TobaccoTrivia

Tobacco Trivia

Okay, Okay - So we lied a little about the trivia. Yes, there will be trivia in this space, but it won't always be about tobacco. You see, we are a very sophisticated and eclectic bunch and the trivia might be about all kinds of different things.

Our trivia for this week (or two or three) is about that great British statesman, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. The source for this is William Manchester's excellent biography of Churchill entitled The Last Lion from Little, Brown, and Company. Churchill preferred long large ring gauge cigars (thus the current Churchill size cigars offered by most cigar manufacturers). He preferred Cuban cigars, specifically Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas. He did not use a cutter, but instead would pierce the cigar with a match. He consumed ten or more cigars a day, but rarely smoked one all the way through. Indeed, his cigars were usually unlit and he simply chewed on them. When a cigar would become hopelessly unraveled and tattered, he would wrap it in gummed brown paper, call this improvisation a "bellyband" and continue to chew.

Considering how the world changed on September 11, 2001, we think it appropriate to quote some words of Churchill from a speech made over the BBC on June 18, 1940 when France was about to fall, the United States was still neutral, and it appeared that Britain would stand alone against Hitler and the Nazis:

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire...

Hitler knows that he will have to break us on this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: "This was their finest hour."

The enemies change, but the issues remain the same.

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