That's not how you do it.

I think I can safely say that shooting someone with toilet paper is a bad idea. And it's not even gross! (Unless the paper is pre-used...)

Story here.

Diarrhea was never cuter (or more deadly)

You've heard the "Diarrhea, Diarrhea" song before, probably on the playground. Here, some cool kids do their version of it. But since this is a promo for WaterAid, a group trying to improve sanitation in places where diarrhea isn't a laughing matter.

Bowel-Howling at the Moon

There's a company called CharcoCaps that sells a product to reduce farting. Or does it cut back on cutting the cheese? Actually, CharcoCaps did a survey to see which term for flatulence people like to use. The results:

58% preferred "farts"

41% preferred "cutting the cheese"

 1% preferred "bowel howl"

Also on the survey: Where's the worst place to cut the cheese? The surveys says:

43% During a job interview.

24% In class or during a business meeting.

18% In a crowded elevator.

13% In a church/temple/synagogue/mosque. 

Here's a quiz that's up on the CharcoCaps website. I just have one question about it: What's "etiquette"?

Want another slice of testicle pizza?

Oh, good grief. The World Testicle Cooking Championship has taken place again in Serbia. At it, very silly people eat a lot of animal testicles...from such innocent beasts as bulls and pigs, as well as camels and kangaroos.

But why eat animal testicles (aka, "white kidneys")? For many of the diners, it's because they think it's good for THEIR testicles. If that's the case, these nimrods need to eat some brains, and fast!

Photo and story from the Telegraph.

No Drinking from the Urinal?

I never get to have ANY fun.

Do Penguins Poop into the Wind?

Here's some advice: Don't spit or pee into a strong wind. I thought of this while reading a scientific article on the way that penguins poop.

Titled “Pressures produced when penguins pooh”, it’s about how penguins shoot poop from their butts in a tight stream. Yes, penguins can rocket their butt mud for huge distances! This may be so that the penguin can poop without leaving its nest. Another reason:

All birds, penguins included, spend a considerable time preening and cleaning their feathers. It seems therefore that these birds propel their [poop] as far away as possible...lest they soil their plumage…It is interesting to note that the streaks of [poop] radiate from the edge of the nest into all directions. Whether the bird deliberately chooses the direction...or whether this depends on the direction from which the wind blows at the time of evacuation are questions that need to be addressed on another expedition to Antarctica.

In other words, the scientists don’t know whether penguins avoid pooping into the wind or not!  

There's a Twilight Series Toilet Sticker Set?

I can't tell if this is for fans of Twilight or those who dislike it! (For the moment, it's at eBay here.)

Unplugged!

You’ve seen people with earlobe gauges before, like this nice guy who I met at Chicago's Wrigley Field. Like me, you may have wondered what inspires a person to stick something the size of an artillery shell through their earlobes. Well, it turns out there are a number of VERY GOOD REASONS to get an ear hole like this.

I’m sure I’ll think of one in a second.

Anyway, to make a hole this big in your earlobe requires work! So first you pierce the ear. Then you start stretching that hole by sticking larger and larger “gauges” into the hole to stretch it out. (The term gauge is a size measurement, like a 12 gauge shotgun.) The problem is that once that hole is bigger than six millimeters across, it’s not going to grow back.

And the odds are that some morning, a person with holey ears might look in the mirror and ask, "Why did I do that?" So today, there are a number of doctors who’ll reconstruct the whole earlobe for them! (That's the picture above.) But what if you stretch out an earlobe hole, then get a doctor to repair it, and then you change your mind and start a new ear plug earhole? What would happen?

A plastic surgeon said, “They'd run the risk of literally tearing their earlobe apart. It wouldn't withstand the stretching, and they'd have two little pieces.” Downer!

Second picture and quote from over here.

We Interrupt This Photo—

"In your face!"

—because what happens next is too awful even for THIS website!

“Let's beat constipation and sloppiness with enemas!”

Ulp! To understand this horrible story, you have to know what an enema is. If you already DO know, you look like the people above. If you DON’T, skip down below to the break, where it says “Read more.” Do that and then come back!

The Story: The Russian city of Zheleznovodsk has unveiled a monument to the enema! Why? Because it’s in an area famous for giving enemas with healthy mineral water. Since enemas can help with digestion, there was a banner at the dedication reading, “Let's beat constipation and sloppiness with enemas”!

The sculpture's enema bulb weighs about 800 pounds and is supported by three baby angels (called cherubim). The artist, Svetlana Avakina said, “This device is eternal, it will never change.” Good to know!

In life, some days you're the pooper...

...and some days you're the pooper-picker-upper!

Poop Like Someone Who's Being Watched!

We can SEEEE you!

Toilet Day continues with this, the least private bathroom stall of all time.

Poop Like an Olympian!

It's apparently Toilet Day here at Ultra-Gross. Here, we see a toilet from the 2008 Olympic Village. This one must be for the gymnasts. Why else would they have installed parallel bars by it?

"That's a successful poop, and...what a dismount!"

Picture from the SI Vault.

Poop Like an Egyptian

This customized Egyptian toilet was on sale at an Atlanta mega-mansion this week. Man, if only I'd had a chance to bid on it! Do you know what it's like to poop like an ancient Egyptian?

Actually...neither do I, but I bet it's pretty cool.

Photo and story from the New York Times.

Please, leave your eyes IN their sockets!

Every year, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! sponsors the Great Face Off. The purpose of this noble tradition is to “find the person who can make the funniest, silliest, weirdest, creepiest or craziest face.” And we have a winner…

His name is Franklin Hannatt. He can pop his eyelids open incredibly wide, which is a flexibility shared by the jaws of Jim Purol. The man with the “World’s Biggest Mouth” displays his skills here with 200 straws in his maw.

That's impressive, Jim...but now let's see you drink out of them!

Photos from Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Shark Bites Poop! (But why?)

There are two kinds of poop: Regular poop and fossil poop! See, if a dinosaur busted a grumpy, that dinosaur dookie could turn into a fossil poop, which we scientists call a coprolite. And it was on a piece of dinosaur poop that an ancient shark’s teeth marks were found.

What the heck? Why would a shark take a bite of poop? Sharks don’t eat feces... so it's the Mystery of the Fossil Poop! Luckily for us, a sharp fellow named Brian Switek has a theory. Maybe a shark bit through another animal’s side, where its teeth left imprints on some poop that was still INSIDE the other animal!

What a great idea. Although it’s just a theory, I now declare the Mystery of the Fossil Poop officially closed!

Images from Brian Switek.

We interrupt your gross news for this bulletin:

Bart’s King-Sized Book of Fun is by Bart King.

That’s me!

It’s now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and will soon be at Powell’s. But hey, no pressure! It’s not like you have to go get a copy of it or anything. (But it might be sort of fun if you did.)

Fresh Underwear, Stale Spelling

If you’re like me, you wear your underwear for a day, then put it in the laundry. But we don’t have to be slaves to this horrible routine anymore! There’s a service available called manpacks. Specifically, it’s a subscription underwear service that MAILS you fresh underwear. You don’t wash your old pairs, you just recycle them. Or use them for rags!

You’d THINK that the people at manpacks are just joking around. After all, the company motto is:

We created manpacks to give men (and the people who love them) more time to build empires, climb mountains, slay dragons... to achieve the goals they aspire to.

But actually, they seem sort of serious! Behold the manpacks philosophy:

Now take a closer look at number 8:

That would be "achievable." Either someone’s underwear is too tight, or the manpacks' spell checker isn’t working!
Addition! Over at Twitter, manpacks responds:

Sheesh, manpacks...if you can't spell your own company's mission statement right, why should anyone trust you with their underwear?

Roadkill Cuisine!

A guy named Buck Peterson has written the perfect recipe book for Ultra-Gross readers: Quick-Fix Cooking with Roadkill. From the book’s website:

“[These recipes highlight] the use of locally harvested, organic, and priced-right road foods.”

Keep in mind that these recipes are for animals that have ALREADY been run over. In an interview here, Peterson says,  “It’s natural, inexpensive and provides the opportunity for unscheduled exercise. Scraping your dinner off the road is a really great workout.

“It’d be a shame to let perfectly good, fresh meat go to waste like that. Using roadkill as a food source takes the idea of foraging to a new level.” 

And if you need to keep the kids busy while you're scraping a possum off the asphalt, just hand them a copy of the Roadkill U.S.A. Coloring and Activity Book! 

Can Rabbits Be Gross? No. (Rabbit-humans are ANOTHER story!)

A group of family friends came to Portland for a visit, so I joined them on a tour of the city.

Somehow, a statue of a nude, Donnie Darko rabbit-human was one of our more memorable sights. First, one boy stared at the sculpture in disbelief...and then his brother got up close and personal!

"Guess what I'm saying right now!"

The Million-Dollar Toilet?!

J.D. Salinger was a famous writer who died recently. And apparently, after Salinger passed away, someone bought his toilet, and is now selling it on eBay for a cool million bucks. (The link is here, but it won't be around after Sept. 4.)

But this seems like a total rip-off to me...this toilet doesn't even have a seat!

Aye-Aye, Captain: Prepare to blow chow!

Man, it seems like there's slide-shows of disgusting animals everywhere...and yes, I know that animals CAN'T actually be disgusting. It's only our immature attitudes about them that might make them seem revolting. Take the Aye-Aye, for example...

As we can see, the Aye-Aye is easy on the eyes. And the Almiqui (below) is not that unattractive. But I admit that the fact that it's the only mammal that has poisonous spit doesn't make it seem lovable!

And of course, no discussion of gross animals is complete without a portrait of the most unfairly criticized animal of all: the naked mole rat. I think that they're actually sort of cuddly and cute, in an ugly way.

Wait, I just threw up on my keyboard. What was I saying?

Photos from the New York Daily News.

"I pity the stool!"

In a take-off on Mr. T.'s trademark line on the A-Team ("I pity the fool!"), a drain cleaning company in Savannah has a cool motto.

African Toilet!

A friend of mine is in the African country of Tanzania...and he sent me this photo of his toilet. Awesome! (In case you've never used a squat toilet before, you just squat over it.)

Poisoned Dog Dookie, Anyone?

I just read an article about disgust over at the Boston Globe. Let me sum up part of it this way: Human beings are weird. We are also SUPER-squeamish. For example, we’re disgusted by our own bodies— their odor, hair, fat, and every bodily fluid except for tears. (And pee!)

Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, talks about how illogical we are: 

“You wouldn’t eat arsenic [a deadly poison] and you wouldn’t eat a dog turd. But even though eating arsenic is worse for you, [you have the same response to] the dog turd.”

Dr. Bloom is right. And not only that, I wouldn't eat a poisonous dog turd either!

Barfing rower photo from REUTERS.

Alien Poop from Outer Space!

Going poop in outer space isn’t easy…there’s no gravity!

And in Mary Roach’s cool book, Packing for Mars, I learned a new, gross term that has to do with this. It’s called “fecal popcorning.” (The word fecal relates to feces, or poop!) The astronauts used the term fecal popcorning to describe the sound that their poop made as it bounced off the walls of the space-toilet. It sounded like the popcorn in an air-pop machine!

Two other things I’ve learned: Space researchers needed to do a lot of experiments with vomit for times when the astronauts would blow chunks in outer space. To do this they didn’t use actual vomit, but they needed a vomit-like substance. So they used Progresso vegetable soup.

Oh, and during the Apollo 10 space mission in 1969, an alien snuck aboard the module! How else to explain what happened when astronaut Thomas Stafford saw a chunk of poop float by in the weightless cabin.

“Who did it?” Stafford asked.

“I didn't do it,” answered astronaut John Young. “It ain't one of mine.”

“I don't think it's one of mine,” said astronaut Eugene Cernan.

Ah, but if NONE of the astronauts pooped the poop, there’s only ONE explanation for who did it!

Alien photo from here.

Watch Your Step!

Two men are approaching each other on the sidewalk. Both are dragging their right foot behind them. As they meet, the two men give each other a questioning look.

"Nice to meet you!"

One man points at his right foot and says “Car accident, 2009.” 

The other points at his foot and says, “Dog poop, 20 feet back.”

Photo from Sprinkle Brigade.

"Eat Brains Love"— Ha!

From over here.

Good one!

"The only time you want to yell, 'I have diarrhea!' is when you're playing Scrabble."

Zach Galifianakis

Um...I Don't Get It!

Okay, so I'm not supposed to stand on the toilet seat and poop...but what is the illustration to the left telling me?

Addition: In the comments, the most auspicious Ziggy Nixon explains that this is an instruction to put the toilet paper in the toilet. (Thanks, Ziggy!)

Crop Dusting OR Flying the Smelly Skies

Some people use the term "crop dusting" as a way of saying passing gas or farting. I was reminded me of this while reading an article by David Sedaris in this week's New Yorker. 

He was writing about airline attendants having to deal with passengers who are jerks:

"You know how a plastic bottle will get all crinkly during a flight?" [the stewardess] asked. "Well, it happens to people too, to our insides. That's why we get all gassy...So what me and the other gals would sometimes do is fart while we walked up and down the aisle. No one could hear it because of the engine noise, but anyway, that's what we called 'crop dusting.'"

When I asked another flight attendant...how he dealt with a plane full of belligerent passengers, he said, "Oh, we have our ways. The next time you're flying and it comes time to land, listen closely as we make our final pass down the aisle."

"Pull my finger!"

Hmm, I might listen, but I'm not going to sniff the air! By the way, that painting of a butt is by Michelangelo, from the Sistine Chapel.

Anyway, Michelangelo rarely bathed, and almost NEVER took his shoes off. His assistant complained, "[He] has sometimes gone so long without taking his shoes off that then the skin came away, like a snake's, with the boots."

Gross, Disgusting, Repulsive Animals (and the humans who love them!)

Yesterday, I was reading an article about animals that freak humans out. I actually disagreed with lots of its choices (manatees are NOT gross), but I'll admit that the star-nosed mole can still get to me.

Gary Meszaros/Photo Researchers

That nose with those fleshy feelers...oy vey! But the best animal photos ran in the reader submissions. Here's a few of the animals that people thought were repulsive...and sometimes, lovable!

Rebecca Bazell is asked, "Is that a pig on a leash?"

Jamie Peyton can't figure out where this turtle's face is. Neither can I!

Rick Korchak calls his cat A.L.F.: Alien Life Form.

Frank Funicello nominated the marabou stork.

And my award-winner is Carol Rabenhorst's picture of a sea anemone eating seaweed! Oh, blech.

Star-nosed mole photo by Gary Meszaros.

All other photos from the New York Times reader gallery.