Old "Blog" Business

Now it is time for the worst part of the "blog," which I enjoy even less than you do - the time when I babble about some fact I just discovered that should have gone into the cigarette lighter book I wrote, which was published in 2016, so it just doesn't matter, so why bring it up? Yes, though I don't "blog" anymore, there are certain pieces of "blog" business that return to haunt us. So, last night I happened to be finally reading the memoirs of President U. S. Grant, in a glossy, maniacally annotated hardcover, which I purchased at Square Books for a no-doubt princely sum long forgotten. In late 2017! So even then, nearly two years after the publication of my so-called cigarette lighter book, it all would have been for nothing. Like everything! So that's no surprise. Anyhow, Grant has some things to say about tobacco smuggling operations between Mexico and the USA in the late 1830s (maybe? The book is big and heavy and sitting in the other room and I'm tired), and about the popularity of cigarettes at that time in general, which (the latter) is a subject that vexed me during my research for the cigarette lighter book. I suddenly realized one day, whilst mooning away at my writing desk, that I needed to know about the history of cigarettes. Otherwise, I might accidentally describe a cigar lighter, wasting everyone's valuable time! I'd hate to tell you, even if I knew, how many hours I brooded about the differences between a cigar and a cigarette. What I liked about the cigarettes that Grant was going on and on about was the corn husks they were rolled in. That put me in mind of the first possible recorded cigarette, at least as far as I could tell on a quick deadline, which (the cigarette) had been coincidentally offered to a travler in Mexico... in 1518! Oh, how my little heart pitter-pattered as I ran to the shelf whereon sat the seldom-opened book I wrote about cigarette lighters. After some scuttling around, I found the passage, but a telltale ellipsis, the lazy typist's best friend, magaged to obliterate the part of the sentence that I vaguely recalled might have had corn husks in it. Oh, wouldn't that have been something, though? My corn husk research might have changed the world, if only I had tried harder.