By Danny Los Angeles

Compton, California East Side, LBC (213) 555-DO"DoubleG" - After much speculation, Long Beach California resident and gansta rap superstar Snoop Doggy Dogg announced recently that he had finally given up Marijuana, a staple crop for him for the "past twenty fo' years". Despite a multi-platinum album with Dr. Dre entitled "The Chronic", and recent concert tours with monikers like "Up In Smoke" and "Puff, Puff, Pass.", Snoop nonetheless told the press that he "just woke up one mo' nin" and decided he "didn't need it no mo'." His other publicly cited reasons for giving up the ganja included "spending more time with the kids" and "just getting back to being Snoop Dogg."

In a related story, as reported by NBC Late Night Talk Show host Conan O'Brien, Snoop Dogg also suddenly found that he now had 16 hours of free time a day. Doggy Dogg added that every time you puff the chronic, you're "taking a minute off your life that you could have been here doing something special." With this heretofore unexplored temporal paradise suddenly opened for him, we naturally wondered what the "something special" was that Snoop Dogg had decided to do with his time. To our surprise, we found that amongst other things, Snoop had taken up Scrabble, read the entire works of William Shakespeare, built a functioning canoe, and had begun to dabble in Theoretical Astrophysics. We sent our own science correspondent off to Compton, California to learn more.

Snoop Dogg was kind enough to elaborate on his recent scientific epiphany. "Well, you know. Since my homie Dr. Dre's had his Ph.D. for a long time now, I just felt like it might be a good move to academically get my shit together, ...and no one can do it better like this, that and this and uh...and, well anyway, I guess I've always been down with the Astrofizzo. Even when I used to sit out on the porch and smoke J's, when I looked at the stars, I had a feeling that they were undergoing thermonuclear fusion in their cores, dominated primarily by the proton-proton reaction chain for low mass stars, and the CNO cycle and triple alpha reaction for phat, massive stars."

Dogg continued. "And its not just the stars, planets, and galaxies that tickle the izzo nizzo bizzo dizzo. Even the mothafuckin' radiative processes in Astrofizzo are pretty smooth.

"I mean, I always thought Compton Scattering was just what happened when I unloaded my gatt into a local crowd. Who'd have known that it was also what happens when ultra-high energy photons scatter off electrons at rest. Who'd have fuckin' thought?"

"And Dr. Dre, let me tell you, he's not just the Doctorologist of Rhymes, that boy got his degree from Caltech, and they's a bunch of crazy ass mothafuckas in that mug. But anyway, Dre happens to be gettin downwith a little bit of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. That boy manipulates tensors like they was his bitch. I gave him about five minutes and he comes up with this new non-spherically symmetric solution to Einstein's Equations for a system of N rotating black holes spinning in random directions. Lets see if Kip Thorne and Roger Penrose can do that, and do it blindfolded, and left handed, with crayons, while running on the freeway like Dre did. Sheeeeeit!"

Snoop Dogg also was excited to share with us another recent revelation he and Dr. Dre had come upon. "I always thought that "Nuthin' But a G Thang" was about ganstas, as most of you might also have guessed, but as Dre and I recently discovered, its actually about that other G thang...Gravity that is. Einstein had it right all this time, and as seemed reasonable, Dre and I took it upon ourselves to do a little rewriting of the lyrics, yo."

Snoop Dogg then suddenly conjured up a microphone, which he later told me he had been storing in the 9th curled up spatial dimension in the Calabi Yau Manifolds of Superstring Theory. "Anyway, it goes something like this...."

After hearing Snoop finish the new rendition of the classic rap song, I couldn't help but mention another recent burgeoning rap star whose lyrics now seemed to be similarly aligned with Snoop's...none other than Steven "E=mc" Hawking. Of course Snoop had heard of him. Sheeeit! In fact Snoop went on to explain that, "Me and the Hawk is tight, yo. In fact, we's so close, that when we chillin', you gots to pay attention to the strong nuclear force, biyatch!"

Snoop expressed these additional mad props. "My man Hawk takes these fuckin bong rips that last for the Hubble time. Even though I'm done with that shizo, I still gots to hand it to my boy Steve. Of course, I really do have to hand it to him since I gots to help him light the thing and pull the carb and shit, but, you know, it's all good in the hood."

When Hawking dropped by Snoop's pad to make an appearance, he and his hi-tech robotic voice synthesizer had this to say, "Snoop, I have to say I'm rather disappointed. I never thought you'd stop smoking the J's. I used to say that the day Snoop Dogg put down the jzoints is the day I stop loving physics and hardcore gansta rap. But that is not the case. I still love general relativity and all my bitches and h-to-the-izoes. Snoop, I would shed a tear, provided that my tear ducts were functional."

Snoop Dogg did shed several tears. "mc Hawking, I feel you. I understand what you're saying, but this is the new Snoop now. I still love my gangsta rap, but I'm parting ways from the Mary Jane. Now I'm into the Astrofizzo, like you. Here, take a bong rip, and we'll go derive the geodesic equation for a really complicated metric with no symmetries whatsoever. You always like that shit."

"Oh Snoop, sorry for talking so much smack. You know I always enjoy hanging out in your crib."

Hawking's voice eerily maintained its pitch and inflection, as always. "Could you light the carb first, and turn on my cyber lungs? This fucking muscular degenerative disease is a bitch, but the ganja smoothes the way to a new day...and like I always say...You better be frightened, you better be scared, cause energy is mass times the speed of light squared....Biyatch!"

"You go mc! Tear that shit up!"

"Snoop" said Steven synthetically. "Those were some dope rhymes that I just kicked.... Anyway, I am truly sorry for what I said before. I really do respect your decision to give up Marijuana. Seriously, how long have you been clean, now?"

"235 days, 23 hours, 12 minutes, 34 seconds, 8 nanoseconds and 13 billion trillion Planck times, but sheeeit, I ain't countin." Replied Snoop.

"Anyway," said Steven, "you're still the same old Snoop Dogg. I say fuck the weed and throw that shit where you'll never see it again, and where you can never ever retrieve it without being torn apart by immense gravitational tidal forces."

"I know just the place", said Snoop, as he finally decided to toss his last stash of bongs, pipes, Ziploc bags of chronic, and unprocessed cannabis leaves, calmly and patiently, into the nearest, conveniently located, stellar mass Black Hole.  HSP