These are a few of my favorite things...

So, I like living in New York. Most of the time. Not this morning, when it took me an hour and a half to get to work, again. But most of the time. And I'm reminded of how much I like to live here when I read the ridiculous headlines that pop up every few months.

Regard:

A Rotten Smell Raises Alarms and Questions -- yesterday, about a rotten egg/gas smell permeating most of Manhattan and parts of Jersey

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers -- late October of 2005, a sugary smell wafted over lower Manhattan

Sweet Smell Overtakes Manhattan, "Maple Syrup. Same As Last Time." -- last December (2005), same sugary maple syrup smell.

I love that the smell is news - I understand the gas smell being news because that's just scary. As "the nose", I am able to pick out the odor of gas pretty much everywhere - I've saved a few buildings by noticing pilot lights were out - but the maple syrup smell? That's just classic Manhattan craziness.


postscript - apparently the gas smell is now thought to be caused by a leak of the chemical mercaptan from a New Jersey power plant. Mercaptan, for all of your curious folk, is the rotten egg smell they add to natural gas to make it easily detected. Because gas doesn't actually smell. Awesome, huh?

UPDATE: I was misinformed. Turns out the smell was caused by a "temperature inversion" yesterday... ummmmm what? Here's the full text from the NYTimes:

"Yesterday’s lingering odor was attributed in part to a temperature inversion settling over the New York region. Of course, that wasn’t the first time this has happened. Before the Clean Air Act, such inversions were linked to hundreds of deaths, as they trapped the deadly toxins from the city’s factories and other agents of pollution.

Time Magazine’s archive has an interesting story about a 1966 inversion here.

It leads to a question some have raised following yesterday’s incident: have we become more senstitive to such odors in our atmosphere?"