Whispers in the Wind

Anyone with a dead-tree or digital subscription to the Times of London will have received their copy of the monthly science magazine Eureka over the weekend. The May issue is about plants and I have a piece in it about plant scents titled “Whispers in the Wind.” Here's a taste:

Orchids, it turns out, have raised trans-species sexual deception to an art form. About one-third of all orchid species dupe their pollinators by mean of chemical mimicry. Insects often depend on smell to find mates and are hard-wired to be exquisitely aware of a few key odour molecules produced by females. Orchids take advantage of the insect’s narrow sensory focus by providing the lure but not the payoff. We have known since 1793 that orchids use false odour cues, but have been slow to fully credit the evolutionary cleverness of plants. Even Charles Darwin doubted the existence of such “an organized system of deception.” He wrote that anyone who believes in “so gigantic an imposture” must necessarily “rank the sense or instinctive knowledge of many kinds of insects, even bees, very low in the scale.” Today, we understand how powerfully insects are led by their nose (or antennae); still, some might consider an orchid’s deceit to be a harmless evolutionary prank. But from the point of view of a short-lived insect, the time wasted is costly indeed.

Sexual odours are not the only ones exploited by plants. In an equally perverse ruse, some plants attract blowflies by mimicking the stench of rotting meat. A female blowfly wants to lay her eggs on a ripe piece of carrion but is misdirected by the olfactory posings of Helicodiceros muscivorus, a Mediterranean lily also known as the dead-horse arum. The lily gets pollinated but the wasp’s offspring are destined for a brief and hungry life. Recently, directors of botanical gardens have taken to using rotting flesh scent as a revenue-enhancing tactic. Morbidly inclined members of the public will pay for the privilege of smelling the six foot tall flowering stalk of Amorphophallus titanum, an exotic tropical tuber with the stage name of Corpse Flower. A given tuber produces a stalk every six years or so, and the stinking protuberance lasts only a few days, or what carnival pitchmen used to call a short stand. Step right up, folks, and sniff while the sniffing’s good!

Plants are also quite adept at mimicking the smell of dung, a resource of great interest to many insect species which comes in a variety of olfactory shadings. Horse dung, for example, is characterized by monoterpenes, such as limonene, while the typical aroma of cow and pig manure is produced by p-cresol. In carnivores, such as dogs, the defining scat note is phenol. The quality of a plant’s false fecal odor is precisely tuned to the poop preference of its insect dupe.

How Fares the Smelly Web?

In the previous post, I explained why two sites were being dropped from the Solo Blog Index. Today, I introduce their replacements and review what’s happened since our last look at traffic rankings in the smelly blogosphere.

Our first new addition to the Solo Blog Index is BonkersAboutPerfume; the owner is Vanessa, who lives in Stafford, England and has been blogging since February 2008. The second is FragranceBouquet, run by Divina, a university student who has been blogging since April 2007. Welcome aboard!

The new sites were swapped in as of December 26, 2010. Here is the revised lineup of the Solo Blog Index, along with Alexa web traffic rankings from December 26, 2010 and the rankings as of today. The Solo Blog Index stood at 82 on December 26, and is at 86 today. (It began life, like all the indexes, at 100 on August 9, 2009.)



The index runs the gamut from highly-ranked, big-time sites down to the smaller blogs. The extensive range is a deliberate attempt to capture traffic trends at all sorts of sites. As usual, there is a lot of variability in traffic ranking over time among the solo blogs. Sorcery of Scent, for example, has been cruising the low 3 million range until suddenly losing altitude in the past two months. On the other hand, FirstNerve got back on its game after losing traffic to slow posting over Christmas and New Year’s.

Here is the Team Blog lineup; no changes have been made since the index began.



And here is the lineup of the Corporate and Community Blog Index, which has also remained unchanged since the beginning.



Alexa traffic rankings of sites in the Team and C&C indexes are much more stable than those in the Solo index. Why? Probably because they post more frequently.

Finally, look at how the Indexes have performed since our inspection on November 7, 2010.



The Team Blog Index, which has been higher than the others since January, 2010, slid below them in January 2011, bottomed out in late February, and climbed back to the top in April. This coincides with a ranking slump at PerfumeDaRosaNega.

The Solo Blog Index, which had been riding high, slumped this past month but is well within its normal range.

Meanwhile, the Corporate & Community Blog Index, which was near historic lows in November 2010, recovered nicely and has been steady though at non-spectacular levels.

For the moment, the smelly blogosphere seems to be chugging along just fine.

The Smelly Web: Time for a Change

It’s been six months since my last report on The Smell Web Indexes. The idea was to track the popularity of fragrance-related blogs according to their Alexa site traffic rankings. It made it possible to see who was up and who was down, and more importantly, see how this section of the blogosphere was faring in general. There was an index just for solo author blogs, another for team blogs, and a third for corporate and community blogs.

While I haven’t posted the results in a while, the data monkeys locked in the subcellar of FirstNerve Manor have continued to collect the data on a weekly basis. I recently visited some of the smelly sites and realized it is time to make some changes to the Indexes. I have done this before when sites were discontinued by their owners or simply fell off the Alexa traffic charts. I also knew I would have to stop tracking a blog if it ceased to be about smell; until now, this hasn’t happened.

On Vetivresse, a solo blog by Christopher Voigt, the last new post was on January 20, 2010. Three months later there was a post indicating that the blog had moved, but it actually seems to have ceased publishing. I’ve had no success finding it in a new location or in getting a response from Christopher. Therefore Vetivresse will be removed from the index.

In the absence of fresh posts, Alexa traffic rankings do not reflect current readership levels. When the Brazilian team blog Perfume da Rosa Negra went silent in November, 2010, I came close to removing them from the Team Blog Index. The site resumed posting on March 3 of this year, so the Rosa Negra team gets a reprieve.

Finally, over at Bitter Grace Notes, Maria Browning has written about perfumes in a blog that has a decidedly literary and artistic bent. Maria’s blog aesthetic—poetry matched to exquisite artwork—is exceptional and always interesting. I had never read D.H. Lawrence’s poem Dolor of Autumn before she posted it:

The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.

Maria is not primarily a perfumer blogger, but when she writes about perfume her insights are worthwhile. Lately, she has written about it less; her last scented post was on October 17, 2010. In it she paired reflections on the movie Carnival of Souls with a consideration of Enigma, “a largely forgotten fragrance from the largely forgotten Alexandra de Markoff line”. It’s a good example of her style.

Bitter Grace Notes was quiet from November 12, 2010 until January 19, 2011. But since Maria’s reappearance there have been no new fragrance posts. Reluctantly, I’ve decided to remove the site from the Solo Blog Index. Even so, I will still be dropping by now and again because I enjoy it.

Blogging is hard work. Interests change. My decision to replace these blogs is based strictly on maintaining the concept and data integrity of the Smelly Web Indexes. It is not a reflection on the quality of the blogs.

Coming soon: Introducing the new players on the Indexes.

Texas Justice: The Stinky Case of the Italian Cowboy

Steve Korris, over at The Southeast Texas Record, describes the twists and turns in a legal dispute over an improperly installed grease trap that led to the odor of raw sewage plaguing two consecutive tenants of a mall-based restaurant space. It’s a malodorous tale of who knew what and when.

The second tenants—a couple who opened The Italian Cowboy restaurant in the Keystone Park Mall in Dallas—sued the mall manager after the “unbearable and ungodly odor” forced them out of business. They claim the manager knew about the malodor problem, and that in fact it was the reason the previous restaurant to occupy the site had closed. The couple accused the manager of fraud for misrepresenting that the space was suitable for the purpose for which it was being leased.

The mall manager’s response was that the lease agreement specified that the only representations being made about the property were those listed in the lease, and bad smell was not among them. In other words, we might or might not have known there was an odor problem, but since we didn’t assert that the premises smelled fine the tenant has no grounds for backing out of the lease.

Lower courts, and even three of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court of Texas, sided with the mall manager. But the majority ruing, issued by the Court last month, said the Italian Cowboy owners had established misrepresentation by the mall manager despite the restrictions of the lease.

The opinion has some piquant Texas flavor of its own. Writing in dissent, Justice Nathan Hecht was skeptical of tenants Francesco and Jane Secchi, noting they had been in the restaurant business for 25 years: “This was not their first rodeo.”

Get Your Chakra On

“Het-Heru Maatkeru is the goddess of magical scents.

Neato! How did she get that gig? By

“bridging the physical and spiritual realms using smell as the vehicle.

Evidently she’s tapped the “insight and traditions of the ancient Egyptians” to create “incredulous scents that vibrate with high frequency.”

Whoa. Is there a vibration theorist in the house? Paging Thomas Prevenslik. Maybe he can explain how high frequencies produce “incredulous” scents.

The Goddess has transublimated herself to the ethereal plane of PRWeb to disclose the latest:

Het-Heru has unveiled yet another dimension to her mastery, “The 28 Day Chakra Balancing Program.” “The 28 Day Chakra Balancing Program,” is a mesmerizing blend of exotic essentials oils created to coincide with the seven sacred power points within us all, known as chakras.

OK people, let’s stimulate those chakras. Boom, chakra, boom, chakra, boom, boom, boom! And remember,

we can activate ancient power daily by connecting with our higher selves through our sense of smell and touch.

Wait. I have a higher self? Where the hell is he? Probably off having a daiquiri while I pound out the blog posts. Lazy bastard.

Exit question: What happens when the Professeur de Parfums meets the Goddess of Magical Scents?