1. Chicago recently passed an indoor smoking ban for all public places (even restaraunts and bars). Columbia kept their smoking lounges for a week until they were informed that being a private college doesn't exempt them from the indoor smoking ban--the lounges are gone now, and so are the ashcans outside the doors. Where the ashcans used to be, there are now signs advising smokers that the new ordinance requires they be fifteen feet or more away from the entrance to the building. There are also a lot more cigarette butts.

2. Jenny and I started watching Scrubs on DVD, and episode two deals with a smoker who keeps smoking despite his doctor's advice. Zach Braff is sad about it, and John McGinty tells him "We can't save people from themselves." Of course, being the tall nerdy white guy I am, I identify with Braff's character. When I see people smoking, a part of me wants to remind them that they're killing themselves by inches. Of course, I eat at McDonald's occasionally, so I'm screwed in a different way. I'm not really sure how to respond to the student whose essay describes smoking as a defining characteristic of her persona.

3. My grandfather died from COPD, a smoking-related lung disease that's basically a cocktail of emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The bitch of it is that he stopped smoking a long time before he developed the disease. I generally avoid addictive substances (excepting caffine), both out of my need for self-control and my knowledge that my other grandfather was an alcoholic (and my father said he occasionally heard the siren-song that might herald alcoholism).

4. The new smoking ordinance doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from smoking, it just makes them look a bit more sad. On my way to work today, I saw an Iggy-Pop-lookalike Tower Records employee huddled under the El stairway, sucking on his cigarette and shivering. I still see little clumps of students outside all our campus buildings (being an art school, we have a higher ratio of smokers than any college I've been at before), they just huddle fifteen feet away from the door.

5. Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan features a hard-smoking Hunter Thompson of the future who requires that his 'filthy assistants' take up smoking when in his employ. Of course, he gets them prescriptions for 'anti-cancer drugs' too.