Mr. Crabs Barred From Public Transit

The following comes to us via Lisa, in reply to “Bill To Ban B.O….Fails.”   I think you will agree that it’s a pretty clear-cut case of when someone should be barred from riding public transit.

From The Northern Light Police Report, Whatcom County, WA (some of the best reading in newspapers these days BTW)

August 28: A Whatcom Transit driver had to call police to intercede with an angry customer at a downtown bus stop. The customer was denied boarding because he was carrying a smelly, large plastic bag leaking fluid. He took offense at this, argued with the driver and then stood in the street to block the bus. The man explained to arriving officers that the bag contained fresh crab, and the leaking material was just seawater and crab juice. He was advised of the bus driver’s rights and responsibilities, and that blocking a vehicle constituted criminal disorderly conduct. Ultimately, the crabber decided to find alternative transportation and the driver departed on his seafood free bus route.

Mister Crabs is clearly at fault, here. Crab juice and seawater dripping all over the interior of the bus? That would REEK,  long after Mr. Crabs was gone.

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).

A Surfeit of Malodorous Vapors

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putrefaction noun

pu·tre·fac·tion \pyü-trə-ˈfak-shən\

Etymology:
Middle English putrefaccion, from Late Latin putrefaction-, putrefactio, from Latin putrefacere 14th century

1. the decomposition of organic matter; especially : the typically anaerobic splitting of proteins by bacteria and fungi with the formation of foul-smelling incompletely oxidized products
2. the state of being putrefied : corruption

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Corpse stench drives Russian doomsday cult from cave

May 15, 2008

MOSCOW (AFP) — Toxic fumes from rotting corpses drove the final members of a Russian doomsday cult from the cave where they had been waiting six months for the end of the world, officials said Friday.

Eight women and one man emerged from the muddy bunker outside a village in the region of Penza, 560 kilometres (350 miles) southeast of Moscow, said Tatyana Ostrovskaya, a spokeswoman for the local prosecutor’s office.

“The last nine people came to the surface after the bodies of two women were found,” Ostrovskaya told AFP.

Interfax news agency quoted local official Vladimir Provotorov as saying that everyone left because there was “a real threat of poisoning from toxic corpse fumes” from two deceased cult members rotting in the cave.

“We could smell it through the ventilation shaft,” he was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying. “When the specialists took out the dead hermits, we asked the others if they would like to leave, and they agreed.”

The cultists were part of an ultra-Orthodox Christian splinter group, led by bearded guru Pyotr Kuznetsov, who reject the modern world and believe that bar codes on food products are a symbol of the devil.

Read more

Chronic Flatulence? Get the GasBGon® Seat Cushion

Whether you’re on the sending or the receiving end of the “pause that refreshes/repulses,” Dairiair LLC makes a line of products that dampen the smell, or both the sound and the smell. One of their products which seems particularly useful in this respect – and which I think may catch on – is the “GasBGon Seat Cushion.” Retailing at $24.95 U.S., and offered in a variety of designs subsumed under the themes of sport (“Tush Down Sport Series”), gambling, (“Holdem Big Slick Chillin’ Series”) and the swanky, upscale (“Black Cushion Signature Series”), one of these is a gift that is sure to please not only the recipient, but all those who have to be around him/her.

The GasBGon® flatulence odor control seat cushion is a high performance air filter designed to look and feel like a conventional seat cushion incorporating a sound dampening filter and a proprietary activated carbon odor filter. The seat cushion functions as a powerful passive control device to effectively muffle the sound and adsorb the odor associated with flatulence. Each cushion is complete with a washable zippered cover for filter insertion/replacement, they are lightweight (less than 1 lb) and are nominally 15 inches square and 1 inch thick. Each cushion comes complete with a sound and odor filter and a Tally-Toot card. A downloadable wind instrument award can be provided for those gift giving occasions. Each cushion can accept a second odor filter for those heavy end users and should be purchased separately. Installation by purchaser.

A malodorous wind

According to a variety of news sources, a change in normal weather patterns has caused a stench from continental Europe to waft across the UK, generating masses of complaints. Predictably, the British wry sense of humor has named this malodorous wind “Das Stink” and “Le Pong.”

Stench from Europe wafts over Britain

A vile stench emanating from the industrial heartlands of Europe has engulfed southern England as freak weather conditions blew pungent continental odours across the Channel on Friday.

The Met Office received hundreds of calls from members of the public complaining about the disgusting smell, which had migrated from the farming and industrial areas of Germany, Belgium and Holland.

Stench from Europe wafts over Britain
The smell even offended nostrils in London

“Das stink” or “le pong” even infiltrated BBC television studios through the corporation’s air conditioning system.

The gut-wrenching smell was reported in Suffolk, Surrey, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, Hertfordshire and all across London….

Read more

Skunkweed

Man Arrested for Bank Deposit with Pot Stench

By Dan O’Donnell

If you’re heading to the bank to make a deposit today, make sure your bills don’t smell like weed.

A 21 year-old man from Sturgeon Bay faces possible drug charges after he tried to deposit money that reeked of reefer…

Read the entire article

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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

Top 5 posts

The top five posts at Things That Stink, for the last 90 days, were:

• Tonsilloliths

• Michelle Obama on Barack: “snore-y and stinky guy”

• Musky Matthew McConaughey

• Tales From the Nasty Chair

• Classifying Crap: The Bristol Stool Scale

And since, out of these five posts, “Musky Matthew McConaughey” is the most recent, by far (Feb. 1), it appears that the earthy miasma of this Tinseltown hunkster’s armpits (according to Fool’s Gold co-star Kate Hudson) deeply interests some people.

Oh – and I should note that some of the incoming links on the Matthew McConaughey post are from gay sites, replete with generally artless photos of large tumescent appendages. Henceforth, I think I will call this the “Flamin’ response” which is a play on the scientific term, “Flehmen Response,” a phenomenon which has everything to do with the sense of smell.

“Flehmen response” in the common Tapir (Tapirus terrestrsis)

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.”

Skunk Smell Remedy

The skunk smell remedy currently discussed in an article at the LA Times (see below, for link) is a recipe for stink-interdiction developed by Paul Krebaum, and published in Chemical and Engineering News (1993).

Victory over stench is sweet

By David Colker, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 27, 2008

Work stinks.

I’m not talking about my job, which I love. Honest.

No, it was a certain emanation noticed by a colleague who innocently approached my desk and asked, “Has there been a skunk back here?”

Early that morning my ever-curious dog, Earl, had gotten sprayed by a skunk in the backyard. Before I could catch him, he sped back into the house through his doggy door, frantically rubbing against everything in sight, starting with the bed.

It was like a Pepe Le Pew cartoon with Smell-O-Vision….

Read the entire article