Introducing: USB Air Fresheners

An endless stream of Cup O’ Noodles, microwaveable dinners, stale coffee, etc. :  let them make for a stinky workspace no longer. Now AromaUSB™ will bring the pleasing fragrances of lemongrass, lavender, or orange to your office. A cybernetic version of those Glade® plug-ins, I guess.

AromaUSB is simply a fragrance diffuser: there’s no drive on the stick. If you want aromatherapy plus flash storage, head on over to scent-drive.com.

Now all we need is a USB drive that smells like frying bacon, for that early morning ambiance.

The Quest for the Odorless Fart

There’s an episode of Family Guy where Peter has liposuction, which turns him into a beautiful person. In short order, he is invited to join an exclusive club for beautiful people, and on the inaugural tour of the facilities his host hands him a bottle of pills: “Here, take these – they’ll make your bowel movements smell like bakery fresh cinnamon rolls.”

Ben Franklin addressed this speculative idea over two centuries ago – that flatus (farts) might someday be rendered innocuous by taking some manner of drug or substance:

My prize question therefore should be, To discover some drug wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that shall render the natural discharges, of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes.

That this is not a chimerical Project, and altogether impossible, may appear from these considerations. That we already have some knowledge of the means capable of varying that smell. He that dines on stale flesh, especially with much addition of onions, shall be able to afford a stink that no company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some time on vegetables only, shall have that breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate noses; and if he manage so as to avoid the report, he may any where give vent to his griefs unnoticed….

From Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, edited by Carl Japikse.

Well, such a product has arrived. Misanthrope and skeptic that I am, I am inclined to doubt its efficacy sight unseen waft unsmelled, but this new product called Whiff!, pushed (yes, that’s the right word) at a website with the evocative name takeawhiff.com claims that their product will render your poop and farts odorless (except in the case of avid meat-eaters, in which case the original essence of the miasma will remain, merely diminished in potency).

Smells like Avril® Lavigne

Between an Avril® line of personal care products and Leslie Feist’s lucrative fornication with Apple®, Inc., Canada is going to get a reputation for producing money-grubbing popsters.

Eau de Avril in the works?

From Canoe-Jam

….Documents filed last month with the United States Patent and Trademark Office say the singer wants exclusive rights to her own name when it comes to products including fragrances, aftershave, bath soap, body lotion and talc

The move has got blogs and fan sites wondering about a possible product line….

Halitosis Detector

Official blurb: “This bad breath meter measures the four escalating stages of unfreshness.”

Uncle Stinky’s Blurb: Happy face = happy breath; frowney face = buttbreath

It can be purchased at restorationhardware.com, for $10.99 USD

Surströmming: “Sour Herring”

Surströmming is an ostensible “delicacy” common to northern Sweden. Referred to as “fermented* or “soured” herring, it is made by putting fresh caught fish in barrels to sit for a couple months, with just enough salt added to suppress the more nasty varieties of bacteria that would propagate in the slurry, otherwise. After two months, the fish is transferred to cans where the “fermentation” process continues, often causing the can to swell (which we in the U.S. would equate with the presence of botulism).

The swelling results from the production of carbon dioxide gas through the action of Haloanaerobium , a species of bacterium which feeds upon the fish.

The fish has such a foul odor that it is often opened and consumed out-of-doors. The smell results from the following compounds, produced during the “fermentation” period, which also add to the “complex” flavor of the product:

• propionic acid: pungent/acrid quality
• butyric acid: rancid-butter
• hydrogen sulfide: rotten-eggs
• acetic acid: vinegar-like

——–
*Not accurate. The process of fermentation refers specifically to the biological action of organisms breaking down carbohydrates (as in grains, fruits, etc.). The processes which occur in animal products (which contain almost no carbohydrate) are properly called “putrefaction” and “rancidification.” It may be that purveyors of putrid, rancid flesh products adopted the term “fermentation” because 1.) The process superficially resembles the process of fermenting carbohydrates 2.) Because “fermented” sounds less noxious than “putrid” and “rancid.”

Charmed, I’m Sure

Having watched a few episodes of Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse, I find the following quite amusing, in a lowbrow sort of way.

Oh – and I think it stinks, too. Putrid. Almost entirely without redeeming artistic or social merit. But, then, I’m a product of my generation, having been born at the tail-end of the baby boomers. I can’t quite get my head around the concept of “the worse it is, the better.” I’m just not “progressive” enough, I guess.

Mind you, grim things can be artistic. And there’s no questioning that the following is art. It’s just not good art. It has no nuance, no subtlety. It’s garish, gratuitous, and sophomoric. And that’s what makes it “good.” That’s the standard to which it aspires.

And to think that my parents thought that Alice Cooper was the Devil.

SPLATTERED MERMAIDS, the Swedish death/grind band featuring members of DERANGED and VISCERAL BLEEDING, has issued the following update:

“The new SPLATTERED MERMAIDS album, ‘Stench of Flesh’, is complete! Listen to one new song and view cover artwork exclusively on MySpace.

“The album was recorded in early January 2008 and has 10 songs (including one instrumental track and a re-recorded version of ‘By My Blade’). To be released via Czech label Bizarre Leprous Productions [on] March 15, 2008.”

According to a press release, the CD “[is] brutal as hell” featuring “straight-forward deathgrind combined with groovy breakdowns and guttural vocals… the band’s most brutal album to date!!” Other songtitles set to appear on the CD include “Gruesome”, “Circular Holes in the Cranial Structure”, “Corporal Manifestation”, “Spliced Spleen Spices”, “Throat Unsafe from a Pair of Scissors” and “Stench of Flesh”. (source)

Adding to my amusement is the hosting website’s administrative statement, immediately following the above: “to report any abusive, obscene, defamatory, racist, homophobic or threatening comments, or anything that may violate any applicable laws, please send an e-mail to…”

Contributed: Literal and figurative stench from a bygone day

Thanks to Stinkbro for sending this along.

The “Sunnyland Stench”

I would be remiss not to cover a current stench-situation in the town where I was born and raised, Bellingham, Washington. (no, not a suburb of Washington D.C., foreign folk – the state of Washington, NW corner of the U.S.).

Awful odor wafts over Bellingham neighborhoods

Coffee roasters, manufacturer possible sources

BELLINGHAM — An unpleasant odor wafting through neighborhoods has residents plugging their noses and searching for answers.

The offending aroma is known as the “Sunnyland Stench” in reference to the Sunnyland neighborhood, where the odor seems most prevalent. But people in neighborhoods such as York and Columbia also have smelled it, said Patrick McKee, the Sunnyland representative on the Mayor’s Neighborhood Advisory Commission.

The odor, described by residents as “chemical” and “sweet,” has been a problem for more than two years but has become stronger within the last year, McKee said….

Read the entire article

I hardly gave stench a second thought in Bellingham, growing up; it was just a fact of life. For the entire time that I was stretching into the 6’2″ frame I now occupy, the Georgia Pacific pulp mill was churning out emissions of one sort or another, down by the bay (it has in recent years severely cut back its operation). Its odor was so ubiquitous that a local publication once solicited opinions about what residents thought the “GP odor” smelled like. Opinions were of course, diverse, but the one I could relate to was “tuna on whitebread.”

Stinky Tofu: Beancurd or BeanTURD?

Restaurant owner fined for bad smell of his bean curd

Odor costs him about $3,100

[Excerpts]

For Peng Tian-rong, business stinks, and he hopes it stays this way.

The chodoufu — a rancid fermented bean curd — Peng sells at his eatery in Shinzhuang, Taipei Prefecture, also has brought the sweet smell of success.

However, the distinctive odor of his chodoufu has seen him fall afoul of the authorities, who have ordered him to pay a fine of 100,000 New Taiwan dollars (about $3,100) for polluting the air. The fine, equivalent to two months’ wages for an ordinary worker, is the first ever imposed on chodoufu deemed too stinky….

…The fine has become a badge of honor that is drawing more customers, some of them traveling from afar to sample his wares.

Some businessmen have sensed an opportunity to cash in on the stink by selling air freshener to chodoufu vendors, saying authorities might crack down on restaurants selling the curd.

But not everything has come up smelling like roses for Peng.

Strangers, he said, often ask him if he has stepped in some dog droppings because of the way he smells.

(Read the entire article)

“Noni,” the “Vomit Fruit”

“Health! The key to the sucker’s purse!” – Goodlow Bender in The Road To Wellville

Wikipedia describes “Noni”–

“Noni grows in shady forests as well as on open rocky or sandy shores….The plant flowers and fruits all year round and produces a small white flower. The fruit is a multiple fruit that has a pungent odor when ripening, and is hence also known as cheese fruit or even vomit fruit. It is oval and reaches 4-7 cm in size. At first green, the fruit turns yellow then almost white as it ripens. It contains many seeds. It is sometimes called starvation fruit. Despite its strong smell and bitter taste, the fruit is nevertheless eaten as a famine food and, in some Pacific islands, even a staple food, either raw or cooked. Southeast Asians and Australian Aborigines consume the fruit raw with salt or cook it with curry. The seeds are edible when roasted….” (source)

Doesn’t sound very appetizing, does it? No matter, for the enterprising individual. Package something attractively, and make a host of vauge, inflated claims incorporating buzzwords like “health,” or “natural” or “environment,” and you can sell damned near anything. Particularly in America.*

Which is exactly what the Noni-fruit millionaires did, creating a stench above and beyond the smell of the Noni fruit itself. The stench of “snake-oil cures” and those who promote them for vulgar profit.

The same exaggerated health claims which made the Noni millionaires were made about sarsaparilla in the late 19th century, but sarsparilla’s chief application at present is as the flavoring agent for sarsaparilla soda and, of course, root beer, which is made (the real stuff) from the roots of the sarsaparilla plant.

Panacea turned pop. That’s funny.