In the last 45 days, have you smoked marijuana? Have you been in the downdraft of someone who’s smoked marijuana? Have you been in close quarters with someone who recently smoked marijuana?

Congratulations! You may have detectable amounts of THC in your bloodstream, and thus be eligible for 4 years in prison! Because that counts as possession!

What’s that? You live in Vancouver? Or The Netherlands? There’s no escaping pot smoke where you live?

Well, you might get lucky.

Yeah, so anyhow: Dubai isn’t a safe place for Westerners to travel? No shit, Sherlock. What was your first clue?

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Boing Boing attracts more than 2 million unique visitors to its site each month, and has over 3.3 million RSS subscribers. And it now offers Boing Boing TV, which was recently highlighted by CNN, and Boing Boing Gadgets. By Comscore’s measure, Boing Boing is among the five most-visited blogs on the web. Technorati’s list of most influential blogs — based on how many other sites link to that blog — puts Boing Boing at #2. According to Google, more than 600,000 other sites link to Boing Boing. Forbes voted Boing Boing “best of the web” among tech blogs, as did BusinessWeek. AdRants, ad exec veteran Steve Hall’s blog, posted an article to the effect that if Boing Boing covers your ad campaign, it’s gone viral. 2006 Bloggies winner: Best Group Blog and Lifetime Achievement. 2006 Webby Awards nominee. Named ‘Best of the Web 2006′ by BusinessWeek. In a 2006 article, The New Yorker described Boing Boing as “a technology blog that is read by geeks the world over.”

It must be true, I read it on the web.

I don’t want to be on a plane that’s going to be travelling anywhere near Dubai.

Go to Huffington Post, where there are hundreds of comments for each article, then give thanks to whatever deity you perv on that people here mostly lurk. Most commenters on really busy blogs are unintelligible, raving fountains of bile. Better yet, go to I Can Has Cheezburger where every LOL has three to four hundred posts written in Kitteh.

It is a bit alarming to think that one’s comment might be read by hundreds of thousands of lurkers, though.

Jeff, Antinous, the rule of thumb I’m about to tell you has been a constant on the internet for as long as I’ve been around:

Of every hundred people who read a discussion site, ten will post and ninety will lurk.

Somewhat less reliable, but still a good rule of thumb:

Of those ten readers who post comments, one will do more posting than the other nine put together.

All three of you are one-percenters.

For example:

“He is to my knowledge being held in the Airport Detention Centre, where he will be treated well and the conditions are good, I am told somewhat like a 3 Star Hotel. If he is in central, he will be fine, although sharing a cell, unlikely to experience any violence, or sodomy. I have had several friends in Central, none of which are troubled by the time spent there.”

While the laws are crazy, the conditions sound much non-citizens.

The thing is, it makes some people want to be more polite and intelligible and other people not so much. I guess that having an audience, like having an illness, just tends to make you more who you are.

[Preemptive strike: No, no country is perfect. I know that.]