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Y'know what really grinds my gears?

Started by Link Prime, 12 April, 2014, 01:47:44 PM

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ZenArcade

A bit of levity: if you all check out CF's last post (no pun intended) on page 26 of the Cellar of Dredd thread below; I think he has the solution to our problems! Z
Ed is dead, baby Ed is...Ed is dead

Dandontdare

When I was 15 I went on a 3 week exchange visit to Georgia (USA not Russia) in a group of 6 staying with families. It was August, incredibly hot and humid and one of the lads, a rather chubby fellow, did not shower at all for the first couple of weeks. I don't think I've ever met someone who smelled worse. Eventually the super-polite and hospitable host families asked their kids to have a quiet word with the rest of us asking us to have a word with him.

von Boom

Quote from: Dandontdare on 11 June, 2014, 03:21:46 PM
When I was 15 I went on a 3 week exchange visit to Georgia (USA not Russia) in a group of 6 staying with families. It was August, incredibly hot and humid and one of the lads, a rather chubby fellow, did not shower at all for the first couple of weeks. I don't think I've ever met someone who smelled worse. Eventually the super-polite and hospitable host families asked their kids to have a quiet word with the rest of us asking us to have a word with him.

Why am I picturing the soap in sock scene from Hamburger Hill?

The Doctor Alt 8

In one way it is nice to know that I am not hypersensitive and that other people  suffer from smellies.

On the other hand isn't it disturbing that there are people STILL SMELLING for non-medical, soap dodging issues?


ZenArcade

Plenty of lazy wee shites about is the long and short of it. Z
Ed is dead, baby Ed is...Ed is dead

Frank

Quote from: TordelBack on 11 June, 2014, 01:43:40 PM
I was Norm (as in the the actor Kevin Eldon ad)

Despite what THE ACTUAL RICHARD HERRING (1967) claims in the comments section of that video, and your obvious desire to be compared to a handsome celebrity, I'm pretty sure that isn't the actor Kevin Eldon. One of the other commentators has it right - it's the one of these who isn't Pat Sharp, Andy Crane, or a puppet.


SmallBlueThing

The use of deodorant and underarm hygiene is a fairly recent development hereabouts. My mum has told me how, when she met my dad, she had to force him to clean up his act because "back then, manly men didn't do it", and he thought it would be "effeminate". This would have been the mid sixties. I'm constantly amused that, when watching very old film stars going about their craft under studio lights (for instance Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in High Society, which I was watching today at work), they probably stank to high heaven.

I'm afraid I have to further embed the stereotype of the stinky geek- growing up, I started to frequent comic shops from the age of about twelve, and my memory is that they reeked ("like the Ancient Greeks!" as my youngest would say). FP2 and Comic Showcase were particularly nasty, as was wandering around the comic mart at Central Hall. And Purple Haze in Plymouth.

But for the ultimate, I have to recall the World Science Fiction Convention Bail-Out Fund Day, sometime back in the 80s. Where Michael Moorcock rubbed shoulders with Lisa Tuttle- and I'd imagine Lisa Tuttle ran away to puke out the window. That man honked. The level of stench in the Con Room was overwhelming- a conglomerate of BO-dripping pits from the assembled throng. Truly awful.

Also a Dr Who convention I once attended, somewhere or other back in the mists of time, was similarly like walking into a solid block of knob cheese and being forced to fill your lungs.

Nowadays I assume things are a little different, due to the proliferation of female ladies of the girl-persuasion at these things. Girls not tending to smell as bad as boys.

The whole stereotype of the greasy, spotty, social-awkward, plastic bag-carrying, stinky geek is a whole other conversation to be honest. Dr Who Magazine once ran a fantastic three part feature on the subject called "The Fan Gene" that was illuminating in the extreme, and should be read by anyone interested in the subject. The links it draws between this and certain Autistic Spectrum Disorders are quite telling, and certainly borne out in my experience, he says speaking Professionally for a moment.

SBT
.

Dandontdare

Quote from: SmallBlueThing on 11 June, 2014, 05:57:35 PM
like walking into a solid block of knob cheese and being forced to fill your lungs.

I always love your turn of phrase SBT, even if that one made me dry-heave a bit.

Frank

Quote from: SmallBlueThing on 11 June, 2014, 05:57:35 PM
I'm constantly amused that, when watching very old film stars going about their craft under studio lights (for instance Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in High Society, which I was watching today at work), they probably stank to high heaven

Clark Gable was notorious amongst his female co-stars for the fetid stench of his breath as he moved in for a big screen kiss. Your observation about the stars of the golden age will make watching Film Four on a weekday afternoon especially entertaining, but you only have to visit your local Post Office for evidence that standards of personal hygiene have improved in the last seventy years. And yes, I'd expect a more than average proportion of fans of geek culture lie somewhere on the spectrum.


M.I.K.

You know what's even worse than the stench of BO on a packed bus on a swelteringly hot summer day?

The combined stench of gallons of deodorants and perfumes completely failing to cover up the stench of BO on a packed bus on a swelteringly hot summer day.

Fungus

Quote from: M.I.K. on 11 June, 2014, 07:41:02 PM
The combined stench of gallons of deodorants and perfumes completely failing to cover up the stench of BO

Leaving the failing to cover up .... detail aside, I'm more familiar with the over-compensation that leads so many people to empty a can of Lynx over themselves at the gym. When I'm 4 foot away and selfishly trying to breathe. My dangerous tactic remains to cough at the slightest tickle to my delicate throat. Between this and walking into other pedestrians who are staring befuddledly down at the phone, I'll no doubt come to a sorry end. One day.

Have a BO story of a colleague but it's so ancient as to not count. But then as said, I may be the perp. Don't think so. Fungus is a name, not a condition.

(Quite a raw nerve this thread has touched...)

TordelBack

#326
Quote from: sauchie X on 11 June, 2014, 05:15:27 PM
Despite what THE ACTUAL RICHARD HERRING (1967) claims in the comments section of that video, and your obvious desire to be compared to a handsome celebrity, I'm pretty sure that isn't the actor Kevin Eldon.

I confess I didn't read the comments - I had just always thought that Kevin Eldon played Norm. as lomgas I've been aware of Elson's existence (which would be some time later).  In fact, it wasn't even that ad I was thinking of, it was an earlier one in the same campaign with the line 'that's not a skirt, it's a belt', which the amusing 'Compo' Maguire (two car accidents had bought him a house) used to greet me with of a morning, but I couldn't find a clip.  Maybe I retrospectively incorporated some Herring routine into my memories.  How peculiar! 

Frank

Quote from: TordelBack on 11 June, 2014, 09:49:12 PM
I confess I didn't read the comments

No-one should ever read the comments on anything anywhere. I'm just surprised mentioned of Pat Sharp didn't attract the usual fond reminiscences of the twins from Funhouse.


Trout

No, no, no.

The smelliest gathering of modern-day humans is a real ale enthusiasts' event or, more specifically, the day after one. I once had to visit the second day of a two-day organic beer conference (for a story) and it involved sitting in a small, hot room with a large group of very sweaty, hungover men farting like sickly cattle. It was horrendous. Indescribably bad, and actually a little distressing.

I thought, "Fuck this," and left. I never wrote the story.

JOE SOAP

#329
A horrible aspect of being stuck beside someone/something with a serious hum for a particular length of time is that the brain gradually acclimatises itself to the stench- filtering it out of awareness when it recognises the funk isn't life-threatening.

The nightmarish realisation that directly follows is that you've been breathing in lungfuls of some smelly cunt's emanation for feckin' ages.