AKA - where are the marketplace bits in the directory, AKA - why is it offline for hours at a time, AKA - why do I have to log into see the review now, AKA - why is something happening that is really quite annoying...

Anybody that visits the site often will have come across an occasion in the last few months where the site unavailable. This is frustrating for us, so we guess it must be frustrating for you too. Here's what is happening.

The main culprit is the scripts that...

Another repost from the earlier blogs:

For a while now, I've been wearing mostly Guerlain scents on Sunday, and more often recently, they've been scents that are usually classed as women's fragrances.

Now I'm not a firm believer in making a great divide between the types of scents that are masculine or feminine; it seems to me that tastes have been merging a good deal in recent years. A lot of women seem to be losing interest in very sweet, floral scents; and at the same...

After reading the thread about how to pronounce the word "millésime" in French, I wrote a reply in which I mentioned that the word refers to a date, as on a monument or a coin.

Well, I began to think about this... Why would Creed use this term to name a perfume? So I did a little investigating. I've been looking at a book by Annick le Guérer, Le Parfum: des origines à nos jours (Odile Jacob: Paris, 2005, ISBN 2-7381-1670-1) and I decided to look up Creed in the chapter on...

Canada Customs has now, for the second time, destroyed a bottle of fragrance that was on its way to me via the postal system. It isn't wholly unexpected, since I know that fragrances are disallowed in the postal system due to Canada Post regulations. Therefore, I know that I take a risk every time a bottle comes to me over the border.

Cross-border buyers are really caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock, on the one hand, is the postal regulation that considers fragrances...

My birthday was Thursday, October 9, but I didn't do much to celebrate it that day because I taught all day into the evening, capping the day off by giving an oral midterm exam to my evening class.

The following day, however, my spouse and I escaped San Francisco, and drove up to Mendocino, about a 150-mile drive inland and then up the coast of California. The town is quite picturesque, with water towers behind many of the older houses and a general late-Victorian atmosphere. It was...