Swampy, you’ve never experienced pole-cat till you’ve experienced it up close and personal. I had a little Dobe bitch with a bizarre sense of prey drive who got skunked FIVE times! “Here, girl! Here, girl! Ach? Yetch!!! BLEACHK!!” She also came out on the short end of the stick in a confrontation with a porcupine, but that’s a whole other story.
Ha! There’s nothing stinkier than people. I live on the Mexican border and about half of the homes don’t have working bathrooms, half of those empty into the New River that also carries all the industrial waste right on into town on our side.
Some days the stink has colors. Different colors burn your eyes in different ways.
[Gomez Addams] Cara Mia! You make my Castillian blood boil! [/Gomez Addams]
I empathize with you folks who live within smelling distance of farms. But there is one smell I hope I never have to experience again. Margarine is made from canola. Canola is the nice, inoffensive name of what used to be called rapeseed. When rapeseed is being processed, it creates a sickening stench for miles around. Its aroma, for want of a better word, is indescribable. It makes people get in their cars and drive somewhere far away from that smell until they absolutely have to return home. Ugh!
SSgtBaloo: I know what you’re talking about. Well, kind of. There’s a Simplot cattle farm more than a few miles off-base here. When the wind kicks up just right (and there’s a pretty high tolerance for “just right” in this case), it’s awful. I’ve heard it referred to as “the smell of money”. Excuse me? It ain’t my money. And it’s stinkin’ up the joint!
Alright - I am new to the SDMB; however, I should now be a “charter member” due to the outlay of $4.95, and I have been a devotee of Uncle Cecil since I was knee high to a grass hopper . . . anyway - I read a fair number of the responses to the “nocturnal_tick” . . . please forgive me if my post is not up to the typical SDMB protocols:
From the available facts (i.e. the pervading smell of rotten eggs), I am of the opinion there was a release of sewer gas in the querier’s proximity. That said, sulfur dioxide is a toxic gas (potentially fatal if a given atmosphere is too high in sulfur dioxide concentration) with a particularly noxious odor.
I seriously doubt the “nocturnal_tick” was in any real danger (barring olfactory unpleasantness); however, I would say the septic/sewer systems of the university are the most likely culprit of the offending stench. The chemistry dept. may also bear a closer need a closer look, as student chemists (both grad and undergrad) have been known to generate, and usually inadvertantly, release high stench compounds.
I hope this reply has been helpful,
Yours in the Straight Dope-
-IUchem
I was driving to college today just casualling listening to my Alanis (OK I was singing along as well) when through the air vent I get this whiff of something pretty funky. But it wasn’t that bad and living out in the country if you’re not used to some strange smells then what the hell are you doing out here? Anyway, so I finally get to college, park up as usual and open my door to step out.
:eek:
Never again will I be able to open my door without some sense of impending doom. The smell just hit me like a sack of bricks and it was nasty. I don’t know if it was trash day or something but it didn’t even smell like trash. It smelt like someone had bought 5 dozen eggs and tried to do a “Cool Hand Luke”, then having completed their mission placed their butt upon my nose and let a mighty one rip! The worst thing was that it didn’t just smell like rotten eggs. It smelt like… gravy.
I mean gravy? How can gravy smell that bad? The entire college site stank of the stuff. Oh man am I glad to be home. :smells air: Ahhhhhhh.
[/QUOTE]
" I am of the opinion there was a release of sewer gas in the querier’s proximity." :eek:
And welcome to the SDMB, IUchem!
Living in the country all of my life, I’ve had the pleasure of smelling the offal of most farm animals. They don’t hold a candle to a veal barn.
The stench coming from a local veal barn is enough to bowl over even the most olfactory challenged. I can’t even describe it other than to take the most rancid “farm smell” you can think of and multiply it by 100,000,000,000 and you might have an idea.
I have an issue with veal anyway and to smell the fruits of that farmer’s labor is enough for me to donate my life savings to PETA. Well, not really, but it’s absolutely awful.
Naw. MSOE.
The smell I’ll thinking of isn’t the brewery; that’s a different, horrible stench. This is not sewage, not lake-y, not industrial…more like organic and rotting. It def smells brown.
I live near a paper plant (near North Ave and the River) and that has its own ‘yummy fragrance’.
Another one that comes around once a year is the late spring kill-off of the alewives. For those unable to sample the scent and unfamiliar, its a massive die off of millions and millions of small fish, minnows really. They wash up on the beaches and rot and rot and rot. In all fairness, this is a Lake Michigan thing and happens too in my native Chicago.
This local article sums it up:
http://www.jsonline.com/outdoors/jun99/ale29062899.asp
My University campus is located on the edge of town; a town which is surrounded by farmland. Get the winds blowing in the right direction and the city is blanketed in the arromatic stench of fresh cow dung. It’s wonderful :rolleyes:
I have been known to comment that “If that’s the ‘smell of money’, then it’s a damn good argument for laundering the stuff!”
–SSgtBaloo
Another “welcome to the boards” from me as well. With the style you’ve got there I think we have a possible SDSAB here.
BTW, I prefer just nocturnal_tick. The “the” makes me seem more important than I could ever be. 
Also, UK college is not the same as US college. I am pretty much coming to the end of what you would consider high school. My being in close proximity to a release of sewer gas is pretty much a no-no. My college is pretty much surrounded by fields (with plenty o’ cows) and no sewers nearby. However it was trash day, so that may have had some bearing.
Why though, did it smell like gravy? I mean gravy is a nice smelling foodstuff, not a stinky, yucky smell.
Oh and from my house to my college the fields are full of Rape being grown so that may be the stinky stuff, does it smell like gravy?
Sorry for the double post.
swampbear, Tupug, I kind of like a faint whiff of skonk. Just not in the house, please.
I had an old camp up in Maine, and I tore up the kitchen floor to repair it. Along comes, at 3am, big ol’ skunk up through the hole, attracted by cat food in the kitchen. Mother cat is snuggled up with her kittens next to the cat-bowl. I’m zzzzing upstairs.
I’m awakened by a loud snarl of feline annoyance, but after that I hear nothing more, and so I go back to sleep. A few minutes later, creeping up the stairs, comes a smell loud enough to wake me again – even were I dead. Skunk, like it’s never been smelled. Skunk, with a soul-sonic force that made my eyes water and my breath short. Extinction-level-event skunk. The only thing I could do was to pull the cats’ sleeping box into a far corner, put fans in the windows facing outward, and go walking around the village until the sun came up. And the camp smelled of skunk forevermore, especially when it rained…
You know what it smelled like, most? Onions. Several billion sliced onions.
Unforgettable. And yechhh.
I live right near Pfizer’s biggest plant (apparently - that’s what the Pfizer letter they mailed to everyone said).
When I drive beside it, I occasionally get a wiff of (from what I remember from my deer cleaning days) what smells a LOT like deer urine. Yeah. Funky.
Oh yeah.
Polecat’s not just a southern word. I first learned it from my northern-LP MI and northern Ohio relatives. I’ve had to break myself of the habit of polecat, because everyone just stares at me blankly.
I’m not aware that they give off any odor while growing. I think it has to do with them being at the plant, having been crushed and boiled. That’s what makes the stench. As I recall, it didn’t smell anything like gravy. This was a truly fetid stench.