Well, as we all know, the French are just a tad off when it comes to everything but I have to say, I think they have the best approach to football around.  Yes, I momentarily break from my persistent silence not to rant about government, mechanics or people everywhere; I’m just presenting a great video of some classy urban touchdown plays.

Stay classy readers.  I’m Ron Burgundy.

It really is an overused joke so that’s why I’m not going to title this post something stupid like “my blog is going to pot” or something just as hackneyed and overused.

I posted of course twice so far about Michael Phelps and how I simply don’t care that he has used pot.  Of course, I then posted a wonderful letter written by the agitator which really was the most incredible expressive fiction I have read in some time.  Thinking of the world class athletic swimmer, it was wonderful to simply fantasize about such a figure standing up for himself instead of bowing to pressure from his PR team before apologizing to the world for smoking pot.  My position was pretty simple.  I don’t care if he smokes pot and I thought for sure that his career would have been horribly jeopardized by that picture published in the British tabloid of him hittin’ a bong.  Frankly, I’m amazed that this pretty much blew over.

Of course, since then, I’ve found out an added detail that while still mostly irrelevant to me, is still kind of neat.  Michael Phelps has ADHD.

Phelps can’t take medications that are normally prescribed for ADHD because that’s pretty much just taking stimulants.  speed is a banned substance when you’re in the competitive sports and yes, this is ADD/ADHD medication.  Yay kiddies!   By the looks of that article, it seems like he can use the disorder to his advantage anyway so why would he want to medicate while competing?

For me, this brings up pot and ADD/ADHD and a comment on Saskboy’s blog just made me roll in my grave.  Or it would have if I were dead and hydraulics were installed to spin me whenever some one said something silly…that and assuming I wasn’t cremated…though ashes could still be made to spin couldn’t they?  Hmm…oh right.  ADD/ADHD.

It seems that Phelps may have had a valid medical reason for hitting the bong but since he was at a house party, I doubt it was his motivator for doing so.  Again, that’s fairly irrelevant to me because I just don’t think that Phelps should have even had to face the possibility of being crucified for smoking the stuff; valid medical reason or not.  It does however raise a topic of interest for me and that’s about treating ADD/ADHD with cannabis over treating it with legal amphetamines such as Ritalin or Desoxyn.  The commenter on Saskboy’s blog said it would be better to treat some one for ADD/ADHD than it would be to treat someone for ADD/ADHD with cannabis.  I disagree…strongly.

ADD/ADHD medication is speed.  Pure and simple, those pills are meth and that’s why they’re a controlled substance.  Aside from being incredibly addictive, they also have a potential to cause terrible health problems such as tachycardia which can lead to a heart attack…myocardial infarction if you want to make it sound even scarier when applying medical terms to 12 year olds.  Anyone remember the story of the teenager who sued her drug dealer here in Saskatchewan after suffering a heart attack after taking meth?  I don’t think I would ever want either of my two kids being put on such a powerful and dangerous prescription.

Cannabis is effective for ADD/ADHD in my opinion and in the opinion of the doc being interviewed in the video below.  Now, I’ve never actually read anything that would credibly suggest that a kid might develop heart disease after ingesting pot.  I’ve never read of any nasty side effects related to ingesting pot actually.  I’ve read extensively on the development of chronic bronchitis in some users but that’s about as bad as it gets and only if it’s smoked quite a bit over a very long period of time.

So if given the choice between putting a child or an adult on meth or pot for treating ADD/ADHD, I’ll take cannabis in a heart beat.  I don’t believe for a second that it’s better to give an ADD/ADHD patient a legal medication than it is to give them illegal cannabis.

You know, the illegality of pot is simply ridiculous and leads people to say the most incredibly stupefying things.  A friend of mine had a friend who developed cancer and was being treated for it.  My friend offered to acquire some medical marijuana for him to deal with the cancer treatments.  The response was something along the lines of “Oh, it’s not that serious.”  Uhh…buddy has cancer.  When will it be serious?

80 odd years ago, some one raised the grim spectre of cannabis making black men look at white women twice and turned it into a national ad campaign.  80 some odd years ago, some one said that cannabis would drive young people to murder and turned that into a national ad campaign.  80 some odd years ago, some one said that cannabis would make people clinically insane and turned that into a national ad campaign.  Today, we are still trying desperately to justify the illegality of cannabis and for some reason, a law rooted in racism and hysteria will still lead people to endorse legal and dangerous productis over illegal and relatively safe products in various scenarios.  It’s the height of idiocy.

Michael Phelps, ADD patients…the list of people effected negatively by pot prohibition just grows and grows.

One of the most wonderful snide comments I have ever read…and its a letter that’ll never be authored by the guy it should be authored by.  From The Agitator, no analytical comment or description is neccessary.  This is simply the best thing I have read to date on the Michael Phelps issue.

So without any further ado, copied from  the link above, a letter I would like to see…but wont.

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have have without a shred of evidence beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.

You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.

Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.

Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen . . . is also a proud pot smoker.

Yours,

Michael Phelps

I ran out of gas and wouldn’t you know it, the blogging stopped.  Yup, my brain just shut off and I spent a whole bunch of time at work.  Is driving all day without an active brain a good idea?  Probably not but it happened.  As an amusing aside, googling “how to check your testicles” results in a link to this post.  A blogger is supposed to note some success when they get a good amount of organic traffic from google but a visitor to my blog resulting from “how to check your testicles” is…well uhh, should I count that as a success?

My head has been bobbling about with thoughts of a financial focus.  I’m thinking of starting an online mall of sorts so in a few years, I can have a moderately successful shopping website.  The cost of the website isn’t too bad being in the $500-$1,000 range and I’ve been exploring a number of ways to make the website fairly easy to maintain cost wise.  It’s just another project that’s waddling through my head and it’s one that doesn’t require me to do a whole lot.  Well, it does require me to do quite a bit in terms of maintaining product lists and such but all in all, not too too bad.  Eh, we’ll see where it goes.  At the very least, it’s neat mental masturbation.  I even learned how to make flash animations in photoshop CS as a result of this so hey, that’s pretty cool.

Something interesting has happened recently in the world of athletics.  American Olympic swimming marvel Michael Phelps was caught on camera smoking out of a water pipe or, a bong.  The guy has a mess of gold medals so it’s a pretty big news item it seems.  The photo is a shocking one for some.  For me, it’s kinda funny and terribly sad at the same time.

For a world famous athlete, it seems like that bong should be bigger and fancier.

So this is likely to destroy the career of Phelps who has millions of dollars in endorsements.  The USA Olympic people have said a whole bunch of stuff about clamping down on drug use so it’s likely that Phelps will find himself in between a rock and a hard place before too long because of this.  Don’t ask me what the funny angle is…I haven’t figured that out.  Maybe it’s shock value that made me chuckle.

The sad part is that in my mind, this guy has done absolutely nothing wrong.  If he was caught on camera drinking, it wouldn’t have been a news story unless he was doing so to extreme excess.  Smoking pot however will see this guy’s career circle the drain if it doesn’t rip right down to the sewer right away.  It doesn’t make sense.

If he was using steroids or something, I could see how the sporting associations involved would give him a rough ride for that.  Steroids have a direct impact on the potential performance of an athlete and they are seen as an attempt to gain an unfair advantage over your competitors.  It would be reasonable for a sporting association to give an athlete the boot over steroid consumption but cannabis?  Can some one tell me the harm please?

Yes, as we all know via the incredible wisdom of Homer, (not the one that wrote The Iliad) Florida is in fact America’s Wang.  And that happens to be where I’m going.  I’ll begin my journey tomorrow and I’ll blog as much of it as I can.

You see, a friend of mine understands that I have had some free time lately.  Actually, this year has been like a jilted vacation with some time working and lots of time…being intellectual.  Yah, it’s not like I’m idle when I’m not working.  I’m useful.  Honest!

So my friend will be taking me in his truck across the boarder all the way to Florida so I can have some fun.  Wahoo!  The only bad part is that my friend drives a Volvo truck…and as such I don’t really have any desire to drive it.  Not like I’m getting paid for this joyride anyway so no biggy.

Unfortunately he can’t pick me up.  I have to drive to Morden Manitoba which is about 8 or 9 hours drive from Saskatoon.  Because my car is dumping fuel out it’s tailpipe so to speak, I’ll have to take my sweetie’s car…which I have lovingly nicknamed the lawn mower. That should be a fun drive. *sigh*

Well, hopefully I’ll take some neat pictures for you all to see.

AN ADDITIONAL NOTE:

On a completely different note, the Olympics are winding down…the Canadians are done and tomorrow is the last day for all the other competitors.  What have we all come to learn girls and boys?

It seems like we were given an incredible demonstration of how China is all about appearance and not at all about substance.  As people watched the games, they also were privy to an arrogant, old, flea ridden police state too arrogant and ignorant of the world around it to realize how important treating people like people really is.

China…a high school preppy girl who cares only about herself and what others think of her.

Canada’s Athletes.  Incredible Olympians.