Say Aaaaah! Laugh courtesy of Mr Puddlecoat.

 I have had to laugh - and cry at Dick Puddlecoat's post and have to add that Chewing Tobacco is different from Snus - but, whatever - same idea. I do wonder how you would police this? Say Aaaaah!?  They could also check your picnic basket to see it doesn't contain Chocolate Cake or Hamburgers, yes?  And frisk you with metal detectors to check you aren't carrying an electronic cigarette. The imagination runs loose. Who needs another planet? This one is as strange as any you could get!

And now for the outdoor snus ban 

If you thought Bloomberg's ban on smoking in 29,000 acres of New York parks  - and California banning e-cigs everywhere - was insane, wait till you get a load of this.

Grand Forks outdoor parks have areas where smoking is banned, courtesy of Measure 8 in November. Grand Forks Park Board Commissioner Molly Soeby wants to extend that ban to all varieties of tobacco. 

Commissioner Jay Panzer responded to Soeby’s proposal at Tuesday’s board meeting with a big grin and the words: “This is a ginormous can of worms.” 

After flashing a smile acknowledging Panzer’s assessment, Soeby argued that chewing tobacco is damaging because it’s an unhealthy habit in what should be a healthy environment. 

“We look at parks as a way to make a community healthier,” she said. “There’s no way tobacco makes us healthier. Our community is becoming more healthy and it realizes what a problem tobacco is.

 The "the smoking ban is only to protect those poor bar workers from passive smoke" defence is but a distant memory, isn't it?

She said she will be OK if she doesn’t get a smokeless ban, but . . . 

“I’ll be back next year,” she said. “The times are a-changing.”

They sure are. After 80 years, deeply anti-social prohibitionists have escaped their collective straitjacket and are greasing up the slippery slope on a daily basis.

I don't fancy alcohol's chances much, do you?"