Smoke Your Way To Drier Nerves: Smoking As Medicine In Early Modern Europe It's always amazing to learn what kinds of things passed as medicine before - and even during - the birth of modern science. In colonial times, for example, American medicine used such "cures" as the moss from a dead man's skull - thankfully... ( added 80 days 1 hour ago.)

Learning To Savor The Moment: How To Be A Quality Cigar Taster There are certain people whose jobs seem more enviable than others. Professional restaurant critics. Wine tasters. Book reviewers. And, for people who love premium cigars, no job could be more enjoyable than that of a professional cigar... ( added 80 days 2 hours ago.)

Holy Smoke!: When Tobacco Was A Religious Ritual Many cigar smokers know that their chosen indulgence was once, for many Native American groups, part of religious ceremonies. But do they also know that as late as 1586, one British scientist was so taken with the mind- and feeling-altering powers... ( added 87 days 3 hours ago.)

Third Time's The Charm: The Discovery Of Tobacco By Europeans Anyone who knows the history of cigars knows that Columbus, so influential elsewhere, had his role to play here as well. The journey in which Columbus, for European purposes, "discovered" the American continent is also the one in which Europeans... ( added 87 days 4 hours ago.)

Cigars Vs. Snuff: When One Form Of Tobacco Beat Out Another The history of technology is littered with those ideas that didn't quite make it. HD-DVD got beaten out by Blu-Ray last year, just as DVD has, with time, supplanted VHS tapes like a better-equipped predator hunting another species to extinction.... ( added 91 days 3 hours ago.)

When Tobacco Was A Panacea In Woody Allen's classic comedy Sleeper, the main character - played by Woody Allen himself, of course - wakes up in a twenty-third century where everything bad is good for you. Steak, ice cream and beer are the ultimate in health food, and... ( added 91 days 4 hours ago.)

The Science Of Smoking: How Smell Works One of the worlds largest and most valuable jewel collections, the Imperial Crown Jewels of Persia, or Crown Jewels of Iran, consists of a mind-boggling number of treasures. On display at the Museum of The Treasury of National Iranian Jewels... ( added 105 days 2 hours ago.)

Have A Small Cigar: Some Anthems For Cigar Smokers Cigars are part of the world of music - or vice versa. After all, a lot of great pop and jazz music has been created by people who cut their teeth playing in ultra-smoky bars, and Cuban folk music features an entire tradition of songs about... ( added 112 days 4 hours ago.)

The Science Of Smoking: How Taste Works For most smokers, the science of taste is like the innards of your cigar lighter - you don't care how it works as long as it does. Still, it is - along with smell - the critical sense that allows you to enjoy the sensation of smoking, and... ( added 112 days 4 hours ago.)

Cigar Destinations: Festivals That Cater To Dedicated Smokers Cigar smoking is all about shared pleasure. After all, it swept Victorian England and became a national pastime in part because it gave men something to do with their hands while they talked after dinner. And it took off during the so-called... ( added 113 days 5 hours ago.)

Cigar Festivals Make Your Calendar Go Up In Smoke Cigar smoking is the most social of pleasures. And with bans on public smoking enacted in almost thirty states, covering half the United States population, cigar smokers must be feeling more and more like an embattled minority. So what could... ( added 114 days 4 hours ago.)

A Smoke At Sea: Cruise Ships Offer Smoking Vacations For Cigar Fans A few years ago, in 2006, the Nevada legislature imposed a public smoking ban. The new rule doesn't apply - as yet - to the storied casinos of Las Vegas , where smoking is still allowed on gaming floors. And of course Nevada is hardly... ( added 114 days 4 hours ago.)

Cigar History Destinations: Florida Cigars have been with us for thousands of years - far too long for any historian, however dedicated, to trace. Tobacco may have grown on this planet (according to current speculation by paleontologists) for as long as eight thousand years, and... ( added 116 days 3 hours ago.)

Cigar-Loving Cities In A Smoke-Banning World However others may feel about them, there's no doubt that public-smoking bans, and other restrictions on tobacco use, leave cigar aficionados burning up. Anyone who reads cigar magazines, for example, will know that - however politically... ( added 116 days 3 hours ago.)

Yachting: A Sport For The Leisured Boating is perhaps the most romantic of all sports, with its aura of long days on deck, of old sea salts' talk, of rope-related knowhow and words like "keelhaul" and "stern," its echoes of Melville and Popeye and of Robert Shaw's character in... ( added 122 days 3 hours ago.)

What Do You Get The Cigar Smoker Who Has Everything? Cigar lovers-by reputation-tend not to be the kind of people it's hard to buy gifts for. After all, cigar smoking is an activity commonly associated with class, a sense of affluence, an interest in the finer things in life. Dedicated cigar... ( added 127 days 4 hours ago.)

V-Cutter, Cigar Guillotine Or What? A Cigar Smoker's Weapon Of Choice The Boy Scout motto says it best: "Be prepared." Many first-time smokers don't even realize that good cigars (and even bad ones) have to be cut open before they're smoked. Nor do they realize that, for this task, it's not a good idea to go... ( added 127 days 4 hours ago.)

Sport Shooting: We Owe It All To The Civil War We all know about the important role that guns play in American recreation. Consider such facts as the profusion of hunting magazines available on any newsstand; the huge number of duck blinds that can be seen in any woods; the fact that every... ( added 129 days 3 hours ago.)

Nicaragua: The Tobacco-Producing Country That Endures To cigar smokers, Nicaragua is already legendary. Through regime change, social upheaval, and revolution, this Latin American nation has produced some of the world's finest tobacco. And since the post-1959 "cigar diaspora"-when many of Cuba's... ( added 129 days 3 hours ago.)

Hunting And Survival: Some Tips For Beginners Hunting is as old as humanity-older, in fact-and as new as the latest high-tech gear they're selling at your local sporting goods store. Fossil evidence indicates that early humans were hunting with spears as long as 16,200 years ago, and... ( added 134 days 2 hours ago.)

Honduras: The Home Of Tobacco Those who love cigars know that Honduras is one of the world's best places to make them. After all, this Latin American country has been a prime tobacco-growing location for centuries, and its cigar industry boomed again after 1959, when many... ( added 134 days 2 hours ago.)

Cigars In Brazil: An Uncertain Future? Those who know their cigars well also, by that same token, know Brazil -albeit as a source of great tobacco rather than as a top cigar-producing nation. Brazilian tobacco, mainly produced in the country's temperate northeastern and... ( added 136 days ago.)

Cigars And Music: A Natural Combination Perhaps it's because there's a close cultural connection between great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about jazz knows that its truly legendary improvisers-Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie-cut their teeth playing in... ( added 136 days ago.)

A Contemplative Person's Recreation: Fishing For Americans in landlocked areas, it may be easy to forget how central fishing is to the world's economies and cultures. So feast on this whopper of a statistic: two hundred million people owe their jobs (directly or indirectly) to fisheries. No... ( added 148 days 3 hours ago.)

Boxing: An Ancient Tradition, A Necessary Skill Obviously, no one knows when the first fistfight took place; nor do we have much of a clue when the art of smacking folks in the face began to be codified, the rules written down, judges and evaluators brought in. But we do know that boxing seems... ( added 148 days 4 hours ago.)