Cigarettes

I love how healthy they are! Even The Flintstones agree! Wouldn't it be terrible if they were unhealthy? I'm glad I don't live in such a world!

What channel is The Flintstones on anyway?

And now this thread takes an abrupt and confusing turn in a completely different direction from the OPs purpose, whoever the OP even is.

Cigarettes don't awe me in the sense that I think there's anything good about them per se. What is darkly fascinating, though, is that despite going from an ubiquitous part of American life that was allowed and advertised basically everywhere and anywhere to being massively taboo, heavily taxed, almost completely unadvertised, banned from most public places...they're still hanging on. Just because there's no more ads and the MPAA is trying to excise them from movies and no reasonable person would flat out say Smoking Is Cool, cigarettes are still a huge, profitable business. The tobacco companies, behind their veneer of trying to help people quit, are probably gloating right now at how their product will never really go away.

Wait, that doesn't awe me. That's terrifying! But still worth considering...

What awes me is that people still smoke. I could get the job done faster by smashing my skull in with a hammer repeatedly.

I have a feeling that if you attempt to race someone where the grim reaper is the finish line and they have several boxes of cigarettes in front of them and you have a hammer, you're going to win quite handily.

But what if they choked themselves to death on the ciggys as you knocked yourself into unconsciousness?

I suppose if the goal was to knock on deaths door using the tools provided for you, but the skies the limit otherwise, one could certainly achieve the goal by just blocking anyway to inhale oxygen by stuffing the things in their nose and mouth.

by stuffing the things in their nose and mouth.

Surely I'm not the only one who thought of the "Gentlemen" meme...

*blows a smoke ring into the thread*

A cig at the end of a long day at work is awesome indeed.

I love how no one is extolling the health benefits of a fag.

Wait, that doesn't awe me. That's terrifying!

You can still be in awe of something terrible.

I loke Ayn Rand! Everybody Smokes and Smoking Is Cool! Thompson Cigars

edited 27th Sep '10 12:21:21 PM by secretist

The interesting thing about smoking in movies/plays/anime (in other words, moving visual media) is that it's a free/neutral action. It's one of the few things a character can do while standing/sitting idly, talking, walking, driving, or drinking. It especially works for the standing idly thing: a character standing or sitting and doing absolutely nothing else is boring to watch. Smoking makes it, in the rawest sense, a bit more interesting to watch. Which may feed into the Smoking Is Cool trope.

Also, it's notably (awesomely?) annoying how long cigarette butts take to decompose. They just sit there. Forever. So do dropped empty packs. Cigarette-related junk is practically the number-one form of litter on my college campus.

I'd say by now I've made quite a name for myself on the forums by suddenly inserting more serious posts into random and humorous threads. Every user has their style, I guess that's mine.

I do like your style, frog, its refreshing. Not that I'm not a goofball irl, but I like going to forums to, know, discuss things.

And smoking in movies- it is annoying that smoking is practically verboted in all movies now. What, people in the theater are gonna get second hand smoke from the screens?:p

Though I do admit seeing a character smoke in a movie, or especially reading descriptions of it in books, do make me jones for a cig myself.

It was all over multiple news outlets earlier this month or late in August: The MPAA has literally been tallying the number of "instances" of smoking in movies, and they say it's down from five years ago but it's still an awful lot.

I can see what they're trying to do here, but I'm not sure if it's really the best idea. I'm not exactly advocating smoking, but I don't think most people will pick it up just because some character in a movie (whether they were "cool" or not) did it. If no characters in movies did anything that public health authorities didn't want shown, it would be unrealistic. And that's not good.

Also, while I'm on my roll of saying what good things I can about cigarettes and smoking while avoiding making any complaints (as much as I might under other circumstances, this aint IJBM!), I will say one more thing. Cigarette packs have, in my estimation, changed appearance less than any other well-known product packaging in the past...oh...50 years or so, kind of? And that's because they work. I'm no graphic design student, but the use of bold color and simple forms on most cigarette packs knocks many more "politically correct" products out of the water. If I could just collect packs and never open them, I think they'd look real nice on display. I'm not actually going to do that, but it's worth a thought.

Over in Beaver Country at least, cigarette boxes always come with those WARNING: Smoking's bad for your health, you know! disclaimers complete with hideous image to go with it.

You know, as much as I hate cigarettes and the untold damage they have done to my family in the last ten years (Nana had a lung cancer scare, Uncle David had surgery done for bladder cancer, Grandpa almost had a stroke), I have to admit it: I have a weird, grudging respect for people who, in spite of all rational logic and laws imposed against them, still smoke. That kind of stubbornness is appealing, even if everything else about them isn't.

[/seriousmode]

If people really did pick up smoking from celebrities, one must wonder if Humphrey Bogart gets tired of getting kicked in the groin in heaven.

Really, if you wanted to kill yourself with a carton of cigarettes, the quickest way might be to just start eating them. Nicotine is potentially lethal at surprisingly low doses; there's enough of it (~60mg) in five or six normal cigarettes to kill the average non-smoker. In practice, you're not going to absorb all the nicotine in cigarettes by eating them, but still, I can't imagine it would take many.

Eating them? That sounds pretty gross. Like, I don't see how even a smoker would want to do that. Reminds me of Thank You For Smoking, with its attempted murder by nicotine patch overdose.

It's funny, I use cigarettes (and drinks and cars and stuff) to try to help define what some of my OCs are like as people, usually before I start in on more advanced characterization. Since there doesn't seem to be any universal standard as to what sort of people smoke what brands, just a bunch of stereotypes, I'm not sure how useful this is.

This thread could really just die now and we'd be none the worse for it...I still feel kind of uncomfortable for what I did to it. i mean, it was started by a sarcastic sockpuppet!!!

edited 28th Sep '10 5:08:09 AM by frog753

Smokes with cigawettes.

edited 28th Sep '10 5:09:29 AM by Bioelectricclam

@Bio:There was a The Boon Docks episode on that.

edited 28th Sep '10 9:00:43 AM by secretist