Cigar bands - on or off?

[storeynicholas]

I mention to Frog in Suit, one song below and here is a bit of another one, Noel Coward's morale-boosting, wartime, London Pride:

London Pride has been handed down to us.
London Pride is a flower that's free

Here's it all. I wish more people would take it to heart.

http://www.leoslyrics.com/listlyrics.ph ... %2Bsod8%3D

NJS

Incidentally, this is a wonderful song. I first heard it on the radio a few weeks ago and enjoyed it immensely.

He also wrote a great number of humorous songs and some of the lesser known ones such as Uncle Harry Mrs Wentworth Brewster are just as amusing as Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Mrs Worthington. There are DVDs and some include snippets of dialogue from his plays - the best bits with Gertrude Lawrence: such as "Very flat, Norfolk.".
NJS

[pvpatty]

Mad Dogs and Englishmen is one of my favourites. My introduction to Coward came a few years ago when I went and saw his wonderful play, Private Lives. Fantastic dialogue.

[storeynicholas]

pv patty - watch out, especially, for the live Las Vegas recordings - complete with audience reaction and also those with Gertrude Lawrence. The plays are great - fast, witty, perceptive - The Vortex, Tonight At Eight Thirty, Private Lives etc. They do (deservedly) play in London still. and, maybe elsewhere too. Sometimes, it amuses me to think what the reaction of some of these people like Fleming, Coward and Churchill would have been to the smoking ban - it would probably be quite amusing to hear their reaction to:
[/i]Gentlemen, kindly extinguish all smoking materials
NJS

[Costi]

[...] the heart of the matter: it is the presumption of those who make the laws that, as a nation, the British are so ill-mannered that we need a law such as this and that they are the people to show us how to behave. It is their 'holier than thou' attitutude that gets up my nose and sticks in my craw - and causes me more discomfort than any amount of smoke blown in my face. They should have better things to do than this - they could try repairing the ruptured society that has evolved over the last 50 years - or even try saving the planet [...]

I see your point, but I would say that, in the UK as much as elsewhere, this ban started not from the presumption that people might smoke in public places denying others their right to spend a pleasant evening in a good restaurant, but rather from the FACT that smokers did precisely this as a matter of course. Those who would not have done it before out of good sense are simply unaffected by this ban, even morally, as we don't feel revolted when we go through security check at an airport. I don't think all members of any nation are civilized enough that laws regulating conduct in public are superfluous and would only result in citizens feeling insulted by authorities.
One more thing, of course there are more serious matters than tobacco smoke, but if my house needs repainting it doesn't follow that it is ridiculous of me to clean the toilet in the meantime.
In my opinion it is simply a cause not worth defending. If the matter is taken personally and subjectively, it shows disregard for others. But if smoking were prohibited alltogether and outlawed, then I agree this would be a severe affront to personal freedom and I might even go out on the streets to protest against it!

[storeynicholas]

I noticed that the opposition in the UK to smoking in public started up following two tragic incidents: the first was a fire on a sleeper train in about 1978, in which several people died and the second was the King's Cross fire in which many people died. The sleeper train fire was on my home run - Paddington to Penzance (ah! the Cornish Riviera Express!). After the fire (the cause of which I do not know for certain), they stopped selling matches on trains. An important contributing factor to the cause of the deaths was that there was no sufficient alarm system. After the matches ban, they began running out of cigarettes. Smokers were blamed for the King's Cross fire - rather than the cheap-skate station owners and their negligent, deliquent cleaning contractors who allowed litter to build up under the escalators - and before long, partly as a diversionary tactic, smoking became a dangerous public menace. If one's house needs to be painted, one might well reasonably still clean the loo - but one could not reasonably clean the loo when the roof has blown off!!
NJS

[Bishop of Briggs]

Costi, in a recent consultation document, the British government has floated the idea of banning smoking in private dwellings. How they would enforce it is not discussed. Once the government gets away with banning a perceived vice in one area, it will try to extend it again and again until there is a total ban.

[storeynicholas]

Costi, in a recent consultation document, the British government has floated the idea of banning smoking in private dwellings. How they would enforce it is not discussed. Once the government gets away with banning a perceived vice in one area, it will try to extend it again and again until there is a total ban.

I also heard that there was some move to ban smoking in the street. Such state control of the individual is redolent of systems that were tried for a while and then abandoned elsewhere.
NJS

[Costi]

I don't know if the roof has been blown off the house or the situation out of proportion
I lived in one of those "elsewhere" countries until I was 13. Imagine that governmental control went so far as to ban abortions - so they were practically under your sheets, if not really between your thumb toes. I would be the last to endorse over-control by the government. Individuals should be free, but not free to harm or disturb others.
I think the smoking in public ban has little or nothing to do with it being considered a vice, as long as smoking is not totally prohibited. I doubt any western gov.t will adopt such a measure any time soon. Following the principle that we may live or kill ourselves as we choose and it's not the government's business, perhaps cocaine should be freely available, too. Heavy drinking and the use of drugs have much the same personal and social consequences - and alcohol is not prohibited (anymore, if we refer to particular countries).
In my view tobacco is more similar to drugs than to alcohol: irrespective of quantity it is harmful and addictive.
But what would a smoker say when his son became a drug addict? That the gov.t should have banned the drug? Hmm...

On one hand we complain (and rightly, too) that respect and manners are no longer what they used to be. I doubt a young man of 70 years ago would have lit a cigarette in a smoking train compartment (where he had a perfect right to) without first asking permission of any ladies present; if such ladies faintly alluded they could open the window a bit and it would be allright, he would have given up without further comment. On the other hand, when the situation gets so bad that home education and manners are not enough to keep the balance anymore and a government acts to restore it, we complain that our personal freedom is being challenged. What personal freedom? To behave rudely? But that is exactly what we are deploring!
The following piece of news is said to have won a Pullitzer prize: "On the subway, a young man offered his seat to an elderly lady. Deeply moved, the lady fainted. When she recovered, the lady thanked the young man. Overwhelmed, the young man fainted."

[storeynicholas]

Costi - the premise to your argument is that society is so far decayed that manners have to be replaced by legislation. I find the probable truth and easy acceptance of this more shocking that any smoking ban. I should explain my point about the roof being off the house. The regular police force has insufficient numbers to ensure a full time presence in St Austell, Cornwall - the biggest town in the county. The nearest full time station is 14 miles away. Therefore, in the event of an emergency, forget a quick response. However, there are plenty of 'Community Support Officers' (basically untrained busy bodies) whose chief function appears to be imposing on-the-spot fines for dropping litter (from which fines they take a commission as an incentive to their enforcement activities). Moreover, the local authority employs officers whose job (or part of whose job) is to enforce the smoking ban in pubs. So the end result is that there is an officious gestapo for several kinds of petty crime and no one to deal with serious crime. The fact that serious crime is getting out of control was recently underlined by at least one Chief Constable. My opinion, for what it is worth is that when a society begins to decay and gets beyond a point of recall, there are two options: the first is to play the fiddle and laugh and the second is to give the appearance of control by regulating not the wolves but the sheep.
NJS

[Costi]

I am sure those employed to fine citizens who litter the streets or smoke in pubs are not the same who could deal with murders instead. Until a police headquarters can be set up locally, the municipality may well continue to keep the toilets clean. I am sure the situation is not the same in other cities, where both litter and smoking patrols and police forces are present, but the stabbings go on undisturbed in spite of it. Anyway, I don't see the rising crime rate really as a valid ARGUMENT that smoking need not be banned in public places. Criminality is not easy to control without a strong-handed government that imposes many general restrictions affecting all citizens. It's not easy to defend a heard of sheep against wolves if you let them scatter over three hills and roam freely. And, as we learned throughout these posts, citizens won't easily agree to limit the exercise of their liberties for the greater good of the community.
I know we could go on like this forever and that is why I go on: I hope it will make us live forever to debate it!

[storeynicholas]

Costi - the most reasonable support that I can muster for allowing smoking in public is to ask the question: would this scene not be diminished by the absence of smoke?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQ06jtaYvk

The proper tango follows the opening (which is, frankly, ridiculous) - well, I say tango but maybe more apache.

NJS

[storeynicholas]

I am sure those employed to fine citizens who litter the streets or smoke in pubs are not the same who could deal with murders instead. Until a police headquarters can be set up locally, the municipality may well continue to keep the toilets clean. I am sure the situation is not the same in other cities, where both litter and smoking patrols and police forces are present, but the stabbings go on undisturbed in spite of it. Anyway, I don't see the rising crime rate really as a valid ARGUMENT that smoking need not be banned in public places. Criminality is not easy to control without a strong-handed government that imposes many general restrictions affecting all citizens. It's not easy to defend a heard of sheep against wolves if you let them scatter over three hills and roam freely. And, as we learned throughout these posts, citizens won't easily agree to limit the exercise of their liberties for the greater good of the community.
I know we could go on like this forever and that is why I go on: I hope it will make us live forever to debate it!

There was a police station. They built a new one and it is largely empty, except for the traffic wardens and the litter wardens and someone measuring them all for jack boots!
NJS

[storeynicholas]

Following the principle that we may live or kill ourselves as we choose and it's not the government's business, perhaps cocaine should be freely available, too. Heavy drinking and the use of drugs have much the same personal and social consequences - and alcohol is not prohibited (anymore, if we refer to particular countries).
In my view tobacco is more similar to drugs than to alcohol: irrespective of quantity it is harmful and addictive.
But what would a smoker say when his son became a drug addict? That the gov.t should have banned the drug? Hmm..."

Taking a number of points here - cocaine does seem to be quite freely available, as well as heroin and crack and cannabis and I am quite sure that proscribed drug-taking has increased in my lifetime to a phenomenal extent; necessitating the creation of rehabilitation hostels in many towns in Britain. This results from failures in the educational system and failures in the family as well as failures in the stamping out of the dealing and distribution networks. Heavy drinking is more pronounced in some countries than others and I fear that the UK is near the top of the league for this and the consequential (unregulated) roving gangs of drunken yobos who seem to find pleasure in beating seven bells out of the vulnerable, as well as all the other crippling social ills of alcoholism. How on earth can you say that tobacco smoking is equivalent to addiction to heroin or cocaine in its overall effect? You say that it is more 'harmful and addictive' than alcohol! But name me, apart from stealing tobacco, a tobacco-related crime. So far as alcohol is concerned there is a whole raft: from drunken driving. public order offences, to crimes of minor and serious violence. And then you add 'irrespective of quantity' - how can that be? Say, I have 5 cigarettes a day, sitting on my verandah, what on earth harm, in the great run of things, is that doing to anyone? Whereas, a drunken wife-beater, downs his eight pints of Pilsner and returns to his cowering family. As to the smoker and his drug-addicted son: if the son is a minor, this is likely to be largely attributable to his family environment and if he is an adult, ultimately it's his own fault. However, I hold no views that currently proscribed drugs should be legalized and, anyway, I don't need to go that far. Using tobacco wisely, is, for me, one of life's great pleasures and I don't see why the tobacco should be dashed from my lips by knee-jerk legislation, worthy of the totalitarian regimes whose shackles were broken to world acclaim. But actually....... even they didn't ban smoking. Bishop of Briggs makes a very sound observation - now they are looking at banning smoking in the home - no doubt children's health and the cleaner's health will be the pretext if they take it forward - and you can bet that disaffected children, thwarted in some enterprise of their own, and quizzling neighbours will be heavily involved in enforcement, spawning rows, vendettas and, of course, yet another tier of pettifogging gestapo, equipped with air-testing equipment and emergency protection orders for children. These people would benefit society far more if they were encouraged to become tailors and shoemakers.
NJS

[storeynicholas]

Costi - the most reasonable support that I can muster for allowing smoking in public is to ask the question: would this scene not be diminished by the absence of smoke?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQ06jtaYvk

The proper tango follows the opening (which is, frankly, ridiculous) - well, I say tango but maybe more apache.

NJS

What? now quoting myself? Well to correct an omission - this scene set Valentino on the road to stardom but the girl - the scene would not have been possible without her - Beatrice Dominguez - died (from complications following an operation - just as he did a little later), before the film was even released. And an interesting fact is that the cinematographer was the same man responsible for Sunset Boulevard, with its reference to Valentino.; indeed Gloria Swanson had known him well.
NJS

[Guille]

I agree completely with NJS's latest post. Plus, I have a few more points.

Costi, you say tabacco is more like drugs than like alcohol, I think alcohol is more like drugs than tabacco. The primary difference between tabacco and drugs is that drugs affect not only lungs and other organs, but also the brain. And although tabacco may affect the brain indirectly, as a tranquilizer, it is not harmfull to any function of the brain. On the contrary, alcohol affects the brain's functioning in many ways and on many different types of functions (logical, memory, spatial...).

The only thing in which tabacco is more similar to drugs than alcohol is in addiction - although only a small percentage of alcohol drinkers are alcoholics (and that's not as true as it is believed, because many of us who drink alcohol only occasionaly are also addicted but to a lesser extent), most of the people who smoke tabacco are addicted to it, just as most if not all who consume drugs are addicted to them. But that's a misleading notion, because tabacco itself is not what makes most people addicted to it, but the added chemicals on cigarrettes with filters. The proof of this is that most of the people who smoke only pure tabacco (cigars) are not addicted, not needing to consume it on a daily basis nor their bodies needing it, but it's more us willing to smoke a good cigar whenever we feel like it.

Just to give a concrete example, as I write this post I'm listening to Edith Piaf's best recordings whiles I philosophize, and I'm smoking a magnificent H.Upmann Magnum 50 and drinking what was left of a Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin bottle from a recent celebration, and I can feel how the champagne is affecting my abilities to think and write much more than the cigar, which, on the hand, is actually enhacing them - reflection is always imrpoved when relaxed, whereas alcohol is a depresive.