As I mentioned before, this juice tastes like hell. A number of folks suggested mixing it with juice but for the first week I felt like that was somehow wimping out. The Aloe is supposedly packed with so many good pharma-things that it’ll not only act as an anti-inflammatory for my back, provide needed collagen and other spine-healing elements but it’d help digestion, skin tone, make my eyes brighter and allow me to better manage a small country.

I haven’t noticed many of these benefits yet — but I have noticed that my carpal tunnel syndrome/repetitive stress disorder is not bugging me at all! Seriously, my crappy, weak and usually aching hands — so degenerated by decades of working full time on the computer, years of video gaming with hideously bad controllers and likely horrible seating and ergonomics have taken their toll. I don’t play nearly as many games as I used to as my hands just can’t do it — an hour or two of TF2 and I’m shot. Perhaps not so strangely, since starting to drink this nasty smelling and tasting juice every day — my hands hurt less. The anti-inflammatory agents must be working. A sign I might be on the right track…!

Anyways, regardless how this is helping my CTS, it still tastes like crap. I decided drinking something nasty tasting wasn’t “manning up” when I could mix it with juice. My local market had a special on some Belgian “Looza” juices so I tried their Banana Nectar and Pineapple, thinking those flavors would be strong and cover up the liquid-plumber-esque flavor of the Aloe. Banana Nectar works pretty well! I could barely notice a hint of the Aloe and mostly just got a mouthful of slushy banana-y goodness.

I’m going to keep going with the Aloe. So far my back isn’t noticeably better but nothing leads me to believe 1 week will do much. I’ve largely got the pain in my sciatic nerve to go away and now I am just haunted by worry that it’ll return and a very, very tender lower-back. I’m doing everything I can not to re-injure it and start physical therapy next week.

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A blend of medical marijuana called “Tom Cruise Purple” may bring legal action from the actor, the New York Daily News reports.

Cannabis clubs in Northern California allegedly are selling vials of the marijuana with a picture of Cruise laughing hysterically, the Rush & Molloy column reports

Not a lot more to read at Report: ‘Tom Cruise Purple’ Medical Marijuana Has Actor Smoking Mad [Fox"News"]

Read a lot more at: Medical high jinks leave Tom Cruise camp fuming [NY Daily News]

**BONUS VIDEO** (potentially NSFW)

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Mexican soldiers battling a violent drug gang and corrupt local police confiscated a sport utility vehicle decked out with extras worthy of a James Bond movie.

What kind of cool tricks did the drug runners install? Nothing nearly as cool as we’d like — I need a rocket booster, lasers and the Mach 5’s tree trimmers — plus a Spy Hunter oil slick. I guess Mexican drug runners lack the same cash-reserves of say Columbian drug runners.

Following a shootout with the gang, soldiers said they arrested four municipal police and confiscated an armored Jeep Grand Cherokee equipped with a smoke machine and spike sprayer meant to deter pursuers

Oh well! I remember years ago when there was a South African car equipped with flame throwers…

Mexico army confiscates James Bond truck from gang[Reuters.com]

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“He offered to buy us beers if we would just let him go home,” Officer Joel Reierson wrote in the report.

I wish cops would be that cool. “Dude, I’m drunk. I got a pocket full of dope and pills. How about you back off, have a beer and I run home and sleep it off?”

Seems a 24 year old in Indianapolis got caught in possession of xanax and weed while drunk in public. The cops found more xanax and more weed in his car. When faced with arrest the gentleman evidently offered the law-enforcement professionals $100 and some beer.

How did it work for him?

Narayan Thomas Trivedi, 24, was held in the Marion County Jail this morning on initial charges of bribery, drug possession, public intoxication and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Whoops! Additional charges!

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More like the Bush Ka-BOOOM!

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Psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti and her colleagues measured levels of a protein that transports the neurotransmitter serotonin in the blood of 20 people who had recently fallen madly in love, 20 people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and 20 healthy comparison participants. … She found that the group of patients with OCD and the recently love-struck were no different in terms of the serotonin transporter protein, suggesting the brain began to function markedly differently as love blossomed.

If you enjoy reading about the chemistry that happens in our brains when we love and feel concern for others, abstracting the most meaningful emotions and experience of human existence into soulless base molecules (like I do!), may I also suggest the great blog Hug the Monkey, which follows research and study of oxytocin, a hormone that influences—or, rather, is—our feelings of comfort and love.

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At a news conference in Brooklyn, state Atty. Gen. Andrew M. Cuomo said the arrests served as a message that “organized crime still exits. . . . We like to think it’s a vestige of the past. It’s not. It is as unrelenting as weeds that continue to sprout in the cracks of society.

Seems the Mafia still has its hat in the game. Every bit a part of America as baseball.

Full Story  [LATimes.com]

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This may sound silly, but you should play around with pheromones sometime. I did back in 2004, and just started experimenting with them again after my own girlfriend broke up with me back in September.

There’s two places to buy online, and both have forums with lots of good information. My current fave is Androtics, because the folks on the forums and the owners seem to be a bit more sophisticated. The older, original source which has fallen out of favor is Love Scent. (Although they sell one of the best all-natural colognes you’ll ever try, Pheros.)

Androtics sells “To Go” sizes which are small, portable and much cheaper than full bottles, in case you want to play around without spending a lot of money.

I asked him what the results of his experiments with pheromone colognes had been.

I’ve been trying out many different combinations for work, which means stuff that doesn’t heat up the girlies, but makes people respond better to you in a professional environment.

I must say I have been getting a LOT more cooperation from all the mega-egos at work, and my stress levels are down dramatically because of this.

I tried out an androstenone-heavy mix last Saturday for the first time. Androstenone is the alpha-male pheromone, and can be quite pungent, so it requires a cologne cover to both mask the scent and carry the pheromones. Never wear this shit at work, it will lead to trouble.

I ended up chatting up a gorgeous 20-something recent college grad at Pianos for quite a while (until I got kinda bored). Disclaimer: I suck at chatting up girls, especially at bars; I never ever ever did well with younger crowds, not even when I was young (I am 37); and I made absolutely no effort to talk to her or anybody else, she started talking to me.

This is what the pheromone crowd would call a “hit”.

Also, androstenone is kinda dangerous, as other men can react in an aggressive manner to it. I had two incidents that night in which friends wildly overreacted to a waiter making a minor error and a cabbie going off-duty just as we tried to enter his cab.

The government is researching the smell of fear; I don’t discount that pheromones could be replicated. I do wonder how well these online vendors can emulate the magic mixture of man funk, as well as how effective it is overall. Until I see some more science on it I’m going to keep rubbing my pit sweat around the rim of lonely ladies’ drink glasses and wait for them to dogpile me.

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A co-worker of mine recently rented a car from Zipcar. [In Canada, I would add. - Ed.] He found an unexpected bonus in the glove box—an ounce of weed was left by the previous owner. Excited by his surprise “score,” he unwisely mentioned it to another co-worker. Next thing you know he receives this letter in the mail.

The letter, in all its fake officious glory, plus denouement, after the jump.

NOTICE: Zipcar has contacted us saying a few people have already asked them about this policy this morning, so just to be doubly clear, Zipcar did not send this letter. It’s a fake letterhead created by this guy’s friends to screw with his head. Zipcar does not actually leave things in their cars as an “honesty trap.”

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This “cop on pot brownies” 911 call blew up on the internet this weekend, but this news report gives you a taste—and also frustrates me tremendously for two reasons. First, the cop was dismissed but no charges were filed, despite the fact that he stole evidence (the marijuana) from a locker?

Secondly, the newscasters crack up after hearing the cop freak out on the call, just like everyone else did when they heard it. Because we all know marijuana is totally harmless. That’s the fucking punchline of this whole thing, yet while we’re giggling about one dumb asshole of a cop’s misfortune, thousands of people are in jail for marijuana-related crimes. Ha ha ha!

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Students celebrated with a makeshift Slip N Slide, music by Bob Marley, Rockstar energy drinks and, of course, pot. At exactly 4:20 p.m., billows of smoke rose above the crowd, as revelers cheered and shouted.

And in Toronto yesterday, over ten thousand people got together for the “Toronto Freedom Festival and Global Marijuana March,” although many of the attendees apparently forget exactly why they were in Queen’s Park.

It was a spirited affair, but to call it a protest would be an overstatement. The event was so laid-back that most of those who jammed the park seemed unaware of the 2 p.m. march through the downtown core.

Everybody loves a good laugh at a hippie’s expense, but don’t forget there are still thousands of Americans in jail because of something as innocuous as smoking marijuana. (Sorry to be a downer, maaan, but I’d like to stop ruining people’s lives over a harmless drug that is more commonly a punchline than the cause of any real dangers to our society.)

Queen’s Park rally goes all to pot [TheStar.com]

(Photo: Moonwire’s Flickr Stream)

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The average THC levels evident in the hashish and marijuana that is available today is far higher than in the same products available in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. In fact, there has been a 1.5% increase in THC levels in the average bag of weed since only four years ago.

To illustrate: that dime bag you bought off of the kid down the street in 1988 had an average THC content of around 3.5%; today’s level is more like 8.5% or more.

National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Dr. Nora Volkow fears that the increased levels of THC are responsible for an increase in marijuana-related emergencies, and that, since many adults remember the weed of their youth as harmless, they are not taking seriously this “problem.”

On a personal note, I have barely touched marijuana for years for precisely this reason; today’s pot is way, way too strong for me. Used to be I had to smoke a few bowls to get a high and one too many and I had a headache; today, two small hits and I’m uselessly stoned off my ass, unable to even tell if I have a headache. Where is the tasty, low-grade ditch weed of my youth? All we have is this wildly expensive hydroponically grown cloned super bud.
Fuck that shit, I’ll just have a beer, thanks.

U.S. marijuana even stronger than before: report [reuters.com]

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In 2002, a long-anticipated paper appeared in JAMA titled “Ginkgo for memory enhancement: a randomized controlled trial.” This Williams College study, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging rather than Schwabe, examined the effects of ginkgo consumption on healthy volunteers older than 60. The conclusion, now cited in the National Institutes of Health’s ginkgo fact sheet, said: “When taken following the manufacturer’s instructions, ginkgo provides no measurable benefit in memory or related cognitive function to adults with healthy cognitive function.”

Ginkgo Biloba? Forget About It. [Slate]

(Photo: Titanium 22)

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A little vaporized blip from shabu will keep you pepped for 12 hours. It sounds less like a party and more like a programming marathon.

Speed-binge supplies of a different nature have been cached in a master-bathroom medicine cabinet — one bottle holding ninety Valiums and another with forty tablets of ProVigil, the market name for the experimental drug Modafonil, a sleep suppressant the U.S. military tested on fighter and bomber pilots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Modafonil is now prescribed for cancer patients to combat the chronic-fatigue side effects of chemotherapy. Nick has laid in a supply because he claims he’s found that combining Modafonil with Shabu takes the edge off the undesirable psychological whammies of sleep deprivation, including auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions.

72-Hour Party People [Westword via Kottke]

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