“Fucking cocaine!” he muttered (at :45 seconds)
“You know I was really so successful at everything I did – business, politics, hell, I could handle anything. Except cocaine. Only I didn’t know that because of cocaine.” (RIP Larry Hagman)
Dirty habits
Cocaine has been in the news – and news parodies in particular – a lot lately. We can thank North American politicians for the rapid uptick in cocaine-related news, even if, every time cocaine is mentioned, I think of the aforementioned clip from the film Primary Colors. (Or I think of the music of Rosa Eskenazi, a Greek singer, who sang a lot about drugs, back in the early part of the 20th century.)
Both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were fixated on cocaine and its crack cousin this week, thanks to Toronto mayor Rob Ford and Florida Republican congressman Trey Radel and their drug-related indiscretions.
Daily Show coverage of Trey Cokehead Radel
One Colbert story, though, comedic as his presentation was, actually struck a chord in my nerd side. Apparently University of Pennsylvania researchers have found that a male cocaine users’ sperm DNA (okay, granted we’re talking about male rodents, not humans) is altered to pass on some kind of immunity to the effects of cocaine, making his male offspring less susceptible to cocaine addiction.
Of course when I passionately rattle off details of studies like this as well as the observed symptoms and effects of various drugs, I scare my colleagues – but it is just general knowledge, gleaned from talking to people who have done these things. I’ve never even been drunk. Actually in a former workplace, one colleague and I were joking that all the aluminum foil accumulated in our office (because I wrapped all my baked goods in foil for transport) could help us smoke crack. Except we only imagined that you needed foil to smoke crack because we had no idea at all how one would actually smoke it. We have no idea how to take any drugs, let alone how to get them.
Dirty minds: Multicultural Swedish fika
In Swedish, “fika” is a concept beyond just a “coffee break”. It is a sacred cow – to the extent that any talk against or threat of eliminating this treasured event from Swedish work life is met with loud protest of a kind that Swedes are rarely wont to undertake. It is so ingrained and expected that HR recently felt it necessary to discuss its centrality to the culture with the global staff. Apparently they wanted to emphasize that people should feel empowered to take fika, to explain that we actually do not have enough fika today and that people should not succumb to the pressure of people giving them “dirty looks” when they seem to disapprove of their “fika-taking”.
Let’s not get into the multicultural challenges of fika. Even the word fika sends nonplussed, flustered Italians into a tailspin, not knowing where to look, averting their gaze, not knowing what to do with themselves when we exclaim excitedly, “FIKA TIME!” (Check out the word “fica”, and you’ll get it.)
Dirty looks
In a recent discussion on these “dirty looks” that (presumably) non-Swedish colleagues give to active fika-takers, one Swedish colleague misunderstood “dirty looks” to mean something sexual. Yes, every time you take a fika, someone will give you seductive looks! In which case, Italian men would hang around and wait for fika to happen constantly.