"As a Frida Kahlo portrait glared protectively at me over Madonna’s shoulder, we talked past, present, future, prayer, dicks, nutritional yeast, and more…"

Writes Mel Ottenberg, introducing "The Madonna Interview" in Interview Magazine.

EXCERPT:

OTTENBERG: When was the last time you confessed?

MADONNA: Well, every song on this record is—not every song. Some are just joy. “Love Sensation” is just joy. But a lot of the songs here are confessional.

OTTENBERG: What about the last time you confessed in a church?

MADONNA: Oh, that’s been a while.

OTTENBERG: Do you have a relationship with organized religion?

MADONNA: Well, I was raised a Catholic and I’m a cultural Catholic.

"The British wife of a death row prisoner screamed 'I love you' as her husband was executed in Texas last night...."

"James Broadnax, 37, protested his innocence in his dying moments, saying 'Texas got it wrong,' as his wife, Tiana, spread her arms against the execution chamber window and had to be helped out of the room. 'My husband suffered so bad from the lethal injection that he had a nose bleed and bruising on his neck,' said Tiana, 31, on TikTok. 'I’m going to expose everyone. The fight didn’t end here, it got worse. You killed Mr Broadnax, but you ain’t killed MRS BROADNAX.'"

From "James Broadnax’s British wife shouts ‘I love you’ as he is executed/Death row inmate who had been convicted of double murder died by lethal injection in Texas even after his cousin had confessed to being the killer" (London Times).

Tiana met Broadnax after finding his story on the website writeaprisoner.com and writing to him. She married him 2 weeks before his scheduled execution and never touched him. She did use an old T-shirt of his to experience his smell.

"Stench of 20 Tons of Spilled Tofu Hits Missouri Town 'Like a Brick Wall.'"

That's the Headline of the Day for me.

It's in the NYT: 

The tofu and the truck languished in the ravine for three weeks while the private towing companies that had been hired to clean up the mess tried to confirm that the trucking company had enough insurance to pay for the job....

The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District has referred to the mess on its Facebook page as “the infamous Jerome Tofu Monster” and the cleanup as “the Great Battle of Jerome.”...

"Nearly 48 hours since being appointed as the third supreme leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran’s history, Mojtaba Khamenei is nowhere to be seen."

I'm reading "Iran's new supreme leader is still nowhere to be seen" (CNN).

No video message has been put out from him addressing the crowds of supporters that have gone onto the streets across Iran to pledge their allegiance to him, nor has a written statement been issued by him or his office. State media has relied on archive footage to introduce him to the audience, and state propaganda networks have heavily relied on AI video and stills to create an image of an all-wise leader who rightly inherits the mantle of leadership.... But even as the leader remains hidden from sight, it seems the wider body politic is still functioning with little suggestion of a change in the war posture....

I wonder when, in human history, has the news of the death of a leader been suppressed so that people would believe that he was continuing to govern?

I haven't studied this question in great depth, but I have formed the opinion that the best story — the story to beat — is that of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. As Wikipedia tells it:

"I could feel it through my ballistic vest. It kind of exploded all over. You could smell the onions and the mustard."

Testified CBP Agent Gregory Lairmore, quoted in "Border Patrol agent recalls moment DC sandwich slinger’s sub 'exploded all over; him: ‘You could smell the onions'" (NY Post).

The lawyer for Sean Charles Dunn, on trial for assault, appealed to the jurors' sense of proportion: "It was a harmless gesture at the end of him exercising his right to speak out... He did it. He threw the sandwich. And now the US Attorney for the District of Columbia has turned that moment — a thrown sandwich — into a criminal case, a federal criminal case charging a federal offense."

This makes me think of the old saying "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." In this case, it's not a swung fist but a flung sandwich, but there's definitely a nose, a nose offended by the stench of onions and mustard. 

"Next came Solórzano, who performed in a leather jacket, throwing his first snowball from a cocktail shaker—a blend of cedar, benzoin, and cardamom which conjured the smell of whiskey."

"To a soundtrack of ragtime and death-metal bluegrass, he waved his towel with muscular grace, using it to represent (variously) lightning in a prairie thunderstorm, his dead lover’s body, and a bar tray that he used to deflect bullets. Between vigorous towel-waving sequences, he narrated his moral dilemma, of whether or not to take vengeance on his former best friend, an outlaw who’d killed his girl.... As the temperature surged to two hundred degrees, Solórzano slammed a snowball scented with black pepper and juniper tar onto the rocks, filling the room with a gunpowdery musk, and waved furiously, darting up and down the sauna stairs, tossing his towel in an elegant plume of white. The crowd went wild."

From "Sweating and Storytelling in a Williamsburg Sauna/Aufguss: a world championship for twirling a really hot towel" (The New Yorker).

Had you heard about Aufguss?

"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: