“Why aren’t you in class or on the courts?” asked a guest, rustling the calm of the sun-soaked corridor of Total Tennis (TT), a summer camp for teen women. “The campanile bell rang at 6:00 a.m.” “Yes, ma’am,” replied Marina, a 19-year-old counselor-in-training. “Monday through Saturday, before breakfast, we’re all supposed to take a workshop. Yesterday mine was Better Backhand. Today it’s Kinesiology.” The student could explain Kinesiology to this new lady but decided not to since she had a …
Tag: Chemistry
Digging into the Chemistry of the Creepy Smells of Blood, Death, and Darkness
When we think of scary, we ordinarily think of the sights–dark hallways and spider webs, bloody masks and crumbling gravestones, and to a lesser extent, sounds–creaking doors and spooky voices–cue Vincent Price’s Witchcraft Magic!–but what about creepy smells? So many write about the nostalgic scents, the comforting ones of kitchens and gardens, lime-flower tea and madeleines, but what about those creepy smells we prefer to avoid or forget–those of blood and the grave, caves and decay? What makes them provoke …
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From Art to Bats: Review of Perfumes The Guide 2018 by Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez
Perfumes: The Guide 2018 presents more than 1,200 perfume reviews by Tania Sanchez, a writer with interests in perfume, aesthetics and culture, and Luca Turin, a biophysicist, perfume critic and olfaction-science rabble-rouser of The Emperor of Scent fame, and accomplishes its mission to assert perfumery as an art form, worthy of criticism. I discovered their first guide Perfumes A-Z while researching Aroma Victoriana, where I quoted their admonishment of the perfume industry and its medieval secrecy–a secrecy that has helped …
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A Conversation with Dr. Hoby Wedler, Blind Chemist, About Wine Tasting, Sensory Literacy, and the Glorious Smell of Wet Pavement
A nice metaphor brought to us from the world of wine is that happy grapes don’t make for good wines. Grapes need to work hard under stressful conditions in order to produce their deliciousness. Hoby Wedler, an organic chemist turned entrepreneur selected as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Food & Drink, who also happens to be blind since birth, offers as an example the happy Cabernet grapes grown in the Central Valley of California. They are watered, get …