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07/09/2003: "Konk Tiki, Thor"

Heyerdahl's Cafe, located on Red Arrow Highway, in Bridgeman, Michigan, has been serving Scandinavian "soul food" to all those who care enough since 1926. I stopped there this morning with my lovely and Swedish mother-in-law for Swedish Pancakes and Lingonberries and what a let down. Let me tell you about it.

We were enroute from Chicago to the Grand Traverse Bay area of Michigan, and, when you reach the Bridgeman exit, you can breath a little easier, having left half the nations "HillRod" truckers behind on I-80, scrapping for control of the (usually) one lane passage Indiana has seen fit to leave available to summer traffic. Breathing easy and feeling that your ETA is now predictable makes the average person hungry and in need of a break. So, we stopped at Heyerdahl's.

Babs, my mother-in-law, is both Swedish and asthmatic, so "breathing easy" in one lane rubberbanding traffic means windows up, air on full, and certainly no smoking. I'm fine with that, but I do smoke, and after two plus hours in the car, I have to admit I was beginning to twitch. This is where the let down comes in; Heyerdahl's has closed their smoking section! My Tiki was Konked, but good.

We know Michigan has its rednecks, but does it have P.C. fruitcakes in positions of power? Yes! Signs in road construction zones threaten a 15 year prison term for "winging" a construction worker. Just winging him, an accident for Christ's sake! Babs would be 90 years old when she got out of jail. That's nuts. Anyway, back to smoking section politics, is this "rabid anti-smoking" exercise of hosing smokers out of their comfort of any value beyond the obvious power trip. No. If the restaurant housing the would-be smoking section were as airy and well-ventilated as the average home, then you may apply the following data from Encyclopedia Britanica:

"Passive smoking--i.e., a nonsmoker's inhalation of smoke produced by smokers in an enclosed space--also appears to heighten the risk of developing lung cancer. Several studies have found that, over the long term, the nonsmoking spouses of smokers experience a lung cancer risk that is almost double that of spouses neither of whom smoke. It should be emphasized, however, that smokers continue to have a much higher lung-cancer risk; the lung-cancer mortality risk for a heavy smoker is 20 to 30 times greater than that of a nonsmoker."

Let's look at the numbers. If heavy smoking is an average of 25 times as much risk as not smoking at all, and living with a smoker, that's 24/7, is only 2 times as much risk as living with a non-smoker, then the hour or two you spend in a restaurant that has a smoking section, even 5 times a week, is statistically trivial. Let's face it, people live in Detroit, and live long productive lives.

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Replies: 1 Comment

Chicago stinks too, buddy.

MoTown said @ 07/21/2003 01:02 AM CST