causeandeffectworld.com Blog

Smoking indoors

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s in Omaha with my family and enjoyed lots of fun family fun – ice skating, my brother’s 40+ league hockey game, beginning the indoctrination of my 3 1/2 year old niece with “The Sound of Music,” and going bowling (big ball, naturally). 

Several things were interesting about the bowling experience:

1. Ball weight - When I switched from the 11 pound black adult ball to the 9 pound purple kiddie ball, I promptly bowled three strikes in a row, to the hoots of my husband and brothers.  When I continued to bowl mostly spares in the remaining frames, they were relieved that one of them managed to beat my by one pin!  [I wuz robbed!]
2. Guns - …were not welcome in the bowling alley according to a sign on the door.  That’s a sign you don’t see in Massachusetts!
3. Smoking - I had forgotten what it’s like to be in a smoky bowling alley – yeech!  There isn’t a law in Omaha, so the libertarians get to inflict their habit on the rest of us (I thought their freedom ends at my nose??).  Anyway, my clothes and hair smelled like smoke when we got home and I realized how much I like the clean smellin’ bowling alleys and pool halls of Massachusetts.  Yea!

Come on Omaha, even France has finally gotten around to eliminating smoking from public places, from the Moulin Rouge to the cafes on the Seine to cafe-tabacs in small villages as of January 2, 2008.

Wow.  When I was a student on a semester abroad program in Toulon, France years ago, I took a class at the Universite du Var a Toulon.  The professor smoked while he paced back and forth across the front of the lecture hall during the weekly four-hour lectures, and most of the students also smoked, just dropping the butts on the floor in front of them.  Smoking was simply a part of life and there was no escape.

So, now it will end.  It may be for health reasons.  But, all I can say is, they are all going to smell a lot better too.

I wonder if Nebraska will be able to bring itself to banning smoking now that France has done so.  It should be easier now that they’ve elected an eastern European as President.