Olfactory Fact #213: Peppermint Sweetens Up Your Diet
April 7, 2009
Researchers at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia found that people who regularly sniffed peppermint consumed 23% fewer calories.
The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind
April 7, 2009
Malibu residents David and Cindy Emminger were understandably baffled when the mysterious and decidedly-unpleasant stench began wafting over their otherwise-posh property last year. “I’d go into the front yard and get nauseous. I couldn’t figure out at first where the smell was coming from,” Cindy told the Los Angeles Times.
Then, she happened to glance over at the new structure which had appeared next to the guardhouse of her close neighbor, Bob Dylan, who is apparently not keen on security personnel utilizing his inside plumbing.
“They had moved the porta-potty directly in front of my front door,” Emminger said. So pungent is the smell from Dylan’s backyard that the family has to decamp every night. “It’s worse when it’s misty outside at night. We turn on the five fans, but it still gets inside our house. We’re not even using the upstairs now. We sleep downstairs.”
Malibu city council officials are investigating the complaint, although an attempt by a health and safety officer to inspect the toilet was thwarted by the security guards, who said the officer was trespassing.
“It’s a scandal,” said David Emminger. “Mr Civil Rights is killing our civil rights.”
A Second Whiff offers a Novel Approach
April 7, 2009
When their keen interest in scent communication led the Whiff-Guys to publish Whiff! last year, they knew it was a novel idea. Now, that novel idea has inspired an actual novel!
The new graphic novel Whiff is Harvard professor David Edwards’ sequel to Niche (co-authored by Jay Cantor, whose darkly hilarious novel Krazy Kat time-warped George Herriman’s classic comic strip characters into the nuclear age where they formed a terrorist organization to demand ownership of their own copyright from the Hearst Corporation). In Edwards’ and Cantor’s not-so-distant future world, inhabitants ingest their food by smelling…or, rather…Whiffing it!
“Over the centuries we’ve been eating smaller and smaller quantities at shorter and shorter intervals. It seemed to us that eating was tending toward breathing, so, with a mix of culinary art and aerosol science, we’ve helped move eating habits to their logical conclusion,” says Edwards, founder of Le Laboratoire and inventor of the soon-to-be-released Le Whif chocolate inhaler, which offers “a revolutionary way of eating chocolate by breathing it” and may well qualify as the world’s first chocolate-cessation device. “We call it whiffing.”
Sound absurd? It’s not.
Dedicated Whiffles will remember from Olfactory Fact #18 that taste buds can identify only 5 basic sensations: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savory. All more subtle shades of taste are actually flavors, a co-mingling of those 5 recognizable tastes with the over-10,000 smells recognizable to humans. From fine dining to McDining, what you put into your nose could well be considered about 2000 times more important than what you put into your mouth.
By the way, for any of you who actually give a hoot about those 9,999 or so recognizable smells which aren’t chocolate, the novel also includes Whiff recipes! Yep, you may now be able to LITERALLY inhale that supersized meal of deep-fried-appetizers and six-cheese lasagna and double-caramel cheesecake, with nary a calorie in sight!
ParkBloggin’ with the Whiff-Guys!
April 6, 2009
The Walt Disney Company has been incorporating scent into its themed environments and marketing programs for decades, and targeted scents are now being used as a communication tool by blue chip advertisers for such heavy hitters as Sony, Samsung, Lexus, GM, Westin, Nike and Reebok, for scores more jumping on board!Leading Amusement Industry Journal ParkWorld Online learns all about Smelling Your Way to Success from Whiff-Guy C. Russell Brumfield in the April 2009 issue of ParkWorld!
