Math was found in a child's library book!

It's so great to see children learning in various STEM areas!

(((re-reads news headline)))

OHHHH, sorry! Meth was found in a child's library book. Meth. Like, the drug. Not math. Small mistake, but I digress.

According to The Tribune-Democrat Newspaper, a 4-year old dropped off a book to the Shanksville-Stonycreek school library (about 80 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA) packed with a small surprise of meth.

Being a rural town where the biggest crime is burnt cookies and an overcooked noodle casserole, the local police turned over the case to the Pennsylvania State Police, where the investigation is ongoing.

Colorado State University--Pueblo has begun offering a bachelor's degree in cannabis.

Really puts the "high" in Rocky Mountain High, amright? Amiright??

((groan))

According to CNN, Colorado (which allows legal sales of marijuana) has reaped over $1 billion in revenue from the sale of the devil's lettuce. Where there's money to be made, educational programs will follow.

As a result, Colorado State University's Pueblo campus announced plans to start a cannabis program, which they expect upward of 60 undergraduates to enroll. Students will have two tracks in which to focus, one based on the natural products and biology of marijuana, while another focuses on the chemistry of the plant.

This feels like a missed opportunity for a cooking class spotlighting weed brownies and CBD gummies.

When Writers Go Weird: That time Ken Kesey faked his suicide.

Are writers ever normal? No, otherwise they'd be productive members of society. 'When Writers Go Weird' is when we remember writers acting strange, odd, off, or--yeah--just plain weird. Also known as Tuesday to them.

Today: That time Ken Kesey faked his suicide.

Contrary to what Hollywood would make you believe, faking your own death to get out of something isn't a common occurrence. This is because faking your death is hard work with you still being alive and all.

Kesey thinking up ways to not kill himself.

This brings us to Ken Kesey. Kesey--who looked like a middle-aged patron in a South Boston back alley bar--is in that group of one-hit wonder authors, but with only a fraction of the fame of your J.D. Salingers and Harper Lees. He wrote more, it's just that none of it was memorable. His most notable work was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a massive hit made even more popular with its 1975 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson.

Kesey sprung to critical and commercial success in his mid-twenties for Cuckoo, which was partly inspired by his time spent in an illegal medical trial run by the CIA for psychoactive drugs run. The trial tested drugs like LSD, cocaine, and mescaline, creating all of the allure of a club scene but without the great dance beats, which Kesey detailed in his writings. Not surprisingly, Kesey continued the medical trial long after the medical trial ended. Drugs are funny that way.

After Cuckoo garnered success, Kesey moved to a ranch in La Honda, CA, south of San Francisco. There, Kesey and a large gathering of acquaintances and friends dabbled in then-legal psychedelic drugs like LSD (notice a pattern yet?), and held parties dubbed "Acid Tests." The group came to call itself The Merry Pranksters and criss-crossed the country in a bus painted for a bad trip--a trip on acid, not Interstate 95--for no other apparent reason than they could.

There's probably at least three dozen
illegal things going on with this bus.

By 1965, Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession, one of the few illegal drugs at the time. Then he found himself busted a second time for the same crime. For reasons unknown--paranoia? fright? looking for a thrill? a history of bad decision making?--Kesey decided to create a faked suicide to escape pending jail time.

Driving up to northern California, outside Eureka, Kesey parked a truck near a seaside cliff and left an elaborate suicide note with the line "Ocean, Ocean, I'll beat you in the end." Suicide never sounded more poetic or romantic. Then, through the help of his friends and luxurious trunk space to hide, Kesey snuck over the border into Mexico to hide from the FBI for his marijuana arrests.

Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, then Manzanillo all received a visit from Kesey, his friends, his family, and even the bus. The FBI didn't buy the supposed suicide, although the media reported Kesey's death as fact. U.S. authorities tracked the author to Mexico, enrolling the help of the Mexican Federales, but Kesey remained largely hidden, even escaping undercover stings a couple of times. For eight months he hid in plain sight in the town with friends. As the New York Times later recounted, a former hotel owner in Manzanillo, Bart Varelmann, wrote in a memoir that "[t]he interior of Ken's bus was a cornucopia of strange pills, exotic herbs, magic mushrooms, peyote buttons, LSD, uppers, downers, poppers, and of course marijuana." Varelmann also noted that "[o]n a windless day one could get stoned just strolling past the bus." If you think this sounds ideal, clearly you were alive for the 1960s.

Then, as randomly as he faked a suicide, as abruptly as the hijinks began, and as if the vacation was over, Kesey headed back to the United States and accepted five months in jail for his prior arrests. The ruse of a suicide was over.

Can you fake a rebirth? If so, Kesey tried his best version of it. The general absurdity of the previous two years faded as Kesey, out of prison, moved to rural Oregon and wrote largely forgettable material for books and magazines, including a memoir and tour in a new version of the psychedelic bus. He remained largely uninteresting--dare say, normal--until his death in 2001.

The weirdest thing Kesey did at the end of his life was that he became boring. And that was maybe the most criminal thing of all.

Saturday Morning PSA of The Week: Potentially the least helpful PSA ever.

Today's public service announcements are all information and no imagination--but yesteryear's? Those were full of drama, plot lines, and cameos from B-grade celebrities, all wedged into one minute of absolute fantasticness.

Consider this a trip back in time to when PSAs were sometimes worth watching more than the Saturday morning cartoons.

Today:  Remind me never to be an older sibling.






Random Thoughts and Questions:
1.)  Wait--17 is plenty old? By what standard? The Middle Ages?
2.)  Actually, Mr. Announcer, I know less about smack and acid than you give me credit for. But thanks for believing in me!
3.)  "So we don't intend to give you any advice." This would be called a lost opportunity by most PSA standards.
4.)  Violent nights hugging people on bad trips? Students falling to the floor? I had a much more angelic childhood than I ever realized.
5.)  Why doesn't Little Brother trust them? Maybe because the announcer sounds like he's luring while he talks.

Randomness Corner: The scourge of illicit delectable meats and cheeses!

Grandma's ham cartel strikes again.

Over a nearly seven month period at Manchester Airport, the U.K.'s third largest, highly trained drug-sniffing dogs never found a single source of class-A drugs like cocaine and heroin, but they found a delightful array of artisanal meats and cheeses brought back by local Brits on holiday.

Does this mean an elderly British grandmother is a hardened criminal if she's hauling back some jamón ibérico in her carry-on from a week in the south of Spain? Fido seems to think so, and would like to take it off her hands.

The dogs cost the airport £1.25 million to train and house, but authorities claim the dogs also detected over 40,000 smuggled cigarettes.

Cheese. Meat. Cigarettes.

Add a full-bodied red wine and candles to this list and Fido will have created a sophisticated romantic evening.

Saturday Morning PSA of The Week: Straight up, dealing drugs never sounded so good.

Today's public service announcements are all information and no imagination--but yesteryear's? Those were full of drama, plot lines, and cameos from B-grade celebrities, all wedged into one minute of absolute fantasticness.

Consider this a trip back in time to when PSAs were sometimes worth watching more than the Saturday morning cartoons.

Today:  Dealing drugs makes for a catchy jingle.





Random Thoughts and Questions:
1.)  Worst Bell Biv Devoe tribute song ever.
2.)  "Yeah, you make a lot of money and you make it fast." Wait, wait, wait--I think my arm was just twisted to begin a life of crime.
3.)  Only the most respected PSAs include the running man.
4.)  Did they just narc on their friends to the cops? Well, that was bold of them.
5.)  It's really cute when we pretend cops would ever hang out with local youth in a friendly way. It's adorable!
6.)  A song repeats "straight up" and there's no Paula Abdul crossover? Such a lost opportunity.

Prison is a great time to dive into self-help books, which is what El Chapo is doing these days.

Oh, no! El Chapo is in prison again!

When in prison a year ago, Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was granted weekly four hour conjugal visits, complete with prison-supplied Viagra. Guzman's long been labeled as highly sexually driven.

But after a brief escape--which included a male-enhancement surgery in Tijuana--and inevitable return to prison, El Chapo is being stimulated in different ways these days behind bars: He's reading books.

Now with his schedule cleared from exhausting, ahem, visits, El Chapo has reportedly read Cervantes' Don Quixote, as well as American evangelical pastor Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

Oooh, ooh, I know! I know! You're really terrible at evading capture!

One of Rick Warren's quotes from the book really rings true for El Chapo, specifically, "We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it."

Well, clearly, in some cases that's not true.

But I'm guessing evangelical American pastors and lusty Mexican drug lords don't always run in the same circles.






Why a kitten? Because.

This Week in Science!!!

A career in writing will lead to premature aging and a healthy dose of personal humiliation. But science and medicine is where you'll make money, fame, and the respect of your parents. As a result, we might as well pay attention to what they're doing in those fields.

So if you've put down your Jane Austen and William Faulkner for a moment, it's time to take another peak at anything going on in the world of science and medicine this week.

Starting off with: Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were onto something.


story one:
Fido can detect your emotions just like your significant other!!!

He's looking into your soul.

And both Fido and your significant other are, to be honest, a little tired of you.

A study from the University of Helsinki (the Harvard of Helsinki) finds that dogs' social gazing behavior is similar to humans, preferring to look at a person's eyes to figure out their mood. Moreover, dogs are most responsive to tense, threatening faces than they are to any other emotion.

You know when you mistakenly walk into a biker bar with a ton of guys with prison tats who just got out of the slammer for involuntary manslaughter, and they give you "that look"? Happens to the best of us. But, yeah, it's kind of like that for Fido. It's believed to be an evolutionary response, as being able to detect a threat, real or imagined, allowed for survival.

What does this all mean then? Take your dog if you want to avoid a biker bar, I think.



story two:
Cocaine can make your brain eat itself!!!

He took three bumps of coke before this photo.

Sure, the pick-me-up favored by investment bankers and second-rate Miami speedboat enthusiasts has been around for ages--but research now says the drug can cause your brain cells to eat themselves. I believe you see that happen to Tony Montana in a deleted scene from the director's cut of Scarface.

In essence, researchers knew cocaine wasn't good for the brain (gasp!), but wanted to know specifically why. A team at Johns Hopkins University performed a study which resulted in learning that the activation of a pathway involving nitric oxide (a gas that cells use to communicate) and an enzyme called GAPDH, which nitric oxide can modify the activity of, resulted in cell destruction.

Cue the coked-out mice!

As if mice didn't look hyped-up on a good day, a range of cocaine doses was administered to the mice. Researchers then dissected the mouse brains and found a series of markers to cell-death pathways revealed. Called autophagy--literally "eating oneself"--it entails, as IFLScience explains, "packaging bits of the cell, such as debris, into membrane-bound sacs and then fusing these with acid-filled compartments that degrade the contents." Or, you know, eating itself.

Being addicted to heroin never looked so appealing!



story three:
Now we have problem gambler rats!!!

I suddenly feel the need to bet on black, baby!

First a little nose candy, now we have rodents addicted to the sexy, sexy thrill of casino gambling.

Scientists at the University of British Columbia have published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience stating that when they administered flashing lights and music mimicking a casino to rats, the rats became "problem gamblers."

Trained with sweet treats and given an option to "gamble" on receiving that treat, the rats typically avoided risk. But once researchers flipped the lights on and pumped up the club beats, the rats were down for some hot gambling action apparently. I assume it wasn't long until an ecstasy-fueled quickie wedding to a showgirl named Honey occurred for the rats.

The researchers point out that when they gave the rats a drug to block a certain dopamine receptor, the gambling jones wore off, and the rats went back to a boring, meaningless life in the suburbs driving a station wagon.



story four:
North Korean scientists claim to have made a hangover-free alcohol!!!

Everyone in North Korea lines up for some booze.

Always at the forefront of revolutionary scientific and superhuman advancements, one of North Korea's leading media outlets, The Pyongyang Times, is reporting scientists from the country have created a hangover-free alcohol. Party at Kim Jong-un's house, amiright??

Distilled to a range of 30-40% alcohol (because you always want a wide range on your finer spirits), the Times reports, "Koryo Liquor, which is made of six-year-old Kaesong Koryo insam [ed: a type of ginseng], known as being highest in medicinal effect, and the scorched rice, is highly appreciated by experts and lovers as it is suave and causes no hangover.”

If there's anything I know, it's about being suave--and nothing channels my inner globe trotting gentleman of leisure quite like thoughts of those sun-kissed beaches ski chalets penthouse suites prison camps of North Korea. The Times article also reports that the alcohol "exudes national flavour," which I assume is a delicious blending of despair and the tears of weeping mothers.

Weeping in happiness over hangover-free alcohol!