Howdy! New guy over here, read the site for a few weeks and decided to join up already. Have collected pipes off & on since the age of 12 (now 44) and over the winter finally decided to get serious about it as a method to help me bag cigarettes. Started smoking a corn cob just after Christmas which went well enough to get me to dig through a storage space to find my old pipes. And bought a couple mail order. Gosh how I love shopping for pipes, can literally search them for hours.
Things improved after I chucked out the Borkum Riff battery acid treated ragweed I'd been frying my poor tongue with, got some Captain Black and then sought out a tobacconist. They make a blend based on the Captain and after about a month of waiting for it to start working the receptors in my brain finally started accepting the non-adulterated nicotine in pipe tobacco.
It's been smooth sailing ever since, with the bane of it all being an insatiable craving for Italian rustic carved briars with colored stems, which get expensive quick. Managed to bring home a nice estate beauty by Armellini in April & am simply in love with her. We spend some time together every night, and someday I hope to introduce her to a handsome young Il Ceppo or Ser Jacapo. Saving my lunch money.
Interestingly, I've dropped 25lbs since ditching a pack of cigarettes per day for my evening pipe. I still smoke cigs while stuck driving but don't like the god awful reek of them in the house anymore, especially after first sensing the Captain Black lingering in the room from the night before.
This might also be of interest: I am a fan of Italian made spaghetti westerns from the 1960s & 1970s and last month was obsessed for a few weeks with the idea of finding out exactly what pipe Lee Van Cleef is smoking in "For A Few Dollars More" and started up a discussion thread at the Spaghetti Western Database that sort of took on a life of its own.
http://www.spaghetti-western.net/forum/index.php/topic,3194.0.html
The answer is an unmarked bent billiard or apple shaped meerschaum with an out of period yellow lucite stem, no metal neck band & a polished surface. Since the pipe is unmarked there's likely no way to determine maker for sure, but if anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. Cheers!