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.

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 :)

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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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!

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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There Will be Bud...

Whoah! That's Deep

Awhile ago, the NYTimes online had a piece about all the crazy critters we're discovering in the middle and deep ocean. It prompted me to get The Deep by Claire Nouvian which is a total mindbender of a coffee table book full of pictures you'd swear were aliens.

I just watched this TED talk with some cool video footage of octopus camouflage. If you watch nothing else, check out the final 30 seconds...

This has all got me wondering how much the web has come to approximate the known ocean. There's a ton of churn in the surface web. Things are always turning over and getting kicked/digged to the surface. But there's so much more that exists well below in the far and unknown reaches of the land.


WebScout of LA Times points out that nobody can possibly be watching all the shit getting posted on YouTube. It's fun as hell to watch the videos nobody else has seen.

For example, as an amateur Jacques Cousteau, I choose a character at random in an alphabet I don't know, for example: を Then I sort the resulting videos by date and I get to see something nobody else has seen. In this case, I was the very first person to view a video of a guy flying a parachute with a snowblower engine...



I just feel so special for being the first person to see something, ya know? It's like the solitary and special feeling of seeing a weird and wonderful creature in The Deep. You don't know at all what to expect and you're kind of prepared for anything... that appears as a streaming video in a 3"x5" box.

GuestBlog: And Now For Some Meth Cooking!

Let me just say--Vince Gilligan is a flippin' genius. I've had a screenwriter fetish for him since he wrote my favorite X-Files episodes (possibly my favorite of the 90s) "Home" and "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" which to jog your memory involved an inbred team of brothers that kept their quad-amputee mother under the bed as a sex snack and Alex Trebek as a Man in Black, respectively. That and about thirty other classics.

And really, in some ways Breaking Bad is all Gilligan's rotten small-town cheerfulness wrapped up in his increasingly sophisticated and cinematic lens. In fact, I have to echo the finally (two weeks ago I couldn't find a single one) tons of positive critics when I say: "Holy crap this is AMC? As in re-runs of It's A Wonderful Life AMC of yore?" Yeah not anymore.

And Bryan Cranston is ungodly great in this role, Walter White, the uber-mild mannered high school chemistry teacher that is dealing with his pregnant Ebay-entrepeneur wife, disabled son, and oh yeah, terminal lung cancer with the same blank, beaten facade til somewhere along the line he snaps--and becomes the man he was always meant to me.

Flashbacks in future episodes bear this out, but all you really need to see are the first, brilliant minute of the show, where Cranston in all his glory is kitted out in a gas mask, tighty whitey underwear, tearasses out of a wildly careening RV, and pulls a gun out of his saggy waistband and aims. Here is a guy who really embraces death, and starts doling out his fair share of it too.

Aaron Paul as White's former/future student Jesse Pinkman deserves some serious props too and if there's any justice, there should be casting agents knocking his door down as the new Colin Farrell or whatever. There's a jumpy, agitated vibe that just screams misguided teenager and yet his soaked in despair meth-fiend downward spiral seems as degraded and world-weary as it gets.

The funny thing is? It's at least as much Walter's fault as his. Here the old steer the young into increasingly fucked up scenarios with little regards to the consequences and Jesse, more than likely desperate for a father figure, obliges. Hapless, and hopeless, he suddenly attaches to his mentor like a gosling to a rubber boot. Walt's at his height when he finally realizes that if he has power over chemistry, and over Jesse and the ripe drug market of New Mexico, he just might have power over death.

At least he'll have a stack of green to burn.

So yeah, what I'm saying is watch it, yeah. I'm definitely more partial to this than reading something about the chairs on In Treatment on the NYT. The series finale is coming soon, but I'm just tickled pink that hard drugs, black comedy and white undies have seemed to found themselves a permanent roost on basic cable.

Beautiful and Entrancing

There's something mesmerizing about this giant puppet girl. You can see all strings attached, but yet it's not hard to make the leap and assume life. In fact, I ended up believing this giant girl must be aware of all the ropes attached to her body.



The tongue is a little creepy though, huh?

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heAD Space

Manny: Ever wish you could defragment yer brain?

Plunge: Compact and repair storage

Manny: Unload bad sector

Plunge: Delete unwanted memories of commercials

Manny: Purge commercial memories

Plunge: Or I guess I could charge for that brain space. Like a banner or a billboard.

Manny: Sounds like a sweet business model when WE charge THEM to post ads in our minds.

Plunge: I best get paid for remembering some shit like Honeycombs commercials from Saturday morning cartoons in the 80's.

Manny: I’ll issue cease and desist letters if they don’t payfrit

Plunge: “Dear Sirs, We're going to stop remembering your shitty commercials… this is a takedown notice. I heretofore refuse to acknowledge that I know who Tony the Tiger is.

Manny: And I sure as shit won't use constructions like "Got Milk?"

Plunge: I didn't like saying "got x" anyway. Now if someone asks, “Got herpes?”
I be like “I'm sorry I don't know what you mean by that”

Plunge: Got ‘Got Milk’?

Manny: Oh yes - we used to carry that catch phrase - but we discontinued memory of that last year.

Micro rage

There are buttons on my microwave for everything except the shit I want to do. There's one that says 'chicken dinner plate' and then 'reheat pizza.' The 'popcorn' button is ubiquitous. The easy-on button makes it easy to only get 30 second increments. I actually puzzled for a long time before figuring out how to get my cheese-crackers to the right level of meltiness without standing in front of the door absorbing radiation waiting to snatch it out.

Clearly 30 seconds is way too long for a little cheese over Triscuits. That's my favored munchie food at the moment. Using the flavored Triscuits is unbelievably delicious with a little slice of cheddar... Mmmm... My favorite flavor is rosemary/olive oil. They're pretty tasty plain too.

The issue is that for a plate of crackers, the optimal moment of melt comes around 12 to 15 seconds. If I hit 'easy on' I have to watch it and stop it around 18 or so. But that requires me to do math and to avoid being distracted for a full quarter-minute!

My attention span is not that reliable. This is what I want my new microwave to look like...

Breaking Badass in the tumble-Weeds

Breaking Bad is oh so good.

It has really satisfying episode chunks. Within each, it manages to fuck with your expectations. It also leads you forward (make no mistake, you'll want more) but without obviously annoying cliffhangers. The first two episodes are available on online at AMC. After that, if you don't have cable, it's torrent time.

Basically the plot theme is Weeds, but in every way jitterier, edgier, more hopped up... Somehow, it's also got me remembering a bit of high school chem. In that vein, here's a way to think about it in an SAT analogy kind of way...

Weeds is to Breaking bad as...
(or to use the annoying symbols)
Weeds : Breaking bad ::

Marijuana : Meth
Suburban mom : HS chem teacher
Agrestic : Albequerque
Hippies : Crank whores
Secret husband DEA agent: Brother-in-law DEA agent
Grow house in Agrestic : Winnebago in the desert
Son who's a nerd : Son with cerebral palsy

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Dig if you will, the .ppt

Oh, I dig! But I don't think this one quite fits the lyrics. I might be like my father, but you might be like my mother. I parsed and parsed until I realized that the lyrics themselves may not be all that logical. Then I, like the doves, had a good cry.

OG Sexy Hands...

You know, Aurorasbored, you can't say the things the NY Times said about Gabriel Byrne without making me think of another great listener:

Taking in the world from the depths of his leather armchair, Paul is all ears. And eyes. And hands. Steepled, clasped in contemplation or lingering at his cheek, those hands, especially, express empathy better than words.



I got all nostalgic for the show and satisfied my jones with this hilariously confrontational interview with Vanilla Ice...

This Just In: NYT Notices Gabriel Bryne Is Attractive

Lingering photographs of his hands at 8!

I admit myself stuck in a non-watching spree with the show. Schedules and a disarmingly fiction-turned-real relationship arguments have kept me from catching it On Demand and HBO has cruelly turned off the free ep pipeline. Though frankly, if you, the "Greatest Network Of Our Time," bleep an adult themed show (I can't imagine anyone younger than twenty tuning in, feel free to correct me) I'm not biting anymore. But you know, curiosity will see me through. I'm placing my bets on Alex having a PTSD episode and shooting everyone, from Paul and Laura to Paul's wife's lover and Sophie's coach.

Anyway, least the Times roots up some veery mild professional criticism of Paul's methods: “At this point in the series,” Dr. Kanaris [clinical psychologist in private practice in Smithtown, N.Y.] added, “I have to say Paul’s counter-transference is not going very well. It makes for good television but bad therapy.”

Also it seems like Byrne is running for cover: "A publicist for Mr. Byrne, who was born in Dublin and who earlier in his career starred in “The Usual Suspects” and was married to Ellen Barkin, declined to make him available to comment about the unusually personal feelings some audience members have developed for him and his character." If you see him on the street and start yelling, "Paul!" remember your grandmother, and her propensity to call soap stars by character names. I mean, this is just a high-minded soap, right?

The creator of the show, Rodrigo Garcia, seems hellbent on making Paul grotesquely unappealing--though I bet by his methods (more Laura attraction, more Gina abuse, calling his wife a whore some more) are just gonna froth everyone up: “Sure, Paul is a sex symbol,” he said. “But he makes mistakes along the way. And now that we’re seeing his real problem, maybe he’s not a god after all. It’s like my mother used to say: Being that close to someone, you are seeing his dirty underwear.”

We shall see--or rather I will, once I catch up.

Google Trends - Can't Get Enough

This Google Trends thing has grabbed me like a catfish. I've definitely been enjoying it. My interest here has been a massive spike over the past three days since my first post on the topic. In fact, my interest and use of google/trends is exactly represented by the world's interest in Walter Mondale. Spooky, right?

Coincidental as that may be, it's clear I'm well behind the curve on this one. Entering "Google Trends" in google/trends indicates the big spike was back in April of 2006 when they launched.

In a spiral down the meta-toilet, I was also curious how many times people Google Google. As it turns out, it's been steadily on the rise.

Penis Fencing

Cracked.com has an absolutely hilarious article on The 15 Most Bizarre Animal Mating Rituals. Among them, is the flatworm's. This hermaphrodite runs into a potential mate, and like two cellmates on Oz, they battle it out to determine who gets to be the male.

Leslie Newman has caught them on film. And I don't mean to spoil it, but here's an excerpt from the dramatic narration. Imagine this being read nature narrator style:

It's known as penis fencing, and the worms are the swordsmen. From the midsection of each flatworm, double daggers protrude. Each dagger is actually a penis. The first one who can make a successful jab can deliver its sperm.

Flatworms Penis Fencing

Pineapple Express has a release date...

August 8, bebe! And here's the trailer...

Google Trends Dirty

This much dugg screen shot comes from Google trends. Being curious/skeptical, I checked and sho-nuff - the world got real curious about "anal fisting" abruptly at the start of 2006. Specifically, Prague and pretty much all of the Czech Republic got real into anal fisting. Truly weird.

Once you start screwing around with Google Trends, it's really engrossing. For example, the trend for "hangover cure" has massive spikes around the holiday season and the leading cities are the stereotypically drunken centers of English language: Dublin, Edinburgh, Manchester, London... In fact, there are only two U.S. cities in the top ten...

For "police brutality" as a search term, 10 out of 10 top cities are in the U.S. Chicago tops the list and Minneapolis beats out L.A. for second place.

A search on the word "hymen" reveals Iran is very interested in this topic and the U.S. is 10th behind mostly Muslim nations. We are losing the war in born-again virgins.