C-list Celebrity Stamps Feet, Demands Own Fragrance

Nothing like whining to get your way if you’re a four-year-old—or a C-list celebrity with an overweening sense of entitlement.Take the case of Gerard Butler.

Who’s that, you say? You know—the guy in Nim’s Island.

No, not Fantasy Island. Gerard Butler! He was huge in P.S. I Love You. 

Didn’t see it? Well, he was Yasha in The Cherry Orchard.

Hey, stay awake, I’m talking to you. He was King Leonidas in 300. OK. Yeah, great movie. The guy has awesome pecs and looks excellent in half-animation.

Okay, so Gerard Butler wants his own fragrance so badly he’s bitching about it on BBC radio.

“I need a perfume. I need to tell my publicist to get on that. He’s not got me any worthwhile branding. Clive Owen has his aftershave, Ewan McGregor has cologne. What do I have? Nothing. I don’t know what it would be like, but I need one.”

Waaaaaaaaah! I want my fragrance and I want it NOW.

Exit question: Does Mr. Butler belong in the Pantheon of Pop Perfume alongside the likes of Messrs. Owen and McGregor? Talk to me people.

Going Rogue, Smelling Great

Heh. The new Sarah Palin fragrance. 

Talk about your “polarizing” perfumes. Although when you think about it, this one would sell like a monster.

American Smellscapes: New Orleans through Olfacta's Nostrils

My only visit to New Orleans was as a greenhorn graduate student. I gave my first scientific talk at the Eastern Conference on Reproductive Behavior (a.k.a. The Sex Conference) which was held at Tulane University. New Orleans was intoxicating. I remember the music, the bars, the strip clubs, and of course the food: gumbo, jambalaya, platters piled high with spicy crawfish, Bananas Foster at Brennan’s, and the best piece of pecan pie I’ve ever had, served at 2:30 in morning with chicory flavored coffee at a diner whose location it pains me to be unable to recall.

Mmmmm . . . pecan pie.

This reverie was stirred up by blogger Olfacta’s vividly described smellscape of New Orleans. 

Truth be told, many of the smells of New Orleans aren’t nice.

Old cities, old sewers; it hangs in the air, sweetish and sour, the odor of humanity. It’s always there. You smell it as soon as you get out of the car. There’s garbage, too; piles of it, waiting for the plow, and manure from the horses that pull buggies filled with tourists around the Vieux Carre.

But it’s the food the aromas of cooking that make it all worthwhile.

. . .the steamy smell of seafood boil—spices, like white pepper, cayenne and thyme, added to cooking water—and crabs simmering in it. That scent poured out of the restaurants and stands as the city got ready for its (long) lunch break. I could smell shrimp and oysters frying, too. That seafood smell mixes with the swamp and river and the sewers and the garbage, and it is that which is, for me, the quintessential smell of the old Quarter.

Olfacta’s keen perceptions of New Orleans are a link in a fine, filigreed chain that reaches back into the 19th century, anchored by that remarkable journalist, gourmand, and man of the world Lafcadio Hearn. An acquaintance recalled that Hearn's “olfactory sense was abnormally keen.”

Even the construction of his nose would seem to indicate great abilities in this direction. It was aquiline and quite large, with finely cut, sensitive nostrils that had a queer trick of quivering when he became excited or deeply interested, just as do a horse’s nostrils when he is turned out in a strange pasture.

Hearn wrote a lot about smells. Between 1877 and 1887 he was a reporter for the local dailies. In one memorable editorial in the New Orleans Item he railed about the disgusting, bat-infested conditions of the Parish Prison.

Any wayfarer who lingers in the neighborhood of Congo Square about sundown, may behold the weird prison, a vast flock of winged demons hovering above it, preparing to hold their ghastly revels under a gibbous moon. He may also smell the ghoulish odor outshaken from the wings of the innumerable host of imps. The odor is never to be forgotten. It contains suggestions of many odors—decaying shoe leather, miscarried eggs and dead cats—and yet it is unlike any of these. It is an original and astonishing odor which inspires fantastic dreams of death and dissolution,—Better we think, that the wicked be favored by a speedy death than that they be slowly driven out of the world by the most indescribable of stinks.

New Orleans, like Venice, has always had an olfactory dark side. It’s the ability of the good smells to rise above it that gives the city its piquant charm. Laissez les bon temps roules.

Paging Yoko Ono: Here Come the Dead Celebrity Fragrances

Two weeks ago while sniffing at the fragrance being launched by Roy Orbison’s widow (Pretty Woman, get it? Do ya? Hunh? Do ya?) we took a swipe at John Lennon’s widow.

Okay, this is just plain sad.
Although I’m surprised Yoko Ono didn’t think of it first . . .

Commenter Nathan Branch said he liked the idea of Yoko by Yoko (“There would have to be a very high, piercing introduction note . . .”). But we kept pressing the idea of necrophilic commercial exploitation:

How about Grunge Widow by Courtney Love?
Or Sonic for Men by Patti Smith?

Well, here’s today’s story from the New York Daily News:

Perfume’s heaven scent: New ‘Antiquity’ fragrances based on DNA of dead celebs

New releases include Elvis and Michael Jackson. The hook: DNA provided by a “renowned celebrity hair collector.”

What fun is blogging when the fragrance industry parodies itself?

UPDATE November 17, 2009

Who’s behind the fragrances based on dead celebrity DNA? The Rev. Dr. Diva Verdun of Beverly Hills, California.

Hey, I didn’t crop it to make her look like Vampira. Took it straight from her page on SpeakerSite.com, which includes these biographical tidbits:

Dr. Diva Verdun, PhD - Entrepreneur, Empowerment (Motivational) Speaker and Executive Producer

Dr. Diva has been a guest speaker at various career trade shows and speaks to diverse groups challenging them to take charge of their own lives. Diva holds a PhD in Metaphysical Pastoral Counseling and is an ordained Minister. Dr. Rev. Diva has established ‘Empowering Word of Truth Ministries’ to empower people to overcome poverty for wealth, failure for success, and dependence for independence so they can live the lives Spirit created them to live. She is the CEO & Executive Producer of Diva Universal Entertainment, and uses her unique empowerment techniques in non-traditional arenas such as modeling and entertainment. Other projects include Diva Style, Diva University of Models, Black’s M.E.N. the Organization/Movement, The Ramesses Man Project, LLC, C’ de Azz Jeans, Connection Films, LLC, Film Festival Academy, News Watchdog Service, Connection Holdings and the 1st and only One-of-a-Kind Perfume made from your DNA genetic code - My DNA Fragrance and the new Barack Obama fragrance POTUS 1600.

Whoooooie! Comedy gold. Res ipsa loquitur.

The Gnarly Fart Bomb of Orange County

In the inland reaches of Southern California’s Orange County, east of the 5 freeway, up where the foothills begin, lies the Upper Oso Reservoir. It’s no big deal. But a couple of weeks ago it started to stink like rotten eggs. The smell of hydrogen sulfide was the result of an algae bloom following a weather-related inversion in the water layers of the reservoir. So now it is a big deal—annoying the usually mellow residents of nearby Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita. According to the chief engineer of the Santa Margarita Water District, a 24-year veteran, the stink is “probably the worst one in recent memory.”

Reporter Rashi Kesarwani of The Orange County Register has been all over the story like a bad rash, documenting steps taken by the water district to re-oxygenate the water and encourage the disappearance of the algae. She’s also tracked the response of the local citizenry. 

Fifteen-year-old Trabuco Hills High School student Natalie Caporuscio, a resident of Melinda Heights in Rancho Santa Margarita, described the stench as a “gnarly fart bomb.”

 Not content to vent to the OCR’s man on the scene, residents took to their blogs as well.

Mission Viejo, CA stinks. I mean, it reeks to high heaven. There is a sulphurous odor so malignant and intrusive, it has enveloped the neighborhood and penetrated the walls of my house for nearly 48 hours.

High school student Chase Miller took the next logical step and set up a Facebook group called Oso Reservoir Smells Like Rotten Eggs. It now has 207 members.

This strikes me as an historical moment in the annals of malodor. Instead of quietly seething or complaining to one another in the checkout line at Vons, people suffering through a big stink can assemble in cyberspace and do something useful. They can log time and place and intensity of stink. They can report on remediation efforts. They can know they’re not crazy and not alone. And they can get something done. The online agitation may have helped incite a protest at City Hall in Mission Viejo.

This being California, the city has taken to its blog (yes, the city of Mission Viejo has an official blog) to update residents on its efforts to smother the gnarly fart bomb. No doubt this beats the way local authorities would handle a similar problem in Chicago or Philadelphia. But the old lyrics still haunt: 

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Jerry Brown is on the move again Chase Miller. Keep an eye peeled for the suede/denim secret police.