Day CCXI

Butts Kill Peeps

     “Wasn’t he like broke?

     “Yea, she took him ta da cleanahs, but he met a chick wit money down da, an they hooked up. So wid haw money an his luck, they getting richah, an richah. He’s back on top again.”

     “Man, I always said he was born with a rabbit’s foot up his ass, ya na!”

      “I noo det a long time ago, man. So wat ya doing?”

     “Same olde, dude, gotta oin a living ya na.”

    That was the last time I saw Chino, and I never heard another word about Jaime again.

     Everyday we learn something new, today I learned the land of Oz is drafting legislation to ban logos, and trademarks in the sale of tobacco. Wish we had that here. Down in Oz as of 2012, tobacco will be sold in plain brown paper bags; which will be printed with ominous graphics, and warnings against tobacco. Plus they are putting an extra .25 percent levy on it which they say will go into their health care system. We’re all the same in this world, I hope they do as they say, and not as our politicians do…which is to plough it into their pockets from a general purse. They also plan to put a stop to on line tobacco advertising.

     “Cigarettes aren’t cool, they kill peeps!”

      Oz claims, and rightly so, we need to stop coddling the industry. I also discovered that as of 2010 our Navy will ban smoking on submarines. Methunk it already was, after all it’s banned on airlines, and isn’t that almost the same? Damn, what took them so long?

     Before we came here, tobacco was a sacred herb, used by medicine men to relieve pain, to heal, and to communicate with spirits. When Chris discovered the new world, he found tobacco in Cuba, and took it to Europe. For a time it was just an ornamental plant in the Spanish, and Portuguese courts, and in the 16^th century Philipe II’s quack popularized it as a universal medicine.