I hear good things about Nathan's smell.

Bunk-bound, that's me.

Plus. The Wonder Bread factory of my 3rd grade field trip smelled strongly like burning rubber. Once they told us how 'fun' it was that you could make pencil erasers out of the bread (just roll it into a ball and wet is slightly)...complete with demonstration...I swore off the stuff.

Come to think of it, it always felt like rubber in my tumbly.

Now, I'm off to sniff Nathan in my dreams.

Oh yeah, I grew up in a coastal town that suffered (and doubtless still suffers) from awful red tide. The smell was terrible--exactly like diarrhea. I couldn't understand why anyone would buy the houses right along the worst stretch of beach, but they sold for lots of money. Craxy people! A lovely ocean view is not worth the price of not being able to open your windows all summer long.

I grew up in a town with an abitibi plant. I understand it moved on not long after I did. But the smell was both unpleasant and reassuring. As my dad's friends used to say, it smelled like money.

Otherwise, Alpena, MI mostly smelled like clean lake smells. There weren't many fish kills or other immediately obvious ecological disasters, so things smelled wet and green. I kinda miss that.

The thing with cowshit and chickenshit is that, free-range animals' poop doesn't really smell all that bad. I mean, it's not a walk in the arboretum, but it's an organic, basically recycled vegetation smell. When you drive by factory farms or chickenhouses (of which there are many in NC), what you get hit by is concentrated essence of the excreta of animals fed commercial feeds and mixes containing ground-up bits of their former compadres. And as we all know, the poop of carnivores smells a lot more nasty than that of herbivores.

Chickenshit smells worse than cowflop, anyway, and pigshit is worse than chickenpoop, even if the animals are healthy and free range, though.

ETA: For my money, though, Calli is right. The worst smell is wood fiber: wood pulp for OSB, plywood, chipboard. Urk. The second worst is papermills, which also use wood pulp, plus chemicals and other fibers.

And...I'll bet Mal was familiar with livestock, on his mom's ranch, and could tell if an animal was ill by the smell of its poop.

I'll bet the Alliance has a lot of papermills.

There exist Serenity action figures.

With NONE of the women. Pfeh.

[link]

Huh. Sounds like one of the action figures will be a Reaver.

If it wasna' for the Reavers, wha' wad ye do?

Dude. I so wanted a Kaylee action figure. With a toolkit, a parasol, a tiny wooden box of strawberries and a glitter-and-glue sign saying "Kaylee's Room." And a Simon action figure with sunglasses and a removable shirt. And Inara with a tea set and lots of different outfits. And Wash, with itty bitty dinosaurs and a stick-on/peel-off moustache. And River with a stick that turns into a gun into a stick. And Zoe. Just Zoe.

And miscellaneous accessories, like apples and cattle and a crate of contraband geisha bobble-heads.

Instead we get nothing but Mal and Alterna-Mal and Jayne and a possible Reaver. Lame, lame, lame.

They've only just started. Give them more time before writing them off.