Shade, fresh air, asthma prevention…like, what can’t trees do?

I dunno dude I’m freakin’ out freaking out freaking out freaking out freaking out

Columbia/Nicholas Murray Butler Nazi ties redux.

Columbia ‘68 reimagined as a high-water mark of modern European leftism. The “Columbia Uprising” is the Paris Commune of our times: discuss.

Foreign dude says important thing, happens to say it at Columbia

According to the almighty source of all information ever, the term 4/20 doesn’t refer to a day in late Apri. Instead, it’s shorthand for the marijuana subculture writ large. 4/20 is the totality of everything weed related: your bubbler, your volcano, the small mountain of keef accumulating at the bottom of your grinder, your collection of Star TrekDVDs, the fact that you may or may not know every line to “The Big Lebowski” (”Give us ze money, Lebooksy!”)–these things are all 4/20. You are 4/20.

So how do we understand this singular annual celebration (I mean, there’s no cocaine day, to the best of my knowledge)? I submit that it’s closed-minded to view it as a massive protest against the U.S.’s nanny state mentality vis a vis anything carrying 60s subcultural baggage, just as it’s closed-minded (and not to mention incorrect) to view it as some massive assertion of subcultural identity. On the former point, weed is such a potent social (and, of course, mental) leveler that 4/20 is celebrated in places where the herb enjoys a mostly-benign state of legality. But on the former point, weed is so widely used that use itself doesn’t make you special. Smoking it doesn’t subvert anything–I know Barney Frank isn’t exactly representative of our country as a whole, but I doubt we’ll see a Hydromorpone Decriminalization Act of 2008 any time soon.

4/20 is a celebration of a substance too weak to be subversive, but too powerful to be left alone. It’s a drug for deadbeats and intellectuals both, for burnouts and poets, for Tuesdays before class, for a disappointing Saturday night, and for the best Saturday night of your life. Reasonably affordable and infinitely flexible, its near-mystical properties belie its psychotropic weakness. Indeed, its aura comes from its normality, and from the fact it’s so…normal–and that is is the only drug (aside from tobacco and alcohol, obviously) that has managed to become so.

Legalizing pot would be a long-overdue acknowledgement of this. But legalization would be a beginning more so than an endpoint–back during my days as a high school journalist, a professor at USC told me that he believed there to be a level of acceptable marijuana use, a sort of balancing point where the social externalities of pot use could be minimized or eliminated, or, at the very least, better understood. This country’s infantile attitude towards drugs prevents the kind of conversations that would help us figure out how and whether drugs can be safely integrated into the social fabric. Legalizing pot would be a crucial first step. But criticizing it would be just as important.

Move over, Keith Richards, the cool new thing to snort is no longer your father’s ashes, but good ole vodka!

Apparently rehab is like going to Vegas–what happens in rehab, stays in rehab, including sobriety.  Amy Winehouse, who has run out of productive things to snort, spent the weekend at London’s Bungalow 8 playing the game “Gas Chamber,” which is where a circle of people go around snorting vodka shots.  (At least it wasn’t crack?)  Prince Harry was caught playing last year (hopefully while not in his Nazi Halloween costume)  She was playing with her merry group of super-duper role models, Kelly Osbourne, Kimberly Stewart, Miquita Oliver and Mark Ronson.

It’s pretty obvious that “Gas Chamber” is really dangerous because it shoots alcohol directly into the bloodstream, so as tempting as it sounds, please don’t actually try it out tonight.  And can we also acknowledge just how painful snorting vodka sounds?

Despite the fact that Big Bad Wolf stole my secret girl-crush thunder, I’m going to post AGAIN on Fire Crotch because hell, this is the first time we’ve seen her give it away for money and not for the love of displaying her little red riding hood.

Ok, listen.  I am unashamed to admit that I have a morbid fascination with Lindsay Lohan.  It’s not in that ‘I’d hit that’ nudie magazine stuck to the bathroom floor sort of way, but more in the ‘Omg it’s Monday, I can’t wait to see the latest dumb stunt she’s pulled this weekend’ sort of way.  And, if you know me, you know I’ve force-fed you really strong drinks and made you watch I Know Who Killed Me more than once.  And you know what, you enjoyed it.  So stop resisting, people—it’s a simple equation.  Lindsay saves you money.  The more you let Lindsay into your life, the better you’ll feel about yourself, thus the less you’ll spend on therapy bills and black market prescription drugs. 

Don’t worry, there’s a point to all this.  Lindsay has graced the latest cover of New York Magazine posing as the iconic Marilyn Monroe.  However, she does a completely terrible job and looks like Britney in a bad wig.  What makes even less sense is that you get an unabashed full-frontal view of her nips, but yet in I Know Who Killed Me, in which she played a double-amputee stripper, you get no nudity.  You do, however, get a double-amputee sex scene that goes on for an absurdly long time, multiple extended scenes of her flossing the stripper pole with her ass in a semi-sheer bikini, and you see her smoke a cigarette through her pikachu (that means vajay-jay for those of you who don’t watch Chelsea Handler) and then hand it to a dirty old man who smells it.  Yes, he smells it.  Remind me again—is this movie a bio-pic or a poor attempt at an art film?  Why do we see more of her privates when she gracefully exits a car than in a movie ABOUT A STRIPPER?!  But you know, since this leggings craze she’s putting us all through started, we haven’t seen so much as a single fire crotch, so I guess I’ll stop bitching about that…

I May Not Know the Difference Between Obama’s and Clinton’s Health Care Plans, But I Can Tell You Which Celebs Have Flashed Their Coochies This Year

So what if the first thing I did when my best friend visited was do a Lindsay Lohan photo shoot? That doesn’t make me celeb-obsessed. Just because I go to Perezhilton.com before I even put my contacts in each morning doesn’t mean I don’t immediately follow it up with CNN.com. Okay, that’s a lie. I don’t go on CNN.com, but I’m still at Columbia so I’d like to pretend I’m smart.

Back to the important stuff—besides Britney’s impression of Madonna’s impression of a British accent. I think the real deal here is the 2008 crotch shot. It’s a new, ‘Young Hollywood’ version of the 2007 crotch shot classic perfected by none other than Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and the likes, or as I like to refer to them as, the Labia Pack.

Obviously this exclusive club is pioneered by soon-to-be re-rehabbed actress Lindsay Lohan. It’s the leggings-shot. Thank you, Lindsay, for going to Utah and leaving all your pants there. God bless you and your innate ability to keep pretending that your see-thru tights are really just skinny jeans. I pray for all the retouch artists out there who have to erase your pubes from their multimillion dollar crotch shots. I’m sorry you lost all your jeans in the great pants fire of rehab photo-op 2007, but we all feel for you, truly.

Is it so wrong to be morbidly obsessed with the future leaders of the United States of AA? Personally, I feel it is a great release to find that, although I spend my Saturday nights at Butler, there are others in the world who are passed out in the front seat of their Escalade being photographed or committed to a psych ward for having multiple personalities. See, life could be worse!

Not! Behold, an extra-special edition of CMMECotD:

“David Rothman, a professor at Columbia University who has led the movement to distance medical schools from pharma, as the drug industry is called, compared serving on speakers bureaus to commercial sex work.

‘You’re their boy,’ he said. ‘If you work for the drug companies, you’re not working for the school.’”

I seem to recall a fireside chat in which Bollinger was pressured on the school’s ties to big drug companies, and on whether the university was as committed to developing low-cost generics as it was to cashing in on potentially-lucrative drug patents. Bollinger intelligently dodged the question, as the pharma vs. generics debate becomes pretty complicated when major universities are factored in–there’s a reason Professor Delbanco marks the determination of a university’s legal right to profit off of its own technological breakthroughs as a turning point in the history of American higher ed.

So what kind of connections does Columbia have? It’s hard to say, and there seems to be very little media interest–searches for “generic drugs” in the Spec archives yields disappointingly few hits. But at least someone at Mailman is pushing for a vigorous and hopefully well-informed debate on generics and large drug companies. It’s one we should definitely be paying attention to…

Elsewhere, Suharto is dead. He was one of the most brutal and most successful dictators in modern history, and a man who had the very good luck of living in a time when the international rule of law typically didn’t extend to heads of state. It does now, and with an international community that’s increasingly oriented towards human rights, I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of him again. And good riddance to it.