After I landed back in LAX (#1 airport in the country for items stolen out of checked baggage!), I saw something kind-of funny on my ride back home from the airport. There was a sign next to an outdoor café on the side of the road which read: “Smoke-Free Outdoor Dining: It’s the Law!” Now this is a nice idea, preventing cigarette smoke from bothering people who don’t like it while they’re eating. The only problem was that the café was right on the side of an 8-lane boulevard, jam-packed with traffic, where cars, trucks, and buses were spewing out visibly dense smoke and pollution right into the dining area! I would actually think that for that location, cigarette smoke would be a welcome relief from all those exhaust fumes! So the sign struck me as being more than a little bit funny where it was located, and in fact, Los Angeles in general is a really hilarious place to ban cigarette smoking outdoors for health reasons, seeing as we’ve got vehicle-emissions-related smog all over the place; and we’re all breathing it in all the time, especially when we eat outdoors right next to the traffic-jammed streets! Yuck!
