I really got in trouble with a women's lib group one time when one asked me if I know where the fire trucks were going. Without thinking, my response was "They are responding to a call of two newly-weds" ....Jeeze, I thought I was going to get slapped.

I was always wondering why one of my Division Officers in the navy said to me, "Chief, you got a lot of class."

Once a girl and I were up in the mountains gettin it on, and then we heard rustling in the trees. We thought we had teenagers on our hands, but it was a pack of ceyotes.

WE LIT UP and scared the hell out of them. We already were scared to death as it were. We eached puffed four cigs each, two in each hand, wildly as we make screaming noises all the way up to the car while they stayed about 50 feet from us for the most part. We got the hell out of there.

No smokes and we would have bit the perverbial dust.

She was the smoker, I had quit years earlier. But those four nail coffins tastes sooooo sweeeet!!!

As a two time cancer scare survivor, I quit smoking, not wanting to risk getting lung cancer on the top of it all. When my white blood cells had over multiplied to the point that they KNEW it was cancer, I was scared, but not scared enough. When they found that tumor in my brain, I was scared but not scared enough.

NOW CEYOTES!!! THAT'S SCARY!!!

I do like the smell of some pipe tobacco's and some cigars, but cigs are a whole different story. For some strange reason I just get this wiers allergic reaction to the smoke.

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Passive smoking (i.e. inhaling the smoke from someone else's fag), however, has been shown to cause serious health problems. For that reason I am in favour of a more anti-smoking approach generally. In someone's home and with the consent of everyone present, I have no problem with smoking. But I would very much like to see it banned in all public places.

Most pubs and bars in this country don't even have a no smoking area. Socially I find this a problem because most of my friends and relatives are smokers. I get a sore throat very quickly in a smoky atomosphere and my eyes start stinging, amongst other things. If smoking were outlawed in public places I wouldn't have to put myself in an embarrasing social position by asking if we could go in a smoke-free zone; it would just be accepted that smoking was not allowed. There are gradual moves in that direction - about the one good thing that Virgin Trains have ever done is to ban smoking in all the carriages (if only they'd do the same thing with mobile 'phones!). But far more is needed, IMHO.

quote:

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"There is one aspect to smoking that puts it in a different category to other self-inflicted health problems, and that is that you inflict it on other people as well."

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Taking this into a new direction (since I'm feeling a little lonely because Will and Tim didn't reply to my post in the Kodak thread), here in the US we are requird by law to wear seatbelts when we drive. What is your stance on that? If I want to get in my car and drive X number of miles and protect myself as best as possible by wearing a seatbelt, then I should be allowed to right? But what if I DON'T want to wear the seatbelt and just assume to get banged up and possibly dead by not wearing it? Shouldn't that be my choice?

I fully agree that I should not be allowed to operate a car when intoxicated or drive faster than the posted speed limit, for those examples could cause harm to others, but what about the seatbelt? If I don't put it on, I am only potentially harming myself.

So much for a free country.

I have a scoliosis in my back and find that wearing seat belts aggrevates it and causes me a back ache. I found this out totally by accident after I stopped for petrol once and quite simply forgot to put my belt back on afterwards. Two hours of driving later, I had no back ache and wondered why. I then realised that I hadn't been wearing the belt. So what is more dangerous - driving with a hurting back, which is distracting, or wearing the seat belt?

There is the argument that the belt keeps you "in the driver's seat" where if you get smacked by another car, if you weren't wearing a belt you might get "tossed" out of your seat and be unable to control your car.

There's also the proven fact that you're more likely to survive a wreck if you are belted in, vs. getting thrown out. On the other hand, I've known people who survived BECAUSE they got thrown out.

In my own life I have found that once you are used to putting the belt on, it eventually becomes a habit and you start feeling incomplete if you don't have it on.

Make a comparison with driving and the airlines. If the captain of the airship says "fasten your seatbelts", you better do just that without any "lip"!

Seatbelt laws are a necessary infringement on our personal freedoms for the following reason:

By nature I am a libertarian and don't want government sticking its nose in anyone's business, and that would apply to folks choosing to smoke (cigarettes or anything else); my big problem is when their activity ruins my meal and makes my life miserable. I say, let them smoke all they want -- I just want them to do it with a big plastic bag over their heads. It's their smoke; only they should have to breath it.

Point is, yes watching cool James Dean drag on a cancer stick was a powerful image for a young kid, and when it comes to teenagers, putting up warning labels will do about as much good as the Surgeon General's warnings on the packs. Bobby is right, all you have to do is tell a kid his breath smells like a sewer while he's talking to you after he's just finished a smoke and it will make more of a lasting impression on him than his watching a hundred anti-smoking tv spots. Doing the anti-smoking campaigns is not a bad thing and it has been shown statistically that they are effective (I still rotate three anti-smoking PSAs in our attraction reel along with a number of other PSAs), but getting down and personal with teens about how uncool it looks, how it makes them look like idiots, how it makes their skin grey and how it makes them stink is a lot more powerful.