Brian's Rant-o-Rama - provided free of charge provided you free me from charges

September 29^th, 2006

Back in my days shortly after returning to Canada from South Korea (I did a fly-by-night to avoid some -er- visa issues) I befriended someone whom I occasionally got drunk with. (By the way, if you think I'm opinionated now, you should hear me when I've cast a couple of sheets to the wind.)

"Brian," he once slurred at me while wobbling his drink out in front of him. "I read yesterday that they are trying to ban drawstrings in children's clothing. They're afraid all our kids are going to accidentally hang themselves. What the fuck did kids do before we invented fucking velcro? When was the last time you heard about an epidemic of self-hanged children?"

"Reminds me of anti-bacterial soap," I drooled, hoping to impress him with my lateral thinking skills. "How the hell did we ever survive this long without soap to kill bacteria crawling on our hands?"

"I'll drink to that [hic]."

"[Hic] Me too."

[Sounds of drink-slurping]

* * *

Right. So, in that vein, a realisation struck me last night about the amazing technological advances in air fresheners. That term alone, by the way ('freshener') is pretty much complete BS; all these things do is spew particles of sweet-smelling chemicals which are small enough to bounce around in the air, presumably through Brownian Motion, long enough that we can draw some of them into our nostrils and register their smell. Nothing gets 'fresh' per se, unless marketeers came up with a way of defining the word 'freshen' differently—and you can be sure they did!

(By the way, that is why I don't open my mouth to breathe in smelly places: If I can smell it then actual particles are entering my nose. If I decide to breathe with my mouth, I may not smell it, but that means I am drawing it right all the way into my lungs! Blech!)

With air fresheners, it seems clear that scientists from one company declared war on scientists in some other company. And it's been a case of scientific escalation—a veritable arms race of air freshener technology ever since.

I mean, when I was a child and the Earth was pure and pristine, and the air was keen. The world needed only simple fresheners where a colloidal mass slowly sublimated into the air over a period of days and weeks. You knew it was finished by the fact that it had shriveled up into a tiny thin rock-hard strip. Throw it away, pull out the next one. But that was also in the days when computers filled up entire research wings of universities and cars only had AM radios and no DVD players, MP3 players, Satellite Radio, or GPS.

These days there are so many varieties or air freshener technologies to choose from:

Slow-release fragrance units, for those who want their living rooms to smell pretty, but can't be bothered to replace the freshener more than once every ice age. These are pretty much the same as the "low-tech" ones that we all grew up knowing and loving and relying on.

Window-hanging or surface-sitting fresheners that look like cruddy craft pop-art (but there's no accounting for taste, right?)

Units that you can "dial" the intensity of the fragrance—and, presumably, shorten the life-span of the whole unit ("make my condo smell gorgeous, Hedley, and don't spare the horses!"

And, along the same lines, units that you can dial the frequency of little white puffy clouds squirting up into the air. I can't think of anything sarcastic to say about these, because they are so brain-suckingly engrossing for about 90 seconds (sort of like lava lamps) and then people suddenly realise they spent an extra $8.00 on something that has given their eyes less than two minutes of joy.

Fresheners that plug into a wall outlet—how else are they going to get the power to turn those little fans?

In answer to that, and if you are worried that they might be a fire hazard, you can use the ones that garner their energy from batteries. Screw the environment, I want my goddamned living room to smell fresh.

Recently, they've started building ones that deliver a little extra hit of fragrance when you press a button. The advertising depicts it as part of a story where some powerbrat comes home after a gruelling day at the stock exchange and self-medicates himself with an extra little squirt of lovely Forest Glade or Crisp Linen or L'eau de la Vierge or whatever.

Another new technology that involves a bi-fragrant architecture (that's just my code-word for something that spews different smells depending on some factor such as time or ambient light in the room, or what setting the user indicates). If you think about it, the possibilities are virtually endless with this one: maybe soon three, four, five hundred fragrances, released sequentially, randomly, surprisingly, abusively, gently ... all together at once, perhaps. "Son, I've got two-words for you: multi-fragrance dispensers! Invest in multi-fragrance dispensers ... the future!"

And, finally, there are fragrant light-shows. They make a pretty stink while flashing coloured lights on your wall and/or ceiling. Magic mushrooms and LSD stickers sold separately. These are literally flash-in-the-pan, if not figuratively as well.

See? It's just bloody amazing what advances have been made in the field of Air Freshener Design. The progress is truly dizzying; each day seems to bring us new heights of pneumatic pulchritude. We can live in the chemical-laden air of our living rooms and bedrooms comfortable in the knowledge that, no matter how well the air we are breathing is sweetened by some plastic device on our shelves or in a wall outlet (or hanging from the lights or stuck to the window), we have even newer and shinier gadgets to look forward to in the future ... a future where there will be a veritable fog of ever more penetrating and osmotically intense scents in all the rooms of our homes.

I can hardly wait.

Or breathe.

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