"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."
---Robert Park
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MentalBlocks
Throwing Mental Blocks at Glass Constructions
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Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Last weekend, I went to the Museum of Science and Industry at Chicago with my parents for Mother's day (don't ask). We took a tour through the Pioneer Zephyr, a snazzy-looking art-deco, streamlined passenger train built in 1934 that now resides in the basement next to the ticket counter. In the first car of the train, decked out in leather seats and complete with a bar/kitchen, is a men-only smoking section, with completely separate air-handling from the rest of the train. At the time, this was entirely common. So what happened after WWII to turn the entire world into the smoking section? Here's an interview with Miss Manners (Judith Martin) in which she hypothesizes on the link between women smoking and the demise of the smoking section:
MARTIN: There used to be smoking rooms and smoking jackets so that non-smokers wouldn't have to smell the effects of smoke. Smokers had to ask non-smokers for permission to smoke in their presence. The greater burden should be on smokers because subjecting other people to the effects of one's pleasures is rude....When women started to smoke openly the old rules were cast aside and it became rather rudely accepted for smokers to smoke wherever they felt like it. You see, in the days of smoking jackets, smokers were referred to as "gentlemen" and non-smokers as "ladies." Gentlemen smoked in their smoking rooms or after the ladies had left the table. If one did wish to smoke in a lady's presence, he asked her permission with the understanding that the permission could easily and politely be denied.
This makes sense to me, in light of the fact that prior to WWII, nearly all smoking sections were solely for the male-only wearers of the "smoking jacket". The existing, expensive-to-replace physical infrastructure reflected and re-inforced the gender taboo. So if a girl got on the train, and wanted to "come a long way, baby" with her Virginia Slims, what was she to do? She had to break one of two major social taboos--either go forward to the men-only compartment, or light up in the non-smoking section. I have not a lick of evidence for this, but one hypothesis might be that the gender taboo was the stronger, and the average girl chose to stink up the non-smoking section. It may have also had something to do with the over-crowded conditions of trains during the war, because of the gas and tire rationing that made auto travel difficult. When there's no more room in the smoking section and you've just gotta light up.... I'd love to get some evidence one way or the other on this.
The rest of the interview is fascinating, as well. Ms. Martin has apparently spent a lot of time thinking about manners in a historical and sociological context.
By way of Innocents Abroad.
12:39 PM
Zowie. Somebody is royally pissed off at Paul Krugman.
12:13 PM
An interesting paper on bias in NPR's Middle East reporting. I haven't read it in enough detail to know if it really proves anything, but my own impression is that NPR avoids stories that make Palestinians and other Arab nations look too bad. At the very least, NPR news analysis certainly has zero predictive value as far as Middle East events go. I might listen to it, but I don't ever pretend that I'm getting the whole story.
By way of Instapundit, of course.
11:21 AM
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Interesting blogging on global warming over at ChicagoBoyz. I recommend the Economist article they link to, as well.
5:45 PM
Lileks on cigars:
10:59 Back to work. Or maybe I should take a break and consult with that cigar again. People ask me: what’s the difference between cigarettes and cigars? Simple: when you go out for a cigar, and your lighter is out of fluid, you set it aside. At some point in the evening you refill the lighter. Eventually you find your way back to that cigar - unless it looks smoked out, in which case you toss it and go to bed.
If you head out for a cigarette, and your lighter’s dead, you find two dry sticks and rub them together until you get a spark. And if you light it filter-end first, you snap off the filter and smoke it backwards, even though that means you get brackish snarky-flavored tobacco flecks in your mouth. Then you go inside and rummage through all your pockets for matches. And if you don’t find any? Easy: desk drawer. There’s a lighter you bought at a gift shop in Mexico back there somewhere. There has to be. There just has to be.
11:33 AM
Random link for the day:Pickelhaubes.com
There's something I find fascinating, in a bittersweet, top-of-the-rollercoaster-nausea way, about late 19th-early 20th century military hardware. It's all beautiful, hand-crafted stuff, the expensive gear of a society made wealthy by the Victorian era of globalization. The best stuff money could buy, made for a time when military service was perceived as all glory, chivalry, and honor. I look at pictures of people wearing it, with their faces full of the pride and esprit de corps of being a member of their regiment, and they look so solid, so substantial, so permanent. And they had no idea what was about to happen.
10:54 AM
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