Dance Magers

The store is located on Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, across the street from the biggest health-food market in West Hollywood, a city which banned the sale of real fur last September. Inside the aged-wood and polished-metal storefront, an employee bounded over and asked what kind of dog we owned. I realized that there was no way they were going to let me buy dog food for myself, so I lied to her face and told her we owned an Akita that weighed 140 pounds. “That’s a huge dog! What does he eat?” “Mostly tacos," I answered.

She laughed uneasily and brought us over to a small freezer section with what looked like packages of blended vomit organized by meat. “All of our food is whole food, made with human-grade ingredients, so it’s all USDA-approved. Restaurant-quality meats, grains, and vegetables.” I caught myself before saying, "That sounds delicious."

This stuff looked like it was vacuum-packed in the sick bay of the USS Enterprise rather than handmade in Ellie Krieger’s kitchen. I sadly realized that my visions of carefully organized chunks of steak covered in a sweet glaze topped with baby corn were probably misguided. I also realized that this was a great place to find a rich, gullible sugar mama with a sweet-ass dog. 

Still, their selection was impressive. I picked up one of each flavor: Lamb with brown rice, fish with sweet potatoes, turkey with whole-wheat macaroni. I also got their special of the week: free-range bison with organic millet. I tried to buy something with kangaroo in it too, but apparently I needed a prescription. I also grabbed some beef-jerky-like venison and paid $50 for an amount of food an actual dog could probably finish in two sittings. On the way home we stopped at a convenience store for sliders, pizza bagels, and a spicy bean burrito, plus a liter of orange soda to wash it all down. At least I could trust that these were decidedly not good for anyone.

At home I began preparing this dodgy feast. The package suggested either defrosting in warm water or microwaving on low, so I boiled two bags and nuked the others. My kitchen quickly took on the familiar smell of cheap, preservative-filled, corn-based, canned dog food, which was exactly the smell I was hoping to avoid, and I wondered whether this wasn’t all one big scam.

Oh, wait, of course it was.

I cut open each bag and squeezed out something like undigested poop. The stink was atrocious, and worse yet, half the food was still cold. I started with the bison, which included asparagus and peaches. I forked a bit in my mouth and immediately gave up on the idea that this could be an improvement over junk food. Though I have no idea what bison tastes like, it was definitely not this; the lukewarm mush was somehow both soggy and dry, and almost impossible to swallow. I choked it down with a big gulp of orange soda. One of the many pamphlets that came in the bag suggested slowly weaning your pooch onto an organic diet to avoid digestion problems, and I became a little worried that I’d straight shit my pants in the middle of everything. This was going to suck more than I thought. I began sweating. Maybe I was turning into a dog. 

I moved onto turkey with macaroni and took a whiff. The smell of dog food came in hard, although at least the pasta was a familiar shape. I wolfed down a bite, and was immediately reminded of my grandmother’s goulash, only if it had been made with wet kibble and left on a balcony overnight. The ground turkey was the real culprit, but still somehow better than the bison. I realized that I was being unfair; to a dog I could see this being a massive improvement over supermarket-brand chow. I turned to my photographer.

"I feel gross."

"I'd be judging you if you didn't," she replied.

Next up at the plate was a mess of tilapia and sweet potatoes—dangerous territory. Luckily, this one smelled nothing like dog food, and it didn’t reek of fish so much as ooze it. Overconfident, I shoveled in a mouthful and retched immediately. It was warm, and all I could taste in my nose was starch and bitter salt. I anxiously eyed the sliders, which smelled amazing by comparison. My stomach sounded like a howling wolf. Uh-oh.

Last on the list was the lamb and brown rice, which actually smelled exactly like the undercooked, over-processed bulk meat it was. I nervously tried a chunk. Hm, not bad. I took a bigger bite. This was actually—dare I say it—barely decent. I ate another forkful and tried to savor the cooked lamb. All it needed was a bit of salt, and you could probably serve it in a dog hospital or a dog prison. I dived in and tried to clean my plate; at least this was palatable.

Thoroughly disappointed, I launched into the sliders and pizza bagels, opening my throat to let the microwaved, soggy trash enter my body. There was no comparison. Shitty human food won hands down, and not just by familiarity. The texture was right, the flavor was divine, and it occurred to me halfway through the leaky burrito that perhaps dogs have a different palate than humans. Perhaps their taste is less refined, which would make some sense. I guess that’s why the whole concept of organic gourmet dog food is almost as stupid as lying your way into eating it. 

I settled down to chew some of the venison treats, which were basically rawhide—though meat-flavored gum that cleans your teeth is a genius idea. I felt full and a bit queasy for the next hour as the rumbling in my stomach became increasingly urgent. This was not good. I worried that I was going to shit my pants. I assume that my body had recognized the dog food for what it really was and called an emergency mandatory evacuation.

I don’t want to go into what happened next in the bathroom, but it wasn’t great. What little food was left over from the night before came firing out, and my belly gurgled angrily as it took some small revenge in the form of heavy, wet dog farts. My eyes watered, and I waited out the battle as bad choices and indigestion raged on the inside. Finally defeated, I left the bathroom. My photographer disappeared while I was pooping, but not before sneaking the below photo through the keyhole. She sent a text that said, “Had to run, sorry!” I didn’t blame her.

A few hours later a strange, unfamiliar feeling came up my spine. I thought I was done having new feelings, so I’m really not sure how to describe it—sort of an unfocused clammy tension, almost like the beginning of a panic, just lingering for a while. I don’t really want to blame the dog food. Obviously my poor diet, lack of exercise, and various addictions are much easier to pile the blame on. I’ve been doing those for a long time, though, and this was something else, like an existential dread. Is this what being healthy feels like? I smoked a cigarette, and the feeling went away. I have no idea what to make of that. I guess just don’t eat dog food.

You’re welcome.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

Now you can own a little piece of the past. This gorgeous Toronto home is being sold by its 96-year-old owners, who have had this house in their possession for 72 years. And they certainly decorated the heck out of it. The house looks like it was put in a bubble during the 1950s and 1960s—so great. So, so, so great. The pattern wallpaper alone is simply stunning.

Read more...

This is the $30 Dick Tie (currently a Kickstarter campaign with only $149 raised towards its modest $900 goal). It's a men's dress tie with a discreet penis shape. That way you can attend business meetings with a giant pecker tied around your neck and nobody will be the wiser. You will giggle the whole time and leave with the pride that, in some little way, you stuck it to the man. Unless your boss calls you out for wearing a shlong on your chest, then it's a free-for-all. I suggest blaming your wife or girlfriend. Yeah, the wife tried making me a tie -- she just got a new sewing machine for her birthday, she's not very good with it yet. "You drew balls on your collar." At least my collar is the same color as the rest of my shirt, you white-collared yacht humper! *flips table* I F***ING QUIT. Keep going for an even more discreet patterned one and their Kickstarter video that I didn't watch. Thanks to lilco, who informed me you can even tuck it into your shirt between two buttons and pretend that's a vagina. The fun never ends!

Dutch photographer Desiré van den Berg has spent the past seven months traveling around Asia. She lives in Hong Kong at the moment, but when she was in Tokyo, back in December 2013, she met Hina, a 23-year-old who works at a trendy Tokyo boutique called Baby Shoop. Hina's shop has the tagline “Black for Life.” She describes its products as “a tribute to Black culture: the music, the fashion, and style of dance.”

Hina's appearance is also loyal to what the Japanese call "B-style"—a contraction of the words "Black" and "Lifestyle" that refers to a subculture of young Japanese people who love American hip-hop culture so much that they do everything in their power to look as African American as possible.

I called up Desiré to find out more about her time photographing Hina and her gang.

VICE: How did you meet Hina?
Desiré van den Berg: She appeared in a documentary about B-style a couple of years back, which I happened to watch. This is what got me interested in the culture. It took a lot of effort, but I eventually got in touch with her on Facebook, through other B-stylers. I said I wanted to take photos of her, and she actually thought that was pretty cool. It was all a bit of a hassle, though, because Hina and the other B-stylers didn't speak a single word of English. We needed a translator both to make an appointment and at the actual first meeting, too.

How does that work in terms of translating rap lyrics?
Hina speaks some English but not fluently. She does like to use some English slang when she speaks Japanese with her B-style friends, like finishing a sentence with "man" or using bad words like "motherfucker" jokingly.

I know Japan is full of weird subcultures, but how do you explain this one?
There are things like the Harajuku Girls, which I guess are rather normal but some are complete excesses. B-style is the sort of thing you would find on wtfjapanseriously.com. Hina often goes to New York, and she idolizes America. Japanese TV is full of American films and commercials and that must be a reason, too. She sees America as a kind of promised land.

Hina at work

Is B-style big in Japan?
No. It's pretty small; you don't really see it on the streets. You really have to look for it. According to Hina, it was bigger a couple of years ago—now there are only a few die-hards left in each city. It's definitely not mainstream, and maybe still to small to even call it a subculture.

What do B-stylers like Hina mainly do?
Hina, for example, visits a tanning salon every week to darken her skin. I was surprised these tanning salons even exist, because in Japan it is a classic beauty ideal to have your skin be as pale as possible.

Just to be clear: Hina is 100 percent Japanese and naturally has pale skin. She is only dark because of the sunbed and the use of really dark foundation. B-stylers also listen to hip-hop, and visit special African hair salons to get braids or curly hair. These salons are usually found in Tokyo's ghettos and are run by small African communities. Hina wears colored contact lenses: they are a lighter shade of brown to make her eyes seem bigger.

The crowd at a B-style event. Boys also tan their skin in order to look darker and less "Japanese."

Do B-stylers get together, or does it mainly exist online?
There are special B-style events where primarily Japanese youth breakdance and dance to hip-hop and R&B. Even though the event attracts mostly Japanese people, you hear a lot of typical slang. I went to one of those events and had the feeling that all of a sudden everything had come together. I got the sense that it's a bigger group than I'd imagined.

Are there people who believe this to be inappropriate?
Apparently not in Japan, but in most comments underneath videos on YouTube you see fierce reactions. Many seem to feel the Afro-American typecasting is all wrong. Hina and other B-stylers are not really aware of this.

Baby Shoop's tagline "Black for Life" printed on a T-shirt

And what do B-stylers' families think of their lifestyles?
When I was in Japan I realized that it's considered really impolite to stare. You see the weirdest people on the streets, but no one stares, not like the way they can in the Netherlands, where I'm from. It's easier for people to be who they want to be. Hina's parents are fine with it. Her mom sees it as a phase that will pass. Even though many Japanese feel right at home in the mass, it is still a land of extremes, which manage to coexist rather well.

You can see more of Desiré's work here.

The headquarters of the Security and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC. Photo via Flickr user US_SEC

If there's anything more maddening than the sheer scale of the financial fraud that sent America and the rest the planet spiraling into the economic abyss in 2008, it's the fact that no Wall Street bankers have gone to jail for causing the mess. As in zero, zilch, none at all.

So at his farewell party last month to celebrate a lengthy career at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the US regulatory agency that supposedly keeps Wall Street in check—James Kidney, a trial attorney who had been hamstrung for years by indifferent bosses, broke his silence and went off on an awesome rant about how no one in the financial sector fears the body supposedly policing their behavior. The SEC, in essence, is a joke.

Describing it as "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors," Kidney told an audience of fellow employees that they had dropped the ball because of a revolving door of corruption between the SEC and Wall Street megabanks. "I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses, whose names we all know, who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket. They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the Commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances," he said.

"As people climb the ladder at the agency, they become more timid and it becomes more political," Kidney told me. "If you employ somebody whose goal is to return to Wall Street, you're going to get a different kind of enforcement than from somebody who's willing to make a career out of tough regulations."

Specifically, Kidney is upset with how the SEC whiffed on its signature post-crash case against Goldman Sachs in 2010, when the Vampire Squid whose employees often go on to work in government was charged with fraud for its marketing of subprime mortgage products that helped trigger the housing meltdown. A deal was made in a matter of weeks and the SEC settled the case in exchange for $550 million, an eye-popping fine that made for good tabloid fodder at the time but is really just a drop in the bucket given Goldman's massive ($913 billion at the end of last year) assets.

"I had the feeling that the idea was to push the whole case out the door to show that the SEC was going after Wall Street bad guys even if they were low-level guys," Kidney told me. The SEC only pursued one individual in that case, a 28-year-old vice president named Fabrice Tourre, and when Kidney demanded they go higher up the foodchain and take out Tourre's boss, managing director Jonathan Egol, he got shut down.

And this isn't an exception, but rather just one of many cases that end in obscene settlements where the firms admit no wrongdoing and simply pay fines—which doesn't exactly provide an incentive not to break the rules again, so long as the profits gleaned by the bad behavior are enormous enough to make it worthwhile. Instead of taking down the fat cats, the SEC tends to ruin the lives of minor offenders by pursuing insider trading schemes that barely scratch the surface of all the shady shit going on.

"The last successfully litigated complex financial fraud case was in 2005," said one congressional aide who is active on financial issues. "At this point the entire white collar legal profession and much of the court system is rotten. They are too corrupt to even know what corruption is."

While he was reluctant to go after President Obama too aggressively because the SEC is, technically speaking, an independent agency (and it's the Department of Justice that has the power to file criminal cases that might actually put a banker behind bars, even if the SEC can make criminal referrals to DOJ), Kidney reminded me that the White House does choose the agency's chairman, as well as the attorney general.

"If he wanted more aggressive enforcement, there would be more aggressive enforcement," Kidney said of Obama, who along with the Democratic Party's various committees raked in $28.82 million from Wall Street banks for his first presidential campaign in 2008 and plenty more since.

Having successfully made some noise and drawn renewed scrutiny to our middling-at-best regulatory and enforcement system, Kidney is content to settle into retirement, and plans to become a docent at the American History Museum in DC and provide part-time legal aid at the Community Council for the Homeless. But those still struggling to rein in financial titans in the US capital take little solace in one man's courage, breath of fresh air though it may be.

"If this keeps up there will be a revolution," said the congressional aide. "That is Obama's legacy, a thoroughly corrupted legal system."

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

As I'm sure you've heard, Fred Phelps, founder and chief dickhead of the Westboro Baptist Church, has died.

Presumably this has been a game changer in the Westboro world, and I wanted to get to know the new them. And what better way to get to know people than making them do a bunch of Buzzfeed quizzes? They have told me many, many things about myself and others that I never knew (and also probably didn't want to know, TBH).

Below is how the members of the church answered the quizzes I sent to them. The answer they selected is presented with a short quote from them explaining their choices. Enjoy!

Which Sex and the City Guy Is Your Soulmate? – Taken by Westboro member Mara Phelps

Q. Pick a dress color for your first date
A. Black ("Black is the color of the human soul. We have no good in us.")

Q. Pick the activity for your first date
A. Dancing ("King David danced in the street after seeing the Lord's divine rule acted out.")

Q. Where do you want to sleep right now?
A. A four poster bed ("It reminds me of Roman times, when people had the word of God with them.")

Q. What would you want for your anniversary?
A. A dog ("Because dogs are loyal.")

Q. Pick a dog
A. A terrier ("It reminds me of a dog called April that we used to have. And someone, in the middle of the night, broke in and slit her throat.")

Q. Pick a flower
A. An iris ("When we first moved to this house, we could see these flowers outside.")

Q. Which New York City tourist attraction would you actually like to visit?
A. The Empire State Building. ("It couldn't have been made unless God had given the engineers and the people who built it the ability to do so.")

Q. Pick a romantic comedy
A. Pretty Woman ("She was supposedly a prostitute with a heart of gold. This generation has been raised to think being promiscuous is something to be proud of. And it is not.")

Q. Which word makes you squirm?
A. Ooze ("There's a sickness to it. The Lord has cursed fags with AIDS which causes them to have sores that ooze.")

Q. When looking for a boyfriend, which of the following is most important?
A. Loyalty ("It's important for people to have loyalty to one's brothers.")

Q. Pick a brunch dish
A. Grapefruit. ("It looks really healthy.")

"I'm not familiar with this character or the show at all. It says he expects the perfect wife. A lot of people expect things to be perfect for them even though they don't deserve it."

Which Queen of Comedy Are You – Taken by Westboro member Jael Holroyd, 29 

Q. Pick a TV show
A. Saturday Night Live ("They bring to life the whole concept of 'there will be mockers.' And I like when current events prove the scriptures.")

Q. Someone says women aren't funny, you...
A. Do a perfect Charlie Chaplin impression ("We'd make a Vine out of it. We're @WBCsays on Vine.") 

Q. Pick a drink:
A. Milkshake ("Because they're delicious. I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you than that.")

Q. Kids are...
A. Wonderful and hilarious ("They're little blessings. A gift from the Lord.")

Q. It's Friday night, where are you?
A. On Twitter ("Our account is @WBCsays, we like to be as creative as possible to reach all the different people out there.")

Q. Pick a vice...
A. The internet ("There's all kinds of freaky people out there.")

Q. The internet is...
A. A powerful medium ("People call us trolls but we're not doing this purely to provoke people.")

Q. Politics are...
A. Whatever ("Obama is a lying murderer.")

RESULT:

"We just picketed the Golden Globes. The one with her and Tina Fey. So I would have to say I am not Amy Poehler. She's pretty funny on Parks and Recreation, though."

How Big of a Dick Are You? – Taken by Westboro member Steve Drain

Q. Do you like Nickelback?
A. Not my cup of tea but to each his own ("I don't really feel like they were trying to be themselves. It felt like they were being derivative of bands of that time.")

Q. Could you be friends with Spencer Pratt?
A. Sure, why not? Probably has some fun stories ("I think that he's just as deserving of the Bible's truth as anyone else.")

Q. You go on a date, who pays?
A. I do, since I asked them out ("I only date my wife, and my wife is very, very good to me, and I try to do anything I can to please her. It's not easy being married to me.")

Q. Would you wear this Tapout shirt?
A. I'm more into Affliction stuff ("I'm not even into Affliction stuff anymore. I don't wear it anymore, but the word 'affliction' reminds me of the affliction of Joseph.")

Q. Do you respond to missed calls and emails right away?
A. Yes, or as soon as I can. I'm sorta busy. ("If it's one of my brothers or sisters in Christ, I wanna see what I can do to help them.")

Q. How do you feel about gourmet food?
A. Gross. Yuck. ("I'm only talking about that particular picture in the quiz. But I'm not opposed to all gourmet food. The Lord, Jesus Christ said 'Man shall not live by bread alone.'")

Q. An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and you have one last day. How do you spend it?
A. With my friends and family enjoying the time we have left together ("I don't think an asteroid will be hurtling toward Earth. I think the Lord is going to be hurtling toward Earth, coming from the clouds with ten thousand of the Saints to execute judgment on the ungoldy and I want to be beheld as a friend by the Lord Jesus Christ.")

Q. Your significant other says "I love you" for the first time, what do you do?
A. Say "I love you back" and kiss them passionately ("I'm only answering that way because I have four options to choose from. But for the first time it wouldn't have been appropriate.")

Q. A random person across the street trips and falls. You:
A. Luckily I caught it on Vine. #epicfail ("I have a guilty pleasure, and that is watching videos of people falling over. As long as they aren't seriously hurt. I love trampoline accidents, I love pinata accidents, you know?")

Result:

"Now look at that! I'm glad that you're not gonna say that I'm that big of a D-star-star-K. I'll tell you how somebody can be a really big d**k, though: lying to someone else about the Bible. Not warning them about their sin. We're supposed to love one another, and the way we're supposed to do that is to warn one another when we're caught up in sin."

Which Pop Star Should Be Your Best Friend? – Taken by Westboro member Rebekah Phelps-Roper

Q. What would you like to do for a night out?
A. Go see some live music ("We sing a lot of parodies of popular music. I sing the Lorde one, you can hear it on our Soundcloud.")

Q. What do you usually talk about?
A. How to make the world a better place ("By preaching, because that is the only way anything can get better.")

Q. What should your best friend do if you get dumped?
A. Try to make you laugh ("I don't date, so I'm answering as though a man at a picket yelled at me.")

Q. How do you feel about gossip?
A. Haters gonna hate ("That pretty much describes everyone who talks about us, including the media.")

Q. Which show would you binge watch?
A. Adventure Time ("I haven't binge watched a show since Grey's Anatomy.")

Q. And what would you like to eat while you're watching it?
A. Popcorn and Diet Coke ("Whatever you're going to eat, make sure it's in moderation, because that's how you're meant to live your life.")

Q. How would your best friend celebrate your birthday?
A. Bake you a cake ("I love celebrating things with cakes, including birthdays.")

Q. What should be the tone of their toast at your wedding?
A. Earnest ("Because weddings are, of course, solemn things.")

RESULT:

"We picketed Taylor Swift! She would not be my best friend, because I would tell her very kindly and gently, 'You have to stop sleeping around with men, girl.' The Lord hates that."

 

Which Twin Peaks Character Are You? – Taken by Westboro member Steve Drain

Q. Pick a movie
A. Fargo ("I like the Coen Brothers a lot. Their films tend to be morality plays.")

Q. What term best describes you?
A. Loyal ("I hope to be loyal in my service to God.")

Q. Pick a song
A. "Money" by Pink Floyd ("I think they're a very underrated band.")

Q. What's your ideal Friday night?
A. Hanging with your significant other ("I love my wife, she's the wife of my youth. And the Lord tells us to rejoice with the wife of thy youth.")

Q. Pick a food
A. Maraschino cherries ("I put maraschino cherries in soda. I think it spices it up.")

Q. Describe your personal style
A. No. ("I don't think any of the other stuff really describes me very well.")

Q. Pick a TV show
A. Breaking Bad ("It's a very interesting story. It's complex. I don't like stories where you already know what's going to happen. Though I've gotta tell you, with all of his supposed love for his wife and son, rather than deciding to be a meth kingpin, he could've just trusted that the Lord would take care of his son and wife.")

RESULT:

"Who is that? I guess he's one of the prime suspects for killing the girl. He looks like he's a good-looking, clean-cut kid. Which means he doesn't at all resemble me."

 

Which Golden Girl Are You? – Taken by Westboro member Mara Phelps

Q, Pick a celebrity chef
A. Ina Garten ("Because I know that she works with a lot of fags, which is part of the reason this country has gotten itself into so much trouble with God.")

Q. Which Real Housewife opening quote do you most relate to?
A. 'I'm not afraid to say what everyone else is thinking.' ("Other people are pushing this concept that sodomy is OK, and I think a lot of people are afraid to say that it's not.")

Q. What is your favorite party game?
A. Truth or dare ("Because it forces people to tell the truth, and I think a lot of people are uncomfortable telling the truth.")

Q. Which social network do you spend the most time on?
A. Twitter ("I don't have any of these, but I have been on Twitter.")

Q. What would your superhero power be?
A. Flight ("Flying commercial to all these pickets is just no fun.")

Q. What do you look for in a lover?
A. Comfort ("I want my husband to comfort my spirit by reading true words from the Bible.")

Q. Which oddly specific Netflix category most appeals to you?
A. Romantic comedies based on classic literature ("I think of things from older centuries when it was more out in the open to talk about sin.")

Q. Pick a 2014 best picture nominee
A. Nebraska ("We have had some awesome pickets in Nebraska.")

Q. Which Disney Princess is your favorite?
A. Snow White ("She reminds me of a more innocent time.")

Q. Which Hogwarts house would you be sorted in to?
A. Slytherin ("Because everybody hates us.")

RESULT:

"I used to watch Golden Girls because I used to have to babysit in the 80s, and that was always on on a Friday night. I don't really remember this specific character though."

 

"What Country Do You Actually Belong In?" – Taken by Westboro member Jael Holroyd

Q. Which of the following is your favorite dish?
A. Homemade meat pie ("My husband is English and I made him some meat pasties. They turned out pretty darn good!")

Q. Choose the first word that speaks to you
A. Word ("Jesus Christ is the word.")

Q. Pick an animal
A. An eagle ("Isaiah 40, verse 31 says, 'Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles.'")

Q. What's the most important to you out of these?
A. Faith ("I'm reluctant to use the term because it's been misconstrued and perverted by people who pretend they care about the Lord.")

Q. Which sport could you watch/play forever?
A. Soccer ("We like to play soccer around here.")

Q. Which of these do you hate most?
A. Ignorance ("The scriptures contain answers to every single question you could want to know.")

Q. Pick one of these vices/sins/guilty pleasures:
A. A laptop ("But only using that for good purposes and preaching a good message.")

Q. Where do you wish you could teleport to right now?
A. Pizza ("God hates Holland, by the way.")

Q. Pick a color combination that appeals to you
A. Green and white ("Because it's pretty.")

Q. Choose an animal wearing a sweater
A. A calf ("Because he looks little and vulnerable and sweet.")

Q. What was the last thing you tripped on?
A. My own two feet ("I tripped the other day at work. A bunch of people were looking at me.")

Q. Which celebrity is your dream lunch date?
A. Richard Dawkins ("I wouldn't do a lot of listening, I would do a lot of talking.")

Q. How do you respond to problems?
A. I ask for help ("If you act on your own, you are going to do foolish and unwise things.")

Q. Pick a baby
A. A baby lifting weights ("Did you know 4,000 babies are murdered every day?")

RESULT:

"I feel a little disappointed because, several times in the scripture, Egypt is used to represent people who are against God."

Follow Jamie on Twitter.

Brace Yourself, Juggalo Bitcoins Are Coming

The final version of the Predator costume required a tall actor, but before Kevin Peter Hall stepped into the final suit, Jean-Claude Van Damme shot scenes as the Predator. And he looked especially insane in the "cloaked" Predator outfit, which was bright red.

Read more...

Security holes are par for the course on the web today, but a new, massive bug dubbed "Heartbleed” is particularly nasty, and widespread: Experts say that two-thirds of websites and nearly everyone that’s used the internet in the last two years could be affected to some extent.

Universal has put the long-rumored Battlestar Galactica movie on the fast track. Variety says the movie will be a "a complete reimagining of the story," which will be written by Transcendence screenwriter Jack Paglen.

Read more...

Warner Bros. threatens to remake Gremlins. And this time they may be serious.

Read more...

Giuliano Visalli

Are you a straight man or woman, tired of seeing your rights evaporate to make way for those of others like, for instance, the gays? And have you been too afraid to express your true feelings, just in case you’re branded a homophobe? it’s time to stop worrying—there are plenty more people out there with little to zero awareness of what’s going on around them.

On March 22, a few of them publicly rang the bell for the rights of straight people all over the world. A stand popped up in the center of Prato in Tuscany, Italy, recruiting those brave enough to take part in “Europe’s First Straight Pride.” The parade is set to take place on May 17 so, if I were you, I'd sign up as soon as possible.

Not convinced yet? Let's take a brief look at the event's official website. The opening message writes:

“The birth of Gay Pride made room and time to debate both internal and external institutions. These days, homosexuality is widely and constantly discussed, but the same cannot be said about heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is perceived as something obvious and predictable. This attitude is wrong. Actually, very wrong. […] Heterosexuals, which according to official figures account for 92.5 percent of the global population, are taken for granted by mass-media as well as society's institutions, who seem convinced that heterosexuals have no issues or needs. That is absolutely untrue.”

Besides deeply articulate reflections on tolerance and the defiance that a majority group should feel for itself, the website offers various information on activities that the association is planning to carry out in the future. Those include but are not limited to: Straight soccer tournaments, straight boxing, straight rugby, straight beach volleyball, and straight zumba classes. There will also be a beauty contest that will crown a Miss and Mr. Straight.

But Etero Pride Italia has goals that go deeper than the setting up of activities that already exist everywhere in the world – the association's aim is to “challenge mass media and the world of communications in general.” For that reason, they are planning to set up radio and TV channels, as well as a magazine called l’Etero (the Straight)—which sucks, because If I had known, I would have never applied for an internship at VICE.

Overwhelmed by the possibilities, I picked up the phone and called Giuliano Visalli, founder of Etero Pride Italia, arranging to meet him in Prato the following day. Giuliano is a tall and masculine guy with longish hair, a square jaw, and a hoarse voice. He brought a female friend along, who described Giuliano as “a real leader” and spent the rest of the time nodding agreeably every time he talked. And Giuliano talked a lot.

VICE: So Giuliano, how is your campaign going so far?
Giuliano Visalli: Really good, I would say. We did some research and we found out we are the first in Europe to try out such a thing. A lot of people have acted surprised, convinced that Straight Pride would already exist. But it doesn't and there are so many people that need it, because heterosexuality is taken for granted.

There is a countdown clock on the homepage of your website. Do you really believe you can put together a Straight Pride event in just a month and a half?
We added the countdown because it looks super cool. I think we'll decide whether we'll go forward with it on May 17, when we have a clearer picture of the situation. If the gay and lesbian associations we approached help us out, we could really make it.

How do you imagine the day going?
Don’t expect a straight version of the Gay Pride parade, with floats and whatnot—not at all. We are aiming for something a little more softcore. A mix between May Day and Gay Pride. Two days of cultural debates and entertainment. However, if our followers demand a 50,000 people parade, we won’t hold them back. We aren't afraid of anything.

How did the idea come about? I can’t avoid thinking of your campaign as a reaction to the LGBT movement.
No, it's my idea and my initiative. There was no external vision that influenced my thoughts. After I dropped Political Sciences in the first year of college, I went into politics. I founded a movement that was called Giovani Toscani [Young Tuscans]. It was an autonomous project. I met so many people through that, and I realized that the straight issue was not being taken into account.

At the time, it was only homosexuality that was on the agenda, and I felt there was a sort of uneasiness among straight people about their own heterosexuality. As if it was difficult for them to come out as straight. This idea has been stuck in my mind for years. Now, with the advent of new technologies, everything is possible: you take your nerd-friend, you jot down an idea and a logo, and the secret dream becomes reality.

Surely you understand that it’s quite normal to wonder why a majority group has to celebrate its own identity.
It’s absolutely necessary, because all those certainties that are associated with heterosexuality no longer exist. We don’t want to lay claim to our rights, we just want to carry on a form of self-criticism towards a world that is slowly falling apart. A self-criticism with respect to what has happened in the last 50 years.

We don’t want to deal with rainbow families, homosexual adoptions, or anything like that. Those are probably issues we will have to face, but later on. We want to speak about straight people’s problems. About the fact that 40-year-old women have lost the sense of their own biological clock and find themselves childless. We want to talk about those Mama’s boys who are still stuck at home.

The LGBT community had the guts to imagine a world where one could be proud to be gay and fight to make it a reality. Those in the majority are not always the strongest.

OK. What is going to happen if the straight person's cry for help is ignored?
I think any Western woman can easily testify that men, in the last few years, have lost a big part of their masculinity. Just look at TV shows. I see male role models that I don’t recognize as straight. Our Straight Pride will make the waxed-eyebrow trend disappear. I’d like to understand where this trend of men waxing their eyebrows came from. What the hell is that?

And what about women?
As I said, they have to rediscover their own biological clock. Mass media hold a great responsibility here. Think about Sex and the City. I used to watch it with my ex-partner and I was astonished by the fact that women idolized a bunch of 40-year-old, childless, career women experiencing a scattered version of sexuality. How degrading is the notion of a 40-year-old woman being horny and trying to steal other women’s husbands?

Going back to your relationship with the LGBT community. What do you really think about Gay Pride?
It’s super cool! Obviously they are a tad excessive in places, but so is every event. They represent the 10 percent of the population. Just think about the possibilties of our movement—we represent the 90 percent. It’s a beautiful, joyful, fresh, and artistic initiative. It’s made of art, tradition, and music. It’s beautiful.

Did you receive any criticism from the LGBT community?
Yes. An article was published on a gay portal in which they defined us as “fundamentalist” and “homophobic,” labelling this idea as another strategy to promote hatred against homosexuals. We contacted them to clarify and the article was removed.

Don’t you think you might be a little old-fashioned?
Yes, absolutely, and I like it. Since 1968 we have seen a strong change in our habits. Everything that was the status quo had to be demolished. But it’s time we look at that moment with a touch of self-criticism.

Do you think other people will listen to you?
Of course. This is why I invested my own money into Etero Pride and registered the brand under my name. The brand has been registered in all European countries, and this is very important. The “Etero Pride” brand belongs to me. I haven’t been on holiday in four years. I could have spent this money to go on holiday, but this thing gets me so excited. The only word that really counts for Giuliano Visalli is emotion.

So Giuliano Visalli is the upholder of tomorrow’s families.
Yes, absolutely. Being a dad is cool. Being a mom is cool!

No doubt.
[His friend nods strongly]

When Colombian National Police finally put a bullet through Pablo Escobar’s head in December 1993, he was running what was probably the most successful cocaine cartel of all time, worth some $25 billion. You can do pretty much anything you want with that kind of money, and Escobar did, building houses for the poor, getting himself elected to Colombia’s Congress, and running much of the northeastern city of Medellín as his own personal fiefdom.

In 1978 he bought up a vast tract of land outside the city and started building Hacienda Nápoles, the sort of sprawling complex that you’d expect the world’s richest drug dealer to inhabit, complete with its own array of wild animals. When he died, the land was ignored for a decade and fell into disrepair. The house was looted by locals who were convinced he’d stashed money or drugs in the walls, and the hippos turned feral.

Eventually, some bright spark hit upon the idea of reopening the estate as an adventure park. They kept the name, gave it a Jurassic Park–style makeover, and reopened it to the public, creating the ultimate family-friendly tourist destination: a still pretty run-down complex with some dinosaur figurines, some hippos, and the enduring, unavoidable legacy of a man whose cartel were responsible for anywhere between 3,000 to 60,000 deaths.

To get to Hacienda Nápoles you have to take a three-and-a-half hour bus from Medellín to the small town of Doradal, and from there it’s another ten minutes on an auto-rickshaw to the entrance. The main gates remain as Pablo designed them, with the Cessna that he first flew into the States, loaded with cocaine, displayed proudly above them. The current owners have decided to repaint the plane with zebra stripes, presumably to make visitors forget it belonged to the most infamous drug trafficker of all time. 

I arranged to meet my old friend Ilmer here. He’s from the nearby town of Puerto Boyacá, and now 33, he was 12 years old when Pablo died. Ilmer told me that a lot of the locals still call him El Patrón, or "the Boss"—kind of like Springsteen if he had his own militia.

The first thing you notice about Hacienda Nápoles is that it’s gigantic, really fucking gigantic. 

You need an auto-rickshaw just to get around the site, which the owners have tastefully painted in the same zebra stripes as everything else. While this is in keeping with the new safari park vibe, there’s also maybe a knowing nod to Pablo buried somewhere in the design. There’s a story the locals love—recently dramatized in the Colombian TV series Escobar, el Patrón del Mal—that, after authorities in Bogotá impounded zebras destined for his zoo, Pablo sent his men to steal them back, replacing the exotic animals with donkeys painted with black and white stripes.

“He could do anything!” laughed Ilmer. “He had so much money!”

Nowadays, a day out at his former compound will cost you 32,000 pesos ($15), or a little more if you want to use any of the various water parks.

“The place was seized in a sting by the DNE [Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes],” Ilmer explained. “But when they carry out a sting on drug lords, they often forget about the places themselves and leave them for ten or 15 years. Then someone—a private company—rented this place, and now they run it."

Pablo originally bought four hippos from San Diego Zoo in 1981: a male and three females. There are now 40 living on site, all descendants of that original bull hippo, who still lives on happily as head of the family.

I’d assumed that all the dinosaurs dotted around the place were cooked up by whichever Jeff Goldblum aficionado ran the park, but it turns out that they too are original Pablo installations. He supposedly built them to give his kids somewhere to play, proving conclusively that any dad is more fun when he has tons of drug money to throw around.

But while Pablo’s wife and children would visit Hacienda Nápoles, he preferred them to stay home in Medellín so that he could throw lavish parties here, flying in women from all over South America to entertain anyone he wanted to influence, like high-ranking police officers or government officials.

There are a few of these dioramas of dinosaurs at battle spread throughout the complex. Here's one, for example, of a triceratops stabbing a T-rex in the groin.

And here are some other things that I'm 95 percent sure were crafted by the maniac behind that horrifying Palestinian taxidermy zoo.

Pablo loved European culture, hence "Hacienda Nápoles," named after a trip to Naples. Besides the title for his estate, he also brought back a love of bullfighting, so he sensibly decided to construct his own 500-seat arena.

The current owners have converted the bullring into a slightly dubious exhibition of Africa-related stuff, complete with some big, sculpted caricatures of tribesmen and a wall of renowned Africans that kicks off with Nelson Mandela and follows with photos of Charlize Theron and Didier Drogba.

It must have been difficult for the new investors to figure out exactly how to handle the legacy of the equally feared and loved kingpin behind their theme park. In fact, that's probably why there isn't a single mention of Pablo anywhere on site, except for in the museum in the middle of the park, which is entirely dedicated to El Patrón.

Here's his classic car collection, which was destroyed by the rival Cali Cartel when they bombed his Medellín home in 1988. After the fire burned out, Pablo moved all the charred cars to his new estate as a sign of defiance, giving it that unique sense of glamour you'd usually only find in a South Shields salvage yard.

There’s a chance that people could get a little uppity about a government-approved museum glorifying the life of a man who killed 30 judges and 457 policemen, as well as countless rivals. So to make sure we all know who this place is honoring, the new operators slung up these photos—one of Pablo dressed as a Mexican bandit, his wanted poster, and one of his lifeless body—at the entrance, under the words Triunfo del Estado (Triumph of the State).

The house has been left in pretty much the same state of disrepair that it was found in after locals tore it apart in search of Pablo's hidden treasures. But photos on the walls show Hacienda Nápoles in happier, less trap-house-y times—El Patrón bobbing around in the pool, or dressed as an Arab prince. 

Of course, all that nostalgia has to be offset somehow, which the new operators have done a fantastic job of with this morbid little cul-de-sac of bleakness.

In case you can't quite make it out, that's a photo of Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Aguilar triumphantly standing over Pablo's corpse, and the walls are lined with black-and-white portraits of the police officers he killed.

A short walk from his front door is the private airstrip Pablo had his men build so he could fly planes directly to his various outposts in the north, like his base on Norman's Cay island in the Bahamas.

Cocaine paste, which originated in Peru, would be refined in Medellín and then brought here to small loading huts, from where—at his mid-80s peak—Pablo was shipping some 70 to 80 tons of cocaine to America every month.

As we walk back down the airstrip, Ilmer asked me, “So, do you think Pablo had a brilliant mind or a criminal mind to build all this?” The answer has to be both. While the museum itself is a stark reminder of the vast number of people he killed for getting in his way, that ruthless figure is at odds with the character the locals—including the park staff—still happily refer to as their very own Robin Hood.

“The exhibition at his house is trying to warn the world so that what he did will not be repeated, but the locals think something different,” said Ilmer. “They still see Pablo as a hero. They think that Pablo was good because they see him as a fair person. If someone was good to him, he was good to them. If they betrayed him, that’s when he became evil.”

As far as Ilmer can tell, Pablo’s death had little impact on the day-to-day drug trade around Medellín. He said the only noticeable changes have come in the last five or six years, since paramilitary groups cut a deal with the government that allowed leaders to only serve five-year sentences for the murders of hundreds of people.

“In Puerto Boyacá, where I live, it used to be an illegal area,” he explained. “It was used for cocaine production, and there was a gasoline cartel who robbed gasoline from Ecopetrol, the biggest oil company in Colombia. All the money there was illegal money. Now, we have more legitimate oil companies coming in. In general, it’s getting better in Colombia.”

But this is a fragile state of affairs. “Now the paramilitaries are starting to be freed again, and we don’t know whether they will continue in their old ways,” he said. “People are used to getting easy money.”

As I left Hacienda Nápoles, it crossed my mind that Pablo's billions probably hadn't been that easy to earn. He did many terrible things, but when you’re wandering around the Platonic ideal of a drug baron’s villa and catch sight of him through a doorway posing with a Tommy gun and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, you can’t help thinking that for a while it must have been a hell of a party.

Follow Kevin EG Perry on Twitter.

In the 1980s, a man named Justin Schmidt invented the Schmidt pain index, which measured the painfulness of stings from 78 species of insects on a scale of 0 to 4 (the only stings that rated 4 were the bullet ant and the tarantula hawk). Of course, pain is subjective, so Schmidt rated all of the stings himself. In that tradition, the author of this study hypothesized that the pain level of a sting also depends on its location on the body. He tested this hypothesis by -- you guessed it -- get

In 2012, a few broke Spanish kids made a short film called Fist of Jesus that centers around the son of God killing zombies with a giant fish bone. Instead of coughing up five minutes of mirth for the internet, it somehow has more than a million YouTube views and has collected upward of 60 awards at film festivals around the world.

Encouraged by their runaway success, those broke Spanish kids want to make a full-length feature called Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem. Thing is, like most broke Spanish kids, they have no money. Hence this Kickstarter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole venture is also accidentally topical and liable to enrage the fundamentalist right in the US, who are doing such an effective job of mobilizing in the face of emergent atheism that they were able to make a pro-Christian telemovie like God’s Not Dead a big success at the box office.

Director David Muñoz and producer Simon Brading spoke to us about their unexpected success, and tried to explain themselves and their movie.

VICE: Tell me about this travesty.
Simon: Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem is high-risk, high-reward, basically. We did the short film prequel, Fist of Jesus, with no budget whatsoever. None.
David: A thousand euros [$1,370]. Practically none.
Simon: Compared with the millions people usually spend on films and stuff like this, we did it with a thousand euros using recycled elements, and we were doing the directing, stunt work, writing, camera work, and everything else ourselves.

Recycled elements?
David: Literally recycling. We found a table and made it into a Roman shield.
Simon: It’s ingenuity and desperation mixed together.

Why are you doing this to yourselves?
David: When we made the short film, we wanted to mix Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Peter Jackson’s Braindead. Now we want to mix something like the New Testament and Mad Max. We must merge these two universes.

What are your religious beliefs? I'm guessing you are atheists? Otherwise surely you would fear the wrath of God right about now.
David: Well, I don’t know what to say. I’m agnostic. I say I don’t know; I don’t say I don’t care.
Simon: I don’t think it was so much bringing Jesus down and saying you’re idiots for believing in Jesus. I don’t think that’s the idea. It was just taking a historical character and making it absurd.
David: And making him human, too. We wanted a Jesus who has vanity. He’s a good man, but he’s selfish, too. He will survive at all costs. In the movie, we make him even more human. He tries to do good things, but we all make mistakes, and Jesus will make mistakes too.
Simon: What cracks me up about the short film is when he brings back Judas, and he’s hanging there. He brings him back to life, and he’s still hanging there, and he dies again, “I did it! I di—oh.” Just stupid mistakes that normal people would make. We’re not infallible. Why should Jesus be infallible?

Are you worried about the potential reaction from Bible thumpers?
Simon: Oh, yeah. The first thing I said was, “There are going to be people who hate you.”
David: There are a lot of believers who laugh out loud and tell us, “You made Jesus anew! He’s fighting the monsters!” Then they say maybe they will have to confess the next time they go to church, because they like it a lot. Others have said that if Jesus saw this short film, he would love it.

That is surprising.
David: We’ve only had four or five comments of people saying, “This is bad.” A lot of people are saying, “I’m Christian; I love it.” I don’t know if they’ll say the same about the feature film.
Simon: We haven’t reached the negative people yet, though. It hasn’t gotten to the Christian fundamentalists or anything like that. It’s gone to places where people go to see films about zombies or films that takes the piss out of something. It’s gone to the right audience so far. The feature film might not. We hope it does. Any publicity is good publicity. If we have people picketing outside the cinema, that’s gonna make it even bigger. Historically, that’s what happens to films.

Image via

Neither of you seem to care about the religion. Why Jesus over Gandhi or even Hitler?
Simon: Hitler’s been done.
David: I had to study Jesus when I was a kid in Catholic school. My teachers were priests. I used to study a lot of the New Testament. Fist of Jesus came to me when I got to that college and started to learn all these things. I was doing drawings for Fist of Jesus when I was eight years old in class. I wrote this story when I was a kid. I tell my co-workers: “Look at these pictures I did when I was kid; maybe it will be a funny short film?”

Why do you think the short film was so well received online?
Dave: We think it's because nobody in the last few years has done films in the way Peter Jackson used to—mixing bizarre and gory stuff with lots of crazy comedy. A lot of people were saying, “At last someone’s doing stuff like Braindead or Bad Taste or Meet the Feebles again.”
Simon: It’s not an hour and a half of watching blood explode everywhere and people going through the same evolution: A girl gets naked, a guy who saves the day, and everybody else gets killed. This was just so different. It’s a humorous way of telling it.
Dave: Loads of people are gonna get killed, though.

What other biblical figures do you pervert in this film?
Simon: John the Baptist, Salome, all the Apostles. It’s basically the Jesus story retold.
David: Then we mix it with monsters and mutants and demons.

Does God show up?
Dave: It’s about Jesus trying to find God, but wherever he goes, he can’t find him. That’s the journey. He’s always saying to all the people he meets, “God wants to speak with me. I have to go to the desert.”

Who’s the guy playing Jesus?
Simon: Mark. He’s a local. A friend of David’s.
Dave: He’s my neighbor.

Can you give me a brief synopsis of the script?
Simon: The journey of Jesus, tempted by the Devil, goes to John the Baptist, goes to the desert, is tempted by Satan—that’s all there. It’s unrecognizable sometimes. It’s so twisted by their minds. I can’t explain it without giving away too much.

Come on. Anything stick out?
Simon: I had problems with the John the Baptist character

Why?
Dave: He puts people underwater and they have to survive. If you get out of the water you are in his religion. If not, you are not worthy. He lives in a swamp. There's a lot of corpses floating on the swamp.

Follow Toby on Twitter.

Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Galloway that the next installment in the Star Wars saga has already begun shooting.

Read more...

Image by Joe Burger

To most people, the turducken, a solid slab of flesh created by stuffing a turkey with a duck, and that duck in turn with a chicken, epitomizes the egregious complexity and gluttonous obsession with meat that makes up a large part of modern American cuisine. But most people are pussies. In the historical world of engastration (stuffing animals inside other animals) and chimera (melding animals together) cooking, this 15-pound bird-block is about as interesting as a flaccid boiled hotdog. The true king of culinary absurdity comes from L’almanach des gourmands, an 1807 cookbook written by Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimond de la Reyniere, a man so outlandish he faked his own death to see who would attend his funeral. His creation was called the rôti sans pareil—the roast without equal—and it is everything that has made the half-dead art of engastration increasingly popular today: ambitious, ostentatious, and alluringly, inevitably delicious.

His recipe calls for a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a plover stuffed with a lapwing stuffed with a quail stuffed with a thrush stuffed with a lark stuffed with an ortolan bunting stuffed with a garden warbler stuffed with an olive stuffed with an anchovy stuffed with a single caper, with layers of Lucca chestnuts, force meat and bread stuffing between each bird, stewed in a hermetically sealed pot in a bath of onion, clove, carrots, chopped ham, celery, thyme, parsley, mignonette, salted pork fat, salt, pepper, coriander, garlic, and “other spices,” and slowly cooked over a fire for at least 24 hours.

For those not keeping track, that’s 20 layers, 17 of them birds, and a grand total of 18 creatures that had to die (assuming only one pig would be used to make the force meat, chopped ham, and salted pork fat) for the amusement of some turn-of-the-19th century dandies. And if that seems impossible, that’s because it is—today at least. Not because it’s scientifically impossible or there’s a lack of eager chefs in this world, but because many of the birds are now hard to find and kill. The bustard, for example, is on the brink of endangerment, and the consumption of ortolan bunting—a force-fed bird, killed by drowning in Armagnac, then parted from its feathers and feat and eaten freshly fried in one bite—is incredibly illegal and considered by some to be an affront to God. Despite that, ortolans still find their way to tables of the wealthy more than anyone wishes to admit, and those determined enough to find the desired ingredients for a rôti sans pareil could do so if they wanted. But of those professional chefs in the world who recreate old engastration recipes like this, none seem eager to use such blatantly illegal or unobtainable ingredients.

In the grand scope of food history, though, the rôti’s not so outlandish. There are recipes dating back to the 5th century for things like the scholar Macrobius’s Roman Trojan Boar: a pig “made pregnant with other animals and enclosed within as the Trojan horse was made pregnant with armed men.” The rôti itself was said to be based upon a similarly dated Roman recipe for a cow stuffed with a pig, goose, duck, and chicken. But this wasn’t just a piece of Roman heritage. There are tales of a Bedouin dish of chickens stuffed with rice and hard-boiled eggs crammed into a lamb, then stuffed into a whole slain camel roasted over a charcoal pit with nuts. Perhaps that tradition followed the Arab Muslims into Andalusia, where a 13th century Andalusian cookbook reports a cow stuffed with a lamb, goose, hen, pigeon, starling, and a final unknown smaller bird served to the Sayyid Abu al-‘Ala of Cueta.

Some of the more recent recipes—developed when engastration was at the peak of its recent historical, theoretical popularity in 18th century England—are still in play today. Possibly the most popular of these was the Yorkshire Christmas Pie of 1774: a turkey, goose, guinea fowl, partridge, and pigeon cooked together in a coffin-shaped piecrust. Food historians and aspirational chefs drag out this recipe every couple of years for British television specials and cooking demonstrations. But the True Love Roast, a 12-bird concoction of turkey, goose, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon squab, Aylesbury duck, Barbary duck, poussin, guinea fowl, mallard, and quail—one bird for each day of Christmas—with eight types of stuffing is still common enough as well. In fact, for $1,200 England’s Heal Farm Fine Food will prepare the bird and ship it to you. That’s not such a bad price either, for 55 pounds of solid meat, which is enough to serve 125 people with a cook time of only ten hours.  

Richard Fitch, a Tudor food historian who recreates historical dishes for spectators at the Royal Kitchens of Henry VIII’s beloved Hampton Court Palace in London, is one of the proud few who has worked on resurrecting engastration and chimera recipes from old tomes. More often than not he’s working on something a little less extreme in the service of recreating foods that will be interesting, accessible, and somehow relevant to a mass audience. His next project will be "pudding of a nox," a type of medieval blood pudding, which he’s trying out spefically because a few members of his team have never tried it before. “Hopefully,” he told me,” this will mean that their learning process will act as a lens through which the visitors can look at the past. And for those members of the public who themselves have never made a blood pudding—most I would guess—they will act as a form of proxy. Everymen if you will. To show that if these guys can do it anybody could.”

Engastrations don’t fit that mold, but Fitch has some experience with Yorkshire Christmas Pie and a few chimeras. “Always pig/fowl combinations,” he says, like the cockentrice, the hind legs of a capon melded to the fore of a swine. And from that experience he knows a little about just why the Tudors and others might have gone through all the trouble of creating these massive monstrosities without the benefits of a modern kitchen.

As far as Fitch sees it, engastrations and chimeras were probably never all that popular. “I am unaware of any evidence that [engastration] was ever really done at all,” he says. At the very least it probably wasn’t commonly made, but was more popularized by the audacity of the idea and a certain degree of plagiarism. The obsession with the dish does suggest that something about the aspiration character of it, the alchemical act of combining animals held some of the appeal. And that does seem to be the case with chimeras, for which there’s a bit more evidence. Henry VIII notably served a cockentrice (and a dolphin) to the King of France as part of a massive feast meant to impress him with the wealth and capability of the English court. Fitch sees it not just as an attempt to do something weird, but to present notables with mythical hybrid creatures everyone knew in an abstract sense to be real and living off somewhere distant. Magicing one together would have been quite the feat of kitchen wizardry.

That spirit of aspirational cooking and alchemical creation is alive and well today in arts like molecular gastronomy. That—and John Madden’s incessant turducken hucking—is probably why engastration is more alive and well today than ever. We can turn a shrimp into a foam, so why shouldn't we ram a dozen birds together or make a chicken ride a pig wearing medieval armor (a real creation: the helmeted cock)? “It’s fiddly to do and demonstrates the skills of the cook,” says Fitch, “but has possibly transformed more into an aspirational or fashionable dish today, one that can be bought ready-to-cook from frozen. A status symbol in food, if you like.”

Engastrations have always seemed a little gaudy. De la Reyniere’s descriptions of the rôti, like, “enclosed in a young woodcock, as tender and plump as Mademoiselle Volnais and quite as well kept,” or “then enclose your callie (quail), which you should cover with a vine-leaf, as a coat-of-arms to show its nobility, in the body of a vanneau (lapwing),” reek of poetics and pomp. With all his slithering, sexually charged references to famous contemporary actresses’s figures, the recipe was probably far more fun to cook than it was to eat.

But there’s a case to be made for the practicality of engastrations, too. In Greenland, a dish called kiviak, made by killing 400 auks and jamming them feathers and all into a seal carcass, then letting it ferment under a rock from three months to one and a half years before eating the birds whole, evolved out of necessity into a matter of taste and convenience. And as for the rôti, de la Reyniere speaks with great longing for the mingling of “the quintessence of the plain, the forest, the marsh, and the barnyard.” It’s a tempting description of a complex and bold flavor, much like the transfer of juices in a turducken that helps the cardboard of a turkey turn into something palatable and novel.

At the end of the day, however, it’s the magical Frankenstein’s monster aspect of engastration and chimeras that draw people in. “From personal experience,” says Finch, “certain people, for some reason, find it offensive and disrespectful to the animals. And whilst I don’t agree, I can see why they would see it that way.” Forcing things together violently and deliciously. Consuming our unholy creations. There’s probably something deeply disturbing and psychological to say about that. But for most of us, the more innocent act of creating something utterly new in the kitchen is the real catch. It’s brutal, gaudy, and complex, but it’s one little corner of medieval magic we’ve managed to hold onto until today.

Trinity Broadcasting Network (or TBN) is the largest Christian TV network in the world. Its shows are currently available in 95 percent of American homes.

TBN has its headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, in the modest building you see above. The network offers free tours to the public, so I headed down to check it out. 

This guy (above, right) was the tour guide for my group, which was made up of me and a visiting Boy Scout troop. I'm not sure if he was new or something, but he left A LOT of the company's history out of his tour, so I'll be filling in some gaps for him as I go. 

Our tour began in the grand entrance hall. As we walked through, the tour guide explained to us that TBN was started in the early 70s by married couple Jan and Paul Crouch in an effort to spread Christianity to as many people as they could. 

What he failed to mention is the church's reliance on what's known as "prosperity gospel."

If you're not familiar, prosperity gospel is a system in which you're told that the more money you give to the Lord, the more blessings the Lord will give to you in return. In this instance, "the Lord" refers to "Trinity Broadcasting Network." 

They gather these donations by holding telethons in which they promise viewers miracles in exchange for donating money to TBN. And being poor isn't a problem: The network tells viewers that God especially likes it when people who are poor or in debt donate money they can't afford. "He'll give you thousands, hundreds of thousands; he'll give millions and billions of dollars," Paul Crouch once told his viewers, according to the LA Times.

The company is reported to bring in tens of millions of dollars in tax-free donations annually. It is unclear if God held up his end of the bargain to those who donated.

Next, we were taken around a small museum area that featured various old copies of the Bible, some of which were more than 100 years old. 

Curiously absent from the tour guide's spiel was any mention of allegations made against the company by Carra Crouch, granddaughter of the founders of TBN.

Back in June of 2012, Carra filed a suit against Jan Crouch and TBN's attorney. In the suit, Carra Crouch alleged that she was drugged and sexually assaulted while staying at an Atlanta hotel during the filming of one of the network's telethons. She was 13 years old at the time of the alleged attack. 

She claims that she went to Jan and TBN's attorneys to tell them about the rape, and they blamed her for the incident. "Jan (Crouch) became furious and began screaming at Ms. Crouch, a 13-year-old girl, and began telling her 'it is your fault,'" the suit reads.

Carra says that, though the network fired the employee who attacked her, they did not report the incident to the police. Beyond the obvious moral issues that arise from failing to go to the police when your teenage granddaughter is raped, this becomes even more problematic as Jan is an ordained minister and therefore legally obligated to report sexual assaults.

TBN has refuted the allegations. The case is scheduled to go to trial on July 21.

Next, we were given an opportunity to take a look around the office of Paul Crouch, the co-founder of TBN. Our tour guide explained that Paul had died in 2013, after spending almost 40 years with the network. His office is being kept open for visitors to honor his memory. 

Maybe the tour guide was in a hurry, because he completely failed to mention that Paul was accused of doing quite a few shitty things over the course of his career. 

For instance, back in 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Paul had paid a former TBN employee named Enoch Lonnie Ford $425,000 to end a wrongful termination lawsuit. In Enoch's lawsuit, he claimed that he and Paul had been involved in a gay relationship, and that Paul had sexually harassed him before firing him.

TBN claims that it only paid the settlement to "avoid a lengthy and expensive lawsuit."

In 2005, Enoch took a polygraph test about the accusations as part of a TV taping, but the results were never released to the public. 

In Paul's office, there was also a photo of his cotton-candy-haired wife, Jan, who, our tour guide explained, helped Paul establish TBN back in the 70s.

He totally forgot to mention that Jan and Paul faced a fair bit of criticism over their handling of money donated to TBN as a result of their prosperity-gospel promises. 

Brittany Koper, the former director of finance for TBN, claims she was fired in September of 2011 after discovering "illegal finance schemes" being run by the network. In a lawsuit she filed against the ministry, Brittany claims that TBN illegally distributed $50 million of donated money among its directors, to be spent on a variety of super unnecessary luxury items.

Speaking to the New York Times, Brittany claimed, "My job as finance director was to find ways to label extravagant personal spending as ministry expenses."

According to the suit, Paul and Jan made multiple lavish purchases for themselves using money that their viewers thought was going to God.

These purchases included rarely used his-and-hers mansions in Florida and California, private jets, personal chauffeurs, gold-plated bathrooms, and offices fitted with saunas and wet bars. 

Jan has also been accused of using company money to purchase a $100,000 air-conditioned mobile home to be used exclusively by her two pet dogs—which is actually kinda awesome. 

The mishandling of finances is so extensive that Wall Watchers, a group that monitors the transparency of how ministries spend donated money, has given TBN an "F" rating, and added the network to its list of "30 worst ministries." 

TBN denies the accusations. 

Next on the agenda was TBN's TV studio space, where, our guide explained, TBN's popular Praise the Lord show is recorded. 

Maybe our guide was in a hurry, because he totally skipped over the fact that the hosts of TBN's shows regularly make claims that are, to put it lightly, completely fucking insane.

Like the time John Hagee claimed that 9/11 was God's judgment on America for not being Christian enough.

Or the time Lance Wallnau claimed that God had given the cure for diabetes to Christians, but they were going to keep it secret in order to gain favor with China. 

Or the time that Robert Jeffress claimed that gay sex is like plugging a TV into the wrong outlet and watching it blow "into smithereens."

Or the time Benny Hinn claimed that the dead would one day be raised by watching TBN from inside their coffins. 

Or there was the time that Paul Crouch said on air that God kills anyone who tries to get in the way of TBN.

Speaking on the network's Behind the Scenes show in 2012, Paul said, "God help anyone who would try to get in the way of TBN."

He went on to imply that God had already taken out some of the network's enemies. "I have attended the funeral of at least two people who have tried," he said. 

Our tour led us past the station's gift shop, which offers "a tempting array of items for every budget, including music, tapes, Bibles, gifts, and a complete selection of TBN souvenirs." There was even a health section, which included books on how to cure everything from yeast infections to cancer using the Bible and prayer. 

Our tour guide forgot to mention that treating cancer with prayer is fucking INSANE. Please don't do this; get chemo or something instead, K?

Next, our tour guide walked us down a recreation of a street from Old Jerusalem. Complete with animatronic Jesuses and a recreation of the Shroud of Turin.

He totally forgot to mention the super shady way the church has been accused of abusing a tax loophole to save money. 

According to TBN's former accountant, dozens of staff members—from chauffeurs to sound engineers and accountants—have been ordained as ministers by TBN. This is apparently done because ordained ministers are able to opt out of paying Social Security, saving the company a whole bunch of money. 

Our tour concluded in this theater, which TBN's website refers to as a "virtual reality theater," capable of "putting you virtually in the picture."

Our tour guide neglected to mention that the theater isn't actually a virtual reality theater at all. It's just a regular theater that shows crappy Christian movies from 15 years ago. Presumably they added "virtual reality" to the title to trick kids into getting excited about visiting. I asked the tour guide what qualified the theater as "virtual reality," and he told me, "We used to have the sound up so loud that you could feel it, but a group of visitors from Japan thought it was an earthquake and ran out of the building so we had to turn it off."

To conclude:

"Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways."
—Proverbs 28:6

Follow Jamie on Twitter.

Gawker How to Tell Someone You Don't Like Them | Jalopnik Honda Just Won April Fools' Day With This Hilarious Ad | Jezebel Miley's New Single Art Features Her Entire Right Boob and a Blunt | Kotaku The Horror Of Spending 33 Hours Trapped On An Airplane

Read more...

This is a series of children's medical helmets painted by artist Paula Strawn to look cooler than the plain white they come in. They almost make me wish I had to wear a medical helmet. I don't though. "Then what's that on your head?" Oh this? This is a CRASH helmet. "And those?" Those are football pads. My mom makes me wear them whenever I go outside -- I got run over by the school bus twice in middle school. "Wow." And once in high school. "Ahahhahahhahahha." Three times since I graduated college. "My God you're a special human being." I always think they're ice cream trucks! Keep going for a bunch more, but you can see ALL (there's a ton) of the designs in Paula's online portfolio. Thanks to chichi, who agrees the coolest helmets are the ones that look like fish bowls that space rangers wear.

This is a short video of the Gainesville (Florida) based WCJB-20 sports news team reenacting highlights from the NCAA 'Elite Eight' tournament game between Dayton and Florida since they didn't have the rights to play the actual footage. It might have actually been better than the real game. Like watching a sweded version of a bad movie. Say, did the Lakers even make the tournament this year? "Wrong tournament." Huh? "You're talking professional versus college, completely different tournaments." Go Dodgers! Keep going for the video. Thanks to Terrance, who tried reenacting shots from a golf tournament and broke every window in the neighborhood. Man, I wish I could have been there.

Meet your future vote-counter. Image via Reddit user humenbean

Bitcoin’s been in some trouble lately. Every week, it seems like there’s a new exchange, social engineering heist, or pronouncement from the IRS to bring the collective spirits of cryptocurrency enthusiasts down. People are understandably worried about Bitcoin’s future as money, including Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, who praised the technology but called out the Bitcoin community for being overly ideological in a recent post. The way it’s talked about in some quarters, Bitcoin's replacement of money will strangle big government, eliminate the Federal Reserve, and radically change our democracy. So what happens if Bitcoin doesn’t become the new money?

As it turns out, it may not need to completely replace money to shake things up. A number of groups have already begun working on evolving cryptocurrency technology and adapting it for other uses. So far we’ve seen SolarCoin trying to incentivize renewable energy, Namecoin allowing people to circumvent pesky internet censorship and site takedowns, and the nationalistic Auroracoin getting handed out to all Icelandic citizens.

One of the most promising applications of new crypto tech lies in creating transparent, efficient systems for making political decisions. For those who are counting on cryptocurrencies to radically shift political power back into the people’s hands, it’s worth considering that decisions about how we organize society and allocate resources are just as important as the currency we use for trading. Enter Bitcoin-based voting.

I spoke with Oliver Hinck from the European Pirate Party about Liquid Feedback, the group's system for internal party democracy. He’s been using the Liquid Feedback system since 2011. Basically, the Pirate Party uses this system to determine its position on issues. For Oliver, this was an important way of crystallizing its platform.

“I was fed up with constantly repeating discussions about copyright—so, I saw that it's absolutely crucial to find new ways for the process of forming the political will of a group,” he said.

Liquid Feedback works by allowing every member a vote on every issue. If they don’t want to vote or don’t feel qualified to weigh in, members can delegate their vote to a trustee. There’s no need for an annual convention, and the party could change its platform by quickly polling members in response to new developments.  

The current way citizens vote at different levels of our democracies is by electing delegates every four years or so and generally staying out of the process in between. Apart from special occasions or various US states' ballot proposition systems, we rarely get to decide on an issue-by-issue basis. Instead, we trust our representative to cast a vote for us or otherwise represent our interests. This arrangement isn’t necessarily a bad thing—many of us are too busy, lazy, uninformed, apathetic, or all of the above to decide on a wide range of political questions that leaders grapple with. It’s a relatively efficient division of labor. Up until the widespread adoption of the internet, having a true direct democracy wouldn’t even have been remotely practical. But as connectivity grows, it’s now within reach, and getting closer.

Liquid Feedback isn’t based on the blockchain—the central technology underpinning Bitcoin. But it’s part of a number of pieces of democratic software like Helios or Ethelo that promise to make in-group democracy much more efficient and achievable. These kinds of processes are well-suited to co-ops, community organizations, social enterprises, credit unions—anywhere you want members to have a direct vote on any issue. The technology uses algorithms based on social research to determine the most amount of satisfaction for a group based on the expressed preferences of its members.

Merging this with the blockchain for security and verifiability is where it could get interesting for big-time, official democracy. This is nicely pictured below in this image from Denmark’s Internet Party.

Image via Internet Partiet

One of the most useful parts of Bitcoin is its blockchain, which is essentially a public ledger of all transactions. It’s transparent, irreversible, decentralized, and very difficult (but not impossible) for one party to gain control over. This means that if you base a direct voting system on a blockchain, anyone with a computer and a little know-how could verify the results. It would be possible to see how many votes were cast, voters could verify that their own votes were counted, and the decentralized network would be the best answer so far to hacking attempts. Combined with the political thought that’s gone into systems like Liquid Feedback, there’s a starting point here for putting political questions to the public much more frequently and ambitiously.

A public voting system could be built within and on top of existing or proposed cryptocurrencies. BitCongress, one idealistic idea, builds itself mainly on Ethereum, a blockchain-based programming platform for trustless contracts, transactions, and decentralized autonomous organizations. Even after going to an Ethereum meetup, I’m not entirely sure how Ethereum works, but its developers describe it as “cryptocurrency 2.0” and say it will enable a wide array of applications of blockchain technology that aren’t possible with Bitcoin alone. If they’re right, then we can compare cryptocurrency today to the internet in 1994—things are just getting started.

A few problems immediately jump out when we picture widespread electronic voting. We’re still human, for one. No matter how optimized our systems get for counting people’s votes and balancing their interests, there will still be people who want to break the rules for their own benefit.

Vote buying, intimidation, and hacking are three big human wrenches thrown into the gears of online decentralized voting. What if someone offers to buy my vote on an issue and threatens to send goons to my house if I don’t agree? What if my device has a virus on it that will change my vote without my knowledge? What if voters just don’t give a shit or get tricked into voting against their interests? What if we get results like California, with its massive proposition battles and referendum-riddled budget?

I asked Emil Kirkegaard from the Danish Internet Party to address some of these concerns. In a blog post, he outlined some responses to these fears. Emil addresses the impracticality and high cost of intimidating enough voters to make a difference, the fact that you could already sell mail-in absentee ballots if you wanted to, and the notion that a voting system must be perfect in order to justify trying it out. Our current paper-voting system isn’t perfect: Turnout is crap, politicians can already indirectly buy votes by promising development or massive advertising expenditures, and people are for the most part disengaged from politics between elections. But we accept it, problems and all, because it’s the best we’ve currently come up with.

The largest problem with e-voting, even with a blockchain network, is client-side hacks (i.e., some sort of exploit compromising a voter’s computer, rather than the network itself). There’s no solution yet, but Alex Petherick-Brian, a programmer working on a friend-to-friend, networked mesh democracy outlined a solution to this that could involve looking for irregularities after the vote, promoting static media like live CDs (which would virtually ensure each voter’s computer was uncompromised by booting into an unadulterated operating system that’s programmed onto a CD), and open voting, where users could verify their vote went where they wanted.

Would e-voting solve all these problems or be perfect? No. Would it be better than our current system? Quite possibly. It’s that chance that makes experimentation worth trying.

It’s probably too soon to embark on a giant national experiment in electronic voting, even when built on a solid cryptographic foundation. But it’s undoubtedly worth starting small, and starting open-source. Canadian cities are already contracting large projects to improve public consultation and make people feel heard, so it’s clear that there’s a demand. What cryptocurrency technology brings to the table is security and openness, two things that are essential for scaling the process up.

Anyone expecting decentralized electronic voting to solve all our democratic problems shouldn’t hold his breath. History suggests that political theory doesn’t match reality. Implemented thoughtfully, decentralized direct democracy offers some fantastic possibilities for improving our political life by letting people have a greater voice if they choose to. In a time when people are already trendily “hacking” their diet, their business model, their workspace, and their sleep schedule, why shouldn’t we be tempted to hack democracy? We might just like the results. 

Follow Christopher Malmo on Twitter.

Religious moviegoers are concerned about the film Noah. Debuting this Friday, the movie will not be an exact retelling of the biblical tale, and this irked religious leaders and commentators enough that a disclaimer was put into Noah without director Darren Aronofsky’s knowledge. Artistic license met biblical literalism, an awkward compromise was reached, but prominent Christian activists will still probably leave disappointed and the controversy will go on. The problem is that Noah doesn

Is Chris Carter returning to his alien conspiracy roots? His long-in-development series, based on Annie Jacobsen's best-selling book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, is finally in official development thanks to AMC.

Read more...

Chris Schryer, with his key dietary partner. Photos courtesy of Facebook

During my youth, I watched my Christian friends give up goodies for Lent. They usually went through the same no-chocolate routine every year. I never saw my friends give up food entirely or decide to chug beer for meals, but this Lent, Chris Schryer is doing both.

On Ash Wednesday, Chris, a devout Anglican from Toronto, stopped eating all solid food and started a new diet, which he expects to abide by until Palm Sunday. For all of Lent, Chris will subsist on an all-beer diet. His meal plan includes a bottle of beer for breakfast, one for lunch, one as an afternoon snack, and an extra large bottle for dinner. Alongside his pal Iain McOustra, a brewmaster at Amsterdam Brewing Company, Chris created an oat-rich doppelbock called Brewmaster’s Trithe, which has enough nutritional value to keep Chris from dying on his journey towards a repentant, spiritual buzz. Lent is halfway over, so this week, I gave Chris a call to see how his beer-fueled crusade has affected his family and shitting habits. 

VICE: You’ve been drinking beer for 20 days straight. How has this affected your digestive system? If you’re not consuming solid food, are you shitting at all?
Chris Schryer: It’s funny because my doctor, and actually a variety of other people, were like, “You’re totally going to get constipated because you’re not getting any fiber!” Constipation isn’t the exact opposite of what has been happening, but it’s certainly not the case. There’s a surprising amount of solid in beer and apparently juice, to the extent that I do take a shit a couple times a day. I don’t eat meat, so I’m pretty regular as it is. Particularly midday and later, shall we say, it's not as solid as it would be because I’m consuming a ton of liquid.

Is it diarrhea by the middle of the day?
It nearly is. The difference is that I always think of diarrhea [as you're going to the bathroom] every five minutes. This isn’t like that; it’s just when it comes out, it’s that consistency.

OK. Thanks for the info. What other changes have you noticed in your body?
I’m losing weight. I intentionally didn’t weigh myself and make weight an issue about this, because the focus for me is much more about the fast, but I definitely need a belt now, so I probably dropped three or four centimeters off my waist in 20 days.

What kind of changes have you noticed in your energy? You play hockey and managed to finish your season while doing this fast.
I think you take for granted the value of complex carbohydrates until you don’t have any. The first Friday that I played hockey during the fast, I was excited, like I’m always jazzed to play hockey, and on top of that I was like, Man, I can play! I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to play or not, but I can play! I went out, did the warm up, and I was rippin’ around the ice on my first two shifts. My third shift, I got out, and my legs were just like lead. I didn’t have any stamina. I was pulling 25 or 30 second shifts at some points. That was the first two weeks. The third week I went in with my head up. I played some of the best hockey I played all season.

What emotional changes have you noticed in yourself since you started the fast?
A big part of this for me is the actual spiritual discipline I get from this sort of pursuit. It requires a lot of self-control. The Christian angle is that a lot of that [requires] depending on your community, your family, and the people around you. But it’s also about taking ownership for your own behavior. That’s been working, and I’ve been feeling good about it. I’ve been made aware of other parts of my life where I just don’t have the right level of self-control, and I have been trying to expand it to that. 

What do you hope your kids think when they grow up one day and learn about the time that their dad gave up food and chugged beers for meals during Lent?
My daughter’s only two so she probably won’t have any memory of this, but she’s super cute and helps in ways that are adorable and ridiculous. My boy, Ben, is five. He’s very aware of the fast and talks about it. He told me on the first day he was going to fast from unhealthy food for Lent—that lasted until dessert—but he was aware of the concept and why I was doing it, and he talks to me about it a lot. What I want my kids to understand is that this thing, this faith that we have, it isn’t something you do and then put away. It permeates your whole existence.

Right. So what did your wife say when you told her about your diet?
You have to understand the dynamic of our relationship. She just kind of laughed and rolled her eyes. She’s been completely supportive of it. 

So I bet you feel pretty drunk right now?
I have a pretty high tolerance, to the point where I have to be careful because I still have to do things like drive and pick up my son from school. I could be completely comfortable behind the wheel and still possibly blow over the legal limit. From a breakfast beer or a lunch beer, I’ve never even felt buzzed. 

How has this contributed to your spiritual growth?
There have been times that I’ve been very, very aware that this beer, which I assisted in making, is made entirely out of stuff that was given to us, and that it is a blessing. This is a blessed substance that has been given to me to be able to undertake this. When I feel hungry, I stop and I pray, or I stop and I try to bless someone. When my priest came and she blessed the beer, she read from the Psalms. It talks about how the Lord provides grain and fills the hills with golden grain, and it’s totally true. 

Follow Kristy Hoffman on Twitter. 

Via Flickr user David Shankbone

There are certain villains of society whose relative merits no one will defend. Anyone standing up for child molesters, serial killers, or members of the Bush administration would be publicly pilloried, and justifiably so. But there is another group that seems to have been added to the list, and though he is without champion, it’s about time that someone stand up for him. This aggrieved class of human is none other than the American Bro.

Just last week on this here website, the American Bro was deemed “the worst guy ever” in a scathing attack that called into question not only his behavior but also his existence. This article paints the picture of a man who lives only to consume and impress, someone who wants to leave his mark on everything, not just the women whose tits he jizzes all over and the gutters that he vomits into after one too many craft beers, but on everything at every moment. He is loud and aggressive, not because he actually has something to say but because he wants to steal that moment—and your attention—for himself.

And what is so wrong with that? That is what men do. That is what men have always done. The problem is not the bro but the society in which he lives. This used to be a great country, a country that made things. America used to produce crops and clocks and cars. Who made all these things? Who ran the farms and worked union jobs in factories and provided for their children? Who were the bikers, cowboys, construction workers, and other Village People archetypes we prized? Men. They got to take this atavistic need to stamp a little bit of themselves onto everything and put it out there into the world. They made your cotton, soldered your TV sets, and tightened the bolts on the first space craft to make it to the moon. They not only manned the tanks that rid the world of Nazis, but they drove them too—a dozen men in uniform with their bodies pressed against one another fighting for freedom.

Now our only major exports are more episodes of Two and a Half Men and orange powdered cheese. What do you expect all these men to do? They’ve taken jobs in the financial sector where they shuttle bits of phantom money and units of “risk” back and forth and try to make more phantom money. This is how America creates wealth now. We don’t make things; we create illusions. And the bros do it for us. Since they are no longer creators and territory markers, they vent their aggression and brute strength in their social lives. They redirect their biological imperatives to letting their big dicks flop around in basketball shorts while they do squats at the gym, grunting so that everyone who isn’t looking at them knows that they are there.

Via Flickr user torbakhopper

Who is going to save this country from drowning in a sea of Chinese debt and high-fructose corn syrup? Not the mild-mannered hipsters obsessed with mustache wax and crafting artisanal honey in their urban sanctuaries. No, they only create small batches of things, trying to leverage their modesty as authenticity. Modesty did not cure polio. Authenticity didn’t win the Cold War. Honey isn’t going to get Putin out of Crimea.

That’s why we need our bros. They are the spirit of can-do American ingenuity. They are the chest-thumping alpha males who will keep other countries from trying to knock us off the top of our colonial heap. That’s why they’re doing so many bench presses. It’s because our supremacy rests squarely on their broad shoulders. They’re sculpting their obliques to look statuesque and formidable, to keep the scrawny Iranians and Pakistanis from fucking with all of these Captain Americas. 

And it’s silly to make fun of the bro’s wardrobe like that take-down article tries to. What is wrong with tank tops? If author John Saward spent as much time doing biceps curls as he did cowering behind his keyboard, he might have some tickets to the gun show himself. But he’s jealous, imagining these he-men flexing in their toothpaste-stained bathroom mirrors, running their wide hands over there undulating abs right before they take a #fitlife photo for Instagram. He wishes he could look like that instead of staring down as his pasty paunch.

The article also seems obsessed with bros’ johnsons. “To him, everything is a dick pic, a flex, a look-how-hard-I-get, a watch-me-fuck-the-universe,” it says. He is right, dick pics aren’t about the recipient—they’re about the sender. When these dudes fluff their meat up to make it more distinguished, they’re just trying to reclaim the tenuous masculinity that has been decimated in our culture. When they get fully hard and press their packages up against remote controls, shaving cream bottles, or Red Bull cans, it is a way to make themselves not more attractive to women but more appealing to themselves. Their very way of life is being threatened by these attacks, and if we can’t look at their throbbing cocks and tell them that they look wonderful and large and juicily appealing, we have failed a whole generation of our young men.

As the cultural tide seems to turn against them, the bros only have one another to turn to. They always travel in packs to insulate themselves from the naysayers. Or maybe it’s because the only company they can find that is as handsome as they are is their own. Yes, they totter down the street, their toned arms around each other’s shoulders as they drunkenly stumble from one destination to the next. They swat each other’s butts when they score anything—a basket, a sale at work, a hot new piece of ass. They shake hands and embrace one another with the left arm, wishing they could hold longer. Just wishing that, in our world, they could pull their fellow bro toward them, their gym-honed torsos, like two bodies in competing underwear ads, rubbing against each other, their heads close together, their mouths only inches apart from one another as they draw their heads back, staring into each other's eyes and wondering what might happen if just this once they leaned in and met their bro for a stubbly kiss as the last game of the NBA playoffs blared in the background of whatever sports bar they’ve been in all night.

Via Flickr user CAHairyBear

We need to support these men, our finest specimens. The ones whose asses bounce in their jock straps as they strut toward the shower in the locker room. The ones who jog shirtless through the park, the sweat cascading in rivulets into their sopping shorts. The ones who sit with their legs wide-open on the subway, calling attention from all quarters to the fleshy mass in their shorts that is just dying to be sucked. These are our champions, and we really should be championing them.

I’ve certainly done my part. One night, back in college, I was driving home with my bro friend Dave, who was majoring in econ and pussy pounding. He'd a bad night with one too many green Jell-O shots (green is always the worst color), and the girl he'd been getting handsy with had had the audacity to reject him. He had made a big scene about how it didn’t bother him, how he had bigger and hotter girls, and how he got as much ass as he could ever want. But in the car he was different. He was despondent, clearly lingering on his rejection. “You OK?” I asked. “Yeah, brah. You know, bitches,” he said. “Yeah,” I replied putting my hand on the knee of his jeans. I left it there a little too long, and when he looked at me, I didn’t know what to expect.

“Dude, will you do me a favor?” he asked. “Will you tickle my back?” He took off his white baseball cap and pulled his T-shirt over his head, his rippling muscles flexing and relaxing in astounding patterns as he bent over in the passenger’s seat. I rubbed the tips of my fingers across his smooth skin for what seemed like hours. Eventually he sat up, and I moved my hands. “Keep going,” he said, letting me cup the firm contours of his chest, the stiff prickles of his nipples, the trail of hair that led into his jeans. I rubbed everywhere, down onto the crotch of his jeans, which was now propped up with what those “bitches” didn’t want. I let my hands rest on the button of his jeans, unsure of how to proceed, thinking as much about his own pleasure as what was happening in my own jeans. I hovered there a minute, and he sat up straight in the chair, his head back and eyes closed, waiting to get what he wanted—no, what he deserved.

“What are you waiting for?” he said, remaining still. 

Man, there is nothing better than fucking a bro. 

All photos by Matthew Leifheit

I’ve never jizzed while receiving a lap dance, but apparently this happens a lot to other men. In Las Vegas, Nevada, a few bros were so worried about splooging their underwear that they invented "the Liquid Lapdance," which is essentially a cum diaper.

“It started because my buddies and I would go to the strip club, and one of my buddies didn’t like to get dances. He said that they hurt him. That’s how we started coming up with how we could make dances better,” Reg, one of Liquid Lapdance’s employees, told me. “The rubbing [part of lap dances] hurt my buddy’s sensitive skin.”

Hence Reg and his friends designed the Liquid Lapdance to give men more comfortable lap-dance experiences and, ideally, to help them cream. “We don’t consider [ejaculating while receiving a lap dance] to be a problem,” Reg said. “We consider that the point of a lap dance.”

I didn’t understand any of this. Lap dances are never “dry” at gay strip clubs. At Johnny’s in Fort Lauderdale, I have seen strippers rim each other on stage, and every time I have paid for a lap dance, I ended up naked in a backroom with a stripper. Why would anyone ejaculate—or want to ejaculate—from a bare-bones lap dance that didn’t even come with a rim job?

Apparently this is a huge problem on the stripper side too, according to some straight dudes I asked. One of them recounted an all-black (except for him and a friend) strip club in Memphis, at which one of the girls accused him of trying to come in his pants while she death-gripped his hand down the front of her underwear and forced him to rub a stud piercing on her clit. He didn’t know if it was a scam or she was trying to roll him in anger after he turned down a threesome with her co-worker for $80. 

But Reg and his pals say they’re simply on a mission to give men orgasms, which is very interesting if you think about how that could be interpreted. Regardless, it’s a mission I could get behind. In fact, they believe in the male orgasm so much, they offer an “orgasm guarantee.” Basically, spray cum all over your diaper while paying someone to writhe on top of you, or you get a refund. Liquid Lapdance’s website claims fewer than than 1 percent of customers have asked for refunds.

“Imagine a pair of oiled titties bouncing up and down your cock,” said one customer review. Another happy buyer described the Liquid Lapdance as feeling “like two lubed ass cheeks sliding up and down,” which is one of my favorite sensations in the world. So I decided to slip on a little number from Liquid Lapdance’s signature line, head to a gay strip club in Manhattan, and try out the Liquid Lapdance for myself.

The Liquid Lapdance consists of two parts: a latex bag for your cock and balls and a black bikini-like back that covers your ass. When you’re a 6'2" grown-ass man like myself, walking around in such a contraption can be a complicated process. According to the instructions, the latex bag had to be sterilized before slinging it over your junk.

I didn’t have any rubbing alcohol and really didn’t feel like going to a pharmacy or wherever to buy it because I was horny to come in my pants at a place called the Adonis Lounge, so I grabbed the closest thing within reach—a bottle of Cachaça—and poured a healthy shot into the diaper. I rubbed the latex back and forth, rinsing it with hot water. Afterward, I poured a large helping of lube into the bag and cinched it around my penis and testicles. Finally, I tied the bag’s strings around my waist and pulled up the bikini back. I looked like an idiot. But I was pretty sure I was gonna come like an idiot, too, so it didn’t bother me so much.

Before heading to Adonis, I walked around the room to see what the diaper felt like. At first, it felt like my penis was permanently stuck in the beginning stages of a blow job, which quickly became annoying because it didn’t go anywhere. Meanwhile, the spandex stuck to my pubes, and it ripped one of them off as I strutted around the room. Now I understood why the Liquid Lapdance comes with a free packet of bikini wax.

But those minor gripes became moot once I arrived at Adonis Lounge and immediately realized I was about to feel totally confident and comfortable with coming in my pants during a lap dance. As a bonus, Adonis lacked the smell of chlorine and semen that pervades most gay strip clubs. They played J.Lo songs and offered clients a variety of strippers: muscle queens, twinks, otters, and other breeds of men. None of them would really know that I was about to have several orgasms in a latex diaper, and I liked that very much.

Shortly after arriving I was greeted by Tim, the club’s owner. Between his short hair and the muscles peeking out of his tank top, Tim looked like he belonged more in the WWE than at a gay club. While trying to find a strip club that would let VICE take photographs for this article, I had to be transparent, so Tim already knew about the diaper. He asked me what the spandex diaper looked like.

I pulled down my pants.

“Can you take a shit in that?” he asked.

“No, I would have to wear it in reverse for that.”

“It’s kind of a shitty design,” Tim’s critique continued. “I’d want it to be tighter if I was gonna bust a nut in it.” Then he pointed at the guys around the room and told me to pick out my favorite strippers.

“Give me that one,” I said, motioning toward a stripper wearing briefs and glasses.

“You like twinks.”

Tim hollered at the stripper. His name was Matthew. He approached me, smiled, and pulled on my hoodie strings.

“I’m here for work,” I mumbled.

“You work here?” Matthew asked.

“No, I’m writing something about this spandex diaper that lets you jizz in your pants during lap dances. Some company mailed it to us.”

Tim leaned over, telling Matthew: “Everything he’s saying is ridiculous but true.”

I told Matthew I had enough money for six lap dances. He smiled, grabbed my hand, and led me back to the champagne room. I sat on a foam cushion that was covered in what I heard another person at the club later describe as “love stains.” He drew a black curtain. Then he asked to see the diaper.

I unbuckled my skinny jeans and pulled down my pants.

Matthew grabbed the spandex bag and laughed at its size. “Nobody can come that much,” he said.

After I left the champagne room, I went to Tim at the bar. He asked me if I had busted a nut. I told him that the diaper was a nuisance in a gay strip club. He agreed. “Straight strip clubs suck,” Tim said. “You can’t touch shit. Gay clubs? You get a blow job.”

If I learned anything from Reg and his Liquid Lapdance, it’s that being a straight dude sounds like a giant fucking hassle. 

Like dicks and want to get your dick wet? Visit the Adonis Lounge! 

Mitchell Sunderland also likes dicks and getting his dick wet. Follow him on Twitter. 

Photo by Isabelle Andarakis

Porn isn't a hard sell. In fact, it's pretty much completely self-sustaining, in that there aren't many other avenues you take when you're planning to spend some time with yourself. And if you can think of anything else, there's probably already porn of it.  

It is a little harder to actually advertise it on posters and billboards, though, which is presumably why PornHub is running an online competition for a new creative director, getting the entire internet to pitch concepts for adverts at them, and hiring whoever submitted the best one. At the moment, it's a bit of a mix between some good ideas and a dumping ground for visual puns involving hot dogs and donuts. 

I wanted to know how people in a half mile radius of me would handle the position of creative director at a big porn website, so I walked around and asked some of them. 

VICE: How can porn be improved?
Will, 27: I don’t think there's enough loving porn. There's a lot of violent porn and porn that people aren’t having a lot of fun with. God, I don’t know—that sounds pathetic. But Jesus, there is a sadness that fills my heart when I see the sadness in everyone’s eyes.

Why do you think they look so sad?
Maybe that's purely my judgement. I guess the position they're put in? But I don't know. I’ve never shot porn. I’ve never been in that position. Maybe they feel completely empowered and happy to be where they are, but often I don’t get that impression.

So how would you combat that?
Maybe support amateurs. Get amateur couples who enjoy filming one another and like sharing that with people. But there's so much porn. It'll be difficult to make a real change, since there's a niche for everything as much as there's a market for everything. As much as I might want to see a loving couple make love beautifully, there will be someone who wants to see a girl fisted by eight guys. 

That's a very valid point. Are there any niches that you would champion if you were to, say, take control of a porn website?
I've certainly never gone online and been like, Why can't I find this thing? Because it's remarkable what you can find. I’ve certainly gone online and thought, How the fuck is someone into this thing? I guess I’d like to see less weird stuff—no donkeys, no one getting upset or hurt. I'll ask myself some questions about it tonight.

How can porn for women be improved?
Lucy, 19: I think it should portray more accurate sexual relationships, and not some kind of warped view of what it should be like in the bedroom.

Can you give me an example?
I suppose violence. I think that too much violent pornography could lead to that being taken back to the bedroom and end up in people having quite unrealistic views of sex. Also, I think that it can affect you much more if you're exposed to pornography from a young age. You grow up with a different view of relationships from what they actually are.

If you were the new creative director of a big porn site, what kind of videos would you focus on?
I don’t know—I’ve never really thought about it before. I think maybe something where women aren’t in such a demeaning position. Pornography is probably often aimed much more towards men. But I don’t know—I’m not really a pro.

You're the new creative director of a huge porn site. What's your first move?
John, 27: It’s a difficult question to answer, but I would continue doing what's going on now and find ways to make it even better. I'd help the business grow using social media.

That's a sensible enough answer. What about the content?
I’m not a regular user. I don't watch porn that often.

OK. Anything you're not a big fan of?
Not particularly. There's usually a lot of advertising, but I understand that's how it's funded and stuff.

Yeah. How about introducing new stuff? Are there any niches that you feel don't get enough exposure?
Any niches? No, I think the internet covers most things.

What would you change about porn?
Jack, 24: Well, a lot of gay porn—and I'm sure other porn—is quite violent. A lot of people are into that stuff. I personally don't like it at all. It gets a bit graphic with all the fists and bums and stuff like that. I’d never watch that.

So what changes would you make as the new creative director of a porn website?
Probably less of that and less of the old people and pooing. I don’t know why that ever became a thing to sexually arouse anyone.

So you'd introduce a maximum age limit for performers?
Yeah, definitely. Old sweaty balls being thrown around the set is just so horrible to watch. Even if you just catch it at the side of the screen, it's a big turn off.

What are your personal porn watching habits?
I watch it alone. I’ve watched it maybe once or twice with somebody else. But yeah, usually very much alone.

Say you became the new creative director of a porn website, what would you do?
Anonymous: Make it safer for women. Get reputable companies who use reputable models, and you don’t get any exploitation or dodgy dealings. I don’t know whether porn companies or producers would have to get some sort of accreditation. Is the industry regulated by authorities? Can the regulation be improved?

That's a good question. What about the more consumery stuff, rather than actually making porn?
Are we talking hardcore porn of softcore porn?

Whatever you want.
I guess there's the argument: Should young people be exposed to pornography? And if you paid for porn, would it not be better if they gave the user a little sneak preview so you could actually see whether it's the type of porn you'd actually like? There's one porn site that's actually free. You can access free videos.

I think there's a lot of those kinds of sites.
Well, that obviously negates the need to pay for it. So maybe there's a lot of porn providers out there who are being screwed by the free providers. 

You land a job as the new creative director of a porn site. What do you spend your first day doing?
Daniel, 25: The biggest problem with most porn is that it's very unrealistic, and a lot of young people get completely the wrong idea about what's in store for them, which is usually difficult and awkward and clumsy, initially. I like stuff that is real, that isn’t staged. The plumber who ends up having sex with every woman in the house is ridiculous. Those terribly acted storylines leave me completely cold. If there's a new director coming in, it’s difficult, because you can’t exactly say, "Get better actors," because that's not the point. And I’m an actor.

So what can you do? How would you improve porn for your consumers?
Place more emphasis on what comes before it. Those things are usually more exciting, just from my own sexual experience. Anything that comes before it is the real excitement, and anything after that is obviously fantastic. Make people invest in the romance of it all, I suppose. There's little romance in porn. There are a few things, like couples on their wedding nights, but it’s all bullshit. I'd try to make the people a little more realistic. Just a dude and a woman, rather than steroidy, veiny monsters.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The relentless litigation of Obamacare returned to the Supreme Court this week, when justices heard oral arguments in the controversial Hobby Lobby case. The case hinges on whether the Christian arts-and-crafts chain can refuse to offer its employees coverage for birth control, based on the grounds that it violates the religious beliefs of the company's devout Baptist owners. 

The arguments brought the culture war back to the courthouse steps this week, opening up a complex debate among the justices Tuesday about religious freedom, government regulation, and corporate rights. But the touchstone question is whether for-profit corporations have the right to exercise religion—something that the court has never ruled on before. Depending on where the nine justices come down on the questions, the ruling could have major ramifications far beyond the issues of contraception and Obamacare.

The case—which actually combines two suits, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius—itself is fairly straightforward. Under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration came up with a set of minimum requirements for health insurance plans, which includes coverage for a range of contraceptives. Hobby Lobby and its co-plaintiff, Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a Pennsylvania-based cabinet manufacturer owned by devout Mennonites, say that they have no problem providing most forms of contraception, but that the government shouldn’t force them to cover IUDs and emergency contraception like Plan B, which they regard as forms of abortion.

Hobby Lobby, the lead plaintiff, claims that it is protected by the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects people from federal laws that pose a “substantial burden” to religious exercise. But the RFRA has never been applied to corporations, and the Obama administration argues that its protections don’t extend to for-profit companies. “It would be such a vast expansion of what Congress could have thought it was doing to say that for-profit corporations can make claims for religious exemptions to any laws of general application that they want to challenge,” Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who defended the law, told the court.

Judging by the transcript from Tuesday’s oral arguments, the justices weren’t buying it. In fact, a majority of justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, seemed onboard with the idea of corporate religiosity. Even Justice Stephen Breyer, who usually sides with the court’s liberal judges, seemed open to considering the argument that companies should be allowed to bring RFRA claims to court. In a pretty convincing hypothetical, Justice Samuel Alito asked Verrilli what would happen if the government decided to ban kosher or halal butchers. “They would have no recourse whatsoever,” Alito said. “They couldn’t get their day in court.”

Still, a ruling in favor of for-profit religious freedom would signal a pretty major shift in the concept of corporate personhood, dramatically expanding on the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling that granted companies full rights to freedom of speech, including the right to make campaign donations. While Citizens United may have been a terrible ruling, the idea that corporations have a First Amendment right to free speech was grounded in decades of legal precedent. The idea that a company can have religious beliefs—and impose those religious beliefs on employees and customers—is totally new.

Such a decision could have some troubling consequences. Opponents of Hobby Lobby have imagined an array of slippery-slope catastrophes, warning that companies could use religious protection to skirt minimum wage and fair-housing laws, discriminate against customers and employees, and gain unfair competitive advantage in the marketplace. “A bad Hobby Lobby decision will have an immediate negative impact on the right of a woman to make personal health care decisions,” Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden said in a statement, “but it could also become a blueprint for discrimination against people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community; allow corporations to evade important federal laws; and change the corporate structure as we know it.”

And perhaps the more pressing concern, raised by the Supreme Court’s three female justices Tuesday, is that companies could claim to have religious objections to other health care services, like vaccines or blood transfusions. “There are quite a number of medical treatments that different religious groups object to,” Justice Elena Kagan said Tuesday. “So one religious group could opt out of this, and another religious group could opt out of that, and everything would be piecemeal, and nothing would be uniform.”

“It really opens up a Pandora’s box, and it is going to be very difficult to contain it in any way,” said James Cox, a professor of corporate law at Duke University. “The very basis of corporate law is that you can create an entity that is separate and distinct from its owners. Once you start moving away from that and say that this entity is going to have the features of the people who own it, that opens up a whole vista and we don't know what the ramifications are.”

"It's been roundly understood that a corporation lacks a soul—I think that's a pretty good metaphor for this," he added.

If the court decides that corporations can be religious, it could also be the death knell for the Obama administration’s case. Under the RFRA, the Justice Department has to convince the court that the contraception mandate represents a compelling government interest—in this case, advancing women’s health—and that the law is the “least restrictive option” for fulfilling that interest. Notably, while the lower courts have been divided on the question of whether corporations can be religious, they have never ruled in favor of the DOJ on the RFRA question.

Where the government’s case appeared to fall apart Tuesday was on the issue of the least restrictive option. Several justices pointed out that the Obama administration has already granted exemptions to the contraception mandate on religious grounds. Churches are totally exempt from providing birth control coverage; religious non-profits, such as schools and hospitals, can register an objection to contraception, and employees then receive contraception coverage from a third-party insurer. It follows that there actually is a way for the government to provide birth control coverage that is less restrictive of religious rights—it just doesn’t want to extend that option to for-profit companies like Hobby Lobby.

“It’s not clear why the government made this distinction,” said Douglas Laycock, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia. “I think they took seriously the claim of religious non-profits, and they didn't take seriously the claim of the for-profit companies, and that was probably a mistake. It might have avoided all of this litigation.”

But Laycock adds that concerns over the potential implications of a ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby are probably overblown, given the restrictions of the RFRA. "It could have implications to the extent that other claims are analogous, but there are not many cases that are analogous.”

Proving that that the government has a compelling interest in a law is a balancing act, Laycock explained, one that depends both on the religious claim and whether there is another way for the government to provide a service. In the Hobby Lobby case, the sincerity of the religious opposition to abortion is uncontested. Meanwhile, the government already has another way of providing birth control coverage. But it could be hard for other companies to meet that burden. “With LGBT rights, it would be hard to prove that it is a central tenant of someone’s religion,” he said. “And there is no other way for the government to protect people from discrimination except to protect people from discrimination.”

This is the arm of 18-year old Norwegian fast food fan Stian Ytterdahl. He got a McDonald's receipt tattooed on it. Why? Because who doesn't love McFlurries? I still can't believe it. I mean, I love fast food as much as the next guy who's given up on eating right or working out, but a tattoo of a McDonald's receipt? It's genius!

Some friends who wanted to punish Stian Ytterdahl for being too active with the ladies (uh huh, sure) gave him a choice between a Barbie on his ass or the receipt on his arm. Ytterdahl resigned himself to his fate (and probably wished he hadn't added those 4 extra toppings to his burger). Sabelink Tattoo said it was the strangest tattoo they'd ever done, and asked Ytterdahl if he'd get their receipt on his other arm--for free, of course. He agreed, and the next session is scheduled for Monday. McDonald's Norway says the tattoo isn't a publicity stunt, but they think it's terrific. "We're obviously talking about a loyal customer," said a spokeswoman.

Wait -- he agreed to get the tattoo as punishment from his friends for being too successful with the ladies? That makes zero sense. Besides, if anything it's going to make him MORE successful. I heard Norwegian girls love the Mickey D. Man, I remember when I got my first tattoo a friend asked me what I thought it would look like when I was 60. You know what I told him? It won't be worth digging up my grave to find out. THEN I POKED HIS F***ING EYES OUT. Thanks to Clarissa, who did not explain it all but did mention trying Taco Bell's new breakfast menu today. Jealous!