Celebuscents: The Perfect Storm of Self Satisfaction

What celebrity wouldn’t want his own fragrance?

George Clooney apparently. He’s reported to have scuttled a Coty deal by demanding $30 million.

Marie-Helene Wagner wonders if it’s because he’s just not that into fragrance. I think it’s because he’s too into himself—he’s trapped in an enormous cloud of smug.

What’s Green and Stinky? S.F.’s Low-Flow Toilets

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross rudely call attention to the aesthetic consequences of green narcissism:

San Francisco’s big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink.

Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

This isn’t news if you’ve been paying attention. A entire range of green gambits—from industrial-scale composting to biofuel plants to waterless urinals—generate offensive megasmells that make life unpleasant. Somehow this entirely predictable outcome catches the recycling advocates and Gaia-friendly plumbers by surprise. The usual result is a lot of money spent on odor remediation efforts. San Francisco is no different—but the sums involved are eye-opening:

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.

Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite - better known as bleach - to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city’s treated water before it’s dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water.

That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year.

Say, what?

Imagine the uproar if a private company proposed bleaching its effluent to the tune of 8.5 million pounds of sodium hypochlorite annually. The Board of Supervisors would demand a halt to this unconscionable pollution, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe would produce a three-part people’s opera about it.

But if the dumping is done by the environmentally righteous . . . well, then it’s merely $114 million well spent to de-stinkify the new Green Utopia.

Just for giggles—as of this post, here are the three most popular comments on the Matier & Ross column:

sfgreat
2:59 AM on February 28, 2011

Low flow toilets are wonderful. I now only flush 5 times to get that poop down. Then another 5 times to get the toilet paper down.
Thumbs up (374) Thumbs down (32)

NaturalNightOwl

1:22 AM on February 28, 2011

Maybe they should accept the reality that a certain amount of water is needed to properly flush toilets, and the sewer system.
Thumbs up (328) Thumbs down (18)

idiot_boy

6:05 AM on February 28, 2011

Just take a dump on the sidewalk, the city seems cool with that, no water needed. If you dont think so just watch the homeless they use the sidewalks as toilets all the time and nothing happens to them. The city council seems to encourage it, so do your part for the environment and join in the no water movement.
Thumbs up (280) Thumbs down (34)

The Dog That Didn't Bark

Police and students were left baffled three days ago when the hallways of Harvey E. Keeney Quadrangle were eerily devoid of any scent of marijuana. “As soon as I walked in the door, I was like, woah, something’s up. Took me a while to figure out what it was,” said Gordon Stiltz ‘14, who lives in Jameson house. Indeed, nearly all Keeney residents noticed and commented on the lack of ganja odor in their dormitory last Tuesday.

Heh.

Sir Elton’s Dirty Diaper Fantasy

A month ago I was contacted by Damian Whitworth, a feature writer at The Times of London. He had heard Elton John at a movie premiere say, “I love the smell of nappies.” For some reason, Mr. Whitworth felt his readers would value my opinion on the topic. Or perhaps he just couldn’t find any other PhDs willing to be quoted by name.

In any case, I obliged and promptly forgot about it. Today I finally got around to looking for the story on LexisNexis (Rupert Murdoch has The Times behind a paid-subscription firewall). It turned up on page 2 of the January 25 edition under the headline “Don’t go breaking a fart . . .” [Heh.]

For all you poopy-minded fans of syrupy pop ballad icons, here’s the relevant bit:

A new-born baby soils an average of 60 nappies a week. Some claim that they really don’t mind changing them but, says olfactory scientist Dr Avery Gilbert, it’s often those with a “less hands-on” approach to the nappy who “associate the iconic scent of baby powder with the entire experience”.

“New born baby poop doesn’t smell all that bad,” he says, “but once they start eating solid foods it’s a different story, but still less offensive than the adult variety. Sir Elton isn’t attracted to that, is he?”

Ooops. Did I just smear one of Britain’s favorite elderly “rock” stars? 

Well, who cares. I like him even less than Sir Paul McCartney.

Ooops. I did it again.

Annals of Anosmia 6: The Literary Nasal Cycle

It looks like we may be in for another flurry of first-person anosmic essays in the legacy media. The last burst of activity ran from 2003 to 2008; the new cycle began in mid-2010 and continued its upswing this week.

On Monday, using Valentine’s Day as a story hook, thirty-five-year-old Stephen Adams took to the pages of the UK’s Telegraph to describe the anosmia which began after he suffered a head cold.

Eighteen months ago, my sense of smell largely deserted me. With it went some of my sense of taste, leaving me with a much reduced palate and a narrow range of alien flavours.

As per the rules of the genre, Adams offers a list of experts consulted; in his case they are Prof. Tim Jacobs at Cardiff University in Wales, and an ENT specialist. The ENT orders nasal endoscopy to look for polyps and a CT brain scan to look for a tumor. Both results are negative.

Adams, like Lowndes, fails to mention the 2004 Nobel Prize for the discovery of olfactory receptors. Perhaps this is merely old-fashioned Anglo anti-American snobbery or perhaps the Nobel is no longer a key feature of the genre.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on my two key literary predictions: no sign yet of I-am-a –celebrity-anosmic essays, nor of soul-searching reflections by researchers seeking more grant money. But the cycle is young and time will tell.