No Smoking

I would like to meet the person who came up with, "Thank you for not smoking," just so that I can call him a pussy to his face.

Think about it. Better yet, read it out loud and slow: "Thank you for not smoking." You are actually pretending that the smoker checked to see if smoking was allowed, and even worse, you actually thank the smoker. When did "thank you" lose its meeting as something you say when someone actually did a nice thing for you? What's the new thing that I'm supposed to say in that case? There is nothing wrong with plain old "No Smoking." There are, however, any number of other ways to try to say the same thing, but in a more clever way. For example,

This one is just odd. It's a folding, cardboard thing from the lobby tables at the International House hotel in New Orleans. Additional twist: they were all removed the day after I stole my copy. Maybe they were new, and they realized that they weren't any good. Maybe they saw me steal one, so they removed them all until I checked out. It's hard to say. To be honest, I just noticed the watermark saying, "One half of all smokers will be killed by their habit." Hey, that's not bad. Consider that I likely have the chance to smoke for 50 years. After all of that, there's only a 50/50 chance that it kills me. Smoking is a lot safer than you thought, isn't it? Here's a much better way to portray "No Smoking."

This is an empty cigarette pack that my mom brought back from Thailand. (No, it wasn't empty when she brought it back.) All of those packs have one of a collection of nasty images like this one. They all take up half of the pack, and the image is printed on both sides of the pack. This is, of course, to deter people from buying cigarettes. I'm not sure if it works. I'm sure that it helps sell cigarettes to people like me -- who don't smoke, but who would be happy to buy at least one pack with any of their many nasty images, just for the novelty of it.