I'm finally comfortable here at blogger. It's a sort of anonymity yet there is always a chance someone will latch onto it. And I'm quite pleased that I can keep the spam out of the comments, at first it threw me off; I was wondering what the hell the guy's comment was when it dawned upon me, it's a sales pitch, it's, it's SPAM. No more of that, toute suite.

Irlene is home for a few days, Eva and Connie are still with the dolphins off Raratonga. Funny thing is, Irlene set up a blog to write about her experiences with them and at the moment can't access it. Probably belongs to casalemedia, the folks who own MySpace.

Wow, my room is really hot for the first time in about ten or twelve days.

With prices on everything spiralling upwards, I bought a can of cigarette tobacco and a couple of packs of EZ Wider. Was gonna roll a few cigarettes when Stro asked me to wait while he reminded me of something. Cigarettes, he said, originated in Brazil and somehow came to the attention of the emperor Napoleon III in the 1840's, and the rest is history. But, he added, the first cigarettes were much, much bigger, they were cigar-sized and lasted much longer. Hmm. Stro's way of making a suggestion. Eight sheets of rolling paper later, I'd made a fair-sized godfatha out of tobacco, and ya know what? Milder, more nicotine, seems like less tar and it lasted almost twenty minutes. They're a pain to make, at the age of fity-seven I don't like doing tedious work with small results, but if I make three or four a day I think I can live with that and cut the cost of what I spend on stog's. By the way, any of the buy-one-get-one offers are pretty much a ripoff, they're like one-sixteenth of an inch shorter and they burn faster, so you wind up smoking four packs in the time you'd smoke three. When I was a kid my mother would time things (like cooking) by the number of cigarettes she smoked; in1954 an unfiltered Pall Mall would last for just about seven minutes. Today you're fortunate if you get five minutes out of anything beside Amercan Spirit or DuMaurier. Or Dunhills or Nat Shermans.

Since I'm on a roll here, many of the brands I knew when I was young have disappeared. They fall into two categories, those that had been around forever and those that began appearing in the 50's and 60's. Among the older brands were Picayune, Home Run, Sweet Caporal, Fatima, Murad (named for an Egyptian sultan who executed anyone using tobacco); later introductions included York, Oasis, Sano, Waterford, and Newport. Only Newpies survived.

One of the best books I ever read about tobacco was written by pipe-maker Carl Weber, the title is The Pleasures of Pipe-Smoking. He gives a lengthy and well-written story of how tobacco was introduced into Western culture, discusses the different species of tobacco, different kinds of pipes; mentions things about cigars and cigarettes (I think Stro was referring to the history of cigarettes as Weber wrote about them; he (Stro) read the book several times) I don't know whether it's still in print, it was published as a small paperback in the mid-60's.

To shift gears here a bit: on the MySpace front, it was gratifying that quite a number of people sent me their home e-mail addresses, now I won't have to worry about what i write falling into the void. And with that I shall close for the day; God be with you all.