Pushing Cigar Smokers to the Very Edge

We have seen the future, and it looks uncomfortable.

Over at Pasta Etc. on Sunset Plaza, three distinguished-looking men were holding their coffee cups and smoking their after-lunch cigars while seated on the restaurant’s curb.

It seems that even though they were dining at the restaurant’s outdoor tables, that wasn’t good enough for their anti-secondhand-smoke neighbors.

What’s next, the center divider?

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A Tall, Hot One: What do people drink on one of the hottest, humidest, most wretched days of summer?

As we placed our order for a frosty iced nonfat half-caf latte at our local Starbucks, we were dumbfounded as customer after customer ordered hot coffees.

Why? we discretely asked a few of them.

“It stimulates me, cools me down. It’s more psychological than anything. I used to work ona boat where it was real hot and we always drank coffee,” said a burly man.

“You see, if you drink hot coffee, your body temperature goes up and you don’t react to how hot it is outside,” pontificated another.

“For 20 years I lived in Central Utah where it’s bitter cold. I’d rather sweat than freeze any day,” said a customer going back for a refill.

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Highway Horseplay: Slogging back home on the 405 from our monthly trek to the Rose Bowl flea market--where we happily haggled over a matching pair of Fiesta nut dishes--we spotted a girl, passing us on the left, who was wearing a bikini top that matched her metallic-lavender Mustang convertible. Her hair clip was lavender too.

Then our savvy flea-market friends started pointing out more young, carefree types cruising around in Mustang convertibles. We thought off-road vehicles were trendy, we mentioned.

“ Everybody rents Mustangs in Hawaii,” we were told, feeling slightly out of it.