Blame It on the Dog (21 page)

“Good,” she replies. “Get your own fucking blanket.”

After a brief silence, he lets a long, uproarious fart and says, “Good night, honey.”

A young guy in a strange town walks into a dimly lit tavern to get a beer. There are only a couple of customers this early in the evening, so he doesn’t realize at first glance that he’s in a gay bar. After he orders a glass, one of the regulars comes over and says, “You must be new around here. Would you like to play a drinking game?”

“Sure,” the guy says. “How does it go?”

“Well, it’s called beer football. If you can down a glass of beer in less than ten seconds, you score six points. Then if you drop your pants and fart, you get an extra point.”

The young stranger, who’s proud of his farts, says, “Hell, I’m game for that.”

The regular says, “I’ll go first.” He guzzles his beer in eight seconds, drops his trousers, and lets loose with a window rattler. “It’s seven-nothing. Your turn.”

The stranger lifts his glass and drinks it down in seven seconds. Then he pulls down his pants.

Suddenly the gay guy, with his trousers still around his ankles, jumps behind him. “Block that kick! Block that kick!”

While we’re on the subject, what does a gay man call a fart?
A mating call
.

Props are also a form of joke (just ask Gallagher or Carrot Top), and when it comes to farting, there’s a huge industry out there beyond the Whoopee Cushion, the Fart Machine, and Pull My Finger Fred. The Johnson Smith Company sends out a catalog several times a year called
Things You Never Knew Existed
, stuffed with items like Realistic
Fart Spray, Fart Powder, Fart Candy, the Fart Whistle, the Farting Wall Clock, the Wacky Fart Phone (“Real phone that farts instead of rings”), the Farting Bear, the Gas Guy (a plastic figure baring his ass, whose farts are activated by a built-in motion detector), Bub L. Breezer (brother to the Gas Guy, except he blows bubbles with his ass), the Fart Detector (“It really doesn’t sound an alarm, but your guests won’t know that”), Fart Puddy (it makes a gloppy fart when you push your fingers into the cup), the Farting Bottle Opener, the Cheeky Farting Keychain, the Farting Salt and Pepper Shakers, and various T-shirts (“I Fart Because I’m Full Of Shit” is one of my favorites, but “Nobody Listens To Me Until I Fart” has a certain existential hook).

On the subject of farts, one last item:
They’ve got to come out, so why fight ’em?
You can blast them out loudly
And boast of them proudly
And if you’re inclined, you can light ’em!

FARTZILLA ATTACKS IOWA!

E
ver wondered what a really big fart could do to your health, your sanity, or your wallpaper? After all, too much of anything can be deadly, so why would flatulence be any different?

To find out, let’s visit Iowa, the mostly rural Midwestern state that has five resident pigs for every resident human. Thanks to the consolidation of the pork industry over the last twenty-five years, most of those pigs live in sprawling compounds instead of traditional barnyard sties, and despite the economic advantages of housing tens of thousands of them in one place for the sausage and rind-chip industry, there’s one big problem. What do you do with all that runny shit? If you’ve ever been around a porcine pooper, you know they seem to suffer from constant diarrhea, and there’s so much of it (each pig squirts eight gallons of manure a week—a lot more than you do) that modern-day managers of pig farms are forced to drain the stuff into lagoons, where it cooks in the sun, feeds legions of microbes, and stinks up the neighborhood for miles around like something out of Dante’s eighth circle of hell. If you want to experience a fart writ large, this is the place. To make matters worse, among the 160 or so compounds contained in pig manure are ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, both harmful to humans. “It stinks about enough to make you sick,” said one farmer, Kurt Kelsey, from the Iowa Falls area. A retired Rockwell City truck driver, Jim Kleemeier, who not long ago won $15,000 in court from a neighboring pig farmer because the odor
reduced his property value, exclaimed, “It stinks to high heaven.… You can’t hardly stand to be outside anymore!” Since the smell clings to woven materials, people have to keep their Sunday clothes stored in nearby towns, away from the pig farms, or else they’d smell in church like something Satan had dragged in. (I’ll refrain from making any pew jokes here.) Among the common American expressions you
never
hear around these parts of the Hawkeye State are “I’ll kiss a pig’s ass” and “I’m in hog heaven.”

To warn new residents about what to expect if they move into proximity of a pig farm, one county decided to print up a brochure that included a scratch-and-sniff manure odor. It was so authentic that the print shop had to be evacuated.

This hardly seems like the wholesome Iowa of
State Fair
. If Rodgers and Hammerstein were writing the 1945 Hollywood musical today, they might have tweaked their songs in slightly different directions, such as “It’s a Good Night for Stinking.” And in the small town of Eldon, Grant Wood would have painted his
American Gothic
Depression-era couple wearing gas masks. But those were the halcyon years when an Iowan could proudly spread his feet wide, tuck his fists into his hips, look out over the amber waves of grain, and take a deep breath of good ol’ American air without being knocked on his ass.

With all that watery shit creating fartlike clouds of annoying stench, there are plenty of inventors trying to come up with moneymaking ways of turning a sow’s rear into a silk purse. Among their ideas are trapping the odor by covering the lagoons with shredded tires and straw, or masking it with orange- or cherry-scented deodorizers; sterilizing the liquid with electric shock treatment; speeding up the breakdown of compounds with a super-microbe mix called Biozyme; and feeding the swine a special swill with extracts of yucca, sagebrush, and other sweeteners to make their shit less piquant. Thanks to over $500,000 in government grants, a Florida company called Global Resource Recovery built an experimental chamber that cooks manure at super-high temperatures and subjects it to heavy atmospheric pressure equal to the bottom of the ocean. The process, says a company spokesman, renders the runoff 97-percent odor free.

These days, inspectors from Iowa State University’s agricultural department routinely travel around to pig farms with an instrument called the Nasal Ranger to measure the air and make sure it’s getting more breathable.

The only problem now is that there may soon come a day when gassy Iowans will no longer be able to blame their own farts on the hogs next door.

OLD FARTS JUST FADE AWAY

I
n July 2003, during the annual convention of the World Future Society in San Francisco, gerontologists and self-styled futurists discussed how long science will be able to extend the human life span. “I think we are knocking at the door of immortality,” said Michael Zey, a Montclair State University professor who has written two books on the future. Dr. Donald Louria from the New Jersey Medical School in Newark claimed that advances in gene manipulation make it likely that humans will someday live far beyond their three score and ten. “Some have suggested that there is no limit and that people could live to two hundred or three hundred or five hundred years,” he said.

Other scientists were skeptical, insisting that the human body isn’t designed to last beyond 120 years even under the best conditions. “We are fast approaching what our bodies are capable of achieving,” said Thomas Perls, leader of the New England Centenarian Study. “To get even the average person to be 100 or to get them to 180 is like trying to get a space shuttle to Pluto.” Leonard Poon, the University of Georgia Gerontology Center director who had studied more than 150 centenarians, was more specific. Citing the case of a French woman named Jeanne Louise Calment, the oldest person on record when she died in 1997, he said, “At 122 she was fairly debilitated. I visited her when she was 119 in France and at that time she was pretty much blind and having very much difficulty hearing.”