stop me, lest I meme again

Four hours left until I can get the hell out of here. And it's dead like Lady Di.

So. What do you want to talk about?

you know where I bet would be the worst place to have a heart attack? during a game of charades.

Anybody who spends any time hanging out with me knows that I am brutally allergic to cigarettes. Over the last ten years my allergy and my asthma has gotten to the point where I can't be near the stuff at all - even the stale smoke coming off the clothes of somebody I'm sitting next to can have my lungs contracting in protest.

But I don't react nearly as strongly to pipe or cigarette smoke. If I get it blown in face I get about the same amount of a reaction as I would to getting a face full of street dust. In fact I've smoked the odd cigar and enjoyed it. Which leads me to believe that I'm not actually allergic to tobacco, but to something in the curing process or additives that are specific to cigarettes.

A few years ago there was an anti-smoking ad that showed a couple of teenagers diving into an oily-looking pool while a text-over listed all the toxic ingredients that are found in cigarettes. Tar. Formaldehyde. Ammonia. Now I don't know how many of those things are also found in other tobacco products or are just a by-product of burning leaves and twigs and bug-poo and sucking them into your lungs, but it's a well-known fact that cigarette manufacturers add all kinds of glop specifically intended to make the things more addictive.

And I gotta wonder, why do we let them?

Everybody knows quitting smoking is hard, whether you've actually ever smoked or not. At this point I think I've still known more people who have successfully quite heroin or cocaine than I've know people who have successfully quit smoking, and it's not like I've spent a lot of time hanging around with illegal drug users in the last decade. Yet we still allow manufactures to lace their product with toxic chemicals that are specifically designed to make it harder.

Given the amount of money that we fork over through our taxes on health care, wouldn't it make more sense to tell the cigarette companies to knock that shit off and stop trying to poison us?

And maybe if they did I'd be able to sit next to my friends on a bar patio again.

forewarned, my drugies

From okoshun. This list of 25 skills every man should have from PC Magazine. Stuff I can do is bolded, things I may have done once and/or think I know how to do but have not done is italicized. Things I'd like to learn how to do, but have not yet had a chance to is in red.

( cut for length )

This particular list reminded me of Robert Heinlein's list of things that every human being should be able to do. So I tried to apply the same rules to it.

( cut part 2 )

I find the evolution pretty interesting. I'm curious to see how the list looks in another 20 years. (splice a gene. build a generator...)