Harsh mellows

I recommend reading the fairly short links and not relying on the quotes if you want the full hilarity of it all.

A few days ago I clicked on a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times, by mistake, and found that she had written the following immortal lines:

The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.
Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.
What could go wrong with a bite or two?
……
I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.
…….

This prompted some initial mockery on twitter but the apotheosis was the following.

sarah jeong ‏@sarahjeong  Jun 3
Thomas Friedman eats brownies with his daughter’s roommate at Yale
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 sarah jeong ‏@sarahjeong  Jun 3
Reminds me of the last time I visited Thailand. What a country! What a place! Full of life, and moisture, like this brownie
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 sarah jeong ‏@sarahjeong  Jun 3
Kids these days don’t eat brownies like we used to in the old days. The brownies of our time were unicycles. These brownies are tricycles
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 sarah jeong ‏@sarahjeong  Jun 3
But tricycles are obsolete. Or are they? One thing I’ve learned from my many travels that obsolete is the new cutting edge.
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etc.

I nearly cried laughing but considered the episode closed. Then today I was reading Paul Krugman and came across this:

JUN 5 4:09 AM     23
Libelous (Trivial)
But funny.

The Guardian riffs off Maureen Dowd’s high in Colorado column, and does the rest of the team.

But I would never, ever snort Aderall. True, I was tempted to try the snuff offered at All Souls last night over claret, but in the end I didn’t inhale.

The twitter collection above seems to have been Sarah Jeong's first draft of her piece today in the Guardian that Paul Krugman refers to above:

….

Ross Douthat is on psilocybin mushrooms when he first sees pictures of Rihanna at the CFDA Fashion Awards
….

When a country loses its moral compass, an unbearable vertigo plagues our every step. Can you feel that? The newspapers and television stations remain fixated on the tawdry, glittering spectacle of this Rihanna – a songstress who has likely never even heard of St Augustine – even as the gravitational pull of the universe warps around me like a pulsating cocoon entirely absent of light.
---

Two things got me in all this. One was seeing the joke play out in real time and the
other was the apprehension I felt about reading whatever the NYT might say about the incredibly important experiment taking place in Colorado.

OK, it was the first. Poetry in motion, internet!