ARTICLES BY AMIE BARRODALE
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 THE DEFENDER OF SNAKES
By Amie BarrodaleI thought of her as the defender of snakes. She was a German woman with shaggy, sandy blond hair. The first time I saw her, she was sitting with a group of paragliders at the Friends coffee shop. A snake charmer, dressed as a holy man, opened a flat wicker basket containing two cobras, whom he briefly serenaded.
"Your snakes hate you," she said. "You're terrible to treat them like that."...
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  THE VICE GUIDE TO NYC WAITSTAFF
THE MAN WITH A PAST
These are the waiters found in dark Italian restaurants owned and operated by Lebanese families. They generally work alone, handling the whole restaurant with the aid of a small boy who buses tables and has the mien of a monkey. These men, the men with histories, are generally in their mid-50s. They are slim, move elegantly, and have skin that appears to have spent decades veiled in cigarette smoke. Their manners are scrupulous. They go out of their...
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 GARY FISKETJON EDITS YOUR HEROES
The Vice InterviewGary Fisketjon is an editor at large and vice president of Knopf. When he worked at Vintage Books from 1980 to 1986, he created the Vintage Contemporaries series. Among the writers he has edited are Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, and Tobias Wol...
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 BURIED ALIVE
In a shrine room in a barn in a village in the Pyranees, it was 8 o'clock at night. The air was cool. On the floor were six or eight antique Persian rugs, and eight pillows arranged in an oval. Sitting cross-legged in the meditation position were the six of us who would be buried alive. Ten minutes ...
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 LITERARY
Book Reviews - The Harvester Of Sorrow IssueIF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER
This book is a bunch of bullshit. I love Belle and Sebastian more than anybody in the world probably, but here’s the thing about them: They are BORING. Beautiful music...
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 WE GOT OUT
North Korean Refugees Tell Us About the HomelandI met these three people in a nine-story Christian church for North Korean refugees in Seoul. I don't know the church's name; the reverend told me just to call it Seoul Church. It looked exactly like a Christian church in Texas or anywhere in the heartland. The parishioners wore suits and dresses; t...
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 BOTTLED UP
Making Change With the ChineseThe Chinese ladies who redeem bottles and cans in the recycling machines outside Key Food on Ave. A and 3rd Street in New York's East Village treat it like a job. They wake up early in the morning and collect recyclables in garbage bags attached to shopping carts all day, and then they redeem everyt...
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 CAGED TIGERS
Exotic Pet Owners Stand Their GroundThese bobcats live in big outdoor pens (up to a quarter acre) and cat rooms in Lynn Culver's house in the mountains of West Arkansas. The ones raised from when they were little are tame, the others are "not affectionate."...
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 BLEEDING EARS
Stop Using Music as a Weapon!It's clearly cool to rock out. Sometimes I like to listen to music naked in my room. I also like to listen to music with my friends. And I found out that they do both of these things in the army all the time! Except they call it "torture lite" and "psyops."
Sometimes I go on a "song jag" wh...
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 SWEET HOME ALABAMA
Southern Schoolkids Are Ready to RumbleThe homemade weapons FEATURED HERE were confiscated from students enrolled in middle and high schools in the Huntsville City School district of Northern Alabama. They were chosen from among a huge collection of weapons kept by the Huntsville Campus Security Supervisor, Jami Holt. Holt calls the coll...
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 CLICHÉS ARE HATEFUL LIES
And I Can Prove ItI like clichés to say in jokes, but I hate people who think they are instructive. Those people are stupid. I set out to prove it by following the clichés to the letter. Watch this...
DON'T LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG
Where does this come from? Taking a bag of kittens to the river to ...
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 100 EXTRA DOS & DON'TS
Had enough? No? OK, let's get The Onion's Amie Barrodale to pump out 100 more.
1. Do joke around with immigrants and toddlers the same way you joke with your friends. Generally, this is a private kind of fun and nothing more, but when it's 4 a.m., and you're screaming and yelling to ...
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