BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY New Jersey has hit a speed bump on the road to medical marijuana. The Christie administration has been asking for more time to implement the law and PW has learned that the bill’s chief sponsor, State Senator Nicholas Scutari, is going to give it to them. As you may recall, back in January New Jersey became the 14th state in the union to pass medical marijuana legislation. A last minute amendment to the legislation — part of a trade-off that made the law more restrictive in terms of who qualifies to receive medical marijuana […]
SUBSTANTIATED RUMOR: Philly Mag To Publish Juicy Story About Rendell’s Extramarital Affairs
[Photo by TED ADAMS] We have been hearing talk that the July issue of Philadelphia Magazine, which hits newsstands next Friday, will feature a story about the extramarital affairs of Governor Ed Rendell. We called up Philly Mag Editor Larry Platt and asked him to confirm or deny and he said the following: “We do have a story on the governor in the July issue, but beyond that I don’t discuss the content of stories before they are published.” Hmmm. We will let you, dear reader, decide how much to read between the lines, but as a wise man once […]
THE PEACE CORPS DIARIES: Letter From Paraguay
BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH One of the cool things about living in Paraguay is that there aren’t any neat packages of chicken thighs in aisle six. There is just clucking, feathered creatures running around, and if you want to eat one, you have to catch, kill, pluck, clean and him first. In my community, people mostly eat beef. However, about once a week, families here will slaughter one of their chickens and prepare a dish called tallarin (noodles) or mbori mbori (balls of corn meal) in broth, or some other kind of soup. And in Potrero Pucu, we use the […]
Sausage King & Country Singer Jimmy Dean Dead At 81
NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Dean followed two separate paths to celebrity. For the generations that came to television consciousness after 1970, Mr. Dean, who grew up on a farm in West Texas, was the face and the voice of an eponymous brand of breakfast sausage, a product of the Jimmy Dean Meat Company, which he started in 1969. In dozens of commercials that were broadcast for more than 30 years — Sara Lee bought the company in 1984 but kept Mr. Dean as a spokesman until 2003 — he represented the product as a wholesome family food, nutritious and delicious, […]
DOCUMENT DUMP: FBI Releases Ted Kennedy’s File
NEW YORK TIMES: Senator Kennedy once wrote to the Los Angeles district attorney, asking him not to seek the death penalty for Sirhan B. Sirhan, who assassinated his brother, Robert F. Kennedy. One F.B.I. file suggests that the feeling was not mutual. It recounts the unsubstantiated claims of an inmate who served prison time with Mr. Sirhan, and who said that Mr. Sirhan tried to hire him to kill Senator Kennedy. “He advised during this time subject offered him one million dollars and a car in exchange for killing Senator Kennedy,” according to the file. Another file dealt with character […]
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: Life Lessons
With your life coach, A.P. Ticker.
WORTH REPEATING: Confessions Of A Hoarder
WASHINGTON POST: My parents recall that my teenage room was such a disaster, the piles of clothes and old newspapers so high, that our dog Ozzie considered it equivalent to the back yard and used it accordingly. Ozzie was clever enough to open closed doors, so my parents installed a chain lock on the outside. The chain naturally prompted questions from visitors, the most tactful being: “Why are you locking your son away?” Nearly 20 years later, my high school girlfriend cannot shake the memory of being surrounded by my piles. “I remember your room smelling so bad I would […]
Prescription Heroin Even Better Than The Real Thing?
BY JEFF DEENEY FOR THE DAILY BEAST Why can’t America seem to kick its heroin habit? According to a new study, it might be because we’re not giving addicts exactly what they want: heroin, in pure, prescription form. Reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, the study provided either methadone or prescription heroin to a group of addicts who used heroin daily. Six months later, more than two-thirds of the participants who had been given prescription heroin were staying off the street version of the drug. Less than a third of the methadone group had the same success. The […]
WHY WE FIGHT: Pentagon Discovers Vast Mineral Wealth In Afghanistan, Worth A Trillion Dollars
NEW YORK TIMES: The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. An […]
WANTED: Pentagon Hunting For WikiLeaks Founder
DAILY BEAST: Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast. The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers. MORE […]
CINEMA: Uneasy Rider
ROAD GAMES (1981, directed by Richard Franklin, 101 minutes, Australia) BY DAN BUSIKIRK FILM CRITIC A great psychological thriller, intelligent, tense and scary, is a real rarity; I’d hate to let one come to town unnoticed, even if it is 29-years-old. Director Richard Franklin’s Road Games is one of the most entertaining examples of a long string of homages to the acknowledged master of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock, showing just enough originality to escape that sort of airless mimicry foisted upon us by so many others who approached the throne. Exhumed Films is hosting a rare screening of this cult […]
KITCHEN BITCH: Time To Make The Donuts
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN When I was in middle school, my dad used to drive me to St. Ursula Villa School in Cincinnati every morning before he turned around and went to work in Northern Kentucky. Sometimes, on Fridays, we would leave home a little early and stop by Remke’s, our local grocery store, to pick up fresh donuts on our way to school. This early-morning Friday pit stop was my dad’s way of saying: We made it through the workweek, and we deserve a treat. In my mind, donuts, my dad, and well-deserved rewards will always go hand in hand. […]