Luxurious Misery

The Taliban has come out against smoking . Smoking bans are anti-civilization, as a great American reminds us:

"Gregorio Fuentes, who skippered Ernest Hemingway's fabled fishing boat, the Pilar, for more than 20 years and is said to have been the writer's inspiration for the embattled fisherman in "The Old Man and the Sea," has died. He was 104. Fuentes died of cancer Sunday at his home in Cojimar, the quiet Cuban fishing village about 10 miles east of Havana where Hemingway used to dock the Pilar. Smoking until the end, Fuentes is sad proof that tobacco kills." - from an amusing compendium of the World's oldest smokers

German entrepenuer Alexander Schoppmann wants to start a new airline that will restore the ‘class’ in first class air travel, by, “ offering Cuban cigars, caviar and flight attendants in designer uniforms - as well as smoking allowed in every seat .” Schoppman, himself a pack and ½ a day smoker, hopes Smoker's International Airways, or Smintair, will be able to provide flights between Germany and Tokyo. “It's all about service, and that includes helping people avoid long hours confined without a cigarette break during a long-haul flight. I've been an airline passenger for 50 years, it made me very angry that the gap between service and price became so big with regular airlines. Especially in the first class and business class, service is at its lowest point ever."

"I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilization. The man behind the counter, as kindly a bloke as I ever wish to meet, seemed to guess our requirements the moment we hove into view. Scarcely had our elbows touched the wood before he was leaping to and fro, bringing down a new bottle with each leap. A planter, apparently , does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I'm not saying, mind you, that he isn't right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down in the register, in memory of the day his father's life was saved at Wembley." - from The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy , P. G. Wodehouse Alas, the recipe for an authentic Green Swizzle (if there ever was such a drink) has been lost. Queen'

Joe Jackson (yes, that Joe Jackson), comes to the defense of smoking in a passionate and intelligent essay: "Two or three years ago I considered giving up my own moderate enjoyment of tobacco because of the constant barrage of horrific statistics. But antismoking propaganda in the USA (I was living mostly in New York) seemed so overblown, so hysterical, that I became skeptical. So instead of giving up smoking, I started doing research. At first my mind was pretty open; I half expected to find that smoking was even worse than I thought, and I decided that, since I wasn't a hardcore nicotine junkie, I could live without it. Instead, I've been astonished, again and again, by how flimsy much of the antismoking evidence really is. By now I'm absolutely convinced that the dangers of smoking (and ‘secondhand smoke' in particular) are being greatly exaggerated, for a number of reasons, many of which have less to do with health than with politics, money and fashion." [