“Meanwhile, in his briefcase he has an actual plan to create sex packets. The nigga was nuts [laughs]. Smooth really believed he was going to get a grant from the United States government to develop this technology to help astronauts have sex when they traveled. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but I didn’t think technology reached a point to where we could induce a dream and allow someone to see who they wanted and have sex with them. Acid and ecstasy were close, but it wasn’t quite that. As we were putting together the concept of the album I told him, ‘You know what? Sex packets would make a cold concept for a song. Let me try to flip it.’ … we started going over the Sex Packet concept to make sure people couldn’t poke holes in it. We started studying the properties of ecstasy and LSD and what all the jargon was. We created a story where there was a professor at Stanford University who designed sex packets for astronaut travel so they could be sexually satisfied. The name of it was GSRA which stood for Genetic Suppression Release Antidote. We created this story that a powerful drug leaked into the streets of San Francisco and it was called sex packets on the street. Then on top of that, we went to Kinko’s and made a serious looking pamphlet on how to use sex packets because it was dangerous and fucking people up [laughs]. We made thousands of those pamphlets and left them on the back of buses and at hospitals. After all that, it was Tommy Boy’s idea to name the entire album after the ‘Sex Packets’ song.”
 — Digital Underground mastermind Shock G tells Vibe the disappointing truth: There was never actually any such thing as “Sex Packets.”

The amount of caffeine in half a can of Red Bull is about as much as you should drink if you want to be focused. After that you start to get stupid, says Science.

by Abe Sauer

Palin champions will hold up last night’s “Sarah Palin’s America” episode as proof of the candidate putting her money where her moose is. That is to say, after years of talking about being a hunter, Palin actually went out and shot something.

While much of the debate around the episode is an ethical one about a millionaire shooting a defenseless animal so as not to have to pay for meat, the real conversation should be about how the episode absolutely exposes Palin as a charade.

In this most recent episode, a woman who has blindly championed the NRA and legitimized her frontier-woman status by claiming to be a “lifelong hunter” comes across as anything but.

For starters, Palin and pa head out on a long hunt without bothering to sight in Palin’s rifle, a mistake no serious hunter would ever make. Why Palin’s dad chose for her a “varmint rifle” for a caribou hunt and why Palin, an admitted “moose hunter,” would not question such a gun’s appropriateness is never answered.

From there, numerous bungles along the way to finally downing the caribou show a hunting tourist who, at worst, appears to pose a genuine danger to fellow outdoorsmen.

While Palin’s hunting-for-TV jamboree certainly impressed the hockey moms, it seriously eroded her base of genuine hunters. One online commentor, on Sean Hannity’s website no less, grumbled, “I turned on Sarah Palin’s Alaska a minute ago and she just shot four maybe even five times at a caribou and missed. Needless to say I’m not impressed with her ability to handle a firearm let alone aim it and hit something.”

On Palin’s own Facebook page, a viewer wrote, “What a joke. I was a fan before the show. No one who is a true hunter lets others carry their rifle or can’t load their own shells. Sarah, you are a phony in this area of your ‘skills.”

Several others wondered why Palin, an experienced hunter, didn’t bring her own rifle, pointing out that familiarity with one’s weapon is a core principle of hunting. Another pointed out, regarding Palin’s veteran hunter dad, “I was surprised to see him using the gun as a walking stick.”

Several hunter friends to whom I showed the video were less than impressed. All agreed that she did not look like she had handled a gun many times. One, who just posted his November kill on his Facebook profile, said “I would not hunt with her.”

In the episode, Palin is handed a second gun, which, thanks to good video editing, she uses to down the animal in one shot.

But knowledgeable hunters would have all recoiled in horror watching Palin immediately place her finger on the trigger of the “hot” Savage 110 as it was handed to her. Keeping one’s finger off the trigger until the very moment of the shot is the first lesson any responsible hunter ever learns.

But Palin’s inexperience with guns is in no way more obvious than when she is handed the rifle and she asks, “Does it kick?” It was an exchange Brad Schlegel took note of, writing on Palin’s Facebook wall, “’does the rifle kick’ what kind of a question is that? Doesn’t matter if it kicks or not you shoot it the same. That was a girly question momma griz.”

It would behoove Palin real American opponents and supporters alike to remember that pretending to enjoy hunting is an American political tradition. Indeed, who can forget John Kerry, avid fowl hunter? Or this: “My father taught me how to shoot.”

Of course, not everyone was convinced that the mystique of Palin as Alaskan hunter is a con job. In the tradition of justifying anything to preserve a dear illusion at any cost to reason, a commenter on Hannity’s forum dismissed questions like so: “You’d have seen her dad take a tumble while caring the gun she used. He must have knocked the scope out of alignment.” Another hunter in the 24 Hour Campfire forum reasoned, “I bet the producers of that show knocked that messed with the scope to make it more dramatic,” while another theorized, “If I had to guess, it’d be someone on the set messed with her scope with promises of wealth to make her look stupid.”

Update, regarding the wearing of orange. As former Governor of the state, Palin should know that Alaska’s policy is that “Upland and big game hunters are strongly recommended to wear Hunter Orange.”

Abe Sauer does not have an addiction to low-paying work.

Man, I hope this tainted association does not ruin the good name of one of nature’s greatest beverages: “The rock band Train, known for ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ and other hit songs, has started a wine club, too. The Train Wine Club lives on a Web site where visitors can join the club, read blog posts, listen to music, find out about the ‘wine of the month,’ enter contests to win concert tickets, sign up for mobile applications and be connected to the band’s official Web site, Facebook pageand Twitter feed.”

I grew up in a town called Little Silver, New Jersey. In the same town, a year behind me in school, was a girl named Erika Simonian. We were friends in high school, sharing a fondness for dirty jokes, and sitting next to each other in Mr. Woodward’s physics class. She became a musician as an adult, and married a guy named Steve, and they’ve started a band together and named it Little Silver. (Which is a better name for a band, I think, than a town.) They’ve just released their first record, an EP called The Stolen Souvenir, and made the video above, which features the rides on the Coney Island boardwalk, laughing gulls at the beach, and guitars that look almost as pretty as they sound.

I know it’s a sucker’s game to convince yourself that celebrities are the same in real life as the personalities they display for public consumption but, I’m sorry, doesn’t Jeff Bridges just seem like the most genial guy in the world? Watch this clip from the forthcoming “American Masters” episode about him and try to tell me that he doesn’t remind of you of that one friend of yours who is always pleasantly surprised by and extremely excited about anything you tell him.

It was a Sunday morning not long ago and I was about two-thirds of the way through the full college basketball scoreboard, over 100 games of it, scanning the box score of a 12-point Miami (Fla.) win over Florida Gulf Coast, which I have to assume is an actual school, when it hit me like an uppercut: there is absolutely no reason I should be looking at this.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon to the Internet. Whether it’s porn-related or not, there are countless times each week you are struck by this realization, especially if you are online as often as I (and most of you reading this are). But even among the pantheon of cat-fighting-puppet or hospital-staff-lip-synching videos, vitriolic opinion blogs about politics and/or upsetting articles on bad websites, wanting to know who played well and who did not in a meaningless and uncompetitive road victory by The U seems, well, insignificant. At least it should to someone with no connection at all to either school.

This moment of clarity also got me to thinking (always a bad idea), and then set me on a mission to determine how, exactly, I came to follow regularly so many college hoops teams around the country. In many cases, it was easy to decipher, usually just a personal connection — my father went there, I lived near there as a kid, I saw them play one time in person and it just stuck, etc.

But then there are those Miami-FGC type games that seem to defy logic. As I dove in, the reasons ran the gamut: from places onetime Kentucky players transferred to to a former roommate’s favorite team, from barely Division I schools that feature surprisingly good players to schools that feature guys my program almost recruited. This latter reason, I am certain, is the nerdiest and most time-wasting of all of them.

And it’s how I came to check up on Hunter McClintock, redshirt freshman guard averaging seven points a game at Oral Roberts. McClintock was never actually a Kentucky player, nor even a real recruit. He was instead a brief fascination for UK fans when, as a late blooming (and still unsigned) point guard, he was deemed a diamond in the rough based on some heavily edited YouTube clips . Now I see he has gone on to new things. I, apparently, have not.

I also caught myself scanning the box score of Thursday’s game between Georgia Southern and the Citadel, a game the Citadel Bulldogs won by 13 points. Now I can’t say that I’m a steadfast Southern Conference guy. I mean, I’ll watch a few minutes of anything basketball-related on cable, but this game wasn’t even on cable so far as I can tell. My interest in this game was confined to one of the Citadel’s bench players: Morakinyo “Big Mike” Williams.

You’ve never heard of this guy, with good reason. Williams was among the very last of Tubby Smith’s final run of terrible recruits, a 7-foot project Tubby managed to steal from powerful American University. Williams was bad enough that Smith’s successor, Billy Gillispie, couldn’t even find PT for him that first, miserable season. But in a previous life as a Kentucky sports blogger I found a way to interview Big Mike, and though he never really saw the floor, I always felt an affinity for him based on his taking a few minutes to respond to my request.

Clearly unplayable, Williams transferred to Duquesne, where he broke out to the tune of 2.3 points and 2.3 rebounds per game. Then he graduated early and apparently bolted again, this time to play as a graduate student at The Citadel, where his official bio begins rather pointedly, “Morakinyo has improved.” Both he and I can only hope this is true, or at least that he’s soon enough going to graduate and disappear so as to stop occupying my life with his extreme mediocrity. It’s his fault, you see.

But Williams does fit into a certain type of completist fanship I subscribe to. I must subscribe to it because I also follow up on former Kentucky players A.J. Stewart (Texas State), Kevin Galloway (Texas Southern) and Matt Pilgrim (Oklahoma State). All three were run out of town when John Calipari arrived to make room for all those NBA draft picks. I should feel bad for them, and I do a little bit. Maybe that’s why I still check up on them. Or maybe I’m just in need of help.

Or not. Because for diehards like myself, following former players is an understandable way to be a fanatic for your program to the bitter end. After all, recruiting and positive player development is the lifeblood of a good program. Then again, watching how recruiting plays out can also be a pretty interesting way to see a program’s lack of development, too. Gillispie was famously taking verbals from eighth graders and guys no one else wanted. As fans, we tried really hard to find the good in this, but there wasn’t much. So actually it’s doubly satisfying in a way to see the great Drunken One’s zirconium-in-the-rough recruits sucking elsewhere. (Billy Clyde, you had me at “That’s really a bad question.”)

Sure, these program-based connections beget some silly fascinations, I’ll grant you. There are still legit reasons to dive into the deep end of the scoreboard, though. After all, it’s important to see how future opponents are faring, right? That’s why I check Southeastern Conference scores every day, as well as scores from Kentucky’s better non-conference opponents like North Carolina, Indiana and Notre Dame. OK, I admit it, I also check in on Mississippi Valley State and Coppin State. And Penn, sure. Gotta play the Quakers this year.

Oh, and the teams you’ve already played, well, they affect your RPI, so I have to make sure and continue to check up every few days on how UCONN, Oklahoma and Washington are doing, if not East Tennessee State and Boston University. But I check them, too, of course.

But those teams all at least have a connection to my favorite team. Not so much with tracking schools Kentucky never plays and whose only reason for being on my radar is that friends of mine were fans. This rarely occurs to me, however, even as I check to see how Temple, Maryland and Providence perform, regardless of who is coaching them, playing for them or opposing them. I guess I root for them as part of being a good friend or something. Not that any of my friends know I’m doing it. Because somehow it would just seem a little weird to tell them because they’d probably have to respond with something like, “Thanks?”

Or, who knows, maybe they’ be flattered. They’d at least care, I bet. My ex-girlfriend went to Rutgers. I don’t think she’d really give a rip that I still look in on that disaster in Piscataway. In fact, she might even find it a touch creepy. Is it? I mean, there aren’t really even many good players there anymore. They all transferred away. And I’ll probably follow them where they go, too. Because I do appreciate a good prospect at an off-the-grid location. This is how I end up at some of the worst box scores in the game, matchups involving bottom-feeders Colorado, San Jose State and Detroit, for example. It’s a little like finding that unknown indie band all your friends will be really into next year. There’s a certain geeky pleasure in being on top of the next Paul Millsap before anyone else (who isn’t as geeky as you are) is.

And then, finally, there’s the inexplicable ones. Like the aforementioned Canes-whatever-Florida-Gulf-Coast’s-mascot-is clash or this one, a fine test of wills between Derwin Kitchen and his Florida State Seminoles and Hartford. I mean, seriously. Were I to have access to a hit count on links at ESPN, the number of clicks on that particular box score would be so low as to depress me. But still I pore over it as if somewhere buried within was a hidden code that unlocks the secret room where they keep Bobby Sura forever frozen. Just in case, you know.

I suppose most of this is just my own neurosis. And I’m not hurting anyone, except maybe my poor three-year-old son who stares up at me with sad eyes while holding up toys as I ignore him to see whether SMU beat Western Kentucky.

Because Western has been struggling this year and I’d expected so much more out of them since Steffphon Pettigrew is now a senior and Oklahoma transfer Juan Patillo has joined the frontcourt. …

— oh GOD, it’s happening again…

Someone please tell my family I love them. I’ll be back, eventually. There’s just a few things I need to check on first.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Image by Mircea, from Flickr.

Seven Britons were trapped in a pub in North Yorkshire for eight days due to the snow that has essentially shut down that nation. Fortunately for them, the alcohol did not run out during their confinement. Unfortunately, they had Internet access the whole time, which will make anyone crazy. Mixed blessings, I guess.

Who says wealth doesn’t trickle down? As the nation’s redundant masses tremble, Oliver-Twist-style, before the spectacle of a Democratic-run Congress deciding whether merely to reward quarter-millionaires or the full-scale kind with lavish tax cuts, they might do well to consult the sobering tale of billionaire enclosure of central California’s water supply. It’s hard to see just how the nation’s owning classes will produce additional helpings of gruel (or at least low-wage service-sector jobs) if they’re so deeply averse to spreading around something as essential to agriculture, health and sanitation as water.

This saga, retailed in dogged and gruesome detail by Alternet’s John Gibler, concerns the enterprising private takeover of the Kern Valley water bank — a crucial source of irrigation for the region’s large-scale agribusiness outfits.

Technically, the water is also an indispensable public good for all the central valley’s residents, especially given the generally parched condition of an agricultural empire plonked down in a near-desert climate averaging five inches of rainfall a year. But Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the Beverly Hills billionaires who preside over the inland agricultural conglomerate of Roll International — America’s leading purveyors of almonds, pistachios and, most famously, the celebrity-branded POM Wonderful elixir of youth — understood back when they began amassing land in the western and southern end of the San Joaquin Valley in the late 1980s that the existing, New Deal-era network of dams and irrigation couldn’t be counted on to supply irrigation for their own particularly water-starved holdings. So they — or rather, the executive and legal team at their subsidiary, Paramount — quietly set about snapping up area water reserves for themselves.

When the dust had settled — or moistened, as the case may be — Paramount had…

engineered the takeover of nearly 20,000 acres of state property where the California Department of Water Resources had invested $74 million to turn a depleted aquifer alongside the Kern River into an underground reservoir, or water bank, capable of storing one million acre-feet of water. After a series of backroom negotiations, the state signed over the Kern Water Bank to five water districts and a private company. The private company, the Westside Mutual Water Co., is a paper company owned by the Resnicks, and the water districts are controlled by agribusinesses, including Paramount.

Smaller growers and public officials are suing to loosen the Resnicks’ stranglehold on the region’s supply, alleging that the vast reservoir is drawing water away from neighboring wells, and harming the region’s already overstrained environmental carrying capacity. In a recent BusinessWeek dispatch on the water fight, Adam Keats, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in one such suit, laid out the Paramount business model thusly: “They’ve divided up the spoils. They have their own philosophy and theory about how the world should work, which involves them getting very rich on our resources.”

To judge by Stewart Resnick’s rhetorical counterblasts, it’s hard to see where that rather bald analysis misses the mark. “The ones who are complaining are saying, ‘You have the water and we want the water.’ Well, that’s great. There are guys in Beverly Hills who have land and I want that land. Maybe they bought it for $10,000 and now it’s worth a million and I’d like some, give it to me.” Yes, because so many state residents need Beverly Hills real estate to drink, shower and clean their dishes in. But as Alternet’s Gibler notes, the analogy fails to hold in another way — the fruits (and nuts!) of the Paramount agricultural combine have appreciated handsomely, even as the California real estate market that Resnick tacitly endorses as a model for food cultivation has flatlined:

With the takeover of the Kern Water Bank, a public asset that could have been used to supply clean water to nearby farmworkers’ towns — and as a drought-relief water bank for both small towns and farmers — was instead used to safeguard the water supply of almond and pistachio trees in the desert for a Beverly Hills billionaire couple. Since taking over the Kern Water Bank, Paramount has more than doubled its production of almonds and pistachios, becoming the largest grower and processor of the nuts in the world. And the Resnicks made the Forbes list of billionaires.

California’s vast inland farming industry has bulked into its present immense scale based on the upward consolidation of land holdings and scarce water resources — a process that also entailed no small amount of payoffs to lawmakers and appropriation of state-financed public facilities, as noted in magisterial detail by journalists Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman’s indispensable history, The King of California.

But the Resnicks — who have cultivated a distinctly Versailles-inflected profile as liberal philanthropists, art collectors, and all around bon-vivants — have clearly reveled in the refinements they’ve introduced to the water-and-dirt foundation of their holdings. Lynda had previously been best known for a late-90s legal run-in with the estate of Lady Diana, which took issue with the unlicensed marketing of People’s Princess memorabilia from the Franklin Mint, which the Resnicks then owned, as the handiwork of so many “vultures feeding on the dead” — a jibe that had to hurt, given that Resnick had paid $135,000 at auction for Diana’s beloved high-collared “Elvis dress” just prior to the Princess’s demise. But Lynda — who had also paid out a cool $211,000 for a string of Jackie O’s fake pearls at a 1996 auction, and proceeded to adopt them as a model for another Franklin Mint line of mournographic tchotchkes — has clearly built up a more expansive self-image as all the pistachio and pomegranate pelf has kept rolling in. As Amy Wilentz has reported, Lynda has composed a vanity essay extolling the Resnick’s art-stuffed domestic compound in Beverly, noting that the home’s exterior is “topped off on all four sides with rows of balustrades through which a queen might peek out and utter, ‘Let them eat cake.’”

And indeed, the workforce that harvests all that excellent Paramount produce might fairly be described as feudal in station — at least in comparison with their Beverly Hills overlords. The immigrant community of Lost Hills, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Paramount farmworkers, was officially pegged at around 2,000 souls in the latest census, but tell Gibler that the population is at least double that — not surprising since many of them are in the country illegally, and hence none too eager to give their name to a federal head counter. More than 96 percent of the population is Hispanic, according to census figures, with 70 percent hailing directly from Latin America.

The town is unincorporated, without a local government, a bank — or, fittingly enough, potable tap water for the migrant workers who live there. “The crops they tend drink better, and cheaper, water than they do…. The groundwater basins have been depleted and contaminated by pesticides and nitrates from the very agribusinesses that employ them,” Gibler writes. “Little to no state funding makes it to their local water systems, leaving them to buy bottled water at the store or from a vending machine.”

Fortunately, though, the Resnicks are also bottled water barons. They own the luxe Fiji Water brand, which they’ve acquired in exactly the same fashion that they’ve privatized the Central Valley’s water market: purchasing the exclusive rights to one of the island nation’s main aquifirs from Fiji’s brutal and corrupt military dictatorship, and denying local residents access to the formerly public good. When Fijian government, starved for revenues in the grip of the global recession, sought to raise taxes on the Fiji Water operation, from a paltry $140,000 to $6 million per year, the company threatened to close up shop, shuttering planned plant expansions and leaving the company’s 400-member workforce to shift for itself in said recession (the company’s stateside corps of greenwashing spinmeisters would probably have little trouble finding work elsewhere). Not surprisingly, the threat came packaged with some trademark Resnickian hysterics about the base inequities of tax hikes: Fiji’s announcement, said Fiji Water CEO John Cochran, sends “a clear and unmistakable message to businesses operating in Fiji or looking to invest there: The country is increasingly unstable, and is becoming a very risky place in which to invest.”

Of course, even a thuggish military dictatorship knows a more practiced pair of bullies when it sees them, and so the Fijian government promptly caved in the face of the Resnicks’ threat. That just leaves a handful of stateside immigration and resource wonks to ponder the grim spectacle of the billionaire couple that’s hollowed out and privatized the foundation of inland agricultural production in California denouncing another autocratic regime for making the environment it does business in “increasingly unstable” and “a very risky place.” One supposes, after all, that the best thing to wash down a mouthful of royally sanctioned cake with is a bracing swig of Fiji Water or POM Wonderful.

Chris Lehmann loves all your things, rich people.

Photo by Jason Hickey from Flickr.

“Elaine Kaufman just threatened to kill me.”