A rose by any other name…

In weird news… Man Asks City To Ban Fart Smells — For A Good Reason

Last week, the City of Pendleton updated its nuisance ordinances to cover the smell of marijuana, NBC reported at the time. That means that even though recreational marijuana will be legal in Oregon starting in July, a person can be fined up to $500 if someone complains they smell marijuana coming from that person’s property.

In a letter published in the East Oregonian on Thursday, someone who signed his name as Peter Walters merely asked that council members take the next logical step and start regulating a far more noxious scent:

It was with great relief Thursday when I read in the East Oregonian that Pendleton’s city council took the time to pass an amendment to the city’s nuisance ordinance banning marijuana odor. Clearly, there has been no issue of greater importance facing the city. Now that this important work has been completed I hope that the council will move on to restricting the other offensive smell that plagues our community: farts.

Walters, who is pretty clearly mocking the marijuana ordinance, notes, “Some habitual farters argue that they need to fart for medical reasons but that doesn’t mean my kids should have to smell their farts.”

Nice move by Peter Walters.

I find the whole idea of trying to ban marijuana smells to be absurd. It’s not even that bad of an odor (obviously as a neighbor, you don’t want to be a bad neighbor and inundate people with any odor, but for people to occasionally catch a whiff? No big deal.)

We have dealt with (and still deal with) much worse assaults on the olfactory system. As a kid, I remember that whenever we went to Indiana, we had to roll up the windows and change the car vent to internal only when we got 10 miles from Gary, Indiana, and it was still unbearable. In college, our frequent trips to Cedar Rapids, Iowa were marred by the ever-present smell of the Quaker Oats factory. And have you ever been to Chinatown?

Even now, I smell the neighbors’ fresh-mowed lawns, and that distinct charcoal/lighter fluid combination every weekend, plus the acrid smell of spent fireworks in July and burned leaves in the fall. On one side, I smell cigarettes, and on the other, dog poop.

It’s the smell of freedom.

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19 Responses to A rose by any other name…

  1. Russell Olausen says:

    In oil country, truly noxious gases from various hydro carbon operations are palmed off as the smell of money. What of the lovers of the smell of napalm in the morning?

    • Windy says:

      I think one of the worst smells in the world is diesel exhaust and yet I have to smell it every time I drive anywhere, because there are always diesel rigs around — buses, commercial trucks, pickups, and even diesel cars. I’d rather smell pot any day. Besides, who’s to say that weed smell coming from a neighbor’s backyard is not a skunk just passing through, or even having taken up residence?

  2. chip says:

    Time for disapproving faces to appear and condemn such retarded leaders as purport to public service in Pendleton {INC}. The one reason to enter a plebiscite is to reform the contents of incorporated “business” so as to return logic and justice to cornerstones of the universal law society. Top to bottom and left to right. Elite rulership institutions must be rejected and dissolved. They enslave even the winners. Make honor and duty the Laws of your nature and be hawkeyed in the hunt to redeem the wicked. Logic wastes NOT.

  3. Servetus says:

    In bastions of holy sanctimonious capitalism and drug war hysteria, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, it’s the acrid odor of the Kaiser Aluminum smelter plants that’s very apparent. Residents of these cities appear unperturbed by the noxious fumes they co-exist with daily. Yet, the sweet smell of marijuana flowers are likely to send some of these same residents into paroxysms of madness that are mediated only by SWAT teams.

  4. Yes, something does smell in Oregon. Its the smell of legislators who do not care about the wishes of the voters in their districts.

    http://tinyurl.com/kg6eeox

    Why Does Oregon Senator Ginny Burdick Hate Democracy?

  5. Uncle Albert's Nephew says:

    Pete once said that the last prohib fallbacks would be driving and kids. Add to that some version of second hand smoke.

  6. allan says:

    “It’s the smell of freedom.”

    nailed it

  7. claygooding says:

    Anyone that has lived within 10 miles of a pulpwood paper mill has had a bad wind day.

    • Windy says:

      I know that from experience, the city which I live just a quarter mile outside the limits of had both a pulp mill and a paper mill downtown owned by Georgia-Pacific, on the bay. That smell when the wind blew off the bay and into town was choking, but it was nowhere near as bad as Everett and Tacoma, haven’t smelled Everett in years and Tacoma seems to have cleaned up their smell, too, the last few times I drove through there I didn’t notice it.

  8. primus says:

    Feedlots are horrible. Up the road a ways is the largest feedlot in western Canada. I roll up the windows and turn off the heater for about 10 km. to minimize the stench. The whole of the nearby town reeks, and yet the people there say it’s the ‘smell of money’. No it isn’t, it’s the smell of shit. Tons and tons of shit.

    • Frank W. says:

      “Once you get used to the smell of rendered hog fat, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it!”
      Expect “smell harassment” to be a hot issue after July.

    • Windy says:

      Dairy country is just as bad when they spray the manure on the fields; and where peas are grown agriculturally, at harvest time the smell of pea silage (which they feed to the cows over the winter), is horrid.

  9. Duncan20903 says:

    .
    .

    All I’ve got to say is:

    Blue Plains

    The Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant is the largest advanced wastewater treatment plant in the world, with a capacity of 370 million gallons per day (MGD), a peak capacity of 1.076 billion gallons per day and covering 150 acres.

    To distribute water and support the distribution system, the Authority operates over 1,200 miles of pipes, five pumping stations, five reservoirs, four elevated water storage tanks, 36,000 valves and more than 9,000 public hydrants.

    To collect wastewater, the Authority operates 1,800 miles of sanitary and combined sewers, 22 flow-metering stations, nine off-site wastewater pumping stations, and 16 stormwater pumping stations within the District. Separate sanitary and storm sewers serve approximately two-thirds of the District of Columbia. In older portions of the system, such as the District’s downtown area, combined sanitary and storm sewer systems are prevalent.
    /snip/

    Man that’s a lot of very stinky sewer trout.

  10. DdC says:

    This stinks

    Full Circle

    “Not only are we here to protect the public
    from vicious criminals in the street
    but also to protect the public from harmful ideas.”
    – Robert Ingersoll, first director of the DEA

    Ideas are more powerful than guns.
    We would not let our enemies have guns,
    why should we let them have ideas.
    – Joseph Stalin

    America’s Disastrous Drug War
    Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens. I am speaking of the war on drugs.
    Walter Cronkite

    “Marijuana laws make liars and criminals out of people who are neither! Laws that don’t respect people breed people who don’t respect Laws!”
    – Gregory Schmid author of PRA2000

    NIDA’s Nutty Nora Volkow’s Tax Paid Gossip
    She has been named one of Time Magazine’s “Top 100 People Who Shape Our World”

    An Exit Strategy for the
    Failed War on Drugs

    Marijuana is scheduled alongside PCP and heroin as a Schedule I drug, which prohibits any medical use. Even when Congress has let the regulatory process play out, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and HHS have obstructed the process.

    Dr. Volkow is the great-granddaughter of Russian revolutionary and Head of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein. Grand daughter of Zinaida Volkova.

    TROTSKY REVELLED IN SOVIET EVIL
    Inhumanly ruthless in his dealings with non-Bolsheviks and at the same time thoroughly inept in his relations with Stalin…. In the end it is impossible to see him as other than an absurd figure, a fantasist seeking to found a paradise who helped build a hell on earth.

    To his American admirers, Trotsky appeared as a kind of Soviet Garibaldi, fighting for freedom against an evil empire. The problem, as Robert Service shows in his new biography Trotsky, is that Trotsky was one of the men chiefly responsible for that evil.

    To her American admirers, Volkow appears as a kind of Soviet Garibaldi, fighting for freedom against an evil pot empire. The problem is that Volkow is one of those chiefly responsible for that evil.

    Inhumanly ruthless in her dealings with non-prohibitionists and at the same time thoroughly inept in her relations with Science…. In the end it is impossible to see her as other than an absurd figure, a fantasist seeking to found a paradise who helped build a hell on earth.

  11. healing herbs says:

    TBI survivor here. A care package arrived this morning just as I was having an eyesocket migraine.
    NYC Diesel it says on the label. After half a hit the migraine was gone and I was able to eat something.
    A big shout out to all those people who don’t let their fellow man suffer in pain and don’t care about profit margins or how much money they can make.

  12. joe minella says:

    We all breathe legal and TOXIC shit every day. Reefer madness is the undead.

  13. thelbert says:

    farting is already a crime in mississippi and florida: http://tinyurl.com/ogq6yz3

    • kaptinemo says:

      What’s next? Armed Methane Monitors ready to shoot-to-kill at the slightest break of ‘wind’?

      Judge: “Officer Jack Boot, why did you kill Joe Sixpack?”

      Offcr Boot: “Well, Yer ‘Onor, he made a threatening move with his butt, and I heard a spluttering sound, and so I thought I was taking automatic small arms fire, and shot his ass!”

      Don’t laugh. It will happen, someday. This is America, after all…

  14. sudon't says:

    “…but for people to occasionally catch a whiff? No big deal.”

    Sorry, but the door was opened for this with tobacco. People allowed the anti-smoker lobby to get away with this nonsense because most people don’t like the smell of cigarettes, and smokers were a minority. Now, the same logic will be used against the rest of us.
    You know, I hate the smell of any kind of perfume. I gag at the smell of everything from scented deodorant to actual perfume/cologne. But I would never support banning the wearing of it. It was a mistake to go after smokers, and to accept all the bogus claims, (I realize many people believed them), made in that campaign.

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