Not quite the grabage shute in Star Wars, but nasty nonethless. London’s Natural history Museum recreates scents from the past to give museum goers a natural sense of what the time period was like:
“Re-creating the breath of a T-Rex for a huge model dinosaur in London’s Natural History Museum posed challenges all of their own. “We spoke to palaeontologists, who gave us a description of the dinosaur. Basically the bigger the creature the smellier they were,” said Knight, who is passionate about accuracy. “The dinosaurs would have had open sores from fighting, and rotting meat stuck in the gaps between their teeth.
“We needed all these features in the eventual odor,” he said.
T-Rex breath turned out so accurate and so revolting, the curators instead opted for a milder swamp smell to evoke the creature’s natural habitat.”
AND, my early request for Quote of the Week:
“I’ve had otter poo on my desk,” said Knight, who created the odor for a zoo’s nature trail, alongside the smell of jaguar urine and rotting flesh.”
Dale Air is your official smell recreator:
“Dale Air started life as an air-freshener firm. Then founder Fred Dale, who died earlier this year, found a lucrative sideline. He was invited to mix familiar odors from the 1920s for use in old peoples’ homes. These triggered memories and encouraged conversation among elderly residents. Dale never looked back. Soon museums were commissioning smells such as Dead Roman Soldier’s Armpit and Viking Loo.”
Loo: A privy, a lavatory. As in “1955 G. FREEMAN Liberty Man II. vi. 113 Johnnie, do take him to the loo, there’s a good boy.”
I actually think this is kind of a cool idea. I’m sure I’d find most of the smells, let’s see, shall we say, less than pleasant? But I still think it’s neat.
I’m actually reading a book right now called Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It involves time travel and one of the things they do to travelers who go to particularly “smelly” times, such as the middle ages, is cauterize their nasal passages so they can’t smell anything. Apparently our sensitive noses couldn’t handle the nasty stenches unlike anything we have to deal with now (or in the near-future of the book).
“The dinosaurs would have had open sores from fighting, and rotting meat stuck in the gaps between their teeth.”
Are you sure he’s not talking about Mike Tyson?
Don’t you wish we all had scratch-n-sniff monitors for this discussion?
I wouldn’t want to smell Mike Tyson. Especially not now:
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/tm_objectid=14372004&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=bankrupt-tyson-living-in-hostel-name_page.html
“FALLEN boxing champion Mike Tyson has told how he had to sleep in homeless shelters after blowing the fortune he won in the ring.
The broke fighter, who once had ?165million in the bank, admitted he was also reduced to accepting hand-outs from drug dealers.
Speaking from his home in Phoenix where he is training, he claimed he is a changed man.
Referring to the infamous 1997 bout when he was disqualified for biting opponent Evander Holyfield, he said: ‘I ain’t the same person I was when I bit that guy’s ear off.”
Nobody is, Mike. Nobody is.
Perhaps Mike was trying to see if Evander was actually an android, so he did a taste-test.