i remember ashtrays on the arm of every airplane seat!
I remember them literally everywhere… restaurants, the mall, bowling alley ball returns had them built in, at the tees on golf courses, at the gas pump, at the crosswalk, on top of every public trash can… They were EVERYWHERE.
I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn’t even reach the ceiling could do anything.
Boy, leaded gasoline really fucked up whole generations, didn’t it? Oh… We are still dealing with the fallout from that, aren’t we?
I’m still convinced that lead poisoning was the catalyst for the fall of the Roman empire. And they weren’t even breathing tainted air constantly.
We still use lead pipes for water infrastructure in many areas of the country for fucks sake.
Fun fact: ancient and medieval societies had so much fucking lead around because lead is commonly found in silver ore (galena), usually around 100X more plentiful than the silver and it melts at a lower temperature. So the quest for silver produced huge amounts of lead as a byproduct and people found uses for it like roofs, water pipes and, uh, sweeteners? Jesus Christ, Rome.
I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn’t even reach the ceiling could do anything.
Barrier? Most restaurants barely divided the two with an aisle.
Tim Hortons had the smoking box, I’d give a lot to find a photo of it. Basically it was one of the last holdouts.
A smoking area in a restaurant was about as useful as setting up a pissing area in a pool…
You got that backwards. Smoking section was the default state. The non-smoking section was the special.
I wonder how much that affected the life expectancy of those kids
Quite a lot. Most mothers smoked while pregnant and gave their kids asthma as a result, and ADHD too. That’s why you see more of that.
My mom quit smoking before pregnancy, and dad never smoked. Still neurodivergent. I’ve not personally heard of a causal link there before.
We’re talking about the US here, right?
Tbh my wife and I smelled rotten eggs more often, at least in cities
I think because their busses use biodiesel?
Weird, the only times I’ve smelled biodiesel it’s mostly smelled like french fries
It isn’t anymore. I checked yesterday. They still have cigarette vending machines and smoking floors in hotels, but most floors were nonsmoking, beer vending machines were more plentiful than cigarette ones, and no smoking announcements and signs were everywhere
I remember bars so blue with smoke you couldn’t see across the room.
I worked for an Internet startup in the mid '90s that was so desperate for venture capital funding we were sucking up to RJR Nabisco (who were rolling in so much cigarette money that they actually started a venture capital division just to do something with the cash). One day some of their executives showed up and they spent the entire day chain-smoking in our conference room (our building was a non-smoking building). The smoke was so thick everywhere you couldn’t even see to the end of the hallway. I made a point of coughing loudly and my bosses sent me home before the end of the day. In the end we got nothing from them.
It’s a warm memory because most of those bastards have probably died a miserable death by now.
My parents didn’t smoke but that’s literally how I knew the babysitter was gone and my parents were home from a night out.