New Radio Show interview

Good afternoon. I did a radio show with Dr. Joe out of McGill University in Canada -- the Harvard of Canada -- and think it came out okay. If anyone wants to check it out, here it is:
https://www.iheartradio.ca/cjad/shows/the-dr-joe-show-1.1761500

Thanks. And everyone: Please have a safe and wonderful Happy New Year! I hope it is bright and full of magic for you all!
PG

More food Stuff!!!!!

So I was in the kitchen doing a little clean up. I had a radio show and then a phone call I had to make, so my daughter and Devon went to the supermarket for me today. Naturally, once they were gone I remembered I hadn't told them to pick up any food for Boots the Wonderdog, so I had to go searching in the fridge to see what we had left over.
I was sort of surprised at what was there, none of it more than a few days old and all still good.
There was some left over 4-cheese mac and cheese with spinach, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and scallions, plus an extra bowl of the cheese sauce that I'll probably pass off as dip if there are any unexpected guests tonight.
Then there was Uncle Clem's chicken -- a chicken and broccoli dish in a rich mushroom sauce topped with mozzarella and baked; a nice bowl of thin spaghetti with a shrimp and clam sauce; two pieces of lime chicken; a good sized pot of chicken cacciatore with lots of baby bella mushrooms and red and yellow peppers; and then half of last night's grill: marinated chicken, sausage, and veggies, that was served with corn on the cob.
I guess Boots is gonna eat well tonight even though I forgot to tell the kids to pick up livers and hearts.
And I guess we've been eating well this week.
I hope you are all eating well every day.

Toast and Jam

Okay, so a friend and co-conspirator at the Fort Worth Weekly, the paper I write for here in Fort Worth, has a weekly show called Toast and Jam. Jeff Prince has done about 100 of them and I never checked it out. Now that I have I have to tell you it is fantastic, brilliant, hilarious. Go to fwweekly.com and on the home page you will see a couple of the 5 minute bits on the right hand side of the page.
Now he asked me to be his guest last week. One of the things done on the show is that after a short intro/interview, the guest makes a toast, and then the guest jams with Jeff. He said he wanted to sing a jungle song and I suggested I'd write new lyrics to Jingle Bells called Jungle Bells but he nixed that. So I said "Why not do 'Welcome to the Jungle?'" Well, he jumped on that and forced me to sing it. In public. And made me promise to put it up here. So I'm doing that. Axl Rose is either gonna kill himself because I do it so well he's embarrassed that he ever did it, or he's gonna kill me for wreaking his best song. Anyway, here goes.
https://www.fwweekly.com/2019/12/11/toast-jam-with-peter-gorman/

Sapo/Kambo Letter to a Writer

A writer in Montreal published a story about frog sweat medicine that was fairly critical of the medicine's actual value to the humans who utilize it. I responded with this:

 

Joe: Hello, this is Peter Gorman, a journalist, and the person who brought the frog sweat medicine out of the jungle and into the Western World in 1986. One of the people who got my earliest reports on its use was Dr. Vittorio Erspamer of the FIDIA Institute at the University of Rome. He had been studying peptides in amphibians, including the Phyllomedusa bicolor, for years, and was thrilled that he finally had a report of someone who had personally experienced the frog's secretions in the human body, as there had been no previous reports of that.

   Erspamer went through my early paper describing what I claimed occurred to me while under the influence of the frog -- 99 percent of it physical -- then used some of the actual material I sent him to study whether what I was claiming could be explained by the peptides found in the frog secretion. He published his findings in Toxicon, a peer reviewed journal that can be found on-line (or I can send you a link). His early work discovered seven bio-active peptides in the material that easily explained all of the physical symptoms. There were two opiods, a vasodilator, sauvagine, a bradkinen that could jump the blood brain barrier, and others.

   The only thing he could not explain was my sensation of animals moving through me, which he chalked up to my having used a Theobroma cacao/wild black tobacco snuff just prior to the frog sweat.

   The indigenous who introduced me to the medicine were the Matsés/Mayoruna indigenous who live on the Rio Galvez, near the Brazilian/Peruvian border. They do not drink any water prior to the medicine use. They rarely vomit during sessions and never appeared to have any protocol regarding the medicine in terms of diet. They simply used the medicine when their arrows were missing targets, when they needed to take long hikes (sometimes days), got the grippe, among other reasons. I continue to work with a few Matsés and have for more than three decades, and still see no protocol.

    When the same medicine was later discovered to be used by nearby indigenous groups in Brazil, their methodology was claimed to include drinking copious amounts of water to induce vomiting. Gringos have since added layers of "spirituality" to the medicine's use because, well, that's what Westerner's do.

   I am belaboring things and I'm sorry. I just want to stress that there is certainly science behind why this medicine is being utilized by many people. My own account of that first use of the medicine -- including a lot of Erspamer's Toxicon material -- was published in Omni Magazine in the early 1990s with the heading Making Magic.

   Sorry to go on. If you wanted to do a follow up to this piece, I'd make myself available.

Thank you,

Peter Gorman

817-517-6620