A shuttle worker employed by United Space Alliance found a plastic bag with a white powder residue — later confirmed to be cocaine — in a shuttle processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center last week.

This raises an important question: from whom are the astronauts scoring? And, is the drug war being extended into near-Earth orbit? More, is the cocaine being scored in space and brought back to Earth in any way connected to the U.S.’s secret moon base so recently exposed? Additionally, why are the U.S. and Russia spatting over an “asteroid hit“? Just what is meant by the term “hit” in this content? Could the asteroid, in parallel with the moon being made of green cheese, be made of pure cocaine?

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?”

So what does this all add up to? It adds up to this: You should read Naked Lunch. It’s an essential part of who we are (as Burroughs wrote somewhere, a paranoid is someone who knows something of what’s going on; if you’re not paranoid, you’re not really alive). It’s part of your education (did you know that language was a virus from outer space? Quick: read this book), it’s part of your sexual being (“If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes”), it’s an essential document of the American Century (“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom”).

And Naked Lunch is a hell of a lot of fun – if your idea of fun is being burned at the stake and reincarnated as a dope fiend on the run from an evil doctor trying to get you to shoot bug powder while simultaneously being gang-buggered by the security forces of Interzone.

Really. It’s that funny, that much fun. Here’s a sample – the Benway mentioned below is the self-same doctor who wants you to shoot bug powder (a note: we don’t do bug powder in this era of high-tech entomological toxins, but think roach poison and you’ve got the idea):

What’s with the serum?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man’s not to be trusted. Might do almost anything… Turn a massacre into a sex orgy…”

“Or a joke.”

“Precisely. Arty type… No principles…”

This fiftieth-anniversary edition is a beauty: cloth-bound, slip-cased, all purple and green in the style of the first Olympia edition (Paris, 1959) with a restored text “faithful to Burroughs’ original composition” (whatever that means; Burroughs didn’t “compose” Naked Lunch; Allen Ginsburg assembled the book by collating extracts from letters written to him by Burroughs; with Naked Lunch, there are only ever variorum editions), and an “insightful afterword” by critic David Ulin. Forget the marketing hype and the DVD-like “extras”: at the price, this hardcover book is a great value. If I recall correctly (and I doubt that I do), Burroughs said something along those lines: Cheat your landlord (if you must), but don’t shortchange the Muse.

So don’t shortchange yourself. Read Naked Lunch, learn to write like a maniac, god-eating atheist dope-shooting creative genius, and then start a blog: let us know what you really think.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

NORML representatives will be testifying in Olympia on Wednesday (Read testimony here.), and NORML Advisory Board member Rick Steves will also be hosting a public forum on the topic at Olympia’s Capitol Theater on Tuesday evening. If you live in Washington, you can urge the Committee to vote ‘yes’ on one or both of these measures by going here and here.

via Coming To A State House Near You: Legal Cannabis? | NORML Blog.

Legislators have pre-filed House Bill 2401, which seeks to “remove all existing civil and criminal penalties for adults 21 years of age or older who cultivate, possess, transport, sell, or use marijuana.” You can read the full text of the proposal here, and you can show your support for the measure by going to NORML’s ‘Take Action Center’ here. (FYI: Separate decriminalization legislation also remains pending, and may be supported by going here.)

Have I mentioned recently that I think prohibition is just plain stupid? Not to mention immoral and expensive….

via Opposing Views: OPINION:AMA Ends 72-Year Policy, Says Marijuana has Medical Benefits.

Early returns Tuesday night showed the proposal winning with 72 percent of the vote. The measure would allow adults over 21 to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana.

The measure is largely symbolic because pot possession remains a state crime for people without medical clearance. But supporters said they wanted to send a message to local law enforcement to stop busting small-time pot smokers.

The vote comes as communities nationwide are struggling with how to enforce pot laws at a time when medical marijuana has surged in popularity.

via Colorado ski town legalizes pot.

Chicago rats fed a diet of sausage, pound cake, bacon, cheesecake, and Ho Hos began to behave like rats addicted to heroin, consuming increasing amounts of food to feel satisfied and continuing to eat even when to do so meant that electric shocks were delivered to their tiny paws. When switched to healthful food (“the salad option”) the rats, which had become obese, their brains numbed by junk, simply refused to eat. A man in Iowa punched another man, who was ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie. Researchers from Oregon determined that ancient beavers did not eat trees, and a firm in New Jersey was distributing vaginal mints.

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The study on junk food addition in rats was reported recently in ScienceNews: “This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

“Psychedelica” seems the perfect name for a species of fish that is a wild swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes and behaves in ways contrary to its brethren. So says University of Washington’s Ted Pietsch, who is the first to describe the new species in the scientific literature and thus the one to select the name.

Read more in Science News Daily…

The artist M.C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams, whereas mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle and visual scientist Dejan  Todorović created an Elusive Arch that won him Third Prize of the 2005 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest…. Several contemporary sculptors recently have taken up the challenge of creating impossible art. That is, they are interested in shaping real-world 3-D objects that nevertheless appear to be impossible. Unlike classic monuments – think of the Lincoln monument – which can be perceived by either sight or touch, impossible sculptures can only be interpreted (or misinterpreted, as the case may be) by the visual mind.

There’s a very cool slideshow that goes along with this article which explains how vantage point is exploited by sculptors in order to trick the brain into perceiving impossible figures in three dimensions.