In the news…

Maybe NIH researchers ought to get out more

Or maybe they just need to read their own web site.

Both The Washington Post and The New York Times picked up a story in the past couple of days about a very small study showing that ketamine can have an immediate salutary affect on people who are chronically depressed.

I really think the researchers at NIH need to get out more, perhaps do a little more clubbing and maybe take off the white coats once in a while. Ketamine (aka: “special K”), largely used in the U.S. as an animal tranquilizer, has been a club drug for the last decade (at least, it’s been that long since Ex #3 and I walked in on her housemate and his plaything of the minute snorting it off the Corian counter in their kitchen). Clubbers don’t do this stuff for no reason, guys. There has to be some sort of salutary affect to it. Whether it’s therapeutic or not is another matter.

Does anyone remember last year’s “magic number” ?

Does anyone remember last summer besides me? You know…last summer when the pundits were shouting about how $60 per barrel was the “magic number” for the price of oil (pre-Katrina, of course).

With BP‘s most recent screw up in Alaska, prices were up to $77 per barrel as of Tuesday. The effect at the pump? Yesterday at 5:30pm EDT I paid $3.15 9/10 (why not just call it’ $3.16, people, come on!) for a gallon of regular; today at 9:00am EDT that same gallon of regular was being advertised at $3.18 9/10.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that gas prices in the U.S. are artificially low (go to CNN.com for a map of gas prices worldwide or to their special feature on energy in America) but I have to wonder about all the games.

Do they think we don’t notice that gas prices go up on Thursday and down on Tuesday, just in time for when most people have time to stop and buy gas (aka: the weekend)?

Maybe when it hits the nearly $6.40/gallon they’re paying in London people will actually start thinking about their carbon footprint.