Toilet Seat Education!

Photo by dpstyles

Do you know why toilet seats have those four little bumpers on the bottom?

It's to create space between the seat and the toilet. This is very important; there HAS to be a space there!

Think about the suction that happens when you flush the toilet. If it were allowed to build up while you were sitting there, the suction pressure from the flushing could suck YOU into the toilet. Not good!

Ooh, speaking of toilet lids, here's Superman:

From istolthetv

El Caganer: Busting grumpies old school!

Traditional Caganer

You may have learned about El Caganer (“the great pooper”) from cool books like this one. Statues of the Great Pooper are common in the Spanish region of Catalonia. The idea was that El Caganer's excellent poop would give farmers good crops!

Why is his poop yellow?

While this may seem odd, the statues date back to the 1600s and are considered symbols of good health. Hey, the Spanish don’t have prissy poop hangups! And that's why they have modern versions of El Caganer, like SpongeBob Squarepants! 

"I have no fear of death...
it's BULLS I'm afraid of!"

Before eating, Catalans sometimes say, “Menjar bé, i caga fort, i no tinguess por de la mort!”

That means, “Eat well, poop strong, and you will have no fear of death!”  (And THAT might remind you of what the Italians say.) 

"Yes, my poop is red."

In the Christmas season, kids play a “Where's-Waldo” game with El Caganer. That’s because the pooping statue is hidden in the Nativity! (Also known as the manger scene.) As a symbol of respect, the pooper is usually located at some distance from the manger’s holy characters. I mean, how weird would it be to see Spiderman IN the manger?

If you’re interested, Caganer.com offers MANY El Caganer figurines, all of them assuming the position.

Run Away from Brown Eye!

"Run away!"

Wow! There's a new butt cover for pets called Rear Gear. The idea is that you hang this little sign from your dog or cat's tail. And it covers up its...anal aperture.

The Rear Gear motto is "No more brown eye." But look at the butts of those brown mutts! A brown eye would match their color better than the patch!

So doesn't the Rear Guard actually draw attention to the spot we're trying to ignore?

Maybe Rear Guard is for people who are super-squeamish. You know, the kinds of people who can barely handle picking up dog poop...or the kinds of people who read this blog!

I'm not going to tell you again!

Truckers don't like to pull over to pee, so sometimes they just go in a jug!

Of course, it's hard to concentrate on safe driving when you're peeing. But these guys are pros!

The problem is that many of these pros then chuck their urinal jugs out the window. Way uncool! 

Put some underwater adventure into your pooping!

What can I say? This aquarium-toilet is amazing! It's called the Fish 'n Flush. And as you can see, it can completely revolutionize your bathroom!

The idea is that the aquarium wraps around the back of your toilet. So when you flush the toilet, it's not like the water all drains out on the fish!

But even so, I have some concerns. Sure, bathroom visitors like to look at fish. But think about the horrible things the fish have to see! And the sounds —muffled by water— definitely leak through to their ears. In short, I'm afraid that this incredibly awesome toilet might be animal abuse!

While you think about that, check out the Fish 'n Flush video.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies has snot in a jar!

The world's coolest store is London's Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. Among other things, you can buy a big jar of the Thickest Human Snot there. It's harvested from free-range snivelling humans!

The shop also sells gore, malodorous gases, children's ears,  organ marmalade, olde-fashioned brain jam, congealed ear wax, and a host of other monstrous items. (To learn the story behind this magical place, visit the links below or above!)

Article here.

Eat Well and Poop Strong!

In northern Italy, the people have a saying:

“Mangia bene, caca forte, 

e non aver paura della morte!”

And Americans eating a Thanksgiving meal can say the same thing in English: “Eat well, poop strong, and you will have no fear of death!”

Lego Thanksgiving by Josh Wedin.

"One jellyfish, sunny-side up!"

Caters News

So what do scientists do when they discover an amazing jellyfish with a yellow center? They call it the fried-egg jellyfish (Phacellophora camtschatica) and they turn back to their microscopes.

I understand that the fried-egg jellyfish is good with hash browns. But don't use ketchup...it just make the stings from the jellyfish tentacles hurt that much more!

Hey, if you illegally caught these animals, you'd be poaching fried-egg jellyfish! (Oh, snap!)

From the Telegraph.

More Gross Dog Jokes, Please

Bogart!

A dog walks into a bar and hops up onto a stool. He looks the bartender in the eye and says, “I can talk. Have you ever seen a talking dog before? How about a drink?”

The bartender thinks for a moment and says, “Sure, the toilet's right around the corner.”

Thanks to the Edge!

All I Want for Christmas is a Toy Dog That Poops

This is a German ad for a toy dog (Kackel Dackel) that eats biscuits and then poops. It's so cool, I'm speechless. Wunderbar!

The idea is that as you roll the dice, the food you feed Kackel Dackel works its way through his digestive system. And if you can get it to come all the way out, you collect that yellow poop as proof of your winning.

As far as I can tell, Kackel Dackel is only available in Germany for the moment...for example, at Amazon.de. Time to buy a plane ticket!

Mucus Saves the Day!

Norbert Wu/Minden/FLPA

Let’s say that you’re a fish living in a coral reef. (If you already live in a coral reef, this will be easy.) When it gets dark, you like to slow down and take it easy…but it’s hard to relax with all the predators (like moray eels) that want to eat you. Almost as bad, there’s loads of parasites (called gnathiids) that want to suck your blood!

So to solve the problem, you spit. That is, you swim into a cozy little part of the coral and you start spitting up mucus to wrap yourself inside of. That’s what parrotfish and wrasses do each evening!

By Patrick Hoesley

These fish have mucus glands near their mouths that allows them to create their own mosquito nets each night. No moray eel wants to eat a fish wrapped in what looks like a spider web. And most parasites can’t get through the mucus!

And humans can also protect themselves from predators and parasites with mucus. If you’re bothered by a bully or someone who constantly borrows money from you, try coating yourself with mucus. I’ll bet they stay away!

New Scientist article on this topic here.

"Going Commando" in Scotland!

You know what “going commando” means, right? Yep, it means not wearing underwear. There are a number of reasons why a person might not wear underwear.

1.) He does not own any underwear.

2.) All of his underwear is dirty.

3.) There are no other reasons not to wear underwear.

Despite the above, kilt-wearing Scots are famous for going commando. In fact, the rule was that if you had underwear on under your kilt, you weren’t a real Scotsman. 

But it’s the 21st century, and even kilt-wearers need to start pulling on some skivvies. At least, that’s the message that the Scottish Tartans Authority is sending. Its officers say that NOT wearing underwear beneath a kilt is “childish and unhygienic.”

Hey, sort of like this blog!

Telegraph article here,

photos by Michael 1952,

and John Haslam.

"Cackling Farts" Defined!

In my far-reaching research, I recently learned that there was an old slang term called “cackling-farts.” Were these farts so horrible, they sounded like an old crone laughing? I had to find out!

After consulting the First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699, I found that cackling farts were a slang term for eggs. I guess the idea was that chickens cackle, especially when they’re laying eggs. So the eggs were cackling farts…though cackling poops makes more sense!

Here’s a few other words I learned:

• Bumfodder: Toilet paper, or “what serves to wipe the Tail.”
• Farting crackers: Pants, or “Breeches.”
• Fizzle: “A little or low-sounding Fart.”

Behold the Crystal Toilet

It's called the ISIS. It's a toilet covered in crystals. You may be wondering, "Why would I need a toilet covered in crystals?"

Why WOULDN'T you?

Gross Joke for the Day!

Boycott shampoo— 

demand REAL poo!

Thanks to Galactic Yeti.

Track That Flush!

Have you ever wondered where your poop goes after you flush? You SHOULD. And if you live in the United Kingdom, Poland, Ireland, or South Africa, now you can!

Flush Tracker has a map that allows you to enter a bathroom location. You can then track where flushes go from that spot! Just for kicks, I did a trial flush from 10 Downing Street, London, which is where the Prime Minister lives. And right now, my hypothetical poop has gone a half-mile at a speed of five miles-per-hour on its way to a sewage treatment plant. 

But what do we call this poo trips? Maybe...

• excrement excursions
• turd trajectories
• plop journeys
• scat scootings

Anyway, this is a fascinating thing to watch, but it’s also done to highlight World Toilet Day…which is TODAY!

Article on Flush Tracker here (via).

Deer Toilet!

"How are YOU doing?"

Why is this stag in a hole?

This is the season when male deer dig holes (called "cologne holes"), poop in them, rub their scents in them, and then lie in all that stink. Why?

Apparently, it attracts females.

Go figure!

Photo by Mark Bridger, 
from the Telegraph.

Pee of Death, Poop of Doom!

Hans van den Berg

I peed blood this morning.

And as it hit the toilet bowl, it turned sort of a rusty color and swirled around ominously.

Well, THAT'S disturbing, I thought. To avoid having a heart attack, I tried to think of something relaxing. So I grabbed the sports section and sat down on the toilet.

Minutes later, I yelled, "I pooped blood!" (And I had—it was all horrible and red.)

"No you didn't," my wife called back.

What the what? When you're dying of blood loss, you don't want someone to tell you you're fine. "I'm dying of blood loss here!" I cried out.

Photo by Darwin Bell

"We had beets last night," my wife reminded me.

Oh yeah! I'd eaten a bowl of the Russian beet soup called borscht. And beets have an incredibly strong red color that manages to STAY red all the way through a human's digestive system. I was going to live!

"I'm not going to die after all," I said reassuringly, as I came out of the bathroom.

"Not YET, anyway," was her answer. (Hey, what does that mean?)

World Toilet Day is coming!

More information here.

Pee is pretty! (Spaceships made of poop? Not so much.)

I just read a great article about space poop and pee by Steve Mirsky. In it, astronaut James A. Lovell said living in a space capsule is like living in an airtight Porta-Potty, because you can’t open a window to get ventilation!

So astronaut farts have long lives! But astronaut pee is not such a big problem. To get rid of it, astronauts can do a “urine dump.” That’s what they call pumping pee into the freezing blackness of outer space.

Author Mary Roach writes, “These flash-frozen droplets, illuminated, would look like this silvery snowstorm. I think three different astronauts mentioned how beautiful the urine dump was.”

But if the astronauts were going for a REALLY long trip, they wouldn’t dump their pee. They’d need it for drinking! Recycling and drinking pee already happens on the International Space Station. Just filter the salt and nasty tastes out of the pee and drink it…again and again and again!

Being in outer space exposes people to radiation. So astronauts need radiation shields, and it turns out that food (and poop!) can do that job! Mary Roach says that as a spaceship flies to Mars, astronaut food could line the inside of the space module.

As the astronauts bust grumpies, they would save their poop. These logs would be put into a device that bakes the poop into tiles. And for the trip back from Mars, you’d line the interior of the spaceship with the poop tiles!

Or as Roach put it, “So you’d fly to Mars in a can of food, and then you’d fly home in a can of poop.”

ADDITION: Astronaut poop has another cool use! Look at this: “First UN Satellite Hopes to Turn Astronaut Poop Into Power Supply”

Article from Scientific American,
top photo by Sam Howzit,
license plate by Eddie-S.

Get Pee in Your Hands!

A woman named Sally Magnusson has written an important new book called The Life of Pee: How Urine Got Everywhere.

How do I know it’s important? Well, look at that title! Plus, I just listened to a radio interview with her. Anyway, here’s the book’s description:

Alchemists sought gold in it...modern-day terrorists add it to home-made explosives...[In] 1969, four bags of it were left on the surface of the moon. Bought and sold, traded and transported, even carried to work in jugs, urine has made bread rise, beer foam and given us gunpowder, stained glass, [and] Robin Hood's tights...And we do produce an awful lot of it. [Add all of our pee up and] it might soon displace a small ocean. No wonder it gets everywhere! [This is] the secret history of civilisation’s most unsavory and unsung hero…

Did you see that? Pee is our hero. I knew it all along!

Oh, and the book only appears to be available in Great Britain at the moment. Rats!

Top photo from the Courier.

Celebrities Barf Too!

Bill Russell was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. In fact, since he won 11 championships in 13 seasons, you could say he was THE best ever!

So what did a tough player like Russell do before games?

Blow chunks!

For years, Russell would get so nervous before tip-off, he'd have to throw up. What’s weird is that right after I saw that in The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball, I was reading the autobiography of actor Michael Caine. (He’s been in over a hundred films.) When Caine started out in acting in plays, he noted there was an empty bucket off-stage in many theaters.

“I wonder what that’s for?” he asked himself.

When showtime got close, Caine got nervous. And then, right before his big entrance, Caine found himself with his head over the pail, throwing up!

Yep, it was a puke bucket. And Caine went on to use these buckets many, many times!

Bill Russell picture from here,

Michael Caine from here,

barf-bucket  here.

Thanks for the tip!

The new city hall in Chandler, Arizona, has signs up:

Urinals and Toilets are served with gray water

Do Not Drink

Hey, I wonder how many thirsty people went to the restrooms and then came back out, disappointed?

Story and picture from AZ Central.com.

Vocabulary Words of the Day!

Photo by Orin Zebest

encopresis: To accidentally go poop, usually in your pants.

imbulbitate: To poop your pants. Example: “From little Timmy’s expression, we knew he had imbulbitated.”

The Worst Birthday Cake Ever

Dysentery [noun]: Infection of the intestines resulting in severe diarrhea with the presence of blood and mucus in the poop.

Oh, and that cake is pretty funny IF you've ever played Oregon Trail!

Learning About Art (gross, gross, art!)

From here.

I was wondering about art this morning after seeing a website called the SpeedOfArt.com.

Wait, that looks like it says Speedo fart. Yuck!

Trying again, I checked the BBC arts site. There I learned that a London artist named Ben Wilson makes paintings out of the old gum people spit out on sidewalks.

Wilson says, "I can make something special out of something that people find disgusting." (Video here.)

One thing that people often say about art they don't like is that, "A monkey could have done that."

But I'd never heard of anyone saying a maggot could make art until I saw this article about Erin Watson. She's a forensic entomologist. That means Watson investigates murder scenes and looks at maggots to figure out how long the body's been dead.

And Watson ALSO uses maggots and children to make art:

"Maggot art is made by gently dropping the larvae into blobs of non-toxic, water-based paint. As the maggots crawl across paper using their hook-like mouths, they drag streams of paint behind them creating what Watson calls 'Maggot Monets.' After a little [help], children become enthralled with the project, says Watson, which has caused throngs of eager youngsters to crowd around her table at past exhibits."

"Making the Bladder Gladder": Sayings for going pee!

Photo by fPat Murray

There's a lot of sayings for taking a pee. For instance, when people say they're going to “answer the call of nature”, it means they’re going to PEE. Not poop!

The same thing goes for “seeing a man about a horse.” (But maybe if you were going to see a man about an ELEPHANT, you’d be pooping.)

If you need to pee really bad, you might exclaim, “My back teeth are floating!” If you're more scientific, go with, “I am feeling micturient.”

From Sodahead

Also, you can TAKE a pee (or piss), GO Number 1, or even DO a wee. But nobody ever GIVES a pee? How selfish! Anyway, here’s the best “I'm going to go pee” sayings!

“Where's the bathroom? I've got to...”

• change water on the goldfish
• dump some apple juice
• drain the dragon
• expel urine from my bladder
• fight a fire
• give my pee ration at the urination station
• go oui oui (France)
• hose the porcelain
• leak the lizard (men only)
• lift the leg (think about dogs)
• lower my water level
• make my bladder gladder
• pass water
• pay the water bill
• piddle
• point Percy at the porcelain
• release steam from the radiator
• relieve myself
• shake the dew off the lily
• splash the pirate
• take a whiz/leak/squirt
• tap a kidney
• take a pit stop
• tinkle OR twinkle
• train Thomas on the terracotta
• troggle
• visit the wizard
• void my bladder
• water the horse
• write my name in the snow (cold weather only)

Learn the story behind peeing like a race-horse here. And find more sayings that use urine (e.g., “It’s like taking pee out of the pool!”) here.

Sloths only poop ONCE a week?!

I love sloths. And now I respect them, too! It turns out that sloths only go to the bathroom weekly. Man, that's got to take willpower!

This video shows how orphaned baby sloths get potty training. The sloth-lings have to be taught to come down from the trees to take care of business...just like the big sloths do!

But maybe "holding it" for a week isn't that big of a thing to sloths.

Sloth 1: Dude, I didn't go for EIGHT days!

Sloth 2: Please. Go two weeks and then brag about it.

(And hey, follow the Amphibian Avenger blog!)

A Near-Death Experience and Pachyderm Poop!

I almost died this morning.

HowStuffWorks

There I was, sitting on the throne of power and taking care of business. When the bowel movement was complete, I reached behind me and flushed the toilet.

But I could tell from the strangled sounds the toilet was making that there was trouble. Clogged toilet! 

Elephant poop is big.

I leapt up and dove behind the toilet to turn off the water. Whew! That was close. The bowl's water level had risen to within an INCH of overflowing. And if it had, all the poop, water, and poopy water would have cascaded all over the bathroom floor...and me!

I'm assuming this would've killed me.

Coincidentally, I then read this story by David Moye about elephants at the Topeka Zoo. After the pachyderms poop, their logs are picked up and dried for ten days. Then the elephant poop is sprayed with acrylic, and turned into art projects called Pet Poo. (And even though the arty pieces of poop are big, they won't kill you!)