Dance Magers

Gawker Opera Singer Can't Stop Farting After Surgery, Loses Job | Gizmodo Whoa, the Raptor Cage From Jurassic Park Is on Ebay Right Now | Jezebel The Complete Guide to Never Ever Ever Getting Fat | Kotaku How Fast Can You And Your Friends Defuse A Bomb? | Kinja Popular Posts

Read more...

The Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles, hot on the heels of some sneakedpics of their next live-action incarnation, return from their winter hiatus this week, and they bring a friend - Casey Jones.

Read more...

Listen to this young girl playing her sheng, a Chinese instrument invented thousands of years ago. The woodwind may be ancient, but the sound is pure 1980s nostalgia—it's the Super Mario Brothers theme, right down to the sounds of Mario collecting coins and mushrooms. Amazing!

Read more...

Heroes is back. The show will return to NBC in 2015 as Heroes Reborn, with original series creator Tim Kring back at the helm as showrunner. The 13-episode event miniseries will star a new cast of characters and follow a story line independent from the show's original 4-season run (though NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke said former cast members would likely "pop" in for cameos.)

Read more...

CAN-FAP leader Glen Callender. All photos courtesy of James Loewen via Facebook

The majority of the Western world has already come to the conclusion that female genital mutilation is bad—it’s brutal, invasive, and causes children unbelievable amounts of pain for no reason. Meanwhile, male genital mutilation, a.k.a. circumcision, is hailed as a great way to prevent everything from venereal diseases to cancer. The benefits of circumcision are still being debated, so medical associations refrain from condemning or supporting the practice for the most part, and generally leave the decision up to a child’s parents. But plenty of anti-circumcision activists want the procedure banned altogether, like the Canadian organization called CAN-FAP, which stands for the Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project.

The foreskin-loving group organized a protest last week in Vancouver, British Columbia, during a TED Talk featuring Bill and Melinda Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been donating millions of dollars to programs that offer circumcision in Africa as a preventative measure against HIV, which has led CAN-FAP to dub Bill Gates “Foreskin Enemy #1.” I caught up with Glen Callender, the organization's founder, to ask him what he was thinking when he named his organization, among other things.

VICE: First off, what’s with the name, CAN-FAP?
Glen Callender: Well, a lot of people seem to think it’s a mistake. But of course it’s deliberate, and it’s a reference to the history of circumcision in the Western world. It began as a non-religious surgery in the 1800s to primarily prevent boys from masturbating. The foreskin is, of course, a built-in masturbation aid, and that’s the way nature intended it.

How did CAN-FAP get started?
I started CAN-FAP in June 2010. The main motivation for it was that I have a really enjoyable foreskin. My foreskin actually has its own orgasms, and it feels fantastic every day of my life. When I was a kid and I learned about circumcision for the first time, I already had a very good relationship with my foreskin, and the idea horrified me. That horror has never left my system—just knowing that little boys are being strapped down and having this valuable, enjoyable part of their penis cut off. The men who have foreskins know that it’s a good body part, it’s valuable, and that there aren’t bad parts of the penis. This is an ancient, religious, superstitious idea. There are no bad parts of the penis, and there are no bad parts of the female vulva. It’s all good, and we shouldn’t be tampering with the sexuality of children and the adults they grow up to be. We understand, because we’re not accustomed to it, that female genital mutilation of any kind is child abuse. You’re taking a sharp object, and you’re deliberately causing pain and bleeding and amputation to a child’s genitals. Well, we do the same thing with boys, and we need to stop doing it. Knives and genitals of children should have nothing to do with each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl or if you cut a little or a lot—taking a knife to the genitals of a child is sexual abuse.

Are there any health benefits to circumcision?
The circumcision rate in some countries is less than 1 percent, so if circumcision improves men’s sexual health, we would see men getting sick in Europe because of their foreskins. But it turns out that the sexual health of intact European men and their female partners is as good as or better than the sexual health of their circumcised counterparts. It’s really bullshit. It’s all about making parents scared so they’ll hand over their babies to be circumcised so doctors can make their money. They know if a boy grows up, when he’s 18 years old, there’s no way he’s going to want a knife near his penis, because any man would be crazy to want less penis.

It’s like, if you saw them plucking out a kid’s eye, you would be horrified because you have an eye and you know how wonderful an eye is. But then you have the parents saying, “No, no, no, we come from a religion that believes that there’s one evil eye, and you pluck that eye out! And it’s fine having one eye; you can still see.” And you go, "Shut up! You’re plucking out a kid’s eye and taking away a sense organ from him. You’re taking away part of his body that he uses to interact with the world and enjoy life." I feel the same way about my foreskin. I have a foreskin, and frankly, that makes it clear that all the arguments for circumcision are bullshit.

Can you tell me why you’re calling Bill Gates “Foreskin Enemy #1"?
Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates has committed over $145 million to circumcising as many African men and boys as possible. And there are hints that they might actually be prepared to spend up to a billion dollars on this, as these programs scale up in different countries. That makes Bill Gates personally responsible for more unnecessary circumcisions than any other individual in the world. He has exterminated more foreskin than anybody else, and that is why he is Foreskin Enemy #1. It’s just an embarrassment in the 21st century—the idea that we should be making up reasons to cut off healthy, normal parts of people's bodies is insane.

The studies that Bill Gates uses as a basis for this funding really make circumcision look good. The results show a 50 to 70 percent reduction in HIV transmission over a short period of time, and that’s the thing in some cases: Even if it works, it’s over a short period of time, not long-term. The bottom line here is that real-world populations don’t reflect that data. If circumcision really did prevent VDs, population data would consistently show that circumcised populations had fewer VDs than the intact, but that’s not the case. The United States proves this within its own borders. They had the biggest HIV epidemic in the Western world there among an almost completely circumcised male population.

Why did people start messing with penises in the first place?
It started out as a preventative measure against masturbation, because they believed in Victorian times that masturbation caused all sorts of health problems. Then it became used as prevention against venereal diseases, then cancer—they always make it [a cure for] whatever the scary thing is. Today it’s HIV, so lo and behold, circumcision prevents HIV! And in the future, if a new venereal disease emerges that we haven’t yet heard of, well, they’ll say that circumcision prevents that too. But really, for cultural and religious and financial reasons, they want to cut off your foreskin. It is a billion-dollar industry in the US: About 3,000 boys a day are circumcised, and that earns pediatricians over a billion dollars a year. And there are billions more in hospitals, and the fact that foreskins get sold into the biotech industry and get used to create skin grafts and used to create collagen and other ingredients for beauty creams—the bottom line here is that this is not an ethical industry.

And what a coincidence that the part that’s being cut off is on the most enjoyable part of your body. You know, God doesn’t want a knuckle, or the index toe off of one of your feet, or a bit of your earlobe, no. He wants part of your penis. Your genitals are supposed to be your happy place, and religion wants to make them your unhappy place, your shame place.

You do something called the Foreskin Pride Salute. Can you explain it?
Explain it? Well, first of all, you can’t have a circumcised T-shirt. You’ve got to have a long-sleeved shirt that goes all the way down to your wrists. And you make a fist with your hand, which symbolizes the head of the penis, and you tuck that fist away into the sleeve of your shirt and heroically extend your arm skyward and pull back that sleeve to reveal the fist. And that is very symbolic. I hope that intact men around the world will adopt the Foreskin Pride Salute to show the world that intact men are proud of our foreskins and we love them. The problem is in your head, not on my penis.

Anything else to add?
I’d like to add that black foreskin is beautiful.

Follow Lindsay Rempel on Twitter.

Note: Larger version right around HERE. This is the tumblr-er TheGreatKeaton's Majora's Mask inspired back tattoo. I really like it. The tattoo was designed by Krystian Marciniak and inked by Anson Eastin at the Forever Tattoo Parlour in Cape Coral, Florida. I love all the different masks. At first I thought Majora's Mask was going to be too hard for me because I suck at time management, but it turned out to be a real treat. I beat it on my laptop using an emulator, playing an hour a day in a Marketing Management class when I was getting my masters. Have I told you about that class? I think I have. One time I went up to ask the professor a question during an exam and she leaned in real close so nobody else could hear and her breath smelled like she'd just eaten a bag of shit. I got a B. Thanks to Vinzercly, who agrees Nintendo should make a bunch more Zelda games, then port them to every console but their own.

Look at that haul. All photos by the author

So there I was, groping around in a pile of trash in the middle of the night.  

People stared at the spectacle of a dozen dumpster divers carrying recyclable Trader Joe’s bags through NYC’s Upper East Side neighborhood. They didn’t look like they needed handouts, but they were digging through the trash in the streets not too far from Park Avenue. They were calling it “a movement.” These people are freegans: a group dedicated to saving food, shampoo, furniture, and anything else that people waste. They want to fight the system of consumerism because they believe it squanders the stuff people need. No one was homeless. On any given night, this meetup group hooks bagel stalkers from different age brackets and socioeconomic backgrounds with their e-mail newsletter. I saw a college kid break bread with a veteran. Each diver has different standards and different favorite foods, but they all share a bootstrapper’s mentality and are almost always on the hunt for things that are free. The food was for us, friends, people on the street—anything to keep it from piling up in a landfill. When someone throws something away, legally it's a public item, but that doesn't keep police and restaurant owners from hassling them.

There were people who survived solely on what they found, and people who dived twice a month who were just in it for the free food. And there was a lot of it.

The inventory from the biggest haul came from Gristedes grocery story: bottles of kombucha, stacks of pre-packaged guacamole and hummus, watermelons, peppers, breads, celery, salads, and packages of tri-colored fettuccine. It’s like this outside most grocery stores every night, but Saturdays are when the masses clean most stores out. There was plenty to go around for everyone’s personal stash and for the group feast that would happen tomorrow night. The leader gave me the address on a slip of paper. 

The haul from Gristedes

I’d been curious about freeganism for years. I wanted to know what a dive was like, what freegans considered cool to salvage and how hardcore it was. It shocked me that I wasn’t grossed out. But jacking $50 worth of pristine quinoa salads tossed into the garbage required so little effort. There wasn’t so much “garbage” in the bag. I was relieved that there were no discarded napkins or coffee filters to scrounge through; it was just a bag of salads and wraps in their packaging that had expired that day. “Companies are conservative with their expiration dates,” Janet, our leader, explained.

I looked over to a mild-mannered Wes Anderson doppelgänger who worked as an intern at a Chelsea gallery as he pointed a flashlight to reveal packages of Japanese sweet potatoes. A woman offered me a container of cold gazpacho she pulled just because I said I loved it, but I told her to keep it. A Brooklyn freegan once told me that people can get cagey about their prime spots, but most freegans believe in sharing.

I scooped out a filmy $12 bag of shiitake mushrooms from Dean & Deluca for the feast the next night. There were no takers for the bag of loose pieces of Swiss cheese because a regular diver, Adam, wasn’t there. Adam’s known for dunking his hand into unwrapped food and eats right out of the garbage.

As people walked by, they took interest in the operation going on. Some passerby swiped a still-soft chocolate chip cookie from the huge pile without stopping. A man slipped into the crowd trying to hide his grocery bags from Gristedes. “This proves it’s a bad economy,” he said. “We’re all suffering, right?” Then he walked off; he must have decided earlier that even though he was suffering, he preferred to pay for his guacamole. 

A recently unemployed woman ate her salad wrap rescued from outside of Organic Avenue.

“At least you’re being resourceful,” I said.

“Yeah. It helps,” she said.

“Would you go alone?”

“I’d feel too weird.”

I had to consider if I would. I imagined myself all alone, checking out the trash in broad daylight, looking not exactly pathetic but whatever is one level less nuts than that. I decided it wasn’t worth it. I was still marveling at how inviting and brightly colorful it all looked on the curb when it was time to tie up the rejects—bananas browned from days of neglect—and move on. Dumpster divers leave garbage sites nicer than they were before. They have that in common with Girl Scouts.

Being an amateur myself, I picked up some slimy garbage in hopes of finding something edible, and accidentally discarded it in a fellow diver’s general direction. A yellow rubber glove appeared in front of my face.

“That’s why I wore these,” a fellow diver named Mohammed said.

Look how much fun we're having!

The Italian market Agata & Valentina, the most upscale target on our hit list, was a bust. It was closed, but lust-worthy aromas of the prepared foods inside reached every corner of my nose. Outside, I lifted a bag of severed pineapple tops to find a ton of raw meat. Too scrappy. Too much work for the group.

We moved on, passing V-Note, a vegan restaurant. It would have been awkward to hit them up, what with everyone enjoying dinner and all. “We could claw at the window and go through their trash while they ate,” Cindy, the sarcastic leader said, laughing.

Dragging my free broccoli home, I had sticky ice cream hands thanks to some suspicious goo that collects on salad in a bag. It’s cool. I scrubbed my hands six times like I was reenacting Lady Macbeth’s OCD post-murder hand washing.

The next night was the feast, located in a residential building in East Harlem. They hold them to reward people who find food and share it. I set about chopping garlic, onions, and celery in the communal kitchen. My first task was simple enough: get rid of the mealy bits on the tomato with a cleaver. People come if they’ve been on the dive the night before, or they find something to bring in on their own. One woman produced potatoes and had prolonged their life span by separating them in her worn-to-death stockings.

Our rosemary bread was rock-hard, but it was nothing a microwave couldn’t fix. “I promise no one will get sick on this,” a cheery leader said. A drunk guy stumbled in looking for chitlins. Almost everyone was vegan—mostly for  moral reasons—so he gave up, but not before delivering a lecture on how an onion can heal a broken leg if you can’t afford to go the hospital.

Every age bracket was represented at the dive, but at the feast, it was mostly people who were retired—an improv teacher, a former management consultant—and the lone young unemployed legal assistant. Not every diver survives on a strict freegan diet; some of them donate food they find to Food Not Bombs, a collective that feeds people in need with rescued food in order to create a more sustainable future. One guy talked about the young kids who jump out of a van to take all the trash from Organic Avenue on 21^st Street. “They’re so ragged they look like they live in the subway,” he said.

I stared at my dish, which would elate hungry people everywhere, feeling disappointed in myself. I worried about anorexia rumors.

Somehow, bagging up the “rescued food” seemed less dicey than the end result: eating it. Boxed spelt crackers and cranberry oatmeal cookies tasted the safest. The stir-fry smelled good enough, but those $12 mushrooms and the tofu were gray. However, I’d pay full price for the asparagus, and the rice and beans were restaurant-quality.

These people were passionate and intelligent, but most of this stuff just wasn’t appetizing. It still impressed me that all this food would go to waste if it weren't for them.

I went into this thinking garbage... never good. But it struck me: the stuff was fresh enough to eat, and I didn’t poison myself. In the end, my own hangups about where it came from tugged at my stomach and got in the way of rational thinking. This was something I personally applauded, but didn’t want to take up.

So I chewed, nodding to signal how impressed I was while I fantasized about tunneling myself into the nearest steakhouse for a rehabilitative lamb chop. I was the only one who wasn’t into it; all the others finished their plates. As I washed the dishes, they invited me to dive again. But while they’re onto something, I remain a slave to the system. I prefer to see my food on a clean shelf.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

From the all-out civil war in Syria to the internet restrictions in Turkey and the return of military rule in Egypt, the revolutionary youth of the Arab Spring seem to be facing one hurdle after another. VICE obtained an exclusive copy of a study that concluded that the “Arab Spring” seems to have been just a “translation mistake.” Additionally, there is no evidence at all to support the theory that people in the Middle East had revolted against their rulers. The revelations come as an embarrassment to Western media outlets that have been claiming for three years that people from Tunisia to Syria were engaged in popular uprisings, as it becomes apparent that the misperception was a result of a multitude of translation mistakes by reporters and commentators who are not sufficiently versed in Arabic.

The study that VICE obtained a copy of prior to publication was conducted by a panel of European and American experts and was funded by the government of Saudi Arabia, but there is nothing to suggest that it had ulterior motives in commissioning the report beyond its commitment to truth and accuracy in reporting. The experts analyzed hundreds of videos and articles and recorded many witness testimonies that all firmly point to a giant misunderstanding.

According to the report, Western reporters in Tunisia and Egypt were confused by the scenes of thousands of people on the streets and wrongly assumed that they were protesting against the regimes when in fact they were spontaneously expressing their support for their leaders. Upon reading the reports in the Western press, Tunisia’s former president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, a sensitive and considerate leader much beloved by his people, felt deeply hurt and decided to leave power before the truth emerged.

A similar scenario was repeated in Egypt, when President Hosni Mubarak decided to leave power rather than risk upsetting his people. The report points out to Western support of the two presidents as evidence of their essential goodness, as it is inconceivable that the Western powers would support corrupt dictatorial regimes.

A crucial piece of evidence was the mistranslation of the phrase al sha’ab yurid ithbat al nizam (the people want the stability of the regime) as al sha’ab yurid isqat al nizam (the people want the fall of the regime). The reporters quizzed about this claimed that it was very loud during these demonstrations, and it was an honest mistake than anyone could make.

Unfortunately, events quickly spiraled out of control before anyone could correct these mistakes, and as the celebrations spread to other Arab countries, the Western press continued to misinterpret them as protests against the rulers. The study harshly criticized lack of familiarity with Arab culture and norms and poor language skills for these failings, which have inadvertently destabilized the region and perhaps the entire world for years to come.

A spokesman for the Saudi government outlined the reasons for commissioning the study arguing that the Kingdom has always been interested in promoting cultural understanding and accuracy of reporting, so it decided to use its resources to correct this giant mistake. “Arab people have huge respect for their leaders, and protests have no place in our culture. Sadly, foreign reporters misinterpreted these events due to their lack of training in cultural sensitivity and poor grasp of the complex Arab language,” he said.

Tragically it seems that the very first public gathering that sparked the theory of an “Arab Spring” was a surprise birthday party that people in one Tunisian town had planned for their leader and that Western journalists present misinterpreted as a demonstration. The passionate and raucous nature of Arab celebrations was lost on the reporters, who are predisposed to see Arabs as angry mobs. The report recommends further investment by Western governments and media outlets in cultural sensitivity training to overcome those barriers in the future.

The Saudi spokesman urged everyone involved to come together to put a line underneath this chapter, citing his government’s effort to end the misunderstanding in Egypt and repair the damage done by misguided Western reporting. “We are very close to re-establishing the situation exactly as it was in 2010 before all of this started. Please urge your governments to support us in correcting this historical error.” He lamented how a small translation mistake caused this much damage, and urged Western reporters to rely on official version of events in the future to avoid such confusion.

Karl Sharro is an architect, writer, satirist, and commentator on the Middle East. He has written for a number of international publications and writes a blog, Karl reMarks, about Middle Eastern politics and culture, with occasional forays into satire. Follow him on Twitter.

Photos courtesy of the White family

The night Victor White Sr.’s son died in the backseat of a cop car in New Iberia, Louisiana, he called the local sheriff’s station to figure out where his boy was.

“I asked them if he’d been apprehended, and they told me no,” he said to me. It wasn’t until the following morning, March 3, that Victor Sr. found out his son, Victor White III, had been arrested and died while in police custody. But he didn’t receive the news from the New Iberia Sheriff's Department—he got the call from his son Leonard, who also lives in New Iberia and had been questioned that morning by police in connection with the death of his brother.

Immediately, of course, Victor Sr. made the two-hour drive from his home in Alexandria down to New Iberia to find out what the hell was going on. But the cops refused to tell him anything about the circumstances surrounding his 22-year-old son’s death, citing an ongoing investigation by the state police. At that point, Victor Sr. had no idea his son's death was caused by a gunshot to the back while he was still in handcuffs in the backseat of a patrol car. Every official he talked to was cagey.

“They wouldn’t even let me see the body,” Victor Sr. told me over the phone. Eventually, when they realized he wouldn’t take “no comment” for an answer, they brought in the coroner and allowed Victor Sr. to take one look at his deceased son—but even then, they had conditions. “They told me I couldn’t see his lower body,” he told me. “I could only see his face.” 

Still completely in the dark about what had taken place, Victor drove back home in utter shock. “It wasn’t until I got back and looked on the state police's Facebook page that I found out what had happened to my son.” Even then, the official version of events opened up even more questions than answers.

Here’s what is known at this point: On Sunday, March 2, Victor White III walked down to a convenience store with a friend to pick up a cigar. When he got there, a fight broke out—it's unclear if Victor and his friend were involved, but in any case the cops arrived on the scene shortly after the fight ended, stopped Victor a couple blocks from the store, and discovered that he had some unidentified narcotics on him. They cuffed his hands behind his back and put him in the back of their cruiser—and that's where the story stops making much sense.

The sheriff's deputies who arrested Victor III allege that when they arrived at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office, Victor III wouldn't leave the car and became “uncooperative.” They say he pulled out a handgun, while his hands were cuffed behind his back, and shot himself in the back.

I called the state police and the local sheriff's office to ask questions about whether Victor's last moments were caught on video, who the officers in question are, and how a suspect in police custody could have had a gun after being frisked, but no one would comment anything of substance since the shooting was being investigated. (This is standard operating procedure at police departments.)

Lieutenant Anthony Green, however, was willing to give his take on New Iberia's response to the shooting, stating, “The community is not really up in arms about this. I don't sense any large unrest.” 

This isn’t the first time the Iberia Sheriff's Department has been suspected of brutalizing the people of New Iberia. Last year, a group of officers were caught on video beating a handcuffed man at the town's annual Sugar Cane Festival, an incident that led to a deputy’s firing. And at least a few activists are upset by this history of mistreatment. On March 11, Reverend Raymond Brown, a fast-talking New Orleans preacher, hosted a small rally in New Iberia and called for the US Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Victor's death.

“We believe they murdered him," he told me over the phone. "They shot him in the back and then drove him to the sheriff’s office. We don't buy the police’s story. If he's handcuffed around the back, it would be impossible for him to reach down and grab a gun like that.”

To those close to Victor III, the claim that he would try pull out a gun and shoot himself while in the custody of police is just absurd.

“He was a respectable person. He went to church. It’s so unusual for them to say he was ‘uncooperative.' And for them to say he shot himself, that’s just unbelievable,” said Victor Sr. “I saw his face. I know they beat him before he arrived at the station, because those who were with him before he was arrested said he didn’t have a mark on him.”

According to his father, Victor III's previous run-ins with the law were minor—the kind you'd expect of any young man: He was caught once with pot, he got a traffic violation for making a U-turn a while back, and when he was 16 he broke someone's window. Local police officials, however, would not elaborate for me on Victor White III’s criminal record, once again citing the ongoing investigation. But Victor Sr. said that at the time of his death, Victor III was getting his life on track: He’d moved down to New Iberia in November to be with his girlfriend and his six-month-old daughter and was living out of a hotel called the Cajun Inn with one of his brothers, his girlfriend, and his baby. He’d taken a job at the local Waffle House, but his long-term plan was to go to vocational school for welding. The day Victor III died, he told his dad over the phone that he was planning on using his $800 income tax refund, which he was carrying around that night in cash, to get a permanent home for his girl and his baby. Everything seemed to be falling in place. 

Outraged and dissatisfied, Victor Sr. and his family have banded together to try and get to the bottom of what happened to Victor White III. They’ve hired attorney Carol Powell Lexing, who gained statewide recognition for her work on the Jena Six case. Severely skeptical of the state investigation and the local police, Victor Sr. and the White family have also created a campaign to raise funds for an independent autopsy and crime-scene tests. Simply put, they're tired of waiting to hear from the police.

"My family has no closure, because there are all these questions still looming over us," Victor Sr. said to me in a moment of reflection and lamentation. "I'm just in disbelief. I still call out his name. I still think I'm going to wake up from this nightmare."

UPDATE: According to the White family's lawyer, Carol Powell Lexing, there is video footage that confirms Victor III was not involved in the fight outside the New Iberian convenient store, which caused the police to arrive on the scene and stop and question him. 

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

Orleans Parish Prison, in New Orleans, is a cesspool of rape and violence. Photo by Flickr user Bart Everson

In the latest gruesome dispatch from the clusterfuck that is America's corrections system, the Associated Press reported last week that Jerome Murdough, a mentally ill former Marine, “basically baked to death” in his 6'-by-10' cinderblock cell in Rikers Island. According to the AP, Murdough, who was homeless and on anti-psychotropic and anti-seizure medication, had been at Rikers for about a week, after being picked up by police in February on a misdemeanor trespassing charge for sleeping on the roof of a Harlem housing project. On the night he died, Murdough had complained of being overheated. Because he was housed in a special unit for mentally ill inmates, officers were supposed to check on his cell every 15 minutes, but instead he was ignored and left alone. When his cell was finally opened, four hours later, Murdough was already dead, and his internal body temperature and the temperature in his cell were at least 100 degrees.

The incident is horrifying, but also perhaps unsurprising, given the grim—and often deadly—conditions for mentally ill inmates at big urban jails like Rikers Island. The number of mentally ill people housed in American prisons and jails has “skyrocketed” over the past few decades, said Bandy Lee, a professor of psychology at Yale University who specializes in violence at prisons and jails. Murdough’s death, Lee said, “is actually a natural consequence” of putting mentally ill inmates in facilities that are neither designed nor equipped to deal with them. “It’s evidence of the level of ignorance that corrections officers have of the mentally ill.”

In a statement, New York City's acting correction commissioner Mark Cranston said that the department is conducting a "full investigation of the circumstances surrounding Mr. Murdough's unfortunate death, including issues of staff performance and the adequacy of procedures." While the cause of death is still under investigation, Cranston did confirm in his statement that there were "unusually high temperatures" in Murdough's cell, and said that "remedial action" has been taken to resolve mechanical issues in the immediate facility. 

But the problems at Rikers Island extend beyond faulty temperature control. On Monday, federal agents announced that they had arrested and charged a New York City corrections officer with "deliberate indifference" in the death of a mentally ill inmate who ate a toxic soap ball and then pounded on his cell door for hours begging for medical help.

As Lee and other experts and prisoners'-rights advocates have noted, both deaths underscore the challenges city jails face in dealing with growing populations of mentally ill prisoners. At Rikers, the proportion of inmates with a diagnosed mental illness has jumped to 40 percent, up from 20 percent just eight years ago, according to the Department of Corrections. Jails are neither designed nor equipped to be mental institutions and, unsurprisingly, locking up people who are in need of psychiatric care has resulted in mayhem. A New York Times investigation into conditions at Rikers Island, published just one day before Murdough’s death was reported, found that at least 12 inmates have been slashed or stabbed since New Year's Eve. According to internal reports obtained by the Times, inmates and corrections officers have suffered lacerations, concussions, punctured eardrums, and fractures to noses, eye sockets, jaws, and hips. The investigation found that in the past ten years, the use of force by corrections officers has jumped 240 percent, even as the Rikers population has declined 15 percent.

The Times report notes that officers are also regularly abused by inmates—in one incident this month, an officer was stabbed in the face with a pen. According to the Corrections Department, mentally ill prisoners are responsible for about two-thirds of infractions at New York City jails. 

“With that number of people who are mentally vulnerable in very stressful situations, of course there is going to be more disruptive behavior and escalation of violence,” Lee said. "Corrections officers are trained to respond with punitive measures or more violence, expecting that individuals will be in control of their behavior. But of course, with the mentally ill, for most of them there is a high probability that they won't be. Rather than follow rules and behavioral guidelines, they will act even more unpredictably. And the corrections officers panic and respond with more violence.”

The chaos isn’t limited to Rikers. Jails and prisons have become the country’s de facto mental institutions, thanks to decades of deinstitutionalization policies that have gutted federal funding for mental health facilities and moved thousands of people out of mental hospitals and into community treatment facilities, homeless shelters, jails, and prisons. As of 2010, there were 43,000 psychiatric beds in the US, or about 14 beds per 100,000 people—the same ratio that existed in 1850, when the country first started to push for humane care for the mentally ill. Meanwhile, the US incarceration rate has jumped 350 percent since the 1970s, according to Department of Justice statistics. Studies have found that the increase in the prison population has actually been almost directly equal to the decrease in the number of people in mental institutions—in other words, the percentage of the population that is institutionalized has stayed constant, but just moved from mental hospitals to prisons.

Image via The Texas Review

“Jails, especially large urban jails, have become the default mental health hospitals for their cities,” said Amy Fettig, the senior staff counsel for the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “It’s a job that they are in no way prepared for, trained for, or resourced to handle.”

The situation has exacerbated what experts say is an epidemic of violence in big-city jails. Due to lack of state or federal oversight of local correctional facilities, there is little comprehensive data on what goes on inside jails. But in Los Angeles County, where the daily jail population averages 22,000—the largest in the country—reports from the ACLU have found a pervasive use of excessive force by deputies in the corrections system. A 2012 study, for example, reported that 64 people had witnessed incidents in which deputies struck an inmate in the head—in 14 cases, the inmates suffered broken facial bones, three inmates had to receive emergency operations, and one inmate was blinded in one eye. The ACLU reports have also found an alarming lack of adequate mental health treatment in the LA County jails, along with a jump in the number of suicides among inmates with diagnosed mental illnesses. This past fall, the Department of Justice announced it was opening an investigation into the jails' treatment of mentally ill inmates, citing the jump in suicides at LA jails in 2013 and the "obsolete and dilapidated conditions" for inmates diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. In New Orleans, a federal monitor said Thursday that the high rates of violence, rape, and shoddy mental health care at the Orleans Parish Prison are “the English definition of mayhem.”

“This is a very toxic mix,” said Fettig. “It’s a toxic mix for the prisoners, toxic mix for the staff, and unfortunately it's also a toxic mix for the public, because an institution that's designed to protect public safety can't do that when it's asked to be a mental health hospital.” 

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken incremental steps to reform the treatment of mentally ill inmates at Rikers and other city jails. In January, the Department of Corrections announced that it would end the use of solitary confinement as punishment for mentally ill prisoners and instead house that population in special treatment units, according to the New York Times. But Murdough was housed in one of those special treatment facilities. His death last week prompted de Blasio to call for further improvements in mental health treatment and training for corrections officers. 

To spearhead those efforts, de Blasio has tapped Joseph Ponte, a veteran corrections official who is currently the head of Maine's prison system, as the city's new corrections commissioner. Ponte, who has a reputation for turning around violent jails and prisons, is known among prison-reform advocates for his successful efforts to curb aggressive treatment of prisoners and decrease the use of solitary confinement. So far, though, it is not clear how he plans to deal with the growing population of mentally ill people in the city's prisons. (Ponte's office in Maine did not respond to interview requests.) 

But other attempts to reform large urban jail systems have been slow-going, and their success has been marginal, at best. In New Orleans, for example, the US Justice Department has ordered the prison to start implementing reforms that at the very least bring conditions up to minimum constitutional standards,  but the city and the sheriff's office have been tied up in court battles over who will pay for the changes. In Los Angeles, the Sheriff's Department has implemented only a handful of recommended changes to improve conditions and curb inmate abuse at county jails, after two years of stalling reforms.

When I was 16 I was fortunate enough to meet Matt Stamps, Rob Kellenberger and Dan Andriano, who were 17, 17 and 15 at the time, respectively. They were starting a band, a ska band, and needed a singer. I came out to give it a shot, we instantly hit it off and boom! We were a band. We called ourselves Slapstick and, thanks to Matt’s tireless networking, the ability of all three of those guys to write great songs, and their pedigrees due to the bands they’d been in before Slapstick (Flowers and Slugbug, anyone?) we were soon playing shows all over the Chicago suburbs. Pretty quickly, we added a horn section and before we knew what was going on, within a year, we were playing shows to upwards of 500 people pretty much every other weekend.

By the time I was 17, we were a pretty popular band around Chicago and we had something of a wee buzz nationally (keep in mind, this was 20 years ago, so there was no internet), and shit was pretty great. Slapstick was a band, along with a few others, notably, Less Than Jake and the Suicide Machines, who were kind of ushering ska punk into something approaching a punk mainstream. The thing about Slapstick though, the thing that everyone really always noticed and mentioned about us every time we played a show or were reviewed was that we were YOUNG. We were just kids. We did our first tour to Canada in a cloth top jeep and a GMC Jimmy in winter when I was 16, for fuckssakes (the ‘tour’ was 2 shows, 3 days long and very unsuccessful, unless you count learning about ‘bottle tokes’ as a success, but I digress)! We were young as shit. I remember playing a show with the Blue Meanies and Dyslexic Apaches at Metro. I was sitting backstage with the dude from the Apaches and when he found out that I was 17, he got super quiet, and he said “Man, I wish I had a cool band like yours when I was 17.”

I think about that a lot these days, as now, I’m 37 and uh…I ain’t OLD like your pappy or anything, but for a guy in a punk rock band, 37 is old. This is a game played mostly by people aged 23-33. You fall on one side or the other of that spectrum, your age suddenly becomes an interesting factor in who you are and what you’re doing, particularly the farther away you get.

That’s why people were so blown away when a band like the Starting Line made these songs that resonated with so many people. “That kid’s only fucking 17!” motherfuckers were saying, and that’s why when Nomeansno put out the spectacular All Roads Lead To Ausfahrt a few years back, people were like, “DAAAAMN! These old ass men have not lost a SINGLE FUCKING STEP!!! They’re still THE BEST!” (go listen to the song Mr. In Between if you doubt the fury of the mighty, unbreakable power of Nomeansno, and consider that it was composed and performed by dudes in their 60’s!)

The thing is, if you’re young, you’re not supposed to be able to have the perspective to be relatable and once you get old, you lose your fire and you forget what’s cool…at least that’s how the story goes, so to be able to be relevant in a medium as fickle as rock and roll, well, wow! You’re 16! Wow! You’re 50! That shit is amazing. Most people start late and quit early, and if we’re being totally honest, most people suck the entire time that they’re in they’re in their “prime” too. Rare are the Dan Andrianos of the world, who have seen success on both sides of things.

My point is, I’ve been lucky enough to have been kinda young and somewhat old in this world, and I’ve come to realize something pretty shocking. It’s WAY cooler to be old than young. I mean, not really. No. No. Being old is gross. You look gross, you smell gross and everything hurts. But to be relevant as an older dude as opposed to as a kid, waaaaaay cooler. Here’s why: When you’re a kid, you’re an outlier, you’re coming into a world that already exists as a new applicant for recognition and sure, you’re looking up to the gatekeepers and looking for their approval, but if you don’t get it, fuck em. You got plenty of time, you got plenty of piss and vinegar and plenty of dumb exuberance and idealism in your tank to convince you to get out there and go for it anyway. If people do notice the 17 year old you, you’re fucking IN, because nothing makes for an exciting story like young ass kids doing something that grownups can barely do. Ask Michael Jackson about it. Ask Leif Garret. Ask Britney Spears. Ask the dead guy from Old Skull. Ask that kid from the Starting Line. It’s no secret that youth is a premium advantage in the world of entertainment, and sure, it’s hard to figure out how to do something worth a shit when you’re still barely able to drive, but guess what? It’s ALWAYS hard to figure out how to do something worth a shit. Kids have the perfect combo of dumb gumption and no responsibilities that really help facilitate getting your bullshit where it needs to be. The fact is, most kids just don’t have confidence. That’s what comes in your 20’s and that’s what makes youngsters who are awesome particularly awesome. The rare, genuine, youthful confidence.

Old, however is a different matter. With old, there’s a lot of baggage. Firstly, there’s the most basic of all: you’re physically a big, gross old person. As a representative of an insurgent subculture, “dad” is not the greatest look. That can be a hard thing to overcome. Secondly, chances are good that, if you’re old, you have some sort of legacy that you have to at least acknowledge in your current output. For example, if you were in a 90’s fat wreck, baggy shorts, doodle-bap band, you can’t just start playing indie pop and expect no one to notice. “the dude from Burgermobile is trying to pretend like he’s in the Pixies now” is the kind of thing a lot of people will say before summarily dismissing your old ass and subsequent output. It’s not to say that reinvention is impossible, but it’s not easy, and the more you spent your 20’s doing something that was very popular back then, the harder you’ll have to work to shed the image that you spent your salad days crafting. Overcoming that? WAY cooler than just being slim and lucking into 3 chords and a narrative about a mean girl who broke your soul. Jessayin.

The other thing is that when you’re older, your shifting perspectives can tend to make the subjects of your art things that haven’t necessarily occurred to lots of the people who could potentially consume it yet. AND, chances are, by the time they get to be old enough to relate to the song you wrote, they ain’t gonna care anymore. Because at a certain point almost everyone stops giving a shit about new stuff and just clings to the shit that used to give em boners. That’s why your grandpa told your dad that music was better in his day, your dad told you the same thing and you think Skrillex sounds like dogshit. You’re all wrong, actually. It’s ALL dogshit. But being in the moment makes that dogshit temporarily beautiful. Ah…this isn’t the point. This isn’t even an issue for most people. The BIG issue for older artists, and this is the kiss of death for like 90% of motherfuckers who try to stay relevant, is they forget what made them cool back in the day. They try to stay exactly the same (impossible) or WORSE, change with the times—change up their perspective, and in doing so, they lose sight of who they actually are. Rather than bringing the angry young James Hetfield into the 21^st century with the gravitas of the rich-ass man he’d become, James Hetfield decided to pierce his labret and slick down his hair and pretend to be a whole different kind of insurgent young badass, all while ignoring that he was 45 and had a household name and several million dollars. That, folks, is what makes motherfuckers old: pretending to be young, jumping on cue to stay relevant, pretending that they’re not one component of a two-part moving sea. In order to stay cool, you gotta keep an eye on your surroundings, and keep an eye on you. OR YOU’RE FUCKED.  If you just do you, and you do it well, you will define what relevant is. If you’re trying to pretend nothing has changed, or worse, trying to grab onto something, anything at all, you’re a pathetic old loser and people will see that and be sad for you. That’s how it works.

Anyway, I’m aware that I’m not really that old (or terribly cool for that matter), but I’m older than everyone in all the bands we just took on tour on the east and west coasts, and those were no spring chickens themselves (Elway excluded, as they’re total chickens). It’s very nice to still be able to do this shit on a level beyond ‘dad bar band’ and I hope it stays that way for a while. It’s been about 8 months since I last wrote a song (Acheron River was the last one I wrote) and I’ve recently cranked up the machine again. It’s exciting and fun and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to still do this shit with some sort of interest behind it. I think a big part of why we’re still around is that we were never huge, so we never really fell from grace, and in that way we got really lucky. I remember feeling lucky when I was 17 too, but I also remember not really giving a fuck about anything or anyone. That shit’s all done changed now. I give a bunch of fucks about stuff. It’s cool. Y’all are cool, and this song I wrote about being naked and doing drugs out of a pool of blood on the floor of the garage is cool. It’s gonna really get your zones moving, I promise.

xoxoxo

These are the R2-D2 swim trunks available from everybody's favorite store in the mall next to an Auntie Anne's Pretzels, Hot Topic. They're on sale for $22.13. For some reason in their online store they're in the girl's section, but that's definitely a dude in the picture. Although I suppose girls could certainly wear them too. Just no judging if I want to wear a two-piece thong. *booty shakin'* Haaaaai, I'm a sexy beach bunny over here! "You need to wax your ass." Is it really that bad? I've only felt it, I'm afraid to look. Keep going for a shot of the rear because there was one available. Thanks to Bryon, who is holding out for a pair of C-3PO ones. Jk jk, nobody has or will ever say that.

Criminals who inadvertently leave traces of their DNA at the crime scene now have something more to worry about. By isolating 24 genetic variants, researchers have developed a computer program that can construct surprisingly accurate 3D models of facial features.

Read more...

Meet the Man Behind DJ Snake & Lil Jon's 'Turn Down for What' Video

This is a video of sushi chef Hironori Ikeno preparing his special -- tiny slices of fish atop single grains of rice. There is no way I could get one of those in my mouth without losing it first. And if it did make it to my face, I'd probably accidentally vacuum it up my nose. Did you know you can run a cooked piece of spaghetti up your nose and out your mouth? Well at least I can. I'm f***ing awesome at dinner parties. *flipping through sushi menu* I'll have the ten cent dinner special. "There is no ten cent dinner special." WHAT?! Keep going for a brief video. Thanks to PBD, only one initial away from being PBR and winning a hipster's heart.

Monzer Darwish is a 23-year-old graphic designer and metal fan from Al Salamiyah, Syria, a district near Homs. For the last five months he’s been travelling around the country and visiting refugees in Lebanon for a documentary he’s making about underground metal bands in war-torn Syria. Needless to say, it's a tough gig. People who are into metal have been persecuted in Syria for years by people who think they’re Satanists. When they're not saving up fuel to practice with power generators, they're worried about other things, like suicide bombers turning up to shows.

Monzer (who taught himself just about everything) is producing, directing, editing, and promoting Syrian Metal Is War on his own, with no crew and basically no resources. He’s sold pretty much everything he has to raise money and has taken out a loan on top of that, which he’s hoping to pay back by crowdfunding. 

Making the film is dangerous and expensive. Monzer says that he wants to stay alive for long enough to finish the film, and so talking directly about politics and religion wasn’t an option. We chatted on Facebook for a while, and then we Skyped once he had enough fuel for his generator to keep the internet and his laptop going.

VICE: It’s impressive that you’re making this really ambitious feature film on your own. What made you decide to dedicate all this time and money to the project?
Monzer Darwish: I know the suffering metal musicians have to go through to make music in Syria. The metal community is suffering from massive amounts of oppression imposed by bigotry and misunderstanding; it is surrounded by everyone, and still the musicians are making, producing, and playing metal. I think that's remarkable, and I'd like for the world to see this phenomenon.

Why do people in Syria give metal fans so much abuse?
They are raised to fight, hate, and persecute anything that’s different or foreign to them.

Are there still shows?
Mostly cover shows. A couple of months ago we played a show in Aleppo; it was called Live Under Siege, we felt that the songs we were playing (like Sepultura’s "Territory") had lyrics that describe things happening like two or three hundred meters away from us. We were feeling the music and lyrics because we're practically living them. People are killing each other for territory.You've seen the film's promo, I suppose? Bashar Haroun says that someone might blow himself up among us. That was considered because it happened before: A girl was having a birthday party, and someone blew himself up in there, and that was a birthday party—not even a metal concert.

This is probably a stupid question, but what’s the reason behind suicide-bombing a birthday party?
Different agendas that I—like everyone else—fail to see, I guess. An explosion occurred in my neighborhood back in 2012, taking the lives of many people I considered dear. Someone blew up a ton and a half of explosives there. Fifty-two people died, many of them children. It's difficult to comprehend.

Were you nearby at the time?
No, but I should have been in my house. Something happened to keep me from being there. A lucky coincidence, I guess. Had I been there, I wouldn't be telling you this story right now.

On Facebook, you said you’ve had a lot of lucky escapes.
I've survived four explosions and lots of clashes so far. The last of them was in Salamiyah’s countryside, where I was supposed to meet with my bandmate to record the guitars for a song he wrote; I postponed the trip because he was going to Homs that day.

Do you and your fiancée have plans for the future? Do you think about leaving Syria?
That’s a really difficult thing to even think about. I can’t live outside Syria, but one day I will have nothing left to stay for, so I will be forced to leave. But currently, I really can't live outside of Syria.

How come?
I’m used to all of this mess! The crappy streets and those people who hate me because I’m a metal head… I freaking love them! I really do, and I am used to them. I find inspiration here.

Right—it’s home.
I can’t explain it. I’m used to Syria with all of its mess, ugliness, and now ruin… It has a certain charm over me.

In the film promo you say things have been dark for a long time in Syria. What was it like growing up?
That’s a tricky question… Before the war, we weren't exactly alive. As youngsters, we were a little behind on everything in the world, and we strived to change that; we strived to live like everyone else. I don’t want to get killed. I just want to finish the film, and then, anyone's free to do as they please; kill me, bomb me or whatever. The film is what's important now.

It means that much to you?
It’s my passion. As I said, I’ve been through everything these people and bands have suffered from. Anyone can make a documentary about music and war, but it’s hard to put feeling into the film, to reflect emotion. And I believe I can do that, because I know how everyone felt through the war.

Did the political uprisings in Syria have an impact on the music?
For the bands that emerged in the new wave of Syrian metal, yes. The atmosphere was a big influence on them. The clashes, the death, and the ruin—all these things would inspire any metal musician!

How did you first get into metal?
I was young and frustrated with the organizers at a programming contest I took part in for kicking me out because I was simply wearing shorts. My friend gave me his headset and said, “Just listen to it; it'll make your anger vanish.” I thought he was kidding, and I thought the song was going to be a happy or a crazy song, but it was Metallica's “Battery," so when I got back home I searched for this kind of music. I hadn’t realized that my teacher who taught me the piano and the oud, who was 75 years old, had a small shop and Metallica cassettes. I never expected that—he loved Metallica! He died a few years ago, and now that I remember that, I wish I had been older just so I could have talk to him and gotten to know him better. I was only a kid back then.

What kind of music do most people listen to in Syria?
Mostly icky, overproduced, and recycled music—and sometimes really interesting folk music. Generally, people listened to music all around; they loved music! This bigotry and hate toward music in all of its genres, and even its banning in a few places in Syria, is something definitely not Syrian, nor did it originate from a Syrian mindset. 

From there how did you find out about the metal happening in Syria?
The first Syrian metal song I listened to was recorded in Damascus in a small shop. I have no idea who played or recorded it, but it was amazing. It was a death metal track. I’m currently looking for the band because I wish to meet them. After that, I started to discover relatively more known bands like Nu.Clear.Dawn, the Hourglass, and Ominous.

You’ve just come back from filming in Beirut. How was that?
I went there a week ago to interview the musicians in diaspora. It went pretty well, except for the part when I got stuck in a clash in Tripoli between Jabal Mohsen and Bab al Tabbaneh. It’s following me everywhere!

Did it make you feel at home?
Yeah, it was a relief.  

Do you have any idea of when the film will be finished?
The situation controls the outcome, so I can’t really tell. When I started filming, I had a whole script that I'd written for the film—the bands, questions, and my vision of the finished product—but after filming in the first city, I ripped that script in half because everything kept changing. Maybe I won't be able travel to Damascus today; maybe someone will die; maybe some bomb will take new lives; maybe I'll die. Nothing's for sure. I try to keep updating those interested through the film's Facebook page, though.

Support Syrian Metal Is War on Facebook.

Follow Jessica Holland on Twitter.

“Daddy? How do you make water?”

“You mean, what is it made of?”

“Yeah, what’s water made of?”

“Hydrogen and oxygen.”

“Oh. And what’s hydrogen and oxygen?”

“They’re chemical elements.”

“So, when we drink water, we’re drinking chemicals?”

“Well, yeah. In a sense, everything is chemicals. Water’s a chemical, air is made of chemicals. ”

“What about, like, wood?”

“Chemicals.”

“What?!?! Is everything chemicals?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“What about lights?”

“Light isn’t a chemical, but the things that make light are made out of chemicals.”

“Yeah, like, the Sun is fire, and it makes light, but is the light fire? No, it’s not.”

“Right. Well, the Sun isn’t really fire. Actually, it’s mostly hydrogen. There’s so much of it, and it’s squeezed down tight by gravity, so it starts to stick together and make helium. When it does, it gets really hot, and makes light.”

“So, like, what made, like… space, and… everything?”

“You mean, where did it come from?”

“Yeah, where did space come from?”

“Well, scientists know that a long time ago, a little less than fourteen billion years ago, the entire universe was just a tiny, tiny little point. And then… poof it blew up, and started expanding. It’s called the Big Bang.”

“What?!?!? The Big Bang?”

“Yep. Before that, there wasn’t any space, and there wasn’t any time. Space and time started then, really, really small, and it was really hot.”

“So, like, everything was all white and light and stuff?”

“In a manner of speaking. It was super hot, though, way hotter than the inside of the Sun. It’s been cooling off and spreading out ever since.”

“Is that why there’s no air in space?”

“What?”

“Yeah because everything spread out, so there’s no air in space. Except there’s air on Earth, but Earth is in space, and there’s no air in space, so why is there air on Earth?”

“Well, the Earth is really big, right? So it has a lot of gravity. And just like gravity holds you down to the ground, gravity holds the air down to the Earth. If Earth were a smaller planet, like Mercury, or the Moon, it wouldn’t be able to hold onto the air. Which is why there’s no air on the Moon.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You know, you remember that space show we watched?”

“Yeah.”

“There was another one of those, that we have on the tv, and it’s all about how animals evolved and that sort of thing. And there will be more, and I’m pretty sure there’ll be one all about the Big Bang, and where everything came from.”

“Really?”

“Really. And when there is, we can watch it, and you can learn more about it. Would you like that?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, then. Until then, though, do you think you can go to sleep?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Do that. Sleep well, I love you.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

————

(The “featured image” up top is from Monday night after SteelyKid’s taekwondo class. They had a belt test last week (she’ll most likely be moving up to yellow), and it seems they spend the next class after a belt test doing board-breaking as a reward. The board in question is half-inch pine, a little thinner than the ones we use for the board-breaking lab in intro mechanics, so I know it’s not all that difficult to break, but she was so fired up about breaking it with a punch, it was ridiculously cute…)

A Philly cheesesteak from Geno's. All photos by the author

The downfall of the United States is not upon us just yet. Though I am convinced that the yuppification of American culture portends our end times, I’m happy to say that we still have some institutions holding fast to the true foundation of freedom: disgusting, heart-pummeling foods that may have a questionable relationship to actual ingestible materials. God bless them.  

Philadelphia’s great contribution to such freedom, alongside more paltry offerings like the Liberty Bell and the Declaration of Independence, is the majestic cheesesteak. Every food truck and corner store in the city offers up some version of this great East Coast American tradition of borderline inedible items. However, at Geno’s Steaks, a Philadelphia staple notorious for harboring a crude version of this sandwich, along with politics that are even cruder, pressure from the increasingly widespread popularity of the cheesesteak may be threatening this iconic item. Torn between menu adaptations geared at a wider audience and the mainstream disapproval of time-honored arts like heart disease, Philadelphia sandwich eaters may be witnessing the refinement of the cheesesteak and, with it, the shaking foundations of that liberty for which the city is so famous. 

Subway has a cheesesteak now. 

The cheesesteak is now pervasive enough outside of Philadelphia that any Subway sandwich chain will serve you some monstrosity of a “Philly.” I tracked down one of these sandwiches in its natural environment: a standing-room only convenience store swarmed with high school kids pounding energy drinks. Shockingly, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. The generous sandwich artist garnished it with a mountain of whacky toppings that brought it closer to a salad than a cheesesteak. No traditional Philadelphia steak shop is going to put raw green peppers, black olives, crushed Fritos, or any number of utterly fucking ridiculous absurdities on its sandwiches. That is happening here.

I got mine on a freshly made “Italian Herbs and Cheese” roll with chipotle mayo because hell is real. There is no such thing as a “Philly,” but somehow this wasn’t even horrible.

Embarrassing as it may be, the attempt to brand the cheesesteak as the “Philly” for mass-market appeal has had apparent success. But in a society plagued by highly suspect food allergies and fad diets, adapting pulverized and processed foods like the cheesesteak for a mass audience tends to equate with fast-food style bastardization. As anyone with his finger on the pulse of authenticity—or anyone who has watched four hours of any random food-television programming cycle—can tell you, to gauge the world’s real perception of the authentic cheesesteak experience we need to look to the heart of South Philly on the only street corner that contains the opposing factions of the Philadelphia cheese steak sandwich: Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s Steaks.   

I’ll spare you the mind-numbing debate that surrounds these two shops. The only voices louder than those arguing for the superiority of either side are often those who argue that the “real place” to find an authentic steak is a mythical deli in the backroom of their grandfather’s basement where you’re forced to drink homemade grappa until you go blind before you’re allowed to order. That sounds like a good time, but I’m confident both Geno’s and Pat’s meet the strenuous demand of representing a tradition that basically involves dumping Cheez Whiz on sliced beef and serving it on a long roll. 

The traditional cheesesteak from Geno’s includes a sliced rib-eye, fried onions, and a slathering of Whiz. It’s pretty delicious and almost definitely made of organic material. 

A proper cheesesteak from Geno's

In its most basic incarnation, these simple ingredients are all you need to achieve deliciousness. Onions are acceptable, but the trend toward adulterating the sandwich with bell peppers or any other foods that actually grow in soil is mostly taboo. Like the best of all American inventions—electricity, airplanes, and hard work—it almost seems designed to kill you.

But even the traditional gatekeepers of the cheesesteak no longer seem content to wrest their sandwiches directly from death’s cold hand. Geno Vento, current owner of the shop who was, I shit you not, named after the restaurant founded by his father, is publicly discussing menu changes more shocking than a six-pound can of processed cheese product. 

He wants to try to make the cheesesteak healthy. 

Coinciding with a recent lap-band surgery and enrollment in culinary school, Vento has been exploring low-fat and low-cholesterol options in an effort to update the currently straightforward Geno’s menu. What these changes will entail for Philadelphia’s sandwich future aren’t clear, but a “diet cheesesteak” seems custom-made for the assholes of the world. Will Geno’s steak go the way of the Subway “Philly” sandwich? Could we see a vegetarian offering alongside the ribeye? 

Maybe afterward we can swing by Ikea for a frozen yogurt and a Häst Slidan furniture set? 

A cheesesteak from Philly’s all-vegan Blackbird Pizzeria is made with sliced seitan, daiya cheese, and plenty of green peppers. Could this be the future of Genos?  It didn’t even give me chest pains.  

A "cheesesteak" from Blackbird Pizzeria

Such efforts to make the cheesesteak palatable to a health-conscious market might go unnoticed if it weren’t for Geno’s historically unique attitude toward newfangled ideas like diversity or tolerance. Geno’s would be just one of many menus that have been sanitized to translate a local dive’s character into widespread appeal. In this particular case, there is more to the process than cutting calories; the character in question gives off the vibes of a shady racist uncle decked out in gold chains and tattoos who is complaining about the Mexicans moving in.  

Having first attracted controversy for its prominent memorial to Daniel Faulkner, the police officer allegedly killed by former Black Panther and currently incarcerated political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geno’s has made a history of establishing itself as anything but accommodating to all elements of the Philadelphia community. The Faulkner plaque, conspicuously placed on the shop’s facade right in the center of the outdoor seating area, was the beginning of an onslaught that featured prominent signs instructing customers to order in English and a steady stream of interviews with the late Joey Vento lamenting the plight of Italian Americans in facing the current wave of goddamned freedom-hating immigrants.  

The politically incorrect signs outside of Geno's Steaks

Geno, the son, has made it clear that he’s stepping away from the aspects of his father’s legacy that overshadowed the food, but catering to the politics and diets of the organic-grocery-store crowds will still be a lofty goal for the heir.

Considering this context, the changes Vento institutes could be a welcome respite from an uncomfortable history. Certainly a healthier— and less racist—Philadelphia is a good idea. But at the same time, these healthy adaptations also make clear the attempt to tame and sterilize working-class food culture. From the exterior view, replete with numerous neon signs and a giant glowing cheesesteak, Geno’s itself looks like some kind of meat amusement park from hell. I’d love to offer a romantic history of the cheesesteak along the lines of the Cubano, with local workers lining up to grab steaks on their lunch breaks, but whatever roots in feeding the common people Geno’s may have had, it is now largely given over to the spectacle of a tourist trap.  

The easiest response, of course, would be for purists to completely ignore Geno’s as it completes this transformation. But whether it be “Philly” offerings from Subway and T.G.I. Fridays or vegan steaks from the city’s local all-vegetarian shops like Blackbird Pizzeria and Govinda’s Vegetarian, the entire cheesesteak landscape is shifting dramatically. It would be comforting if the crowds of tourists drawn to Geno’s neon lights like idiotic moths to a flame walked away with at least a somewhat authentic experience of Philadelphia cuisine. Hopefully, there’s a way to preserve the only slightly toxic tradition of the delicious cheesesteak while navigating the more thoroughly toxic aspects of its present predicament.  

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Pandemia

The European Union wants American food manufacturers to rename domestically produced foods in a number of categories, including Parmesan, feta, and Gorgonzola cheese.

They want to do this so they can't be confused with the real McCoys, which have been ostensibly monopolized by European manufacturers. Whose cheeses, no doubt, are derived exclusively from black-and-white-spotted dairy cows, lovingly milked at dawn by tawny Continental milkmaids, the milk squirted directly into a wooden bucket resting on a bed of dew-speckled hay. 

What little authority the European Union has to make American companies change the name of a product on American shelves remains to be seen. Roger Waite, an EU representative, signaled to the Associated Press that this is "an important issue for the EU," and our authorities think it’s going to be on the agenda at an upcoming US-EU free-trade conference in Brussels.

A shaker full of something or other. Photo by flickr user Wigxxx

Kraft sounds pretty mad about it. Their spokesman, Basil Maglaris, said, "Such restrictions could not only be costly to food makers but also potentially confusing for consumers if the labels of their favorite products using these generic names were required to change." But while they may balk, businesses only care that they’d have to pay to design and print new labels. 

The controversy may sound like an example of that sort of smug, European cheese snobbery you have to combat when you travel abroad. Cue offensive French accent: “You know, what you Amereecans call cheese, we would not see fit to use as—qu'est-ce que c'est—industrial lubricant.” I’m not saying it’s not that, but there’s also much more to this.

For expertise, I reached out to John Coupland, food-science professor at Penn State, who put the controversy in context for me. I first wanted to know how likely the EU's plan was to succeed. "I don't see it going anywhere," he said when I initially emailed him. Coupland is an expert on food ingredients and was knowledgeable about the trade politics of food.

I got him on the phone to learn more. “It’s fairly alien. We’re much more used to defining food by what it is,” he said, referring to Europe’s protected-food classifications. “You can make Swiss cheese, and I can make Swiss cheese, and as long as you meet certain standards, that’s what it is.” In Europe, he says, the thought process is completely different. “Food is associated with a place. It doesn’t matter how good your champagne is—unless you brew it in a certain place, it’s not champagne.”

Here’s a row of bottles. If you’re an American, tell me what you’re looking at:

Photo by Chris Ibbotson

If you said “champagne,” you’re way off. It’s Martini & Rossi's notoriously crappy, hangover-inducing asti spumante, a college-party favorite. But if you walk into most American supermarkets asking for champagne, this is what they’ll point you to. If you’re like me and most Americans, you’ve probably never had authentic champagne, and you don’t give a fuck.

As for authentic Parmesan, forget it. We don’t even care whether we’re eating “cheese” in the first place. Kraft singles omitted the controversial word from the main label a long time ago, and we, the eagle-eyed consumers of America, just kept faithfully shoveling it into our shopping carts.

Screencap from ReadLionCanada on YouTube

Be honest—even if this is a stupid restriction brought about by Italian snobbery, do you really think the spider eggs and salt you shake onto your pizza deserve to be called “Parmesan,” a word meaning “from Parma, Italy"?

Now, for the record, even at its worst, our Parmesan isn't spider eggs and salt. It's mostly Parmesan cheese as defined by the FDA, plus, according to Coupland, "microcrystalline cellulose, a powder added to prevent caking." He also explained why dietary fiber is in so much of our food:

"I think they want the stuff to be refrigerated, but I don’t think most people refrigerate it. Even if you write 'Refrigerate this stuff' on the package, you’re gonna be nervous that your customers aren’t going to. You can’t go in and enforce that. So in order to get the stuff to last, well, they have to put some cellulose in there, which stops the pieces of cheese sticking together."

There's also a little potassium sorbate in there. It's an additive, yes, but one found in nature. And that's it. A short list of ingredients, all things considered.

"I like Kraft cheese. I’ve got a can of the stuff at home," Coupland told me. "Industrial manufacturing is all about making something consistent. It’s not like it’s awful." 

I'm being honest when I say that "It's not like it's awful" is exactly what I think when I eat 90 percent of the foods I eat. It's just flavor powder. If you're like me, you probably mispronounce it and say “parma-jann” anyway. So if the can suddenly says “Parmesan-flavored product,” will you even notice, let alone hesitate to buy it?

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Someone Made an 8-Bit 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' Video Game

The Cinnamon Club's Bombay Burner

Food snobs always moan about English curry. "Tikka masala doesn’t even exist in India!" they cry. And so what? Neither do social equality or traffic laws. For better or for worse, the English "curry night" has now become an institution in its own right—a beery show of bravado that's a bit like the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter but with more football songs and embarrassed women.

Yet Britain's bastardization of Indian cuisine recently came back to bite me. I'd got in touch with the Cinnamon Club in central London because I wanted to try the Bombay Burner—their own creation and apparently the hottest curry in the world.

With the dish sitting in front of me, my eyes were streaming before I'd even picked up a fork.

Vivek Singh

I say it's apparently the hottest curry because it's almost impossible to measure the overall heat of a composite cooked dish, as Vivek Singh, creator of the Bombay Burner, explained to me.

The curry consists of minced lamb stuffed into 24 halves of the hottest Scotch bonnets you can find outside of the Caribbean, and blended with a combination of other chilies, including habanero, jalapeño, bird’s eye, Thai green, and the Dorset Naga, a sub-strain of the Bhut Jolokia and up there with the hottest in the world.

I could try to work out the overall level on the Scoville scale, but the bottom line is that this was a plate of fucking hot chilies stuffed with even hotter chilies and slathered in chili sauce. You'd be hard-pressed to find something spicier outside of a can of pepper spray.

The chefs coughed and spluttered after checking the smallest bite of the curry for seasoning, which wasn't a particularly promising sign for the well-being of my digestive tract.

I had to sign a disclaimer stating that I understood the risks associated with eating the Bombay Burner and was doing so at my own volition. I'm not sure how well it would stand up in a court of law if I were killed, but it certainly added to the sense of ceremony.

I didn't really have a game plan, so opted to handle the challenge with a short burst of speed eating, figuring I could knock back all of the stuffed chilies before the spice caught up with me.

I was wrong; turns out trying to solve this with tactics was like trying to tactically approach a swimming pool full of burning oil. After just two half chilies, I was already struggling; the heat was so intense that I could feel it in my hands and face as much as in my mouth.

The chemical that gives chilies such a fierce heat is capsaicin, a substance so potent that, when used to make pepper spray, it causes temporary blindness in protesters who've become a little too human rights-y for the police to handle with batons and shields alone.

Just as I was beginning to face up to the physical strain of my dinner, the more transcendental effects of the capsaicin began to take hold. Self-styled "chili heads" often describe a mildly euphoric endorphin rush brought on by substantial chili ingestion. There was nothing euphoric about my experience; it felt more like I was K-holing in a house fire.

But unwilling to throw in the towel, I picked up my fork and stab-chew-swallowed until the plate was clear.

Molten tears and glowing lips aside, it was a delicious curry. The general rule behind a dish this intense is to create something that still hits all the flavor marks you'd expect—otherwise, why not just serve up a plate of Nagas and be done with it?

Unfortunately, the chefs weren't satisfied with my completion of the dish, so they brought me out a plate of Nagas, which were stuffed with the same vicious blend of chilies that make up the Bombay Burner.

This second serving didn't bother with the courtesy of trying to provide any flavor marks—it just destroyed my taste buds and set fire to my tongue.

After two mouthfuls I threw in the towel, drained a couple of lassis, and tried to focus on blander, happier times. Still, Vivek said that 400 people have tried the Bombay Burner and I was now one of only five who'd been able to finish it. I didn't think I'd done too badly.

A few hours later, that warm glow of pride gave way to something else entirely. What started as a slight rumble grew steadily more violent, and by the time I got home, my stomach sounded and felt like a washing machine full of spanners.

I turned to an age-old remedy for extinguishing spice, which—on reflection—may not have been the best decision. I don't know if you've ever drunk four pints of milk in one hour, but it doesn't exactly make for a settled stomach.

As is often the case with curry, the heat unfortunately remained intact throughout the entire digestion process. Later that evening, I relived all the fun of the afternoon, only this time (luckily) without any of the waiting staff there to witness my pain.

I really don't recommend you try the Bombay Burner. But you should definitely order it, then duck out and let your friends have a go.

Follow Mitch Syrett on Twitter.

P0rnBurger is a website chronicling a man's journey to cook one magnificent burger a week, and take a picture of it. Then eat it. Eventually, it will make its way to the bottom of a toilet bowl, but the website doesn't document that part of the adventure. And I'm okay with that, especially considering most of these burgers look like they really put the sore in assholer. Keep giong for a couple more selections. Then come over for a St. Patty's BBQ tonight. Thanks to Thornbush Hero, proof-positive that even prickly bushes can slay dragons and rescue princesses. And to Matthew, the man behind the burgers. Overnight me one?

Fred Phelps. Photo via Getty

Yesterday, Nathan Phelps, the son of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps, posted a note on Facebook claiming that his father is "on the edge of death at Midland Hospice house in Topeka, Kansas." He also mentioned that Fred was excommunicated from the church in August of last year, but didn't give any details as to why. Although the information at this point is sparse and unofficial, Westboro spokesman and Radiohead fanboy Steve Drain told the Daily News "Fred Phelps is having some health problems. He’s an old man and old people get health problems.”

In celebration of the icy hand of death caressing Fred's gross old body, we reached out to Lucien Greaves, the leader of the Satanic Temple, who last summer performed a "Pink Mass" over the grave of Fred's mother in order to turn her into a lesbian in the afterlife. When we spoke to him at that time, he told us, "Fred himself is getting pretty long in the tooth, and I hope to be presiding over his Pink Mass before long," so yesterday we asked Lucien what he thought of the recent news of Fred's demise, and if there are still plans to turn him gay after he dies. We have republished his response in full below.

It is often considered proper form for the remaining party among two established enemies, when one is dead or dying, to make disingenuous statements of remorse—to express that "nobody wishes death" upon their opponent. You’ll find no such dissembling from me. As I write this, Fred Phelps is now in the process of doing probably the one thing that he’ll ever do for which he will have my gratitude: He is dying. And while some part of me thinks, the sooner the better, another part of me hopes he lingers long enough to savor the full terror that must consume a mind as superstitious and bitterly haunted as his during its last moments of life.

The claim that Fred Phelps had been excommunicated from the Westboro Baptist Church within its recent history is new to me. I only hope that it is true, and that the consequence of this excommunication is that Fred finds himself frightened and alone on his deathbed now, abandoned by the only people he personally shared his spiteful and depraved sense of mission with.

In his life, Phelps can be credited with many an inadvertent positive influence. As a caricature of cruel religious-based inhumanity, Phelps often rallied people in opposition to his stupidity, and he served as a ludicrous arch-villain. He was a living argument ad absurdum in support of all of the things he detested and decried. On the eve of Phelps’s death, I think there is much that the American public can be proud of. We can be proud not only of the strong counter-protests that followed the Westboro Baptist Church wherever they flagrantly and tastelessly displayed their disgusting malice, but also that we live in an environment where Fred Phelps was allowed to publicly spew his vindictive ideas with such infuriating and thoughtless impunity. It is infinitely better to suffer the few Fred Phelpses that will surely always exist than to live in a political environment in which odious speech is regulated by an officiating body.

The Satanic Temple exercised its own right to offensive Free Speech in our performance of the Pink Mass at Fred Phelps’s mother’s grave this past summer. After having two same-sex couples (one male, one female) engage in homoerotic activity at the grave site, we declared Fred Phelps’s mother a post-mortem homosexual conversion. At the time, I predicted that Fred hadn’t too much longer till he would pass, and I stated—in a direct tweet to the WBC—that I would be presiding over Fred’s own Pink Mass before too long. As I have made a promise to a dying man, I fully intend to do my very best to see it through, and the pomp and circumstance of this Pink Mass will surely far, far exceed that of the original event in Meridian, Mississippi.

For more on the Satanic Temple, go to thesatanictemple.com

This is a selection of Anucha "Cha" Saengchart's low cost cosplay outfits. They actually look a lot more like no-cost cosplay outfits. Anucha runs a Facebook page called Lowcost Cosplay, which is filled with even more costumes. He definitely has a knack for capturing the essence of a character with as little as possible. Me? I have a knack for capturing the essence of human souls in soul snares and using them to perform black magic. Plus I'm pretty good at making voodoo dolls. *stab stab stab* Did anybody feel that? Somebody should be in great pain right now. Keep going for a ton more. Thanks to lilco, META, Carmen, ChaosLex and A, who have every intention of using one of these for this year's Halloween costume.

A man from Dunedin, New Zealand shall henceforth be known as "FULL METAL HAVOK MORE SEXY N INTELLIGENT THAN SPOCK AND ALL THE SUPERHEROES COMBINED WITH FROSTNOVA." At 99 characters, it is the longest legally allowed by the country's Department of Internal Affairs.

Read more...

To commemorate the centenary of the Great War, the diaries of 3,987 British soldiers have been digitized and made available online. They contain first-hand accounts of trench warfare, gas attacks — oh, and that time two cats and a dog were suspected of being spies.

Read more...

On Earth, farts are typically no big deal -- smelly, harmless, and they quickly dissipate. But if you're an astronaut, every fart is a ticking time bomb. The gases in farts are flammable, which can quickly become a problem in a tiny pressurized capsule in the middle of space where your fart gases have no where to go. In this "oldie but goodie" study from the late 1960s, scientists fed subjects a then-state-of-the-art space diet compared with a "bland formula." They discovered that the space

Own the full Batman experience for just $25 today in one attractive set. [WBShop]

Read more...

There's not been a lot of discussion of evolution in Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos so far, and yet a very slight reference to it was so upsetting to Fox's Oklahoma City affiliate that they just "happened" to run a promo for the nightly news over the show's sole mention it, as you can see in the above video.

Read more...

UPDATE: Cosmos writer Steven Soter responds to my critique here. The first episode of the ambitious reboot of Cosmos, which debuted last night, closely follows the template of the first episode of the original. It also differs in some important ways--most of them right on target, but one of them unfortunately off the mark. Special effects have advanced greatly since Carl Sagan's 1980 original; the new visualizations are both more dramatic and more realistic. Science has advanced greatl