Two posts in one day, oh my!
But because of my love of:
1) New York
2) Things That Smell Good
I just had to yoink this article from my good friend Jenn:
October 28, 2005
Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers
An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted
through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it
and declared that it was awesome.
"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant."
The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his
friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton
Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to
where they stood now, near a Dunkin' Donuts. Maybe it was from there,
he said. But it wasn't.
Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the
syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared
that it was something sinister.
There were so many calls that the city's
Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and
Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of
Environmental Protection to look into it.
By 11 p. m., the search had turned up
nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to
come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In
Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back,
stronger than before, by 1 a.m.
"We are continuing to sample the air
throughout the affected area to make sure there's nothing hazardous,"
said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. "What the
actual cause of the smell is, we really don't know."
There were conflicting accounts as to its
nature. A police officer who had thrown out her French vanilla coffee
earlier compared it to that. Two diplomats from the Netherlands
disagreed, politely. Rieneke Buisman said it smelled like roasted
peanuts. Her friend Joris Geeven said it reminded him of a Dutch cake
called peperkoek, though he could not describe that smell.
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The sense of smell is very complicated and we know very little about it. It's really the only sense that we lack any descriptive language for and we are reduced to comparing it with words usually reserved for it's cousin, Taste.
What is most fascinating to ME in the above article is the different ways people described the smell depending on their background. Everyone smelled the same scent but their descriptions varied so much! Peanuts most definately do not taste like Maple Syrup but they were both used to describe the mysterious scent.
There's a cool bio-neuro-psycho-sociology research paper waiting to happen right there, but I'm much too lazy to write it. Although I could use the Nobel prize's cool million dollar award right about now.
