Environmental Regulations Preserve Unbearable Stench in San Diego

The San Diego Union-Tribune editorializes:

The buildup of feces isn’t some saintly natural process that must be allowed to run its course lest there be some terrible consequence down the line. It happened because of a combination of circumstance, climate and official decisions. It’s not part of Mother Nature’s grand scheme for La Jolla Cove or the planet.

The most pungent phrase: California’s excessive regulatory culture “effectively sanctifies animal waste.”

A Gloomy American Smellscape

They pass the bad place as quickly as they can. Uncountable twolegs gather here every afternoon during the summer to yell in unison in some strange ritual, but it is deserted. It is deserted almost every autumn. The smell is the same: hopelessness, emotional decay. Yet the stench is somehow stronger. Every year, for more than a hundred years, the scent of despair grows more pronounced. It seeps into the ivy, joining the abandoned dreams of those who came before. There is something awful and unnatural here. Something wrong. This is a dying place.

Desolate, yet easily accessible from the Red Line.

One Step Closer to a John Lennon Fragrance?

Dead celebrity menswear? Yes, if you’re Yoko Ono.

Ono’s sketches from 1969 are childlike in their simplicity and humorous in their matter-of-fact approach to how men should dress. 

Ono’s eccentricity and penchant for quirks are evident in the playful collection, which includes suit pants adorned with a hand cutout sewn over the crotch and a jersey pullover with eyelets cut out over the nipple region. A separate “lightbulb bra,” which is embedded with battery-operated light bulbs, can be worn underneath the pullover.

Riiiiiiight. [C’mon, it’s Art!—Ed.]

“So, I made this whole series with love for his hot bod and gave it to him as a wedding present. You can imagine how he went wild and fell in love with me even more.”

I can? OK, let me try. . . . Nope, nothing yet. . . . Wait, still trying . . . Let me get back to you later.

Between this and her making an appearance at Lady Gaga’s Fame launch, it sounds to me like Ms. Ono is limbering up for a dead celebrity fragrance. I’ve been predicting Lennon by Ono. But there might be issues with ownership of his name and image. So FN commenter Nathan Branch might have the right idea: Ono by Yoko. Because, really, it’s all about her.

But then consider this tidbit, from her interview with Miya Masaoka in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

MM: What did he [Lennon] smell like?

YO: Very clean. Always showers, baths — he didn’t have a very strong odor, how some men have to use very strong cologne. Sometimes both of us liked the idea of having a beautiful scent, so we would both wear rose oil or something. He liked to use witch hazel.

Hmm . . . maybe it’s going to be Two of Us by Yoko.

Olfactory White: Whale or Minnow?

A new paper out of Noam Sobel’s lab at the Weizmann Institute has been getting a lot of media play. The piece by Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience (“Olfactory White: Newly Discovered Odor Is Blend Of Smelly Compounds”) is lame, and misleadingly titled. The one from Sid Perkins at ScienceNow is better and includes this fairly restrained quote:

“Olfactory white is a neat idea, and it draws interesting parallels to white light and white noise,” says Jay Gottfried, an olfactory neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. The new study “definitely adds new information about how the brain interprets odors,” he notes.

Sobel’s team selected a bunch of smells that cover odor space (defined by sensory and physiochemical means) and diluted them to smell (roughly) equally intense. Then they randomly combined the odors into mixtures with varying numbers of components. By the time the mixtures reached around 30 components, they all began to smell about the same. To the extent this is remarkable it is because the 30-component mixtures had no components in common. (In contrast, a combo of 30 floral notes would be easily distinguishable from a combo of 30 resinous notes.)

Sobel et al. go to some lengths to experimentally demonstrate that these large mixtures, like large mixtures in tonal audition and color vision, converge on a perception that is, in technical psychophysical terms, “white.”

So?

Well, the Weizmann Institute is trying to patent “a wide range of potential applications for olfactory white.” I have no doubt there are some clever applications, but my hunch is that each of them will prove to be quite narrowly focused.

Meanwhile, “olfactory white” may be rare or even nonexistent in the natural world, but I bet thousands of people smell it on a daily basis. Isn’t it the smell of any sizeable fragrance blending facility? I’ve been in a dozen of them and they all smell the same—it’s an unmistakable scent, yet not really of one thing or another. (Sure, some days a particular project will dominant the air. I’m talking about the ongoing background scent in the perfume labs and compounding rooms.)

Olfactory white: a “neat idea”? Yes. A “new smell”? Not so much.

The study discussed here is “Perceptual convergence of multi-component mixtures in olfaction implies an olfactory white,” by Tali Weissa, Kobi Snitza, Adi Yablonkaa, Rehan M. Khana, Danyel Gafsoub, Elad Schneidmana, & Noam Sobel, published online November 19, 2012 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Ka-Boom! Michael Jackson Perfume Project Self-Destructs

Just as I foretold, the posthumous Michael Jackson perfume project has self-destructed.

The long-running, on-again, off-again and ultimately zombified collaboration between Joe Jackson, the late star’s father, and Julian “Franck” Rouas, the colorful character from the Côte d’Azur, was detonated last Friday by Jackson.

Here’s the statement released on the website of “The Legendary Music Manager” and “Patriarch of the First Family of Music”:

Mr. Jackson confirmed today that after much due diligence and legal counsel he has effective today the 15th of November 2012 cancelled all collaboration with French designer Julian Rouas Paris, Inc as well as any affiliation with any of Mr Rouas’s companies.

To drive the point home, Mr. Jackson offered a pictographic version of his statement (shown above).

To reassure those MJ fans still yearning for an olfactive tribute to their musical hero, Mr. Jackson promised to press ahead with a perfume to be adorned with a 3D holographic portrait of his son.