My father used to say "drifting around like a fart in the marketplace".   I later found out (from Maurice Samuel) that that was a version of the Yiddish "vi a farts im roisl" (like a fart in the pickle barrel), referring to a fermentation bubble working its way up thru the interstices between the pickles. But that, in turn, was a play on "vi a frantsoiz in Rusland" (like a Frenchman in Russia), alluding to the stragglers in the retreat from Moscow.