Post: #26

Post: #27

I voted cigarette because the subject-line is about "cool".

Smoking tobacco as a thing, aside of the addiction and micro-attention bumps from the nicotine, is about giving a favorable impression if it fits your persona, style, present atmosphere and if you can make it "speak for you" even when you are not speaking.

On my terms:

* Cigarettes: slow burning, non-FSC filtered if I can find them these days. FSC cigs smoke themselves and are therefore bullshit. Non-FSC tobacco cigs burn slow and easy. I grew up on Marlboro Reds and Camel Shorts back in the early 80's (a whole different breed of cigs than that are out there these days). Had a Winston Hard mode in the 90's after I got back from Desert Storm. I have rarely ever smoked more than a pack of 20 a day for the past 35 years.

* Cigars: good if you are dressed up and it's from a good company (like Nat Sherman). I like non-cured, but I like to dip the lip-end in a high quality brandy every so often to humidify the burn and add some flavorous alcohol to the inhalation. Best done when suited up or in a tux and you can make the stink for everyone else worth their while.

* Pipes: aside of a corn-cob one with straight unflavored tobacco I smoked in my teens and then again for kicks in my late 20's... I could never really get into them. Too many flavors and styles... although I admit, if I followed my Professorship career I abandoned decades ago for the tech world, I'd probably be in a study right now sipping on my blackberry/rum/sweet-lemon tobacco while arguing about ancient Egyptian religion with a feminist PhD over Isis and Nephty's real roles in Osiris's life (and death and resurrection)... and reading this forum on some dumbass newday Macintosh "be different" machine on a fourth screen.

All of that aside...

A previous poster made a comment about all the bad things that have happened to politics and the world since smoking tobacco got blocked and stigmatized... I'm with him on that idea. The world is a much worse place now that smoking has been assaulted and violently made into a loser's proposition.