Author Archives: Onke Onken

Clearing up a possible misconception….

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By now, I’m sure you’ve all seen Grady Warren’s cringe-inducing, please-be-a-Colbert-bit video in which he defends the Teabaggers from charges that they are racists. (And to answer Grady’s oft-asked rhetorical question: Yes. Spending all of your time and energy making broad generalizations based on religious and ethnic identities *does* make you a racist.)

There is one area where I think our two sides could come together, though. At about the 3:37 mark Grady asks, “Are we racist when we ask that our children not be taught that little Johnny’s got two moms or two dads and that’s normal?” For starters, this is one of the few things you said that *doesn’t* actually demonstrate that you’re a racist, so good job there. Secondly, I think this might have all been a big misunderstanding. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Ignorant Liberal, so let me assure you – we are NOT asking that your kids be taught that having two mommies or two daddies is normal. It isn’t. In fact, when you consider that gay people are just a few percent of the population and that many, many areas still have policies that impede the ability of same-sex couples to adopt, I think it’s safe to say that it’s downright unusual, perhaps even rare. So we’re in agreement – nobody should be taught that it’s normal.

What we *do* want people to understand is much simpler and shouldn’t be at all controversial. We just want people to realize that this unusual thing isn’t something to be afraid of. We’re not even using a values-based argument here – the science shows that kids raised in same-sex households aren’t any more messed up than the rest of our kids. Actually, values do enter into it, but they’re the kind of American values – people should be free to live their lives without interference from outsiders if they aren’t causing any harm, people should be equal in the eyes of the law, etc. – that I’m sure we both share.

I’m glad we could clear that up for you. Also, part of your problem may be that you seem to think that any Hispanic-looking person who is photographed looking angry is an illegal. I think a number of those people could just be Americans who, like I, believe you’re a douchebag.

Tell Us Another Weed Story, Uncle Onke!!

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Ok, ok, just give me a minute to focus. Hoo boy.

Ok! Today, we’re gonna talk about hash!

Tootsie Rolls of the Gods

Hash, short for “hashish”, is a much more compact form of marijuana. Remember before when we talked about trichomes? Trichomes are little dried resin crystals that contain the lion’s share of a plant’s THC and other cannabinoids. Hash is what you get when you fuse a bunch of those trichomes into a single mass. The color and consistency of the hash will vary with its purity and production method but the best stuff is typically a dark, golden brown.

The key to making hash is getting all the trichomes away from the rest of the weed. You can do this by accumulating the shake from your Hazemaker, but for most hash this is done by drying the plant material, grinding it up, and then blending it with either a solvent or ice water. Solvents (like rubbing alcohol or butane) dissolve the resin so that the plant matter can be filtered out. Then, the solvent is boiled off (or just allowed to evaporate) until you wind up with pure hash. The ice water process is the chemical opposite of the solvent process. Instead of dissolving the trichomes, the ice water causes the resinous little darlings to harden up and stop sticking to the plant material. Once the plant material is filtered out with a coarse screen, the water is run through much finer screens to capture the trichomes. The nice part about either of these two processes is that you can start with any part of the plant – many growers collect the otherwise-useless leaves for their hash – and still wind up with a high-quality product.

The form your hash is in at this point will depend on your method. If you used a solvent, you’ll have a tarry sludge that you’ll need to scrape up and re-spread a few times just to make sure all the solvent has evaporated. If you used the ice-water methods, you’ll have a clumpy powder that somewhere on the sticky (yay!) to gritty (boo!) spectrum. You can take that clumpy powder and compact it with a Hash Press or you can heat it to melt it into a single mass. Then, you’re ready to smoke!

You got your Big G's....

If you’re on-the-go, you can mix little bits of hash into tobacco or weed and smoke it in a joint. I have nothing against either of these methods, but I think hash is best when smoked on its own. You’ll need a standard glass pipe (available anywhere fine stoner products are sold). Take a small amount of hash and roll it between your fingers into a narrow cylinder. Then, press the cylinder into the bowl of your pipe, making a crescent around the inside of the bowl. This lets you control the burning from one end of the crescent to the other so you don’t get overwhelmed by the smoke.

Now, let’s talk about how to burn this stuff. You could use a lighter like some kind of goddamn caveman, but hash won’t hold a flame like weed will so you’re going to end up pulling a long drag of lighter air directly into your lungs. Ugh. You can use a middle-man like a Bee Line, a hemp(of course!)-based wick that holds a flame more cleanly than a lighter. Or, you can egregiously overgear and head straight for your new best friend, the Phedor.

It glows red-hot with love for you.

The Phedor is a handheld ceramic heating element, which is pretty much exactly as hazardous as it sounds. If you can grit your teeth through visions of accidentally setting it down on your lap or causing some other kind of stoner catastrophe, though, you’re in for a treat. The Phedor provides an extremely accurate source of high, even heat for your hash consumption needs. Once the element heats up, you can place it on the glass right next to the tiny tube of hash in your pipe and watch the delicious smoke come pouring out. While I’m not wild about every aspect of the product design (couldn’t they enclose the ceramic element in a spring-loaded sheath so it would be protected when you let go of the gizmo?), the end result it totally worth the effort. Since good hash has a THC content of anywhere from 50 to 70%, a tiny little lump of the stuff can treat you very well.

Think of it as a Stillsuit for weed

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The Hazemaker

Potheads are like old people who went through the Great Depression as kids. No matter how flush we are now, we all have this secret fear that the Lean Times will return. We save stems and leaves against that dark day, but a lot of us are overlooking a potential oasis in the land of Dry: The humble Trichome.

Trichomes are the tiny, sticky-outy bits on a cannabis plant. On female plants, they secrete a resin to capture any pollen that male plants in the area might be putting out. This resin, of course, is heavy with all the wonderful cannabinoids that make cannabis the Best Plant Evar. Once dried, this resin becomes those crystals you see on decent weed, usually called “shake” or “kif”. In the course of handling weed (grinding it, rolling joints, etc.) a lot of the kif gets shaken loose and falls uselessly on your lap, carpet, rolling tray, or hooker’s stomach. Just like those fractional pennies in that awful Superman movie with Richard Pryor in it, these little bits can add up to something substantial if collected carefully.

Any decent grinder should have a kif compartment, of course, but that only works when you’re grinding. If you really want to see what you’re missing, you need to get yourself a screen box like the famous Hazemaker. It’s pretty simple – a nice, hardwood box provides you with a convenient surface for all of your weed-handling needs. Nestled inside that box, though, is a fine stainless-steel mesh suspended over a smooth black glass tray. This is where all the beautiful trichomes will accumulate all through the Days of Bounty. Then, when you find yourself suddenly underweeded, you have some options.

Saving for the future, like a responsible adult does.

If you managed to grab yourself a nice vaporizer, you’re probably in the best shape. You can take some of your previously-vaped weed (you are saving the used-up stuff in a killbox, aren’t you?), mix in a decent amount of your stored-up kif, and away you go. If you accumulate a respectable amount of shake – say around a gram or more – you might consider getting a Pollen Press, a little gizmo that compresses the shake (which is actually not pollen at all, as we covered two paragraphs ago!) into a small disk of hash. If you’re stuck in the middle – no vape and not enough to press – you can always try to smoke it in a small pipe or mixed in with tobacco or something, I guess.

The Wingnut Mentality

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Much is made about the division between Left and Right in the US, about how partisan we’ve become and what’s to blame, but I think there’s a more fundamental issue here. In all my years of futile arguing with Wing Nuts I’ve started to notice a pattern at work. I don’t think that the division between Left and Right really has much to do with public policy. I think it has everything to do with what I’ll call the Wingnut Worldview. Yeah, everybody’s different and all generalizations are false and blah blah blah, but there seems to be a set of underlying assumptions that permeate right-wing thought in the US. I think the real genius of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh is not that they’re biased – which they clearly are – but that they seem to have a special knack for validating this Wingnut Worldview and breaking down every issue or story so that it fits neatly into that narrative. I’ve run into this again and again in discussions with conservatives, where I’ll pull out facts and figures to support my case only to have them respond with blank stares, since my “facts” don’t seem to jibe with how they *know* the world is. I’m really not trying to say “Hurr Hurr Republicans are stupid!” but I really do think that the two sides talk past each other a lot because of these basic assumptions. Here’s a list of some of the components of the Wingnut Worldview: Continue reading →

A Handful of Joy! Wait – that sounds bad….

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The Vapir NO2

Say Hello To My Little Friend!

Here’s my latest toy: a brand-new Vapir NO2 battery-powered rechargeable vaporizer. I was reading through the accompanying material, which discussed the vaporization temperatures for Dandelions, Saw Palmetto, etc. and I was a little confused as to why somebody would pay $179 just to be able to huff lawn clippings. Then it hit me – this would be totally perfect for pot! Continue reading →