From Russia With Love

Are you feeling like Nigel-party-for-one, because you're without any weekend plans?

Never fear, the party people are heading to Russia.

Alexei Kudrin, Russia's finance minister, is making it his countrymen's patriotic duty to light up and get boozy.

"People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state," As the revenue from increased taxes on alcohol and cigarettes will be spent on funding social programs and services.

But what about the exponential rise in hospital beds required with this peer pressured patriotic booze up?

According to Time's John Cloud

[A] new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that -- for reasons that aren't entirely clear -- abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

This still doesn't account for the inevitable increase in the hospital beds required to cope with the influx of smokers gagging for breath.

Sounds like Alexei got the party started prior to announcing this policy...“Ah that’s just drunk talk, sweet beautiful drunk talk.” ~Barney Gumbal

O Book of mine

I've previously made mention my beliefs that cigarettes are Satan's handmaiden.

However i can't deny that this is an ingenisouly cute idea. Tank Books have taken the flip-top cigarette pack and re-realease classics such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ernest Hemingway’s The Undefeated and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Indie German Publishing house - Automatenverlag - has taken the idea one step further and have started dispensing books, graphic novels, children's cookbook, travel guides and collections of poetry in vintage cigarette machines in and around Hamburg.

At only 4 euros a pop - the books are cheaper than a pack of cigarettes and instead of shrinking your brain you're pumping it up, ooooo feel the literary burn.

Lit up literature

I don’t like cigarettes.

In fact I think they should be banned.

Not a particularly groundbreaking statement – or is it?

What sort of world would it be if it were smoke-free? You would probably put many health professionals out of work, unclog the hospital system and save billions in health care.

But what will happen to literature?

There are a slew of authors past and present who have lit up – Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Albert Camus, J K Rowling.

George Orwell

Mark Twain

Author Richard Klein analyses the origins of smoking in his book “Cigarettes Are Sublime” – in an attempt to quit his habit. Klein suggests cigarettes offer more than a whack of nicotine, but the very act of lighting up incites “a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity”.

If cancer-sticks supposedly offer so much relief to the typically tortured soul of the writer – what will happen if they are banned? Would the world be denied future masterpieces?

Then again Karl Stig-Erland Larsson of The Millennium Trilogy was a smoker and passed away before his fourth book was finished. So have we already been denied because of cigarettes?

I don’t like cigarettes.

In fact [book lover or not] I still think they should be banned.