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Fairway as a Runway

by Juliet Macur

United States Open, Davis Love III received a package from his clothing sponsor, Ralph Lauren, and was startled by one particular item inside: linen pants the hue of Pepto-Bismol. He was told to pair them with a blue-and-white-striped shirt on the first day of play.

Love modeled the trousers for his wife and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

But it was no joke: Ralph Lauren meant to send him those pants the color of Bubblicious. The company was so jazzed about the shade that it sent Webb Simpson a pair too, but in cotton. So, in their blindingly pink outfits of powerful pulchritude, the two of them acted as beacons at Congressional Country Club on a gray, overcast Thursday.

Simpson, who wore a lime green shirt with those pink pants, said he never questions the outfits Ralph Lauren sends him — even if they seem ripped from a page of “The Official Preppy Handbook.” Love, perhaps hardened by the 20-plus years he has on Simpson, is somewhat less pliant.

“They tell me, ‘Look, we sell more pink pants whenever you wear the pink pants,’ and I get that,” Love said of his sponsor. “But I always ask them: ‘Well, who’s going to sell the khaki? I want to sell the khaki.’ ”

The on-course wardrobes of players like Love and Simpson are often scripted by clothing companies at major tournaments like the Open. Each day, those players are given specific outfits to wear, down to the belt and shoes. Sponsors are aware of how much news-media exposure the players — and their fashion choices, good or bad — will get, no matter how they perform.

One day at the Masters this year, for example, Luke Donald wore a pink shirt, Kelly green pants and white visor. And people couldn’t stop talking about it. One British newspaper said Donald’s “pistachio, raspberry and white outfit made him look like a walking Neapolitan ice cream.”

Marty Hackel, the fashion director at Golf Digest, said: “When Luke wore bright colors, everyone was just so upset about it. But golf is an outdoor sport, in the sun and nature. Why do we want to dress like we’re cleaning out the garage?”

Rickie Fowler, who went to Oklahoma State, describes his look as “not exactly the country-club tradition,” looking nothing like Thurston Howell III when he wears head-to-toe orange on Sundays to honor his alma mater. One blogger called him “a traffic cone with hair.”

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On Whiskey and Grease: Pappy Van Winkle

by Wright Thompson

You never know where you're gonna find the greatest bourbon on the planet. Like last month, I was on a cooking team at a barbecue contest, and one of the guys on it with me was a pretty famous chef. His name is Sean Brock, and his restaurant, Husk, in Charleston, S.C., only serves stuff grown, raised or made below the Mason-Dixon Line. He traffics in all the pharmaceutical-quality narcotics of the southern food junkies: Allan Benton's bacon, Will Harris' beef, and, of course, Julian Van Winkle's whiskey. So we were hanging by the bar at our tent, the day before the cooking began, and I was looking around at all the bourbon we had brought in. He grinned. "You like bourbon?" he asked.

Out came this bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, which is hard enough to get in the first place, but this was special edition stuff, bottled just for Husk, 20 years old and 107 proof. I've never seen a movie star naked, but it's got to be something like this.

"I think it's the best whiskey ever bottled," Brock says, as he handed me the fifth for a swig. "Goddamn. I love it. I love it too much."

If you know what Pappy Van Winkle is, you're already mad at me. If you don't, I'm about to change your life. Pappy, officially called Family Reserve, is the top-of-the-line bourbon made by The Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. It comes in 15, 20, and 23 years old. There's a cult.

I actually met Julian once, in Kentucky. I was sorta shocked he didn't look like Yoda. I've bought out entire stores of Pappy. If I walk in a place, and they've got it, I'm walking out with it. As an experiment for this piece, I decided just now to call a few liquor stores, ask for Pappy, and then write down what each store said.

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My First Time, Twice

by Ariel Levy

When I was fourteen years old, I decided it was time to lose my virginity. Precocity had always been my thing. As an only child, I spent most of my youth around adults, which made me sound sort of like one. By early adolescence I had become so accustomed to being told I was mature, it seemed obvious to me that this next benchmark had to be hit early in order to maintain my identity. I was curious about sex. But mostly, I had a reputation to uphold. (I was pretty much the only person interested in this reputation.)

The first—and only impressive—expression of my precociousness was when I insisted on learning to read in nursery school. I loved talking and words and once I could write them down I was a step closer to becoming myself. The upside of being a verbal kid is that adults often think you are bright, but children have another name for such a person: nerd. I realized, as I was going through puberty (early), the necessity of shifting my focus from doing things that would impress my parents and teachers to engaging in behavior that would strike my peers as cool. I started saying “like” constantly. I smoked pot when I was twelve. I dropped acid when I was thirteen. Losing my virginity was the next logical step.

It’s not that these things were necessarily fun. Well, the pot, actually, was great—unless you are reading this and you are twelve, in which case it was awful. But the acid was a classic bad trip, during which I thought I heard the breathing of dead people. With sex as with drugs, my interest in the entity itself was far less potent a motivator than my fervent desire to transform myself from tiny dork into Janis Joplin. It felt like my job. I needed to do things that would make people gasp. Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity. The clock was ticking.

I had a beautiful boyfriend when I was fourteen, with whom I was thoroughly infatuated. Josh had dark blue eyes and long, curly brown hair, which was (prematurely) streaked with silver. He hung out on the steps in front of our high school with other boys who smoked cigarettes and, occasionally, joints in the bushes. Both of our sets of parents were slowly but surely separating, and both Josh and I were paradoxically desperate to assert our independence from them by mimicking the very expressions of rebellion they had taught us. We listened to Neil Young and Bob Dylan. We wore tie-dyes. We read On the Road and The Prophet. When Josh and I started going out I felt that I had been delivered from my isolation, my uncoolness, and my family. It did not occur to me that I got the ideas for my outfits from photographs of my mother taken at a time when she looked happy to be with my father.

Josh and I were unstoppable in our pursuit of ’60s-inflected accessories and experiences, but we were timid about sex. On the occasions when we found ourselves alone in bedrooms or on couches, our bravado dissipated and we became children again, unsure of what was expected of us. We did not have a lot of lust to guide us. We found each other attractive, but we were so young neither of us had ever experienced clear erotic desire. The thing I badly wanted wasn’t sex but to be rid of my virginity, the last vestige of a childhood spent trusting and respecting adults, seeking their approval. Josh, I knew, was as confused about what this entailed as I was. I never brought it up. It was all we could do to get past second base.

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FireEye: Botnet Busters

by Christopher S. Stewart

Alex Lanstein stared at the 65-inch computer monitor in the living room of his Boston apartment. Streaming data lit up the screen, the actions of a cyberlord giving orders to his botnet, a zombie army of hijacked computers controlled from an unknown location . It was early in the morning of Mar.16. The 25-year-old cybersecurity analyst had spent months preparing for the events soon to unfold. His reddish hair still matted down from sleep, Lanstein stood up and poured another cup of coffee. Suddenly, the data stream flickering on the monitor became dark, and a smile curled across Lanstein's stubbly face. Operation Rustock had begun.

Lanstein's employer, FireEye, is a Silicon Valley company that defends corporations and governments against targeted malicious software, or malware. FireEye's clients include Fortune 500 companies—Yahoo! (YHOO), EBay (EBAY), and Adobe Systems (ADBE), among them—and members of the U.S. intelligence community. The company had recently shut down some of the highest-profile spam-blasting organizations, winning recognition for imposing order on a generally disordered and unpoliced world.

Now, Lanstein and FireEye were chasing their mightiest target to date, the Web's most sprawling and advanced spam machine, called Rustock—pusher of fake pills, online pharmacies, and Russian stocks, the inspiration for its name. Over the past five years, Rustock had quietly—and illicitly—taken control of over a million computers around the world, directing them to do its bidding. On some days, Rustock generated as many as 44 billion digital come-ons, about 47.5 percent of all the junk e-mails sent, according to Symantec (SYMC), the computer security giant based in Mountain View, Calif. Although those behind Rustock had yet to be identified, profits from it were thought to be in the millions. "The bad guys," is what Lanstein had taken to calling them.

For months, FireEye plotted a counterattack, along with Microsoft (MSFT) and Pfizer (PFE)—Rustock was peddling fake Viagra, as well as sham lotteries stamped with the Microsoft logo. Working from FireEye's intelligence, U.S. Marshals stormed seven Internet data centers across the country, where Rustock had hidden its 96 command servers. Microsoft lawyers and technicians were there, too, along with forensics experts. Another team had been deployed in the Netherlands to destroy two other servers.

The sting was executed flawlessly, with everyone pouncing at once. And yet Rustock somehow fought back. From an unknown location, perhaps in Eastern Europe, the botmaster remotely sneaked back into its spam network, locked out Microsoft's technicians, and began to erase files. Clearly, those behind Rustock didn't want anyone seeing what was inside those hard drives.

After a struggle lasting about half an hour, the technicians finally wrested back control of the server. Lanstein's cell rang. T.J. Campana, senior manager for investigations for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, told him it was over. "The bad guys lost."

Global spam levels plummeted as Rustock was taken off line. At the same time, the cybergeek community saw that something significant had happened. Who killed Rustock? And how? For two more days, Lanstein was under order from a federal court in Seattle to keep silent as a way to defend against any leaks to the enemy. Even later, when he could talk, some of the biggest questions remained unanswered, such as who was behind Rustock, and what would he, she, or they, try next?

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Call Off the Global Drug War

By Jimmy Carter

In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

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Curtis Mayfield

The Clock in the Mountain

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

Digging out the entrance tunnel for the Clock.

The Clock is real. It is now being built inside a mountain in western Texas. This Clock is the first of many millennial Clocks the designers hope will be built around the world and throughout time. There is a second site for another Clock already purchased at the top of a mountain in eastern Nevada, a site surrounded by a very large grove of 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines. Appropriately, bristlecone pines are among the longest-lived organisms on the planet. The designers of the Clock in Texas expect its chimes will keep ringing twice as long as the oldest 5 millennia-old bristlecone pine. Ten thousand years is about the age of civilization, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism.

Engineer Chris Rand (right) with the first Geneva wheel part.

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The Empty Room

by Jonathan Lethem

Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some polluted intersection and crackled like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been overtightened and then eased, sat to one side of the coffee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an ­appropriate top. In fact, the traffic light would follow us up the Hudson, to Darby, to the house with the empty room. There it never escaped the garage.

Another memory: my playmate Max’s parents had borrowed, from mine, a spare set of china plates. I spent a lot of time visiting with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s older brother. So I was present the afternoon my father destroyed the china set. Max’s family lived in a duplex, the basement and parlor floor of a brownstone, a palace of abundance . . . Max and his brother had separate rooms, and a backyard. All this would pale beside the spaciousness of our Darby farmhouse. That was the point.

The return of the china had become a running joke between our two families, or at least for Max’s parents. They kept trying to give it back, my father kept explaining that we really had no use for the second set; he claimed that it had been a gift, not a loan. In this my father struck them as facetious, when he was actually not only sincere but losing patience.

This day my father had swung by on his way home from Penn Station to pick me up. His work was taking him to Albany more often. While they stood in the kitchen, Max’s father took him by surprise, placing the stack of scrupulously cleaned china into my father’s free hands.

“You really don’t want them?” my father confirmed, in his dry way.

“No, please,” said Max’s father.

“Well, then, we’ll just do this,” declared my father, opening his hands. The plates dropped and exploded, slivers finding every corner of the kitchen and the living room carpet beyond. There, memory halts. Max and I were reduced to pen pals when my family moved.

The New York State Department of Housing and Urban Development was my father’s employer, and we went upstate to be closer to his work. The move, though, was sold to my sister and me as a kind of bodily impulse on my family’s part, like that of salmon spawning, to reject the hectic, compromising city in favor of a place where we could live. I was old enough to fantasize about the teenagerish collections of who knows what I’d cunningly display in a bedroom of my own, and how I would exclude Charlotte and her friends, and then how, later, with great ostentation, I would allow them to enter.

The movers poured our belongings into the new home. Its hugeness, the endless closets, the fact of the barn and garage: these performed a magic trick on our stuff. My father’s accumulations dwindled as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Charlotte and I ran through the house in a fever, counting the doors, including closets, attics, cellar. We lost count at sixty. We then chose our rooms. One room was appointed a den, another a guest room. My father singled out a room downstairs, formerly the doctor’s consulting office (my parents had purchased this house from the estate of a retired country optometrist), with one door and one window, otherwise a simple rectangle outlined with plain molding, and declared it the future site of the empty room. The room was empty now. So it would stay.

“What’s it for?” asked his eleven-year-old son.

“Anything we want it to be,” my father said.

“Can we play there?” asked his eight-year-old daughter.

“As long as you take your toys out with you when you’re finished, yes.”

He explained by means of a series of exclusions. I asked whether we could go inside and close the door. “There are no rules,” he said. “But—” I began. “Except that it stay empty,” he interrupted. “Can I eat in there?” I asked, a few days later. “There’s nothing you can’t do in there,” my father said, mysteriously. “Our family eats together at the table,” said my mother. Charlotte asked if it was my father’s room. “It doesn’t belong to any of us,” he said. “It’s just a part of the house. In the same way that Arfy lives with us but doesn’t belong to us.” On moving upstate we’d gained a puppy, to prove we had a backyard. “Is it Arfy’s room?” asked Charlotte, perhaps misunderstanding. “Arfy, too, is free to use the empty room,” said my father. “If Arfy poops in there, who has to clean it up?” I asked. We all glanced at my mother.

Then came a ritual cycle of first occupations, Barbies and ­G.I. ­Joes soberly scattered and collected under my father’s gaze. My mother ignored it. One Saturday morning she slept in, and my father led us in to sit cross-legged for a breakfast picnic on the smooth, cold floorboards, our Pop-Tarts raised above our heads to keep them from Arfy’s nipping bounds.

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Friday Book Club - Cat's Cradle

by Michael H. Miller

The reputation of Cat’s Cradle among the literary cognoscenti is summed up succinctly in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s obituary in the New York Times: “Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes.” This was also my perception of the novel — something I had moved on from the same way I progressed beyond acne. Kurt Vonnegut, I thought, is serious fiction for people who do not take fiction seriously. A recent volume published by the Library of America, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, would seem to confirm his rightful status alongside other inductees into the Library of America’s unofficial canon: Henry James, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. So why the bias?

My older sister introduced me to Vonnegut when I was 14 and had no interest in books. She gave me a copy of Cat’s Cradle, which I read in more or less one sitting, setting it down, reluctantly, only for bathroom breaks and a longer, more unfortunate respite, Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house. From there, Vonnegut became the first author whose work I desired to read in full. Despite some of the turgid later works—Hocus Pocus and Deadeye Dick, in particular—I succeeded. At the end of this binge, an interesting thing happened: The impulse was purged. I never read a page of Vonnegut again.

Because of the novel’s reputation as, essentially, gateway literature, I assumed I had progressed beyond his writing in favor of Delillo, Pynchon, even the likeminded Philip K. Dick, who has had the benefit of always existing on the fringe of popular taste, always in need of a great defender. (Surely, the argument for Do Androids Dream of Sleep? as the Greatest Novel Ever is rarer than similar claims about Slaughterhouse Five.) Putting aside those assumptions, I decided, for the first time since I was 14, to revisit the author that got me reading in the first place.

I immediately saw a book filled with subtle meaning that had escaped me before, even in that blunt opening line, “Call me Jonah.” If Melville’s Ishmael (probably the most famous character in literature to use the imperative as a way of introducing himself), like the Ishmael of Genesis, was saved from drowning, Vonnegut’s narrator is telling us he is quite doomed from the outset: The Book of Jonah, of course, takes place inside the belly of a whale. The narrator’s real name is not Jonah (it’s John), but from the first sentence Vonnegut has us thinking about water. He repeats the image throughout the novel so that by the time of the arrival of ice-nine, the real villain of the book, a substance that freezes any liquid at room temperature, we’ve been anticipating its appearance and expecting the worst.

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Going Straight

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

One Saturday afternoon last winter, I drove north on Route 85 through the rolling rangeland of southeastern Wyoming. I was headed to a small town north of Cheyenne to see an old friend and colleague named Michael Glatze. We worked together 12 years ago at XY, a San Francisco-based national magazine for young gay men, back when we were young gay men ourselves.

Though only a year removed from Dartmouth when he arrived at XY, Michael had seemingly read every gay book ever written. While I was busy trying to secure a boyfriend, he was busy contemplating queer theory, marching in gay rights rallies and urging young people to celebrate (not just accept) their same-sex attractions. Michael was devoted to helping gay youth, and he was particularly affected by the letters the magazine received regularly from teenagers who were rejected by their religious families. “Christian fundamentalists should burn in hell!” he told me once, slamming his fist on his desk. I had never met anyone so sure of himself.

Many young gay men looked up to him. He and his boyfriend at the time, Ben, who also worked at the magazine, made a handsome pair — but their appeal went deeper. On weekends we would go to raves together, and I would watch as gay boys gravitated toward the couple. Michael and Ben seemed unburdened (by shame, by self-doubt) and unapologetically pursued what the writer Paul Monette called the uniquely gay experience of “flagrant joy.” But unlike some of our friends who rode the flagrant joy train all the way to rehab, Michael and Ben rarely seemed out of control. There was a balance — a wisdom — to their quest for intense, authentic experience. Together they seemed to have figured out how to be young, gay and happy.

I thought about those times as I pulled my rental car into the Wyoming town where Michael now lives. A lot had happened in the decade since we last saw each other: he and Ben started a new gay magazine (Young Gay America, or Y.G.A.); they traveled the country for a documentary about gay teenagers; and Michael was fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay.

“Homosexuality came easy to me, because I was already weak,” he wrote in the opening line of an article for the far-right Web site, WorldNetDaily.com. He went on to renounce his work at XY and Y.G.A. “Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic,” he claimed. In a second WorldNetDaily article a week later, he said that he was “repulsed to think about homosexuality” and that he was “going to do what I can to fight it.”

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Standin' On a Corner

by Dan Frosch

WINSLOW, Ariz.— Repeat the lyric, “Well, I’m a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” and watch the glint of recognition in peoples’ eyes.

So it should come as no surprise that the line from “Take It Easy,” the 1972 seminal hit by The Eagles, has become the lifeblood of tiny Winslow’s tourism trade.

On the corner of Second Street and Kinsley Avenue, on Route 66, sits Standin’ on the Corner Park, an homage to the open-highway ballad that now draws hundreds of visitors every day and has revived this dusty railroad town between Flagstaff and the New Mexico border.

The park’s main attraction is a life-size bronze statue of a floppy-haired man with a guitar, the song’s protagonist. (Locals point out that the statue, by the sculptor Ron Adamson, is neither Jackson Browne, who wrote the song with Glenn Frey, nor Mr. Frey, the Eagles member who sang it.)

A cherry-red, vintage flatbed Ford truck is parked nearby. And on a brick wall behind the statue and truck is a large mural, by John Pugh, featuring a grinning blonde in a pickup, who clearly — as the song says — is “slowin’ down to take a look” at the itinerant, all-American musician who has caught her eye.

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100 Million Android Fans Can't Be Wrong

by Beth Kowitt

The inside story of how Google conquered the smartphone world.

When Google (GOOG) acquired a tiny wireless startup called Android in 2005, few at the search giant had particularly high hopes for the deal -- if they even knew about it. At that point Google had purchased just a handful of companies, mostly software makers it had quietly folded into its operations. (Big, high-profile deals like YouTube and DoubleClick came later.) Besides, not many people knew exactly what Android did: The upstart was in stealth mode, and co-founder Andy Rubin, best known for creating the Sidekick mobile device, said little about its product or mission. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt would later joke that he scarcely noticed when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the company.

Today, of course, Android is impossible to ignore. It is the mobile operating system -- the brains of a cellphone -- that powers more than 100 million gadgets. (That number will be out of date by the time you read this: Every day another 400,000 Android devices are activated.) Apple's (AAPL) iPhone gets credit for showing consumers just how cool and powerful a mobile device could be, but Google democratized smartphones by making Android available free to any handset maker that wanted to use the platform. At last count, Android software was on more than 300 different phones and tablets around the world. The only smartphones that use the iPhone operating system? iPhones. "If you just plot the graph looking at how quickly we grew," says Rubin, now senior vice president of mobile at Google, "it's almost vertical."

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The Big Business of Synthetic Highs

by Ben Paynter

It's a Friday afternoon in April, and Wesley Upchurch, the 24-year-old owner of Pandora Potpourri, has arrived at his factory to fill some last-minute orders for the weekend. The factory is a cramped, unmarked garage bay adjoining an auto body shop in Columbia, Mo. What Upchurch and his one full-time employee, 21-year-old Jay Harness, are making is debatable, at least in their eyes. The finished product looks like crushed grass, comes in three-gram (.11ounce) packets, and sells for about $13 wholesale. Its key ingredient is a synthetic cannabinoid that mimics tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. Upchurch, however, insists his product is incense. "There are rogue players in this industry that make the business look bad for everyone," Upchurch says. "We don't want people smoking this."

From the outside the place looks abandoned. The only sign of life is a lone security camera. Inside, two flags hang above a makeshift assembly line. One shows a coiled snake and reads "Don't Tread On Me." The other has a peace symbol. The work space consists of a long, foldout table containing a pile of lustrous, green vegetation, a pocket-calculator-size electronic scale, a stack of reflective, hot-pink Mylar foil packets, and a heat sealer. Each packet has the brand name, Bombay Breeze, and is decorated with a psychedelic logo featuring a cartoon elephant meditating among abstract-looking coils of smoke and stars.

Upchurch supervises as Harness weighs out portions of the crushed foliage, dumps it into a packet, and slides the top through the heating machine to create an airtight, tamper-proof seal. He finishes about a dozen in 10 minutes, topping off what they will need for their deliveries: two shipments of more than 1,000 packets each. Upchurch points to a disclaimer near the bottom right-hand corner of each package that reads, in all caps: "NOT FOR CONSUMPTION." Says Upchurch: "That's to discourage abuse."

His protests and disclaimers to the contrary, Pandora is getting smoked—it's being packed into bongs and reviewed on sites such as YouTube (GOOG)—for its ability to alter the mind. Like many others, Upchurch is repackaging experimental medical chemicals for mainstream store shelves, most often with some clever double-entendre in the branding. He says he sells about 41,000 packets a month, delivering directly to 50 stores around the country and shipping the rest to five other wholesalers, some of whom use Pandora's products to create their own brands. Upchurch says he ships mostly in bulk orders for larger discounts. He projects his company will earn $2.5 million in revenue with $500,000 in profits this year, depending on what federal and state laws pass. "I think my business model is based less on charts than it is on guts, or something," he says.

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Pencil Dice

The simple addition of dice markings to a six sided pencil makes all the difference. Pencil dice is an essential addition to any brief case, pen cup or pencil case. A little something to help you pass the time, entertain the children or even make decisions.

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Feist

[ed.  On a Feist groove today.  Wonderful songs, fabulous voice.]