When I was young, Nickelodeon came out with a couple of substances that they marketed as toys for children. There was Floam, comprised of tiny Styrofoam balls and some manner of goop that glued them together, and there was Gak. Gak was a slime-type substance, and it could make various popular noises when you smushed air bubbles in it –- "pffft," "prracpt," "grrrrrup," and so forth.
I was very pleased when, one Christmas, I received a packet of Floam and a packet of Gak. The Gak was pink, and I was very excited to put my small hands in it. But when I opened it, I discovered that it smelled AWFUL. It was like bad cheese. Now, maybe I was just one of the few children who didn't enjoy the smell of rotting dairy products, but it was not pleasant. Still, I plowed ahead, sticking my hands into the stuff, until I discovered that the bad cheese smell didn't exactly wash off my hands when I was done. I shoved my Gak in the back of the closet, never to play with it again.
This spring, however, I experienced an olfactory shock when I discovered that some of the flowering trees in my neighborhood smell exactly like Gak. This brings up a couple of questions:
- Were they trying to make Gak smell like flowers and just totally screwed up? Like, they opened up a book, pointed to some flowers, and told the Toy Scientists to make the stuff smell like that? And thusly they could have just as easily pointed to one of those flowers that smells like rotting meat and Gak could have ended up smelling like that?
- If a tree is known for smelling like bad cheese every year, why do you plant it? I mean, it flowers, sure, that's nice. But tons of trees flower. And this is the city. Each one of these trees was planted on purpose. Every time this tree flowers, is it supposed to remind us that life is double-edged, and for every beautiful thing, there is an ugly smell to maintain balance in the universe?
According to Wikipedia, a couple of years later Nickelodeon came out with a version of Gak that smelled like pickles. I haven't come across a pickle-gak-flower tree yet.