At least that's what my Grandma used to say. I'm guessing it actually just passes through within 24 hours. But then again, as a kid I also believed that by swallowing a watermelon seed I was going to die a horrible death when that sucker took root in my stomach and I later tried to pass the whole watermelon. Thanks Grandma.

What the world needs is Biodegradable Gum. And an ashtray at every stop sign.

~Fae
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-:¦:- Bling Blog -:¦:-

          The Army really nailed down a hatred of butt-flickers for me. Nothing worse than doing a police call and picking up dozens-hundreds of spittle covered cig butts.

Greywar at JoeUser

Greywar at Buzz.mn

Laborare Est Orare

Here in Birmingham (AL) the city has installed ashtrays on almost every corner in the city center. Smokers are invited to "can their butts" and it seems to work pretty well. It also helps the homeless as they are able to raid the trays for butts to get that last puff left on the stick.

Well, what ARE cigarette butts, anyway? Cylinders of cotton used to filter the cigarettes? Filter? Filter WHAT? What the heck do these things filter? Have you seen those photos of smoker's lungs? I don't think cigarette butts do ANYTHING.

No, they're just Cigarette Handles, and doubtless they contribute to the thriving Cotton Industry somewhere. Well I don't cotton to tradition for tradition's sake: why not just get RID of the cigarette butts? Considering what cigarettes do to a smoker, why not just wrap the nether end of a cigarette in a bit of asbestos so that it doesn't burn the smoker's fingers? Then when they're discarded, little wads of fibrous asbestos will litter the grassy medians, helping reduce the threat of grass fire from, well, from other cigarettes tossed out of cars.

What I like is a solution that not only solves one problem, but creates a bigger problem.

"The Good and Great Must Ever Shun
That Reckless and Abandoned One
Who Stoops to Perpetrate a Pun,"
Lewis Carroll, 'The Three Voices'

Did you ever notice too that 99% of the trash you picked up during police call was cig butts?

And when you pointed out that all you picked up were butts, all the smokers around you were quick to claim that they disposed of their cigarette butts in the proper receptacle.

I guess cigarette butts grow in the ground.

Did you ever notice too that 99% of the trash you picked up during police call was cig butts?

          Around the barracks it was actually a relief to come across beer cans instead of the unending supply of disgusting cig butts. And yes, no one ever owned up to being a buttflicker.

Greywar at JoeUser

Greywar at Buzz.mn

Laborare Est Orare

Tsk tsk tsk. Using such a public forum to promote goose genocide.

For shame, James Lileks!

I don't know about you guys, but I always used to field-strip my butts. And put the filters in my pocket, so that later I could deposit them in the red "butts" cans nailed to the posts in the barracks.

Yeah, right.

I have actually seen women (ladies?!) like my MOM's age, spit on the street in NYC. Not just "pitooey" either, but large honkin' lung-hocking spittery that took obvious effort. And spit right there on 40th street. Makes a gal feel SO PRRETTY when she does that. Also, one time, just for fun, I counted the spitwads on my walk across town (again, 40th street, from 8th Ave to Park Ave) - I realize I need to get a hobby - and I counted 21 of them. And that was just one side of the street. People are gross. They always will be. That's all I have.

I propose that we just call people who treat the city like their own ashtray "butthead". It works on multiple levels.

I caretake the apartment building I live in and I can honestly say more than 75% of the trash I pick up in our parking lot is cigarette butts. Personally I don't care if people smoke or not, but what really bugs me is when they're flicked in the lawn, or the planter, or just on the ground directly NEXT TO the receptacle for them outside the apartment's front door. C'mon is it that hard to toss it in a metal box the size of a shoebox?
There's way more annoying and important stuff out there than this, but still, it irks me.

Didn't the Butt Flickers tour with Elvis Costello in the early '80s?

I don't disagree with anything here, but non-smokers need to realize that public receptacles meant for cigarette butts are NOT garbage cans. I don't want to flick either, but the average public cigarette-butt receptacle fills up so fast with coffee cups and food wrappers that you can't get a butt into it without starting a fire.

What's worse than a butt thrown out? How about the whole ashtray? It's always pleasant to pull up to a parking spot right where some numbnuts dumped an ash tray full of butts and ashes. Yeccchhhh!

The DMV here is always surrounded by people smoking, sitting on concrete stairs that are covered in old gum speckles. I'm really glad I didn't have to use the bathroom there...

Noooo, don't choke the geese!! What will I feed all my old bread to then??

~~~~~~

Don't let anyone take your bucket!

The parking garage for my office building is part of the city's "transit center" (i.e., main bus stop). Each morning as I make my way to work I pass about 30 lungwads that people have horked up on the sidewalk. It makes me want to go home and scrub the soles of my shoes with bleach every day. And, along the same lines as Mary's comments, some of the people I see spitting are women. I know we've come a long way, baby, but I really think that's a bit much.

Just this morning, after finishing my weekly grocery shopping, I stepped into a piece of gum lying in the parking lot. Since the temperature was quickly approaching 110 degrees, the wad actually liqified and melded onto my shoe. No amount of scraping would remove such a mess. Strings of gum, as thin as spider web, stretched from the asphalt as I struggled. I cursed the thoughtless spitter. Cretin.
Leslie in AZ

I second the gum for birds, but make it pigions or sea gulls. My car seems to be their favorite target.

Teach Jasper to eat the geese and think of all the money you will save on dog food, and not have to worry about toxic checmicals being added by cheap importers.

Hey Greywar:
After that snotty jerk from Augsburg wrote that "mouthy" piece in the Strib "guest Column page today, as One that has always used an ash tray,as a result of snippy faced anti smokers like this cat, start watching the "BUTTS FLY"
You Estimate on garbage collection is hilarious, It takes 63 cigarette butts to weigh one ounce x's 16 oz to the lb X's 2000 punnds to a ton, You must be getting your information from the same bunch that manufactures Second hand Smoke Statistics.

Just got back from a few weeks in Europe. Our so called betters are clearly in the dark about how to deal with smoking and the attendant refuse.

Smoking (cigarettes) is still permitted, and entirely acceptable, in most restaraunts. Cigars smoking may be frowned upon in some places, and rarer few will actually have placards out asking patrons to leave the stogie unlit.

And the streets? Still the most convenient ashtray going.

I figure a hundred smokers pay at least $100,000 a year in taxes. That is enough to pay a driver and purchase a street cleaner. The next hundred smokers is enough to pay for 3 people to go around with some brooms. Hey, we got to get something out of the extortion don't we?

I, too, hold no great animosity towards smokers (even though I'm not one myself -- grew up with parents, aunts, uncles, etc. who all smoked like chimneys -- it was the cocktail and cigarettes generation.) However, the worst case of cigarette flicking I ever saw was in Irvine, California back in the late 90s during a bunch of horrendous brush fires. Laguna Beach had been burning for a couple of days and the fire was creeping over the foothills to the campus of UC Irvine. I was there for a night class and the fire threat forced the campus to be evacuated. While waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Jeffrey Parkway inching my way towards the 405 freeway, the guy in the car in front of me flicked, you guessed it, a lit cigarette out the window.

I understand the concept completely and I always try to just be courteous.
But when the moon and stars align, and allow me to hit the windshield of a tailgater with my cigarette butt..
It just don't get no better.

I agree with the last poster. If the state isn't going to use that money to really help people stop smoking like they said it was to be used for, then use it to purchase ash trays for every public building. I've been to many U.S. cities where just about every building downtown had an ashtray. It's pretty simple, if businesses purchased an ashtray, which really isn't that expensive, people wouldn't be putting their butts out on the street. Take 'em away and what do you expect?

I, myself, am getting really tired of the smoking debate. When are we going to move onto something else? What's next a "fat tax?" Or a fingernail biter tax? Or a pick your nose tax? It's getting ridiculous.

a1batross, your comment demonstrates how little we wish to understand when the opportunity to mock presents itself. Filters were once made of paper, which was biodegradable. This was abandoned for a polyester material, which is the only fibre we are now prepared to weave on this continent. And once upon a time (the time, of all coincidences, when smoking-related cancer was being scientifically proven--beyond doubt), filters were made of asbestos. This was a scientific attempt to apply a scientifically-proven filtering medium to the science of reducing tar intake. Now there was a solution for you.

I used to put ALL my butts in an ashtray...when said ashtray was on the table at a restaurant, the beer-stained counter of my favorite watering hole, or sitting on my office desk.

Now after decades of being forced outside with the other "subhumans", I have a lot less regard for littering the ground with my "third hand smoke". Treat us like second class citizens, we're bound to live up to the expectation.

Now gum-spitting, that's just plain nasty.

James, James,
You're right. You've got to get a grip on the inner schoolmarm and either strangle her or find her a young man to have an illicit affair with.

The road to fascism does not start with The Patriot Act but with the endless modifications of small little acts through the use of large scary social justifications.

Sort of like, you know, getting guys with long hair to cut it back in the 60s and 70s. A small thing. Why not do it? Can't we all just get along in the "approved" reality.

Be-have.

If you bump into that strutting young punk Osborn, tell him to get some comments going under his oh-so-stern "instructions to 'you' " or the next time I come out to see my family in Minnesota, the only butt he'd better keep off the street is his.

Or rather, don't.

Flicking a cig but can cause a wild fire, which will result in you being charged for manslaughter and property damage.

When I chew gum for two days, with it on the bed post over night, on the second day, it spontaneous loses coherence and turns into a mealy, unpalatable, bunch of particles that I either swallow or spit out. It is not "gum" anymore and seems to wash away with water.

How it was established that gum takes 7 years to completely digest puzzles me. Did they have actual human subjects chewing it that long in a stretch or did one volunteer chew for a few months and then pass the wad to the next?

I think you grandma probably had read it in the Readers Digest.

As a motorcycle enthusiast, I beseech my car-driving, smoking fellow humans to please try to be aware when flicking the red hots out the windshield that you may just hit a biker with it, and that is just not nice.

In agreement with the motorcycle rider above, not all of us keep our windows up and roofs closed during the summer... I get tired of seeing people flick their butts out of vehicle windows and since I drive with windows down and sun roof open I don't need a flying bundle of tobacco to possibly draft in and hit me. I've taken to honking my horn anytime I see people throw their butts out the window and onto the road.

In regards to field stripping butts, I don't know why smokers can't do that... my brother while living with my father used to smoke, and my father was very particular about the cleanliness of his house and yard. So my brother couldn't smoke inside, and when he smoked outside he'd simply pinch off the end of the cigarette when he was done, so that what little tobacco (burning and otherwise) that was left would drop to the floor where he'd rub it out. Then the filter that was still left in his hand was promptly placed in the trash. No special ash can needed as nothing flammable was placed in the trash. When he was out in public and no trash can was available he'd simply pocket the butt till one was around.

We had a guy come to our workplace to talk about handwashing during cold and flu season -- I think there were other health issues, but I particularly remember him saying that "good" handwashing should take at least as long as it takes you to hum the Happy Birthday song twice. Anyway, he said that you should prepare a paper towel (if you have the old hand-crank dispensers, or if your auto-feed one isn't primed), then wash, then dry, then use the paper towel to turn the water off (so as not to get tap germs), then use the towel to open the door (so as not to get door-handle germs), then throw away the towel outside the bathroom. He said if there wasn't a wastebin just outside the door, you should throw it on the floor, and see how long it takes them to install one there. I don't think he was kidding; our restrooms all have a trash can mounted on the wall outside the door, which is emptied fairly often.

My point is that perhaps whoever owns/maintains the land where all these butts are piling up needs to put an ashtray out, because people are trying to tell them something. It's a lot easier than griping about it and digging around trying to pick up all the butts. Likewise, somebody commented earlier that cig disposal units tend to fill with trash -- I'd say that implies they should be placing them next to a real trashcan, or using one of those combined trash/ashtray units, or emptying the nearest trash receptacle more often.

There are those, I've heard, who have an even better solution to the problem of tailgating. Somehow, they find, when Idiot Child is riding your bumper, it always happens to be just the time to deploy your windshield-fluid wiping system. Copiously. Without fail, backoff occurs. And there's no chance of starting a forest fire.

Myself, I always just give the brake pedal a few taps delicate enough to activate the brake lights, although NOT the actual braking system (the light switch is on a hair trigger). You'd be surprised at how well that works.

It's pretty simple for me. Supply an ashtray and I'll use it. Don't and I won't.

I do carry a little travel ashtray in my purse for at work. I like to sit on a set of steps that don't have an ashtray nearby, so I use my own and empty it on my way inside.

I noticed when I was at Disneyland last that although Downtown Disney has lots of ashtrays, there aren't any right around the park entrance. In that case I pour a bit of water on my butt (shut-up you there in the back!) and toss it in the trash. Mouse land is so clean I'd feel like crap if I didn't dispose of ANY of my trash in the proper container.

Let Me Rant!

The smoking nazis kicked us outside and then complain about smokers in the doorways. Then lots of smokers in one area and the ashtrays fill up quickly. Provide the ashtrays and smokers will use them. If there are none on the streets then the street is the ashtray.
It is like the anti littering campaign in the early 70's. They wanted people to stop littering and throwing out drinks and bags out of their cars. Fine, but provide trashcans so we can dump our trash. Then in the 90's state parks stared getting rid of their trash cans and expected people to carry all the trash out and find the dumpster miles away. The parks were being cheap and did not want to pay for people to empty trashcans.
I would go to a state park and if they had bags I would pack out the trash. But if there wasn't a trashcan at the entrance to the parking lot the trash bag was left on the ground. Later parks expected you to provide your own baggy. Guess what ?Lot of more littering on the ground.
I was at a rest stop in West Virginia and they had plenty of trash cans and empty them 3 times a day. Parks and picnics areas in West Virginia there is a trash can every 25 feet. no trash left on the ground.
Same principle. provide people for what the need and they will keep it clean. Make it difficult and the damn to you and I will leave my cigarettes butts on the ground.

Smokers have been pushed around enough. I have had a snippy woman compalin when I was at an outdoor picnic about my smoke around a child. Tough the child won't die from a little smoke.

Smokers get complaints about smoke coming in doorways and by now most smokers will gleefully blow the smoke straight at these rude people who say we can't smoke in offices . I have seen cars without ashtrays so the window is what is used.

Provide spitoons , trashcans and ashtrays or resign to seeing the mess on the ground. You reap the consequences.