Linda Perhacs is a singer-songwriter known for her only album, "Parallelograms" - a piece of delicate psychedelic folk. First released in 1970, it sunk without being noticed, but later gradually became - despite very bad sound quality - a sought-after collector's item. (It was remastered and reissued in 2003, so now it's possible to enjoy it without looking for pricey originals.) The album has many beautiful songs, like "Moons and Cattails" or "Paper Mountain Man", but the most remembered is the title track.

This 2005 re-recording is different from the original, which had a less full, more "airy" sound. Still both versions are very spacy and eerie, far from the standard for a folk-rock song (even in the lyrics: "quadrehedral, tetrahedral, monocyclocybercilia..."). Perhacs says about the new version: "the song now really goes out into the universe and surrounds you with circles and semi- circles and parallel sounds. It is kind of a journey into the ethereal and the beautiful as this song was always meant to be, a moving sculpture of sound and color".

After over 30 years, she's writing songs and recording again, so let's hope her second album will be ready soon. More Most Eerie Psychedelia coming soon!

In a world filled with false dichotomies we must constantly choose which is the more disgusting between two options. Given America's fear of illegal drugs and its simultaneous embrace of all things snacky, one blogger poses the question: Which is worse for your health: drugs or obesity?

As a lifelong bean-pole I will say that I would greatly prefer drug addiction to obesity, as long as I had a decent supply of drugs. Perhaps if food was illegal I would be more inclined to fatten up to combat resource scarcity, but if I could find drugs that kept me from getting hungry, probably not...

For those of you who don't obsessively read internet news sites - let me let you in on a secret: we are now officially living in a cyberpunk novel.

Firstly - a hacker group called anonymous has declared open warfare on the Church of Scientology for murdering people, generally being insane and filing suits against YouTube for the release of the now famous Tom Cruise video.

While the idea that a loosely assembled vigilante hacker group is capable of crippling an entity like the CoS is amazing already, it gets even better given the context of this Penthouse interview with L. Ron Hubbard Jr from the '80s:

Penthouse: He was trying to perform an abortion?

Hubbard: According to him and my mother, he tried to do it with me. I was born at six and a half months and weighed two pounds, two ounces. I mean, I wasn't born: this is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me. It happened during a night of partying --he got involved in trying to do a black-magic number. Also, I've got to complete this by saying that he thought of himself as the Beast 666 incarnate.

Penthouse: The devil?

Hubbard: Yes. The Antichrist. Aleister Crowley thought of himself as such. And when Crowley died in 1947, my father then decided that he should wear the cloak of the beast and become the most powerful being in the universe.

Penthouse: You were sixteen years old at that time. What did you believe in?

And it just gets better from there, going on to detail his father's fascination with, among other things, phenobarbitol, cocaine, espionage, moon children and siphoning people's souls. It's a fascinating world we live in, people.

If a recent article from our friends down under is to be trusted, GHB users have gotten pretty cynical about the likelihood of overdosing themselves:

Many sites and forums advise regular GHB users to buy a $70 ambulance subscription to avoid paying for a $2000 ride to hospital.

Huh. Well, whether that's actually being posted on forums or not, local paramedics are just appalled:

"GHB is a terrible drug," paramedic Alan Eade said.

"You will, at some point, regardless of how often you use the drug, overdose."

Oh. In that case, maybe these sites could just be promoting cushy pillows to fall down on or something. What mayhem!

Now this sounds promising:

Scientists have successfully tested a new method to treat long-term pain, using genetically-modified viruses. By delivering specific genes directly into the spinal column the viruses alleviated severe pain for up to three months at a time and avoided the need for drugs....

In the study Benjamin Storek, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, used a virus that was modified to carry the prepro-beta-endorphin gene into nerve cells where it activated opiate receptors, mimicking morphine-like painkillers. He injected the virus directly into the spinal fluid of rats suffering from neuropathic pain. The rats remained pain free three months later. A second gene, interleukin-10, was also effective. The results were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If this holds up in humans, this would be life-changing indeed for the legions suffering from various forms of chronic pain, for whom opiate painkillers are often only partially effective and have numerous undesirable side effects. Go Team Science!

As long as we're cataloging how caffeine might affect pregnant women, allow us to meanwhile plant a seed in all you non-pregnant women: apparently caffeine may reduce the risk of ovarian cancer. Oh sure, it's premature to tell and you wouldn't want to go bathing in caffeine or anything, but still:

Tworoger's team looked at the association between smoking and ovarian cancer risk among 110,454 of the women, and the association between alcohol and caffeine and ovarian cancer risk among 80,253 women, all followed from 1976 to 2004. For the smoking analysis, the researchers found 737 confirmed cases of epithelial ovarian cancer, the most common type of ovarian cancer. For the diet analysis, they found 507 women with epithelial ovarian cancer.

No association was apparent for drinking alcohol and ovarian cancer, or for smoking, with one exception. "It [smoking] does appear to increase the incidence of a rare type, mucinous ovarian tumors," she said, a subtype of epithelial ovarian cancer.

However, the researchers found an "inverse trend" for total caffeine intake and caffeinated coffee consumption and ovarian cancer, but the individual risk reductions didn't reach statistical significance.

The association for caffeine was strongest if the women had never used either birth control pills or hormones after menopause, Tworoger said. Why caffeine may be protective isn't certain, she said, but its consumption may lower estrogen levels, at least in postmenopausal women.

Your mileage, of course, may vary!

Problem: You're a medical marijuana patient and you're nearly out of medicine and your dispensary has closed for the day. You have chronic pain and need your medicine or tonight will be a living nightmare of exploding nerve cells. What do you do?

Solution: The AVM! The Anytime Vending Machines are 24/7 ATMs that dispense medical pot to pre-approved patients with a type of pre-paid debit card. They've been installed at two LA-area medical marijuana dispensaries, are guarded by round-the-clock security and deliver your choice of 5 strains of ganj - er - medicine. Yay progress!

Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac) weighs in on the antidepressant re-analysis. In summary, he notes that not all trials are created equal. If the drugs are effective (and even Turner's re-analysis suggests that they are), then well designed studies will be more likely to show positive results than poorly designed studies. If well designed studies are also more likely to be published, then Turner's observation of higher publication rate for positive studies is a logically necessary result.

There is a bit of a bind here. When results depend on the interpretation of experts, they are open to criticism of bias. But on the other hand, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. The balance of the data seem to suggest that it was correct for the authors of inconclusive studies to interpret their findings positively - these drugs are effective. Myself, I favor incorporating human judgment in the process and prefer to combat bias through transparency.

Kramer notes in a sidebar that

Turner's judgments, regarding spin in published data, are demanding; if researchers aggregated data, combining a highly positive study and an inconclusive one into a pooled analysis yielding overall moderate results, Turner counts the inconclusive study as having been misreported, even when the monograph indicates up front that data sets have been merged.

This approach has its strengths and weaknesses - and is fundamentally what Turner has himself done. What is gained by condemning it as universally inappropriate? Furthermore, there are good methodlogical reasons for preferring to publish positive findings over null findings. A scientific study is basically a line of reasoning. When the results all line up, we have some reason to think that all links in that chain of reasoning are correct. However, when the conclusion is not supported, the problem could be any single one of those links: maybe the outcome was poorly measured, maybe the entry diagnoses were inaccurate, maybe compliance to the regimen was low or maybe it was something else.

The bottom line, Kramer claims, is that the FDA procedures still seem to have made the correct decision about these drugs.

Nor is it at all clear that the standards the FDA used for drug approval yielded harmful results for public health purposes. One requirement was that a drug must demonstrate efficacy in two trials; inconclusive findings in other trials might then be set aside. This standard may have been reasonable. Given how much "noise" enters into even careful research—problems in diagnosis, problems in outcome measurements—it is hard to identify effective medications. Only about one in 10 drugs that enter late-stage trials comes to market; excluding effective drugs may be a price we pay for setting the bar as high as we do. The Turner reanalysis supports this "two is enough" policy. When you include the negative data, each of the 12 antidepressants under study still demonstrates efficacy. That's not to say that full study results shouldn't be made public—only that there's no evidence that the old procedures led the FDA astray.

I've been trying to find you people a good story down here. Really, I have. I stay out till 6am pretty regularly, and the hardest things I've seen people doing are champagne and coffee. I've gotten a little hopeful when I've seen some twentysomethings urgently sniffling, then I realize that everyone has just caught my cold. The leading contender for anything drug-like is tango, which doesn't really count. But the next runner up is mate, and it lets me share this lovely little image of hollowed out cow hooves with you. I'm dying to bring one of these home to somebody, and can't decide who would be most horrified.

Anyways, MATE! Grassy, coffee-ish, caffeinated tea that people drink out of a hollowed out gourd (or hoof!) through a straw filter. It's wacky. And way more prevalent than standard bagged tea at the grocery store, in about a million flavors. In more adventurous lands, sometimes made with coca leaves. I've been going through waves with mate. While I'm a bona fide caffeine junky, and it doesn't give you the same kind of queasy shaky that a lot of coffee does, I think my mouth has gotten too accustomed to harsh tastes that accompany my caffeine, so I find myself back at coffee. Plus I'm just a sucker for steamed milk. However, I might start drinking my coffee out of a cow hoof for effect.

I've got a week and a half left, so maybe something will crack wide open and I'll be able to break a story for you about the hidden world of Argentine jenkem rings, but until then, I'll probably just be dancing.

In case Tom Cruise's creepy Scientology cheerleader video wasn't, uh, creepy enough, apparently Scientologists in the UK are forging ties with law enforcement to distribute anti-drug propaganda. Of course, they're taking a few liberties with the truth:

One of the booklets handed out by Metropolitan police on behalf of the church’s Say No to Drugs campaign said Hubbard was creator of “the safest, most effective - and only - detoxification procedure of its kind”.

In total 1m booklets are distributed each year. They label alcohol and antidepressants as “poison” and say that oxycodone, a prescription painkiller, is “as powerful as heroin”.

A booklet on heroin says methadone, the drug used by the NHS to treat heroin addicts, is as dangerous as the class A drug and should not be prescribed.

Eeep. Of course, I'm not totally surprised; even police officers, after all, crave audience with Tom Cruise:

Last autumn the City of London police carried out an inquiry after some 20 officers accepted Scientology hospitality that included tickets to the Leicester Square premiere of Mission Impossible III, and a £500 a head charity dinner at the church’s British headquarters, both of which were attended by Tom Cruise.