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….

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.

Read the complete article

Angela Lansbury Smells Like Street People?

The original page where the odoriferous opinion copied below was posted, http://www.street-people.com, appears to be offline, but the cached version remains, so I clipped the pertinent portion and edited it for punctuation, along with correcting the spelling of Landsbury Lansbury. The essay is a rambling affair about New York City, which goes so far as to categorize the smells of various street people, and then goes even farther, endeavoring to fit Ms. Lansbury into one of those categories.

Clearly, this individual has never smelled the likes of “UrineMan,” up close and personal, as Index (fistofblog.com) and I have. That old graybeard was “Grade-A Street People.”

I think the dude is way offbase, without ever having had a whiff of Eau de Angela Lansbury, myself; how can you assess the smell of any one person while standing in a crowd on the streets of a major U.S. city – the major U.S. city – of all places? Mark Stewart, aka “Stew” brings the conundrum, here, into focus, with a lyric from his commissioned tune “The Big Game.”

It’s got loneliness and guts
And Frank Sinatra’s cigarette butts
And the riddle of the drinks
It’s perfumed, and it stinks.

(Mark Stewart, incidentally, composed and performed the tune “Come Home Gary” in the Spongebob episode “Where’s Gary?” You may listen to Stew’s “The Big Game” over at Fist Of Blog).

Enough rambling. Here’s the excerpt from the now defunct streetpeople.com, where our Stinkguru poser gives his opinion on A.L.–

I went out to dinner and walked around New York enjoying the nightlife. The hotel was in the theatre district and as I walked back, a huge crowd had gathered by one of the theatres, so we went over to see what was going on. It seems the actors and actresses from the show where leaving and stopping to sign autographs, so I stood around to see if we saw someone famous – or if it was someone from The Lion King [so as] to take them in the alley and cripple them, hopefully ending the show’s torture of people with insipid songs. Gracefully emerging from the side door was Angela Lansbury who many of us thought was dead, but a star nonetheless of classic movies like The Manchurian Candidate, Broadway musicals where she originated one of the roles in Sweeney Todd, and TV where she bored us to tears as that uppity bitch in Murder She Wrote. I don’t know how they ended that TV series but they could have won an Emmy award if they had her killed, not just the character, but her in the shows final episode. Still a star is a star and I snapped a quick picture. Her body guard kept the fans at arms length which I assumed was for her safety until she walked past me to get into her car. It was not intentional but I caught a whiff of Angela Lansbury aroma. Just like a teenage girl is over-scented more than a cat in heat, Angela Lansbury has an aroma and it was not Chanel No. 5. It was not old person smell – that is a mixture of medicated creams, cat, and aggressive application of flowery perfume – it was that damp smell. Angela Lansbury smells like street people.

Ben Franklin on Flatulence

It may be difficult for some to accept that one of our founding fathers conceived of and wrote the following; nevertheless, it is so. I give you an excerpt from Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, edited by Carl Japikse.

…It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind.

That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it.

That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

That so retained contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present pain, but occasions future diseases such as habitual cholics, ruptures, tympanies, &c., often destructive of the constitution and sometimes of life itself.

Were it not for the odiously offensive smell accompanying such escapes, polite people would probably be under no more restraint in discharging such wind in company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their noses.

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….

It seems that in the 200+ years since Franklin wrote the above, the concept has yet to catch on. Possibly the chemical composition of fecal matter (sulfurous compounds, e.g., thiols), and the gases produced (e.g., hydrogen sulfide) are fundamentally incompatible with the production of pleasing smells. Franklin’s argument sounds reasonable on the surface, but thinking one level deeper, we must admit that “mildly odorous” farts (e.g., a vegetarian’s) are a long way from the the essence of blooming jasmine on a tropical summer night, and it seems even farther away when one has a rudimentary understanding of just why feces and farts stink.

BUT–can you imagine if someone was able to accomplish Franklin’s vision? It would become a new industry in its own right, and entrepreneurs able to get in on the ground floor would make billions.

A Monday morning, late summer, 2075. Elaine has just arrived at the office, eager to show off the new designer fragrance her boyfriend got her in Paris. As she passes through the cube-farm, she pauses, lifts her leg, and lets one go. An exotic aura of smell spreads across the office, conjuring images of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or some far-off Shangri-La where painted fairies dance upon Lotus blossoms under azure skies….