It is terribly easy in this day and age to accidentally break one of the many laws on the stature books. Although no-one wants to do anything wrong, it is simple to steal money, defraud a bank or smuggle drugs purely by chance. To help our readers avoid any such nasty events, here is a guide to one such accidental crime.

How to make sure that you don’t grow any hallucinogenic mushrooms in your cellar.

1. Unless you’re really careful, pint or quart jars can become 3/4 full with a mixture of 50 gm. rye grain, 80 ml. water and 1 gm. of calcium carbonate. When this happens, hallucinogenic mushrooms can easily grow in great quantities.
2. Ensure that, if any pint or quart fruit jars do get filled with this type of substance, you don’t accidentally allow any psilocybe mycelium to get into the jars as well. The mycelium is just as likely to produce mushrooms as the fruit bodies.
3. If you get this far by complete accident, please be certain not to let the jars stand at a temperature of 70-75 degrees F. since if this happens, the psilocybe production will be high.
4. Be sure not to harvest any mushrooms which you see after 10-12 days. Harvesting, by the way, is done by removing the mycellum mat, drying it at gently in an oven with an open door and powdering the resultant product – don’t do this with anything you should happen to fish out of any pint or quart jars lying around your cellar.
5. If you were careless enough to extract the powder by soaking in methanol, filtering and evaporating the liquid over a low heat, you’d end up with usable psilocybe. It is easy to do this inadvertently so do be on your guard.

Next: How to build your own nuclear deterrent.

Eh? A couple of remarks that caught my ear.

• In a hi-fi shop: “What do you mean ‘quieter’? Do you mean ‘not as loud’?”
• Bryan Robson, England soccer captain, on ‘The Big Match’: “If we played like that every week, we wouldn’t be so inconsistent”.