"Had I thought that there was any chance that she could have been hurt by this stuff, I would have been a lot more vigilant."

"I had no idea it was so bad... I'd never have thought we'd be in this situation. If she had bought it off the street or from a corner, that's one thing, but she bought it from convenience store."

"What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches?"

The drug is Plan B (the "morning-after pill") and the mayor is Bloomberg.

About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10....
The city says about 6,300 NYC girls had unplanned pregnancies last year, and more than half had abortions. Of those who give birth, the city says, about 70 percent drop out of school, making their futures bleak.

"Stimulants will help anyone focus better. And a lot of young people like or value that feeling..."

"... especially those who are driven and have ambitions. We have to realize that these are potential addicts — drug addicts don’t look like they used to."

What's going on with prescriptions for Adderal?

"Perhaps we could design 'love drugs,' pharmaceutical cocktails that could boost affection between partners..."

"... whisking them back to the exquisite set of pleasures that colored their first years together. The ability to do this kind of fine-tuned emotional engineering is beyond the power of current science, but there is a growing field of research devoted to it. Some have even suggested developing 'anti-love drugs' that could dissolve abusive relationships, or reduce someone's attachment to a charismatic cult leader. Others just want a pill to ease the pain of a wrenching breakup."

What's to prevent your abusive-relationship person from committing further abuse by slipping the drug to his/her victim Oberon-style?

What thou seest when thou dost wake,
Do it for thy true-love take,
Love and languish for his sake:
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wakest, it is thy dear:
Wake when some vile thing is near.

IN THE COMMENTS: furious_a said:

Artificially aroused men pursuing artificially enhanced women under the influence of artificially induced emotions.

Who says "Romance is dead"?

Kevin said:

I wonder if they watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and are going forward in spite of, or are going forward because of.

"To think that I would go on a national TV show and get away with continuing a lie so big... is ridiculous."

Says the "extremely remorseful" Matthew Farmer, who went on "American Idol" and told a story of military combat service replete with exploding IED, brain damage, and PTSD. In fact, though he was in the army, he never saw combat.

Soldiers who served with Farmer claim that Farmer's injury came from mixing Accutane, a prescription medication for acne, and alcohol.

Farmer denies allegations that he was sent home for unauthorized use of medicine. He blames the producers of "American Idol" for distorting his story through editing.

The contestant, who sang Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" for the judging panel, blames "Idol" for focusing on his war stories rather than on his little girl, who accompanied him to the audition.

Farmer accuses the editors of "chopping up" parts of his interview and focusing unduly on his story of being medically evacuated from Iraq.

He meant to exploit the child, not the military service. Watch the clip at the link. The poor child looks exceedingly displeased with her father, as if she knows he's shaming himself, lying.

Cycling News to Lance Armstrong: "When you came into the sport, it probably wasn't to dope, it wasn't to cheat..."

"... but at what point, specifically, did you realize that was how cycling worked and that the governing body weren't dealing with the situation?"

Armstrong: "My generation was no different than any other. The 'help' has evolved over the years but the fact remains that our sport is damn hard, the Tour was invented as a 'stunt, and very tough mother f**kers have competed for a century and all looked for advantages. From hopping on trains a 100 years ago to EPO now. No generation was exempt or 'clean'. Not Merckx's, not Hinault's, not LeMond's, not Coppi's, not Gimondi's, not Indurain's, not Anquetil's, not Bartali's, and not mine."

"Swartz didn't face prison until feds took over case..."

"The late Internet activist was facing a stern warning from local prosecutors. But then the U.S. Attorney's office, run by Carmen Ortiz, chose to make an example of Aaron Swartz, a new report says."

The report is likely to fuel an online campaign against Ortiz... An online petition asking President Obama to remove from office Ortiz — a politically ambitious prosecutor who was talked about as Massachusetts' next governor as recently as last month.

There's a hot campaign to destroy Ortiz. Note that there's also this other case where she's accused of "bullying" a motel owner, in what she calls "strictly a law-enforcement effort to crack down on what was seen as a pattern of using the motel to further the commission of drug crimes for nearly three decades." Ortiz is considering appealing in that case, and the Boston Herald has the headline: "Ortiz to motel owner: We’re not done yet." It's not like she said we're not done yet.  That's the newspaper's paraphrase of "We are weighing our options with respect to appeal."

Is the prosecutor getting bullied? If she were to commit suicide — Swartz-style — would everyone feel ashamed of what they did to her?

No one cries for a prosecutor.

"A death sentence handed down in Bali to a British grandmother found guilty of drug trafficking has been condemned by the UK government."

Can you understand why?

"Maybe I'm naive, but I still don't think Lance doped."

Michael Ian Black.

"Lance Armstrong will offer more than the sporting world’s most long-awaited confession..."

"He’s expected to counter the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s portrayal of him as the mastermind of what it called the most sophisticated, professional doping program in the history of sports by saying that doping was endemic to cycling...."

"Steamboat Willie overdubbed with the Koyaanisqatsi theme."

"The Disney classic paired with Phillip Glass' classic theme. Oddly unsettling on a number of levels."

Hmm. I don't know. I clicked through and watched it a bit, and the main thing I thought was what a great cartoon, full of weirdness and sadism that was always there and not something new injected by the mysterious-serious soundtrack. The injection — which might feel good to druggies — is aggressive nudging that only serves the purposes of those too numb to see what is there in life as it already is. 

The second thing I thought was every time those spooky voices incant "Koyaanisqatsi," what I hear is "[unintelligible] Wisconsin."

By the way, Meade happened to glance over at 0:50 and laughed out loud, not because of anything about the added soundtrack, but the original comic idea. I said: "What? This is 'Steamboat Willie,' the oldest cartoon in the world." But his laugh meant — as I immediately realized — that this is something perfectly great, perfectly timeless, and utterly — udderly — unimprovable.

"No to the man with 762 home runs. No to the pitcher who won 354 games. No to the hitter who got 3,060 hits."

Baseball Hall of Fame vote against steroid-era stars.

"Cyclist Lance Armstrong considering public confession to drug use..."

Isn't that already a confession? But it sounds like what he's talking about doing is saying whatever it is he needs to say to get back into the sport:

The World Anti-Doping Agency code says athletes who fully confess to doping might be eligible for a reduced punishment. Armstrong hopes to compete in triathlons and other events, but many of those are sanctioned by athletic organizations that have agreed to the WADA code.

Should he get another shot... I mean... chance?

“Does he think people are completely stupid?” asked Betsy Andreu, whom the cyclist vilified as a bitter and vindictive woman because she testified in a court case that she had heard Armstrong tell his cancer physicians that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. Her husband, former Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreu, was denied jobs in the sport because he refused to lie for Armstrong, according to the damning report released by the United States Anti-Doping Agency in October that detailed the cyclist’s drug use.

“This guy is like a Mafia don,” she added. “Will he apologize to all the people who wouldn’t lie for him? Will he compensate people for costing them jobs and businesses? How do you put a price on lost opportunities?”

It's not hard to read between the lines there. Armstrong needs to hand out a lot of compensation to everyone he hurt, enough to make them back off.

“Will he pay Christophe millions of dollars for forcing him out of the sport?” Andreu asked, referring to Christophe Bassons. Bassons has said that Armstrong threatened him because he suggested banned drugs fueled Armstrong’s comeback from cancer.

“Will he compensate (Tour de France champion) Greg LeMond for ruining his bicycle business? Will he apologize to Emma (O’Reilly, Armstrong’s former masseuse) for calling her a prostitute? Forgiving doesn’t mean being a doormat. Being a Christian doesn’t mean allowing people to profit from their crimes.”

Armstrong needs to do the math. How much money does he have? How much money could he possibly make if he gets back into sports at his advanced age?

The dark-eyed junco.

I didn't have the presence of mind to grab the camera and take a picture of the globular gray bird with a white belly, perched on the deck railing just beyond the glass. Instead I scrambled for my glasses, and the bird flew away. But we remembered how it looked, and Meade figured out it was dark-eyed junco, and googling, I found lots of photos but what I liked best was this lovely illustration and story.

The junco was not so much flying in to the window as it was flying right up against it. It would fly up and down the window's length, using its claws to aid in climbing. All the while it peered at us. It did this repeatedly. Various hypotheses were tossed about as to why a junco was engaging in this risky, precious energy expending behavior....

Dark-eyed juncos are "the 'snowbirds' of the middle latitudes." Of the middle latitudes? That makes me look up "snowbird" in the OED. Snowbird... I just think of that cornball Anne Murray song. But the OED says a "snow-bird" is "One or other of various small European or American birds, esp. the snow-bunting (Plectrophanes nivalis), snow-finch (Montifringilla nivalis), or snow-sparrow (Junco hiemalis)":

1694  Philos. Trans. 1693 (Royal Soc.) 17 996   The Snow-bird which I take to be much the same with our Hedge Sparrow; this is so called because it seldom appears about Houses but against Snow or very cold Weather.

OED has this 3rd definition: "3. U.S. slang. One who sniffs cocaine (cf. snow n.1 5d); gen. a drug addict":

1923   J. F. Fishman Crucibles of Crime vi. 126   It was discovered that each of them [sc. handkerchiefs] has a small ink mark in one of the corners..these handkerchiefs had been dipped in cocaine... The mark in the corner notified the ‘snowbird’ that it was ‘loaded.’

There's a 4th definition, also U.S. slang:

1923   Nation 31 Oct. 487   In winter, when building is at a standstill in the North, northern workmen, ‘snow birds’ or ‘white doves’ in Negro parlance, flock south.

And a 5th definition: "A person who likes snow; a snow-sports enthusiast." And here we get a D.H. Lawrence quote from 1928: "I am no snow-bird, I hate the stark and shroudy whitemen, white and black." [ADDED: Is "whitemen" an error in the OED?!] That's from something called "Not I," which I can't seem to find on the web. But with some "snow-bird" searching, I did come up with this D.H. Lawrence poem, "Self-Pity":

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

You're not feeling sorry for yourself on Christmas Eve, are you?

"The Drug War is about control."

"Obama likes control."

And here's the NYT reporting on the way the Obama administration is supposedly mulling over what to do about Colorado and Washington.

Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him.

It's all about Obama!

(Why didn't I have a tag "Obama and drugs" before? All that "choom" stuff and so on....)

ADDED: Meade riffs on Obama and hope and segues into "pocketful of hope... money for dope... money for rope..." and I find the old John Lennon song in my iTunes:

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky
Is gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope 

That makes me think about and "10 For 2: John Sinclair Freedom Rally" which took place in Ann Arbor in 1971 — where I was in town, listening to the live feed on the radio — and John Lennon himself showed up and that "inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2012."

40 years ago. Obama was 10. It was the year Obama returned from Indonesia to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and go to prep school. As David Maraniss tells it:

A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. 180 Choom is a verb, meaning “to smoke marijuana.” As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.” To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled. When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning “numbing tobacco”) instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,” explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.

Obama likes control!

"We leaf through Bryan's drug sketchbook."

"The drawings are beautiful and compelling."

"That's lighter fluid," he says. "I used metallic crayons to give it that lighter fluid feeling. That's computer duster. If you don't do it right, it can freeze and shatter your teeth. That's crystal meth. That painting's probably the seventh or eighth on the same piece of paper, because I kept doing it over and over again. I couldn't stop. That's marijuana…"

If you don't do it right, it can freeze and shatter your teeth. Holy lord.

Anyway... here are the drawings, self-portraits done on drugs.

For comparison: Here's a series of portraits done in the course of a U.S. government experiment with LSD (back in the 1950s). 85 minutes into it, the artist was all "'I can see you clearly, so clearly. This... you... it's all ... I'm having a little trouble controlling this pencil. It seems to want to keep going.

I got to that last link via "3 Myths And 8 True Stories About LSD." Apparently, "The US Government Gave Artists LSD To See How It Would Affect Their Work."

"[T]he hypocrisy of pillorying a guy for using his employer’s equipment to grow marijuana..."

"... while his employer offers training in how to create a pair of substances — including one with its own mind-altering properties — that together probably do more damage to the state’s health and well-being than marijuana ever could."

Wisconsin State Journal columnist purports to detect "hypocrisy" after a University of Wisconsin researcher is arrested for growing marijuana in his university lab, when the university teaches beer brewery and has a big ice cream making plant.

Fat-choked dairy products in general are a focus of much study at the university, which regularly provides technical assistance to Dairy State dairy producers.

Given its status as the drunken-driving capital of the United States, and federal statistics that put its obesity rate of 27.7 percent, Wisconsin’s love affair with beer and ice cream might be far bigger threats than a couple joints.

Care to think about the Wisconsin economy without beer and dairy products? And the notion that more marijuana would help us out of our obesity... I'm having trouble with that line of reasoning. Wouldn't you keep eating or eat even more? Seems like your argument demands a focus on the drugs that make you skinny....

What drugs make those skinny rocks stars dreadfully skinny?...  I've always assumed that the drugs make them forget to eat, or maybe they can't afford food or the drug drives down appetite. What drugs do this?...  I want to add some authentic detail into a play I'm involved with....

The classic rock hard drug is heroin, which would definitely cause that gaunt look, and coke would be the 2nd choice. I would research those drugs...

Google "coke bloat". Makes you skinny, except in the face and tummy....

Heroin. If you're talking about the standard Janis-Joplin-oh-my-god-she-looks-like-a-skeleton-but-damn-she's-still-kinda-hot thing, it's heroin. If you're going for the where-are-her-teeth-and-what's-that-purple-thing-on-her-lip thing, methamphetamine.

So, there you have it. What you want is: heroin. Bonus: You'll be growing a very pretty flower!



Okay, all you nonhypocritical University of Wisconsinites: Cultivate your gardens!

Is this Trump's impending bombshell?

"Operatives close to the Romney campaign were contacted and rejected the information..."

“They didn’t want anything to do with it,” the source said. “They thought it was not anything they wanted to be associated with or anything their candidate would want to be associated with.”...

“The operatives close to the Romney campaign believed the man’s story would be the ultimate October Surprise but they got nowhere. People who would have taken the information to the highest levels of Romney’s campaign just wouldn’t touch it."

That's at Radar, linked in the top of the center column at Drudge with the teaser: "Romney says no to Obama cocaine hit..."

Meanwhile, Trump himself is teasing that he's got a "bombshell" he's releasing on Wednesday. It's "something very, very big... It's going to be very big. I know one thing - you will cover it in a very big fashion." It's "large, bordering on gigantic." So, I get it... huge, immense size.

What has happened to the beautiful people?

Did some disease just strike Hollywood? Seriously, they look ill or corrupt or desolate. Scroll down. And go here and scroll. Are they all somehow dying? Is this the return of "heroin chic"? Did the picture-of-health go out of style? What's happening?

Why does Hollywood suddenly look so awful?
	More evidence that Obama is going to lose the election.
	Maybe some new drug abuse problem.
	They don't look worse now, you just notice it now because their work product is so rotten.
	Show business is terrible, and without a sufficient flow of $ they look as crappy as anyone else.
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"My daughter has repeatedly brought home books from the school library that I have a problem with. I'm a feminist and I'm anti-censorship. I'm lost."

So wrote a woman at Ask Metafilter:

Yesterday, for the THIRD time, LittleTaff brought home a fairy tale... this time Rapunzel. Objectified women with little or no agency, basing marriage decisions on the appearance or wealth of the men, and WITCHES!!!!

After the second version of the Little Mermaid came home, I had a phone interview with the head and told her that I wasn't happy about the way women were portrayed, that I could see some historical merit in the books, but thought they were more appropriate for older children... but also that the Disney version of the Little Mermaid had no literary nor historical merit and did the school need some fundraising for books. (I'm on the fundraising committee. )

We were just talking about the Disney "Little Mermaid" yesterday, specifically the song "Part of Your World" — remember the singing "dads" — and my son John emailed me a link to his Ask Metafilter answer to that worried woman:

Really, [the Disney "Little Mermaid"] has no merit? Listen again to the song "Part of your World." Do you not hear the feminist themes in that song — about "bright young women . . . ready to stand?" What could be more feminist than a young woman expressing her interest in scientific discovery — "what's a fire, and why does it burn?" (The lyrics are fresh in my mind since I sang it in karaoke the other day along with a female friend.) I'm sure there's a great feminist critique of the movie to be made. But do you really want to prevent your daughter from seeing anything that could potentially be the subject of such a critique?

You seem to assume that you've seen all the truth that exists to be seen in your world, and educating your daughter is just about transmitting these truths to her. On the contrary, it matters relatively little whether your child shares your views. What matters more is equipping your child to deal with the world in her own individual way.

So I say, let your daughter be exposed to all of this. I'll bet she can handle it. Focus on talking to her about it instead of trying to create the perfect parental filter (considering that the filter is never going to last anyway). You might even learn something from her in the process.

You can probably tell I didn't filter my children's reading/watching. And I can't remember my own parents ever saying one thing about my choices — even my choice to watch just about anything that was ever on television (when they themselves rarely watched television). (My parents spent nearly every evening sitting around talking to each other. Not reading and talking. Just talking!)

Speaking of controlling your children, I was just listening to one of my favorite old Lovin' Spoonful songs "Younger Generation" (video and lyrics at the link):

Why must every generation,
Think their folks are square?
And no matter where their heads are,
They know mom's ain't there....

Listening to it now, I'm not sure whether it's a sincere expression of a desire to let children range free — "I must be permissive... all my deepest worries must be his cartoons" — or making fun of hippie-style parents who don't know where to draw the line:

Hey, Pop, my girlfriend's only three,
She's got her own videophone,
And she's taking LSD,
And now that we're best friends,
She wants to give a bit to me,
But what's the matter, daddy,
How come you're turning green?
Can it be that you can't live up to your dreams?

Crazy dreams! (And yet, today the little girl does have her own videophone.)