Who's your Maine man? Why, Alaska, of course!

Listen up, Joe the Plumber and Rito the Hairdresser, Alaska gives to you there a sledful of foreign policy experience. Being the state that is the most far away west and that also far away east gives you that doctrine knowhow that all soccer moms have also. You can keep an eye on two countries, Russia and Asia.

Take a globe (which should be right next to your phonograph machine), then look northwest of Washington. See that giant state? No, that's Canada. A little more to the left.... That's it, Alaska. Now, trace the Aleutian islands and watch your fingers go past the "Made in China" print, past the 180° meridian of longitude, and into the Eastern Hemisphere. Whoa, Alaska is actually east of the "Prime Meridian"! (Oh please. Before he got famous and started wearing gold chains and oversized medallions around his neck, we just called him "Greenwich." His mother still calls him "Urkel.")

Take that, Maine! Easternmost state, indeed. Tshaaa!!!

I don't want no stinking bean sprouts in my northern Vietnamese pho

If you are in a noodle house serving northern Vietnamese cuisine, do not ask for bean sprouts for your pho, unless you want to antagonize the people who run the place. Keep on asking, and you might get some free spit in your soup. They don't add no stinking sprouts and herb doohickeys to their already perfect noodle soups, dangit!

What? But how do you know you are eating northern pho? Rule of thumb: thick noodles and green onions = north; thin noodles with a side dish of fresh herbs = south. Or maybe you can just check the cover page on the menu or even the giant restaurant sign, but pshaw, that's too easy.

The first pothead lit up way before 420 BC

To the list of things that Chinese people did first (detonated fireworks, navigated with a compass, traded with paper money, and printed books), add "smoked pot."

A marijuana stash was discovered in a 2,700-old Chinese tomb. Well, OK, he was a white Chinese guy and he probably would've claimed that he was just holding it for a friend, but it still counts.

The full academic yatter is in the Journal of Experimental Botany. I wonder how grad students who submit articles to the journal "test" experimental botany. Newspapers also reported the archeological find.