Smoke Break

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Smoke Break

By late next year all cigarette packages in this nation must bear pictures of diseased lungs, smoke issuing from a tracheostomy, and perhaps even dead bodies. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) believes that these grotesqueries will turn folks off to smoking.

The reality, of course, is that pictures of cancerous corpses are just the thing to attract the attention and pocket money of the typical 16-year-old.

If cigarettes really are fatal, then why don’t government entities ban the darned things? Is it possible that quitting tobacco taxes is harder for a government than quitting tobacco is for a three-pack-a-day man?

But the really cosmic question is this: do cigarette company workers have to go outside for a smoke break?

We’ve all heard the news about cigarettes; there are more urgent warnings necessary on these other objects:

Guitar: “Caution – picking up this instrument will give you delusions of talent.”

Television: “Warning – this is not your life.”

Video game: “Danger – play this only if you don’t have any friends.”

Goatee: “Before wearing this, um, style, consider the root word of ‘goatee.’”

Goatee II: “Aviso – the goatee is the hirsute equivalent of the Nehru jacket.”

Big-Box Electronics Store: “Please note that every employee in this building is programmed to lie to you.”

Telephone message: “When we say your call is important to us, we don’t mean it. If your call were important, you wouldn’t be listening to a recording. Have a nice day. If you believe that this recording cares.”

Pencil: “This device does not know mathematics.”

Restaurant: “The servers here have been instructed to nasal out ‘no problem’ instead of saying ‘you’re welcome.’”

Family restaurant: “The ‘family’ bit means screaming children throwing food.”

Vegetarian restaurant: “You can hear the carrots scream when you bite into them. Really. Carrots are your friends. Why would you eat your friends?”

Radio talk show: “Listening obediently to the following millionaire who never had a real job does not constitute participatory democracy.”

Bible: “Reading this does not make you judge of the universe.”

Golf club: “Using this stick to hit a little ball into a hole in the ground does not empower you to send young people to their deaths in other countries.”

State line: “Welcome to New York. You may not marry your bicycle. Yet.”

Bottled water: “This is just water. We took it out of a tap and drained it into a bottle made of weird chemicals. And you’re going to pay for this?”

National Public Radio: “As we go into yet another annoying fund-raising campaign, remember than some of our announcers are given over $300,000 a year to babble on the radio. And now, let’s dig into those pockets, little people; NPR needs the money for, like, y’know, social justice and global warming.”

Oh, yeah, there’s a whole lotta smoke being blown these days.

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