Ed lopes around his manky, smelly house all day, reading books called Vicious Jungle Headhunters, dwelling on the grisly objects that he has assembled, and eating pork and beans from bowls that he has fashioned from hollowed-out skulls.
Under the new plan, Mr. Brooks said, Red Hook residents would no longer face the prospect of garbage trucks making hundreds of noisy, smelly trips each day through their neighborhood.
Soft, hard, goaty, sheepy, blue, crumbly or creamy, tangy or mild, or seriously smelly, rarely a day goes by without me squashing some on a piece of bread, scattering a handful into a sauce or over a gratin or salad, or simply grabbing a chunk and consuming it greedily on the hoof between kitchen and garden or desk.
She describes them as tireless workers, caught between foot and shoe in a sliver of space, rubbed and smelly by the day's end -- usually, let's face it, despised.
"That a guy in China who smelt his own smelly socks every day after work was found to have a lung infection actually doesn't surprise me," said Domenic Roscioli, a podiatrist with the Royal District Nursing Service in Australia.
And they made several visits to Harvard, where 26 smelly students emerged Wednesday after a three-week sit-in over how much the nation's richest university pays its janitors.
The other preps are the Federico Tesio at Pimlico on Saturday, where Smelly will be favored; the Remington Park Derby at Remington on Saturday, featuring Drag Race, and the Louisiana Derby at the Fair Grounds on Sunday, where Big Easy, Genuine Meaning and Very Formal are the choices.
Such anecdotes of physical bravery go to a deeper affinity between the two men: their shared fearlessness in opposing what Orwell called the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the day.
"It is so ecologically out of balance that if it goes on this way, it will kill itself," said Alan Berger, a landscape architecture professor at M.I.T. who was excitedly poking around the smelly canals on a recent day and talking to fishermen like Mr. Assunto.
Johnson was preparing her smelly concoction for the final day of medical drills during the most recent "Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC)" training course in Turin, Italy, during the last week in July.
