This humorous tidbit from Richard Carleton Hacker's
"The Ultimate Pipe Book:"
I had not yet learned that there were pipes
other than the cheap drugstore variety and
grown disgusted with the harsh bitter taste of the
breaking-in process I had experienced with the
two pipes I already owned. Therefore, upon
purchasing yet another heavily lacquered, red
colored filter pipe ... I packed my new briar
full of a coarse Burley tobacco, fired it up
with a packed of paper matches and climbed into
my 1954 Austin-Healey four-banger and roared
down the highway for about an hour holding my
red-hot glowing pipe out the window to
"properly" break it in within a record time.
At about 70 miles an hour the smoke was pouring
out of the mouthpiece like a steam engine! At
the end of my experiment I confidently brought
the pipe back into the roadster and looked at
what I expected would be a nicely charred,
evenly smoked bowl. Instead, the pipe looked
like it had been created in Dr. Frankenstein's
lab; the entire exterior finish of the pipe had
bubbled and cracked and the pipe itself had
burnt completely through at the heel. At $3 for
the pipe and ten cents for the tobacco it was a
relatively inexpensive lesson for me, even in
those days, but it taught me something I have
never forgotten: to this day I will not smoke a
pipe in an Austin-Healey.
(Copyright 1984, 1989 Richard Carleton Hacker. Reprinted without
permission. From "The Ultimate Pipe Book," second edition,
Autumgold Publishing, ISBN 0-931253-03-9, pg. 129.)
Kam
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kamk@sgi.com
"Maybe `WWW' includes the word `weird' somewhere." -kozmo (kozmo@cruzio.com)
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