California Says Pass on Grass

It has just been brought to my attention that in addition to deciding which rich white males would be serving in Congress, this past midterm election also covered several other issues. Namely, whether or not people in California should be allowed to get stoned out of their minds whenever they want.

Proposition 19 would have allowed adults over 21 to legally smoke marijuana, but the measure lost 56% to 44%. Political experts say that the bill most likely lost because young voters didn’t show up on election day. Well duh. They were in their basements smoking pot watching election coverage. Now, I wouldn’t know this for certain, but I’m pretty sure all those funky graphics CNN uses during their coverage must look awesome high. Now, frankly I think the bill failed because the good, moral people of California did not want pot to be legal. They would prefer to keep getting stoned illegally. "It's cheaper," is probably what they said.

The main reason behind the bill is that the state of California apparently has built up a massive debt paying for Lindsay Lohan’s rehab stints, so they figured that by taxing marijuana, they could make lots of money. They also figured they could make some money off of tourism when the entire state of Colorado visits.

Unfortunately I think that thinking is flawed. Whatever money they would make in taxing marijuana would be lost when the California state legislature decides to order 2,500 Big Macs during a lunch break. Also, pot smokers are not the type of people that are going to spend a whole lot of money shopping on Rodeo Drive. Also, I’m pretty sure the economy would tank as a result of every worker in California quitting their jobs and becoming full time poet-musicians.

Now, I don’t really care about this particular bill. For one thing, I don’t live in California. But as a current resident of Colorado, I am well versed in the argument over marijuana. Now, I'm not a stoner, but in Colorado that puts me in the minority. Smoking pot in Boulder is one of those things that is technically illegal but the cops don’t really enforce, sort of like polygamy in Utah and incest in Alabama. I mean, every year 10,000 people gather on a field to publicly get high and create a smoke cloud so thick Sarah Palin can see it from her house in Alaska (she gets mad because it obscures her view of Russia). Just today, a Colorado woman was caught crossing the border with enough pot to get the entire republic of China high for the next week.

The thing is, Colorado’s medical marijuana laws make legalizing pot here a moot point. All you have to do is get a prescription for it. Okay, actually you just need to know somebody who has a prescription for it. And it’s not like it’s all that hard to get a prescription. It’s not like the old days where you had to get a really bummer disease, like cancer or glaucoma. Now even the most innocent of ailments will get you a prescription, including (but not limited to): joint pain, back aches, migraines, eating disorders, problems focusing, acne, gout, ingrown toe nails and an irrepressible urge to smoke pot.

There are a lot of people who argue that marijuana should be legal because it is less harmful than alcohol, and yet alcohol is legal. Other people say that crime would be reduced if marijuana was taxed and regulated like alcohol and tobacco. Now, I don’t know if marijuana is safer than alcohol. I guess in a way it is, since drunk people tend to get the urge to go out and do very stupid and often dangerous activities, such as lighting things on fire and flirting with women. Whereas people who are high typically don’t want to do anything more rigorous than ordering Chinese food and putting on their Strange Wilderness DVD (don’t tell me that the makers of that movie didn’t have stoners in mind when they put in this scene).

But health wise, I tend to believe marijuana is worse. I drink alcohol and I’m fine, but I’ve been around stoners and there is definitely something wrong with them. For instance, I’m convinced it creates large holes in the section of the brain that would normally be dedicated to speaking in complete sentences. Also, most people have a part of the brain that typically limits the amount of snowboarding and skiing movies a person can stand. Stoners are missing this part of their brain. They will sit there for hours watching clips of more talented and active stoners going down a hill. After about the fifth clip as far as I can tell they are just replaying the same damn thing over and over again.

So actually, I hope that they do pass this bill in California next election. Maybe then all of the stoners here will move there, and I can finally take out this darn skiing DVD.

A Love Letter To Mother Earth

Dear Mother Earth,

So yesterday was Earth Day, when we get together to celebrate the fact that we somehow haven’t blown you up yet. This day really reminded me that I have been taking you for granted. Sure, you and I have had a sort of up and down relationship. I mean, as I’m writing this it is snowing and storming outside. In April. It takes two to make this relationship work Mother Earth, and right now you are pissing me off. And I haven’t even brought up all the earthquakes and volcanoes yet.

But as much as I sometimes get mad at you, some reader’s poignant comments on my space story really brought me back down to Earth (haha pun, and yes I will continue to point out all of my puns). Anyway, the comment said something about how I am crushing the human spirit and make too many jokes (who makes humor jokes on a humor blog?), but this person also pointed out that at any moment we could get hit by a massive asteroid and have to live on Mars (and by the way, Armageddon was on TV twice last night). This comment truly hit me hard; I don’t want to live on Mars. It’s just full of dirt with no scenery whatsoever. It would be like living on Planet Oklahoma.

So I really want to become more environmentally friendly and turn over a new leaf (haha more puns). Luckily for me, this past Tuesday marked a gathering of 10,000 people who really love the environment. That’s right; it was 4/20, when thousands of people gathered in Boulder to commune with Mother Nature by smoking a whole lot of weed and being completely useless to society. If anybody knows anything about going green, it’s these people (okay I promise if you laugh at them, the puns hurt less). You can tell that these people really care about the world simply by looking at the massive pile of trash that they left on the ground after their gathering.

As I was walking through the crowd to try and get to my class (yes, some people choose to go to class on this day) I got spit on by some stoner who called me a “mindless conformist” that didn’t give a damn about the world. Now at first, I thought this was a stupid statement. Does doing something legal make me a conformist? I guess rapists should yell out to non-rapists that they are also conformists. Also, I felt that as one of the fifty people who wasn't smoking pot, the guy in the group of 15,000 that was smoking pot made me the rebel. But now that I thought about it, he was right. I was enabling “the man.” By not smoking pot, I was able to be productive and go to school and work, which is just what those government bastards wanted. I fell into their trap! How could I be so stupid? Also, I don’t know if it was the second-hand high or what, but I either saw the biggest dog I have ever seen or the smallest bear walking around the library.

Anyway, after that enlightening experience, I am as committed as ever to being environmentally friendly. I feel like I should learn from the cops, who saved tons of paper by not having the balls to ticket these people. I mean, they could probably end this stupid tradition that CU supposedly says they don’t approve of by one year just handing out a bunch of tickets and scaring people, but is writing all those tickets really worth it? I mean I personally love having my school’s reputation being that of “the one were all the people smoke pot.” It looks great on resumes, and prospective students love it too. So just like the cops, I’m going to save paper too by never doing my homework. I mean, do you know how many trees I kill every time I do a seven page paper?

Plus did you see all of the stoners in the fast food restaurants that afternoon? Even more environmental genius. Why? Because fast food places serve burgers. What are burgers made out of? Cows. What do cows do? Fart methane gas. What does methane gas do? It corrodes our atmosphere. So I’m going to eat a burger every day until I die (in a month or so) to help the Earth.

I feel bad though, because there apparently was a huge Earth Day party that I missed last night. I wish I could have gotten wasted in the name of a god cause, as opposed to what I normally do, which is get wasted for no reason at all. And I’m sure that they recycled all of their bottles as opposed to just smashing them over each other’s heads and leaving them on the ground. And I’m also sure that they used compostable cups instead of going through hundreds of those plastic red cups that are sitting in landfills all over the place.

So Mother Earth, I admit I’m not your best child. I don’t do all of the great things for the environment that these stoners do, and I don’t hand out thousands of paper slips telling people how to save trees. But I’ve never said I was anything but a normal guy who tries to turn off the lights when he leaves and tries not to chop down trees. But I promise that I’ll try harder from now on. But this is a two-way relationship, and you need to do something for me. The next time 4/20 rolls around, and the sky is gray, could you just rain and drench all of them? Is that too much to ask?

Love, Mitchell.

Lending A Helping High

Now I know that I complain a lot about the city where I currently live, Boulder, Colorado. But I still hold out hope that this town is actually filled with good-natured, law-abiding citizens who are simply ecologically friendly and have an undeserved bad reputation. Then a story comes along and reminds me that most of the people in this town are dirty hippies who worked hard to earn that reputation. This is one of those stories.

But believe it or not, this story has several signs of hope for the city of Boulder. For one thing, if the average Boulderite found a two-pound bag of weed, the last thing they would do is call the cops. This is a scientific fact, as the numbers from a very comprehensive survey I did of the three people around me when I read this article prove. When I asked them if they would have reported the find, the consensus was “F**k no!” Most likely, the lucky Boulderite would seclude themselves in their room with nothing but a Pink Floyd CD, the Wizard of Oz, and fifteen pepperoni pizzas and emerge a week later claiming he knows how to solve health care and who killed JFK. Also, it is very possible that this person simply thought that they were making a charitable donation. I mean, the street value of that pot was $8000, which is a lot more money than most charities get from people. In this person’s defense, they probably assumed (possibly correctly) that pot keeps people warmer than coats.

The part of this story that I can’t believe is that the police are actually trying to find the owner so they can return it to them if they have a legal right to have it. Now, I’m not a doctor, but for a person to have two pounds of medical marijuana, they better have a tumor the size of a large beagle on their forehead. I bet this is awkward for police, who are used to taking people’s drugs away, not giving them back. I wonder if they will do one of those things that they do in supermarkets for stupid kids that get lost.

PA: “Will the owner of the two-pound bag of Maui Wowie please report to the lost and found.”

Pot use in Boulder is sort of like polygamy in Utah and inbreeding in the south; sure it’s illegal, but law enforcement just let it slide. I mean, I picked up an issue of a local paper (I won’t say which but I will say that it is in Boulder and it comes out Weekly). I then realized that the entire back page was ads for either medical marijuana or marijuana paraphernalia. Now, I’m willing to bet the odds of a person with a painful terminal illness that would qualify for medical marijuana being enrolled in a four-year university are about as good as me winning America’s Next Top Model. (Not that I don’t have the looks, but I can’t walk in high heels. Don’t ask why I know that).

I’m sure that you have already assumed that the entire population of Boulder is a bunch of stoners. This is unfairly pigeon-holing us. We are much more than a bunch of pot-heads. For instance, we also drink way too much. And we’re perverts. And we beat people up late at night. The sad thing is that when I read that the assailant was described as a “Pacific Islander,” who was fat and ugly, the first thought that came to my mind was “What was I doing last night?” At that moment, my roommate Chris simply appeared in the doorway with a disapproving frown and simply said “Why did you do it?” Now before you bust down my door and make a citizen’s arrest, I took a look at the sketch and of course it wasn’t me. My sketch looks a little more like this (okay fine, more like this). Then again, you could be this guy. That is what we call hiding in plain sight.

As for the girl on the roof, the real mystery is how someone wasted enough to fall off a roof got on a roof in the first place. I also like how the “detectives” concluded that the girl had probably drank “large quantities of alcohol.” Now if that isn’t fine detective work I don’t know what is, because I would have never guessed this girl was drinking; I figured all women were just clumsy retards (that was sarcasm by the way ladies, but don’t worry the sexist comments are coming). This is just further proof that we should never let a woman do a man’s work. And yes, doing stupid stunts drunk is a man thing. When men do it, they don’t go to the hospital. They dust themselves off, shrug off the pain, continue drinking to the applause of his fellow drunken male admirers, and then die the next morning of massive internal bleeding and alcohol poisoning. The good thing is that in the off chance that he survives the fall, he will probably be prescribed medical marijuana.

Long Arm of the Law

So on Monday night, me and my roommate Chris were up at 1 am trying to study for a philosophy midterm exam. Needless to say, I was studying for this exam by watching Sting music videos, and it just so happened that the ad before the video for “Fields of Gold” (favorite song ever by the way) was an ad for Chicken McNuggets. And we all know what happened next; desperate for those little bite-sized morsels of chicken-flavored Styrofoam and an excuse to stop not studying, I told Chris we should drive to McDonalds and go get some.

Five minutes later, we pull out of the Drive-Thru with twenty nuggets, fries, and happiness in a paper bag (I literally mean happiness; that was not a drug reference). It seemed like nothing could go wrong (aside from failing the midterm that is). This was a sign that everything was about to go horribly, terribly, Bieber-esquely wrong.

Now, at 30^th and Baseline, there is a no u-turn sign that everybody ignores. I mean everybody. When the Pope goes to this McDonalds he pulls a u-turn in the Pope-mobile (I’m assuming that is what he drives). It was one in the morning, and the road was empty, so we pulled the turn. As he is doing this, Chris jokingly comments “I hope there aren’t any cops around.” Of course the last time he said this to me while making an illegal turn, we saw a cop. So I jokingly told him not to jinx it. As most of you have already figured out, sure enough a cop car appears out of nowhere and pulls us over. Now, we assumed that once he figured out that neither of us were drunk or high he would let us go with a warning (although it’s harder than you think to convince someone you aren’t high when you have two pounds of chicken nuggets sitting on your lap at one in the morning). But instead, the cop gave Chris a $100 ticket. These are the same Boulder cops who every year let 10,000 people gather on a field to smoke pot.

So basically, we ordered $110 McNuggets. With our luck, I was half expecting to open the bag and find out they got our order wrong, at which point my head would have exploded thus releasing the hamster that lives in there (his name is Happy). I haven’t had a fast food experience this bad since I was walking back from Wendy’s and I was jumped by a herd of raccoons (flock?). For those of you who can’t understand why this is scary, clearly you have never encountered a pod of raccoons (gander?). Just one of those things is scary enough, much less an entire school of them (maybe it’s a pod?).

Now, this story illustrates several points. First, studying is bad. If I had just conceded I was going to fail this test and gone to sleep like I should have, none of this would have happened. Also, no matter how great he was with the Police, watching Sting music videos past midnight never leads to anything good. But most importantly, we need to remember whose fault this really is: the cops.

Now I’m not ragging on all cops. I’m sure that most of the cops out there are drug-busting, cat-grabbing, rapist-catching, gun-toting, hyphen-using, bad-ass defenders of the innocent. But then again, there are cops like these. Now, I’ll at least give them this: if I were in a drug lord’s house for nine hours, the Wii wouldn’t have been the first thing I would have gone for, if you get my drift. But still, we pay these guys to get drug dealers off the streets, not beat their high scores on Wii bowling. Also, look at the cop’s celebration at 16 seconds into the video. I don’t want guys who celebrate like that confronting heavily armed criminals; they would eat him alive.

Now let’s go to the other end of the spectrum, from cops who don’t take their job seriously enough to cops that want to shoot you. Now, I understand using tasers on dangerous criminals and drunken people, but a 76-year-old? Where was the guy going to go? He was on a tractor (and why do they drive tractors in parades in Wyoming?) and he’s 76 years old. I’m pretty sure the cops could have handled him without shocking him (and yes, these cops were later fired).

I mean, if cops were serious about stopping real crime and drug use, they should just watch a Denver Nuggets basketball game on TV. The Nuggets have a deal where Taco Bell offers four tacos for $1 if the team scores more than 100 points in a game. This is a very big deal for the Nugget’s two announcers, Chris Marlowe and Scott Hastings, who occasionally mention it.

Marlowe: And Carmelo scores! The score is tied at 12.

Hastings: Only 88 more points until tacos.

Later on…

Marlowe: Basket is good! Nuggets ahead 97-95.

Hastings: Someone should shoot a three so we can get tacos.

Marlowe: Billups drains a three! Nuggets win!

Hastings: TACOS!!!!!!!!

Now don’t tell me that these two just like tacos. They have the munchies. The other night, with the Nuggets up by 40 points, Hastings stopped talking about the game and just started giggling and talking about tacos. If the cops just checked under his table, they probably would have found a bong the size of a large dog. But no, instead of arresting stoned sports announcers, they are on empty roads ticketing students merely trying to get some study food. Then again, maybe they’re just trying to catch Hastings coming back high from the Taco Bell Drive Thru.

Cop: Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?

Hastings: TACOS!?!?!?!

Finals MVP: Most Valuable Pharmacist

So I haven’t written in awhile, but that was mainly because I was busy studying for finals. Sort of. Actually, I was asleep for most of finals week. I actually had to set my alarm to make sure that I woke up for a 4:30 pm final.

Anyway, with most of the country either just finishing finals or beginning to take them, I think that we need to talk about a very important topic: recreational drug use before tests. Okay, so I used to be in favor of other students doing this, especially in classes with curves. It made me feel a lot better about my chances knowing that the idiot next to me was getting his answers from the talking waffle on his desk and laughed every time he saw the phrase “fallacious argument” on his philosophy test (okay so that last part was actually what I was doing, but that’s not important).

But now students have discovered that they can take these prescription drugs that actually help them take tests. Apparently, these drugs help them focus. This is alarming for several reasons. For one, it erodes the moral fabric of the American collegiate experience while trivializing the struggles of those who truly need medication for genuine mental problems. But more importantly, these people are getting better grades than me. This is a problem for me even without people taking mind steroids. But if these students are suddenly walking around with super-brains while I’m sitting here trying to figure out how long it takes to microwave nachos, I’m never going to make it out of here with a GPA higher than my BAC.

Now maybe there are some of you reading this who take part in this practice. I ask you this simple question: is it truly rewarding to achieve something through cheating as rewarding as achieving something through hard work and dedication? That is a stupid question; of course it is just as rewarding. In fact, it may be more rewarding, because while some of us are studying drug free, the druggies get to do other things with their free time, like watch Jersey Shore.

So some of you are simply saying, “Well Mitchell, why don’t you just take the drugs to help you take tests?” Well because I have higher moral standards than you, that’s why. Also, nobody will give me any. I don’t hang out with any people who take drugs. Or at least drugs that would help me study. Now if you want to find Narnia and laugh at centaurs, I’m sure my friends can help you there. And I don’t want to pay a drug dealer for them. Frankly, I think it’s more important to save your money for things like sushi rather than waste it on education. Besides, I’m paying thousands of dollars to come here, so I assumed that passing the class was included in that deal. With the amount I’m paying for out of state tuition I should be getting A’s for the classes I don’t even show up for.

Besides, I have serious doubts as to whether or not these drugs even actually help people take tests. It’s not like they make you smarter, it just helps you focus. So if I took these drugs, it simply means that I would go into the test and suddenly be very aware of the fact that I don’t know anything. This is not what I want. I would prefer to go in there and do what I do now, which is sit and smile blankly at the circles on my paper and then proceed to fill in bubbles randomly while “Macho Man” plays over and over again in my head. Sure, on a good day I get two questions right (name and date) but I leave that test stress free.

Unfortunately, this is not the norm. Most people come out of finals looking like they were just forced to watch puppies burned alive. Of course it helps that I am a journalism and philosophy major. My finals normally consist of the questions that have no right answer. In fact, normally you are rewarded for answers that make absolutely no sense. But for those people who were naïve enough to major in science, they don’t exactly have it as easy. I remember when I was in the dorms an upcoming chemistry test was a huge deal. For the entire week prior to the test, everybody would be locked in rooms trying to slit their wrists with their text book pages while studying for days at a time. Then of course there was the actual night of the test. I would be sitting in the lounge watching TV and over the course of the hour I would see people trickling in sobbing uncontrollably and muttering to themselves. I always made sure to lock my door on those nights, because I figured it was only a matter of time before one of them went ballistic and tried to choke sleeping people with their lab coats.

And that is why this new trend of using drugs in tests is alarming. Unlike me, most people take tests seriously and want to do well on them. With that kind of pressure, it won’t be long before everyone is using these drugs for everything. The day won’t be long before ESPN begins to reveal that Jeopardy contestants were juicing. And in that world full of lies and cheating, schools will not know who to trust. But then they will look to me, the last clean student on the campus; the last bastion of hope and honesty. A student whose mediocre grades and lackluster work ethic will lead the world into an era of righteous under-achievement. But they better hurry, cause normally when finals end I take off to Narnia for a couple of days.

Meet the Doobie Brothers

In case you weren’t able to tell by the large clouds rising from across the country, Monday was 4/20, which is when people around the country gather together and, in a showing of true unity, run off the edge of a cliff. Wait… sorry, I’m thinking of lemming migration. 4/20 is actually the day when everybody gets to smoke pot like it’s some kind of nationwide Pink Floyd concert and everybody smells like Willie Nelson’s trailer.

It really is a novel concept when you think about it: something that is normally illegal is suddenly okay for one day because everyone decides to do it all at the same time (let’s just hope that people don’t learn to apply this concept to other illegal activities, like rape). Nobody is really sure how the date came to be decided or when this event started. The History Channel keeps sending out historians to go do research, but they always stumble back with seven bags of Doritos and “Go Green” t-shirts.

So I did some of my own research on 4/20. Now, I research these notes the same way I research for ten-page final papers: I don’t. I look up what I can on Wikipedia (which is responsible for at least 80% of my knowledge of the world) and make the rest up. When some people do papers, they get worried that they might get caught for plagiarizing; I never have that fear, mainly because I almost never put facts in my papers. No professor is going to allege that I plagiarized the sentence “Florida quarterback Tim Tebow is responsible for slavery in the 1800’s,” (although he is responsible for global warming).

Anyway, I looked up 4/20 on Wikipedia and low and behold, my very own school, the University of Colorado, had its own section in the entry. Now, this didn’t exactly surprise me. The city of Boulder is definitely a very green city, and I mean that in more ways than one. Boulder has the second highest per-capita pot usage behind Boston (and I bet Bostonians fudged those stats just so they could finally be first in something), so of course it would be the site of one of the largest 4/20 gatherings in the nation. Every year, thousands of stoners gather at the school to simultaneously kill millions of brain cells. Do you remember that show “The Land Before Time,” where those prepubescent little dinosaurs go on an epic search for “The Great Valley?” Boulder on 4/20 is like the Great Valley for stoners, who every year from across the country wander around hoping to find “tree stars.” This year, we had 10,000 people show up at the event, and police have stopped even trying to arrest people for smoking. There were however some people arrested for some other minor crimes like selling food without a permit (which is sort of like watching a bank robbery and arresting the guy who is overdue on his parking meter).

Of course, not all of those 10,000 people are actually smoking. It’s almost become a tourist event that Boulder could put on those brochures they hand out at travel agencies. For instance, I went last year to see it even though I myself do not smoke weed (really, do I need something that makes me slower and hungrier than I already am?). But a lot of the people there are there for one reason: to provide the stoners with food. With all of the pot being smoked, the area code of Boulder easily consumes in two hours what the entire country of Kenya will eat this month. A Taco Bell near the campus actually ran out of food last year. I was in the line at Wendy’s watching one of the stoners try and order food:

Stoner: I’d like five cheeseburgers, five fries… Do you guys have Big Macs?

Cashier: No sir, this is Wendy’s.

Stoner: Cause I could use a Big Mac.

Cashier: We don’t have Big Macs.

Stoner: Huh? Why?

After his order, he proceeded to go to his seat (by that I mean he fell down two times and stumbled over to his booth) where he promptly fell asleep and did not pick up his order. Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure fast food restaurants probably started 4/20, because they make bank. The food vendors at the actual event do okay too, but they would probably do better if they themselves weren’t also stoned and eating most of their own food and forgetting to charge some people money.

Before you just assume that this thing is just for losers and stoners, I’m pretty sure that at least one of my professors also attended. I walk into my geology class the next day, and the lecture that the professor had prepared was a bunch of random pictures of food and about 20 yes or no clicker questions with no right or wrong answer (“Ah, you all get credit.”) I swear, one of the questions was:

Were dinosaurs cold- or warm- blooded? A. Yes B. No.

As you can probably guess, most of the students had difficulty answering this question. In fact, the only guys who appeared to know the answer were the historians in the back eating Doritos.

Phelps' Secret Swimming Formula

In case you don’t keep up with all the latest celebrity scandals, a picture of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps smoking marijuana out of a bong has surfaced (haha pun). Story is that Phelps just showed up to some college party doing what all young males are doing when we show up for parties: looking for chicks, drinks, and drugs. Apparently Phelps found at least one. I’m sure this is not the first time that he has done this; I mean he’s Michael Phelps, he could get into any party he wants.

But this party was ruined by “that person.” They are the people who apparently think it is a great idea to take pictures of everybody at parties and then post them up all over the internet. Okay, so a lot of people probably took pictures with Phelps that night. But those pictures were just to take out for the grandkids to convince them that at one time you were cool. “See, I once got wasted with a 16-time Olympic medalist. What have you done with your life?”

My first reaction to the photo was “Well DUH!” I mean, of course Michael Phelps smokes dope. It would explain so much. I mean, have you ever listened to the guy talk? He sounded stoned in all of his interviews with NBC. Plus, have you ever seen how much the guy eats? You thought that was because of his strenuous workouts? No, it’s because he always has the munchies from smoking the green. Besides, Phelps was pulled over at the age of 19 for a DUI, so this is not his first run in with the law.

Some people are thinking that this will tarnish his image, particularly as a role model. I don’t see this as a negative for society overall. You just know that after the Beijing Olympics, tons of helicopter parents began signing their children up for these ridiculously expensive swim programs in the hopes of making their kid the next Michael Phelps. The parents of the kids who don’t make it in one of the cash sports always need an obscure sport to enroll their child in so they can someday hope to watch them on TV (how else do you explain lacrosse?). Maybe now that parents have become disenchanted with Phelps, they’ll go back to raising their children in rabbit cages in the hopes of creating the next Shawn Johnson.

If anything, this whole scandal just increases my opinion of Michael Phelps. I used to swim competitively in high school, and I have seen swimmers who could swim non-stop for hours struggle to swim in kiddie pools after smoking dope. Swimming is not a sport you can do stoned. If you’re high in soccer, yeah you stumble around and fall down, but they will just think you’re faking an injury, which soccer players do all the time. But in swimming, you just drown. So if Michael Phelps is swimming stoned, he is truly amazing. Even more outstanding is that Phelps owned up to his mistake. Sure, he was dropped by Kellogs as a sponsor (even though I bet a large portion of people that consume cereal are stoned college students) and was suspended by U.S Swimming, but this whole incident just makes him feel more like us: a goofy college kid who just happens to swim fast. Besides, it was the offseason. I’m sure every athlete in the world smokes pot in the offseason.

ALERT: ANTI-TIM TEBOW RANT:

Except of course, Tim Tebow, because Tim Tebow is perfect (that sound you hear is me vomiting). For those of you who don’t know, Tebow is the quarterback for the University of Florida Gators. I have never hated an athlete more than I hate Tim Tebow. Everybody seems to think that Tim Tebow is the pinnacle of human evolution or something, even though I think he looks closer to Neanderthal than Homo sapien. Everybody keeps talking about what a great and humble kid he is, yet he talks more trash than anybody. The reason I first didn’t like him was when he started talking about how he thought Colt Brennan of the University of Hawaii was a system quarterback and that he didn’t deserve the Heisman. Nobody talked about this, but when UH Coach June Jones said exactly the same thing of Tim Tebow, the media pulled its groin leaping to the defense of Tebow.

When Tim Tebow was flagged for taunting in the title game (while backing away from the other player might I add), the announcer had the nerve to say “I bet that’s the first thing he’s done wrong in his life.” He earlier had said “If you spend 15 minutes with Tebow your life will be better for it.” Blehh. The guy is a talentless hack. He does what any 6’5’’ guy would do when given the ball; he runs straight forward and runs over small cornerbacks and celebrates like he just cured cancer. I’m pretty sure he is legally retarded. This is what’s going through his mind on the field:

“Haha, Coach gave Timmy ball. Timmy run with ball. Why people chase Timmy? Timmy no do nothing wrong. Now Timmy mad. Timmy hurt mean man with scary mask. Hey, that man dressed like zebra. Timmy like zebras.”

END OF TIM TEBOW RANT ALERT

So in short, let’s give Michael Phelps a break. At least he’s not Tim Tebow.