“Smoking or non?”
Until she left home, my wife didn’t realise that normal non-smoking households don’t have to mop their walls.
My wife’s parents used to smoke heavily. She tells me how they had to clean the windows monthly just to be able to see out of them
We had to do this with our first house. Former tenants were 2 pack a day each with kids in The house. The water cascaded down completely brown.
Gross, even in my chain-smoking days I never smoked indoors.
Omigod.
I remember bars so blue with smoke you couldn’t see across the room.
I know one of those bars. When my city banned indoor smoking back in the mid-aughts, that bar still reeked of cigarettes for years. It was just coming out of the walls
I worked for an Internet startup in the mid '90s that was so desperate for venture capital funding we were sucking up to RJR Nabisco (who were rolling in so much cigarette money that they actually started a venture capital division just to do something with the cash). One day some of their executives showed up and they spent the entire day chain-smoking in our conference room (our building was a non-smoking building). The smoke was so thick everywhere you couldn’t even see to the end of the hallway. I made a point of coughing loudly and my bosses sent me home before the end of the day. In the end we got nothing from them.
It’s a warm memory because most of those bastards have probably died a miserable death by now.
We’re talking about the US here, right?
Yeah, Japan still is like a giant ashtray last time I checked.
The laws changed prior to the olympics coming, so it’s not like it was pre-corona and pre-olympics. Even some places that didn’t legally have to change used corona as an excuse because of the recommendations of the government (not law). Still a lot of places with smoking.
Tbh my wife and I smelled rotten eggs more often, at least in cities
I think because their busses use biodiesel?
Weird, the only times I’ve smelled biodiesel it’s mostly smelled like french fries
Not sure if it makes a difference, but biodiesel can be made of quite a few different materials. Could depend on what the fuel was actually made from.
I support biodiesel made from the bodies of oil company executives.
rotten eggs smell usually comes from the sewage system
It isn’t anymore. I checked yesterday. They still have cigarette vending machines and smoking floors in hotels, but most floors were nonsmoking, beer vending machines were more plentiful than cigarette ones, and no smoking announcements and signs were everywhere
I am talking about where I grew up in Canada.
i remember ashtrays on the arm of every airplane seat!
I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn’t even reach the ceiling could do anything.
Boy, leaded gasoline really fucked up whole generations, didn’t it? Oh… We are still dealing with the fallout from that, aren’t we?
A smoking area in a restaurant was about as useful as setting up a pissing area in a pool…
You got that backwards. Smoking section was the default state. The non-smoking section was the special.
Dumping water in a piss pool then?
I’m still convinced that lead poisoning was the catalyst for the fall of the Roman empire. And they weren’t even breathing tainted air constantly.
We still use lead pipes for water infrastructure in many areas of the country for fucks sake.
Fun fact: ancient and medieval societies had so much fucking lead around because lead is commonly found in silver ore (galena), usually around 100X more plentiful than the silver and it melts at a lower temperature. So the quest for silver produced huge amounts of lead as a byproduct and people found uses for it like roofs, water pipes and, uh, sweeteners? Jesus Christ, Rome.
I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn’t even reach the ceiling could do anything.
Barrier? Most restaurants barely divided the two with an aisle.
Tim Hortons had the smoking box, I’d give a lot to find a photo of it. Basically it was one of the last holdouts.
Minneapolis airport had a smoking room in one of the concourses. It had glass walls and was as gross as you could imagine. I held my breath everytime I walked past
Holy crap that’s a memory unlocked, transferring in Minneapolis and holding my breath as you walk past the smoking area
Im 24 and I got the tail end of this with Gen X smokers, motherfucker I can still smell their shitty marlboros. At least go with scavenged WW2 ration cigarettes like a civilized person.
The 80s was another level of smoking. Smoking on planes, smoking in the nursing station while working, the doctor smoking while he rounded on a patient, smoking in movies, every restaurant, I didn’t see anywhere people didn’t smoke save for mostly in my school, but the teachers did have a smoking lounge.
Oh ive heard the stories, but well the smell and look of a 99 cents store filled with smokers and every adult at the park smoking a cigarette is burned into my brain. I know what I missed since the old tech I mess with will sometimes have the smell absorbed into it so badly I need to make a vinegar solution and leave it in the sun to ge the smell out. Im just saying that I have an inkling of how bad it was at its peak, and can say im fucken glad kids these days arent exposed to it nearly as much.
I got some really cute clothing for my kids from a friend I was helping move who smokes heavily, and I’ve washed it 3 times and it still smells of cigarettes…
She also gave us some totes which I scrubbed with vinegar and dawn in the bathtub which turned the water brown but it still smells a bit of cigarettes. Some pancake mix from their pantry literally tastes like cigarettes. Good riddance to smoking!
You know where you couldn’t smoke? The MetroDome (old Twins and Vikings stadium). “No smoking! No smoking in the MetroDome.” was announced before every game.
…was that because of its inflatable structure?..
No it was just around the time that no smoking was becoming a thing. It was actually really annoying when the allowed smoking. Once they stopped allowing smoking in the Dome, the stadium announcer would declare “No smoking. No smoking in the MetroDome.” and it got a huge applause every time.
Although I was at a game when the roof ripped and the lights started bouncing kind of like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But they cranked up the air pressure which compensated for the rip.
Just go to Europe to relive that part of the 90s
The 90s were nothing compared to the 80s for smoking.
Smoking indoors is banned basically everywhere thankfully, but yeah, there are still way too many smokers here.
In France it’s like a third of people, in Greece it’s like every other man smokes.
I went to the UK and France in 2004. Got to go back to France last year; I was going to say it’s like the U.S. in the 1990s but it seems like they’ve banned indoor smoking in most buildings so it is better than that. There are still a lot more people smoking in outdoor sections than I’ve experienced in the U.S. for about 20 years, though. I’ve gotten so used to smoking being rare in the U.S. that it felt weird to see (relatively) so much in France.
Fun fact: instead of cupholders, 1970s cars would proudly advertise the number of ashtrays they had equipped the car with, usually 1 within reach of every seat. This number was equally important as horsepower or price on marketing materials.
The flip side is that now that cars have zero ashtrays, most smokers just throw the butts out the window.
The same people doing that now would have been doing it then also. It’s so easy to put an ashtray in your car, or just an old soda can, and people used to care a lot less about “littering”.
I remember this!
I have a 2015 car. Imagine my surprise to find that it has front and rear ashtrays. I hadn’t seen an ashtray in a car since probably the early nineties. I remember for a while after the ashtrays stopped being standard that you could order a “smoker’s package” to get them, but I thought that option had long since gone away.
Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.
Yes, someday we will all ingest nothing but crumbly dry blocks of nutrient fuel, and scoff at those who used to slurp up liquids like a meat mosquito.
Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.
But then where will I put my water bottle?
I have a Trabant, a car from East Germany that was made pretty much as cheap as possible. Still has ash trays front and back.
I remember a beloved fish-and-chips restaurant in the area where I grew up that had, in addition to fun cartoons of a clam introducing various dishes, smoke stains all along the edge of the ceiling. It was that bad… funny to think that it was soon after smoking was banned that the place closed down–maybe it never actually tasted good but nobody could tell??
I had a family friend who smoked so much the walls oozed yellow. I could not bear to go over there even though I adored her.
EXACTLY.
I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m like this.
Man AI generated video is getting so cool. Obviously this video has some big issues with it, but it brings life to a 1960s postcard. Wow
I even love the issues, honestly. Is the bed coming to life? Wait, is that a hand under the bed? And I think my man’s leg is a radiator now, but I’m more concerned about how comfortable he is with that hand in his pants. Man, this stuff is a fever dream wonderland. I really do love it.
Honestly I see a future where weird AI videos get their own complete genre. That hand coming out from under the bed was pretty cool.
Holy shit a Subgenius sighting in the wild!? in 2024?!!?!?
Praise Bob.
So the grocery store in my little town growing up was the last hold out. They had ash trays in their buggies until they legally couldn’t, then kept the buggies for years after.
What’s a buggy in this context, a cart?
Yep. I actually didn’t know there was another name for it until I was in my 20s.
Correct.
And back in the 80s, a cart was something you pushed at the grocery store, not something you smoked. And a buggy was a hardware cart that you’d deploy to go shopping, and then when you were done you’d roll it back and get your quarter back.
1984 was a strange time, linguistically speaking.
People were smoking in the corner store at used to work in way past the day it became illegal, including the lady that owned it and the employees…
Ashtrays on carts, that’s a new one to me who grew up in the very smoky 80s.
I think it was probably very location dependent. I know the Skaggs where my mom worked did, plus the little affiliated grocery store in my town. But I don’t remember them at Kroger or Piggly Wiggly (back when that was a thing there).
When I was a kid the old people in my family all chain smoked when we went out to eat. I hated eating with them because of that. I seriously thought my aunt was 15 years older than my mom because of her chain smoking and alcoholism aged her. Found out after she died she was only 3 years older.
What I remember most is coming back from concerts reeking of cigarettes and having to immediately throw my clothes in the wash and take a shower. Going to shows got so much more enjoyable after they banned indoor smoking at clubs.
Even just going to a restaurant or bar got so much more enjoyable.
Ashtrays everywhere. Companies marketing for kids who proudly make massive branded ashtrays, like McDonalds.
At least the ashtrays can still be used, one of my buddies uses them for coasters and I want to use one for screws when I work on stuff.
I got told to turn my Joe Camel shirt inside out in the 8th grade. I didn’t understand. I was so rad and so was he.
Good lord the times have changed thank goodness.
I don’t get it
I was a child rocking a camel cigarette shirt.
camel Joe was a hero back then
I still regularly marvel about how great it is not to have to quarantine my clothes and have a shower as soon as I come home from the pub or restaurant, and it has been 20 years since it was banned around here.
I went on a road trip a few years ago and we went to a bar… somewhere along the mid Atlantic. Maybe Virginia or one of the Carolinas, and people are smoking at the bar, and I felt like I had just landed on a different planet. Like… I had almost forgotten people still smoked at all, let alone a dozen people puffing away in a small barroom.
We got pretty drunk and had a good time though. But then when I took a shower in the morning, it was like all that smoke residue was oozing out of my pores and hair. Being hungover and having a steamy, cigarette-smelling shower did not start the day off well.
Same. I’m so sensitive to smoke I will run away from anyone smoking in my vicinity even outdoors.
sometimes though, the bars smell like piss. i think id take cig smoke smell to piss smell
If your bar smells like piss, maybe it’s time to go to a different bar.
Your beer tastes like piss
That’s cos we piiiisss in it
I’m old enough to remember a home visit from my GP for childhood asthma and he was prepping his pipe with tobacco while talking to me
I moved to São Paulo recently and discovered that people here still smoke on clubs. Is disgusting coming back from party with the hair and clothes smelling like cigarettes.
My wife is from an Eastern European country, and whenever we visit her folks I have a similar experience. Every single restaurant reeks of smoke, and there is apparently no political appetite to change that.
The funny thing about cigarettes is they kill lots of appetites by providing such ready dopamine release.
Apparently many states in Germany have smoking in pubs too . It’s so nasty. Makes me actually ill to be around a smoker.
I’m old enough to remember when smoking was banned in bars/clubs in the UK. It went from a musky smell to body odour, and it took practically all venues by surprise.
Now, I’m so glad that indoors smoking was banned. Looking back, it was fucking gross, and while sadly lots of people now vape indoors it was a huge improvement to basically be able to actually breathe in those places.
I came to Ireland when they just banned smoking and it was still legal in Germany. The first time I walked into a pub and ran against a solid wall of sweat and beer farts I missed smoking.
Seriously this! I grew up poor so going to restaurants was a 2-3 times a year thing. And as a kid, going to one meant non-smoking area, where the nasty ass smoke would still waffle over. And my eyes would get irritated, id get really sick and cough nonstop for days.
It didn’t even notice the coincidence until it happened to me at a friend’s house in college who was also a heavy smoker.
