Is This The Best Headline of the Year?


I don’t know, but “Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers” certainly is a very strong contender…


I myself was mystefied by the incredibly good chocolate smell that drifted in the window of my new apartment a few years ago. Was it a demented craving-produced illussion, triggered by the pot a friend had left me as a birthday present?

No. I live next door to a soup kitchen type place that bakes brownies a lot.

I was at a bar/restaurant in Hoboken and smelled it around 8:00. I thought someone was making crepes or having waffles for dinner. When I smelled it outside around 8:45 and on my drive home to Jersey City, I wondered whether I was imagining things. I even wondered if the smell of burning hair can be a symptom of having a stroke, then what is the smell of waffles a symptom of?

None of the coverage has even posited that the smell might have originated in Jersey. Sure, we're the first ones to be blamed if it's foul odor, but if it's sweet and syrupy, then it couldn't possibly be from New Jersey. Is it possible that an industry here is experimenting with ways of countering NIMBY complaints?

Seriously, I definitely smelled it on this side of the Hudson before 8:30 and it was quite powerful. Does anyone really know what goes on in Union City?


I smelled it while walking past a CLS lobby-type reception, and thought, "Wow, who serves caramel apples with wine?!"

Probably my respiratory tract has been eroded and burned by whatever experiment this represented. Otherwise, it was something along these lines, I'd imagine:

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