Why give a pot cookie to a nine-year-old?

 Posted by on 27 May 2009  Modern Life
May 272009
 

Answer: Because he can’t figure out the bong.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s son is autistic and has medical problems that probably leave him in serious pain. That’s “probably” because her son, whom she refers to as “J”, isn’t verbal enough to say. Lashing out at family members and caregivers, J was a challenge to deal with.

But none of the medical alternatives seemed worth the risk:

Last year, Risperdal was prescribed for more than 389,000 children—240,000 of them under the age of 12—for bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, and other disorders. Yet the drug has never been tested for long-term safety in children and carries a severe warning of side effects. From 2000 to 2004, 45 pediatric deaths were attributed to Risperdal and five other popular drugs also classified as “atypical antipsychotics.”

So, after gradually coming around to the idea, Lee and her husband got their son licensed to use medical marijuana, bought $80 worth of pot, in various forms, and started experimenting with ways to get him to take the drug:

We made the cookies with the marijuana olive oil, starting J off with half a small cookie, eaten after dinner. J normally goes to bed around 7:30 p.m.; by 6:30 he declared he was tired and conked out. We checked on him hourly. As we anxiously peeked in, half-expecting some red-eyed ogre from Reefer Madness to come leaping out at us, we saw instead that he was sleeping peacefully. Usually, his sleep is shallow and restless. J also woke up happy.

The story doesn’t yet have a fully happy ending — the family is still in the early stages of trying out medical marijuana. But it’s still worth the read, and I was particularly intrigued by how Lee feels about the social stigma of pot.

Perhaps he’s gunning for the Guinness World Record in irony, too?

 Posted by on 26 May 2009  Modern Life
May 262009
 

A man some call “Johnny Sue-nami” — he has earned the name by apparently filing more than 4,000 lawsuits worldwide — is now threatening to sue the people behind the Guinness Book of World Records. Why? Because they’re going to give him the Guinness World Record for most lawsuits, and he says they’re going to print false information about him:

Jonathan Lee Riches, aka Irving Picard, filed his latest legal fight this week in the Richland office of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, although he is incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

…

“The Guinness Book of World Records have no right to publish my work, my legal masterpieces.”

Previously, he’s also launched lawsuits against various celebrities, and even a bunch of things that can’t normally be sued: the video game Grand Theft Auto, the book Mein Kampf, the Appalachian Trail, the Roman Empire, and the 13 Tribes of Israel. It’s all cited on his Wikipedia page.

Steve Martin plus his Muppet peeps in a bluegrass hoedown

 Posted by on 26 May 2009  Vintage/Retro
May 262009
 

I can’t decide what I like best about this “Duelling Banjos” video. Is it:

a) Muppets playing bluegrass?

b) The explosive finale?

c) The fact that Steve Martin appears to be dressed up like Han Solo?

Found this clip at Boing Boing, where they inform me that it’s from 1977, and it’s Martin with “Lubbock Lou and His Jughuggers.” Great band name.

The head of my country is bad-ass

 Posted by on 26 May 2009  Modern Life
May 262009
 

michaelle_jean_1_11072007Most people think that the head of the Canada is the Prime Minister — that’s a common misconception, but it’s wrong. Actually, the head of our government is the PM, but our head of state is technically the Queen (or King, if it happens to be), who is represented over here by the Governor-General.

G-Gs, as they are (sometimes) colloquially known, are appointed by the PM, serve a mostly ceremonial role, and generally do all the boring “figurehead” and symbolic stuff of government.

Fun times.

Currently, our G-G is Michaelle Jean, and here’s what she did on her Monday:

First she gutted it. Then she had the bleeding heart pulled out of its furry, flabby carcass. Finally, she swallowed a slice of the mammal’s oozing organ.

And when it was all over Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean wiped the blood of a freshly slaughtered seal off her crimson-spattered fingertips.

…

Hundreds of Inuit at a community festival gathered around as Jean knelt above a pair of carcasses and used a traditional ulu blade to slice the meat off the skin.

After repeated, vigorous slashes through the flesh, the Queen’s representative turned to the woman beside her and asked enthusiastically: “Could I try the heart?”

Within seconds Jean was holding a dripping chunk of seal-ticker, which she tucked into her mouth, swallowed whole, and turned to her daughter to say it tasted good.

Jean grabbed a tissue to wipe her blood-soaked fingers, and explained her gesture. She expressed dismay that anyone would characterize the Inuit’s eons-old, traditional hunting practices as inhumane.

That lady rocks.

(edited to reflect actual proper terminology – see the comments)

So, turns out you can’t trust everything you read in an autobiography

 Posted by on 26 May 2009  Modern Life
May 262009
 

I thought Lesson No. 1 of journalism was to get your facts straight. (Actually, I was taught that Lesson No. 1 was to get peoples’ names right — but facts are definitely a close Lesson No. 2.)

Armed with just that knowledge, you’d think that a professional journalist — even a TV personality journalist — who was writing his own autobiography might be able to get some of the basic facts and figures right.

Larry King, you disappoint me.

Although I posted approvingly about his autobiography a couple of days ago, according to Slate, the whole tale is embellished and maybe made up. At the very least, it doesn’t mesh with similar stories he’s told before — and some of the tales from his youth are denied by the people he claims to have been with.

I understand the desire to tell stories, Rashomon-style, that show oneself off from the best perspective. But surely a journalist — even a putative one — should know enough to keep the basic facts intact. Apparently King has not learned this lesson.

So I leave you with some schaedenfreude: a transcript of Larry King interviewing James Frey, in which the journalist excoriates the memoirist for not telling the truth:

KING: But it is supposed to be factual events. The memoir is a form of biography.

FREY: Yes. Memoir is within the genre of non-fiction. I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say I’ve conned anyone. The book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than five percent of the total book. You know, that falls comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir.

KING: James, with the kind of incredible life you’ve had, why embellish anything?

FREY: I mean, I’ve acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book, that I’ve changed things, that in certain cases things were toned up, in certain cases things were toned down, that names were changed, that identifying characteristics were changed.

There’s a great debate about memoir and about what should be most properly served, the story or some form of journalistic truth. Memoirs don’t generally come under the type of scrutiny that mine has.

KING: People reading a memoir expect it to be a true story.

Seeing some beauty in the everyday

 Posted by on 25 May 2009  Modern Life
May 252009
 

Here’s a daily moment of insight:

If it was for some reason hard to see clouds, can you imagine how much people would pay for the privilege? Like, if there was only one spot on Earth that had clouds, everyone would be going there and having these big spiritual experiences just from seeing the clouds.

Okay, I don’t truly buy it — although clouds can be fun and amazing and interesting, people don’t automatically pay big bucks to visit places that are natural and rare.

But it’s weird to think about: what would be our human response to gigantic floating puffy white things in the sky, if they were only visible from, say, south Asia? How would it change our feeling towards smokestacks?

Cop pension plan buys into newspaper, wants to see some changes

 Posted by on 25 May 2009  Modern Life
May 252009
 

Here’s an interesting dilemma:

“The San Diego Union Tribune was recently purchased by Platinum Equity, which in turn has a $30-million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles cops and firefighters, along with other public employee pension funds. Now the President of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union which represents L.A. cops, wants the editorial board of the paper to be fired because they don’t like what has been written about them.”

“Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced,” Weber wrote in a March 26 letter to Platinum CEO Tom Gores.

Weber, in an interview, emphasized that the League is not demanding changes in the paper’s news coverage of the issue or in its staff of reporters. “It’s just these people on the opinion side. There is not even an attempt to be even-handed. They’re one step away from saying, ‘these public employees are parasites,’ ” Weber said.

There’s an interesting discussion over at Boing Boing about how opinion pages are supposed to be directed by the owner of the paper, and so this might be okay, but it makes everybody squeamish because it’s an arm of the government, and they’re not supposed to meddle in Free Speech.

I, however, am of the opinion that once something has been passed through the bureaucracy of a pension plan or a mutual fund, you’re not really acting as an owner. Haven’t any of these cops pulled someone over and gotten an irate “I pay your salary, you know!”

And how did that work for the driver they pulled over?

Right. And that’s about how it should work for people who “own” something at arm’s length.

Great Zeus!

 Posted by on 24 May 2009  Vintage/Retro
May 242009
 

Who can argue that the ’80s were a high water mark for cartoons? Sure, the animation quality is sketchy, and we were the first generation subjected to marketing messages disguised as entertainment, but at least I learned my Greek drama!

And man, what a theme song. Trivia time! The guy who sang it (Johnny Nash), you will also know from having sung “I Can See Clearly Now” and “Tears On My Pillow”. Cool, eh?

Thanks, Gorf!

Clever vandals are clever

 Posted by on 24 May 2009  Modern Life
May 242009
 

stop-for-the-claw

I’ve always had a thing for people who deface street signs or billboards, with one caveat — it has to be clever, or make me laugh. Sometimes, they don’t. Luckily, they often do.

Here’s a three-part gallery (part one, part two, part three) of defaced street signs that (mostly) accomplish that mission!

When I was in Montreal as a young lad, there were bilingual stop signs that said ARRETE / STOP, but francophone activists had taken red paint and covered over the S, the top of the T, part of the O and the round part of the P. That left a message of ARRETE ICI — or “stop here”. I believe that was my introduction to the world of culture jamming, although that term hadn’t been invented yet, or Adbusterized.

On the streets of my home town, I often see pedestrian crosswalk signs — which normally feature a generic walking man — given the “skateboarder” treatment (it’s simple to add a skateboard underneath just about any stick figure) or the “corporate drone” treatment (also, simple to add a briefcase and dollar figures about the head).

Go doodlers!

So you want to be a supervillain

 Posted by on 24 May 2009  Modern Life
May 242009
 

claw_inspector_gadget

You know, taking on the James Bonds and Inspector Gadgets of the world isn’t easy. No matter how many henchmen you employ, there’s something about the job description that turns them all into ninnies.

So here’s a handy list: How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord.

There’s 100 of them:

* I will never employ any device with a digital count-down. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable. I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.
* I will never utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there’s just one thing I want to know.”
* When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.
* I will not have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it would prove a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time.
* I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero’s rugged countenance and she’d betray her own father.
* Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it’s too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.
* I will hire a fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legion of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman foot soldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.

Et cetera.

Countdown to Folk Fest: Neko Case

 Posted by on 23 May 2009  Music
May 232009
 

Some of you may initially be unfamiliar with the name Neko Case. You’d probably know her better as the red-headed chick from super group the New Pornographers. Or even as the chick who sang that song that was in that mockumentary FUBAR:

Which is great. But she also has fantastic solo albums.

Neko Case was born in Virginia, and moved to Vancouver where she met the other members of the New Pornographers. She then moved on to Seattle and Chicago, recording albums in both cities.

Case makes beautiful alt-country music, anchored by her truly powerful vocals and honest, confessional lyrics. My absolute favourite song of hers is from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood:

Neko Case – Hold On, Hold On

Neko Case – Vengeance is Sleeping

Things I did not know about Larry King

 Posted by on 23 May 2009  Vintage/Retro
May 232009
 

larryking

For basically as long as I can remember, Larry King has just been the old guy with a boring show on CNN. But he’s got an autobiography coming out, and there’s kind of a funny excerpt on their website, which I happened to read just now:

I was thirty-seven years old. (In 1971). I had no job. I had a couple hundred thousand dollars in debts. And a four-year-old daughter ….

Things got bleaker and bleaker. I became a recluse. By late May, I was down to forty-two dollars. My rent was paid only until the end of the month. I locked myself in my apartment wondering how bad things could possibly get. Pretty soon I wouldn’t even be able to afford cigarettes. I remembered a night when I was a young man in New York, alone, cold, and without cigarettes or the money to buy them — I had smashed open a vending machine to get a pack.

So what does he do? He takes his last money to the track and bets it all — ALL of it — on the ponies. What a guy.

It led me to his Wikipedia page, where I also learned that he had had extensive legal troubles in the 70s, like grand larceny and the like.

He’s also known for “his general lack of pre-interview preparation” which includes not reading the books of authors whom he later interviews.

So, hey — Larry King! My kind of lazy guy!

The faster they rise, the harder they fall

 Posted by on 23 May 2009  Modern Life
May 232009
 

I don’t know why, but it seems like baby names are everywhere these days. I posted about the Baby Name Wizard a couple of days ago, and mentioned that the book Freakonomics had a cool chapter on baby name adoption trends.

Now I see that the Freakonomics blog has a post up about some recent research into baby name trends. It seems that the faster a name becomes popular, the faster its popularity drops off a cliff, too. They use this graph to explain it:

charlene

Here you see the adoption curves, and later abandonment, of three names that were about as popular at their peaks. Charlene’s popularity built slowly in the first half of the 20th century, peaked around 1950, but then stayed quite popular throughout the second half of the century. But Tricia and Kristi both became popular almost overnight, only to disappear just as quickly.

In a follow-up survey, the authors found that expecting parents are less interested in giving their kids names that have caught on quickly, in part because they perceive that these names may be short-lived fads. And so abandonment patterns mirror adoption.

Poster Justin Wolfers goes on to predict that the name “Cash” will decline rapidly and disappear in about 2012, based on how fast it has climbed the charts in recent years.

Obviously, there are other factors at work here, but I’m constantly fascinated by peoples’ herd-like behaviour. I read a book once, called Bellwether, which was partly about finding the people who unconsciously set trends.

Instructions to rebuild civilization, carved on a modern Stonehenge

 Posted by on 23 May 2009  Modern Life
May 232009
 

georgia_guidestones

How come I have never heard of this before? On a hill in Georgia are massive slabs of granite, with carved instructions in eight languages offering rules to rebuild civilization in the event of a global apocalypse.

It’s not quite as practical as the time traveller’s guide, these rules are more like guidelines, including “maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature”, “guide reproduction wisely”, “improving fitness and diversity”, and “prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.”

These Georgia Guidestones repeat the instructions in English, Spanish, Russian, Swahili, Chinese, Hindi, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew.

There was a lengthy article about them on Wired, which I read through, absolutely fascinated. The best part is that no one knows who paid to put them up, or why — everything was done in utter secrecy, through pseudonyms and cash transfers. The stones — 20 feet tall and arranged in an X — also serve as astrological trackers:

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun’s yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

Of course, not everything thinks they are as awesome as I do. The New Age inscriptions annoy some Christians, and attract druids, witches, and anti-One World Government types. Wired mentions a theory that it may have been bankrolled by Rosicrucians, which is cool.

There’s a little bit more at Wikipedia.

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