Complex Numbers

Influencers Under the Influence

I don't have a lot of time tonight, so it's a good thing this one came up, because it requires very little embellishment from me.

15 Most Impressive Things Accomplished Under the Influence  

It's important to note that there are good things that come out of being in an altered state of consciousness. If there weren't, no one would do it. Well, almost no one. Well, very few.

Some of history’s greatest minds kept functioning long enough -- and in some cases, functioned better -- while drunk or high to bring us some of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments.

It's the "functioned better" part that's impressive.

I won't copy all of them here. Just the ones I find most interesting. As this is Cracked, the numbers are backwards as usual.

15. Dock Ellis Pitched a No-Hitter on LSD

Dock pitched the only no-hitter of his career while tripping the very same balls he was throwing. As is customary for frequent drug users, he woke up that morning not knowing what day it was and figured that was as good a reason as any to drop a ton of acid...

I just had to note that the first sentence is a great turn of phrase. I used to know what that usage is called, where one word serves double duty, and I haven't even dropped acid. Maybe if I did, I'd remember.

In any case, I also need to point out that "a ton" of acid would probably kill you. Not from the acid, but ingesting 2,000 pounds of anything will make your stomach explode (as far as I've heard, there's no LD₅₀ or whatever for LSD). But I do know that construction: it's hyperbole, and it's absolutely essential to comedy. It's just that I'm just responsible enough to disclaim that no one should do a literal ton of acid.

13. Khrushchev Made Peace With Yugoslavia Thanks to Booze

I know some people are angry drunks. They get all the bad attention and they give booze a bad name. If I had more time, I'd tell the story of a friend of mine who, as a teenager, got everyone drunk at a mock NATO team-building exercise, which resulted in the same effect: peace on Earth. Perhaps another time.

12. Francis Crick Credited Microdosing With His Discovery of DNA

Funny how he credits LSD but not the actual person he should be crediting, Rosalind Franklin.

Incidentally, yes, lots of these are acid-related. I wonder if there's a connection.

10. Ulysses S. Grant Won the Civil War Drunk

The bluster General Grant needed to win the Civil War might have come to him courtesy of good ol’ bourbon. He was known to be such a prolific drinker that a “principal responsibility” of his chief of staff during the war was making sure he didn’t drink himself to defeat, with mixed success.

As the principal suppliers of bourbon were in the South, perhaps he was just trying to liberate the facilities.

9. Pythagoras Came Up With His Theorem While High

Look, I don't expect Cracked to be a paragon of accuracy, but shit, man, we're not even sure Pythagoras was an actual person and not, like, a fictional character made up by an ancient Greek math club.

Whether they were smoking weed or not is therefore subject to debate.

8. Cocaine Allowed Freud to Invent Psychoanalysis

Considering that pretty much everything Freud did was later denounced, I'm not sure this counts as an awesome thing.

4. Gary Dahl Invented the Pet Rock in a Bar

The pet rock started as a literal joke when Gary Dahl was out drinking with his friends and, in response to their complaints about taking care of pets, told them, “No problem at my house. I have a pet rock. No vet bills, except once in a while to scrape off the moss.”

What Dahl really invented was the idea that marketing could make anything sell. Anything. This later led to inventions such as bottled water and chicken wings, and continues to promote rice-adjunct pisswater as if it were beer.

No word on whether he was related to Roald or not.

That's it for my comments. To see the others, you'll have to go to the link. Some of them are cheats, because there's no way to know for sure (they say "probably" in some cases). But I think the point is made: sobriety can be overrated.