, you have to light their heads last if you want it to burn evenly, things like that. So there's a few tricks that you learn over time. For the most part, I'd say they're all burnable. You'll have the odd one, like, one of the arms didn't go but the rest was fine, that kind of thing. But usually for the amount that actually gets burned, you'll get really high off them. I'd say they're about 80 percent effective.

For fuck's sake.

How much weed is in one of your joints?
I'd say the average is typically about five to seven grams? I always try to get as low as possible 'cause, I mean, even the two gram joints are more than enough for most people. So usually they're shared in big sessions. I've made them up to almost a full ounce, I think was the largest one. But for the most part I try to get them smaller, and sometimes that just comes with doing the same design over time. Like when I do people, the first person that I did was the 28 gram one. I've gotten them down, experimented with doing three-gram ones and things like that. More often than not I'd say they average five to seven grams.

How long does it take for you to roll one?
The first ones took about eight hours. There's a line of cats and dogs and stuff, I spent weeks refining those. Those are just little minimalist ones so I can roll those in about 40 minutes. And those are kind of the ones where if I get my MMPR, I'd sell it just because I can whip them out quickly, and then sell some of the more expensive designs for more money. But yeah, typically I would say it's about eight hours. I've spent up to 40 hours, I think was the longest one? That was the Joan of Arc one, and that was the first one where I experimented a lot, where I really started taking it seriously, and that was the one where it kind of turned from a... More of just a pastime into an actual... I mean, I don't like to call it a full-time job because I'm not making money off it, but I have been working full-time lately just rolling and trying to get followers and that kind of thing on the Instagram page.

Yet another designer joint.

How many papers does it take to roll an average design?
Oh, uh, it's quite a few. I go through, I would say probably about $40 worth of papers a month, and that includes ones that come in packs of 500 for about $10, just to give you an example. So it is hundreds of papers every time. Whenever I use colours, those papers tend to be a little more expensive, so I'll usually roll something a few times in normal papers before I roll it in the coloured papers. But yeah, I would say in a joint, there's probably about 20 papers, and then I probably used another 100 papers just trying to get the design ready or even just cutting off stickies to use on the joint. The rest of the paper gets recycled. I usually have a big cup next to me, like one of the extra-large Tim Hortons cups, that I can just dump all the excess paper into and that'll fill up by the end of a roll. So it's probably close to a hundred papers every roll.

How long does it take for one of these joints to burn, since there's so much weed and paper in it?
Quite a while, I'd say about 45 minutes is pretty typical. We've had a few that have gone longer, like an hour and a half was the biggest one.

Do you have any tips for everyone on how to roll regular joints?
There's a few tricks you can master. If you just want to improve at small joints, you need to learn how to plumb and backflip your rolls. Plumbing is just basically where you roll it around a stick and then you wrap a paper around the stick as well so you have a tube going through, and that creates a hollow path for the smoke to get through. It makes it much tastier and it stops resin buildup around the tip. The joint burns evenly whereas a lot of joints, if you roll them normally, the last 15 minutes, you're just burning the roach, you know what I mean? The other thing you can do is backflipping the roll, which is actually, you roll it backwards, like sticky side out, and then just lick over the paper so that it sticks to the sticky and burn off the excess. And what that does is it gets rid of an excess paper so you're smoking more weed and less paper. If you combine those two, then basically you're going to get the most flavour and the least amount of paper out of it.

Look, it's the most Canadian thing to ever exist!

What are your thoughts on Trudeau promising to legalize weed?
Obviously legalization great. My biggest concern right now is the laws tend to favour medicinal use, whereas what I do is very much recreational. There's not too much medicinal about the joints that I roll. And while I think that there are a lot of great medicinal uses for weed, I think that it's a bit silly that a lot of people are sort of admitting to problems they don't have or maybe aren't as serious as they need treatment for it. And I think that's a bit dehumanizing, especially just to get weed. So I really hope the new laws do make room for recreational use and do kind of favour recreational consumers. Other than that, I'm really looking forward to legalization and I hope I can actually be a part of the marijuana industry when it is legal, and maybe sell these things within it.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

Photo via Getty

Nothing highlights the scuzzy, pustule-ridden underbelly of humanity quite like Christmas. The Walmart stampedes, ye ole drunken family stabbing, Santa Dolls in Brazil filled with cocaine: Terrible choices get rationalized when they are done in the name of giving your loved ones—or yourself—a better holiday.

And there's nothing like the generosity of others to highlight the terrible darkness that generosity can spawn. For every Christmas toy drive, there's a Christmas toy drive crime scene. Still, it's wonderful fodder for all us smug secular folks—and Jews—to post indignantly about on Facebook, or just terrific inspiration for another Tom Waits song.

So snuggle up with the Elf on Shelf that you're using to behaviorally modify your kid's shitty attitude, pour that egg-nog, and enjoy a brief history of the season's strangest crimes.

BATH SALT HOME INVASION

If Clark Griswold took bath salts, then it would probably go something like this: In 2011, a man named Terry Trent of Dayton, Ohio, got blasted on bath salts, walked in the back door of his neighbor's house, and decorated the place for Christmas. He lit candles and tastefully arranged them on the coffee and kitchen table. Terry even hung a Christmas wreath on the garage door and relished in the merry scene by blaring the television while playing with some toys under the tree.

The sounds from the TV woke an 11-year-old resident of the house, who went next door to inform his mom about the strange man downstairs.

This incident raises many questions: What if Santa were real and just had a synthetic drug problem? What if all junkies were so thoughtful? And what the fuck else are you going to do in Dayton, Ohio besides ride the Ivory Wave to Valhalla?

SANTACON BANK ROBBERY

Journalists are getting beheaded in Syria, it's near-impossible to get an abortion in Texas, and almost half the world lives on less than $2 a day. Even so, a bunch of assholes dress up like Santa every year, run drunkenly through the streets, and dry-hump each other through sweaty, plush suits. The only good that can come from such a grotesque public display of whimsy is a good old-fashioned bank robbery. Last year, some fucking genius dressed up like Santa during SantaCon, the seasonal Santa-themed pub crawl for people with strong opinions about football and other useless bullshit, and robbed a bank in San Francisco.

The cops never found him.

Check out the episode of Broadly's show 'Ask a Bro' about Santacon in Brooklyn.

SNAKE AND CASH THIEVERY

What are you going to buy your male child? Legos? A Grand HaloCraft War video game? Why don't you be a real man, and steal him a handful of snakes like Donald Laigast Jr of Sidell, Louisiana allegedly did? In 2012, according to police reports, Donny grabbed some snakes and a cash register from a pet store. He told cops it was a Christmas present for his son.

So I ask again: What are you getting your son for Christmas? A handful of snakes or a box of tampons?

GPS-MONITORED BABY JESUS RECOVERY

What if you walked into someone's apartment and, under the glow of a Miller Genuine Draft light-up sign, there was the potbellied figure of a ceramic baby jesus stolen from a local nativity scene? Would you be like, "Wow, Craig! Even though you sell tweak to high school kids, you still know how to pull off a good-natured prank!"

Or would you call the cops?

Your answer is irrelevant, because the cops are wise to your friend's bullshit. In places like Wellington, Florida, that baby is strapped with a GPS monitoring device. In 2007, a stolen GPS-rigged baby Jesus was found face down in a 18-year old's Florida (of course) woman's apartment.

GIANT WEED XMAS TREE

Last year, a Chilean woman reportedly informed her neighbors that she had picked out the best Christmas tree, and her kids were going to have the best holiday ever. It turned out the tree was just a giant cannabis plant. I hate stoners, and frankly hope this woman was publicly executed as a deterrent to future bullshit.

DRUNKEN DANCE STUDIO FLOAT JAUNT

In 2006, 42-year-old South Carolinian David Allen Rodgers figured he'd volunteer to drive the Christmas float for his local dance studio. And so what if he cracks a beer while he does it? The parade only goes, like, four miles an hour, right? You're telling me that a man of fine Scandinavian-German stock can't handle a couple sips of brew? What is he, a Democrat?

But Rodgers allegedly sped off course at something in the vicinity of 60 miles per hour, terrifying parents and children alike. He was eventually apprehended and charged with driving under the influence, 18 counts of assault and kidnapping, unlawful conduct towards a child, assaulting an officer, open container, and more.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Matti Matilla

In 1991, Jeff Westover married his wife and became a stepfather to a five-year-old daughter who had not grown up believing in Santa Claus. "That was my first real parental challenge," Westover told me. "How do I convince this very bright five-year-old child that Santa Claus is somebody she needs to know about and have as part of her tradition?" He decided to direct his all of his stepdaughter's questions to an "elf" at the North Pole, who he had respond to her via the fax machine located in his home office. His stepdaughter loved it—she brought these responses to school to show her friends, and before long other parents started reaching out to Westover to find out how they too could receive these faxes for their own children.

Today, Westover's ruse has expanded into MyMerryChristmas, a website that, in addition to fielding emails to Santa, also features a holiday radio station, an interactive "Santa tracker," as well as a message board for users to bond over their mutual holiday cheer. His site, like many others, has changed the face of what it means to write a letter to Santa.

When you were a child, you probably wrote your Christmas list in the form of a letter to Santa Claus, which your mom or dad would then address to the North Pole, and drop off at the post office. The US Postal Service maintains a "Letters from Santa" program, which helps parents write their own responses as Santa, while both the British and Canadian postal services send back automated letters from Santa Claus for the kids who write to him. But we live in the age of the internet, and so now there are a whole number of websites such as Westover's that allow kids to send messages to Santa, only to get a response more or less immediately.

Some of these sites are run by volunteers, and started from a simple desire to help kids enjoy the spirit of Christmas. Alan Kerr—the self-described "Head Elf" behind EmailSanta—was inspired by the 1997 Canadian postal strike, in which 45,000 postal workers refused to deliver mail until their wages and work rules were renegotiated. Speaking over the phone, Kerr told me how upset his sister's son was when he found out that he wouldn't be able to mail a letter to Santa. Figuring that there had to be something he could do to improve the situation, he looked to the then "pretty new" internet as his saving grace. "I was just kind of fooling around with it to see what I could do," he recalled. "So I just set something quick up and sent ," he said, "there's a special page he sends to children, just in case, so that they can talk to people and get special help."

Last Christmas, a few kids from Vietnam visited the EmailSanta Facebook page to ask Santa directly why he forgot to visit them and leave presents. Kerr lamented that "dealing with disappointment" is "one of the more difficult parts of the job" of playing Santa. He tries to reply to these comments with words of encouragement, relying on the Santa legend that jolly ole Saint Nick "doesn't bring presents to everyone even though he tries" as a means to make sure that every kid knows that Santa still loves them.

And even if the job is hard or can get depressing, the idea that a kid can send Santa an email and get one back is sort of incredible, and that's why the people who run these sites do it. "It's a tradition," Westover told me when I asked about how it has felt to donate his free time to maintain the MyMerryChristmas site for a quarter of a century. "It's part of what makes Christmas for us."

Follow Michael on Twitter.

Occupiers spend the day investigating a neighbouring island, finding several culturally modified trees (CMT) that were altered past generations of Tsimshians. All photos courtesy the author.

Gumboots first, four men in bright red survival suits splashed into the 20-foot skiff. They were heading out to escort the liquified natural gas (LNG) surveyors off of Flora Bank.

Occupier Mathew Danes held a slim, black ghetto-blaster above his head, the eagle tattoo on his right temple partly obscured by sweat-dampened hair. A Tribe Called Red's "Burn Your Village to the Ground" blasted at full volume, war drums pounding through the speakers as the crew barreled through the water. The boys were hooting and hollering, pumping themselves up, raising the blood and grinning through the spray-like air on this wet and rocky northern BC coast. These boys are ready to fight, ready to defend. They are determined to prevent development of the proposed LNG plant on this traditional territory of the Gitwilgyoots Tribe of Lax Kw'alaams.

Lyle Donald Wesley Jr., son of the hereditary chief of Lax Kw'alaams, has made his position clear: no jobs are worth the destruction of this place.

"I am willing to die to protect it," he said

Danes, of Port Hardy, put it simply, "Our ancestors would have done the same thing."

Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned company behind the Pacific NorthWest LNG (PNW LNG) project, intends to build one of the world's largest LNG plants in an ecologically sensitive area encompassing Lelu Island, the edge of Flora Bank, and an estuary that lies at the mouth of the Skeena River. Members of Lax Kw'alaams and their supporters have been occupying Lelu Island since August 25 in an effort to prevent research and construction of the plant with its proposed 1.6-kilometre bridge and 1.1 km pier.

Members of the Lelu Island Occupations confront two boatloads of Surveyors. All three boats held spotlights up high, attempting to gain the visual advantage.

The Prince Rupert Port Authority believes the location is ideal for development, according to communications manager Michael J. Gurney. Close enough to be convenient yet out of sight from Prince Rupert, it has deep water access and is near a port.

The occupiers' concerns are rooted in the environmental sensitivity of the region, traditional land title, and protecting the economic viability of small-scale commercial fishers. The Skeena River is one of Canada's largest salmon producing rivers—second only to the Fraser—and averages about 10 million returning salmon each year. Residents that live in or use the area include thousands of eagles, porpoises, and orcas.

The project is still awaiting approval from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, which is expected to rule on the proposal in early 2016. According to a report commissioned by PNW LNG, "the project is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects on fish and fish habitat."

Despite structural changes PNW LNG made to the proposal to lessen the quantity of dredging required, the combination of construction and operation could still have a serious impact, said Greg Knox, executive director of the SkeenaWild Conservation Trust. Underwater blasting, dredging (more than 700,000 cubic meters) and trenching (4.5 km) would be major components of construction; disturbing pre-existing contaminants from an old pulp mill and re-releasing them into the ecosystem.

Hereditary chief Sm'oogyet Yahaan, or Donald Wesley Sr., of the Gitwilgyoots tribe of the Lax Kw'alaams, a Tsimshian Nation. Lax Kw'alaams is seeking legal title to the island.

Flora Bank is particularly vulnerable, with its shallow sandy bank rich in eelgrass that is vital to the health and protection of juvenile salmon. "This particular area is the most critical habitat that exists for Skeena salmon and it is probably the most critical and sensitive salmon habitat on the west coast of Canada," said Knox.

The degree of potential damage is uncertain. However, "When you put $11 billion worth of infrastructure right over top of the most sensitive habitat there is on the West Coast, you are taking a rather big risk," he added.

It could collapse the commercial fishery and the $100-million sport fishing industry and endanger the food-security of Indigenous folk all the way up the Skeena, Knox explained.

Drilling off the coast, into Agnew Bank, has been going on for weeks as PNW LNG tests soil samples and ascertains the depth of bedrock.

An occupier taking a breather on the edge of camp.

According to PNW LNG's Environmental Impact Statement, "Changes in sediment or water quality will be short-term and are not expected to affect fish health or marine resources as a whole. "

That is small comfort, said Knox. "At low tide, right where they're doing all this drilling, that's where the fish are hanging out because there's no water on the bank at low tide, so they're hanging beside the bank, over top of Agnew Bank... Petronas has been saying, basically, 'Hey, we're not going to touch Flora Bank, therefore everything's OK,' and it's an absurd argument because those fish are there twice a day, at low tide."

Flora Bank is highly unusual according to sedimentologist Patrick McLaren, of SedTrend Analysis. The bank has remained essentially unchanged since the ocean reached its current level some 8,000 years ago. That makes it a very vulnerable bit of sand, according to McLaren's report A Sediment Trend Analysis of Prince Rupert Harbour and Its Surrounding Waters.

Much of McLaren's work has been used in the most recent 3-D model by PNW LNG. McLaren however is flabbergasted at how they managed to take his research and come up with the conclusion that the plant would be harmless. "They've twisted it around to suggest that my work in fact supports their model, and that's absolutely incorrect, it doesn't support their model at all," McLaren said.

Matthew Danes warms up in a sleeping tent after patrolling on the water.

Spencer Sproule, PNW LNG's senior advisor was contacted, but was unavailable for on-the-record comment.

It is has been nearly four months since the occupation began. In the beginning, interactions between occupiers and the PNW LNG-hired surveyors were relatively peaceful, consisting of escorting surveyors off Flora Bank and brief boat-to-boat interactions. However, tempers have flared over the last month. Occupiers yell across the water, demanding that workers get lost, while survey boats resort to constant video surveillance. One worker held up a grappling hook while the boats circled one another during a late-night confrontation. Boats have made physical contact. Boatloads of surveyors pass the island with their hands covering their faces while a designated videographer rolls to catch any angry words cast by the occupiers. The RCMP boat has been out patrolling the area regularly.

Occupiers Mathew Danes, Lyle Donald Jr., Kendal Hughes, and Warren Tait have a smoke in one of the first structures to be built on the island. The running joke in camp is that they are the first Tsimshian people to ever build a teepee in their village.

Lelu Island is under the traditional protection of hereditary chief Sm'oogyet Yahaan, or Donald Wesley Sr., of the Gitwilgyoots tribe of the Lax Kw'alaams, a Tsimshian Nation. Lax Kw'alaams is seeking legal title to the island.

On November 9, Wesley penned a letter to newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, asking him to halt the LNG project, warning that tensions were on the rise. The letter was endorsed by 70 signatories, including the Lax Kw'alaams Band Council, numerous other First Nation groups and several well-known environmentalists including David Suzuki and Alexandra Morton.

Four Tsimshian Nations responded by declaring publicly that they are not in accord with the letter and its demand that the project be scrapped.

Ken Lawson or Gwishawaal, a Gitwilgyoots house leader and current front man on the island, bluntly stated his opinion of their stance. This is not their land.

A PNW LNG barge can be seen kilometres out from the island. The buoys are set up by surveyors and now cut across the water for several hundred metres.

"This territory belongs to the Gitwilgyoots tribe. It does not belong to the other nations. They are Tsimshian. They have their own territories, they have their own houses. They have their own tribes. We are the Gitwilgyoots tribe. We are defending Gitwilgyoots territory...It's plain and simple, it's cut and dried. I'm not stepping on anyone's toes, I'm defending our territory...I'm defending this estuary, the land, the water, the way they should be. All of the nations should be defending this land, not just Gitwilgyoots tribe. This is for everybody."

Lawson acknowledges that the occupiers have come under scrutiny, even from his own community of Lax Kw'alaams, for the heckling and visible anger they have displayed to surveyors while on the water. "Let me put it this way, we're not going out there to blow kisses," Lawson said.

"I'll defend my guys by saying I think what they do, they are doing because they have to. We work with what we have and who we have, just like the surveyors are. The surveyors are trespassing. They are asked not to come onto Flora Bank. They are asked not to come onto Lelu Island. They came on anyway, so we're not just going to sit there and say 'have a nice day.' They're trespassing; so are we wrong or are they wrong? I say they're trespassing."

Occupation has not been easy. Occupiers spend their days building boardwalks, buildings, cooking, cutting firewood, patrolling the sea to disrupt the work of surveyors, removing flagging from trees marked by surveyors and putting up 'no trespassing' signs along the entire perimeter of the island; all the while trying to come together as a community.

One occupier, James Ryan, worked for 20 days non-stop, 10 to 12 hours a day, building the first permanent structure on the island. He worked himself into a hospital bed where he remained for 10 days. He returned to camp for another 12 days before taking a break.

Warren Tait grabs a neighbouring boat to stabilize the smaller one so that passengers can transfer.

Occupiers are a diverse and ever changing group; Lax Kw'alaams, Metlakatla, Haida Gwaii, Port Hardy, Unist'ot'en as well as non-indigenous supporters from Vancouver and beyond. The number of occupiers is constantly in flux due to the necessity of work, family and finances. For security reasons the exact number is kept private.

More than anything, camp-life is hard, according to Leona Peterson, who is currently on the Island and has spent several days there, on multiple occasions. Peterson was one of the original handful—mostly women— who organized the occupation. Her first reaction when she learned about the project was tears, her second was action.

Peterson's governing council of Metlakatla signed an Impact Benefit Agreement with PNW LNG a year ago. They also rebutted the letter sent to PM Trudeau on Nov. 9, 2015. Peterson recalls the helplessness she felt when her leaders took that stand. "They're supposed to be the people that are looking out for us. And they've decided to align themselves with industrialization that will cripple us," she said.

Around the late night fire, discussions about the industrial complex and the meaning of development were central concerns. Talk turned to the 1763 Royal Proclamation, a piece of pre-Confederation legislation, which declares Indigenous land title has always and will continue to exist; that all land must be ceded by treaty or will continue to be considered indigenous. Most of British Columbia is unceded territory, including Lelu Island.

Voices got louder and the excitement was palpable when discussion turned to the Supreme Court decision of June 6, 2014 when the court made history by awarding Aboriginal title to the Tsilhqot'in people in BC's interior. "That case could really turn the tide for us," said Wesley Jr. Currently the case of Lelu Island is waiting to enter the courts.

The land claim is an important part of the battle over the island, but it is not a Native-only issue. "This is not a First Nation's issue, this is everybody," Lawson said.

James Ryan, a Lax Kw'alaams occupier, enjoys the morning sun with a local resident. Dozens of eagles can be seen in a single day throughout the area.

The uncertain future weighs heavily on the pocketbooks of investors and workers with an eye on potential jobs: there's an estimated 8,000 person-years of work in BC and 650 full-time positions during the 30 years the plant would operate. But the weight sits all the more firmly on the hearts of the people who have grown up surrounded by this land and water, who make a playground of it in the summer months and who have sustained themselves and their families with the bounty of the sea.

"It's total devastation. Our whole ecosystem is being ripped out right in front of us," Wesley Jr. said. "It's like tearing out our heart. Everyone in my community depends on this."

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With Christmas just days away, children across the globe are giddy with anticipation to see what Santa will bring. But some children, like the young protagonist in Dan Sully's short film Senka,know that Christmas isn't always a white wonderland. After the quiet young boy finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, his mother's boyfriend creates a mythical beast named Senka that punishes bad behavior and terrifies him into keeping a secret.

Instead of just being a traditional broken home narrative, Sully's bleak story is complemented by a well-defined ominous mood and a beautifully muted color palette. Where the similar Christmas horror film Krampus relied heavily on big-monster CGI for frights, this short cleverly injects fear into shadows, turning what is just out of sight into something scary and dangerous.

The film's main tension is not driven by the boyfriend or even the standard local gangsters, but from within the boy himself. That's where Senka lies and why Senka succeeds.

If you like Senka, you should check out Dan Sully's previous short film The Ellington Kid, about a different kind of urban legend. It will send your head spinning by the end.

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