Today in tenuous connections...

Seriously, fuck you cancer.

As you've probably already heard, cancer, in a characteristically dick move, took noted musician and goblin king David Bowie yesterday. Because cancer, as we've discussed, is an asshole. But on a tangential, quantum universe note, the local newspaper from my hometown of Rochester, N.Y. decided that today would be an awesome time to remind everyone that back in 1976, Bowie was arrested there for having half a pound of marijuana in his hotel room.

Yes. Cops, who I can only assume were among the R.P.D.'s cleverest investigators, went to Bowie's hotel room after a concert and found him and his friends all smoking the pot. Did I mention Iggy Pop was there? Anyway, it was some fine police work, but why bring it up now?

Wait, for real? Just pot? Did they even look in the nightstand?

Rochester: come for the arts and nightlife,
stay for the draconian drug law enforcement!

I suppose when someone talented and influential dies, we all like to feel connected in some way, even if that way is a decades-old drug charge that could have potentially ended his career. At the time, half a pound of pot carried a maximum fifteen year prison sentence and-holy shit fifteen years? Fortunately, Bowie and the others were able to plead famous, (no, really) but still, if I were the city of Rochester I'm not sure I'd want to associate myself with nearly depriving the world of the last forty years of David Bowie's music.

You know, if decisions we make play out in some alternate universe as some physicists wildly speculate, does this mean that somewhere there's some alternate universe out there where David Bowie spent fifteen years in prison in upstate New York on some possession charge and we all sat through a shitty version of Labyrinth starring Mick Jagger, who would have been, at best, a Goblin Duke?

Yes. Other differences between Earth Classic and Alternate Earth include mandatory
casual Fridays, butter-flavored soft drinks and oh, we sold Florida back to Spain.

(source: science)