What do you get when you cross sleeping pills with the tail end of the LSD molecule? Ambien! The miracle cure for insomnia taken by millions of Americans every year that definitely doesn’t make your entire frontal lobe completely vanish while the rest of you walks around doing weird stuff. Stuff like perhaps taking a drive down the wrong side of the highway, start frying eggs in the middle of the night in a full body cast, and many other activities both hilarious and terrifying that you’ll never remember even if you live through them. Ambien is an incredibly strange chemical, not just because of the sensational side effects that get people in a lot of trouble, but also because it truly does seem to be a miracle cure, not for insomnia but for brain damage. Ambien seems to allow neurons that stopped firing because of some type of damage to start turning back on and firing again. It’s an incredibly strange chemical. And it’s even stranger that this stuff is just being given out as a sleep aid.
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Who among us hasn’t had apocalyptic visions with a head full of mushrooms? Terrence sure did. This week we’re looking at one of the pillars of the legendary psychedelic evangelist’s cosmology: Timewave Zero. After Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis had their noggins rocked by psilocybe cubensis mushrooms in Colombia, Terrence returned from the jungle with “some funny ideas,” ideas around a self-similar fractal waveform, calculated through doing fancy wizard math on the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese divination system. According to McKenna the resulting waveform could be overlayed on top of human history and showed a steady, relentless march towards a point of infinite novelty, infinite newness, the eschaton. And this eschaton, according to Mckanna, was set to arrive “on time and under budget” on…December 21, 2012. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. But that doesn’t make the ideas within Timewave Zero any less relevant, worth talking about, or poetically true. And hey, maybe the apocalypse did happen in 2012 and this is all just our hallucinatory death dream. You really never know.
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Who among us didn’t have at least a touch of the mad scientist fantasy as a kid, right? Most of us, probably. And who among us failed to ever have anything come of it? Most of us, probably. Not David Hahn. David Hahn had himself a notion to build a fast breeder nuclear reactor in his mother’s potting shed. And by golly, he did. By cobbling together stolen fire alarms, camping lanterns, and parts financed by selling stolen hubcaps, along with a whole lot of good old-fashioned bullshitting, David Hahn managed to build a small, functional, fast breeder nuclear reactor before he was out of high school. Neighbors said sometimes they’d even see a flashing green glow coming from the old potting shed. Part celebration of mad genius, part tragedy and cautionary tale, the story of the so-called “radioactive boy scout” is a tale of complementarity: it can be all those things, depending on how you look at it.
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Admit it, there aren’t nearly enough creatures in your life. Weird creatures, cute creatures, mean creatures, there’s a whole wide world of creatures out there. And today we’re talking about three of them. And with a subtitle like “Water Monsters,” you might be thinking we’re talking mythical beasts, Nessie’s or Champ’s or the Kraken. Nope. We’re talking real live creatures, but these dudes are most certainly monsters. In this episode, we talk about three animals each with attributes that most certainly qualify them as monsters (especially considering the etymological root of “monster” that Willow digs up), the electric eel, the Greenland shark, and the mimic octopus. Why those three? Because they’re sweet as hell, that’s why. Good creatures, the lot of ’em.
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Sometime during the 20th century, hot dogs became forever linked with an American pastime—Competitive eating—and with the most American holiday, the Fourth of July. One could argue that the business of “major league eating” is everything wrong with consumer capitalism. Because it is. However, today we’ll be taking time to celebrate the absurdity of it all by discovering how Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog contest began and why it persists.
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