LONDON (Reuters) - They chase each other at high speed wielding axes and hammers. But the famous cartoon duo of Tom and Jerry are in trouble in Britain for smoking on screen.

A channel airing the cartoons has agreed to cut scenes that glamorise smoking after British media regulator Ofcom received a complaint from a viewer who took offence at two episodes.

In the first, “Texas Tom”, the hapless cat Tom tries to impress a feline female by rolling a cigarette, lighting it and smoking it with one hand. In the second, “Tennis Chumps”, Tom’s opponent in a match smokes a large cigar.

In a bulletin posted online, Ofcom noted “concerns that smoking on television may normalise smoking”, and said that the Turner company, licensee for Boomerang which aired the cartoons, had agreed to edit some smoking scenes out of “Tom and Jerry”.

“The licensee has … proposed editing any scenes or references in the series where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorised or where it might encourage imitation”, Ofcom said, adding that “Texas Tom” was one such example.

But it would not cut all smoking scenes, it added.

Ofcom said it recognized smoking was more generally accepted when cartoons were produced in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, but noted that the threshold for including such scenes when the audience is predominately young should be high.

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Ok, so I did a few things I’m not proud of. So I bombed a few places I shouldn’t have. So I threatened a few people I didn’t know. That’s all behind me now. This is phase two, of my new Second Life.

So basically, Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, touted this new security feature to ban users of the Second Life world. Egregious violators would have not only their accounts banned, but their computers as well– meaning, they would no longer be able to play Second Life on that computer, even if another user of that computer was perfectly innocent.

That worked for like a day.

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