Part of St. Louis smells like Tums. In Detroit, I lived across the street from a small bakery. That was heavenly (and high contrast to the look of the area).

I like the clean smell after a rain.

Note to Joss: Smell-o-vision!

Mmmmm, apple blossoms.

Jasmine is blooming riotously all over the East Bay right now. Walking past a jasmine plant climbing up a school fence on a warm, sunny afternoon=stoned with sensuous animal pleasure.

I do love Jasmine.

I walk into my house each evening: jasmine over the gate, lilac just inside the gate, lemon blossom three feet afterward. Happy, happy nose.

I have the sort of olefactory acuity that makes most smells wince-inducing but there are a few:

Hazelnut coffee beans. I never drink the stuff, but the smell of the beans makes me so happy, an old boyfriend once ground a bunch up and scattered them on the floorboards of my car. (shortsighted, of course, but romantic none-the-less)

Speaking of ocean...Crabtree & Evelyn's Jojoba products smell like I think the ocean should. My favorite manufactured smell of all time.

I'm with Aimee on the men smelling like fabric softener. It says to much!

eta: ::glances furtively at the thread title::

And I bet Mal smells GREAT. All hero-ey and stuff.

I just had the weirdest thought.

What would your favorite super hero smell like.

Even weirder thought...Mr. Incredible smells like the outside of a shampoo bottle.

Good LORD, I need to stop thinking immediately. Disaster may ensue.

Somehow, the earliest parts of my childhood (like Frank's, in Maine) are all populated by stinky smells.

I don't remember where, but there used to be a paper mill right on the highway (Rt. 1) somewhere between Kittery and Portland. Wow, it stank. Years and years later, when I was in college and we roadtripped up to Dixville Notch in NH, we passed through the mill town of Berlin and those not-from-around-here had to breathe through the Dunkin Donuts box. I was oddly nostalgic.

Before that, though, were the salt flats of Machias, way up the coast near Canada, when the tide was low. There was some kind of bridge from one part of town to another that went over the marshes, and the whole area smelled like farts.

I think my least favourite outside smell is sugar cane. My father still contends it doesn't have a smell, but when you mix its sweetness with car exhaust, I get headaches and need to vomit.

Actually, the smell of freshly manure-sprayed fields is kind of pleasant to me. It tells me that the cycle of growth is starting again and we will be getting fresh vegetables or animal feed from the field later in the year. It has potential. Not that I'd want to have to smell it all day long, although I did live across the road from a barnful of heifers for three years. You get inured to the smell of cow poo after awhile. My favorite smells are lilacs, the ocean and baby powder (with or without baby, but better with.)

My cousin Steve grew up in Northfield, MN, which is, despite what the package says, the home of Malt-O-Meal. You can usually smell different production days, but the most obvious is when they are making chocolate Malt-O-Meal. Everywhere you go in town the air smells like chocolate Malt-O-Meal. It swirls, and ebbs and flows around you, and the people smile a little more often.

One thing I miss from when I lived in CA is flowers that smell pretty. Flowers in Alaska generally don't smell, or at least not much. We do have lilacs, but you have to bury your nose in them. The local flowers that do smell, smell bad. I suppose that's no surprise with skunk cabbage, but chocolate lilies, which are beautiful and should smell nice, smell like a rather more unpleasant brown thing instead. My mom picked some before she new, and put them in the house where the warmth brought the smell out. Bad idea.

up until about 20 years ago Hills Brothers had a roastery perched right on the edge of the Bay

I can't believe I missed this. We didn't go over the Bay Bridge often as a kid, but you would think that I would have caught it sometimes. Bummer.

eta: oh, and topic, um... can't wait for the smell of film on the bdm!