I found this image of a building in Melbourne that utilizes the Cafe Wall illusion to create the appearance of floors that zig and zag up and down, yet each floor is perfectly level. This is one of those illusions that demonstrates how badly humans suck at perceiving parallel lines when faced with even the simplest perspective challenges. Click through to the link at Wolfram Math to learn more about this nifty trick of the eye.

Yesterday I posted about how writing about drugs in college might just possibly be bad for your future political career. (Never mind writing about college fifteen years later...) This prompted me to dig up one of my earliest pieces from my fifth year of college, when I had a column called Random Access in my campus newspaper. It was the first appearance of a character called Crank Boy that I would later go on to use over and over again throughout the years. I won't pretend that this is particularly polished, but looking back on it, I'm definitely bemused by the fact that they let me get away with this stuff. When I started the column, it was a little more benign, but within a matter of weeks, I was foisting this kind of dementia on the hapless students of my Iowa campus.

This was originally published in 1993. Someone else wrote the headline. It cracks me up imagining someone else having that job.

*********************

I was already hallucinating wildly when my friend Crank Boy came to visit. Most of the time he looks a little funny anyway, but today he had three heads and little chirping mouths all over his chest. Yes indeed, friends, I was having an interesting evening.

"How you feeling, Scotto?" Crank Boy's middle head, the one that looked like Cheryl Tiegs, asked.

"Well," I replied slowly, so as not to bite my own tongue off, "you know how sometimes you really have to throw up, only you can't, and you just sit there and heave and heave and heave..."

Crank Boy's heads nodded.

"Well," I continued, "imagine that you're heaving like that and somebody comes up, doesn't matter who, could be anyone, let's just say it's Fred Grandy. Fred Grandy comes up and starts shoveling spoonful after spoonful of Hellman's mayonnaise into your mouth, jar after jar, and then he scrapes sandpaper across your eyeballs and starts singing 'Ave Maria'..." I paused for a moment. "Umm... did I have a point with all of this?"

Crank Boy's three heads looked disdainfully at the pile of garbage that surrounded me. I was literally bathed in empty Mad Dog bottles, used syringes, empty Robitussin bottles, three or four mounds of macaroni and ketchup and bottle after bottle of pills that I filched from my shrink.

Crank Boy's first head, the one that looked like Phyllis Diller, asked, "Scotto... are you a substance abuser?"

"Of course not," I replied in a huff. "I treat my substances very well, thank you."

Wired hipped us to a pair of new studies about the medicinal effects of marijuana. In the first study, published in the journal Anesthesiology, 15 people had capsaicin ("the 'hot' chemical found in chilli peppers") injected right under their skin - which, remind me not to sign up for that study when it comes to town - and then dosed with either a "moderate" amount of pot or a large amount of pot. The results:

University of California researchers found moderate use had the greatest impact on pain in 15 volunteers, while large doses actually made pain worse....

Five minutes after smoking the drug, none of the doses had any effect on the pain felt.

But 45 minutes later, those who had smoked the moderate dose said their pain was much better, while those who consumed high doses said it had got worse.

They did, however, feel "higher" than counterparts who had taken moderate doses.

Of course, the real world implications of this study, while interesting, are hardly conclusive - except of course for those who advocate using pot to treat chili pepper burns. As Wired points out, "The University of California study needs to be conducted on a far larger group of subjects suffering from the sort of pain -- back pain, migraines -- that marijuana is used to treat in real life."

Meanwhile, a separate study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, examined the effects of pot on depression in rats, and found similar results as the U Cal study:

The neurobiological study conducted jointly by McGill University and a research institute affiliated with the Universite de Montreal indicates cannabis in low doses increased serotonin levels in the brains of laboratory rats.

The depletion of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that controls moods, leads to depression. Anti-depression drugs work by increasing the serotonin in the brain.

However, when the doses were increased on the rats, the effect was described as completely reversed, even devastating. Serotonin levels dropped significantly.

"We know from anecdotal evidence that (human) smokers of marijuana experience good effects ... but they also experience unwanted effects," said McGill PhD student Francis Bambico, who authored the study, which is to be published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.

"Some smokers experience anxiety, agitation. But at very high doses and in certain circumstances, it leads into depression-enhancing effects, particularly if you take in a lot of cannabis at very high doses."

While doing a little digging about Tim Leary yesterday, I came across an anecdote that was first published in Paul Krassner's LSD Stories For The Soul, about the time a 23-year-old photo journalist Robert Altman got the chance to drop acid with Leary and his wife Rosemary after taking pictures at a "Leary for governor" press conference (one of which is featured above).

I did the driving while my pal Barbara Mauritz rode shotgun. Tim and Ro occupied the back seat. Somewhere in the middle of the San Francisco Bay bridge Tim's arm reached over. I spot a powdered residue in his palm.

"Want some?"

It could only be one substance, no explanation necessary.

"Wow!" I thought. "This is an occasion."

Sharing acid with the great Tim Leary. I needed no second invite and immediately accepted my guest's granular overture. Physically restricted at this 'moving' moment the only thing I could do was stick out my tongue and lap it up.

I was thrilled. Indeed I trilled inwardly "Hey, I just licked acid off Tim Leary's palm!" This would be one of those 'great moments' I'll share with my grandchildren.

Needless to say, hijinks ensue; I'm trying to imagine how much acid must have been in that "powdered residue." But really, the main reason I'm posting this anecdote is so you get a chance to see the astoundingly retro background on that web page. Warning: eyeballs may bleed.

Canadian Dan Gardner takes a look at drug hypocrisy in modern culture and dares ask the question, "What the hell?"

Western cultures have a bizarre relationship with psychoactive drugs. Some are believed to be so dangerous and destructive that they are banned and those who make, sell or use them are deemed criminals and outcasts. But when a government-owned corporation seeks to boost alcohol consumption by marketing the drug as a sociable and sophisticated indulgence, no one sees anything amiss.

...

News and entertainment media are filled with stories about people who suffer as a result of taking an illicit drug, but they almost never have stories of people who take an illicit drug without bad consequences following -- even though the latter event is vastly more common than the former. The opposite is true of alcohol: As a 2003 study of British television found, stories of people suffering as a result of drinking do appear occasionally -- almost always in the news -- but those stories are "infrequent" compared to "positive, convivial, funny images" of drinking.

It is one of those high-level essays that points out the obvious paradoxes in modern drug policy, but it is a good read. Check it out.

College mid-term season means that students have a week to learn all the material they were supposed to be learning all semester. Black coffee is yesterday's answer to the all-night cram session; the students of today have pharmaceutical speed:

"I got prescribed [Ritalin] in fifth grade, upon recommendation of my teacher, and used the medication until Grade 11 or 12 ... I take it today to study, but never after 8 p.m. or I won't get to sleep," said a St. Francis-Xavier student who wished to remain anonymous.

But don't think this is a one-sided story in praise of this wonder drug. There is caution from a local dealer as well:

"I warn people before giving it to them that they should try using [Ritalin] before taking it for any major or important work," the student supplier said. "I've seen many people take this medication and the result is they either can not focus they become too anxious, or too euphoric."

And to round it all out, can we get a sound-byte from a concerned third-party?

"It's kind of unfortunate really," he said, "[but] people are going to do it, people have always done it. People are going to use stimulants or abuse stimulants or whatever. It's kind of like coffee, only in the pill form."

Ah journalism, how sweetly formulaic art thou...

Consciousness Cafe hipped us to a gala cocktail reception benefiting the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in NYC. If you've got a couple hundred smackers to spare and you want to hang out with Alex Grey and Mariel Hemingway, this is the shindig for you! Hemingway has this to say:

Alex's art is multi dimensional and my interest in opening to different dimensions especially the fourth/ the heart is my passion.

The Chapel and Alex have created space and work where the world as we see it, is open to a world that we can feel and experience differently, perhaps a world we are not familiar with. We are on an integrated path and the combination of the music art dance and fine art is the window into dimensions that are Bigger than us. Alex has opened this door.

The event is called Metamorphosis, and will feature an art auction and a chance to see some new Grey pieces unveiled. But did I also mention... Mariel Hemingway!

Here's something you definitely don't see very often: a local news scare story about jimson weed. We already know that some kids will get high on anything, but apparently only in "gardens and fields all over Kansas" does "jimson, or Moon Weed as it is often called, because it produces a flower at night," grow wild and readily enough to become the subject of a scare piece. A certain Dr. Doren Fredrickson of the Sedgwick County Health Department had this to say on the risks:

"The margin between some hallucinogen effects, and death, are fairly small, so you take a few more leaves, and you may push yourself into the death category," Doctor Fredrickson said.

You hear that? The death category. Which is like the Double Jeopardy round, except more permanent. At any rate, local kids definitely seem to know the score about the stuff:

"I just heard stories how they acted all stupid, and crazy, and got pulled over," one girl said.

"I know some people that took them, and they said they just tripped out," another girl said.

Perhaps a sign of the times that,

"Kids just use anything to get messed up I guess," one of the girls speculated.

But what's encouraging is that all the warnings about Jimson Weed, that parents, police and educators have put out there, also appear to have had an effect.

"I heard it was really dangerous, and you could die from it, and that's scary," one of the girls said.

You heard it here first!

Apparently, if you write about drugs when you're young, then try to become a political leader, people might, uh, use that against you, as British politician Chris Huhne, contender for leader of the Liberal Democrats, discovered:

The piece, which bears [Huhne's] name as an 18-year-old student at Oxford University in the 1970s, states that drugs such as opium, LSD, and amphetamines should be an “accepted facet of our society”.

Most notable is the author’s apparent familiarity with class A substances and their effect when taken. “Opium is available in Oxford and, in its natural form can be safely experimented with,” the article states. Opium and the class A drug heroin are both opiates. “Colours, movements and shapes are serenely beautiful, as beautiful as a dream and as realistic as George’s [a cafe frequented by students] at 7.30 on a Monday morning.

“Acid [LSD] is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper . . . The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people . . . if one is able to live with oneself . . . then acid holds no surprises.”

Although he wrote this back in 1973, it seems like a whole genre unto itself: the proselytizing college newspaper article, in which some subset of students, having discovered drugs for the first time and also having keys to the printing presses, decide to try to convert their dorm room chums. I can't actually remember if I wrote an article like this back in school; I did have a fictional weekly column in which the main characters included "my good friend Crank Boy" and we certainly went on drug-induced binges in those columns, but I suspect the average person on my college campus back in Iowa would not have considered those pieces all that inspirational. (I'll see if I can dig up a good example of one of these...) Of course, the equivalent these days is actually posting videos of your drug trips on YouTube and pictures of your bong collection on your MySpace profile.

At any rate, it's sad to see that this kind of college age goofiness means you can't run for office. I better shut down my exploratory committee...

A moving tribute to old Bob by comic book author Alan Moore.