I am sooooo shocked!

Many people? Seriously? Many people fear bioterrorism? I usually assume someone’s baking.

I guess you don’t live here. We’ve learned to assume the worst, and are usually right.

!!!
I’ve experienced this as well. I was living in an old brownstone in Chicago two years ago and every time the radiator heated it smelled of maple syrup. Bizzarre.

‘In this day and age, we must take every possible threat to our safety seriously no matter how innocuous it might be.’

He added, ‘It wasn’t exactly akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, but a smell over a very large area.’

Paranoid absurdity followed by mid-sentence metaphor failure. Comedy gold.

You seem to want everything to be logical. What are you, a Vulcan? Logic doesn’t rule emotions. Calling something an “unjustified emotional response” is absurd on the face of it; emotional responses aren’t justified, ever, nor are they ever unjustified. Justification and emotional responses don’t interact in any way.

And as for Diana, you know (or perhaps you don’t), it’s possible for someone’s life to mean something to people who never met them. For one thing, the people who cried for Diana may have admired her and hoped that one day they would meet her; those hopes would have been dashed by her death. In addition, many people saw that she was doing good work (the first celebrity to publicly embrace a person with AIDS, for example, which had an influence on millions of people), and the potential for more good work was cut off by her death.

But “justified” as that may be, if you’re looking for justification for emotional responses, you’re looking at the wrong species. That’s not how humans are, and I hope they never will be.

And as for your post at 53: Please stop being a dick. If you don’t think you’re being a dick, you are incorrect. Go stand in front of a mirror and say 10 times “I have been being a dick. I should stop now.” If that doesn’t make you think you’ve been being a dick, repeat the exercise until it does.

I visited my former (semi-squalid) flat to see my old flatmates recently and noticed two streaks of brown liquid running all the way from the ceiling to the kitchen worktop.

I asked them what it was and they claimed it was maple syrup. It smelt like maple syrup, they said, and admittedly looked a bit like maple syrup (albeit dirtier), but I wasn’t convinced. Who spills maple syrup and leaves it on the floor long enough for it to soak all the way through a linoleum floor, through wooden floorboards, through a layer of plaster and down a wall to the MDF kitchen work surface below? How indeed would that happen??

In my assessment of the situation, similar in pessimism as the assumption that the NY smell must be bio-terror, I have simply decided it must be a dead mammal of some sort. Could the decaying juices of a dead mouse smell like maple syrup? Could anything else explain this?

As a NYC-born Hobokenite with no sense of smell, I don’t understand what all the sniping is about. I do remember everyone talking about that maple syrup thing and wishing I could smell it, too…

Jack: Do you smell maple syrup?
Liz: Yes!
Jack: Don’t panic, Lemon, it’s probably not a chemical attack.
Liz: What do you mean, probably?
Jack: It’s probably just a strange wind pattern coming over those factories in Staten Island where food flavors are made. I don’t think it’s northrax.
Liz: What’s northrax?
[Tracy starts his Re-Run dance]
Jack: It’s a chemical agent we sold to the Saudis in the 1980s that smells exactly like maple syrup. But I don’t think this is it

Growing Season in Lancaster County PA
This time of year it’s nice to open the windows and let fresh air into the house. This is farm country, and so, also at this time of year the farmers are spreading manure on their fields. It’s not horribly objectionable, so long as you’re not right next to the field, but still, you know it for what it is: liquified farm animal shit.

What’s odd, here in my little corner of the county, is that the main Twizzlers factory is only about 2 miles away, and when the atmosphere is just right this time of year, in through my open windows wafts a combined breeze of cherry or strawberry Twizzlers aroma combined with the stench liquified shit.

My nose at once orders my mind and taste buds to be simultaneously revulsed and heightened with salivatory anticipation. Am I going to eat some sweet candy? Or am I going to puke?

We all assumed it was the chemistry building, so I guess this is a comforting (somewhat) confirmation.

Whenever there’s a bad smell, New Yorkers blame NJ.

because New Jersey is the armpit of the United States.

At my house, it’s usually going to rain if I smell garlic in the morning. It means the winds are from Gilroy.