Sorry, but it’s soapbox time.
Here’s just one more example of the hundreds you can easily find — of the anti-smoking movement trying to scare Hollywood into banning smoking (or restricting it so severely that in effect, it would be banned) — and the mainstream media playing right into the anti-smoking frenzy.
The latest issue of Newsweek reports on proposals to require movies to carry an “R” rating for “tobacco” imagery. And they obviously have taken a press release (or a direct feed of “information”) from the antis in order to bolster the argument. The article claims that in the movie “The Ring,” and this is a quote from the article paraphrasing a Dartmouth professor of pediatrics and anti-smoking activist, “the scariest part was all of the smoking by stars like Naomi Watts (about 29 cigarettes, reports SceneSmoking.org).”
First of all, we checked the listing at SceneSmoking – which as many of you know, would define an organ-grinder’s monkey with a cigarette in his mouth, running through the background of a scene, as a “smoking incident.” But what it really says at SceneSmoking is that there were a total of 10-29 smoking scenes, involving three different people including an extra, in the movie. It does not say that Naomi Watts smoked 29 cigarettes. For those of you who didn’t see the movie, here’s the smoking review we did of the movie after it came out:
“One nice scene with Naomi Watts and another girl; the other girl takes several nice drags with good exhales, then Naomi takes the girl’s cigarette to light her own, with one drag. (3/4 *)”
Hmmm…maybe we just missed the other 28 cigarettes.
Or maybe the anti-smokers have lied once again in order to get a gullible mainstream writer to carry their propaganda message.
Naw, that couldn’t be. Writers are much too intelligent and professional to be duped like that.

We were at the drugstore today, and while it might not qualify as a “sighting” per se, we thought it was worth passing along. A very attractive woman, blonde, sunglasses, nice figure, probably in her mid 30s was in front of us at the counter, with a girl who almost definitely was her mid-to -late teenaged daughter. The woman asked for “4 packs of More 120s and 2 packs of Marlboro Lights 100s, please.” Unfortunately, the clerk put them in a bag instead of handing all the packs over at once (which might have let the woman give the Marlboro Lights to her daughter) – they paid and left. We hurriedly paid for our items and left; the woman and her daughter were well ahead of us, getting into their mini-van and driving off, so we couldn’t see if she’d handed the cigarettes to her daughter It was still nice to see, though