The question is answered, but slowly

I’m beginning to answer my own silent question.

My wife’s mom passed away a long time ago, and she still wrestles with the memories. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to fully understand it until it happened to me. But the question always has been there: What is it like when your own mother dies?

I’m not the sort of person who shows emotions very easily. A lifelong trait forced on me by, I suppose, myself. I enjoy life and people and things in general. But I never made a big hoop-de-do about showing it. That’s one reason I never liked birthdays or anything that put me at center stage of the “How is he going to react now?” show.

I’ll deliver a class lecture, make a public speech, emcee an event, act in a play, even do a song-and-dance or a bit of standup comedy. But they all are prepared events, which is a lot different than spontaneously showing emotion.

We just passed May 17, which would have been my mother’s 94th birthday had she lived just another 15 weeks or so, and are coming up fast on her wedding anniversary and what I jokingly used to tell her was the best day of her life, my birthday. That cycle of “firsts” that everyone goes through for the first year of a loved one’s passing provides its own roller-coaster ride of physical ups and downs, emotional highs and lows, real and metaphorical laughs and tears. My brother, her only other child, and I talk about it from time to time.

To some degree I suppose that offers its own comfort. While I may have wanted her to last a few years longer, she wasn’t interested. Her last few years were a time of physical pain, emotional fatigue and a desire to, as she put it, “get this over with, already.”

I do miss her, of course. But I don’t think of her in the shape she was in when she wanted to call it quits. I think of the vibrant, tomboyish redhead who liked sports and dancing and liked to dress up and go out for drinks and dinner. She was maddeningly stubborn at times, fiercely loyal at others. She was a nurturing mother but could be part of “the other necktie” school of parenting (*) if you didn’t call her on it.

But now that I’m beginning to put a tiny bit of it in perspective, that’s what made her who she was. Everyone saw her in a different light. In her later years, that light was dimming and only the negatives were shining through. That’s all clearing away now — slowly, surely and to my great relief.

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( * ) A young man receives a gift of two neckties from his mother, a woman known for being both generous and extremely controlling. To please her, he selects one of the ties and wears it to her house for Sunday dinner. As he walks in, she takes one look at him, crosses her arms and says, “So, you didn’t like other tie?

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A world view? Don’t bank on it

See those two banknotes? The top one is a 10-pound British note, the bottom one a 10-pound Scottish note. They have been legitimate currency around the world since long before the United States was even an idea.

As of the close of business Friday, each of them was worth $19.7920 in U.S. currency. It took me less than 30 seconds online to ascertain that rate of exchange. It took me only a little more than that to thoroughly confuse three naive employees of the Pioneer Savings Bank’s Brunswick, NY, branch office where I do a lot of business.

Perhaps I should say “did” a lot of business. After the rank ineptitude and dismissive attitude I witnessed, I’m seriously considering taking my business elsewhere.

The situation was simply this. I had five 10-pound notes left over from a recent trip to Scotland. That means I had roughly $100 worth of U.S. money tied up in banknotes I couldn’t spend locally. So, I went to a bank to exchange the notes for good ol’ Yankee greenbacks.

The first teller literally pulled back her hand when I presented the UK notes, as if I had tossed her a red-hot charcoal briquette.

“I don’t know what to do with these,” she stammered.

“Simple,” I said. “Just look up the current rate of exchange and I’ll see if I want to trade the notes today or wait till the rate is a little more in my favor.”

Not a bad plan, I thought, since the exchange rate was 2.06 U.S. dollars for each British/Scottish pound last week when I got the notes in the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh — without the slightest problem, I should add.

“I don’t know how,” she said, gesturing in a panicky fashion to a young man I took to be an assistant manager of some sort, although throughout my visit he never introduced himself or his title.

“Oh, we can’t access that kind of information on these screens,” he said, gesturing to the teller’s screen and starting to walk away.

“May I suggest you try a computer with Internet access?” I said. “I know you have them here. It only takes a few seconds to get the current exchange rate.”

He hemmed and hawed, then pointed in the direction of someone at another window. “She’ll have to do this when she’s finished with what she’s doing,” he said rather brusquely, then made a success of retreating to a small office across the lobby. “I have another customer I’m taking care of.”

“She” was finished in about three minutes with whatever business she was transacting, then turned to me and asked how she could help.

“I merely want to exchange these five banknotes for U.S. currency. One is a 10-pound British note, and the other four are each 10-pound Scottish notes. But they’re all worth the same amount,” I explained, wondering why in the world I had to explain something so basic to supposed banking professionals.

She picked up the notes I’d spread on her little teller window ledge and walked to the office where the presumed manager of the moment had scurried. She waited at the doorway for about five minutes till he had completed his business with the other customer. I stood right behind her.

She walked in, put the notes on his desk and said to him, “I don’t know what to do with these things. Are they checks, or what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We can’t do anything with these anyway.”

That was it for me. I walked in the office and, mustering up all the remaining patience I possessed, said, “They’re called money. They’re not checks, for heaven’s sake. Just look at them. All I want is to exchange them back into U.S. currency. And all you have to do is look on the Internet at the currency exchange rate to know how much to give me.”

“We can’t do that,” he said, beginning to sound more miffed than befuddled.

“Why not?” I replied. “This is a bank. You’re supposed to, among other things, change money. Any bank in Europe does it for any currency. It’s elementary banking.”

“Oh, sure,” he said with an “Aha!” look. “In Europe. But we’re not allowed to do that here. What would we do with the foreign money you gave us?”

“You’d send it to your main office, and they’d exchange it at a favorable rate with a central bank,” I said. “You mean to tell me you’ve never been taught how to make such a basic transaction?”

“Well, we just can’t do that,” he said, metaphorically — and perhaps actually, although I couldn’t see under his desk — digging in his heels. “You’ll have to go to some other bank.”

So, I went home, seething and marveling at just one more example of U.S. insulation from the rest of the real world and wondering if that ever will change.

It’s no wonder so many people in other countries think we’re such rubes. Many of us are. And Pioneer Savings Bank has a whole cluster of them.

Save the language: Part 477

Earlier today, I shared a note of complaint I sent to one of my editors about some lousy copy editing that introduced an error into one of my stories.

I also lamented the lack of respect for the English language that I see all around me. That, however, was before I stumbled upon a very serious Web site called “Hot for Words” that just may have found a way to make people pay attention to the meanings of words.

It’s the intellectual — and entertainment — property of a 27-year-old philologist (look it up) named Marina. That’s her over there.

Got your attention now?

Giving England the (Gold)finger

“This isn’t the country I grew up in. No one speaks a word of English these days.”

No, this isn’t a reprise of Brit pop singer Morrissey’s screed against changes in the ethnic makeup of the United Kingdom reported last month. This time it’s the iconic singer Dame Shirley Bassey of “Goldfinger” theme song fame.

Bassey, shown here clad in a brilliant red gown, was interviewed for a fee by the UK paper The Daily Mail on the occasion of her 70th birthday attended by Joan Collins (standing next to her) and others. Dame Shirley lives most of the time these days in Monaco.

Why?

“This isn’t England any more, at least it is not the country I remember growing up in,” she told the newspaper. “You don’t hear English spoken here. You read about terrible things, not just drugs but all the killings.

“When you live in a safe place like Monte Carlo, you can walk home at any time of the night and you don’t have to worry. I don’t feel at risk there. If I drive myself, I can leave the car doors unlocked. I wouldn’t do that in London.”

Bassey, by the way, requested that the fee for being interviewed be donated to the War Widows’ Association.

God save the turkeys

Which of these things is not like the other?

If you guessed the one in the feathered hat, you’re wrong. It’s the two animate objects, not the inanimate map, flocking together.

This occurred to me as I was watching the BBC News on cable TV tonight. I like the channel because the British Broadcasting Co. is head-and-shoulders above U.S. commercial and “public” television in providing a broad look at the news of the world and putting it in some kind of perspective with deep reporting and insightful analysis. Most of the time.

On this particular evening, the newscaster — a Brit based in Washington, D.C. — couldn’t restrain himself when it came to making fun of an American custom: the annual presidential pardon for a turkey just before Thanksgiving.

This year the freed bird will range down to Florida to, I am not making this up, serve as grand marshal for a Thanksgiving parade at DisneyWorld in Orlando.

The newscaster got his jollies over all this. I agree it’s a particularly stupid thing, and can’t imagine how it came about — unless it had something to do with a poultry industry PR gimmick.

But that doesn’t give a foreign guest to our shores license to poke fun at our current gallant leader and our favorite holiday food. England has some pretty odd customs, too, and most of them involve a certain Queen Elizabeth II. I don’t mean to be nasty, mind you, but it took her years to master The Royal Wave she uses at public gatherings. A parade grand marshal does the same thing, but the turkey didn’t need to be made ruler of a nation to do so.

Obviously, she doesn’t serve as much purpose as a tasty turkey and costs a lot more per pound.

Need proof? The turkey breast I bought this year cost $2.67 a pound. The queen, even after you take away all her freebie perks like rent and staff and travel and clothes and other goodies, is conservatively worth $3.2 million a pound.

SOCIETY’S BREAKDOWN STARTS WITH THE SMALL THINGS

PHOTOS BY WILLIAM M. DOWD

GET OFF THE BUS, GUS

The latest 5-minute ride that took me 15 minutes got me to thinking:

If our kids are, as most studies agree, getting fatter and weaker all the time, perhaps adding a bit of exercise to their daily regimen might be an intelligent thing to do. Nothing drastic, mind you, just something simple to begin with — like eliminating door-to-door school bus service.

I know we live in an era of paranoia about the safety of our kids, but it’s not asking too much to have school children walk two or three doors from their school bus to their home or to where a parent is waiting for them.

My aforementioned longer-than-necessary drive was caused by the latest instance of something I’ve been seeing for years now. A school bus stopping every two or three houses to disgorge passengers. This happens in broad daylight with no danger lurking, with adults posted every few yards waiting to escort the kids home. Yet, rather than letting a bunch of them off at one time and requiring them to walk an exhausting, oh, 20 feet, the bus keeps stopping, backing up traffic, putting additional wear and tear on the bus’s brakes and so on.

Kids Health says, “In addition to the health benefits of regular exercise, kids who are physically fit sleep better and are better able to handle the physical and emotional challenges that a typical day presents — be that running to catch a bus, bending down to tie a shoe, or studying for a test.”

I doubt the “running for a bus” part is applicable, given what I see in this community, but it’s time to stop the silliness.

ONCE MORE, LIFE OUTPERFORMS ART

I was watching the latest episode of (WARNING! WARNING! GUILTY PLEASURE CONFESSION ALERT!) the new TV series “Dirty Sexy Money” the other day and laughing at how entertaining but outrageous and unbelievable some of the plot twists are.

In this particular one, a brother-sister set of twins who belong to the fabulously wealthy family at the center of the series wanted to rent the Brooklyn Bridge and toss a birthday party for themselves at a cost of a few million bucks.

Funny, but preposterous, I said. Things like that don’t happen in real life.

And then I read on the Jezebel.com Web site about David Brooks, “the evil defense contractor who was charged yesterday of letting troops die at the hands of his shoddy body armour so his daughter could have a $10 million bat mitzvah. What did they, hold the thing at the local International Space Station?”

But, the blogger went on, maybe Brooks didn’t get as much for his money as he might have. To wit:

“Yeah, so 50 Cent and Aerosmith (above) performed. $10 million could buy you practically an entire year of Madonna performances, and you’d get to share in her perfume sales. So what, did they give out Birkin goodie bags? (If Hermes even manufactured $10 million worth of Birkin bags in a year that might be a possibility, but they don’t.)

” … Ranting and raving about how David Brooks ripped off the American taxpayer and sold out the military all so his daughter could make it into the Guinness Book of JAP is distracting us from the real fraud: David Brooks was robbed. This was maybe a ten million Hong Kong Dollar soiree at best, and some rogue party planner is laughing all the way to the bank. Your only choice is to laugh with her.”

AIR YOU CAN CHEW

I can hardly wait until the city delivers my quarterly water bill.

Yesterday morning I emerged from our air-conditioned cocoon, took in a deep lungful of air, and began to chew it. Yes, air so thick it has substance, what with the amount of moisture and microscopic airborne particles.

The first thing that comes to mind on such days is how good a nice, long shower would feel. And, the showerheads have been getting quite a workout. Because showers use a bit less water than baths, I take consolation that the situation could be worse, dollarwise, although the cost of laundering the endless pile of bath towels occasioned by the maniacal showering probably offsets the saving.

In a society in which many of us live in hermetically sealed splendor — darting from our air-conditioned homes into our air-conditioned cars and then darting into our air-conditioned workplaces, then reversing the cycle — all this talk of chewy air and overworked showerheads may seem a bit frivolous. But it is, after all, Indian summer. ‘Tis the time for frivolity of one sort or another. So, shower with a friend or loved one.

Better still, shower with a stranger. It’ll give you so much more to talk about.

A DIP IN THE GENE POOL

We’ve all slowed down to gawk at traffic accidents. I suspect the same shared experience occurs with cable TV. Some things are so bizarre you can’t help staring.

Take the judge shows. Most deal with squabbles over cell phone bills, apartment rent and pets on the loose — unless, of course, they deal with paternity issues. That seems to be the No. 1 category when I happen upon such shows and can’t tear myself away from the spectacle.

Listening to the usually undereducated, poorly spoken and selfishly “entitled” combatants trying to convince a TV judge to rule in their favor makes me fear for the human gene pool. If this is what keeps reproducing, we’re in big trouble.

However, there is some hope on the horizon for a better gene pool from another species — apes. A team of researchers from the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta says they have compiled conclusive evidence that apes communicate using gestures. In fact, say the researchers, those they observed use both hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood.

Meaning what? Just that they cite these findings as support for the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

Although all primates use vocal and facial expressions to communicate, only the great apes — gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos — use gestures as well, an ability they share with humans. When they make gestures, they use their right hand, which is controlled by the left side of the brain, the same side that is the as the human language control center.

Now, if we can just get some of these TV courtroom bozos to observe the bonobos and learn a thing or two about communication, humanity may live a bit longer.

SOME JUSTIC MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

More proof there is a god. Of one sort or another.

When irascible Australian actor-singer Russell Crowe was convicted in 2005 for tossing his cellphone at a hotel employee who had annoyed him, he got off with a $160 fine. Of course, it was widely believed he also paid the assault victim $100,000 in “sorry about that, mate” money.

Temperamental supermodel Naomi Campbell, 36, today began five days of court-ordered mopping at New York City’s Sanitation Department, as punishment for striking her maid with a mobile phone. She also was ordered to pay her $350 in medical bills.

Seems fair all around. That may be because, annoying as he can be, Crowe has brought a lot to the arts with his acting and singing. Campbell? Not so much. Some things buy you some good karma.

ILL-GOTTEN FAME IS FLEETING FOR SOME

Today is the anniversary of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.

Care to guess which anniversary? Try 57th.

The idea of such a list was, so the story goes, dreamed up back in 1949 when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was playing cards with William Kinsey Hutchinson, head of the old International News Service. They were chit-chatting about ways to promote capture of the FBI’s “toughest guys.” Hutchinson saw to it that a news article was written about the idea, it caught on, and on March 14, 1950, the FBI officially announced the list.

There is no particular length of time a fugitive stays on the list. Some people have been there for years. One, Billie Austin Bryant, was on it for about two hours in 1969. Some fail to make a dent in the public consciousness. Others, like James Earl Ray and Ted Bundy, are indelibly etched there.

Has this list done much besides give postmasters something to hang on their lobby bulletin boards? That’s debatable because dangers in our society have grown to the point the original list isn’t the only one the FBI maintains. There now also is a Most Wanted Terrorists list.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY MORE TAINTED THAN TINTED

Every few years I get so fed up with the idiocy of St. Patrick’s Day that I can’t contain myself.

It’s boiled over again in the face of the annual avalanche of plastic shamrocks, green beer and fools on TV and in print adding an “O” to their names and promising pots of gold to anyone who would listen to their sales pitch.

Just a few days ago I heard a talk-radio caller saying someone was “as drunk as an Irishman.” Some cops still called the police van a Paddy wagon. It is difficult not to trip over all the plastic leprechauns and shillelaghs laying around taverns, stores and restaurants. A lot of politicians run around with name tags that stuck an O’ in front of their names and make the usual gratuitous remarks about loving the folks from the Auld Sod.

In this ethnically, religiously and racially diverse nation we have been sensitized to the effects of stereotyping people. We understand when African-Americans and Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans and Jewish-Americans, Arab-Americans and Mexican-Americans — perhaps even Martian-Americans — become angry at hurtful, demeaning jokes and remarks about their heritage. But we seem, as a society, incapable of understanding why some Irish-Americans “get their Irish up” when they’re regarded as fair game for insults.

Even in Ireland itself, what once was a quiet day of religious contemplation has disintegrated into a booze-fueled mess catering to tourists. Irish authorities last year reported more than 700 violence- and alcohol-connected arrests on St. Patrick’s Day.

It is baffling enough that it’s happening there. Perhaps it is because the Irish also are widely regarded as amiable folks, the kind of people who take little ethnic slurs as good-natured fun. But in the U.S. it seems seldom remembered the slurs are a nasty holdover from a time when they had their turn at the bottom of American society — being denied education, being relegated to back-breaking jobs like digging the barge canals, driving the railroad spikes, clawing coal from the bowels of the earth miles down where the air was foul and the life expectancy short.

A time when signs saying “No Irish Need Apply” were commonplace on rooming houses, business places and restaurants. A time when the Irish were jammed into ghettoes later occupied by succeeding generations of immigrant groups; when the “Paddy wagon” hauled a lot of them off to jail on the slightest pretext.

A time when the likes of immigrant Kate Mullaney had to risk life and limb to get Troy, NY’s laundry workers a modicum of respect and pay and, in the process, formed the first female labor union in the nation.

Some say the ideal would be for Americans of all backgrounds to forget about roots and become generic, non-hyphenated Americans. That may be desirable in the sense it could foster a togetherness now missing in our national dialogue, but it never will happen.

People do, to some extent, like to be different. Maintaining ties with one’s heritage makes them so, and keeps alive the rich inheritance from that culture that adds to the marvelous American stew.

But, isn’t there a classy way to do it?

Light a birthday candle for the ignorant

Today is George Washington’s birthday.

According to the Gregorian calendar we use these days, that is. Otherwise, he was born on Feb. 11, according to the Julian calendar that preceded it.

In either instance, it is not the same birthday as Abraham Lincoln’s (that was Feb. 12) or any other president’s despite what the government entities that have turned “Presidents Day” into a long weekend paid at your expense and what commerce has decreed with its idiotic sales gimmicks that use the images of Washington, Lincoln and others like some kind of carnival sideshow hawkers.

There is so little respect these days for our American antecedents that I know I’m fighting a losing battle in trying to point out the ignorance, the insult and the idiocy of turning the birth celebrations of arguably our two most distinguished presidents into a freebie day off at the expense of other citizens who don’t happen to work for the government and/or an opportunity to turn a fast buck in the world of commercialism.

But, I shall persevere. Don’t even get me started about what has happened to Memorial Day, also changed to give government workers an extra three-day weekend.

Year of the question

William M. Dowd photo

While in Las Vegas over the weekend, I was in the company of a number of Asian-American marketing and publishing types celebrating the Lunar New Year (the Year of the Pig on the Chinese calendar, although celebrated all across Asia) and the debut of a new French beverage product.

As we were slowly assembling for a private lunch at Sensei restaurant in the Bellagio, we began swapping experiences.

One gentleman, a Chinese-American, was telling me about his work at a Chinese-language newspaper in Los Angeles when a South Korean-American representative of a marketing firm walked into the room. He smoothly switched to Korean to greet her, explaining to me that although Mandarin is his native tongue, he had lived in Korea and picked up the language there.

The marketing lady exchanged a few pleasantries in Korean with him, then switched into perfect New York City English with me. Although raised in Seoul, she explained, she had been born in the U.S. and wanted to move here, so she studied English. In Beijing. Her time as a New York City resident has buffed away any residual accent she may have had.

“Some people tell me I sound Canadian,” she said in a bemused way.

And so it went throughout the event, with native-born Americans, French business people there to push their new Martell cognac, and numerous Asians and Asian-Americans, representing a major niche in the world of cognac sales.

All of which makes me wonder again whatever happened to the public education of my youth, when you learned languages — including your own, math and writing skills, and a modicum of history. That doesn’t seem to be a problem in many other nations’ schools which now far surpass us in turning out people of curiosity and interpersonal skills despite us spending billions on education.

2 down, 363 to go

January 2 and we’re still here.

I love it when doomsayers are wrong. Of course, if they’re ever right I won’t be around to comment on their predictions. But, in this case, my streak remains intact. All those who predicted the end of the world in various cataclysms are wrong once again.

We have survived into another year of global hot spots — Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and others we pay little, if any, attention to as they bubble and fester and spill over. We have survived another year of George W. Bush because, after all, this is the US of A and no matter how broad our fannies grow and how soft our middles may be and how I-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it our attitudes are, we keep on keeping on.

I suspect, however, there is something in the doomsayers’ warnings. As a nation, we may be going on pure momentum at this point.

Too many of our schools suck, too many people buy into the conventional “wisdom” spouted by lazy inner-city dwellers that they have to sell drugs because their only other alternatives are death or prison. Too many of our medical insurers are more interested in squeezing more money out of plan participants than anything else. Too many of our politicians lack the true skills and desire that make statesmen and stateswomen for the ages.

But, somehow, the sun keeps coming up each morning no matter what we do or don’t do. And, when it does that tomorrow, it will usher in a bright, clear day. And on we go.

BORN IN THE USA

“How come you people didn’t run a picture and story about the 300 millionth American born this week?”

That, sad to say, was the gist of a serious inquiry made by several readers to the newspaper that currently employs me.

I use the word “sad” because, while we did publish stories on the topic, we didn’t publish a story and photo about THE baby because absolutely no one knows who No. 300 million is. Matter of fact, absolutely no one knows for sure that our population has reached 300 million. The figure is simply a matter of educated guesswork by population specialists and demographers.

While late-night comics like Jay Leno were showing faked video footage of an illegal sneaking across the border with Mexico then being heralded as the 300 millionth, some otherwise serious news outlets trumpted the birth of No. 300 million right in their community.

The Chicago tabloid the Sun-Times blared on its front page (seen here), “The 300,000,000th American Is Born: HERE SHE IS!” and showed a photo of a baby born in Chicago. However, as it turns out the paper simply made that up.

The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago alternative publication that likes to debunk the mainstream media, jumped on that gaffe with both feet. At the same time, it provided a nice roundup of links to other news venues and how they handled the story and its various aspects.

THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY

Illegal aliens sneaking across the Rio Grande into the U.S. usually say they’re trying to get away from a land of no opportunity.

Apparently, Mexico wasn’t always that way.

Scientists have found what they say may well be the oldest example of New World writing ever found. And, it comes from an ancient civilization in what today is Mexico.

A 2,000-year-old example of a previously unknown form of writing was found on a stone slab in the State of Veracruz, according to a new report in Science magazine.

Scientists say they believe the inscriptions were made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads. If so, that means they were writing 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere.

So, a non-PC thought occurred to me: If Mexico had a civilization that developed writing as far back as the birth of Christ, where did it all go so very wrong? They had a 20-century headstart on the U.S. and blew it.

There must be a moral in there somewhere. Perhaps something to mull over while waiting in line to apply for legal immigration.

NOTHING TO SNIFF AT

How often have you see a seemingly mismatched couple walking hand-in-hand and you wonder what was it that attracted them to each other?

That attraction may be so strong one of the parties could be accused of being led around by the nose. If Nobel Prize winner Linda Buck and a colleague at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle are on target, that is literally correct.

What Drs. Buck and Linda Buhumans have discovered is a new class of receptors used by mice to detect pheromones, the sex hormones released by a potential mate. The same gene is found in humans, so they theorize it may work the same way. In other words, their partner’s smell attracts them.

Of course, not just any smell will do. Mammals have about 1,000 different odor receptors which help trigger all sorts of responses to all sorts of smells — fear, repulsion, love, hunger and so on.

Buck should know what she’s speculating about. She won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discoveries on odor receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.

Then again, perfume makers throughout human history have known the way to a man’s heart is through his nose.