This just in: Religious use of ayahuasca ruled lawful in U.S. This MeFi post is first with the links. (The first one goes to the Church, which calls its sacramental substance "hoasca.") The comments below it are likely to be most interesting.

More: Ayahuasca.com "is a library and community collectively researching the botany, ethnography, mythology, arts, music, therapeutic mechanisms, and phenomenology of the Amazonian Spirit Vine."

The active ingredient in ayahuasca, DMT, consumed late ethnobiologist Terence McKenna:

McKenna was particularly fascinated by a certain consistency of experience among hallucinogen users at "heroic" dosages. It seemed as if they were all going to the same place, a realm inhabited by entities he referred to as "self-transforming machine elves."

McKenna died of brain cancer in 2000. Much more on his Wikipedia page.

Before air conditioning: Have a 'Gansett (mp3). Relive those memories of hot summer afternoons, Curt Gowdy following the beer jingle with a plug for the Red Sox. Undated, but it has that '50s feel. Source: blohards.com (the Benevolent and Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Redsox Diehard Sufferers of New York)

From Edward Cossette of the abandoned Bambino's Curse, nearly three years ago:

I had forgotten how much I love Curt Gowdy. He IS the omniscient voice of baseball in my head, the voice God himself would use to call a game. Listening to Gowdy last night on ESPN 2, I am ten years old again on a summer Saturday afternoon, my dad is stretched on the couch, fans whirr in the background, and on our new and first color tube is Fenway Park, so green I want to reach out and taste it, and filling in the spaces between is the voice of Curt Gowdy.

And here's a young Gowdy doing a black and white TV promo (real video) for the Jimmy Fund, before zip codes -- you send your contribution to "Boston 16, Mass." Zip codes started in 1963.

(Other clips on that page show promos by James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Ed Sullivan, Spencer Tracy,)

Links wrap:

Dancing House, in Prague

Most Unusual Buildings On Earth. Some of them, anyway.

One billion mazes: High-quality pdfs to print and solve.

Even weirder after death: Follow-up on Carlos Casteneda's followers after the novelist's death in 1998. Here's the Metafilter item, with links that go way past the fiction.

Remains of guru's disciple identified Shortly after the 1998 death of "A Separate Reality" guru Carlos Castaneda, whose peyote-fueled sorceric journeys into the Mexican desert captured the imagination of a generation in the 1970s, five of his closest disciples made out their wills, disconnected their telephones, and disappeared into thin air. via

Introverts get their energy from being alone; other people wear us out. The most popular essay ever on The Atlantic's Website was Jonathan Rauch's Caring for Your Introvert in March 2003.

Atlantic editor Sage Stossel revisits the topic in an interview this month with Rauch: Introverts of the World, Unite!