Guru Unaffected by LSD – Christmas Flounder (N.C.) – Japanese Urban Legends

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/baba-ram-dass-and-the-tale-of-the-acid-gobbling-guru/

Scientific American

24 December 2019

Baba Ram Dass and the Tale of the Acid-Gobbling Guru

Skeptics have questioned a story told by the late counterculture icon in his classic best seller Be Here Now

    By John Horgan

[…] To commemorate the man, I’ll tell a little tale about him. It begins in 1999 when I interviewed psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna in New York City. McKenna said he doubted a famous anecdote in Be Here Now involving […] a guru whom Ram Dass met in India in 1967[.] […] When Maharajji asked Ram Dass for “medicine,” Ram Dass gave him three pills, each containing 305 micrograms of LSD, a very strong dose. The guru gulped down all three pills. “All day long I’m there,” Ram Dass wrote, “and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing—nothing happens!”  LSD didn’t affect Maharajji, Ram Dass implied, because the guru already had such a profoundly mystical outlook. […]

[Via the Wayback Machine]

https://web.archive.org/web/20061126230654/http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/scientific_curmudgeon/?p=32

The Scientific Curmudgeon

12 July 2006

Did Ram Dass’s Guru Really Take LSD?

by John Horgan

See also John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 185-6.

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https://www.starnewsonline.com/foodanddining/20191224/is-local-christmas-fish-tale-fishy-or-perfect-muse

Wilmington StarNews [NC]

24 December 2019

Is local Christmas fish tale fishy, or a perfect muse?

[…] [Newsman Paul Jennewein] first penned the tale of the Christmas Flounder on Christmas Eve in 1950 and it has been annually reprinted ever since. Apparently in the Great Depression, Wilmington folks, too poor for turkeys and hams on Christmas Eve, slipped out into local waters with lights and gigs. They would bring home flounder for Christmas morning, stuffing them with local delicacies like oysters, crabs, collards and grits. These dishes supposedly appeared on tables across the region, even after the bleak days of the Depression had passed. […]

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https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00789/japanese-urban-legends-from-the-slit-mouthed-woman-to-kisaragi-station.html

Nippon.com [Japan]

27 December 2019

Japanese Urban Legends from the “Slit-Mouthed Woman” to “Kisaragi Station”

The story of a terrifying “slit-mouthed woman” who approached children in the late 1970s kickstarted Japan’s modern urban legends.

[…] Compared with word of mouth, urban legends conveyed digitally tend to go to one of the two extremes, either staying completely the same or radically changing during the process. “When you pass on a story orally, you’re always going by memory, so even if there are small changes the main details stay the same. Online, you can copy and paste or transform it completely if you want.” […]

Tampon Tax (Thailand) – Why Starbucks Irks Conservatives – Stevie Wonder Drove a Snowmobile

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1818319/tampon-tax-is-fake-news-insists-govt

Bangkok Post [Thailand]

18 December 2019

'Tampon tax' is fake news, insists govt

The government's campaign against "fake news" took a bizarre turn yesterday when Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha spoke out to try and scotch a rumour that a 40% tax would be imposed on tampons. The rumour spread after Puea Chat spokeswoman Ketpreeya Kaewsaenmuang announced that, unlike sanitary pads, tampons were regarded as a cosmetic product rather than a hygienic necessity. As such, they might be taxed as "luxury goods", she added. The tax ceiling for luxuries is 40%.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-does-starbucks-melt-conservative-brains

The Daily Beast

21 December 2019

Why Does Starbucks Melt Conservative Brains?

Right-wingers keep falling for hoaxes and believing the worst about the ubiquitous coffee purveyor.

[…] And all of this comes amid the annual right-wing panic over whether Starbucks’ holiday cups are sufficiently Christian, and whether its employees say “Merry Christmas.” Part of the problem is Starbucks’ role as a public meeting place in a country that invests little in so-called “third places”: areas of community engagement outside the home or workplace. […] It’s a situation ripe for Fox News-style grievance narratives about the embattled Republican, forced to endure liberal tyranny everywhere he turns. […]

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Elton John, Me (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019), 106-7.

We spent the first weeks of 1974 recording at the Caribou Ranch, a studio up in the Rocky Mountains that gave its name to our new album Caribou. […]

Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt your question: no, I have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.

Moon Landing Hoax – Devil in the Dancehall (Granger, WA) – Drones Used to Spread African Swine Fever

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Moonbound: Apollo 11 and the Dream of Spaceflight (New York: Hill and Wang, 2019), 235. “The leaking of the Pentagon Papers and the impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon provoked a growing distrust among Americans toward their own government. All of which helps explain an unlikely legacy of Apollo: the persistent claim that the whole thing was a hoax.”

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“Letters to the Editor,” Beyond Reality (New York) #46, Nov./Dec. 1980, pp. 8-9. A woman died from fright after dancing with the Devil in Granger, Washington, ca. 1979. “Evidently he had changed from a normal man into one with hoofs and glowing red eyes.” A variant of “The Devil in the Dancehall.” 

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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chinese-criminal-gangs-spreading-african-swine-fever-force

South China Morning Post [Hong Kong]

14 December 2019

Chinese criminal gangs spreading African swine fever to force farmers to sell pigs cheaply so they can profit

Chinese criminals have been exploiting the country’s African swine fever crisis by intentionally spreading the disease to force farmers to sell their pigs for a low price before smuggling the meat and selling it on as healthy stock, state media has reported. Sometimes the gangs spread rumours about the virus, which is fatal to pigs, but in more extreme cases they are using drones to drop infected items into farms, according to an investigation by the magazine China Comment, which is affiliated to state news agency Xinhua. […]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3042991/china-flight-systems-jammed-pig-farms-african-swine-fever

South China Morning Post

20 December 2019

China flight systems jammed by pig farm’s African swine fever defences

A Chinese pig farm’s attempt to ward off drones – said to be spreading African swine fever – jammed the navigation systems of a number of planes flying overhead. The farm, in northeastern China, was ordered last month to turn in an unauthorised anti-drone device installed to prevent criminal gangs dropping items infected with the disease, according to online news portal Thepaper.cn. […]