If you never read anything else I recommend, read this guy every day. Catch both the Backfence and the Bleats. Do it for the children.
...Anyway. I bought a few plug-ins and sampled them over the next few days. They did the trick; the laundry no longer smelled like Gollum's feet. Now every time I walked downstairs I had the sensation of someone grinding a coconut into my face. Out went the Tropical Medley. In went Mango Splash. I had no idea what this would smell like -- I mean, drop an exotic fruit into a bucket of herring cutlets, and you have a Mango Splash. It wasn't bad, but like all the rest it came on strong the first few days, making everything Mangolicious, then it just gave up. I replaced it with Butterfly Meadow, the most vaguely named scent in the panoply. Meadow can mean anything, depending on the number of flowers in bloom or the number of cows that have wandered by. Butterfly means nothing -- who knows what a butterfly smells like? Having lived with the scent for a while, here's my report: if you ate a huge meal of tulips and beans and spent the night burping, your room would smell like Butterfly Meadow. It's not bad. But it's just not right.
Lileks on air fresheners...
