The association between smoking and creativity is an old one, almost stereotypical. In the nineteenth century the painter Edouard Manet, for example, used the upward drift of cigar smoke in his famous portrait of the celebrated French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme to symbolize the wafting elusiveness of the poet's mind and sensibility.

There's no doubt about it. Tobacco farming is tough work, with backbreaking hours in hot conditions. Nobody knows that better than the growers and harvesters of so-called "shade tobacco," who make possible a multimillion-dollar industry from rural Connecticut.

There are certain people whose jobs seem more enviable than others. Professional restaurant critics. Wine tasters. Book reviewers. And, for people who love premium cigars, no job could be more enjoyable than that of a professional cigar reviewer for a popular cigar publication.

Cigars are part of the world of music - or vice versa. After all, a lot of great pop and jazz music has been created by people who cut their teeth playing in ultra-smoky bars, and Cuban folk music features an entire tradition of songs about cigars.

Cigars have long been a part of the iconography of American politics. On the negative side, early-twentieth-century newspaper cartoons symbolized the greed of villainous "party bosses" and robber barons by showing fat men lighting their stogies with one-hundred dollar bills.

For many of us, casino gambling and cigar smoking go together like Frank and Bing. Generations of first-time Vegas visitors have enhanced their experience via frequent applications of cigar smoke, just like those iconic Rat Packers of yesteryear with their impeccable suits, suave manner, and constantly-replenished supplies of alcohol and tobacco.

Cigar smoking is all about shared pleasure. After all, it swept Victorian England and became a national pastime in part because it gave men something to do with their hands while they talked after dinner.

Cigars have been with us for thousands of years - far too long for any historian, however dedicated, to trace. Tobacco may have grown on this planet (according to current speculation by paleontologists) for as long as eight thousand years, and archaeological data suggests it's been smoked for at least four thousand.

Cigar smoking is the most social of pleasures. And with bans on public smoking enacted in almost thirty states, covering half the United States population, cigar smokers must be feeling more and more like an embattled minority.

A few years ago, in 2006, the Nevada legislature imposed a public smoking ban. The new rule doesn't apply - as yet - to the storied casinos of Las Vegas, where smoking is still allowed on gaming floors.

As Chariots Of Fire did for Eric Liddell and Braveheart did for William Wallace, the 2002 film A Beautiful Mind made mathematician John Forbes Nash a household name - without necessarily rendering his life, or his work, much better-understood Audiences and critics welcomed the movie - it won a 2004 Academy Award - but enthusiasts of Nash's work insist that even bigger rewards await those who study Nash's real-life work, and the esoteric discipline, game theory, in which he made his name

One upper-Midwestern state has gone to great lengths to render itself a desirable filmmaking location - and the entertainment industry is taking notice.