"There are people that come, and they’ve been on it for three years, and they’re just so tired of feeling nauseous and constipated."

"They have come to Mountain Trek to get off of it. To learn accumulated lifestyle habits, so that they don’t then gain all the weight back."

Said Kirkland Shave, co-owner of the wellness retreat Mountain Trek, quoted in "The Ozempic era is forcing wellness retreats for the elite to change/Attendees might be looking to wean off weight-loss drugs or mitigate side effects such as digestive discomfort and muscle loss" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I've never gone on a wellness retreat — though I have watched Season 3 of "The White Lotus" — but I was interested enough to click through to the Mountain Trek website and to momentarily bask in the idea of the place. But as with all travel, you have to do the hard creative work of imagining what it's really like there.

"In the past I would typically ignore the flowers in the local park; now I actively seek them out. And when I’m in the kitchen I’ll inhale the aromas..."

"... that are readily available in my spice rack, and I pay greater attention to the fumes emanating from the boiling pots and pans. I now consider smell training to be an essential part of my routine. I find it to be pleasantly meditative, leaving me mentally grounded in much the same way as my daily yoga. And while I cannot say that I’ve noticed a huge leap in brainpower, I am optimistic that I am protecting my brain from future decline. This morning I made my espresso as normal and sniffed the cup hopefully. For the first time since I began my smell training, the aroma hit me hard. I couldn’t help but smile when I realised that I had, quite literally, learnt to wake up and smell the coffee, and I shall never take my nose for granted again."

I'm reading "Wake up and smell the coffee — the new way to train your brain/Loss of smell can signal a decline in mental health. David Robson discovered how to improve it" (London Times).

The author is only 39, so his ability to revive his sense of smell is very different from mine. He had luck with one of those smell kits where you sniff at various essential oils — eucalyptus, lemon, rose, clove. Keep trying. Practice smelling. I've already done that. Imagine telling blind people to look harder and deaf people to listen closely. What if that worked?

"I'm reading about a tennis player who smelled so bad that her opponent was heard complaining, and I'm wondering..."

"... if a sports player might in some cases, perhaps this one, deliberately acquire a bad smell to gain a competitive edge? Are there known cases? Do the rules cover this behavior? It could be a way of cheating. Beyond sports, what other areas of human competition offer opportunities to gain an advantage through smelling bad?"

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok.

You can read Grok's answer here.

And here's the news story that prompted my question: "British tennis player Harriet Dart apologizes after asking opponent to wear deodorant during match/Dart told the umpire that her opponent, Lois Boisson, 'smells really bad'" (CBS Sports).

"Lemurs are strange in the way that the reclusive and wealthy are strange; having had the island of Madagascar to themselves evolve in..."

"... they have idiosyncratic habits. Male ring-tailed lemurs have scent glands on their wrists, and engage in 'stink-fighting,' battles in which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or the other retreats. It feels no madder than current forms of diplomacy. It’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive."

Writes Katherine Rundell, in "Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures" (commission earned) quoted in "A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs" (Paris Review).

Hadn't used my "animals are jerks" tag in a long time.

"Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight..."

"... and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as 'You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.'... He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, 'It smells old in here.' Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was 'hostile to the spirit.' He once remarked, 'Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man/A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century" (NYT).

"My concern is this is instrumentalizing the dog. This is not giving the dog any choice in the matter."

"If your dog wants to rub itself in coyote scat or fox scat, that’s the dog’s choice. But if it gets a spray of Dolce & Gabbana on it, that is not its choice. We need to be far more respectful of dogs and their wishes."

Said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine, quoted in "Dolce & Gabbana Has New Dog Perfume. Veterinarians Turn Up Their Noses. An extravagant scent might seem like the height of pampering for your pup. But veterinarians are raising red flags: 'Overall, it’s a very bad idea'" (NYT).

"Everyone... had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch."

"Stop cutting your toenails on your desk. Don’t bring a gun to the office.... H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls."

From "So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?/Get in line behind the H.R. managers themselves, who say that since the pandemic, the job has become an exasperating ordeal. 'People hate us,' one said" (NYT).

"The benefits of face-to-face interactions may be related to smell. When our noses pick..."

"... up the body odor of other people, for example, we tend to pick up their emotions, too: from anxiety and fear to happiness. In one experiment, researchers applied electrodes to the faces of volunteers and asked them to sniff samples of sweat of people who had previously watched either happy video ('The Jungle Book') or neutral videos (the weather forecast.) After inhaling the body odor of cheerful people, the volunteers’ facial muscles twitched in a way that suggested they felt happier, too.... This role of scents in feeling the emotions of others, he says, may help explain why people with more sensitive noses tend to have larger circles of friends and suffer less loneliness — both important predictors of health and longevity.... Smelling the body odor of a loved one can help reduce stress. When European researchers submitted a group of volunteers to weak electric shocks, those who could sniff T-shirts previously worn by their romantic partners stayed calmer...."

From "Why in-person friendships are better for health than virtual pals/Simply having good friends isn’t enough. Research suggests that to truly thrive, we need to physically meet with our friends on a regular basis" (WaPo).

1. I have almost complete anosmia so does that make other people less useful to me? I guess I would have more friends if the potential to smell them was part of the allure. 

2. Apparently, you have to go to Europe to find people who volunteer to take electric shocks and attempt to succor themselves with smelly T-shirts.

3. We're not hearing about experiments that made people smell the sweat of unhappy people, but wouldn't that change the inferences? If you can smell and you go out and about where you can smell people in person, then, presumably, the smell affects you, but the effect could be negative or positive, depending whether the smellees are happy or unhappy.

4. On the internet, nobody knows you're a smelly dog....

"The 150g tins — enough for a single meal — will cost roughly £1 and contain a chicken dish created without harming a single animal."

"Rather than slaughtering chickens, Meatly’s scientists extract a sample of cells from a chicken’s egg, which are replicated and grown in vats in a process similar to making beer or yoghurt.... Meatly, which is also planning a product for dogs, hopes to appeal to animal lovers’ environmental conscience, with a growing trend for pet owners to feed their animals a vegan diet.... [Owen Ensor, the founder of Meatly], 35, who is vegan, has tasted his firm’s product. 'It tastes like chicken,' he said.... [H]e does not need to worry about texture, which bothers humans much more than animals. 'Pets care what food smells like and they care what it tastes like, and if it has the right nutrients,' he said. 'But they don’t particularly care what it looks like or if it has the right kind of texture.'... [R]eplicating the correct texture from a vat of cells is tricky."

From "Britain’s first lab-grown meat: it’s for cats/Tinned chicken cultivated from cells taken from an egg will be marketed to owners who want to supply a normal diet without the guilt. Its vegan creator explains" (London Times).

With cats in the picture, I'm inclined to read "lab-grown" to involve Labrador retrievers.

How does Ensor know cats don't care about texture? But it's not as though traditional cat food is providing the texture I presume cats love (which is the texture of a freshly killed mouse).

By the way, as a human being with a greatly diminished sense of smell (AKA taste), I am overwhelmingly concerned with the texture of food. Food texture matters!

I feel compelled to disagree.

I'm reading "Robert Sapolsky Doesn’t Believe in Free Will. (But Feel Free to Disagree)/Shedding the concept 'completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy,' the Stanford biologist and neurologist argues. It might also be liberating" (NYT)

The interviewer asks, "So, whether I wore a red or blue shirt today — are you saying I didn’t really choose that?"

Sapolsky answers:

Absolutely. It can play out in the seconds before. Studies show that if you’re sitting in a room with a terrible smell, people become more socially conservative. Some of that has to do with genetics: What’s the makeup of their olfactory receptors? With childhood: What conditioning did they have to particular smells? All of that affects the outcome.

And what of those of us who have lost all or most of our sense of smell? Is this random affliction making me liberal?

Asked "Do we lose love, too, if we lose free will?" he says:

Yeah. Like: “Wow! Why? Why did this person turn out to love me? Where did that come from? And how much of that has to do with how my parents raised me, or what sort of olfactory receptor genes I have in my nose and how much I like their scent?”

Lacking a sense of smell, am I more free? I know, he'd say I'm not free at all. I lack this factor that affects other people's decision-making, but that just leaves me disproportionately affected by the remaining factors.

It seems clear, based on the whole article, that believing there is no free will makes people more liberal. You won't think people deserve the rewards and punishments that come their way. But you don't have free will to decide not to believe in free will. First, comes the desire to justify the status quo and to punish wrongdoers, and then comes the belief in free will. Take that away, and you'll run into the arms of Sapolsky.

"There have been debates over whether marijuana smoke inside an apartment building is any more annoying than, say, a spicy curry simmering on a stove all day or a pungent pot of chitterlings."

"A better comparison would be to the 'corpse flower' at the U.S. Botanic Garden on the National Mall, so named because it smells like rotting flesh."

From "Learning the highs and lows of D.C.’s medical marijuana lingo/As recreational marijuana sales prosper in Maryland, medical dispensaries in D.C. jump through" (WaPo).

It would be racist to object to "a spicy curry simmering on a stove all day or a pungent pot of chitterlings," so be careful what you say about the marijuana smoke permeating your apartment building. That's the insinuation I'm picking up.

"The liberalization left behind a legal oddity: Marijuana use remains prohibited in public spaces...."

"Yet it’s allowed on private property.... Some have proposed social consumption spaces — 'analogous to a bar or a restaurant,' said Morgan Fox, NORML’s political director — though such sites could pose a nuisance to neighbors as well as workers. Another idea is to rescind the prohibition on smoking in public spaces, which would presumably cut consumption in cramped residential settings. It would also import the smellscape of New York City, where sidewalk pot smoking is legal. 'The number one thing I smell right now is pot,' said Mayor Eric Adams in July 2022. 'It seems like everyone is smoking a joint now, you know. Everybody has a joint.'"

Writes the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, in "A dispute over marijuana smoke raises questions for D.C. — and beyond."

Smellscape....

Screen Grab of the Morning.

"A perfumier designed the aroma to contain hints of 'pus, blood, faecal matter and sweat' so [Jude] Law could imagine himself as [Henry VIII]...."

"At the start of filming Law said he made sure 'very subtly' to use a dab or two of the stomach-turning scent. However, when he found that the smell aided his performance, 'it became a spray-fest.' "When Jude walked in on set,” the director, Karim Aïnouz, said, 'it was just horrible.' [Alicia] Vikander, who performed sex scenes with Law, gave a look of disgust as the actor [said] 'Even the camera operators were gagging. My memory is that we were laughing a lot.... [I'd] read several interesting accounts that you could smell Henry three rooms away. His leg was rotting so badly. He hid it with rose oil. I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful.'"

From "Jude Law has more than a whiff of Henry VIII in Firebrand/The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Cannes film festival on Sunday" (London Times).

Watch Ms. Vikander approach the putrid actor:

I asked ChatGPT, "Can you tell me about other actors who have used smelliness to enhance their performance?" In classic ChatGPT form, I got a list of 5 items:

"[T]he Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies...."

"'The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,' said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist.... 'They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.'... 'Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,' Dr. Cooney said. A relief in the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th century B.C. battle details prisoners being brought back to the pharaoh Merneptah with 'donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.' If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. 'The stink must have been awful, and thus the "fish in baskets" comment,' Dr. Cooney said."

From "In Ancient Egypt, Severed Hands Were Spoils of War/Archaeologists offer a new explanation for one of the century’s grislier finds, 'a carefully gathered collection of hands' in a 3,500-year-old temple" (NYT). 

"I decided to put the Christmas tree up, and I was looking for a tote of Christmas ornaments, and that’s when I discovered him."

A quote from "Illinois woman finds husband’s body in home eight months after he disappeared" (NY Post).

"Before the legalization of marijuana, [Josepha] Ippolito-Shepherd could have called 911 and police would have criminally charged her neighbor..."

"... but now officers told her nothing could be done. She wrote to D.C. Council chair Phil Mendelson, who said the only way to rectify her problem would be to undo the legalization of marijuana. So she took the dispute to court, claiming the smell is a public nuisance, and the trial, which began this week, is the first of its kind to make it this far in the District court...."

From "Sick of smelling her neighbor’s legal pot, this woman sued" (WaPo).

Now, I'm thinking I have 2 kinds of readers: the ones who are saying why should I know or care about the Madison Public Market and...

... the ones who are saying yes, that's the thing that Althouse questioned that one time and Paul Soglin, the Mayor of Madison, instead of engaging respectfully, decided to attack her big time, so she was forced to resort to reason and mockery?

I'm reading "Madison Public Market all but scrapped, as officials make one last plea to alders for funding" (WKOW).

Here's the post I wrote on January 10, 2017:

"Actually, Sandy [Sandra Bullock] and I did once try to develop a whole idea of a husband and wife team, who were QVC’s most successful salespeople..."

"... but we’re getting a divorce, we hate each other, and we’re taking it out on air as we sell things… That’s as far as we got."

Said Brad Pitt, quoted in "'I Love What Gwyneth Has Done With Goop': Brad Pitt Unveils His Genderless Skincare Line Exclusively To Vogue" (Vogue UK). 

Genderless?

"Trash juice, the viscous concoction brewed by the contents of every truck, and its habit of spraying out of bags as they’re compacted, is a major theme..."

"... at the Department of Sanitation’s Ronald F. DiCarlo Training Academy, where I have unofficially joined New York’s Strongest for two days to try and learn how to collect, sort, and dump the 12,000 tons of trash the city produces on a daily basis. 'In New York City, nobody finishes a cup of coffee,'” our instructor, Sergio Serrano, a spirited DSNY veteran with a bushy beard that I assume is full of knowledge, tells us. 'You will know the flavor of the month and come to hate the flavor of the month.' To emphasize the point, Joe O’Hare, another instructor who works at the same garage, shouts, 'Pumpkin spice latte!'...The job can be about as gross as you might imagine. Instructors rattle off the most repulsive things they’ve encountered on their routes — a pig’s head, an entire lamb, 'disco rice,' which is a deceptively appetizing name for maggots — with bravado. But it’s also a union job and a clear path to a middle-class life in the city. The starting salary is $40,622, which more than doubles after five and a half years on the job. There’s a pension, and opportunities for overtime and growth. Trainers told me that the hardest part of the job was the schedule, which can be erratic in early years and difficult to maintain with a family, but everyone seemed relieved to be there...."

From "I Went to Trash School/An education in 'juice,' how to protect your shins, and keeping 12,000 daily tons of garbage at bay" by Clio Chang (NY Magazine).