Travel liquids allowance

No one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13, 2011). Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street. Yet today, at seventy-two, he is all but forgotten. Almost forty years to the day after he blew minds at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, with a brand-new batch of “Monterey Purple,” Owsley is checking out of a motel in nearby Carmel. Three years ago, he underwent extensive radiation for throat cancer, losing thirty pounds in the process. He is moving so slowly that someone from the front desk comes to the room to ask if he ever intends to leave. Ignoring the inquiry, Owsley roots through his bags for a large state-of-the-art conical burr grinder and a white funnel-shaped device … [Read more...] about Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD

It wasn’t too long ago that I entered the airport still sleepy-eyed from my 4am wakeup for our travel back East.  Despite the frenzy everywhere, I remained calm knowing that I’d gone through the process of applying for Global Entry, one of the four ways of becoming eligible for TSA Pre-Check.  I recall moving around clients on my therapy schedule for the pure purpose of securing a time for the interview process as they were booked out months in advance.  Fast forward to standing in the pre-check line with my online boarding pass and getting up to the front of the line only to have the formerly jovial TSA agent narrow his gaze at me (clearly I had just committed a crime!) and inform me that I was not pre-checked and would have to go back into the other line that was now zigzagging what felt like a mile away.  Panic started to creep in as we were boarding in 20 minutes, the line next door was definitely looking more like a 40 minute commitment, and the … [Read more...] about Why TSA Agents Need Therapy Skills Training

Everyone feels something when they're in a really good starry place a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: Advertisement Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old "existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour." But everyone feels something. Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—"Where is everybody?" A really starry sky seems vast—but all we're looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). So what we're really looking at is this: When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, "Is there other intelligent life out … [Read more...] about The Fermi Paradox: Where the Hell Are the Other Earths?