what is that horrible smell

a variation of this:

I was talking to a college roommate one night, sitting on his bed, just about nonsense. I asked him when he had gotten brown sheets and he told me that these were the same blue ones he had at the beginning of the semester, he just never washed them

I never set foot in his room again

hahaha
oh old pizza and brown sheets now that is what i am looking for

smelled like a bunch of mice were re-enacting the 120 days of sodom behind the sink.

― dr. strongo, Friday, December 2, 2011 2:16 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

also just recently we had so much bad food shoved way in the back of our refrigerator that waves of what could be charitably described as "period smell" used to waft through our kitchen at random times until we cleaned that bad boy out

― OH NOES, Friday, December 2, 2011 2:25 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

dying at both of these

my kitchen sink smells fucked up right now. i guess i need baking soda or something?

I bought my house in 2009 from an old widow who had lived there alone for 4 years or so, but who had moved into the house in the 1940s. It had a very particular smell of dust and decomposing chemicals from the upholstery and 40 years of greasy cooking and booze and whatever.

So I'm on the commuter bus heading home yesterday and a guy sits down next to me who smells just like my house before we cleaned it up and renovated. It wasn't "horrible" like rotten potatoes but it was pretty unpleasant to be rubbing up against him on a bus seat.

iirc the sheet revelation cued me into to some sensory clues that my mind was busily deflecting in order to preserve my sanity, like how the sheets felt vaguely wax-papery and how his bedroom smelled faintly like old ham

xp: my math is somewhat off there. She got the house in the late 50s.

There's a water treatment plant a couple miles from our house which, thankfully, only smells when you are directly next to it. But sitting at the stoplight adjacent to it is pure torture, even with the windows rolled up tight and the vents shut. I've gagged many a time sitting there.

not really related but this just reminded me: i had no idea till i moved to the US that "skunk" is called that because it actually smells like a skunk... i always thought it was just because it was strong-smelling, LIKE a skunk.

― smoove operator, Friday, December 2, 2011 7:19 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

I don't understand at all. You thought that skunks were called that b/c they smelled strong like a skunk, not b/c they actually smelled the way a skunk does? I'm trying to understand but there's something I'm not getting.

Mostly I came here to say that this thread title sounds like the name of an Onion infographic, e.g., What Are We Yelling About?

I remember in high school, a bunch of us spent a week at the U of MN at a high school journalism camp where due to a mixup jjj and I were not rooming together as planned. We were in jjj's room where we'd ordered a pizza and were sitting around bullshitting and eating when jjj's roommate came in and freaked the fuck out. You would have thought we were frying durian in cat diarrhea based on his reaction, which included angry shouts of "WHAT IS THAT DISGUSTING STENCH" and "GET PERMISSION BEFORE YOU JUST BRING A PIZZA INTO SOMEONE'S ROOM, GAAAAAAAWD!" Of course we were all "um yr roommate is right here and he said it was okay, so whatever" and continued eating.

I want to say he ran out of the room and we hid the pizza box under his bed but I might be making that up.

xp: Jesse, "'skunk'" = "'mary jane'" = "'ganja'"

tbf I will probably kick somebody out of my house for bringing in the horrible stench of dominoes

Holy shit. I read a comment on FB a while back that is perfect for this thread. I have to find it!

xp- Ooooohhhh! Now I understand. Thank you.

steady larfs at my desk, keep it up

lol

IIRC it was some local campus pizza place (which may or may not have been a Dominos now that I think about it)

green peppers smell atrocious on pizza, but it's not like old canteloupe.

also the worst smelling old lady perfume from clinique is obviously YOUTH DEW

maybe that's estee lauder?

youth dew vs. creamofsumyunguy

I found it! A guy posted this comment to a friend's FB post about a stinky train car:

When we lived in the city, I was quite tired one winter morning and wearily took the dog for her morning walk. I rushed back to the apartment, got my bag, headed for the bus stop. I get on at LaSalle and Goethe. At LaSalle and Division, a homeless guy gets on and, of course, sits next to me. It is at that time I smell the strong odor of shit. FML. But, by the time we get to Oak St, the bus is packed and there is nowhere to go, so I just stay put. I get off at LaSalle & Adams, head to the office at the CBOE, the shit smell still haunting me. I get into the office, reach into my jacket pocket for my keys, and find a bag of dog shit, no doubt put there during my dog walk just 20 minutes earlier!

OH NOES otm - we don't have skunks where i come from, so i had no idea what one smelled like. i wonder how many other people are completely ignorant of this.

xp: oh god, I have a story like that

We were visiting friends in town and their condo had this awful, horrific smell in it that seemed to have no origin; everywhere we went, it was there. We thought we had tracked it down to some spots on the stairs outside their door and the husband, who was head of their condo association, typed up this long letter about cleaning up after spilling things in public spaces and taped it on the front door of the building.

After about 10 minutes of conversation we decided to leave because the smell just wouldn't go away. We walked outside and I noticed some reasonably fresh dog shit someone had neglected to pick up with a noticeable footprint in it. It jumped out at me because the footprint matched the tread on the bottom of my shoe. Basically, in our quest to find this smell that was magically following us everyone, I managed to track dog shit around their entire condo and halfway up the carpeted stairs in the common space.

Oops.

why do I have so many of these stories, clearly I am a disgusting beast

haha I was just gonna comment about how half this thread is HI DERE posts

the other half is me! i am disgusting but also have a lot of smell-related memories.

I've never had to deal with skunk spray close up, mainly just smelled it in roadkill-passing; from a distance and with brief exposure, I actually kinda like it.

i usually like skunk smell too but as i mentioned, i am disgusting.

I don't mind dead skunk smell, if dead skunk smell is what I think it is

WHAT

SKUNK SPRAY IS THE WORST FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD

gagggagaggrrgrrglaaaaaaaaaa verging on retching just thinking about the time my childhood cat tangled with a skunk, that was not good times

they don't have to be dead!

xp says the guy who wore lysol perfume

http://www.sinpets.com/dogpix/20070727Coprophagia_homebreeder_Samoyed_ToaPayohVets.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSKHUcenqHs

I managed to track dog shit around their entire condo and halfway up the carpeted stairs in the common space.

I have done this. Ugggh!

Old skunk a ways away is okay. Fresh skunk real close will shut you down

xp did the shit hit the fan?

I have done a similar thing as the man with the dog shit in his pocket, except it was a purse that the cat peed on.

I would rather BATHE in cologne than smell a skunk up close ever again

I would rather soak for an hour in DRAKKAR than smell something sprayed by a skunk again, words cannot adequately describe the physical PRESENCE of that smell; the closest I can get is the aggressive BO you sometimes run into on public transportation that mashes so many terrible smells together that the overwhelming scent your brain can process is "stale saliva".

at work there was one set of cubicles which always emitted the weirdest scent. it was as if food had gone sour and someone had vomited in response to that, and then someone took Lysol to try to cover up the sour food and vomit.

I would rather soak for an hour in DRAKKAR

hahaha what about TWO HOURS?!
you're right though -- the amalgamated stench of super old BO is what makes me retch on the most regular basis

Good lord is that Samoyed cute.

Now that we're through mowing for the winter and the trees have dropped their leaves all over the yard, I'm very nervous about tracking dogshit into the house.

xp: don't smell its breath

I think the worst smell ever in my mind is associated with a mental image of a pair of very old red sweatpants that have never, ever been washed

I lived in a total shithole when I first moved out on my own and we had tons of mice. One night my roommate and I were watching TV when we were overwhelmed by a horrible smell. After some inspection he realized it was coming from my chair. Pulling away the cushion revealed that I'd been sitting on a rotten dead mouse for a couple hours. NBD.

Mild, far-off skunk smell is sort of intriguing, but skunk roadkill is bad, (god help if you were the one to hit it) and skunk spray on a dog is worse. My poor childhood dog got sprayed in the face and we tried everything to wash it off (including tomato juice, which did nothing) but it hung on for months. She also got a face full of porcupine quills, and there is no question that a face full of quills is easier to handle than a face full of skunk musk. Not even in the same ballpark.

xps OH NOES OTM. It's just impossible to handle.

more xps

http://damnyouautocorrect.com/images/surprise-mom.jpg

One of my proudest public transit moments was when I led my inlaws between the cars on a moving train because we boarded a car on which a man who had shit his pants approximately three weeks ago and had yet to clean them was taking a nap. Even better, the car we crossed into smelled like vanilla butter cookies, no lie.

i met this dude at a bar once 4 years ago, halloween karaoke party, he was wearing nothing but a one piece shiny gold spandex jump suit type thing as if he was some generic superhero like "solid gold man" or something, and wafting off of his body was the most confusingly awful scent.

like there's BO, and then there's the next-level cottage-cheese-in-the-desert-heat-mixed-with-pickle-brine poupourri that was drifting towards my nostrils in what i swear were visible stink lines.

our cat tangled with a skunk once when I was a kid, which did have a semi-funny ending because before the skunk encounter she was grey and white and afterward, when we pour several cans of tomato juice over her in a fruitless attempt to remove the smell, she ran away before we could wash her off so for several weeks she was stained dark pink and light pink

!!! haha wtf

lol car talk gets bad smell q's all the time. iirc the answer is to take it to a body shop.

there was one where a guy's buddies pranked him by hiding a fish in the vents or something

Maybe advice for d - http://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/features/fido/zeolite.html or http://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/features/fido/ozone.html

ta!

No smell as yet i've the soda left on it and will hoover tonight before checking status

why are you putting coke on it? gross

simpsons

all i'm sayin

simpsons

The odor that you may smell on the 9th floor is due to an oil delivery to the building early this morning. I have spoken to the building security and they have checked our floor and now that the ventilators are running – the odor should be eliminated shortly.

If you have any problems, please see me at once.

parents are boiling seaweed again