the smoke-easy, Seattle, circa 2006

Ridiculous overreach. Unnecessary litigating. Nannycoddling. (All part of a sadder, larger trend.) The smoking ban has a new unintended consequence: the smoke-easy.

Quietly, the tattooed bartender scans the room, poker-faced.

It's about 11 p.m. on a weeknight. A man with a shaved head is talking about being in a heavy-metal band. Two young women are flipping through an adult entertainment industry magazine. About a dozen others are drinking in the bar.

Nobody looks like the type who'd rat the bartender out to the health department.

So she pulls out a stack of black plastic ashtrays -- the kind that used to be so prevalent in bars across Washington -- and casually places them in front of her customers, who immediately begin digging out packs of cigarettes.

The bartender tells them, "You shouldn't smoke" and "Don't do it," partly because she just graduated from nursing school and really thinks people shouldn't smoke, and partly because the bar doesn't "officially" endorse smoking.

Then she walks from behind the bar over to the front windows and closes the red velvet curtains....

The sheer inanity of I-901 ought to be apparent to everyone by now. It's legal to inhale all the smoke you want from your own cigarette. It's illegal to inhale all the smoke you want from someone else's. How stupid is that?

"Smoking is part of dive-bar culture," said Zack Brown, a smoker in a literally underground establishment elsewhere in the city. "It's like people drinking PBR."

Pabst Blue Ribbon? Now there's something worth banning. PBR smokes you.