One of the more ridiculous claims made by the anti-tobacco zealots is the suggestion that people did not know that cigarettes were bad for them. It’s nonsense, of course, and, in this context, a reader writes to inform me that there is an episode of the Three Stooges in which Curly wins a sweepstake organized by the Coffin Nail Cigarette Company. Now that’s a telling fact in itself – fans of the three stooges have never been known to be the sharpest of people (Oh, spare me the outraged e-mails – Moe, Curly and that other fellow simply were not funny) and yet their scriptwriters knew that even aficionados of Cro-Magnon comedy would understand that cigarettes were ‘coffin nails’ and thus, presumably, bad for them.