IKEA Monkey

Hey there preppers! Remember when we talked about Doomsday Prepping for Non-Paranoid People? About how, in these uncertain times, we should all have a well-stocked emergency kit, or in my case, an emergency cabinet? If you acquired the basics of water, food, and gear six months ago, now is the the time to open your…

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Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (37-0-0, 33 KOs) will put his undefeated record and unified middleweight titles on the line Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas against Canelo Alvarez (49-1-1, 34 KOs). The bout will pit arguably the two biggest stars in boxing against each other and do so with both seemingly still in their primes.

Golovkin at 35 is eight years Canelo’s senior, but his late start in the United States kept him from a big time bout like this. GGG made his debut stateside back in September 2012 against Grzegorz Proksa and, as he’d done in his 10 previous fights overseas, ended it early with a knockout to defend his WBA and IBO world middleweight titles. Since then, Golovkin has fought 13 times in the U.S., moving his camp to Big Bear, California and fighting out of Los Angeles.

In those 14 fights in the states, Golovkin has finished 13 by way of knockout — his lone decision coming in his most recent bout against Daniel Jacobs. Against Canelo, GGG will have his biggest test but it also represents his chance to prove himself as truly being one of the all-time greats in the sport. Alvarez’s lone loss is to Floyd Mayweather Jr. when he was still young and even then, he gave the undefeated champion one of his best challenges of his career.

Golovkin’s undefeated record, lethal power, and size advantage on Canelo as a natural 160 pound fighter — Alvarez, even when he was the middleweight champion, fought between 154 and 156 pounds — make him the slight favorite in Las Vegas for this fight. While the Jacobs fight was Golovkin’s least convincing win of late, you don’t have to go too far back to find why the oddsmakers have GGG as the favorite. The compilation video below features all 33 knockouts of his professional career, and below that I’ve breakout some of my favorites during his recent run.

Golovkin can send an opponent down at seemingly any time with either hand, but I’m a sucker for body knockouts, which makes his 2013 knockout of Matthew Macklin my favorite of his career. Golovkin attacked Macklin’s body throughout the fight and eventually, that took its toll as a left hook to the liver sent the Irishman to the canvas for good.

Against Marco Antonio Rubio in 2014, Golovkin’s one punch power was on display as he landed one of the most incredible looping, overhand left hooks I’ve ever seen on top of Rubio’s forehead to send him tumbling to the mat and out.

However, the most iconic image of a Golovkin opponent tasting his power for the first time came in his bout against Curtis Stevens, when a left hook sent Stevens down with a bewildered look on his face as he climbed back to his feet.

Eventually, Golovkin wore down Stevens for a stoppage by the referee, but that stunned look from Stevens on the second round knockdown will forever be etched into the minds of GGG’s fans.

Top democratic congressional leaders announced they had reached an agreement with President Trump Wednesday evening on an immigration reform package that will protect the nearly 800,000 young DACA immigrants living in the United States under an Obama-era policy.

That immigration reform package also included border security, but excluded Trump's border wall.

Continue reading on VICE News.

Summer may be waning, but September is National Honey Month, and there are plenty of ways to enjoy local and regional honey around town. [ more › ]

On Tuesday evening, the Supreme Court blocked two rulings by a federal district court that would have required Texas to redraw its state and federal congressional districts. The lower court had ruled that the Texas Legislature illegally gerrymandered these districts along racial lines and ordered new maps for the 2018 election. But by a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court put that order on hold, ensuring that the gerrymander will remain through 2018. The decision may also indicate that the five Republican-appointed justices will eventually reverse the district court’s decisions altogether.

There’s no doubt that LaCroix — the comeback kid that transformed from the seltzer your mom drank to a ubiquitous libation treasured anew by the millennial gang — has amassed a dedicated following recently in the U.S. But that devotion doesn’t mean its fans know what the “essence” is in the carbonated drinks — and no one really seems to care.

On every can of zero-calorie fizzy water, “natural flavor” is listed under ingredients, whether it’s tangerine or graprefuit. According to LaCroix’s website, those “natural flavors” are “derived from the natural essence oils extracted from the named fruit” used in each flavor.

The Wall Street Journal embarked on a quest to find out what, exactly, “essence” is — and found it wasn’t easy to nail down.

Fizzy mysteries

First of all, “essence” is not a term defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, although the agency allows companies to plaster it on products when describing “flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof.”

LaCroix wasn’t particularly helpful when the WSJ inquired after the true nature of “essence.”

“Essence is our picture word,” a LaCroix spokesman told the WSJ, adding, ““Essence is—FEELINGS and Sensory Effects!”

Okay then.

Food industry executives and scientists, however, say that essence is a clear, concentrated natural chemical, and has been used in everything from gravy to shampoo over the years.

It’s created by heating parts of fruits or vegetables — skins, rinds, what-have-you — at a high temperature. The resulting vapors are then captured, condensed, and sold in 55-gallon barrels, reports the WSJ.

No one cares

Despite this mystery, it seems like most people aren’t up in arms about the nature of “essence.”

“I know what flavors I like but I have no idea what kinds of chemicals are in there and I don’t care,” one fan told the WSJ. “I know it tastes good.”

“Essence is fairies in a warehouse somewhere dancing with fruits, and suddenly you have this amazing drink,” another said.

Earlier this summer, endlessly hateable jerk-face Martin Shkreli was convicted of fraud, and while he hasn’t been sentenced yet, the judge on his case has just revoked his bond. That means he’ll now be in jail until his sentencing hearing later this fall. Oddly, the decision wasn’t because Shkreli tried to con sick…

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Over a decade ago, a Beverly Hills prep school-attending teen named Rupert Ditworth was charged with attempted murder after attacking his classmate Elizabeth Barcay with a claw hammer, striking her with it over 40 times and splitting her skull.

Four months ago, after working diligently on the Trump campaign, Rupert Ditworth — now Rupert Tarsley — was elected Secretary of the Broward County, Florida Republican party.

Tarsley’s previous identity was discovered this week, and he has no plans to resign, on account of how he doesn’t even really see what was wrong with what he did anyway, and was elected fair and square.

“Why should I resign,” he asked in an exclusive interview from his $2 million beachfront condo. “I did nothing wrong and I was elected. This is just party politics.”

It sure is. Clearly, only a Democrat would have a problem with a nice young white boy with a bright future ahead of him viciously attacking a woman with a claw-hammer.

I mean, who among us hasn’t done this at least once as a teenager?

Tarsey, according to published reports, invited Barcay, the daughter of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, to ride with him to Jamba Juice after a big exam.

Tarsey eventually parked the car and allegedly pulled a hammer from a backpack. He then started hitting her over the head, opened the passenger’s door and pulled her out while choking her before driving away.

According to the Times, Tarsey’s parents rushed him into psychiatric treatment as Barcay recovered painfully and eventually attended the school prom in a wheelchair.

Youthful indiscretions, obviously! Like torturing small animals, setting fires and wetting the bed. It’s not like things people do as teenagers, like hitting a woman over the head 40 times with a hammer and then choking her, ever determine what they are like as adults. Besides, Ben Carson claimed he stabbed a guy once, and he turned out… normal..ish. And besides, this was probably all before he found Jesus, which means it totally doesn’t even count.

Some of his Republican colleagues, however, are holding out hope that he will resign, on account of them not wanting to look bad.

Tarsey’s real identity was discovered by a member who alerted local GOP Chairman Bob Sutton over the Labor Day weekend.

“We were blindsided,” said Sutton, a schoolteacher. “He’s a member of the Knights of Columbus, for Christ’s sake. And he came highly recommended by the former chair. We had no idea what his background is. We want him out but he is refusing to resign. He deceived us. It looks like he even used a reputation management firm to make sure we wouldn’t find out who he is.”

A schoolteacher, huh? Probably a secret liberal! Also is being a member of the Knights of Columbus some kind of sign that someone is not a violent bastard? Because I feel like it is not.

Tarsey, who is 6’2″, claims that he was only doing self-defense with that claw hammer, and that the only reason it’s an issue is because he “spoke out” against Sutton in some way. Otherwise, probably everyone would think it was real good that he hit that girl with that hammer!

Hey! You know who also did a lot of volunteer work (at a suicide hotline) and worked for the Republican Party?

He also may have had some issues with violence towards women. So, while surely Tarsley is an upstanding citizen now, if you are a woman with long brown hair parted in the middle, you might want to avoid him. Particularly if he has his arm in a sling and needs some help with his groceries. Just putting that out there. As a suggestion.

[Miami Herald]

Lucasfilm recently had an opportunity to bring a female director into the Star Wars fold when Colin Trevorrow was fired from Episode IX, but the studio went with J.J. Abrams instead. Meanwhile, MGM and Eon Productions are readying the next James Bond movie, and with no director attached yet, people are wondering if…

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WELL, WELL, WELL. Alex Jones, investigator and figure-outer of all the secret truths that exist, has done it again. He has “spoken” to his “sources” and they have told him that every single night, the Deep State sneaks into the Oval Office (yes, the entire Deep State, single file) and puts a roofie in Donald Trump’s Diet Coke and one in his iced tea and one in his burnt steak and one in each scoop of his ice cream. Hell, General John Kelly probably hollers, “Who’s a good boy! Who’s a good boy!” from his office, which makes Trump gallop on all fours toward the voice of the nice chief of staff who says he’s a good boy, at which point he sits and shakes and rolls over and plays dead, earning his reward of as many spoonfuls of peanut butter as he wants, all of which are FULL OF DRUGS.

This is a thing that happens. ALEX JONES KNOWS.

ALEX JONES (HOST): Ladies and gentlemen, I was told this by high level sources …

THE HIGHEST.

… and it was evident and especially after [Ronald] Reagan was shot in his first year in office when he was acting like Trump, and doing the right things, that he never really recovered. They gave him cold blood, and his transfusion that causes brain damage. They slowly gave him small amounts of sedatives.

THEY DID IT.

Who is “they”? THE FUCKING DEEP STATE, DO YOU NOT SEE THEM HIDING BEHIND THE CURTAINS? They are very sneaky.

It’s known that most presidents end up getting drugged.

Oh it’s not just “most of them,” it’s ALL OF THEM KATIE. George W. Bush choking on that pretzel? BECAUSE IT WAS LACED WITH THE KIND OF DRUGS YOU’RE ‘POSED TO SAY NO TO. Obama being all crazy boners for broccoli and arugula? HE WASN’T PANDERING TO MICHELLE’S LADY GARDEN, IT WAS BECAUSE THEY WERE COVERED IN VERY ADDICTIVE DRUGS THAT ARE NOTHING LIKE ALEX JONES TRUCKER SPEED.

Small dosages of sedatives till they build it up, Trump’s such a bull he hasn’t fully understood it yet.

BUT ONCE HE FIGURES IT OUT, OH BOY.

But I’ve talked to people, multiple ones, and they believe that they are putting a slow sedative that they’re building up that’s also addictive in his Diet Cokes and in his iced tea and that the president by 6 or 7 at night is basically slurring his words and is drugged.

We do remember that time Trump took phone shits all over the Australian prime minister because it was 5:00 PM ZZZZZZZZ PRESIDENTING MAKES HIM VERY SLEEPY. But maybe it was the drugs!

Now first they had to isolate him to do that. But yes, ladies and gentleman, I’ve talked to people that talk to the president now at 9 at night, he is slurring his words. And I’m going to leave it at that.

Maybe he’s just senile. Or maybe that’s what THEY want us to think:

So notice, “Oh, he’s mentally ill. Oh, he’s got Alzheimer’s.” They isolate him then you start slowly building up the dose, but instead of titrating it like poison, like venom of a cobra, or a rattlesnake, or a water moccasin where you build it up slowly so that you get a immunity to it, you’re building it slowly so the person doesn’t notice it. First it’s almost zero, just a tiny bit and then a little more and then your brain subconsciously becomes addicted to it and wants it and so as the dose gets bigger and bigger you get more comfortable in it. The president’s about two months into being covertly drugged.

WHOA. THE FUCK. IF TRUE.

And now the dose is in everything Trump touches or tastes. It’s upon Steve Bannon’s bosoms (allegedly!), it’s on the tip of the Russian ambassador’s dick (allegedly!). There is literally no place the Deep State won’t hide Trump’s mind-control drugs. (NOT ALLEGEDLY.)

Alex Jones knows sharing this information is dangerous:

Now I’m risking my life, by the way, tell you all this.

He better don his invisibility robe and wizard hat, then! Otherwise the Deep State will probably assassinate Jones a bunch of times, just like they’ve done to Roger Stone. And you might think, well, how can the Deep State drug Trump and murder Roger Stone and Alex Jones all at the same time? The answer is shapeshifting, and also something about gay frogs. OPEN YOUR EYES, YOU IDIOTS.

I was physically sick before I went on air.

Awwwww, that sucks. Doktor Zoom is sick today too. HOPE HE’S NOT GETTING DEEP STATED.

Because I’m smart. And I don’t mean that in a braggadocious way. I mean I’m not dumb.

Well …

In fact, I’m tempted just to let it out now so they don’t cut the show off or something before this goes out.

Let it go! Let it go! Iiiiiiiii don’t care what they’re going to say, let the storm rage onnnnnnnnnnnn!

I mean this is the kind of thing that gets you killed.

The cold never bothered Alex Jones anyway.

They drug presidents because the power structure wants a puppet. The president needs his blood tested by an outside physician he trusts.

Well there’s always this guy:

That’s the ticket.

But wait, what if Dr. Weirdass up there runs the tests and just finds usual stuff like Adderall, Imodium AD, Heartgard and whatever they use to treat syphilis acquired in the late 1970s?

THEN THAT MEANS THE DEEP STATE IS MAKING ITS DRUGS UNTRACEABLE, OBVIOUSLY, YOU SHEEPLE.

Oh well. Even if they ferret out whatever Trump is almost certainly being drugged with, the Deep State always has Plan B, i.e. that one weird chemtrail that comes out of Air Force One’s fanny and goes directly up the president’s nose.

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT HERE.

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[Media Matters]

Employees at the two Motel 6 locations in Phoenix told the Phoenix New Times that it was common practice at the chain to share guest information with ICE. If true, this would mean that an American motel company is willingly referring paying customers to a ruthlessly overzealous deportation force that was recently…

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Transforming his body for roles has become pretty standard for Christian Bale, who famously dropped 60+ pounds to play Trevor Reznik in The Machinist, got super-ripped for American Pyscho and Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, then let it all hang out for American Hustle. We assumed he’d alter his appearance again…

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For one of America’s largest gun manufacturers, the “Trump slump” in sales has meant a nearly $100m fall in firearms revenue compared with the same quarter last year. American Outdoor Brands, the rebranded name of historic gun company Smith & Wesson, reported a 48.5% decrease in firearms revenue compared with the same quarter last year, when many Americans believed Hillary Clinton, a supporter of gun control, would be elected president.

There are certainly some downsides to working aboard a massive container ship that criss-crosses the world’s oceans for months at a time. But through the lens of JeffHK’s timelapse camera, it’s hard to imagine a more soothing and relaxing career choice than roaming the open sea.

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Google cleverly designed Chrome to prevent inevitable website crashes from bringing down the entire browser. But that stability comes at the cost of tremendous RAM usage when you’ve got countless tabs open. There are tools you can use to help curb Chrome’s memory appetite, but turning tab maintenance into a game…

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New Red Wings Arena To Feature Luxury Penalty Box

The Sheriff’s office in Chelan County, Washington, is doing an apology tour following someone from their office “accidentally” posting a meme to the official Chelan County Emergency Management page, depicting protesters being run over by a car along with the slogan “All Lives Splatter.” The meme, shared from the page “Libtards: ya gotta love ’em,” was accompanied by a status reading, “I don’t wish harm on anyone … but protesters don’t belong in the road!” With the insinuation being that if protesters are in the road, it is perfectly acceptable to run them over with your car. Because what else are you going to do? Not run over a human being with your car?

This comes on the heels not only of the Charlottesville rally, at which James Alex Fields Jr. ran over and killed 32 year-old Heather Heyer with his car, but another recent incident in Vancouver, Washington. The very same state that Chelan County is in!

This weekend, police in Vancouver arrested a man attending a far-right “Patriot Prayer” rally for attempting to drive his truck into a crowd of protesters. Luckily, no one was hurt, but not for lack of his trying.

At that same protest, a group of “Proud Boys” drove down the street pepper-spraying protesters, and subsequently crashed into a police vehicle. Very “Blue Lives Matter” of them!

It’s beginning to become pretty clear that this is not simply a crude meme or a joke to these people, and that they truly do not understand that it is wrong to try and run people over with your car. The comments on the meme itself make this clear:

This is not a “joke,” it’s a call to violence, and the people sharing this meme clearly seem to believe that not only is it “justifiable” to run over protesters in the street, it is completely legal. Posting something like this on the page of a sheriff’s office is going to solidify that belief.

The Sheriff’s Office of Chelan County is saying that this was done by accident, and that the staffer meant to share the meme to his own page.

“Staff at Chelan County Emergency Management feel terrible that this inappropriate and hurtful post made it onto the Facebook page,” Burnett wrote in the news release. “Changes have already been made in procedure to assure nothing like this will ever occur in the future.”

The thing is, this is not actually something one can easily do by “mistake.” For those of you who have never done the social media management thing, allow me to explain. In order to share something to the Facebook page of a page you manage, you have to go through SEVERAL steps. It’s not like you click share and whoopsie daisy it posts to a page you manage instead of your own account.

First, after you click share, you literally have to scroll down to the thing that says “Share to a page.”

Then, you have to select which page you want to share it to.

There’s a little more to it than just clicking share, and it’s pretty much impossible to do all that by accident. I’ve done social media management for years, and I’ve never posted something to a page I manage by accident. Also, for the record, I have never accidentally liked a porn video on Twitter.

Even if it was a mistake, the fact that someone who believes it is whimsical or cute to run over protesters with cars was working, in any capacity, for the police, is beyond disturbing. Someone at the office should probably inform him that murdering people with your car is illegal, and then fire him.

[Seattle PI]

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When you pay in advance for tickets to a food festival, you expect an event that serves large quantities of said food, right? Yet people who bought tickets to pizza and burger festivals held in Brooklyn on Saturday found tiny and cold slices of pizza, warm drinks, and a long wait before they could even get to that subpar food.

The festival, Gothamist recounts, was promoted as “a day-long celebration of the dough, cheese, tasty sauces and delicious toppings” of pizza.

That’s not what festival-goers found after they waited for over an hour for admission, even if they had $75 “VIP” tickets. One VIP guest told Gothamist that he got seven slivers of cold cheese pizza and cold onion pizza that were equal to maybe one normal slice. That’s better than no pizza at all, but not worth the $150 that he paid for two tickets.

“3pm start and they haven’t even open[ed] yet,” one festival-goer posted on the event’s Facebook page at 3:38 P.M. “Vendors aren’t set up, people lined up around the corner for an hour. Poorly run event.”

What Burgers?

Worse, the organizers also sold tickets to a “burger festival” on the same site at the same time. Yet people there for burgers said that they had a lengthy wait… and weren’t allowed to pick up a few slivers of pizza in the interim.

A co-founder of the venue, an outdoor event space called Hangry Garden, told Gothamist that he hadn’t worked with the festival organizers before, but that the event seemed legit.

“We’d never worked with these guys before but we saw the response they got on Facebook, which was tremendous, 30,000 interested people. We didn’t think this was going to be a subpar event,” he told the site. Then the organizers said they wouldn’t be able to pay the full fee, and other things didn’t seem right as the event date approached.

Hangry Garden made a Facebook post denying any involvement in the disaster that was about to happen.

There were some other things that didn’t add up on the tickets, as well. For example, food festivals like this usually name the vendors on the site or on the ticket purchase site, since that benefits the festival and raises the profile of the pizzeria. This festival didn’t.

“The Fyre Festival of pizza”

While this isn’t the same as the 100% fake food festivals that we’ve warned readers about in the past since there was some food served, attendees say it definitely wasn’t as advertised.

Guests made inevitable comparisons to the Fyre Festival, an event that was supposed to be a high-end music festival experience with luxury accommodations and gourmet food, but ended with guests who had paid hundreds or thousands of dollars in disaster relief tents picking at slices of cheese on bread.

Disappointed festival-goers are now organizing on a Facebook group for pizza and burger justice. There’s talk of a lawsuit, but one ticket vendor has been simply refunding customers.

Gothamist speculates that the festival organizer may have been behind a similarly terrible African food festival last year.

In the midst of a record breaking opening weekend for "It," the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, NY opened its doors for only clowns to enjoy the film. Step inside this theater full of a little kid's nightmares.

WASHINGTON — Climate change denials amid catastrophic hurricanes are a reminder that humans are not a particularly smart species, Pope Francis said Sunday while flying over areas in the Caribbean decimated by Hurricane Irma.

The fact that your “likes” on Twitter are public, and not just quiet sources of contentment for the content generators themselves, continues to be a source of joy as older celebrities, politicians, pundits, and athletes grapple with the platform. Many are the tales of randy men going rogue via social media, not even…

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In the wake of the real Tommy Wiseau’s triple-belted appearance at TIFF to promote The Disaster Artist, distributor A24 has released a full-length trailer for the film. As we hoped, the trailer goes all in on James Franco’s impression of Wiseau, allowing Franco to deliver a majority of the trailer’s exposition…

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The spacious and extravagant duplex has taken another dramatic price chop

Occupying the 14th and 15th floors of the 1927 McNally & Quinn/Rosario Candela-designed building at 1500 N. Lake Shore Drive, this lavish co-op in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood has returned to the market with a greatly reduced asking price. Owned by the Wrigley family for two generations, the 10,000-square-foot residence offers unobstructed views of Lake Michigan and is full of historic architectural details salvaged from old European buildings.

According to the agent notes, the property’s foyer, dining room, living room, and library all sport Louis XV Boiserie paneling dating back to the mid-18th century. The home’s antique limestone staircase was also imported from France and carefully reassembled by skilled craftspeople. Even the updated designer kitchen draws its inspiration from historic French architecture.

The opulent seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom home arrived on the market in early 2016 seeking $13.5 million before re-listing for $9.99 million roughly five months ago. With no apparent takers, the sprawling duplex returned yesterday for $8.5 million. The seller is accepting cash offers only, per the listing. The monthly co-op fee remains unchanged at $10,689.

• 1500 N. Lake Shore Drive Unit 14-15, Chicago IL [Conlon Real Estate]
• Elegant Gold Coast duplex returns with new price [Curbed Chicago]
• Gold Coast archive [Curbed Chicago]

Predictions are hard. Especially in politics. But former Trump advisor Steve Bannon made an incredibly confident prediction about the future of the Trump regime last night. And he could be right.

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For decades, American cities and states have been competing to dismantle the high-tax postwar social model to win increasingly mobile jobs from their peers. This practice leaves the losers smarting from a diminished sense of self—hello, Hartford, Connecticut—while the winner loads the tax burden of its new prize pig onto existing citizens and businesses. It rewards corporations for being flighty, faithless partners to cities and punishes small and local businesses that cannot make credible threats to secure their own incentive packages.

On Saturday, footage surfaced of a campus cop at the University of California, Berkeley, citing a hot dog vendor for running his stand without a permit. As students streamed by the cart on their way out of a football game, officer Sean Aranas rifled through the vendor's wallet and took out all the cash inside before seizing it.

According to local blog Berkeleyside, UC Berkeley alum Martin Flores captured the scene on Saturday afternoon and uploaded it to Facebook, where the video—since shared on Twitter and other social media platforms—has been viewed more than 11 million times. Flores wrote (in a now-private post) that he'd walked to the food cart to buy a few dogs with his daughters, but halfway through the transaction, the cop told the vendor—identified only as "Juan"—that he was getting shut down.

As Aranas pulled the cash from Juan's wallet, Flores repeatedly asked him why he had to take his money.

"People can drink on campus [at] football games and no tickets, but a hardworking man selling hotdogs earning a living gets his money taken and a ticket?" Flores asked.

"He doesn't have a permit," Aranas replied. He added, "Yep, this is law and order in action."

UC Berkeley police told local FOX affiliate KTVU the money Aranas seized was booked into evidence, adding that police have a right to seize cash from anyone subject to an arrest or citation. Still, they told KTVU they're investigating the incident.

---

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Under a controversial law enforcement practice known as civil asset forfeiture, police are allowed to seize property and cash from anyone they merely suspect is involved in criminal activity. Often, even if those suspected criminals are proven innocent in court, it can be a costly, time-intensive nightmare to try to get their money back from the government. Once confiscated, that money usually goes back to the local police departments that seized it—a thorny setup in which local PDs are motivated by profit to scoop cash and other assets from suspected criminals.

"Basically, when one combines profitable ends with easy means, abuses abound," Ezekiel Edwards, the director of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, told VICE about the practice back in 2015. "You end up with legalized robbery by the government."

Though it'll likely be tough for Juan to get his money back, Flores launched a GoFundMe campaign to "ensure that Juan has his personal, legal, and professional matters addressed." The fund has already raised more than $35,000. According to the LA Times, Juan told Flores he plans to use the money only for personal losses and legal fees.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Music soothes the savage beast.

Two things are indelible parts of baseball: Managers arguing with umpires, and the stadium playing “God Bless America.” On Sunday Reds manager Bryan Price showed us what happens when those worlds collide.

Credit to Price. Even though he was mad in a tense moment of a 5-5 game, he didn’t miss a beat as soon as it came time to be patriotic. His pause was rewarded. The Reds still won 10-5 which meant his argument was for naught.

Perhaps the best part of this is that we’ve seen this before. In 2013 Terry Francona and Michael Bourn were arguing with an umpire in an Indians game when the same thing happened — but they weren’t quite as good at stopping their conversation.

‘God Bless America’ stopping arguments is a new baseball tradition — and one we need more of.

Missouri couple makes an affordable, recycled home out of shipping containers

Zach and Brie Smithey of St. Charles, Missouri, have remodeled several homes, but none of them were the perfect fit. “We were looking for something that wasn’t quite the norm,” Zach explains.

“We renovated homes built in 1880, 1904, and the 1970s. With each house, we got closer to our flavor, but never quite hit it,” he says. “We realized that to do something different, we had to start from scratch—to get what we really wanted, we couldn’t follow someone else’s template.”

When they purchased an empty lot in 2011, they pictured building a more traditional house made out of conventional materials. But as the years passed, their vision shifted, and at some point, they stopped thinking about what a house should be and began wondering what other forms it might take. Ideas such as a concrete house, a geodesic dome, and a tiny house were weighed and rejected. “Realistically, how many people could live in a tiny house for the rest of their lives?” wonders Brie.

The couple doesn’t remember how the concept was raised, but when the idea of a container house came on their radar, it immediately felt right. “I had never seen one before, and I wasn’t even sure they existed,” Zach says. Online searches convinced them and informed them that if they built a container house, they’d be the first in the area to do so.

“We chose a container house because it gave us the most bang for our buck,” says Brie. “It allowed us to use recycled materials, which was important to us. The cost of it, and the fact we did so much of it ourselves, allowed us to live mortgage free, which was also important to us.”

Little did they know that at the time they were doing the research, their future home was sitting in a nearby container yard. “Once we decided to do this, I found a broker that sources containers from container yards across America,” Zach says. “There are many options: You can buy them new, used, or ready to be retired.”

The couple chose the last option, feeling that a few dents only add to the character of the units. They ended up with containers that had been built in Shanghai and traveled around the world 12 times on boat, train, and truck before coming to rest in North St. Louis. “We found eight 40-foot containers, each one with nine-foot-high ceilings,” Zach says. “We paid $1,600 for each, and $375 to have each of them delivered, so they ended up being about $2,000 apiece. The whole project cost us about $135,000.”

The couple had the containers delivered to their lot, used a crane to stack them in a giant cube shape (there are four containers on the bottom and four on the top), and began shaping them into their home. “Building a regular house is an additive process—you put more on it day by day,” says Zach. “But in a house like this, it’s more of a subtractive process. You stack up the containers, and then you carve away the walls you don’t need.”

Before we go on with this story, there are a few things you need to understand about the Smitheys. The first is that Zach is an artist and that informs his remodeling projects. “For me and my art, it’s all about the process, not the end result,” he says. “This house is just like a big sculpture project. I figured it out as I went along, and the journey was more important than the destination. In the end, we have something we couldn’t have imagined at the beginning if we had had a hard and fast goal we were aiming at.”

The second thing you need to know is that he and his wife appear to be the types who see things differently. For example, what mere mortals consider a packing pallet, this couple sees as a building opportunity/free wood. “The great thing is that once people know you think this way, they seek you out and unload stuff,” says Zach. Indeed, when they talk about the home, very little is new and explanations are peppered with phrases like: “My friend was remodeling a house and had to get rid of a lot of brick” or “My friend’s wife works at a JCPenney that cancelled a remodel and had a lot of extra materials.”

Finally, this is a couple that’s seemingly unfazed by things they don’t initially know how to do. He’s an artist and she had worked as a massage therapist—but they didn’t hesitate to purchase and operate a restaurant (Miss Aimee B’s Tea Room & Gallery), something they’d never done before. She later founded Brie’s Protein Bars, a health food company. They apply this can-do attitude to remodeling; so having no direct experience with container buildings was no problem.

“Really, the only way to learn how to remodel is to remodel,” says Zach. “We did most of it ourselves, save for the electric, plumbing, and HVAC. Because we were doing it ourselves, we were constantly changing tasks and using/developing new skills. It was exhausting and went on 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a year and 14 days."

Brie agrees that the process was difficult. “I expected it to be hard—if it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” she allows. “What I didn’t expect is how difficult it would be to work with the metal. It’s heavy, it’s thick... YouTubers make it look easy, but trust me, it’s not for everyone.”

In the most basic terms, here’s what they did: Stacked up the containers, cut out openings between them, built a frame within the metal shell, put in the utilities, and then hung the drywall (except in strategic places where they left the metal exposed).

Of course, that simplistic explanation doesn’t even begin to cover the improvisation that went into it. “I figured it out as I went along,” says Zach. The figure-it-out-as-you-go style is responsible for features like antique arched windows hung upside down in the living room (they were left behind at their restaurant, rescued from an old church next door); baseboard and crown molding made from randomly cut boards from packing pallets; and cement board painted in a rainbow of drip patterns and installed as shower walls.

Throughout, recycled materials are everywhere you look. In addition to the aforementioned items, rope pulled from the mud on the banks of the Mississippi was cleaned and used to frame a television; birdbaths and a fountain plucked from a landscaping company’s boneyard find new life as sinks and a plumbed bar table; a combine chain and tractor hooks are used to support a wall-hung vanity in the upstairs bath; and a conch shell is repurposed as a faucet in a bathroom on the main floor.

Of course, none of this was easy or without headaches. “If, during construction, we encountered a problem we looked at it as an opportunity to innovate,” Zach says.

Anything this different is bound to inspire curiosity—especially in a small community like St. Charles (population: 69,293). “When we were building it, not a day went by without someone coming into the house and asking questions,” says Zach. The curiosity reached such a pitch, that the couple decided to host a community open house on May 20th, the day the last light fixture was hung. The couple anticipated a few hundred people, and they were surprised when 2,000 showed up. “I was in shock,” says Brie. “Negative comments always seem louder than positive ones, but that day, it seemed like the house was full of positive comments and so many compliments.”

The couple decided to make it a benefit for the local animal shelter, and ended up raising $8,000 at the door for the organization.

To this day, it’s still attracting attention, with cars slowing down as they drive past and people gawking. “We don’t mind, and good things have come of it,” says Zach. Those things include two building commissions for him: a shipping container makers’ lab for a St. Louis elementary school and another shipping container house for a couple in St. Louis.

And, while community interest isn’t waning, neither is the family’s love for their just-right home. “I still can’t believe I live here,” says Zach. “It’s the home we hoped it would be.”

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So many gowns!