Dad’s BIRTHDAY from Jake And Amir.

God, I love that shit.

Dad from Amir on Vimeo.

I got back from camping at the Bobolink Festival on Monday and I still haven’t been able to wash the hippie out of my hair. Shit, at least I didn’t come back with dreads…

This weekend I threw down the traipsing of indie rock and reverted to the 19 year old Spencer who traded ’70s Pink Floyd bootlegs with other longhairs; the one who found neither the smell of patchouli oil nor the color scheme of tie-dye totally atrocious. And I’m supposed to be writing about it for the Synthesis Weekly right now. But for some reason, the only thing i want to do is watch Jake and Amir videos and get stoned.

See this cat? His name is John Staton, he plays the skins for On The One, formerly of Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Staton stole the show for me, even after The Living legends’ Grouch and Eli tore it up the night before. On The one laid it down. God, I really should write this fucking review… Jake and Amir? Save me.

In order to help paint her opponent Barack Obama as the “elitist” candidate, on the heels of his recent remarks in San Francisco that small town Midwesterners “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Hillary Clinton took shots of Crown Royal and ate a slice of pizza with Indiana supporters on Saturday. Hopefully this marks a new turn in the contest for the Democratic nomination, in which Clinton and Obama see who can party hardest. Maybe Obama will start doing cocaine again. But that might be a little too “elitist.” He should probably switch to Meth, and really get after that small town vote!

Didn’t you hear? Last week an Illinois Christian priest was derided and reprimanded by a state representative in front of the House State Government Administration Committee for spreading a philosophy that’s dangerous to children.

Oh wait, I’m sorry. It wasn’t a priest. It was an atheist who objected the government dishing out 1 million dollars to a Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, and he was met with the following response from Rep. Monique Davis (D).

Davis: I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if t his matter does go to court—

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

Chicago Tribune.

You can hear audio of the debate here: Audio

(more…)

In an article published this week in the philsophy journal Time and Mind, Benny Shannon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advances the theory that the biblical prophet Moses was high on hallucinatory drugs when he heard God speaking to him on Mt. Sinai:

“And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking.” Thus the book of Exodus describes the impressive moment of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. The “perceiving of the voices” has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Shanon reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca. “One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds,” he says.

Shanon, former head of the Hebrew University psychology department, said his first experience with ayahuasca was in 1991 when he was invited to a religious ceremony in the northern Amazon in 1991 in Brazil. “I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” he says. Since that time, he has used it hundreds of times, and has published a book about the plant.

Of course, theories like this are nothing new. The late-ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna famously hypothesized that psychedelic plants were the catalyst for human evolution with his “Stoned Ape” Theory:

McKenna theorized that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open — following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way. Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. McKenna, referencing the research of Roland L. Fisher, claimed enhancement of visual acuity as an effect of psilocybin at low doses, and supposed that this would have conferred an adaptive advantage. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including a physical sexual arousal (again, not reported as a typical effect in scientific studies) — and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia — gave evolutionary advantages to those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet. McKenna theorizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person’s mind through the use of vocal sounds.

About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed the mushroom from the human diet, which McKenna argued to result in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.

Is god really a mushroom? Who knows? Certainly not me.

The most cred marriage in emo - Sherri Dupree from Eisley and Chad Gilbert from New Found Glory - is apparently, less than one year in, already over:

Dear friends,

I see you have caught wind of the heartbreak I am currently
going through.
Much to my dismay, the rumors are true of the split of my Husband
and I; And sadly, I do not have the power to change the hearts of man.
I just ask that you would please, respect our privacy at this time,
(I know you will); And refrain from discussing it on this forum. And
thank you for your concern.
The world has been completely turned upside down and I thank you
for your prayers for both of us. Though my heart is broken in half
over this, I know God mends all things in time.

All my love,
Sherri

“Are not five sparrow sold for two pennies?
Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.
Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows”
-Luke 12;6-7

Bummer.