Now, the powers that be in Atlanta—namely one Doug Strachan, the Creative Innovations Manager for the City of Atlanta Department of Aviation—hae come up with a brilliant new useless scheme to make the airport sound and smell better. Not only will travelers be able to inhale a scent called “Breeze” (a combo of vanilla and lavender) that will help them feel better about their miserable lives:

The pleasant, relaxing scent is going over so well that Strachan said a custom scent that will be exclusive to Hartsfield-Jackson is being developed. “We want to make people feel better,” he said. “We wanted to give them an olfactory cue which suggested that the airport is opening day fresh and we want to enhance their travel experience.”

To go along with this olfactory manipulation (did you people not see Serenity?), Strachan and fellow Skinnerians have re-written three old R&B tunes to better suit their human experimentation. They bought the rights to three old jams: “Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches and Herb, “Bustin’ Loose” by Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, and “Fantastic Voyage” by Lakeside. They are now–-with the help of the actual hard-up artists–-rewriting the lyrics to make them more airport-friendly. For example, the reworked “Shake Your Groove Thing”:

Opening Day fresh, Opening Day fresh,
Yeah, yeah
Hartsfield-Jackson do it now
Opening Day fresh, Opening Day fresh,
Yeah, yeah
Show ‘em how we do it now!
Show ‘em how we do it now!

I think we can all agree that the biggest problem with fun R&B classics is their pesky good-time lyrics. It’s nice to know that someone’s taking care of that. You know what would make my visits to airports better, guys? Letting me leave my shoes on when I go through security. Glad to see people can still have useless jobs and ideas in this economy!

Atlanta airport grooving to clean music [CNN]