Friday, March 28, 2008

Midget Retards Lost and Found... 3000 Years Later

NYTimes recently revealed the rare remains of a race of our ancestors found on Palau. They had all these traits that were thought to be prehistoric to humans. But these bones weren't all that old. There were also tons of them in a burial cave and they were between 1400 and 3000 years old. That's nothing! These bones are from people who living and thriving all through Greeks, Romans and Christ.

Lee Berger - the dude who found them on vacation - seems to think that these people were a mutation that happened when some people were blown off course and just started inbreeding on an island. He likens it to the birds of the Galapagos that inspired Darwin. The thing is that these are people, so the differences between them and us are so much easier for us to process.

From their skeletons, it appears that they were very small people (about three feet tall) and looked like they suffered from microcephaly (or little-headedness). Like the 'chuas' or 'rat people' of India, like this lady.

It seems that these people were likely retarded - they certainly had brains smaller than average normal humans or pygmies.


View Larger MapThe most likely way that they landed on Palau is that they got horribly lost in an outrigger canoe and blew their way there. Once there, they were stuck and just set up shop and started making babies.

Allow me to recap the way I'm understanding this story: 3000 years ago, a boatload of retarded midgets blew off course in the middle of the Pacific and founded another species. This sounds like that urban myth about Midgetville, USA. Except it's coming from an anthropologist in the NYTimes.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Weed Prank - Do you know the Muffin Man?

About a month ago, I blogged about the rebellious rage that might have provoked two teens to put weed on a cop's burger. I ran across another story that is from about two years ago, but it's so eerily similar I have to draw the parallel. In a senior prank in Dallas, two kids baked pot-muffins and delivered them to the teachers' lounge in their high school. Here's the news clip...



Stoned Teachers - Watch more free videos

Again, like the New Mexico case, both kids got probation - here they're pretty clear the maximum sentence for food tampering could have been 10-20 years.

Both kids here were also striking out against an authority figure. And they were doing it in an anonymous rather than targeted way - at least in neither case, were they targeting individuals, just adults with a particular job.

In Dallas, though, they actually cooked the weed and therefore activated it. So, their prank worked. The kids in New Mexico, just wasted their weed as well as they burgers they sprinkled them on.

I remember having thoughts about how funny this kind of prank would be when I was in high school. I can see their side of it. But now, I just see all the downsides - like the cops driving, or getting called to a murder while stoned. Or the teachers who wouldn't know what was wrong with them and becoming very paranoid. Or potentially eating too much cafeteria food at lunch and getting the runs during class...

But there's something going on here that's Kids vs Adults that I find fascinating and disheartening. I believe teens should be able to look up to adults and try to learn from them. They're going through some weird, spooky, hormonal shit. We've decided to shut them off and let puberty and adolescence run its course away from the rest of society. We use teachers, schools and police to keep the acne-studded-oddballs off the streets. But then, that appears to foster some ill-will in some kids, doesn't it?

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Easy Bake - Pot Brownies in the Microwave

I've always been a little dubious about the power of eating pot. In most cases, I have failed to do a controlled experiment because I always end up smoking at the same time as I'm eating. Now, this weekend, I had a sore throat and felt like I shouldn't be smoking, so I had the perfect opportunity to give this a whirl.

Usually when I'm baking brownies, it would be a social affair, so I'd make a big pan. But this weekend, it was just me. That's a lot of pot to reach the right level of potency in one or two brownies. And let's be honest, if there's a whole pan - when the munchies kick in, I'll end up eating the whole thing anyway.

So along comes 'Warm Delights' the portion control dessert product pitched for single professional ladies. This is a really exciting breakthrough in pot browies for the same two reasons this appeals to the single gals: 1) it's wicked easy and very quick 2) portion control means you're economizing on the pot.





















Here's how you can bake the perfect pot brownies for one or two people:

1) Crumble or chop the weed into a saucepan and cook with about a tablespoon of butter or veg. oil (butter is better). You want to sautee it on very low heat until it releases that distinctive odor and turns light brown and is crispy to the touch (watch your fingers!). Keep stirring the pot pot - DO NOT BURN IT!















2) Empty the mix into the plastic bowl they include. Pour the hot butter over the mountain of chocolate powder and start to mix it in with a spoon. It will be very thick. You will need to add a little water at a time until it mixes into a smooth batter (like the traditional brownie mix you know and love).















3) Microwave for just 45 seconds. Ah sweet sweet technology. No pre-heating. No waiting. And voila!

4) Then you can fancy it up by squeezing on the chocolate frosting.















5) Eat it.

6) Wait 20-30 minutes and SURPRISE you're easy baked!

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Update: June 2012
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I just stumbled on this post several years after forgetting about the blog entirely.  I am happy it is still up on the web. But I'm shocked to realize this particular post has over 30,000 views - not to mention a whole lot of really helpful comments.  If even a small percentage of you people who have viewed this page get yourselves Easy Baked as a result, I'm so happy to have helped!!!

A few of my own opinions in response to the comments:

For me, the dosage in a brownie is about the same as I would smoke to get the result I want.  If the weed is really potent, I use less, like a bowl.  You can see the size nodule I used in the top picture.  That's about a gram of potent weed, and the brownie was a very strong high.

If I'm using outdoor weed of the sort I'd probably smoke most of a joint over an evening - I use that much.  I don't want to eat more than one brownie in an evening.  I might start with half and eat the other half later.

Baking is like science, you can keep track of how much you use and how long things take in your microwave.  Next time, vary your inputs.  From my experience, my digestive fullness has a big influence on how quickly I metabolize the weed.  If I eat a brownie on a relatively empty stomach, it kicks in much faster and has a bigger impact.  So even though you might be tempted to save the brownie for dessert... you'd be better off starting with it.

I recommend cooking your weed a bit in butter or oil.  Don't skip that step.  That's the slow controlled heating when you're going to activate the psychoactive junk.  The quick heating in the microwave acts primarily on the water molecules.  Steam bubbles in the batter and cooks the cake.  The quick microwave blast doesn't cover you for activating the cannabis.

Eating is preferable to smoking in a lot of situations:

  • For people with breathing problems
  • On airplanes (finish before security)
  • If you're a teenager living in a city
  • Family dinners
  • Dormitories
  • Movies (so you're not most high during the previews)
Enjoy and let me know how it goes :)

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Hotels.com - Truly Funny Commercials

I saw this shampoo ad on the plane (thank you, JetBlue) and started laughing out loud. It was kind of embarrassing for the first minute. But whenever I thought about it for the rest of the flight, I just started laughing again. This was more embarrassing because I was flipping back and forth between Top Chef and American History X. You know whenever someone is laughing, you look at their screen... so I'm not sure what conclusions my seatmates came to about me. You have to admit this is funny shit...



They're all collected at thetalentjungle if you want to see a few others.



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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Get High for Dinner

Holy Shit! This company seats you and 25 of your guests for dinner and then lifts you up a couple hundred feet in the air while you eat. The chef is there with you and you get seat belted in like a roller-coaster. Costs about 8000 Euro.

Check out the video. Unreal!

Monday, March 17, 2008

cLASSIC cONCENTRATION

I had to concentrate really hard, but I sure did get it...



I'll never hit a bicycle again!

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