Professor Albert Hoffman, January 11, 1906 – April 29, 2008ce.
Dead at 102.

If you ever did acid, you owe him a debt of thanks.
If you ever liked music or art made by someone who did acid, ditto.

I had the honour of meeting him at a conference in 1998. Little Swiss guy in a suit, looked thirty years younger than he was. And he glowed. Nearest thing to a Bodhisattva I have ever met.
I shook his hand and asked the only question I could think of - "why didn't you fall off the bike?"

He mattered.

...referring to a well-known story to promote your product, without grasping how that story ended, viz:

"Grow your men's treasure like a Jack's Bean Tree!".

Remember what Jack did to the beanstalk? Not an association one wants with Viagra, I suspect.

" According to a new study conducted by medical researchers, thirty-three percent of popular songs contain explicit content and forty-two percent of songs hint at substance abuse. "

I am shocked. Shocked.

'German PC builder Tomarni specializes in super-silent machines as well as, it seems, some gaming systems. Having tweaked all that there was to tweak to achieve "maximum performance" on the PCs themselves, they claim it was time to face up to the real weakest link: that damn human user. The solution? A performance-enhancing pill called FpsBrain.

Here it is, in Tomarni's own words:
Being ambitious computer players ourselves, we are almost daily working on optimizing our computer systems in order to achieve maximum performance. Despite all the investment, one factor has not been considered: the player himself. FpsBrain was developed to maximize the playing skills of the computer player. '

That's Fps as in First Person Shooter - my gaming drug of choice. Another reason for me to never game online - having my ass handed to me by pre-teens would be bad enough, but this...

Oh dearie me.

"The Dutch government is banning the sale of all magic mushrooms after a series of high-profile incidents involving tourists who had taken them...

Calls for a re-evaluation of the drug grew after a 17-year-old French girl jumped from a building after eating magic mushrooms during a school trip to Amsterdam in March.
Other incidents involving the drug have included an Icelandic tourist jumping from a balcony and breaking both legs and a Danish tourist driving his car wildly through a camping ground, narrowly missing sleeping campers."

Much as I'd like to just shrug and joke about this, I can't. Not while alcohol and tobacco kill thousands and are legal.

As Boing Boing put it...

' Police in Bicester set up a drug testing station in a pub, and swabbed the palms of every customer before they were allowed to enter. The swab was checked for drug residue. Anyone who tested positive was searched on the spot for possession of drugs. 150 people submitted to the test.

The police explained that it was part of a crackdown on violent street crime. But for some reason, they did nothing to stop the patrons from ingesting the drug that the pub was selling -- alcohol -- which is often found in the bloodstream of people who commit acts of violence.

The detective in charge said: "The public were very supportive. Many people were saying they wanted to be tested." '

The photo of the smiling punters being swabbed by smiling cops gave me the shivers.