Sunday, April 24, 2011

Day 114



Blurb: Happy Easter from myself, Sadie and the corpse flower.

Backstory: I like to consider myself a connoisseur of smells and oddities, so you can imagine how excited I was when I learned a corpse flower had bloomed here in Columbus. It's a rare flower from the island of Sumatra that's almost extinct. The stock is about five feet tall with a bloom that has a three foot radius, and here's the kicker, it smells like a rotting corpse.
The flower opened late last night at one of Ohio State's green houses. They only bloom about once every ten years if you're lucky and they only stay in bloom for two days. In the horticultural world this is a big deal, so they opened the green house today for the public to come and seen the corpse flower. Recently in Switzerland over nine-thousand people waited to see one, the number was much smaller today.
I waited in line for a little under an hour with hundreds of other people. The green houses are located on top of a building so you had to take an elevator up. I give the staff at Ohio State a lot of credit because everything was very orderly. After going up the elevator we waited in another, much shorter line to see the actual flower.
It's a very weird looking plant, as you can imagine from the picture. The leaves are a really dark red color that's about the same shade as extremely rare meat. Along with the weird appearance was the smell; it's supposed to smell like a rotting corpse. The smell wasn't that strong today, I thought it smelled like stinky garbage and the whole green house didn't smell the like garbage. The staff said it smelled much worse last night.
I was a little disappointed the smell didn't knock me off my feet. I've smell a lot of stinky things and this was no wear near the smelliest. It smelled a lot like a back alley in a big city on garbage day, a little rare and annoying. In fact I've had co-workers and trash that I've made that have smelled worse. All in all it was something interesting to do that every few people have gotten to experience. So rage on corpse flower.

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