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O'NEILL: Youths may miss 'Butts' message 

It's been a long time since I was a 13-year-old boy, but I'm guessing I'd be more intrigued than repulsed by a teen-ager wearing an oversized cigarette butt on his noggin, as "Butt Head" does.

Ditto for the freaky chick with the horn rims that is "Butt Ugly," and the pair of choppers clenching a cancer stick in "Butt Munch." As for the two ads supposedly dramatizing the real dangers of smoking -- a cigarette transformed into a bullet, and another combined with a syringe -- I think the operative adolescent response would be "cool!" . . Maybe this is why the tobacco companies caved, taking down all their billboards this spring. Some genius in Richmond or Winston-Salem must have realized that any mention of cigarettes, in any context, can't hurt.

We should have saved the 200 Gs and left the damned signs blank.

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