Tightly Wound

Two words: Harry Potter.

I rebelled against him as a kid. I called him Carl Sandbag and started to hate rutabagas (no, really) on the power of those smarmy stories.

I've got my taste for rutabagas back, but I'd still rather read a sandbag than Sandburg.

Hah! You think that's bad. Try having been born in Galesburg and sharing your feelings about Ol' Carl. And living in Chicago most of your life and cringing whenever the fog. . . you get the idea. Gives me the grues, he does.

At least we none of us live in Winesburg, Ohio (to conflate a buncha burgs). That would turn one off of all 20th-century literature.

Meg -

I have never met anyone who has actually eaten a rutabaga. As a child, I thought they were a fictional food.

But it is pleasing to see that others share my Sandburg-hate.

If you've seen The Insider or read anything by Jeff Wigand, I'm not sure how you can think of tobacco companies as anything but evil.
Anyway the technology to make cigarettes fire safe has been around for a very long time, long before the well-deserved lawsuits against the industry began. Moreover, the cigarette companies' arguments against fire-safe arguments don't hold water. See:
http://www.jeffreywigand.com/insider/moakley.html

Chris -

Not championing tobacco companies here--grew up in Winston-Salem. But a whole commercial the gist of which is that cigarettes are bad because they can BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSE!!!!! just tickles my funnybone. Cigarettes are bad because smoking them fills you with chemicals that cause cancer and a host of other diseases. Burning down the house by accident, while bad, is not a hazard specific to tobacco.

It's like the fact that they're dangerous and addictive is no longer bad enough, and people won't be swayed not to smoke unless we point out that they'll ALSO destroy your property!

Sort of like saying that it's not dangerous enough to point a loaded gun at someone and pull the trigger, but the gun could also get dropped on your foot and break a bone! So don't buy a gun! Eeek!

It's true that the most delightful thing about rutabagas is their name. Why call them swedes when you've got access to lovely rrrooootabayyyyyga? But I'm a lover of root vegetables -- neeps (pars- and turn-), tatties, and all. Well, except for beets, which taste like just-mined magnesium to me. Or is it uranium, I forget.

Frivolity aside, are we destined to find our state authors tiresome? I certainly had to leave Tennessee to appreciate James Agee. And no distance from Georgia will endear Sidney Lanier to my heart.

Or maybe it's just the South. I don't have problems with California's many authors (although those auteurs are another thing).

The Truth.com commercials always make me want to start smoking just to spite the preachy, smarmy assholes.

No shit. I mean, really. Smoke, in your lungs, bad for you? Well, no WAY, dudes. Thanks for that tip, I never might have had that insight if not for your heavy-handed propaganda campaign. Thanks again.

Bastards.

What I feel for Mr. Sandburg just might be worse than hate; complete and utter indifference.

Well there's a fallacy that goes we shouldn't worry about x because y is a worse problem. The more important question is how severe of a problem x is. I'd think it would be pretty silly to worry about cigarette fires if only about a dozen people were killed every year but they actually cause 1000 deaths and 3000 injuries each year according to NFPA. As the ignition source in fires, they're the largest single cause of deaths.

Hang in there - in a couple of years your child will be old enough for The Jungle Books. Oh best beloved.

Heck, I meant The Just-So Stories. My brain has rotted.

I thought of you, BAW, when I heard some politician on the radio (National Pinko Radio, of course -- and I'm a pround pinko) fulminating about how we need to give an R rating to all movies in which a character smokes, unless that character contracts lung cancer onscreen. He insists that 200,000 innocent children will be saved from the grips of the demon weed per year.

Frankly, the fulminating against the other demon weed is more entertaining. *Cheroot Madness* is never going to beat out *Reefer Madness* in a cult-movie face-off.

I have to chime in with the cigarette smoke burning down houses is bad crowd -- when I was a kid, my neighbors' house burned down, killing all three of the kids in it (though not the parents, who managed to get out) -- cause of the fire being the cigarettes the mom had dumped from the ashtray before she went to bed.

I mean, yeah, it's nasty that they give people lung cancer. It's also sort of bad that they burn people alive in their beds. I don't see how that's going overboard with the truth, exactly.