Graydon Carter uses the February Vanity Fair Editor's Letter to rail against smoking laws and complain about Starbucks forcing him to use Italian words when ordering coffee. Again.

A Loews manager apparently tried to enforce the theater's "no outside food" policy and Mr. Carter had just purchased a cup of coffee from the much maligned Starbucks:

"He got the manager who repeated the company directive and pointed to a container where I could throw away my coffee...

Like the infantile renegade I am, I didn't toss the cup, but hid it in a huge inside pocket of my overcoat. The Loews gatekeepers gave me the once-over when I returned, empty-handed and moving carefully, so as not to spill hot coffee down my pant leg. After the movie, I put the empty cup on a display case outside the manager's office. Very mature."

On Bloomberg's regulatory changes:

"[The smoking ban] follows his somewhat arbitrary evisceration of the of the recycling laws and his making a number of streets 'thru streets' (meaning that you have to drive practically to the river's edge before being able to make a turn). There was, too, his ban on extracurricular noise. No doubt, one will be forthcoming on cussing...And all this comes at a time when we are waging war against Iraq, come hell or high water..."

Poor Graydon. Has to sit in the back of the chauffeured car service for another five minutes while the driver goes three blocks out of his way to make a left turn.

Mr. Carter, inspired by Gangs of New York, concludes with a vague suggestion that all of this warrants some sort of public uprising. We assume this means a storming of Loews with venti lattes and an veritable orgy of illegal left turns.