Pubdate: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 Source: Charlotte Observer (NC) Copyright: 2003 The Charlotte Observer Contact: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/78 Author: Doug Robarchek Outfront LOGIC GOES UP IN SMOKE ON THIS ONE In a ruling seen as a defeat for the White House, the Supreme Court has refused to hear a case aimed at making sure cancer patients can't get marijuana to ease their pain. That's one we've never understood. They don't want people who are fighting for their lives against cancer to have access to marijuana because -- what? It might be bad for them? Or maybe they're worried that marijuana use will lead them to harder drugs. Pot opponents like to cite statistics that say most heroin users started with weed. Well, our crack OutFront researchers found out that's not exactly true. Actually, virtually all heroin users start out on mother's milk. Later they move on to harder stuff: chewing gum, tobacco, beer, liquor, marijuana and heroin. We find this alarming. Even if we ignore the evidence on milk and gum, it's still painfully clear that tobacco leads to beer, and beer leads to heroin. So let's nip this in the bud and outlaw toba ... oh, jeez, bite your tongue, Doug-Bob. This is North Carolina. We wouldn't want to outlaw the stuff that caused the cancer, just the stuff that might help fight it. Hot hookups heralded Lest you think we never cover the really big news, here's a bombshell: Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love are number one on the list of rock 'n' roll's "hottest hookups," past and present, according to Blender, which apparently is a magazine. We don't know, we just read about it in USA Today, so we know it's big news.Shoot, we don't even know what a "hot hookup" is. Judging from the list, it's apparently a couple that 14-year-olds and brain-dead goobers just can't hear enough about. Other hot hookups, according to this recap of Blender, include Jennifer Lopez and P. Diddy (3rd); John Lennon and Yoko Ono (5); Lopez and Ben Affleck (12); and Elton John and David Furnish (37). We looked all over the list, but Les Paul and Mary Ford were nowhere to be found. What's the deal here? Where are we? How did we get here? How did we come to be a society in which art doesn't resemble anything and poetry is words without meaning? Why are we a nation whose music has no music? When did we do this to ourselves? When did sculpture turn into boxes and lumps, globules and formless forms? Where has all the beauty gone? And most of all, why did we let it go? That Pat! What a card! Religious broadcaster and prominent longtime dog-brain Pat Robertson says he was only joking recently when he said the State Department should be A-bombed.That's a good one, Pat. But let's not be too critical of ol' Pat at this difficult hour, when he's about to undergo delicate surgery. A team of doctors is going to try to remove his head from his butt. First, of course, they have to do a series of tests to determine which is which. Our list of hot hookups We were thinking about that "hot hookup" deal, and we've decided it should be defined as one of those natural matches that, when you hear about it, just seems to make sense. Our list of hot hookups: Britney Spears and teenage boys' fantasies (get it on hundreds of time every hour); Madonna and the male population of the Western Hemisphere (if she hasn't done you yet, be patient); Bill Clinton and anything that moves (or doesn't); Donald Trump and Donald Trump (this time it's the real thing); Michael Jackson at 40 and Michael Jackson at 10 (the perfect marriage of narcissism and pederasty); Dean Martin and Roseanne Barr (this might seem odd, but hey -- it's the one bar he was never in). Doug Robarchek - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens