Blame It on the Dog (18 page)

Hint: There’s a fart hiding inside.

As everyone knows, a healthy human turd is about 80 percent water. (You
did
know that, didn’t you?) Constipation turds are only about 50 percent water, which means they’re more compact; diarrhea, on the other hand, is 90 percent liquid. Anyway, whatever the density, the rest of a stool is made up of various ingredients, including fat, which scientists for a long time believed was the main flotation factor in turds that won’t sink.

NEWS FLASH: I interrupt this chapter to bring you a special incident that actually happened to me. I was at a party at a nice home in the Hollywood hills where only the bathroom on the ground floor was available for guests. I had to pee, so I went in, shut the door, and lifted the toilet seat. Floating in the bowl was the biggest, meanest-looking turd I’d ever seen. It was one of those coiled Turdzillas whose release must have made the poopetrator feel lighter than champagne. I quickly flushed the toilet before doing anything else, hoping never to see it again. The water whooshed and swirled, giving it a couple of half-spins and breaking it into several pieces, but most of the turd, defiantly, was still there. I flushed again. Another slow counterclockwise spin, and … there it stayed, bobbing like a cork.
Well, I had to pee so I did my business, and then I flushed again. The yellow tint that I contributed to the water disappeared, but not the turd. Defeated, I dropped the seat back down and opened the door, hoping to scurry away anonymously, but several people, including two very pretty girls, were waiting to get inside. They greeted me warmly with smiles. I thought, should I shut the door in their faces and try to flush down that turd again or, if that didn’t work, scoop it out of the bowl with something and toss it out the window? Or should I just leave and let the girls think I was the culprit? Well, like a coward, I left them to their fate. They and all their friends gave me weird looks for the rest of the evening and avoided me like, well, the type of guy who would donate a python turd to the party. In other words, a real party pooper. Even now, I feel flush just thinking about it.

Anyway, back in 1972, Dr. Michael D. Levitt, who had not yet earned his title of “King of Gas” (see
chapter 18
), and Dr. William C. Duane published an article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
called “Floating Stools: Flatus Versus Fat.” Having first discovered that they could get small amounts of “colonic methane” gas out of a dried turd simply by slicing it open with a scalpel, the two physicians got a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service and set about to find out how much gas there was, and whether it was enough to have a pneumatic effect. After slicing several stools into small cubes, they put them in flasks containing distilled water and then applied two kinds of pressure. (Don’t ask me how.) Positive pressure let them measure “critical sinking pressure” and negative pressure yielded “critical floating pressure.”

The doctors’ findings were almost airtight: the more fart gas that’s trapped inside a turd, the harder it is to send it swirling down the crapper.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) agrees. According to its MedlinePlus website (
http://medlineplus.gov
), “Stools that float are generally associated with some degree of malabsorption of nutrients or excessive flatus (gas).… A change in dietary habits can lead to an increase in the amount of gas produced by bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. Similarly, acute gastrointestinal infections can result in increased gas content in the intestines due to rapid movement of food through the GI tract. One misconception is that
floating stools are caused by an increase in the fat content of the stool. In fact, it is increased gas levels in the stool that make it less dense and allow it to float.”

But don’t worry too much if your farty, non-fatty feces keep hanging around inside the bowl. “Most causes are benign,” says the NIH, “and will resolve when the infection ends or the bacteria in the GI tract adjust to the changes in your diet.”

Maybe it’s time to update Benjamin Franklin’s old adage to “Fish and visitors—and turds—stink after three days.”

AN INTERPLANETARY WHIFF

W
hen NASA and the European Space Agency landed the Huygens spacecraft on Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, on January 14, 2005, they discovered that Titan’s windy surface is covered with pools of methane kept in a liquid state by the –
290°F
temperature and heavy atmospheric pressure. As the heat from the retro-rockets kicked up a fart cloud of enveloping methane gas, Huygens’s sensors duly sniffed, analyzed, and reported the results to the Cassini mother ship orbiting overhead, as if to say, “Look what I did, Mommy.”

Will NASA be sniffing Uranus next?

TWO FARTS WAFT INTO A BAR …

W
hat’s a fart book without some fart jokes, limericks, and poems? Let’s face it, you’re only young once, but you can laugh at farts like an immature dimwit all your life. In
Who Cut the Cheese?
I tried to organize the most popular ones, show their variations, and give a brief explanation of the humor behind them. But this time around I’m just throwing out a few random funny bits I’ve picked up over the last several years.

An Irish immigrant named Mrs. Murphy has a restaurant in Ohio that’s famous for its Non-Gassy Bean Casserole. That’s exactly what it says on the menu. “Mrs. Murphy,” many first-time customers ask, “why doesn’t your bean casserole make you fart?”

“Because I use exactly 239 beans,” she says in her lilting brogue.

“Just 239 beans? Why 239?”

“Well, if I used one more bean, it’d be too farty.”

When a Kentucky mountain woman visits her doctor, he tells her to come back in a couple of days with a specimen. She goes home and asks her husband, “What’s a specimen?”

He says, “Danged if I know. Go next door and ask Edith.”

The woman goes next door and comes back in twenty minutes with her clothes torn and her face covered with cuts and bruises.

“What in the Sam Hill happened to you?” asks her husband.

“Danged if I know,” she says. “I asked Edith what a specimen was and she just told me to go piss in a bottle. I told her to go fart in a jug, and then all hell broke loose.”

A doctor, during his weekly visit to a nursing home, notices that one of his elderly patients, Mr. Whipkey, has begun to lean sideways in his chair. One of the nurses rushes up behind and catches him.

The doctor goes over and says, “Afternoon, Mr. Whipkey,” and presses his stethoscope against the old man’s sunken chest. “How are you feeling today?”

As the doctor listens to his heartbeat, Mr. Whipkey begins to lean in the other direction. Again the nurse grabs his shoulders and straightens him up.

“How do you like it here?” the doctor asks him.

“Oh, fine, Doc,” says the old man, “ ’cept this nurse won’t let me fart.”

Birds of a feather
Flock together;
But birds that fart
Flock apart!
   —Mitchell Trauring

A West Virginia woman rushes her little boy down the holler to Doc LaPann’s office in Osage and declares, “Oh, please, doctor, please, Wesley here just swallowed one of his daddy’s .22-caliber bullets, what are we gonna do?”