POKE THEM IN THE EYE!

Mr. Bevis Mustard hated bulls eyes, so he had his sons Armstrong and Clinton poke them all out. Their agile fingers busied themselves with the task at hand. Four years old, six years old. Already adept! Child protective services, if they heard about this, would come down on his neck, he was sure of it! All because of those nasty nasty bulls eyes.


There were bowls of it.


No, I have no idea who came up with the term. But it makes sense. The hardened staff of dark tobacco fed threw the spinning machine, around which red and blonde Virginia leaves are twisted, forms the centre of the sliced disks, and poetically might be seen as "bulls eyes". In any case, it sounds better than "dog asses", or "horse flies". It remains hard, and when you rub out the disks so that you can stuff your pipe, you must pay especial care to fully reduce the thick fragments lest they become hot flecks that might cause pitting.

If I had kids, I'd set them to work. It would probably keep them quiet for all of twenty minutes. Thirty if they were fastidious about the task. But then I'd undoubtedly hear from the special agents of social services, who'd disapprove of me exposing them to daemon tobacco.

There are currently four or five tobaccos made this way.

Escudo is still like that, along with Three Nuns, Davidoff Flake Medallions, Peter Stokkebye Luxury Bullseye, and 4th. Generation Black Dot. Doblone D'Oro is somewhat more like the typical MacBaren spuncuts, and Cabbie's Mixture by Samuel Gawith, finally back for a brief time at least, is handrolled leaf sliced into disks without an eye in the middle at all.


Having purchased a stash of spuncut tobacco recently, enough for two or three months (in addition to all the other pipe tobacco I am sitting on), this morning I poked out the eyes for extra attention, before fully rubbing out the remainder. I don't like encountering hard bits of eye in my pouch.

Unreducable hard crumbs have been discarded.

This afternoon I'll head downtown for snackies and a smoke.
And, quite likely, a cup of tea around four.
Nowhere near visitors.
Pried eyes.



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