Maximum Yield Cannabis Canada July/August 2019 | Page 24

canna
FACTS
Weed Was First Ever Online Purchase
According to historian John Markoff, the world’s first e-commerce transaction
was the purchase of a bag of weed. In 1971, students at Stanford used
Arpanet accounts to engage in the world’s first e-commerce transaction. In
Markoff‘s 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture
Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, he reveals how the digital drug
deal went down. Apparently, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts
at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a
commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of
Technology. Before Amazon and before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce
was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange
the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana. Today, the
number of new drugs available online is accelerating at such
a rate that police and toxicologists can’t even identify what
they are, because they have no reference samples available
to compare them with. And all across the net, there are
millions of drug deals taking place.
— theguardian.com
Axis: Bold as Love Rates as Top Stoner Album
According to Rolling Stone Magazine, Jimi Hendrix’s sophomore
album, Axis: Bold as Love, is the best stoner album of all time.
Released way back in 1967, the album is sixties rock’s finest
psychedelic odyssey, a bowl-sparking masterpiece with 13 songs
boasting a virtual banquet of stoner delights including the trippy
sound collage from a fake radio station that opens the album,
woozy studio tomfoolery, epic dragonfly flights like “Spanish
Castle Magic” and “If 6 Was 9,” freak-power Google News-
alerts (“white collar conservative flashing down the street
pointing their plastic finger at me”) and, of course, guitar
playing that pretty much perfected the idea of rock and roll
as interstellar escape pod. Axis: Bold as Love beat out some
stoner heavyweights including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side
of the Moon (ranked third), Beck’s Mellow Gold (ranked
tenth), and Radiohead’s Kid A (ranked sixth).
— rollingstone.com
Great Gig: $50 to Smoke and Rate Marijuana
For some it’s a dream job: get paid $50 an hour to smoke cannabis and rate it.
That’s just what Toronto’s Kyle Merkley does. He’s one of eight people on the
“cannabis curation committee” at Ahlot, which sells “curated collections”
containing different kinds of weed. Naturally, the job posting attracted
lots of attention. In fact, more than 25,000 people applied for the
job last fall, which Merkley compares to reviewing different wines.
It’s a part-time job and he still has a day job in music production,
but he’s not complaining. “It’s quite fun,” says Merkley. “This
is something I’ve already been doing.” Merkley said his
personal ranking system includes the look, smell, taste,
effect, and x-factor of a given strain. The x-factor is a
rare quality that makes it stand out. “Helping people
discover what’s out there is kind of a personal
mission of mine,” he says.
— ctvnews.ca
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