Up in Smoke

San Diego, California, 10 or 12 years ago: A group of us were going to dinner, and we planned to meet at the bar near the pool. I ordered a bottle of beer and lit up a smoke. I asked the bartender for an ashtray, and he looked at me as if I were from Mars. "You can't smoke in here!" he said.

That was my first experience with the anti-smoking hysteria that has taken over this country. I do not dispute that cigarettes are not good for you, and I believe that people should be able to enjoy a smoke-free environment. What I do not believe is that the government has the right to tell a business owner -- particularly a bar owner -- that he or she cannot allow smoking in their establishment.

About four years ago, the Columbus City Council banned smoking in virtually all public places in our fair city. Some suburbs followed suit, but not all. So you had a situation in which it was possible to smoke in a bar on Olentangy River Road, but not in a bar a half mile away on 5th Avenue.

Since then, the entire state has gone smokeless, so no bar has any advantage over any other bar.

No one has ever been forced to patronize a bar, and no one has ever been forced to work at a bar. The do-gooders who promoted the smoking ban claimed that people wanted smoke-free bars. Fair enough. If the demand was there, all one had to do was open such a bar, and see what kind of business it would do. Then people could make their choices about which bar they wanted to patronize, and the property rights of all bar owners would be protected.

This was never a health issue. It is a property rights issue, and property rights are a bedrock of our social and economic way of life. Using the logic of the smoking ban, it is not so far-fetched to envision a day when perfume and cologne are banned in public places. It sounds ridiculous to even suggest such a thing, but the same could have been said for a smoking ban 20 years ago.

UPDATE: Found this little gem the day after original post. From 1992 (and no surprise, it's California):

Cows

The bovine witness stand:

"Look. We know how you did it. How is no longer the question. What we now want to know is 'Why?' Why now, Brown Cow?"



I can't remember where that one came from, but give Gary Larsen ("The Far Side") credit.

We took a trip to the Great White North over the weekend to do a little work in the field on Saturday (protecting my ash trees against the evil Emerald Ash Borer), drink a few (ahem) quick ones with my brother, and have breakfast with Mom on Sunday morning. The coolest part of the trip was the cows.

I grew up on a farm, and the farm looks little like it did when I was a kid. We got rid of the last of the cows around 1962, and a year later we planted the first of what would become many thousands of fruit trees. Over time, all the fences came down, and the farm became a wide-open space dedicated to growing peaches, apples and nectarines...and the clock kept ticking, and now the trees are gone, as is the '73 Ford pick-up truck in which I used to cruise the streets of Bellevue. Anyway, that's another story for another day.





But the memory of the cows lingers. Even after we were out of the livestock/dairy business, my grandparents to the west had cows. They were our next-door neighbors, and lived a quarter of a mile down the road. We would walk through the fields to visit them, and that meant walking through a cow pasture. I remember heading home one day, after raiding my grandmother's freezer for some raisin cookies, and the cows started to stampede. I had about 50 yards to get to the fence, and they were gaining on me, and it briefly occurred to me that I could be trampled to death by the cows. Then I remembered the secret to making cows stop dead in their tracks, and I was thus able to leisurely climb over the fence.


Upon arrival at the farm last Saturday, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my brother Thom had completed his mission of making repairs to the barn, installing a new fence, and bringing some cattle back to the farm. I hadn't seen cattle at this place in more than 40 years, and it was almost eerie. The sights, but more importantly the smells, transported me back to my youth. And I do not find the smell in the least bit offensive. It smells like a farm.



Here is the image. A field, a fence, dandelions, and cows. What I like most about this scene is the grove of trees in the background. That is the site of the Golden Hill Cemetery. Of course, growing up as a kid, I had no idea that the hill would become a cemetery, but it certainly makes a nice back-drop for the new bovines on the block.







It was a pleasant day on Saturday, but the weatherman was calling for lots of rain on Sunday. And those who live in these parts know that we got a LOT of rain on Sunday. And on the farm,we knew there would be rain without even having to listen to the weather report. Here are the cows about an hour after the other picture was taken. They knew it was going to rain, so they laid down.

Markets

Adam Smith, whose An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the foundation of western economic systems, would have enjoyed reading today's business section.

I think I'll walk to work today.

It's Cinco de Mayo...

...and I haven't posted in about two weeks -- if you ignore the recently removed post regarding The Police and Elvis Costello.

So as you recover from Cinco de Mayo, take a look at this picture. If you can look at it for 10 minutes without looking away, you need help.