Apparently, they've decided that putting enormous pictures of balloons on the walls of one of the Edwards theaters in Long Beach will make that time between when you sit down and when the previews start pass much more quickly. They were wrong. What I'd like to know is who proposed such an idea and how they justified it. "Balloons tested well with audiences in Newport."
I saw Episode 2 finally, and aside from being slightly grossed out when Padme and Anakin got all the-hills-are-alive on me—or when Padme and Anakin did anything together, really—I enjoyed myself. Besides, I suspect that in time, Hayden Christensen might be even more fun to make fun of than Mark Hamill, and I get a kick out of imagining legions of children refusing to call the Christopher Lee action figure anything but "Count Dooky."
I'm nearing the 24-hour mark without a cigarette. I have a patch on my arm. I have a whole lot of Trident and Altoids Citrus Sours. I have homeopathic, sublingual tablets. I have a Richard Klein quote of the day:
Cigarettes free the soldier by momentarily masking the cruelty of his condition; their effect is less that of producing a narcotic sensation than of permitting an intellectual stance detached from reality - one that, Janus-like, invites the return of nostalgia or speculates in dreamy anticipation. But cigarettes are more than therapy. It is not enough merely to assert that though bad for health, they provide remedies for ills of the spirit. In fact, cigarettes serve soldiers in other ways, more puzzling and in peacetime less apparent. Consider the enigmatic assertion of General Lasalle (1775-1809), a Napoleonic hero who, before he fell valiantly, at the battle of Wagram, is reputed to have said: "A hussard must smoke; a cavalryman who does not smoke is a bad soldier." What does this mean? The general's claim that there is a link between smoking and being a good soldier is not argued; it is merely asserted, apodictically, like one of those mute Marlboro or Camel advertisements that show only the vivid image of a man clearly accustomed to pitting his strength against the forces of nature.
At times in recent history refusing to smoke was considered anti-American, a rejection of a certain idea - some might call it a myth - of the heroic linked to the pathos of the frontier. By heroism is meant in the strict Hegelian sense, courage in the face of death, looking death in face. When one smokes, one does not merely suck a tit of consolation; cigarette smoke is not always, not often, perhaps never mother's milk - it mostly tastes bad, produces a faint nausea, induces the feeling of dying a little every time one takes a puff. But it is the poison in cigarettes that recommends them to the heroic - a strong poison; it takes an infinitesimally smaller amount of nicotine to kill an adult than it does of, say, heroin or cocaine. In every puff there is a little taste of death, which makes cigarettes the authentic discipline of good soldiers.
- Cigarettes Are Sublime
Some people read American Cancer Society publications while they're quitting. I read Richard Klein. Do you know about him? He is a professor at Cornell who wrote
Cigarettes Are Sublime as a sort of extended farewell to his own smoking habit. I might very well decide to quote him incessantly for a while. Then again, I might not. I'm not feeling exceptionally consistent.
