02月 9th, 2010
Marlboro
After years of smoking,
The lack of oxygen
Caused his choking.
When the smoke had cleared,
He was dead.
Which is what we feared.
Though the choice was his,
We mourned his death.
For what is…is.
Now the the Question stands,
Heaven or Hell?
He belongs to which of these lands.
Stash Spotted! The 10 Weirdest Places Drugs Have Been Found
It’s not outer space that has NASA seeing stars. It’s cocaine!
There was no failure to launch at a NASA this week, as a worker discovered a bag of cocaine outside a bathroom in a secure part of a space shuttle hangar at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Despite being all spaced-out, NASA has a zero-tolerance drug policy (and is now drug testing everyone with access to the area), so it’s an extra odd place to find some dope. Perhaps not the strangest or funniest, though. Check out some of the most memorable places (that don’t involve dead baby corpses) where drugs have been discovered.
In an ATM, February 2008
• An 18-year-old woman in Bremerton, WA accidentally placed her bag of meth in a deposit envelope instead of her money and tried to deposit it at a Kitsap Credit Union ATM. Silly junkie! Depositing your meth is the how you go through withdrawal!
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In fat rolls, September 2009
• A 5-foot, 220-lb. woman in Pontiac, MI, who’d been sentenced to jail time at her court hearing, tried to sneak her stash in with her by tucking it in some sweaty blubber—completely overlooking the standard strip search. Suddenly smuggling dope in through your anus seem less gross.
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In a public flower pot, September 2009
• Practical jokers in Millville, NJ put planted marijuana in a flower pot hanging from a lamppost on…wait for it…High St. Police eventually noticed the three-foot-tall plants sticking out and took them down, but it was high-larious while it lasted.
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In front of a donut shop, September 2009
• A man, who was apparently unaware of the strong bond between police and pastries, got caught dealing heroin out of a Marlboro Menthol cigarette pack in front of the local Dunkin Donuts in Easton, PA. Hey, some people like their donuts with sprinkles of heroin on top.
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In shark corpses, June 2009
• Drug gangs in Mexico City, Mexico tried to conceal more than a ton of cocaine slabs destined for the U.S. in the frozen corpses of sharks. When Naval officers discovered the stash, those responsible for the shipment claimed the drugs were a conserving agent. Coke—it does a shark body good!
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In stuffed animals, August 2009
• You know how they make teddy bears so cuddly? They slice the cute lil’ fuckers open and stuff ‘em full of heroin! At least that’s what a smack ring in the Bronx, NY did, filling Build-A-Bear dolls with dope before delivering them to distributors. With so much junk coursing through their bodies, we guess you could call them “unsteady bears”!
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In dogs, July 2004
• Dogs may be man’s best friend, but we don’t think they’re cool with drug dealers surgically inserting eleven containers of cocaine in them to smuggle from Colombia to the UK, as a northwest London couple did to some sweet pooches. Sometimes it’s absolutely right to bite the hand that feeds you.
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In a shipment of artichokes, September 2009
• In Peru, police uncovered four tons of high-grade liquid cocaine hidden amongst 8,000 cans of artichokes at the port of Callao. That’s one way to get kids to eat their vegetables.
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In a cast, March 2009
• A 66-year-old Chilean man, who had two fractured bones below the knee, tried to smuggle cocaine into Barcelona in his cast made out of cocaine! The man couldn’t catch a break, in part because he was also hiding coke in his luggage, a six-pack of beer, and the aluminum legs of two stools.
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In a submarine, October 2009
• In Guatemalan waters off the Central American Pacific coast, U.S. anti-drug agents and the Guatemalan Army intercepted three Colombians and a Mexican in a small submarine carrying ten tons of cocaine. That’s even more drugs than the Beatles fit in their yellow submarine!
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In a religious statue, May 2008
• U.S. customs officials with drug-sniffing dogs seized a 6.6-pound statue of Jesus Christ, which a Mexican woman had in the trunk of her car. It turned out God’s son was made from a mixture of plaster and cocaine, which gives a whole new meaning to the “most high.”
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Ayrton Senna On The Very Edge
Bereft of Honda power yet still supernaturally fast, Senna here is zooming for his record-breaking sixth and last win at the 1993 Monaco Grand Prix.
We may be able to see a beautiful integrity in the uncompromising and dauntingly competent stance of today’s cars, wide and low and sticky with rubber, clean and complex as a surgical theatre, a blare in the ears and a blur in the eyes and a fireproofed gauntlet flung in the face of relevance.
L. J. K. Setright’s words from his 2002 book Drive On!: A Social History of the Motor Car read as if written specifically to subtitle Senna’s driving.
The year is 1993, the season is still early, and after his win in Monaco, Senna would be leading his great rival Alain Prost in the championship. No longer teammates as during the tumultuous end of the 80s under Ron Dennis at McLaren, Prost would strike back with four wins in a row, enough to earn his fourth world title and deny Senna his.
The McLaren, armed with a Ford instead of a Honda in the rear, is a focused blur of Marlboro colors, taking a corner with no margin left to spare.
No wonder, as it was on this very circuit five years earlier that Ayrton Senna experienced and described the sensation of flow, that peculiar mental state where a person’s skills and challenges are in perfect harmony:
I was already on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel, but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit, but still able to find even more.
Described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, my fellow Hungarian with the rather impossible name, flow is a precarious state of mind, prone to disruption by self-awareness, and rather frightening to comprehend from any other state of mind, as Senna himself learned during his pole run in Monaco:
Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove slowly back to the pits and I didn’t want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I was well beyond my conscious understanding. It happens rarely but I keep these experiences very much alive inside me because it is something that is important for self-preservation.
Self-preservation would elude him. At the much-maligned 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, 343 days after his last win in Monaco, Ayrton Senna crashed into a concrete wall and died.
Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport
Send an email to Peter Orosz, the author of this post, at peter@jalopnik.com.