Those dark October days are coming.

Ideal days for writing tales of terror. I’m looking forward to it. Harleyrider gave me a great idea in the comments thread at Frank’s place. Second hand smoke grenades. They don’t have to explode at all, they just need to contain as much smoke as one exhale and they can wipe out an office building. It doesn’t even have to be tobacco smoke as long as you tell them it is.

Extrapolating to third hand smoke grenades, those don’t need to have anything in them at all. Just something you can pull a pin out of and which will then fall in half. Tell a room full of drones it’s a third hand smoke grenade and that if you set it off, everyone in the room will eventually die.

Naturally, you can’t say exactly when they will die, but if the grenade goes off, it will be at least ten years sooner than they would have otherwise. None of them will get it. Watch them cower.

Then watch them spend the rest of their lives in terror, not knowing exactly when they will die. Don’t tell them, but neither does anybody else. They will enjoy spending the rest of their lives worrying about the end of it. Don’t spoil it for them. Not until they are on their deathbeds, then you can tell them it was all just made up, that there was nothing in the grenade but the laughter of babies and the scent of kittens. Oh, and a drop of puppy blood to hold it all together. Puppy blood is about as cute as it gets, surely?

October might come early this year. The chill winds of winter are already on the way. I have a good crop of tomatoes this year but have not yet seen a red one. Look at these damn things -

Click to make my fruits swell.

I’m going to have a lot of green tomato chutney this year, even if I smoke in the greenhouse every day.

Oh well, at least I won’t have to worry about Alzheimer’s or ulcerative colitis. I have not yet met an antismoking drone with either condition. If I ever do, I will take great and malicious delight in pointing out that if they had been smokers, they wouldn’t have suffered that disease.

Tobacco plants are doing okay but there are fewer of the really good ones this year. The trick of planting them in buckets means I can move them into the greenhouse if it turns out that the weather men have got it right for once, and the danger of frosts is really already here.

Some leaves are already going through the Junican/Rose process using T-shirts instead of towels. I have a lot of T-shirts from the days when we used to get actual summers and they don’t get a lot of use any more. Might as well do something with them.

I wonder if it’s worth telling those quitters who spend a fortune on patches that they could get the same effect by taping a leaf to their arm? They would indeed get the same effect. None at all. It would, however, save them an enormous amount of money because they could grow their own patches. With the size of the leaves, they’d only need one a week. We don’t have to keep the secrets of these plants all to ourselves, let’s share them with those trying to quit and poke the Pharmers in the eye at the same time as the taxman.

Then again, you’d get exactly the same quit rate with dockleaf or lettuce as you do with the patches. I will have a word with Man with a Van because I smell a money-spinning scheme here. It isn’t taxable until you can smoke it and if it’s lettuce, it isn’t taxable at all. Hmm. It is probably a public service and therefore eligible for Government funding. Just pay is for leaves and Duct tape and we’ll cut the smoking rate. We don’t really need to. ASH haven’t and they’re still raking it in.

Nicotine is water-soluble. It’s easily extracted and you could dump a barrel of it into a reservoir for a total cost to yourself of nothing but the barrel and the cost of taking it there. Would that make all the drones take up smoking since they are now addicted? Of course not. They won’t know what they think they’re addicted to until you tell them, and if you tell them then you don’t need to bother with the barrel. It doesn’t need to be there, they only need to think it is and they will believe themselves addicted. Every time they visit the shops they will be drawn to the mysterious green packs behind the tall black doors. The packs they had never given a second glance in the days before Prohibition. Ah, the hidden mysteries, like the secret tobacconist’s shop under the Sphinx or the Holy Grail. Did you know ‘grail’ was Aramaic for ‘ashtray’?

Enough ramblings for now. I have to get up in time to visit the post office tomorrow and the lazy swines only open during the day.