Do Stoners Come Up With Government-Funded Research Programs?
Late-night hosts asks his audience to separate real from fake projects.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., released his final "Wastebook" this week , outlining what he considered misguided spending by the federal government on things like research programs. Some of the programs sound ridiculous -- a life-size foosball game? But are they ridiculous enough to have been thought up by someone stoned out of his mind?
Jimmy Kimmel seems to think so, as he played a game with his audience Wednesday evening called "Expenditure or Stoner?" Kimmel described a government program included in the Wastebook and asked his audience if they thought it was real or the workings of a weed-addled mind. Of the five programs Kimmel described, only two were made up by the show.
The actual programs Kimmel highlighted included the National Science Foundation-funded $856,000 study of mountain lion energy that had the cats on a treadmill in a lab in California, and a $171,000 study using monkeys to examine the idea of streaks in gambling. The monkeys gambling made the cover of the Wastebook.
Kimmel did up the government with two stoner ideas:
- A metal foil that can keep mountains cold.
- A microchip that can read a cat’s emotions.
Let's hope no one from NSF was watching last night and got any ideas.