The smoking coat

It's freezing cold here. Whatever happened to global warming? I hear it's for real, but certainly not over here at the moment. It's been so cold that I had to take out the smoking coat- and that's serious. Once the smoking coat comes out of the wardrobe, you bet your ass the temperatures must have hit arctic zones.

Or maybe I'm just a wimp. People always expect me not to get cold, just because I'm from Switzerland. "What? You are cold? But you are from Switzerland!", they say, with this "you freak!" look on their faces. What's up with that? We get cold in Switzerland too, because believe it or not, we are also made from flesh and blood. Generally. We just have well insulated houses and good central heating. And we put on beanies and gloves and scarves. And smoking coats. Ok, I hear you say, what the hell is a smoking coat? Well, I'm not talking about a "smoking jacket", which is one of those old fashioned ugly velvet coats in which old men would sit around and smoke pipes and scratch their balls and talk about hunting. My smoking coat is just a big fluffy warm coat with fake fur trims, which is too warm to wear 98% of the time in Queensland. In one of our old houses where we had a little backyard we used to wear it to go outside and have a cigi. That's how it became the smoking coat, the poor dear. One of my friends calls it my pimp coat, but don't listen to him. My coat is not pimpy, ok.

Other people, by the way, have entirely different definitions for smoking coats again. In an article about smoking and breast feeding, they recommend the mother to "wear a smoking coat- some article of clothing that you cover up with when you smoke," so the baby would not have to smell the smokey clothes.

The pediatric asthma experience journal, on the other hand, encourages smoking parents to "use a smoking coat or jacket when they go outside to smoke."

Further google research revealed that apparently the following items also qualify as smoking coats.

This is scary:


And this will more than likely give me nightmares:



I don't know what the hell this is, but it's not good:



This jacket has lungs that go black as you smoke. What a charming idea:



Now what's really disturbing is the fact that increasingly, pets seem to be smoking these days. And this is what their smoking jackets look like:



And the ones for your futuristic smoking dog:



Or the suggar daddy version:



What's wrong with the world?