Home from holiday – more on that later. The new battery for the Acer arrived while I was away. Windows is definitely doomed on that little machine. The last few days it has insisted on running a full filesystem check on drive C at startup which takes ages to report ‘Nope, it’s all fine’. So that one is getting a new brain, and then the desktop replacement… no, save it all for later.
Via #Octabber on Farcebok comes this interesting snippet. It’s in the mainstream media – and yet it’s what we’ve all been saying for years! Things are changing. Times are turning against the Puritans once again. They are getting desperate now.
One of the ASH drones was on the TV news while I was offline. She insisted that a blanket ban on Electrofags was the only safe way because ‘they expose bystanders to nicotine and other harmful chemicals’.
Ahem. Nicotine is not harmful, never has been and unless you concentrate it, take drugs to suppress your gag reflex and then drink it, it never will be. If nicotine kills people (as ASH love to imply) then every doctor who has ever prescribed nicotine patches and/or gum, along with all those involved in production and supply, are guilty of attempted mass murder.
The other ‘harmful chemicals’ are propylene glycol (food grade, used as a thickening agent in many foods and also in medical atomisers), food-grade flavourings, and steam. If those are harmful, a whole raft of food producers will be in the dock beside the medics and the Pharmers and the shops selling anything containing any of this stuff. Since, as ASH like to say, the date of guilty knowledge is long past, there can only be one verdict.
Taking things to their logical conclusion is fun, isn’t it? The ASH drones are either so desperate they have given up any form of thinking ahead, or, perhaps more likely, they are incapable of thinking ahead.
The smokophobes prefer to take things to their illogical conclusion, because they are all stupid and driven only by spite and hate. Hence their latest claim that Hollywood has decided to use Electrofag as a prop to denote the bad guy.
Never ones to let facts get in the way of a good spite-fest, they begin with a version of logic so twisted you could screw it into a concrete block and hang a bulldozer on it.
But tobacco companies hoping that e-cigarettes will receive similar treatment are in for an unpleasant surprise.
Sigh. Tobacco companies are really hoping Electrofag falls flat. The antismoker mind is so bizarrely warped that they actually believe the tobacco companies want their biggest competitor ever to succeed. So far have the Puritans conflated anything resembling smoking with actual smoking, they will soon declare that someone chewing a pencil proves that tobacco companies make pencils.
Actually, if a pencil-like object were made of compressed tobacco it could be a new Sneaky Snus. You could even put graphite down the middle of it and actually use it as a pencil, then surreptitiously bite a bit off the end. Save the shavings when sharpening, of course, then pack them into little paper tubes to avoid littering. You can burn them later. This might never actually happen but the mere thought of it should be enough to soil some antismoker underwear.
The rest of the story has no more logic than that opening statement. It claims that Electrofag is to be used as the new ‘black hat’ for the bad guy – the usual one is an English accent these days. I recall seeing the film of Stephen King’s ‘Dreamcatcher’. Even in that film, the evil alien had a proper ‘what-ho chaps’ English accent.
The real story is that the actor has a pause in action and the director doesn’t know what to do to avoid having him just stand there. So he puffs on an Electrofag.
Why not a real cigarette? Those have been excised from films in the name of Righteousness. Soon, Electrofags will be too. And chewing on pencils. And toothpicks. The smokophobes are getting seriously deperate now. Soon, even the Daily Mail will notice. Well, maybe not ‘soon’. Eventually.
How far we have come from the 1945 film ‘Dead of Night’ where the killer was identifiable from the beginning to those in the know.
He was the only one not smoking.
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Incidentally, it’s nearly time for Octabber again. Good of the smokophobes to pick October for their daft ‘Stoptober’ game. That’s when the annual crop is just about ready to burn.
So those of us growing our own only need to produce a month’s worth of free smokes. There’s no danger of any tax going in for that month.
underdogs bite upwards 
Re your “Dead of Night” note: one of the ways I try to educate younger folks about how purely artificial the antismoking mindset is, is by pointing them back to 20th century literature with a challenge to find references to “stinky cigarettes,” “reeking smoke”, and “kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray” etc. (Google’s NGram does a nice job on these things btw.)
Isaac Asimov was actually mildly antismoking, but even HE wrote a short story similar to that “Dead of Night” thing in that the psychopathic murderer was eventually discovered due partly to his totally unique craziness of not allowing visitors to smoke in his home. It turned out that he’d probably burned up his child in a smoking-caused fire 20 years earlier and it had made him crazy.
Re Efag’s “harmful chemicals.” Anytime you run into that argument online refer people to http://bit.ly/FDAstudy where they’ll find TobakkoNacht’s analysis of the formaldehyde claim etc.
– MJM
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Ahh! OK! The Asimov story is titled “The Dead Past.”
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This is where we differ. I make no attempt to re-educate the drones. I prefer to drive them deeper into their insanity until they are too scared to leave their homes or even open a window.
They could try visiting the doctor for help but… as they all know, all smokers are ill all the time so every seat in every waiting room is contaminated now. Every surface in there has been touched by, and coughed on by, smokers. The same is true of hospitals and ambulances. Taxis, buses, trains and planes.
They gave us ‘no safe level’. I give them ‘no safe place’. Seems like a fair trade to me.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you – I’ve been trying for ages to remember the name of that fantastic film! The kind of film that used to be shown on a Friday at 11pm when films were worth watching – I thought the ending was seriously scary.
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Jay, heehee… at first I thought your response was in answer to a posting I’d made somewhere else earlier this evening about another … er… fine film:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092859/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
( In case there’s anything wrong with that link: “Deathrow Gameshow” a seriously funny *bad* comedy from 1987. Kind of a movie Leggy might produce if he were a film buff and was having a lighthearted moment. )
– MJM
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The entire film is on YouTube – or at least, it was. I downloaded it using RealPlayer when I last saw it, in case it vanished.
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It’s inevitable that efags will get the same restrictions that cigarettes have; a national radio station reported the story this week with the headline “The WHO have recommended that ecigarettes should be banned in public places due to fears over second hand SMOKE”. The manufacturers will try to point out the obvious mistake but drones will hear SHS and that’s it, job done.
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Among ther worst-rated comments on that story is a new one. Someone claims that a house they rented was left littered with used Electrofag cartridges and smelled like a seedy old pub.
It’s made-up crap, of course, by an idiot who thinks you stub out the used Electrofags like a cigarette and who thinks the things put out a smoky smell. I’ve tried several and there is no lingering odour at all.
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Leggy, the file check indicates your hard drive is on the way out.
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The little Acer is solid state. No moving parts. So it probably needs a total reformat. I hope it doesn’t need new memory chips – I’m not sure that’s even possible!
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Model number please.
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It’s an Acer Aspire One, model number is a load of Chinese characters followed by ZG5.
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If it’s the one with the SSD (8gb), the drive may be failing, as I said.
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Replacing that drive looks like a right sphincter-crinkler of a job. If it is dying though, and the part is cheap, I’d give it a try.
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