Ban on smoking seems to have side effects

In Singapore, as well as in England, smoking was banned in most indoor venues on July 1. Those of us who do not smoke heaved sighs of relief (and we can now do so with great lungfuls of cleaner air).

However, I have seen several articles in newspapers and blogs complaining about the stench that remains in pubs and clubs after smoking was banned. People are complaining about body odours of various sorts, including underarm odour and other, less socially acceptable, odours.

I think it's a conspiracy to try to get those of us who cannot stand smoke in venues to relent. The conclusion to which they want us to come is that smoke odour is better than those other odours.

I say, put deodorant in goodie bags and hand it out at club and pub entrances.

And as for other smells, ban those who've eaten beans, cabbage, garlic, or onions in the past 24 hours.

You know you want to.

Cigar nostalgia

Odd for me, who just posted a little diatribe about smoking, to be nostalgic about cigars, in which I have never indulged bar a bit of adolescent experimentation. However, a recent post in rsc's LJ made me wonder a bit.

We were discussing baseball, which is a pastime in which I've rarely indulged lately, either watching or participating. However, when I was a kid, on a Sunday summer afternoon at my grandparents' house the grownups would be in the garden with a highball and us children would be either running around outside or inside watching the Red Sox baseball game. In the 60's the Red Sox weren't, as I remember, very successful. However, they used to have some very interesting advertisements. One of the major advertisers was White Owl cigars, and I mentioned this in my second comment. This, of course, impelled me to do a web search to see what had come of them.

Well.

I was unprepared to discover that these cigars now come in all sorts of flavours such as grape, peach (peach?), pineapple, blackberry, and strawberry. These are presumably to catch the younger generation and get them used to serious tobacco before the health warnings on the packs are intelligible to them. I'm sure that my cigar-chomping ancestors and relatives (such as my Great-Uncle Hervey, who was rarely found without a cigar in one hand and a whiskey in the other) are turning in their urns. He died at the age of 65 of a massive heart attack, natch.

White Owl seems to have been acquired by the Swedish Match Company, which also owns lots of other cigar brands, and seems bound and determined to ruin the lungs, mouths, nostrils, and gums of us all, given half the chance.

Cigar boxes were, in my youth, popular recepticles for various things such as stamps, miscellaneous papers, marbles, and the like. I don't know where kids put such things today, except...oops, I forgot. They're all too busy posting to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like to need cigar boxes in which to put miscellaneous collections of things which they now don't bother to have anyway.

I was also startled to discover (probably I am the last in the civilised world to discover this) that cigars, eviscerated of their tobacco, are popular with the, um, weed-smoking set as a place in which to put their cannabis and smoke it. Of course, only the pushers would use real hand-rolled cigars for this; everyone else buys a box of Phillies or White Owls for this purpose.

The advertisements were quite witty for their time.

I'm sure that someone knows who the rubber-faced comedian was in this advertisement above? The reason I remember it well is that he looks a lot like my Great-Uncle Denis, and we used to make very merry over this fact.

And this one:

Sometimes not having much to do at work can be enormously interesting. Do note that ads in those days were not the 10-second wonders we have today; they went for a full minute, if not longer.

Continuing nostalgia kick...I make a Manhattan

I often wax nostalgic about Manhattans...they are made with bourbon (or rye), sweet vermouth, a dash of bitters, and a maraschino cherry.



I am going to make Chicken Breast with Tarragon-Flavoured Rice for HWMBO this evening (surprise him with culinary skills that were notoriously absent last week...) and thus needed some dry sherry. In the supermarket, I got the sherry, and then saw some sweet vermouth underneath it. I thought: "Well, make your own Manhattan!" and bought the vermouth too.

Lo and behold, 1 jigger Jack Daniels, one jigger sweet Martini (next time 1/2 jigger, although the equal proportion recipe makes a lovely taste treat), and dash of bitters later, I have a Manhattan on the rocks.

I am transported back decades.