stuff that smells bad

If you look at this map of what Fantasy Island will look like after they build houses on the Bunny Loop, which, by the way, is much better than building houses on the whole trail system, you see an Existing Tucson Water Facility down toward the bottom. Today I learned that the Existing Tucson Water Facility occasionally smells like the inside of a used washing machine:


You can smell that right through the screen, right? That dreadful combination of mold and cheap fabric-softener chemicals? No? Well, you probably can't smell it when people on tv flap paper money around, either.

Ok, I can't actually smell those things through the screen, but I can't think of anything similarly noxious that most people could look at and understand. It could be that there aren't a lot of pictures of that stuff on purpose, so we're going to go to something people can probably smell through the newspaper: a giant impromptu toilet in Palo Alto, CA, where they have an economic situation such that 800 square foot houses from the 1920's sell for around $700,000, which is the kind of thing that could cause, say, a homelessness problem.

Not that the article blames the homeless. It seems to blame diners from a nearby restaurant, denizens of the playing fields right across the street from Stanford Shopping Center (where you can buy a cheesy-looking nylon purse for $450), and bus and train passengers for not availing themselves of the one pay toilet in the vicinity, which leads us to the quote of the day:

"It's unconscionable that people are so filthy," [the Mayor of Palo Alto] said. "It happens all over the world. I'm unhappy it's happening at our train station."