MY BIG FAT GREY SQUIRREL!

Why is it grey squirrels are so much cuter than the blackies? The silver-grey fur, the white ring around the eyes, the FAT FAT lush silver tail, and their habit of looking right at you as you film them foraging. . . I can't stay mad at them, even as they drain all my bird feeders.

Harry and Meghan: Watching paint dry

CRAIG BROWN: News just in from Harry and Meghan's new hometown of Montecito... yes, watching paint dry CAN save the world

By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be mulling over an invitation to the King’s Coronation in May.

A statement on behalf of the couple confirmed that they have been emailed about the event but it’s not yet clear if they’ll accept. And that’s the news. The time is three minutes past eight.

March 7: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be mulling over the a la carte menu at an out-of-town restaurant near their home in Montecito, California. A statement on behalf of the couple confirmed that they have not yet decided between the Cobb salad and the sushi. A decision is expected imminently.

March 8: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be mulling over whether to go out or stay in. A statement on behalf of the couple confirmed that they have been involved in discussions about the relative benefits of the two options.

March 9: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be watching paint dry. A statement on behalf of the couple confirmed that they are pursuing their paint-watching in a spirit of universal unity and reconciliation on behalf of all the underprivileged people of the world.

March 10: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be preparing a statement about how their paint-watching operation is going. In an exclusive interview on CNN — his first in more than two hours — Prince Harry said: ‘I was never given the opportunity to watch paint dry in my childhood. It was always like “Oh, no, no, no, you must be able to find something better to do. You want to do this, you don’t want to do that.”

‘They tried to make out that the paint would dry whether or not I watched it. It was, like, brutal. And that’s something that, as an adult, I’ve struggled to cope with.’

March 11: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be mulling over an invitation to watch paint dry at the newly decorated house of their neighbour Oprah Winfrey in Montecito, California.

In an exclusive interview with the entertainment editor of Psychology Today, the duchess said that over the coming years they are determined to let their children watch as much paint dry as possible.

‘It’s, like, a very positive experience. It, like, teaches you that though paint of whatever colour or creed may at first be very, very wet, so wet it’s like, really, really wet, well, you only have to, like, wait long enough, and — here’s the amazing thing — it will eventually dry.

‘And to me that’s the most valuable life lesson of them all.’

March 12: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be mulling over whether to sign up for a major Netflix series, Harry and Meghan: Becoming Dry.

A spokesperson for the couple said: ‘Harry and Meghan are proud to share their passion for watching paint dry with millions of others, harnessing their own expertise to push for safer, more inclusive paint-watching communities around the world.’

Speaking to her friend Gwyneth Paltrow for her podcast Spending And Caring, Meghan said: ‘Harry and I want to shed light on paint and continue to watch it dry so as to empower and inspire others to protect this beautiful, fragile planet we call Earth.’

March 13: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to be gazing at their own navels with great tenderness and compassion, in a specially curated session at the Archewell Navel-Gazing and Enlightenment Retreat (ANGER) in Montecito.

Prince Harry reveals on the My Best Trauma podcast that learning to gaze at his own navel has done wonders for his mental health.

‘As a child, I, like, literally didn’t have a navel, or, if I did, I didn’t know where it was and was certainly not encouraged to gaze at it.

‘Growing up, I suffered from unconscious bias against my own navel. I never gave it a chance to speak, so naturally it felt sidelined.

‘And that’s why Meghan and I are now on a mission to teach everyone to engage with their navels, and to listen to everything our navels have to tell us about our shared values.’

News just in: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex announce their new Archewell Nursing Home, dedicated to nursing all kinds of grievance, from the wholly inconsiderable to the very small.

OH ME, OH MEMES! Just some funny stuff

 

Creepy 1961 Computer Sings DAISY (HAL'S song from 2001)!

Though this is without a doubt the dumbest video I ever made, it has just topped NINE MILLION VIEWS on YouTube, leading to a boom in my subscribers, which now stand at 14,600+. I just put two very old videos together, but many of the thousands and thousands of comments say, "FAKE!" They expect the two videos to be synced up, and I never even tried for that. It would be impossible anyway. But it always gets me how the videos I spent the least time on get the most views. They get into some sort of recommended stream, so that people are mainly directed to the same video and not the better-crafted ones. Strange are the ways of YouTube!

😀My BEST bird-watching day EVER!🌞

Sheer magic on Burnaby Lake!

Win-Win-Win: "An easy labor, a slim baby, and the Full Flavor of Winstons!"

 

While mushing my way through a ton of bizarre vintage ads to post, this one jumped out at me, causing me utter disbelief. The text said: "Taste isn't the only reason I smoke. People are always telling me that smoking causes low birth weight. Talk about a win-win-win! An easy labor, a slim baby, and the Full Flavor of Winstons!" Below her cheery comment was the slogan, "Winston - when you're smoking for two".This ad seemed to be saying that back in the bad old days, mothers deliberately smoked to have smaller babies which would be easier to pop out. The idea was so extreme that I wondered if the ad had been tampered with, if it was satirical, or a blistering comment on something-or-other.

BUT. . .  then I saw this.

Mothers-to-be smoking for smaller babies

Some women keep smoking through pregnancy just because they want to give birth to a smaller baby, according to British researchers.

By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent

3:22PM BST 07 Jul 2011

Even though most women now understand there is “overwhelming evidence” that smoking during pregnancy is harmful to the developing child, they continue to do so, said Professor Nick Macklon of Southampton University.

He told the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Stockholm: “It is important that people who believe that a smaller baby means an easier birth take into account the increased risk of complicated deliveries in smokers, as well as the risk of disease later in life which goes with low birth weight.”

"Smoking during pregnancy is not just bad for the mother and baby, but for the adult it will grow into."

He and a team at the university’s department of obstetrics and gynaecology have now produced what he called the first “hard evidence” that women who stopped smoking upon discovery they were pregnant, could protect their unborn children from harm.

The study looked at over 50,000 pregnancies in the Southampton area, analysing the birth weight of the babies and comparing this to self-reported smoking behaviour.

Those who continued to smoke through pregnancy had lower weight babies.

The more women smoked the lighter their babies were: those who smoked more than 10 a day had babies weighing some 11oz (300g) less than the average birth weight from a non-smoking mother, of about 7lb 10oz (3.45kg).

However, those who ceased smoking at about the time they conceived were just as likely to give birth to a normal weight baby as those who had never smoked.

He said: “We can now give couples hard evidence that making the effort to stop smoking in the periconceptional will be beneficial for their baby.

“Stopping smoking can ameliorate these detrimental effects.”

This could help change behaviour among smoking mothers, which he said had hardly changed in Britain over the last decade.

Prof Macklon explained that smoking during pregnancy “affects the transportation of nutrients, especially oxygen, across the placenta”.

It was also “reasonable to assume” that some of the 4,000 or so toxins in cigarettes were harmful to foetuses.

Note that in spite of the provocative headline, this article does not come right out and directly state that mothers smoke because they want to have smaller babies: “It is important that people who believe that a smaller baby means an easier birth take into account the increased risk of complicated deliveries in smokers." The message is in there somewhere, of course, but it's politically incorrect (or something - or violates civil rights) to spell it out.

If this is true, then the world is in more trouble than I thought. Next women will guzzle alcohol during pregnancy to deliberately cause fetal alcohol syndrome, because a dumb child is easier to handle than a smart one, won't be so expensive to educate, and won't sass you back.

This Camels ad is particularly insidious. It shows a woman wearing a veil, white gloves and a sort of Jackie Kennedy flared jacket, delicately implying pregnancy. On the opposite page is the usual garbage about "what cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?" The juxtaposition of the ladylike woman "in the family way" with a doctor earnestly pushing his cancer sticks jams these two elements together in people's minds: Doc loves to smoke, particularly Camels, meaning it must be OK; so for the pregnant woman, facing coyly in the other direction, it must also be OK, and for her baby too. Doctors were gods then, and it didn't matter what sort of bilge they promoted or defended.

My scanner is busted, or I'd post another photo of a pregnant woman from The Family of Man, a very tony and pretentious photographic exhibit from the 1950s. I am sure there was no irony or censure in the fact that she very obviously held a cigarette, right out in front of her swollen abdomen, in a way which people probably thought was darling. She had a sort of dreamy, oh-I'm-just-waiting-for-it posture, "but while I'm waiting, I'll just have a smoke". Most of these "candid" shots seem very posed to me, so let's hope she did not subject her baby to second-hand smoke, on top of whatever horrors crossed her placenta from puffing on Camels.

The above ad looks like it should be for Johnson and Johnson or Gerber or Pet Milk, but it's not. Disgusting of Big Tobacco to claim they take just as much pride in their lung-rotting lethal weapon as you do in your newborn infant. It's all the same to them. Birth. Death. Note also (in the text below) how in a hundred-word ad, the brand name appears FOUR times, as does the term "gentle/gentleness" - and what the holy HELL does that have to do with a cigarette?

Born gentle

Proud mothers, please forgive us if we too feel something of the pride of a new parent. For new Philip Morris, today's Philip Morris, is delighting smokers everywhere. Enjoy the gentle pleasure, the fresh unfiltered flavor, of this new cigarette, born gentle, then refined to special gentleness in the making. Ask for new Philip Morris in the smart new package. NEW Philip Morris. . . gentle for modern tastes

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. I got my scanner working, and though this is a bad representation of that photo from The Family of Man, you can see what I mean. The subject's expectant dreaminess is completely wrecked by that cigarette, though I doubt if it had much impact back then, except to make people think: "Lucky her. She'll have an easy labor, a "slim" (read: premature) baby, and her Winstons too. Win-win-win!"

Depressed doorbell commits suicide

Just because it made me laugh!

Worldwide Privacy Tour: South Park Annihilates Harry and Meghan!

MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Hallelujah South Park! Will their delicious take-down of privacy-hungry Harry & Meghan FINALLY make them see what insufferable hypocrites - and global laughing stocks - they've become?

 By Maureen Callahan For DailyMail.Com

Well, she said she wanted to be a cartoon princess. Now, thanks to the brilliant minds at 'South Park,' Meghan Markle is one.

In 'Worldwide Privacy Tour,' which aired Wednesday night, Meghan and Prince Harry were savaged as hypocritical publicity hounds who nonetheless demand to be left alone. After promoting his memoir, here called 'Waaagh,' the 'prince and princess of Canada' move to South Park, whose children cannot abide their insufferability. At one point, the outraged prince flashes his frostbitten penis — to a child! — while defending his wife.

As the animated Harry and Meghan toddle around the globe, holding placards that read 'STOP LOOKING AT US!' and 'WE WANT OUR PRIVACY!,' their entitlement, stupidity and lack of self-awareness was sliced through by a cartoon talk-show host with, in my view, better questions than Tom Bradby or Anderson Cooper.

Appearing on 'Good Morning Canada,' Harry and Meghan — the latter speaking inanities with a Valley Girl accent — sit down to a chorus of boos. The impeccable line of questioning beings.

'Let me start with you, sir. You've lived a life with the royal family, you've had everything handed to you, but you say your life has been hard. And now you've written all about it in your new book, 'Waaagh.'

Harry: 'Yes, that's right friend. You see, my wife and I —'

Meghan: 'I was like, totallllllly, you should write a book 'cause your family, like stupid, and then [unintelligible] journalists.'

Host: 'So you hate journalists.'

Harry: 'That's right!'

Host: 'And now you wrote a book that reports on the lives of the royal family.'

Harry: 'Right!'

Host: 'So you're a journalist.'

Yes! Exactly right.

Meghan: 'We just wanna be normal people. This attention is so hard.'

As the animated Harry and Meghan toddle around the globe, holding placards that read 'STOP LOOKING AT US!' and 'WE WANT OUR PRIVACY!,' their entitlement, stupidity and lack of self-awareness was sliced through by a cartoon talk-show host with, in my view, better questions than Tom Bradby or Anderson Cooper. 

Well, she said she wanted to be a cartoon princess. Now, thanks to the brilliant minds at 'South Park,' Meghan Markle is one.

'Waaagh!' indeed. You have to wonder what the mood is in Montecito this morning, the online reaction from us 'normal people' nothing short of a rousing standing ovation. Do Harry and Meghan get it now? Do they understand that they are laughingstocks not just around the world, but in the province Meghan values above all others — Hollywood?

'South Park': Grade A+. Chef's kiss. This was a perfect episode. The only possible criticism: What took Trey Parker and Matt Stone so long?

Granted, it seems every week does bring a brand new hypocrisy. One must work hard to keep up.

'Because I'm from the States, you don't grow up with the same understanding of the royal family. And so while I now understand very clearly there's a global interest there, I didn't know much about him.'

That was Meghan Markle in November 2017, seated next to Prince Harry as they gave their first interview to the BBC as a newly engaged couple.

A fair number of people — myself included — found it near impossible, laughable really, to believe that Meghan, creature of Hollywood and student of fame, had little idea who Prince Harry or the British royal family was. Or that this self-professed smart, savvy, well-cultured woman had not so much as Googled her fair prince before their first date. No social climber she!

It all sounded very Yoko Ono, who, upon meeting John Lennon, claimed to have never heard of him.

Now — could it possibly be — that Meghan was insincere? A newly resurfaced post on her late blog The Tig (think Goop, but more basic and obvious) reveals that Meghan was very familiar with the British royal family and with William and Kate's nuptials. She even wrote about the type of princess she, Meghan, dreamt she might someday be.

Hey, Harry: Don't feel too bad. Even Lennon fell for it. As he told Rolling Stone in 1971, Yoko had 'only heard of Ringo, I think.'

Ringo! Not the world-famous half of the most celebrated songwriting duo of post-World War II Western civilization. When you're that well known, it seems, nothing is as refreshing as someone who claims not to know who you are or what you do or why people care about you. The implication, of course, being that said ignoramus sees through the veneer of celebrity to you. They like and love you for you, not the attendant wealth or social status or privilege or refracted fame that comes with being your other half.

Here's Meghan in her 2014 blog post, fantasizing about becoming a princess while also mocking the entire idea, because she's just that cool and just that above everything, even a storied institution dating back over eleven centuries.

'Little girls dream of being princesses,' Meghan wrote. 'I, for one, was all about She-Ra, Princess of Power. For those of you unfamiliar with the '80s cartoon reference, She-Ra is . . . a sword-wielding royal rebel known for her strength. We're definitely not talking about Cinderella here. Grown women seem to retain this childhood fantasy. Just look at the pomp and circumstance surrounding the royal wedding and endless conversation about Princess Kate.'

Well, well, well. How will Meghan explain that away? Or as recounted by Harry, that upon meeting Prince Andrew she thought he was the Queen's handbag holder? Or, as she told Oprah in 2021, 'I went into [my marriage] naively because I didn't grow up knowing much about the royal family'? By the way, Meghan's 'grow[ing] up' would have been at the height of the royal family's coverage in global tabloids: Princess Di's supernova fame, the first future king ordered to divorce, Diana's death and the subsequent wall-to-wall 24/7 media coverage of her funeral.

In 'Worldwide Privacy Tour,' which aired Wednesday night, Meghan and Prince Harry were savaged as hypocritical publicity hounds who nonetheless demand to be left alone. 

Here's Meghan in her 2014 blog post, fantasizing about becoming a princess while also mocking the entire idea, because she's just that cool and just that above everything, even a storied institution dating back over eleven centuries. (Above) Cartoon princess, She-Ra

Meghan would have to have spent her formative years in the Yanomami Amazonian tribe, thoroughly cut off from the modern world, to have known so very little about the royals.

How will Meghan explain, as she claimed in last year's insipid Netflix doc, that she had no idea how to curtsy or why it was important to show respect to the Queen? As she sat beside her husband, who looked pained and humiliated, Meghan characterized her first meeting with the late Queen Elizabeth, one of the world's most admired women, thusly:

'I mean, Americans will understand this,' Meghan brayed, because 'we have Medieval Times, dinner and a tournament. It was like that.'

What must Harry, who wrote in his memoir that Meghan knew 'almost nothing' about the royals, be thinking now? Will he think to himself that his now-wife knew well and good who he was? As Andrew Morton wrote in his 2018 biography 'Meghan,' her friend Ninaki Priddy said that the future duchess 'was always fascinated by the royal family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0'

This seems to be the root of Meghan's self-obsessed rage, does it not? She married the spare. She'll never be the next Diana. If anything, Catherine, Princess of Wales, is carving out a similar beloved place for herself amongst the British people. Meghan is the also-ran, attempting to run a rival court out of a soulless Montecito manse while decrying the uselessness of all things royal.

But don't you dare not call her the Duchess of Sussex!

Lest we forget, Meghan's overarching message since joining this family has been the smug, insufferable, disingenuous utterance, 'Be kind.' It's what she said in that first interview with Harry, claiming that she made it very clear to their matchmaking friend she had one non-negotiable quality in a potential mate:

'And so the only thing that I had asked [our mutual friend] when she said she wanted to set us up was — I had one question — I said, 'Well is he nice?' 'Cause if he wasn't kind it didn't seem like it would make sense.'

We all know now that Harry isn't very nice. You don't take millions from your father and cling to your titles while disparaging and insulting him, then tell the world — for years — that they're a family of racists before taking it all back and blaming the press for your woes while revealing all manner of your father and brother's private pain and intimate information and get to call yourself a nice guy.

On top of all that, we're meant to feel sorry for Meghan and Harry.

You don't mock the physically disabled female teacher at your boarding school for kicks, as Harry did, and get to call yourself nice. You don't double-down and name this poor woman in your memoir, blame her for not being attractive enough to make you 'horny', then recount the serial humiliations you subjected her to without ever expressing an iota of remorse or guilt or shame and get to call yourself nice — let alone a humanitarian and a thought leader in mental health.

Mental health advocates — these two! It's just amazing. No matter how many discrepancies, these two evince nothing, not so much as a blushing cheek or a head hung in shame. They're like two dead-eyed sharks, moving ever forward through the chum in their wake. They don't seem to understand that credibility and authenticity is paramount when trying to launch themselves as personal brands.

They also don't seem to understand what laughingstocks they've become. After the priceless Jimmy Kimmel bit about Harry and his todger, after Stephen Colbert mocked the royal family to Harry's face during his appearance, 'South Park' — a show that gleefully flays hypocrites of all stripes — has focused their ire on these two professional victims. No one deserves it more.

As the young animated character Kyle exclaimed, 'It is seriously driving me crazy. I'm sick of hearing about them but I can't get away from them! They're everywhere. In my f***ing face.'

A cri de coeur for us all. Alas, Harry and Meghan seem to lack the one quality that might possibly redeem them: A sense of humor.

BLOGGER'S GLOAT: Finally, somebody said it! There were so many zingers, both obvious and very subtle, in this brilliant episode. These two are SUCH A PAIN - and have been such a pain for FIVE YEARS now. It looks as if this may be a turning point for them. Harry's book is ridiculous, Meghan has disappeared, and rumors swirl that she is either pregnant (she has weaponized her pregnancies before) or seducing 89-year-old billionaire Gordon Getty and attempting to "harvest" his semen. There's no end to it, but at least now we can laugh.

DANGER! Rant ahead.

(This is a copy of a non-existent letter of protest to Amazon re: the travesty of their "new and improved" author page. I have been using it proudly for more than ten years as a way to showcase all my published work, until I realized the bottom had dropped out of the whole thing. I have nowhere to send or post this, as they don't seem to want any feedback of any kind, so I  just wrote this in my journal for my own sanity. I cannot believe how Amazon boasts about basically wrecking the setup so that it looks like nothing. I used to be very proud of it and put links to it at the end of every blog post, but now I am ashamed to direct anyone to it any more. But here it is. The rant of the week. Buckle in.)

Though you are not providing a means to send feedback and likely are not interested in it anyway, I have something to say about your “updated” Amazon Author page. The new and improved one that you have been boasting about is nothing but an insult. I showed it to a friend who looked puzzled and said, “So what’s this supposed to be?” It had NO photo of myself or of anything else, only a small box with the first sentence of an author profile, and a bare-looking listing of my three novels. And that’s all. The old format looked great and I was very proud of it, and I often directed editors and publishers to it and linked it to my Facebook page and my blog. Now I am ashamed to show it to anyone because it looks like NOTHING.

I guess (?) you are supposed to click along all the separate buttons at the top to find bits and pieces of information about my work, but who will bother to do that? I had no idea how or why I was supposed to access the information, or why I should even bother. The first rule of ANY website is lots of eye-catching visuals on the home page. One photo is worth a few thousand words. But there are no photos at all! The old format not only had a prominent author photo and a complete author profile, as well as a  photo gallery (which included my three book covers -  crucial to reader identification of my books), but it also had a blog feed which both helped promote my blog, and which helped link the blog back to the author page.

I no longer provide any such links to anyone because this thing is such an amateurish mess. The automated email I got from you (not a human being, of course) gushed over how proud and excited Amazon is over this nonsense. How can you say that, when you have stripped my page of practically everything that was of any use to me? Any publisher can tell you that an author photo should be the bare minimum for identification, unless you click around and try to find it under that ridiculous truncated “author profile”.

I am seriously thinking of pulling this thing if I can, as it is actually working against me as an author. I thought Amazon was interested in selling books! This format will drive potential customers away by creating confusion and looking extremely bare and unattractive. NO ONE is going to bother clicking on multiple buttons at the top to get bits and pieces of information which are divided up between multiple pages. With the old format, all the information was on one page, attractively set up, eye-catching, and at a single glance you could take in all of my life’s work, even my decades of freelance work, not to mention those all-important images of my book covers.

I don’t know why a mega-corporation like Amazon thinks you don’t need any visual images on your home page to attract potential customers. Anyone in the book business knows, or should know, that the cover is about 85% of what catches a prospective customer’s eye. What a travesty this is, and shame on you for running over your authors like this with all these utterly ludicrous statements about being "excited" and "thrilled" about this decimation. Thrilled about what? I am NOT "thrilled" at permanently losing one of my major forms of promoting and selling my books. It would appear Amazon would rather I not sell anything at all through them, as they’re doing a pretty good job of burying everything I have ever written. This is worse than a disappointment. It is actual damage to your authors whom you pretend to care about. But in the end, you are the ones will will lose potential book sales by burying the information in the ugliest format imagineable. Trying to put a spin of excitement on this travesty is both desperate and pathetic. It is a public relations disaster, or it would be if you gave a single damn about your authors. And YOU will be the losers in the end. 

ECLIPSE: a "safe" cigarette? Big Tobacco's most outrageous lie

When I stumbled on this bizarre infomercial, likely from some time in the 1990s, I had to know more. Like, what was Big Tobacco thinking in trying to perpetrate an absurd hoax like this? 

I found ads for Eclipse cigarettes that made my hair stand on end. 

"A cigarette that presents less risk of cancer, chronic bronchitis and possibly emphysema."

This all seemed a little too bizarre to be true. So, like any good researcher, I did the easier, softer thing and looked it up on Wikipedia. Which didn't actually tell me much, but I DID get a link to a decent article about it all. Made my hair stand on end all over again! I felt like Harold Lloyd at the climax of one of his thrill pictures. The lies and doubletalk in the 1990s were just as astounding as anything perpetrated back in the 1960s, when Don Draper took a courageous stand and threw out their most lucrative client, Lucky Strike. 

Heated Dispute Over 'Safer' Cigarette

By Melissa Schorr

B O S T O N, Oct. 4, 2000 -- The promise of a “safer” cigarette may have been dampened today with findings that the smoke-free “Eclipse” contains higher levels of cancerous toxins than other low-tar brands already on the market.

Several anti-tobacco groups, including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Heart Association and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, released the results of the study today at a press conference in Washington, D.C. An independent laboratory, Labstat International of Ontario, Canada, performed the analysis with funding from the state health agency.

In response to the results, the Massachusetts health department contacted the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Massachusetts Attorney General asking them to investigate the safety claims being made by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. of Winston-Salem, N.C. on its Web site and in ads.

One claim, for example, the firm makes is that Eclipse may present less risk of cancer compared to other cigarettes.

The groups hope this report will spark an immediate governmental review of the product and its removal from the marketplace. “We want to see independent regulatory bodies review the scientific research in a comprehensive way,” says Dr. Greg Connolly, director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Project, who initiated the research.

A Safer Ciggie? 

R.J. Reynolds developed the Eclipse cigarette to help reduce the health hazards of smoking. Rather than burning the tobacco directly, the Eclipse heats the tobacco using a carbon rod insulated by glass fibers. The smoker inhales the heated air drawn across the tobacco.

Because only 3 percent of the tobacco is actually burned, the manufacturer says the cigarette produces fewer cancer-causing chemicals. It also produces very little second-hand smoke, potentially reducing the growing conflict between smokers and non-smokers.

The Eclipse was developed under the name Premier in 1988. It was test-marketed in Chattanooga, Tenn., in 1996. Currently, it is being tested in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, and is also available for purchase via phone or internet.

R.J. Reynolds began specifically touting the cigarette as safer for smokers this past spring, after its researchers reported that the Eclipse produced around 80 percent less carcinogens and tar in its smoke than a traditional ultra-light brand of cigarette, the “Merit Ultralight.”

The company began contending the cigarette was less likely to cause a risk of cancer, bronchitis or possibly emphysema, with ads saying: “A cigarette that responds to concerns about certain smoking-related illnesses. Including cancer.”

Claims Challenged Questioning those claims, the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Project commissioned a Canadian laboratory to investigate the cigarette, comparing the Eclipse to two other low-tar brands, RJR Reynold’s own “Now King Size Hard Pack,” and Brown & Williamson’s “Carlton King Size Soft Pack.”

The results, released today, say Eclipse had equivalent amounts of nicotine and higher amounts of known cancer-causing chemicals than the other products: The Eclipse contained 734 percent more acetaldehyde and 475 percent more acrolein, two carcinogens, than the Now cigarette.

The lab also detected higher toxin levels than when the product was originally released in 1996.

“The [company’s] claim appears to be false and misleading,” concluded Howard Koh, the Massachusetts state health department commissioner, in his letter to the agencies calling on them to launch an investigation. “Further, the use of the data to make health claims about reduced risk to cancer also appears to be false and misleading.”

The report also found Eclipse produced significantly higher levels of carbon monoxide, a risk factor for heart attack, than RJR Tobacco had found in its own research. RJR has not made claims regarding cardiovascular issues because its findings had been “inconclusive.”

The American Cancer Society also is calling for the removal of the product from the marketplace. “RJR’s health claims on the Eclipse cigarette are ludicrous,” John Kelly, the society’s chairman, said in a statement. “The health claims cannot be trusted to tobacco industry scientists alone.”

Previous independent studies have also questioned other aspects of the Eclipse’s safety. In 1998, researchers reported in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention that tiny particles of fiberglass were present in the cigarette, a possible cancer risk if inhaled.

Keeping the Flame Alive 

But RJR Reynolds defends its product. “Under every testing regimen we have used, the smoke from Eclipse is chemically much simpler than that of other cigarettes, including ultra-low tar cigarettes,” Gary T. Burger, executive vice president of research and development, said in a statement responding to the Canadian findings.

Burger said his company has done animal and human tests showing a dramatic difference in toxicity, and will report those results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal within the month.

Other tobacco manufacturers are also testing cigarettes with allegedly fewer health risks. Phillip Morris is preparing “Accord,” also a reduced-smoke cigarette, while Star Enterprise, a small company in Richmond, Va., is test marketing “Advance,” a cigarette with tobacco specially bred to contain fewer nitrosamines, one of several cancer-causing agents.

Smoking kills an estimated 400,000 Americans annually.

Daniel Finger contributed to this report.