Pascal Dangin, the premier retoucher of fashion photographs, casually admits he’s “complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body,” particularly those of women, so it pleases me to see he’s a fat French guy who I can imagine jerking off to jpegs of Alyson Hannigan in his rec room. In fact, like Dangin, “I look at life as retouching,” so I’m going to retouch that as fact:

Pascal Dangin is a fat French guy who jerks off to jpegs of Alyson Hannigan in his rec room.

That is intriguing, but left unanswered by the profile of Dangin in this week’s New Yorker is how he realizes his ideas of physical perfection when no such thing exists (although I read somewhere that this process might be intertwined with his masturbatory tendencies), the ridiculousness inherent in everyone knowing fashion photos are heavily retouched but the practice continuing, and why Dangin activated his 25-pixel Obfuscate Brush in Photoshop to recast onetime girl-next-door Drew Barrymore as a melty wax figurine for the March cover of Vogue. (The Jezebel article doesn’t mention it but the New Yorker article confirms the cover is Dangin’s uncredited work.)

I can’t decide if this Danny Shanahan cartoon from the August 27th issue of The New Yorker is a tribute to Gary Larson’s Far Side panel shown below, a ripoff, or just a coincidence.

I think Shanahan is reaching with the “funny” pun; it took me a while to realize that, oh, it’s a clown the elephant has stepped on and clowns are funny. See, it’s a play on words.

Larson is more to the point, and you can’t deny the humor in the grimace-face of the flattened caveman. If I remember the history behind Larson’s cartoon correctly, he couldn’t even get it by the censors at his syndicate, and it either lay unpublished for years or ran with a watered down version of the caption (“I THOUGHT I heard something squeak.”).

I don’t like to admit I read Rolling Stone occasionally, but I do, usually on flights because it goes down real simple, like that diet of plain white toast and water you get on right after you’ve been vomiting a lot. The magazine’s celebrating its 40th anniversary, or at least that was the most recent issue put out at the lone gift shop in the Akron Canton Airport, but I did learn a few things:

1. Putting his fearsome musical prowess to the side, McCartney still comes across as sort of a twat to me.
2. Bob Dylan is the most difficult musician to interview because he’s not up on the whole “talking about his methods of composition” or “answering yes or no questions.” Jann Wenner spends approximately half of the interview chiding him for being so catty and asking each question multiple ways to elicit answers that never arise.
3. I thought it was kind of funny that they would run one of those high-school humor sexist ads for Axe body spray adjacent the opening page of Jane Fonda’s interview.
4. Chip Kidd explains that the meaning of his cover design was to enlarge the letter combination “Ro” in the Rolling Stone logotype until it resembled a “40.” But in fact it merely resembles a blown-up “Ro.”

I wanted to source the quote “News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising” and what better reference than the internet. Or not.

Unbeknownst to me, this “news/advertising” aphorism is stockpiled often by those grubby quote-compilation sites, nearly none of which ever source anything. I like sourcing. I need sourcing. It’s my journalistic background tapping my shoulder.

Google muddied the waters. One site alleged the words were spoken/written by Harold Evans, an editor of the London Times. An Australian site begged to differ, offering Henry Northcote, also known as “the first Baron Northcote.” The majority of the sites pinned the quote on Rubin Frank, billed as a former NBC News president, except that his name isn’t Rubin it’s Reuven. And there are a growing number of sites purporting the quote to be one from Bill Moyers. It’s easy to see how this evolved: a 2003 article in the Christian Science Monitor quoted Moyers as saying “We’re trying to get the truth behind the news.... Someone once said that news is what’s hidden; everything else is advertising.” And before you know it, sites were attributing the quote to Bill. According to one of these:

“I came to see that news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity.”

—Bill Moyers in speech responding to charges by Kenneth Tomlinson of liberal bias at PBS.”)

In short, sourcing stuff on the badlands of the net can be a futile exercise. Take a browse through urban-legend debunker Snopes.com to find many examples of attributable text that, seemingly the instant your Mom emails it to her bridge group, suddenly gets misattributed, added to, deleted from, then misattributed some more, like, most classically, that Mrs. Fields cookie recipe or more recently, this Dave Barry list. Why would someone mangle something written by someone else or switch attributions for no discernable reason? “Dropped on their heads at birth, perhaps?” guesses Barry.

But this is the natural progression of notable quotes, merely sped by technology. There was a great article by Louis Menand in the February 19th issue of The New Yorker, a review of the Yale Book of Quotations that notably notes, “Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.” At length:

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in Casablanca says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.

Here’s where the smoothness comes into play:

What Michael Douglas did say in Wall Street was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was not a quotable quote; it needed some editorial attention, the consequence of which is that everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words “Greed is good” in Wall Street.

I know what Menand’s saying. An English professor of mine in college frequently used the quote, “We live by selected fictions,” which he attributed to Lawrence Durrell. It was one of my favorites then (and still) though I wavered when I read Durrell’s novel Balthazar years later and discovered the actual wording is the much more prosaic and less memorable:

“We live,” writes Pursewarden somewhere, “lives based upon selected fictions.”

Essence distilled, lesson learned. I must adapt to live with misattribution and inaccuracy, at least in my spicy quotes.

A guy I work with convinced me to enter last week’s New Yorker Caption Contest with him. For this drawing by J.C. Duffy, he developed his potential entries separately (and I never did get to see them) while I cranked out 10 off the top of my head in five minutes and passed them along to him for review.

1. Bring a salad. We’re having rump roast for dinner.
2. Why, yes, I would be interested in supporting a concealed firearms proposition.
3. We tried spraying but every year it seems like there’s more of them.
4. Believe me, it’s not all thrills and wonderment under the big top.
5. Then it hit me: the bars of the cage are wide enough to walk through!
6. No, I’m on a land line. Those are whip cracks, not static.
7. I’m not too worried. Mortise-and-tenon joints are the strongest in woodworking.
8. Just maul him? Now why didn’t I think of that?
9. It’s the only exercise he gets and he could stand to lose a few pounds.
10. I can’t complain. I’ve got my health.

Because the contest allows only one entry per household, our aim was to narrow the list to those most in the New Yorker style. What’s that? As Potter Stewart once said, I know it when I see it. If pressed, I would say it generally caters to a white, well-moneyed, overeducated (people who will feel a secret rush when they “get” a literary or cultural reference that would be lost or overlooked by someone like their doorman), East-Coast or New York-dwelling audience familiar with the regimen of dysfunctional-relationship cocktail-party therapist-couch middle-management desk-job existentialism. I mean, if we’re stereotyping here.

Anyhow, we agreed the most New Yorkerish were 1 and 6. Number 10 is also really New Yorkerish and I like it but my problem with it is that it’s too general and could be applied to any number of the magazine’s man-and-woman or person-and-animal one-panel bon mot cartoons.

I think 3 is funny but I suspect it’s a Far Side caption. (Let me know if you do; I can’t be bothered to look it up.) My initial favorite was 7 because I enjoy the semi-obscure specificity of mortise-and-tenon but as I step back now to consider the caption as a whole, I don’t get it. “Needs work,” a teacher would write on my paper.

The biggest problem arising from some of my ideas is that it’s unclear who in the panel the telephone conversation is referring to, especially 8 and 9.

My coworker and I agreed that, if we were gambling men, 6 would be my best bet. It’s cutesy but not as much as 1, which has a sort-of Gahan Wilson macabre-lite humor. And anyway, first-tries are never right, are they?

But the best part of this anecdote was when I completely forgot to submit my entry by the deadline of 11:59 last night, in part due to my tuxedo adventure. The guy I work with forgot, too. Ha ha! I’ll be interested to see the three finalist captions and whether they bear any resemblance to mine so I can grouse about it.

I don’t have as much a problem with transparency and bias in the media as I do with journalists just getting the story and getting it right.

Remember that statistic I referenced last month about 51% of American women living without a spouse? That was from a front-page New York Times article on January 16th that ended up spurring analysis across the media spectrum, plus snide comments about the photo of the single woman petting her cat.

This Sunday there arrived a little-ballyhooed follow-up article on the Op-Ed page of the Times by public editor Byron Calame, who pointed out that the only case in which the 51% statistic is true is when the survey data is expanded to count teenagers aged 15 through 17 as “spouseless women.” As you might guess, nearly 90% of those girls live with their parents.

Although the range of ages used in collecting the survey data was noted in the article, it was buried below the 20th paragraph in mentions that were either inaccurate or minimal. So the central point of a front-and-center article in one of the country’s most esteemed newspapers was just plain inaccurate/misleading.

There’s more: an unsettling suggestion of editorial finagling to promote the story’s position over its clarity. An early draft seen by Calame mentioned the survey’s age range much earlier and more clearly. As a Times deputy national editor told Calame, the assertion that more women in America are living without a husband than with one “probably lifted this story onto the front page.”

Post-Jayson Blair, the Times has sanded down some of its classic self-righteousness by appointing a public editor and running extensive corrections daily. But as these elements make clear, the Times screws up often in ways great and small. Worst, this article was piddly in the grand scheme, nothing like a strong exposé dealing with politics, government or business; makes me wonder what’s getting misreported elsewhere. Trust no media fully!

O.K., so, from today’s Washington Post (“U.N. Climate Panel Says Warming Is Man-Made” by Juliet Eilperin):

There is no longer any reasonable doubt that human activities are warming the planet at a dangerous rate, according to a new worldwide assessment of climate science released today by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

With at least 90 percent certainty, the IPCC’s “Summary For Policymakers” concludes human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half century. Hundreds of scientists from 113 countries prepared the report, which represents the most comprehensive overview of scientific climate research since 2001.

I wonder about that 90% figure, particularly here in the U.S. Why? Let me give you some other percentages of certainty:

1. As recently as last February, 29% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
2. More than half of Americans say God created humans in their present form.
3. More than 75 percent of Americans agree with health professionals that obesity is a serious problem. Yet two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, more than half don’t get the recommended amount of physical activity and 25 percent get almost no exercise at all.

In other words, despite strong evidence to the contrary, people will stick with their own ill-informed ideas and actions. Yee haw! Let’s keep up with those record carbon emissions and continue to scratch our heads over the disappearance of Arctic ice, rising sea levels and record heat waves. I’m pretty sure all those things are temporary anyway and have something to do with the sun orbiting a bit closer to the Earth than normal.

Sources

1. The New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted Feb. 22-26, 2006, cited in “Few Americans Perceive Hussein-9/11 Link,” Mar. 1, 2006, Angus Reid Global Monitor
2. “Poll: Creationism Trumps Evolution/Most Americans Do Not Believe Human Beings Evolved,” CBS/AP poll, Oct. 22, 2005
3. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, quoted in “Americans Missing the Boat on Fitness,” Nutrition Health Review, Fall 2004

Interesting reportage by Sam Roberts in the New York Times today, that 51 percent of American women live without a spouse:

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results. [...] Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Although that’s a revealing, far-reaching statistic, I can’t believe the Times chose a photo of a single woman petting her cat to illustrate the article.

“Better than a photo of her eating a pint of Häagen-Dazs,” the photo editor probably reasoned.

On my subway ride back from my plane ride back from Cleveland tonight, I read an engrossing article in Vanity Fair about Esquire in the ’60s, when its editorial and design departments kicked ass (“The Esquire Decade” by Frank DiGiacomo.)

To gain heavyweight champ Sonny Liston’s trust for this now-classic cover photo, the salty and savvy adman/designer George Lois invited a cherubic, white eight-year-old girl to the shoot so Liston wouldn’t be as much his surly self and drop as many F-bombs. An outtake photo shows the boxer forcing a smile in the Santa hat as the smiling girl cuddles up to him, probably an infinitely more discomfiting cover image to the cracker Esquire-buying public in December 1963 than the shot that was used.

Sports Illustrated later noted that Liston looked like “the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney.” And Esquire’s ad director, who suggested at the time that Lois “refrain from putting a black Santa on its cover until Saks Fifth Avenue put one in its stores,” later estimated the magazine lost $750,000 in revenue from advertisers who pulled out of the issue. But that year, Esquire would hit an all-time high circulation of just under 900,000 and was on its way to becoming perhaps “the great American magazine of the 1960s.”

Today, Donald Trump forgave Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner for her alleged trespasses of underage drinking and hot girl-on-girl action. This reminds me a lot of my own New York story.

‘She left a small town in Kentucky and she was telling me that she got caught up in the whirlwind of New York,’ Trump said at a news conference. ‘It’s a story that has happened many times before to many women and many men who came to the Big Apple. They wanted their slice of the Big Apple and they found out it wasn’t so easy.’

Jason

I love how Jayson Blair is now writing about bipolar disorder, which he says played a “huge role” in his plagiarism problems.

H.

And he’s self-employed in a “profitable retail business.” Translation: He’s working the hot dog counter at Wal-Mart.

Jason

I wonder: Can we take him at his word that the franks are all-beef? What’s his source?

H.

I think the franks are mostly baloney.

I laughed at a quote by Taco Bell president Greg Creed in today’s New York Times (“E. Coli Sickens 39 in New Jersey and New York” by Robert D. McFadden). Addressing the E. coli outbreak of food poisoning traced to his company’s chain, he said, “Health officials have indicated that there is no immediate threat and whatever may have occurred has most likely passed through the system.”

Aside from the intense vagueness required by the corporate catastrophe first-response playbook (indicated, no immediate threat, whatever, may have and most likely), I was struck by the phrase passed through the system. Ha ha! When you’ve made your customers shit blood, you may want to watch your double entendres, Greg.

There’s a great Roman innovation that doesn’t get as much play as the aqueducts and sewer systems: satire.

A fine article (“My Satirical Self”) in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine by Wyatt Mason, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, notes that satire began with Gaius Lucilius in the second century B.C., who lampooned all things Greek, a culture he felt his fellow citizens were imitating too closely.

“A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.”

Juvenal, another Roman, writes, “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . . Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.”

The New York Times printed the word shit today in a story about what President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the Group of 8 summit, unaware his mic was live:

“I feel like telling [Secretary General Kofi Annan] to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad. “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.

Gawker wonders if this little shit is a first for the language-conservative Times. It’s not, but it’s extremely rare. This is a paper, after all, that’s squeamish about printing hell or damn unless they’re used in combat reporting or similar “extreme circumstances.” As for stronger obscenities, the paper’s trusty Manual of Style and Usage notes that “[e]xceptions have been made only a handful of times” to the rule that “The Times virtually never prints obscene words.”

Short of a thorough LexisNexis search, one of the few instances of shit in the Times was in 1974, when it published transcripts of White House conversations that figured into the Watergate scandal. “Expressions highly objectionable by Times standards were printed because of the light they shed on a historic matter, the possibility of a presidential impeachment,” explains the style manual.

Plus, let’s face it, I don’t think The Times liked Nixon much. I don’t think it likes Bush much, either; but at any rate, the paper seems to have relaxed its shit standard, seeing as how the current president’s comment is nowhere near as damaging or inflammatory as the Watergate tapes.

If it’s true that this city is a leader in fashion, dads and aging male porn stars will be happy to hear that “moustaches are enjoying something of a renaissance among young New Yorkers,” at least according to an Agence France Presse article published today.

This is one of those stories that defines or perhaps forms a trend via a time-honored cart-before-the-ass journalistic formula, which I will reveal to you here.

1. Interview three people who exhibit the trend, in this case including “a tall man with blonde highlights in his hair to match his silver jacket” who confides that moustaches are “cool, right?”
2. Quote a fellow media source backing up the trend. James Bassil of AskMen.com offers the fascinating generalization that women either love moustaches or are “absolutely repulsed” by them.
3. Patch together a trend timeline. This article’s author forms a history of the moustache in American pop culture, from Clark Gable, to the Brawny Man, through actors Tom Selleck to Nicholas Cage (a “hip role model”?), and brings it home with a reference to the New York City Beard and Moustache Championships last month, where the ’stache was “taken for granted.”

There you have it: a trend is grown as easily as facial hair. Impressionable young gentlemen throughout the five boroughs should spend an appropriate amount of time primping and contemplating their new cookie dusters in the mirror, first taking care to adjust their trucker caps so as so provide the clearest view.

How terrible it must be to be Face Transplant Woman. Not because of the whole mauling and face transplant thing, but because she’ll only ever be known as Face Transplant Woman. No personal achievements or accolades will ever change that. Even if she were to join the competitive eating circuit and win the Nathan’s Famous contest by consuming 52 hot dogs with buns in under 12 minutes, the headlines would read, “Face Transplant Woman Eats 52 Hot Dogs” or “Woman Crams 52 Hot Dogs Into Transplanted Face.”

In the pit of fleeting, dubious celebrity, she is stuck on the lowest level. The highest contains those 15-minuters whose deed is forever free-associated with their name: Lorena Bobbitt, for example. The middle level includes people who need a qualifier to jog the memory, such as Former Mideast Hostage Terry Anderson. On the lowest level are those like Face Transplant Woman and The Runaway Bride, who go nameless and summarized by a succinct catchphrase.

Good luck, Face Transplant Woman. Maybe we’ll see you soon on Oprah with your new book.

The Complete New Yorker: this thing is great. Every issue of the magazine—literally reproductions of every page, covers and ads included—on eight DVDs, accessible on Windows or Mac computers. I’ve read plenty of reports that the interface could be more intuitive, that you can’t copy and paste article text, that it’s slow and that the need to swap DVDs frequently makes nerds reminisce unfondly of the mid-80s when they would play King’s Quest and have to swap 5 1/4" floppies every five minutes.

Pshaw! Although The Complete New Yorker lists for $100, you can get it for a shade more than $60 with free shipping from Amazon.com. I daresay you get what you pay for. Yes, the interface is clunky with a completely unintuitive search screen that frequently turns up strange or incomplete results. Disc swapping is slow only when you’re tracking the “complete works” of an author or a topic over time: “television” or “the Yankees,” say. But enterprising individuals have released a hack that shows you how to copy every issue to an external hard drive and access the content from there, drastically improving article retrieval speed. (I intend to do this as soon as UPS delivers my 250GB external LaCie drive.) And, yeah, you can’t copy and paste text, but if you could, it’d be a probable copyright law violation. But the pages print crisply-I don’t want to squint-and-scroll on my PowerBook’s 12" screen to read a 15-page feature anyway.

But the bottom line is that $60 figure. That’s a lot of hits for little cash. For me, highlights includes every Pauline Kael movie review and essay. Every James Thurber and Roz Chast cartoon. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was first serialized in the magazine, and a 1957 interview he conducted with Marlon Brando.

Susan Orlean, whose piece on orchid-hunter John Laroche appeared here before it became the book that became Adaptation, has turned out other profiles on diverse people and topics, including the Shaggs, Corcoran Group broker Jill Meilus and the World Taxidermy Championships. Calvin Tompkins, meanwhile, has profiled the most original artistic and cultural minds of the twentieth century: Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Georgia O’ Keeffe, Paul Strand, Julia Child, Claes Oldenburg.

Certain content is indispensable for New York history aficionados. You get E.B. White and James Thurber’s original “Talk of the Town” pieces, an early one of which, from 1928, encapsulates an anecdote of Thurber sitting a few rows behind Rachmaninoff as the great pianist first hears the theremin played.

A lengthy 1950 profile of Hemingway catches him during a New York stopover en route to Italy. “This ain’t my town,” he grumbles. “It’s a town you come to for a short time. It’s murder.” The reporter tags along as the author drinks constantly, shares Perrier-Jouët and caviar with old friend Marlene Dietrich (“the Kraut”), begrudgingly purchases a new coat and belt at Abercrombie & Fitch, appreciates art at the Met and, throughout, speaks in the clipped, precise tones of one of his own characters.

You also get the ads, humorous curiosities that should prove invaluable to pop culture fanatics and graphic designers. In the mid-’50s alone, we learn that the BarcaLounger “can work relaxing wonders for a tired man...or a frazzled housewife” and that a full, “legation blue” men’s suit retails for about $69.50 at Saks on 34th Street and “stretches from the conference table to the cocktail hour to an evening of entertainment.”

Because I know you were still wondering about that smell...

Good Smell Vanishes, But It Leaves Air of Mystery

By Anthony DePalma

The New York Times, October 29, 2005

The night air all over Manhattan was brisk, with a hint of winter and a dash of something sweetly out of the ordinary. Some thought it smelled like maple syrup. Some said caramel, or a freshly baked pie, or Bit-O-Honey candy bars.

From downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and parts of Staten Island, the question was the same on Thursday night and into early yesterday: What was that smell?

The aroma not only revived memories of childhood, but in a city scared by terrorism, it raised vague worries about an attack deviously cloaked in the smell of grandma’s kitchen.

It was so seductive that many New Yorkers found themselves behaving strangely, succumbing to urges usually kept under wraps. One woman who never touches the stuff said she was inspired to eat ice cream.

Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.

Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.

The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the other boroughs—so quickly that officials expressed concern. The city’s Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday that tests and air monitoring had revealed “nothing of a hazardous nature.”

“It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time,” Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan.

The chase led the city’s environmental bloodhounds to some interesting places. Investigators working on a tip checked the Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven in SoHo, but the owner insisted he had not been the culprit. His staff had spent the afternoon roasting almonds, he said. And anyway, chocolate, for those who really know, smells bitter, not sweet.

“Perhaps if it was a chocolate smell, people would be running here today,” Mr. Torres said from his shop, which he said was no busier than normal for a Friday in autumn. His chef, Susana Garcia, 31, who was on duty Thursday, said the mysterious odor was definitely more like maple syrup than like chocolate. It was, Mr. Torres said, a kind of warm-your-heart holiday smell appropriate for this time of year.

If there was anyone in New York who could recognize the aroma of maple syrup, it would be a Canadian like Jeff Breithaupt, 42, cultural affairs officer at the Canadian Consulate in New York. He said he was out running on the Upper East Side last night when the smell came to him. Right away, he thought it was caramel candy.

A labor organizer, Rekha Eanni, said she could not characterize the exact smell, but after getting out of a night class at New York University she was overcome with a craving for pumpkin pie. When she got home there was no pie, so she did something she never does.

“I made myself a pretty big bowl of vanilla ice cream with honey and cornflakes,” she said.

Experts say that no human sense is more directly connected to the emotions than the sense of smell. “Before we know we are even in contact with a smell we have already received it and reacted to it,” a professional perfumer, Mandy Aftel, said. “Smells come in without language and go directly to the emotional center of the brain. That’s why they are so connected to memory.”

As soon as he smelled the mystery smell, Greg Nickson, 45, a freelance cameraman, was transported, like Marcel Proust, to things past, things like the chocolate factory that flooded his childhood neighborhood in Chicago with sweet aromas.

When he poked his head out of his 10th-floor apartment window to look for his wife, Mr. Nickson got a good whiff of it, and it puzzled him.

“I thought,” he said. “‘How could the smell be so pervasive?’”

With the cold nighttime air trapped under a lid of warm air over the city, and only a 3-mile-an-hour wind, any odor would have been kept low to the ground, where it could have slipped between buildings to work its way uptown and to the other boroughs, said Patrick Kinney, an associate professor of environmental science at Columbia University.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at City Hall about the smell, he repeated that tests showed it was not dangerous.

With the mayor enjoying a sizable lead in polls about the upcoming election, someone asked whether it struck him as, perhaps, the sweet smell of success.

He gave an enigmatic answer. “Nature,” the mayor said, “should be allowed to take care of its own.”

Kareem Fahim and Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

Admit it; if you didn’t know better, you’d think this article (or at least its headline) was from The Onion.

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers

By Kareem Fahim

The New York Times, October 28, 2005

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

“It’s like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes,” he said. “It’s pleasant.”

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn’t.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

There were so many calls that the city’s Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

By 11 p.m., the search had turned up nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back, stronger than before, by 1 a.m.

“We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there’s nothing hazardous,” said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. “What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don’t know.”

There were conflicting accounts as to its nature. A police officer who had thrown out her French vanilla coffee earlier compared it to that. Two diplomats from the Netherlands disagreed, politely. Rieneke Buisman said it smelled like roasted peanuts. Her friend Joris Geeven said it reminded him of a Dutch cake called peperkoek, though he could not describe that smell.

Since late April, The New Yorker has replaced its end-page, which had typically contained a supposedly witty essay by the likes of Steve Martin, with The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. And I had thought Tina Brown was dragging down the intelligence of the magazine.

The only captions being accepted and awarded in the contest are those in the “New Yorker style,” a fact already lampooned by literary hipsters. That style, with a reliance on the New York Liberal urban life of business, dinner parties and strained relationships, has become as much a recognizable part of the magazine as its typeface.

As much as I hate to begrudge a fellow writer from Ohio, James Thurber, who was on the magazine’s first staff in the 1920s, contributed a lot to this aesthetic with his cartoons, the subjects of which can be summed up by one of his book titles, Men, Women, and Dogs. Yet Thurber remains a favorite cartoonist of mine because he was forever sneaking in more innovative subjects with a what the hell? flavor of humor I find tasty. I’d rank one of his New Yorker submissions in my top-five all-time favorite cartoons. It was originally published in the issue of April 6, 1935. Here it is:

I’d prefer the New Yorker to get back to including more craziness in this vein, or perhaps some Dada-inspired randomness, because that’s great, too. I recall reading about a time that a newspaper accidentally switched the captions of The Far Side and The Family Circus, vastly improving each.

And no mention of The Family Circus and captions gone awry is complete without citing The Dysfunctional Family Circus, perhaps the first popular caption contest. The DFC website allowed users to submit their own captions to The Family Circus panels that had their original captions removed. Most submissions were bad, some were insane and a few were laugh-out-loud funny, which you could never say for that cartoon’s original captions. Launched in June 1995, in its heyday, the DFC received 50,000 to 70,000 page views daily, until late 1999, when it was permanently shut down by a cease-and-desist order from King Features Syndicate. It’s one of the few websites I still recall reading regularly when I was in college. You can view a single scavenged page from the site here.

In the spirit of this, the next few posts will be dedicated to my own caption contest, using some idiot single-panel cartoons I found on a stock-art CD from 1995 and removed the actual captions from. Get to it.