Before today it seemed the use of medieval weaponry in drug deals had gone the way of the knife, the chainsaw and the cheesy mustache: guns are all the rage these days and most likely your neighborhood dealer's weapon of choice. News from the border tells us differently: patrol agents in Arizona have seized a large catapult that smugglers were allegedly using to launch large packages of marijuana from Mexico to a remote area in Arizona. And you thought getting weed into that MGMT show was difficult! The 9-foot tall catapult was found about 20 yards from the border in Mexico, and capable of launching almost 4.5 pound packages of la yerba into the United States, says Philip Caulfield at the NY Daily Press. Was this a result of a physics project gone awry? Drug lords with a keen sense of classical history? Nostalgia for the days of princesses and castles? Some quick reactions from the web.

"I have not seen anything like that in my time before as a Border Patrol agent ... although we are trained to handle any kind of a threat that comes over that border," says Tucson Border Patrol Spokesperson David Jimarez, quoted at Fox News.com. You don't say!

"The trillion dollars we have spent waging the drug war? Not so wasteful after all. We have the technology...to stop 8th century (B.C.) technology!" quips Josh Brokaw at Reason.

"In other news, Wile E. Coyote is apparently Mexico's newest drug lord," says Adrian Chen at Gizmodo.

"Apparently the underground tunnels for smuggling drugs across the Mexico/U.S. border are sooo 2010," writes April Peveteaux on The Stir. She suggests another method of subterfuge from antiquity for the wannabe classicists: a Trojan horse?

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Eli Rosenberg