Secrets of the City

Sen. Amy Koch, R-Buffalo, proposed a bill to outlaw the sale and possession of glass pipes, bongs and other smoking “accessories” that could be considered drug paraphernalia.

[Insert your nanny-state comment here.]

Whether it’s nanny-statism or just political showboating, it’s a stupid law, and I bet pray it will go down in flames. Illicit use or possession of paraphernalia after the fact is already illegal, so I just don’t see the point. And of course this is is a step in the wrong direction, leaning farther away from legalization.
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WRT bird collisions, it’s unfortunate that those nasty pigeons don’t migrate, although it’s hilarious to see their imprints slammed up against the glass of a skyway, usually with wings spread wide, and a small amount of uro-fecal matter just below the smudge.

The bird story reminds me of a commercial for Garage Logic featuring a couple who kept having chickadees fly into the glass door at their cabin. They simply put up a shredded plastic bag and the noise kept the birds away.

This is how we get bird flu, too, by the way. People dicking around with dead birds.

I presume this paraphernalia bill would impact the crack pipes currently being sold at corner stores across the city? I certainly hope so.

It’s very disheartening to watch a crackhead purchasing a glass tube and a 50 cent “choreboy” plug right in front of a 9-year-old getting m&ms.

Surely Amy Koch must have better things to do than author such a ridiculous pointless law. This law would have zero effect on marijuana use. It will only punish legitimate businesses and tack on extra fine to most drug possession offenses.

Whatever makes her appear to look tough on drugs I guess.

We should put paraphernalia on the black market so gangs can profit off of that too instead of these lame-ass peace-loving bob-marley/jerry-garcia-lovin independently-owned bong shops.

Sweet. We can eradicate illegal drugs just like South Dakota did when they made para illegal. Oh, wait…

Does this mean apples and pens will be illegal now too?

Because I’ve known some pretty creative potheads.

(Don’t forget honey, especially in those cute little bear containers!)

Oh and I think you can use spray paint and a pop can to kill your brain cells too. No more soderr, guys!

Drugs don’t kill people, dumb idiot legislators kill people. We laugh ourselves to death.
I don’t like the sale of pipes at the corner stores, either, ranty, but that is something neighbors can raise hell about. the next time the store comes up for a license renewal, force your city to put conditions on the license.
and if that’s too nanny state for some of you, tough bounce. I’d rather do that than see some unlikely-to-be-enforced state law passed

Apples? Wow, that’s one I never heard of before…

ranty, you’d be amazed the things engineering students can turn into bongs and pipes. Seriously. I was.

Actually, I *think* it may already be illegal to sell those pipes at local “grocery” type stores, but I’m not sure… either way, they appear to be a lot more profitable than marked-up, nearly-expired cub foods grocery items.

Ah well.

…and when those engineering students sold those bongs and pipes to other students, did they pay the state any tax?

We don’t want any of that dirty, dirty pot paraphernalia giving any money to the state… I hope they ban it!

I think I bought condoms in a cub once. That was pretty cool.

ahaha, they didn’t sell them, man, they used them.

I’ve got a list of about 200 bills stupider than that one.

I get about 5 bills stupider than this one per month in the mail, but I still have to pay them.

I’ve got a list of about 200 bills stupider than that one.

You should create a post linking your five favorites that haven’t been discussed here yet. I’m sure it’d be a great thread.

a small amount of uro-fecal matter just below the smudge.

I’d shit myself too if I were flying directly at a skyway.

IMPORTANT LINK
How Mark Mallman feels about Mary Lucia

important, but dead

IMPORTANT LINK
Chuck is one sick dude

Does this mean apples and pens will be illegal now too?

don’t forget pepsi cans.

And potatoes. Denis Leary once pointed out that the most profound effect of pot smoking is arts and crafts projects, at which point he shouted, “Hey! I bet I can make a bong out of that guy’s head!”, leaped off the stage, and proceeded to try to such marijuana smoke out of the pate of one of his audience members.

What the fuck is this Twitter, anyway?

It sounds like the worst of instant messaging combined with the worst of “social networking”, meaning it’s full of far too many twenty- and thirty-somethings who swear it’s not for the mostly-teenaged look-at-me emo crowd.

There is such a thing as TMI when it comes to personal information, whether it’s because I don’t want to know, or I just wish you would shut the hell up about yourself.

I’d like to see this bill and how she intends to differentiate drug paraphernalia from tobacco pipes, papers, etc. Unless she’s only specifying “glass”, in which case retailers will get just as creative as their pot-smoking customers in selling such items.

I like Twitter and I’m trying to get more of my friends to use it. For me, it’s less of a mini-blogging thing, and more of a Dodgeball-type thing. I like to know where my friends are headed every night for cocktails.

Hey man!

Scratch my balls!!!!

So does this mean that they’ll be outlawing Swisher Sweets as well?

I’ve found Twitter to be quite useful and entertaining. Think before you post so you don’t piss your friends off, and there are ways to manage folks you don’t want to get messages from. Not hard.

twitter?

Yeah. Twitter. It’s getting bombarded right now so it’s a tad bit slow today. Popularity skyrocketed after SXSW.

Judging by its availability, I’m going to call BS on breathless articles nearly proclaiming that “Twitter can save lives.”

Considering that I do a lousy job of tracking what I do at work just to get paid, the odds of me keeping people posted on what I do outside my nine-to-five… for free… like anyone cares… impossible.

It’s all about the “me” generation, Champs. And you thought the 80s were bad…

Vets trying to be normal. Last year I was riding home on the light rail when a guy got on at Lake Street and sat next to me. I could smell he’d been drinking. I was reading and had my iPod on, keeping to myself, but after a moment he asked if he could talk to me a minute.

I thought, oh christ, now what, but I could see he was bummed out and upset so I took off the headphones and closed the book. He said he’d been overseas in the service and had killed some people, and he felt like a murderer, and how it was so messed up that you’re a good person over there for doing it but when you get back you feel like a horrible person, and that sometimes he feels like killing himself. He didn’t look at me most of the time he was telling this story, and he was sort of crying.

What do you say? That’s tough, and you need someone to talk to besides a stranger on the train. Then he got up and said, Thanks, I’m sorry to bother you. I tried to say, no, really, it’s okay. He moved to another seat to pull himself together a little. When he got off at the VA station, I thought, good, you’re getting some help. I hope it’s enough. I felt really, really sad for him and for everyone going through that hell.

Hopefully he got help.

We haven’t really been doing right by our veterans.

oh god, twitter looks positively annoying.

I would just continually post “still sitting at home” every hour until I had no friends left.

Again, Twitter is kind of based on the premise that you have friends/people you are interested in hearing from, and vice versa. So if you’re not one of those people, don’t worry about it. I totally thought it was the stupidest thing until I started actually using it, and now I’m hooked. But again, I signed up initially to use it for a specific purpose, which it performed very well. My usage and enjoyment may very well taper off now that that’s over.

I find it an excellent thing to occasionally do instead of getting work done, but that’s just me. And I’m salaried anyway.

Sometimes I just watch scrolling text in terminal windows in the background and wait for jobs to finish. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be on mnspeak much.

Does this count as a bird collision?:

http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/16940709.htm

I have no friends. Seriously. I lived in my new house more than three months before I learned that my intercom for unlocking the main entry doesn’t work. And that was for an uninvited guest, no less.

This will serve me well in the future. The new standard for inviting someone over is now, “Do I want to walk a whole block to the other side of the building, go downstairs, open the door and then walk all the way back?” If not, no invitation.

Life. Is. Good. when all your decisions boil down to yes-no questions.

Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between Kwatt and Mpls Simpleton.

It was Simpleton who was talking about how he didn’t have any friends, wasn’t it?

I’ve got wood….en friends.

I never got laid when I was a Repub either…but since I left the Party there’s been a Party in my pants!!!!!!!!

Alex – isn’t that what cell phones are for? How much more redundant technology do we need. I just found out I can send SMS text messages from my computer for free. So that’s two devices on my desk that perform an identical task. how dumb.

First the pipes are outlawed, then its brownie pans and other dangerous baking paraphenalia…Wayne made the right point. There is no limit on creativity when a person’s highly motivated.

I bet people who run newspapers and live by me have friends!

Nah its wayne that doesn’t have any friends.
I’m just not looking for new friends.

Well that and I’m firmly a Democrat and gay…but from what I can tell kwatt has sex with as many guys as girls so he is possibly bi.

If masturbation counted as sex, how many straight guys would be left?

I’m totally hand homo.

If manual stimulation counts, I guess you could say I’m bi-curious.

I don’t like talking on the phone. Just ask anyone who has ever tried calling me. But text messages, in the last few months, I totally dig.

Twitter was awesome at SXSW to find out where people were, what parties/panels sucked/rocked. It’s less useful now that I’m home, but still kinda cool. It’s basically like having a little RSS feed of my contacts, delivered instantly through text messages.

But I used to be anti-Twitter, and I heartily encourage the anti-Twitter attitude.

remember when you could, like, talk to people?

On Sunday, s4xton was telling me about something you download that sends certain texts to specific groups of friends on your phone, once you take the time to create those groups. I am not very technologically-inclined, so I’d not heard of it yet, and as far as I know, it’s not a feature already on my BlackBerry. I’ll look into it as soon as s4xton reminds me what that was, but for now Twitter is quite handy. It’s very easy to use and there was nothing to download, plus I can Twitter from the website or IM if I want. I’d love to keep typing about this, but I just realized I’m probably too pharmacologically-enhanced right now to have even started this comment.

You have a blackberry.

What.

On Sunday, s4xton was telling me about something you download that sends certain texts to specific groups of friends on your phone, once you take the time to create those groups.

I was referring to Upoc. There’s communities and public groups and shit, but I tend to avoid all of that. I use it for the private groups.

-Aaron

*random interjection alert*

Aaron, what is the meaning of s4xton? Do you drive an S4 or something?

Many years ago it used to be “Saxton” – but after a struggle with domain names and such and the realization I wanted something unique, I switched to “s4xton.” It’s pronounced like “saxton,” and not “ehs four ex ton” as some people enjoy saying.

The “Saxton” name has a long story. Email me if you really want to know it. It isn’t that exciting. It dates back to a story from when I was in junior high and I’ve kept it ever since.