Why old sports photos often have a blue haze
December 6, 2015 5:05 PM   Subscribe

Why do old sports photos often have a blue haze? Hint: it has nothing to do with film speed or color temperature.
posted by zanni (104 comments total) 39 users marked this as a favorite
 
Nice piece, just as long as it needed to be; thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 5:13 PM on December 6, 2015 [12 favorites]


CALVIN'S DAD: Well, the world was bluer back then.
posted by aaronetc at 5:14 PM on December 6, 2015 [101 favorites]


And here I was thinking atmospheric haze.

I suppose stadiums back then had a lot of atmosphere, eh? Eh?
posted by a car full of lions at 5:32 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, whoa.

You don't see the projector beam at movie theaters any more, like I did as a kid growing up in the 70s: our pre-multiplex one-big-screen Odeon was half smoking, half non-smoking.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:39 PM on December 6, 2015 [27 favorites]


Nice timing: Slate just published this collection of photos with a similar effect, probably due to smog. They're gorgeous, but I'd rather be able to breathe: Spooky, Beautiful 1930s Photos of London Streets at Night
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:50 PM on December 6, 2015 [12 favorites]


Cigarettes helped make me what I am. I quickly learned that going out to social events led to waking up in the morning with sticky, smoky hair, a headache, and stinking, fit-only-for-the-laundry, clothes. I found I preferred curling up with a book. I don't miss those days and although I go out more now, I still like to curl up with an (e)book.

Larry Niven wrote a story set in a park built in the ruins of an old LA freeway. A man brings a petrol driven lawn mower to the park and starts it. The crowd watches with interest and nostalgia ... until they smell the fumes.

Then, as one, they converge on the culprit and destroy the mower.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 5:56 PM on December 6, 2015 [12 favorites]


One of my pet theories is that part of the reason the opening scene of Star Wars was so effective is that when the huge, wedge-shaped star destroyer appeared, a real, three-dimensional white wedge would have appeared over the heads of the audience as the light from the film projector illuminated the cigarette smoke in the theater.
posted by The Tensor at 6:11 PM on December 6, 2015 [104 favorites]


"Nice timing: Slate just published this collection of photos with a similar effect, probably due to smog. They're gorgeous, but I'd rather be able to breathe: Spooky, Beautiful 1930s Photos of London Streets at Night"

Every one of those looks like murder is imminent.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:15 PM on December 6, 2015 [18 favorites]


I do sometimes find myself missing the slight haze of smoke that defined bars before smoking inside was banned. Also baseball smells like cigarette smoke, sweat and stale beer from my childhood in the dugouts of dad's beer league team.
It can add a certain ambience. Also coughing, so I guess it's fine.
posted by neonrev at 6:15 PM on December 6, 2015


I remember going to the 9:30 Club in DC to see the Squirrel Nut Zippers in '98 and being amazed at the lack of smoke in the place. Pittsburgh is in general about fifteen years behind the rest of the East Coast and only banned smoking in clubs within the last decade so I'd never been in a rock venue without copious amounts of smoke before and it seemed so weird at the time. Now I can't stand to be anywhere where people smoke.
posted by octothorpe at 6:30 PM on December 6, 2015


Nice timing: Slate just published this collection of photos with a similar effect, probably due to smog. They're gorgeous, but I'd rather be able to breathe: Spooky, Beautiful 1930s Photos of London Streets at Night

BRB, going to post these to NeoGAF as "Leaked Screenshots Show Next-Gen Thief Game".
posted by selfnoise at 6:49 PM on December 6, 2015 [7 favorites]


Funnily, I was just watching an old Happy Days episode: The One Where Joanie Learns to Smoke.

The thing that struck me* was that they just lit up in the booth at Arnold's and no one said a word.

It's been years, probably 15 or more, since I've lived anywhere that allows smoking indoors, and I'd almost forgotten the ever present haze.

*Other than the fact they were 16!**
**And that Henry Winkler was way too old to be playing Fonzie by that time.
posted by madajb at 7:06 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


That explains the color of this website, too.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:10 PM on December 6, 2015 [21 favorites]


In college, when I would leave our apartment in the morning, I would see a haze of smoke in the living room about chest height from everyone sitting around smoking the night before.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:18 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


My favorite part of that Kareem picture is #14, who is supposed to be a college player but who is obviously in his late 40s. Also, his stance is the physical equivalent of "No. Please. Don't shoot. Oh darn. You shot it. Okay."
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 7:20 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Kareem's skyhook. That photo at the angle shows just how impossible it was to defend that shot. That kind of length and athleticism, and he had his body between you and the ball. It pretty much wasn't fair.
posted by azpenguin at 7:28 PM on December 6, 2015 [7 favorites]


I was out with some folks the other night and realized I am nostalgic for every single thing about smoking, except the smell, diseases and fire.
posted by crush-onastick at 7:34 PM on December 6, 2015 [21 favorites]


I'm nostalgic for men wearing short shorts. I have been a proponent of the men's short short for years, but it seems like I will never be able to get any traction. Screw you, Jordan.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:37 PM on December 6, 2015 [21 favorites]


Stephen King has brought this point up when writing stories that are set in the past. He also had the protagonist in 11/22/63 notice, when he traveled back in time, that the mill town that the time portal exists in looked more prosperous, but also reeked, because the mill was still running.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:40 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Also, I can remember when I volunteered at a crisis hotline in college, it was originally headquartered in an older building in the semi-decaying downtown, and one evening, when I went in, there was a stratum of cigarette smoke about eighteen inches down from the ceiling from a class that had been held there.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:41 PM on December 6, 2015


Interesting that they call him Kareem in the photo caption - I thought the general convention was to call him Lew Alcindor when referring to time periods when that was still his name (similar to referring to Cassius Clay instead of Ali for the early part of his career), but maybe that's not an actual thing. I'm sure there are plenty of counter-examples.
posted by LionIndex at 7:43 PM on December 6, 2015


Kareem's skyhook. That photo at the angle shows just how impossible it was to defend that shot. That kind of length and athleticism, and he had his body between you and the ball. It pretty much wasn't fair.

I came here to post this. Who on the planet is stopping that shot? Wilt with a pushbroom?

That and I'm not oddly not old enough to remember people smoking publicly indoors. Minnesota Clean Air Act was when I was still in short pants. That didn't stop all of my relatives from smoking at home though.

My first trip to Wisconsin was hilarious. I'm walking around GenCon smoking with the security dude.
posted by Sphinx at 7:44 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


There's an English-style pub in Portland which used to have a visible thermocline layer of smoke. You didn't notice it while sitting down, but you certainly noticed it when standing up. In addition, even now the walls are a noticeably different shade where something was in place during the smoking era.

It got better when the giant smoke-eating machines went into place, and my clothes still smell of the place when I get home. But at least it's the smells of coffee that's been on the pot too long/frying oil and not cigarette smoke.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:52 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Who on the planet is stopping that shot?

You beat Kareem only by beating the crap out of the other four guys. You needed the Celtics to beat the Lakers.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:52 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


When smoking in restaurants was banned in Ontario, one of the first thing I noticed in our regular pub was just how much dirtier and more run down it looked without the thick haze of smoke obscuring the place. It was jarring at first. I can't imagine ever going back to having smoke indoors. Good riddance.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:58 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


We still have bars that allow smoking. There's a rule that if a bar makes under a certain percentage of their revenue from food then they can allow smoking indoors.
posted by octothorpe at 8:06 PM on December 6, 2015


Just today I was trying to take an Instagram photo through someone's ecig smoke to get a cool effect. Didn't really work though. The smoke was very visible in person but not on the screen.
posted by miyabo at 8:22 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm nostalgic for men wearing short shorts. I have been a proponent of the men's short short for years, but it seems like I will never be able to get any traction. Screw you, Jordan.

The issue rides up every so often, but it's hard to get people on side and drive it to the basket. As a leg man, I gotta say, those photos in the FPP...
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:34 PM on December 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


I was a smoker in the 1990s, which was kind of the tail end of smoking being allowed indoors. I smoked in bars, restaurants, rock concerts (holding up a cellphone still seems wrong to me compared to holding up a lighter). I smoked in airplanes. When I visited Montreal, it was like a smokers' paradise except for the cigarettes cost $10 a pack. People smoked in department stores! I quit in 1996 and for about the next 5 years inhaled greedily when walking into a smoky bar or restaurant. Now, finally, I can't stand it and am so grateful for anti-indoor-smoking regulations.
posted by Daily Alice at 8:38 PM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


My brother was born in 1961, and I was born in 1965. My mom quit smoking when I was 16, so 1981. My mom was really sick while she was pregnant with my brother, and one of my favorite pictures of her is from right after she came home with him from the hospital. She's gaunt and pale, but wearing that dark red lipstick that was fashionable then, which makes her look even paler and more gaunt. She's holding this tiny premature baby. And she's smoking a cigarette.
posted by not that girl at 8:51 PM on December 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


one of the first thing I noticed in our regular pub was just how much dirtier and more run down it looked without the thick haze of smoke obscuring the place. It was jarring at first.

That may have been from the cigarette tar caked on the walls. I once helped wash the interior walls of a senior citizen's trailer, and was shocked at how the dirty-yellow color--an institutional shade that I tend to associate with the seventies--turned to off-white with the application of diluted Murphy's Oil Soap and a sponge. You may not be surprised to learn that the resident of this abode sat at her kitchen table, chain-smoking and calling out suggestions in a decent Tom Waits imitation.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:56 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Now, if that had been second-hand opium smoke instead of tobacco smoke, would anyone have doubted the potential for addiction from that amount of early childhood exposure?

Oh, and that stuff 'vapers' exhale -- what's in that? Not so much visible smoke ...
posted by hank at 9:19 PM on December 6, 2015


I remember listening to a radio interview in the 80s with Mendelson Joe (Toronto musician/artist/personality) saying he'd developed a sensitivity to smoke and wouldn't be performing publicly until bars stopped allowing smoking. It seemed really outlandish to me at the time.
posted by bonobothegreat at 9:24 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oh, and that stuff 'vapers' exhale -- what's in that? Not so much visible smoke ...

Propylene glycol and/or vegetable glycerine, typically a combination of the two. Same sort of thing that is used in smoke machines for performances or to deliver certain medications for certain respiratory ailments, certainly some risks are present but in their un-contaminated, pure, non-denatured by heat state, "PG" and "VG" are pretty safe.

The more vegetable glycerine in the mix, the more opaque the vapor will be. People who use "mods" (devices that don't resemble cigarettes at all and maximize certain things like battery life) are able to produce enormous opaque clouds that take awhile to disperse and can be quite obnoxious about it but usually they only go nuts in vape shops in my experience, now that smoking or vaping within 25 feet of anywhere is banned where I live. I like to do it from time to time and have a mod and rebuildable atomizer (for geeking out and giant clouds) but largely have quit smoking with no cigarettes in 5+ years (and no nicotine in the occasional e-liquid I use for the past 6 months).
posted by aydeejones at 10:33 PM on December 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


Here's what "cloud-chasing" looks like
posted by aydeejones at 10:35 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


but usually they only go nuts in vape shops

I can't get this phrase out of my head.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:39 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


They still smoke in the bars in Berlin. Not the restaurants, thank god, but still if I go out to watch football ('soccer') I have to make myself ready for the stench when I go home.
And I was an enthusiastic smoker for a couple-twenty odd years. I'm glad that time is over, honestly.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:35 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


There's an English-style pub in Portland which used to have a visible thermocline layer of smoke.

When I was an undergraduate in the late '90s, student assembly meetings were held in a big auditorium, with the seats arranged on a pretty steep incline - there's maybe 8m of height difference between the first and last bank of seats. Now smoking was not allowed during actual lectures, but you put a few hundred young revolutionaries in a room discussing how to organize on various matters ranging from protesting education reform laws up to smashing the state and overthrowing capitalism and there's going to be smoking. After about 4-5 hours of deliberations, if you stood at the top of the auditorium, a well-defined horizontal layer of smoke across the top couple of meters of the entire room was very clearly visible.
posted by Dr Dracator at 12:15 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


None more blue than The Beatles at Shea Stadium.
posted by colie at 12:17 AM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


That Sports Illustrated cover photo of a dominant Lew Alcindor gliding over a cowering Elvin Hayes (#44) is the flip side of SI’s cover 9 weeks earlier, which showed Hayes rising above a flat-footed Alcindor as he sparked the University of Houston to a 71-69 victory, stopping UCLA’s 47-game win streak. Known as college basketball’s 'Game of the Century’ – the first regular-season game ever broadcast in prime time – it even has its own blog.

That game in the Astrodome was one of only 4 losses (in 171 games total) Alcindor’s high school and college teams ever suffered, and he made up for things in the ensuing NCAA semifinal game as UCLA destroyed Houston 101-69 on their way to the second of three consecutive national championships.
posted by LeLiLo at 12:45 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


one of the first thing I noticed in our regular pub was just how much dirtier and more run down it looked without the thick haze of smoke obscuring the place.

When the smoking ban came in in the UK a few years ago, after the smell of cigarettes dissipated we discovered that what it had been covering up all these years was the smell of the gents' toilet. Almost enough to want the cigarettes back.
posted by Grangousier at 1:07 AM on December 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


I'd say I am nostalgic for the smoke, but really I am nostalgic for my youth...
posted by bystander at 2:09 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


I remember whenever Ireland banned smoking in pubs, because at the time I played Irish music, and everyone was really concerned that the smoking ban would kill Irish sessions. I'm in America, so I have no idea if that happened, but I do know that what killed Irish sessions for me was how everyone at my local was a jerk who made it really clear that they didn't want me around.

Sorry, that went in a direction I wasn't expecting. What I meant to say is that I'm OK with smoking bans.
posted by teponaztli at 2:32 AM on December 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


Slate just published this collection of photos with a similar effect, probably due to smog. They're gorgeous, but I'd rather be able to breathe: Spooky, Beautiful 1930s Photos of London Streets at Night

In this week in 1952 upwards of 4000 people over and above the expected norm died as a result of the 'Great Smog' in London.
posted by biffa at 2:40 AM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


You don't see the projector beam at movie theaters any more

At my college apartment, we had a big projector. It was also one of the last buildings in town(and i heard, no longer is) where you could smoke indoors. When it was cold out, the windows would be shut and everyone would just be sitting around smoking all fucking day. I'd get up to take a piss at 3am, and my roommate would be laying in bed smoking.

Sitting around in there with the curtains drawn, or at night while everyone chain smoked watching movies when you could see the beam like that is pretty iconic of that time period for me.

And yea, it's weirdly an experience that just doesn't exist anymore. It could get especially cool if there was a really bright geometric object on a dark scene, or a bright line and you'd end up just seeing that shape floating in the air. Big bright flashes would light up the whole room in a really ethereal way.

I miss how it looked, but i completely do not miss in any way sitting around smelling and inhaling smoke 100% of the time i was in my house. Sure did look cool though.
posted by emptythought at 3:31 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


There's an English-style pub in Portland which used to have a visible thermocline layer of smoke.
The Horse Brass? Yes.
posted by gingerest at 3:35 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


I used to do lighting for small-time rock bands in little clubs. The cigarette smoke in the air made lights look more dramatic by delineating the beams. Then the air got cleaner, and the lights didn't look so good, so we added a smoke machine, which I turned on in small bursts to keep a haze in the air. The smoke machine was cheap and old, and it tended to get stuck on, obscuring the band in a thick white cloud. I would then have to sprint to the stage and give the thing a whack so it would stop. Still better than the cigarette smoke.
posted by tommyD at 3:50 AM on December 7, 2015 [9 favorites]


I once bought a used car with a beige interior -- except when I put down a visor, I learned that the interior was white, before the previous owner smoked it.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:36 AM on December 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


I remember when you could smoke in the mall, convenience stores, grocery stores—everywhere. It's so strange to think about that now. What were we thinking? Why did non-smokers put up with it?

Even when I was a smoker, the notion of smoking indoors, in my home, was gross. Fresh tobacco smoke doesn't smell so bad, but you let it go stale, and it's horrible. It's bad enough having that on your clothes and hair and fingers and breath—let alone everything you own.

To future generations (maybe even to today's younger generations), the era of widespread public smoking will look like the era of Victorian city streets caked with excrement—like, how can you have a civilization amidst all that filth?
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:31 AM on December 7, 2015 [12 favorites]


Eftpp: I was thinking that just now -- a couple of years ago a local art house cinema showed Die Hard as part of their Christmas Movies series and when Bruce Willis' character gets off the plane (at LAX!) and lights up by the baggage carousels, there was these weird sort of gasp/laugh I out if the audience. Almost everyone in the room was old enough to remember 1988, but it was jarring nonetheless. I recall musing on what is commonplace today but would appear shocking in another 25 years.

And as to why non-smokers put up with it, it seemed to be a majority versus minority thing. I worked in the eighties a place where there was nominally no smoking allowed, a policy ignored by at least 75% of my coworkers. There was only one time I pressed the issue: I recall asking one guy just about to light up beneath a no smoking sign in the tiny lunch room we shared if he could at least hold off until I had finished my sandwich. He made a lateral thumbs-up gesture and jabbed his thumb into his chest: "My pleasure, my choice!"
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:54 AM on December 7, 2015 [13 favorites]


In my past, I would be in a room, for an activity that I now remember fondly. People would smoke in that room, and when you would look at the air? You would see smoke.
posted by entropone at 6:05 AM on December 7, 2015 [11 favorites]


While looking for a seat on a long distance train journey in Norway in 1997 I remember going into the smoking carriage and being shocked at how absolutely thick the air was with smoke, it was like a Sherlock Holmes-style London fog.

Non-Brits may be interested to know it is now illegal to smoke in a car here if an under 18 is present, with a £50 fine.
posted by biffa at 6:18 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


The Village Inn in my town used to be where all the college kids went at night to smoke, drink coffee, do homework and socialize. This was in the late 80's/ early 90's. I remember when they converted from all smoking to smoking and non-smoking sections. You could usually hang around until about 2 am at which point you'd start to hear the kitchen help yelling "go to Denny's!"

The last time I remember seeing smoking in a restaurant was probably around 2001. It was somewhere near Winston-Salem.
posted by jenh526 at 6:33 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


when I put down a visor, I learned that the interior was white, before the previous owner smoked it.

An interior colour commonly found in less salubrious accommodation, known as 'fagnolia' in the UK.
posted by colie at 6:38 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


And as to why non-smokers put up with it, it seemed to be a majority versus minority thing.

I don't doubt you about your workplace, but in the US smokers have been a minority since 1965 and a minority of both sexes since 1970. More likely a story about an intense minority versus a less intense majority.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:57 AM on December 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


As a wee tike, I distinctly remember getting onto overseas flights where the "no smoking" signs actually meant "at some point, you can of course smoke." Of all the places that are bad places to smoke, an airplane seems like the worst. But then, forcing a population of nicotine addicts into a small space for 8 hours without a cigarette probably seemed like a worse choice.

As to why "nonsmokers put up with it," you can get used to omnipresent smells, even cigarettes. My one friend who still smokes doesn't bother me to be around because I grew up with parents that smoked; I have the science of sitting just close enough/dodging the smoke stream/moving when the wind switches (if you're outside) down. I still end up inhaling some, but between my dodging and his attempts to blow away from me, we do ok.
posted by emjaybee at 6:58 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


not that girl: "She's holding this tiny premature baby. And she's smoking a cigarette."

My mother used to tell the tale of when she was in the delivery room about to give birth to me. Her doctor had been called, and was supposedly on the way, but my mother was starting to get concerned. Apparently, very soon before I entered the world, he rushed in to the delivery room, put out his cigarette in an ashtray that was MOUNTED TO THE DELIVERY ROOM WALL and helped to deliver me WITHOUT EVEN WASHING HIS HANDS.

Gotta love the 60's.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 6:58 AM on December 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


when I put down a visor, I learned that the interior was white, before the previous owner smoked it.

Check out the "dirty patch" they left on the restored ceiling of Grand Central Station. The "dirt" was mostly due to cigarette smoke.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:05 AM on December 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


I remember when you could smoke in the mall, convenience stores, grocery stores—everywhere. It's so strange to think about that now. What were we thinking? Why did non-smokers put up with it?

I think it was hard for smokers to really hear the non-smokers. If you've got a serious habit, you lose your sensitivity to the smell and smoke. I think we're at the same place with cologne/perfume/personal scents now, minus the addiction part. I lived with a pair of smokers for a year. Even when one of their roommates discovered she had a smoke allergy, on top of the standing complaints about the smell, they just couldn't believe it could be true. I think they sort of had to believe it wasn't true, because the alternative was to contemplate something other than maintaining near-constant nicotine intake anywhere in the house at any time.

Also, holy cow were people heavily propagandized by an industry with deep pockets and zero scruples. One summer in high school in the mid-80s I lived with a family that got on the mailing lists for a smokers' rights group. It was some pretty impressive full-court propaganda. They got a whole glossy magazine that was dedicated to inspiring stories about smokers "fighting back" against oppressive, anti-American laws that would take away their freedom: Pictures of cheering crowds of pro-public-smoking demonstrators, etc.
posted by mph at 7:09 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


> I think it was hard for smokers to really hear the non-smokers.

Also, not all non-smokers are fanatical anti-smokers (as MeFites tend to assume). I grew up with my parents (and all my older relatives) smoking, and it always seemed utterly normal to me; I never took up the habit myself, but the smell is still nostagic for me and I have mixed feelings about the ever-increasing bans. (Yeah, yeah, I know, please don't bother to link to the Surgeon General's study, I know all that and I'm not saying smoking is a Good Thing, just providing a little counter to the groupthink.)
posted by languagehat at 7:18 AM on December 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


When I visited Montreal, it was like a smokers' paradise
My friend is fond of saying about those days, "Montreal restaurants have two sections, smoking and chain smoking".

Now let's discuss the blue haze in old photos of Grateful Dead concerts!
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 7:35 AM on December 7, 2015


I recall asking one guy just about to light up beneath a no smoking sign in the tiny lunch room we shared if he could at least hold off until I had finished my sandwich. He made a lateral thumbs-up gesture and jabbed his thumb into his chest: "My pleasure, my choice!"

This reminds me of an argument (a very English, polite, civilised argument with a massive layer of venom underneath it) I had with a man in a bus station. He claimed the big sign with the standard "no smoking" roundel and "Thank you for not smoking" written next to it wasn't saying smoking was forbidden, just that they'd prefer not, and he'd fought in the war and what did I know about anything anyway (I was 19 at the time and very obviously an undergraduate). The other passengers in the queue completely ignored us in that studiously deliberate way.

Eventually we got on the bus. As I took my seat I heard him being further back in the queue complaining about me to the driver, who told him quite clearly that smoking was not allowed in the bus station and that's obviously what the sign meant.

Of course, these days smoking is now illegal in the bus station, as it's an enclosed public building and a workplace. The signs have been changed to reflect this.
posted by mathw at 7:41 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think it was hard for smokers to really hear the non-smokers. If you've got a serious habit, you lose your sensitivity to the smell and smoke.

My dad quit smoking around…1985 or so? He says that when he passes people smoking, their smoke still smells good to him.
posted by ignignokt at 7:47 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Denny's!

Ah, yes. My teenage friends and I often haunted the Denny's, because you could smoke and get endless coffee refills. The wait staff hated us, and I can't say I blame them. We were loud and cheap and messy, often fumigating the place with six or seven cigarettes burning at once.

When they banned smoking at the Denny's, we migrated to a seedy, low-rent place downtown, with a bar on one side of the building and a greasy spoon on the other. The wait staff there hated us slightly less.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:53 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


ignignokt: "My dad quit smoking around…1985 or so? He says that when he passes people smoking, their smoke still smells good to him."

My dad had a similar experience. He quit smoking in '59 when my mother told him she was pregnant with my oldest brother. I remember him saying that it took about 20 years or so until he no longer got an impulse to start smoking again when he inhaled it 2nd hand from other smokers.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 7:54 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


My dad quit smoking around…1985 or so? He says that when he passes people smoking, their smoke still smells good to him.

I've been more-or-less quit for quite a few years now (with a couple of relapses), but the smell of Camel Lights in particular (this was the brand of choice for myself and my friends back in the day) still takes me straight back to 1996. It's an impossibly wistful feeling. I honestly think that a certain (undoubtedly rose-tinted) longing for that lost life is part of the reason I occasionally forget my common sense and light one up. For me, it's the smell of the eagerness and optimism and easy friendship of youth, and the passion of formative experiences. I'd better stop myself before I get maudlin.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:59 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


I grew up in Winston-Salem in the 80's and thought it was normal to get a tracheotomy and a oxygen tank when you got old because it seemed like every time I went to the grocery store with my mom you'd see at least one person dragging their tank around. Such a strange thing to normalize
posted by thecjm at 8:19 AM on December 7, 2015 [8 favorites]


"Also, not all non-smokers are fanatical anti-smokers (as MeFites tend to assume). I grew up with my parents (and all my older relatives) smoking, and it always seemed utterly normal to me; I never took up the habit myself, but the smell is still nostagic for me and I have mixed feelings about the ever-increasing bans."

That's me, except that the smell isn't nostalgic and I don't have mixed feelings about the bans. A few of us here are upper middle-aged and were born during the later years of universal smoking. (Also a child of a mother who heavily smoked and drank during pregnancy in the early 60s ... and I was two-months premature.)

And, yeah, for much of my adult life I didn't mind when people smoked because both my parents were three-pack-a-day smokers. But by the late nineties when the smoking bans became much more common and I was less and less around smoking, I became more sensitive to it. These days, I really can't stand it at all.

Because it personally didn't bother me, I was never zealous about the smoking bans. But smokers who were defensive in opposition to bans and people who dismiss or minimize the problems with secondhand smoke have always bothered me -- that tends to push me more in the other direction because the mindset sort of encapsulates something that really upsets me. Not only does smoke often bother the non-smokers, but it has health implications for the non-smokers, too. I'm a lot less inclined to worry about the smokers themselves -- it's a very unhealthy habit, but most of us have one or two very unhealthy habits. But the disregard for other people ... that has bothered right from the very beginning of restrictions on smoking when smokers would get all up-in-arms about it. I just don't understand the attitude of aggressively not caring about how it affects the people around you.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:24 AM on December 7, 2015 [5 favorites]


My dad was a 4+ pack-a-day smoker, back when smoking was allowed anywhere --- even more, Dad was a submariner, and they rarely even *surfaced* more than once every two to four MONTHS. Sure, the air was cleansed (sort of!), but imagine the atmosphere down there.....

Anyway, Dad went cold-turkey when the Surgeon General's report came out in the mid-60's: from smoking more than four packs every day to a total non-smoker overnight ---- all I can tell you is, Dad had AMAZING willpower. And boy were we all happy to see him leave on his next voyage: he never picked up another cigarette, but those first few months were rough on everybody.
posted by easily confused at 8:29 AM on December 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


I quit smoking a few years ago--moving to a country where cigarettes were $10 a pack and they were terrible at that certainly helped--so it's now become Officially Weird for me to go back to Atlanta and the bars I used to hang out in knowing that you can smoke in them. I realize I can't stand it anymore so uh, I guess drinking in Decatur will be the way to go when I visit friends.
posted by Kitteh at 8:31 AM on December 7, 2015


mph: "If you've got a serious habit, you lose your sensitivity to the smell and smoke."

Probably the most hurt feelings argument I ever had with my father (a 2-3 pack a day smoker) was the morning of my wedding when I (non-smoker) refused to sit in the smoking section of the restaurant where he took me for breakfast because I didn't want the smell to haunt me for the rest of the day.

Years later, after he'd quit, I'd stopped by his place after hanging out in an enclosed space with a group from work that was about 50% smokers. I of course reeked of smoke. My father asked me what "that horrible smell is" and I explained to him where I'd been. And I think realization washed over him for the first time about what a horrible impact second hand smoke had on others.

The burning eyes feeling I get from clouds of smoke that persists for days pretty much turned me off live music in the 80s.
posted by Mitheral at 8:41 AM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


not all non-smokers are fanatical anti-smokers

Some of us only became, uh, radicalized after living next door to the world's heaviest smokers for a few years. If it wasn't coming through the walls it was coming through the windows, and I learned to be on guard at all times against the first whiff of smoke, because if I didn't adjust windows/air conditioning/door closures immediately, my entire apartment would be full of smoke (both tobacco and cannabis). Not just from the tenants, but from all their many guests, at any hour of day or night. (The management told me every year at lease renewal time that the neighbors weren't staying, and I believed them as Charlie Brown believed Lucy about the football.)

I've never much liked smoke, but I do miss being able to sit near friends who were smoking, or attend events with smoking (that is to say: every event in the Denver metro area that doesn't explicitly cater to children, smoking bans be damned.) I just can't do it anymore. It's not just distaste for smoke at this point, it's some kind of adrenaline-based GET OUT GET OUT thing and I can't deal with it and I resent the fuck out of being forced to deal with it almost everywhere I go.

But yeah, the lighting in the photos sure was pretty. Maybe not so much all the cigarette butts on the floors in those buildings, though.
posted by asperity at 8:44 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


This discussion reminds me of how bad cars used to smell. Walking next to roads used to be disgusting. I really love vintage cars, but every time I smell one of them running I remember why new cars are so much better. Walking to school or work along a busy road used to be horrible. Now car exhaust is so clean you really notice when one isn't.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:57 AM on December 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


My dad's mom was a heavy smoker, only quitting after she developed lung cancer (which she bounced back from pretty quickly as I recall, didn't lose her hair from chemo/radiation, passing away many years later from liver cancer which I think was unrelated to smoking). Dad told me they used to go on family drives on Sundays when he was a kid, where she would chain smoke the whole time with all the windows rolled up. I am convinced that this is the traumatic origin story of his becoming a pulmonary physician.

Though, I also remember being shocked by how many people were smoking in our house when we had a party of some sort for the pulmonary department of the hospital in the mid-80s. I had seen a woman rushed into the ICU and put on a ventilator once when I'd been in the car with my Dad when he was on call, and I couldn't imagine seeing that kind of thing daily and still being a smoker, it was mind-boggling.

Dad also earned the hatred of the nursing staff for a while by spearheading the task of getting the cigarette machines out of the ER waiting room and banning smoking from the hospital altogether. He could see that the no-smoking laws were coming and decided to get ahead of them instead of waiting.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:01 AM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


It used to be super common for smokers to be assholes about it, and the rest of us were just expected to suck it up. In my teens and twenties I had friends and acquaintances who I couldn't leave them alone in the room while I was in the toilet, because they'd light up in MY home. Or we'd have huge battles when I didn't want them to smoke in my parent's car. People would smoke in hospital stairwells and elevators, and think that if no one sees, it's OK. And somehow I'm the one committing the social solecism by telling them to put that out? Sheesh.

I know, I know, #notallsmokers, but a lot of smokers used to be real jerks about it. I'm glad that the tables have turned and they have mostly learned to be ashamed of themselves. Jerks.
posted by elizilla at 9:07 AM on December 7, 2015 [7 favorites]


Serious question: Do people who grew up after smoking bans became commonplace and smoking became less common (and after the actual push-in cigarette lighters in cars became nonstandard) still call the car's cigarette lighter a "cigarette lighter"?
posted by mudpuppie at 9:20 AM on December 7, 2015


mudpuppie: I'm old, so yes it's still a 'cigarette lighter' to me; but when I bought my current car (back in Jan. 2003) they called it a 'power outlet'.
posted by easily confused at 9:30 AM on December 7, 2015


I spend time in Russia and China every now and again, and people smoke indoors there. In Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia, I was photographing a private hospital and they had little smoking vestibules in the hallways between examination rooms. That was in 2012.

The weird thing that I can't figure out is that the indoor smoking never bothers me in China and Russia. I've been to some indoor smoking places in the US in recent years (can't remember where...maybe in one of the Dakotas, maybe somewhere in Ohio or Georgia), and it's just as awful as I remember and as many people are talking about in this thread. But indoor smoking has never overwhelmed me in places outside the US for some reason.
posted by msbrauer at 9:31 AM on December 7, 2015


Do people who grew up after smoking bans became commonplace and smoking became less common (and after the actual push-in cigarette lighters in cars became nonstandard) still call the car's cigarette lighter a "cigarette lighter"?

My kids call it a "car plug" -- "I need to charge my iPod -- who has the car plug adapter?"
posted by Etrigan at 9:32 AM on December 7, 2015


The weird thing that I can't figure out is that the indoor smoking never bothers me in China and Russia.

Maybe because the air outside is just as toxic?
posted by Etrigan at 9:33 AM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Before smoking bans if I was in a restaurant where no one else was smoking, I would go outside to smoke.

I never really had any problem taking my filthy habit away from people who did not smoke.

I think when the indoor bans were first being discussed someone pointed out that the staff at bars and restaurants had no choice about being bathed in second had smoke, and I knew waitresses and bartenders who worked those jobs because they paid well enough for them to get by. It seemed unfair that they would be trapped by circumstance and then have environmental assault stacked on top of it.

And I always felt the same way elzilla did. And those smokers did seem like jerks. And that particular type of "freedom" jerk seems to have gotten more resentful and louder, about many things that aren't smoking.

I also remember traveling to California when that state had been indoor banning for a little while, and having to find places to skulk to feed the monkey, and being surprised at the number of people that scuttled up to me to borrow a lighter, because they had cigarettes, but no lighter? I think they could hide their cigarettes from whomever they were hiding it from, but the lighter would give them away? Never understood it, but it happened enough that it seemed odd. As if whoever wouldn't smell it. But lots of closet smokers, attempting to pass as "not vice riddled" at that time.
posted by dglynn at 9:41 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Regarding old cars: Yeah. This year we've had a 21 year old living with us, and our town has an annual salute to American Graffiti (because so much of it was shot here). So we're hanging out in the evening, and all of these classics are crusing around, and the millenial asks: "Did the past really smell like this?"

And I thought "wow, fuel injection has brought us wondrous things" and "dude, if you only knew about what cigarette smoke public places, let alone in bars, used to do to us...".
posted by straw at 9:44 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Serious question: Do people who grew up after smoking bans became commonplace and smoking became less common (and after the actual push-in cigarette lighters in cars became nonstandard) still call the car's cigarette lighter a "cigarette lighter"?

Curious about this and if "Roll up the windows" still gets said in cars
posted by thecjm at 9:45 AM on December 7, 2015


Well, my 3 year old has not noticed the car's cigarette lighter, but she calls Bics lighters 'medicine lighters'.

She also said that the gutter punks in the Haight must be dog doctors, because they were playing with a puppy and smelled of medicine.

Is gutter punk an offensive term? Never thought about it until preview
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 10:06 AM on December 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


My grandfather smoked a pipe for more than half a century. Reading it written that way makes it sound continuous and it very nearly was: he quit when I was maybe 20 and up until he quit, I never saw him without a pipe save during meals or while sleeping. He actually quit because my grandmother had developed emphysema from 55 years of second-hand smoke. She returned home from a doctor's appointment and told him the doctor had said that either her husband quit or they had to live apart. He put out his pipe on the spot and for the rest of the decade or so until he cashed in, never once smoked again or complained about missing it. The willpower involved in that was astonishing.

But that said: once he died, I moved in with my grandmother as she was terrified of a retirement home. She lived on another year or so before her ailments caught up with her and then I stayed on alone in the house for another six month to get it ready for sale. The deep cleaning involved in getting decades of nicotine out of the walls and carpets was... considerable.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:11 AM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Serious question: Do people who grew up after smoking bans became commonplace and smoking became less common (and after the actual push-in cigarette lighters in cars became nonstandard) still call the car's cigarette lighter a "cigarette lighter"?

No, it's been an iphone charger to them for as long as they've been alive.
posted by entropone at 10:19 AM on December 7, 2015


Literaryhero: I'm nostalgic for men wearing short shorts.
Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division has an unreleased song that he played on his book tour and at solo shows called "When Shorts Were Short" about his nostalgia for short shorts. In it he says that current basketball shorts look more like skirts.
posted by larrybob at 10:37 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Maybe because the air outside is just as toxic?

I thought that initially, but when I go to China I usually don't go to Beijing. Other cities and rural are badly polluted, but AQI is usually nowhere near Beijing's usual numbers. And it doesn't explain my experience in Russia, either.
posted by msbrauer at 10:43 AM on December 7, 2015


When I was a kid my lungs were very very very picky about cigarette smoke. To the point where one person smoking could send me to the ER really quick due to asthma.

My poor mother scouted out restranuts before we entered, would place me in the furthest spot from the smoking section and would fight like a momma bear for someone to stop if they reached for a lighter.

Long story short: I was hospitalized regularly.
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:49 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Doroteo Arango II: "Is gutter punk an offensive term?"

Friend of mine came up with a good joke about this yesterday;

"What did the crust punk sew up his ripped jeans with dental floss?"









"Because his parents are both successful dentists!"
posted by wcfields at 11:06 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


My mom smoked from the time I was a young child up until I was 13 or 14, then quit cold turkey. When I was a teenager, my best friend's dad was retired Navy, and his parents would sit in the dining room all day chain-smoking and playing gin rummy - my friend's whole house had a permanent haze. I wasn't fond of it but neither did it bother me too much - until I got home and could smell the reek on my clothes.

Years later mom admitted that, as a recent quitter, that stale smoke smell would always invoke intense cravings in her for a cig. Not only am I amazed she managed to hold out, I can't believe I was never interested in smoking myself. Even though I was surrounded by smokers for years, the idea never appealed to me. Which is good, because I'm sure that with my lack of will-power, if I ever started I'd never be able to quit until I died of cancer.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:18 AM on December 7, 2015


One of my pet theories is that part of the reason the opening scene of Star Wars was so effective is that when the huge, wedge-shaped star destroyer appeared, a real, three-dimensional white wedge would have appeared over the heads of the audience as the light from the film projector illuminated the cigarette smoke in the theater.

I was seven years old when Star Wars was released and saw it in its original run in theaters at least ten times. Smoking was not allowed in theaters by that point in my hometown, so, at least for me, your theory doesn't hold up. I remember seeing scenes from old movies as a kid where people would be smoking in a movie theater, and I could hardly believe it was ever allowed, even though you could smoke indoors in many settings.
posted by krinklyfig at 1:18 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Is gutter punk an offensive term?

Like anything, it depends on who you ask, but I've heard the term used most frequently by gutter punks, to describe themselves.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:42 PM on December 7, 2015


This discussion reminds me of how bad cars used to smell.

Well, now. For the past several months, I have been noticing a cloud of sulfurous air whenever I drive past any highway on-ramp where a bunch of cars enter. I can't see it, but I sure can smell it. I've taken to closing the vents until I'm well past such areas. Then there are the "rolling coal" pinheads...
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:05 PM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Serious question: Do people who grew up after smoking bans became commonplace and smoking became less common (and after the actual push-in cigarette lighters in cars became nonstandard) still call the car's cigarette lighter a "cigarette lighter"?

I'm 25. I think i'm at the EXACT transition point, because me and my friends all remember being kids in the 90s when people would smoke in cars, you'd go to restaurants and people would be smoking, etc. Everyone i know calls it a cigarette lighter. I also remember being EXTREMELY confused when i first got in to a car that just had a little plastic plug(that's impossible tiny and easy to lose! ugh) where the lighter would normally go. I thought that it was either some weird anti smoking statement or you had to pay extra for them now, but i never saw one on a new car again after that(i wanna say that was almost exactly 2000?)

However, from what i've seen, everyone born after around 1995 doesn't. I'm sure there's exceptions, but that's just not the default word for it anymore. I haven't had anyone go "huh?" and not know what i meant yet, but they don't call it that. It's always just "car adapter" or something like that. I've heard car plug before.

It actually slowly crept in to and took over my vocabulary too. The socket itself is the lighter, but anything that plugs in to is just a "car adapter" or "car charger".

It's also worth noting that with every new car, even the cheapest hyundai, having built in USB ports i don't see people use those sockets unless they have an older car anymore.
posted by emptythought at 2:10 PM on December 7, 2015


I think when the indoor bans were first being discussed someone pointed out that the staff at bars and restaurants had no choice about being bathed in second had smoke, and I knew waitresses and bartenders who worked those jobs because they paid well enough for them to get by. It seemed unfair that they would be trapped by circumstance and then have environmental assault stacked on top of it.

I had a friend who worked as a cocktail waitress in New Mexico, then moved to California and continued cocktailing. "I never thought I minded working around smokers," she told me once, "until the second winter I lived here, when I realized I hadn't been sick once that year. I used to get three or four colds a winter; I'd be hacking and coughing until April."
posted by Lexica at 2:55 PM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, Greg_Ace, you could also be a smoker like my dad and never get cancer but have strokes instead. That plus heart disease (that smoking also made worse) was what got him in the end. He was 52.

Leaded gasoline and cigarettes everywhere; it's a miracle anybody survived the first half of the 20th century.
posted by emjaybee at 3:33 PM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


emjaybee: "That plus heart disease (that smoking also made worse) was what got him in the end. He was 52."

Please accept my most heartfelt sympathies. 52? Christ, I wouldn't have a beef if that was me, but that's WAY too young for people who have families.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 5:11 PM on December 7, 2015


It's also worth noting that with every new car, even the cheapest hyundai, having built in USB ports i don't see people use those sockets unless they have an older car anymore.

Huh. Perhaps it's also a function of age (mine, not my car's) that my one-year-old car has both a 12v outlet and a USB port, right next to each other, and it never occurred to me to use the USB port to charge my phone. I use the one that plugs into the cigarette lighter. :)
posted by mudpuppie at 5:35 PM on December 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


Fond memories of doing philosophy in campustown bars until very late in grad school. Not so good memories of the smoke everywhere--clothes, hair. Ugg. Now I get pissed if people are smoking outside here in CA and it comes in the door.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:17 PM on December 7, 2015


elizilla is right. In college in the early 90s I was the dick for getting pissed about people smoking in the bathroom. It was all framed as the non-smoker imposing her preferences on the poor embattled smoker. Thank God that's behind us.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:30 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Gutter punks it is then.

Smoking tobacco is a stupid filthy habit, it killed 2 grandparents at 62 and 65, and my father at 61. I am down from two daily packs of unfiltered to 2 or 3 Marlboros a day plus vaping during office hours.

The one thing I miss, and the main reason I vape, is that in that transition period were smoking inside was not forbidden, but just impolite, smokers had a reason to step outdoors and contemplate or conversate.

I last went to college in the 90s, at a school were most classrooms had floor to ceiling windows opening to wavy lawns and old groves, with large awnings to protect from tropical rain or sun.

If the teacher smoked, the smokers would stay inside smoking, the non smokers would take the class sitting outside. When the teacher did not smoke, smokers would take the class from the garden, smoking nonstop.

I loved non smoking teachers. Nothing beats being young and immortal, sitting outdoors under a three, arguing philosophy 101 or linear algebra with wise old professors, smoking Alitas and Delicados till your fingers burned. An uninterrupted chain linking Plato's Akademia in Athena's sacred olive groves to a bunch of young Mexicans in a Jesuit garden.

Last time I visited, the doors and windows were kept closed to keep the AC in, and everyone stays indoors close to the laptop charging plugs. No one is smoking anything on campus, but I found lots of aderall and modafinil wrappers in the bathrooms.

I wanted to yell 'Come on kids, step on my lawn! Take a nap! Make out with someone you like!', but I have already been kicked out once before.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 7:17 PM on December 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


emptythought: "It's also worth noting that with every new car, even the cheapest hyundai, having built in USB ports i don't see people use those sockets unless they have an older car anymore."

15A at 12V is way more potential power than 3A at 5V so lots of high power 12v devices plug into those sockets. Fridges, air compressors, impact wrenches, car heaters, power inverters, spot lights, jumper cables, trickle chargers, immersion heaters to name a few. Never can tell what manufacturers are going to cheap out on but I don't see the 12V power port going away anytime soon.
posted by Mitheral at 7:49 PM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


We'll know the future is here when kids use USB sockets in cars to charge their E cigs.
posted by miyabo at 8:32 PM on December 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


« Older I love you, see you tomorrow   |   Into the uncanny valley: 80 robot faces ranked by... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments