Butt Blasts from the Past!

You may know Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) from his famous story Gulliver's Travels.

Swift was a funny man, as he showed in short book titled The Benefit of Farting Explain’d.

This classic included a lovely poem about passing gas in Parliament. It's known as... 

"On A Fart, let in the House of Commons" 

Reader, I was born, and cried;
I crack'd, I smelt, and so I died.
Like Julius Caesar's was my death,
Who in the senate lost his breath.
Much alike entomb'd does lie
The noble Romulus and I:
And when I died, like Flora fair,
I left the commonwealth my heir.

See, the narrator is like Julius Caesar because he died in the Roman senate, just like our gas passer. And that last line is funny, because he "heir" is pronounced like "air" and he's leaving his foul-smelling air to the government. Heheh... ouch. 

Oh, and one more thing—Jonathan Swift wrote all this under a fake name: Don Fartinando Puff-indorst!

Ad Astra, Victor Glover!

Victor Glover is a former Navy pilot who just became an astronaut. As part of his application process, he was asked to write a poem about the experience of becoming an astronaut. Here’s what he came up with:

“Eyes fixed gazing off into space
My mind in awe of the human race
This is all dizzying to me
Because I gave so much blood and pee
Happy to be here (by the) colonoscopy place.”

Victor Glover, we salute you! (Story via.)

Uncool!

Via.

What's the stinkiest city in the world?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought that honor should go to the German city of Cologne (a.k.a. Köln ). The poet wrote:

In Köln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavement fang'd with  murderous stones,
And rags and hags, and  hideous wenches,
I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!

Where the Sidewalk Ends— ICK!

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
Near where the street begins,
And there the mucus grows soft and green,
And there the poop burns with a light so mean,
And there the booger-bird rests from his picking
To cool in the vomit-scented wind.

Photo of "Ick Street" by Glenn Caley Bachmann.

Ye Olde Bum Wiper

You have to admit, that's a pretty impressive toilet paper holder! Of course, it's holding the perfect toilet paper roll...I'm guessing that my Care Bears t.p. might not look as good.

This product has the unwieldy name of A Knight to Remember Gothic Bath Tissue Holder. Which is bogus, because anyone who's truly Gothic doesn't wipe...and knights just held it! (Taking off all that armor to bust a grumpy was just too much trouble.) All of which reminds me of a poem that got a lot of mileage in ye olde family home:

In days of old, when knights were bold

And toilets had not been invented

They laid their load by the side of the road

And went away, contented.

Mamma Mia!

I was talking to my sister yesterday. And to express surprise, she used an Italian phrase: "Mamma mia!"

What sprang to my mind was a rhyme we used to say a lot back in grammar school, and I'm proud to share it with you today:

Mamma mia!

Pappa pee-uh!

Baby's got uh-diarrhea!

It doesn't mean anything, but it does have a nice flow to it. By the way, that picture is of my nephew. He told me that if you put a plunger up to your ear, you can hear the ocean...and then you'll hear a toilet flushing!

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!

TP Poetry

Wow, I found another item about toilet paper and poetry!

The average American uses 57 sheets of toilet paper daily. I don't know how much the average Japanese citizen uses, but to help the environment, Japanese bathroom researchers (really!) came up with the idea of “toilet poems” in Japan’s public restrooms.

So starting this year, Japanese public bathroom-goers reaching for a sheet began finding poetry written on their poo-tickets. Some examples:

—“That paper will meet you for but a moment.”
—“Fold the paper over and over and over and over again.”
—“Give love to the toilet.”

These must sound better in Japanese. Anyway, these messages were intended to encourage conservation, and they worked! There was a 10-20 percent drop in toilet paper use where the poems were placed. (Oh, the picture to the right is of the friendliest wall graffiti I've ever seen.)

W.H. Auden Was a Poo-Ticket Cheapskate

You might call it TP, and in Japan it’s called “household paper,” but I’ve always liked the term “poo-tickets.”

If you’re an American, you probably have ultra-soft, quilted poo-tickets. But according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, quilted toilet paper is the worst choice you could make.

That’s because it can’t be made from recycled paper. Instead, the ultra-soft kind requires “virgin” wood, and so trees have to be cut down to make it.

Getting toilet paper that contains recycled material is an easy way to be a good citizen. (These are green poo-tickets!) Another method is to try using less paper than you do now. Poet W.H. Auden gave his houseguests one sheet of toilet paper per bathroom visit. (This seems a little cheap, even to me!)

Undead Poets Society: Zombie Haiku

A website called BoingBoing held a poetry contest for the best haiku with a zombie theme. Here are some of the entries!

Within the coffin
the cry came from a dead man
reanimated

Groaning getting loud
Barricades won't hold for long
Nice knowing you all

Brains are like candy,
sweet grey matter slips through lips,
My arm just fell off.

crunching through his brain
I realized I no longer cared
whether he loved me.

And the winner!

You lopped off my arms!
Thanks, now I can squeeze through your
Windows at night. Yum!