Archive for the ‘Smell’ Category
August 23, 2026
From my deodorant history, in my 8/19 posting “Two favorite movies”:
I cut the dosage, found less aggressive deodorants, discovered that sandalwood suits my body chemistry. Most important, I stopped pumping out pheromones like a stag in rut. It got better. Ever since, I’ve been giving off essence of locker room, with (currently) a very light coconut and vanilla deodorant to moderate it some; you can now say fairly that my armpits smell delicious. )
Specifically, Native brand coconut and vanilla deodorant, in a tube that has just come to the end of its life and been replaced by the cucumber and mint flavor. And I have reordered a trio of three flavors — these two plus lavender and rose. They’re all subtle, non-irritant, and long-lasting. I’m a fan.
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Posted in Death and dying, Language and food, Language and the body, My life, Smell, Taste | Leave a Comment »
August 19, 2026
In the last few days, I’ve returned to two movies from long ago that gave me great pleasure then and have just brought me fresh joy. From 1953 (when I was in high school, in Pennsylvania), Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck (which came up on a free classic movie channel on my cable service). And from 1963 (when I was in grad school, in Massachusetts), Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney and a cast of wonderful character actors (which I had just gotten the DVD of in the mail).
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, My life, Smell | Leave a Comment »
August 18, 2026
A note on my 7/14/26 posting “Raunch dressing”, on a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:
Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature
Which led to some notes on smoky tones in fragrances. And then took me to this bit of fancy writing from the Creed Boutique site:
Aventus is bold, confident and timeless. Uniting fresh Calabrian bergamot, smoky birch and an iconic pineapple accord, this is a fragrance that leaves its mark.
BBP, for short, I guess.
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Posted in Language and plants, Language in advertising, Smell | Leave a Comment »
August 18, 2026
About the moment. From my 8/17 posting “Cool nights”, on my greatly increased prednisone dosage:
it seems to me that my already unusually keen senses of smell and taste have heightened; all my food is fabulous, especially if jazzed up to be even more bitter, more sour, more aggressively fermented, or more spicy than before, and I’m now getting stronger sniff bulletins from my environment
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Smell, Social class, Taste | Leave a Comment »
August 17, 2026
It’s mid-August, and still hot summer in Palo Alto, but the nights are now cool (quilt time is upon me) and it’s cool when I get up (around 3 am), moving me to put on a thick flannel shirt and gelling the coconut oil I use to treat my body (it becomes a thin clear liquid in the heat of the day, but the gel is what you want if you’re using it for skin and hair).
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Posted in Chemistry, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Smell, Taste | 1 Comment »
July 14, 2026
(time for some bad-taste Headline News for Penises, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
It starts with the at least superficially modest advertising slogan (underlined below), in a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:
Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature.
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Posted in Logos, Signs and symbols, Smell, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
March 16, 2025
This is a third Kharkiv Opera posting, about a pleasant, playful, joyous event staged in the face of terrible times. Previously on this blog:
— on 3/9, “The dandelion caper”, about the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us
— on 3/11, “Music of the night, about the enjoyment of music
Today, it’s about the enjoyment of food, in particular a 2/17 soup* I contrived from things I happened to have in the house — leftovers from a Chinese food delivery; some leftover crunchy salad greens; rice sticks (maifun), which are staple household supplies in my kitchen cupboard; beef broth in a carton, ditto; and some fine chili power that I got as a gift a while back. The result was fabulous, and there was enough for three meals. Amazing Wok duet mushroom beef, Taylor Farms Mediterranean crunch salad, Dynasty rice vermicelli, and Penzey’s medium hot chili powder: I salute you.
[*The mills of the mammoth grind exceedingly slowly.]
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Posted in Chinese, Language and food, My life, Names, Photography, Smell, Taste | Leave a Comment »
September 10, 2024
White Party: my name for the white-flower bouquet that León Hernández Alvarez gave me last Thursday for my birthday, which I trimmed and rearranged yesterday. It sits on my worktable, giving me great pleasure.
White roses are symbols of purity — sorry, not my game at all — and loyalty, which I think suits me pretty well. But then the shock yesterday when I saw that the white rose was actually a very pale pink (symbolizing gentleness, sweetness, and of course femininity, so also — yay for the boys with pretty pink pom-poms — gayness).
The name alludes to the White Party in Palm Springs (this year it was March 29-31), the circuit party that bills itself as “the largest gay dance festival in the world” (there are of course other White Parties elsewhere around the world; there’s some discussion of circuit parties — and for a bonus, shapenote singing — in my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”). Never felt bold enough or hot enough to go to one, and now both my dancing days and my traveling days are long over. But the name comes with sexy vibes, so I’m going with it.
But now about the flowers.
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Music, Signs and symbols, Smell | 2 Comments »
August 19, 2023
(It’s Tom of Finland, with man-on-man sex, and — not shown, but plainly inferrable — penises of monumental size, all discussed in street language, so massively not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Well, that’s the straightforward reading of the page for August in my 2023 Tom of Finland calendar. And certainly White Guy is sliding his absurdly thick cock deeply into Black Guy’s ass, but a look at BG’s posture and facial expression suggests that if he had enough control of himself to speak, he’d be proclaiming something like “Damn, that’s fiiiine!”
So maybe WG is doing BG, and enjoying it, but he’s not fucking BG harshly and pitilessly, like an eagle taking a rabbit. Maybe he’s mostly doing it for BG, giving BG the fuck that he wants, even serving him, out of brotherly affection. Doing him a solid.
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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Masculinity, Phallicity, Pornography, Smell | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2023
(Intimate talk about male bodies, mostly mine, in plain terms, though not so racy as to ban kids — but I will freely use the vernacular noun and verb piss, nouns dick and balls. In any case, some people will find the topic of crotch odor unsavory.)
I’d hoped to be able to post about meat dreams and crotch pong on the same day — just for the sound of the two off-color compounds together, but meat dreams took a lot longer than I’d expected (I somehow ended up in the 16th century), so crotch pong had to wait a day. So it goes.
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Posted in Alliteration, Assonance, Clothing, Compounds, Dialects, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Signs and symbols, Slang, Smell, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 1 Comment »