"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." - Moby-Dick

As someone whose brief fling with nicotine was due to a packet of Gauloise and an incredibly chouette cigarette lighter I should probably run away from anything which contains the words "cute" and "cigarette" in its description. But I'm older...and therefore theoretically wiser now...and can admire this whale ashtray without reaching for the demon weed...and even go so far as to envision a herd of whales floating along my mantelpiece, with nary a puff of smoke in sight.