Tetherd Cow Ahead

Try this: go for a walk in your neighbourhood, and every ten paces or so stop and have a really good deep smell. Walk a couple of blocks doing this. If you’re really obsessive like me, take a notebook and write down everything you smell. Isn’t it amazing? Cut grass, curry, bitumen, paint, cat piss, magnolia, mildew, petrol, leaf mulch, cigarettes, burnt toast, eucalyptus leaves… why is it that we don’t pay more attention to our sense of smell?

I really like perfumes. This is not these days usually considered a desirable trait in a man unless he is gay, or a perfumier, or both. I’m not talking about the industrial solvent-style ‘male’ scents that are marketed under irksome butch brand names to wearers of cheap bling, but of the astonishing seduction of jasmine and sandalwood, vetiver, Damask rose, freesia and magnolia, gardenia, rosemary, frangipani and murraya, frankinsense, golden wattle, carnation, bergamot, lilac and violet, pine and vanilla… some of the gorgeous fragrances that are, for the most part, the province of perfumes made for women.

I know almost nothing about how to assess a perfume. But I do know that when I smell certain things, I have strong, sometimes almost knee-weakening rapid-fire flashes of nostalgia or desire. It’s almost like the scent is a hardwire directly and unambiguously into the usually mazelike recesses of my emotional core. I remember a few summers ago passing a woman in the street not far from my house. It was dark between the streetlights and I couldn’t see her face at all. The perfume she was wearing was, as far as my conscious brain can tell, not something I had smelled before, and yet the sense of eroticism and yearning it evoked was so overpowering that it is a testament to the sterling quality of my upbringing that I didn’t ravish her on the spot.

The amazing thing is, the mechanism of the sense of smell is very poorly understood. In fact, there is quite some controversy in scientific thought on the matter, and there is no better account of it than Chandler Burr’s fascinating literary portrait of maverick perfume scientist Luca Turin, ‘The Emperor of Scent’

Some of my favourite perfumes:

Guerlain ‘Vetiver’
George Trumper ‘Eucris’
Annick Goutal ‘Gardenia Passion’
Christain Dior ‘Dioressence’
Guerlain ‘Pamplelune’

I can really understand how people get passionate about perfume and I love to dip into this blog every now and then: ‘Now Smell This’

An Honest-to-God sighting of The Cow, and via boingboing no less! [Link]

Originally here photographed by Alan Clifford.

Some years ago I got a little obsessed with collecting first edition and rare copies of books by an American author of the early to mid 1900s, named Harry Stephen Keeler. Keeler wrote stories that are conventionally classified in the ‘mystery’ or ‘detective’ genre which rather sells his style short. His baffling and complex novels take a bit of work to navigate, but even if they are obtuse (sometimes to the point of being impenetrable) they are unarguably unique.

I fantasize that I could bring Keeler to the modern world in the form of some kind of surreal television treatment, but I wonder if anyone could ever capture the wonderful oddness that suffuses the old printed hardcovers that I have on my bookshelf. I love these books, and in many ways they are some of the most valuable possessions I have.

One book, ‘The Case of the Jewelled Ragpicker’ has an inscription in the front in Keeler’s writing, penned to his wife Hazel which reads: “To my own very very dearest Hazel”. I always find this tiny bit of the author’s sentiment touching and vaguely melancholic (perhaps because I know that Keeler was to lose his wife some years later).

The Wikipedia entry on Keeler is here: [Link]

There is a Harry Stephen Keeler Society Page here: [Link]

…including a Keeler plot generator which gives a remarkably good idea of what you might expect from a Keeler story: [Link]

I notice also that science author William Poundstone (‘The Recursive Universe’) has a bit of a Keeler fascination: [Link]

Thanks Anne for putting the idea for this post in my head.

Another thing I saw in the auction house last week was the mysterious Castleray Non-Electric Machine. “So What?” I hear you say. Well, the ‘non-electric’ machine had a power plug on it, and also was rated at 220 volts. It looked pretty electric to me.

The Non-Electric Machine was about a meter long, with maybe five or six horizontal rods joining two metal blocks, one on either end. There were a number of what looked like some kind of clips along the lengths of the rods. As far as I can tell, there were no moving parts. I was genuinely perplexed by this odd device so I am offering a ☆REWARD☆ to the first person who writes and tells me what the Castleray Non-Electric Machine does (I mean what it really does, with proof all you wits out there). The lucky successful Cow-o-phile will win a Tetherd Cow Aheadâ„¢ T-Shirt. Now, since there is actually no such thing as yet, that means you will also get the first Tetherd Cow Aheadâ„¢ T-Shirt after I design one. That’s just gotta be worth some creative Google searching.

Update: The Non-Electric Machine had gone from the auction house when I checked yesterday. This indicates one of two possibilities: either it didn’t sell and has gone back to the hopeful person who thought someone might pay good money for one of these things, or someone who knew what it was did pay good money for it. Or, I guess conceivably, someone who didn’t have the foggiest idea of what it was paid good money for it.

A person who falls in either of those last two categories is, of course, well placed to win their very own Tetherd Cow Aheadâ„¢ T-Shirt if they act quickly…

70 days and counting till Serenity! w00t!

Impress your less hip friends: get the Joss t-shirt from ThinkGeek (or buy it for me for my birthday) ;-) [Link]

Some interesting things I have learnt over the last few days:

☆ How to make Vietnamese coffee…[Link]

☆ That Sarah Bernhardt, the famous fin de siecle actress, was an amputee… [Link]

☆ That the Tango is an electric car that can travel at 100mph, looks like a Smart Car caught in a sandwich toaster and costs US$84,000.00… [Link]

☆ How to start a Flame War (thanks Anne)… [Link]

☆ How to make fancy stars in html…

I promise to use this knowledge for Good and not Evil.