Scenes from the smoking ban

On Friday night, at PT's Pub on Eastern Avenue and St. Rose Parkway, food was available, as delicious as ever, and while my friends and I ate like kings we hardly noticed the couple at the bar feeding the poker machine between cigarette puffs.

It was the same scene the next night, at Tommy Rocker's Cantina, on Dean Martin Drive, where one employee told me this: "If someone wants to smoke, who am I to stop them? That's a problem for the health department to take care of."