this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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xkcd
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oh wow I really needed the explanation for this one 😂
Some "old home remedies" would be: tomato sauce, for skunk; peanut butter, for gum; and prairie oyster cocktail, for hangover. Most of these either don't work or make the mess worse so a game show where people try this on a wild animal would be disastrous and possibly humorous if you ignore the animal abuse.
You don't have a home remedy for removing skunk smell, removing gum from hair or curing a hangover?
No.... I know of skunks from the cartoon Pépé the Skunk, but I never really reconnected that with reality, as in, they smell bad IRL, that's not just a cartoon thing. So that prevented me from identifying the xkcd being about grandma's remedies.
They smell about as bad as a feral cat. What they do is they make you smell bad if you scare them.
Not just bad either, vomit-inducing, appetite-destroying-bad. It's their defense mechanism from large things with sharp teeth that haven't eaten in 24h. The smell stays on you and anything the liquid touches for weeks. Burn the clothes, wait for new skin cells to replace the existing ones. Pray it isn't on something like your car or place of residence.
We have a skunk that roams around our back yard. Our dog got within a foot of it once, luckily didn’t get spayed. I can tell when he’s outside, just the lingering odor of their spray fills the entire outdoors. It is incredible how potently disgusting their actual spray is.