The Sandoz Collection by Sandoz Diego Cerveza (best short books to read .TXT) 📖

new colorized lava lampoon version. The just to prove that people are strange production was a 2005 release of "Reefer Madness: The Musical" a show tune belter that was exhaled and released after a roach clip run on Off-Broadway. Theres No Business, Like Dope Business!

Julius Ceaser was a rank amateur when it came to ruling a vast empire. Nero was no hero either, and I Claudius had to make way for I Cannabis. In the powerplay annals of history and conquest, kingdoms, kings and conquerors, there are only two who can measure up to the tokin' task of total and absolute rule. Cheech & Chong...The Crowned Heads of the Holy Rollin' Empire!


California born Cheech Marin and Canadian Tommy Chong emerged as the Laurel and Hardy of the Reefer Revolution. Lighting up the radio dial in 1971 with their first album, and it wouldn't be long until the big screen went 'Up In Smoke" in 1978. Over the years they have remained as the Stoner Poster Children of the counter culture and have taken their rightful place in the Hemp Hall of Fame and Infamy.

Cheech met Chong in a comedy club in Vancouver in the post-Woodstock year of 1970. Chong formerly was a musician with Canadian rock bands, eh, and decided to take a stab at comedy, and when the hemp plant planets were in perfect alignment Tommy traded in his Maple Leaf for the Green Leaf and a pairing of historic proportions was conceived. The act was a hit and they decided then to hit road with their act. "Up In Smoke" was the dynamic doobie duo's big screen debut and featured this oddball couple as Anthony "Man" Stoner and Pedro de Pacas. Produced by none other than Lou Adler it also featured Strother Martin of Cool Hand Luke fame ("What we have here is a failure to communicate!") and Edie Adams, Mrs. Ernie Kovacs as Tommy Chongs Mom & Dad! Tommy, Man Stoner, gets kicked out of the house and heads for the ocean where he meets son of a beach Cheech in his Chick-Mobile and from there on it's horsepower, joint jokes and homegrown fun...as they try to keep one toke over the borderline, (driving a van made of marijuana from Mexico to the United States) from Sgt. Stedenko of the DEA, played to bumbling perfection by Stacy Keach.

Eventually, in a pop premonition of the low spark of high heeled leather boys in "Rocky Horror Picture Show", the Bong Boys end up on stage at LA's Roxy Theater with a fetchingly attired Cheech in a garish pink tutu and Tommy dressed as a giant red quaalude! The times, they may have changed, but the lude dudes are still scoring big on the streets with continued sales of those vintage albums and cult classic movies. The best part is, they only seem to get better with age.

If smart bombs and Black Hawk helicopters fill the Pentagons battlefields to overflowing with the tools of war, then rolling papers, waterpipes, lava lamps and bongs are the weedy weapons of choice in the head shop arsenals of the United Altered States of America. Getting bombed on bongs, stoned on joints and getting as high as a caterpiller on hookahs is as American as red, white and blue napalm and the cache of nuclear stars and stripes weaponry of mass destruction at our disposal.


Rolling papers have been a staple since they first appeared in 1854 on a European battlefield! It was during the Crimean War and the Battle of Sevastopol that a French Zoave soldier broke his claypipe in the heatful exchange with the Russkis. Claypipes were the vehicle of choice for smoking tobacco in those times, so in order to enjoy his daily smoke he simple tore some paper from his gun powder bag, folded it, placed a line of tobacco in it and rolled his own. The idea caught on with others and the rest is hempstory!

This new way of smoking wasn't just confined to the battlefields, and seemed to catch on back in the toney town of Gay Paree. In 1894, two enterprising brothers, Maurice and Jacques Braunstein, developed and patented a unique process of interweaving cigarette rolling papers. The process was called, simply, zig-zagging and the company became the legendary Zig Zag Company. Zig Zag Papers were such a hit, that they took the Gold Medal honors in 1900 at the Universal Exposition in Paris. So, whatever became of that soave Zoave of fancy France? Next time you pull out your Zags to roll a Godzilla sized doobie, look at the logo. Yep, thats him. High times have immortalized his Royal Reefer Headness and he's been helping us all to ride high as a kite for over a century.


The lava flow of the Vesuvian Sixties didn't race down a Mediterranean mountainside. Instead, it flowed through the inner mind with heat and hot sexy colors performing their ballet of bubbles. The original liquid in motion lights, as they were called, was the brainchild of a native of Singapore, named Craven Walker who called his first light, The Astro Lite! A Roswellian name to be sure to light the path for the invasion of the UFO's of the Flower Power Ganja Galaxy to come!

During WWII Walker was a pilot with the RAF fighting the flying metal of Messerschmidts during the Battle of Britain. As the world tried to put the pieces of the political puzzle back together after the fall of Berlin and atomizing of Hiroshima, Walker went about his tinkering and by 1963 light up London with the first loads of lava lamps. The lamp lit up one of the trade shows in Germany and two marketing suit and tie types bought the US light rights to the little Astro. In 1965 the first marketing eruption occured as the innaguaral light was sold in the United States. The psychedelic lava flow had begun. Craven Walker died in London at the age of 82 in 2000 and once said of his little light, "If you don't like lava lamps, you don't like sex either!"

The weed seeds of the counter culture of the spare change Sixites were planted a long time ago in a compost pile of history that goes back thousands of years. The early American Colonists were no stranger to cannabis and we can trace the nations hemp lineage from Washington and Jefferson to Cheech and Chong!

Hemp, Hemp, Hooray!

Feed Your Head!

It was an age of paranoia, not the colorful and harmonious age of Aquarius sung and hailed by the Fifth Dimension, quoth the raving nevermore. Why do so many sit in front of television sets with tin foil hats on you ask, You did ask, didn't you? They do wear it don't they/ You with the roll of Reynolds wrap at the ready and reading this readily.

Armies of defoliated tinfoiliated Citizens of the Tin Foil Nation, shoulders heavy with the burden of unexplained theories of conspiracy. Too much stimuli...atomic amounts...faster...faster...dial phones, dial tones, cell phones, ring tones...awash we are in an ocean of information....a small fish...a big fish...a one ton newt-on a neutron minnow in a wasteland so technologically vast, so powerful with information, it could level the Great Wall of China faster than an earthquake in Haiti.

You know, the whole tinfoil television connection is a direct result of the Atomic Age. Think about it...the Googie Fifties...the advent of the TV tray to place the TV dinner on to sit in front of the TV set to watch Uncle and Auntie Miltie. The TV dinner had a peel back tinfoil cover that when ceremoniously pulled back revealed bad meatloaf.. Next...(there was not cable..only antenna telly)...when you wanted to boost a signal you placed a strip of tin foil on the connectors to the antenna to summon the signal gods from network heaven to dismiss the ghosts of double vision that formed on the screen....we used the foil, unfolded, to wrap and cover the television dinner leftovers in the duck and cover age of space too...face it..television and tin foil go hand in hand...today, schizoid and psychotic alike, try to block perceived (to them a reality world gone awry) government rays from emanating from the TV and ensconcing themselves, barnacles on the brains...they fashion and don tin foil hats as a protective barrier against Manchurian Candidation, a tin foiled-again government...of the tinfoil people, for the tinfoil people and by the tinfoil people ..now we have legions of Reynolds wrapped Tin Heads, all bad limited edition imitations of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz...the first of the Metal Heads!


The true power of the medium flexed its muscle, when Kennedy democratically debated, defaced and debased a tired 5 o'clock shadowed Ricky Ricardo Nixon on television. Nixon was stuck in the past of radio...won the debate on that medium by the way,...but Kennedy coiffed and confident won the tube race, (radio with pictures, this television)...next the power morphed before our very eyes, as as we watched the Vietnam war unfold body bags one by one in our living rooms, along with napalm and B-52's (not the group)....Korea was not televised...the big one was not televised...but we invited Vietnam into our living rooms as an unwitting host invites a vampire into it's home....if we didn't like what we saw we just changed the channel, poof...reality gone in a puff of smoke...never before was the mute button used to silence a war....it was also the first war, with real dead people, that took two minute breaks for commercials...Vietnam...brought to you by General Motors...makers of fine cars and tanks.....GE...better living through chemistry...

Also in the big stimuli parade came the silver screen sci-fi B-screamers. Cheap tin foil suited creatures from outer space. Tin and tinfoil miniature saucers dangling on strings of cheese before assaulting a miniature earth. Tin and tin foil....the foil is not a fable. Even the tv show...Rin Tin Tin...two tins, not just one, all an effort to block out stimuli and to starve the head from Speedy Alka-seltzer and his mad, Madison Avenue kinfolk. Scrubbing bubbles, my ass. It was enough stimuli to make the mind run amok amongst the snap, crackle and pop of the medium and its mixed messages. Bravo Brillo! It was too much....we found a need to starve ourselves in our back yard Eisenhower bomb shelters, right next to the tinfoil covered grills of our backyard barbeque....isolated from isotopes and ready for radioactive activity..bring it on..."we've got your tin foil right here!" It was all tin and aluminum..silver and shiny...The Invasion of the Aluminati!! The Tin Lateral Commission.


Three stations, maybe four if you were lucky were on the air. UHF was in the future, VHF ruled the airwaves...(cable hadn't reared it's Borg-like head to feed us intravenously...bundled no less...in complete control of our daily lives..phone-cable-internet...one down, all down)..much as AM ruled the radio roost until FM...Amplitude modulation made room for frequency modulation with a sexy undulation. Then...along came Pong...King Kong Pong...the future was beckoning and little did we realize the avalanche of stimuli that would come crashing down the mountain and close off all routes of escape. A sinister little game to be played on your telly screen with a few screws and wires..we were on the cusp...and didn't know it...this little game that walked with an electron limp, the recon unit of the information age...spies in disguise really....Chinese-like, like a slant eyed ping-pong ball, not round, but vertically rectangular like a piece of Pez candy floating without strings nor wings...we had pong without the ping impinging into our daily red, white and blue lives...our beehives....our tinfoil lives....it was all Greek to us...or Chinee or maybe it was English but we just didn't understand it or the ramifications.

Dick Tracy and his gizmo's