Blame It on the Dog (11 page)

Anyway, four decades later, life imitated art, sort of, when Goosebumps Products—an insole manufacturer in Longwood, Florida, whose slogan is “Changing the way the world walks”—discovered that its famous Easy-Flo Gel insole, which normally “massages the foot with each step,” was suddenly sounding like a farting contest. “They were Whoopee Cushions for the feet,” Goosebumps executive Bryan Thomas told the
Orlando Sentinel
in early 2005. “It very nearly put us out of business.” Goosebumps had to throw away at least 35,000 of its molded orthotic shoe inserts at a loss of over $200,000.

Goosebumps brought in chemist Richard Cavestri to find out what was causing the problem. Cavestri traced it back to eight drums of glycerin that Bell Chem, a local outfit, delivered to Goosebumps in late 2002 and early 2003. Though Goosebumps’s contract called for a food-grade glycerin ideal for feet cushions, Bell Chem delivered a lower-grade variety that might also have been watered down. As a result, air bubbles formed inside the gel. And when buyers later slipped the insoles into their shoes and went stepping out, their feet made “a flatulence-like noise,” according to Cavestri.

Bell Chem President John Cervo claimed he didn’t know about the lawsuit until the
Sentinel
called him for a comment. “This is unbelievable,” he said, insisting that the dispute was a private matter between Goosebumps and his insurance company, which will probably end up footing the bill. He referred any further questions to an attorney, who did not return phone calls. That’s probably the best thing to do when you’ve been caught flat- and flatulent-footed.

RUNNING WITH THE WIND AT HIS BACK

I
n horse racing lore, they are thoroughbred names that will live forever: Man of War, Seabiscuit, Secretariat, Hoof Hearted … Hoof Hearted??

You can see him coming up on the outside in the stretch and crossing the finish line on countless sports-blooper TV shows like WB’s
Most Outrageous Outtakes
, or the 2003 ABC special
ESPN’s Blunderful World of Sports
, as the track announcer screams, “Hoof Hearted is taking the lead, he’s pulling away, it’s Hoof Hearted, Hoof Hearted, Hoof Hearted!”

Viewers all over America looked at each other and asked, “Did he just say what I think he said?”

Apparently there have been several Hoof Hearted thoroughbreds over the past quarter century. One reportedly raced in South Africa several decades ago; there was also one in Canada in the early 1990s, and another in California in 1982. In the late ’90s, Hoof Hard Ed ran in the Midwest. Any one of those horses could be the one in the often-aired TV clip.

But the champion among the bunch is Sky Hoof Hearted, a four-year-old California gelding that in 2005 won several races around the Southwest, from Santa Anita (near Pasadena) to Turf Paradise (Phoenix). According to the Thoroughbred Database at
www.pedigreequery.com
, Sky Hoof Hearted is descended from Native Dancer—horse racing’s first television star, who won everything in
1953 except the Kentucky Derby—through both his sire (Bertrando) and dam (Specific Gravity). He was bred by Martin J. Wygod and trained by F. C. Frazier at River Edge Farm, just outside Solvang.

So why would anybody name an expensive thoroughbred Hoof Hearted? Well, some people simply like to put one over on everybody with a practical joke, especially when there’s a gatekeeper of good taste, which in this case is the all-powerful Jockey Club. Thoroughbreds have to be registered with the Jockey Club within a year of their birth (they’re all given an official birthday of January 1 of the year they’re born to put them into an age group for racing) and named by the February of the year they turn two. The owners submit six names in order of preference for the Jockey Club’s approval, and there are rules for what names can’t be used, including “names that are suggestive or have a vulgar or obscene meaning,” according to racing expert Cindy Pierson Dulay—“Names considered in poor taste.”

Like Hoof Hearted.

Since a horse’s name can’t be changed after its first professional race, some owners try to sneak sly, innocent-looking monikers past the Jockey Club judges, before the track announcers rattle them off over the loudspeakers. By then, the horse is out of the barn, with his name intact. Along with Peony’s Envy, there have been Nip Pulls, Potopein, and If You See Kay. More subtle was the name of a 1979 filly, Breakwind, sired by Warm Breeze.

But none of them has gained the legendary stature of Hoof Hearted. In my mind’s eye, I can see that proud fellow at full gallop, flared nostrils steaming, as the announcer yells, “Hoof Hearted is rounding the bend and coming up the rear!” And yes, of course he wins by a nose.

PULL MY FIN

I
n the 1973 novel
Breakfast of Champions
, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, came up with an alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who communicated by tap dancing and farting. Far-fetched? Well, maybe the tap dancing. But right here on earth we have nonfictional creatures who use flatulence as a kind of primitive language—and no, I’m not talking about twelve-year-old boys.

For example, in the August 2000 issue of
Discovery
magazine, writer Josie Glausiusz observed that the deadly Sonoran coral snake and the western hook-nosed snake—both natives of the American Southwest—have an odd way of scaring off predators. “When threatened,” she wrote, “they emit rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca, the common opening for sex and excretion at a snake’s rear end.” Both types of snake have muscles that can form pockets of compressed air and then release them in loud pops. Bruce Young, an experimental morphologist at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, told Glausiusz, “Essentially it’s snake flatulence.”

A couple of years later, in another realm altogether, Dr. Ben Wilson, marine biologist at the University of British Columbia’s Bamfield Marine Science Centre, heard a strange noise emanating from his lab’s herring aquarium one evening. “At first, I thought someone was hiding in the cupboard pulling a prank,” he said later. Turning up the volume of the fish tank microphone, he heard what
sounded like farts, accompanied by tiny air bubbles coming from the rear ends of several herring.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, Dr. Wilson picked up the telephone and enlisted the help of Robert Batty, senior research scientist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, Scotland. While Wilson studied Pacific herring caught in British Columbia, Batty focused on Atlantic herring from the British seacoast. The fish were placed into laboratory tanks where they could be studied with hydrophones and infrared video cameras. Sure enough, whether Canadian or British, the herring farted in high-frequency bursts up to twenty-two kilohertz, accompanied always by streams of bubbles. At times, the tanks resembled old Lawrence Welk TV shows, and the fish didn’t seem to be the least bit embarrassed about it, because there wasn’t a red herring in the bunch.

“It sounds very much like someone blowing a high-pitched raspberry,” Batty told James Owen in the November 10, 2003, edition of
National Geographic News
. At first, Batty and Wilson suspected that the herring used their depth charges to frighten off predators, or for buoyancy, like the sand tiger shark that gulps air at the water’s surface, swallows it into its stomach, and farts out whatever is required for it to maintain its depth under water.

The herring were in fact gulping air at the surface like sand tiger sharks and storing it in their swim bladder, not using stomach gas from food digestion. But Drs. Batty and Wilson determined that the herring were releasing air bubbles not for buoyancy but rather as a way of maintaining contact with each other after dark without giving away their positions to predatory fish, whose hearing is less acute.

This “water-breaking” seemed like one of those discoveries that could elevate a mere researcher into a respected, perhaps even famous scientist, but when Ben Wilson sat down to prepare an article for the prestigious British scientific journal
Biology Letters
, he had a problem. How do you describe farting fish “without sounding too silly,” as he put it later? The secret lay in scientific-sounding euphemisms.

Fish farts? Too colloquial, not to mention vulgar.

Piscine poots? Not serious enough.

Ichthyological butt bubbles? Even sillier.

So Wilson limited himself to terms like “burst pulse sounds,” “digestive system venting,” and “bubble expulsion from the anal duct region.” As for a formal designation that such a natural occurrence required in the scientific community, he settled on
fast repetitive tick
(FRT).

Wilson’s explanation that FRTs were simply a kind of Morse code between fish prompted the
Miami Herald’
s nationally known columnist/humorist Dave Barry to ask what these herring might have been discussing. “I mean, we’re talking about creatures with roughly the same IQ as a Tic Tac,” he wrote. “They are not down there discussing Marcel Proust. My guess is they’re probably breaking wind to convey extremely simple messages such as: ‘Hey, it’s dark!’ ‘I know! The same thing happened last night!’ ”

Barry contacted Dr. Wilson to ask if those FRT-ing herring were males, since it’s a well-known scientific fact that human males break wind purely for the sense of accomplishment it gives them. But when Dr. Wilson told him that it was difficult to tell male and female herring apart, Barry suddenly envisioned a whole new explanation:

“Maybe that’s what they’re communicating about: ‘Hey, you want to mate?’

“ ‘Sure! My name is Bob!’

“ ‘Hey, my name is Bob, too!’

“ ‘Uh-oh!’ ”

(If you’d like to hear a herring fart, check out www.zoology.ubc.ca/~bwilson/herring.htm.)

WHEN IS A FART INDECENT?

T
he historic day was February 3, 2005. No, I’m not talking about the forty-sixth anniversary of Buddy Holly’s plane crash. The event in question has even deeper implications—a new line in radio censorship was crossed. Shock jock Howard Stern was told by his corporate bosses that because of new FCC guidelines, the farts on his nationally syndicated show were too long and too wet.

That’s not exactly what the FCC said, but with today’s arbitrary standards of government censorship, not to mention stiff fines, the bosses at radio station WXRK-FM in Manhattan weren’t taking any chances.

It began when Stern was talking to a very attractive young schoolteacher about her lesbian trysts. When she mentioned that she was living with her parents because she couldn’t afford her own place, Stern offered her $500 if she would let another guest, Will the Farter, a young guy capable of farting at will, poot into her face five hundred times. She reluctantly agreed, and Will did his nasty business in different positions—lying on his back with his feet in the air, kneeling on all fours, etc.—as she kept her eyes clenched tight and her nose close to his butt.

After the segment ended and Stern moved on to other business, his producer, Gary Dell’Abate, came into the studio to tell him that the station manager, Tom Chiusano, had been going crazy
during the rectal volley and used the seven-second delay button to “dump” many of the farts off the air. An occasional fart was apparently okay, but when they got too lengthy or sounded too moist and soggy, Chiusano felt he had to edit them out. “Howard said that was absolutely crazy and there is no FCC rule against farting,” according to Stern’s web page (
http://howardstern.com
). “Farting is second-grade humor!” He went into a rant, begging to be free of his contract with media conglomerate Infinity Broadcasting Corp. because he couldn’t take being censored anymore. (At this point, Stern had already announced that when his contract with Infinity expired at the end of 2005, he would be moving to Sirius Satellite Radio, where the FCC has no jurisdiction.) To make matters worse, Dell’Abate reported that he had also received a list from Chiusano about old comedy bits they could no longer rebroadcast during their
Best of Stern
shows, thanks to recent FCC pressure. Stern read the list of no-nos on the air. One of the banned bits was him talking about having an “anal fissure.”