Daily Rant  Big Rants

Odor De Jour Have you ever noticed how many things in the world have an extremely high odorific factor? It seems that either my nose has gotten more sensitive or the smell factor of the earth in general has gone up. To increase public awareness of nasal offenders, here is my abridged List of Things that Stink. 1. Unwashed bodies. Most of you are computer heads, you know it, you may deny it, but you know it. And I'll bet one or two of us has pulled that no-shower-for-a-week thing while working on something important (like playing games!). And then all of a sudden you stop and realize that no living organism will come within 5 feet of you. It's called "body cheese". Its that feeling that you get after working a 12 hour shift at McDonalds at the fryer bin, that feeling that you are wearing a translucent suit made of grease, dirt, and sweat. That's when you take a long hot shower before a judge slaps you with a restraining order citing "civilized man" as the defendant. 2. ScannerBoy's cat. I've known Scanner for 3 years or so now. Once I tricked him into becoming my roommate, he decided to get back at me by getting a cat. Now don't get me wrong, I love cats, hell I grew up on a farm, and it's impossible to not have a cat on a farm (unless you specifically hunt them down). But I have a bad allergy to most cats which will cause my sinuses to start beeping like a bomb and if I don't dope myself up on Benadryl (that crap should be sold on street corners by guys named No-Face, I swear) or leave the house everyone in a 1 mile radius gets covered in snot. Luckily for me, Cooter (no I have no idea where he decided that was a good name) was not one of those cats. Unfortunately for all of us in the apartment, he did come with one little teeny weeny problem. The cat is actually a secret Iranian chemical weapons facility dressed up in fur and claws. I personally think it's the mounds of wet cat food Scanner feeds him but whatever it is, that cat can clear a room faster than Barracuda after bad Serv-A-Lot. Imagine sitting at home watching Aliens on a huge custom home theatre system. (The kind that gets you arrested for noise violations) The cat wanders into the closet room that does double duty as the storage room and the home for the cat's litter box. Right about the time things are getting good in the movie (read: lots of gunfire) your entire frontal lobe is forced to shut down as your nose sends an enormous signal to your brain. The cat has struck again. You look to the cat room just in time to see the cat SPRINTING out of the room with his tail straight up in the air. You then know why your nose shut down to save your brain. I won't even try to describe the smell people, let's just say no one uses the TV room for 4 hours afterwards. 3. Quaker Oats cereal plants. I used to live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa because I got a cool job working for Mattel Interactive, NOT because I like Iowa. Anyways, Cedar Rapids is known for 2 things: about 50 Rockwell Collins buildings and the Quaker Oats cereal plants. Now, on good days (like Cap'n Crunchberries day) the plants give off sweet aromas the remind you of that time you ate 4 bowls of Apple Jacks as a kid and spent 2 hours on the toilet. On bad days, however, the smell of burnt corn flakes permeates the area, leaving behind a stench layer that doesn't wear off for days. 4. Barracuda. I have known 'cuda for over 5 years now, he's a really cool guy and he's funnier than hell. Unfortunately, his odor de derrier leaves a little something to be desired. Personally, I think he's in league with the terrorists in ScannerBoy's cat, he makes and tests the weapons, and the cat deploys them. The poor man has a small lactose intolerance problem (read: milk = weapon of mass destruction deployed from the south end of a northbound cuda) but I will never forget Black Saturday. There is a thing in the world of bologna called Serv-A-Lot is. It is summer sausage that is sold in one size: 1 meter logs. Yes, you could beat someone to death with a log of bologna if you tried. Anyways, so we're going to cuda's parent's house in South Dakota to go hunting. (yes, I was born and raised in the Midwest, where at least once a year thousands of men dressed in blaze orange armed with various weapons gather after a long night of drinking (complete with hangover), to stand in a cold wet field and freeze their asses off until the stroke of noon, at which time they walk through said field saying things like "here bird" and "get up bird" and if any living thing bigger than a field mouse but smaller than a man moves, it gets blasted by multiple barrel-fulls of high-speed lead.) Cuda's mom is nice as hell and goes out and blows $100+ on food for the great white hunters so they have things to eat when they come back from walking through weed-infested fields and shooting things. She buys not one but TWO logs of Serv-A-Lot (abbrev: SAL) and makes sandwiches. After eating the sandwiches and the rest of the groceries, expending all our ammo and drinking way too much beer, we get in the car to head home. But mom won't let her son go home without taking something with him so she gives us the extra log of SAL. This thing sits and ferments in the fridge for way over its allotted life span and one night 'cuda gets a hankerin for a sandwich and of course the only thing left to put on his bread is... that's right, REALLY old SAL. So he comes downstairs into the computer room, happily munching away on a Miracle Whip and SAL sandwich. We sit down to a good night of gaming and I forget about the SAL now in his GI tract. But the Nazi war criminal bastards in his stomach haven't forgotten about it. No, no, no, they are doing the dance of joy because we unknowingly equipped them with one of the most destructive chemical compounds known to man. Utilizing the extensive equipment already present in cuda's intestines, the mad scientists of bung are able to concoct their most fiendish creation yet. Meanwhile, Cuda and I are well into a fine night of gaming and all of a sudden I catch a whiff of the chemical aerosol that is now escaping from betwixt Cuda's gluteous maximus and time slows to a crawl. Allow me to try to describe the situation for you. The best I can do is the description of the spell Death Fog from D&D. As the "ghastly green-yellow cloud of noxious vapors" begins to fill up the computer room my hyper-sensitive nose (trained extensively by the cat and his litter box) detects the first wave of vapor and gives me enough time to yell "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES" and flee the basement to higher ground where I know the ghastly cloud cannot follow I highly recommend surgical removal of your nose. I suppose a noseplug would work too.