(Note: your care mutual fund is likely to suffer critical shortfalls of care. Written for a specific audience).

The world’s biggest bodybuilding show has come and gone, and like always, the Mr Olympia contest seems curiously next to the controversy and drama. Two quick rules: a) everything in bodybuilding sucks except the bodybuilders, and b) complaining about sports is more fun than following sports. There were events in 2015 that we’ll be chewing over for a long time.

Phil Heath won a fairly uncontroversial victory. Shawn Rhoden was the only one who seemed to be pushing him, but when they turned around, it was all over from the back. Phil’s thickness and fullness just stole the show, and his structural issues (narrow clavicles etc) don’t seem to be holding him back at all. I noticed that one judge had him in second place in the prejudging. By the night show, all five had him in first.

The biggest story was Phil’s missing arch-rival: where is Kai Greene? Over the past few weeks he’s ended a long-lived contract with Musclemeds, launched his own company, failed to sign the contract for the contest, lost his chance at a near-guaranteed second place finish, and has released a nine minute video literally crying about it< all/a>. If you hear people saying he was “banned” from the contest, piss on them. He has not been banned. He did not sign the contract, and that’s the only reason he was not at the Olympia this year. Here’s IFBB promoter Robin Chang’s account of Kai Greene’s failure to put a signature on a piece of paper. Frankly, nothing about this story makes any sense, and although I have some theories I think we need more to go on.

Kai’s non-appearance left the door open for someone else to move up to number 2, and that someone else proved to be…Dexter Jackson. As a rule, he looks better in videos than photos. I don’t think anybody predicted this – Dexter is 46 and seemed to be a permanent fixture in the 4th-6th spot. I don’t know about this decision: his condition and proportions are great, but he’s fundamentally a pretty small guy in the lineup. Dexter is great…but top 2 great? My opinion vacillates.

Otherwise there’s just little storylines popping up and resolving themselves. Big Ramy was being touted as the heaviest bodybuilder ever to set foot on the Olympia stage…DIDN’T FUCKING HELP, DID IT? Enjoy your fifth place, you waterlogged Egyptian. I say this with the expectation that he will be a top-level threat once he figures out how to diet properly. The guy’s just overwhelmingly massive, and not necessarily in a good way. The cuts and details you want to see just aren’t there.

The big positive surprises of the show were Will Bonac and Dallas McCarver (who is just 24 years old). A lot of fullness and pop in both of them, and plenty of potential to shunt their way up the ranks. I’m concerned that Bonac keeps getting lost in the lineup – on his own, he’s pretty much flawless. Dennis Wolf and Branch Warren did their usual “ugly as fuck but still tough to beat” acts. Roelly Winklaar could have placed higher – he’s another one who keeps getting overlooked. Steve Kuclo had no business stepping on stage that weekend – does he even diet for shows these days?

In any case, the circus is over, and now these depleted athletes can partake in some bread.

What do you do when you have some new songs, but not enough for an album? When you’ve got unreleased tracks, but not enough for a compilation? When you’ve got a bunch of band members hanging around the studio, but they’re not seriously interested in a reunion? In 2010, Danish power metal band Iron Fire’s answer was to “do all three simultaneously.”

It’s hard to figure out exactly what sort of album this is – most database type websites consider it a new studio release, but most of it was written in 2003, and was present in rough form in various demos. It’s mixed up with a few, and all of them are recorded by the band’s former members: and it’s a metal band, so there’s a ton of former members.

I don’t know why they bothered tracking down every random asshole who was ever in this band to contribute instruments – you can’t hear any difference. The drums are very triggered and mechanical. The guitars are a pulverising backwash of distortion. You’re not going to be smiling and thinking “hey, that’s Morten Plenge on drums!” Everyone’s performance sounds fairly interchangeable, except for vocalist Martin Steene, who has always humanised some very inhuman music and continues to do so here.

The songs are all fairly strong, although it’s clear why some of them never appeared on a real Iron Fire album. “The Phantom Symphony” is long-winded, but contains a lot of tasty treats, tacky horror-movie obsessed lyrics aside. “Back to the Pit” and “The Graveyard” are just the usual fare. “Crossroads” is a ballad that serves to break up the relentless speed that dominates most of the album.

The new songs are better. “Reborn to Darkness” has a jangly, progressive edge to its riff approach. “Still Alive” lays on the quadtracked guitars, sounding more like Nevermore than a European power metal band. “My Awakening” is fast and powerful as fuck, probably the most immediate and memorable track on the album, with some well-placed death metal vocals in the chorus. The bonus version of the album contains an orchestral version of “Crossroads” and another re-recorded song called “Afterlife”, which sounds pleasant enough.

The presentation and production is good, but it’s not as much as a retrospective as you’d hope for – this is a VERY modern sounding Iron Fire. I hope you like downtuned guitars and death metal vocals. Ultimately I don’t know how necessary something like this is – Metalmorphosized is something aimed at the band’s hardcore fans, and they’d probably be more satisfied by hunting down the demos that these songs originally appeared on. Still one of the more memorable compilation-cum-studio-cum-reunion albums I’ve heard.

Before Burroughs decided his purpose in life was to beat the English language like a bitch who owed him money, he was writing things like this – a sane, lucid, and readable pulp novel about his addiction to heroin. Books about drugs often have a hallucinogenic quality, as if they’re trying to give the reader a second hand high. This isn’t like that. Burroughs is offering his body as a testing ground: he puts substances into it and writes about it in analytic terms.

This was shocking in 1953. In 2015, not so much. Rich trust fund brat pulls the silver spoon from his mouth and starts cooking coke on it: stop the presses. Even if it’s not a pack of lies like A Million Little Pieces, the story is very familiar. I feel like I’m reading about a man’s disclosure of sexual envy and mid-life ennui. We get it. This is not special.

Its interesting if you want to know more about drug culture in America before Vietnam, Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and all the rest. But really, not that much happens in it. Burroughs describes how he got involved with the scene, the interesting characters he met, and his occasional run-ins with the law. Beyond that, he doesn’t tell us much. This isn’t an exploration of man’s dark heart, it’s a police report.

Subsequent re-issues have tried to shoot steroids into the story with lurid, impressionistic cover art. But the original Ace Books cover art best captures the spirit of the tale: a man struggling with a woman, who has knocked a hypodermic syringe out of his hand. This is the most dramatic incident in the book, and even then it’s not all that interesting. Burroughs’ sexual proclivities are written about in the same dry way – he throws in off-handed mentions about boffing men, and then its back to scoring drugs. I was curious for more. These details about his life could have been expanded upon, and expounded upon. Instead, we get sketches.

But Junky has some moments where Burroughs really hits paydirt and gives us something good. I liked his description of being a drug addict. Paraphrased, it goes something like “I didn’t take drugs to get high. I took drugs to be functional. Heroin meant I could brush my teeth and shave myself and put on clean clothes. That was my high.” Pleasure operates at a tight Malthusian limit: no matter how much you dump into the brain, once a habit starts there will never be enough. I was reminded of a rotten.com article on crystal meth, and how quickly you degrade to a state where basic, mundane life is impossible without it.

Moments like that are chinks in the armor of Junky, and I wish there were more. Right now, it seems like a paradox – a tell-all book that tells almost nothing. I was hoping for more insights, more details, more specifics on what it’s like to be a man like Burroughs in the 1950s. I wonder if the good stuff was left on the cutting room floor: this was a different age for publishing, just as it was for everything else.

I suppose you could argue that Burroughs promotes a positive social message by making drugs look boring.