The following New Year’s Eve, Clark brought on even more musical acts, including Billy Preston, Tower of Power, The Pointer Sisters, and Linda Ronstadt. Once again, Clark anchored in Times Square while the festivities came to us via the Queen Mary for the second year in a row. However, this time around, the Queen Mary portion of the show was hosted by George Carlin, who kicked things off with a joke about the ship and how, during the previous year, “6 and a half million people paid a million and a half dollars to walk on a ship that isn’t going anywhere.”

Throughout the show, Carlin checks in with Clark to see how things are going in New York and introduces the different musical guests. He also does stand-up a couple times, mostly utilizing material from his albums, like the “White Harlem” routine from Occupation: Foole and the “Some Werds” bit from Toledo Window Box (“Refrigerator-freezer is entirely too long. It should be refrigideezer.”) In between these segments, Carlin appears in a few short sketches where he plays the ship’s captain, Captain Flotsam. After the ball drops, we’re even treated to the rare sight of Carlin dancing—in case you needed any more reasons to check out the show.

In 1974, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve switched to ABC, where it’s remained ever since. Clark stayed with it as the anchor until he had a stroke in 2004. He then passed the duties over to Ryan Seacrest, who continues to host the show to this day. Clark died in 2012.

You can watch the entire 1973-1974 New Year’s Rockin’ Eve broadcast with George Carlin below.

The post George Carlin Hosted the Second-Ever ‘New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ appeared first on VICE.

Being Eddie also comes on the heels of several recent documentaries focusing on comedians. With so many different platforms, it can be hard to keep up with everything that’s out there, so we wanted to put together a small selection of comedy docs that might also be of interest. Here are a few of the more well-received ones you can check out right now.

4. Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in 2 Pieces

Last year’s two-part documentary on Steve Martin is split into separate episodes, focusing on his early career and his career now, respectively. Along for the ride are Tina Fey, Jerry Seinfeld, Selena Gomez, and, of course, longtime pal Martin Short, among others. It currently sits at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, with an audience score of 94%, and is available exclusively on Apple TV.

3. Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

In large part a conversation between director Rob Reiner and his close friend of 60 years, Albert Brooks, this 2023 documentary tells Brooks’s life story from childhood to the present. It also features insights from generations of comedians, including David Letterman, Ben Stiller, Wanda Sykes, and Nikki Glaser. Rotten Tomatoes currently rates it 97% fresh, with an 89% audience score. You can stream it now on HBO Max.

2. John Candy: I Like Me

Directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds, John Candy: I Like Me was released in September and follows the brief but memorable career of John Candy, featuring home videos, outtakes, and other rare footage. Also included are interviews with many of Candy’s contemporaries and co-stars like Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, and Macaulay Culkin. Right now, its Rotten Tomatoes score is at 89%, with a 97% audience score. Look for it on Prime Video.

1. George Carlin’s American Dream

This two-part documentary about George Carlin was released in 2022 and directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio. With contributions from his family as well as people like Kevin Smith, Bill Burr, and Patton Oswalt, it covers every era of Carlin’s life. Currently, the Rotten Tomatoes critic score is at 100%, and the audience score is 92%. George Carlin’s American Dream won an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. Check it out on HBO Max.

The post ‘Being Eddie’ and 4 Other Documentaries About Comedians Streaming Right Now appeared first on VICE.

This isn’t all that surprising, seeing as how Pryor, Carlin, and Bruce have long been considered to be among the best and most influential people in their field. What’s extra interesting about those selections, however, is the fact that all three of them were in the military before doing stand-up. And fittingly enough, for three of the most rebellious comics on those lists, each of them was kicked out after a brief stint. Veteran’s Day seemed like an appropriate time to look back on their short-lived military careers.

Lenny Bruce

In 1942, Lenny Bruce joined the U.S. Navy at just 16 years old. He was a shell passer and would see action in Africa, Italy, and France. Though he had an excellent record for the most part, he wouldn’t last the entirety of his teenage years. In 1945, he told a group of psychiatrists at Newport Naval Hospital in Rhode Island that he “sometimes” enjoyed wearing women’s clothing. “When is that?” they asked. He replied, “When they fit.”

Bruce was initially given an undesirable discharge for his behavior. After an attorney reviewed his case and saw how ridiculous it was, they eventually changed it to an honorable discharge.  

George Carlin

George Carlin joined the Air Force in 1954 and served as a radar technician. It was during that time that he first started working as a radio DJ in Shreveport, Louisiana. He was court-martialed three times in three years and received several other disciplinary punishments in addition. In 1957, he received a general discharge; among the reasons listed in his discharge papers were “driving while intoxicated” and “disrespecting an Air Policeman.”

Richard Pryor

First joining the Army in 1958, Richard Pryor would serve for just 18 months. As Pryor told it, his experience transformed him into a “vicious killing machine” one weekend when his unit was watching the Lana Turner movie Imitation of Life. During one of the more racially sensitive scenes in the film, a white soldier started laughing, which led to an altercation between him and one of Pryor’s friends. The white soldier had the upper hand, prompting Pryor to stab him with a switchblade several times. He got thrown in jail for the incident, and, fortunately, was able to get an honorable discharge because the base commander was about to retire and didn’t want to deal with the situation. 

The post ‘Rolling Stone’ and Comedy Central’s Top 3 Stand-Ups Were All Kicked Out of the Military appeared first on VICE.

But you still know who the big ones are considered to be, despite your personal preferences. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you when names like George Carlin and Richard Pryor are considered among the best to do it. You probably also wouldn’t bat an eyelash if someone like Eddie Murphy or Jerry Seinfeld were to come up, even if they’re not your cup of tea. The general consensus is the general consensus.

That said, every once in a while, a piece of evidence comes along that’s hard to argue with. Something that makes you wonder if it might actually be possible to label someone the greatest without bias. Today, we’re going to be looking at just that, in the form of a clip from The 7th Annual American Comedy Awards—the entirety of which has been uploaded to YouTube courtesy of Clown Jewels. In an isolated segment from the original 1993 broadcast, Carlin gives every other comedian of his time something to contend with, and in less than six minutes at that. Let’s break it down beat by beat…

From the beginning, we have Jerry Seinfeld and his Seinfeld co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus bringing Carlin up and paying homage to his famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine. Joking that words like the ones on Carlin’s list can be used in context according to the censors, Louis-Dreyfus gives Carlin an appropriately vulgar introduction, and we’re off and running. Carlin starts, “I guess everybody knows the difference between show business and a gang bang is that in show business, everyone wants to go on last.” One joke in and he’s got Whoopi Goldberg laughing already. He also gets her with a line about Joe Piscopo going straight to the top if a bomb were to hit the building—a clear indication of how many funny people were in attendance that night.

At three minutes in, Carlin jokes, “Some people see the glass as half empty, some people see the glass as half full. I see the glass as too big.” This gets a good response from Billy Crystal, who nods affirmingly to another unseen member of the audience. So far, so good. What else do you got, George?

“I just thought of something. I’m willing to bet that no one…no one hooked on crack can play the bagpipes.” Huge laugh from Richard Pryor. Nicely done. Well, you can’t really hope for better than that, can you? Might as well wrap things up now.

Wait, there’s more? “W.C. Fields once said that to make most people laugh, you just have to show a guy dressed up as an old woman falling down a manhole, but to make a comedian laugh, it really has to be an old woman.” Now we’ve got Eddie Murphy laughing hysterically. And OK, maybe Carlin accomplished it with someone else’s line, but he still delivered it in his signature George Carlin way, so you know what? We’re counting it. 

And until a video surfaces of someone accomplishing an equally impressive feat, we’re just gonna have to go ahead and file this under G.O.A.T.

Check it out for yourself below.

The post G.O.A.T. Status: Watch George Carlin Make Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy Laugh in Resurfaced Clip appeared first on VICE.

Carlin’s record is for HBO specials specifically. Between 1977 and 2008, he released 14 of them. That number is a bit iffy only because 1997’s George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy isn’t a full-on stand-up special. It was partially a retrospective of his career and also contains an interview with Jon Stewart at the end. Yet, he does perform stand-up in it—even if it’s less than a half hour’s worth—and it is a special, OK? So for those reasons, it technically counts.

Whether Carlin has 13 or 14 specials doesn’t really matter, though, because the fact is that very few people are close to him. That’s not to say comics aren’t cranking out material at a similar pace; if Kathy Griffin would’ve kept releasing her specials on HBO, she would’ve broken Carlin’s record in 2011. Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Ricky Gervais, and Dave Chappelle would also be nearing his record if they’d all remained with HBO.

But as it stands, there’s only one stand-up comic closing in on Carlin’s HBO record, and that’s current HBO employee Bill Maher. Overall, the Real Time host has released 13 specials, though only 11 of them were for HBO—2012’s Crazy Stupid Politics was for Yahoo! Screen, and 2016’s WhinyLittleBitch streamed live on Facebook. Still, 11 is still more than anybody else, and there’s no sign of another comedian coming close to Carlin any time soon.

Robert Klein put out the first HBO comedy special in 1975, and he has only nine to his name. Dennis Miller landed his first HBO special seven years before Maher, but he still has only eight, and neither he nor Klein has done anything for HBO since 2010. So it looks like it’s up to you, Bill. No pressure, but if you’re looking for a shortcut, you can always try the ol’ George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy trick.

The post The One Comedian Nearing George Carlin’s Stand-Up Record appeared first on VICE.

The cursed hour-long special is the work of Dudesy, a podcast hosted by Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen and curated by an AI program with the same name. At the start of the special, Dudesy intones that it devoured the work of the long dead comedic genius and rendered it into a terrible, hour-long facsimile of Carlin’s work called I’m Glad I’m Dead. It’s all on YouTube for everyone to cringe along to, and fair warning from a fan of the real Carlin such as myself: it can not be unseen. 

The AI comedian, which is not funny and only sounds vaguely like Carlin, spends the hour riffing on various topics like Taylor Swift, U.S. gun culture—and of course, hyping the supposedly revolutionary potential of AI technology.

Carlin’s family did not give Dudesy permission to create the special, and his daughter, Kelly, publicly denounced it on X. “My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius,” she wrote on the website formerly known as Twitter. “These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can’t let what has fallen into it stay there.”

Sasso and Kultgen played a clip of the Carlin-bot on their show before dropping the entire special on YouTube. The pair seemed visibly uncomfortable during the segment—Sasso especially. The former Mad TV comedian lambasted AI comedy. 

“I personally dont want to hear a fuckin’ Nirvana song that’s not written by Kurt Cobain and played by fuckin’ Nirvana, I dont give a shit, I don’t give a shit. It’s not real, it doesn’t matter,” Sasso said. “Anyone can do an impression, Dudesy is doing an impression…I don’t think a new comic has anything to worry about because we need new voices.”

“Dudesy has consumed every Carlin special and has pulled off something miraculous, but its not, by definition, new. It’s taken from a bunch of other shit,” Sasso said. 

Despite the obvious discomfort, the pair still pushed people to watch the special. The podcast exists to promote Dudesy, and promote Dudesy they did. A screen behind their heads displayed the name of the AI model, and Sasso wore a large belt emblazoned with the AI’s logo. The Dudesy show launched in March 2022, and Sasso and Kultgen have said they can’t reveal the company behind the AI due to a non-disclosure agreement. 

The special is a little more than an hour long and begins with a disclaimer where the Dudesy AI explained it was doing an impression. It was intercut with crowd noises and featured AI-created images that reflected the bits. The gist of the special is that Carlin is back from the dead to tell some jokes and try to allay your fears about AI. 

“AI will not replace most jobs, it’s going to make them easier,” Dudesy as Carlin said in the special. “Right now, you should be watching a few YouTube videos to figure out how to train ChatGPT to do your job for you so you can dick off all day and still get a raise. And if AI does replace your job, rest assured the billionaires will still find a way to force you into wage slavery for $10 to $15 hours a day so you won’t have time to think about restructuring society into a more equitable model for everyone.”

The AI model then painted a picture of a horrifying world where all your dead favorite comedians are back, forever. “I might be the first standup comic brought back from the dead by AI but I certainly won’t be the last. Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Bill Hicks, Robin Williams, Dick Gregory, Andy Kaufman, Mom Mabley, Sam Kinnison,” it said. As it name-checks the dead, grotesque AI generated version of their faces flash on the screen. 

“Everybody’s coming back and we’re all gonna have our own 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 365 day a year stream commenting on everything that’s happening in the world as it happens,” it said. “AI-resurrected standup comedians are gonna be the news anchors of the next decade. Which, now that I think of it, means news anchors are probably out of a job too.”

Dudesy doing Carlin spins this as something to be embraced. Imagine Cosby jokes without all the Cosby sexual assault, it explained. What if we had Catholic priests without the crimes? AI, it said, will usher in a heavenly future with no theft. Save for, of course, the theft we’re witnessing before our very eyes as a machine scoops up a lifetime’s work of an artist and uses it to spin a fairytale about a future where art is replaced by machines controlled by the wealthiest among us.

I’ll be honest. Fear is at the core of my disgust. The early battle against AI feels like it’s already over. The financial incentives are too great and the billionaires pushing AI will do anything to make a few extra bucks. The idea of stripping creative jobs from humans and ceding it to cheaper machines is just too lucrative an idea to pass on.

Case in point: Valve will now allow AI-powered games onto its Steam digital distribution platform. The hit video game The Finals uses AI-generated voices. SAG-AFTRA is penning a deal with an AI voice generation studio. Journalist Jeff Jarvis testified before the U.S. Senate about the need to protect the rights of AI journalists. Human creativity is already being swallowed up. It’s already here.

But all this work is built on human training data. Midjourney can’t generate anything until it’s pored over millions of human created artworks. ChatGPT and other LLMs rely on vast swaths of copyrighted material created by human hands. Dudesy can’t fart out a crass imitation of George Carlin without viewing 14 standup specials that are the sum of a human’s life, dreams, and labor.

AI will win in this battle, but I don’t believe it will win the war. It’s an open question whether people will accept AI-generated content, and the public reception to the faux-Carlin special hasn’t exactly been overwhelmingly positive. Even Sasso, a comedian linked to this project and ostensibly tasked with promoting it, doesn’t really buy it. 

And when AI runs out of human material, it will have to devour its own output to keep the churn of content coming, and the results will be disastrous. But we’re in for a rough and very stupid few years as the moneyed classes buoy this experiment. More memories will be desecrated. More jobs will be lost. More people like Sasson and Kultgen will wince into the camera, acting as handmaidens to the short-term destruction of their own craft.

The post The George Carlin AI Standup Is Worse Than You Can Imagine appeared first on VICE.

It is in this heightened and cramped climate that on Wednesday, August 1, the National Comedy Center opens its doors, the first museum in the country fully dedicated to comedy. It’s been built in Jamestown, a city on the western end of New York near Pennsylvania and Ohio, population 30,000—essentially in the middle of fucking nowhere. It is where, though, Lucille Ball was born and raised. Ball dreamed of a cultural landmark of this sort—not the festival held in her honor or the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum erected in her hometown, but one solely yet broadly focused on her craft and its evolution. Nearly 30 years after her death, she’s gotten her wish.

According to the National Comedy Center’s “About” page, it will include “50 immersive exhibits,” which take you “on an interactive journey through comedy history, from early vaudeville acts to the latest viral memes.” It reportedly cost $50 million to construct, with millions from state and federal funding as well as private donations. (Chuck Schumer, a New York senator and cousin of the comedian Amy Schumer, was a big proponent of the project.) In an introductory video on the center’s website, famous comedians and the daughters of famous dead comedians discuss its importance—and why comedy should be taken seriously.

“The thing that makes comedy so significant, especially in the States,” Seinfeld says over music in the opening, “it’s one of the few things that, Americans, we really invented this as a world.” (Demanding credit for everything has become a major preoccupation of Seinfeld’s retirement, as he drinks coffee and drives cars. Take that Jonathan Swift!)

Entering the museum, a refurbished art deco train station from the 1930s, is almost a futuristic endeavor. You, as a visitor, create what’s called a “sense of humor” profile designed to personalize your experience. According to the Wall Street Journal, you can stop to check out George Carlin’s entire archive, Rodney Dangerfield’s duffel bag, or Lenny Bruce’s black trench coat. The Associated Press press mentions Jerry’s “puffy shirt” from Seinfeld will be on display as well as scripts from The Dick Van Dyke Show. The joint isn’t short, either, on interaction. There’s apparently a camera to fuck around with, one that you can twist and turn to see the sets of different late-night talk shows; a hologram theater with a virtual Jim Gaffigan pacing around and delivering a set; and something called “comedy karaoke,” where you can try out some of your favorite pithy one-liners. (There’s a bar, too!) With 37,000 square feet to get through, it’s obviously not lacking in shit to see and do.

“It is not a hall of fame,” Robert Klein says later in the center’s video, “but is a comprehensive appreciation of the art.” (Gaffigan compares it to baseball’s Cooperstown, which is a hall of fame.)

Complete comprehensiveness is what the center most wants—or at least hopes—to achieve. And it could arrive, really, at no better time—at a moment when we are clearly asking the very question about what we’ve been laughing at all along.

As soon as you walk into the lobby, there’s a statement, the Wall Street Journal reports, that “will warn [you] that the comedy doesn’t necessarily represent the views of the museum.” Journey Gunderson, the center’s executive director, has repeatedly emphasized that she did not censor anything. “We’ve taken the approach that when it’s necessary for storytelling, to do justice to the history of comedy, we are including the work of controversial figures,” she told the Journal. “We’re not going to pretend that The Cosby Show wasn’t revolutionary for sitcoms.”

The National Comedy Center isn’t going to solve any of comedy’s woes—but it can, in the very least, be what any great museum should be: a place to witness, and learn from, great successes and tragedies.

“Culture is preserved by meaningful storytelling,” Gunderson said in a statement to Forbes. “What these artists have done is important, and it should be both celebrated and contextualized, drawing connections that make the past relevant to the present.”

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The post America’s First Comedy Museum Preserves a Time When We Knew How to Laugh appeared first on VICE.

From his 1971 countercultural transformation until his death in 2008, fans and colleagues saw George Carlin as a consistent and incisive bullshit detector for American society. I’m a comic, and in my circles, Carlin is invoked with the reverence of a saint. On his podcast, comedian Todd Glass has his guests “swear to George Carlin” instead of swearing to God when they want to convince everyone they’re not kidding around. Carlin is that big of deal.

Unfortunately, stand-up comedy doesn’t tend to age well. So much of the humor relies on a contextual understanding that is hard to communicate through time. After a couple years, even the best material can have all the edge and insight of a Cliff Clavin quote in an email forward from your grandmother. Wanting to know if Saint George could avoid this fate, I rewatched Carlin’s 1999 HBO special You Are All Diseased. I picked this one because I remember watching it as a kid, but also because 1999 was the last time anything in our society seemed to make any sense. So much of our cultural and political landscape has changed (some might say “gone to shit”) in the past 18 years. Would any of this still resonate? More important, would it still seem funny?

There are certainly parts of the special that haven’t stood the test of time. I watch hours of stand-up a week at shows and open mics, and, well, most of it sucks. I have a practiced ear for comedy clichés, and there are definitely a lot of those here, even if Carlin was the originator of them. In 2017, Carlin’s insistence on “ass rape” as a metaphor for any kind of exploitation, as well as his usage of “cocksucker” for anybody he doesn’t like, seem not only homophobic but also trite and uninspired. A lot of the rhetorical scaffolding holding up the punchlines shows its age—the trend in stand-up these days is much more conversational, and Carlin introducing a list of song parodies or some unconnected bits of wordplay make the slight bits feel even slighter. Yet even with this clunky delivery, most of the actual jokes remain pretty solid.

I had already prepared myself to hate a chunk where Carlin talks about fictional restaurant and bar names, a mind-numbingly common premise now (an open mic game: drink every time you hear a “Pho” pun), but his suggestion that TGI Fridays could sell more drinks if they changed their name to “Holy Shit It’s Only Wednesday” made me laugh out loud. For all of his reputed darkness, gleeful silliness is just as integral to Carlin’s success. His anarchic sense of joy is what’s missing from his imitators in political comedy today, those who tend to come off preachy or dour—two things Carlin never was. It’s interesting we remember him as a spitter of bile when there’s a good chunk of time here devoted to his idea for a television program called “Missy Takes a Big Dump in the Woods.”

I thought Carlin’s overtly political material might age worse than his absurdity, but that’s mostly untrue. Sure, there are some corny Clinton jokes (including the most sexist refutation of Bill Clinton’s lechery possible: that he sucks because he didn’t think to cheat with somebody hot). There’s some talk of the dangerous nonsense of religious dogma that seems a little beside the point now that godless neo-Nazi billionaires run our country. (Really? A man in his 60s just discovered that people make up stories about God?) But the overarching theme of Carlin’s material here, that human beings are very afraid—of terrorists, of germs, of God himself—and that we sometimes greatly compromise our own quality of life in service of those fears is just as relevant today as it ever was. When he describes the prospect of a terrorist attack as “exciting” in his opening bit, his stance seems to be that a full life is impossible without some danger, and since some danger is inevitable, we might as well embrace it. It might seem dark on its face, but even Carlin’s darkest jokes here ultimately have a sort of groovy, life-affirming perspective that a lot of his imitators sadly lack.

Of course, danger feels even less avoidable now than it did in 1999. It’s certainly possible that being able to “lighten up” in the face of it is a luxury that a lot of people don’t have. But I don’t think Carlin’s saying people are wrong to take their survival seriously. Rather, according to Carlin, if you stop having fun and let the autocrats he rails against set up shop in your brain, you might as well be dead already.

Follow Kath Barbadoro on Twitter.

The post Does George Carlin’s ‘You Are All Diseased’ Actually Suck? appeared first on VICE.

A tiger cub, 40 of which were found dead and frozen at a Thai temple. Photo by Willow Grove, via Wikipedia

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE

US News

• Trump Gives Millions to Vets After Media Report
  At least 11 veterans’ charities have received donations from Donald Trump’s foundation within the past week; checks written on the same day or in the days after reporters questioned him about the money he claimed to have raised at a fundraiser in January. At least 11 of the 41 charities listed by the Trump campaign got the money on or after May 24. —NBC News
• Police Investigate Parents in Gorilla Shooting Case
  Police will investigate the killing of a gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo after a three-year-old boy fell into the animal’s enclosure. Cincinnati Police said the inquiry related only to “the actions of the parents/family that led up to the incident,” rather than zoo safety procedures. Hamilton County Prosecutor said criminal charges were “possible.” —AP
• Baby Born with Zika-Related Defects in New Jersey
  A woman diagnosed with the Zika virus gave birth to a girl with microcephaly at a New Jersey hospital, the first case in the New York City tristate area. The mother is a visitor to the US and contracted the disease overseas, according to officials at Hackensack University Medical Center. —ABC News
• Microsoft Opens Up Augmented Reality to Rivals
  Microsoft has announced that it is opening up the Windows Holographic platform to third parties, a platform it can use to build its own virtual and augmented reality devices. Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group, said the company wanted to “unlock opportunities for the ecosystem.” —USA Today

International News

• Islamic State Hits Back at Iraqi Army
  Iraqi forces are facing fierce resistance from ISIS fighters on the outskirts of Fallujah, as the army attempts to push into the city. ISIS has launched a counter-attack in a southern suburb of Fallujah. UNICEF warns that an estimated 20,000 children remain among the 50,000 people trapped in the city.—Reuters
• Fort McMurray Residents Return After Wildfire
  Thousands of evacuees who fled from a massive wildfire in the Canadian oil city of Fort McMurray are set to return home on Wednesday. More than 90,000 people were ordered to leave when the wildfire began a month ago, and officials expect the city to reabsorb as many as 15,000 residents. —CBC News
• Former Miss Turkey Found Guilty of Insulting President
  Model Merve Buyuksarac, a former Miss Turkey, has been given a 14-month suspended prison sentence for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a poem she shared on Instagram. She is the latest of at least a dozen Turks to face such a trial and sentence. Her lawyer, Emre Telci, described the cases as “insult trials.” —Al Jazeera
• Tiger Cub Corpses Found Frozen at Thai Temple
  Some 40 tiger cub corpses have been found in freezers at a Thai Buddhist temple accused of animal abuse. Police and wildlife officials started an operation on Monday to remove the living tigers at the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi. The popular tourist attraction has been closed since the operation began. —BBC News

US Navy sailors stacking bricks of cocaine seized in 2004. (Photo by Operations Specialist 2nd Class Eric Weber, via Wikipedia)

Everything Else

• Billions Wasted on War on Cocaine
  Economists at MIT and the Universidad de los Andes say US taxpayers got a poor return on $4.3 billion spent fighting the cocaine trade in Colombia. Between 2000 and 2008, it cost the US $940,000 to eliminate each kilo of cocaine. —The Washington Post
• World’s Largest Rail Tunnel Opened in Switzerland
  The longest rail tunnel on the planet will be officially opened in Switzerland Wednesday. The 35-mile Gotthard base tunnel provides a high-speed rail link under the Swiss Alps between northern and southern Europe. —The Guardian
• Surfer Blood Guitarist Dies Aged 27
  Thomas Fekete, guitarist and founding member of Floridian band Surfer Blood, has died after battling a rare form of cancer. He was just 27. Fekete’s wife said he passed away “peacefully in his sleep.” —Noisey
• Oakland Launches Basic Income Experiment
  Tech startup business incubator Y Combinator will give 100 people in Oakland between $1,000 and $2,000 a month to see what impact free money will have on work patterns. The research team thinks a basic income could be a solution to greater automation. —Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our new video ‘A Completely Objective List of the Ten Best Comic Books of All Time.’

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Taking cues from Spark Master Tape and Tommy Wright, the Melbourne trouble/beat makers also drop some pretty spectacular samples including chopped Drake, comedian/realist George Carlin and a sample from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Check the sermon-like “Lacrimosa’” that features orchestral spookiness, a Carlin sound byte and gunshots. It’s perfect for getting up to good old-fashioned thuggery with your friends in a new bucket hat and with a fresh pack of Zappos in your pocket.

Also check out:

Kill Murray is Stoned and Kawaii

Did Silly Joel and the Candymen Just Drop the Greatest Line in Australian Hip Hop?

Confessions of a Staunch Nation

The post Premiere: The Mysterious ฿ ~ warlords ~ ฿ Drop Some Carlin and Drake On Their Debut appeared first on VICE.