Jewelry is one of the more thoughtful gifts a man can present the special woman in his life. However, choosing jewelry continues to stump many males. Assailed with doubt, men often opt to give safe gifts such as flowers and chocolate.

While the tradition of observing a wedding anniversary by presenting a specific gift category has been popular only since the mid-1900s, the roots of this custom actually extend much father back.

For many, the idea of giving a gift creates a feeling of dread. Perhaps all too often your gifts have been met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. With a growing reputation for bad gift giving, the task becomes just that - a job to accomplish.

Many cigar smokers know that their chosen indulgence was once, for many Native American groups, part of religious ceremonies. But do they also know that as late as 1586, one British scientist was so taken with the mind- and feeling-altering powers of tobacco as to call it a "holy smoke"?

Anyone who knows the history of cigars knows that Columbus, so influential elsewhere, had his role to play here as well. The journey in which Columbus, for European purposes, "discovered" the American continent is also the one in which Europeans discovered the joys of smoking.

The history of technology is littered with those ideas that didn't quite make it. HD-DVD got beaten out by Blu-Ray last year, just as DVD has, with time, supplanted VHS tapes like a better-equipped predator hunting another species to extinction.

For most smokers, the science of taste is like the innards of your cigar lighter - you don't care how it works as long as it does. Still, it is - along with smell - the critical sense that allows you to enjoy the sensation of smoking, and learning more about how taste works may enable you to get more from your cigars.

However others may feel about them, there's no doubt that public-smoking bans, and other restrictions on tobacco use, leave cigar aficionados burning up. Anyone who reads cigar magazines will know that this is one legislative trend all those magazines' writers seem to agree on.

It's no surprise that we tend to give cigars as gift items at weddings, bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, and new births, or that cigars remain popular gift item ideas for new dads, new moms, new brides and grooms, and newly engaged couples. After all, cigars have been associated with celebration and ceremony, with marking the moment, for as long as they've existed.

Cigar lovers - by reputation - tend not to be the kind of people it's hard to buy gifts for. After all, cigar smoking is an activity commonly associated with class, a sense of affluence, an interest in the finer things in life.

The newest addition to metro Detroit's art scene is also one of the most anticipated. The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) delivers what it promises: contemporary art.

Many first-time smokers don't even realize that good cigars (and even bad ones) have to be cut open before they're smoked. Nor do they realize that, for this task, it's not a good idea to go grabbing that pair of blunted old rusty scissors you keep in the "handies" drawer, or that steak knife in your kitchen, or any other device that wasn't intended for this use.

Camping - it's a brute necessity, and one of the most refined and civilized of pleasures.