Things are, as is the usual at the Smokingpipes offices... novel, shall we say. That we continue to be besieged by innumerable quantities of birds, well, actually at this point I think we've gotten used to that - personally, I hardly even notice the squawking cacophony which fills the halls every time someone opens the back door, anymore. More significantly, Sykes, having at last paused from adding any more monitors to the panoptical eccentricity that he calls his office, has added a monitor to the kitchen, instead. Upon first noticing this, I had suggested that we could use it to loop an image of a glaring, staring eye, to watch over the coffee. He abstained from entertaining this suggestion, instead setting up a real-time display of our sales statistics. Coincidentally, not long ago our extremely professional in-house software developer, Tommy, had come up with a nice bit of work which would display sales figures in the form of several different images of Sykes's head, each bearing a different expression ranging from glowering disapproval, to unbridled cheerfulness. I, naturally, suggested we could dust that little project off for our new kitchen overwatch monitor, possibly elaborating upon it by adding under each image an appropriately brief, Orwellian text; "Doubleplus Ungood", for example.

Sykes, not one to go mad with power, passed on this suggestion as well, and a modest, unthreatening combination of bars, graphs, and numbers won out instead. As silver lining, at least, upon returning to the pipe library I found Adam reveling in the discovery that nearly any movie title can be transformed into that of a blistering, brawling, possibly surreal Western tale of gunfighters, gunfighter-related mayhem, and treacherous women by simply swapping out one word with either "bullet", or "bullets". Like so: Seven Bullets for Seven Brothers, Enter the Bullet, Edward Bullethands, Charlie and the Bullet Factory, Bullet Gump, Gone with the Bullets, Bullets to the Future, Four Weddings and a Bullet, A Bullet Named Desire (wherein Blanche DuBois declares that she has always depended upon the bullets of strangers), Gone in 60 Bullets, 30,000 Bullets Under the Sea, Robin Hood: Prince of Bullets, Bullet Driver, The Silence of the Bullet, The Seven Year Bullet, Planet of the Bullets, Gentlemen Prefer Bullets - and so on. Just as remarkable, we noted, is how readily the plots suggest themselves.

All that nonsense having been said, it's time for today's bullet. We have for you: fresh briars from Stanwell, Neerup, Nording, Savinelli, Brebbia, and Peterson; artisanal pipes by Ardor, Askwith, and our old friend, Peter Heeschen. Oh, and what's more, today also see the introduction of our official Smokingpipes logo merchandise, too.

Eric Squires: Copywriter