The stinky trees I mentioned yesterday are in full bloom. I can't go anywhere without being around these vile things, they're a blight on civilization. They also remind me of two things:

The first thing is a story my sister told me about one of her friends who likes oddball plants and flowers. One day this woman saw a plant at a really cheap price in a catalog and the description said the plant had a "pungent aroma" or something similar. Anyway, she bought it and planted the damn thing right beside her front door. When it bloomed it smelled like rotten meat and it attracted flies.

OK, the other thing the stinky trees remind me of is a bizarre "marriage manual" from the mid-20's called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique by Dutch madman Th. H. Van De Velde. (Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this.) I found this book at a thrift store years ago, and I wish I possessed a large enough vocabulary to adequately convey the insanity of this text. But I digress. In a chapter that deals with, among other things, smells, I stumbled across the following: "[...]The semen of the healthy youths of Western European races has a fresh, exhilarating smell; in the mature man it is more penetrating. In type and degree this very characteristic seminal odor is remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut (Marrons), which also vary according to the condition of the trees and the atmosphere, and are sometimes quite freshly floral, and then again, extremely pungent and quite disagreeable.[...]" Of course, the stinky tree that now haunts my every waking moment isn't a Spanish chestnut, it bears no fruit that I know of, and if it did bear fruit I certainly wouldn't eat any of it.