X-Ftn-To: Gwailoh-9 

Gwailoh-9  wrote:
>And
>blue-skin Shiva (?) 

Blue throath (nilakantha).

>turned blue from eating poison right?  

No. He was left with a small blue scar in the throat, after ingesting
all the poison that threatened to destroy the three worlds and
everybody in them.

>Curiously,
>the psilocybin mushroom turns blue when picked, which is one of the
>ways to help distinguish it from poison mushrooms.  coincidence?)

Not even coincidence, except for the blue color. 
Besides, mushrooms are dangerous. You can't rely on the exact chemical
balance in most species; the same species of mushrooms builds up
different chemicals, depending on the terrain and climate. The
Russians, for instance, use amanita muscaria with vodka in order to
get high. Their variety has less muscarine and more atropine compared
to the variety that grows in other parts of the world, and it once
happened that some Russians tried their recipe with the Croatian
amanitas and got seriously poisoned. Our variety is much more toxic
than theirs.
There is another mushroom, also amanita, which is OK to eat if you
boil it first and throw away the water: amanita rubescens. Every now
and then some people die of poisoning - always the mushroom experts,
because nobody else eats it- because there is a poisonous variety,
totally indistinguishable from the edible kind: amanita
pseudorubescens.
So, if someone wants to get high, mushrooms aren't very safe, you can
get yourself killed just like that. The varieties that contain
psychotropic substances - cortinarius, psilocybe, clitocybe, amanita -
contain some of the most poisonous varieties of mushrooms, and are
notorious as instable. 
Disclaimer: I'm not a mycologist, I just collect mushrooms for lunch
when I walk through the forests, and I have to know some things about
them in order not to pick the wrong kind.

-- 
Homepage: http://www.danijel.org