There are a lot of bad smells in the world. Among them, some have attained "legendary status": skunk, any kind of crap, limburger cheese (seriously, how could anyone eat that stuff?)...
But I've smelled something far worse. No matter how many sewage plants or dead animals I drive by, there will always be one odorous memory that haunts me more than any other. I could give you 1,000 guesses, and there's no way you'd get it (unless you glanced down and saw the picture below).
Yeah, the worst smell in the world is an orange peel.
You are probably in squinting your eyes, shaking your head, thinking, "Jon is an idiot." And that last part may be true, but I assure you, the picture above represents one of the worst smells, nay experiences, of my life. Here's the story:
I spent some time in "East Asia" (pardon the secrecy) about 5 years ago. My roommate while there was an old friend of mine, Greg Del Moro.
- [Tangent-within-a-tangent: As you might have already realized, the name Greg Del Moro is extremely similar to the name Gregor Mendel. So we usually called Greg by the name Gregor Mendel-moro or just "the father of genetics".]
Apparently the people of that part of the world find that orange peels help keep a fridge or room fresh and pleasant? And while this might be true of a peel that's one or two days old (I wouldn't know, I've never dared experiment with such a monstrous power), the one in our fridge must have been rotting for months.
If you google "orange peel uses" or "orange peel scent", you will actually find tips for how orange peels can freshen the air -- while they're being boiled. And I can attest to this, as just tonight my roomate boiled some orange peels while making cider. Yeah, my roommate makes cider.
Questions for you to ponder/answer:
- Do you have any stories of something that smelled surprisingly awful?
- Do you have any friends with sweet nicknames like "the father of genetics"?
Jon
I had just finished eating an orange before I read this. I'm glad I ate first and read second.
ReplyDeleteOnly have an answer for #1:
ReplyDeleteOK, so my parents made a Ham stu/soup one year (I think it was made with the Christmas leftover ham or something). There was plenty of that leftover, so they decided to store it in the outside closet to our house (it was cold enough to keep it preserved (since it was December)).
Let's just say, we forgot it was in there for a while. A LONG while. If I remember correctly, I was commissioned to dispose of it during summer break in like August (yes, like 8 months later). However, I couldn't just throw the pot away, it was one of my mom's favorite pots, so I had to extract the solution inside and transport it into a trashbag.
When the seal was cracked when I lifted that lid off the pot, whooooowee, that smell hit me like an ACME anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon. I believe I described it as "if vomit could vomit, that's what it would smell like". The whole time I'm trying to transfer this hazardous waste into a trashbag, I'm trying to prevent myself from adding to the disgusting filth by barfing. Let's just say, I'm more proud of myself by keeping that in than any other moment in my life.
This one time in college, a milk jug fell behind our trash can. This jug had NOT been washed out. It also had the cap on it. When we found it it was bulging like a balloon!! We were trying to move it carefully; however, it burst while in our apartment. The smell of aged, rotten milk is extremely putrid and is very hard to remove from the environment. This smell was awful.
ReplyDeleteAnd Jon, ORANGE PEELS!?!? I think you're the only person I've ever heard complain about the smell of them. You're ridiculous.
The worst smell in the world is SURELY rotting potatoes. Oh my gosh. I can't take even the thought of it.
ReplyDeleteI have an idea. Let's get a big container, throw in orange peels, potatoes, milk, and leftover Christmas ham soup, and put it in a warm, sealed, undisclosed location for a full year. Then we can all gather to open it and revel in the horrifying funk we've unleashed. Maybe it'll even have mutated into some sort of living entity. We should bring a camera, just in case. It could become the next Blair Witch Project, and we'd all be rich.
ReplyDeleteOn second thought, the container I just envisioned sounds eerily close to what a composter is. So I'll go with "year-old compost heap" as the worst smell in the world.
Since no one took the awesome nicknames bait, I'll jump on it...
ReplyDeleteThe sweetest nickname I know of doesn't belong to a person, but an animal. My friend has an abnormally large cat that his family refers to as...
wait for it...
"The Four-Legged Belly"
The worst smell I've ever been hit with was in Nicaragua at LaChureca.... just look it up online and you'll understand why. It was so hard to reconcile the fact that families and children were living here. Sometimes when walking by dumpsters or trash cans left outside, I get this unpleasant wiff of stench. While I want to gag, at the same time I am thankful of the daily reminder that I was blessed by God to be born in a country and into a family where I did not have to live that way. Still, the worst smell ever!
ReplyDeleteand talk about reverse psychology... reading about your orange peel experience made me want to eat a clementine (which I am currently doing and it's pretty good smelling!)
ReplyDelete