“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” – Sherlock Holmes

A quote from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, from a passage where Doyle asserts that the human mind, properly medicated, is more powerful than the supernatural. After sneering at a supposed man of science’s tale of the spectral hound, he sends Watson off for the day so he can apply his mind to the case. On Watson’s return to a room dense with tobacco smoke, obviously emitted by a man who has not left his London rooms, he asserts that he has traveled to the location of the crime, in Devonshire. “In spirit?” Watson asks.

“Exacty. My body has remained in this arm-chair, and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.”

Everything they said was bad for us…

To paraphrase Woody Allen in Annie Hall, everything they say is bad for us may actually be good for us. Or at least not so bad for the people in the same room.

Here’s a study that lays the out the science of second hand smoke, hinting also at the politics of it. The US Surgeon General being, after all, a political appointment. Bottom line: second hand smoke cannot be used as a moral bludgeon to ban smoking.

And how about this? The benefits of psychoactive mushrooms? Apparently users feel more centered afterwards. Hm.

And demon alcohol gets an undeserved bad rap, especially our the yeasty brewed kind. George Will outlines here how civilization would have been, well, nowhere without the water purifying and genetic weeding-out benefits of the ultimate carb…beer!

And finally, drinking AND smoking may be your best defense against rheumatoid arthritis, depending. But you don’t have to take my word for it, here’s the story from some hot shot researchers in Stockholm. That’s in Europe, you know.

So essentially in spite of all the anti-smoking and growing anti-alcohol brainwashing going on out there it looks like in some ways you are actually wrecking your health if you DON’T smoke and drink. Anyway, that’s how Mrs. Shears and I now rationalize our occasional puff. We’re taking our anti-rheumatoid arthritis treatment. And when we drink beer (and Mrs. Shears can drink some beer) we are actually doing our bit for advancing civilization.

Now for the whole centering business.

The Ionian Mission

Every once is a while the harmonic convergence of cultural consumption merges to form, well, a blog post. Two and you call it coincidence. Three is rarer, and worth noting. Call it blogorhythm.

We just finished the next work in our campaign to read all of the Patrick O’Brian Age of Sail masterpieces, The Ionian Mission. Captain Jack Aubrey’s ship is skirting the coast of Greece and he writes in his serial letter home that his daughters should be asked to find Epirus on the map. What are the odds, that the name for an ancient and obscure Greek province should appear in two consecutive modes of media consumption, a computer game and a historical novel?!

And further, Aubrey then advises that his son George should also be led to learn about the deeds of Pyrrhus, “‘for it would be a great shame, was George to be found ignorant of Pyrrhus when he grew up.’”

The next sentence O’Brian writes is a thought that has likely crossed every father’s mind: “Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.”

Yes.

And while we’re about it, earlier in the book O’Brian, via Doctor Maturin, a smoker, dashes off what may be the most eloquent praise of tobacco ever written. In his cabin, after a huge breakfast “in the Naval fashion” Aubrey invites Maturin, who’s about to embark on a risky mission, to smoke:

“If you have finished Stephen, pray smoke away. I am sure you bought some of your best mundungus in Mahon.”

“If you are sure you really do not find it disagreeable,” said Stephen, instantly feeling in his pockets, “I believe I may. For me tobacco is the crown of the meal, the best opening to a day, a great enhancer of the quality of life. The crackle and yield of this little paper cylinder,” he said, holding it up, “gives me a sensual pleasure whose deeper origins I blush to contemplate, while the slow combustion of the whole yields a gratification that I should not readily abandon even if it did me harm, which it does not. Far from it. On the contrary, tobacco purges the mind of its gross humors, sharpens the wits, renders the judicious smoker sprightly and vivacious. And soon I shall need all my sprightliness and vivacity.”

Testaments to American Inventiveness and English Stick-to-it-iveness

To overcome a boneheaded ban on smoking in Minnesota bars, some joints resort to…acting.

And this Brit agester sticks to what works even at the dawn of his second century of life. His secret? Exercise, and continuing his chosen method of celebrating success.

New Amsterdam

It’s quite rare that Mrs Shears and I will make a point of watching the first episode of some new TV show, seeing as all series’, without exception these days, are insipid and braindead affairs. The last shows we watched in first run were: every season of  Seinfeld, a few seasons of Malcolm in the Middle, and about one-point-three seasons of Monk, until we realized that show was bound and determined to remain a one-note song.

We thought this New Amsterdam might be interesting and, by and large, it was more interesting than not.

Stop here to avoid spoilers.  

Start with the bad: Clichés are hard to avoid, especially, apparently, on TV crime dramas. You had your three glaring cliché characters dragging the whole thing down: The Belligerent Colleague, the Unwelcome Woman Police Partner and the Corrupt Rich Guy. You’ve seen them many times before – that’s why they’re clichéd – so no need to belabor it. It’s almost like the creators (and this would include show runners, writers, directors and meddling network suits) feel they need to add these sorts of signposts or their audience will get disoriented, forget they’re watching TV and wander aimlessly out of the room.

Our hero, John Amsterdam, is given the gift of immortality by an Indian shaman woman for saving her life…400 years ago. He’s a Dutch soldier trying to keep his fellow blood thirsty Europeans from slaughtering the Indian women. (Kill the men, no problem.) Ostensibly this is all happening in or around Manhattan Island before the trinkets-for-skyscrapers deal was inked. Amsterdam is repaid with a sharp sword through the gullet.

Overall the show found interesting ways to dab history and made-up history into the script, some of it purely throwaway and some worked into the plot. And the episode ended with a cool time-lapse animation of Times Square morphing from the old days to present.

The treatment of tobacco was surprisingly equitable. It’s unusual enough to have tobacco present at all, but here it appears to have magical restorative powers; the shaman woman grants John his curse/blessing by blowing smoke from a pipe into his mouth, and by waving what can only be a bouquet of smoldering tobacco leaves over his body.

Later though, Unwelcome Woman Police Partner slams him with the obligatory “You have a death wish.” while he’s drawing nicely on a hookah. A hookah! The creators here obviously went out of their way to moderate any knee-jerk smoking stigma and found an exotic and unfamilar nicotine delivery system for their hero. To have John Amsterdam smoke a cigarette or a cigar might not only get them in trouble with the the network tobacco censors, but narrative short-hand conventions over the last decade or two have evolved so that smoking is as much a signal of the Bad Guy as black hats might have been in the old Westerns. A Bad Guy – and it usually is a guy, a white guy - can easily be identified in modern movies and TV shows because he smokes. (Remember that guy who smoked in the movie Deep Blue Sea? You knew that brainy shark was going to eat that guy.) Then again how often do you see a hookah on a network TV show?

The tone of the show was tolerably tongue-in-cheek, with Amsterdam occasionally referring to his presence at some long-ago historical event or other, and his companions looking at him like he’s just a little off, rather than completely nuts.  Hopefully they’ll refine this, keep it low-key, instead of dropping it.

But we don’t hold out too much hope that the Indian shaman’s magical medicinal plant will stick around for too many more episodes. Complaints from the life-style commissars have probably already begun to flow in.

Second episode tomorrow night. It was good enough to have us leaning toward watching that one too.

The Surgeon’s Mate

The Patrick O’Brian novels are an unparalleled mix of Age of Sail detail, insights into pre-Victorian anglophonics and keen characterizations but they also achieve their effect in many small ways, at times overshadowed by the more obvious of their merits.

One such is the minute attention to food, drink and other substances. Alcohol is prominent, both on-board and off, and tobacco is not only widely used, it’s practically celebrated, and at times prescribed by our co-hero, Doctor Maturin.

Anyone who’s read the books will know the characters in the excerpts below. If you’ve seen the movie only, excellent as it is, you’ll have gotten a mere fraction of the portraits of these men, and a small fraction at that, and absolutely none of the women. These excerpts from this, the sixth book in the series, will give scant background but if you’re sensitive to even the tiniest of spoilers, you’d better stop here and start reading the books, before they’re banned for promoting tobacco use.

This first snippet is the part of the aftermath from the ending of the previous work (Desolation Island.) Here Maturin considers Diane Villiers, who has dealt him some emotional blows in the past, she having lately spent some time among the ruffians of the New World (and as the mistress of one): 

Page 36: “His pain was not the piercing thrust of jealousy but rather a certain grief at hearing her say something crass. He had always taken it for granted that whatever Diana might actually do, her tact was infallible and that she could not, without intending it, say anything that would give offense. Perhaps he had been mistaken: or perhaps this long stay in America, living only among the loose, expensive set of Johnson’s friends, together with her distress, had coarsened her for the time, just as it had given her a hint of colonial accent and a taste for bourbon and tobacco…as refuge in coarseness, as it were.”

Yeah! Bourbon and tobacco. Refuge in coarseness. Never thought of them like that. Perhaps because to many of us New Worlders, coarseness would be a step up.

And later Captain Aubrey, in Halifax attending a ball for the Royal Navy’s first naval victory of the War of 1812, the Shannon’s taking of the Chesapeake, has had his wind spilled by disappointment: by no letters from his wife, Sophie; by the news from a fellow ball-goer that he had recently danced with Sophie at a ball in England; and by the loss of an assignment because he’d been away so long (recounted, again, in the previous book.) Things begin to look up when a young lady takes an interest, and after one of his former crewmen promises to fix him something with more of a kick than the “thin fizzy stuff” officially available to the party-goers, something more familiar to him from years aboard ship…grog. Aubrey, a gifted sailor, commander and fighter on a ship, can barely make his way on land, whether it be with finances, navy department politics or romantic affairs, and tends to drift toward the rocks in all these areas, especially after he’s had a few. Here he’s engaged in some verbal sparring with an obnoxious Army officer over the attentions of a young lady when the confrontation comes to an end, and Jack begins to feel a little more…irrigated. 

Page 60: “Miss Smith’s reappearance checked any retort that might have been forming in Jack’s mind: the music began again, and as he led her into the dance he observed that it was strange how differently wine took different men – some grew glum and fault-finding, some quarrelsome or tearful; for his part he found it did not affect him at all, except perhaps to make him like people rather more, and to make the world seem a cheerful place. ‘Not that it could be much more cheerful than it is already,’ he added, smiling at the throng, where the greenbacked girl, dancing away totally unconscious of her betrayal, was adding much to the gaiety of nations.”

Resonates, eh? I’ve known maudlin and argumentative and hypercritical drunks, but Aubrey’s “no-affect” affect sounds familiar as well. Mm hm. That what-a-wonderful-world feeling, yep, that’s exactly how alcohol doesn’t affect me. Every time.

BTW: And the girl was “greenbacked” because a sudden rain storm had chased those outside in the shrubbery back inside, perhaps before they’d has a chance to be brushed off by their companions.