2 March 2026
In 2024, Mark, Katrina, and I went to the Wellington Go Green Expo. We've talked about this event on the podcast before, and back then Mark had commented on the quantity of mushroom-based products. His hypothesis at the time was that this burgeoning industry might be due to the unsuccessful campaign to legalise recreational marijuana use in late 2020 - any company that had hoped to take advantage of the anticipated boom in cannabis sales needed a quick, low-cost pivot. Now, I'm always game to go on the deep dive necessary to prove/disprove other people's pet theories. Mushroom coffees, chocolate, and supplements have escaped the containment of your local health food/organic store, and the encroachment of mushroom crisps/chips into the aisles to mainstream grocery stores has made this topic feel more salient than it has ever been.
28 April 2025
I doubt anyone could have anticipated the degree to which the death of Pope Francis has drawn the attention of the internet. The fervour is likely fueled by the unexpected fan base that sprang up around the 2024 movie Conclave, a film about the quiet intrigues of cardinals as they select the next pope. I'm confident there is a media literacy paper in here about the intersection of prestige films with a meme culture informed by reality television. But until then, I'm enjoying a very niche form of mash-up humour while I can get it.
24 June 2018
The NZ Herald has published a story about a woman whose terminal cancer was cured after she took cannabis oil. Of course, there's more to this story - isn't there always. In this case, the woman used both cannabis oil and chemotherapy to fight her cancer - no prizes for guessing which of those two will have helped her more. It also turns out that cancer was only "terminal" if the woman had not received any treatment. This is not what is normally considered to be a diagnosis of terminal cancer - terminal usually means that the cancer is not treatable with medicine, not that the cancer is not treatable without medicine.
11 February 2018
An Australian woman, Shona Leigh, has publicly spoken about how she supposedly cured herself of cervical cancer with cannabis oil. This story seems to be popular in NZ because of the new Labour government's recent efforts to relax our laws on medicinal cannabis use.
1 February 2004
Cellulite is the term used by women's magazines to describe dimpled fat. It has no scientific or anatomical validity and it is simply ordinary fatty tissue that assumes a waffled appearance because fibrous tissue prevents the skin from fully expanding in areas where fatty tissue accumulates. This has been confirmed by a study where biopsies of fat and cellulite were microscopically indistinguishable by pathologists who were blinded as to the samples' origin. Calling fat "cellulite" is part of the modern trend to seeking alternatives to the (unpalatable) truth, in this case an adipose euphemism.