There are many good blending houses, producing many fine mixtures, but it seems to me that a majority of the material on the market is mediocre and repetitive. Many of the domestic craft blenders have had to rely necessarily on the tobacco industry giants to source much of their leaf. Thus the English blend from the corner shops around the country smell unsurprisingly similar to one another. There are only a handful of sources for Latakia and Perique. Who bothers importing exotic Virginias from Africa and India anymore? Where is the old Rhodesian Virginia? The fragrant Yenidje? The Syrian Latakia? The Xanthi, Dubek, Basma and Mahalla? Due to industrialization and suffocating regulatory restrictions our own domestic tobacco has become a homogenized cellulose compost that has no character of its own and must be sauced and doctored to become tolerable. And even in such an alarming context the marketing wizards have us all convinced that there are more numerous and unique blends than ever before. How can we be expected to make an infinite and profoundly diverse assortment of tobacco mixtures with such a limited array of 'materia prima.' For my part I find it more and more difficult to smoke a mixture that I consider average. If I have to struggle to articulate a redeeming character or distinguishing feature of a blend then I must simply confront the truth that it is average and perhaps, with only a finite number of bowls to be smoked in any given day or indeed, in a lifetime, why bother to constantly seek out that minimal goodness that hides within all things? Why not instead seek the absolute best, unapologetically, and smoke to good health, each bowl as if it were our last?