I see Duluth News-Tribune columnist Jim Heffernan has already written a humor column about the “theater loophole” in the Minnesota smoking ban now being used by northern Minnesota bars. Fortunately, the piece I’m working on takes a different angle. Good thing, because Heffernan is phoning his columns in from Florida and I’m within a smoke cloud of the controversy. I wouldn’t want to be scooped under those circumstances, at least more than I already have been.