Marijuana Now Legal in Colorado, Unless it Isn't

This is what the world’s coming to. Back in my day, we didn’t
expect handouts from anyone—we had to work for our weed.

Perhaps somewhat lost in the tumult accompanying last week’s reelection of President Barack Obama was the passage of Colorado’s Amendment 64, which legalized the use of recreational marijuana and left the entire state feeling somewhat stunned that it was more pot-friendly than Oregon.

Well, Amendment 64 sort of legalized marijuana, anyway. Marijuana—or “dope,” as it was called by cool kids a million years ago—is still illegal according to the United States government, and while we did pretty poorly in our tenth-grade Government & Law class, we’re reasonably certain that Colorado was the sixty-eleventh state admitted into the Union, and is thus in some small way affected by the United States government. So in a way that only Erwin Schrödinger—or perhaps a lesser but more thoroughly stoned physicist—could truly appreciate, marijuana use in Colorado is simultaneously legal and illegal.¹


This Amendment’s passage sets up a potentially lengthy and involved showdown between the federal government and a local governor less than thrilled to be backing the new law.² Furthermore, the amendment, having received more than 1.3 million votes of support, may fundamentally alter the age-old stereotype of marijuana users from shiftless, lazy, slacker potheads to motivated, politically involved activists who may or may not remember how they ended up in this voting booth, or why the ballot is watching them.

One place in Denver, Colorado, that sells pot.

In the twelve years since Colorado passed Amendment 20, which legalized the use of medicinal marijuana in the state, the federal government has done little to affect the drug’s expanding availability, which may have fed the public support for this year’s Amendment 64.

It remains to be seen whether the government lacks the manpower or funding to deal with the potential legal quagmire, or is simply not interested in doing so, but for the time being, Colorado is the place to be for the discerning smoking aficionado interested in breaking somewhat fewer laws than usual.

That one place in Boulder, Colorado, that doesn’t sell pot.

In a completely unrelated development, applications to the University of Colorado–Boulder have risen by 32,150% over the last six days. Experts attribute the increase to the popularity of skiing, and young people’s love of John Denver.

This photo of Boulder was taken at 4:20. We don’t know
what this means, though, because we’re pretty square.

NOTE
1. It’s probably too much to hope for, but if that humble sentence can someday at least momentarily boggle the mind of a reader who’s recently toked up, we’ll consider this entire blogging enterprise to be a success.
2. It might be ironic that Governor Hickenlooper has reservations about legalizing a drug that sometimes makes people do stupid shit, given that he made good money selling people beer—but we’ll leave that discussion for another day, or somebody else’s column.

Butterflies: Nature’s Financial Planners

 

For reasons perhaps too complex for mere humans to fully understand, monarch butterflies, like many birds, migrate north and south with the seasons. They’re the only species of butterfly that does so.¹

Hundreds of thousands of butterflies—perhaps millions; it’s really tough to count them because of all the fluttering and flapping, and their looking exactly the same from more than about six inches away—winter over in the Piedra Herrada Sanctuary, a forested mountainside outside of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, some two hours² west of Mexico City.

Tourists fortunate enough to visit Valle de Bravo can, with the help of local guides, hike up the mountainside to view the remarkable sight of swarms of monarch butterflies in their winter habitat, their bright wings swirling in the quiet sky like cascades of autumn leaves.

 

Perhaps more remarkable is that no single butterfly actually survives long enough to return home. The round trip takes several times longer than the typical two-month lifespan of the monarch butterfly, so an entire migration can span some three to four generations.³

What we have here, then, are creatures with the foresight to act in a way that is not particularly useful—or even detrimental—to themselves, but are vastly beneficial to future generations. The monarch butterfly has no written language, no history, and a brain smaller than a toenail clipping, and lives (as far as we can tell) almost purely by instinct, but has the insight to work for the good of descendents that it’s certain never to meet.

We wonder what that’s like.

 

NOTES

Butterfly photos by Dr. Mrs. Some Guy.

1. At least among the species we’ve interviewed.

2. Or four and a half hours, if your driver isn’t sure where he’s going and the major highway is closed.
3. We welcome quibbling with our facts from the butterfly experts amongst our readership. We readily acknowledge that we are not scientists, and presume that the authors of the Wikipedia page we’re reading aren’t either.

Fake Pandas for Sale

In one of the most stunning advances in bizarro genetic engineering since 1997’s pot-bellied elephant, northern Colorado farmer Chris Jessen has bred a miniature cow that sorta looks like a panda.

Our latest crime against nature. Possibly just a misdemeanor.

This made news not only locally but also across the country (in the Washington Post and Orange County Register, among others) and as far away as London,¹ which leads us to believe that either 2011 has (with this notable exception) started off in a spectacularly boring fashion, or that this weird little cow’s existence is far more momentous than one might suspect.

The birth of Ben, the miniature panda cow, is not Chris Jessen’s first encounter with shrimpy animals. His “hobby farm” is depicted in various brief articles as a sort of haven for wee creatures—not only miniature cows and donkeys but also an animal described by different sources as either a miniature kangaroo or a wallaby, which is, as we understand it, similar to an oversized miniature kangaroo, only smaller.

From what we’ve been able to learn from a casual stroll through the Internet, $0.75 to $1.00 per pound is not an unreasonable price if you’re looking to buy a fully-functional cow. Ben, however, may sell for as much as $30,000. This may seem like a lot, but it is certainly much, much cheaper than the trying to buy an actual panda, so one might consider this a bargain.

For a mere thirty thousand dollars—barely enough to make a down payment on a home in many parts of the country—you can invest it in an animal that kinda resembles a totally different animal. But wait—there’s more! While most bargain-basement cows are bred to produce milk or be delicious, the panda cow is said to “not have much practical use”—beyond, presumably, standing around chewing and crapping all day with flies on its eyeballs.

We’re not about to tell you how to spend your money—if Ben the Imposter Panda is the pet you’ve always been waiting for, knock yourself out. A delegation from China has already visited Jessen’s farm and was reportedly fascinated, so this weird little venture may well pay off. But unless Ben the Imposter Panda tastes exactly like real panda, or proves he can mimic adorably fat panda antics such as pantomiming kung fu or getting stuck in a tree, we’ll just keep saving up until we can afford the real thing, thank you very much.

100% authentic panda. Accept no substitutes.

NOTES

1. Capital city of Guatemala, according to our Geography Department.

Hubris and the Indestructible Plastic Car

At the risk of sounding like an After-School Special or an early South Park episode, I’ve learned a valuable lesson today, one worth sharing with as wide an audience as possible.¹ I’ve learned that if you’re willing to brag about how durable your car is—aloud, in writing, or even just smugly to yourself—you should be prepared to have it fall apart on you, Bluesmobile-style, almost immediately.

My list of suspects for this poetically just but financially shitty piece of automotive vengeance is long and not particularly coherent—I don’t know whether to blame karma, the Car Gods, fate, the Underpants Gnomes, or simply some harsh and unyielding cosmic force that specializes in cruelly expensive comeuppance.

Some might say that I’m blowing this out of proportion—that it’s not out of the ordinary for a fourteen-year-old car with a mostly spotless track record to eventually break down, that it’d be unrealistic to expect to hit 300,000 miles without every once in a while having to spend a few hours waiting for a tow truck on the side of a busy highway.

Bullshit. I don’t want to hear it.

So now, one week and several dollars later, my once-indestructible plastic car has two new shifter cables and a shiny new corrosion-free head gasket. As an added bonus, I got an oil change that was probably 4,000 miles overdue. I prefer to believe that I got a free head gasket and shifter cables, but had a four-digit bill on the oil change. Whether that’s denial or just plain stupidity I will leave up to you to decide.

An example of a healthy, happy head gasket.

My head gasket (artist’s conception)

Take a lesson from me—if you have a great, durable little car that doesn’t give you any trouble and costs you very little, shut the hell up about it. Don’t tempt the mystical forces of comeuppance unless you’re prepared to pay the consequences.² The engine you save could well be your own!

NOTES

1. Given how little I know about marketing a blog, and how little time or money I’m willing to spend on it, the widest possible audience is right around six people. Thank you for your support, by the way.
2. By which I of course mean “mechanic.”

The Indestructible Plastic Car

At around 5:00 on the afternoon of September 9, 2010, the odometer on my shitbox 1996 Saturn SC2 reached 290,000 miles. Where I live, there’s a law against sending or reading text messages while driving, but to my knowledge there’s no law against taking cell-phone pictures, so I took a picture of it.¹

When I bought the car it had been driven 36,000 miles, and usually got around 41 to 42 miles per gallon. Now, a dozen years, 254,000 miles, and some 6 to 8 oil changes later, this little car, battered and bruised by the equivalent of almost twelve trips around the Earth,² struggles to get more than about 38 mpg. For a bit of perspective, the average fuel efficiency for a mid-sized car, for the mix of highway and city driving I do, would probably be around 24 mpg.

With the exception of one very expensive accident that occurred before I’d even made a payment on the damned thing, the most significant repairs this car has needed are (1) a new driver’s-side chair, (2) a jury-rigged trunk latch,³ (3) a new clutch cable, the loss of which apparently limits you to 10 mph in first gear on the interstate, and (4) several new headlight bulbs, which apparently burn out abnormally often in cars that have been mangled and then not-quite-totally straightened out, and thus tend to rattle a lot at high (and sometimes low) speeds.

If you don’t count gas, oil, seat covers, or the mild-to-moderate repairs listed above—or the rather hefty price tag of straightening out a car almost all the way after t-boning a Chevy Malibu at around 45 miles per hour—I’ve gotten about 22 miles per dollar out of this car so far. To put that in perspective, you’d need to get around 2.7 million miles out of your 2007 Porsche 911 to get the same value out of it.⁴ That’s not a typo: 2.7 million miles.⁶

For more than two decades, the brain trust at General Motors (Saturn’s parent company) couldn’t figure out a way to sell a fuel-efficient, dirt-cheap, incredibly durable, low-maintenance, consumer-friendly American car to the millions of Americans⁷ who were looking to buy fuel-efficient, durable, inexpensive American cars.

This is, as you may know, the same General Motors that, after spending much of the last hundred years as a hugely successful company, recently took the biggest, stinkiest, steamingest financial shit in the history of the auto industry, eventually needing $57.6 billion dollars’ worth of U.S. government intervention merely to continue to exist.

Granted, the Saturn is not without its problems. They might have sold better if they didn’t look like they were made of plastic—which they are—and it’s possible that some potential customers were turned off by the notion that Saturn dealerships were honest enough to sell the cars for the price listed on the sticker rather than some arbitrary number that you’d have to beat out of them. But I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some connection between GM’s inability to make money off of well-made, well-priced little plastic workhorse cars and the fact that the company now owes you and me just shy of sixty billion dollars.

NOTES

1. And just in case there is, I pulled over to the side of the road and took the picture while revving my engine up to 60 miles per hour. Honest.

2. That’s twelve trips around the Earth at the equator, of course. It’d be just under 46,179 trips around the Earth if I were circling the South Pole from a mile away.

3. Fixed at home by Dr. Brainsmart for the lofty price of one (1) six-pack of tasty beer.

4. Not counting, of course, how many times that Porsche would get you laid, which probably adds something to its value. I don’t have any way of calculating this number, but I’m sure it’s a lot higher than the number of times a Saturn will get you laid.⁵

5. Zero.

6. That’s 430,542 trips around the Earth!

7. Or Canadians. We can’t forget about our lovely and loyal Canadian readers, with their beady little eyes and flapping heads.