The New World Odor

Tackling the world’s economic woes with odoriferous chemical cocktails. That’s novel. And stupid.

Smelly Davos unveils new world odor

DAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) — If there’s a sweet smell at this year’s Global Economic Forum, it’s unlikely to be success.

With troubled markets threatening to leave an unpleasant stink over proceedings, this year’s Davos summit has enlisted the help of a perfumer to ensure gathered world leaders and business chiefs don’t turn up their noses.

Christophe Laudamiel, a scientist who stirs up scent cocktails for New York-based International Flavors and Fragrances has spent the past six months developing a range of odors he hopes will help delegates tackle the financial meltdown.

“Even though Davos has a very corporate image, it is looking to the future and the world of olfaction, of smell and perfumery is part of the future,” Laudamiel told CNN in the lightly-scented entrance lobby of the Forum’s main venue.

Laudamiel, and his collaborator, Berlin-based Christophe Hornetz, have installed eight fragrance dispensers throughout the conference center, squirting tiny whiffs of his specially blended aromas into the thin mountain air being inhaled by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and many others.

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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….

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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.”