06 Feb 2012 - Established in 2010 by University of Oxford professor Dorothy Bishop, the Orwellian Prize is awarded every year in January to “an article in an English-language national newspaper that has the most inaccurate report of a piece of academic work.” Its full title is the Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation.

 This week Bishop announced the 2011 winner. Hearty congratulations to British tabloid the Daily Mail. Its winning work completely ignored the actual findings of a research paper in order to concoct a false, sensationalized story about marijuana and schizophrenia.

1 Feb 2012 - Taran Noah Smith, who played the youngest son on "Home Improvement," was arrested early Wednesday morning for alleged DUI and possession of hashish.

Law enforcement sources told entertainment website TMZ Smith was arrested in Los Angeles County around 1:00 a.m.

Authorities believe he was under the influence of marijuana at the time of his arrest -- and TMZ reports they also found a stash of hash -- a type of marijuana.

Smith, 27, rose to fame as Mark Taylor, Tim Allen’s son on the long-running ABC comedy "Home Improvement" in the 1990s.

28 January - Michael Bublé never wrote a song without marijuana. The Canadian crooner says pot makes him productive and helps him to write his tunes. He told the following to The Peolple magazine: 'Marijuana can be very useful in the studio, I never wrote a song without a bit of a smoke, it helps me create something good.' 

While his wife, model Luisana Lopilato hates the smell of marijuana, on a recent trip to Holland, Michael took a deep breath each time they passed a coffeeshop. It seems Michael still has to find the right balance between love and his lifestyle, as his ex-girlfriend Tiffany Broomley also frowned upon his smoking pleasures.

27 Jan 2012 - When French existentialist and writer Simone de Beauvoir first tried to smoke marijuana, she did not inhale. It was 3 May 1947 and she was as new to New York City as she was to the drug. Friends taught her how to breathe in the smoke, but she was immune to it's effects. "I feel guilty," she wrote in her diary. "No angel bothers to lift me from earth." She added, "I turn toward the bottle of bourbon."

Beauvoir’s unrequited love for marijuana is among the highlights of "New York Diaries: 1609-2009". This new book is the most festive and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across. It's editor, Teresa Carpenter, a longtime Village Voice writer and lifelong diary enthusiast, has had the ingenious idea to comb through hundreds of diaries, written by the famous, the infamous and the unknown in New York, and to liberate these chronicles of their crunchiest and most humane bits.

Starting on January 1 and traveling day by day through the year, these journal entries are selected from four centuries of writing—from the early 1600s to the present—allowing New York natives and visitors, writers and artists, thinkers and bloggers, to reach across time and share vivid and compelling snapshots of life in the Capital of the World.