I thought I noticed a lot more hard liquor advertisements on tv lately, and where I hadn't seen any before. The "Bacardi and Cola" nonsense is one of the earliest I remember, but there are probably others I've blocked from memory entirely.

I thought there was a ban on such commercials, on tv specifically. Just like there was a ban on cigarette ads. (Those have not seen a comeback, I notice. I guess liquor companies are less afraid of being sued than tobacconizers.)

Turns out, it wasn't so much a ban on liquor ads as a Gentleman's Agreement not to air them. (Gentleman's Agreement being lawyer-speak for "I can change my mind whenever I want, and I never signed anything, so there!") This was a 50-year-long agreement by all the networks, and the alcohol companies as well.

Until 1996.

That year, in March, Seagrams (hereafter known as the Antithesis of All that is Good and Noble) aired an ad on a sports cable network, and by the end of the year, Congresscritters and the Prez himself were trying to ban the ads outright.

It didn't work. Within a couple of years, more and more ads were popping up, and not just on cable networks. NBC fell off the (band)wagon in 2001. And now we get treated to such whimsies as Bailey's Irish Cream and Smirnoff's ads on a regular basis.

I hope they know, these ad execs, if they decide to return Joe Camel to the little screen that . . . well, his nose looks like a penis. Shhhhh.