The Boy With Kaleidoscope Eyes / Is Eating Nine Pizza Pies
If I don't watch out, I'm going to be content blocked.

On Wednesday, I posted a discussion of cigars which, in my mind, included only one minor parenthetical implicit drug reference.

Annika set me straight:

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Sounds like you may not be hip to this bit of trivia, so i'll let you in on the secret. Phillie Blunts are for pot smokers. That's why they're so cheap and come in all those exotic flavors and why they use the playboy models and hip-hop in their marketing....

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I couldn't (and still can't) access the link she provided, but I could access over 30 definitions in the Urban Dictionary which proved her point. Here's the second definition, supplied by Lazy Blaze:

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A cigar that has been hollowed and refilled with marijuana. The term 'blunt' was originally derived from the preferred brand of cigars for this operation, Phillies Blunts.

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However, I don't necessarily see the positive correlation between Playboy models and marijuana. One site claim that marijuana leads to decreased sex drive. However, this same site also claim that marijuana results in breast enlargement...in boys. Other sites have similar claims.

So, if I refrain from speaking about mind altering substances, what do I talk about? Caffeine is out:

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Every time you drink tea, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, or cola you are giving your body a 'hit' of caffeine. Along with nicotine and alcohol, caffeine is one of the three most widely used mood -affecting drugs in the world.

If you have more than two or three caffeine drinks per day Your 'habit' may be affecting you emotionally and physically much more powerfully than you'd expect....

The following are commonly attributed to over-use of caffeine:

1. Stimulates your heart, respiratory system, and central nervous system.

2. Makes your blood more `sludgy' by raising the level of fatty acids in the blood.

3. Causes messages to be passed along your nervous system more quickly

4. Stimulates blood circulation

5. Raises blood pressure

6. Causes your stomach to produce more acid

7. Irritates the stomach lining

8. Makes digestion less effective by relaxing the muscles of your intestinal system

9. Its diuretic effect caused increased urination

10. Stimulates the cortex of your brain heightening the intensity of mental activity. This can result in a temporary feeling of alertness and, in the short term, banishes drowsiness and feelings of fatigue. In those who already have high levels of anxiety the heightened intensity of mental activity can produce unpleasant effects.

11. Affects the length and quality of sleep. Heavy caffeine users suffer from sleep-deprivation because their nervous system is too stimulated to allow them deep, restful or prolonged sleep.

12. The American Medical Journal has reported a correlation between caffeine and decreased bone density or osteoporosis in women.

In addition to the above effects prolonged or heavy caffeine use can produce more uncomfortable experiences:

13. `Caffeine nerves' a jittery feeling with shaking hands, palpitations, and wobbliness in the legs.

14. Caffeine addiction which involves nervousness, irritability, agitation, headaches or ringing in the ears.

15. Causes your adrenal glands to release their hormones into your bloodstream

16. Causes blood sugar, or blood glucose, to be released from storage through the effects of the adrenal hormones. This gives you a temporary lift but…

17. …requires your pancreas to over-work. This is because your pancreas now has to produce extra insulin to reduce this extra blood sugar. Once the extra insulin has 'mopped up' the extra blood sugar your temporary lift from the caffeine ends.

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This information is from the NLP people:

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NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) has been variously described as the technology of the mind, the science of achievement, and the study of success. It is based upon the search for and the study of the factors which account for either success or failure in human performance.

For over a quarter of a century NLP explorers have studied or ‘modelled’ the behaviour and thinking styles of particularly effective and successful people in business, education, sales, therapy, sport, and personal development.

The results of this work are nowadays presented in workshops and extended trainings which, in effect, provide shortcuts to more successful living - you learn in hours what may have taken the experts years to discover by trial and error.

The essence of NLP could be expressed in the question

How is it possible to be an idiot... or an expert?

NLP is, in effect, the study of what accounts for these types of performance. It is the practical and pragmatic study of the ingredients of excellent performance and the transfer of these ‘ingredients’ to others.

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This should not be confused with the organization formerly known as the National Library of Poetry, which apparently doesn't require any training at all:

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The International Library of Poetry is one of several organizations of questionable repute operating under the internet domains poetry.com and poets.com. Once known as the "National" Library of Poetry, they are now "International."...

Serious poets consider the International Library of Poetry contests and their affiliated organizations to be unethical, and their free poetry contests a scheme designed to prey on amateur poets by relieving them of their money....

Is the following poem worthy of consideration for a national prize?

My Cat Has Fleas

My cat is chewing on her butt;
It makes me think she is a nut.

I try to drown the fleas in spray;
They jump and shout and just yell "Hey!"

I try to drown the fleas in powder;
they eat it like it's fine clam chowder.

I try to drown the fleas in gas;
that really burned my kitty's ass.

Yep. The NLP picked this poem as a national semifinalist in their free poetry contest. Click here for details. And you can have your very own semi-finalist poem published in a handsome book of similar, excellent poems for only $49.99.

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OK, the prevalence of non-drug related material in this entry will probably help me avoid content blocking. But let's explore what wockyjivvy is doing:

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The National Library of Poetry (now the "International Library of Poetry" and hosted at poetry.com) sponsors poetry "contests" several times throughout each year....This scheme seems pleasant enough -- until one realizes that it is very possibly impossible to write something dreadful enough that it won't be chosen as a "semi-finalist".

The poems presented here represent attempts to write something that the austere judges for the National Library of Poetry would deem so horrible that they could not, in good conscience, bestow the status "semi-finalist".

The quest is valiant, though, to date, unsuccessful....

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Winning Writers is actively encouraging the production of bad poetry. And you don't have to be spaced to enter.

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How to Submit Your Entry to the 2005 Contest (entries accepted August 15, 2004-April 1, 2005)

1) Find a vanity poetry contest, a contest with low standards whose main purpose is to entice poets to buy expensive products like anthologies, chapbooks, CDs, plaques and silver bowls. Vanity contests will often praise remarkably bad poems in their effort to sell as much stuff to as many people as possible....

2) Make up a deliberately absurd, strange, laugh-out-loud parody poem....

3) Submit your parody poem to a vanity contest as a joke.

4) After you've done steps 1-3...submit your entry to the Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest....

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Here's another bad poem, from contestant S. L. Pierrotti:

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Ode on a Grecian Formula

Oh sacred libation of Narcissian (sp?) splendor,
From thee I reattain, through unpretentious market vendor,
Ebon locks once lost, that now renewed, quickly reengender,
And mend penis-vital connections with youth, once hindered.

The empowering single application of sanctified unction
More than libido-enhancing Viagra restores function.
The stygian night of repellent, slack-bellied age has flown,
The withered renewed! The palsied limb now rises on its own!

Lo, the Elysium of youthful, sweat-scented bodies beckons,
Upon the sacred vessel of efficacious deception your servant reckons!

Oh, formula of the gods, to your humble supplicant, I pray, bestow
The raven wings of Adonis above, the might of Jupiter's member below,
Enough to bring an eternal Olympian festival of adolescent sex,
If not, I'll try some botox next.

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And here's an entry from Misty Massey:

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Oops! I Donne It Again

Britney, be not proud, though some have called thee
Blonde and talented, for thou art neither thing;
Those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Mariah, Christina, unlike you can both dance and sing!
Young teenage girls who wish like you to be
Preen and pose to taped karaoke song,
And boys, not our best men, over thee do long
Whilst your booty wiggles, lifesize on MTV.
Thou'rt "Slave To You" and "..Baby, One More Time"
And dost with tight pants and bleached hair Pepsi sell.
Yet, with just one film role, can make us sleep as well.
Still, better than thy dancing; thy feet ne'er move!
But soon a younger, blonder star is made,
And Britney shall be no more; Britney, thou shalt fade.

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And now we've come full circle back to Annika. Let's end the ramblings here.