Tableaux noirs

The light from the funeral parlor

                    made a       

golden wedge on the sidewalk

-- William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

the smoke of her cigarette   whirling back over her shoulder

like a sweet-smelling  scarf    in the wind

-- William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)

Fais-moi mal, Johnny

Défense de fumer

They’re at it again -- the bas-bleus/bluestockings of the Gallic nanny state.

La ministre de la santé pourrait interdire le tabac dans les films

Doit-on interdire la cigarette au cinéma au nom de la lutte contre le tabagisme ? Le sujet n’est pas nouveau mais revient dans l’actualité cette semaine. Alors que les sénateurs ont adopté jeudi une mesure consacrée à l’augmentation du prix du tabac d’ici 2020, la sénatrice PS de la Sarthe Nadine Grelet-Certenais en a profité pour interpeller la ministre de la Santé Agnès Buzyn sur la responsabilité du cinéma sur le tabagisme en France.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2017/11/18/97001-20171118FILWWW00082-faut-il-interdire-la-cigarette-au-cinema.php

Readers respond:

Dans les films de Gabin, il n'y aura que le générique..

---

et le narguilé ????

---

Après le tabac ce sera l'alcool, le sexe, la religion, la guerre , la politique. Elle ferait mieux de s'occuper de son ministère comme si il y avait pas plus urgent à traiter !

---

Il faudrait alors aussi interdire l'alcool dans les films, puis les armes à feu, interdire la violence, la guerre, mec racisme... Pas qu'au cinéma d'ailleurs, mais également dans les livres !!!

In the face (or butt) of all of which, we repost our earlier  doigt d’honneur.

~

“Do you mind my smoking?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all, sir.”

-- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1892)

Stout lass!

The latest from France,  from the bobos-fachos, in their chasse au fumeurs:

Marisol Touraine, ministre de la Santé, annoncera mardi 17 juin une série de nouvelles mesures qui devrait placer la France en pointe dans la lutte contre le tabagisme.
Parmi les plus spectaculaires, la mise en place du paquet de cigarettes neutre, sans marque apparente, ainsi que la possibilité d'actions de groupe, permettant aux fumeurs malades de faire condamner les fabricants à des dommages et intérêts.
Le vapotage, quant à lui, serait banni des lieux publics. [-- Le Figaro]

“Lèche mon cul, Marisol.”

Tu parles, Charles

"D'accord !"

[Update 19 July 2014]   The hypocritical vindictiveness against tobacco  leads to other legal skulduggery as well.  Thus

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/business/jury-awards-23-6-billion-in-florida-smoking-case.html?_r=0

No-one born after 1950 has any excuse for being ignorant of health hazards from cigarettes.  The guy started in chain-smoking at age thirteen and never let up.  His choice.   Appropriate damages in this case:  Zero.   But a … Florida jury  (a phrase proverbial for imbecility) decides that a Saganian figure -- biyyuns and biyyuns of dollars -- should be paid.

Tha's messed-up, man ...

Second that, brother.

~

[Original post from January 2014]

Back of the Bus

Suppose that, in some country that vaunted itself on its record of human rights, in North America or Western Europe, there was a cardiac hospital whose waiting-list for heart-surgery numbered both black and white patients.   Now suppose that the hospital had -- not surreptitiously and shame-facedly, but quite openly and unabashedly, even as something to pride themselves on -- a hard-and-fast rule:  So soon as a white becomes a candidate for surgery, he automatically zooms ahead of all the blacks on the waiting list;  and so on forever.   Assuming that, as in most places, the demand for the surgical service always slightly outpaces the supply, the upshot is that no black could ever receive heart surgery.

This morning there appeared a radio essay by the Dutch-Moroccan academic and journalist Fouad Laroui, Je fume, donc je suis, reporting just such a case, in the north of ultra-bien-pensant Holland;  only, with one difference:   The group continually sent to the back of the bus  are not blacks, but smokers.

Here's looking at *you*, kid...

And such is the climate of political correctness there reigning, that the principal challenge to this invidious rule  has come, not from the quarter of general societal welfare and logic (shall such exclusions be applied, on the same grounds of ills abetted by personal behavior, to other risk groups, such as the obese or homosexual?),  but rather, from the ranks of Identity Politics themselves!  For the Turks resident in the Netherlands have -- not opposed the rule per se, but merely demanded that they themselves be excepted, as a group, on the grounds that, in their culture, smoking is not an individual choice, but an ethnic identity badge: Among Turks, a man wears a moustache, and smokes;  un-point-c’est-tout.

Laroui regularly reports on issues affecting Muslims in his current country of residence, les Pays-Bas;  and generally to defend them.   But in this case, he twits the Turkish case for absurdity, pointing out that it is a slippery slope down which other groups can be expected to snowboard, as some already had:  Muslim Somalis in Holland demanded group exemption from Dutch anti-narcotic laws, on the grounds that qât is part of their culture.   (Such an exemption was successful in the United States, in the case of Amerindians and peyote.)   He does not, however, take explicit exception to that hospital regulation itself;  perhaps deeming such comment superfluous in the case of so evidently overweening a rule, but perhaps not.

[Update 13 Feb 2015]  ISIL dislikes smoking.  Smokers dislike ISIL
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-islamic-state-smoking-ban-20150212-story.html#navtype=outfit

Islamic State fighters prepared to burn confiscated cigarettes last year in Raqqa

[Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/world/middleeast/isis-wives-and-enforcers-in-syria-recount-collaboration-anguish-and-escape.html?_r=0 ]

.

Langston

[In harmony with today's Google doodle, we repost this.]

“Our problems in America are very much like yours,” I told the Africans, “especially in the South.  I am a Negro, too.”

But they only laughed at me and shook their heads and said:  “You, white man!  You, white man!”

-- Langston Hughes,  The Big Sea (1940)

[Unusual first-name, common surname;  cf. Malcolm.]

I have lately been reading widely in European cultural history of the 1920s and 30s, and in that context, re-reading the second volume of Langston Hughes’ autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (published  1956).   It is one of the best books I have ever read.  And it is far more gentle and ironic and humorous, more universal in appeal, than the impression you would get from the Wiki article on Hughes (which does not even discuss the book),  which pretty much sees him in the lens of identity-politics.   

In that memoir, largely concerned with European travels, his 1932 trajectory improbably intersects that of another of my favorite writers, Arthur Koestler:  and it is fascinating to read of their stay in Turkmenistan, first from Hughes’ perspective here, and then from Koestler’s (in Koestler’s own memoirs, and in the fine biography by Michael Scammell).   Their compresence on this outpost of the world-historical stage, at that fraught time, is impossible to summarize or even allude to in any illuminating way, absent the necessary background in the Zeitgeist of the time.  (Read The Invisible Writing; read Out of the Night; read Memoirs of Montparnasse ; read Mémoirs d’un revolutionnaire …)

I tend not to be drawn to books with titles like A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934) (which title was quite possibly imposed on Hughes by his Bolshevik publishers), or Famous American Negroes (1954), since I am not a Negro.(**)  On the other hand, I am not an Englishman either, and I love Dickens.  It all depends on whether you are in the hands of a great writer.  And in some of his books, Langston Hughes is that.  -- Further, though a widely-traveled man of eclectic culture, he was very, very American.   Henry James, T.S. Elliot -- Europe can have ‘em.  Langston we keep.

(** : By contrast, the title of his story collection, The Ways of White Folks, is very appealing indeed, for I am fascinated by the ways of white folks, some of whom I number among my best friends.)

~

We have commented elsewhere on the current overpuffing of the literary merits (properly nugatory) of certain currently coddled groups (which both decorum and due discretion  bid leave unnamed) -- based largely, one imagines, on the profiles of who-all happens to work at the literary media these days.    Black men, by contrast, have been relatively quiet this past decade;  if one gets the red-carpet treatment in the news, when not for some notable recent achievement, it is likely not for being black, but for (something else).  But there are treasures, not much trumpeted.

Langston Hughes shares some traits with another noted American writer of mixed race, Barack Obama.   (Yes, I know, he became President;  but prior to that, his excellent autobiography qualified him as, indeed, a writer.)   Both had a virile, absent father, admired diffidently from a distance;  both spent a fair number of years, as children or young men, outside an English-speaking country;  both were well aware of their marginal status -- marginal with respect to just about any gestalt you could name.  (Langston may actually have been marginal in a further respect not shared by Obama;  don’t know, not important here.)   And both turned this predicament to ultimate good advantage.

There is nothing wrong, of course, from being a comfortable member of the dominant community (ethnic or religious or what have you) in your home country;  but that background does not, by itself, lead on to philosophy.   The minority, by contrast, cannot help confronting such matters.  If the confrontation collapses into futility, you wind up with Identity Politics.  If it serves as a path to insight, you get the world’s great literary observers.

~

One of the books I enjoyed during the years in Berkeley after I had dropped out of graduate school for lack of the wherewithal to pay the tuition, and lived (richly!) on literature  rather than food, was Langston’s The Best of Simple.  ‘Simple’ (or Semple, to the registrar) was, as the vernacular version of his surname might suggest, a Naturkind, an ingénu, a naïf :  and though this personality is archetypically American, the European designations (for which I cannot, at present, think of a good English equivalent), are in point, for I Wonder as I Wander provides a surprising hint at the genesis of this character:

I have an affinity for Latin Americans, and the Spanish language I have always loved. One of the first things I did when I got to Mexico City  was to get a tutor, and began to read Don Quixote in the original, a great reading experience  that possibly helped me to develop, many years later, in my own books, a character called Simple

-- a kind of blend, as it were, of Sancho Panza and the Quixote.

Another surprising detail from his Mexico days (since American literati of the ‘20s and ‘30s were not generally a devout bunch):

I went to vespers every night  in the old church just across the street, lighted by tall candles  and smelling of incense.  Sometimes I even got up early in the morning to attend mass.

(Laus deô.)

~

By a biographical accident, it was the work of Langston Hughes that first introduced me to poetry (beyond “Twinkle twinkle little star” -- not that there is anything wrong with that poem, either, in its place).  My parents were not bookish;  yet somehow, on their scantly-populated shelves, stood a “slender volume of verse” (in the classic phrase of the time), its rich yellow hardcovers  together actually thicker than the text in-between, called:

The Weary Blues

by Langston Hughes

(Itself already a kind of monostich, I noted with astonishment.)

One I recall from memory:

Bring me all of your dreams,   you dreamers.

Bring me all your heart-melodies,

that I may wrap them   in a blue cloud-cloth,

away from the too-rough fingers  of the world.

I hesitate even to quote this, for the very reason the poet cites:  the too-rough fingers of the world.  It needs to nestle in its octavo yellow covers,  being gently handled by my own slim fingers, aged nine.    (It is not, in itself, on the level of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”;  but remember:  Up to that time, I had met nothing much beyond the level of the Alphabet Song.)

~

Anyhow, here is a picture of the man, one that warms my heart.  I could easily have selected one less contentious;  but Langston liked his liquor, and his jazz, and the sweet feel of a woman -- and yes, he sometimes enjoyed a smoke.    He was never one to kowtow to pieties (not even those of the Left).   

Here's looking at you, kid.

[Update Sept 2014]  Cf. now this
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/in-re-rice-v-rice.html


[Update Feb 2015]  A searching, revealing assessment by critic Hilton Als, here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner

Back of the Bus

Suppose that, in some country that vaunted itself on its record of human rights, in North America or Western Europe, there was a cardiac hospital whose waiting-list for heart-surgery numbered both black and white patients.   Now suppose that the hospital had -- not surreptitiously and shame-facedly, but quite openly and unabashedly, even as something to pride themselves on -- a hard-and-fast rule:  So soon as a white becomes a candidate for surgery, he automatically zooms ahead of all the blacks on the waiting list;  and so on forever.   Assuming that, as in most places, the demand for the surgical service always slightly outpaces the supply, the upshot is that no black could ever receive heart surgery.

This morning there appeared a radio essay by the Dutch-Moroccan academic and journalist Fouad Laroui, Je fume, donc je suis, reporting just such a case, in the north of ultra-bien-pensant Holland;  only, with one difference:   The group continually sent to the back of the bus  are not blacks, but smokers.

And such is the climate of political correctness there reigning, that the principal challenge to this invidious rule  has come, not from the quarter of general societal welfare and logic (shall such exclusions be applied, on the same grounds of ills abetted by personal behavior, to other risk groups, such as the obese or homosexual?),  but rather, from the ranks of Identity Politics themselves!  For the Turks resident in the Netherlands have -- not opposed the rule per se, but merely demanded that they themselves be excepted, as a group, on the grounds that, in their culture, smoking is not an individual choice, but an ethnic identity badge: Among Turks, a man wears a moustache, and smokes;  un-point-c’est-tout.

Laroui regularly reports on issues affecting Muslims in his current country of residence, les Pays-Bas;  and generally to defend them.   But in this case, he twits the Turkish case for absurdity, pointing out that it is a slippery slope down which other groups can be expected to snowboard, as some already had:  Muslim Somalis in Holland demanded group exemption from Dutch anti-narcotic laws, on the grounds that qât is part of their culture.   (Such an exemption was successful in the United States, in the case of Amerindians and peyote.)   He does not, however, take explicit exception to that hospital regulation itself;  perhaps deeming such comment superfluous in the case of so evidently overweening a rule, but perhaps not.

Nature’s Thurible

[This gallery goes out to all those who, having once lit up, subsequently failed to repent abjectly, groveling in the dust, as required by the stifling climate of political correctness that has been spreading across the planet like an oil slick.]

India isn't so much concerned about its periodic mob attacks  on Muslims, or “Eve-teasing” (the smug Indian euphemism for sexual pestering), or gang-rape involving metal instruments, or dowsing wives with fire or acid for failing to increase the dowry, but there is one place they draw the line:    smoking.

India’s tough censorship policy has cost its people a wide range of visual pleasures, but even so, its latest blow would have been difficult to anticipate. Last Thursday, film fans in India woke up to the news that the next day’s planned release of “Blue Jasmine,” the latest film from the writer and director Woody Allen, had been canceled. Apparently, Mr. Allen was unwilling to follow the local guidelines for showing people smoking on film.

According to the new rules, the theaters must also run a 30-second advertisement provided by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare detailing the ill effects of tobacco before the film begins and again at intermission. If Mr. Allen had let the Indian government have its way, “Blue Jasmine” would have been preceded, and interrupted, by an advertisement that starts with gory close-ups of mouth tumors in a variety of men and women and ends with the last words from a real person lying on a hospital bed with a swollen jaw and emaciated frame.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/why-woody-allens-blue-jasmine-wasnt-released-in-india/?_r=0

[As one canny reader comments:

The Indian concern here stems all the way back to 1988 when the distrubutors of The Accused forgot to superimpose "do not do this, fellow Indians" on screen during the gang rape scene.  ]

The bluenose hypocrisies of the anti-smoking brigade in America  are bad enough;  but to be out-PC’d by a place like India, is truly astonishing.

(Note:  France has likewise surpased us in smarmy self-righteousness on this issue.)

Moi je chie sur ces puritains immondes

For our posts promoting the glorious wonders of the magnificent and healthy habit of enjoying the benefits of nature’s very own tobacco leaf (which, had Saint Francis been acquainted with it, he would surely have blessed), try these:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/smoking

[Disclaimer:  Owing to the evils of corporate agribusiness, with their poisons and pesticides and whatnot, we cannot actually, at present, in a strictly empirical as opposed to transcendental sense, recommend smoking the products commercially available today.  However, we heartily endorse the clean fresh taste of original unfiltered Camels (a satisfied blend of domestic and Ottoman tobaccos), as manufactured during the New Deal,

which refreshed the senses of a generation of farmers and railroad men, my own grandpappy among them.  May you enjoy deep and satisfying drags, O men of labor, in that One Big Union beyond the grave.]

Note:  For a poem on the matter by our friend Murphy, the wise-cracking two-fisted private detective (gat in one hand, gasper in the other) check this out:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2012/01/in-praise-of-camels.html

~

For the smoke-filled adventures

of our pistol-packing pre-Conciliar private eye,

check these out:

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

BAM !

~

[Afterthought]    The silver screen in India threatens to becomes quite cluttered.   Supposing an actor were imprudently to chow down on a cheeseburger, the action must needs be interrupted by warnings never to harm the sacred cows, accompanied with explicit images and roaring soundtrack  of scenes from the abattoir.  Accompanied perhaps (in a bid to attract Israeli investment) by admonishments that such a combination of milchig and fleischig is strictly treyf.

Banned in India

More, for your viewing pleasure:

.

The Soteriology of Smoking (remise à jour)

Blest leaf! Whose aromatic gales dispense

To templars modesty, to parsons sense :

So raptured priests, at famed Dodona’s shrine

Drank inspiration from the steam divine.

-- Isaac Browne, “A Pipe of Tobacco”

Evidence that tobacco now exists in a Fallen condition, from a state of prelapsarian purity:

I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel.

Bonus mini-thingie:

Dead Men Don't Smoke Camels.

Not just (original, unfiltered) Camels, though; take it from Sherlock Holmes:

“Watson, when you pass Bradley’s, would you ask him to send up a pound of the strongest shag tobacco?”

-- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

~

A testimonial from Dr. Sigmund Freud, 1926:

Renouncing the sweet habit  [Süsse Gewohnheit -- Goethe, Egmont] of smoking  has resulted in a great diminution of my intellectual interests.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 121

(Compare the tale of Paul Erdös  and his very temporary forced abstention from amphetamines:  "You have set mathematics back by two weeks!")

Freud suffered an excruciating jaw surgery for cancer, with many unpleasant after-effects.  Yet he resumed smoking, with the consent of his physician.

Freud, post-surgery, 1929

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin Sigmund Freud, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

It was the opinion of the poet Calverley, expressed in his immortal ‘Ode to Tobacco’, that there is no heaviness of the soul  which will not vanish beneath the influence of a quiet smoke.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning (1929), ch. 3

[Update  21 July 2013]  The latest in the chasse aux fumeurs, from the land of the politiquement correct:

Marisol Touraine évoque l'interdiction de fumer dans les parcs et à la plage

La ministre de la Santé aimerait que les villes songent à étendre les zones non-tabac en interdisant la cigarette dans les lieux publics en plein air, comme les parcs, les plages, ou devant les écoles.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/07/20/01016-20130720ARTFIG00272-marisol-touraine-evoque-l-interdiction-de-fumer-dans-les-parcs-et-a-la-plage.php?m_i=w%2BvwXoQzPGZO1D35jzaSFOzTudMH5qIVB%2BM765UzGrw%2BpFUwM

To this, a learnèd reader makes reply, dans la langue de Molière:

Vous n'avez vraiment rien d'autre à foutre  Mme Touraine?

For an even more in-your-face defense of a good smoke, check this out:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/10/natures-thurible.html

Cigarette?

I’m liking “Magic City” (set in Miami, 1959) better than the critics did.  Maybe say something intelligent about it someday, maybe not.  But what is:  so-o-o … refreshing about this show, is that:  Everybody Smokes.

Not just the badguys -- everybody.  Men, women, young, old -- they smoke;  get over it.

Nowadays, by some sort of Hollywood/Vast-Wasteland unpublished rule,

nobody is allowed to smoke onscreen

except serial killers and child pornographers.

And this stifling prohibition  is more suffocating than a roomful of stale cigars.

1959 -- it wasn’t like that.

1959 -- I was alive then, and I remember.

Sweet smoke …

For further pro-smoking propaganda, click here:

        In Praise of Camels

A Special Thanksgiving in Mali

[Note:  What follows is the funny stuff.  For something more serious, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/04/update-to-azawad.html ]

Speaking in Touareg through an interpreter, the Azawadi Minister of Tourism, Dr Justice, issued the following announcement on behalf of the People’s Freedom-Loving Welcoming Committee:

Free and independent Popular People’s Azawad welcomes its newest Western guest.  Gilberto, vous êtes le bienvenu!  We here in people’s freedom-loving Azawad love freedom -- and you will too, Gilberto, when you regain yours, just as soon as your loving government (“Uncle Sugar”, we call him) pays the ransom, as they always do!

The French Ministère du Tourisme et du Rapt  issued the following appreciative statement:

La victime s'appelle Gilberto Rodriguez Léal. Il a été enlevé mardi soir  dans la région de Kayes, à l'ouest du Mali. Le Français, dont la profession reste inconnue, circulait à bord d'un véhicule Peugeot immatriculé en France. Selon des sources sécuritaires et administratives maliennes, il aurait été enlevé «par au moins six hommes armés à la peau claire».

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/11/21/01003-20121121ARTFIG00578-un-francais-enleve-a-l-ouest-du-mali.php?m_i=gVfgGhzzwfJFkj0fYERi7PMZaSK1_vWZZ%2B0hhvl7p7WXhlVM4

Azawadi Minister of Free Enterprise, Abu-Mitt ag-Romney, who has taken up asylum in freely independent Azawad after a spot of bother back in the States, praised the arrangement.  “This is small business at its best.  We look forward to doing much more such commerce with our French friends in the future.”

[Update 27 November 2012]  Turns out his name is (as pronounced by himself) Rodriguez Leal Gilberto.   You can see him here thanking his captors hosts for their hospitality.  “Je suis bien traité,” he reveals -- which is saying a lot, since the same thing cannot be said, for instance, by diners at Denny’s, or folks standing in queues at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Here I am housed and fed for free, and catered-to by an attentive staff

http://fr.alakhbar.info/5379-0-Nord-Mali-Premiere-apparition-de-lotage-francais-Rodriguez-dans-une-video-du-MUJAO.html

[Update 24 December 2012]

Repercussions and bavures from the Islamist/jihadi takeover of northern Mali:

Un groupe islamiste revendique l'enlèvement du Français au Nigeria

Ansaru justifie le kidnapping de mercredi soir par le rôle de la France dans la préparation d'une intervention militaire au Mali.

[Update 26 Dec 2012]  A good summary here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/al-qaeda-group-france-is-endangering-hostages-by-agreeing-to-train-malis-soldiers/2012/12/26/40513506-4f4b-11e2-8b49-64675006147f_allComments.html?ctab=all_&

Abu El Hamid Abu Zeid: "I offer you my friendship..."

[Update 28 December 2012] From the NYTimes:

Tough Love in People’s Azawad

Moctar Touré was strapped to a chair, blindfolded, his right hand bound tight to the armrest with a rubber tube. A doctor came and administered a shot. Then Mr. Touré’s own brother wielded a knife, the kind used to slaughter sheep, and methodically carried out the sentence.

“I myself cut off my brother’s hand,” said Aliou Touré, a police chief in the Islamist-held north of this divided nation. “We had no choice but to practice the justice of God.”

Such amputations are designed to shock — residents are often summoned to watch — and even as the world makes plans to recapture northern Mali by force, the Islamists who control it show no qualms about carrying them out.

After the United Nations Security Council authorized a military campaign to retake the region last week, Islamists in Gao, Mr. Touré’s town, cut the hands off two more people accused of being thieves the very next day, a leading local official said, describing it as a brazen response to the United Nations resolution. Then the Islamists, undeterred by the international threats against them, warned reporters that eight others “will soon share the same fate.”

This harsh application of Shariah law, with people accused of being thieves sometimes having their feet amputated as well, has occurred at least 14 times since the Islamist takeover last spring, not including the recent vow of more to come, according to Human Rights Watch and independent observers.

But those are just the known cases, and dozens of other residents have been publicly flogged with camel-hair whips or tree branches for offenses like smoking, or even for playing music on the radio. Several were whipped in Gao on Monday for smoking in public, an official said, while others said that anything other than Koranic verses were proscribed as cellphone ringtones. A jaunty tune is punishable by flogging.

Thank you for not smoking

.