Photo via Flickr user M01229

Read: Here's What Happens to the Luggage You Lose at the Airport

Living close to an airport is probably obnoxious for a plethora of reasons, but it's been particularly challenging living next to DC's Reagan National Airport for one unnamed person, according to some statistics published by the Washington Post last weekend.

Of the 8,670 noise grievances the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority officials recorded in 2015, an impressive 6,500 allegedly came from the same, solitary individual.

WaPo not only "asked, repeatedly," for more info on the anonymous vigilante (the paper was denied, sadly), but also did the math for us—the complaints come down to "just over an average of 18 a day, every day, for 365 days."

Reagan National Airport is super aware of how shitty and noisy "changes in flight patterns" have become in northwest DC and is working on solving the problem, which will hopefully allow the mystery caller to find someone else to scream at 18 times a day.

There's no way of knowing whether or not these complaints are actually just a series of prank calls, or maybe a sort of experimental real-time novel, but that kind of commitment is impressive no matter what motivation lies behind it. If those planes won't quiet down, perhaps the persistent complainer could apply for a performance-art grant.

Photo via Wikimedia

Periods are shit. And they're even worse when you have to go to work and make conversation with Joe from two desks down when you've got a pain in your uterus so blinding it could be—according to science—"almost as bad as a heart attack."

Admitting that to your boss, though, can be hard. Asking to go home sick because you're bleeding is awkward at best, a totally off-limits social taboo at worst. That's why a British company called Coexist announced last week that it would be introducing period leave to the women in their office. It's not a new thing—Japan has had period leave for more than 70 years, and Nike already offers women monthly menstrual leave.

But in these stringent economic times, what would actually happen if all working women were given time off to give their uterus some TLC once a month? Would the global economy collapse? The stock markets crash? Or would it—as the Sun columnist Karren Brady believes, just reduce women in the workplace again to the "weaker sex at the mercy of our monthly cycles"? We asked Dr. Hyun-Jung Lee, professor of employment relations and organizational behavior at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

VICE: What do you make of a workplace "period policy"?
Dr Lee: I'm originally from South Korea, where women have a right to have a day off per month if the pain of their period becomes unbearable. It makes a lot of sense there because they have a strict working environment. People show up to work from 8 AM, do 12-hour days, and traditionally many companies also ask that you work on a Saturday until midday. They need to be totally present in their jobs.

Do we actually need a period policy in the UK?
Well, not necessarily, because in this country there is already a lot of flexibility at work. A lot of people take sick days—my assistant is actually off today because she is unwell. That said, giving your workforce more flexibility about when and where they work has positive affects on the overall well-being of your staff. Obviously, you have to show up at work for a certain amount of time and you need to interact with your customers and colleagues, but at the same time, a lot of things you can do much better if you're at home with your laptop and not surrounded by people and unnecessary distractions.

So could a period policy make an office more productive?
Yes. For example, both the Virgin Group and Netflix have a policy of unlimited annual leave. It's unbelievable, I know, but a policy like this is an acknowledgment that if you treat workers as human beings, people will make more responsible decisions.

I asked the head of HR at Virgin how many days she takes off a year and she said not many. Because knowing that she can take the days off when she needs to is motivating and puts the importance of the work into perspective. No one wants to work in an environment where you feel there are people constantly monitoring you. The feeling that you are being watched only has negative effects on productivity.

But what about people who can't work from home? Would a menstruation leave policy be at all plausible?
I can see the challenge because with a period you can't really predict when it's going to start. Women's mensuration cycles are often irregular. So in that respect, it could cause unplanned distribution to the workforce. But if you are at work and suffering, the likelihood is that you will be unproductive regardless.

It is also a pain that can be contagious. If you are suffering, you are not really functioning, and people can see that you are not working, which can have a negative effect the morale of other employees.

What would be the economic impact of all women being able to take time off when they are on their period, then?
One day a month, not showing up the the office wouldn't make a financial impact, in my view. On paper, if you look at the policy, you might think that because a substantial amount of the workforce could be taking an extra day's leave once a month, that could cost the business a lot—but that is only the economic based model. If you take into account the positive effects such a policy would have on work-life well-being, happiness, and productivity, it doesn't really matter.

Should more businesses be implementing a period policy?
Yes, but businesses have to be aware that the way you implement such a policy is the most important thing. Senior members of staff would need to be very clear that this is a positive policy that will most likely create a flexible working environment, where all employees have more respect for the work they are doing.

I say this because this is a sensitive policy. In South Korea, the reality is a lot of women don't take these days off because it's still very embarrassing to declare that you are on your period. Women still have to compete with men in the workplace, so it would seem undesirable for many women to take an extra day off and in some way demonstrate that your private life is more important than your work.

How likely is it that a policy such as this would be implemented across the UK?
I think that this is a very revolutionary idea that would take a long time to implement in British working culture. There is also the issue of gender equality, as the policy only affects females. What would it mean for how women are seen in the workplace? A lot of trade unions would have an issue with this and would take a long time to deliberate.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

This stock photo would be a thing of the past under Steve Hanke's proposals.

You would never complain that a mile is too long, or a decibel too loud, so it's hard to imagine how something like time can stop working. Time is just a thing we have, and despite all the world's cultural differences, every country uses the same 24-hour clock. Who would want to tinker with that?

Well, quite a lot of people: Spain, for example, is looped into the same time zone as Eastern European countries like Poland and Hungary, despite being geographically in line with Morocco, the UK, and Portugal. The consequences are that the Spanish sleep, on average, 53 minutes longer than their European peers and don't see much daylight. Economist Nuria Chinchilla, who studies work and family life at Spain's IESE Business School, told NPR that the time zone change is ruining the lives of ordinary people: "We have no time for personal life or family life... therefore, we are committing suicide here in Spain. We have just 1.3 children per woman. And it's because we have no time."

Spain's time zone is doubly crushing to some because of the rationale behind its introduction. In 1942, General Franco adapted the country's time zone to match Nazi Germany's as a simple show of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Political allegiance is a surprisingly common reason for time zone changes; after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014, the peninsula's time zone skipped forward an hour, ditching daylight savings time to better match its new owner. A clock-change can also affect economic realities, like in 2011, when American Samoa jumped west across the international dateline to be in better sync with its nearest traders, Australia and New Zealand.

Occasional rumblings of how to solve national problems such as Spain's late-night living or Indian tea-pickers' preference to work during daylight hours will gain pace every so often. But not all attempts to change time are successful. In 2010, David Cameron supported a backbencher's private bill to push UK time forward by an hour, but it was eventually filibustered and then lampooned by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who jokingly proposed Somerset deserved its own time zone a quarter of an hour behind London's.

But could a bigger, universal solution to the world's time issues be on the horizon? Step in Steve Hanke and Richard Conn Henry, both professors at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who have invented the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, which has a 364 day year, with a "leap week" every five or six years. The idea is to make the calendar perennial, so that each date falls on the same day each year, making dates easier to remember. At the same time, the world would also switch to Coordinated Universal Time or UTC, which would set every watch across the world to the exact same time.

This all sounds like a utopian exercise in imaginary mathematics, but the professors are deadly serious about every government in the world universally agreeing to change the way time is measured, and they have plans to spread the world of their calendar and UTC using viral campaigns on social media. We spoke to Professor Hanke, whose experience lies in currency reform from Ecuador to Indonesia, to find out more about this plan.

VICE: How arbitrary are the time zones we have right now?
Steve Hanke: In 1870, St. Louis had six time zones. There were 75 railway times across the States that year. And the time-space compression was chaos because, of course, you had to schedule things. By 1883, we adopted, mainly at the behest of the railways, standard railway times, and with that, we got the four time zones that we still have in the US. Same goes for Germany; there were five big time zones until, in 1891, 90-year-old General Helmuth von Moltke argued in his last major speech in the parliament that the only reason he won two wars was because he was running with the unified consolidated time system for the rails—and the logistics of supplying troops. By the early 1970s, pilots and airports all went to universal time, for safety. But we're now in another era in which we're witnessing an enormous time-space compression with the internet. So we have a lot of universal time that's being adopted and used, and we don't realize it's being used.

But getting a new time zone for the internet is hardly a safety concern, is it?
It's not a safety issue. It's a coordination issue. And universal time is already spontaneously being adopted from the ground up for lots of practical reasons. And when the railways and the pilots demanded new time zones, they didn't ask anyone. It was a necessity.

So what's wrong with our time zones now?
The most simple thing is scheduling a meeting or a conference call. The errors will, from an economics point of view, waste time and money.

Isn't that a bit of a first world problem?
I think, generally, UTC facilitates commerce and commercial activity. Anything that does that is a good thing because it leads to peace and prosperity. That said, historically, there have been disputes over who sets time; Paris didn't like that Greenwich got to claim Mean Time, and colonies were resistant to time zone changes.

Time zones as they stand. Via

Some might say this will benefit people within technological industries to the detriment of people farming and manufacturing.
There are two layers here. One: The main thing is to get "time talk" going, because it will provoke spontaneous adoption of the obvious. But two is that we'll need two systems; you'll have universal time for everyone, that will be the mean time and the anchor, but you'll also have work-zone time on top of that. So when the sun's at its highest, you're going to be having your lunch, but this will be at different points on your watch depending on what part of the world you'll be living in.

How easy is this going to be to implement?
Once people think about it, it's easy to understand. If we went to universal time, the work-zone time might be cleaned up a little. Maybe we'd have 24 work-zone times throughout the world. A shop in London will open at 9 AM and close at 5 PM under solar time, but under universal time, in New York, you open at 2 PM. The transition is easy to make, countries have gone metric, and that's a much bigger switch than universal time.

But we seem to be more obsessed with time now than we were with currency or measurements then.
Let's assume that's true—I'd argue that it's easier to make the transition, then, because if people are more interested and obsessed with time, it's probably going to be easier to change it. Henry once called his elderly mother in Toronto one summer's day, and he asks, "How's the weather?" She says, "It's really hot—it's almost 30 today." He couldn't believe it, because she was very old, and she'd switched to metric without realizing.

Once the "time talk" gets going, what else stands in your way?
In a way, I don't see the obstacles as being too great. I'm a laissez-faire free-trade liberal in the classic sense, and I like things to be spontaneously and voluntarily adopted, and I think if it's logical, there are a lot of benefits to it. Pretty soon, you and I will be talking about this, and you'll ask, "How did you do that? Did you have to go to the UN or Washington, DC?"

Well, a non-governmental approach has kind of been tried before. In 1999, Swatch introduced Internet Time, measuring out a day in 1,000 ".beats." Watches sold that year would contain two times. One to be adjusted based on solar time zones; the other was a counter going up to 1,000 on loop each day. But that was phased out by 2001. What will make UTC last?
I don't think Swatch sold it very well. But it did get "time talk" going. With UTC, the companies will get on board with this train after it's left the station, because people will start using UTC and watch companies will make a fortune selling 24-hour dials.

Do you think a company like Apple or Google are aware they could capitalize on UTC?
I can't answer the question as I haven't talked to them, which suggests that maybe I should be talking to them, but if we get more "time talk," these people are smart, they'll be calling me!

They're smart, and they're rich. Maybe you should pitch to them. Because this doesn't seem like something one head of state could introduce.
If we get into the political sphere, there are heads of states who like to do big, bold things, and if one of them who was influential got a hold of it, it could be introduced. China, India, or Russia could do it.

What about the cultural currency of time? Like Kanye West tweeting that he doesn't want to work with people who won't let him call them at 3 AM—that won't mean anything under UTC.
People get put off by universal time, saying "I don't want to do that because I don't want to work when it's dark out or sleep when it's light," but who would want that? It's got nothing to do with universal time! When universal time is adopted, we'll still have to consider if the people we're communicating with are awake or not.

So, in an ideal world, you see UTC and solar time coexisting?
Yes, and it's natural. From an astronomical point of view, the time is the same everywhere in the world right now.

OK, please stop. Now you're hurting my brain.

Follow Sophie Wilkinson on Twitter.

This piece was published in partnership with The Influence.

One summer day in 2007, Utah State Senator Mark Madsen (R-Saratoga Springs) was grilling chicken and corn on the cob in his yard with his family, when he was hit by what felt like the flu. As a chronic pain patient, Madsen, who sustained back and spine injuries from two car accidents and playing football in his youth, was wearing a Fentanyl patch to alleviate his discomfort. Not realizing the Fentanyl patch had burst, Madsen went to go lie down.

"Our oldest daughter came to me and said, 'Mom, Dad told me to wake him up, and I can't wake him up,'" recounts Madsen's wife Erin. "I went downstairs to wake him up, and he was cold and clammy. He had turned gray. He was not breathing." They called 911 and their neighbor who was a paramedic, while Erin tried to resuscitate Madsen with rescue breaths. "I could feel that his heart was beating, but he was not breathing. I was terrified. I had four young children, and I thought my husband was dead."

Having survived an accidental opioid overdose, Madsen has become one of Utah's strongest proponents for medical marijuana. He sponsors Senate Bill 73 (SB 73), currently up for debate in the state assembly, to make cannabis available to patients who qualify under nine conditions—including cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer's—or are allergic to opioids, or at high risk of addiction.

Madsen is also a practicing Mormon, the grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, the 13th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Given the Mormon Church's opposition to the ingestion of substances like alcohol—or even coffee—Madsen's support for medical marijuana is surprising, and he clashes with the church on his bill.

"I have absolute faith, but I have stewardship to the people who elected me," Madsen tells The Influence. "I don't believe it's the government's business to tell people what they can take into their bodies. It's not the government's business to tell you what state of mind to be in."

The church, which initially took a strong stance against SB 73, has softened its position following some amendments—most notably the bill's recent exclusion of smoking cannabis flower. Patients would be able to consume cannabis only in extract form, such as capsules, tinctures, or vaporizable oils.

As of February 22, the church's latest statement urged a "cautious approach" to medical marijuana: "In our view, the issue for the Utah Legislature is how to enable the use of marijuana extracts to help people who are now suffering, without increasing the likelihood of misuse at a time when drug abuse in the United States is at epidemic proportions, especially among youth. Recent changes to SB 73 are a substantial improvement." Still, the church demands more research on the effects of marijuana and the perceived risks of THC.

Partly because of such concerns, Utah's legislators are now deliberating two medical marijuana bills that have progressed from the State Senate to the House of Representatives.

Senate Bill 89, sponsored by Senator Evan Vickers (a pharmacist by trade) is competing with SB 73. It's a CBD extract bill; that is, Vickers' bill allows a select few retailers to sell, to a limited range of patients, medical marijuana extracts high in cannabidiol (CBD)—a non-psychotropic chemical compound that alleviates pain, inflammation, anxiety and seizures. This rival SB 89 excludes medical marijuana with more than 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—the dominant compound in cannabis, which also benefits several health conditions, but additionally makes users feel high. Utah has already enacted a CBD bill called Charlee's Law, which allows qualifying patients to order cannabis with less than 0.3 percent THC from other states. SB 89 would allow retailers to sell similar products within the state.

"Our biggest challenge is overcoming Reefer Madness propaganda and helping legislators understand that legalizing medical cannabis does not necessarily put Utah on a 'slippery slope' towards recreational," says Connor Boyack, a supporter of SB 73 and president of the Libertas Institute, a libertarian think tank based out of Lehi, Utah.

Around 80 percent of Utah legislators belong to the LDS Church. "Each is affected by the position of the Church to different degrees," says Boyack. "Some will do whatever they ask without question, while others consider the Church's statement as they would any other organization, focusing instead on representing their constituents."

Utah is 60 percent Mormon and 64 percent in favor of medical marijuana. With or without the Church's blessing, Mormon Utahns are coming to their own conclusions about cannabis.

Allison Easley from Sandy, Utah, suffers from fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis. She is a devout Mormon, having been active in various children's and women's church groups, and has even served in leadership roles. "I have a complicated relationship with the Church now that they've made statements," she says. "I suffer on a daily basis, and the other people who are LDS in states where it's legal are allowed to use medical marijuana. But in Utah? Nope."

"I was struggling with the Church as it was," she continues, "but this has pushed me to want to leave for good. My health, being able to take care of my eight children, being able to walk, play, be a wife—none of this can happen if I'm in pain and addicted to opiates."

Easley says she and her Mormon peers with debilitating medical conditions feel betrayed by the Church. She used to live in California, where she learned firsthand that medical marijuana—and specifically, cannabis herb containing THC, but not CBD oil—helps her. "My opinion on the Church's statement is that they've turned the state of Utah into a theocracy, and that's troubling for me. These men who run the Church, they're old, they still believe Reefer Madness because they were told to believe that '50s propaganda."

Easley and her family now plan on moving back to California because of this issue; she says up to 12 of her friends' families have already done the same, relocating to Oregon and Colorado.

In fact, Easley explains, marijuana is not even mentioned in the Mormon health code, called the Word of Wisdom. The text condemns alcohol, tobacco and hot drinks like coffee, and advises sparing meat consumption. (The LDS Church itself denied our requests for comment.)

"Substances like alcohol can alter your state of mind and thus not give you the most control over of what's happening, or you might not have the agency to control your body as you want," says Brandt Malone, editor-in-chief of the Mormon News Report. That's the rationale the Church may be using in regard to marijuana, he says.

"But what's the difference between me taking Percocet or being on a morphine drip, versus a doctor saying, 'You have some back pain and I'm going to recommend marijuana?'" Malone asks. Each month, 23 people die of prescription drug overdoses in Utah; heroin addiction rates are rising there as well.

Pat Bird, director of operations at the Utah County Department of Drug and Alcohol Prevention and Treatment, says those opposed to SB 73 are concerned about social impact. "We know that THC is linked to numerous problematic situations with young adults with regard to psychotic episodes, IQ, and impact on substance abuse and addiction. We have an excessive amount of information on the harms of marijuana," Bird claims, citing increased marijuana DUIs and emergency room visits from edible freak-outs. "CBD, though we don't know the total impact, we know it doesn't have any psychoactive substances in it." (It should be noted that while marijuana can have adverse effects, most use is non-problematic. Claims that it lowers IQ are opposed by scientific evidence, and zero people die from marijuana overdose each year, compared with many thousands of deaths relating to prescription pills and alcohol.)

The Church understands the impact marijuana can have on social problems, says Bird. "We stand behind the science and the medical community to handle this, not popular vote. We know that marijuana is not benign and virtuous." Popular vote isn't used to approve other medications, he argues, so if marijuana is in fact a medicine, it should be treated as such. "Something we should increase is the research. I would fully support that," he adds.

"Many politicians aren't educated on the actual science behind cannabis, its mechanism of action, and the way it interacts physiologically," says Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). "When people take medicines, they take pills. There's a stigmatization against smoking." The Church and other opponents of SB 73 continue to call for more research before they will back a bill that is broader than only allowing CBD-dominant extracts.

As SB 73 awaits action in the House of Representatives before the end of the legislative session on March 11, the biggest problem is that communities are split, says Christine Stenquist, a patient and founder of TRUCE (Together for Responsible Use and Cannabis Education), which advocates for medical marijuana in Utah. "Law enforcement is split, the medical community is split. You can find studies and statistics, which support whichever perspective you want. That's what creates this problem of not knowing who to believe." (Senator Madsen's assistant tells The Influence that SB 73 was was dealt a setback Monday when it was voted down 8-4 in the House Health and Human Services Committee.)

Madsen cites studies showing a decrease in opioid overdoses in medical marijuana states, while Pat Bird and his allies rely on studies illustrating an uptick in marijuana use disorders. For now, Stenquist says advocates for the bill are waiting for a friendly committee in the house to pick it up. If by March 11, it doesn't pass, she says TRUCE has enough financial backing to pursue a ballot initiative for November—though with a fast-approaching April due date, some doubt whether a medical marijuana ballot initiative requiring over 100,000 signatures is still feasible.

"Right now our wings are clipped; we're in a holding pattern," says Stenquist. "I know a lot of people who are upset and frustrated. Even if you're not a practicing LDS member, the LDS Church affects your day-to-day life."

Madison Margolin is a New York-based journalist who covers marijuana and cultural and social issues. Follow her on Twitter.

This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

Drawing by Klari Moreno

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

In Cuba, sex is everywhere. From the moment you arrive at the airport, it feels like you were just transported to a parallel universe of good-looking, tanned salsa dancers. Walking the streets, there is no doubt you will walk past boxes of Vigor King Size condoms stacked up in chemists' window displays, while in bars of a more sketchy variety, you can buy a Momentos condom with one Cuban peso.

The Cuban regime has banned porn, but weirdly you can watch it on TV in some bars, where patrons will glance at it with the kind of nonchalance that can make it seem like a football game is on, instead of a couple ploughing the fields of love. Sexual prowess is highly valued, but spending time here you'll notice that although sex is engrained in Cuban society, there are also a lot of stories, myths, and superstitions surrounding it. One of them is "the Pearl"—a sort of penis talisman I first heard of from Julia, a Spanish friend of mine who lives in Cuba.

Julia had been living in Austria before she came to Cuba in 2008 to work as an assistant for an artist. "The three years I spent in Vienna had been one long dry spell. Everything seemed cold and complicated there, and I wasn't really interested in anyone. When I arrived here, I immediately realized Cuba would be a different story."

In the weeks before her job started, she met a guy called Nelson. "He was the only man I met during those weeks who didn't show any sexual interest right away—though I later learned that was just a strategy. But I didn't really know anyone in Cuba and I was ready to end my Viennese drought. After our third meeting, I brought him to my place. We made out, which naturally led me to touch his dick. There I felt something hard—not just his state, but, like, a marble under the skin of his penis. I looked down, and that's when I saw the pearl."

According to Arianna Villafaña, a Cuban doctor at the Móstoles University Hospital, the pearl is a small ball, often made of plastic, that's placed under the skin of the penis through a small incision. The surgery is usually performed at home, without any proper sanitary precautions. "The goal is to enhance sexual performance," says Arianna. "The Cuban myth claims that women who feel the pearl will go mad with pleasure."

Dr. Almudena López, a sex therapist and a colleague of Arianna at Móstoles University Hospital, says there is no basis in human anatomy for the pearl to be that successful. "For it to really stimulate the clitoris, the pearl should be placed at the very base of the penis, which never happens. As for the G-spot, that's something you can easily reach with a finger, but it's much more complicated to reach directly with the penis. Of course eroticism is for a big part a psychological affair, and given that the famous pearl has some mysteries to it, it might actually tickle the brain more than any other part of the body."

"I don't remember feeling anything special with the pearl," says Julia. "Or maybe I did, I don't know. But I think my excitement had more to do with the fact that my Viennese dry spell was over. Nelson told me he had it done during his military service without any kind of anesthesia, and that it was quite a nuisance at first, because his skin was too tight. But he was so proud of it, because he considered the procedure to be some kind of virility ritual."

Condoms sold in a bar

Dr. Arianna Villafañe insists that the pearl can have a devastating effect on the health of the owner. During her years working at the Hospital Provincial Saturnino Lora at Santiago de Cuba, she saw cases of tetanus, balanitis, and gangrene as a result of getting the pearl. "I personally only saw a case of balanitis that resulted the surgical removal of the pearl, but I have heard about cases in which part of the penis had to be removed because it had been severely affected by gangrene."

Usually guys who have one or more pearls in their penis are young men in military service, convicts, or sailors—not just from Cuba, but all over the world. The trend is said to have reached Cuba thanks to merchant seamen in the 1960s, who returned from Asia and apparently brought along some techniques of sexual organ modification. In fact, the tradition is said to have originated among imprisoned members of the yakuza, one pearl for each year they spend in jail. But the procedure was also prevalent in the Philippines, while Chinese traders used to go a little further: they'd insert a rattle in their penis to give any sexual encounter the festive soundtrack it deserves.

Through some friends, I get in touch with Manuel, who has a pearl in his penis. Because at this point I had already returned to Spain, we text through Telegram, one of the few chat apps that work in Cuba. Manuel is 35, has four children from three different women, and makes a living buying and selling imported foods from Miami. He first heard about the pearl when he was still a child, but after entering in the military service, he finally encountered some. "When we were showering or getting dressed, I noticed that some guys' dicks had round lumps on them," says Manuel, "I asked them about it, and they explained. A couple of weeks later I had the procedure myself. There was one guy in the barracks who used to always do it to everyone who wanted it, and he did mine too. But I made the pearl myself."

He followed his friend's advice, stole a domino game piece, broke it into pieces, chose the best bit and started polishing it until it was round and the proper size. "It should be thoroughly polished, which means that at the end of the process, you have to keep the pearl in your mouth all day long and suck on it like it's a piece of candy, have it roll around your teeth until it's a smooth little ball. I even trained with the pearl in my mouth. When I was ready, I went to the guy who would do the procedure. I had to lay my penis on a flat surface, and he tore a piece of my skin off with the sharpened lower part of a toothbrush. That's where he made the cut. The pain was terrible, but I knew it would be worth it, because all the jevitas go mad over it. You get a bandage on your dick, so you can't wash yourself or masturbate for a few days."

I asked him whether he was scared he'd get infections or lose his virility, but he said that the pain and the risks are all worth it. "The pearl stimulates the clitoris about 20 times more than if you have sex without it. When I was in the military, people used to tell the story about a guy who fucked a slightly delicate jevita, and she actually had a heart attack. She almost literally burst with pleasure. If you want to seduce a viejita, you just need your pearl, and you have her. It is the best."

The only bursting I can truly see happening is penises bursting with chancres and gangrene, but Manuel is adamant. The next message I get on Telegram reads: "If I was in Europe, you'd try the pearl, girl."

The Saint Sabina church and other area churches offered a reward at the site where Tyshawn Lee, 9, was fatally shot in Chicago's Gresham neighborhood in November. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)

Chicago police have arrested a suspected triggerman in the November execution-style slaying of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee, a tragedy that made national headlines in a city known for horrific gun violence.

Dwight Boone-Doty, who is 22, was charged with first-degree murder for allegedly luring the boy from a playground into an alley, where his body was found riddled with bullets, as the Associated Press reports. Another man, 27-year-old Corey Morgan, was also charged with murder in connection with the killing last fall.

Brutal violence is all too common in Chicago, which has already seen more than 100 murders in 2016. But even in a coarsened local media environment, the grisly killing was seen as uniquely heinous, its victim a mere fourth-grade student. What's more, the incident has authorities worried gang members are now retaliating on one another's families.

Such targets were previously considered off-limits.

Unnamed law enforcement sources told the Chicago Tribune that the tragedy stemmed from a rivalry between two gangs, the Gangster Disciples and the Black P Stones. Back in November, police suspected Lee's murder had to do with them calling in a man named Tracey Morgan for questioning. After talking to the cops, Morgan was killed and his mother was wounded, according to USA Today. Although the precise series of events is still being pieced together, it's believed Lee's father, Pierre Stokes, was in the Gangster Disciples' Killa Ward faction, and that the deaths of two other reputed members (and a number of related shootings) led to his son being killed.

Last fall, Tracey Morgan's brother Corey was questioned and let go before being arrested on an unrelated gun charge. While in jail, evidence suggested he was involved in the Lee shooting, and he was formally accused of sitting in the getaway car. Police said they had more suspects at the time and were actively searching for a man named Kevin Edwards. But Doty, who is suspected of actually pulling the trigger and was also arrested in November on an unrelated charge, was formally fingered Monday. (He's also charged with attempted murder and aggravated battery over the death of 19-year-old Brianna Jenkins in October.)

A basketball was apparently found near Lee's body after his death, and his grandmother said the child loved the game, his tablet, fried chicken, and macaroni and cheese. Garry McCarthy, then the Chicago police superintendent,called the act an "assassination" and "barbarism," as well as "probably the most abhorrent, cowardly, unfathomable crime that I've witnessed in 35 years of policing." (McCarthy was later forced to resign after a video was released showing one of his officers shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014.)

Lee's father, Pierre Stokes, refused to help police investigate. However, he told the Tribune he doesn't understand why his son was targeted because he is "not hard to find."

The shooting death and its aftermath marked a new low for the city that has taken on the controversial nickname ChiRaq. As of November, cable giant Comcast was reportedly canceling service calls to the city's South Side because it was too dangerous to go there. Lee also did not go trick-or-treating this past Halloween because, his father said, it was too risky.

It remains to be seen if Chicago police come up with a fresh strategy to combat what could be a monstrous shift in local gang tactics. Until then, regular citizens are left grappling with the grim reality of life in their city.

"I walked around the front and looked at him. His eyes were open. He had a gunshot to the head. I knew he was gone," the man who found Lee's body told the Sun-Times. "Who could shoot a child down like that—like he was garbage?"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Spacey giving you them log-the-fuck-off eyes

You have met them, the new type of person that has emerged in the last couple of years through the cracks of your classic popular tribes—not quite a hipster, not quite punk or cutester, not an earnest pothead or fuckboy, but something else, something other—The Man Whose Entire Personality Is Built Around Really Liking Breaking Bad.

There he is, inexplicably turning up to your house party at the exact start time you stated on Facebook, in a Los Pollos Hermanos T-shirt and a porkpie hat. He insists on knocking on doors when there's a perfectly functional doorbell right there. He always has some blue candy meth in his pocket at all times. "It's actually really good," he's saying. "Breaking Bad. The show. The show I like. The one I was just talking about. The show. It's like... it's about everything, you know?" Does he have a theory about what Jesse did after the finale? No, worse—he has 6,000 words of fanfiction about it. "Heh, did you see SE02E03?" he asks. "Crazy ep. Crazy." What is his opinion of the episode "Fly"? "It is the best hour of television ever made." Later, when you're trying to have fun, you have to quietly escort him off the premises after he uses your pube Gilette to shave his head and tries to throw a pizza onto the roof.

Well, good news: That man is hideously depressed, and so are we all, because binge-watching TV shows is trouncing our mental health. That's according to a new University of Toledo study, anyway, which found that, of 408 participants, 35 percent qualified as binge-watchers, and those binge-watchers reported higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than their non-binge-watching counterparts. The study found 77 percent of participants watched TV for two hours or more without a break on an average day, with anyone doing more than that—four consecutive episodes of House of Cards, a whole thing of Orange is the New Black, Brooklyn Nine-Nine on a loop until Netflix does its little 'you OK hun?' pop-up—classified as binge-watching. So, all of us, basically. Everyone reading this has binged-watched. Everyone who has ever lived, born from about 1985 onwards, is a binge-watch doer. Everyone.

Is it a surprise that binge-watching makes you feel bad? Nope. If you haven't watched so many consecutive episodes of Making a Murderer while lying under a big quilt that you actually started to feel sleepy and heavy in that sick sort of hungover way, then you haven't actually lived. Yes, I said it—the only way to truly live is to do something so fundamentally lazy that your body starts to actively feel unwell. That—not success, not love, not family, not children, not a legacy, not money, not drugs—is the true meaning of living.

"'Binge-watching' is a growing public health concern that needs to be addressed," said the scientists who headed up the study. But so can just watching TV in general. A long-term American Journal of Epidemiology study in 2011 found that watching TV for more than three hours a day put women at 13 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with depression. So can winter weather, or summer weather, or smoking, or sleeping too much, or not sleeping enough. So can, according to about a billion studies from 2010 onwards, too much Facebook. If you get through life without getting scientifically depressed by it, you are some sort of superhuman who should donate his brain to medical research. Anyway, House of Cards came out this weekend, so go easy on it—two episodes a day, three maximum. Try not to knock on tables too much because you are not, we have been through this, Frank Underwood. And don't post any spoilers online. Namaste.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

One of the reasons that the all-white Oscars this year stung so much is that the awards ceremony has gone out of its way to laud critically acclaimed slave narratives. Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave both picked up Oscars in the past couple of years; Sundance darling Birth of a Nation currently seems likely to be obsessed over during the next awards season. What's troubling isn't that slave-based stories are getting attention, but that other African-American narratives aren't. Surely our tales are worthy when they're not attached to systemic victimization.

That said,Underground, a new WGN show, isn't so much a slave story, but a thriller with slavery as the setting. Series creator Misha Green has an explanatory motto: "It's not about the occupation, it's about the revolution." Separating the two could be a tough ask. The occupation here is an emotionally wrought piece of history, and the revolution draws fictional thrills from factual pain.

The brainchild of Heroes co-writers Green and Joe Pokaski, Underground tells the story of a group of slaves who must make a 600-mile trek through dangerous terrain to escape from a Georgia plantation. The revolution is sparked by Noah (Straight Outta Compton's Aldis Hodge), who discovers a "map" to freedom after a failed escape attempt. It adds up to a standard point-A-to-point-B adventure story that's buttressed by its setting.

Underground centers itself on action thrills rather than dramatic heft. But so far, it's not clear what the action is going to add up to. Four episodes in and nearly halfway into the season, we haven't taken the crowded cast out of the plantation. One slave, recruited for his physical strength, loses a child, attacks a slave trader, and gets imprisoned in a box for that assault. Rosalee, a shy house slave played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell, is lashed for defending a child. Those incidents, while brutal, still feel like they're low-stakes, as if they're shockers in and of themselves instead of in service of a larger plot.

The cast of 'Underground.' Photo courtesy of WGN America

Thankfully, even when the show seems to be spinning its wheels, the characters remain well-rounded and sharply written and acted. You see that in an early discussion about the escape and with Amirah Vann's Ernestine, the head house slave, who might be the most absorbing character on the show. A mother more concerned with preservation than justice, Ermestine's moral ambiguities feel convincingly human; the scene where she imagines far worse possibilities—including being put in a breeding farm where she's "forced to have a dozen babies I'll never get to hold"—in a revealing conversation is an early standout.

"We wanted to make sure that each of our enslaved people had agency," Green told me over the phone. "That they were characters who laughed and loved and cried and fought."

An overwrought slave narrative runs the risk of being limited to educational catharsis, which is essential, but not at the expense of seeing brutalized bodies without empathizing on a human level. That's a problem when there's a predominantly white America (and Academy voting membership) that attaches blackness only to pain. Slave narratives deserve to be told, but sometimes it's about the eyes that are watching them.

"Do we want every story to come out to be about slavery?" asked Tia C. M. Tyree, a professor at Howard University's department of strategic, legal, and management communications. "No—we are a dynamic people with a spectrum of stories and experiences to tell. But we cannot shy away from telling what was the foundational story of our existence here in America."

Underground's flaws don't come from lack of effort. The first season was shot at LSU's Rural Life Museum, a memorial of 18th- and 19th-century Louisiana, where scenes from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and the upcoming Roots reboot were shot. David Floyd, the museum's director and stalwart of its academic reputation, said that "99 percent" of Underground is based on historical fact, including the costumes and replicated artifacts.

The pieces are there. It's a matter of what the show does with them once it's finally off the plantation.

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

Underground premieres Wednesday at March 9 at 9 PM on WGN America.

Groucho Marx. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Here's what we know about the forthcoming Groucho Marx biopic: First, it will be based on the 1996 book Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House, written by Marx's former personal assistant, Steve Stoliar. Stoliar worked for Marx during the last few years of the comedian's life and witnessed all the weird and well-documented drama that went down between Marx and his controlling (and much, much younger) girlfriend Erin Fleming. Second, the screenplay is being written by Oren Moverman, who co-wrote the script for the recent Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy. And third, the film will be directed by heavy metal veteran and horror auteur Rob Zombie.

It's this last bit that has proven controversial. Zombie—best known for his multiplatinum musical career and horror flicks like House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, and two Halloween remakes—isn't exactly the obvious choice to direct a dark drama about the final years of Hollywood's most fabled comedian. In fact, when Zombie was announced as director, the internet threw such a hissy fit that Stoliar felt compelled to write a piece for The Hollywood Reporter defending Zombie as the right man for the job. But other than a widely distributed quote describing the film as "Groucho's Sunset Boulevard," Zombie has remained silent on his involvement.

That is, until now. Zombie recently spoke exclusively to VICE about his love for the Marx Brothers, how people underestimate him, and the similarities between heavy metal and horror.

Rob Zombie. Photo by Piggy D

VICE: When were you first exposed to Groucho Marx?
Rob Zombie: I was a big Marx Brothers fan when I was a little kid because their movies were always on TV. A Night at the Opera, in particular, was on a lot. So I discovered the Marx Brothers movies around the same time I discovered any movie, really. Also around that time, You Bet Your Life, Groucho's game show, was on local TV all the time. I was hooked on that. Groucho was still alive, so you'd see him on The Dick Cavett Show or The Merv Griffin Show. So I was always a fan.

What do you think it was that drew you to his style of humor?
The Marx Brothers were pretty outrageous, especially for the time. They're almost like surrealists—especially Harpo. But I always loved Groucho's double entendres and quick quips, where it seemed like he was on script but ad-libbing at the same time. They were just so bizarre. But for a kid growing up at that time, certain figures were so legendary—Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, James Dean. Hollywood figures like that were so big that they were everywhere. I remember having a Groucho Marx T-shirt as a kid, I think before I even knew who he was. There was a big Groucho resurgence in the early 70s, I think, because he became hip with the college crowd again. I was probably in the second grade, but it was still prevalent.

You got involved with this film because you'd enjoyed Steve Stoliar's book, Raised Eyebrows. When did you first read it?
I remember buying it in hardcover maybe five or seven years ago. I've read tons of books on the Marx Brothers, but what stood out about Raised Eyebrows was that it was the first one that was just about a certain period of time, and it was written from the point of view of the person who lived it. It wasn't an overall biography that covered his whole life—a lot of those books might have the facts wrong because at first she would seem nice; then she would seem crazy. One day she'd seem like the only thing keeping Groucho alive, and the next day she'd be abusing him. As time went on, Steve realized that she was drugging Groucho and trying to manipulate him for her own showbiz career and kept him separate from his family and children. The story just gets darker and darker.

She's a really complex character. All three of them are. Everybody has to be amazing because all the roles are pretty demanding. In fact, that's one of the problems I had with the first pass of the script: Steve had underplayed his character, I think naturally because it was him. But I said, "Steve, the whole audience is seeing this through your character. You're the super-fan who's 19 and now living in the house with the legend. You gotta stop minimizing your role."

This movie will be judged in way that your horror movies have not been, because it's based both on true events and on a book. Is that on your mind as you're putting the film together?
No, not really. I think it's kind of exciting because in the horror genre, nothing is seen as what it is. It's written off. Same with hard rock: It doesn't matter how skillfully something is made or how much work goes into it, or how incredible it is, it's just, "Oh, it's bad. Who cares?" It's like what used to drive me crazy with the Grammys: The hard rock or heavy metal award would be presented off-screen—even if it sold like 5 million copies—and then something like best spoken word would be presented on-screen, even if it only sold like 600 copies. It's always like that. Then 30 years after the fact, someone does a retrospective on it at the museum of modern art. These things are never appreciated in their time.

All photos courtesy of ESL

It's easy to look at eSports as another male-dominated section of the gaming industry, and by extension the tech sector. And it's true that the biggest winners of the most spectacular tournaments are typically young males. But there are signs that change is happening.

Nothing about competitive gaming is geared towards it being a discipline where men have a natural advantage—if you have fingers and thumbs, a great relationship with your teammates, the commitment to get ahead in high-pressure environments, and that small quality of skill at the game in question, there's no reason why anyone, of any gender, can't be a contender. At the recent Intel Extreme Masters event in Katowice, all-women Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams battled for a not-inconsiderable prize pot of $30,000, with the mixed-nationalities WRTP (We Run This Place) defeating CLG Red (Counter Logic Gaming) to take first place.

It sounds like a lot, but WRTP's prize money's not up there with what the best all-male teams are winning. For example, the CS:GO champions at IEM Katowice, Fnatic, pocketed over $100,000. But it's clear progress, and provides hope that gender equality in representation and reward in eSports can be achieved before long.

One area of eSports where there certainly is a high-profile woman doing her thing is in commentary, or shoutcasting. Lauren "Pansy" Scott is a 25-year-old Brit living abroad in Cologne, Germany, where she's a regular on ESL coverage of World of Tanks, Battlefield 4, and CS:GO. She's been fascinated by competitive first-person shooters since 2003's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Playing the Splash Damage-made game led to her attending events in Enschede, Netherlands, though those gatherings were so very far from the massive eSports tournaments we see today.

"Trying to convince my mum that it was a good idea to send 15-year-old me to Holland to play video games with a group of guys I met online was a tough one," Scott tells me, on a break from her incredibly busy schedule. "But I made it there, and it got me hooked. But these weren't the kind of events we see today, with the whole stadium style and huge audience, massive prize pools and so on—this was far more turn up and maybe have a pint or two as your prize in the end. I was attending as a player, and I eventually went over to play Call of Duty 4 Promod, where I joined a 'professional' team and ended up picking up some decent results, almost making a name for myself."

Scott's future wasn't to be in play itself, though, and she very naturally moved from active participation to animated observation. "Back then, there really was no money to support gaming as a living, and it was creating a huge rift between me and my family. I ended up moving out of my mum's, then my dad's, before my nan took me in. I had to get a job to support myself, as my family really didn't see gaming as being viable, but antisocial working hours caused more than a few problems. So, I eventually moved into shoutcasting for Call of Duty 4—I already had a bit of a reputation for playing the game, and casting was a lot less draining on my time."

"Back then, Twitch was in its early days, so you'd have maybe 500 people tuning into a game. But years later, I received an offer from ESL to come on board as a multi-game caster, full time. I'd previously covered a few events for them as a freelancer, and I didn't totally fuck it up, so they wanted to give me a chance. What with my family issues at the time, I jumped on."

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's documentary on the competitive gaming world of eSports

Audience figures for eSports have rocketed. IEM 2015 attracted over a million online viewers concurrently, setting new Twitch records in the process. A year earlier, the Dota 2 International tournament registered over 20 million total viewers, while the League of Legends season finals achieved 32 million in late 2013. That's some way from a few hundred logging on to listen to Scott calling the various plays of a CS:GO encounter.

"Seeing the eSports scene get to this size, it's everything to me. At the time, to walk away from my family, when we weren't on the best terms, was terrifying. So now it's good to be able to tell them that I'm doing great out here, and that all those years of me being a pain in the ass and being kicked out of the house were for something. I'm utterly proud of what we've achieved, now people like me are commentating to hundreds of thousands of people. I'm always a little nervous, because I don't want to fail at this point, having given up so much for it—but it's all worth it when you do events like the CS:GO coverage at ESL One Cologne, in a stadium, and people are rapturous for a game that I've loved for years."

"Outside of the live events, the huge stadiums, we don't really see the scale of the online audience that's watching. But I guess that's a blessing sometimes, as if you really thought about how many people were listening to you, you would end up utterly bricking it."

Just like commentators in any form of sport, keeping abreast of game developments and constantly adding to her many layers of research and experience keeps Scott at the top of her profession.

"I'm a prep-heavy caster," she says, "and I always have been. I like to be able to depend on my notes, in case my brain just goes to mush. So, for any given event I'll create a spreadsheet that works on several functions, providing me with information that will help me be ready for a delay, or a fill that I might need to deal with. I'll have some simple information on there—the name of the event, the teams, the prize money, and the structure of the games. But I'll have more in-depth stuff there, too, regarding recent performances, head-to-head results, players to note, and map-specific results. Then there's my own hand-written notes, which are more about what I've recently observed within specific teams. I'll know about impact players, and what makes them come away with the best results. At the biggest events, I'll look for over-arching storylines that we can discuss, and see how they play out over the course of the tournament."

But even then, Scott's not finished. "After all the written prep, I'll try to practice casting the specific teams that we have coming up, so I can put my prep into action and see how it flows by reviewing myself afterwards, by listening back to myself. Now, this is just what I do—I'm not sure if other casters go into such detail in CS:GO. Most of them are more than comfortable to do it off the back of just what they've recently seen."

This level of commitment has made Scott known to an audience of millions. I wonder what it's like for her nowadays, when she gets on with socializing, with just being a woman in her mid-20s, knowing that she could well be recognized on any given evening out.

"I never really let my personal life and my work combine that much, but it's getting harder to separate the two. For example, on New Year's Eve I was out in Harrow on the Hill, which is as delightful as it sounds, doing the usual rounds of the old student pubs we used to frequent before I moved to Cologne. In one bar, the tender said to me: 'Are you one of those commentators?' My friends found it wonderfully impressive, but it's also hilarious. It's still a little strange for me, to be recognized, as I can be a bit of an idiot on a night out, as most of us can be. I can forget that I have to keep tabs on what I'm doing, as I'm not just a random girl with a gin and tonic, now."

I get the impression that breaks from her career are good for Scott, despite the risk of being spotted and hassled for an autograph or photo. She tells me that casting is "draining on your personal life, and your time outside of gaming," and that 2016 has "already been insane with traveling and work, so I'm excited about the prospect of a break." But what's even clearer from our exchanges is that she's completely in love with what she does, with her living, and how she's part of a culture that continues to grow fantastically. "I constantly want to improve. I think the moment I'm 'content' with my commentating, that's the moment I'm out of it. When it comes to my craft, I want to do the best I can."

Despite the evolution of eSports, its position now as a gaming sector that myriad multinational companies want to get involved in, and media outlets the world over have begun to take very seriously indeed, Scott's sure that it has a way to go before being appreciated in the same way as "traditional" sports.

New on VICE Sports: What I Learned Taking Up Soccer in My Twenties

"I don't think we will ever get the global access of traditional sports, or at least for a long time yet. You have to think of it in this way: most people during school would at least play some form of sport, right, so having to suffer through those horrid attempts at playing netball or rounders, if you were truly unlucky, it means that down the line you may accidentally find yourself watching one of these sports, with understanding already in mind. The generation that we have viewing the highest echelons of gaming already has that understanding, from their own personal gaming experience, and maybe in the years ahead that'll grow, and we will find a greater viewer base coming in."

"I do, however, believe we could do more work from the production side of things. I was watching the ESL ESEA Pro League Invitational with my aunt, who has absolutely no understanding of eSports, while we were out in Dubai. She started to get the hang of it pretty quickly once she noticed the players and how player cams actually showed who was on the screen at the right time. This made it much easier to understand that these are real people doing real things, and get a concept of the whole picture.

"That just a small factor, though. At the end of the day, our viewers are already growing naturally, but I think there are small things we can put into place that could certainly help maybe the 'older' generations have a chance of finding eSports accessible."

Anyone wanting to sample eSports for a first time, with Scott's shoutcasting assisting their education, can tune into the CS:GO Pro League finals in London on May 12-15. More information at the official ESL website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Look at HTML FLOWERS's Instagram.

To celebrate International Women's Day, here is a story from Helen Oyeyemi's story collection What Is Not Your Is Not Yours, out today from Riverhead Books. "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society" concerns two societies at Cambridge that don't get along. The Bettencourts, men who made a list of the school's top "homely wenches," and the Homely Wenches, a group that was founded by the women on the list, after one found her name on it. Dayang is a second-year English major from Malaysia who wants to join the group, but is struggling to answer one of the two questions on the application: What is a homely wench?

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo by Manchul Kim/courtesy of Riverhead Books

A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society

From: Willa Reid
To: Dayang Sharif
Date: November 12th^, 2012, 18:25
Subject: JOIN US

Dear Dayang,

Amongst Cambridge University's many clubs, unions, academic forums, interest groups, activist cells, and societies, there's a sisterhood that emerged in direct opposition to a brotherhood. What this sisterhood lacks in numbers it more than makes up for in lionheartedness : The Homely Wench Society. The Homely Wenches can't be discussed without first noting that it was the Bettencourt society that necessitated the existence of precisely this type of organized and occasionally belligerent female presence at the University.

The Bettencourt Society has existed since 1875. The Bettencourters are also known as "the Franciscans" because a man gets elected to this society on the basis of his having sufficient charisma to tame both bird and beast. Just like Francis of Assisi. Each year at the end of Lent term the Society hosts a dinner at its headquarters, a pocket-sized palace off Magdalene Street that was left to the University by Hugh Bettencourt with the stipulation that it be used solely for Bettencourt Society activities. If you've heard of the Bettencourters you may already known the following facts: No woman enters this building unless a member of the Bettencourt Society has invited her, and no Bettencourt Society member invites a woman into the building unless it's for this annual dinner of theirs. And getting invited to the dinner is dependent on your being considered exceptionally attractive.

The Homely Wench Society has only existed since 1949. The women who were its first members had heard about the Bettencourt Society and weren't that impressed with what they heard about the foundational principles of these so-called Franciscans. As for their annual dinner... hmm, strangely insecure of intelligent people to spend time patting each other on the backs for having social skills and getting pretty girls to have dinner with them. But people may spend their time as they please. No, the first Homely Wench Society members didn't have a problem with the Bettencourt Society until Giles Rutherford (Bettencourt Society President 1949, PhD Candidate in the Classics Faculty) was writing a poem and got stuck. What he needed, he said, was to lay eyes on a girl whose very name conjured up ugliness in a manner identical to the effect produced by invoking the name of Helen of Troy. Luckily for Gile's Rutherford's poem, the first wave of female Cantabs working towards full degree certification were on hand to be ogled at. Rutherford sent his Bettencourt Society brethren out into the university with this task: "Find me the homeliest wench in the university, my brothers. Search high and low, do not rest until you've sketched her face and form and brought it to me. Comb Girton in particular; something tells me you'll find her there." The Bettencourters looked into every corner of Newnham and Girton and found many legends in the making. They compiled a list of Cambridge's homeliest wenches, a list which later fell into the hands of one of the women who had been invited to the Bettencourt's annual dinner. This lady stole the list and sought out other women who'd accepted invitations to this dinner. Having gathered a number of them together she showed the list of homely wenches around and asked: "Is this kind of list all right with us?"

"No it jolly well isn't," the others replied. "This is Cambridge, for goodness sake—if a person can't come here to think without these kinds of annoyances then where in this world can a person go???"

They hesitated to involve the women whose names they'd seen on the list. Some of the Bettencourt dinner invitees were friends with the homely wenches, and didn't want to cause any upset. Who wants to see their name on such a list? But in the end they decided it was the only way to gather forces that would hold. Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end. Moira Johnstone, the first of the homely wenches to be informed of her place on the list had to suspend a project she'd been working on in her spare time—the building of a bomb. She'd been looking for an answer to a question she had regarding the effects of a particular type of explosion, but the temptation to test her model on a bunch of fatheads was too strong, so she stuck to books and hockey for a couple of days. The others had similar responses, but soon settled on a simple but effective riposte. As they worked through this riposte the Bettencourt dinner invitees and the homeliest wenches discovered that they liked each other's company and were interested in each other's work; they thereby declared themselves a society and gained the support of new members who hadn't been featured on either list. Nonetheless the members of this new society dubbed themselves Homely Wenches one and all.

The 1949 Bettencourt Society Dinner began pleasantly; lots of champagne and gallantry, flirtation, and the fluent discussion of ideas. They were served at table by waiters hired for the evening, and whenever a Bettencourt disagreed with one of the guests he made sure he mitigated his disagreement with a compliment on his opponent's dress, thereby reminding her what the true spirit of the evening was. Fun! At least it was for the boys, until a great crashing sound came from the next room as the waiters were preparing to bring in the first course. Rutherford called out to the head waiter for the evening; the head waiter replied that 'something a bit odd' had happened, but that service would be up and running again within a matter of moments. Waiting five minutes for course was no great hardship—more compliments, more champagne—but when the head waiter was asked to explain the delay he asked jocularly: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

The lights in the kitchen had been switched off and then switched on again as the food was being plated, and then the waiters had heard footsteps in the next room, and then the portrait of Sir Hugh Bettencourt in that very same room had fallen off the wall. The Bettencourt boys laughed at this, but their guests turned pale and went off their food a bit. Who could say what might have happened to it when the lights had gone out? The Bettencourt boys laughed even more. Even the cleverest woman can be silly. When the same sequence of events occurred between the first and second course—footsteps and falling objects, this time all along the floor above the dining room—the Bettencourters stopped laughing and looked for weapons that would assist them in apprehending intruders, spectral or otherwise. Their guests were one step ahead of them and already had a firm hold on every object that could conceivably be used to stab or whack someone, including cutlery. "Do you want us to go and have a look?" asked Lizzie Holmes, first-ever Secretary of the Homely Wench society.

"No no, you stay there, we'll take care of this," Bettencourt President Rutherford said, adding a meaningful "Won't we?" to his patently reluctant brethren.

"Yes, yes of course..." the Bettencourters had to go forth unarmed, since the frightened women refused to release even one set of ice tongs. Up the stairs they trooped, with no light to guide them ("We'll just wait in the kitchen," the waiters said) and they searched each room on the first floor and found no one there. When they filed back into the dining room, however, it was full of uninvited women, each of whom had taken seats emptied by the Bettencourters and were tucking into the platefuls of food the Bettencourters had temporarily abandoned. "Sit down, sit down, join us," cried Moira Johnstone, number-one Homeliest Wench. The Bettencourters looked to Rutherford to see how they should proceed; he decided the only sporting response was a good natured one, so he and his brethren had another table brought into the room, had the waiters set places at it and sat there and ate alongside all the Wenches. Their plan had been just as you must've guessed by now: Earlier that evening the last of the 'most attractive' women to enter Bettencourt headquarters had lingered at the door and let the first of the 'homeliest wenches' into the building.

As far as we know, the Bettencourt Society never compiled another list of homely wenches. The Homely Wenches Society flourished for a time, and then dwindled as ensuing generations of female Cantabs saw little need to to label themselves or to oppose the Bettencourters (whose numbers remain steady.) The activities of the Homely Wench Society mainly come under the banner of 'Laughs, Snacks and Cotching' but in response to advice from Homely Wenches who've since graduated, the Society produces a termly journal. Mostly for the purpose of posterity; we have no real readership other than ourselves.

So if you want to join our questions to you are: Who are the homely wenches of today? What makes you think you're one of us?

Your answer is a key that will unlock worlds (yours, ours) so please make it as full and as bigarurre as it can be.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Willa Reid (third-year History of Art, Caius)
Ed Niang (second-year NatSci, Clare)
Theo Ackner (second-year History, Emma)
Hilde Karlsen (third-year HSPS, Girton)
Grainne Molloy, (second-year Law, Peterhouse)
Flordeliza Castillo (first-year CompSci, Trinity)
and
Marie Adoula (third-year MML, King's)

This is Grainne's self-perception. If you can overlook her narcissism you may come to care for her one day. —M.A.
You sayin you care for me, Marie? —G.M.

At least that's what Grainne Molloy imagines Rutherford said. This is not verifiable! —T.A.
Bah, history students. —G.M.

Again with the unverifiable exchanges, Grainne?? —T.A.
Leave me alone, Theo... —G.M.

Our predecessors are classy ladies. —T.A.

Every member of the modern day Homely Wenches who isn't from South London—i.e., everybody except Ed Niang—had to have the verb 'cotch' explained to them, but once we understood we found it apt. —T.A.

It took Dayang Sharif (second-year Eng. Lit, Queen's) days to think up an answer that was full and bigarurre. As soon as she read the e-mail she wanted in—actually as soon as she'd met Willa and Hilde on the train she'd wanted in—but as with all groups the membership hurdle wasn't so much to do with convincing the Wenches that she was one of them as it was to do with convincing herself. She looked the word bigarurre up and found that it meant both "a medley of sundry colors running together" and "a discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another." "Medley of sundry colors running together" made her think of her Director of Studies, Professor Begum saying: "I saw you with your Suffolk posse, Dayang. A colorful gang!" She'd looked at him to check what he meant by "colorful" and deciphered from his grin that other definitions included "delightful" and "bloody well made my day."

Day composed an answer that centered on the evening she'd met Hilde and Willa. She'd got on at the Kings Cross with Pepper, Luca, and Thalia, all four of them covered in sweat and glitter, Day at princess level surrounded by three majestic beings—they'd had their Friday night out in London town and now they were ready to get back to Day's room and crash. Hilde and Willa sat opposite them sharing a red velvet cupcake. Day remembered trying not to fret about two whole girls afraid to eat a whole cupcake each. She didn't know them or their fears. She noticed Willa's long chestnut hair and Hilde's eyes, which were like big blue almonds. She'd never seen them before but nodded at them, and they nodded back and continued their conversation, which seemed to be a comparison between medieval and modern logistics of kidnapping. Pepper and Luca were addressing Thalia's complaints about art school, and Day was about to throw in her own tuppence worth when five boys who looked about the same age as them came swaying through the carriage singing rugby songs. Actually Day didn't know anything about rugby so they might not have been rugby songs, but the men definitely had rugby player builds. They stared as they passed Day and her friends; Day felt a twanging in her stomach when they walked back a few paces and their song died away. She could see them thinking about starting something, or saying something. If these boys said something Pepper would fight, and so would Luca, and then what would Day and Thalia supposed to do—broker peace? Hardly. Day could punch... her parents had only been called into school for emergency meetings about her twice, and both times had been about the punching. Not necessarily the fact of her having punched someone, no, it was the style of it. Day punched hard, and when she did so she gave little to no warning. She punched veins. Aside from being disturbing to witness, the vein punching was extremely distressing for Day's target; the link between heart, lungs and brain fizzed and then seemed to snap, then the target's limbs twitched haphazardly as they tried to recover their notion of gravity. Every now and again Day's sister requested punching instruction from her, but this wasn't something Day could teach. She just knew how to do it, that was all. She thought it might be connected to anxiety and the need to be absolutely certain that it was shared. And she really didn't feel like punching anybody that night. She'd had a good time and just wanted to keep having one...

A couple of the rugby boys were black. They both caught Pepper's eye, and all three looked apologetic for staring. But that didn't mean there wasn't going to be a fight. So Day, T, Pepper, and Luca tensed up. Day saw something interesting: Chestnut Hair and Blue Almond Eyes were no longer eating cake and had tensed up too. Not the way you tense up when you're about to run away, but the way you tense up when you're not about to have any nonsense. Their postures had changed in a way that made them part of Day's circle—and actually, looking around, they weren't the only ones. Others scattered across the carriage had become alert too. "Jog on, lads," a barrel-chested man advised, and the boys seemed to reflect on numbers, then left and took their thoughts of starting something with them. When they'd gone Chestnut Hair leaned across the table and said, "I'm Willa." Blue Almond Eyes introduced herself as Hilde and said, apropos of nothing: "When we were little we had chicken pox together."

"Ah," Luca said, sagely. "So you two are close."

Willa rubbed her nose. "Oh, but we didn't do it on purpose..."

Willa was seriously posh. She tried to sound estuary but couldn't go all the way. At the station Hilde turned to them and asked "Are you students here?"

T, Pepper, and Luca talked over each other: As if! Yeah right... and all three pointed at Day: "There she is, Miss Establishment..."

"Please just live your hate-filled lives happily, guys," Day said.

Willa took Day's email address and said she'd be in touch. "We should all cotch sometime."

Cotch? Pepper thought that sounded sexual, Luca said: "Maybe something to do with horse riding? That one blatantly rides horses." Thalia just giggled.

The meeting on the train sort of answered the question of what made Day think she could be a Homely Wench, but it didn't answer the question of who a Homely Wench is. Second year was a year of conscientious study for Day; she couldn't have another exam result fiasco like last year (too much time spent visiting Pepper at Oxford) so she could only return to her questions of wenchness after she'd done as much work towards her degree as it was possible, all the reading and note taking and following up on references that she could do in a day. Queen's was in Day's blood, since it was her father's college too. In his day he'd flown in from Kuala Lumpur specifically to enroll, whereas she'd come in from Suffolk. Her college library was at its best late at night. At night the stained glass figures in the windows seemed to slumber, and the lamps on each desk gently rolled orange light along the floors until it formed one great globe that bounced along every twist and turn of the staircase to the upper levels. When she surveyed the entire scene it seemed to be one that the stained glass figures were dreaming. And she was there too, living what was dreamed. She stretched, sighed. Well, I'm a fanciful wench, but am I a homely one? Aisha was gunning for New Hall, their mother's college.

Day hadn't sighed quietly enough: A few desks away Hercules Demetriou (first-year Law) looked over at her and smiled. She looked away. She didn't think he was evil or anything, but he definitely disturbed her. The issue was all hers for fancying him even though he'd already been elected to the Bettencourt Society. The boy was was tall and well built and had wavy hair, excellent teeth and unshakeable equilibrium. Up close you saw smatterings of acne but that was no comfort. His skin tone lent him enough ethnic ambiguity for small children whose parents had a taste for vintage Disney to run up to him and ask: "Are you Aladdin?" He'd flash them a dazzling smile and answered: "Nah, I'm Hercules."

Hercules of Stockwell. So full of himself. This was not an attraction that Day could ever confess to anybody. Hercules talked to her, though. He'd say, 'See you in the bar, yeah?' as he and his friends walked past her and her friends. Then Mike or Dara or Jiro would turn to her and say things like, "So will you see him in the bar? Or his bed, for that matter?" Horrible. When Hercules Demetriou spoke to Day her heart beat loudly and her loins acted as if they didn't know what the rest of her knew about him. What was he after? Day didn't actually think she was unattractive: Her appearance was mostly passable, and sometimes even exceeded that. Two things that were not in her favor were her spectacles, which often led people (including herself) to incorrectly anticipate a sexy librarian effect. You know... the glasses come off, the hair tumbles down and there she is. Nope. She had unreasonably large feet, too. She'd never walk on moonbeams. Why would the perfectly proportioned Hercules Demetriou keep trying to befriend her? It made no sense. Unless the slimy Bettencourters were compiling another List after all.

The young hero was still looking over. She took her glasses off, cleaned them and then typed a couple of paragraphs.

Who is a homely wench? Is a girl who exhaustively screens every man her mother contemplates seeing a homely wench? Leaving these things to Aisha meant just letting it all go to hell. How about a girl who sometimes finds it easier to talk to her dad's boyfriend than she does to her dad—what manner of wench is she? Day's dad still fasted at Ramadan even though he didn't go to mosque anymore, and from time he flared up at signs of Day and Aisha's 'secular disrespect', which he was almost sure they were learning from their mum (They weren't. If anything they were learning it from Dad's boyfriend, Anton.) But apart from being less hung up on manners, Anton was less sensitive than Dad. Day had once mentioned being envious of her friend Zoe for having two mums—she'd been talking about the miracle of having two mums who were both so cool, but her dad had taken her words to mean that she didn't want all the family she had, and he'd looked so crestfallen that she'd spent ages explaining her original comment and making it sound like even more dismissive of him and Anton until he'd had to laugh.

A girl at the desk next to Hercules'—Lakmini, Day thought her name was—wrote him a note; must have been a hot note because he fanned himself with it. But Miss Dayang Sharif couldn't have cared less what the note said, no way.

Who are the Homely Wenches of today?

She wrote about her first boyfriend Michael, her first and only boyfriend to date. She'd been in love with him and they broke up but the love didn't. In fact the love got—not truer, just better. Their friend Maisie's parents were away on the same weekend as Eurovision so Maisie opened up her house to 'all my Eurovision bitches', which turned out to be not that many. Just Maisie, Day and Aisha, until Michael showed up, with two friends he'd never told Day about, Luca and T. A taxi pulled up outside of Maisie's house and Michael, Luca and T got out, the three of them were dressed in silk sheaths—real, heavy silk. Maisie rushed to the front door: "What? Who are they? Are the Supremes really about to come in right now? I must have saved a nation in a past life..."

It took a couple of hours to get around to talking to Thalia and Luca. She only had eyes for Michael. For the first time she was seeing that he had everything she coveted from pre-Technicolor Hollywood. Hip-swinging walk, lips that tell cruel lies and sweet truths with a single smile, eyelashes that touch outer space. If Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth had had a Caribbean love child, that child would be Michael just as he was that night. They hugged for a long time, and later they talked on the balcony outside. "Thank God for the internet," he said. "I wouldn't have found Luca and T without it. All sort of nutters out there, but mine found me..."

He settled on the name Pepper. Day remembered the rest of that night in stop-motion—whirling around the room holding hands with Luca, who held hands with Aisha, who held hands with Maisie, who held hands with Pepper, who held hands with her, dancing around in a circle with bags and coats stacked in the centre, cheering for the countries whose stage performances made the most effort or projected the most bizarre aura. Luca and T became friends too. "For life, yeah? Not just for Eurovision..."

Thalia didn't even like Eurovision. She said she'd come along to meet Day. "This one talks about you a lot," she said, gesturing towards Pepper.

Day's stepdad Anton, who had had trouble remembering Michael's name, hailed Pepper with joy, even as he teased Day about the times she'd said Michael was the one. Day just shrugged. Pepper wasn't always on the surface, but whether she was with Pepper as Pepper or Pepper as Michael, Day had found the one she'd always be young with, eating Cornettos on roller coasters, forever honing their ability to combine screams with ice cream.

So... who is a Homely Wench?

Day wrote about Luca, muscular and much pierced Luca, and how that first Eurovision they spent together his hair was the same shade of pastel mint as the dress he wore. He and T were a bit older, in their early 20s. By day he sold high fashion pieces: "Everyone wants to fly away from here but not everyone can make their own wings... so they buy them from me..." By night he was an unstoppable bon vivant, deciding what kind of buzz was right for that night and mixing the pharmaceutical cocktail that had the least tortuous hangover attached. He'd had nights so rough he could hardly believe he was still alive- "But this can't be the after life. Ugh, it can't be!" Luca laughs long and loud and his body shakes as he does so. He's better at forgetting than forgiving; he says this is the only thing about himself that scares him. Speaking of him Day's father says "So... vulnerable," at the same time as her stepdad says 'Brazen!' Neither is quite right. When Luca was younger he got kicked out of his parent's house for a while; they'd hoped it'd make him less brazen, but it didn't—he stayed with friends and got brasher, and when he came home it was like he took his family back into his heart rather than the other way around. Day knew Pepper and Luca were together. She'd also heard that Luca liked to pursue straight men. Thalia referred to this tendency as "Luca's danger sport." Pepper said Luca'd be fine. "He's got us."

Oh, and Thalia—Day had to talk about T. Thalia's aesthetic was the most civilian (Pepper had learnt the most from her YouTube makeup tutorials) and Thalia was her full-time name. She was reserved, refined, she lived with an older man none of her friends had met; the only reason her friends even knew about the older man was because of a week when T had been ecstatic because she'd sold five triptychs and received a really considered, insightful note about them from the buyer. But then she found out the buyer was her boyfriend, so she was furious for a couple of days, and then the fury mingled with elation again. Luca argued that the boyfriend was merely investing in T's work, which would no doubt make T famous one day (Whenever T heard this she said, "Care," to indicate that she didn't.') T painted scenes onto mirrors, dramatic televisual two shots from stories that had only ever been screened in Thalia's mind. Her mirror paintings left gaps where the facial features of the characters would normally be, so that your face could more easily become theirs. T's brushstrokes are thin, translucent, and mercurial in their placement; they swirl into one other. Her colors are white and silver. Around the images Thalia paints a few words from the script: an alphabet frame. Day's favorite was a voiceover:

The poison taster is feeling a bit ill. He's well paid but he hates his master so much that today, the day he finally tasted poison, he's eaten a lot and is managing to keep a normal expression on his face until his master has eaten at least as much as he has. Eat heartily, boss, don't stop now...

Who's a homely wench? Luca is, and Day is, and so are Pepper and T and Hilde and Willa and anyone who is not just content to accept an invitation but wants more people to join the party, more and more and more. Day can just hear Pepper and Luca climbing up onto a tabletop at such a party and screaming out (they'd have to scream through megaphones as you're envisioning a gathering that'd fill Rome's Coliseum many times over): Hello everyone, it's great to see you all, you homely beasts and wenches.

Send.

The Homely Wenches have no fixed headquarters, and all the members agree that this keep them humble, relying as they do on the soft furnishings and snack-based offerings of whichever woman is host to Wench meetings for the month. February was Day's month for hosting meetings, and this particular meeting had been called to discuss articles for the Lent term edition of The Wench. There were to be two interviews: one with a bank robber who'd turned down a place at Cambridge and half regretted it. Marie was covering that story; she had a feeling for bittersweet regret and mercenary women. The other interview was with Myrna Semyonova, author of a novel Sob Story, which she'd written to make her girlfriend laugh, consisting as it does of a long, whisky soaked celebration of all the mistakes two male poets (one young, one middle aged) had made and were making in their lives. The narrator of the novel was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski. Willa was covering that, and her reaction to Sob Story's being taken so seriously was the same as that of Semyonova's girlfriend: It made the joke twice as funny. Ed was working on a piece about female love interests in the early issues of her favorite comic books and how very odd it must be for them to operate within a story where you're capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. "Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can't get just can't see 'the real you', no?"

Day looked from face to face. Marie would get on with T; they both favored grave formality and never letting a single hair fall out of place, though Marie's Zaire French accent and her tendency to wear jackets over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves gave her attitude more impact than T's. The Society was too small to have a leader, but if they'd had one, Marie would've been it. Sometimes, when Marie and Willa spoke together in French, glancing around as they did so, Day felt that they were disparaging her mode of dress, but Ed had reassured her that that was just how people who could only speak English naturally responded to fluent French speakers. Ed, named after Edwina Currie, was much easier to get to know. You could chat to her about anything; she was upfront in a good way. If she didn't understand a reference you made she just said so and then asked to hear more about it. It was hard to picture her becoming friends with the likes of Marie and Willa without the aid of the Homely Wench Society. She was black like Marie and a Londoner like Willa, but, as she put it herself, "a different kind of black, and a different kind of London." Willa had never set foot on a council estate (she'd walked past a few and had been "petrified")—Ed thought Willa was joking about that, but she wasn't. Until very recently Ed had never seen a horse in real life, not even the ones at Buckingham Palace. Taking an actual trip to Buckingham Palace was something mini-Ed would have considered "a mission," if indeed it had ever occurred to her. Willa thought Ed was joking about that, but she wasn't. Day could see it all. Ed had a solid boyishness about her, and had once been asked to participate in an identity parade, one of whom had a mark on his face, a cut between nose and mouth. The boy with the mark had tried to persuade Ed to mark her face too, with a key—"A really cool key as well... it ended in a lion's head." The boy with the mark said he knew people who'd do favors for Ed for the rest of her life if she just cut her face. Ed reasoned that whatever this boy had done, his victim must have marked him so as to be able to know him again. Therefore Ed was better off out of it. Where she was from the hard nuts mostly communicated with their eyes, so she moved her jaw as if chewing gum, and as she did this she shook her head no. Her petitioner accepted this and moved on to the boy next to her. Marie thought Ed was joking about all that, but...

Theo and Hilde didn't think anybody was joking unless they were explicitly told so. Theodora Ackner, Nebraska's finest, was still disconcerted by Europe's ghosts. Hilde, Ed, and Grainne could no longer hear them, but the ghosts seemed to wake up again around Theo, since she actively listened for them. Lisbon, Paris and Vienna were tough places for her, beauties clotted with blood. Hilde refused to accompany Theo to Oslo. "About a quarter of my family lives there, Theodora. Let me know these things in my own way."

And then there was Grainne Molloy, who had lobbied to be recorded in the annals of the Homely Wench Society as "the irrepressible" Grainne Molloy, unsuccessfully, since, as Hilde pointed out, "Sometimes you are repressible, though." While Grainne did truly lose her temper several times a day, that frenetic energy of hers occasionally served to obscure another trait: the cool and calculated collection of incriminating anecdotes.

The newest Homely Wench was half in love with every single one of her fellow Wenches, but she wasn't sure what she, Dayang, brought to the mix. She'd been a member for just over three months and hadn't had an idea for an article or group activity yet. She snapped the group photos so she wouldn't have to see physical proof of her being odd man out. Maybe she could do something toward recruitment; a few of her friends from college and faculty had seemed interested when she mentioned the Wenches.

Flordeliza, the youngest Wench, their first-year, arrived late. As expected. "Afternoon, ladies!" She grabbed a handful of biscuits and flopped down onto Day's bed. She'd been growing out a side Mohawk since the summer, so her front hair was still much longer than it was at the back. Her clothes were crumpled and she'd clearly slept without removing her eyeliner; Day had barely noted this before Flor announced that she had a tale of shame to tell. But also a tale of possibility.

"Go," Theo commanded from the window seat; she'd arranged Day's curtains about her so that they resembled a voluminous toga.

"Empress, I hear and obey... but first of all, you're not allowed to judge me."

"We're all friends here," Marie said, sternly.

Flordeliza revealed that a member of the Bettencourt Society was into Yorkshire Filipinas. "Or maybe just into this?" She pointed at herself.

"Oh God," Grainne shouted. "Oh God, Flordeliza, what did you do?"

Day waited to hear about Flor and Hercules. She felt a bit sick but that was just obstructed emotion, a sensation the Dayang Sharifs of this world know all too well. Spring was definitely in the air, even as early as February. Everyone except Day was in some sort of romantic relationship—Marie with a townie who rode a motorbike, Willa with a curator at the Fitzwilliam, Theo with a guide who led tours of Dickensian London, Ed and Grainne with each other, and now Flordeliza with her Bettencourt boy. Day's only hope was that Hercules Demetriou would come out of this story sounding so greasy that Day's physical response to his proximity would be mercifully dulled forever.

(The other day she'd passed him and a few other boys she suspected were Bettencourters on King's Parade, apparently conducting a survey that involved soliciting the opinions of women. "More like ranking them," she muttered, and Hercules had smiled at her and said: "Sorry, what was that?"

"Nothing. Hello."

"Hi. Listen, do you want to—"

"Sorry, I can't. Bye!")

Flor wasn't talking about Hercules, but about a third-year at her college named Barney Chaskel, a boy she hadn't pegged for a Bettencourter because, "Well, he's sort of low-key and makes fun of his own obsession with conspiracy theories and... he's sweet."

"Sweet?!" came at her from every corner of the room. Day asked it loudest, more with curiosity than incredulity. Hilde said: "Flor, aren't you going too far?"

"Look... on the way over I actually thought about presenting all this as if I'd seduced him on purpose to get info, but the truth is I didn't know Chaskel was a Bettencourter until this morning! I said I had to run to a Wench meeting, and he was like... surely not the Homely Wenches? And I was like, yeah, the very same, and then he went 'How funny, I'm a Bettencourter...'"

"'How funny'...? This 'Barney Chaskel' thinks our decades of enmity are just a bit of fun...?" Theo wondered aloud.

"Flor," Marie said, in sepulchral tones. "So far this is the tale of our enemies evolving into ever more superficially pleasing forms. You mentioned that this was also a tale of possibility?"

"Flordeliza, if there's a twist introduce it now or there might be beats in store for you..." Ed added.

But Flor did have something good for them after all. She'd followed Barney Chaskel to Bettencourt Society headquarters and had seen him punch in the code that let him into the building. That was why she was late: She'd seen the sequence, but not its exact components. So she'd cased the joint, observed that the Bettencourters left through another door, and given herself three chances to repeat the code Barney had punched in.

"Babe," Willa said. "BABE. Third time lucky?"

Flor laughed and said: "Second." Grainne and Willa hooted and jumped on her, but Hilde, Ed and Theo were unmoved. "There's no need for us to enter Bettencourt premises," Hilde declared. Theo agreed: "The Wenches made the ultimate gesture years ago."

"No, come on, come on, we've got this so it'd basically be folly and sin not to use it!" Grainne said. But Ed backed up Hilde and Theo: "Yeah, it'd be nice to fuck with the Bettencourters' heads a bit more, but I'd rather we move on, concentrate on building ourselves up. We need more pieces for The Wench... weren't we just about to hear an idea from you, Day?"

"I think we should go in," Day said. Everybody went quiet, but her words were mainly for Marie, who hadn't expressed an opinion either way. "I think we should go in and do a book swap."

"A book swap?" Marie echoed.

"Yup. I'm betting the Bettencourters don't have many, or maybe even any, books by female authors on their bookshelves. And speaking collectively we don't have that many male authors on our own shelves –"

"Yes, but that's our desire to honor what's ours, Day," Hilde said.

"I know," said Day. "And I do. But I want to read everything. When it comes to books and who can put things in them and get things out of them, it's all ours. And all theirs too. So we go in, see what books they have, take a few and replace them with a few of ours."

"No muss no fuss," Theo said, grudgingly.

"I wanted to trash the place but I don't care what we do as long as we do something," Willa said. "I suppose that would've wrecked Flor's budding romance though."

Flor covered her face but didn't deny being keen on Barney Chaskel.

Marie spoke up: "I too do want us to do something. I have been waiting for a chance to do something to the Bettencourt Society, ever since a Bettencourter used me as a human shield on my very first Thursday at this university..." she stared out of Day's window and into the very moment of the incident. Her face was transfigured with wrath.

"Another guy was chasing him," Grainne whispered to Ed and Flor. "He said he never thought the other guy would hit a girl..."

"So I think we should do something with what you've brought us, Flor," Marie concluded. "All in favor of Dayang's suggestion, raise your hands." She raised her own hand. Day raised her hand too, as did Flor, Grainne, Willa and Theo. Theo said she was only coming along to make sure they did it right.

Day found Hercules Demetriou sitting at her usual desk in the library. Rather than talk to him she went to his usual desk, which was unoccupied, and set up her laptop there. He looked over at her three times, she looked over at him once. Just once, and he came over. Argh, was it that pitifully obvious?

He drew a chair up to her desk and leant on the corner of it. Everything about him was dark, delicious, fluid—that gaze especially. If she moved her arm just a little it'd touch his. There was an envelope in his hand.

"Listen, I heard you like John Waters," he said.

"I do," she said. "So?"

His sister Anthea ran a cinema in Stockwell... he described it as "pocket-sized." He made it sound like the kind of the place both Ed and Willa would frequent. So the Homely Wench Society wasn't the only way they could possibly have met and liked each other after all. Anthea had given Hercules two tickets for a screening of Female Trouble, and...

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Are you finding it hard to believe that a girl wouldn't want to go and see a film with someone as amazing as you?"

He drew back, but didn't retreat. Instead he subjected her to a deeper look. The first to break the gaze would lose, so she didn't blink. "I was just finding it hard to believe that a John Waters fan wouldn't want a ticket to Female Trouble," he said, then dropped his gaze, laughing a little. "Here. Take two." He put the envelope down in front of her and went back to his desk.

Then he came back: "Dayang, can I ask you something?"

Oh my God. "If you must."

"Why did you come here?"

"Here?"

"Here, to this university."

She thought of Professor Arjun Begum, one of the professors who'd interviewed her, and how he'd said he liked the connections he could see her making in her mind, and the way that she tried to tend them so that they thrived. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. Usually it was "Aren't you overthinking things, Day?" But a gardener growing thoughts—she liked that. Also in Freshers' Week Professor Begum had saved a dead end conversation for her. She'd been cornered by a Professor who clearly felt he had some stuff to say about Malaysia and seemed to have been waiting for the right pair of ears to hear it all. "Your people," this professor boomed, having asked about her hometown, summarily dismissed "Ipswich" as an answer and enquired into her genetic makeup. "Your people have a saying..." he waved a hand so that port swirled around in his glass, but Professor Begum stole his moment of gravitas by remarking that one of the things he found interesting about contemporary tribes was that more of them were hand selected—"Nowadays there are people who choose their people one by one, as they encounter them... I can't decide if that's braver or more timorous than simply going by gender or ethnicity or favorite bands..."

If Day had been less shy—if she'd been her sister, for instance—she'd have hugged Professor Begum right there and then. He was one reason for her being there, and for her wanting to keep making space for other people engaged in the long, long comedy and tragedy of choosing their people one by one.

Hercules tired of waiting for Day to answer him: "Didn't you want to see who else was here?" he asked. "I know that's part of the reason why I came. It's the reason why I go to most parties."

Parties? She couldn't stop herself from smiling. "OK... same."

"So," he said. "I'm here. You're here. You find me off-putting at the moment, but why don't you try treating me like a person? You might like me."

"Bettencourter," she said.

His eyebrows shot up and he said: "Ah." Not an enlightened 'ah'. If anything he was more puzzled.

"It's Lent term. Aren't you supposed to be looking for someone to bring to that dinner of yours?"

The penny dropped. "You're a Homely Wench, aren't you?"

"And proud."

He gathered up his things and left the library, shaking his head and muttering something she didn't catch. Day took the cinema tickets out the envelope and texted the date on them to Pepper:

Female Trouble in London yes or yes??

YESSSSSS

The Bettencourters were well read in various directions; that's what their bookshelves said about them, anyway. Plenty of stimulating looking books, less than ten percent of which were authored by women. The substitutions were made by torchlight, as nobody thought it was a good idea to switch on the house lights at 4 AM and risk some passing Bettencourter coming round to see if any of his brethren was up for another drink. (The keys to the rooms of the house were on a hook beside the light switch in the entrance hall, so the girls peeped into the Bettencourt Society drinks cabinet, too. It was more of a walk in closet than a drinks cabinet, a closet vertically stocked with hard liquor from floor to ceiling. There were even little ladders for more convenient perusal. Day had never seen anything like it.)

Flor, Day, Willa, Marie and Theo unloaded their rucksacks and filled them again with books from the Bettencourt shelves. Not having read any of the books she was taking, Day made her exchanges based on thoughts the titles or authors' names set in motion. She exchanged two Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Jean Stafford's short stories for John Cheever's, Marlen Haushofer's The Loft for Robert Walser's The Assistant, Dubravka Ugresic's Lend Me Your Character for Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarrelled and Other Stories , Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder for Capote's In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. She stopped keeping track: If she kept track she'd be there all night. But she left with a quality haul, and so did the others. The Wenches had their noses in books that were new to them for weeks. They waited for some challenge to be issued from Bettencourt headquarters, but none came forth. They didn't seem to have noticed that their library had been compromised. Maybe a drink swap would have been more effective.

Flor and Barney of the Bettencourters really seemed to be becoming ever more of an item; it was gross but the Wenches acted as if they didn't mind so as not to encourage a Romeo and Juliet complex. Besides, Theo summed up what all the Wenches were feeling about the Bettencourt book haul when she looked up from the pages of Kim Young Ha's Your Republic is Calling You and said resentfully: "They have good taste though."

Hercules Demetriou didn't show his face at the Female Trouble screening, not that she missed him when there was popcorn and Pepper and so much divine and diabolical mayhem onscreen, plus criminal beauty and Cookie Mueller. Just 'cause we're pretty everybody's jealous!

"Were you expecting to see someone?" Pepper asked her, as they walked out of the cinema. "You kept looking round."

She lied that she'd been watching the audience. It was a plausible lie because she was the kind of person who watched audiences.

Hercules was waiting on the staircase that led up to her room, his legs stretched all along the step, his feet jammed into two slots in the banister. He was reading one of the books Flor had left at Bettencourt headquarters: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. When he saw her he scrambled to his feet and hit his head on the stone ceiling. She felt his pain, so she patted his shoulder as he went by; he took her hand and followed her up the stairs until she came to a halt.

"What?"

"Is this yours?" he asked, holding up the book.

"No."

"But you've read it?"

"Yup."

"It's great, isn't it? It sort of rocks you... reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realise that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they're sorry because they've decided to smash you to pieces..."

"But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order..."

"And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work."

"It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?"

He was smiling at her again. He hadn't let go of her hand yet. It was nice until he invited her to the Bettencourt dinner. She hesitated for a surprising length of time (surprising to her, anyway) before she said: "Herc, I can't."

He wasn't daunted; she'd shortened his name, that had to mean something! "You're a Homely Wench. I'm not saying I get all that that entails, but I don't think the Bettencourters and the Wenches are that far apart in the way they see things anymore. Laughs, snacks and cotching, yeah? And we have a journal too: a journal read only by us. Can't we read each other's? I know you want me to pretend you don't look like anything much, but you're a beauty. Sorry. You are. Just come to the dinner, come and and meet the Bettencourters and actually talk to them, come and meet the people they think are beauties too. We're not like last century's Bettencourt Society. I guarantee you'll be surprised."

They both laughed at this closing speech of his. She didn't want to blush but blushed anyway, and he saw that. He thought she was a beauty! What a wonderful delusion. And she liked the idea of the Societies reading each other's journals. Maybe the Wenches could get the Bettencourters to share their liquor, too. She could just about imagine putting on a slinky dress and going along to this little dinner, making the acquaintance of his brothers in charisma and the boys and girls they'd brought along. But she could also picture the looks that some of the diners would give other diners, the words that'd be murmured when the subject of evaluation left the room. Really... her? Or Nice, nice. Both possibilities made her feel weary. With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, why her? came up so quickly.

"I can see you believe you lot are new and improved, but to have this dinner where each of you brings one person to show off to the others..."

"Isn't that what all socializing's like when you're in a relationship?" Hercules asked, resting his chin on her palm. This boy.

"Yes, well, I don't know about that –"

"Never had a boyfriend? Girlfriend?"

She took her hand back, stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear: "Ask someone else."

"You'll be jealous," Hercules whispered back.

Day waved him away and climbed the last few steps to her door. "I won't. Goodnight, Herc."

He cupped his hands around his mouth and walked backwards down the stairs, calling out: "You like me. She likes me. She doesn't know why and she can't believe it, but Dayang Sharif likes me!"

The Homely Wench Society's final meeting of Lent Term was held in Flordeliza Castillo's room at Trinity. Plans for a trip to Neuschwanstein Castle had been finalized and there was no real business left to discuss, so Dvořák's The Noon Witch was playing, Grainne was sitting on the windowsill puffing away at an electronic cigarette with a face mask on ('A ghost! A well moisturized ghost!'), Flor was lying with her head in Day's lap having Orlando Furioso read to her, Ed and Marie were mixing drinks, and Theo carried Grainne's to the window and then back to Flor's desk as Grainne's smoke went down the wrong way and she staggered over to Ed, sputtering: "Bettencourters incoming... Bettencourter invasion!"

Flor must have been in on it. Must have. Her room wasn't easy to find. As a matter of fact, who's to say that that the events of that historic afternoon weren't the culmination of a scheme Flor and Barney had hatched between them way back in September?

The small but lionhearted Homely Wench Society gathered at Flordeliza Castillo's window and looked down upon the mass of menfolk below, many of them bearing beverages and assorted foodstuffs. At their head, in place of their president, was Hercules of Stockwell, waving a white flag with much vigor and good cheer.

Excerpted from What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi by arrangement with the Wylie Agency and Riverhead Books.

A grandmother sits with her nine grandchildren at a refugee camp in South Sudan. Ilana Rose/World Vision

"This moment here was in South Sudan, a young country that has been in a state of civil war for the past couple of years and where I have visited a lot of refugee camps," explains Ilana Rose. She steps back from her work, a photo of a grandmother with her nine grandchildren.

Rose says the woman's daughter was just 26 years old but had already given birth to three sets of twins."The really bad trouble started in December 2013," she says. "The daughter was pregnant with these twins here, but the family had to flee. She didn't know where her husband was, and she gave birth on the side of the road mid-escape."

As a prominent Australian photojournalist, Rose has covered subculture and social justice for over 25 years. From S&M culture in the 90s, to indigenous justice at the Koori Courts, and Australian women's affairs—every photo that surrounds us in her Brunswick home stands as a time capsule, quiet vigils to moments in our history.

Lucia Eugenio De Mamani, a leader of her community in Bolivia. Ilana Rose/World Vision

Born in Melbourne's east, Rose started taking photos in her teens and went on to study at Victorian College in the 1980s—one of the only photo schools of the time. It was tough to get her foot in the door of the industry, though: "It was very difficult for women around then to get a job, so I freelanced for all the dailies."

After graduation, Rose went abroad, working in London as the Sun Herald's foreign correspondent for three years. Much of her 20s was spent photographing subcultures from 90s train gangs to the beginning of graffiti in Melbourne. She was the Big Issue's first photographer and shot an 80-piece with the Koori Courts shown on Reconciliation Day at Melbourne's Federation Square in 2005.

Rose's most recent exhibition comes after a four-year stint with World Vision, delving head first into the state of modern gender inequality. She ventured to third world countries all over the globe, such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Uganda, Peru, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. The photos will be shown at No Lillies, a fundraiser for UN Women, currently at MAGNET Galleries.

Sudanese women skipping in Uganda. Ilana Rose / World Vision

"This one here was in Uganda, January last year, where South Sudanese were fleeing over the border." Rose points to a photo of two women, both refugees, skipping in barren land. "This girl on the left and her siblings lost their parents, so when they arrived at the refugee settlement, the woman on the right took the girl under her wing and began looking after her."

Throughout her four years working with World Vision, Rose traveled the world, photographing women in developing countries from Africa to South America. In India, she met a woman with a tattoo in memory of her late husband. It's just his name and a heart. He had died from HIV/AIDS, and the woman was one of many in her community marginalized because of her husband's death. "She told me how much she loved him," Rose remembered.

A woman with a tattoo in memory of her husband in India. Ilana Rose/World Vision

Traveling the world for the past four years, Rose says she's seen first hand that for women in the developing world overcoming gender inequality is a fight for survival. "There are no jobs and entire families must fend for themselves off the land. The one thing that's a real gender problem is that girls are not sent to school," she says.

"Everyone sees education as the key out of the poverty trap, but girls are often the ones doing things like fetching water—a risk that puts them at harm alone on roads for kilometers at a time."

Bolivian goat herder. Ilana Rose / World Vision

Back in Australia, discussion of gender disparities quickly turns to women at work: the theme for the No Lilies exhibition. With a mother who was a feminist in the 60s and who attended university with the likes of Germaine Greer, Rose believes the problem of gender inequality is deeply rooted in Australia.

"I was raised to see myself in no way as a lesser being, and that is because of my mother," she reflects. "I grew up as a 'tomboy'. I've worked in a man's world. I have gay friends, straight friends, friends who are ambiguous in their sexuality—I never look to people for these identifiers. I look inside.

"It seems as if, for me, gender inequality is this lack of understanding that family work and home care are still so undervalued."

A poverty stricken Ecuadorian grandma, who spoke of nothing other than the aspirations she had for her grandchildren. Ilana Rose / World Vision

Individually, Rose's photos are powerful but considered as a whole their message is clear: The female world is not one clad with materialism, beauty, or sex. It is defined by selflessness. "I saw women do everything—absolutely everything, including a lot of manual labor," she says.

"The most amazing thing about these experiences was seeing the parallels between women here and women all over the world. Women everywhere want the best for their family and to foster a love like no other."

Ilana Rose was interviewed by Alexandra Manatakis

Lena Dunham is one of the best known endometriosis sufferers. Image via

The news that Girls star Lena Dunham was recently hospitalized for complications stemming from her endometriosis is one of the first times I've ever seen the condition get coverage in the mainstream media. It's a disease characterized by incredible pain that very few people know about. But 10 percent of people with a uterus will suffer from endometriosis at some point in their life, including me.

I was 19 when I was first diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition that causes the tissue that normally grows inside your uterus to spring up in other places in your body. I knew something was wrong for a long time, right back to the second time I got my period when I was 13 years old. The pain was so intense I couldn't go to school. I would faint if I stood up too quickly, I could barely eat, and I couldn't sleep. I had to take weeks off at a time because the pain was so horrific and my bleeding lasted much longer than we'd been taught a period was supposed to.

I saw my family doctor about it, and he told me pain was normal when you get your period. I had to continue to complain until I was finally referred to a gynecologist. But he told me my pain was normal as well. He did prescribe a contraceptive pill, an attempt to shorten the length of my period. And after a couple of years, it did, but the pain never stopped or even lessened.

Over the next few years, the pain continued to progress. I kept visiting my gynecologist, convinced there was something wrong with my body, but nobody—no specialist, family member, or friend—seemed to believe me.

The pain of endometriosis comes from nowhere—shooting, sharp, and intense. It hits in the lowest point of your stomach, cramping up in waves. I'm told it's not unlike the feeling of labor contractions. Sometimes it'll shoot to your lower back, meaning there's no comfortable position. Then there's the nausea and dizziness, which feels as though it will never end.

So at 19, at yet another appointment, I finally told the OBGYN I was so sick of being in constant pain that I wanted to die. This seemed to shift something—he sat up and asked me questions, and after an internal exam, he came to the conclusion that I had endometriosis. I had no idea what it was but was booked in for a laparoscopy and a hysteroscopy—two procedures where a camera is inserted to examine the pelvis and the lining of the uterus.

This is a pretty common experience for people with endometriosis: It's hard to get a diagnosis. The fact that female pain is often not taken seriously enough by doctors plays a role. My case isn't even the worst I've heard of. For some sufferers, endometriosis is unbearable.

I had surgery to burn out the endometrial tissue, and I was told that I should no longer experience pain once I had healed. This was a lie. It has been over two years since that surgery, and although the internal ultrasounds tell me my uterus is no longer drowning in excess endometrial tissue, the pain hasn't stopped.

But being diagnosed with a disease that has no cure is not the worst part about endometriosis. There are so many misconceptions, and I believed all of them at some point: If you read any article on endometriosis, including the Wikipedia page, you'll see it says that endometriosis undoubtedly leads to infertility. This is not always true. Many people with endometriosis have children. But for ages I thought my diagnosis meant that was it for me, I could never have kids.

And then there is my favorite and most regular experience of endometriosis pain: the flare up. I will be out socializing, or at work, and all of a sudden, for no logical reason, my stomach bloats up to four times its size and pain seizes my body. There is nothing I can do about it, except try to explain to those around me, bosses included, that I did not plan this, I am not making it up, and I need to get myself home.

I keep hoping that one day they will find a cure, but there is so little awareness for an illness that is so debilitating to those who have it. Some days I can be fine, and I'll be on my feet for hours. Other days, I wake up, and I cannot move. The pain cannot be relieved. Lying down, sitting up, bathing: It's still there.

They can perform surgery, give you hormone-based medication, prescribe you strong painkillers, but there is no guarantee that any of these may work. Until awareness is raised for this disease, the government and medical industry will not put further research and education into fighting it and finding a cure.

That's the other thing that makes living with endometriosis difficult: So few people even know what it is, let alone how debilitating the pain can be. So that's what I'm hoping for in writing about my experience—that a couple of people might learn more about what endometriosis means for the people who battle it. We are strong. We can fight this.

Follow Eleanor Rigby on Twitter.

A table of guns seized by the NYPD in New York in 2013. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Ralph Gilbertson, a 74-year-old living in Richfield, Minnesota, thinks the CIA is watching him. He thinks agents are impersonating his neighbors and the local cops, and he has sent letters out to the managers of his apartment building saying so. He also thinks that the cops' recent seizure of his guns is unconstitutional, and he's likely right.

His weapons—he has three handguns, which he's licensed to carry—were taken away by the police after his building managers called a city agency worried about the apparent combination of firearms and paranoia that he represented, reported the Star-Tribune on Sunday.

But Gilbertson is challenging the seizure of his weapons in a case that shows just how complicated it is to take away someone's guns in America.

While his disposition may make his neighbors nervous, Gilbertson isn't a convicted felon, hasn't been charged with domestic violence, and no court or psychiatrist has ruled he's a ticking time bomb. (He suffers from a mild form of bipolar disorder, but according to the Star-Tribune, "his psychiatrist sent a letter to the judge saying that Gilbertsen is compliant with his medications and poses no danger to himself or others.")

"He's not being charged with a crime," says Joseph Olson, emeritus professor at Minnesota's Mitchell Hamline School of Law. "He's eccentric—that's not a crime in America."

Watch our documentary on DIY Guns:

Guns-rights organizations and conservatives occasionally invoke the specter of a Democrat-and-UN-coordinated mass gun seizure effort, but the Second Amendment is pretty darn robust. In America, it's a lot easier to buy a gun than it is for the government to take that gun away.

For instance, though felons are generally barred from owning firearms, there are plenty of states where there are exceptions to that rule—even for people who have a history of violent crimes. And though it seems simple to say, "People who are mentally ill and potentially dangerous shouldn't have guns," in practice, creating databases of people too sick to own firearms is complicated and controversial.

And even when you aren't allowed to have guns, it's rare that officers will come to your door and pry them from your fingers. The exception is California, where in recent years lawmakers put a bunch of money into a program to seize guns from all the people who aren't supposed to have them. The results, reported the Washington Post last year, weren't promising, mostly because there were too many guns to confiscate:

"At the end of 2014, 17,479 people remained in the illegal gun owner database, down from 21,249 people at the year's start. About 34,868 registered firearms still are believed to be in the hands of people who are not allowed to own them... Last year, agents conducted 7,573 investigations and seized 3,286 firearms. At the same time, 7,031 gun owners were newly flagged."

In January, another gun-seizure law went into effect in California. Passed in 2014, the law allows immediate family members and law enforcement to ask a judge for a restraining order to seize an owner's guns and bar the person from buying guns in the state. The restraining order lasts 21 days but can be extended to a year.

The law was passed in response to Elliot Rodger's violent rampage in 2014; Rodger's parents said afterward they saw warning signs before the 22-year-old went on a killing spree.

Naturally, the idea that the cops could take away someone's guns like that has alarmed Second Amendment advocates, but there are reasons to doubt that the measure will have much of an effect. "It's only a rare case that a family member will have enough suspicion that they'll report it, the police act on it, and that they issue a court order," said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

California faces the same problems any state trying to enact gun control measures faces—namely that American gun laws are a patchwork of local and state regulations. California's neighbors Arizona and Nevada have some of the country's most relaxed gun laws; unlike California, they don't require require background checks in private sales.

Another problem is that there are over 300 million guns in America—even if everyone wanted to, how could you control a supply that large, especially when serendipitous person-to-person exchanges are also a liability.

"They control gun shows in California because they check on those, but if you're just a guy in a bar and I'm talking to you, and I say, 'I'm looking for a gun,' and you say, 'Well, my friend Jerry's got a gun, and he wants to sell. I'll call him up on my cell phone here and he'll bring it down. What are you willing to pay for it?'" said William Vizzard, professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, and author of Shots in the Dark: Policy Politics and Symbolism of Gun Control. "How do you control that?"

For the Minnesota cops dealing with Ralph Gilbertson, his guns, and his imaginary CIA agents, the problem is less abstract: What do you do when people are concerned about someone who has both guns and potential mental health issues?Police may have acted extra-judiciously in this case, but legally, they don't have many options.

"The street cops nowadays have to be psychologists," Lieutenant Mike Flaherty, a Richfield Police Department spokesman, told the Star-Tribune. "People don't wear nameplates saying 'paranoid schizophrenic.' So the police have to go in there and make judgment calls... Is he crazy dangerous, or is he the crazy uncle? We have to make that decision and let the legal system sort it out."

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

The author gets masked up, ready to inhale laughing gas constantly for half an hour.

One of the things that makes laughing gas the cupcake of drugs—a high so basic and fleeting it makes cocaine look like ayahuasca—is the sheer number of fringe celebrities making it into the tabloids with a balloon selfie.

Is "hippy crack" becoming the millennial answer to the boomers' LSD, or to Gen-Xers' heroin? Just ask the collection of reality TV stars and socialites in the UK posting their balloon selfies on the internet and cruising into the sidebar of shame.

While it's fun to wonder whether or not a generation really is defining itself with a high that makes you feel as if your head is bonging around in a thunder drum for a few seconds, the relentless publicity of laughing gas as a recreational drug is a minor hindrance for Ravi Das, a neuroscientist at University College London who has uncovered an extremely serious use for it.

"The only thing that you ever hear about it in the media is negative, really," says Das. "But I think it might be undergoing a bit of a renaissance. The view of it as just a kind of obstetrics analgesic may be changing."

Das's research, published last Friday in the journal Psychological Medicine, shows that laughing gas, or nitrous oxide (NOS), may help to prevent traumatic memories from "sticking" in the brain. Administered straight after a distressing event, the nitrous oxide is thought to disrupt a process that helps permanent memories to form. Das suggested that I test out his theory by allowing myself to be mildly traumatized, then pumped with laughing gas for 30 minutes.

The author watching 'Irreversible'

That's how I ended up in a small office at University College London, watching the Gaspar Noe film, Irreversible. It's a notoriously difficult film to sit through. Roger Ebert summarized it as "a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable." Luckily, I didn't have to watch the whole thing—because Das had helpfully extracted the two most brutal, traumatic scenes into a 15-minute montage of grim butchery. A relentless nine-minute rape scene segued neatly into a six-minute fire extinguisher murder, which I watched before completing a questionnaire.

There isn't much to say about the actual footage, other than it is one of the most graphic and distressing bits of cinema I have ever watched. Das had actually intended to use real life footage of car crashes compiled by German police, but study participants actually found Noe's fictional work more traumatic.

"We'd used a lot of different trauma films in the past," he said. "Clips of car crashes and stuff like that. And we found that people's intrusion counts over the course of the week were just at floor level. But a single scene with higher production values increased the number of intrusions people had."

An "intrusion" is a kind of unprompted flashback to the film. The researchers cycled through a range of horror films and real-life footage before deciding that Noe's film was better at disturbing the viewer—and delivering more intrusions—than any other.

"A lot of the other horror films are so stylized and over-gory, and they have this kind of visceral shock value but not the kind of empathy-inducing effects ," Das said.

I'm not sure if I felt traumatized, exactly, but there is something intensely uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and memorable about both scenes. For reasons that are not apparent to me, the memory of the rapist's erect CGI penis pinging into view is seared on my brain for eternity.

Dr. Ravi Das

The actual study documented the experiences of 50 participants, and some volunteers didn't make it through the full 15 minutes of video. The most distressing part for me, though, was the acute sense that I was the only one watching, silently, while Das made notes and Chris, my photographer, tried to catch me looking concerned.

My anxiety, however, was about to get even worse, because I was going to spend the next 30 minutes sitting in a chair, getting high on my own.

If you've ever experienced a flicker of paranoia when taking a balloon—the sensation that you've lost a second or two of consciousness—then imagine that strung out over the course of half an hour. Within two minutes, I turned to Das, who seemed very relaxed about the whole watching-me-get-high thing. "I'm high," I said. He laughed awkwardly. I sat silently and slightly shamefully, feeling increasingly dissociated, my short-term memory and ability to concentrate evaporating.

There's no doubt that 30 minutes of laughing gas felt a lot better than 15 minutes of Irreversible. According to Das's research, "intrusions"—those unwanted flashbacks to the film—fell by half in a group that received nitrous oxide rather than just normal air.

The following week involved a review of just how intrusive Irreversible would be in my day-to-day life.

Not very much, it turned out. I had a few grim, uninvited recollections of the rape scene, the most memorable of them happening immediately after I'd left Das's experiment room. I was also asked how much I remembered of what I'd seen, and although a couple of scenes stood out, a quiz revealed that there were entire chunks I'd simply forgotten.

My experience was in line with Das's theory that nitrous oxide has the potential for stopping bad memories in their tracks, but there was a twist in the research: Das also found that for people who already felt dissociated by a traumatic event, nitrous oxide could actually put them in a worse situation.

"Some people have a tendency to dissociate following traumatic events," he said. "People who were more dissociated following the film didn't show the beneficial effect of the nitrous oxide. There was some indication that it may have actually increased injury."

"There are a lot more questions to answer before we'd say it should definitely be used," he added. "But it's an interesting jumping-off point."

Clouding memories with nitrous oxide is obviously useful in a traumatic context, but less so when you'd prefer a mental record of your weekend. Das thinks it's doubtful that a handful of balloons taken recreationally could dissolve your memories of a good time, because you spend very little time inhaling the gas. Canisters are not typically the kind of thing people desperately call in at 2 AM and sit doing back-to-back until they pass out. But if this is you, then Das's research at least presents another reason to re-examine your life choices.

Follow Ben Bryant on Twitter.

A Toronto cop was busted with a loaded Colt Cobra at the US border. Photo via Wikimedia.

A Toronto police officer has been docked 20 days' pay after attempting to cross the United States-Canada border with several weapons, including an unregistered handgun, in his personal vehicle.

During a secondary search at the Fort Erie Peace Bridge crossing in 2014, CBSA agents discovered a loaded Colt Cobra firearm and extra ammunition in the vehicle of Toronto police Const. Anthony da Costa, according to a police document.

The document, a sentencing decision from the police force's Disciplinary Hearings Office, states that investigators also found "pepper spray, an expandable baton, seven knives, brass knuckles and a pair of handcuffs."

"One of the knives was a prohibited weapon," according to the decision.

"Constable Da Costa did not possess any paperwork" required for bringing the weapons across the border and did not have a license or registration for the firearm.

Da Costa was arrested and charged, and told investigators there were other weapons at his home. His lawyer would later argue that a brutal beating during an undercover assignment had led da Costa, a veteran officer, to fear for his safety and carry a weapon for protection.

The next day, Niagara police searched da Costa's home, where they found a rifle, a pistol, ammunition and pepper spray canisters. DaCosta had registered and properly stored the guns, according to the document, but he"did not have currently valid licenses to possess either firearm."

A CBSA spokesperson said in an email that da Costa was charged with four counts of making false statements, four counts of attempted smuggling and one count of willful evasion under the Customs Act.

The Niagara Regional Police Service laid eight charges against da Costa, according to Const. Philip Gavin, including three counts of possession of a restricted or prohibited firearm without a license and registration.

Da Costa pled guilty in a Welland, Ontario court to two firearms charges, according to the disciplinary decision. He received a conditional discharge and three-year probation. The Crown did not pursue the other charges.

The disciplinary hearings office handles charges of misconduct against officers in accordance with provincial legislation. The tribunal functions much like a courtroom,with defense and prosecution often calling witnesses and eliciting testimony before a hearing officer. Penalties for misconduct can include demotions in rank, forfeiture of pay and termination.

Da Costa pled guilty to two counts of discreditable conduct at the quasi-judicial tribunal last year. Defense and prosecution made a joint submission on penalty, arguing for concurrent 20-day forfeitures for each charge.

Defense counsel Gary Clewley said last year that da Costa had a license and registration for the Colt Cobra,but"both had lapsed."

Clewley also argued during a hearing that daCosta had an otherwise outstanding record, and had been commended for his work. The officer had struggled with alcohol dependence and "hyper-vigilance," according to Clewley.

Da Costa had drank to help blend in strip clubs and other places while working undercover. Hehad also used alcohol to "medicate himself," according to Clewley.

And in 2004,eight gang members attacked da Costa, nearly beating him to death.

"Obviously, his cover was blown," said Clewley, who argued that da Costa felt a gun was necessary for protection.

Da Costahas since sought treatment, Clewley said, and made a "remarkable recovery."

Supt. Gord Jones, who served as hearing officer, told VICE that there are "opportunities for officers who are feeling threatened" to seek authorization from the police chief to carry a firearm when off-duty.

Some fake OxyContin pills, like the ones pictured above, were confirmed to have W-18 by Health Canada earlier this year. Photo courtesy of Calgary Police

Over a month ago, W-18, a synthetic opiate known to be 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 times stronger than morphine, was confirmed by Health Canada for the first time to be found in fake OxyContin pills in Calgary, Alberta.

He's making America grate. Photos via Donald Trump/Facebook.

Congratulations, America. You played yourself. Writing about Canadian politics, as I tend to do, requires cutting down an overinflated superiority complex at the best of times, but the 2016 US presidential election season is threatening to put the smugness into overdrive.

In a totally unexpected twist of fate, it turns out there are real consequences to making the democratic process into a pay-to-play reality show—especially when the main attraction is partisan hacks shouting talking points at each other while navel-gazing nerds play at being sports announcers. Presidential politics are all fun and games until someone comes along and actually treats it like fun and games.

Donald Trump's candidacy is a runaway train T-boning a bus full of orphans and dragging the wreckage through a protected wetland and uprooting all the plants and killing a bunch of endangered waterfowl. At the end of the line is a giant oil refinery/dynamite depository. The conductor is standing naked on top of the engine with a syringe full of methamphetamine jammed up his asshole, twirling his yuge orange dick around like a helicopter, firing a kalashnikov into the air and screaming racial slurs at the top of his lungs. The train is also on fire. Even though everyone knows that this can only end in the face-melting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's impossible to look away because nobody knows how to turn the cameras off.

Of course, Trump is just the latest symptom of a deeper social disease, one that is metastasizing and all but guaranteed to leave the patient braindead if allowed to run its course. Trump is the earthquake you get when the two great fault lines of contemporary US politics slam into one another: the fact that the Washington establishment is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and the fact that much of white America has lost its goddamned mind.

That Trump is powered by people who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore is obvious to the point of banality. But to boil it down to "stupid people are angry and also racist," while definitely partly true, is to miss a lot of the bullshit that made The Donald's latest presidential bid possible.

What it really comes down to is a large swath of scared people who know that the American dream is dead. But they're stuck in the bargaining stage of grief, and hoping that daddy can cut them a deal.

IT'S MOURNING IN AMERICA

Everyone in America knows that the Emperor wears no clothes. We've known this for years—at least since Vietnam, and reconfirmed for us again after the economic meltdown in 2008. We know that the political system largely consists of lobbyists buying politicians to compete (or collude) with one another to create Value For Shareholders in agribusiness and/or weapons manufacturing. We know this, we know that the two major establishment parties know this, and we know that they know that we know this.

And yet every two-to-four years, everyone pretends that this isn't the case and that we still live in an Enlightenment-era political experiment and that democracy actually works and yadda yadda yadda. The party outside the presidency trots out someone who promises to Make America Great Again and the party inside the presidency trots out someone who promises that America Never Stopped Being Great and both of these statements are increasingly meaningless to increasingly large segments of the American public.

But this year, the whole arrangement has gone tits up. The Republican party is in terminal shock that an aggressive idiot who doesn't seem to know what words mean is the front-runner to be its presidential nominee—despite having spent eight years telling America that having an aggressive idiot in the White House was a really good idea and then another eight years screaming that mandatory private insurance is a form of communism and/or reverse racism.

Meanwhile, the Democrats—whose core message for the last two-and-a-half decades has been to carry the banner of Progress while telling voters to "expect little, deserve less, ask for nothing"—are alarmed to discover that their constituency includes a large number of people who actually want social programs and universal healthcare. Which, as a Canadian, I find adorable.

This is the inevitable outcome of both parties making the last eight years about the culture wars. The so-called moderate wings of both the Republicans and Democrats sing roughly the same tune when it comes to projecting American power abroad or bailing out the banks at home—even if in disagreement about, say, the precise scale of the global shadow drone war. All the substantive discursive struggles have taken place mostly on the cultural front. And after eight years of Obama, both sides are ready to claim (for different reasons) that the social justice jargon is coming from inside the White House.

Despite some very serious continuing problems—rampant police violence against black people, the rollback of reproductive rights at the state level, disproportionate numbers of LGBT youth finding themselves on the street, that sort of thing—the traditionally marginalized segments of American society have more voice and political visibility than ever before. The expansion of civil rights is undeniably a good thing, even if progress is brutally slow and comes with a side of pinkwashing. Hillary Clinton might be as willing as any previous Secretary of State to violently flex the muscle of American empire, but at least married gays can now serve openly in a future foreign war.

But this being America, there are a lot of people still violently attached to white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. The Republican establishment has made hay for the last three decades by getting large swathes of the country riled up about LIBERALS in the hopes of getting evangelicals, paleolibertarians and assorted "racial realists" to stampede to the polls and vote for the red team. With a cosmopolitan black law professor named Barack Hussein Obama in the White House, feeding this beast turned out to be alarmingly easy.

So easy, in fact, that the greatest con-man in living memory is using the opportunity to spin white anxiety into gold.

MAKE AMERICA GRATE AGAIN

Donald Trump is hocking Americans the political equivalent of cheap Viagra. Are you worried your body politic is flaccid, out-of-shape, and unable to perform in the throes of middle age? No worries, bro. We'll make that motherfucker great again. Virile Mexican rapists will trouble you no more.

Donald Trump is the alpha male to end all alpha males. He is a winner, always, even when he's losing (or facing fraud charges). His whole life has been spent building gaudy, phallic towers with his name on them and his go-to point in any debate or interview is that he has the biggest polls, which I had assumed was a very non-subtle way of saying he had the biggest dick until he literally opened a debate last week by saying he had the biggest dick. Somewhere, most likely in hell, Sigmund Freud is having a really good laugh about all this. And that's even before you factor in that Trump is on record as wanting to date his daughter.

Subtlety is dead and Donald Trump is wearing its skin as a mask. The American government is full of pussies, faggots, nerds, and losers and Donald Trump is going to give them all wedgies and shove them in a locker. Just look at what he did to poor Jeb "Please Clap" Bush. The man is tailor-made for a conservative movement that has grown fond of using "cuck" as their pejorative of choice. Nothing betrays the fragile masculinity behind Trump as much as weaponizing emasculation.

Evangelical leaders are rightly alarmed that so many of their sheep are flocking to a serial divorcee who made his fortune building casinos and whose name is synonymous with flashy conspicuous consumption. But they shouldn't be, because most of what passes for Christianity in America long ago ceased to be about the teachings of Jesus Christ and is instead the state religion of American power and the vengeful, angry God of white identity politics. That Ted "Carpet Bombing" Cruz is the only candidate edging out The Donald as the top choice of people who worship a 1st-century Jewish pacifist should tell you just how far the GOP has fallen from the grace of God.

No doubt that white people remain dominant in America's racial hierarchy. But this position is being challenged for the first time in a very long time; arguably ever. And so white people have lost their goddamned minds. I mean, white supremacy in America has always been insane, i.e. pathologically irrational, constitutively fucked beyond belief. But now, because it's under siege as the de facto assumption of all American life, we're seeing the ugly backlash.

The real danger to the success of identity politics as a political tactic was that white identity politics would eventually go mainstream. This is where we are today. Donald Trump has eschewed the respectable Republican tradition of dog-whistle racism for a gold-plated megaphone that also shoots bees at people, and the perfect storm of violently fragile masculinity dovetailing with white anxiety circling the economic drain is what makes it all work. This is what's getting protestors and blacks and Hispanics and Muslims jeered and punched and beaten and ejected from Trump rallies.

Faced with an assault on the institutions of power that have structured their lives for as long as anyone can remember, white America is looking for a hero. And this is the heart of Trump's appeal: the guy genuinely does not give a fuck. His billionaire status means he's free to do and say whatever it takes to win, donors be damned. And who doesn't want to be on the winning side?

This is why it doesn't matter what anyone says about him. It doesn't matter that he's got a long list of failed businesses, that his Mexican border wall is impossible, that John Oliver wants to #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain, that Trump University was an elaborate scam set up to defraud desperate Trumpophiles, or that wantonly torturing civilians and banning a sixth of the earth's population from the country is balls-to-the-wall insane. It doesn't matter. The normal rules of social life do not apply to him. He makes his own rules. He is beyond rules. He is beyond reason. He is a walking, talking eruption of phallic power with a direct line to the American id and this is why all the strictures of civilization shrivel up and die before him. He's a bargain-bin Nietzschean Superman for a country raised on children's beauty pageants.

RENDER UNTO CAESAR

The establishment is powerless to stop this, because the world they've spent 30 years carefully curating is coming apart at the seams. A merry band of Wall Street plutocrats led by Mitt fucking Romney is not going to put a dent in Trump's momentum because, aside from Political Correctness Gone Mad, they represent everything wrong with American government.

This—and only this—is the one point of overlap between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, however much New York newspaper op-eds would like to convince you that they're secretly the same guy. They are the only two candidates publicly acknowledging that things are bad for the country's working class, and that part of the problem is both Republicans and Democrats colluding on free trade agreements that erode American sovereignty and make some guy in a corporate office rich while shuttering factories across the country.

But even while the established political consensus is starting to fray, people are as likely to reach out for the primeval rush of an authoritarian father-figure than to roll up their sleeves and rebuild the Great Society.

This is the only endgame for a cultural zeitgeist obsessed with "authenticity" as it stares down the death of the American dream. Making America Great Again cuts two ways. One way is putting in the hard work of making that dream a reality and actually building a country where everyone is equally able to stand or fall on their own personal merits, rather than on account of the social grouping they were born into.

The other is dispensing with all pretenses that the United States is anything but a pay-to-play game for the rich and powerful. Know your place, keep your head down, render unto Caesar, and if enough gold piles up then maybe the big man on top can cut you in on the action.

Both are equally "authentic" responses to a broken system—fixing it or tearing the whole fucking thing down. Which one do you think the US electorate is more likely to buy when push comes to shove? Even if President Trump never comes to pass, there's no putting this genie back in the bottle.

So come on, America. Come to daddy. And get ready for the spanking of a lifetime.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter