Photo by Jake Burghart

1. PERU
The New King of Coke

Peru produced 60 percent of the world's cocaine in 1992, before Colombia overtook it as the global kingpin of coke. Now, Peru has reemerged as the international leader in cocaine production, cultivating an estimated 150,000 acres of the drug a year. We went to the country to learn more, embedding with the Peruvian special forces, speaking with local coca farmers, and linking up with cartel members who showed us how to make cocaine. We discovered that despite the government's response—and a hefty amount of foreign aid devoted to combatting cocaine production—Peruvian coke is being consumed around the world like never before, and the Andean nation runs the risk of becoming the world's next great narco-state. Wilder Núñez, a local coca farmer, told us, "It's a lie when the government says the coca will disappear. Coca will never be forgotten."

Watch The New King of Coke on VICENews.com.

2. CHINA
Training Female Bodyguards

China's millionaire population is surging at record speeds. The country now has the second-highest number of millionaires in the world, right behind the United States. Since private security firms were legalized in 2010, many of the elite have taken to hiring bodyguards. Women are in particularly high demand because they are less conspicuous than their male counterparts; they can blend in by playing the roles of secretaries and nannies. We flew to Beijing to spend time with female students as they spent grueling hours training at the Yunhai Elite Security academy. "Female bodyguards are more discreet and can respond to threats quickly without people noticing," explains Xin Yang, president at the Yunhai school and a former Chinese military martial arts instructor.

See Femme Fatales and watch the documentary, part of our VICE Reports series, coming soon.

3. CYPRUS
Illegal Songbird Trapping

We recently traveled to Cyprus to learn more about why the largest massacre of songbirds in the world is happening on British sovereign territory. Dhekelia, one of two areas on the island retained by the British once Cyprus gained independence, is host to industrial-scale bird trapping. Local authorities were forced to bring the nation in line with European laws once Cyprus joined the EU in 2004, but criminals seeking to profit from the illegal trade continue to supply the country's restaurants. We met locals who were dismayed that their tradition of trapping birds has been outlawed, and we joined up with a team of European activists who disrupt the poachers' traps at night.

Watch The Politics of Food: Illegal Songbird Trapping on Munchies.VICE.com.

4. CHILE
Beaver Slayers of Patagonia

In 1946, importing 25 pairs of beavers from Canada to Chile in order to foster a fur trade in an economically lackluster territory of Patagonia seemed like a smart idea. But no one would have imagined these incisor-toothed vermin would one day lay waste to Patagonia's forests. Today there are roughly 100,000 beavers in the region, and their presence has allegedly led to the most transformative destruction of its ecosystem since the last ice age. We traveled to the southernmost tip of Chile to meet the beaver hunters in charge of crudely restoring order here. According to Rodrigo Molina, a veterinarian and head of the invasive wildlife program for the Chilean government, the beavers are "trying to colonize the continent."

Watch Beaver Slayers of Patagonia on Motherboard.VICE.com.

5. VENEZUELA
Changa Tuki of Caracas

Born in the slums of Caracas, Changa Tuki is a distinct electronic dance-music scene that represents a subculture of artists, musicians, and dancers whose style and dress reflect the cultural happenings of the Venezuelan barrios. In a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, Changa Tuki is seen by some as just another community of thugs and criminals. We flew to Caracas and spent time with dancers involved in the Changa Tuki subculture. Elberth "El Maestro," one of the scene's leaders, told us, "What we do is culture. I have 38 students who I rescued from a street corner who had nothing to do. They were up to no good. Now they dance with other local troops."

Watch Changa Tuki of Caracas on Thump.VICE.com.

I was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, when I first read Inherent Vice. It was July of 2009. I was there for the summer and I got an advance copy off the publisher. Any time a new book of Pynchon's has come out—at least since I've been around—it's like I hang the do not disturb sign on the door and don't come out until it's done. It took me a couple days to do it.

I remember it quite well, sitting there, reading it and thinking, I'm never going to make this into a movie. I felt the same about Vineland. I thought about making that into a movie before, but I just couldn't figure it out. It's like Gravity's Rainbow—I've never got through it.

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Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis. Photo by Jürgen Fauth via Wikimedia Commons

I also remember thinking, when I read the book, This is like The Big Lebowski. And that was a reason not to make the movie. That was a reason to say, like, "Why would I have to do something like The Big Lebowski? Why would I even come close?" But the more I looked at it, the more I loved the book, and I had to kind of ignore that and pretend like it didn't exist, because, you know, The Big Lebowski is the best movie in history. So I just ignored it and thought about it a different way.

I think part of the fun of Inherent Vice is to get just completely tangled up in the many loose ends and overwhelming information, which is meant to be part of the joke in the book. You're either going to think, My head's going to explode and I give up, or, My head's going to explode and it feels kind of fuzzy. I wanted the same for the film.

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Joanna Newsom in 'Inherent Vice'

I didn't change a great deal from the book. The main thing I did change was this character that Joanna Newsom plays, Sortilège. In the book, she was this great supporting character who floated around and would give Doc acid or give him astrological advice—that kind of stuff. I took that character and made her a bit bigger and gave her narration and made her more of a sidekick. Kind of like Tinkerbell. When I read that character it reminded me of Joanna, so I asked her to do it. Joanna hasn't done acting before, but I know her personally through her husband—our families know each other—and, you know, she's kind of got that hippie spirit. She just has that oozing out of her, the way she looks and the way she talks and the way she sounds, she's just so fucking cool. She was perfect.

This story that Pynchon was telling was obviously autobiographical and from his generation and from his heart. I wanted it to feel like it was from that time, to try and make it feel authentic to that era, almost like it was a kind of faded postcard—a picture you might see of your parents in a drawer that's faded in color a little bit. We just tried to be accurate in terms of what people were wearing and what people looked like. Los Angeles at that time was a little bit hazier because there was so much smog, so we also tried to give it a little bit of that look.

The fact that it was California felt right to me for sure. It's all so familiar to me. It's home, so that part of it was very appealing, to work in these places that I knew very well. But the era was kind of new to me, and that was exciting. I was only a kid in the 1970s, and my parents weren't hippies, but I'd get nauseated by my parents' friends who were. You'd hear them talk about the 60s like, "Oh man, it was so great. The drugs and the music were so great." And you were like, "Ah, fucking hell, enough of that!" But I think what they were on about wasn't necessarily the drugs or the music, but the feeling that there was a revolution that was about to happen—but it ultimately fell away and slipped through their fingers.

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Joanna Newsom, Joaquin Phoenix, and Katherine Waterston in 'Inherent Vice'

I don't know if I'll ever adapt a book again. I know I still have original things to write, but if another book comes along, I'll adapt that. I have no real plan. Magnolia was probably my most personal work, and I learned that, if you write something really personal at a current time in your life, then you feel it flow through you but you sort of know instinctively that you'll never be able to get back there again. That you'll never be able to revisit that moment in time.

In that sense, starting from scratch can be quite dark and lonely work, but it's less lonely adapting a book because you're working with something else.

Inherent Vice, which has been in limited release since last month,opens in theaters nationwide today.

As told to Amelia Abraham.

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Foie gras. Photo via Flickr user Sophie

Foie gras not a delicacy for those with delicate constitutions. As per French custom, it's made by force-feeding birds—which means long metal tubes are crammed down their throats—until their livers become so swollen that they sometimes cannot walk or breathe. To speed up feeding times, farmers sometimes cut a slit in the bird's esophagus so they can insert a pneumatic pump. That's foie gras. There are ways to produce foie gras without the force-feeding (known as gavage), but they're not terribly common and in France, foie gras is only foie gras if the bird has been force-fed. If that bothers you, you probably shouldn't eat it.

This kind of graphic imagery has fueled a lot of foie gras hate this week, especially since foie gras was just made legal in California again. There had been a ban on the product since 2012 for ethical reasons, but a federal judge overturned that ban yesterday, citing the Poultry Products Inspection Act, which gives the federal government the authority to regulate poultry products. So, good news: You can now feast on animal cruelty once again!

If you're feeling good about yourself because you avoid foie gras, remember that you're probably doing something to cause another living thing misery right at this moment. Foie gras production is by no means ethical, but neither is debeaking chickens, tail-docking pigs, keeping animals perpetually pregnant, or keeping them in stalls so small and so crowded they they cannot properly turn around. Over 99 percent of farm animals in the United States are factory farmed, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and subjected to conditions that are neither comfortable nor humane.

There's no need to start playing the Ethics Olympics here, but let's admit that criticizing foie gras has a certain amount of cultural cache—foie gras is fancy-people food, a symbol of horrible decadence. It's much easier to ignore something like factory-farmed pigs, because bacon is a food of the people and it's also irresistibly delicious. Plus, foie gras costs more than a goddamn Xbox game and tastes like cat food most of the time. Why would you want to eat that?

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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Photo by the author

It's safe to say that America is shifting its attitude toward marijuana use. Ballot measures to legalize cannabis were passed by voters last year in Alaska, Oregon, and DC, legalization initiatives are underway in additional states, and over half of the country approved of legalization in recent polls. At the same time, cannabis vendors continue to expand their presence on "dark net" online marketplaces where buyers and sellers alike are anonymous so long as they take the correct technical precautions like installing specialized software, using encryption, and learning to discern phishing attempts.

For those wishing to use pot outside of states that permit the stuff medicinally or recreationally, the anonymous markets of the deep web are effectively serving as an internet marijuana dispensary that ships nationwide—on these places you can find color photographs, florid descriptions detailing the properties of available strains, and many of the same value-added products, like edibles and lotions, available in the most aboveboard of West Coast dispensaries.

In fact, many of these sellers market their goods as "medical marijuana," with some listings claiming that their crop comes from farms growing cannabis for legal dispensaries. Given that diversion of cannabis products across state lines is still banned, is there any truth to this marketing, and if so, why are legitimate medical marijuana enterprises choosing to double-dip and sell their product on both the white and black markets? Don't they have enough business in-state to avoid potentially jeopardizing the legality of their operations?

To find out, I perused these markets myself and reached out to dark net cannabis vendors to hear their take on the cannabis industry and legalization. I had these conversations in October, during the lead-up to the FBI's highly publicized November 6 bust of Silk Road 2 and several other markets. I corresponded with four vendors: EverGreenTea, who has been selling since the days of the original Silk Road with thousands of completed orders and is based in California; BestNThaWest, a long-time participant in the medical marijuana industry, located in an unidentified state; GotDank, a seller who openly advertises his product as California-grown medical marijuana; and PacificNorthWest; a cautious but opinionated seller who would not confirm their exact location.

VICE: Do you grow cannabis yourself, or sell on behalf of other growers?
EverGreenTea (EGT): I source from growers and producers... I was involved before this like so many others, trying not to get busted for having less than 100 plants in the backyard/garage. I can say that in the past growing or selling medical cannabis has never been a sustainable thing. I took a loss; spent money on supplies, electricity; time spent going to patients who lowball you or people who try to rip you off, the local cities and counties not authorizing your business. But with the dark net I'm actually able to run a sustainable business.

BestNThaWest (BNTW): Both. I grow myself and work with local growers that have supply issues as well. I have been growing for the MMJ [medical marijuana] sector for roughly a decade.

GotDank (GD): I used to grow, but I no longer do so. Growing is like having a small child. It's really a full-time job with strings attached. Being in the industry, I've made a lot of contacts with larger co-ops that supply higher volumes of medicinal cannabis. I got rid of my own product... enabling me to ditch the growing pains and move into higher volume distribution. I do not think I could do both, or at least not without bringing more people into the business and spreading out job duties. I could make a lot more money that way, but the risk and labor needed to do that is not really worth it to me.

Since the growers you work with have the opportunity to legally grow and sell cannabis, do you know why they choose to sell via a dark net vendor? Is it because they've found limited local opportunities to sell legally?
EGT: Yes, there are growers who cannot get the price they want in dispensaries or do not have the relationship there already. If you are a grower, you can walk into a dispensary and they will either turn you away or lowball you. Seems like the cities and counties allowing you to have a store suddenly gives you more control of the market. People will walk into your business and you can lowball them, then charge customers even more, but then again it's business and the cities and counties have artificially affected the market by not allowing such businesses, and so people are either lucky to be one of the few [who are] licensed, or [dispensary operators] simply open a store without a permit.

GD: The competition is really high in the California medicinal dispensary market, and you are always dealing with someone who is trying to maximize their profits for their business, so they are always looking to lowball you on top of the already competitive environment that have made prices drop over 200 percent in the past few years. Pounds used to sell for $4,000 to $5,000 to a dispensary until about 2012. Then things started dropping fast, and now you are lucky to get $3,000 for a very high-quality product, $2,000 for a decent product, and you probably cannot move anything that falls below those two categories for above your cost.

PacificNorthwest (PNW): I became interested in vending here as soon as I saw the dark markets since I knew many growers were unable to afford their electricity and other growing expenses due to falling prices. Prices have fallen in many areas due to oversupply. The harsh economy is not helping either. So now to make a living you need to get big or export out of the flooded areas. Legalization will most likely make that situation worse. So it is a good thing for buyers and middlemen and corporate farmers.

Do you have any interest in starting a legal canna-business should the opportunity arise?
EGT: I would be happy to become "licensed" to run a cannabis business in California... For 18 years there's never been such a thing at the state level, only tolerance of "nonprofit patient collectives" which somehow also means for-profit dispensaries, growers, and producers of cannabis products. Now we are beginning to see the more commercial products, but without true legal recognition. It seems like the large companies may either set up as a "nonprofit" or have two companies, one for profit and the other one as the "nonprofit collective."

I think back a few years ago, the law was more unclear. Everyone thought it was funny that all the perfectly healthy young people growing cannabis were medical cannabis patients. You were supposed to wait until someone had cancer, and then they could grow on their own and wait five months to harvest or have a "caregiver" grow for them. Or just go to the dispensaries which carried your medicine already, but how did they get it? The California laws were meant to let you get away with breaking federal law, as long as you didn't break it too much, but, again, it's kind of a catch-22 problem—always a question of a person wanting to do enough business to make it worth their time to even do it, and not getting busted.

BNTW: Do I plan to still vend via the dark net if it is legalized? Most likely for some time, especially during the early transition. "Legalization" and a true free market are very different things, and the dark net offers a much freer market than a state-controlled and -regulated industry ever could. In many places you have to put up an enormous amount of cash up front to even apply for a license, and then face extremely heavy taxation on any profits. This alone will make the dark net continue to be a viable alternative.

PNW: We have not tried to sell weed within any legal process to do so, we don't know if that would be profitable on the small scale we operate on. If I was king, I would make sure the laws encouraged the smaller independents like microbreweries, microgroweries, and direct farmer-to-buyer marketplaces. I doubt the future will profitable for the little grow-ops of the future. That's a sad thing to me... I just see a great loss of culture ahead if things go the way they usually do and farmers end up unable to make a living without growing so big they lose touch with the love and the art. It will probably be good for migrant laborers, at least. I expect taxes and paperwork to help keep the price up at the retail level (partly by making the biz somewhat miserable for the producers). If they make it really harsh, that will keep a strong black market going.

GD: I've pondered getting into the industry, but with the trials I have seen people face, it gives me extreme caution. I know many business owners who have operated legally under state law who are now serving jail time because the feds decided to bring the hammer down. I've seen entire families split apart, massive debts incurred due to legal costs and fines, civil forfeitures, etc. I feel much safer knowing that there is no brick and mortar store linking me or my identity to my sales.

***

A close look at state of cannabis regulation across several states backs up these vendors' assertions. California legalized medical marijuana in 1996 but has since failed to enact regulation which would license medical cannabis growers or define parameters for legal cannabis enterprises. This has created an ambiguous legal environment where medical cannabis users are decriminalized but growers themselves have no official guidelines except for limits legislated at local levels, allowing counties and cities to pick the cannabis vendors they allow to operate, and routinely leaving growers without any way to prove they are raising plants for the "legal" medical industry.

Recreational markets pose problems for growers as well. In Washington State, they're prohibited from selling directly to consumers, and instead must vend to state-licensed processors and retailers. Blocking growers from vertically integrating with retailers, or conducting direct sales themselves, unnecessarily lengthens the supply chain, raising prices for consumers while decreasing revenue for cultivators.

Another looming regulatory complication for cannabis growers are taxes and fees. In Colorado, retail cannabis is taxed at more than 27 percent, driving both consumers and growers to the black market where they can both get better deals. In Washington State, the effective tax rate is 44 percent. Other states are making their programs even more restrictive: Maryland is going to charge $125,000 for a medical marijuana business license alone; in New York State, a total of just five cultivation licenses will be fiercely fought over, and the victors will only be able to sell cannabis-infused products—no buds or joints.

As civic anxiety over cannabis begins to dissipate and examples of responsible canna-businesses increase, will regulation ease and pave the way for more small-market vendors? Or will the rules remain biased towards those who can afford the government-imposed costs of business? Given how long marijuana prohibition itself has lasted—and increasingly affirmative scientific research—the public has reason to be skeptical of marijuana regulation regimes that harshly restrict growers, because those restrictions will ultimately affect customers as well. A pot brownie may soon be legal for you to buy and eat, but how much will it cost, and what will be in it? Unless state regulation of cannabis can accommodate the marijuana economy we already have—legal or not—the dark net will continue to be one of many spaces where black market demand for cannabis meets white market supply.

Bill Kilby is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

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If you happen to be in New York City tonight and aren't trying to wedge yourself underneath your radiator, Scot Sothern is having a show at Daniel Cooney gallery in Chelsea. Scott is a regular contributor to this website and a longtime documenter of LA's seediest locales. He's spent the majority of his life lurking on the crusty fringes of society, and some of the images he captured in those fringes in the mid 80s to early 90s will be featured tonight in his first New York solo show. The 25 vintage prints in Lowlife: 1985 - 1991, are the only ones in existence.

According to the press release: "the images offer the viewer a potent look at disenfranchised Americans, usually existing under the radar and out of touch. Through Sothern we have a view into an authentic underground world where human life is expendable and for sale 'at the price of a Big Mac and a fix.'"

The show will be up through February 28.

Lowlife: 1985 - 1991
Daniel Cooney Gallery
508 West 26th Street, Suite 9C
New York

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Collages by Marta Parszeniew. Images via/via/via/via/via/via/via/via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Today, in journalism, the anniversary is king. With the present (and future) a difficult and terrifying place, even the most insignificant milestone can give us a chance to escape into the warm embrace of the past in the name of having something to write about.

Of course, it's not only journalists reaping the rewards of the throwback tactic; everyone's complicit. Film companies crank out anniversary edition DVDs and Blu-rays; record labels plug re-mastered copies of seminal albums; governments and political interest groups use emotive dates to recruit and convert.

With that in mind, I thought I'd save you a little reading time this year by telling you how things are going to pan out anniversary feature-wise in 2015.

JANUARY

12th: Bereft of any obvious nice round number Nirvana or Kurt anniversaries to really go to town on this year, the 25th anniversary of Kurt and Courtney meeting at the Satyricon club in Portland will have to do. Resourceful hacks unearth eyewitnesses (Krist Novoselic). Courtney Love's mental health is discussed. The phrase "fateful night" never goes unused.

24th: It's been 50 years since roaring wartime orator/talking dog Winston Churchill rode his Spitfire off to the great Gentleman's Club in the sky, which means that, with the exception of one Guardian piece, Britain's "greatest leader" (Telegraph, Times, et al) is lauded by the country's media. A functional alcoholic, author, and wearer of finely tailored clothing, the feature opportunities range across the spectrum, from "Drink like Winston" lifestyle pieces to "Get the Churchill look" spreads. All features are recycled in the summer for the 75th anniversary of his appointment as prime minister.

31st: What better way to follow up last year's great big World War I centenary love-in than by celebrating the centenary of the first large-scale use of gas as a weapon?

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Images via/via/via

FEBRUARY

2nd: On the 25th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, the great and the good of the Western world line up to write about the "Nelson I knew." Bob Geldof releases a star-studded version of the Specials' hit "Nelson Mandela," a song he has mysteriously acquired the rights to. The profits are dedicated to making sure Africa will always be there to serve the philanthropic needs of the West.

6th: The 70th anniversary of Bob Marley's birth sees food features on where to eat jerk chicken competing with long reads on the truth and fire of the reggae great. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell shares the same tried and tested stories about how well he and Bob got on and reminds everyone that, despite what they might have heard, he definitely didn't rip Bob off. Bunny Wailer's increasingly worrying state of mind is ignored, though the Marley family's decision to sell the rights to "Marley Natural," the world's first cannabis brand, to three rich white Americans definitely isn't. Pop stars who only ever listened to Legend talk about what an "inspiration" Bob was to them.

27th: If Russell Brand hasn't been trending consistently since the beginning of the year, the first anniversary of the The Trews gives everyone an excuse to post some videos of him having a good old barney with Fox News.

MARCH

2nd: To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of The Sound of Music, the BBC sends Julie Andrews back to Austria to relive the experience of making the film. The resulting documentary is unexpectedly harrowing. Von Trapp-themed fashion pieces are everywhere. Serious film critics make the case for its enduring cultural significance and the "lost Europe" that was once defined by serenity and calm.

5th: The third anniversary of Kony 2012. Joseph Kony is still at large. Invisible Children founder Jason Russell gives a "raw" interview to a serious newspaper in which he talks "honestly and emotionally" about his problems with drink, drugs, and Christianity.

15th: Thirty years ago, Symbolics.com became the first ever registered website, and this anniversary gives everyone a chance to let you know all about Symbolics.com (this takes two sentences) before talking about how wonderful/terrible the internet is (this takes thousands of words, hundreds of gifs, and lots of bad intros about cats).

15th: Fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. It will never end. The Western media tries to work out which group of bad guys is the most bad. They settle, as usual, for Islamic State.

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Images via/via/via

APRIL

4th: Third anniversary of the birth of Grumpy Cat. If he's dead, think pieces speculating on whether the internet was his real killer are penned, alongside a well-stocked photo gallery of the little grumpykins in action. If he's alive, just the photos.

25th: "They died so we could live," intones the Telegraph, marking the 100th anniversary of the horrors of Gallipoli. The Mail celebrates Anzac Day and the "unbreakable bond between the Queen and her subjects."

Pictures of the young Mel Gibson in the film Gallipoli provide the internet with an endless stream of "You won't believe how hot Mel Gibson was when he was younger" listicles. "Remember Gibson as a handsome young man, not as a drooling racist," we are told. The film's anti-imperial message is conveniently ignored.

MAY

5th: Two days before this year's election, the 10th anniversary of Tony Blair's third election triumph prompts a series of pieces about how unelectable Ed Miliband is. Ed's latest piece of weirdness (something will have replaced the staring or the bacon sandwich by then) will be contrasted to the oily, people-pleasing smoothness of King Blair.

JUNE

13th: The 150th anniversary of WB Yeats' birth encourages a bunch of journalists who don't read contemporary poetry to write about how bad contemporary poetry is. Quotes from the great Irishman's poems are extracted and funneled into lists broken up by generic pictures of his homeland.

18th: The 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo is marked by a series of re-enactments. Most of the coverage un-ironically celebrates our thrashing of the cheese-eating surrender monkey frogs.

19th: Eight hundred years on from the signing of the Magna Carta, Britain's enduring commitment to human rights/the demands of small groups of rich men is celebrated by one and all. Politicians from all sides fight for column inches in which to proclaim their love of Britain, freedom and great scrolls of parchment. Stephen Fry bemoans the lack of decent Latin readers left in the country. None of the writers will have ever read the hallowed document.

But have we capitulated to the bankers in the same way King John capitulated to the feudal barons, only with less reason and less benefit, some commentators ask?

(Similar sentiments will also be expressed for the 750th anniversary of parliament earlier in the year, in which the use of "Westminster" as a term of abuse evocative of a hive of pedophiles will be discussed.)

29th: The one-year anniversary of Isis's rebranding as "Islamic State" and their announcement of the formation of a caliphate. The group wins a media award for most covered organization. Media outlets compete over who has the scariest, most piratical pictures of IS fighters.

JULY

7th: Ten years since the 7/7 bombings in London, the media, backed up by the government, talk darkly of the probability of something similar happening again. New anti-terrorism measures are announced. New types of terrorist are written about. Fear spreads. The 9/11 NeverForget hashtag is co-opted.

14th: To celebrate the first ascent of the Matterhorn 150 years ago, music sites host Mousse T's "Horny '98," which has been re-released with a video of people mouthing the lyrics while pretending to fuck the Swiss mountain.

29th: The 125th anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh's death. Countless features ask whether you have to be mad to be a genius. Someone goes too far and publishes a guide to chopping your own ear off.

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Images via/via/via

AUGUST

4th: The 55th anniversary of Psycho. Not the frame-by-frame remake, alas, but the original Hitchcock version. Every weekend supplement carries a large feature on the film. Will it ever be bettered, critics ask? No, they dutifully answer.

6th: On the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of the Western media solemnly recounts the horror of what happened before insisting that America would never do anything like that again. A number of outlets disagree and publish polemics reminding everyone that America continues to be a bastard abroad. Those who already think this read the polemics, agree with them, get angry and then feel hopeless.

7th: "The Riots—what have we learned?" asks every single broadsheet on the fourth anniversary of the shooting of Mark Duggan. News channels interview "real Londoners" and ex-cops talk about how Duggan was really just a gangster who had it coming. Ferguson analogies are made. Russell Brand does something.

22nd: Twenty years on from Rancid's "seminal" album ...and out Come the Wolves, music sites analyze the phenomenon of pop-punk and ask if the album was the genre's highpoint. They conclude that no, the highpoint was probably something Green Day did.

30th: Rolling Stone, Q, and Mojo all dedicate entire issues to the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. New Yorker publishes a 36-page piece entitled "In Search of Highway 61." Middle-aged white men line up to discuss the genius of old raspy voice.

SEPTEMBER

1st: The fifth anniversary of Wiley joining Twitter lets everyone compile some of his greatest Tweets and watch the traffic roll in.

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Images via/via/via

OCTOBER

20th: The Lord of the Rings turns 60 and the cast of the films are brought together to wearily recount the three decades they spent in New Zealand making them.

25th: Six hundred years since Agincourt. British thesps are forced to record a version of Shakespeare's Henry V.

27th: A year after British troops left Afghanistan, the government, backed by much of the media, continues to insist that Britain "won" the war. Evidence to the contrary is largely ignored, but Afghanistan's "inability to govern itself" is noted. Perhaps we should go back because they don't understand democracy? A Tony Blair opinion piece agrees.

NOVEMBER

1st: The 40th anniversary of the release of Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity leads to a series of long think-pieces that will sit in a few tabs in your browser for weeks before you finally admit you're never going to read them.

4th: The 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols' first gig. Punk was "a clarion call for the working man" says the Observer. NME's cover story heralds the "most radical band ever to spit into the audience." In a Britain that was on its knees, the Pistols were a blast of fresh air. John Lydon gives some grumpy, no-nonsense interviews.

24th: "It's been 20 years since the release of GoldenEye, but Pierce Brosnan hasn't changed a bit," purr a collection of lifestyle magazines.

DECEMBER

12th: The 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's birth allows for some gossip-heavy biographies of the crooner, while Ronan Farrow's parentage is questioned. A series of "The woman he loved" pieces, all about different women, are published.

25th: Anniversary of Jesus' birth overshadowed by coverage of football, weather conditions, and presents. Vicars complain. The light dies.

Follow Oscar on Twitter.

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A man swimming around in some human excrement. It's his job though, so that's fine. Image via East West Dive and Salvage

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In an incident that makes staying in and watching Jools Holland repeatedly say the words "boogie woogie" sound fun, police in Somerset are investigating an incident in which a New Year's Eve partygoer was stripped, shaved, thrown in a pond, and—and there's not really any good way to say this, so let's just kick to it—had shit rubbed in their mouths. Human shit. The worst of all the shits.

As the Wells Journal reports, police are investigating the shit-in-mouth incident after a video of the event did the rounds on social media, because it turns out The Minority Report was wrong and the only form of crime reporting in the future will be via misguided tweets rather than a psychic having a premonition in a bath.

Quick walk through of the video: a victim passes out at a house party, and their head is partially shaved and they are stripped naked—classic unimaginative move. Then someone rubs human shit in their mouths and a group coordinate to pick them up and throw them, still naked and shit-mouthed, into a garden pond, actions that pass right through banter and straight into vile.

Thing about rubbing your shit into someone else's mouth is: you're still the scrubber in all this, aren't you? You can't mock someone who got shit rubbed in their mouth if it was your shit that you rubbed in their mouth. There was a kid at our school who used to pick up dried old dog turds, desiccated by the summer heat, and throw them at lads in younger years before laughing at them for having turd particles on their coats. There is no logic in a man who is willing to pick up a shit to make a point. There is no arguing with them. They just want to watch the world burn, while shunning antibacterial gel.

Avon and Somerset Police Inspector Mark Nicholson told the paper: "We are aware of the incident through social media and would like to encourage anyone who witnessed it to come forward. Anti-social behavior is treated seriously and anyone who wishes to come forward to talk to us about the incident is welcome to contact us."

Weirder, though, is he added that the force was monitoring social media threats to find the shit rubbers and, presumably, rub shit into their mouths in retaliation. "Vigilante action will not be tolerated and any incidents will be treated seriously," Nicholson warned.

Does this mean Somerset will soon turn into some Gotham City–esque crime hotspot, where gangs of vigilantes go around pinning each other down and rubbing shit in each others' mouths? If people are willing to put a balaclava on and take to the streets rubbing shit in people's mouths willy-nilly as some vague form of retaliation, then maybe it's best we don't have the death penalty in this country.

Anyway, goes without saying, but: next time you're at a party and someone passes out, don't rub one of your shits in their mouth. Just draw a dick on their forehead with a permanent marker, or something like that.

If you live in Somerset and you know who rubbed shit in someone's mouth on New Year's Eve then you can call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 1111. Similarly, if one of your mates has a newly shaved head and a thousand-yard stare, maybe buy them a pint and be nice to them.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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The cover "Charlie Hebdo" ran after its office was destroyed by an arson attack in 2011. The caption reads, "Love: Stronger than hate."

My understanding of French culture, that country's debate on immigration, and Muslim theology are limited at best. However, I was a writer and editor for The Onion for 19 years, and I think I have a grasp on satire. So it is with some confidence that I will say that I don't understand the satirical point behind running a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed naked and on all fours with a star over his asshole, as Charlie Hebdo did in 2012.

I mean, I understand that depictions of the Prophet Muhammed are theoretically banned by the Quran (they're not explicitly banned by that text, but we don't need to get into all that), and that it's supposed to be transgressive and shocking, but what is a non-Muslim Westerner saying when he or she draws a cartoon like that? To me, it comes from a place of fear and misunderstanding, and it's a big "fuck you" to Muslims. It's an uneducated Westerner's knee-jerk reaction to a Muslim extremist's knee-jerk reaction, ignorance combating ignorance, and it turns into a giant circle knee-jerk. When one gets the ball rolling, it's easy to hide behind a cry of "satire!" in order to justify these offensive images.

Obviously, no one should die over such images, even if reasonable people might doubt that they need to be put out into the world. And in fact, if someone wants to publish images like that, it's important—vitally important—that they do so.

The engine of social progress is fueled by discourse, but discourse can get mired in repetition and dogma. Unless there's a flashpoint, people are more than happy to let the status quo go unchallenged—headlines blur together, tragedies become routine. Satire, good or bad, can hone in on an injustice—real or perceived—and broaden it, amplify it, turn it into something so loud that it can't be ignored.

Recent case in point: Allegations of Bill Cosby's serial rapistry appeared in People, arguably one of the nation's most middle-of-the-road mainstream magazines, in 2006; the year before that, one of his accusers was interviewed on The Today Show, the bland morning news program on the very network that aired Cosby's hit sitcom. Nobody rose up and took notice. But last year, comedian Hannibal Burress mentioned the accusation when calling Cosby out on his hypocrisy of demanding a certain behavioral standard from black men when he himself has been accused of raping several women—and now the controversy has reached the point where major networks are wary of working with the formerly revered comic.

More personally, when The Onion published its reaction to 9/11, we were inundated with emails thanking us for giving people something to laugh about, a new way to react to the horror that was fresh in their minds. It made some people's lives a little better, which was, without a doubt, cool.

So what did Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of a naked Muhammed accomplish? Years ago, I interviewed cartoonist Joe Sacco, the creator of Palestine, for The Onion's sister publication The AV Club. The topic turned to Robert Crumb and the graphic, shocking, awe-inspiring drawings he produced. "Crumb kicked down a lot of doors for us," Sacco told me. "We're still afraid to go through some of them." I think that's true for all means of expression. It's important to know that everything can be said in order to say the things you want to say.

Though they seemed mostly designed just to provoke, the offensive cartoons were also published alongside what I would say are more thoughtful works, including an image of a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist preparing to behead Muhammed for his beliefs. It's perfect satire, and a salient point made all too poignant by the events that occurred this week. Moving forward, I wish Charlie Hebdo would lean more toward that sort of thing—but more than that, I hope they don't give a shit and continue to push every envelope so that somewhere, someone is inspired to confront the ideas they believe to be self-evident and maybe create something for themselves.

Joe Garden is currently a freelance writer and performer; in the past, he was a writer and features editor for The Onion, but has now fled society to live unencumbered by responsibility. Follow him on Twitter.

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President Francois Hollande, photo via Wiki Media.

Today, Paris is still reeling from the mass shootings at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday and the shooting in Montrouge Thursday morning. At the time of writing, the death toll is at least 15, including two as yet unidentified people killed today at a siege at a kosher supermarket in the city's 20th arrondissement. The shooter there—who has taken hostages—is thought to be the man from Montrouge. Meanwhile, the suspects from the Hebdo attack are also holding a hostage after being pursued and cornered by the authorities on an industrial estate northeast of Paris. Reports continue to drip through of attacks on mosques, presumably carried out by antagonists from France's right wing.

Here, political analyst Jérôme Sainte-Marie, president of PollingVox—a highly-respected research agency that helps encourage and inform public debate—explains why the events are likely to have disastrous consequences for French society and the country's already fragile government.

§

There has been a shift in the French public opinion over the last decade. While racism against North African or Arabic people has declined, this has been counter-balanced with growing concerns about Islam. People used to fear immigration because of unemployment—now they fear it because of religious matters.

Racist prejudices may have declined in France, but cultural clashes are more present than ever. As a consequence, an increasing number of French people are starting to think that Islam is not compatible with democracy, and that Muslim people aren't able to integrate into their society.

There was a major turning point in 2010, when former president Nicolas Sarkozy's discourse became much more hostile to immigration. This continued during the run-up to the 2012 elections. He referred many times to "halal meat," for instance, which had a very negative impact, as it legitimized anti-immigration and anti-Islamic positions in society.

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The Charlie Hebdo crime scene yesterday. Photos by Etienne Rouillon

Polls have shown that French people largely believe that the integration of foreigners into their society is not working well, and that less than 25 percent of the people in France have a positive image of Islam. Eighty percent believe wearing the veil is a problem for society. A good example of growing tensions is the increasing amount of graffiti on religious sites or in cemeteries that have been reported in the last few years.

Yesterday's attacks can only exacerbate pessimism for the future of France. It might also crystallize certain attitudes, such as the idea that Islam, in its very essence, is different to any other religion. The concept of secularism—very dear to French society—might be used more and more as a weapon against Islam. As well as ostracizing the Muslim minority, in the long term, this may encourage people to adopt a national outlook on things, rather than an international one.

Consequences will also be harsh for the French government. Our government is currently the most unpopular that France has ever known. Less than one in five citizens support President François Hollande, and the left wing has been losing all the partial elections for the last two years.

Recent polls by the French organization IFOP have shown that, if France were to hold a general election now, opposition to the right wing would see votes leaking to the far right, leaving the left wing out entirely.

The recent attacks can only exacerbate public pessimism for the future of France.

This current, weakening influence of the executive power is unprecedented in France. It's largely due to the lack of an effective government response to people's main concern: unemployment. Policy has not yielded any tangible social or economic results and, once the raw mourning period relating to the attacks has dissipated, there will inevitably be strong critiques towards the government regarding security policies, which have previously been labeled as too permissive, and not supportive enough of the police.

The police have been a clear target in these attacks, which will put the Prime Minister and the Minister of Internal Affairs in an unsteady position. As public support plummets even further, an already weak government will become profoundly fragile.

The Front National—France's leading far-right party—will undoubtedly benefit from all this tumult, as it is currently the only party directly and publicly linking immigration to internal security problems. Its influence is currently reaching the same levels as the right-wing UMP party, and far outweighs that of the Socialists.

The direct effect of these attacks on French society remains hard to predict, but it will largely depend on how the government responds in the next few weeks. It is highly unlikely, however, that the outcome will be positive for Hollande or his party.

As told to Alice Tchernookova.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Let me be clear: The people responsible for murdering the journalists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7 were the men who pulled the triggers of the Kalashnikovs. Moreover, we've no need to reach into our grab bag of ethical epithets in order to find one that fits these men's characters; we don't need to speak of "barbarism," or a "complete lack of civilized values," or agonize about how they became radicalized—because we know the answer already—but what we can unequivocally assert is that these men, in those rattling, coughing, cordite-stinking moments, were evil. If by evil is understood this: an egotism that grew like a cancer—a lust for status and power and "significance" that metastasized through these murderers' brains. The problem for the staunch defenders of Western values is that each and every one of us possesses this capacity for evil—it's implicit in having an ego at all—so when the demonstrators stood in the Place de la République holding placards that read "JE SUIS CHARLIE," they might just as well have held ones reading: "NOUS SOMMES LES TERRORISTES."

The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the law exists to restrain our worst impulses, not encourage our best. Those politicians, religious leaders, and commentators who in the hours and days since this atrocity have spoken about freedom of speech as a sine qua non of that liberty which is in turn essential for civilization would've done well to remember both this and their own history: The birth of the French republic was attended by justice—blindfolded and wearing earplugs. It was called the Terror. When the sans-culottes stormed the Bastille they found a handful of prisoners in the ancient bastion, among them the Marquis de Sade, who soon enough found himself elevated to the position of revolutionary judge, dispatching aristos and other reactionaries to the guillotine. It was a nice example of liberation—if by that is meant the freedom to murder for political ends.

The idea that the French secularists have of their political system (and for that matter the British secularists of theirs, the Americans of theirs, and so on), is not only that it encourages their best impulses, but that if it's perfected it will render the entire population supremely free and entirely good. This is a process that both right and left seem to feel is unstoppable—whether powered by some sort of moral "natural selection" or historical determinism. For these boosters the Enlightenment project of perfecting man's moral nature is still underway, and will only end when a (godless) heaven has been established on earth. But such rarefied progress is precisely what is mocked, not only by the murdering of Parisian journalists but by the drone strikes in Syria, Iraq, and Waziristan, which are also murders conducted for religio-political ends. It is mocked as well by the clamoring that follows every terrorist outrage for the suspension of precisely those aspects of the law that exist to restrain our worst impulses, in particular the worst impulses of our rulers: namely, due process of law, fair trials, habeas corpus, and freedom from state-mandated torture and extrajudicial killing.

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The memorial issue of Charlie Hebdo will have a print run of 1,000,000 copies, financed by the French government; so now the satirists have been co-opted by the state, precisely the institution you might've thought they should never cease from attacking. But the question needs to be asked: Were the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo really satirists, if by satire is meant the deployment of humor, ridicule, sarcasm, and irony in order to achieve moral reform? Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from H. L. Mencken's definition of good journalism: It should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." The trouble with a lot of so-called satire directed against religiously motivated extremists is that it's not clear whom it's afflicting, or whom it's comforting.

The last cartoon drawn by Charb, Charlie Hebdo's editor, featured a crude pictogram of a jihadist wearing a hat called a pakol—this would mark the fighter as an Afghan, and therefore as unlikely to be involved in terrorist attacks in the West. Charb's caption flies in the face of this: Above the Afghan jihadist it reads, "Still no attacks in France," while the speech bubble coming from his mouth reads, "Wait, there's until the end of January to give gifts."

Setting to one side the premonitory character of this cartoon, and the strangeness of a magazine editor who was prepared to die for his convictions (or so Charb said after the Charlie Hebdo offices were firebombed in 2011), yet not to get the basic facts about his targets correct, is it right to think of it as satire? Whatever else we may believe about people so overwhelmed by their evil nature that they're prepared to deprive others of their lives for the sake of a delusory set of ideas, the one thing we can be certain of is that they're not comfortable; moreover, while Charb's cartoon may've provoked a wry smile from Charlie Hebdo's readers, it's not clear to me that these people are the "afflicted" who, in Mencken's definition, require "comforting"—unless their "affliction" is the very fact of a substantial Muslim population in France, and their "comfort" consists in inking in all these fellow citizens with a terroristic brush.

This is in no way to condone the shooting of Charb and the other journalists—an act that, as I pointed out initially, is evil, pure and simple, but our society makes a fetish of "the right to free speech" without ever questioning what sort of responsibilities are implied by this right. But then it also makes a fetish of "freedom" conceived of as agency worthy of a Nietzschean Übermensch—whereas the truth of the matter is, as most of us understand only too well, we are in fact grossly constrained in most of what we do, most of the time—and a major part of what constrains us are our murderous, animal instincts.

Click here for live updates from Paris, via VICE News

The first week of 2015 ended tragically when three masked gunmen stormed the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12, including some of France's most prominent cartoonists, and injuring many more in the deadliest terror attack the country has seen in decades. At the time of writing, the perpetrators were involved in a hostage situation at an industrial estate about 30 miles outside Paris. In response to the events, France raised its terror alert to the highest level—which has only happened once in the last decade—and 100,000 people across the country took to the streets in solidarity with the victims.

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All 'CrossCountry Canada' screencaps via Internet Archive

In today's video games, you can choose to assume the role of a high-powered military dynamo in the Call of Duty series to murder other soldiers in glorious HD, or you hop into the boots of an alien in Destiny to zoom across moonscapes with a jetpack and a space rifle. But in the glory days of the Canadian edutainment software industry in 1991, the name of the game was: delivering potash from Saskatoon to Winnipeg in the most subdued and frustrating manner possible.

If you grew up in Canada's elementary school system in the 90s, there's a good chance you sat in front of a text-command-driven truck driving simulator called CrossCountry Canada (play here). The weird thing about the game is that most people who played it seemed to have fond memories of it. Sure, the concept makes a rudimentary flight simulator feel like Quake, but there was something oddly soothing and patriotic about taking the helm of an 18-wheeler and traveling across Canada bringing valuable goods from city to city.

Given that I hadn't played CrossCountry Canada in about 15 years, I was excited to power up the emulated version on the Internet Archive, which—unless you've been living under an internet-free rock for the past few days—just published over 2,000 MS-DOS games that are free to play in your browser.

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I immediately felt a rush of nostalgia as I saw the CrossCountry Canada title screen pop up in my browser, and was excited to enter my name of choice: Thrillho.

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Once Thrillho was strapped into his 18-wheeler, I was presented with a map of Canada and a blinking command prompt. I wasn't sure what to do, but I knew I wanted to drive north to deliver some gold in Manitoba. I tried entering "N" to go north.

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Oh, of course my fictional MS-DOS truck isn't turned on. My bad.

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Now that my truck was on and spewing virtual pollution into a virtual Canada, I was ready to get moving. I tried "drive north" instead of just "N," and the game kicked into gear. I was on the road in Winnipeg, feeling the wind in my hair and presumably cranking some sweet CanCon tunes on the road. But it wasn't long before the game threw a wrench in my plans and presented an unexpected challenge: my headlights were off, and I wasn't driving safely.

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Clearly the game wasn't about to let me disobey the rules of the road, so I acquiesced and fired up my headlights. Just like Future told me to do in his hit song, I turned on the lights.

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Unsurprisingly, turning on my headlights wasn't going to be the last challenge that CrossCountry Canada would throw my way. Far from it. I guess I was turning up too hard, cranking up the radio as I tore through Winnipeg: I got into an accident.

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Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out what the hell the game wanted me to do. It told me I had to get to a gas station to get my truck repaired, but I couldn't get to the gas station without getting my truck repaired. I was stuck in an infinite feedback loop, on a game from 1991, but playing it in 2015 inside a web browser that was emulating MS-DOS.

Frustrated, I shut down the game and got in touch with one of the game's programmers, a blues artist from Vancouver named Jimfre Bacal. Bacal's primary duty in the development of CrossCountry Canada was to port the original version from Mac to PC. He told me the game intentionally did not provide its users with the language needed to control the game, and that they caught a bit of flak for that. But I suppose trying to figure out how to play the damn game is where the edutainment comes from.

Bacal said programming edutainment for "little pipsqueaks" was a "garbage-heap of money" in terms of salaries for programmers in the mid-to-late 80s. He clarified that point by saying: "There was a 'newness' about educational software during that era and sales were low compared to today's video game sales. Big companies mostly shied away from school software and many small independent software companies competed against each other to fill the void. By the 90s, gaming software had become the big thing with the introduction of game boxes that supplanted desktop computers as the main target for game companies."

When discussing the current state of the gaming industry, Bacal lamented an industry where he believes engineers are using their intellect to design the biggest explosion in violent titles. He thus referred to edutainment gaming as the "pinnacle of ethics."

Despite Bacal's somewhat gruff comments about his experience coding CrossCountry Canada, it seems the nobility of making edutainment software for kids has left him with a strong impression about the possibilities of software development. Playing CrossCountry Canada even for a few minutes on the Internet Archive brought back some great memories of going on potash runs, via MS-DOS, through the Canadian landscape. And while he might use metaphors about garbage to talk about his pay at that time, the CrossCountry Canada experience provided a rare, oddly patriotic relief from the ennui of elementary school life on the ancient computers that populated Canadian school boards.

Follow Patrick on Twitter.

[body_image width='677' height='484' path='images/content-images/2015/01/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/09/' filename='remembering-peter-cook-the-funniest-dead-man-alive-body-image-1420803331.png' id='16796']Dudley Moore (left) and Peter Cook (right). Photo via Wiki Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

I have been living in a world of nostalgia for over ten years, and it is the fault of one man. Since 2003 Peter Cook has soared above all others as my favorite comedian, someone who has magnetized me in a way I find it difficult to exaggerate. Had I a time machine I would ask in a heartbeat not to meet Mozart, nor to be shown Shakespeare's plays as they were first performed; I would choose Greek Street on October 5, 1961, the opening night of Cook's satirical nightclub the Establishment, so that I could watch the man Stephen Fry called "the funniest man who ever drew breath" at the height of his beautiful fame.

January 9 marks 20 years since Peter Cook's death. What remains of his legacy, and what was he about?

My very first foray into the strange world of Peter Cook was at age 14, when, on a family holiday, we listened to a tape of him and Dudley Moore performing six sketches. I must have heard sections of that tape hundreds of times by now. Looking out of the window in the back of the car, I was in total, mesmerized bliss. Eric Idle said of watching Cook's stage revue Beyond the Fringe for the first time, "I simply had no idea you were allowed to be that funny." This is exactly how I felt when I discovered Peter Cook.

Fascinated, I went on to sit for hours in Waterstone's reading Cook's biography, written with grace and exceptional skill by Harry Thompson. As though reading a novel, I cried when Cook died, particularly moved by the description of how his comedy partner Dudley Moore was affected: "His first act was to pick up the phone and ring the answering machine in Peter's empty house, thousands of miles away in the middle of the night, just to hear his partner's laconic drawl once more."

Cook's triumphs were predominantly in live entertainment and a lot of his television work was destroyed by the BBC, meaning that he is not a familiar name to the man on the street in the way someone like Eric Morecambe is. When I speak to Robin Ince about Cook, he says—and I agree—that this is why Cook's fans are so devoted: His work has to be sought out, its author therefore more of a precious, hard-won secret.

For a man so fêted by his peers, Cook's legacy is difficult to define. Received (and inevitably simplistic) wisdom is that he achieved so much by the age of 28—lavishly praised for his West End and Broadway shows, founder of a comedy club, proprietor of a satirical magazine, and star of a BBC show—that he all but ran out of steam, relying increasingly on alcohol and on doomed attempts to rekindle former glories rather than invest time and energy in new challenges.

Good comedy is like music; it's as precise and it's as difficult. Cook's comedy has always enthralled me because of how beautifully rhythmic it is, how smooth its cadences, and how satisfying its beats. When Cook says, "Frog à la pêche is basically a large frog—covered in boiling cuantro... with a peach... stuck in its mouth . It's one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen," it is so astonishingly perfect that a response to it is conscious only on one level. Of course the image is exquisitely odd, but beyond that, the words have a profoundly physical effect on the listener. As John Cleese said of Cook performing, "After a few seconds perfectly sane, sensible people would start moaning and pawing the air and emitting strange wounded-animal noises."

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/01/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/09/' filename='remembering-peter-cook-the-funniest-dead-man-alive-body-image-1420806754.jpg' id='16806']Peter Cook memorial issue of Private Eye, Ian Hislop's office

Private Eye, the magazine of which Cook was the proprietor as well as a long-time contributor, survives as a testament to the type of comedy for which he was so perfect a fit: satirical, incredibly well-informed, often surreal. Ian Hislop tells me, "He was a great proprietor because he didn't interfere. He'd come in in bursts and just be very funny, and then disappear again." On the wall behind the editor hangs a framed and enlarged copy of the Eye's memorial issue printed after Cook died, and the esteem in which Hislop holds Cook is touching.

"He was always larger than life. My only regret is that I think we sometimes indulged him, collectively." The comparatively tee-total Hislop means that they could have taken a harder stance on Cook's drinking, rather than seeing it as an inextricable part of him. At the Eye people tended, in fact, not to ask about Cook's private life, and vice versa. "He didn't say, 'Ooh, how are the kids?' Like a lot of Englishmen of a particular vintage and time, that was not how he communicated," says Hislop. When his personal life was perhaps in turmoil, or when professional projects were not working out, the Eye was the place to which Peter could turn for a room full of admirers and plenty of hands willing to write down his every word.

"The best thing he did towards the end of his life, for a very long time," says Hislop, "was Clive [Anderson]'s show. And I think it's because Clive's quite a Puritan and basically made Peter work."

Hislop is referring to a 1993 episode of Clive Anderson Talks Back , in which a 56-year-old Cook shone as four typically enchanting weirdos, proving himself capable of reaching the highs he enjoyed as a young man. This was about a year before he died. "At that stage he was a very easy person to get on with; very amiable," Anderson tells me. "He was a hero to me from afar but he remained a hero, having both met him and worked with him." When I ask Hislop what Cook might have been up to had he been alive at 77, he says, "I have a feeling that after the Clive thing he might have got his act together personally."

This an optimistic assessment of a man about whom people are now reluctant to speak ill. But saying anything about Cook with any certainty is difficult. Getting the measure of the man is excruciatingly hard, like trying to catch sand. To me he is a series of endless contradictions: though Hislop says Cook never inquired about people's well-being, others say the total opposite; where some claim him to have had multiple and diverse skills, others say he could do nothing other than comedy.

To illustrate the contention that the image of him as unfailingly, effortlessly funny is a rose-tinted one, I would choose a fascinating moment in Cook's 1989 performance on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Despite his prodigious gifts, he is an awkward improviser in this format. After a series of short scenarios Cook and Stephen Fry have had to act out, Cook assumes the game to be over; it is apparent that he would rather be smiling laconically from a seated position. At this point Clive Anderson calls out one final request. Cook is tangibly angry—"Oh good grief. We've done three"—and one realizes in that totally genuine reaction that this is no longer fun, this is hard. He reacts in exactly the way that a passerby might if called on to do improv: He panics and he feels awkward. "His appearing on that wasn't as happy an experience as the four-character chat show," Anderson admits to me. Hislop says: "I saw him perform live often enough to know that it was just terrific when he turned it on. I also worked with him enough times to know he could come up with unfunny ideas just like anyone else."

To examine Cook's life in any depth is to learn that, genius though he certainly was, he was not a "professional comedian" in the same sense as many of those who cite him as seminal. He had a very particular set of skills, and in areas like sketch-writing or appearing on chat shows he was never bettered. But what he had couldn't really be packaged, nor could it be stretched much beyond his comfort zone. "Something like fire," a throwaway phrase in a monologue of his, was also the title of an anthology of contributions from friends about his life. The title was beautifully appropriate as a reflection on his gifts: where did it come from, this bizarre way with words? What made it so difficult to harness?

[body_image width='869' height='474' path='images/content-images/2015/01/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/09/' filename='remembering-peter-cook-the-funniest-dead-man-alive-body-image-1420808192.png' id='16824']Peter Cook picture right. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Helped by his Clive Anderson performance, there is no doubt that Cook's status as of the country's most influential comic minds is pretty damn solid. There are plenty of people working to preserve his legacy, and even to extend it. "I think his reputation is secure," says Anderson. In the square mile of Soho that was Cook's professional playground for many years, Mike O'Brien, founder of comedy record label Laughing Stock Productions, is trying with others to resurrect Cook's Establishment Club. He says the aim of the club, to which Cook's widow Lin has conferred her blessing, is to fit "all the best elements of Soho under one roof." There have been several performances already, predominantly at Ronnie Scott's jazz club, featuring an eclectic range of performers, as the original Establishment club would have done.

Given that shortly before he died, Cook was thinking of resurrecting his short-lived club, this venture seems like one of which he would have approved. That people constantly feel the need to associate themselves with Cook's enigmatic genius, to commemorate and to emulate him, is a moving tribute to the impact he had when he was alive. Nobody has had a greater impact on my life. I would encourage you to devour as much information as you can about him, and find yourself similarly enchanted.

Follow Ralph on Twitter.

I rode two and a half hours through a snowstorm on December 29 to Pueblo, Colorado, to see the Westboro Baptist Church picket at two marijuana dispensaries. The hate group was in town to protest Pueblo County becoming one of the first in the state to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, inspiring 400 counter-protesters to come out in opposition.

Before arriving in town, the WBC had announced its plan to also protest outside of Marisol Therapeutics and Pueblo West Organics, warning us all that "God Hates Your Sorceries (Drug Trade!)." So there they were: Six lonely WBC sign-wavers at Marisol, the first demonstration site, guarded by a team of cops who stood 30 yards away. There were also 25 to 35 marijuana supporters who held their signs, pretended to puff on novelty-sized fake joints, and shouted obscenities. The counter-demonstrations were a hysterical circus of costumes, props, jokes, and laughter. The general sentiment among the pro-weed people was that if Westboro has become anti-pot, then full legalization must be around the corner.

"They're making disapproval of cannabis look silly, just like they did with being anti-gay," said Kayvan Khalatbari, owner of Denver Relief Dispensary and Consulting, who was dressed as a chicken at the Marisol dispensary. (Khalatbari runs a small publishing company that is putting out a novel of mine, and was also my ride to the event.) "They aren't a threat to marijuana. The cannabis side is mostly joking around and belittling their cause."

When Westboro Baptist Church began picketing in the early 90s, a time when it was more socially acceptable to be openly homophobic. Through their tenacity and media moxie, WBC would go on to become the most recognizable anti-gay organization in the world, with every TV news story about sexual bigotry containing a clip of their iconic "God Hates Fags" signs. And it was these aggressive and offensive efforts that also helped rally progressives to fight for gay marriage.

At the same time, however, Westboro wasn't the threat to gay rights that people like Tony Perkins or the National Association for Marriage were, because traditional marriage conservatives hated the WBC—who also picket military funerals—as much as they hated liberals. (Fox News host Sean Hannity once called the church "mean and sick and cruel.")

That such a despised group became the public face of homophobia arguably helped the cause of marriage eqaulity.

"There were a complicated set of factors that lead to gay marriage acceptance, but extreme opposition groups were definitely one of them," said Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at CU Denver. "Taking an extreme position on social issues can backfire and mobilize the opposition. You'll get more attention than a moderate position would, but it has a cost of credibility."

The campaign for a legal and regulated marijuana market is still miles behind the fight for sexual equality, which is understandable considering it doesn't have the same moral urgency. Marijuana legalization also doesn't have a recognizable and ubiquitously hated villain, someone advocates can point to and say, "Hey, look at this dipshit, you don't want to be like him, do you?" Which might be where WBC could lend a hand to the marijuana movement. They certainly galvanized the pro-pot crowd last week.

Despite heavy snowfall and below-zero temperatures, people came from all over to show their opposition to WBC's stance on weed. Comedian Andy Juett drove the 112 miles from Denver to Pueblo to film a comedy sketch at the protests with stand-up comic Ben Kronberg. "If they're going to take on marijuana, they're going to create a whole new set of enemies that they didn't have before," he told me.

Even older people suffered the cold to make sure their message was heard, like 62-year-old Wendy Moore. The medical marijuana patient who suffers from chronic back pain and resides in Pueblo said to me, bluntly,"They're a sorry group—they suck."

Ironically, the WBC presence in Pueblo also caused even more people to buy and consume weed. At the second protest site, Pueblo West Organics owner Randy Russell offered all of the counter-protestors a 30 percent discount for the day, giving the event the communal air of a holiday. Russell said that while he wanted nothing to do with a hate group like the WBC, he had to admit that their anticipated arrival was publicity. "The fact that they're protesting here is bringing customers into our store."

For whatever reason, the Westboro Baptist Church never made it to Pueblo West Organics for their second scheduled protest.

"Maybe they had enough?" wondered Russell.

For the sake of the marijuana movement, I certainly hope not.

Follow Josiah on Twitter.

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Illustration by Cei Willis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Voter apathy, a lack of distinguishing features between the main parties, and low turnout at elections has conspired to give Britons a situation where no party looks likely to win a clear majority in the general election this year. But of course, lack of votes doesn't lead to the absence of government, rather a coalition government that nobody voted for which make compromises that piss off their supporters, further fueling apathy in a vicious cycle.

Last week David Cameron twice refused to rule out teaming up with UKIP, while a Guardian article posited a coalition between Labor and the Conservatives as "the only way forward."

Here is a rundown of the possible pairings that could result after the general election to get everyone in the UK really excited for the next round of fudged half-measures and political infighting.

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Nigel Farage. Image via Chatham House

Conservatives and UKIP

To the horror of immigrants, gay people, and foxes, the prospect of Nigel Farage sitting next to David Cameron in Parliament is not all that unlikely. Constituency level polls currently show that UKIP is likely to win five seats at the general election. More optimistic projections show the party could win as many as 30. Either way, Nigel Farage's party could well be significant player's post-2015, if the election is as tight as many predict.

A coalition with UKIP is a popular policy among grassroots Conservatives, many of whom have not jumped ship only because of UKIP's tacky color scheme. Farage has also hinted he would be open to the idea, in return for an in-out vote on Britain's place in the EU.

There is plenty of common ground to be found with right-wing Tory backbenchers and UKIP on issues like persecuting immigrants and getting out of the EU. This will be your idea of heaven if you see Brussels as the capital of all evil, governed by bureaucrats addicted to British money and making more laws specifically designed to fill the pages of the Daily Mail.

The dinosaur element of the Tory Party would be emboldened. Fewer than half of its MPs voted for gay marriage—would Cameron have been able to face down the nay-sayers if he was teamed up with Farage rather than Clegg? Probably not. This would of course loose the Conservatives the votes of socially-liberal conservatives—the kind of people who hate homophobia but also hate paying too much tax—and they are needed to beat Labor in the long run.

For UKIP, an alliance with the most establishment of all the establishment parties would spoil their outsider credentials somewhat and potentially alienate disaffected Labour voters. Lots to lose and little to gain on both sides, then. It may depend on how bad the swingometer looks for the Conservatives.

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Photo by James Turner

Labor and Tory

The idea of Dennis Skinner and Michael Gove battling it out for the best spot on the same green bench at PMQs isn't as crazy as it sounds. On the one hand, opposites attract. On the other, how opposite are these parties really, when you get down to it? Most of them went to the same Oxbridge colleges anyway.

You may think that such a coalition would please nobody at all, but you'd be wrong. Among people in the City, who are already coming out in hives over the instability an election might bring—which is bad for business—there is significant support for such an arrangement. Writing in the Telegraph, Ben Wright noted that a Tory-Labor pact might just be what the business community want: a broadly pro-EU, pro-business, center-right government that wants to make massive cuts to the welfare state.

Of course it's hard to see what the voters would get from this, other than the smug satisfaction of knowing they were right in saying: "the parties are all the same anyway. What's the point?"

Labor and Lib Dem

Which riles you up more, Ed Miliband endlessly droning without actually saying anything at all, or Nick Clegg making an enormous Thing of calling random strangers on TV debates by their first name as if it was a pick-up technique from The Game? No need to choose, you can have both!

Before you get too depressed at the idea, remember that the possibility of this charisma free coalition is mercifully remote. The first reason being that Labor figures have ruled out a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the election, and the second being that there might well be so few Lib Dem MPs left after May anyway.

Current polls suggest that Nick Clegg's party will have less than 20 seats after the election, with Clegg's own Sheffield Hallam seat one of those under threat.

The two parties would appear to have a lot in common in terms of social policy, but Labour would probably be reluctant to work with a party so tainted by five obsequious years in a Tory lead government. By the same token, everyone still hates Labour from the last time they were in power, so it would equal out. Sort of.

Labor and SNP

This coalition of left-wingers, perhaps including a handful of Greens and Plaid Cymru MPs, seems the least likely of all these unlikely arrangements, but as the upcoming election promises to be the most unpredictable in history, we might as well speculate.

Following their huge surge in support seen during the Scottish referendum, the SNP are widely predicted to wipe out Labour in their Scottish heartlands come May. One poll from October had Labour with four seats and the SNP with 54.

All this raises the prospect of the SNP propping up a minority Labour government, which the party's former leader Alex Salmond insists is a possibility. Any SNP/Labor pact would push Ed Miliband's party to the left on a range of issues, with the SNP having made a great show of their opposition to Trident and spending cuts embraced by the major parties.

But for all the SNPs left-wing policies, there's one issue they value above all else. The SNP could be tempted into backing pretty much anything a Labour government felt like doing for a few years at least, with the promise of another referendum to get the hell away from the Westminster circus forever.

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Photo via the Financial Times Flickr

Conservative and Lib Dem

Like a medieval history graduate who's just left university with a third class degree, Nick Clegg is desperately lonely and willing to work with anyone. Despite that, the prospect of a second Conservative-Lib Dem coalition looks unlikely for several reasons. First, for Tory MPs angered by David Cameron's failure to win an outright majority in 2010, the prospect of a second coalition government would likely push many MPs over the edge into forcing a leadership election. Second, the policy differences that existed before 2010 between the two parties have grown even more pronounced during their five years in government.

The Conservatives are offering the chance to leave the EU, while the Liberals are massively pro-Europe. The Conservatives are committed to scrapping the human rights act, while the Liberals see it as one of the great policy achievements of the last two decades.

It sounds like a stupid arrangement, but of course it's the one we have at the moment.

Here's to the next five years!

Follow Joe on Twitter.

Good ambient music has the remarkable quality of making everything you experience while listening to it seem more important. You can just clip your toenails, or you can put on Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb" and elevate clipping your toenails to the realm of transcendental spiritual experience. Minimalist composer Sean McCann's work tends to have a similar effect.

This track, "Charade," is off his upcoming album for the Root Strata label, titled Ten Impressions for Piano & Strings. The record took four years to complete and it's fascinating to hear McCann's approach towards sound shift constantly throughout. This song is pleasant, ethereal, and spacey, so put it on while you clean your room and pretend you're in the final scene of a Darren Aronofsky movie, except without the heroin.

Preorder the record on Root Strata here.

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Notre Dame under military protection. Photo by Étienne Rouillon

French police officers had been periodically stationed outside Charlie Hebdo's offices ever since 2006, when the newspaper reprinted 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that had originally appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. Speaking after the attack on the office on Wednesday, in which 12 people lost their lives, the magazine's lawyer Richard Malka told French radio station RTL, "[Hebdo] had been living under threats for eight years; there was protection, but there's nothing you can do against barbarians who show up with Kalashnikovs."

The magazine's editor, Charb, was assigned his own personal police protection in November 2011, after their offices were firebombed. Luz, an illustrator, and Riss, Charlie Hebdo's managing editor, were also assigned personal protection, but at the time of Wednesday's attack only Charb had his own private guard. Those two officers were unable to save his life. Franck Brinsolaro, one of the officers in charge of Charb's protection, was also killed in the shooting. As well as providing personal protection to the editor, police officers regularly patrolled the offices' immediate neighborhood. Three patrols had already taken place just prior to the attack. According to Le Monde, there was no "static" guard on that day, only dynamic roving patrols.

Speaking to Le Monde, Laurent Nunez, from the office of Paris' chief of police, explained that the "static" guard was reinstated every time "a somewhat sensitive issue" hit the newsstands. "The threat seemed to have gone down," said Nunez—a sentiment shared by Hebdo's staff, including editor-in-chief Gérard Biard, who noted that "the threats were perceived to be milder in recent times."

Shortly after the attack, officials boosted security at the offices of several other French newspapers, fearful that other assailants might strike. Sophie de Ravinel, a journalist with French daily Le Figaro, reported the presence of "two armed police officers in bulletproof vests, searching through bags" outside the paper's headquarters in Paris. Speaking to VICE, police union spokesman Christophe Crépin explained, "Until the order is lifted, every French news outlet will be guarded 24/7 by heavily armed police officers wearing bulletproof vests." Given the immediate triggering of Vigipirate, France's national security alert system, the increased surveillance will largely "depend on the resources" of nearby police stations. "Even though the attack targeted a publication based in Paris, the regional dailies will be afforded protection," said Crépin.

The French interior minister did not respond to VICE's request for an interview.

Security was also stepped up at the offices of international publications, including those of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish broadsheet that first published the caricatures of Muhammad in 2006. In 2010, Kurt Westergaard, who penned some of Jyllands-Posten's most controversial cartoons, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in his home. In an internal memo, the newspaper's directors warned their employees that "the level of surveillance and security in and around our Copenhagen and Viby offices has been stepped up." (The newspaper's spokeswoman declined to verify this memo.) According to Hélène Kohl, a freelance journalist based in Germany, newspapers in Berlin have also tightened their security, even as they have republished some of Charlie Hebdo's incendiary cartoons:

[tweet text="Today's issue of Charlie Hebdo has Michel Houellebecq on the cover. His new book 'Submission' comes out today. pic.twitter.com/8dEgJhqTzN" byline="— John Martin (@JohnMartinIV)" user_id="JohnMartinIV" tweet_id="552809124040548354" tweet_visual_time="7 Janvier 2015"]

French writer Michel Houellebecq—whose latest novel, Submission, about a future, Muslim-led France, hit the shelves this week—is also under increased protection since the attack. On Wednesday, Houellebecq's publishing house, Flammarion, evacuated its offices in the Paris neighborhood of Odéon. Contacted by French weekly L'Obs, a Flammarion spokesperson explained that the decision had been taken "in conjunction with the police" as a precaution. The controversial writer was featured on the cover of Charlie Hebdo's latest issue, predicting: "In 2015, I'll lose my teeth... In 2022, I'll observe Ramadan." In another cartoon inside the paper, he is pictured saying, "In 2036, [the Islamic State] will come to Europe."

According to Jean-Pierre Diot, vice president of the French Federation of Close Protection, former member of France's special protection services and author of the book From Pope Jean-Paul II to Nicolas Sarkozy, 15 years in the Association of Personal Protection Services, "More and more public figures and journalists are living under police protection because of the increased political tension and terrorist threat."