I've yet again been the victim of 'anticipatory plagiarism'! I was happily thumbing through the December issue of Cigar Aficionado when to my surpise on page 297 I came accross an advertisment for Due Mondi cigars. They have taken my brilliant idea for double capped cigars and have applied it to three of their frankly rough looking cigars.

Hello! Where are my royalties?

Any good lawyers out there willing to represent me in my upcoming civil suit? I'll split the royalties 50/50

Half a Cigar

A while ago I bought a whole lot of Dominican cigars, that I recently noticed have been in the humidor long enough to mellow nicely. Now I don't really have the time most days to sit down and enjoy a full length Churchill so I have come up with a cunning strategy.

I cut them in half!

Now anyone who smokes cigars and knows enough about their construction will know that this isn't usually a very good idea, as the glue used to keep the outer leaf of tobacco from unravelling is mostly applied at the cap and so cutting the cigar in half usually means that the outer leaf unravels leaving a smokeable but unsightly cigar.

I stumbled upon a nice little solution a week ago and thought that it might be useful to someone out there; here's the clever bit, I gently and with great care slide the label up the cigar to a point just above the cut. This stops the leaf from unravelling after the cigar is bisected! I have to admit that I completely screwed this up a few times before mastering the technique. I also suppose that any other type of material could be used, like an elastic band, but using the label just seems like the most elegant method.

Job done!

Now I can enjoy half a cigar a few times a week. If only the cigar manufacturers would make double capped Churchills, that would be cool. When you have the time to smoke a full Churchill you could simply snip off one cap, when you only wanted half you could just cut it in half and have two shorts.

Maybe I should try to patent that idea!

Anyway a few points that I think I should also point out are:
1. This is a wasteful process as two half cigars do not equal one full length cigar in terms of consumable tobacco.
2. The flavour of the halves are a little different than the Churchills, I'm not entirely sure why, but it is.
3. I wouldn't try this with a really good cigar in case it goes wrong.

Cigar Cool

I received Cigar Cool by Jonathan Futrell & Lisa Linder as a gift this Christmas. It is a book about cigars and cigar smoking. Not a comprehensive tome by any means, this book is more along the lines of an extended glossy magazine article.

The presentation is very well done, very trendy. There are lots of good photographs and some interesting layouts as well.

The typeface used throughout is exclusively courier and it would seem as that the authors have a general dislike of uppercase characters or the shift key was broken, but apart from that the book is a pleasant read.

Cigar Cool

Presentation: 14/20
Layout: 15/20
Content: 38/60

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Total: 65/100

The introduction is very self agrandising and should perhaps have been edited out alltogether, but if you make your way past that following chapters takes you on a short journey through the history of smoking from Columbus' discovery of the habit in 1492 through to today. After that there is some interesting information of tobacco and cigar production. This is probably the most interesting part of the book and it covers the history of cigar production along with the methods used to produce cigars from the planting of the seeds to the ligting of the cigar.

Overall it is a pleasant light read for tobacco enthusiasts.