Gross Nicknames!

Maybe you think you've had a bad nickname. Please! My name is BART. Guess what that rhymes with?

Hey, this reminds me that when famous scientist Charles Darwin was a kid, he was so interested in chemistry, his friends nicknamed him “Gas.” Downer!

The great artist Michelangelo didn't have a bad nickname. Why would he? This is the guy who painted a masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel in 1541. It was awesome! A classic! Incredible!

But even so, some people had a problem with the painting. See, “The Last Judgment” was a big painting with lots of people… and over three-dozen of the men shown in the masterpiece were naked. Yikes! So another artist was picked to paint underwear. Lots and lots of underwear.

The lucky person picked for the job was Danela da Volterra. But he is better known today for his nickname of Il Braghettone: "The Underwear Man".

Ooh, and here's another unfortunate nickname: In World War II, the Japanese admiral Shigetaro Shimada was called: “Droopy Drawers” (Yurufun)!

The Chinese have some funny nicknames, too. For example, China Central TV is headquartered in an unusual skyscraper. Its owners wanted to nickname the building Zhi chuan ("knowledge window"). This was probably a bad idea, since that sounds a lot like the Chinese word for “hemorrhoid” (Zhi chuang).

But before that nickname could get going, a Chinese taxi driver started calling it dà kùcha: “Big Underwear”. And that’s the nickname that’s stuck!


BONUS: The best, grossest nickname might be right here.

"I call shotgun!"

If you were talking on your cell while in this truck, you'd be on the mobile phone on a mobile throne!

Raise Your Pants, Raise Your Image (and cover your butt!)

A New York politician named Eric Adams is tired of seeing people with their butts hanging out and their pants on the ground. 

So Adams is campaigning against sagging on billboards (above), in speeches, and even with a video!

And in this YouTube video, Adams argues that “Young people are above this.”

Not to be a jerk, but I disagree! Young people are actually BEHIND this. (Oh, snap!)

Mother Goose Is the OG of Grossness!

In 1952, a guy named Geoffrey Handley-Taylor studied 200 traditional nursery rhymes. He found that about half of them were were not very nice! These nursery rhymes contained:

• 1 case of cutting a human being in half
• 1 case of decapitation
• 1 case of death by squeezing
• 1 case of death by shriveling (!)
• 1 case of death by starvation
• 1 case of boiling to death
• 1 case of death by hanging
• 2 cases of choking to death
• 3 cases of death by drowning
• 8 references to murder
• 1 case of cannibalism
• 2 references to graves
• 9 cases of children being lost or abandoned

Worst of all, there were four cases of cursing in these kids' poems! (And not I'm even going to bother with all of the children in the nursery rhymes who were kidnapped or otherwise bothered by meanies.)

Geoffrey Handley-Taylor concluded this way: “Expressions of fear, weeping, moans of anguish, biting, pain and evidence of supreme selfishness may be found in almost every other page.”

Sheesh Mother Goose, lighten up a little!

When Do You Need a Deodorant Cannon? (Never!)

Have you ever smelled someone with bad b.o. who has drenched himself with deodorant and cologne? It doesn’t work, does it? You still smell the rotten stink underneath the perfumey stuff! 

The Chinese government hasn’t figured this out yet. China has more people generating more stinky trash than any nation on the planet. If the people did a good job recycling, this wouldn’t be a huge problem…but they don’t! In Beijing, only 4% of all garbage is recycled. (For comparison, New York recycles 36% of its trash.)

So what do you do when you end up with huge, smelly landfills of garbage? The Chinese solution is to fire deodorant cannons! According to this article, the cannons spray gallons of fragrance into the air.

But I’m going to predict that this isn’t going to solve the gross smells. After all, we have a big fan blowing bad air out of our bathroom, and even it isn’t enough to keep it smelling good in there! 

The New York Times (sort of) wants you to read GROSS STUFF!

GOOD NEWS! New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof thinks that every boy in the U.S. should read The Big Book of Gross Stuff! In his column “The Boys Have Fallen Behind” in yesterday’s edition, Kristof wrote:

“One remedy [for poor reading skills] may be to encourage lowbrow, adventure or even gross-out books that disproportionately appeal to boys.”

(Okay, so he ALMOST recommended it!)

BAD NEWS! An article on Gross Stuff in the Oregonian yesterday ended with this unfortunate line:

“King, in all his grossness, lives in Portland.”

What the what? I’m not gross at all! You see, as this book’s author, I face a unique danger. People might link ME with the disgusting things I’m writing about!

Not wanting to be contaminated in this way, I’ve taken special steps to ensure that I myself am in no way gross. So during the writing of this book, I stopped manufacturing:

• mucus
• dandruff
• tweets from my Twitter

Furthermore, I showered twice daily. This process included exfoliation, defoliation, and deforestation. (Plus, I scrubbed between my toes!)

Finally, before sitting down to write, I looked at pictures of kittens, flowers, and puppies. This helped purify and protect my mind from the horrible topics that my cruel editor forced me to research.

So there!

Drugs for Your Butt?!

There's a pharmacy in Indiana known as Butt Drugs. But this business does NOT specialize in medications for the butt. Rather, it was founded by a man named Bill Butt.

Why did Bill name the store after himself? I'm not sure, but my guess is that he had a sense of humor...and he was deeply immature!

Toilet Art That Will Bowl You Over

Isotope Comics in San Francisco has a Toilet Seat Museum. It's a place for comic artists visiting the store to leave a memento of their work. It’s pretty cool, although a lot of the artists actually just use the toilet LID, not the seat. (Artist Mike Brennen did the robot above.)

I thought of the museum because a studio in Chicago is having an “art of the toilet seat” show right now. Most of the paintings are on the toilet lid, like the one here by Mitch McConnell. But there is a WAY bigger problem with this!

The show is called “Paintings for You to Poop On.” 

What?! It sounds like somebody doesn’t know how to use a toilet! You don’t poop ON the toilet lid or seat. What a disaster! If you did that, you'd end up with flaming poop all over them, like below. 

No, after raising the lid, you poop in FRONT of it!

But I’m willing to forgive all, because this show does have a good slogan:

—Prizes for #1 and #2!

Roses seat by Kirsten Easthope, pupu-platter lid by Derek Yaniger.

Eyeballing Some Jewelry?

If you're in the market for some jewelry, consider this Green Zombie Eye ring. But be careful! Just as real zombies are rotting and therefore somewhat delicate, this ring is also fragile.

My favorite part of the maker's description is this: "Comes with a certificate of authenticity." Really? Somewhere out there is a one-eyed zombie? How cruel have we become?

Be Prepared!

What if you're on a road trip and there's no rest stops? And you really have to bust a grumpy? Sure, you could stop by the side of the road, but that's totally uncivilized.

It's better just to climb aboard this custom toilet for a better view...now that's what I call being king of the road!

Ever Wonder What a Frog's Tongue REALLY Looks Like?

The Horror in My Backpack

I use my backpack all the time. So I was surprised to reach into the bottom of it and feel something that felt like soft leather.

"What the heck is this?" I wondered, as I pulled the object out.

Astoundingly, it was a banana that I had meant to eat...a MONTH ago! But although it got slightly crushed over time, the banana didn't leak...it just got dryer and blacker.

And since the black banana didn't stink, I put it back on the fruit plate with the rest of its friends!

"Mommy? Why is a man crawling out of the petunias?"

A company named Design Toscano makes a variety of cool garden statues...including this one of a zombie coming up out of the earth.

I recommend buying this as a gift, and then installing it in the lucky person's yard without telling them!

Need Back Hair? Get Yak Hair!

I remember watching the very first episode of Malcolm in the Middle. It started in the kitchen, where the shirtless dad (Hal) was getting his back hair trimmed by his wife as the kids were eating breakfast.

It was so horrible, you had to laugh!

So I was interested in this interview where the actor who played the dad, Bryan Cranston, talks about the scene. Apparently, to give him enough back hair, they glued YAK hair to his body! Yak hair looks sort of like human hair, it’s just longer. (If you want to hear his funny description of it, go to NPR here and listen at 9:30.)

Hey, you know what would be REALLY gross? Seeing someone with a hairy back who was sagging. Yuck!

It Is, Isn't It?

"Poopin' is cool" from over here.

When Squatting, Turn That Frown Upside Down!

Longtime readers of this blog (hi Mom!) know that November 19th is World Toilet Day. But did you know that World WATER Day is March 22nd? Me either. Like World Toilet Day, the idea behind World Water Day is to spotlight the fact that over a billion people on the planet don't have plumbing.

The protesters above are trying to dramatize this by sharing a toilet. But is it really necessary for that lady to grimace like that? When on a toilet, one should always have an agreeable smile. (This offsets the disagreeable act taking place below!)

A toilet protest without toilets is the Big Squat. For this, people squat at noon on World Toilet Day. It's neat! And there's a whole page of people squatting all over the world over here. (Best of all, some of the squatters are even smiling!)

Paris toilet photo from Robert Basler's Oddly Enough blog at Reuters.com.

This Is Why You Shouldn't Swallow Your Bubblegum

When Cheese-Heads Get Hot

Let's say that you really like Apple products. You've got iMacs, iPhones, and iPods...so you just can't wait to hear Apple leader Steve Jobs announce the new iPad!

But you HAVE to wait, so while you kill time, you make a cheese-head of Steve Jobs!

That's what Ken from The Cook's Den did. And actually, I'm not even sure his mozzarella head is gross...or at least, it wasn't until Ken heated the cheese for his Spicy Steve Nachos Supreme recipe!

Getting a Higher— er, LOWER Education

The World Toilet College is a school in Singapore devoted to “improving toilets and sanitation” across the world. And since over a billion people don’t have access to toilets at all, we salute their good work! 

But looking at the entrance to their building, it seems weird that they're displaying URINALS. Only half of the population can use those! Plus, while 30% of poop can be made of bacteria and germs, pee is antiseptic (free of germs).

But if the World Toilet College is going to insist on having urinals on display, maybe they should have more eye-catching ones!

Google Maps Was Never Grosser

This bloke living at 22 Crewkerne Close, N. Somerset, England, saw the Google Maps car photographing his street and decided to let the world see his butt.

I doubt that the Google driver even saw this happening, though. After all, you can get in trouble for this sort of nonsense! 

Bottom photo from dspain.

Dueling Urinals!

Men don't HAVE to pee standing up, but we pretend we do. And we get away with it! But that means urinals are wasting space in public bathrooms everywhere. Luckily, some genius came up with this space-saving idea!

The only problem? Try to imagine two men using these two urinals at the same time.
That's...not...good.

On the other hand, these dueling toilets give users more space...but not much privacy! But on the bright side, think of the conversations that the bathroom-goers could have!

Wait. There ARE no good conversations they could be having!

Want to See a Toy Helicopter Loaded with Whale Snot?

Let’s say you want to study the health of whales. To do this, you could take blood samples from them (really hard to do), or collect their poop (also hard)…or you could just get some of the whale’s snot.

Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse decided getting whale snot was the easiest of the three ways. That's because when a whale comes to the surface it blows a bunch of water, air, and mucus out its blowhole! So all the doctor had to do was come up with a way to COLLECT the blowhole boogers.

At first, Dr. A.W. tried going out in a boat and waiting for whales to surface. Then she would just lean over the side of a boat to collect the falling snot. But this is pretty hard to do… plus, who wants to get caught in a mist of falling whale mucus? (Not me!)

So instead, she got some remote-controlled helicopters. After attaching collection dishes to the bottom of them, she would fly these helicopters INTO the blowhole spray that the whales blow! And that's what that picture above shows: A toy helicopter loaded with whale snot. 

If you’d like to see Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse’s paper (“A novel non-invasive tool for disease surveillance of free-ranging whales and its relevance to conservation programs”), it’s over here.


UPDATE! (September 30, 2010): I am happy to announce that Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse's work won the Engineering Prize at this year's Ig Nobel awards ceremony. Congratulations!

Taxidermy: Stuff It!

A taxidermist is a person who stuffs dead animals. Sure, that might seem a little creepy, but let's not be so judgmental! Why be close-minded?

Let's listen to a taxidermist named Damien Hirst explain why he stuffs deceased creatures.

He says, “I just like rotting.”

Oh boy. What is WRONG with these people?

By the way, the article that I got Hirst's quote from is about the new book, Still Life, by Melissa Milgrom. It also has this information:

Can human beings be [stuffed]? One preserved human... is the British economist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), whose body is seated in a chair in a glass case at University College London. His head is now a wax reproduction. “His real head is taken out only for ceremonial dinners [because his will] requires his presence at such events.”

I wouldn't mind having that in my will, too. Hey, what if you took Jeremy Bentham's head and slam-dunked it through a basketball hoop? You'd be stuffing a stuffed head!

You May Have a Broken Leg, But Your Funnybone is Just Fine!

Let’s say you broke your leg, or perhaps your universal joint. That’s got to hurt! 

But luckily, there’s a company out there that makes casts that are so cool, having broken bones was never so much fun! 

It’s called Casttoo, which is a combination of “cast” and “tattoos.” And the experts working there can put almost any picture you can imagine on your cast. That means that compound fractures are now cute!

One particular Casttoo design that caught my eye were the “broken bone” casts, which seem to show an X-ray of the broken bone in question. 

And you know what? 

I sort of like this idea!