Another Good Reason to Decriminalize Controlled Substances

Only NPR could get away with the following lead-in for an on-air story: "Americans consumed an estimated 26 million avocados on Super Bowl Sunday, mostly in the form of guacamole, according to The California Avocado Commission (CAC)." That's 13.2 million pounds of the rich, creamy, green fruit. More from the source:

"The avocado tree is related to the laurel and is the fruit of the genus Persea....a bright green tree that grows from Mexico, south to Colombia and Peru, and north to Florida and California. The three strains of avocados that now exist...Mexican, West Indian and Guatemalan...were first catalogued in 1653 by a Spanish padre named Bernabe Cobo. These strains included hundreds of avocado varieties which come in sundry shapes...round, pyriform (pear-shaped), crooknecked (like a squash); skin colors...green, purple, maroon, and jet black; and skin textures...smooth to pebbly.

This fruit of the New World has been known by many names. In Chile, Peru, and Ecuador it is called Palta, the name given to it by the Incas. In West Africa, it is called custard apple. In Spain it is known as abogado; in France, avocat. The latter two names, both of which mean lawyer, and the English word avocado have probably all derived from attempts to speak phonetically the Aztec name ahuacatl."

Apparently, growers of this delicacy are facing increased pressure from poachers, many of whom reportedly are stealing the fruit to re-sell them as a means of generating income to support their drug habits.

Global Neural Evolution

Reminder to self: Discuss The Secret Life of the Brain as metaphor for the Earth's evolution of an external neural network (internet) as a means of building in connectivity of inhabitants of the planet.

Also -- it seems that Stalin (yes, the old evil dead bastard) has a hand to play in the whole Mid-Eastern mess, as the borders that he established after 1927 criss-cross the Fergana Valley as it winds through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan -- Stalin's goal was to fragment the region (central Asia) as much as possible, further complicating the possibility of establishing any semblance of logical geographic gov't to take place, according to author of Taliban and Jihad, Ahmed Rashid, who was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air (with host Terry Gross). "Difficult, impractical, debilitating," he says of the borders. What a tangled web is history.

Another dumb online survey: Which drink are you?

Scary conspiracy stuff: From The Wilderness Publications
Interesting cynical thoughts blog: the angry librarian