Freedom... and cigarettes

Cigarettes.

The name alone used to imply glamor but in today's society, they are believed to be worse than heroin by many of the anti-smoking pundits out there and the tobacco companies’ strangle hold on millions of people worldwide as some would believe.

The Facts:

The modern cigarette consists of much more than tobacco. Nicotine, a highly addictive drug found naturally in the tobacco plant, is manipulated with precision to enhance addiction and hundreds of additives, ranging from sweeteners to ammonia, are blended in, usually with no prior government testing, disclosure or oversight. That is about to change with President Obama's passing of a new bill that puts cigarettes (and their ingredients) under the control of the FDA (and don't get me started on the hypocrisy surrounding the fact that the President smokes).

So what are the hundreds of additives added to cigarettes?

Acetaldehyde (an additive believed to work synergistically with nicotine to enhance addiction), Acetone (a toxic solvent), Ammonia (added to boost absorption of nicotine), Arsenic (a potentially fatal poison), Cadmium (known human carcinogen), Carbon monoxide (highly toxic), Cocoa (one of many sweeteners added to mask the taste of tobacco; also acts as a bronchodilator allowing smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into lungs), Formaldehyde (probable human carcinogen; best known as an embalming fluid), Mercury, Nitrosamines (probable human carcinogens), Polonium-210 (radioactive element, known human carcinogen), as well as 200 other trace chemicals that may be hazardous to your health.

The Tobacco Companies Reason for Cigarettes:

“The cigarette should be conceived not as a product but as a package. The product is nicotine. Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a day’s supply of nicotine.... Think of the cigarette as the dispenser for a dose unit of nicotine..... Smoke is beyond question the most optimized vehicle of nicotine and the cigarette the most optimized dispenser of smoke.” - Philip Morris, 1972

“In a sense, the tobacco industry may be thought of as being a specialized, highly ritualized, and stylized segment of the pharmaceutical industry.” - R.J. Reynolds, 1972

“Moreover, nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug effective in the release of stress mechanisms.” - Brown & Williamson, 1963

The Consumers Reason for Smoking:

So why do we continue to smoke billions of cigarettes a year (aside from the obvious addiction factors)? Many continue to smoke because they just can’t quit. The pharmaceutical companies have made a killing off of patches, pills, and other "Stop Smoking" aides that many times just don't work. Then there’s what I like to refer to as the “misguided masses” that started and continue to smoke because of peer pressure or the air of “looking cool”. Though it may sound like I don't like this type of smoker, it is simply that they are often times the reason why the rest of us keep getting bad press regarding smoking. In fact, these first two groups are usually the ones portrayed in all the anti-smoking advertising on television. Some people only smoke when they drink. As their intoxication level goes up they find they need something to keep their hands busy. A bit bizarre but hey, why not? Others, like my friend Josh, smoke to be able to control fire, one of the most chaotic elements on the planet, in the palm of his hand. I like his reasoning, but don’t entirely share his view.

The Point:

So you may be wondering, Ben, why do you continue to smoke? The answer is simple. Freedom. The founding fathers of the United States of America set down legislation that acknowledges that each and every American has the inalienable God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They also provided for no taxation without representation which every smoker has to deal with. Every new cigarette tax imposed on smokers blatantly ignores this piece of early legislation including the new FDA thing that will potentially increase cigarette taxes by as much as an additional $1-2 per pack. As it stands, tobacco companies have not (to my knowledge) increased the prices for their products at all in the last 10-20 years. If you can get your hands on any "duty-free" cigarettes, you'll see what I mean. A carton of duty-free Camels, cost as little as $15-20 with shipping, but a carton at the local corner store, costs $55-60 in Ohio (and it's much higher in places like California and New York). In Ohio, that's about $40 in taxes per carton or $4 a pack. EVERY increase in cigarette prices has been the result of some new state or federal tax. Soon my fellow smokers and I will potentially have to deal with an additional $1-2 federal tax and a possible carbon tax in the next year or so. This is the very epitome of taxation without PROPER representation and something needs to be done about it, but I'm getting off point. How else can you legally (for the time being) purchase and consume poison repeatedly throughout the day and not get arrested for it? Besides, despite the whiners that hide behind the peer pressure argument, smoking is, was, and (as long as it remains legal) will be a choice. I chose to start smoking. No one held a gun to my head and told me I had to smoke. Yes, I know that there happen to be health risks involved, but everything in life can be a health risk.

The surgeon general has determined that doing anything, anytime, anywhere can be hazardous to your health. You could be the healthiest person in the history of the world and one morning while jogging, get hit by lightning or trip on a curb and fall under the wheels of a semi, or on your way home from work, a defective wire in your car could ignite the fumes in your gas tank and blow you to kingdom come. Look at Jim Fix. He jogged every day of his life and was considered by some to be the epitome of health, but he died of a heart attack...while jogging. We all have to admit that at some point we are going to die, regardless of what we try and do to prevent it.

You might argue that, other than internal health risks, smoking ages you. This is true for those that stress out about not being able to quit. A few years ago, I worked at a temp job through Manpower with a 63 year old black lady named Pandora. She’d been smoking since she was a child, but until she told me her age, I was convinced she was in her mid-40s. Why didn’t smoking age her? She told me she didn’t allow herself to worry about anything she couldn’t control. She was addicted to smoking but refused to stress out over it.

Then there’s the argument that smoking shortens your life expectancy. Look at George Burns. He smoked a big fat “Winston Churchill” style cigar (which is roughly the equivalent of at least a pack of cigarettes) every day of his life until his death at 101. He didn’t die from lung cancer or emphysema but a heart attack. The same thing that killed Jim Fix. Was it the cigars that killed him? Maybe. But come on. THE GUY WAS 101 YEARS OLD. If smoking shortened George Burns’s life expectancy, I’d hate to think of how old he would have lived to.

I choose to continue smoking because I can. Am I addicted? Probably, but I’ve never tried to quit and, at the moment, have no inclination to do so. Doesn’t the fact that I’m addicted make me a slave to the tobacco companies? My rights (for the time being) as an American citizen allow me freedom of choice. I CHOSE to start smoking. If that makes me a "slave", that was a choice I made. No one else (at this point in American history) has the right to take that freedom away from me. Every cancer-inducing, lung blackening cigarette that I smoke, is a personal expression of my God given ability to make my own decisions (good and bad), and deal with the consequences from them like an adult.

I refuse to be “a good little automaton droid” and believe everything that everyone else tells me to do. I am therefore I think. I think I want a cigarette. That is my right (until some other anti-tobacco organization or reckless politician takes it away).

My capacity for choice is my freedom. In closing, I would like to end with a bit of Latin.

Libertas Vel Nex (liberty or violent death)

**For more information on Smoker's Rights and how they are being stripped away, check out the Smoking Lobby, that has been advocating smoker's rights worldwide since 1999 or Citizens Freedom Alliance's The Smoker's Club that distributes an online and offline newsletter on Smoker's Rights.**

Short Scale Cigar Box Guitar

As far back as the Civil War ('The War of Northern Aggression' for my fellow Southerners), the simple cigar box has had a role in the creation of music. In it's earliest recorded use (from an etching by French artist Edwin Forbes), it was converted into a cigar box fiddle by some Confederate soldiers. Late in the 19th century, plans for the 'Uncle Enos Banjo' were published in the "American Boy's Handy Book" by Daniel C. Beard as a step-by-step guide to creating a cigar box banjo. Around the turn of the century and into the first few decades of the 20th century, the cigar box guitar and cigar box fiddle were used in the growth of jug band music and the blues. During the Great Depression, the cigar box saw another resurgence in popularity in the US. Since many could not afford 'real' instruments, they would cobble together a cigar box, a broom handle, and some screen wire and then be able to sit on their porch and sing the blues. After the Great Depression was over, the humble cigar box slipped back into the shadows until around the age of the new millenium. It was then, during what some call the 'Cigar Box Revolution', that the cigar box guitar started to re-emerge.

It's an instrument nearly anyone can create and the required equipment to truly get the Delta Blues 'sound'. The technology has advanced since it's early years. Most cigar box guitars are now electric. Though many DIY luthiers use the simple piezo element as a pickup, some have used everything from single coil pickups and humbuckers from more modern guitars to hand winding their own pickups from scratch. The hand wound pickups range from using enamel coated copper wire, a couple of bolts, a bar magnet, and some cardboard to creating pickups that would practically rival those made by Gibson, Seymour Duncan, Fender, and DiMarzio. The necks vary from simple planks of wood to recycled necks from broken guitars to hand-crafted professional quality guitar necks made from exotic wood. The bridges range from steel bolts to electric and acoustic guitar bridges to custom fabricated ones. Strings range from a single string 'Diddley Bow' to six strings like that on a modern guitar. The same range can be seen on types of strings used, parts used for tuning pegs, frets or lack thereof, material used for the guitar nut, and length of the guitar's scale. Each cigar box guitar builder has added their own elements to their creations.

"So I went ahead and made me a guitar. I got me a cigar box, I cut me a round hole in the middle of it, take me a little piece of plank, nailed it onto that cigar box, and I got me some screen wire and I made me a bridge back there and raised it up high enough that it would sound inside that little box, and got me a tune out of it. I kept my tune and I played from then on." - Lightnin' Hopkins

So I decided to try my hand at creating a cigar box guitar myself. I originally intended to make everything but the box and tuning pegs from scratch, but on one of my trips to the junk store, I managed to find a Spiderman 3 child-size electric guitar pretty cheap. It was one of those guitars with a small built in amplifier and speaker to allow children to practice without an amp. The scale was only 20 inches long, but since this would be my first cigar box guitar, I could make it work. After I got it back to my studio, I popped a 9 volt battery into it and tested it out to make sure it hadn't been destroyed by some overzealous child. It was badly out of tune, but otherwise, everything was fine. I would be able to salvage the neck, tuners, bridge, single coil pickup, and strap buttons off of it for my purposes. I thought about reusing the built-in amp, but set it aside to possibly build into a little cigar box or Altoids tin amp.

With the guitar stripped down, I went to a local cigar shop in search of the proper cigar box to use for the body. I managed to pick up a small Punch Magnum English Market Selection box for a couple of dollars that would match the color of the neck from the Spiderman guitar perfectly.

Because I wouldn't be using the original built in amplifier from the child's guitar (that had the volume potentiometer and jack wired to it) and wanted to wire in a volume and a tone knob for the pickup, I dug through my parts bin and pulled out a couple of 250k potentiometers, a 1/4" mono jack, a 0.022 uF capacitor, and a couple of spare white Fender Stratocaster knobs.

With all the parts I would need in hand, it was time to build the guitar. The Punch box was just long enough to allow me to mount the bridge at the very end of the top of the box and still maintain the original 20" scale. Since the cigar box wasn't originally built to take the strain of guitar strings, I attached a small block of 1x2 oak to the underside of the lid to give the screws for the bridge something extra to grip into. The screw from the strap button would provide extra support by going into the oak block from the back of the guitar.

The Punch box was thin, but not thin enough to be able to mount the neck without a little assistance. So I cut a couple more lengths of 1x2 oak, glued them side by side to make a pseudo-1x4, and shaped them to fit into the hole I cut into the Punch box for the neck. With a little extra sanding and a couple coats of semi-gloss black spray, the oak could now be glued into the box to provide extra support for the neck while still flowing with the lines of the box and neck. After test fitting the neck and a little more sanding, it was starting to look like a guitar.

Before I haphazardly cut the hole for the pickup, I found a Pickup Response Demonstration Applet designed by J. Donald Tillman that allows you to input the guitar scale length, number of frets, frequency of the string, and number of pickups and move the pickups back and forth between the bridge and neck to get the best frequency response from the guitar. As luck would have it, the best response came from when the pickup was mounted in the exact center of the Punch box which was also the best aesthetic location for it. Since the Spiderman guitar had the screws for the pickup screwed straight into the body of the guitar, I had to add another piece of 1x2 oak inside the box to give something other than the back of the guitar to screw them into. To avoid pushing the bar magnet against the oak, I carved out a channel down the middle of the oak for it to sit comfortably.

With the pickup test mounted and the neck and bridge in place it was time to figure out where to mount the output jack and the knobs to be accessible but out of the way of the playing area. The best place I could find for the output jack was on the end of the guitar in the space between the bridge and the bottom of the box. After drilling a 5/16" hole in the box, I was able to mount the jack.

The knobs proved to be a bit more difficult to mount. Because the Punch box was so small, every location on the front of the guitar that I tried put at least one knob in the way of the playing the guitar. Because of this, the only location I could find that wasn't in the way, but still easy to get to was on the side of the box up by the neck. This would put them in a tough spot for any left-handed players, but since I'm right-handed, it works out. So I drilled a few 3/8" holes and mounted the potentiometers and knobs.

With all the components figured out, now came the fun part. Wiring it all up. I found a wiring diagram for properly hooking up a single coil pickup with one volume knob and one tone knob on Seymour Duncan's website. I have to say that Seymour Duncan's support pages are great reference if you are just getting into working with guitar electronics. Unlike the wiring diagram, I was using a 250k pot for the volume instead of a 500k one and a 0.022 uF capacitor instead of a 0.047 uF capacitor since it was what I had on hand. After working on this project, I can honestly say that soldering is not fully within my skill set just yet, so the task of hooking everything up was definitely frustrating. To make matters worse, finding outlets to plug things in at my studio can be a challenge at times. The only outlet that I could plug the Hakko 936 Soldering Station that I bought last year into that was near my work table happened to be the same one that my AC was using. To use the soldering station, I would have to unplug the air conditioner. Let me tell you, doing something you're not entirely talented at yet in a room with poor circulation and no AC in the middle of June in Ohio is grueling. So Thirty minutes later, about a pint of sweat, and a few choice words after burning myself with a hot soldering iron, it was together and time for final assembly. After attaching the neck, the back strap button, the pickup and stringing it up, I plugged it into my little Crate Bass Amp to check out what this little bad boy sounded like. Only there was one problem... no sound. I would have to take the strings, neck, back strap button, and pickup screws off and look over the electronics to see what I messed up.

It turned out that when I soldered the ground wire and capacitor to the back of the tone knob, I hadn't gotten a good solder joint and they had broken away from the back of the potentiometer. So once again, no AC and a few more choice words trying to get the components to solder correctly and it looked like the problem was fixed. I double checked the rest of the solder joints and they all looked good (well maybe not good, but functional). To avoid potentially having to disassemble the guitar again, I went ahead and plugged it into the amp to make sure that the electronics were functioning properly before re-assembling it. This time there was sound. Once I put the guitar back together, I plugged it into my little Korg Chromatic Tuner and tuned it to the most commonly used blues tuning, Open G (D G D G B D), before I hooked it into my amp and strummed the strings. A nice G chord came through the amp. I had successfully created my first musical instrument.


It still has a few bugs that I might need to iron out. Somewhere along the line, I misplaced three of the little plastic bushings that go on the tuning pegs. So I either need to try and find them, remove the three that are still on the guitar, or replace all six of them with metal ones to balance it out. Also, there's a slight buzz that happens when you're not touching the strings or the bridge. I'm pretty sure it's a grounding issue that could be fixed by lining the inside of the guitar with aluminum or copper foil to cancel it out. Other than that, it looks like a successful build.

Now if only I knew how to play guitar... but that's another project all together.

A Theory on Alien Civilization

Back in 2005, after the record breaking hurricane season and an e-mail that was floating around the Internet regarding Mars, I came up with a theory regarding the origin of the “Grays”. For those that don't know what "Grays" are, they're the aliens commonly believed to be responsible for abducting rednecks and crazy people and leaving crop circles on farmers fields for the past century or so. After finding out that the e-mail had used a bit of faulty information, I adjusted the theory somewhat to fit into a more realistic perspective and have since adapted it some more to make a bit more sense. Here it is for your reading pleasure.

I have a theory that the "Grays" are actually a highly adapted descendant of mankind.

How is this possible you might ask?

It seems that the gravity of the planet Jupiter tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit. Because of this, every two years, when the Earth laps Mars in it's orbit, the two planets come within around 35 million miles of each other. In 2005, Earth and Mars came the closest they have been to each other in 5000 years at a little over 34.6 million miles apart. Maybe each time that Mars has come this close to Earth it has influenced Earth’s orbit or at least its weather patterns just like Jupiter affects Mars. During 2005’s hurricane season, we saw larger and more frequent hurricanes than in documented history.

You may be wondering why a group of people would have left Earth and never returned except to abduct people and leave crop circles in farmer’s fields. Nearly every ancient civilization had a flood myth. Perhaps 5000 years ago, a society of early human scientists saw the change in the weather brought about by Mars effect on Earth's orbit and foresaw the coming of a Biblical style “Great Flood” so to speak. This sparked their need for a hasty departure from this planet. With Mars being the closest somewhat livable planet to Earth, it made sense to head to “the red planet”. Utilizing some form of magnetic engine, they crafted a ship and were able to be able to leave Earth's orbit. Then, using the "slingshot" effect of the Earth's gravity, they were able to launch themselves toward the moon and use its lesser gravity as a launch pad for a further trip to “the red planet”.

Don’t forget the face on the surface of Mars that looks remarkably human. Perhaps it was placed there by this scientific “society” as a sign that humans have already been there. Now I know that astronomers have said that, upon closer observation, it is not actually a face. However, let’s not be ignorant to the fact that we’re dealing with thousands of years of wind and maybe even water erosion based on recent studies that Mars may have had surface water at one point on a planet that has been hit by multitudes of meteors and asteroids throughout the years. All this may have “disfigured” the face so to speak.

Add to that, the image floating around the internet of the Crater Hale on Mars. If you look blow the image up and closely at the bottom left of the crater, you see what looks kind of like an aerial view of a city with roads and buildings.


Atlantis did vanish from the face of the planet over night and the “Great Inquisition” set back human society by as much as 2000 years technologically. So if there were a group of people that had the ability to escape Earth’s orbit five millennia ago, they would be 7000 years more technologically advanced than we are today. Add to that 5000 years of adaptation and evolution to survive in the vacuum of space (mankind is the most adaptable species on the planet by the way) and you may end up with a tall lanky human with gray skin, large heads, and so on.

Look at it this way. If this “society” had the ability to tap into the full potential of their brains, they probably communicated telepathically. Because of this, the mouth would only be needed for consumption of nutrients rather than communication. Thus turning into a small slit. The brain would most likely enlarge over the centuries as generation after generation used more and more brain power. The nose would become relatively obsolete and recess to two small holes on the front of the face being necessary only for “breathing”. Also due to the communication issue, the ears would recess down to small holes on the sides of the heads. After multiple centuries dealing with the darkness of space, the overall size of the eyes would increase and shift slightly towards the sides of the head to allow for a greater field of vision and the ability to see further. To compensate for the low light levels, the pupils and lenses would enlarge to the point of dominating the entire surface of the eyes to allow as much light as possible to hit the cornea. Because of living in an environment that has minimal to nil gravity, the body would be capable of growing to greater heights than it can when dealing with Earth’s gravitational pull. Due to the larger frontal lobes, this “society” would most likely have the ability to move and manipulate objects with their minds, thus negating the necessity of having ten fingers and ten toes. All in all, after 5000 years living in space this “society” would have adapted/evolved from a human one to the currently perceived depiction of the “Grays”.

If this were true, this same group has had the ability to influence the course of human civilization throughout history even before they left by offering an occasional “hand” to assist society’s progression. Scientists have discovered that built within many of the crop circles that have been discovered are extremely complex mathematical formulas. All throughout recorded history, there have been points when mankind has made drastic unexplained advancements in technology over a short period in time. Maybe, just maybe, we owe these contributions to our “cousins” in space?

It’s just a theory…