You want to do drugs? Pro baseball is out, but there’s a bright future in rock ‘n’ roll for you. This week was a great example of double standard around drugs in our culture. The hulking Mark McGwire was shut out of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown because some of his 583 home runs likely came from a steroids-powered batting arm. This, apparently, is a bad thing, so a bunch of pure-as-the-driven-snow sports journalists have decided to bar him from the games, ahem, highest, honour. Awards are for athletes who are natural genetic freaks, not for those whose skills come from pills.Meanwhile, a world away in Cleveland, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was inducting the latest nominees. While this year’s group isn’t the most drug-addled bunch ever, the Hall itself contains such a litany of famous overdoses, cokeheads, pot advocates and hallucinogenic lyricists that you’d assume a pharmacology degree was one of the nomination requirements. Take a look at Eddie Van Halen, one of this year’s nominees, and tell me his homeless-junkie look come from years of clean living.
So it’s not that our culture has a problem with a copious intake of drugs, you just have to pick the appropriate time and place. Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there. But this rant was really just an excuse to post my favourite viral video of the moment, Spiders on Drugs. In the 1950s a researcher drugged spiders and observed the effects on their webs. This clip updates it do this decade with a Hinterland Who’s Who twist. Great stuff.
