Today is an important day. It's the anniversary of that unassuming day in 1770 when Captain Cook first discovered Australia. (Never forget.) But there are whole swaths of humanity that don't spend every 4/20 in sober reflection, contemplating what Captain Cook must have thought upon viewing Australia's sweeping shores and magisterial outback: "This looks like a great place for a penal colony. And then later, when such things have been invented, a chain of steakhouses."
No, there are certain people that spend the whole of 4/20 engaged in the base act of smoking marihuana. Can you believe such a thing? Empirically proven by John Fante's Ask the Dust to cause insanity, "el weedo loco" as it's called by the natives, has a whole holiday dedicated to it, and traditionally, that holiday is celebrated vociferously on the University of Colorado's Boulder campus, with up to 10,000 hep-cats, cool cats, and other varieties of felines descending upon Norlin Quad to "catch a buzz."
But not today.
Today marks the unprecedented shuttering of the University's campus, an event ok'd by officials in an attempt to stamp out the yearly ritual. Their tools? The cold truncheons of the noble Boulder police department, and, of course, fish-based fertilizer. That's right! Not only have the Boys in Blue surrounded the campus, but Norlin Quad has been roped off and coated in fish-based fertilizer.
Naturally, activists, rousing themselves from stained flophouse couches across Boulder, acted on behalf of the devil plant to try and stop the University from shutting its doors. But a Boulder District Court judge upheld the ruling Thursday (though an injunction has since been filed by the weedheads), and the brave men of Boulder P.D. were free to coat the campus with stinky ichthyoid-based justice.
Their actions, though, were not without cost.
One student who was about to cross the quad stopped in her tracks, saying "Oh, that smells disgusting. Never mind." She turned and walked in the other direction.
Never forget.
