It’s Monday, time for another mixed bag of topics I want to address before I forget about them, but which taken alone don’t rate blog posts of their own.
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My daughter switched from cigarettes to e-cigarettes about a year ago. We never let her smoke in our house, but one day I walked into the family room and there she was on the sofa, puffing away on an e-cigarette. My reaction was instantaneous: “Take that damn thing out of the house!” She argued that the smoke was just water vapor, and odorless at that. She went on to say it was flavored vapor with no nicotine, which I didn’t buy for a minute, since she’d been smoking tobacco since she was a teenager and was thoroughly hooked.
Eventually we came to a compromise: she has to do her vaping outdoors, unless of course I’m not here, in which case her mother probably lets her get away with it indoors. She’s living in her boyfriend’s house now … he’s a non-smoker, but I don’t know what his policy is.
So anyway, policy. The air museum where I work as a volunteer tour guide is beginning to wrestle with vaping and vapers. It came up at a staff meeting last week. We’re starting to notice visitors smoking e-cigarettes inside our display hangars, where a no-smoking policy is in effect. The museum complies with federal and state laws, which ban smoking indoors. The question was whether the museum has a policy on e-cigarettes. Turns out it doesn’t. The answer, at least for now, is that we’re not to tell visitors they can’t smoke e-cigarettes indoors.
This morning I Googled federal policy on e-cigarettes in the workplace, and it seems there isn’t one yet. While some states and cities have outlawed e-cigarettes in restaurants and workplaces, so far the feds haven’t, nor have Tucson and the state of Arizona. If the government, at any level, ever does ban smoking e-cigarettes indoors we will too, but until then we have no policy, which translates to letting vapers get away with it.
You can deduce my position from that last sentence, in case my reaction to our daughter vaping inside our house didn’t make it clear. I’m against e-cigarettes. I admit my reaction is an emotional one. I’m a former smoker who had a damn hard time quitting, but I did and have been smoke-free since 1978, and that probably makes my negative feelings toward vaping and vapers even stronger. Vapers are indulging an addiction to nicotine, and I don’t want to be stuck in any kind of confined space with them, even if I can’t smell it. Not in the workplace, not in an elevator or restroom, not in a plane or bus or train, not in a restaurant or a store.
Also, too, there are a lot of smokers. What’s their reaction going to be when they start routinely seeing vapers doing their thing with impunity, any damn place they feel like it? The e-cigarette business is going to be huge, and we’re going to have to deal with the issue sooner rather than later.
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Bicycle-haters in Tucson have been salting bicycle lanes with tacks. So far, they’ve nailed me twice. The Tucson bicycling community has been aware of the problem for years, and after much whining we’ve finally gotten the attention of law enforcement, who say they’re looking for the miscreants responsible (though frankly I won’t believe that until I read about some actual arrests).
Normally when I use a screen shot of someone’s Facebook or Twitter post, I smudge out the poster’s face and name. I think you’ll understand why I didn’t with this one.
He’s probably just trolling, but I do hope the police pay him a visit, if only to put a scare on him. And if it turns out he’s one of the assholes who’ve been spreading tacks, I may have to revise my position on the death penalty.
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A friend shared an NRA Facebook post about Gabby Giffords and husband Mark Kelly and their lobbying efforts on behalf of gun purchase background checks. Reader comments, as you can imagine, were appalling.
Just a case of two leaches trying to suck the lifeblood of America’s Constitutional rights instead of working at a “real” job !!! They’re dedicated to creating more problems while solving nothing just to keep those Libtard donation dollars flowing into their pockets . They’re the white , yuppie version of Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson .
Well I guess these two can learn something from the State of Georgia, in particular Cobb County Georgia. This has already has been implemented years ago! These people are either IGNORANT and have not done much research, or they are just NEWS MEDIA HOUNDS and want to be negatively popular! When are these people going to realize and learn that it is the CRIMINALS that “DON”T REGISTER THEIR ILLEGAL GUNS” and cause the majority of crimes! Do you think that is why they are called CRIMINALS???
they both sound like they are missing part of their brains!
Poor Gabby is probably along for the ride. It disgusts me that they parade her around as a victim. Her husband is straight out a jerk.
*uck these 2 *ssholes, and their “group”. Here is AZ, people have a bumper sticker that says “giffords continues to inspire”, they should change that to “giffords continues to annoy”!!
And then they got worse. I asked my friend if he really wanted to be associated with people like this, and he responded with the old “both sides do it” bromide. I suggested that in fact most of that stuff comes from one side. He responded by throwing Martin Bashir in my face … the MSNBC commentator who suggested someone defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth and was subsequently forced to resign … and there was really nothing I could say after that. Thanks a lot, Bashir. Yes, we all know Sarah Palin is a cunt, but we on the left do not say such things aloud lest we reduce ourselves to the level of NRA minions.