When pigs fly? This one gets pretty close. Meet LiLou, the newest addition to San Francisco International Airport.
She’s a therapy pig, part of the airport’s Wag Brigade, according to Mercury News, alongside 300 cats, dogs and rabbits that make flying less stressful for travelers passing through. They’re certified Assisted Therapy animals, trained to be super-soothing and sweet, and given signs that say “Pet me!” What a great gig.
They’re documenting LiLou’s adventures at the airport on SFO’s Twitter account, showing her doing tricks for the crowd and owning the place in her blue tutu. Pigs are super smart and are social animals. With a little training, the role is a natural fit.
— San Francisco International Airport (SFO) ✈️ (@flySFO) December 5, 2016
LiLou is the first therapy pig, however, and causing a minor controversy: Animal rights activists are demanding that the airport restaurants stop serving pork. PETA’s plea to SFO states:
“Like LiLou, pigs are extremely good-natured, playful, affectionate, sensitive, social, and smart. Yet the ones used for food are confined to filthy warehouses, their tails are chopped off, their teeth are cut with pliers, and males are castrated—often without any painkillers. At slaughterhouses, they scream as they’re hung upside down and bled to death, often while they’re still conscious.”
They’re planning to urge travelers against eating meat with new ads places around the airport. LiLou, in her blue tutu and painted nails, didn’t intend to become a poster pig for going vegan, but it’s a targeted advertising campaign that’s likely to land close to home.
Although legal marijuana will officially be a thing in Massachusetts later this week, it is still going to be at least another year and half before the average adult citizen can just walk into a local pot shop and purchase cannabis products in a manner similar to beer.
This means unless a person is a medical marijuana patient registered with the state, there is not going to be any legitimate opportunities to buy marijuana until the state launches the recreational sector sometime in 2018.
Legal Marijuana
However, as of Thursday, Massachusetts residents 21 and over will have the freedom to carry up to an ounce of marijuana on them outside the home without fear of a law enforcement shakedown. Those same people will also be permitted to keep up to 10 ounces of weed inside the home and discreetly cultivate up to 12 plants per private household.
Unfortunately, renters will be challenged in both smoking and growing marijuana because most rental agreements do not permit those activities.
In order to prevent the marijuana masses from shoving money into the mouth of the black market, the new law comes with a “gift” provision, which makes it perfectly acceptable for an adult to transfer up to an ounce of weed to another adult consumer. But this act must be a cash free transaction, as paying for weed in Massachusetts until the retail pot shops are up and running is still considered a criminal offense.
At the same time, while the people of Massachusetts are almost certainly gearing up for the first weekend of legal weed, it is important to understand that the system is not rooted in anarchist principles and it does come with a rather extensive list of common sense rules that have been modeled in the image of the state’s alcohol and tobacco laws.
The new law does not give people permission to smoke marijuana on the street, nor does it change anything with respect to the laws against drugged driving. So, while the police will no longer be able to drag a person to jail for simply having pot in the vehicle (locked in the trunk or glove compartment only), there is nothing stopping them from conducting roadside sobriety tests in an attempt to bust a motorist for driving high.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of Massachusetts’s new marijuana law is that it does not allow people to transport legal pot products across state lines. This is because marijuana remains highly illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which makes traveling from, say, Massachusetts to New York with marijuana a crime known as drug trafficking – a felony offense that carries the potential for some serious prison time.
Other legal states, like Colorado and Washington, went through similar grey periods with respect to legal weed. But some of the confusion will start to clear up as soon as the state gets the regulatory affairs of the cannabis industry worked out and the herb is finally available for sale to the public.
You know how parents say money doesn’t grow on trees? Well they’re still right, but they never said anything about condoms. And in Austin, Texas, condoms do grow on trees.
Austin Health and Human Services employees have been hanging condoms in the trees of Walnut Creek Park for a month. The initiative aimed to promote safe sex, though it was unknown to the HHS director and the city Parks and Recreation Department, according to the Austin American Statesman.
HHS Director Shannon Jones reminded his staff that there is a department “vetting process,” but was vocal in his support of the initiative. The bags hanging from the trees contained not only condoms, but also lube and safe sex information.
“The rates of HIV in our community are high,” Jones said. “We need to use traditional and nontraditional efforts to reduce the spread of disease.”
Employees targeted Walnut Creek Park because their public bathrooms “have always been known as a meeting place for sex,” according to Walnut Creek Neighborhood Association President Robert Meadows.
However, park employees unaware of the initiative took down the bags, considering them litter. While crediting the creativity Austin Parks and Recreation Department Director Sara Hensley wasn’t fully sold on the idea.
“Plastic bags, of course, can fall into the creek and hurt critters,” she said. “Then we found out it was an effort to educate the public about safe sex, which we absolutely support, but I’m not sure hanging something from a tree is the best way to get the message across.”
The decision to continue pursuing this awareness will be made soon, said Hensley. Consider it a lesson that everything you need comes from nature, including condoms.
On Saturday, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to criticize the war on drugs and call for alternative strategies. In front of a distinguished audience in Oslo, Norway, President Santos lamented that Colombia had “paid the highest cost in deaths and sacrifices” in the war on drugs and said that it was “time to change our strategy.”
“We’ve had no better ally among sitting presidents than Juan Manuel Santos,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “His advocacy for alternative strategies is all the more striking given the extent to which he was understandably focused on achieving the peace agreement for which he won the Nobel Prize.”
President Santos was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his work toward a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) of Colombia. The decades-long conflict with the FARC has resulted in over 220,000 deaths and the internal displacement of five million people. The peace accords themselves include challenges to the war on drugs, including the provision of alternative livelihoods for coca farmers, the decriminalization of drug consumption, and a focus on health and evidence-based approaches to drug use.
During his acceptance speech, President Santos said: “We have moral authority to state that, after decades of fighting against drug trafficking, the world has still been unable to control this scourge that fuels violence and corruption throughout our global community. […] It makes no sense to imprison a peasant who grows marijuana, when nowadays, for example, its cultivation and use are legal in eight states of the United States. […] The manner in which this war against drugs is being waged is equally or perhaps even more harmful than all the wars the world is fighting today, combined.”
The war on drugs has brought devastation to Colombia and Latin America. The militarized drug war in Mexico has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, disappearances, and internal displacements and has corroded rule of law and due process. Illegal drug trafficking, and the associated violence, have made Central America home to some of the most deadly cities in the world. Aerial fumigation of illicit crops have destroyed livelihoods and the environment in the Andes. And yet, despite decades of the drug war, drug production and consumption have not decreased.
However, in recent years, debate and political will for drug policy reform has gained unprecedented global momentum. In recent years, Kofi Annan, George Shultz, Paul Volcker and Richard Branson joined former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), César Gaviria (Colombia) and Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico) and other distinguished members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in saying the time had come to “break the taboo” on exploring alternatives to the failed war on drugs – and to “encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs,” especially marijuana.
In April, on the eve of the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem, world leaders and activists signed a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urging him to set the stage “for real reform of global drug control policy.” The unprecedented list of signatories includes a range of people from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Durbin and Bernie Sanders, to former President Jimmy Carter, to former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and George Shultz, businessmen Warren Buffett, George Soros, Richard Branson and Mo Ibrahim, actors Michael Douglas and Gael Garcia Bernal, Super Bowl champion Tom Brady, singers Annie Lennox and Sting, activists Gloria Steinem and Michelle Alexander, as well as distinguished legislators, cabinet ministers, and former UN officials.
In the past few years, drug policy reforms have taken place across the Americas. Uruguay became the first country in the world to legally regulate marijuana in 2013. In 2015, Jamaica approved a broad marijuana reform measure, decriminalizing the use of marijuana for religious, scientific and medical purposes. Colombia and Puerto Rico issued Executive Orders legalizing medical marijuana, and Chile is already cultivating marijuana for hundreds of oncology patients. And just last year, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting the consumption, possession and cultivation for personal use of marijuana was a violation of human rights.
On Thanksgiving night, anchored by gravy and sweet goodies, my family watched The Fast and The Furious. Many reasons went into this decision: a) The FF franchise revolves around family, the tearing and mending of those tricky relationships, holding onto loved ones while driving cool cars really, really fast, and b) because I had the remote. Why they handed me this power is beyond me.
Other IRL family members slipped away to bed, but my father and I stayed up late, absorbing its nuanced portraits and NOS-fueled explosions. It was, how they call it, a bonding moment.
So imagine the anticipation Sunday night when the FF-ers dropped a new trailer for its eight installment (!!) called—gorgeously, perfectly, incredibly—The Fate of the Furious.
Understandably, we have some questions following the trailer release. Let’s break down our super important queries about the fate of our beloved FF-ers.
So Dom’s a bad dude now?
Fair warning: The next sentence you will read is a blasphemous statement. Dominic Torretto is the only film or TV patriarch that matters. (Sorry Don Corleone.) (Sorry Tony Soprano.) (Sorry Coach Taylor.) Everyone else pales in comparison. He is the archetype and the architect.
But the heart of the Fast and Furious is and always has been the relationship between Dom and Brain O’Conner. Theirs was a classic big brother-little brother relationship—each knew who really was boss, but it didn’t stop little brother from trying to win. On top of that, underneath their hulked-out exteriors, both knew they needed one another. That relationship grounded all the other goofy shit in these movies and why installments like 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift feel diluted. People don’t just want to watch fast vehicles and colossal stakes; they want to watch those guys drive fast vehicles and beat the colossal stakes.
With that in mind, it may seem like misstep to separate Dom from the family and turn him bad. But what move did they have left? After upping the villain and consequences the past two movies (and toying with us that Brian would die like 5,000 times), a standard FF episode would feel bland. Either Dom’s leading the gang solo now, or Brian’s there through some facial CGI wizardry and it feels wrong. Dom going bad is the right call.
Will Brian make an appearance?
Tough to tell. He isn’t mentioned or seen throughout the trailer. When Furious 7 ended, it felt like a closing on Brian’s narrative, and a sincere tribute to Paul Walker’s death. However, the Walker brothers, who filled in for some critical Furious 7 scenes, admitted that Vin Diesel asked if they could bring Walker’s character back down the road. They said yes.
Chances are Brian returns. It’s a move they’ll save, though, for ultimate impact. With plans through a 10thFast and Furious film, they need something to tease down the road. Maybe Brian comes in last minute and turns Dom from bad back to good. Anything is possible.
What unbelievable stunt will they pull off this time?
Screenshot via Fast & Furious/YouTube
Wait…that’s a submarine?
Yes. They defeated tanks, aircraft, and drones. Where else could they go? Can we just imagine that pitch, though?
FF producer: “What about submarines? We ain’t did one of them yet.”
Any other person ever: “You realize those are, like, underwater and stuff, right?” FF producer: “Last movie The Rock drove an ambulances over a bridge into an exploding drone and survived. Then he double-tapped the drone and announced, ‘I am the cavalry.’ There are no rules.”
Any other person ever: “But a submarine needs water to—” FF producer: “No rules!”
How many times will The Rock refer to himself as ‘daddy’?
Hopefully 10.
How many panning shots of Vin Diesel staring intensely out of a car will there be?
The trailer has about three and I pray that’s the whole movie. Just one long pan of Vin looking forlornly out into the world, wondering his fate as a furious man.
Is Fate of the Furious Oscar bait?
Vin Diesel thinks so! Here’s what Diesel said about the movie’s Oscar chances, singling out F. Gary Gray’s directing as worthy of Academy recognition:
As bizarre as that might be, he is definitely going to [be recognized]. As crazy as that might sound, he should have really been acknowledged for Straight Outta Compton. I think he went into making this movie with a little bit of a chip [on his shoulder], going ‘Oh, really? Now I’m going to take the biggest saga in the world, and I’m about to throw Oscars at you.’ Wait until you see what he does!
Should I go into a coma until this movie’s released?
This is a personal question. And that answer is yes. Friends and family, I’ll see you April 14, 2017.
Up until now, meaningful marijuana policy has been handled by state legislators. But beginning next year, the U.S. Congress will get a little more serious about doing something at the federal level.
Over the weekend, two members of Congress — one Republican and one Democrat — announced they were joining forces to create a Cannabis Caucus for the 115th Congress.
Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., and Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., will focus on a national strategy for national marijuana reform.
“People who have been ambivalent about this before, all of a sudden just inherited constituents who care deeply about it,”Blumenauer told DecodeDC. “Florida just passed an initiative for medical marijuana which makes it the second largest marijuana market in the United States. All of a sudden there are lots of legislators who just had their constituents vote more strongly for marijuana than they did for them.”
Rohrabacher, who reportedly is still being considered by President-elect Donald J. Trump for Secretary of State, wants the focus to be on a durable structure for change. “There needs to be more strategy between us, those of us who are engaged in this. More of a long-term strategy,” Rohrabacher said . “We need to have a vehicle in which people on the outside will be able to work through and sort of have a team effort from the inside and the outside.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., is also considered to be deeply involved in the caucus, which will begin meeting next month.
According to DecodeDC, the caucus will be made up of members of Congress who see marijuana reform as an important issue and it will focus on a bipartisan effort to pass bills.
Rohrabacher and Blumenauer have both fought vigorously for marijuana decriminalization and a state’s right to choose how to regulate the drug.
Rohrabacher, who openly says he is a medical marijuana patient for arthritis pain, introduced the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2015.
Blumenauer introduced the bipartisan Medical Marijuana Research Act of 2016 and co-sponsored the Marijuana Businesses Access to Banking Act of 2015.
According to Blumenauer, the two biggest issues facing the cannabis industry are that companies aren’t fairly taxed because federal law won’t allow them to fully deduct their business taxes — and that cannabis businesses can’t work with banks.
“We’ve had the movement crest,” Blumenauer told DecodeDC. “Two hundred and fifty million people have access to medical marijuana, a quarter of the population has access to adult use. We’re watching an industry now where 60 percent believe marijuana should be legalized, and public opinion mirrors what happened at the ballot box.”
Do you ever feel like “they” are hating on you? Do you ever wish you could be the best? Well DJ Khaled helps block they with new cocoa butter collection. He is a long time supporter of all things glow and smooth, has teamed up with Palmer’s Cocoa Butter to release a capsule We The Best collection. Khaled has been known to showcase his support and usage of Palmer’s Cocoa Butter on his popular Snapchat channel.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BNu1rT8DvZ6/
But Khaled is making the relationship official with this collaboration, which includes three different variations that capitalize on Khaled’s catchphrases. You can “Live Life Smooth,” the way Khaled does, you can use “They Block” to keep away all the they’s in your life, and display your “We The Best” glow.
It’s yet another win for Khaled. His Drake-assisted single “For Free” went platinum while this year’s Major Key LP certified gold last month. Khaled also announced he’s already working on a follow-up album.
You can check out Khaled’s Cocoa Butter commercials below. Stereogum reports the collection will go on sale tomorrow.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BNxLxqCjAsa/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BN3PAXbgJtm/
Khaled is an American DJ, record producer, and record executive. Originally a Miami-based radio hype man, Khaled has become known for his extensive curation of high-profile music industry artists and producers to record singles or albums. His distinctions are his booming voice presence, “motivational” abstractions, and numerous catchphrases. While his musical contribution is often questioned, Khaled’s role has been described as organization, direction, promotion.
Cocoa butter, also called theobroma oil, is a pale-yellow, edible fat extracted from the cocoa bean (Theobroma cacao). It is used to make chocolate, as well as some ointments, toiletries, and pharmaceuticals. It is is a decent source of vitamin E, which benefits your body in many ways. Vitamin E supports vision, reproduction, and the health of your brain, skin, and blood. Cocoa butter contains a high amount of fatty acids, which make it well-suited as a main ingredient in skin cream.
Buzz Aldrin, that guy who was the second man to walk the moon, was evacuated from a trip on the South Pole due to altitude sickness. He arrived to New Zealand in stable condition, where he was treated by a Dr. David Bowie.
.@TheRealBuzz‘s daughter Jan has arrived into NZ. Just in time for the wonderful Dr David Bowie to say maybe 1-2 days til we can go home. pic.twitter.com/yAKJtq0ChI
Aside from having been one of the greatest performers on earth, David Bowie – the singer, not the doctor – was also an incredible proponent of space, naming his alter ego Ziggy Stardust and calling out to the stars and the space men in many of his songs. He was a little bit of a visionary as well, releasing his album Space Oddity, a few days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
His death on January 10th was a heavy blow that set the tone for an uneven and some might say rough 2016. Bowie inspired and was beloved by many, proven by this awesome tribute video made by Astronaut Chris Hadfield.
For your entire life, you’ve been told to eat your vegetables. You dodged them like green-tinted bullets as a child by pretending to politely cough bites into your napkin but, as an adult, green isn’t as mean as you remembered. You’ve even expanded your epicurean repertoire to include root vegetables and other things that innately taste like dirt. Butter ‘em up, dredge them in cheese, flash-fry coated in tempura or take in all their nutritional goodness raw, vegetables are part of a balanced diet and actually do taste good, especially when the right wine is paired with them. Here’s 5 wine And vegetable pairings done right.
Carrots with Albariño
This Spanish white wine variety is no stranger to working with vegetables (think tomato-and-veggie-pureed gazpacho). The warming and nutty profile is also lush with tropical fruit flavors and juicy acid. Zanahorias aliñadas (marinated carrots) is a popular vegetable side dish in Spanish cuisine, cold-poached in olive oil to fatten up the root vegetable with a little herbal unctuousness. The amiable matchup goes together like wine and carrots: give it a go with the jasmine-accented single varietal from Adegas Valmiñor in Spain’s Rias Biaxas or Idilico’s almond-and stone fruit-flavored version from Washington State’s Yakima Valley.
Asparagus with Grüner Veltliner
This herbaceous, perennial plant produces an unfortunate amount of organic compounds that contain sulfur and high doses of chlorophyll-based green flavors, both off-putting presences when next to or in wine. Do not fear, dear wine drinker, the vegetal vegetable’s citrus-herbal quality can appeal to a higher acid, zippy white wine like Grüner Veltliner. Try a classic Austrian rendition like E&M Berger’s zesty pop-top bottle or let the New World take a stab with a dry and crisp bottle of Dr. Konstantin Frank in New York’s Finger Lakes.
Spinach with Gamay Noir
Whaaaaaat, a leafy green with a red wine? Take it easy: the earthy, mild flavors of spinach make a cordial companion for Gamay Noir, a lighter bodied, slightly earth and fruit-forward red more often found in France’s Beaujolais and Loire Valley. Now is the time of year to strike, as this style of wine is readily available at retailers and typically discounted from last month’s Beaujolais Nouveau Day (Nov. 16). Chomp down on these greens next to a glass of the rhubarb-fruited Pentâge Winery Gamay from British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley or go classic with the approachable and earthy Louis Jadot’s Beaujolais-Villages from the namesake region.
Green Beans with Sauvignon Blanc
Two words: lemon and butter. The light and bright string bean lends itself nicely to complementing zesty, tangy citrus and the fat of butter. With likeminded flavors to the citrus and crispness of the vegetable, Sauvignon Blanc can contrast the richness of buttered beans while mirroring the acid of the green itself and lemon. Pick a lush, juicy Sauvignon Blanc from California, North America’s leading producer of the green-skinned grape, like Cliff Lede’s from Napa Valley or one from the Loire Valley, like Henri Bourgeois’ mineral-heavy Sancerre.
Beets with Pinot Noir
Although the red root vegetable that exudes tastes of earth and sweet, tangy red fruits can play for both teams (it also pairs well with aromatic Riesling), Pinot Noir is its kith and kin. The typical minerality and red berry fruit flavors, not to mention dazzling acid and low tannins, of the varietal match similar tendencies of the vegetable that some say tastes like dirt. Lucky for beets, the profile of Pinot Noir is all about the soil it comes from too. Stay ‘Murican with a soil-driven Oregon Pinot from Sokol Blosser or go kiwi with the vibrant and tea-leaved Wild South Pinot from Marlborough, New Zealand.
As we prepare ourselves to say goodbye to 2016, let’s take some time to reflect on the food fads that came and went. There was fancy compound butters, chia pudding, koji, and overnight oats. Here are some other food trends from the past several years. Were you paying close enough attention to spot them?
