I began smoking pipes back in Nixon's interrupted second term of office. I remember this because I nearly immolated myself with hot embers spilled from a pipe while rejoicing and cheering at his resignation. Since that time, I went between pipe and cigars until the early 1990's when cigars became trendy and tripled in price and my beloved Jamaicans began to be made elsewhere. I relearned the gentle, if inconvenient art of pipes if only to save money. A tin of Amphora brown could be had for the price of one cigar and last me a hundred smokes.

Then the internet started and suddenly the availability of tobacco and that damned eBay enticed me to bury myself in endless varieties of pipeweed and pipes I never needed. You know the rest. Until I discovered this site, I had little guidance on the characteristics of tobaccos, so a lot got thrown away. Or should have been. I probably still have it.

I began writing reviews in 2004 for my own use as a backup to crashing computers. You can find them helpful or not (I hope you do) but I don't really care; I write what I think, even if it is critical of a Pease blend. This site is for opinions. Like anuses, everybody has one. Unlike anuses, I value your opinions, especially once you've written enough to display your biases. I can always tell time by a clock that is always 8 hours off.

Since that time, a seemingly helpful "helpfuness" field was started but has since been co-opted by like-thinking people to congratulate each other in their agreement on a tobacco and to manipulate their own and other's apparent popularity apparently independent of review quality. Remember high school? Yeah. That.

That said, I do think more about what I say and how others, including older-me might interpret them, and that's a good thing. I don't go back and edit them unless I find glaring errors or have new information, no matter how badly I wrote it.

Keep your pipes clean.

Gary