via CNN.com:

Many of the 36 volunteers rated their reaction to a single dose of the drug, called psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

...

That experience included such things as a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love. People say "they can't possibly put it into words," Griffiths said.

Two months later, 24 of the participants filled out a questionnaire. Two-thirds called their reaction to psilocybin one of the five top most meaningful experiences of their lives. On another measure, one-third called it the most spiritually significant experience of their lives, with another 40 percent ranking it in the top five.

About 80 percent said that because of the psilocybin experience, they still had a sense of well-being or life satisfaction that was raised either "moderately" or "very much."

Sounds great!

Such comments "just seemed unbelievable," said Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, the study's lead author.

But don't try this at home, he warned. "Absolutely don't."

Wow man. Bummer. You're such a buzzkill.

I am coining this word now, in anticipation of the day when video sharing sites routinely scan incoming videos for
"a certain percent of skin tone in an image". In response, amatuer pornographers will simply put colored gels over the lenses of their video camera (or employ the digital post-processing equivalent), neatly defeating those skin-tone checkers and probably creating a whole sub-culture (starting in Japan, probably) devoted to tinted skin.

Remember, you heard it here first: Chromopornography.

We'll also accept "Chromoporn", "Chromo", "Chrome", and even "Chrorn".

Bought a pack of Orbit Lemon-Lime gum. Opened it, got a whiff of the stuff, immediately thought of dish soap. It's mostly lemon, but it seems like there's a touch of mint/menthol in there, and that really pushes the flavor into the realm of detergent.

I wish companies would stop using food fragrances for their non-food products. Two of my favorite scents are practically ruined: lemon is "what soap smells like", and vanilla is about to become "what a candle smells like".

In the comments to my weekly "Start your iPods" thread, Robert C. leaves a link to a video of Thom Yorke from Radiohead doing a song, solo and acoustic. Good stuff. He's got some serious strumming going on.

I suspect only C/C++ programmers will get this one.

0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall

found on a .sig on CodeProject

Wifey and I made this cake a couple of weekends ago. It turned out to be the blackest food I've ever seen. Not just really dark brown, this was b l a c k - and delicious!

The only changes we made were 1) decaf coffee and 2) Hershey's "dark" cocoa instead of the normal kind. Oh, and we cooked it in a bundt pan, instead of in short layer-cake pans.

Super rocking cake action.

For Skot, at Izzle Pfaff, it was XTC's Skylarking. For Snarkout, it was SuperChunk's No Pocky For Kitty^*. Bernard Sumner, from Joy Division and New Order has a whole list of them, as does Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices.

For me, it was The Cure's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

Up until I heard that record, I was pretty much into Metal; and metal was quickly turning into Hair Metal. But, just in time, the new kid showed up at our high school and turned me onto this album. The first thing it did was show me that it was possible for other genres besides metal to be dark, gloomy and angry (very important for teenage boys). For example, the first song:

Oh kiss me, kiss me, kiss me
Your tongue's like poison
So swollen it fills up my mouth
Just just love me, love me, love me
And nail me to the floor
And push my guts all inside out
Get it out, get it out, get it out
Get your fucking voice out of my head
I never wanted this
I never wanted any of this
I wish you were dead
I wish you were dead

To me, back in '88, that's was 100x more powerful than any metal song could ever be. Metal was, and probably still is, obsessed with sorcery, Satan, and insanity - stuff that I don't find scary, and that I can't relate to at all. But this song, "The Kiss", was the stuff of one guy having a really hard time with some woman (and probably some drugs). It seemed so much more authentic, to me. And even more importantly, the next song, "Catch", isn't angry at all; it's just a sweet little song about a crush:

Yeah I know who you remind me of
A girl I think I used to know
Teah I'd see her when the days got colder
On those days when it felt like snow

You know I even think that she stared like you
She used to just stand there and stare
And roll her eyes right up to heaven
And make like I just wasn't there

And she used to fall down a lot
That girl was always falling
Again and again
And I used to sometimes try to catch her
But never even caught her name

And sometimes we would spend the night
Just rolling about on the floor
And I remember even though it felt soft at the time
I always used to wake up sore...
etc...

It's happy, dreamy, whimsical, and intimate. While the first song is a 5 minute guitar freakout with a blast of angry lyrics crammed in at the end, Catch is a soft little 2:45 with synth-violins, acoustic guitar and Robert Smith's trademark "doo-doo-doo"-ing. The first two songs set the limits, and the rest of the songs ricochet back and forth between those extremes. There are love songs on that record - OMG! I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to a love song. But those love songs are so unlike anything I'd ever heard before that they didn't make me run out of the room screaming, the way most Top 40 love songs did - and still do. For example, "Just Like Heaven" is on that record: one of the best songs ever written (and I'll fight anyone who disagrees), and it's a bleeping love song! But you couldn't hear anything like that on commercial radio at the time (at least not where I was). Sing along with me:

Show me, show me, show me
How you do that trick
The one that makes me scream she said
The one that makes me laugh she said
And threw her arms around my neck
Show me how you do it
And i promise you
I promise that I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you
.. etc

A love song sure, but worlds away from the stuff you'd hear on Top 40 radio back in 1987: Lionel Richie, Huey Lewis, Bryan Adams, Lou Graham, etc.. The lyrics were fresh, the music was fresh, the style was fresh, it was a love song, and it even rocked a little - just ask Dinosaur Jr..

This album was a whole new world: a wonderful world where love songs didn't have to suck, where dark songs didn't have to be about witches and black masses, and where dance songs weren't insipid (ex. see "Hot! Hot! Hot!"). I don't think I bought another metal record for years after that. Once I figured out that there were more than two kinds of music (metal and crap) I was on my way to becoming a muscial omnivore - except opera; that shit's poison.

* FYI, Pocky is a Japanese snack: thin rods of a pretzel-like cookie, dipped in chocloate, or other sweets. Very yummy.

When they run, it makes our job easier," said Jim Matheny, a lieutenant with the Stamford, Conn., police department. The 41-year-old told ABC News he has no trouble chasing down suspects who wear low-hanging pants.

"They go to take off and either they have to use their hands to hold their pants up or several times the pants just fell down around their knees and they had to stop running," Matheny said. "They spend all day thinking of ways to beat the police and then they go and put these pants on. It really handicaps them."

via ABC News

I'm not one to get upset about celebrities sharing their opinions with people who didn't ask to hear them - if Sean Penn wants to moan about something, let him - I just ignore it. But, sometimes, they do things that are just so stupid, shallow, completely inneffective, and pointless that I just can't ignore them; because to do so would deprive me of a chance to ridicule them. So, in the spirit of mockery, I present you with the stupidest, shallowest, most inneffective and pointless stunt I've (ever?) heard of: a bunch of self-absorbed celebrities are going to do a "rolling" hunger strike. That's where one rare and precious celebrity goes an agonizing 24 hours without food, then the next delicate pampered flower does his own 24 hours without food, then the next, then the next, etc.. That's right, 24 hours each - what dedication!

Boring day here at work. There are only about three of us here today, and my boss is cranking this Christian metal-rap stuff in his office.

So, I'm going to play a round of one of my favorite games: given two arbitrary musicians, find a link between them, without using any kind of reference material. Since I decided to do this while reading a review of a Primus record, while also a Fleetwood Mac song on the iPod, that that's what I'll attempt: Primus to Fleetwood Mac.

calculating....
calculating....
calculating....
Done.

Les Claypool of Primus played with Adrian Belew on Belew's last string of records.
Belew played guitar on David Bowie's Lodger.
David Bowie teamed up with Queen for the song Under Pressure.
Queen is currently working with former Bad Company singer, Paul Rodgers.
Paul Rodgers played in a band called The Firm, with Jimmy Page.
Before Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was in The Yardbirds.
Before Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton was in The Yardbirds.
Eric Clapton played in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, along with John McVie.
And John McVie is the bass player for Fleetwood Mac.

Wow. That one probably took 45 minutes. Easily the hardest one I've ever finished - some I've never finished.

I usually try to do these in my head, but this one just wasn't happening, so I started diagramming the relationships I was coming up with. See below, if you're interested.

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