Dolce & Gabbana Go to a Sex Therapist

“If a fragrance is announcing desire, what it’s doing is altering you to pay attention to the potential, for inviting you to experience aspects of your desire.”

Does this make any sense, grammatically or otherwise?

Go Rimbaud

In the NY Observer, Nate Freeman interviews the author of I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, the new memoir by Richard Hell. (Yes, as in Richard Hell and the Voidoids.) From the quoted passages Hell sounds like a smell-aware writer.

In the mid-Sixties he hitchhiked his way to Florida with Tom Verlaine:

“We didn’t know anybody there,” he writes, “or know anything about the place except that it was warm and airy, and there was plenty of citrus fruit and seafood, and girls who smelled like suntan and had little particles of sand on them here and there, including inside the waistbands of their panties.”

Then there’s this bit about CBGB:

The birthplace of punk was a garbage dump. In an unpublished column he wrote during the club’s formative years that is included in Tramp, Mr. Hell says, “the first thing I noticed is that it smelled like dogshit. Then I saw the damned dog.”

Good times.

Blaming the Methane: Los Angeles Edition

Methane is an odorless gas. It is also hazardous at high concentrations. This is why the gas company adds a stinky blend of mercaptans to it as a warning agent. Simple, right? Unless you are a TV reporter or Santa Monica Fire Department spokesman, that is.

A sulfurous stink rose in Los Angeles over the weekend and the usual clown riot ensued. Here’s the headline from KNBC-TV:

Ocean Stink Prompts Flood of 911 Calls

And here’s the lede: “Methane gas from the sea floor caused a foul odor on Sunday . . .”

I don’t blame coastal resident Maria Carlito Covarrubias for posting on Facebook about a possible gas leak, nor Summers McKay for calling her building manager with the same worry. Like everyone else, they’ve been drilled since childhood to identify mercaptans with natural gas. And public safety-wise that’s a good thing.

But reporters (yes, Sharon Bernstein and Heather Navarro, I’m talking about you) ought to know that methane is odorless and the stink is artificial. And first responders (Justin Walker of the Santa Monica Fire Department, I’m talking about you) should be clear on the concept.

When he talks about tectonic plates and sea floor ruptures, Mr. Walker could simply point out that regardless of methane content geologically vented gases often smell sulfurous (fumaroles, mud pots, hot springs, etc.).

Adding to the confusion is this KNBC subhead: “The smell may not have been the result of a natural process in the ocean as originally thought.” Huh? So was it a utility gas leak after all? Something extraterrestrial, perhaps? Or did the copy desk just stick that in?

Sheesh.

UPDATE March 4, 2013

One and a half cheers for KABC-TV which gets it mostly right:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (KABC) — Air quality officials said methane gas [d’oh!] or stinky algae were the likely sources of Sunday's foul odor across the Southland.

Technicians with the South Coast Air Quality Control District said they believe the stink is an ocean-based natural occurrence blowing ashore from the Santa Monica Bay.

Santa Monica hazmat crews found unusual concentrations of odorless methane gas [yessssss!] in the air.

Officials believe either a pocket of stinky algae, or a bubble of methane laced with sulfurous gas, surfaced in the ocean. [There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?]

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times blog quotes S.M.F.D.’s hapless Justin Walker:

Recent shifts in water temperature might have caused plankton and algae beds to bloom, releasing methane just under the surface, Walker said. The gas also might have been produced by a geologic event, such as a shift in tectonic plates, he said.

Or, to quote Zed: “Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.”

Smelly Eliot

I’ve never been a fan of T.S. Eliot. The other day, however, I was reading “Effects of Analogy,” an essay by my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens. In it, he quotes from Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night. It’s passage full of striking, if desiccated, olfactory imagery.

“. . . A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

Obama’s Brain Activity Map: Making the Connections

In his SOTU speech, President Obama issued a vague call for more investment (i.e., spending of taxpayer dollars) in “mapping the human brain.” Five days later, the New York Times supplied more details: the project, a comprehensive map of human brain activity, will be on the scale of the Human Genome Project which cost $3.8 billion dollars over thirteen years.

(The undertaking is already being referred to as “Obama’s Brain Project.” Funny isn’t it that we never talk about “George H.W. Bush’s Human Genome Project”?)

Science bloggers have been buzzing and tweeting about this for days. Some question the rationale: is the science ripe enough? are the objectives clear? Others question the priorities: should we place a massive bet on brain mapping when only a tiny fraction of individual neuroscience grant proposals are being funded by NIH?

Perhaps they all miss the point.

It took years of support from DOE and several major scientific confabs before the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990. In contrast, the idea of a brain activity map was first raised last June in a paper in Neuron and now it’s national priority. Extraordinary! Until you think about how things work in the Age of Obama. It’s all about who has the most juice.

Consider:

Top contributors to Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign (source: Center for Responsive Politics):




Affiliations of the six authors of the Neuron paper:

University of California (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab):
University of California (UCSD)
University of California (Kavli Institute, UCSD)
Harvard Medical School
Columbia University
Cal Tech

And from the NYT:

A meeting held on Jan. 17 at the California Institute of Technology was attended by the three government agencies, as well as neuroscientists, nanoscientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm. According to a summary of the meeting, it was held to determine whether computing facilities existed to capture and analyze the vast amounts of data that would come from the project.

So there you go! Obama’s Brain Activity Mapping Project is on a fast track—no peer review, only a single planning meeting held a month before the announcement—and key players include five of his eight biggest campaign donors. This is a top-down, big government initiative of the sort we have become very familiar with in the Age of Obama.

Exit question: Will Brain Activity Mapping be to Big Neuroscience what Solyndra was to Green Energy?