sweet smell of success blankets nyc

new yorkers lived in a cloud of sweet yummy smells yesterday. truly bizarre. from the NYTimes:

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."

emergency services were overrun with worried callers but tests came up negative for sinister scents. from 9pm onwards reports of the smell wafted up manhattan all the way up to 112th St, where it was noticed at midnight. then it went back downtown stronger than ever. it's anybody's guess as to what the smell is:

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.

the new yorkers, though they are many things, are not paranoid freakazoids. many nerve agents do have sweet smells, one would imagine as cloying: cyclosarin, phosgene, and hydrogen sulphide apparently smells sweet when rare but stinks like rotten eggs in larger doses.

Comments

[kurtrik]

sadly, i missed this phenomenon. and i was out walking the streets last night!!

[Anne]

oh no kurt. i was dying for a first hand account. know anyone that did smell the eggos? did you read the nytimes article. it's so witty.

[Mason Inman]

Maybe this Wired article has the answer to NYC's waffle smell conundrum: scientists doing tests of how gases flow through the city so they'll know what might happen in a terrorist attack.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/posts.html?pg=2

Granted, these guys used sulfur hexafluoride, which is supposed to be virtually scentless. Maybe some jokester mixed in some essence of Eggos...