On today's list of things I'm pondering...

is something that smokers do.  And it has me perplexed.

Why is it that smokers insist on holding their cigarettes out of the window of their automobiles, and flicking their ashes into the wind?  Cars have ashtrays for precisely that purpose.  Is it the smell of the smoke getting into their clothing and hair that bothers them so?  If the odor bothers them, maybe they should just quit and not have to deal with it.

When I lived in Las Vegas, the worst part of spending long hours playing live poker (the money was good, which made this worthwhile) was the smell of the smoke.  I knew breathing it in was bad for my lungs.  I'm sure that part of my problems with my lungs today stems from more than 2 years of spending an average of 12 hours a week playing cards and breathing in second-hand smoke.

But the smell was what really bothered me.  My laundry load was double what it might normally have been because I'd get home from a poker outing and immediately take a shower and change clothes.  I had to buy an airtight dirty laundry hamper to keep those odor-permeated garments from smelling up my apartment.

So is that why I see all the smokers holding their cigarettes out the window, or am I missing something?

Why does the government subsidize PBS?  We don't subsidize CSPAN and that's our government's operations being broadcast into our homes.  That's a self-sufficient nonprofit.  Why can't PBS do the same?  Sesame Street and Big Bird don't need government funding.  They get tons of money from merchandise and other licensing revenues.  It's other PBS programming that needs the subsidies.  If the marketplace won't support PBS, why should it exist?

All this focus on honesty, dishonest and fact-checking at the debates makes me wonder why it is no one brings up Joe Biden's past plaigirism.  I do make fun of him for saying that the President said "jobs" is a three letter word, and his saying that there's nothing stopping GM from leading the automobile manufacturing industry into the 20th Century; but everyone's fussing that Paul Ryan lied about his marathon time and yet something that I think is much worse is apparently forgiven and forgotten.  Why is that?

Does either candidate have a monopoly on hypocrisy?  Mitt Romney spoke out in support of the Vietnam War in college and then avoided the draft by going on a Mormon mission to France.  That's pretty hypocritical.  Very hypocritical.  But Barrack Obama gave a speech in June of 2007 in which he was highly critical of the Federal government for not waiving the Stafford Act requirement that New Orleans put up an amount equal to 10% of the funding they received from the Federal government to rebuild after being hit by Hurricane Katrina.  Yet two weeks earlier, Barrack Obama voted against waiving those very requirements.  That seems to be just as hypocritical as Romney's position on Vietnam.  Maybe one is more dishonest than the other overall, I can't speak to that.  But neither is entirely untainted when it comes to honesty or hypocrisy.

Alright, enough politics.  More Centrist Party soon, I promise.

So TailSlate.net, the website I write film reviews for has an excellent article up about the casting of Ben Affleck as a real-life Hispanic man in "Argo" which opens Friday.  Ben isn't playing the role as Hispanic, it's been "Caucasianized".  Is this an example of racism in Hollywood? 

Is it more permissble to alter the race of a character when it's a fictional character as opposed to a real life person?  If the fictional character isn't an iconic one?  Denzel Washington played a character in "the Taking of Pelham 1-2-3" remake that was originally performed by a white actor.  How would fans have reacted to casting Emma Stone rather than Zoe Saldana as "Uhura" in the 2009 reboot of Star Trek? 

There's a retired Wall Street trader who has spent $65,000 on matchmakers and gone on 250 blind dates trying to find the woman of his dreams.  But the matchmakers say he is seeking something that doesn't exist, and that "he's a six, looking for a ten".  I wonder how much time passed between date #1 and date #250.  If you do three a week, that's still almost two years.  Having gone on 100 blind dates in a one year period myself, and having trouble telling them apart during that process, I can't imagine if he was going on those blind dates at an even faster pace that I set during that time.  Looking back I can honestly say the whole exercise was a complete waste of time.  Not because I didn't meet Miss Right, but because given my approach, I had no chance of meeting her.

Could be worse.  At least I wasn't looking for Miss Right at this Moment.  Miss Right at this Moment is always a mistake.  But as I sit here and ponder my dating past, a past that reaches back to summer camp in 1970 or 71, with only a couple of exceptions, I have to admit that my life is better for every woman who came into my life.  So I can't complain too much.