Aaaaaaaaand... we're back.
You know, once I quit smoking I figured that I would experience a cold like a normal person; instead of every little head cold being a two-week ordeal I'd be stuffy for three days and then get over it. (If you weren't aware, smoking while you have a cold makes your cold last a looooooong time.) This, however, does not appear to be the case, as I was sick for the better part of a week straight, though in fairness somewhat less so than was normal in the past. My cold, thankfully, never made it to the "hacking cough" phase, and for that I'm sure we're all eternally grateful.
After my recovery I made it down to Somers Point to hang out with my crew down there and for the first time in my life I went to a Japanese restaurant. Japanese restaurants can be somewhat difficult if, like me, you for the most part do not eat seafood. (For the record, I don't eat seafood unless I or someone I know and trust caught and cleaned it. You know how many things there are in a fish that can kill you?) So we're at the restaurant and I appear to have found the one thing on the menu that breathed gaseous oxygen before it decided to be food - Hibachi steak. I figure that even with all the other things that will be piled around the steak - rice, vegetables, etc - steak is, at its heart, pretty hard to screw up. It's steak, for god's sake.
Of our large group I'm the last one to order, and everyone else, being suicidal nutcases, is ordering vast quantities of exotic-sounding Mercury and Other Fish-Based Toxin Delivery Systems. They and the waitress/geisha are tossing back and forth all these Japanese (or at least Japanese-sounding) words, and after I order the waitress/geisha looks at me and very clearly says, "and how would you like that cooked?" like I'm at Nick's Roast Beef and the moment was totally ruined.
The food was great though, and my friends? The ones who ate sushi and eel and that water-dwelling shit? All dead. Ha ha, suckers!
Also, I am now totally down with the whole eating in a restaurant without shoes thing.
Driving back at 2:30 in the morning I was listening to the BBC World Service on NPR - I get twitchy if I don't hear an English accent at least once every 24 hours or so - the big story was that the UK is now entirely smoke-free in all public places (except the main terminal of Glasgow International, ba-dump-bump!) and how no one in England really gives a shit.
Except, of course, Joe Jackson.
You may or may not recall Joe Jackson. If you don't, that's okay, because he sucks. Imagine if, instead of being Elvis Costello, i.e. a vastly talented songwriter and performer who is, to put it charitably, not exactly the best-looking guy in the universe, you were an incredibly, horrifyingly untalented songwriter and performer and were, in fact, so hideously, mind-blowingly ugly that the subatomic structure of the very universe itself would recoil in horror at your approach and that all matter in your path would shunt itself into a parallel dimension when you were near to avoid your Medusa-like countenance. That's Joe Jackson. He's like Elvis Costello, only he sucks and is uglier. He had one semi-major hit in the US, "Is She Really Going Out With Him." He blows.
Anyway, this dickrag was so incensed at the smoking ban in New York in 2003 that he actually fled the city and the country and moved to England (where, it should be noted, he is fucking well from in the first place). He in fact wrote a song about the great injustice of having to go outside to smoke. No one, by any reputable accounting of the incident, cared. Now that a smoking ban has been enacted in England, he is so incensed that he is fleeing THAT country and moving to Germany.
Now understand, I do not say this as some kind of ex-smoker zealot, crusading against the evils of public smoking. If you want to smoke, go ahead. If you want to smoke near me, go ahead. I don't care. And when I did smoke I always tried to accommodate people I was with or near who did not appreciate it. I never once (I don't think) refused a polite request to please take my cigarette outside or flaunted someone's "no smoking in the house" rule. I don't especially care if people smoke or where they do it, nor do I care whether it is banned in public places (and similarly did not care when I did smoke). I care more about the fact that Joe Jackson is an obnoxious asshole whose songs suck and is so ugly that, if you are not properly shielded, his face could actually permanently sterilize you if you walked past him on the street.
Joe Jackson claims that a smoking ban is the first step towards a nanny or fascist state. Here's a hint, Joe: you are in England. You ALREADY live in a fascist state. The difference between our Colobus monkey of a president's attempt at secretly creating a fascist state and your government's long-since-successful implementation of one is that the English are much more pleasant and upbeat about it than we are. Here the government tries to curtail your rights and install a fascist architecture in secret and then acts like nothing happened (or, alternatively, like you're a terrorist for asking questions) when they get found out. In England, the situation is more like a nice gentleman in a top hat who says, "yes, well, here's a very short list of the rights you do have, here's a rather long list of the rights you DON'T have, and the tube will be here in precisely 94 seconds. Cheerio!"
And you know, Joe, a word of advice: if you're worried about living in a fascist state, Germany may not be the country for you.
JLK
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