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We’re here! We’re here! Casa Bonita!

 

If this story from THR is correct, Denver’s pandemic-shuttered and bankrupt Casa Bonita restaurant may soon re-open under the ownership of Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The longtime sentimental favorite featured much entertainment but only so-so Mexican food. It shouldn’t be hard to improve the menu, but Parker also has other ideas:

“I was already thinking about how I was going to make Black Bart’s Cave a little bigger.”

As Eric Cartman once said, “I think we should go through Black Bart's Cave right away ‘cause, we’re gonna wanna do it seven or eight times.”

Make Way for Dionne Warwick

Many in my generation vividly remember Dionne Warwick’s hit songs of the 60s: Walk On By (1964), I Say a Little Prayer (1967), and DoYou Know the Way to San Jose? (1968). The slickly orchestrated pop tunes (by Burt Bacharach and Hal David) were a perfect match to Warwick’s effortless high voice and precise delivery.

So what brings her to mind? Why, a press release from Fragrance Creators Association:

Fragrance Creators Association has announced that DDD3 Inc., owned by entertainer, entrepreneur and philanth­ropist Dionne Warwick, has joined its membership of more than 60 large and small businesses spanning the fragrance supply chain.

My reactions were, in descending order:

“That’s nice, Dionne Warwick is still alive.” (She is 80 years old.)

“What on earth does she have to do with fragrance?”

It turns out she launched a single, self-named perfume back in 1986. Dionne must not have been too memorable—there is no mention of it on Fragrantica.com and only a placeholder on Basenotes. Good luck trying to find a collectible bottle on eBay.

According to the FCA blurb, she plans to relaunch Dionne “in response to popular demand.” Or perhaps to leverage attention from her recent nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Or perhaps to climb out of her 2013 bankruptcy and deal with an epic $7 million owed to the IRS.

DDD3, Inc., the company named in the press release, is not a fragrance house. It appears to be the corporate entity that books her ongoing musical performances. Warwick’s contract rider can be found online. Alas, it contains nothing as outrageous as Van Halen’s no-brown-M&Ms clause. Sure, Ms. Warwick must be flown first class, but most of the rider concerns stage lighting, rehearsal timing, and orchestra staffing (“Three (3) trombones-two (2) tenor & one (1) bass”). Her dressing room requirements are not particularly diva-ish. She prefers Pepsi (“No Coca Cola or Diet Sodas”), Cristal (“Two (2) bottles of Cristal Champagne per concert (NO SUBSTITUTES)” and is very specific about the fruit plate:

Fresh fruit platter: sliced pineapples, green seedless grapes, sliced watermelon, sliced honeydew melon, sliced cantaloupe melon and bananas. If any of the above fresh fruit is not in season, contact road manager.

Ms Warwick is entitled to earn whatever the market will bear and she is certainly playing every card she can as she climbs out of a deep financial hole. What lingers in the mind, however, is why the Fragrance Creators Association sees fit to include her and her company in its membership on the basis of a one-off scent that vanished after launch 35 years ago.

Play It Again

 

The Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California is hosting yet another blooming corpse flower. Can you say “overkill”? This is their twelfth one.

Naturally they are livestreaming the blessed event on their u-tube channel. When I last checked it had 59 viewers. They have not enabled comments which makes it even more joyless than usual.

It’s time for someone to create livestream corpse flower commentary, just like the gamers do. I think The Ocho’s Cotton McKnight and his sidekick Pepper Brooks could be the right team:

Cotton: Wow, that makes 3 millimeters in the last hour alone.

Pepper: That’s right Cotton. It’s a towering erection that just won’t stop.

Cotton: And we’re getting wind now of a smell . . . a distinctive odor that resembles day-old roadkill.

Pepper: That’s what the bloaty stage is all about, Cotton. Pretty soon we’ll need barf bags.

Perfume Platitudes: Paging Crash Davis

 

The first law of fragrance marketing requires that every smellebrity introducing a perfume attest to a personal role in its creation.

The legendary Dolly Parton, now launching her first scent—Dolly: Scent from Above—has complied with tradition and issued the correct formulaic statement:

“I felt like a mad scientist trying to find the right combination, but we did and it took us about two years.”

Regarding her decision to enter the beauty business, she is also quoted as saying:

“I’m going to start with perfume. Everybody has always told me how good I smell.”

Wut? That sounds like an enormous non sequitur. But then we note this on her website:

“The truth is, I have been blending my own scent for years. It’s a combination of bath oils, powders and perfumes that have become my “signature” and is known everywhere I go. It’s time for me to share this with you. I hope you enjoy!”

IFRA? I don’t need no stinkin’ IFRA!

FirstNerve is inclined to award Ms. Parton a honorary Mad Scientist degree for her fearless personal efforts at blending.

Meanwhile Iggy Azalea reaches back to her long-neglected Australian roots (she grew up in Mullumbimby, NSW) in making the de rigueur claim of personal involvement in the creation of her new fragrance: 

Iggy said she was inspired by Australian native flora when concocting the aroma.

Apparently Australian sandalwood is a top note in Devil’s Advocate. [Top note?—Ed.] [Whatev. Just go with the flow.]

Amorphophallus titanum: End of the Grift?

 

In Alameda, California a “local gardener” invited people to an abandoned gas station and let them smell and touch his giant misshapen penis . . . plant. Nothing sketchy about this at all.

Is it just me, or has the pace of stinky “corpse flower” blossomings slowed since the pandemic? We were usually good for several such exhibitions a year at botanical gardens around the county. All that was missing were the tour t-shirts.

Perhaps specimens of giant misshapen penis plant—the literal name according to its Latin binomial, not the consumer-friendly sanitized version—all just “happened” to cease sending up their grotesque, foul-smelling inflorescences at the same time. Or perhaps their owners adjusted lighting and feeding regimes to delay the blessed events until such time as paying throngs are once again able to attend in person. Just saying.

If this cynical conjecture is correct, we should witness an epic outbreak of penis plant erections later this year. (It’ll be the biggest interdimensional crossrip since the Tunguska blast of 1909!—Ed.)

Meanwhile, in a plot twist that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of an upcoming Nick Zollicker story, the Witte Museum in San Antonio plans to fake it till they make it. That is, the museum will present a life-size model of an A. titanum blossom and allow patrons to sample a recreation of its aroma from a “smell station.” Welcome to the Audio-Animatronics® version! It’s the Disneyfication of giant misshapen penis plants.

I expect the San Antonio folks will be getting an earful any day now from the  cartel of botanical garden directors.

Genius!

 

This guy in Brooklyn has jumped onto the non-fungible token craze by selling digital recordings of his own farts.

This is brilliant on so many levels.

While giving Alex Ramírez-Mallis all due credit as a (f)art world innovator, I do have some reservations. Having listened to a few of his audibles, he seems to be—if not a true squeaker—a short-burst specialist. The type Dr. Raymond Stantz might classify as “a focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm or a class-five full-roaming vapor. A real nasty one, too.”

You can spend your crypto-currency on ARM’s staccato output, or you could wait for someone in the basso profundo category with a more sostenuto style of delivery. It’s all a matter of taste.

Blurbalicious

 

My exploration of the interplay between scent and the other senses began when I ran a sensory psychology research group for Givaudan-Roure fragrances. The company’s perfumers and fragrance evaluators talked about notes and accords using remarkably precise and vivid language. After taking part in smell training sessions, and meetings where we discussed potential fragrance submissions to clients, I began to think that these multisensory metaphors might have a measurable empirical basis. That was the hunch that sparked a research program that established the links between scent and the domains of color and auditory pitch.

I used those results to create practical commercial applications for the company, and later used similar techniques to help my own clients incorporate multisensory alignment in their product development work.

Over the years, cross-modal perception has really taken off as a research topic. The studies have come thick and fast: Does the color of the plate influence your liking of the food? Does the weight of a glass impact the flavor impression of your drink?

While these studies have been done by dozens of labs around the world, by far the most prolific and influential researcher is Charles Spence, a professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. Spence has created a Crossmodal Research Laboratory and spawned a number of very successful students. He has also been generous in citing my earlier work in his papers.

So I was pleasantly surprised to receive an advance copy of his latest book along with an inquiry from his publisher asking me to blurb it. In Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living, Spence applies the principles of multisensory perception to everyday life—he wants to help people declutter their sensorium in a practical way.

I liked the book well enough to offer a blurb. Lo and behold, not only did the publisher use it, but it made the front cover, beating out blurbs by five other Big Names who were relegated to the back of the dust jacket. </gloat>

“Spence does for the senses what Marie Kondo does for homes.”

Put that in your blurb bong and smoke it.

Sensehacking goes on sale in the USA on March 5. May he sell a million copies.

#5 Combination Plate

 

There’s a entertaining piece by Chris Vanjonack in Westword about Denver’s legendary Casa Bonita restaurant. Yes, the place featured in the classic South Park episode is, in fact, an actual and much-loved kitsch-classic Mexican restaurant. It’s been around since 1974 and has outlived its sibling locations in Tulsa, Fort Worth, Little Rock, and Oklahoma City. Eric Cartman wasn’t the first kid to become delirious with joy at the prospect of attending a friend’s birthday party at Casa Bonita—it’s been a dining destination for generations of Colorado kids. The 2003 South Park episode brought a surge of renewed traffic to the place, but like so many other restaurants in the state, it may have fallen victim to government-inflicted economic destruction of COVID-19 lockdowns. 

While we’re on the subject of Mexican food [Awk segue—Ed.] there’s something that’s been bothering me—and I wonder whether I’m alone on this. The last can of refried beans I warmed up was . . . disappointing. Instead of melting into a nice, bubbling, spoonable consistency in the pan, they remained a semi-solid mass of spackle-like stiffness. Naturally I figured I’d bought the vegetarian version by mistake. But no—it was Rosarita brand Traditional Refried Beans. And I recalled a similar experience with the last couple of cans of my usual brand: Old El Paso Traditional Refried Beans. A little research shows I’m not the only one noticing a difference. 

Check out the current consumer ratings on the brand’s home page: 

Twenty-nine of thirty reviewers give Old El Paso’s TRB a one-star rating. And the comments are merciless. There appears to have been a recent change in the recipe. 

Hmmm. I wonder if Old El Paso decided to reduce the amount of lard? Lard is probably the ingredient that gives refried beans their melty quality, and produces the tasty puddle next to the rice on your restaurant combo platter. It’s out of fashion now among the high-minded nutrition nannies. Did the company cave? Inquiring minds want to know.

Welcome to Berkeley’s Rebranded “Gourmet Safe Space”?

Image: Diablanco

Berkeley’s North Shattuck Association has voted to abandon the decades-old “Gourmet Ghetto” tag for its upscale foody neighborhood. The organization folded because the “co-founder” of a new coffee shop said his millennial-age employees found the name “upsetting and confusing.”

Next up: Peet’s Coffee on Vine and Walnut will be forced to abandon “Major Dickason’s Blend” because of its militaristic connotations.

[Hat tip to SFGate.com commenter LeonRussellFan for the safe space gag.]

P.S. One would think “Wrecking Ball Coffee” is a problematic name for a Bay Area business, given its triggering reference to gentrification, displacement of marginalized people, etc. And yet . . . that's the complainant's brand name.

Going Fictional: Introducing the Nick Zollicker Stories

I’ve always been fascinated by the portrayal of smell in fiction. I made a brief study of it in What the Nose Knows, and here on FN I’ve taken a close look at various authors and how they weave scent into their novels. Among the writers I’ve discussed or quoted are E.L. James, Tom Robbins, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and P.G. Wodehouse. (You can find these posts via the FN Review, FN Retrospective, and Olfactory Art tags.)

In most of these works scent is mentioned in passing. It functions to characterize a person or place or, especially in the case of Nabokov, to provide a sepia-toned sense of nostalgia. Smell is rarely a central theme in fiction. There are exceptions, like M.J. Rose’s The book of lost fragrances, Süskind’s Perfume: They story of a murderer, and Roald Dahl’s brilliant short story Bitch.

One would think the world of contemporary commercial perfumery is an ideal setting for fiction. The business is an unstable blend of creative fashion and technical chemistry. It straddles the magical and the mundane. It simultaneously touts its innovation and its longstanding traditions. It is filled with characters of Dickensian dimensions.

Another setting ripe for fiction is the world of academic smell research. University labs are stocked with weirdos and drones as well as the rare brilliant scientist. Scientists share a lifestyle—monk-like yet dissipated—that is remote from the experience of most readers. Their scientific obsessions are remarkable if not often bizarre. It’s all fertile ground for fiction.

Well, somebody needed to step up to the plate, and it appears that the someone is me. I have created a contemporary smell expert named Nick Zollicker. He lives in Berkeley, California where he runs a secretive private olfactory research institute. He has wide experience in the hard-edged world of commercial perfumery yet thrills to pushing the boundaries of olfactory science.

My first two Nick Zollicker stores An Imperfect Mimic and Smothering the Savage. They are now available digitally on Amazon. (You can read them on your Kindle or download the Kindle app onto whatever device you prefer.) I hope you enjoy them.

It’s Cyber Monday and I’ve put the Kindle version of What the Nose Knows on sale at a deep discount: only $2.99. Why not grab a copy?

Do you have a friends or relatives who are into scent? You can buy them a Kindle copy! Just hit the “Give as Gift” button on Amazon. You can have it delivered to them instantly or you can schedule it to arrive on their device at any time and date you choose. Great idea for Christmas or Hanukkah.

Plus: plenty of time to order a paperback copy for old-school types. It’s already priced as low as it can go!

Attention Holiday Shoppers!

Looking for a last-minute stocking stuffer? How about a Kindle copy of What the Nose Knows for the low, low price of $2.99?

Click the “Give as Gift” button on Amazon to send a copy to someone else’s Kindle.

Pro Tip: You can have it delivered instantly, or you can schedule it to arrive on the recipient’s device at any time and date you choose. (At FirstNerve Manor we open gifts on Christmas Day but there are those who prefer Christmas Eve.)

Remember, the low pricing ends on New Year’s.

Tobacco Smoke and Mirrors from the NIH: Does a High-minded Cause Justify Lying about Science?

A few weeks ago a tweet showed up in my Twitter stream: “Within a few days of quitting #smoking, your sense of smell gets better.”

Despite being sent by the National Institutes of Health Office of Disease Prevention, this claim immediately set off the alarm on the FirstNerve Bogosity Meter. I’ve followed the scientific literature on smoking and olfaction for many years and could recall no such result.

Hoping for enlightenment, I followed the @NIHprevents link to a page at smokefree.gov called “What Happens to Your Body After You Quit?” There I found this:

Within a few days you may notice other things.
Your senses of taste and smell are better.

Somehow I had expected more content from NIH. So I goosed them with my own tweet: “Really? Evidence would be nice. None cited at ur link.” Two days later I got a reply: “@theNCI [the National Cancer Institute] forwarded to us the following study to share with you http://1.usa.gov/1dO37Gu”

The NCI link was to a paper on PubMed that I know very well, a study published by Dick Doty and his colleagues in JAMA back in 1990. They gave the UPSIT smell test to 638 people with detailed smoking histories. They found reduced odor identification ability in long-term smokers, an effect that increased the more a person smoked. They also found that the effect was reversible.

So does this support the NIH claim that a smoker’s sense of smell will improve “within a few days” of quitting? Hardly.

The paper quantified smoking history in pack-years, calculated as the number of packs smoked per day multiplied by the number of years of smoking. The results of smoking and quitting are discussed exclusively in terms of pack-years, not days or even weeks. So NIH and NCI seem to have pulled the “after a few days” claim out of thin air.

More troubling is what the JAMA authors say about the effects of quitting:

While improvement in smell function appears to occur following cessation of smoking, such improvement is not rapid (eg, for a two-pack-per-day smoker, restoration of smell function to a level observed in non-smokers requires approximately the same number of years as the number of years smoked. [Emphasis mine.]

Contrary to claims by the anti-smoking activists at NCI and the NIH Office of Disease Prevention, there is no evidence in this paper that smell function improves “within a few days” of quitting. In fact, that claim is at odds with the JAMA authors’ own conclusion.

I tweeted the relevant passage to @NCI and @NIHprevents with a comment: “Did you not read the paper? Or are you lying in the service of a higher cause?”

I also wrote: “No improved smell ‘within a few days’ of quitting. Suggest you retract misleading claim.”

I have yet to get a response.

This episode illustrates a disturbing trend—the bending of science in the promotion of public policy objectives. While encouraging people to quit smoking may be a noble and high-minded policy goal, it does not justify mischaracterizing the scientific literature. And twisting science is the last thing that the National Institutes of Health should be doing. The increasing brazen and emotional-laden ad campaigns by anti-smoking zealots seem to have infected the NIH and NCI with an attitude of “anything goes.” They can play that way if they choose, but only at the cost of their institutional credibility.

P.S. As I point out in my book, the effects of smoking on smell function are not as clear-cut as most people assume. For perspective, consider this statement by the JAMA authors: “It should be noted that the magnitude of the adverse effects of smoking on olfactory function is not large compared with the effects of such variables as age and sex.”

The study discussed here is “Dose-related effects of cigarette smoking on olfactory function,” by Richard E. Frye, Brian S. Schwartz & Richard L. Doty. JAMA 263:1233-1236, 1990.

It’s Here! The All-New Paperback Edition of What the Nose Knows

The original hardcover edition of What the Nose Knows has been sold out for a long time. There has always been a Kindle edition but never a paperback. Until now.

After sweating every detail for months, I’ve finally released my own paperback edition on Amazon. It’s a beautiful thing, if I do say so myself. (And I do!) Grab a copy.

Order one for your newbie DIY perfumer friend. Get one for Uncle Fred who likes to read about science and psychology but needs a break from Malcolm Gladwell. Assign it as additional reading for your next Sensation & Perception course at Faber College. Take one to Starbucks and finally get a conversation going with that cute barista.

Now You Can Follow FirstNerve by Email

I’ve been doing some blog maintenance and just added a “Follow FirstNerve by Email” widget below my Blogger profile. This is for all you people out there who don’t read an RSS feed and/or would like to get an email notification of new posts. It’s an easy-peasy signup powered by FeedBurner.

And now back to your regular programming.

Spritz, Boom, Bah!

Nothing says Texas A&M University like “refreshing top notes of Italian lemon, bergamot and iced pineapple.” Welcome to collegiate colognes, a rapidly growing niche in the fine fragrance business. Arian Campo-Flores and Meredith Rutland at the WSJ provide a decent rundown on the fad, and refrain from overdoing the cow shit jokes.

In actual fact, universities as “personalities” offer the perfumer as good a creative canvas as any—there are visuals, emotional associations and even the occasional bona fide scent marker. From a purely aesthetic point of view, there isn’t much to carp about. [Besides, we’ll have a ton of material once Parlux signs Miley Cyrus for Twerker.—Ed.]

The main danger for the collegiate cologne market is success—there are hundreds of universities and just not that many distinctive, high-quality fragrances to go around. By the time the trend hits Bergen Community College, we’ll be talking knock-offs and aftershave.

Challenges

I received a letter this week from an organization that wants me to join. Read the opening paragraph and see if you can guess which group sent it.

Dear Avery Gilbert, 

As global citizens, the challenges we face have never seemed greater than they do today. Climate change, chronic and emerging diseases, rising food costs, population pressures, environmental degradation, and continued reliance on fossil fuels are just some of the issues we all face in one form or another.

So where do think it come from? Here are your choices:

Sierra Club
American Psychological Association
Environmental Defense Fund
American Association for the Advancement of Science

I’ll post the answer later.

UPDATE November 10, 2013

Here is the answer:



What is the difference between an organization that promotes scientific research and one that advocates specific positions on public policy?

If you can’t distinguish one from the other based on their own communications, then whose fault is it that science is losing credibility as an honest, skeptical and disinterested endeavor?

Price Break on What the Nose Knows

What’s on your bookshelf?

Amazon just dropped the price on the Kindle edition of What the Nose Knows to $8.39 (from $13.99). That’s 40% off. Grab yourself a copy now. Click through the Amazon link at the right and you’ll kick a few cents into the FirstNerve Beer Fund at no cost to yourself.

Enjoy.

Tell your friends!

UPDATE September 2, 2013
My apologies to everyone to went to Amazon and didn't see the reduced price. It seems to have lasted only one day.

UPDATE September 5, 2013
Well, how does $11.84 sound? That's the price today.