Maureen Dowd Tries Pot-Laced Candy

"For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand. But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. 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. I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me." - Maureen Dowd, in a New York Times piece about marijuana labeling issues in Colorado. The candy bar she ate was apparently meant to be divided into 16 pieces for "novices."

Quote Of The Day - Maureen Dowd

"I have long been opposed to gays marching in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. It isn’t because my father was a past national president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which ran the parade for a century and started the rule that no gays need apply. Faith and begorrah, heaven knows I have nothing against gays. I have something against Irish parades. It has just always seemed strange to me that gays were fighting so hard for so long to bust into such a hoary, boozy, corny tradition. Didn’t they have something more fun and cool to do? But certainly, if gays want in, they should get in. And that’s why Mayor Bill de Blasio is right to blow off the parade in protest of the Putinesque restrictions." - Maureen Dowd, in a New York Times column that slams Bill Donohue and includes a quote from Panti Bliss. "If they’re not kind of gay, they’re not really a parade. A heterosexual parade seems to me an organized walk in the traffic lane."

NOTE: For non-New Yorkers wondering what's with all the fuss, NYC's St. Patrick's Day Parade is a really big deal. Organizers bill the event, which launched in 1762, as the "largest and oldest civilian parade in the world." An estimated two million people attend the parade, which features 150,000 participants. Sao Paolo's gay pride parade, it should be noted, regularly claims attendance of three to four million and over 200,000 participants, but anti-gay groups claim that figure is wildly exaggerated. And Macy's claims that attendance at their Thanksgiving Day Parade is about three million.

Quote Of The Day - Maureen Dowd

"The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history. Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it.

The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the 'gifts' they got. Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count." - Maureen Dowd, writing for the New York Times.