Thursday, February 16, 2023

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.


Sunday, February 12, 2023

LEGEND: The Man with No Strings


Joel Grey. Legend. First crush (almost: there was Maynard G. Krebbs on Dobie Gillis, and the robot on Lost in Space).  And I just realized something astonishing: he is now NINETY years old, still sprightly, and still dancing on this earth.



. . . and yes, I did see him perform live once, but it sure was a long wait from that time I first saw him in Cabaret: one of the best movies ever made, and still near the top of my all-time-fave list along with Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce.

Nobody knew what he was doing up there in 1973 because there was no name for what he was doing. But there he was on film pretending to be live onstage, this ferociously sweet, snide, horrible, wonderful thing, this devil doll dressed up like a human being who danced and pranced around like something weightless.  Who even came out in drag, making a quite plausible blonde floozie with hair under his arms, then turned his cloche hat around to look like a helmet and goose-stepped off the stage with a truly evil stage-laugh.









It was no surprise at all when he won an Oscar for this: he had already won the coveted Tony. I fell in love with Joel Grey watching Cabaret in 1973, became totally obsessed with Joel Grey for years and years, chased down whatever information I could find about Joel Grey (and in those days this necessitated lurking about in library stacks with a sharp razor - I must have looked like a maniac - so I could steal his picture). I compiled him, I filed him, I watched him on The Mike Douglas Show and I often wondered who he really was.

I didn't get to see him doing what he really does, dancing and prancing live onstage in the manner to which he seems born, for another 15 years or so, when a road company of Cabaret stopped in Vancouver. He seemed tiny up there, though his dancer's legs still worked like springs. I remember a song that never appeared in the movie (and the stage version is radically different, the movie having been converted into a Liza Minnelli vehicle): it was called I Don't Care Much, and at one point his disembodied white carmine-lipped face was suspended in the air like some nightmarish ghost balloon.


What did I like about him, enough to stay on that decades-long bloodhound trail? For the thing is, I never really stopped being obsessed with him. I had memorized his birth date from an LP of his night club act, in which he stepped out from a giant trunk and sang and danced. I knew it was April 11, 1932. Back then he looked almost ridiculously young, more like 25 than 40.

Over the years I kept following the thread: I saw, sitting in our car at a drive-in, a very strange movie he did with Cliff Robertson in which he played a clairvoyant. A suspiciously diffident, shifty sort of guy given to sudden blasts of rage. I wondered if this was the real Joel Grey. Then I saw an even stranger movie he made with Paul Newman called Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or Sitting Bull's History Lesson), directed by Robert Altman. Notable to Canadians because it was shot in Calgary. He looked dishy in this, with a very Biblical beard that I was sure was real because he appeared on Front Page Challenge, an embarrassing Canadian panel show, and brought the beard with him.




Forgive me for being all over the place as I try to pin down the flying popcorn of memory. When the internet came in, Joel Grey was suddenly very accessible again. But in the meantime he had done a jillion things, a quadrillion things, and always seemed to be active. He'd pop up in the coolest and most cutting-edge TV shows. He never seemed to go away.  "Old" didn't seem to stick to him: he was even more than ever like a blob of mercury made flesh.

I couldn't add it all up because it was like one of those Chagall panels made of stained glass. You don't stir those colors together, you leave them to be what they are. Saturated and strange, they should clash and conflict, but they don't. The images: menorahs, flying bulls, violins, Christ on the cross, lovers sailing through the air in sexual rhapsody - they couldn't possibly work together, but against all reason, they do.



Joel Grey was Petrushka, he was Pulcinella, he was a little clown being yanked on a string, but when I got rare glimpses of the real person, he was surprising, a real person, almost quiet. I paid attention to everything about him because that's what I do, I extract people, I make essence of them, cook them down. I saw kindness.

It didn't surprise me to find out he takes photographs of his native New York and has become  famous for them. I remembered that book, I Am a Camera,  Christopher Isherwood's memoir which became the basis for Cabaret. He is an eye.


For quite a while, thinking only of his Oscar-winning keynote performance (I refuse to say iconic!), people began to think of him as "Jennifer Grey's father". Jennifer Grey has had a strange career, a good one, mind, but strange: perhaps peaking too early in Dirty Dancing, altering her appearance for some reason, then becoming kind of obscure. But popping up again in Dancing with the Stars, her famous parents commenting on her performance like the seasoned pros they were.

This is all over the place, I can't get it all in and I shouldn't try. He has danced and capered with us for 90 years, after all. We shouldn't be surprised - some people do 90 very well (William Shatner is due to turn 91 and is hosting one of my favorite TV shows, The UnXplained, along with a ton of other stuff), and in spite of his apparent frailty I don't think Joel Grey is frail at all. Petrushka isn't frail, even when the puppetmaster drops him on the stage and cracks his head. Those strings have always been translucent anyway, and he is powered by something quite else.





From what I've been able to gather, all the bits and pieces of recent interviews and performances on YouTube, his main art has been living. I love this clip from Dancer in the Dark: I watched the bloody thing on a rented DVD about six times just to see his dance number, which he did when he was well into his '60s. He was still on springs, still striking sparks with his tap shoes and smiling at the audience in that slightly fierce, slightly vulpine way.



Be around, Joel Grey; be around for a long time, for as long as possible, because we like you, need you, want you. You are a slice of humanity and we find you interesting. You don't embarrass us by flailing around in your success. You are real, even while trying on all sorts of different people, then letting them slide off your shoulders because something else has suddenly come up that is a whole lot more interesting.



UPDATE. Something, more than one thing prompted me to revisit this valentine to my old crush. I recently watched Cabaret for about the fifteenth time, and it was almost as astonishing as the first. Grey wasn't just brilliant, he was downright scary, embodying that dance with the devil which was Berlin in the 1930s. But then I re-watched Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and felt crushed all over again. He was just so CUTE! So enigmatic, so mercurial, yet unknowable, like all brilliant people are. There's more - though I haven't read it, he wrote a memoir called Master of Ceremonies in which he "comes out" - yes, he's gay, or I guess you could say bisexual, since he was devoted to his wife and family for decades before revealing this aspect of himself to the world.

I have to confess that at first I was miffed. I mean, why do this to your family when you have kept the secret for so long? But didn't we know? Of course we knew, and didn't want to know we knew. His daughter has come out to pay tribute to his honesty and integrity with her eyes full of tears. Ninety years old, my God, what does he look like now? I had a fantasy of meeting him, of almost wanting to kneel before him or lay my forehead down on the back of his hand. It won't happen, but it's funny how this comes back, all this, from 50 years ago - FIFTY.  And I have just turned 69. How does this happen? How can we know something and not know it at the same time? Such is life, such is the human condition. Such is Joel Katz, son of Mickey and father of Jennifer. Long may he wave.


ADDENDA! Yes, he's still growing, he's still glowing, he's still. . . you know the rest. The article I just found in a New York magazine talked about how he got through the pandemic by taking pictures of the flowers in his apartment. And he still looks elfin and cute and enigmatic, unknowable, ever enthusiastic. And I think I love him just as much as I did before.


Monday, January 30, 2023

This is nothing short of a miracle!

 

I used to subscribe to this channel, then for some reason got away from it .Now I'm binge-watching all of them. Out of a single portait, this computer animation not only brings the 40-year-old Poe to eerie life, but extends his lifespan another 40 years to distinguished old age. And then, they make him a woman!

Thursday, January 26, 2023

"Did you play any of these?" Bizarre games from back in the day

 

Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, Clue. Some board games are classics and have been staples of family fun time for decades. Then there are those odd games where you simply crack open a bunch of nuts, or slowly murder a large mammal with gravity. We dug through some old Sears catalogs from the 1960s to remember the forgotten board games of the decade.

Did you play any of these?


LOVE

Twister is game already full of flirtation and suggestion, so it is suprising that a younger spin on the game blantantly called LOVE existed in the midcentury. "Use your hands and feet to spell L-O-V-E," the ad proclaimed. Our parents would have put the kibosh on this scenario immediately.


FEELEY MEELEY

Here is "the game that gives you a funny feeling." Players put their hands inside a box and fondle and plastic toy, trying to guess what it is. Once you've become familiar with the 23 little objects, the game was pretty much pointless. Of course, you could also just cut a hole in a shoebox and make your own.


GREEN GHOST

This glow-in-the-dark game looks pretty fun, with its little plastic snakes, bats, keys and spooky trees. Oh, and feathers! That being said, with all the tiny parts, there's no way kids weren't losing some pieces.


GRAB A LOOP

You wear a belt with rings attached to it. You run around. Your friends try to rip off the rings. Hours of fun!


BUCKET OF FUN

Bucket of Fun combines all the fun of cleaning up your toys with… well, that's it. Plastic balls erupt out of a plastic bucket. You gather them up. This is like selling a deck of cards just to play "52-card pick up."


BEE BOPPER

For a mind-numbingly simple game — you swat a bee — the description is rather long-winded: "Spin bee on spinning card. Watch closely where he stops. Spinner has 4 colors that correspond to Bee Launchers. If spinner stops on your color act quickly to get your bee up before he's caught on the launcher. If bee is caught before launch, catcher gets 2 points… after launch 1 point. Winner is the one with most points."


THE LAST STRAW

Hey, kids! Want to rupture the spine of an ungulate? Just overburden this poor Bactrian camel with wood and watch his back snap in two! Ha! Just because "the straw that broke the camel's back" is a common idiom, that doesn't mean it makes for a good game.


MR. SPIN-HEAD
Feed a clown marbles.


OH, NUTS!

Pick open a bunch of plastic walnuts, looking for marbles. At least with real nuts, you can eat them.


DON'T SPILL THE BEANS

More proof that all you needed to make a game in the 1960s was some plastic food and an idiom. Though, technically, isn't the goal of the game — dumping beans into a pot — "spilling the beans"?


SCARNEY

What more could children want than a cold, ultilitarian, multi-purpose game from "gambling expert" John Scarne. Okay, maybe on second thought we'll play with that plastic camel.


NBC-TV NEWS GAME WITH CHET HUNTLEY

Another thing kids love: the tragedy and politics of the evening news!


TALK TO CECIL

"Cecil is a hand puppet that really talks… He directs the game." Obey the dragon!


Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Have Gun, Will Travel: Paladin's Seduction

 


I've been watching Have Gun all over again, and as usual, I am struck by how much it has changed. I have mixed feelings about Richard Boone, finding him both sexy and a little too craggy and world-weary to be truly appealing - oh, those long, long sighs that seem to indicate he's actually a little bored to be doing Season 7 of this thing - though he does have a diamond-sharp intelligence mixed with alpha-male swaggering that was, maybe, ahead of its time. He was something of an anti-hero, and an antidote to Chuck Connors, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, the other major players in this wildly-popular '60s genre. Have Gun was sometimes called the "thinking man's Western", and Paladin was surely a thinking man who sometimes thought with his pistol. Take that whatever way you wish.


This man wore ruffled shirts and paisley smoking jackets, murmured sweet somethings to the multiple fancy ladies in his hotel room in San Francisco, and then got called out to go and kill somebody. We knew it was coming when he flashed his card with the knight on it and we heard that unforgettable four-note theme that meant TROUBLE. BTW, I haven't confirmed this yet, but I have heard that it was written by the genius composer Bernard Hermann, who also scored Psycho, Taxi Driver and countless other classics.


In essence, that was the show. Ladies, card, travel, gun, oops, BANG, dead.  It was only a half-hour show, meaning the plot, characters and story arc had to all be accomplished in the space of 23 minutes. Sometimes I get lost in these intricacies which are introduced and developed so quickly that it can be hard to follow. Boone slows the pace down with his gravitas, his pacing lion's stride and centaur presence on a horse (though he DOES bounce a little too much, revealing that he's really a city slicker at heart). 


There's always a woman, often in some sort of dilemma, and always a longstanding grudge, sometimes a prisoner with his hands shackled together, a few tussles in which we obviously see Stunt Paladin at work, and then - always always - the gunfight. This is where the cobra strikes. And his fans all know that even if he has had to lay down his enormous horse pistol, he has another little gun secreted in the palm of his hand which, at close range, can blow a man down in a second. And then there's that thing he does with his hat, the quick jerk down over his eyes followed by a gentle pat on top. Aside from Humphrey Bogart, no man has ever worn a hat so well.

THIS particular scene is hotter than I expected. Paladin is getting over a fever and lying prone in the wagon - an erotic scenario to begin with - and this Mexican spitfire, whose husband is puttering around just outside the wagon, climbs in, climbs on and seduces him. He is more than willing to be seduced, and is that rare, rare thing - an actor who knows how to kiss convincingly. None of this Anthony Perkins flinching and wincing. He looks like he enjoyed doing this scene, and his little crooked smile at the end seems to say, "Ah. Another conquest."