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Watch Global Head of Content Alex Miller's Favourite VICE Docs of 2015

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This has been a great year for VICE documentaries. We released a true crime series called Red Right Hand, started a daily variety show, and took home ten Webby Awards in 2015, including Best Documentary Series for our show The Real and the People's Choice Webby for Best Individual News and Politics Episode for one of our Russian Roulette dispatches.

To cap off 2015, we asked some of the bigwigs around the VICE office to put together lists of their favorite documentaries from the past year. Today, our Global Head of Content, Alex Miller, has given us his list.

Miller's favorite docs of 2015 include our episode of American Obsessions about Magic: The Gathering, VICE's interview with Eagles of Death Metal about the tragic Paris attacks, and the aforementioned first season of Red Right Hand.

Give the videos a watch above, and get ready for a whole new slew of documentaries in 2016.


Comics: The Real Deal Crew Remembers Bad Deeds of Christmas Past in Today's Comic from Lawrence Hubbard

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The 'Affluenza Teen' Was Arrested in Mexico

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Photo via Jalisco State Prosecutor's Office

Previously: We Asked a Private Investigator How to Catch the 'Affluenza Teen'

Texas teenager Ethan Couch, famous for killing four people while drunk driving in 2013, then avoiding jail time, was arrested with his mother on Monday in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, after fleeing the US, American and Mexican officials told the New York Times.

In 2013, the now-18-year-old evaded going in prison thanks in part to the idea, posited by his psychologist during his trial, that Couch was so spoiled by his wealthy parents that he never learned right from wrong. The Texas judge appeared to buy that argument at least somewhat, and sentenced him to ten years of probation rather than hard time.

He popped back up in the news earlier this month when a video surfaced of him playing beer pong at a party, a likely violation of his probation agreement. Officials now believe that he had a "going-away party" before fleeing the country with his mother, though obviously the pair have little to celebrate now.

According to CNN, Tonya Couch, Ethan's mother, is being charged with hindering the apprehension of a juvenile and could be sentenced to between two and ten years in prison. Ethan's potential punishment is a little more complicated: If his case remains in the juvenile system, he can only be given 120 days in jail. If a judge transfers his case to adult court, the punishments for violating probation are more severe but his violations would not carry over—meaning that Couch could get off relatively lightly once again.

RCMP Issue Canada-Wide Warrant for Young Duo Wanted in ‘Extremely Violent’ Murder of 18-Year-Old Man

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The RCMP have issued a warrant for the arrests of Marissa Shephard (left) and Tyler Noel. Photos via RCMP.

The RCMP issued a nationwide arrest warrant Monday for a man and woman wanted in what police say was the "extremely violent" murder of an 18-year-old Moncton, New Brunswick man earlier in December.

Firefighters discovered the body of 18-year-old Baylee Wylie after putting out a fire at a house on Sumac Street in Moncton on December 17. His death was later determined to be a homicide.

On Christmas Eve, the Codiac Regional RCMP laid first-degree murder and arson charges against Marissa Shephard, 20, and Tyler Noel, 18, and issued provincial warrants for their arrests.

In a press release, police said it's unknown if the the pair, who were previously considered persons of interest, are together or if they've left New Brunswick.

"The murder of Baylee Wylie was extremely violent. These two should be considered dangerous and not be approached," Codiac Regional RCMP Sgt. André Pepin said in the release. "Anyone who is helping these two evade police can be charged with accessory after the fact to commit first degree murder."

Police have not released any more details on Wylie's murder.

A funeral home obituary described Wylie as a "warm hearted, kind, generous and caring person who's engaging smile radiated from him and could genuinely brighten any room... He rarely ever left his mother's or grandparents side without the words 'I Love you.'"

Marissa Shephard is described as a Caucasian woman with brown eyes and brown hair standing 5'5" tall and weighs approximately 100 lbs. She has a tattoo with the name "Stephen" on her neck and a tattoo of a crown on her chest. A Facebook account that appears to belong to Shephard lists one of her jobs as being a "full time mommy."

Tyler Noel is described as caucasian man with brown eyes and black hair, standing 5'8" tall with a medium build and weighs approximately 140 lbs. He has facial hair and sideburns and tattoos on his right arm with the words "mom," "dad," and "Mary" as well as a skull.

Both are from the Moncton area, although their relationship with each other is unclear. Several photos on Wylie's Facebook appear to show him with Shephard; a photo posted December 13 shows him kissing her on the cheek, with the caption, "Shoutout to her ex for keep getting this photo reported."

Police previously arrested an 18-year-old man in connection with the murder. Devin Morningstar appeared in Moncton Provincial Court on December 21 and was charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of arson. His next court appearance is scheduled for January 9.

Anyone with information on Shephard's or Noel's location is asked to 911, the Codiac Regional RCMP at 506-857-2400 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

In general, Moncton has a low murder rate—there were no homicide victims reported in 2013, according to Statistics Canada, and three in 2014, when three Mounties were fatally shot. It does, however, have a slightly higher-than-average amount of violent crimes.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.


How to Survive New Year’s Eve Without Embarrassing Yourself

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Photo via Bruno Bayley

If the end of the year lists are anything to go by—end of year lists as far as the eye can see, end of year lists on top of other end of year lists, end of year lists of other end of year lists, Here Are The Best End Of Year Lists Of The Year—if the end of year lists are anything to go by, it's coming up to the end of the year. Goodbye, 2015. Farewell to you, the year. Did you have a good one, VICE reader? Hold that thought then delete it. I don't really care if you had a good one.

The end of year is a good time to reflect, obviously, on the year gone by: of the music and film highlights, of the highs but—more inevitably—the lows. Think back through the year. Summer was great, wasn't it? That smeary, sweaty heat, dust in the air and sunlight dappling through the leaves, Coronas in public parks, standing outside pubs in your bare feet. And that holiday you went on, drinking only blue alcohol, pink with the tan and wearing vests, shouting on Spanish strips and having a quad bike tequila hangover on a beach. Spring was so fresh. Autumn so crunchy. All those good times. But still: You can't quite forget that time in May when you said a joke in a packed elevator at work ("Oop! Like sardines!" wasn't it?) and nobody said anything to acknowledge that you'd spoken. Or that time you slipped on a crushed beer can on some concrete and a whole primary school class out on a trip saw you split your trousers. That time you crafted a really good opening line on Tinder and a screenshot of it got widely disseminated on nail polish emoji Twitter. You just can't move past the bad times, can you? Like winter, it's coming: New Year's Eve. The end of the old times and the start of the new. The perfect excuse to do shots and forget every error, every fuck-up, every slight of 2015.

Thing is: It's December 28 and you've forgotten to fucking plan anything, haven't you? Every year. Every fucking year. Relive the hell of NYE and adjust your night accordingly. Here's everything that's going to happen to you.

Photo via Bruno Bayley

THE 'SIX FACEBOOK INVITES AT ONCE' NEW YEAR'S EVE PARTY RUSSIAN ROULETTE (S.F.I.A.O.N.Y.E.P.R.R.)

The scheduling conflict between Christmas and New Year really is a top-to-bottom shitshow that should be addressed by the government, because you spend 20+ days of December planning for Christmas—all that excitement, all that gift-wrapping, all that tree carrying—and then you're stuck in a fuzzy sort of overfed purgatory, the gray days of December 27 through 30, cookie after cookie, growing too fat for even your oversized Christmas sweater, and then boom: like waking up on a hangover with the startling realization you are two hours late for work, you remember with a jolt that New Year's Eve is coming, and you empirically have to do something.

Having to do things is, I think we can all agree, bad. Having to do things is possibly one of the worst responsibilities humans have in their lives. This is why people have children: to get out of doing things. This is why people get dogs, or save up deposits on houses. Doing things is so bad it makes us do enduring, long-term mistakes. Doing nothing is preferable. Picking up butt-warm dog shits with an inside-out bag over your hand is not fun, but it's preferable to going out, to doing things, to talking to people.

But on New Year's Eve, everything goes out of the window. There is an odd duty to New Year's Eve. Unless you are legitimately married and with children—unless you regularly say adult things like, "I have more than one weather app on my phone, I really like knowing about the weather," "It's time to balance the checkbook," and "Merino wool is truly the only wool for me"—you basically have to go out. And so here's the rub: Everyone has to do something, which means the quality of everything peaks and troughs at once. It means the club nights are spectacular, but the house parties are quite often shit. The human slurry of normal people who don't go out every Friday dilutes everything down to a digestible level and hides it all behind a perky Facebook invite. Is this an actual party you're being invited to? Or is it six girls in cardigans watching television and going home, after a glass of white wine each, at 12:15 AM? It is impossible to know.

On NOISEY: The 25 Best Grime Tracks Of 2015

SOMEONE SIDLES UP TO YOU WEARING A PAIR OF "2016" NOVELTY SUNGLASSES, THE "1" IN "2016" RENDERED MONSTROUS AND BULGING BY THE MISPLACEMENT OF A LENS

They say "wahey" and they mean it.

AGAINST BETTER JUDGEMENT YOU ARE CONNED INTO BUYING A PITCHER BECAUSE "YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO TO THE BAR AS OFTEN"

There is this myth with pitchers, and that myth is: It is possible to have a good time while drinking them. Because with pitchers, more than any other drinking, you are chasing the fun dragon: consuming too much liquid too be comfortable, but with too low an alcohol content to get you actually drunk, thus necessitating a second pitcher, and then you have fucked it—flying right on through "bored pre-drunkenness" into "full-on shouting" without stopping at "actually having fun." The most fun part of being drunk is the shit-chatting stage and the stage where you're confident enough to talk to strangers. Everything before and after that—the boredom, the being aware of how much a round costs, the smell of the pub carpet; the crying, the vomiting, the kebabs—are actually terrible. You've pitchered your way from one bad bit to another.

When you consider buying a pitcher, just consider: are you "Crazy Chick"–era Charlotte Church? Are you the most perfect pissed angel to ever walk the earth? If you are not "Crazy Chick"–era Charlotte Church, you're not going to have any fun drinking pitchers. She was the only person capable of doing it, and even she couldn't keep it up for long, turning through pop stardom through parenthood and now into earnest left-wing blogging. Is that what you want from your New Year's Eve? Do you want to wake up and write an earnest 800 words about Jeremy Corbyn? Nobody wants to get that pissed, ever.

Photo via Bruno Bayley

HAVING A REALLY REAL CONVERSATION ABOUT LAST YEAR

This is the trap with New Year's Eve goads you into: Everyone is all reflective and nostalgic, and someone goes, "So how was 2015 for you? Good year? Bad year?" and you suddenly look into middle distance and realize: You're in the same job, you're living in the same black mold–infested house, actually you technically got demoted, didn't you, in February, when that intern got made your boss, and you've still got the same problems last year's resolutions were meant to fix—still spending too much, drinking too much, still floating in a fug of satisfaction-free millennial sub-angst, angst not enough to make you do anything about it, angst just enough to make you sad, and God it's 2 AM and you're sobbing about your job to a bewildered looking stranger who only wanted to get to the punch bowl, snot all down your face, tears all down your front—

HAVING A REALLY REAL CONVERSATION ABOUT THE COMING YEAR

—oh God and now it's 3 AM and you're thinking about the year to come, this is like a panic attack now, fuck what will even change in 2016, what will even get better? God it's like: You think of New Year's Eve like a line, you know, like a clean break, but really it's just the same old shit, again and again and again, nothing comes good unless you make it come good, the only way to fix things is with work, oh Christ, adulthood is huge, adulthood is enormous, adulthood is just you overboard in the middle of the sea, the ocean is deep and dark beneath you, there's no one around for miles, oh my g—

YOU GET A 4 AM TEXT FROM YOUR MUM THAT SHE SENT AT MIDNIGHT AND ONLY JUST CAME THROUGH NOW AND IT'S REALLY SWEET AND LIFE-AFFIRMING AND SAYS HOW PROUD SHE IS OF YOU

Aw, thanks mum.

YOU GET A TEXT FROM YOUR MUM PISSED OFF THAT YOU DIDN'T TEXT HER BACK IN THE SECONDS AFTER SHE TEXT YOU SO "ME AND IAN ARE GOING TO SLEEP, NOW. DON'T WAKE US UP WHEN YOU COME IN."

Fucksake, mum.

YOU WAKE YOUR MUM UP COMING IN

Oh god you vomited too loud and now she's yelling. "I HOPE YOU DON'T WANT A BACON SANDWICH TOMORROW, BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT GETTING ONE." You just want to go to bed. You just want to go to bed. The last two jokes really rely on you staying at home for Christmas and then just sort of staying there for New Year, too.

YOU ACTUALLY WENT TO HAVE NEW YEAR'S EVE IN A BIG CITY—YOU'VE GONE BACK TO SCHOOL OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT—AND THAT LAST TWO JOKES REALLY DIDN'T HIT WITH YOU AT ALL, I MEAN THEY VERY MUCH SHOULD BE DISMISSED

Basically if you spend New Year's Eve in a city instead of a satellite town or village then there are just like six more clubs to get turned away from in the drizzle and it's way harder to get a cab home but, on the perky side, there are lots more places open until dawn.

Photo via Robert Foster

YOU HAVE TO PAY $20 TO GET IN YOUR USUAL BAR

Mark's on the door in a big black North Face jacket and he's asking you if you've got a ticket or if you want to buy one on the door. "Mark," you're saying. "Mark: it's me." Mark knows you. Mark, from behind the bar. "Mark, don't you remember that time I testified in court for you about that time you punched that kid? I lied and told them he didn't have teeth when he turned up." It's $20, he says. There's buffet.

Pub buffet, n., the artistry thereof: there is no artistry in pub buffet. There is no determining "a" or "the" in "pub buffet." "There is buffet," Mark says, solemnly. "We done buffet." A cheese sandwich splits and wilts. An egg somehow grows more congealed in its mayonnaise. A pork sausage delicately balanced on a cocktail stick and pinched into a half-grapefruit wrapped in foil. Buffet.

Inside, the party is vibing: There's Pete, in his corner with his stout; there's Seany, pride of place on the fruit machine; and then there's about 200 fucking people in the fucking middle of the pub are you fucking joking. They keep ordering a "Woo Woo" or a "slimline G&T" from a stone-faced landlord. They keep being loud and happy. They keep going "FIVE... FOUR... THREE... TWO...!" They keep having fun. They have ruined your local with their once-yearly dose of fun. They have fucked New Year's Eve with their insatiable appetite for being normal.

On MUNCHIES: Ful Medames Is An All-in-One Breakfast And Hangover Cure

YOU HAVE TO ORDER YOUR DRUGS AT 4 PM AND EVEN THEN YOUR DEALER IS PROBABLY GOING TO IGNORE YOU

I mean at the best of times the dude in the blacked out Audi who you text once monthly for some "extremely peng dizz" turns up an hour, an hour-and-a-half late, and you always seem to have to trudge from one car park at the side of an overpass to another car park at the side of an overpass to meet him, but I mean this is really taking the piss now: you try and stock up at 4 PM, like a good and honorable citizen, and he doesn't even respond to your text until 10, and even then he's somewhere taking a massive bag of cut-down coke to some house party full of posh kids. It's 2 AM when he turns up with most of a bag of baby food in a Ziploc with a little bit of drugs in it, and he wants double because there are "more police about than usual." The party is essentially over and the high you get is comparable to drinking a can of Tizer really quickly while spinning around. And yet you retreat to the bathroom with it in secret, you dirty little piggy, don't you? Yes you do. And you wake up with a sore throat and red eyes and a silent little promise to yourself to give up drugs this year. And you never will.

Photo via Robert Foster

YOU HOLD ON TO THE DOOMED HOPE THAT A NEW YEAR WILL SOMEHOW BRING WITH IT CHANGE

What frail and useless hopes we all cling dear.

YOU STRUGGLE WITH "PEAK MANAGEMENT"

The thing: Nobody wants to be fall-down drunk before midnight, but then nobody quite knows what time to stop and go to bed with the parameters of the entire night changed and shifted forward—idling on the driveway of drunkenness before midnight, but then hell breaks loose and the rules go out of the window in the hours afterwards, and so now where does the night end: 3 AM? 7 AM? In two days' time? Never?—and so post-midnight you're just on it in an effort to get royally, celebration-worthy drunk, so drunk it is an event, and then oh: Oh shit, no, you're vomiting red wine into a sink on your while a line of people call you a "dickhead" or a "red vomit dickhead." It's 2 AM and not a single taxi will go near you so you have to stumble-walk home in the cold and in the drizzle. Wake up fully clothed in a stark bathroom and the taste of regret on your tongue and down your throat. You fucked it.

Photo via Bruno Bayley

OH, THE EVER DESPERATE FUMBLE FOR A KISS

It's five minutes to midnight and you've spent too long in a toilet cubicle pretending to have a shit in case anyone looks under the door but secretly very much doing cocaine off the back of your phone instead, and you've burst outside and the DJ is winding through the first few moments of The Final Countdown, and all the couples are doing that gross couple thing they do—arms around each other's necks, gazing into each other's eyes, smiling, the disgusting happy fuckers, smiling—and all your other mates seem to have pulled and now no: you're stuck darting like fish through the sea with various other desperate gakked-up singletons, arms glancing off each other, pulling potential targets into and abruptly out of the kissing orbit, Tinder irl, hyper Tinder, and now everyone's counting—five, four—and you're still standing on your own—three, two—and now you know with a grim inevitability that everyone around you will kiss across midnight and you won't, and so you just consolidate the fact that you will start the year in a similar way to that in which we all die i.e. truly alone, and you give a weak cheer, and a confetti canon goes off on and over you, and the only four people who know the words to Auld Lang Syne start singing it, and you're folding your arms and being pulled into a begrudging dance circle, and that's it, that's you, happy 2016, this trough can only be followed by a peak.

YOU, EATING A STREET HOT DOG, WATCHING THE SUN RISE THROUGH THE GRAY AND THINKING ABOUT YOUR LIFE

5 AM and you've somehow found some dude with a boxy food cart selling burnt onion and a supermarket value sausage in a burger bun, and it tastes like heaven would taste, and it tastes like death, and the orange lamps and black mist and drizzle of deep night give way to a grey smoky sunrise, and it's just you and the pork and the sun, the streets littered with polystyrene chip cartons and passed-out girls, and you just gaze at it and think: Yeah, maybe, when I walk home and get to bed around 7 AM, woken by the dim puttering of my family and friends, maybe this is a New Year, a New You: a chance at something else, something better. Or maybe you'll just waste another year away getting shitfaced and watching Family Guy on iPlayer. Could go either way. The point is there is a chance at something else, at least. The point is Happy New Year.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

The Definitive Guide to How Canada Stopped Being Totally Embarrassing

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Canada's cool dad amid non-subtle subtext. Photo via Twitter.

Well hello my friends. We had a pretty big year. The Jays made a pennant run in October and Jose Bautista flipped his bat in the air and it was the coolest thing to happen in Toronto since the ex-mayor got busted for partying too hard. We also got a new Grimes album. It's actually been a pretty stellar year for CanCon.

But 2015 was a pretty banner year for another reason: this was the year of the Canadian cultural war.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Early 2015 is basically a lifetime ago for those of us in the Age of Clickbait. But back then, Canada was conservative as fuck. Alberta was still wrestling with the radical idea of letting gay and straight kids be friends with each other on school property. It was still possible to believe that the country's oil-powered economy wasn't in as hard shape as it seemed. The federal government was belligerently opposed to treating Indigenous women like human beings and kept warning us about reefer madness. They were even seriously entertaining the thought of erecting a giant statue of something called Mother Canada on the eastern shores of Cape Breton (because that's where Canada ends, I guess).

We were nearing the end game of a decade-long struggle over the soul of Canada. 2015 was going to Year Zero, the moment when the country's clock rolled over and The Big Shift would be a real thing and the new conservative century would finally take hold.

All in all, a bang-up year to be an Old-Stock Canadian.

In retrospect, there were a lot of signs that this entire enterprise was in the process of coming off the rails. The day before Valentine's Day, the Sun News Network—aka "Fox News North" among pearl-clutching Upper Canadians—abruptly vanished from the airwaves after a four-year struggle to be taken seriously. (A moment of silence for all our legitimate media comrades impacted by the closure.)

For the vast majority of you who never watched it (you monsters), Sun News was an attempt to correct for the obvious Marxist and/or liberal bias of Canadian media by being "unapologetically patriotic." Most of its hosts took this to mean "screaming about David Suzuki" and "calling Justin Trudeau's mom a slut" and "saying racist things about the Roma." The result was, according to one former host, "mind-bendingly bad television," and after begging the CRTC to make the channel a mandatory part of basic cable—which failed to elicit any sympathy from the regulatory body, or taxpayers in general for that matter—the owners pulled the plug. Fortunately for the rest of us, all its best contributors quickly regrouped over atThe Rebel, where they continue to bring you the realest news and hottest takes this side of the 49th parallel, freed from the tyranny of corporate oversight or basic audio/visual production technology.

The conservative vanguard, running their green screen out of a Nintendo 64 on election night. Image via The Rebel.

There were a few bright spots for the country's Islamophobia industry early this year, which had a strong first quarter showing after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France and continued this upward trajectory when the government managed to pass its comprehensive anti-terror law (Bill C-51). But despite years of the federal government's best efforts to veto, Omar Khadr was finally released this spring after 13 years of incarceration. It ended up being a pretty triumphant moment for human rights activists in Canada, even if Elizabeth May put a damper on the whole occasion by getting way too excited (or too "overtired") about it and dropping an f-bomb at the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner in Ottawa. (Everyone knows cursing in Canada is a mortal sin.)

Of course, everything really started coming apart at the seams after the NDP took Alberta, which we can probably say conclusively at this point was the wildest thing to happen in this country in 2015. A progressive insurgency in wild rose country was a sure sign that the conservative century was in jeopardy. Shit came so unglued that competing sets of Canadian culture warriors launched boycotts against Tim Hortons—one because Tims loved oil pipelines too much, and another because Tims didn't love oil pipelines enough. Tim Hortons is our country's most precious national symbol—more popular than the Queen, the last time anyone checked, so this was pretty fucking serious business. In retrospect though it's possible that most of these people were just very agitated that they weren't getting any action on Ashley Madison.

Pity also poor Mike Duffy. It's bad enough that thanks to this year's trial, his picture is going to be next to the word "corruption" in all future dictionaries of Canadian English. It's worse still that the time he wrote in his diary about his explosive cabbage roll farts is now a matter of public record. But the worst of all that most of the country was more emotionally involved with a dead raccoon on a Toronto sidewalk than in giving a shit about the mechanics of the Canadian Senate. Such is life in the North.

SEXUAL HEALING

Then came that godawful election and Canada seemingly transformed overnight. Or three interminable months, whatever. We started giving a shit about Syrian refugees and a middle class no one could actually define and having a "cool" prime minister who loved selfies. Suddenly we were having a referendum on Canadianness before the Conservatives' nationalist renovation was finished and the whole blessed enterprise blew up in their faces. The Big Shift ended up as a big shit, and Thomas Mulcair will be forever haunted by the knowledge that if he'd appeared on TV dancing to "Hotline Bling" before October 19, the NDP would have taken every seat in the country.

Canada is back, baby, because it's 2015. JT brought sexy back and also established the country's first literal dynasty. Accustomed to Stephen Harper's dumpy rectangular frame for ten years, both national and international media spent a solid month ogling Trudeau like a gaggle of teenage girls who'd just picked up a copy of Tiger Beat and an aggressively large can of Red Bull. The Trudeaus appeared in Vogue and people all across the country started melting down. Jihadis are shooting up Parisian theatres and our prime minister has the audacity to be a publicly recognizable and affable man? This outrage will not stand. God forbid Canada is ever cool about anything for more than 15 fucking minutes.

The only remotely real scandal to emerge so far in the new Trudeau era was #nannygate, in which people got really upset that the prime minister's children had a taxpayer-funded caretaker. Naturally, instead of focusing on the real issues—why are Trudeau's nannies paid so abysmally? Why isn't publicly funded childcare available for those of us who actually need it?—most people were hung up on "look at this rich piece of shit." Not that I'm opposed to soaking the rich, but this is the laziest class war ever.

Depending on who you ask, Canada is either too far gone or not far gone enough. The Liberals are too radically PC because they committed to gender parity in cabinet but also not PC enough because the prime minister justified his decision by smugly stating the current year instead of rattling off the collected works of bell hooks. If Harper's key public relations strategy was to blithely ignore all criticism, Trudeau's might lie in disarming it with charm (and smarm). I'll let you decide which is worse.

THE GAME IS CHANGING

Not that it's misguided to worry whether Trudeau's rhetorical nod to social justice is more talk than walk. Many Canadians are still unprepared to have adult conversations about complicated topics like race or gender. The prime minister himself has played into clumsy anti-black stereotypes about gangster rap and absentee fatherhood. For every person calling out police carding in Toronto as part of white supremacy, there are more prepared to justify practical racism. A yoga class in Ottawa got canceled and half the country started openly wondering whether openness to the concerns of disenfranchised peoples had gone too far.

Canadian settler society remains mired in a neurotic tizzy. La plus ca change, etc.

But there are positive signs. Despite flareups of xenophobia (sometimes encouraged by the government), most Canadians have managed to hold it together when it counted. Kim Thuy's Ru—a novel about Vietnamese refugees struggling to fit into Canada—won Canada Reads 2015, foreshadowing that maybe our collective hearts weren't totally made of stone. In a moment of beautiful irony, Zunera Ishaq became the face of Canadian multiculturalism when she wore the niqab at her citizenship ceremony in October and the nation didn't disintegrate. And concerns about cynical photo-ops aside, the way Syrian refugees were welcomed to Canada this year was genuinely heartwarming.

Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples—the real beating heart of any Canadian cultural revolution—have finally started seeing some of the institutional recognition they deserve. Indigenous consciousness and activism has been on the uptick in Canada since Idle No More first erupted at the end of 2012, and this year saw a lot of the movement's gains consolidated. Indigenous music has cleaned up in Canada this year with Tanya Tagaq taking a Juno, Buffy Sainte-Marie taking a Polaris, and two 11-year-old Inuit throat singers dominated Trudeau's cabinet swearing-in ceremony in November.

More importantly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission wrapped up its work this year. They issued 94 calls to action in June and a final report in December after spending 7 years collecting testimony and evidence from survivors of Canada's residential school program all around the country. The Liberals have promised to enact all 94 of the commission's recommendations, which includes launching the long-demandednational inquiry into the more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada since 1980. This is a stark contrast to Conservative minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt sitting down through a standing ovation when the TRC called for that inquiry in June.

Maybe the best visual metaphor for what happened in Canada this year.

That the Trudeau Liberals are committed to following through on the TRC is a beautiful thing. But whether they actually stick to the hard work of establishing a real "nation-to-nation" relationship in 2016 and beyond is another thing entirely. The federal government has never even figured out how to properly deal with Quebec on a nation-to-nation basis, so god only knows how they're actually going to make this work.

But we have some reasons to be hopeful. 2015 started with a government celebrating John A MacDonald's 200th birthday and ended with a new government endorsing a 3,700-page report detailing the cultural genocide he established.

America would never flip off their deadbeat dad(s) like that. Say what you will about Canada these days, but that's pretty fucking cool.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

PLEASE LOOK AT ME: A Man Finds His Next Art Acquisition in This Week's Comic by Julian Glander

The Strange Case of the American Tennis Pro Who Forgot English One Day and Thought He Was Swedish

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In February of 2013, a 61-year-old veteran named Michael Boatwright turned up in a Palm Springs hospital with an unusual case of amnesia. He'd been found in a nearby motel room apparently incapacitated, and when he returned to consciousness at Desert Regional Medical Center, Boatwright—a US citizen from birth—only spoke or understood Swedish.

Straddling the line between neuroscience and magic, the headlines were straight from Ripley's Believe It or Not!, and marked the beginning of the appropriately bizarre final chapter in Boatwright's bizarre life.

Local newspaper coverage of Boatwright's strange diagnosis of "transient global amnesia," begat national, then international attention. Like many flavor-of-the-month personalities before him, Boatwright—who at first only answered to the name of his Swedish alter ego Johan Ek—became known by his one-line summary, and the narrative cried out for a satisfying conclusion. The story did indeed conclude, not with his memory being returned, but with his resettlement in his retroactively-adopted Scandinavian homeland, where he could get by in his new native tongue, and ostensibly live happily ever after.

But then a few months later, the story concluded all over again, this time with Boatwright's abrupt early death by suicide.

"He wanted to escape," Gifford Searls, a friend from Boatwright's past, told VICE in an interview. Searls says he once saved Boatwright during a suicide attempt, and thinks Boatwright's final act was the consummation of a long-held desire. Searls told VICE he believes, in no uncertain terms, that Boatwright was faking his neurological condition, but still considers him a friend.

Linda Kosvic, a local representative of the Vasa Order of America, a social club for Swedish-Americans, also knew Boatwright, but didn't consider him a friend. She told VICE, "We believe that something fishy was going on and nobody would come out and actually say anything." Kosvic said when the press was fixated on Boatwright in 2013, she stopped short of going out on a limb and declaring him a faker, but only because, "I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a professional in the health industry, and I don't know what's going on his head."

She also has a different view of Boatwright's death from Searls. "What we heard later was that the Swedish government was questioning Michael's reasoning for being , and if he really should be there. So Michael was getting worried about that, and that was just before he died."

During the months he spent as the celebrity resident of a hospital, and later a homeless shelter in Palm Springs, seemingly everyone around the world who remembered Boatwright fondly made contact so they could try their hand at jogging his memory. In this way, those who surrounded Michael Boatwright in 2013 cobbled his biography together without any of the material coming from Boatwright himself.

Born in Florida in 1952, Boatwright appears to have led a rudderless life with a few close calls with stability and normality. He joined the Navy, where he served as an aviation mechanic in Vietnam from 1971-1973. Sometime later, he moved to Sweden, possibly to play tennis. "He said he didn't remember anything, but in another instance he said he father sent him to Sweden to play tennis," said Viola Wyler, another Vasa Order of America member who came to know Boatwright well. Tennis remained one of Boatwright's lifelong passions.

"He married a Swedish girl, and then they moved to Florida, and then they got divorced. From what I know, she lives over here but she have nothing to do with him," said Kosvic. Boatwright and his Swedish wife divorced in 1983.

Starting in the mid-1980s, Boatwright apparently lived on a boat off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island. Then he found himself darting around from Houston to Mexico, to his parents' place in Miami. During that time, he corresponded with an old Swedish girlfriend named Ewa Espling. The addresses on his letters are the only documentation of his whereabouts during all that time. In 2003, he lost touch with everyone he knew.

Photo courtesy of Gifford Searls

Around that time Boatwright moved to Japan, where according to the account he gave to Searls he taught English for about ten years. Later, living in China, he told Searls he'd fallen in love again in Japan. The photo above is, according to Searls, Boatwright's Japanese wedding day. He and his wife had a son named Taiki.

Searls, who was a late-in-life friend, only meeting Boatwright in 2012, relays Boatwright's experiences in Japan in terms that make it sound like one of the happiest times in Boatwright's life. "He said their house was 500 years old—he loved it there." While in Japan, Boatwright came into possession of a high-quality samurai sword with connections to his then father-in-law. Boatwright became very attached to his sword.

"They got a divorce, but apparently it was extremely bitter because she would not even let him contact his son. She totally cut him off 100 percent," Searls said.

Johan Ek wasn't Boatwright's first alter ego. A nickname from his past was "Strongbow," his name when he was a knight who participated in Swedish live action role-playing (LARP) events in the 1980s. Johan Cassel of the Society for Creative Anachronism told the press that in those days Boatwright "was pretty good at jousting." Cassel described him as "one of the better performers," and called Boatwright's Swedish "decent."

His fascination with sword battles never faded, and as technology improved, Boatwright was able to find other creative outlets. As "Korstemplar" on DeviantArt (an identity he cultivated during his time as an ESL instructor in China after leaving Japan,) he posted Lord of the Rings fan art, and invented his own miniature universe of elves and other magical creatures using consumer-grade 3D modeling software.

In short, underneath it all Boatwright was undeniably an old-fashioned geek. He also had an eccentric take on world events. In 2011, around the time the Occupy movement was sparking protests around the world, he wrote on a web forum called Project Avalon that a "global economic revolution," was on its way. "Does anyone see the military white hats turning on their governmental masters?" he asked, and then described a possible scenario in which heroic members of the military blow up the Federal Reserve.

Boatwright's public YouTube history reflects that same personality. He clicked "like" on 9/11 conspiracy videos, martial arts demos, medieval reenactments, tennis tips, and tutorials on elf imagery. But through the years, videos about the afterlife and near-death experience apparently also held a certain fascination. During the time he would have been in China, he liked a video of a man named Rich Martini speaking for over an hour about reincarnation.

It was in China, that Boatwright befriended Gifford Searls, a tennis instructor, in 2012 when they were among the few tennis-loving Americans living Zhuhai, a Chinese city near Hong Kong. Searls was a teacher at United International College, while Boatwright was an ESL instructor at TPR English School. Searls described Boatwright as a skilled tennis player and "one of the most fun" he'd ever competed against.

Boatwright and Searls' friendship seems to have been largely tennis-based. They bonded on the court, and once off the court, they talked about their shared fascination with female tennis star Ana Ivanović. Boatwright abruptly stopped working at TPR, and it remains unclear why. Still, according to Searls, Boatwright couldn't go back.

One Friday night Searls unexpectedly received a phone call from Boatwright. Boatwright was heavily drugged and begging for help. According to Searls, Boatwright had taken a fatal dose of animal tranquilizers, and then changed his mind. Most reports say his ex-wife in Japan had just remarried, but this detail remains unconfirmed, and her identity has never been publicized.

Boatwright's suicide note, photo by Brady Ng

Boatwright left a suicide note, which Searls has held onto. It included a bulleted list of the reasons for his suicide: "No family, no job, no money, and nowhere to go," the list read. "See you on the other side!" it concluded.

"The real mystery is why he called me," Searls said. However, since Searls says he paid the penniless and now jobless Boatwright's medical bills, and let him recover at his house in the days after the suicide attempt, it seems to have been a wise decision. After a week at Searls's house—during which Searls's wife Xiaoli was uncomfortable with Boatwright's presence, Searls says—Boatwright's Chinese visa was set to expire. He had to leave the country.

Searls says he paid for Boatwright's plane ticket and gave him a lead on a possible job opening: He knew a guy named Jim Leupold, the director of tennis at the JW Marriott hotel in Palm Desert, California. In return for the favors, Boatwright left his laptop, and his most prized possession, a samurai sword, in Searls' possession. "He gave it to me with tears in his eyes," Searls said. "When he left, I was optimistic."

Boatwright traveled to Palm Desert on February 24, and booked a room at the local Motel 6 in neighboring Palm Springs. His only worldly possessions were a duffel bag of tennis clothes, multiple cell phones, multiple ID cards, a stockpile of tennis rackets, and $400 in walking around money.

His meeting with Leupold was apparently the last documented time Boatwright ever spoke English. For reasons that remain unclear, Leupold couldn't offer Boatwright a job. It must have been a grave disappointment for Boatwright, who had traveled halfway around the world on a job tip, only to wind up empty handed once again. Boatwright would have returned, still jobless, to a motel where he could only afford to stay for about another week. His prospects were gone, and his small stash of money was dwindling.

Those were the circumstances on February 28, when some sort of catastrophe occurred that apparently scrambled Boatwright's brain. The nature of the event, however, has never been elucidated publicly, and Boatwright's amnesia diagnosis made him the last person who could be asked to explain what happened.

"I think they found him unconscious, as if he had just fainted or collapsed, and possibly wrung his head," Brett Kelman, an investigative reporter for The Desert Sun told VICE in an email. "I've seen it reported in some places as if he was injured in a robbery, but I'm fairly certain that was not the case." Most reports leave that part of the story out and let the public imagination fill in the gaps. A soap opera character who wakes up in a hospital with amnesia would almost certainly have been maliciously bludgeoned by their evil twin. For all anyone knows, that's what happened to Boatwright.

"When I first woke up in the emergency room, that's the name I knew that I had," Boatwright later told a local camera crew from the College of the Desert Foundation. "That was my name: Johan Ek. It feels natural for me, and it feels natural to answer to that name." Among Boatwright's few possessions were multiple forms of photo ID, in the name Michael Boatwright, including a Department of Veterans Affairs ID, and a recently-used passport.

From late February of 2013 until July of that same year, Boatwright languished at Desert Regional Medical Center, becoming a curiosity for employees of the hospital like social worker and former archeologist Lisa Hunt-Vasquez, who sought the help of the local Swedish-speaking community to try and communicate with Boatwright. That's how Kosvic and the Vasa Order of America became involved. "We shared Swedish foods," she said, along with "Swedish literature, magazines, and books—anything that could help him jog his memory."

" reaching out trying to help him, but the other thing is you don't want to be taken advantage of," Kosvic said, adding, "Sometimes you don't know if you're really stepping into a rat's nest."

After more than four months of Desert Regional Medical Center doing amateur detective work, The Desert Sun reported on the Boatwright case, opening it up for the professionals—and the whole world—to have their say. It also allowed Boatwright, now "Johan Ek" in his own mind, to publicly state his own case.

"Sometimes it makes me really sad, and sometimes it makes me furious, at the whole situation—the fact that I don't know anybody. I don't recognize anybody," he told the College of the Desert Foundation. Many people quickly came to the conclusion that he was faking. To anyone who doubted the truth of his story he said, "walk in my shoes for one day. Then you'll experience the nightmare of a lifetime."

Organizations of amateur detective like Websleuths.com got in on the action. Some sleuths remained convinced he was pretending, despite Hunt-Vasquez's insistence that she had tried to trick him into speaking English, and he "has not slipped up once."

One of the Swedish speakers who became closest to Boatwright was Wyler, a native of Sweden now in her 80s who seems to feel like those who were helping Boatwright let themselves invest too much emotion. "Because of his fairly good looks, and his very nice manners, and nice smile, women would really fall for him, and want to take care of him, and he seemed fairly happy being taken care of by women," Wyler opined to VICE.

According to Wyler, "Johan Ek" did not pass for an actual Swede. "I knew the Swedish he was speaking was learned Swedish, and not something he was brought up with." She described errors a native speaker wouldn't make, like over-reliance on the written pronunciation of words, when "that's not the way you would actually speak."

When she asked "Ek" to recall the foods he grew up with, he seemed to have been raised on rich, banquet meals, not Swedish home cooking. "The food he always mentioned was, let's say, high-end, expensive food that the average person would not eat. He was talking about salmon. He would talk about various cheeses. And that is stuff for when you try to put on a nice dinner," Wyler said.

He also seemed to occasionally understand English. Kosvic claims Boatwright was "not fluent, but fluent enough that he understood what I was trying to communicate with him."

The Desert Sun story was picked up by USA Today, then became TV news all over the United States. Nine days later, one of his sisters turned up in Louisiana. Michelle Brewer told The Desert Sun she hadn't heard from her brother Michael since 2003, probably around the time he left for Japan. "He's always been just a wanderer. Then he'd come back when he needed some money or something from somebody. Then he'd take off again," she said. Brewer may have been his sister, but locating her didn't resolve the situation.

A slideshow of Boatwright's character designs

What's more, while no one could look inside Boatwright's head, the early diagnosis of "transient global amnesia"—a temporary state in which you don't create new memories—didn't seem to track. According to Popular Science, Boatwright's apparent symptoms might have reflected something more akin to "psychogenic amnesia."

In 2004, a German man experienced a kind of linguistic memory loss with interesting parallels to Boatwright. The 33-year-old showed up in a mental institution claiming to have lost his memory and the ability to speak his native German. He spoke English with a German accent, his case report said. Upon his release, there was some doubt that he'd really lost all of his memory, or all of his German-speaking ability. "He appeared to retain implicit knowledge of autobiographical facts, and of the semantic or associative structure of the German language," the report said.

In short, historical precedent says Boatwright could have been telling the truth—or some version of it—about his amnesia even if his mind wasn't a total blank, or even if his ability to speak English hadn't disappeared altogether. According to Kosvic, "if you tell this to Ewa , she will shut you out because she was using the fact that he spoke only Swedish as the way she got him over there into Sweden."

There was a little over a month between the initial media blitz, and Boatwright's departure for Sweden. Espling, Boatwright's Swedish ex-girlfriend, got involved when she heard that Boatwright was in distress.

In early August, Boatwright was discharged from the hospital, and relocated to a homeless shelter where he would only live for about three weeks. In a strange turn of events Riverside County paid for Boatwright to be flown to Sweden. Jerry Wengerd, director of the Riverside County Department of Mental Health told The Desert Sun that in Palm Springs, Boatwright had "no alternatives to homelessness," while in Sweden, people were willing to help.

Boatwright's samurai sword. Photo by Brady Ng

Today, a cheap ticket from Palm Springs to Gothenberg, Sweden, where Boatwright landed, would set the county back a little over $1,000. On the face of it, $1,000 might seem like a good use of public funds if it really did move someone from abject poverty to a productive, happy life. "We were satisfied he was not going to nowhere," Wengerd said, waxing somewhat poetic.

For eight months, Boatwright lived what outwardly appears to have been a happy, Swedish life. He met with a journalist in the home of Ewa Espling, although it's not clear that they resumed their relationship. Boatwright finally found a job as a private tennis coach in the small coastal city of Uddevalla, and even played a little competitive tennis in Gothenburg. "I feel like I've been born again," he told the Swedish Press, adding "I'm so lucky."

During his time in Sweden, Boatwright continued to use the internet as "Korstemplar." He liked a riveting 1992 documentary called "Shadows: Perceptions of Near-Death Experiencers," in which dozens of people give firsthand accounts of their experiences in the afterlife. Most of them are of that "I walk toward the light," type. Some verge on the psychedelic. All, it should be noted, are in English, and Swedish subtitles are not offered.

Then on April 22, 2014, Boatwright killed himself. Details of his death are nearly nonexistent, apart from the fact that he was found dead in his apartment by a friend. However Tony Helander, spokesman for the police in Uddevalla told VICE in an email that "the case was a suicide."

It's obviously odd and unsatisfying to be left with the story of a man who ended his life even though he appeared to have gotten everything he wanted. Ewa Espling turned down an interview request, saying, "I have made a promise to Mike, a promise I will keep, that is to not allow more of all the strange and for him hurtful writings about a life that he him self couldn't remember."

"If he took his life in Sweden, it was by accident. It was not because he wanted to do it," Wyler told me. She feels that Boatwright's initial brain injury was the result of a somewhat embarrassing type of accident, and so was his death, which is why there was so much mystery surrounding his initial injury. According to Wyler, a local policeman "told me lots of things that shouldn't be known," specifically, that "quite a few famous men, when they commit suicide, they don't do it by intention to commit suicide."

Helander disagreed with that interpretation. "His death was not an accident and it was not a crime either," he said, adding, "we are not going to tell you any more about this case."

To Gifford Searls, however, the Boatwright story finally arrived at its logical conclusion. "He tried to kill himself here. He goes to Sweden. He succeeds. I don't think he was afraid of death; I almost think he was looking forward to what happens after he died."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


These Were the Best Late-Night TV Moments of 2015

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Stephen Colbert with Vice President Joe Biden on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.' Photo by John Paul Filo/courtesy of CBS

In the history of late-night television, 2015 will be remembered as a year of reluctant goodbyes (David Letterman, Jon Stewart), returning favorites (Stephen Colbert, Larry Wilmore), relative newcomers (James Corden, Trevor Noah), and feats of international reporting (Conan O'Brien, Jon Oliver). The landscape was also dominated by men. But change is finally afoot: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee premieres in February, and Chelsea Handler is finalizing plans for her forthcoming Netflix talk show. Here, VICE revisits the ten best late-night moments of the year, TV events that kept the aging form relevant in the digital age.

Jon Stewart on the Charleston Church Shooting, June 18, 2015

In July, six weeks before Bruce Springsteen gave him a farewell sendoff from The Daily Show, Stewart was tasked once again with facing America hours after a mass shooting. This time, a white gunman had murdered nine black members of a prayer group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Shoulders sagging, Stewart attested that our country makes it impossible for him to do his most basic job: write jokes. Although he is usually hyper-articulate when denoting an injustice, in this case Stewart was as wounded and fed up as the rest of us to be living in a nation where not even schools, theaters, malls, or places of worship are safe from gunfire.

Jimmy Kimmel on Cecil the Lion, July 28, 2015

When Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer paid $50,000 to kill and behead a 13-year-old lion outside a Zimbabwe sanctuary, Kimmel turned his television show into a platform to fund animal protective efforts. In tears, Kimmel—who until then was best known for making celebrities read "mean tweets"—chastised Palmer's manhood in one of the most compelling late-night talk show segments of the year. Within 24 hours, viewers had pledged more than $150,000 to the Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who had been tracking Cecil's well-being.

John Oliver on Government Surveillance, April 5, 2015

In April, John Oliver devoted a full episode of Last Week Tonight to the plight of "international fugitive" Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who released thousands of pages of classified government documents to journalists in 2013 (and is often mistaken for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange). Oliver secretly flew to Moscow to interview Snowden, who was apparently almost a no-show. Instead of a potentially dull, policy-oriented discussion about foreign and domestic surveillance, Oliver got to the heart of what apparently matters to the American public: Whether the US government can see photos of yours or your loved one's dick.

Conan O'Brien in Cuba, March 4, 2015

Due to a 53-year-old trade embargo, travel between the US and Cuba—just 90 miles off the coast of Florida—has been restricted for generations. In another international excursion, a white-suited, Panama-hatted O'Brien brought ten Conan staffers to the island country to film a special that the Los Angeles Times dubbed "the kind of guerrilla operation one might expect from, say, VICE and not a seasoned late-night veteran." During his trip, O'Brien danced rumba, sang salsa, and tried to roll a cigar.

Jimmy Fallon with Lin-Manuel Miranda, November 6, 2015

Broadway virtuoso Miranda, who adapted Rob Chernow's 800-page biography of a founding father into the record-destroying musical, dropped by The Tonight Show last month for three rounds of "Wheel of Freestyle" with the Roots' rapper-in-residence, Black Thought. Musical performances have been the program's strong suit since Fallon assumed his desk from Jay Leno in early 2014. Fallon first impersonated Neil Young and Barry Gibb during his time at Saturday Night Live; on The Tonight Show, various public figures have since participated in his "Slow Jam the News" segment, and his recurring celebrity lip-syncing contests are now subject of the Spike TV spin-off series Lip Synch Battle. Provided with suggestions such as "dinosaur," "pumpkin pie," and "Darth Vader," playwright Miranda proved that his recent MacArthur "Genius" Grant was well deserved.

David Letterman's Final Episode, May 20, 2015

Photo courtesy of CBS

With one last self-deprecating dig about being overlooked to host The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson's comedic heir, David Letterman, bid farewell to late-night television after 33 years combined at NBC and CBS. Letterman had lots of star power on hand for his final night of The Late Show, including a Top 10 List co-delivered by Bill Murray, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jim Carrey; a video tribute from former Commanders-in-Chief; and the Foo Fighters in concert. His wife and son also received heartfelt thank-yous, as did the show's crew. The tributes even extended to his competition: Jimmy Kimmel purposely aired a rerun that night so that his viewers would instead pay homage to Dave, and Conan O'Brien told his TV audience exactly when it was time to change the channel.

Trevor Noah on Ben Carson and Rupert Murdoch, October 8, 2015

South African Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show in late September (Jon Stewart has since signed a four-year production deal with HBO), and already he's becoming an expert on our harried election cycle. Neurologist-turned-presidential hopeful Ben Carson was on the receiving end of Noah deadpans recently for the sacrificial-lamb strategy he said he once employed during a stick-up at a Popeyes "organization" over 30 years ago. Nonetheless, Carson's claim inspired media tycoon Rupert Murdoch to tweet his support for a "real black President." Noah, who like President Obama is biracial, delivered a series of stereotype-puncturing zingers for some of his best work this year.

Larry Wilmore's Panel on Black Fatherhood, February 4, 2015

Longtime Daily Show contributor Wilmore extended the franchise at the start of 2015, fronting The Nightly Show, Comedy Central's replacement for The Colbert Report (in turn, Stephen Colbert inherited David Letterman's network time slot this fall). After Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman was forced to answer press questions about whether, if necessary, he'd miss the Super Bowl to attend the birth of his child, Wilmore (himself a father of two) posed the hypothetical to a panel of four additional black dads. As if five black men gathered on TV solely to talk about parental responsibilities wasn't revolutionary enough, Wilmore then escalated the conversation by asking whether black women are too bossy, a question the majority of the panelists wisely refused to indulge.

Stephen Colbert Interviews Joe Biden, September 10, 2015

Like Vice President Joe Biden, new Late Show host Stephen Colbert is part of a painful fraternity—in a single instant, each man experienced multiple, cataclysmic personal losses. In 1972, Biden became a 30-year-old widower when his wife and 13-month-old daughter died in a car crash en route to buying a Christmas tree. And as if September 11 wouldn't become a tragic enough date, in 1974, that is when ten-year-old Colbert lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash. This spring, Biden also mourned the death of one of his remaining children, former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden, who had brain cancer. On just the third episode of Colbert's new show, a good-humored Biden Senior spoke about power and grief, and foreshadowed why he ultimately didn't enter the presidential race. In a year filled with news that was too serious to crack jokes about, Colbert's sincere and emotional conversation with Biden was par for the course.

Follow Jenna on Twitter.

Ink Spots: '​Doll Hospital Journal' Is a Zine Made By and for People with Mental Health Issues

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An illustration from the cover of the second issue of 'Doll Hospital Journal.' Artwork by Laura Callaghan

Last year, PHD student Bethany Rose Lamont started looking for an outlet through which she could convey her experiences with suicidal thoughts beyond "depressing, unsettling" tweets and personal essays. So she posted a question on Twitter asking whether there would be any interest in a zine focused on mental health issues, examined through a feminist-queer intersectional lens.

A successful Kickstarter later, issue one launched in February and featured a broad range of contributors on a host of relevant topics: funny, touching comics about anxiety, personal essays about self harm and disordered eating, photo stories, interviews, poems, and an article about Kanye West's depression. It sold out within two days.

Earlier this month, Doll Hospital Journal launched issue two, which covers issues such as mental health in women's prisons and the relationship between mental health and physical disability. I got in touch with creator Bethany Rose Lamont to talk about compromising for a wider audience, tangible progress in mental health representation, and the dubious classifications around outsider art.

VICE: Making a zine is an interesting arrangement, because there's a real community angle, but by its nature it can be accessed by a wider audience; do you ever feel like you have to compromise between the two groups?
Rose Lamont: No, actually. Not that we don't care what people think, or anything corny like that, but rather because this is a journal created by and for people with mental health struggles. We all have the same motives, basically. Our staff is dealing with this stuff—so are our contributors, so are our readers—so it's not like there's some huge pressure for us to do an about face and start bullshitting people. We're all on the same page and that's cool.

Is there much thought of what reception the zine gets?
I had no expectations for the reception of Doll Hospital, either positive or negative. In all honesty, I had no idea that anyone was going to read it! It was just a tiny project I wanted to do with a few friends that got bigger than I ever imagined. I try not to be overly precious about this project as I see it as belonging to everyone, so I always welcome and encourage any feedback.

In terms of criticism, some readers who have not experienced mental health struggles themselves can be surprised that not all the stories within our journal have a "happy ending" or perfect solution. But really, what does? There's no point sugar coating this stuff. Mental health can be devastating—it can rip your world apart—and it can be affirming to just step back and be like, "Yeah, this really sucks."

Which contemporary mainstream figures would you say are doing important work for mental health issues, through campaigning, educating, and so on?
Bassey Ikpi, who founded the Siwe Project and No Shame Day is doing amazing work. We got to profile her in the second issue of Doll Hospital, which was a huge honor. Dior Vargas, a Doll Hospital interviewee for Issue Two, is another powerhouse in the landscape of contemporary mental health. I'd particularly encourage you to check out her "People of Colour + Mental Illness" photo project.

Another vital contribution to mental health advocacy is coming from Dr. Nadia Richardson, particularly her No More Martyrs campaign. What she's doing is so urgent and so important, everyone should know about her and the work she's doing.

An illustration for the article "Halloween and Mental Health" in the first issue of 'Doll Hospital Journal.' Artwork by Séamus Gallagher

What, to you, feels like tangible progress in the way mental health is treated and represented?
I think progress is being made within mainstream conversations on mental health. Experiences of depression and anxiety are very slowly entering a wider dialogue. And I'm incredibly grateful for authors like Matt Haig and public figures like Zoe Sugg for making that happen. However, it's important to be critically aware of when other social issues are being thrown under the metaphorical bus.

I always cringe when I see the language of physical disability and chronic illness being co-opted in an attempt to "rebrand" mental health. Don't get me wrong, mental illness has physical consequences too, but so often I see these campaigns fall into seriously dodgy territory. Catchphrases like "you wouldn't treat someone like cancer like that" or "you wouldn't treat someone in a wheelchair like that" totally fail to understand the discrimination and struggles people with chronic illness and physical disability are dealing with, and how that is actually likely to make these individuals more vulnerable to their own mental health struggles, especially in this current political climate in the UK.

What's your view on a term like outsider art?
The concept of outsider art is something I think about a lot. My work's been described as outsider art and I have a first from Central Saint Martins, so it's clear these ideas go beyond whether or not the individual has had formal training, you know? Look at Daniel Johnston: the man went to art school, was on MTV, hung out in the coolest circles and objectively did everything right, and he's still seen as an "outsider artist." If you're outside the ideals of what someone making work "should" be, it doesn't matter how many certificates you accumulate; people are still going to find ways to isolate and pathologize you.

It's also clear that this isn't just a question of mental illness; these issues exist in conversation with the history of colonialism. That general question of what's "art" and what is "craft," what's destined for the cabinet of curiosities and what's going in the White Cube. Plus, who's asking those questions and who's making those choices? Because it's not the people creating the work.

What would you say are good resources for people looking to get informed about mental health issues, or for those who suspect they may have mental health issues?
For those looking to learn more about mental health generally, I would recommend listening to those in your community who are dealing with this issue. Reading is a great place to start, as so many amazingly talented authors are writing on their experiences—you just need to take the time to find them. A few of my favorite writers addressing themes of mental health include Esmé Wang, Imade Nibokun, and Diamond J. Sharp.

If you are concerned about your own mental health, I would avoid hitting Google as a first point of action. There is so much misinformation online, particularly on more misunderstood mental health experiences, so it's easy to feel even more isolated and awful as a result of trusting, say, users on Tumblr for a coherent understanding of a multi-faceted and deeply personal issue. I would speak to someone you love and trust first, whether that's a friend, a family member, or if you're still in school, a counselor or a teacher. Laying out your concerns and talking them through with someone who knows and loves you is always a good first step to figuring out any big and potentially intimidating subject in your life.

What, to you, would be the ideal culture in which mental health is treated?
I think we need to nurture a culture where people struggling with mental health are able to advocate for themselves, a culture where they are listened to and believed. I have heard so many stories of doctors dismissing or undermining patients, and one bad experience may prevent someone from getting the help they need in the future—and that's wrong. This obviously goes both ways, and I'd like to see a future where the relationship between doctors and mental health patients is not one of fear and frustration.

Thanks, Rose.

This interview has been edited for length.

Follow Fin on Twitter.

An Ilustrated Tribute to Lemmy Kilmister

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Illustration by Jay Howell

Lemmy's 70th birthday was a few days ago. I remember thinking, Wow, I can't believe Lemmy's 70. Then four days later he was dead. Lemmy started playing rock 'n' roll in the early 60s and continued up until this month, being drunk and high all the while. He was the epitome of the concept of a rock 'n' roller as a figure who is sort of outside society and survives despite self-destructive habits, like a modern hunger artist. It's hard to name people who could be considered Lemmy's peers. Keith Richards seems the closest, but the Rolling Stones were embraced by the sophisticated set pretty early on in a way that Lemmy's group never really could be. Rock 'n' roll is increasingly played by nostalgia acts, and its participants seem less rebellious and more like alternative boy bands while coopting the imagery of rebellion. I don't know if it's sad that Lemmy died. He lived longer than seemed plausible, and he seemed to do what he loved for over 50 years straight. What's sad is that we don't get to have Lemmy anymore, and the void that's left by his absence is going to suck.

I asked professional and amateur artists to submit drawings of and a few words about Lemmy to honor his memory because that's what makes sense to me. I received about 100 submissions, and I'm presenting the 13 best here, along with one tribute Lemmy doll. The first one, by Jay Howell, is up top. I did one, too.


Andrew Black

"If God and Lemmy got in a wrestling match who would win? Lemmy? Wrong again, trick question. Lemmy is God." —Airheads

James Harvey

Benjamin Marra

Lemmy embodied rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll is something in short supply in the world, and Lemmy held onto it like a vice. If all of us were a little more like Lemmy, and lived as much as he did, we'd all probably be happier for it. Now that he's gone, it feels like rock 'n' roll is gone, too.

Judi Rosen

I have always had an affinity for psych rock. I think Hawkwind and Motörhead were such a part of the culture I surrounded myself with that I sorta took the music for granted. I learned about Stacia Blake and was really inspired by the idea that she was considered a member of Hawkwind. Sure seems like the subculture was a lot more progressive back then.

Garrett Morian

My earliest memory of Lemmy was listening to "Ace of Spades" in my brother's room, hoping we wouldn't get caught by our parents.

The raw power, intricate simplicity, and pure authenticity of Motörhead's sound and Lemmy's rhythm and whiskey- and smoke-stained vocals (along with his hard and striking appearance) had something I had never heard or seen before even while listening to Sabbath and early Metallica albums.

Lemmy is near the top of my list of my earliest inspirations to pick the up bass myself, and is one of the all time greats!

Lemmy, you lived and played hard and fast—rock on in peace!


Kjelshus Collins

Nicholas Gazin

I drew the press clipping announcing the formation of Motörhead. I find it inspirational.


Sean Äaberg

I owe a lot to Lemmy. When I was trying to figure out what road to take in life and with my family, Lemmy made it very clear that rock 'n' roll can be a lifelong pursuit, passion, and way of life, and that hanging back to the rock 'n' roll crossroads where all of the fractured fairytales of metal, punk, and the like meet was THE WAY and that you could do that and still be more badass and more "punk" and "metal" than any punks or metalheads. RIP LEMMY.

Brian Butler

After three days at sea, somewhere on the edge of the Bermuda triangle, I witnessed Lemmy summon all the powers of Poseidon to rock out to around 2,000 sunburned metalheads. I was assigned the duty of illustrating the debauchery aboard the Motörhead Motorboat cruise, and it was a responsibility I took very seriously. Over the course of four days, I documented grown men dressed as demon chickens, cannonball contests, seaweed pentagrams, loads of drunks, boobs, performances by the likes of Slayer, Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies, and the Shrine, and even heard rumor of 5 AM cake fights and improvised glory holes. This was a journey that only the mighty Motörhead could navigate, with Lemmy at the helm. It was an honor to have served.

Majority of Canadians Disapprove of Donald Trump and His Anti-Muslim Policy

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Shockingly, many Canadians don't like this dude. Photo via Facebook.

To get a quick glimpse of what Canadians think of Donald Trump, one needn't look much further than the movements in Toronto and Vancouver to remove his name from Trump-owned buildings. But it seems that negative sentiment runs a little deeper: according to a new poll, a majority of Canadians disagree with the contentious US presidential contender. However, that same poll suggests that a majority of us wouldn't bar him from entering the country.

A Forum Poll of 1,395 Canadian adults found that overall, more than two-thirds (68 percent) disagree with the business-mogul-turned-potential-politician, who, ever since launching his campaign for the GOP nomination in June, has apparently made an effort to be as racist, Islamophobic, sexist and generally offensive as possible.

When it comes to specifics, 67 percent are against Trump's plan to bar all Muslims from entering the US, but in true Canadian fashion, more than half (54 percent) were uncomfortable with barring Trump from Canada (although a third were fine with him never being allowed into the Great White North again). The largest opposition to Trump came from people who had voted Liberal or Green in previous federal elections (84 percent) with NDP voters coming in a close second (82 percent).

Not that Trump doesn't have his supporters, though. Just under one-fifth of Canadians (19 percent) actually approve of him, while 12 percent didn't have an opinion. Twenty-two percent are also cool with his idea of barring Muslims from entering America.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump got the most support in Alberta and Ontario (34 percent and 23 percent approval, respectively) and among people who voted Conservative in the latest federal election (41 percent). Approval was also more common in the youngest age group, males and people in mid-income groups, although in each case, again, people across all age groups, provinces and political preferences were largely against Trump in general and his call to ban Muslims.

"Trump has his adherents and defenders in Canada; they just aren't as numerous as they are in the US," Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said in a news release. "Canadians aren't as quick to adopt extreme positions as some Americans are, and Donald Trump's positions are certainly extreme."

Trump hasn't found much popularity among Canadian politicians either.

"I don't think anybody in Canada or around the world thinks I have anything supportive to say, or anything but condemnation, for Donald Trump," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during an interview with CTV Sunday.

Opposition leaders also weighed in when Trump first made remarks about banning Muslims from entering the US.

"They're ridiculous comments... I'm sure that by and large, even people in his party will think his comments are ridiculous," interim Conservative Party leader Rona Ambrose said.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair also condemned the idea. "I say that we should limit access to Canada for people that are spouting hatred and we should make sure that Donald Trump stays out of Canada," he said.

The Forum Poll was conducted by Forum Research with the results based on an interactive voice response telephone survey of 1,395 randomly selected Canadians 18 years of age or older. The poll was conducted between December 21 and December 22.

Results based on the total sample are considered accurate +/- 3 percent, 19 times out of 20.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

Bill Cosby Is Finally Being Criminally Charged for Sexual Assault

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Bill Cosby last year. AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File

Bill Cosby has been charged with aggravated indecent assault for allegedly drugging and penetrating a Temple University employee in 2004, the Montgomery County District Attorney's office announced at a Wednesday press conference. Although several dozen women have publicly claimed that the 78-year-old comedian and former Beloved American sexually assaulted them, this is the first time authorities have charged Cosby with a crime related to rape allegations.

Andrea Constand, who once worked with the Philadelphia college's basketball program, made the first formal sexual assault allegation against the comedian a decade ago, and says she was at Cosby's suburban home in 2004 when he offered her three blue pills and a glass of wine, led her to a couch, and positioned himself behind her.

"Cosby then fondled the victim's breasts, put his hands inside her pants, and penetrated her vagina with his fingers," according to a press release issued Wednesday by the district attorney's office. "During the assault, Cosby also put her hand on his erect penis. The victim did not consent to any of these acts and reported that she was unable to move or speak and felt 'frozen' and 'paralyzed.'" Cosby has claimed that the two had sex, but it was consensual.

According to an affidavit, Constand says she woke up in Cosby's house at about 4 AM to discover her sweater was bunched up and her bra was undone. Cosby allegedly gave her a blueberry muffin, walked to the front door, and said, "Alright."

Constand originally came forward in 2005, but the district attorney's office declined to pursue Cosby. She filed a civil suit and received a settlement in 2006, but in July 2015, a deposition related to the case was unsealed, and the Montgomery District Attorney's Office decided to look into it again. The statute of limitations was set to expire in January, according to NBC News. Cosby also recently filed defamation suits against several of his accusers.

"I think that I'm a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them," Cosby

Love and Loneliness in Charlie Kaufman's 'Anomalisa'

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'Anomalisa' poster via Paramount Pictures

There is a scene early in Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa when a character is walking through the Cincinnati airport, all fluorescent lights and buzzing swarms of sweaty strangers looking for luggage or a Nathan's or discounted sunglasses. The man is in town for just a day; he's giving a lecture on customer service techniques. He's middle-aged and British and moderately famous, at least in the context of sport-jacketed men capable of saying "business strategies" and "productivity seminars" out loud without cackling.

His posture is the work of many hours dragging rollable travel accessories behind him, deep-dark circles under his eyes. Eventually he decides he has had enough; he puts in his headphones and for this moment, everything vanishes. There is only music, like it's the first time he has exhaled in four hours. Here, in a way, is what Kaufman is always getting at: the world is out for blood and sometimes you want to pull the ripcord. When you don't have a parachute, you'll settle for .mp3s or the voices in your head.

Anomalisa is Kaufman's first film in seven years. It was funded primarily through a 2012 Kickstarter campaign intended initially to fund a 40-minute short. When the campaign exceeded its financial goal by double, they made the movie twice as long. It is Up in the Air without George Clooney's unflappably triumphant stare or the lolz about inefficiently packed carry-ons. It is Lost in Translation without the shoegaze and Bill Murray's disarming fortune-cookie wisdom and those few scenes that feel like the last night of summer vacation. It is a stop-motion puppet film about existential dread, and a sad man who hates insincerity teaching strangers that the path to prosperity lies in pretending to be happy over the telephone. Life, usually, is a minefield of paradoxes.

The man in the airport is Michael Stone (voiced by Dave Thewlis). Back home is a young son, and a wife he acknowledges the way people water houseplants. It's not so much a marriage as it is a prolonged well-I-guess-if-you-want-to and a collection of cross-country phone calls about the weather as he stares out a window.

In the hotel, Michael rehearses his speech but he hates every word of it. Routine on a small-scale is tedious; on a large-scale you call it a career. He calls down for a meal and the man on the phone recites every ingredient in his salad to make sure it's correct. Kaufman fixates on the empty hyper-attentiveness of everyone and thing in the world, on being barely there, on physical proximity without the intimacy. To feel intensely alone in a world filled with people trying to make half-connections with you. Room service and the concierge, cab drivers with recommendations about region-specific chili and the aquarium, the sterile hotel rooms where everything is arranged just so, every impulse accommodated. Michael returns to his room at one point later in the film and sees the lights dimmed and his slippers lined up on the floor. What is turndown service, really, but someone to help you get into bed without actually being there to kiss you goodnight?

Kaufman has a way of manifesting the demented psychological impulses we have without it feeling like a gimmick.

A little while after arriving, Michael calls an old girlfriend. Her name is Bella and she lives in Cincinnati. She agrees to meet Michael at the hotel bar, in the vaguely defined maybe-a-reconciliation ;) scenario perpetrated by every dude with a weakness for nostalgia and hard liquor. Michael ended things abruptly 11 years ago, we learn. He thinks maybe things have changed but he realizes that they haven't. Bella has questions tonight but he has no answers; she doesn't know what she came for but it wasn't this. She storms out.

Here, also, is something we notice in these scenes: Bella, and everyone else in Michael's world, has the same voice (every character with the exception of Michael's and one other is voiced by Tom Noonan). Their faces are identical, too; bellhops and waiters and his wife, the characters on TV shows. Beige skin smooth as pool table felt, pointy noses, thin lips in perfect horizontal lines; the face attached to the scalp as a separate piece entirely. All of them like this. Their faces look like the Michael Myers mask, or corpses after a mortician has painted on a layer of makeup. Here, on earth, trudging all around us like zombies: dead people made to look alive.

Kaufman has a way of manifesting the demented psychological impulses we have without it feeling like a gimmick. He is making a blatant statement about the sameness of human beings, but the relentlessness of Noonan's voice—a mix of GPS directions and a masseuse asking if that's too much pressure—becomes almost terrifying. Michael's world is a static to navigate through. Everyone is talking and he is incapable of communicating with any of them, like there's a biological disconnect, like their brains have pathways that are not like his. Everyone is in his face, and yet indecipherable, inaccessible, alien.

I think about the way Kaufman assembles these surrealist visuals, the way he sometimes abandons "enjoyment" for the sake of an essential emotional truth. "It's very important to me that the characters are recognizable and identifiable—not likable, I don't care about that, but that there's something presented that is honest in my mind in terms of human interaction," he said in a recent interview with New York. These ridiculous juxtapositions have a purpose beyond the sensational, and I am consumed by them even if I often find his films unsettling.

I think about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when Jim Carrey meets Kate Winslet for the first time. Carrey is sketching her on the train. In the sketch, everything is in black and white, there are no other passengers, except for her, colored in. Winslet approaches him; they learn each other's names. Behind them, passing in the window, a blur of gray-brown trees, hard earth, rectangular brick buildings, old houses, power lines. It's winter; it's cold. But occasionally, on the train from one nowhere to another, there is someone you see in vivid detail, someone explosive, someone descended, gift-wrapped, someone with blue hair and an orange sweatshirt the color of a clementine peel. Her name, of course, is actually Clementine. Where does she live? A place called Rockville Center. Does this make any sense? Metaphors with heartbeats? No, not really, except, in that place in your brain wrecked by side glances from that girl, the way she enunciates "bitch" as she leans over the seat, the way she seems both fragile as glass and just as sharp. In that way, it makes all the sense there is.

Michael returns to his room to take a shower after seeing Bella. He gets out and as he's drying off he thinks he hears a voice that is not Tom Noonan's. He dashes into the hallway and bangs on doors till he comes to the room of two women. One is an aggressive blonde. The other is Lisa; she's timid and self-conscious and dresses like your aunt who never got married. She doesn't sound like everyone else. She sounds like Jennifer Jason Leigh. Michael is entranced by her every action. The three of them end up back in the hotel bar, and then Michael and Lisa end up together back in his room.

Drunk and in love with someone new is looking at the clouds and telling yourself you see something written in them.

Michael is looking for a bulletproof love that doesn't exist. If it feels perfect, you're probably just drunk and naked. Humans are frantic and selfish and twisted, ugly and mean, erratic and whimsical. His wife and kid are back home alone, his ex-girlfriend discarded a second time. He doesn't have much use for anyone. And yet there he is, again, drunk in Cincinnati, Ohio, land of Some Pretty All Right Parking Lots, I Guess, and he meets a girl he's convinced can fix everything. Drunk and in love with someone new is looking at the clouds and telling yourself you see something written in them.

The pivot at the end of the film will knock the wind out of you, and on your way, there is a sex scene between Michael and Lisa as authentic as any I have ever seen. Two people there, in the dim light, sometimes entwined, sometimes on opposite sides of the room, hurtling toward something, desperate and utterly defenseless to this moment's own momentum, Lisa's asymmetrical breasts, the cuff on Michael's shirtsleeve getting stuck on his hand and Lisa helping him figure it out. No one looks sexy trying to take their socks off, and there's no use in trying.

***

There is a scene in Kaufman's Adaptation when Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is talking to his twin brother Donald (also played by Cage). Charlie wishes he could be as oblivious as he thinks Donald is. Once, years ago, when the two were in high school, Charlie watched Donald flirt with a girl named Sarah. She looked happy, interested. But as Donald walked away, Sarah and a friend started laughing at him. Many years had passed since that day. Decades. Charlie thinks Donald never heard the girls. But Donald did. He kept loving her anyway.

Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.

Sometimes what we are falling in love with is not this new person, but the way this new person helps us channel a newness in ourselves, to feel resurrected. We want to know the weight of our judgments; the power of every gesture, making direct eye contact, watching her slouch and sigh at one of our lines, proud to know we can shake that person till they see and feel that newness in themselves. Loving's easy. Forever's the hard part. Eventually, most of the voices end up sounding the same.

Anomalisa opens in select theaters December 30.

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

'Magic Mike XXL' Was the Most Important Feminist Movie of 2015

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Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers

Many year-end articles have been calling this a good year for women in film and television, but identifying what that actually means and what, specifically, counts as a good example of feminism is a hard consensus to reach. Search results for "Amy Schumer feminist" will yield an alternating list of reasons why she is an amazing, sneaky, raucous failure of a feminist. Repeat the search with Mindy Kaling or Lena Dunham's name and you might begin to suspect that it's impossible to be both an accepted feminist and an actual human woman. Even a film like Mad Max: Fury Road, which has been widely praised (including here at VICE) as the feminist action film we've all been waiting for, has its share of detractors criticizing it as being mired in lazy, sexist tropes and using Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa to problematically equate female empowerment with force, violence, and militaristic competence.

The cumulative effect of all these articles has got me worried. When we write criticisms of mainstream attempts at feminism, do we have a goal in mind? If so, what is it? The questions of what we want feminism to be and how to best represent it in the mainstream are absolutely necessary to answer, but both are so massively complex that any attempt at a mainstream feminist cultural production will prompt a glut of responses pointing out its shortcomings. These responses spur useful and nuanced discussions, but also run the risk of shaming women and men for not being the "right" kind of feminist, when what that would require remains difficult to pin down. Reducing the complexity of such issues is certainly not the solution either: Historically, attempts to simplify social causes end up excluding significant portions of the population the cause is intended to benefit.

I asked Dr. Carol C. Gould, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, for her thoughts on this knotty problem. "I think that positive references to feminism are helpful, even—perhaps especially—in popular culture contexts," she told me over email. Similar concerns were echoed by the former president of the American Philosophical Association, Linda Martín Alcoff, who has written extensively on feminism and race. "The representations of feminism in popular culture are hugely important," Alcoff told me. "Too many celebrities feel they will lose portions of their audience if they use the F-word. And as a result, young people think feminism is a weird, small cult. I'm more accepting than perhaps most feminist theorists on its emergence in the public domain, even when what is meant by feminism seems a little thin or vague."

It is exactly this "thin or vague" version of mainstream feminism that gets attacked by critics and scholars, and it is understandable when it does. Part of the problem is that there are so many different kinds of people affected by the social (rather than biological) construction of the concept "woman." It's not by accident that Simone de Beauvoir opens up her seminal text, The Second Sex, with the question, "What is a woman?" Short answer: It's hard to determine, but there are a lot of us and we look and act and want a lot of different things, thus making any attempt to represent an ideal version in a single character—like Furiosa or Jessica Jones or the mega-capable Rey of the newest Star Wars film—necessarily incomplete, lacking, and problematically non-representative.

On Broadly: 'Rose McGowan on Sexism in Hollywood':

And this is in part why I believe MMXXL to be the most important feminist film of 2015. It eschews any attempt to exalt a single woman as the ideal and, instead, absurdly, inelegantly attempts to jam all of us onto the screen. And it fails. Of course it fails! But I've never seen a film that really made such a good faith, if clumsy, effort to try.

This surprised me because the first Magic Mike film didn't seem to care much about women. Tatum's love interest, Brooke, is a straight-laced nag/saintly nurse who chastises Mike and Alex Pettyfer's "The Kid" when they just want to have fun. One night she arrives at the strip club, ready to smother everyone with disapproval, and sees Tatum strip for the first time. Throughout much of this scene, the camera stays on Horn who reacts as if director Steven Soderbergh were in her ear whispering, "OK, now while you watch him strip, pretend you've never thought about sex before and now are suddenly confronted with it for the first time. Feel embarrassed, make an embarrassed face, roll your eyes, now flee the club feeling conflicted and joyless." A few other women roam around the film's periphery in order to provide blowjobs or offer up their fake breasts for a feel.

So, I wasn't expecting Magic Mike XXL to devote scene after scene to an inclusive picture of female happiness. That happiness comes in multiple forms—sexual pleasure being chief—and is for women of all sizes, ages, races, and economic classes. Additionally, the film presents a view of masculinity that includes honesty and emotional communication, condemns violence as an immature way of solving problems, and pronounces that men should take pride in the "healing" pleasure they bring to women. These points are hammered home so often that some critics claimed the overzealousness of the diversity grows " wearying."

Did I roll my eyes when a bunch of hot dudes were telling women how they'd "heal" them? Yes, I did. It's condescending. Also, I certainly did take note of the absence of disability in the otherwise diverse representation of female bodies worthy of sexual attention. Onscreen, disabled women are mostly represented as tragic, frail, and sexless, and while Theron's amputated Imperator Furiosa is certainly not frail, she still is a bit tragic and sexless. Dr. Alcoff had a different concern about the film. "There's a danger when popular culture uses feminist ideas in ways that not only misrepresent but mislead," said Alcoff. "This is the case with Magic Mike XXL, which appears to be about the gender equality of men and women in sex work. So the movie makes use of this representation, and then goes on to portray sex work as a choice individuals can make. It does not show the real costs, the constant violence, regular dehumanization by clients, wage theft, and sexual violence that is part of so much sex work. So, there is a falseness to that representation."

These are all valid, useful critiques of the film, but I still believe MMXXL to be the most important film of 2015 and my reason for that has something to do with my weeping mother. We saw the film together and while the entire theater was laughing and clapping, we were crying.

My mother cried at the scene when our road-tripping protagonists make a stop at a palatial estate in Charleston. They are there to visit a girl they've met earlier, but upon their arrival, they find the girl's mother, played by Andie MacDowell, and her rich, wine-drunk, middle-aged friends. I noticed my mother shifting uncomfortably at the beginning of this scene. There's an expectation that this interaction will be played for laughs at the expense of the older women who seem to be nothing more than sloppy cougars throwing themselves pathetically at younger men. I could sense my mother preparing herself to sit through yet another sexually desperate and cartoonish depiction of women her age. But that's not what happens. Instead, the men and women engage in genuine conversation about, as my mother put it, "the nature of love and desire." Here were a room full of people, said my mother, "who had been married or were married or wanted to be married. They were all talking to each other, trying to figure out why things don't always work well. And no one is ridiculed." One still-wedded woman admits that her husband won't make love to her with the lights on. Ken, played by Matt Bomer, is shocked by this and is eager to remind her how beautiful she is while serenading her with Bryan Adams's "Heaven." It's a scene that comes close to being cringeworthy, but is somehow saved by Ken's unabashed sincerity.

At the same time that Andie MacDowell's crew is entertaining the men, Mike notices that Zoe (Amber Heard) is feeling blue and goes to investigate. One expects Zoe to clearly emerge in this scene as Mike's love interest, but—despite a bit of friendly flirting—a love story between them never materializes. They share a conversation in the kitchen that is both sweet and displays Mike's emotional intelligence. Zoe has met a photographer who tries to sleep with her under the guise of supporting her talent. In this scene, Tatum does not: dodge the emotional burden of the conversation, make her feel apologetic for having feelings, chastise her for being too emotional, fetishize her sadness, condescend to her by telling her she should have known better than to trust a guy who claims to be interested in her talent, condescend to her by telling her she's worth so much more than she herself knows, condescend to her by telling her she's so special and someday everyone will see her the way he sees her. He does not tell her she's perfect or beautiful with the accompanying assumption that that is all that really matters. At no point does their conversation reveal itself to really be about their attraction or love. At no point does Mike indicate that what he is really after is sex and that he's willing to do this talking bit due to the future promise of sex. At no point does he require a congratulatory pat on the back for being able to have a non-sexually motivated conversation with a woman. The camera does not linger uncomfortably on Zoe, letting us watch her watch him leave the kitchen, new feelings burbling up on her angelic tear-streaked face, her eyes telling us that he's not like the other guys. None of that happens. Instead, they make each other laugh. He tries to make her feel better. And then the scene moves on. He does slip in a few cheesy lines about helping her "get her smile back" about his god being a "she," but the moment is saved, yet again, by sincerity. Cue my weeping.

My mom and I were deeply moved by these scenes simply because they showed something so divorced from the day-to-day reality of our female lives. And that was a huge fucking bummer. "I've come to expect men to either ignore me or approach me with a rote come-on," said my mother, my heart breaking from the sheer recognition of this pattern in my own life and the lives of the women I know. "I haven't experienced much sincerity from men," she said in a quiet, stern voice.

MMXXL is not a perfect film, but, through stark contrast, it did remind me just how far our society is from achieving its feminist goals. It's intended to be a wish-fulfillment film, but it was painful to be reminded just how much of it is fantasy. None of this is meant to be some blanket statement about "men," as I'm well-aware that there are many men in this world who regularly communicate with women without entitlement or the promise of sex; there are men who can celebrate a woman's sexuality without implicit or explicit blame; there are men who comfortably share their feelings without punching each other or hurling insults borne of their bizarro gay panic. I know a bunch of these men and, luckily for me, I'm married to one of them.

But here's my point: This is still not the expected norm for me in my interactions with men, nor media representations of male and female relationships. Nope. I still live in a world where the morning news tells me that a presidential candidate referred to Clinton's 2008 loss to Obama as her being " schlonged" and pundits blame her for her husband's infidelities. I still live in a world where I have to explain to a male colleague why it's anti-feminist to frequently say women's periods and vaginas are disgusting (his response: "But they are disgusting!") We still live in a world that denies rape culture and legislates women's reproductive choices, but won't pass laws ensuring women get paid the same amount on the dollar as their male counterparts. So, the world of MMXXL was, in many ways, painful to visit, as it is just so far removed from the one I inhabit. Nonetheless, the film is a helpful and important reminder of how much work toward gender equality can—and, hopefully, will—be done. It comes as a great surprise to me that, at the end of 2015, I'm lobbying for further consideration of thick-necked Channing Tatum's feminism, and I'm sure plenty will disagree with me, but I urge you to watch the film again with an eye toward the inclusive, progressive world it attempts to build.

Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer and philosopher who studies and teaches in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.


What We Learned About Australia in 2015

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Image via

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia

This has been a rough year for Australia. To me, and others who question the wisdom of Christian-themed conservatism and free market economics, 2015 seemed like an orgy of dumb where the nation did everything to prove that, yes, Australia is in fact the world's largest trailer park. Those of us confronted by the mess could only go home to tune out, drink it off, and find a better world in Fallout 4.

But 2015 was also the year the first signs of a correction started to take place. We hit peak-stupid and reached the other side. If feels nice to be on the other side, like being able to eat again after particularly savage food poisoning. It also provides a chance to work out exactly what happened and find some lessons in the rubble. So here's what 2015 taught me about Australia—and Australians.

Tony Abbott in his single most memorable moment. Image via

Tony Abbott United Us. Accidentally.

Of course the story starts with Tony Abbott. He was the man who made himself minister for women. He scrapped the Science portfolio. The guy ate raw onions just because he liked them and threatened to shirtfront Vladimir Putin. He pretended to take climate change seriously but made every action to affirm otherwise. His public oratory was stilted and embarrassing. He was mean and ruthless, but unlike Turnbull, he was incapable of curbing his less popular instincts.

When Abbott woke up to the idea that people didn't like him, he spent 2015 trying to scare Australia back into line. He asked The ABC, "whose side are you on?" He held increasingly flag-cluttered press conferences. In one public appearance he used the word threat 16 times and death cult 19 times. When green groups challenged the right of a multinational corporation to build a mine on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, Abbott called it sabotage and green lawfare.

So as far as 2015 goes, watching former Prime Minister Tony Abbott go down with a whimper on September 14, 2015 had to be the feel-good highlight. For the first time in a long time I felt optimistic.

Malcolm Turnbull in his most memorable jacket. Image via

We Woke Up with Malcolm

When Australia woke up after disposing of Abbott, there seemed a new feel in the air. Malcolm Turnbull was going to be our guy. We didn't really care about the details because he wasn't Abbott and we needed him to not be Abbott for a while. Progress couldn't help but like him and the center-right desperately hoped he could rescue them from the Christian jihadists of the Liberal Party.

The problem for Malcolm Turnbull, though, is that he is Julia Gillard in a blue tie. He knifed a sitting leader for the good of the country and his own party, but not one of them is likely to appreciate it in the long run. The New South Wales state Liberal Party already hates the guy and then he can only do so much because he's got to regularly deal with such conservatives as Mathias Cormann, Peter Dutton, and Josh Frydenberg.

This is why the Paris climate agreement for Australia was a lukewarm start to a better Australia. It's why Turnbull seems keen on wind farms at the exact same time he's pushing Abbott's "Green Lawfare" changes to keep farmers and activists from challenging the will of multinational companies. And, again, the Adani coal mine on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef got re-approved.

A poster from Operation Sovereign Borders. Image via

We're Still Really Hung-Up on Borders

Australia is a nation that loves border controls. On the right side of politics, that means treating refugees like dirt until they set themselves on fire. Literally. On the left, that means sending misogynists back where they came from. For Barnaby Joyce, it occasionally means threatening to murder Johnny Depp's dogs.

Australia has been detaining people fleeing torture and burning cities in remote, hellish corporate-run Pacific Island prisons for long enough now. It's become just another thing we do. Then in September pictures started coming in from Europe where refugees were fleeing Syria and Australia was actually moved. The public pressure was enough that Tony Abbott announced the country would take 12,000 more people than we normally would, even as Germany was talking about taking 800,000. Then Australia fucked it all up by talking about giving preferential treatment to Christian refugees over Muslims.

Then there was that time the government decided latte-sipping Melbourne needed the Border Force to straighten them out. Unfortunately, Melbourne didn't take well to a bunch of jackboots on its streets asking anyone with a brown tinge for their papers and the city rallied to tell them with a single voice to fuck off.

A Reclaim Australia protest in Melton. Photo by Julian Morgans

Is It Just Me, Or Did We Get More Racist?

2015 was a big year for Reclaim Australia, but by far the standout through it all were the boys from the United Patriots Front (UPF)—another tough-sounding acronym on Australia's ultra-nationalist scene. The guys said they were on a mission to save Australia from Islam, even though no one asked them to and Islam has been here since 1861.

But as time wore on, the group struggled to remain coherent as their ex-leader, Shermon Burgess, handed off his job to Blair Cottrell and quit because his own people were teasing him. Once the dust settled, the group announced over Facebook that they were going to launch their own political party, " Fortitude," which would inevitably compete for votes among the far-right with another anti-Islam political party, the Australian Liberty Alliance. This is the party that was recently launched in secret somewhere around Perth by Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders.

The soon-to-be closed Ford plant in Geelong. Image via

Shit Is Expensive and There Are No Jobs

All the things that made Australia fat and happy over the last decade are over. The mining boom is done, even if Australia is trying to keep the dream of easy money alive through its coal mines. The car industry will start shutting down next year, which will hit South Australia and Victoria hard. Around the country, those under 30 have become the most educated generation ever at a time where fewer people are hiring graduates. Those same people are moving to Melbourne and Sydney in large numbers despite the need to earn six figures just to afford living there.

Point is, it's been a big year for Australia. The road ahead is uncertain and filled with problems, as it is every new year, but maybe the worst is in the rearview mirror. Pat yourself on the back because you made it through, if only a little dented.

Follow Royce on Twitter.

VICE Canada’s Most Read Stories of 2015

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A vigilante pedophine hunter, the grossest way to smoke weed, and those pesky bears.

The most overused word in our office this year was "dumpsterfire," and with good reason. I suspect every year feels somewhat unique in its ability to make you question humanity but 2015 has more than its share of fucked up-ness. But we made it our collective duty to look directly into the abyss and still file stories (mostly) on time in order to gain a better understanding of even the most bizarre and disturbing and (occasionally uplifting) situations. Thankfully we are able to quantify which stories found an audience—so without too much more of a preamble, here are the most read stories that came out of VICE Canada this year.

We asked the writers of these stories to remind us how it all went down and what happened after the story was filed.

Rehtaeh Parsons. Photo via Facebook.

1. No Jail for the Man Who Texted Photo of Himself Penetrating Rehtaeh Parsons as She Vomited

Hilary Beaumont, VICE News Staff Reporter

The past couple years have seen story after story of women and girls viciously harassed online, with inevitably devastating effects, and the Rehtaeh Parsons story is one of the most horrifying examples of how an alleged sexual assault and subsequent slut-shaming gutted the life of a girl and her city—my hometown of Halifax. This article in particular, though, was ultimately about redemption and whether it was possible for one of Parsons' harassers to achieve it.

The man in question admitted to penetrating Parsons while she appeared to vomit, flashing a thumbs-up to a cellphone camera as he did so. He then texted the photo, sparking a chain reaction that spread the photo amongst Parsons' peers, leading to the girl's attempted suicide and death when her parents removed her from life support. Justice Gregory Lenehan grilled the young man in court, saying he used Parsons as "no more than a prop for his enjoyment" but ultimately sentenced him to 12 months of probation, a light sentence due in part to the harassment the harasser himself had faced.

That sentence pulled me in two directions: while I believe in redemption, especially in the case of 20-year-old offenders who apologize for their actions, I wasn't convinced that he, and some overly sympathetic media outlets, fully understood the weight of what he did, at a time in which that understanding is vital to the ongoing conversation about sexual assault and harassment. "Humans make mistakes," he said in the courtroom that day. "I will not live with the guilt of someone passing away, but I will live with the guilt of the photo."

2. The Woman from the Calgary Stampede Threesome Reminds Us That Women Can Do Whatever They Want

Sarah Ratchford, Contributor

After a young woman was oh-so-predictably shamed for what seemed to be quite typical Calgary Stampede behaviour—namely, getting hammered and banging two dudes at once in public—I knew I couldn't let it slide without interviewing her and giving her a chance to say her piece. The only reason people found out in the first place is that some jackass videotaped the whole thing and put it on the internet, and I didn't think she deserved the backlash from, presumably, the underlaid masses. The woman took the incident and ran with it, using it as an opportunity to make cash as a dancer. The most striking thing, for me, about the reporting of this story was how few rape threats came my way. Just three, as I recall.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. Photo via Facebook.

3. Alberta Loses Its Goddamn Mind for the Fourth Time: A Guide for the Perplexed

Drew Brown, Contributor

Alberta has been continuously losing its goddamned mind for seven months now but, my god, what a spectacular election. A man might live to the end of his days and never see another like it. By the end of April, I had a feeling she was gonna go and go she fuckin' did. Then half the country read this and I started getting emails from octogenarians mad that "The Vice" was letting a "foul-mouthed street criminal" cover provincial politics. Which is fair enough. But you travel back to March 2015 and try wrapping your head around "Alberta's New Democratic Government" without reaching for an expletive and see how far you get. Mostly though I just wanted to write about Bible Bill.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Belgian Cops Are Being Investigated for Allegedly Having an Orgy After the Paris Attacks

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Belgian police in Brussels in 2011. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In the wake of the tragic terrorist attacks that killed 130 and wounded hundreds more in Paris last month, the planet's collective gaze promptly turned to Belgium. That's because several of the attackers reportedly lived in or had family connections to the capital of Brussels, which has apparently become a hotbed of radical Islamic activity in what some argue is a testament to the fragility of the European Union.

Suffice it to say international condemnation of Belgium's security apparatus has been intense. And it didn't get any easier for the local powers that be on Wednesday when officials confirmed they're investigating an alleged orgy said to have occurred about a week or two after the Paris attacks at a precinct not far from where several of the suspects once lived, as the New York Times reports.

The participants apparently included two female members of the Brussels police force and a coterie of Belgian soldiers who were stationed in the city during the chaotic days after the bombings and mass shooting in France. At the time of the alleged orgy, the Belgian government had raised its terror threat level to the highest possible level, though it has since been reduced. Still, on Tuesday, cops in Brussels announced the arrest of two men earlier this week suspected of plotting yet another attack, this one intended for New Year's Eve. Yet another arrest was made Wednesday.

According to the local paper La Dernière Heure, on the night of the alleged orgy in late November, two female cops were encouraged to visit the police dorm where the soldiers were sleeping after the station had been closed for the night, and had sex with eight men. As you might expect at a time when emotions were running high, alcohol is believed to have been involved.

The police commissioner for the adjacent Brussels-Capital district, Ilse Van de Keere, acknowledged the rumors have been percolating, but maintained what you might a call a euphemistic stance.

"All these people have been working closely together for weeks now, often doing long hours," she told the Times. "We have developed a very good working relationship with the army."

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Passengers Stuck on Hamilton Runway for Eight Goddamn Hours Until Some Hero Called 911

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Imagine being on this plane but it was in Hamilton and you weren't ever allowed to leave. Photo via Flickr user redlegsfan21

As if we needed more proof that travelling during the holidays is a special kind of hell, passengers on a Sunwing flight from the Dominican Republic to Calgary were stuck on a runway at an Ontario airport for eight hours going into Tuesday morning. Passengers were only let off at 5 AM after someone called 911.

Pauline Lamoureaux, one of the passengers, was on her way home to Calgary with her husband and kid after a vacation in Punta Cana. "We were on the tarmac for eight hours; we were told they're de-icing, they're doing this, they're doing that," Lamoureaux told VICE. "Five minutes went to an hour, went to two—it just propelled."

The flight had stopped for refueling and a crew change amidst a winter storm in Ontario late Monday night.

Lamoureaux confirmed that some passengers were having panic attacks, while others were simply getting angry or frustrated. Though she said the dynamic remained pretty civil, some people did "raise their voices." According to her, there was no ventilation in the main area of the plane where passengers were, making the situation even worse. Some people were heading to the front of the cabin where the air was a little better to try to get some relief. "You can understand how people react: they're not getting answers, they're getting postponement after postponement, they're exhausted—it's the middle of the night."

Once let off from the plane in Hamilton, Ontario, Sunwing accommodated passengers by getting them hotel rooms. But as Lamoureaux said, they only needed the rooms for a couple of hours since they were able to board another flight to Calgary later in the morning.

Sunwing has apologized and stated that it will be giving passengers on the flight $150 travel vouchers, but at least one passenger won't be using it.

"Absolutely not, no we won't use them, and I don't even know if we'll see them; they weren't promised to us, they were promised after the fact," Lamoureaux said.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Guy Dressed as Santa Robs Alberta Jewelry Store

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Canadians are stealing each other's shit left and right during this cheerful holiday season. Photo via Flickr user Matthew Filipowicz

The RCMP in Stettler, Alberta, are looking for a "pock faced" suspect after a man wearing a Santa Claus costume and armed with a gun robbed a downtown jewelry store on Christmas Eve.

According to a news release put out today, the armed Saint Nick entered the Ware's Jewelry store in Stettler, about 200 km south of Edmonton, around 4:30 PM on December 24 and pulled out a gun. He then demanded "various items, including jewelry and precious stones" before leaving the store and driving away in a black 2005 Hummer H2.

No one was injured during the robbery, and police located the abandoned Hummer in a residential area four days later. After looking at surveillance video, police believe an older-model pickup truck, possibly a Chevrolet, may have been used to move Bad Santa after he ditched the Hummer.

The suspect is described as a "pock faced" white male around 5'11" to 6' tall with blonde hair, and anyone with info is asked to call Stettler RCMP or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477.

In other Christmas-themed crime, two life-sized nutcrackers were stolen from a front porch of a farmhouse just east of London, Ontario, sometime between the night of December 27 and morning of December 28. The nutcrackers, described by the CBC as " stately figures painted in bright green and red uniforms," had taken one of the homeowner Kelly Elgie's husband more than a year to make.

"We were devastated, we were stunned," Elgie told the CBC. "...Someone's feeling, I'm thinking, like a bit of a jerk right now and maybe they don't know how to give them back," she said, and asked the thief (or thieves) to just put them back at the end of the driveway.

Meanwhile in the Prairies, someone in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, stole a statue of the Virgin Mary from a nativity scene on Dec. 29, the CBC reported, adding that people stealing stuff from nativity scenes are a "perennial problem around this time of year." The same report also mentions someone who beat the crap out of a someone's Christmas lawn ornament earlier that day, causing $150 in damage.

Now hopefully we can put this all behind us soon and get back to normal weird crime.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.


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