Slapping down the heretic.

I’ll start with the digression and get it out of the way.

I have no money at all (not quite true, my bank balance is in double figures and today is payday, there was a Thing but I have time to fix it) and I am smoking a cigar made by Jose L Piedra of Cuba.

How? The cigar was donated by a blog reader along with a box of others. They needed rehydrating and some need re-wrapping  I have loads of pipe tobacco, also donated. All this happened as a direct result of the smoking ban because if not for that ban, this blog would have remained as the lonely witterings of a random lunatic and would have a readership of five by now, if I was lucky.

The smoking ban focused this particular lunatic’s witterings. It made Frank Davis and others start up their own blogs. If the ban had not been so comprehensive we’d all be in our respective pubs with a pint or dram and a smoke and talking shite to strangers. We’d never have heard of each other and would still believe tobacco doesn’t grow here. Frank and Junican in particular might never have started blogs. I might have tired of it, with nothing insensible to say. There would be no ‘pro-smoking movement’ (there isn’t and never has been really) and the antismokers would have delighted in their partial ban that kept us out of places they wanted to visit. Everyone would have been happy and ASH would have had their funding stopped. Oh. I see the problem.

Nobody is promoting smoking. It’s not a club. My smoking does not depend on yours. You don’t pay me royalties for every fag you smoke. I don’t care whether you smoke or not. It has no effect on me. I am not ’empowered’ in any way if someone else decides to start smoking and am not ‘disempowered’ if a smoker stops. Although it should be noted that every time a smoker gives up, the angels cry. But hey, don’t let that worry you. It’s just a line for the antis to take out of context and get all heart-attacky about. They need that. They’re too dim to think up real arguments. All they have is hysterical hyperbole.

They have caused the creation of a world of the weak, where finding a cigarette in a box of mushrooms demands far more than a refund on the mushrooms. Sure, it’s not nice to find odd things in food. I have found slugs in salads often. I kiill them because I already have too many slugs, but slugs in salad are not strange. It’s what slugs eat when they can’t get tobacco.

The cigarette in question was unsmoked and looks like a menthol tab to me. There used to be a trend for people to have a cigarette behind their ear as some kind of fashion statement – does that still happen? Those of us with glasses never went for it. If so, I can see a factory worker forgetting about their ear-fag when emptying their pockets into a locker and maybe wondering where it went at the end of their shift. It really could be as simple and as trivial as that.

It’s no big deal. It’s annoying, but harmless. It has no effect on the mushrooms. It’s not a scorpion or a tarantula, both of which have turned up alive in imported foods. A refund is in order but what else does the guy want? A Nobel prize? An accolade from the Dreadful Arnott herself?

Which brings us, in a sort of roundabout way, to something that might one day be sharpened into a point.

The Nazi Horde of antismoking have joined in with the game of prosecuting Twitter users. In particular, they have had a pop at one who routinely shows them to be not only dicks, but small, limp and flaccid dicks. Button mushrooms, to keep within the very loose bounds of this blog’s focus. Viagra won’t help them, they’ll need lollipop sticks and elastic bands and a good dose of latex prosthesis to get anywhere near something that would make a shrew excited.

There are many silly things in their complaint but I was most taken with this one –

 

– Fake book cover including one of our copyrighted images (also infringing Penguin’s rights):

Penguin? Have they asked Penguin if they care? I doubt it. I also doubt Penguin care. A publisher getting free publicity isn’t likely to give a damn. I wouldn’t. Heck, I don’t. I revel in bad reviews as well as in good ones. It all means somebody read it. That’s what I wrote it for and it was meant to make you feel uneasy. It was meant to scare you.

Besides, there is a part of copyright that covers fair use and parody. All my scientific papers, all my books, and everyone else’s, are copyrighted., If nobody was ever able to quote any part of them they’d be no use at all. Parody is allowed under copyright law. You can take an image and change it. None of ASH’s whines have any basis in reality, not even in ‘law’.

They have nothing. Nothing. They never had anything real to argue with. All they ever had was Puritanism and made-up rubbish and schoolyard threats. This is the cult Moribund has joined, along with the House of Lards. It’s the cretinous groaning the Cleggeron Coagulation bow down before. The controlling influence behind the Scottish Nannying Puritans. All of them.

Voting for them should be classed as more addictive and deadly than tobacco. It is the most lethal addiction on the planet today. They cause harm to you, and you keep doing it? And you call smokers stupid? Get a grip.

There was one voter who cried all the water out of his body, and another who threw up her own pelvis bone after realising what they had voted for. It’s a fucking disgrace. (Ta, Prog, but I still can’t keep a straight face when saying it).