Smoke 'em if You got 'em

If you are compelled to have a beer every hour, on the hour every day from the minute you wake up until you go to bed at night, you have a drinking problem. If you keep a six-pack of Schlitz on the nightstand, you should seek help. If you take frequent breaks at work to go outside and drink a beer, evidence would suggest that you're an alcoholic. Alcoholism is frowned upon in todays society and folks who partake in this dangerous past-time tend to have other problems, great big ones, with nasty pointed teeth. But what if we substituted candy bars for beer? Is the same behavior just as dangerous? Instead of pickling your brain and running over pedestrians with your car, you'd be spiking your blood sugar to the moon and looking like Gilbert Grapes mom. Even a bottle of soda an hour would be more than your system can handle. There are studies showing that even too much water in a day can have detrimental health effects. The point, anything in excess can be bad while moderation can be acceptable, sometimes beneficial. They're examples of a disorder. If you just have to have a slice of cake on the hour, you're a cake addict. If you have a slice of cake after dinner with a cup of coffee, you're having dessert. If need to bust out a piece of birthday cake when you step out of the supermarket on your way to the car or vice versa, you have a problem. If people decide that they don't like public drinking, they ban it. The public part, not the drinking part, that didn't work. When it comes to cake or soda, the only victims, butterflies aside, are themselves so we're a little more tolerant(but civilized folks cast an evil eye). Bad behavior in public places should be unacceptable. There should be shame. Excessive smoking is bad behavior and should be shamed like bad behavior. People should not be tolerant of smoking in public. That's where the effort should be spent. It's wearisome to see an all out war being waged, relentlessly, against a product that is being misused. The war should be on the addicts that misuse the product. The folks that enjoy tobacco products in moderation and in a private setting should not be categorized with the "tobaccoholics" (it hurt me to type that). Tobacco has a terrible reputation due to the millions of tobacco abusers who don't have the personal discipline to not smoke a cigarette. Anyone who enjoys a smoke or two a day is counted among those who physiologically need twenty or more cigarettes a day and called a smoker. If you have a drink or two every day, you're not an alcoholic but have a smoke with those drinks and your insurance premiums double. It's likely that a diet of twenty to forty snickers a day will kill you faster than the cigarettes would. It's a shame that if someone has a problem with something, our government tends to try to prevent everyone from having access to it. It's like throwing a giant anchor on any chance of societal progress. How can any society succeed when it hinders those who can because there are some who can't? If I like to have a smoke or two in the evening with a beer, I am neither an alcoholic nor a smoker. Tobacco can be used responsibly.

Yay Windmills

All of a sudden I'm pro-windmills. Sure, they're unsightly and noisy but what if they work? I mean, I seriously doubt that a turbine the size of a Volkswagon that runs intermittently can supply enough power to really power much more than fifty houses, and I think I'm being generous with that figure, but think of the jobs they'll bring. Just a few minutes ago I saw an article that expressed concern that politicians are courting blue collar neighborhoods with hopes of making wind converts. This is proof that there are jobs in these windmills. Back in the Great Depression, the government created "busy-work" jobs to get folks working again. We could use a few of those jobs now. Worse case scenario, they don't work and we gotta tear them down. Hey, more jobs and srcap-metal to boot.

The Gull and the Conch

I was at the beach today and I saw something cool. I saw a sea gull pick a conch up in it's beak and fly up with it and drop it. It was a decent size conch, about five inches from the top of it's crown to the pointy part I always step on bare foot, and the gull brought it up pretty high for the drop. He, I really don't know if the bird's packing heat or not so one's as good as the other, brought the conch up for at least five drops before I stopped marveling at natures ingenuity and began wondering. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. We, people, don't have to worry about some giant bird coming along and picking up our house and dashing it against some rocks bent on eating us whole. Imagine how upsetting it would be to be sitting there watching Master Chef when all of a sudden your entire house is lifted a hundred feet into the air and dropped. Would life insurance cover something like that? If there were giant predators on the loose that occasionally swoop down and pick up a particularly plump dude and cart him off to feed to some hungry chicks, would it cost extra to be insured for that? Maybe it depends on where you live. Bad neighborhood in a flood zone with giant predators living nearby could really raise your premiums. This bird must have dropped that conch at least five times. I wanted to see it rip the little occupant out and gulp it down but it was taking too long so I started home. As I was walking I got to thinking. Wouldn't it make more sense if the gull dropped the conch on some rocks. The street's not far, it could drop the oversized sea snail on the black-top. Anything has to be better than repeatedly dropping it on the sand. It would fly up about thirty feet and, thump! The conch would land safely, unscathed, in the sand. I began to wonder if animals have stupid members of their species. Like, for example, we have Anthony Weiner. Seriously New York, you really ought to be ashamed of yourselves if you elect this guy. Do other sea gulls look at this guy and tell jokes about him and make fun of him behind his back? Does another gull tell them to stop that because they should realize that he has a learning disability and it's not his fault he's stupid? Have you condemned an entire breed of dog because the one you had might have been retarded. Maybe not all labs are as dumb as yours. Maybe you just got a slow one. It could be the same with personality. Some folks are inherently pretty cool while some dudes are just assholes. Maybe your dog isn't stupid, it could just be a jerk.