Posted: 12:00 AM ET, 01/04/08There’s something mystical, even spiritual, about Havana. I landed yesterday in the great city from Cancún, Mexico, and I immediately felt like I had arrived in a very special place. You have all heard Havana called a cigar mecca, which it is, but it’s much more than that. Read more
Posted: 11:04 AM ET, 01/02/08I spent New Year’s Eve with some of the same people that I celebrated with 30 years ago. Yeah, they are really great old friends, including my then-girlfriend, now my wife. The mother of my daughter’s best friend joined the party, too. My daughter and her friend were there for the food, and then departed to meet with friends at their own parties. Read more
Posted: 01:42 PM ET, 12/31/07There’s only a few hours left of 2007, so I’m taking a moment to reflect on the year gone by.
First, this was as fast a year as any I remember. I’m sure part of the reason is the four-year-old who is playing in front of me as I type this (now I know what dad was talking about when I was younger), and the other reason is the full year I had at work. Read more
Posted: 11:26 AM ET, 12/22/07I’m flying out of Miami early this afternoon, but I had time to fit one last meeting into my schedule before I left. This morning I had breakfast with Litto Gomez, maker of La Flor Dominicana, LG Diez and Coronado by La Flor cigars.
I’ve known Litto for more than 12 years now, and he’s making his best cigars ever. Read more
Posted: 12:27 AM ET, 12/22/07I’m back in my hotel room after a long, full day in Miami. I started in Hialeah, at a cigar factory/shop I had never visited before called Flor de Gonzalez. If you want to try a smoke made in the United States, you don’t have to limit your search to 8th Street. Read more
Posted: 01:12 AM ET, 12/21/07There’s clearly something wrong with me. I spent the other night standing in my driveway, swinging a 10-pound sledgehammer into the ground to break the inch-thick coating of ice that was just about everywhere. Now I’m walking around in short sleeves and sunglasses in Miami, where the weather is absolutely perfect. Read more
Posted: 04:46 PM ET, 12/19/07I told you so.
It is always a little dangerous for a journalist to openly pronounce, “I told you so.” But I had one of those moments today when I opened the front section of the New York Times. Read more
Posted: 11:22 AM ET, 12/18/07I’d been waiting for this moment since last year, when the Padrón family gave the world a tantalizing glimpse of its new cigar, the Padrón Serie 1926 80 Years, at the Las Vegas Big Smoke. We just call it the 80th Anniversary for short, but that shouldn’t be confused with the company’s 1964 Anniversary Series. Read more
Posted: 01:21 PM ET, 12/17/07I’ve always admired Sir Winston Churchill. Half American, half British, a man of words and a man of action, he stood up to the Nazi threat, all while puffing more cigars than 20 men would normally smoke. How can you not admire him?
I recently picked up the tidy (192 page) biography on him by John Keegan, which came out this year in paperback, published by Penguin. Read more
Posted: 01:37 PM ET, 12/12/07I think it is happening just about everywhere that smoking is being banned. There is a small underground movement of freethinking people who are determined to exercise their personal freedom to smoke. Granted, I don’t want to impose my smoking pleasure on someone who doesn’t like smoke, but that doesn’t mean governments should legislate in favor or against either one of our preferences. Read more
- Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 - |