Trees are amazing beings. Last week, I visited the Ledges in Cuyahoga National Park and witnessed towering trees growing on bare rock, their roots twisted around the cracks of boulders to find nourishment 30 feet below. Like Jurassic Park nature, trees find a way.

And they can even grow in your lungs. In 2009, doctors found a fir tree growing in the lungs of Russian Artyom Sidorkin. He’d been coughing up blood for weeks and under extreme pain. Doctors thought they’d find lung cancer, but instead found a fir tree growing in his lungs. It was two inches tall and had green needles. They think he might have inhaled a seed, which germinated into a tree. It’s the story of the Giving Tree if Shel Silverstein was possessed by the soul of Guillermo del Toro.

“The good news? It’s not cancer. The bad news? You’ve got a pine tree growing in your lung.” Cough, cough, ouch, ouch, every day is Arbor Day’s sweet revenge.

Music is a great pairing to any herbal smoking session. It gets your feet tapping, might even inspire you to get up and dance around the room. Music will actually cause your heart to synch to its rhythm and do its own form of dance.

Boil music down and you’ve got tempo and beats per minute. The body naturally synchronizes its movements to match the pace, right down to your heart. There is an entrainment effect where the heartbeat aligns with the beat of the music. A good song is in sync with your cardiovascular system. You feel it in your bones, your soul, and the very blood of your heart, literally.

Masturbation was the TikTok of the 1800s – the downfall of the youth, a viral threat to society, Jesus, and the purity of America. Physicians and priests agreed – flogging the Bishop depleted little Johnny of his vital essence, stole his soul, and made him insane. It was an epidemic. (And maybe the Chinese were behind it.)

Enter stage left: John Harvey Kellogg, a physician and health advocate, who had the brilliant idea that bland foods could reduce sexual desire. Kellogg invented cornflakes as a boring breakfast option that could kill horniness faster than Lawrence Welk sitting in for Moby at a ‘90s Rave.

Similarly, graham crackers were created by Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer from the 1830s. Graham preached that a diet free from meat, spices, and stimulants could help control sinful urges and promote spiritual well-being. His namesake crackers, made from whole wheat flour and devoid of flavor-enhancing additives, were intended to be part of this ascetic diet. Graham believed that simple, bland foods would help maintain moral purity and prevent sexual excesses. And then S’mores were invented and the world once again became the cesspool of an orgy we all know and love.

“Left my wallet in El Segundo.” Play that track on repeat to a wheel of cheese, and it will start to bop. Seriously.

Gardeners like to talk to their plants. At Bear Blend, we talk to our herbs all the time. “We’re going smoke you like a brisket, my cute little herbal sweeties.” Sound waves can affect plants in mysterious ways. 

A group of Swiss researchers decided to try the same concept with music and cheese. In a study titled “Cheese in Surround Sound,” these scientists who were not out to find the cure for cancer played a variety of music to cheese wheels: Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and “Jazz (We’ve Got)” from hip-hop legend A Tribe Called Quest. A sad control wheel of cheese didn’t get to listen to any music at all. 

The cheese listened to music 24 hours a day for six months, through a transmitter that focused the sound waves into the cheese wheels. All milk came from the same farmers, processed on the same day, to start with a clean slate.

Cheese that listened to the Tribe had “a discernibly stronger smell and stronger, fruitier taste than the other test samples,” according to a summary of the experiment’s findings.

“I like its flavor, and so the hip-hop cheese was my favorite cheese. … Rock ‘n’ roll and techno — there was not such a big difference,” Beat Wampfler, a longtime cheese enthusiast who worked with researchers at Bern University of the Arts in Switzerland to create the experiment, told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

Our tax dollars at work. “A rat done bit my sister, but whitey’s on the moon,” Gil Scott Heron states in his early foundational hip hop. You can’t pay your doctors bills – universal healthcare remains a pipe dream. 

And the C.I.A. spent $20 million to bug a cat and tried to train it to spy on the Russians in the 1960s.

Dubbed “Accoustic Kitty,” the C.I.A. experimented on cat by implanting a microphone in its ear canal, wiring a radio transmitter and sewing a thin antenna into its fur. The idea was to train the cat to wander up to diplomats in parks (think the Russians) and listen in on their conversations.

Ever train a cat? Ask any pet owner – cats train you. On its first test, the cat wandered off into the street, got hit by a taxi, and became $20 million roadkill. 

But hey – at least the C.I.A. dosed Kesey and didn’t turn him into a hitech bugged spy. Or did they? Puts the Electric Kool Aide Acid Tests in a whole new light. If you need brand new conspiracy, we’ve got the lemonade.