On Wrath

There are seven things which the LORD hates,
Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
And hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that run rapidly to evil,
A false witness who utters lies,
And one who spreads strife among brothers.”

~Proverb 6:19 – 6:19, King James Bible

Mr. Vick, you have sparked worldwide controversy, and another addition to the Seven Deadly Sins collection.

The line “hands that shed innocent blood” was the precursor to Wrath being considered a mortal or deadly sin, but was expanded because, I suppose, a person could be an asshole without actually killing someone. But originally, according to Wikipedia, Wrath was described as “inordinate and uncontrolled feelings of hatred and anger…the desire to seek revenge outside of the workings of the justice system and generally wishing to do evil or harm to others. The transgressions borne of vengeance are among the most serious, including murder, assault, and in extreme cases, genocide.”

Let’s be clear here. Vick admitted to setting up, financing, and managing a dogfighting operation. Dogfighting is when two or more dogs are trained, usually through means involving beatings and starvation, to fight to the death. During the fights they literally bite and rip the flesh off each other and die slow and painful deaths, either from organ damage, blood loss, or from having their jugular severed or windpipe crushed. The under-performing dogs are often executed by drowning, hanging, electrocution or gun shot. Vick not only knew what he was financing, but enjoyed watching it, and from all accounts, participated in the execution of the dogs with his own hands.

Hasn’t he ever seen a thriller? Doesn’t he know that people don’t mind watching teenagers get picked off by the dozens, that innocent bystanders can get blown away without a single tear being shed, that even children are fair game…but let threat come to the family pet, and moviegoers will start to whimper in horror?

He released a statement today, which admitted responsibility and refuted earlier claims that he was not guilty of the charges laid.

"First I want to apologize for all the things that I've done and that I've allowed to happen…I was ashamed and totally disappointed in myself, to say the least. And I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts. What I did was very immature, so that means I need to grow up. I totally ask for forgiveness and understand as I move forward to a better Michael Vick the person, not the football player. I take full responsibility for my actions. Not for one second will I sit here and blame anyone else for my actions. It was totally irresponsible. I feel like we all make mistakes. I made a mistake in using bad judgment and making bad decisions. And those things just can't happen. Dogfighting is a terrible thing and I did reject it."

Call me crazy, but I don’t see how financing something, watching it, putting money into making it happen more often, and using your own two hands to participate in it is quite the same thing as thinking it’s terrible and rejecting it, and I think it’s kind of rich coming from someone who repeatedly posed in photographs, smiling, with the fighting dogs. But the real problem for me is that he puts what he did down to “immaturity.”

Immaturity makes you date people you know are going to treat you poorly because they look good with no shirt on. Immaturity is mixing anything with Jaegermeister and calling it a shooter. Immaturity is wearing your pants with one pantleg rolled up. Immaturity is not slaughtering dogs. Michael doesn’t need to “grow up,” he needs to do some reading on the psychological profile of violent psychopaths (the three main precursors of which are bedwetting, fire starting, and cruelty to animals.) A man who can sit through a dogfight, enjoy it and want to see more of it, who can hang a dog he bred and raised with his own hands, is a little more than immature. It’s incredibly troubling to me that he would trivialize a crime of repulsive violence to the level of breaking curfew, especially in the same breath as his acknowledgment that he's a role model to children.

I also enjoyed the very subversive tactic of sending a plea to separate “Michael Vick the person” from “Michael Vick the football player.” A nifty trick designed to allow us to hate the person but to try and separate his means of income from his crime. As though a football player who earned millions of dollars by having thousands of fans, many of whom are children, and by being the endorsement face of many products doesn’t have anything to do with refraining from criminal activity. He’s trying to insinuate that while he understands that you’ll hate him for his ‘immaturity,’ his career shouldn’t be impacted. Let’s look at it this way; if Michael Vick was a politician, would we be saying, “Sure, he participated in something like that, but he makes good public policy. He shouldn’t be removed from office.” No, because he’s a football hero. Apparently, our disdain for domestic abuse, rape, animal cruelty and even murder can be lessened by a really impressive record with rushing yards. It’s sad, but it’s life, and I think anyone who expects this man to spend more than a year behind bars is a nice person, but a misinformed one.

Besides, Michael claims to have Found Jesus. His “we all make mistakes” and “I give myself up to God” and redemption talk, as ridiculous as it sounds to most of us, is usually a pretty good strategy, because it confuses the mostly atheist left wing and placates the right wing, who never get to hear about God in the media anymore. (If I were the part of the Christian right, I think I’d actually be pretty pissed off that the only people who kept finding Jesus were those who were trying to evade rehab or escape dog fighting charges, but whatever.) He’s not finished, as much as I’d like to think he was.

And I don’t mean to open a very messy can of worms, but he killed dogs. Would we be going apeshit if they were some other animal? Scary Spice’s boyfriend killed a duck with a brick, but he’s still out there enjoying his life. What if it were a fur farm? A slaughterhouse for cows? Pigs? We like dogs, and I think that’s the problem here. He picked on the Miss Congeniality of the animal world. Every meat-eater out there, myself included, is implicit in the often painful existence and death of animals, it’s a matter of fact that we can pretend isn’t the same, because it’s not dogs, and other people do it all the time. But it is the same. It’s a difference of degree, not of principle. So while I believe he's an asshole and probably a mentally sick man, let's have a rational look at the matter, not a witch hunt.

But if Wrath is having 'hands that shed innocent blood,' he’s guilty of Wrath, no matter which way you cut it, and I don’t think Jesus would be all that keen on him. If Vick did a little more homework, he’d find out that committing a deadly sin, in the eyes of the God that he’s currently trying to give himself up to, “destroys the life of grace” and is unforgivable except through confession and perfect contrition, neither of which he’s showing. That Old Testament stuff does not allow for lesser sentencing and plea bargaining; he’s probably better off giving himself over to the Judicial Branch of Georgia than to God. If he’s not careful, he’s going to face an even less pleasant reception once he checks in for eternal damnation; personally, I kind of like to think that he’ll be issued a suit made out of meat and introduced to an unforgiving pack of his former pets.

But Disney taught us that all dogs go to heaven, where, unlike the NFL, Vick probably will not be welcome. And I sure hope the poor puppies are up there right now, being loved and cared for by Helen Keller, and the kid from Lassie.

Rest in peace, you poor things. You were the only ones Vick forgot to apologize to in his speech.


For my friend R, who is a friend to all puppies and kittens, and who would probably be happy to see this guy get his ass kicked. By Johnny Cash.

On Envy

Avarice, envy, pride,
Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all
On Fire. ~Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

I always thought of envy as a pretty powerful motivator as opposed to a venal sin, but then again, I also didn’t think gluttony was all that bad either.

So if Greed is the desire for material goods and worldly things, Envy is the desire for qualities seen in others that one lacks. Dante called this "the love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs." So it’s being a two-part asshole; first, you have to want what that person has, and secondly, you have to want them not to have it any more. In Purgatory, Dante noted that the punishment for envy was to have your eyes sewn shut with wire to remind you that you gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. (I actually thought that was an anti-aging procedure, so there you go.)

If this is actually a venal sin, then we’re all screwed. Who doesn’t like to see someone brought low? “Not me!” we claim, defensively. “I’m a positive person. I get immense gratification from seeing others succeed!”

I call bullshit. If that were the case, why do you think photos of celebrities with no makeup are so highly prized? Because deep down inside, in a dark and twisty place (the same place that takes the better umbrella from the umbrella stand and pretends not to see the person rushing for the elevator when you’ve already pushed the button), we love to see someone else brought low. It’s not a noble part of our makeup, but it’s there.

The real indicator that humans really are motivated by envy is to remember that we seldom, if ever, hate another person based on qualities we despise. Which is ironic. No, we hate others based on their attainment of those qualities that we admire. Think about it. Do you ever lose sleep about people who exemplify laziness? Or insecurity? Or negativity?

Nah, we hate people that have the things we really want. Success. Generosity. Patience. Perky boobs.

Jung would have a field day with this one.

On Gluttony

How did gluttony get to be a deadly sin? I figured I'd start with the "lightest" sin and work my way up, but come on. I'm not convinced this even is a sin. It would be understandable for it to be a sin if what you were eating was, say, babies, or if you were a glutton because you were taking food away from hungry people, but how is it a sin all on its own? Wanting more of something is pretty natural.

In fact, it's driven by a survival mechanism. If a wolf brings down a caribou, you never see it nibble a leg and then go all coy and say to the wolf head-deep in the belly next door, "oh no, you bad thing, I just couldn't eat one more bite!" No, they eat until they fall over. And they're the ones that survive the winter.

When people are gluttonous about good things, like exercise or charity or education, that's a good thing, although kind of annoying for the rest of us. So I suppose in order to indict gluttony, you have to indict it only as it relates to naughty things, like recreational drugs or Big Macs. But even then, how sinful is gluttony? Yes, it's not a good idea to turn one's body into Vegas, but is it a sinful one? For the most part, gluttony only punishes the person doing the gluttony, so it's a tool to punish sinners. (Just like religion.) I guess being gluttonous could make one grossly overweight, and thus makes one look bad in stretchy clothing, and I think that we can all agree that looking bad in stretchy clothing is definitely a sin. But the mindset behind gluttony? That's beyond reproach. We love people who really throw themselves passionately into things. So what if you're trying to smoke cupcakes through a crack pipe instead of adopting underprivileged orphans from exotic countries by the dozen? The central dedication is the same.

But, you say, people don't just hurt themselves. Addicts hurt their families and loved ones. People who eat, drink or hotknife their feelings tend to pass those traits on to their children. So, for the purposes of making this a very neat seven-part post, and in the spirit of not trying to refute the word of god, here are some gross facts about gluttony that make me kind of embarassed to be human.

In a medical study, people who had eaten a full meal within an hour were offered either a free medium or giant-size popcorn. Gues which one they invariably picked? And all the participants dug in and ate the popcorn even despite none being hungry, but that's not even the gross part. The people with the giant-sized ones were given stale, two-week old popcorn and they ate it anyway. Apparently, we'll eat something if it's free, even when we're not hungry and even when that thing is garbage.

In another study, one group was offered chocolate cake and another group 'gateau du chocolate.' The group with the gateau du chocolate ate way more than the chocoate cake group, even gateau du chocolate just means chocolate cake in French. (I guess that doesn't really make us gluttonous so much as snobby, and stupid.)

Scientists have found that if you eat with one other person, you'll eat far less than if you are eating with seven people. In fact, people will consume 96% more food in big groups. I have no idea why, except maybe that humans are pretty competitive; maybe we think it's kind of cool to be able to eat a steak covered in...another steak.

All of these facts, in case you were doubting me (and you are right to - I make up facts all the time) are from O Magazine. And I suspect Ms. Winfrey might know a thing or two about eating habits. So I maintain: gluttony is good in theology but not in applied science.

And eating babies is still definitely not OK.

On Why Kids Nowadays are Great Big Wussies

"The environmental movement of our times was sparked by the re-release of Bambi in the 1950s." ~Tom Platt, from Walt Whitman's The Last Days of Disco

Do you remember the huge brou-ha-ha that erupted when The Lion King came out?

First there was all the fuss over the word “sex” being subliminally inserted into a scene. A conservative activist even went so far as to ask for a ban on the film because he felt the intent of Disney was to make children sexually promiscuous (guess it worked, huh, Paris?)

Seems kind of argumentative to me, considering that kids have memorized every song from Disney movies and own the DVD before the thing is in pre-production. If you want a Disney movie to influence kids, don’t use a hazy word that you have to freeze frame the movie to find. Just have one of the lions tell kids outright to have promiscuous sex, for heaven’s sake. That would get it done much more efficiently. Only very, very nerdy children run through animated films in freeze frame trying to find hidden stuff, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they see messages telling them to have sex, because they are never going to get laid anyways. Freeze frame nudity is the only kind they’re ever going to see. Don’t take that away from them.

The Lion King was also criticized for being too “dark” for children. I guess the Nazi hyenas were pretty scary, but I don’t know that children are really grasping the fascist or genocidal undertones while they’re watching a hyena voiced by Whoopi Goldberg do a song and dance number. The dad lion did get trampled by a herd of buffalos, but that was far less traumatic than Bambi’s mother getting both barrels from that hunter. And Scar was a threatening character, to be sure, but if you’re looking for true terror in the form of Jeremy Irons, may I please direct you to Kubrick’s Lolita. That presents both Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffiths as sex symbols. Not for the kiddies. (Or grownups, for that matter, Mr. Irons, please put your pants back on.)

So what’s all the fuss these days? Kids are too sheltered if they think the African savanna is a place where zebras and lions hang out together and happily fulfill the socially dictated requirements of the caste system. Wait until they get into the corporate world. This is not a world we want children to go into unprepared for reality. Protected, yes; ignorant, no.

Let’s look at what was put forward to my generation as good kiddie fare:

Watership Down. Made the year I was born, this featured a bunch of bunnies dealing with displacement and dictatorships, all in psychedelic animation and scored to John Denver. (No, seriously.) It depicted, in full colour no less, a rabbit getting its ears torn to shreds by the owsla, the rabbit secret police (cough cough) and a rabbit burrow being plowed over while the rabbits and their babies crush each other to death as they try and scramble to the surface. The climax features a rabbit being freed from choking to death in a wire snare, blood oozing down his throat, and one rabbit tearing another’s jugular out while it screams, backlit by lightening, and blood pours down its jaws. And these bunnies are the cutest things you’ve ever seen, all expressive ears and huge eyes. I remember walking home from school very, very slowly the day we all watched that.

Plague Dogs. This is another animated movie that ostensibly indicted animal testing, something I think all of us would admit is pretty horrible as subject matters go, but that really only served to scare the pants off the children that expected the “can’t we all just get along?” camaraderie of the Fox and the Hound. No, while this movie does admittedly have a fox-dog friendship, the two titular dogs start off trapped in an experimental laboratory in Britain. (Boy, the Brits are mean to their animated animals…and let’s not even get into the concept of Dalmatian coats.) The lab is a nightmare – it even has a gas chamber for kittens. They endeavor to shield children from this horrible concept by calling it..."the kitten gas chamber.” Well done. So one of the dogs has undergone brain experiments and wears a bandage over his exposed brain (not kidding) and the other dog, noble Rowf, has had rocks sewn into his stomach cavity and is forced to undergo tests where he swims in a tank until he drowns, and then is electro-shocked back to life to do the test again. Then the dogs escape, and you breathe a sigh of relief until half an hour later when the dogs are accidentally shooting a farmer point-blank in the face with his own rifle and eating the dead human corpse. The movie ends with the dogs being driven out to sea, and it fades away as they swim towards a hallucinatory island off in the distance but presumably drown, alone and terrified. Get the popcorn, kids!

The Secret of Nimh. Yet another animated feature showing cute animals having terrible things done to them and doing rather gruesome things to each other to the sound of synthesizer music. It centers around a brave little widow mouse whose child is bedridden and in the path of a plow that will crush their home (in case the children couldn't figure out what that would look like, the movie helpfully shows it in a flashforward.) Brave mother mouse, being romantically pursued both by a seagull and a libidinous secret police mouse, consults with a group of rats. These rats are shown in flashback to have been experimented on and injected, thrashing and squeaking, with all sorts of components, and as a result have developed superhuman intelligence. Nicodemus, a superintelligent rat who has visions and really creepy glowing eyes, is plotted against by a power-mad capitalist rat faction, which is eventually successful in crushing poor Nicodemus underneath a cinderblock. All of this takes place underground, in gloomy wet caverns, and drugs are featured all over the place: medicine for the baby, sedatives for the cat, psychotropics for the rats. Pretty far from the mousy frontier fun of An American Tale.

The Last Unicorn. This wasn’t so much scary as just plain weird. It was as if the producers at Rankin/Bass got together, smoked a few joints, consulted King Lear and a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and then decided to make a children’s movie. There are sexual undertones all over the place: the huge rampaging Red Bull forcing all those delicate white girl unicorns into submission and then drowning them in the sea, the tree that tries to date rape a magician, and finally, a man that falls in love with a horse. Might be a little touchy to replicate these characters for McDonalds toys, don’t you think? Not to mention some pretty serious violence: a woman is torn apart, screaming, by a naked-breasted harpy, a young prince is trampled by a flaming bull, said bull is dragged under the waves and drowns, a decapitated skull gets loaded on wine, and the unicorns rush the castle en masse, tumbling the old king to his death on the rocks. It also features a song with the following lyrics:

“...when the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain
and the last lion roars at the last dusty fountain
and it seems like all is dying and leave the world to mourn...”

Not as catchy as Hakuna Matata, I suppose.

Old Yeller. "Ma? Ma...there's sumthin' wrong wit Yeller. Hey boy, who's my Yeller? What's wrong, Yeller?" Nuff said.

So after my generation survived all the fascism, rabbit capital punishment, kitten gas chambers, doggie vivisection, rat torture, and the forbidden love between a man and a tree, you’d think that Poor Mufasa’s off-screen trampling wouldn’t be considered nearly so terrifying.

Hiding anything scary from our children might be a bit of a worry. This is a generation, after all, that will have to live with environmental devastation, the continued ghettoization of the developed world, the poverty, insurmountable national debt, vicious civil wars and widespread epidemics of the undeveloped world, and Britney Spears’ continued moral decline.

They can handle a few Nazi hyenas.

For my sister A, who I remember being very scared by The Dark Crystal.

On A Bad Day at the Office

Firefighter: You wanna tell me what happened here?
Lance: Uh, there was a fire, I dunno, I came by and it's... checkin out the fire.
Firefighter: Well that lady uh, Mona? She said that you two were in the building together when the fire started.
Lance: Yeah, she's a liar, cuz I dunno her so whatever, whatever she says is a lie, so...
Firefighter: K, so you're saying you weren't in the building with that woman?
Lance: No, not I! Aright, she started it, aright? Because she was like "I hate my job, I'm gonna burn this mother down!" And I said "You better not... you better not!"
Firefighter: She said it was an electrical fire.
Lance: It was. It was a total electrical fire.
Firefighter: Why aren't you wearing your pants, Joe?

Ever had the kind of day when you just wanted to turn and walk out of your office shortly after setting fire to it? We all have.

Luckily, we all also have the capacity to overcome irrational impulse. After all, it’s not your office pissing you off. It’s really more the unnatural requirement for you to spend nine or ten hours a day cooped up in it, creating emails that just create work for other people in little offices across the street from you. These, I suppose, are the questionable efficiencies created by the Industrial Revolution, so I guess it would make more sense to torch the collective works of Charles Dickens than to go around vandalizing office buildings. No wait…Dickens exposed the harmful humanistic impact of the Industrial Revolution. So I guess you should light the iron plow on fire, or whatever.

I guess you really shouldn’t light anything on fire, because that doesn’t solve anything.

But still, sometimes you just want to burn that mother down.

On Why It's Important to Finish High School

Overheard at a Vancouver lounge on Saturday evening by two women exiting the bar to head to a nightclub:

Voice #1: "I had a really good time chatting with those people. I was talking to them for, like, an hour about Spanish."

Voice #2: "You're so great with meeting new people! People really like you. You're so, you know, personal."

Voice #1: "Oh my god, thank you! I really do feel like I have good communication skills."

Indeed. The word you were looking for, ladies, is personable.

You heard it first here, kids. Stay in school.

On Why I Love Femme Fatales

“What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails,
And puppy dog tails,
That's what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice,
And everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of.”

~Mother Goose

I can’t think of the last time when I encountered a woman who was whole-heartedly, exuberantly, unapologetically bad, but I'm always a little glad when I do.

I can’t bring myself to hate a femme fatale. In the gender Olympics, we’re always Miss Congeniality. We make swans out of napkins. We vote left, hate the death penalty, adopt kittens, and are ten times less likely than men to jaywalk. We know the names of flowers and make casseroles. And I would bet good money it wasn’t a man who invented the process whereby you screen pictures of your kids and pets onto t-shirts and mugs. So it gives me perverse delight when I encounter a woman who, plain and simple, you just don’t want to fuck with.

I first realized the immense appeal of the femme fatale at the tender age of eight while at Sunday School, of all places. I was happily eating pages out of my catechism in an attempt to escape the boredom of our teacher’s diatribe on the sin of betrayal when she distracted me from consuming God's word with the story of Samson and Delilah. I was fascinated. Truly to my discredit, it wasn’t until years later that I realized the hero of the story was meant to be Samson, not Delilah. In my eight-year-old mind, Delilah took out the strongest man in the land and managed the destruction of an entire temple of bad guys simply by showing him her boobs. Pretty impressive, and that was on the fourth attempt; perhaps Samson should have caught on when he woke up to her tying his hands and feet the first three times. The concept was much easier to understand than the simultaneous unity and disparity of the holy trinity; Samson may have been able to wrestle a lion and slay an entire army, but exposed nipples were the Great Equalizer.

Since then I’ve had a clandestine admiration for women who traded in insipidity for killer intellect, bullwhips, wraparound sunglasses and Ducati Monsters. We owe a great deal to them. The Mata Hari supposedly wheedled secrets out of some of the highest-ranking officials in Europe during World War I by dancing around in a two-piece curtain. Cleopatra ascended to be ruler of Egypt during a time when most women were still giving birth in haybales, and Sharon Stone may not be able to claim the very first crotch-flashing in cinematic history, but she can certainly claim one of the most memorable.

The femme fatale has also contributed a great deal to the cinematic realm, perhaps in no genre more significantly than the action genre. Male characters, by and large, need to have gimmicky superpowers and a very extensive rationale for any damage they wreak upon society. Wolverine grew adamantine claws and was wildly pissed off because they killed his dad; Spiderman shot webs around and was wildly pissed off because he got wedgies in high school; and Dr. Doom created mystical energy fields with his hands and was wildly pissed off because a time machine on the fritz turned his feet into goat hooves (among other indignities.) By contrast, most femme fatales require nothing more advanced than a tremendous pair of breasts and possibly some leather bondage gear, and their sole reason for evil-doing is usually just sheer boredom. Now that’s my kind of evil. And were it not for the femme fatale, the entire genre of film noir would be non-existent. Someone needs to screw over the trusting sad sack, or we’d all be watching Turner Classics. And no one wants that.

So hail to the bitches, for they do all the things we secretly want to do. They tread shamelessly upon the weak to satisfy their own selfish desires, smoke and wear stiletto heels, drink hard liquor straight up, and you’ll never, ever catch them in pink. And while we won't admit it, that's hot. There’s a reason the entire developed world wants to have sex with Angelina Jolie; she was painting her clothes with her husband’s blood, getting Latin tattoos of death references all over her body and having bisexual affairs with gorgeous asian supermodels while Jennifer Aniston was doing a movie called “The Good Girl” and getting dumped (twice) by Vince Vaughan.

Sorry, Jenn, no contest. Vive la femme fatale.

For MF, who is far too nice to be a femme fatale but who understands the appeal of a fast sportbike and a really kick ass tool kit.

On Great Comebacks Overheard During a Cellular Conversation

"Why? Why?

Fuck you, that's why."

On Airport Lounges

When you think of "lounge," what images are conjured up in your mind?

Chocolate brown leather airchairs, a crackling fire, perhaps a few framed prints of pheasants? Well-loved and well-worn copies of British literature - perhaps Dickens - strewn amongst cut-crystal highball glasses of brandy? Witty folk in hunter green smoking jackets with those brown suede elbow patches mingling amiably and saying things like, "isn't it awful what's going on in Durfur these days?"

Well that's what lounge conjures up for me. But no, as it turns out, it's a small room unevenly lit with flickering flourescent bulbs where people chatter anxiously at top volume into their Blackberries, trying to drown out screaming children and the stale reek seeping in from the smoker's aquarium. Racks of cheezies, the National Enquirer, and cold starbucks coffee drinks abound, but not a brandy in sight.

There is a time and place for social stratification, and the airport, ladies and gentlemen, is it.

On Smoking On First Dates

It's well-deserved scrutiny or a witch hunt, depending on your viewpoint, but it seems that smoking has overtaken drunk driving, unsafe sex and Nazi sympathizing to take first place on the list of things that society disapproves of.

Smoking also happens to top the list of most people's "dealbreakers" when it comes to first dates. (Sadly, having children would probably have to take spot #2.) And it's considered a pretty reasonable dealbreaker, so you smokers out there - you may feel like there's just no solution except to throw a patch on your arm and kiss your pleasant personality goodbye for the next four months while you quit. Not so!

Smoking and relationships, you see, is kind of like being an alcoholic in a job. No one hires an alcoholic. If someone walked into HR and introduced themselves while wearing an inside-out shirt and reeking of Jim Bean, you can bet good money that resume would find its way to the Shred-It centre faster than Enron's expense reports. But, if you hire someone who subsequently becomes a raging alcoholic, could that company then get rid of them? No way. Not a chance. Legality aside, that would seem to be vaguely immoral - kicking a man when he's already down, out, and perpetually bleary. No, you are stuck with months and months of missed work, incomprehensible emails, and raised eyebrows at the sight of the travel mug. (Just ask Lindsay Lohan's co-stars.)

So here's the thing. No one is going to date a smoker, but you can't break up with someone for smoking once you're already going out. It just seems hystrionic. So folks, if you can get past the first few dates, you're olly olly oxen free.

Now, that's going to be tough. A previous post on first dates reveals that alcohol, after all, is essential to the dating process, and a poor smoker squirming their way through a first date once the first couple of drinks hits them is like a dog in a car with the windows rolled up in summer.

So if you suspect you won't be able to get through your seared tuna skewers and that fourth vodka tonic without scrambling out the bathroom window or huddling with the cooks out back next to the garbage dumster, I have for you the golden ticket. Simply take a jiffy marker and write "LAST PACK" on your ciggie pack before you leave the house. And when you do break down, go smoke, and come back in with that bingo hall reek clouding around you, and your date questions you, look sheepish and pull out the pack. Watch the look of judgment melt instantly away as they hug / high five / wet kiss you in joy. You're not a filthy addict anymore! No, not you...you're a fighter! You're a scrapper!

You're a big, fat liar.

But while they're lulled in the false assumption that you'll be cigarette free in a matter of weeks, you are free to play out the first few dates without concern about getting immediately culled for your disgusting, smelly habit. Giving you plenty of time to find things you're going to want to dump them for.

Now come to think of it...men, don't bother with this advice, as women will simply deny you sex until you quit. You're best to go straight on the patch.