Thar Be Boobies

I’ve always thought bedroom role-playing was kind of silly, and the step beyond that – “furry culture” – absolutely makes my skin crawl. Some people are into it, though, and go to great lengths: props, elaborate costumes, etc. This video short from “Robot Chicken,” entitled “Thar Be Boobies,” doesn’t go so far as that, and its outcome is less than satisfying for the participants, but it does serve to make a point: all ye lasses who thrill to the idea of a bawdy romp with a Corsair from days of yore, be glad...yea, verily, be overjoyed that it’s naught but a fantasy, because the reality….well, you really don’t want to go there.

Utah Lad Wins 36th National Odor-Eaters Rotten Sneaker Contest

Excerpt from full article in the Deseret Times:

They rated the shoes for condition and smell, eventually settling on [Sterling] Brinkerhoff’s torn, once-white low cuts as the worst of the worst.

“They were foul,” said Fraser, a 17-time judge. “There were two or three (entries) that were the kind you smell from a distance.”

Top Ten Posts @ Things That Stink

Just to give you an idea of what sort of stinky things interest the unwashed masses, here are the top ten posts, as measured in pageviews, for the last four months. In countdown style, a la Letterman–

10.) 1000-year-old eggs

9.) The Stink List (page)

8.) Andouillette: French Pig-Colon Sausage

7.) Michelle Obama on Barack: “snore-y and stinky guy”

6.) “NodorO” Eliminates MGO (Male Genital Odor)

5.) Eva Mendes-Cameron Diaz Fart/Belch-Off

4.) Ask Uncle Stinky (page)

3.) Tonsilloliths

2.) Classifying Crap: The Bristol Stool Scale

*Drum roll* And the number one post for the last four months is…

1.) From The Best of Craigslist: “Don’t Shave Your Ass-Hair!”

Stinky? Wash with onions.

Okay, so the hospital left a swab inside her body after labor, creating pain and misery, and causing a stench to develop. That’s bad. But where on earth did this woman get the idea that washing with onions was going to help?

Mother may sue over swab left in body after labour

Hendrick Mphande
HERALD REPORTER

A YOUNG Motherwell woman is considering legal action after nurses left a swab inside her body after the birth of her baby.

Naledi Maleke‘s ordeal started on the morning of January 6, 2006, when she developed labour pains and her sister and a friend took her to the Motherwell Clinic, a 10-minute drive from her parents‘ home.

She had a disagreement with a nursing sister at the clinic over how she should position herself before giving birth. The nurse apparently “developed an attitude” when she refused to lie in a position in which she felt uncomfortable.

“Two days after leaving the hospital, I started experiencing discomfort and pains in the abdominal area,” said Maleke.

“I was unable to walk properly and this was accompanied by a stench.”

After 17 days of excruciating pain along with the foul odour, the East Cape Midlands College student consulted a doctor in Kwazakhele who discovered the swab.

“I tried everything from washing with salty water and peeled onions mixed in a bucketful of water, but the awful smell I picked up after giving birth to my baby boy had a grip on me,” said Maleke….

Read the entire article

Stinky Jobs

CNN.com/Living has posted a list, via careerbuilder.com, of 20 “offbeat jobs.” Several of these jobs involve stench in one form or another, and therefore interest us here at Things That Stink:

Breath odor evaluator

Job description: Sniff morning breath, coffee-breath, garlic breath, etc. Rate breath. Stinky subject then uses breath freshening product, odor-evaluator sniffs breath again and rates it a second time.

Flatulence smell-reduction underwear maker

Job description: Fashion special undies with built in filters to capture various noxious butt-gases (hydrogen sulfide, most notably). Worn by people with gastrointestinal problems.

Dog-breath evaluator

Job description: Sniff dog’s breath in order to evaluate effect of dog’s diet on his chops-stench. Ratings: 1-10 (10 being worst) with additional categories of sweaty, salty, musty, fungal or decaying.

Porta-potty servicer

Job description: Pretty much self-explanatory. But I betcha they find some nasty shit, both literally and figuratively, inside those stinky little booths.

See the entire list at CNN.com

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.”

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 Cheese Disease”

I’ve decided it might be fun to feature posts, from around WordPress, on the general topic of stench. It’s pertinent and it’s often amusing (or disgusting).

To kick things off, I’d like to highlight a post from Currently Dreaming’s Weblog entitled “Stinky Cheese Disease”–

So, I’m strolling the aisles of the grocery store, like I do every week, minding my own business…when a smell so hideous that my eyes start to water does a full-body slam on me. I look up from my grocery list and see YOU. The Man in the Dirty Overalls. I push my cart at warp speed to get around you, skid around the end display and say a prayer in the fresh air in front of the pickle display.

“Please don’t follow me! Please don’t follow me! Please don’t follow me!”

Read the Entire Article

You have our sympathy, Currentlydreaming – for while “Things That Stink” documents that which issues from the Crack of the Earth, we do not enjoy the direct experience of stench, especially when its source is the crust covering the body of a chronically stinky person in bib overalls. Not long ago we were at a book sale, and therein was a man with pit odor so rank, so strong, that it would have been impossible to distinguish him from a vat of month old Spaghetti-Os. We were not pleased.

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)

The Durian Fruit

Not widely known to Americans, the Durian fruit is a South Asian “delicacy,” which, like so many “gourmet” foods, is either loved or despised. But regardless of whether one likes it or hates it, it seems that all agree its odor is pungent – so pungent, in fact, that in Singapore, signs prohibiting carrying Durian on public transportation are posted–

Lord Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in “On the Bamboo and Durian of Borneo” (1856), that: