Word: ashtrays
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Unlike picking the nose or chewing gum or other disgusting quirks that one can merely ignore, smokers literally force others present to participate, whether they like it or not. The visible detritus of smokers, the world's rudest people, is also noxious, since they consider the world their ashtray...
...roads lead to rum and last month they went down to Winter Haven, Florida, chasing the Red Sox Spring Training Tan. They didn't really arrive until the day they wandered out on this teak-wood deck with an ocean view and thatched umbrellas over the ashtray tables where you set the kind of Caribbean concoctions that come in gutted coconuts and topless pineapples; that was when, with the help of a little juice, Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville music came marimba-ing out of the loudspeakers. This is Florida, man! You may not be no pith helmet, mama honey...
...made a tremendous drug deal, you dumb bastard, Bell thought contentedly behind the inscrutable smile, and Reed disdainfully, with a sneer that spread across his face like jam on a child's that belied Merle Haggard, proletarian boots, and construction worker's cigarettes, picked a butt out of an ashtray overflowing with them. He lit it, burnt his nose, and Bell began to laugh, because it took all of three seconds for the match to flame up. "LSMFT," he mumbled. Camfort stopped, looked surprised, asked what? "I said," said Bell, taking great care with his words, "Lucky Strike Means Fine...
...average TV or radio studio, Canadian Novelist Mordecai Richler wrote recently that the best you can hope for "is something brown, reminiscent of coffee, poured into a Styrofoam cup that, in most cases, you are advised to hold onto as it must also serve as your on-camera ashtray." Authors sometimes deserve no better. When Gore Vidal appeared to do New York's Casper Citron radio show, recalls Citron, "he walked in and said, 'Cash my check for $50, get me a drink, and what's your name?' " Vidal admits that he does TV interviews...
These are the politer ploys in what has become a rather uncivil war. Fighting fire with ire, bumper stickers declaim: KISSING A SMOKER IS LIKE LICKING A DIRTY ASHTRAY. A bellicose lapel button declares: SMOKERS STINK. Since slogans do not extinguish cigarettes, many antis become vigilantes. A scourge at some business conventions these days is a self-appointed enforcer who goes around plucking butts from smokers' mouths. One vigilante tactic: when a fellow guest lights up after dinner, an antismoker dunks his hand in the smoker's water glass. "What the...!" expostulates the smoker...