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I was browsing through an old copy of “Popular Mechanics” I had stashed on the top shelf of my bedroom closet the other day. When I say old, I mean old; the pages yellowed and brittle. The date was November 1919 which was ironically, the year of my father’s birth and one of the reasons I have kept the magazine around so long.
The magazine contains a full page ad touting the advantages of quitting smoking and offering a smoking cessation program for less than $2.00 (plus postage). Apparently, the tobacco prohibitionists have been around for a long time.
Later, while surfing the net, I came across the following essay by Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) on a smoker’s choice web site. Mr. Clemens didn’t care much for the anti-smoker fanatics in his day either.
Both the graphics and the essay are in the public domain, so I reprint them here for your consideration and amusement.
The Moral Statistician
By Samuel Clemens
Originally published in Sketches, Old and New, 1893
I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.
I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.
You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?
It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income.
Now you know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"?
Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it either; but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices. And so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.
I was playing some old records the other day, listening to some folk music from the late fifties and early sixties. One of the songs on the record was an ‘a cappella’ arrangement of “The Ballad of Springhill”. It’s one of the finest versions of the song I’ve ever heard; which is not really surprising. The song was both written and performed by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl.
Bono and U2 are among the many who recorded the song. They did a version as recently as 1987. OK. So it wasn’t all that recent.
Anyway, back in the winter of 58/59, I was going to SMH (Sydney Mines High School). I believe I was sitting through an early morning latin class when we heard the whistle from Princess Colliery signaling trouble in the pits. It was a long eerie blast, frightening actually, that sent shivers down your spine.
Most of the class, myself included, just looked around with raised eyebrows wondering just what the hell was going on. Some of the kids knew, either briefed by their parents or perhaps having listened to the radio that morning before coming to school. And, it didn’t take a lot of explanation for the rest of us to understand.
“They’ll be going to Springhill.”
When you live in a mining town, within a quarter mile of the pit head, you don’t need any more explanation. You just start wondering; how bad and how many?
The October 23, 1958 “bump” at Number 2 coal mine in Springhill was the worst in North American mining history. You’ll need a geologist to explain what a bump actually is or what causes them. But, you can imagine the death and destruction wreaked by a small underground earthquake, especially to miners labouring deep in the bowels of the earth. There were three distinct shock waves from the bump in Springhill, shaking the entire region.
Draegermen and teams of barefaced miners immediately began the rescue effort. Teams began to arrive from other coal mines on Cape Breton Island and Pictou County, to help with the rescue of trapped miners. The first of the rescue teams encountered survivors at about 13,000 feet down the slope, walking or limping toward the surface. Rescuers were forced to work down shafts either in a partial state of collapse or blocked completely by debris.
The last of the survivors were brought to the surface on Sunday, November 1, 1958. There would be no more in the days that followed. Bodies of the dead were placed in airtight aluminum coffins before being brought to the surface due to the advanced state of decomposition.
Of the 174 miners in Number 2 colliery at the time of the bump, 74 were killed. The remaining 100 were rescued, with some spending as many as eight days trapped underground.
We had just gotten our first television set and CBC affiliate CJCB-TV usually started broadcasting around one o’clock in the afternoon. However, when I got home for lunch that day, Dad was already glued to the black and white “portable” in the living room. If I recall right, some of the men he’d served with in the North Novies were working in the Cumberland mine.
The disaster became something of a milestone in television history as the first major international news event to appear in live television broadcasts. That kind of stuff is “old hat” these days, but in the fifties it was high drama.
A week or so later, when the last of the survivors were being brought to the surface, a reporter rushed to ask one of them “what he wanted most” after having been trapped underground for eight days. Without hesitation, and with the whole world watching, he replied "A cold 7-Up."
I remember the old man laughing and saying “That bugger just got himself a job for life.” I don’t know how long the job lasted, but the 7-Up company did hire the guy as a spokesman.
Following the disaster, the Springhill mines, once the town’s economic lifeblood, were closed, never to reopen.
The Ballad of Springhill
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In roads that never saw sun nor sky
Roads that never saw sun nor sky.
by Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl
The McDonald's Happy Meal could become a thing of the past in Liverpool, England. The city council is planning to outlaw the meals on the grounds that they are damaging the heath of children, particularly as they offer free toys in order to encourage parents to buy junk food for their children.
Council’s Childhood Obesity Scrutiny Group is proposing a by-law that would forbid the sale of fast food accompanied by toys. Councilors say the promotional items are used to boost sales through something they call "Pester Power" - children pestering parents for Happy Meal toys. Liverpool Council claims they are contributing to the epidemic of childhood obesity.
For the full story, see my other blog, Stand FAST
The Gibson Guitar Company makes guitars; very good guitars. Activision makes computer games; very good computer games. So, why is Gibson suing Activision? What do they have in common? Well, that’s a long story; a very long, complicated story.
Guitar Hero is a computer software program that simulates playing guitar in a concert setting. It’s a very popular game and the people producing and selling it are making lots of money. The company currently, making all the money is Activision, who have made over a billion dollars since acquiring rights to the game.
Activision believed that Guitar Hero would give them an early leadership position in music-based gaming, which the company expects to be one of the fastest growing genres in the coming years. So, in 2006, they bought the company, Red Octane, which published Guitar Hero. They paid a miserly $100 million. Red Octane, prior to being bought out by Activision, signed a deal with Gibson Guitars to use designs of some of their guitars as controllers to be used with the game.
But, the game originated with Harmonix, a developer of music based games, who signed a deal with Red Octane to publish the game. The developer, Harmonix, recently launched a lawsuit against Activision who now owns Red Octane for failing to pay royalties under the terms of the Harmonix/Red Octane publishing agreement. But less than a week after launching the lawsuit, Harmonix withdrew it in favour of reaching an amicable agreement out of court.
But, a week later, Gibson Guitars sued Activision, the parent company of Red Octane, for patent infringement. The row started in January, when Gibson attorneys sent Activision a letter accusing it of violating a 1999 patent titled "System and Method for Generating and Controlling a Simulated Musical Concert Experience." A copy of the patent included in the lawsuit describes a device that lets a user "simulate participation in a concert by playing a musical instrument and wearing a head-mounted 3-D display that includes stereo speakers."
Activision disagrees with the applicability of the Gibson patent and wants a legal determination.
Gibson wants to sue Activision for patent infringement on an idea that they must have forgotten they owned, or they wouldn’t have signed the deal with Red Octane in the first place. It took Gibson three years to discover that a company with which they were partners (Red Octane) was breaching one of their patents (Gibson’s). So now they’re suing the parent company (Activision), who didn’t actually buy the company (Red octane) until after they had signed the deal with Gibson. Follow me?
The question that has to be asked is whether or not this is an actual patented invention, or an inappropriate attempt to patent an idea. In Europe, patents are not permitted on software applications. These are protected under copyright laws. In the US, the patent office has been accepting software patents for many years, but there has been no judicial ruling as yet and the legality of such patents is in question.
Songs, books and computer code can be copyrighted; but just how do you go about patenting an idea or a theory without specific music, words or code.
For example, could I patent an idea for a song about a man who catches his girlfriend cheating with another man, shooting the pair of them and then being sent to the gallows for murder. Could I then sue anybody who actually wrote such a song for patent infringement, even though I had never written a single word or note of music? But, that appears to be what Gibson is doing.
It’s hard to believe that Gibson actually wrote computer code or developed gaming hardware in 1999, six years before signing their deal with Red Octane. We’ll have to wait and see just what’s happened in this case.
Guitar Hero sold 14 million copies in North America alone in 2007, earning over a billion dollars in the process. Not hard to understand what this fight’s all about.
I was browsing through an old copy of “Popular Mechanics” I had stashed on the top shelf of my bedroom closet the other day. When I say old, I mean old; the pages yellowed and brittle. The date was November 1919 which was ironically, the year of my father’s birth and one of the reasons I have kept the magazine around so long.
