Absinthe's Mystery Solved: It's Booze!

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RACHEL MARTIN, host:

Welcome back to the Bryant Park Project from NPR News. We're online all the time at npr.org. Mike.

MIKE PESCA, host:

Yo.

MARTIN: What do you like best about working with me?

PESCA: Well, it's not exactly what I like the best. It's what I like The Most.

MARTIN: Yeah!

(Soundbite of music)

DAN PASHMAN: There it is.

MARTIN: What I like the most is The Most.

PASHMAN: That's an intro.

(Soundbite of laughter)

MARTIN: I think we have Howard Dean in the studio.

PESCA: Yeah, I think it's your willingness to share your red-light-district experiences. That just has to be its own blog. Rachel gives reviews of red light districts. I found it off-putting and the German ladies mean.

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: So who's up first with The Most? What stories of The Most do we have?

PATRICIA MCKINNEY: I'll take control of this from the control room. This is Tricia, the editrix. I checked Google Trends this morning and right up there in the top was the name "Keoni Lucas." I'd never heard of this person. It turns out he was a surfer born and raised in Hawaii, son of famous surfer Jimmy Lucas, apparently well-beloved in the surfing community. The reason he's in Google Trends today is he passed away about a month ago.

He was in a car accident in Los Angeles, where I think he'd been living in order to pursue an acting career. So I was trying to figure out why he was on the list today. I found a post on somebody's blog saying that apparently there was a memorial service in Hawaii for him yesterday, about 150 friends and family gathered to celebrate his life. So, Keoni Lucas, he was a surfer himself, aspiring actor, beloved in Hawaii.

MARTIN: And you have another.

MCKINNEY: Yes, I have another one. This was not as high up, but it leaped right off the page at me. The name "Charles Nelson Riley," you know.

PESCA: Yes.

MARTIN: It always does. It always leaps off the page.

MCKINNEY: You've got to love Charles Nelson Riley.

PESCA: Did it leap with an Ahh!?

MCKINNEY: Ahh! I can't really do it as well. But the searches spiked at nine o'clock, so I sent out an email immediately, someone tell me why people were searching for Charles Nelson Riley at nine p.m. eastern last night. Matt Martinez knew the answer.

Apparently NBC aired a "Saturday Night Live: Best of Alec Baldwin," and he had once been on their "Inside the Actor's Studio" sketch, playing Charles Nelson Riley. So there's the convergence of two of my favorite things, Alec Baldwin and Charles Nelson Riley. So we have a little clip of his impersonation.

(Soundbite of TV show "Saturday Night Live: Best of Alec Baldwin,")

Mr. ALEC BALDWIN: (As Charles Nelson Riley) Once we were taping "Match Game" '75, Nipsey Russel, Brett Summers and I, and we were hanging out at Gene Rayburn's house and Nipsey says, Charles, where does the joy come from? And I said it comes from my blank and it blanks from my blank!

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BALDWIN: (As Charles Nelson Riley) And Betty White laughed so hard, her boob fell out!

(Soundbite of laughter)

MCKINNEY: And there, for me, my cup runneth over. A Betty White reference makes any day better. And "Match Game."

PASHMAN: Trish, you can have the rest of the day off. My God, everything came together for you on that one.

PESCA: You have Betty White as a screensaver. I love that. I love your forensics, too, your sleuthing. Jeanne, what do you have?

JEANNE BARON: That is a hard act to follow.

MARTIN: Yes, it is. Good luck, my friend.

BARON: But OK. What came between LSD in the 1950s and mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, which apparently shamans have integrated into their rituals for eccentrics?

PESCA: A double Grateful Dead album recorded for "Fillmore West"?

BARON: Absinthe, that 19th century hallucinogen, and there have been mysteries shrouded around what exactly was causing those hallucinations which made France ban absinthe in the very early 20th century. And now, those mysteries have been debunked.

It was long thought that the herb wormwood, which has a chemical called thujone in it, was causing these hallucinations, but no, no, no, no, no! New research out from the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry says those side effects, hallucinations, some not so pretty - ticks, dementia, numbness - were just old-fashioned alcoholism and possibly toxic compounds from faulty distilleries.

MARTIN: That's not as nearly as cool as wormwood.

PASHMAN: But it wasn't alcoholism. It was just alcohol. It's because if you drink anything that strong, you're going to see some things.

MARTIN: Some effects. And we should say that's the most-emailed on Yahoo!

BARON: Most-emailed on Yahoo! Thanks for catching that.

MARTIN: Yeah.

PESCA: What else is the most-emailed on Yahoo!, Dan?

PASHMAN: I've got a most-emailed from Yahoo! News. "Americans Unload Prize Belongings to Make Ends Meet." This is kind of a grim sign of the state of the economy. A scan of Craigslist - interesting enterprise story here on the AP - basically turned up a lot of people selling valuable and prized possessions, not just to make money, not for spring cleaning but because they need gas money, or they need to pay the bills.

There's one teenager in Georgia, put up a post selling some stuff, saying her mother lost her job, and the post pleads, please buy anything you can to help out. Another seller in Milwaukee put up a diamond engagement ring to pay bills.

PESCA: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm going to be a skeptic. I don't know. If Yahoo! doesn't have the answer, you might not have the answer.

PASHMAN: All right.

PESCA: But people sell things all the time. Maybe a little sob story will inspire people to buy. How do they know what the cause and effect is, or is this all anecdotal?

PASHMAN: Well, there's two things.

PESCA: OK.

PASHMAN: First of all, a lot of these posts are specifically saying - and they interviewed some of the people making these sales, and they said - like, this woman selling a tea kettle that her grandmother gave her. My grandmother raised me, so it hurt. We've had bouts here and there but we always got by. This time it's different.

And they have Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster, acknowledging the increase in popularity selling all sorts of items on the web, but he said rate of growth is, quote, "moving above the usual trend-line." And he also said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.

PESCA: OK. I guess I'll buy it.

PASHMAN: All right.

MARTIN: Mike, what do you have to share?

PESCA: Although if you say, you know, a little advice to these people. If you show your desperation, you're not going to get the highest price possible.

PASHMAN: It is not...

PESCA: People are like, look, I've got a tea kettle. It doesn't really mean much to me. You know, make me an offer.

PASHMAN: It's not a recommended negotiation strategy.

PESCA: This is the number-one story and the number-two story on the bostonglobe.com under two different headlines. I guess different editions have different headlines. This story, about Kelly Podroia, who is the wife of the very popular Boston Red Sox player, Dustin Podroia, she has an anti-tanning message.

We just felt pasty and gross from the winters, says Kelly Podroia, who grew up in Chicago, so at 14, which is too young, she started tanning. She would summer in a backdoor pool. She would, at spring break, always tanning. And when she was 18, she was diagnosed with stage-two melanoma.

At 24, which is how old she is now, she joined the Melanoma Foundation of New England as a volunteer spokeswoman, and she says she is exhibit A when warning teens of the dangers of tanning. She also went to Arizona State University, where she met Dustin, where tanning goes on.

Now, what I thought was really interesting about this, obviously, someone as high profile as that is going to give it a lot of attention. Red Sox wife, melanoma? I remembered that Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher, his wife, Shonda Shilling...

PASHMAN: Still a Red Sox pitcher.

PESCA: Oh, yeah, he's still a Red Sox pitcher, right.

PASHMAN: Yeah, so his wife...

PESCA: Current and former, his wife, Shonda Shilling - he's on the DL, that's why I got confused.

MARTIN: Hurry, the dramatic build-up!

PESCA: Is a skin cancer awareness person. They have something called the Shade Foundation for the prevention and detection of skin cancer. What are all these Red Sox players doing with these wives? I think they get tan, attract the Red Sox player, and then they move...

PASHMAN: And then they move to Boston where they'll never see the sun again.

PESCA: Yeah, and then they'll be like, you other ladies better stay out of the sun because we've got our men. All right, that is my extremely cynical and possibly offensive - they're doing a good thing, and all of this tanning is out of control. And you know what we need? We need a professional baseball player to say, I'm marrying a pasty girl because I'm taking a stand. And that is The Most. We put all these links to our stories on our website at npr.org/bryantpark.

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