Grainy

There is a book review in this week's New Yorker on a criticism of perfume -- and yes, I do know this is a sports blog, and no, I'm not gay, and yes, taking this long to get to the point is bad writing -- that makes the point that much of what we think is taste, is actually smell.

The proof, of course, is that heavy smokers can more or less eat anything, which is why women smoke after sex. It's amazing what you can learn from the New Yorker. (And hey presto, so much for the gay.) But it does tend to beg the question of why dogs will eat anything.

Anyway... the nose is something that is cultivated over time. When you acquire a taste, in all likelihood, your nose learned something new. I think a corollary can be made about sports, which makes this the 8,234th thing that can be related to sports, but so be it.

If you're a sabermetric guy about baseball, you're basically a wine drinker in a beer bar. Eventually, you find a wine place to get your jones (or James) on, and if you get far enough into it, you become insufferable to the beer drinkers. And it's also, of course, a false choice to think you can't be both.

When you read stuff that, say, describes a certain kind of wine as "grainy", it doesn't seem possible or true, given that you are, well, describing a liquid. But then you taste something that actually is that way, and voila... grainy.

There's also a movement afoot that basically says that you can map smells out into a grid, and since the money involved in perfume is huge, you probably should. The counter to that is that smells and tastes are wildly complicated and subject to the inaccuracies of, being, well, meatbags.

And I'd talk more about this, but being meat myself... I'm probably not smart enough to go further into this. Moving on.