Blame It on the Dog (22 page)

These were all intriguing arguments about where mankind was heading, but when the bratty news outfit Wired News (
http://wired.com
) reported on the conference, it flippantly headlined the story: “Experts Debate Old Fart Age Limit!”

In other words, how long can an old fart live?

But one related topic not discussed by the World Future Society was: When does somebody become an old fart?

Time was, calling some codger an old fart or an old poop (which a few hundred years ago meant a fart) or an old fretchard (another archaic word for fart) might have gotten your ass kicked, because these were considered insults. They implied that the person was no longer useful or worth much—an attitude already chiseled in stone by this country’s ubiquitous advertising culture, which couldn’t care less about the over-fifty demographic. It’s likely that these terms came about because older people tend to release gas more often, sometimes without realizing it, because the intestine, like any other muscle, becomes less elastic and more slack with age. Also, old men sometimes lose enough of their sense of smell that they let their hygiene slip, and if the wife isn’t there anymore to take care of them, they might get a little ripe. The expression has also broadened in recent years to include someone who’s out of touch with what’s happening in today’s culture, or who clings to old ideas or ways of doing things. Even a young, stodgy person can be an old fart under that definition.

Now, with the wised-up, self-indulgent, seventy-seven-million-strong Baby Boom generation beginning to hit sixty, we’re seeing a transformation of “old fart” from a pejorative into a proud self-deprecation or an endearment—a badge of honor—as long as the old farts themselves, not some young whippersnappers, are using it. Call it the mainstreaming of the Old Fart, that funny guy who has dry dreams and wet flatulence, grows hair in his ears instead of on his head, and takes all night to do what he used to do all night. He’s perfect for marketing greeting cards (“Crappy birthday, you old fart!”), T-shirts and caps (“Old fart on board,” “I’m with the old fart,” etc.), novelty items like the Old Fart Bobble Head (“He’s not just an Old Fart—he passes new ones all the time”) and Old Fart Slippers (they make flatulent noises when you walk in them), and
books (e.g., computer expert Aaron Rosenzweig’s
Old Fart’s Guide to the Macintosh
and
Old Fart’s Guide to the Internet
). They’ve even come up with Old Fart wine (impertinent, with a heady bouquet)—which raises the question: if Old Fart wine gave you a bad case of gas, could that be considered the wrath of grapes?

It doesn’t mean that old folks today are less fearful of aging, but rather that they’ve co-opted this particular old-fashioned term and defanged it to the point where anyone wanting to disparage a senior citizen these days is more likely to use the term “old fuck.” But even though Hallmark makes light of old farts, don’t expect the company to start using the word
geriatric
any time soon, which in its clinical, dead-end way is truly scary.

According to the
Wall Street Journal
, one-third of Americans will be fifty years old or older in 2009. This being the case, America is fast becoming a nation of old farts, and we might as well get used to it.

But cheer up. Like my dad used to tell me many years ago, it’s better to be an old fart than a young shithead.

MOBY CRACK

I
f you think some folks are capable of letting a whale of a fart, imagine what whales themselves can come up with. And why not? Why shouldn’t the largest mammal on earth, blessed with a three-chambered stomach, blast the biggest, stinkiest farts?

Several years ago, Richard Martin, an Australian-born marine biologist who lives in Canada, spent some time, like a modern Captain Ahab, hunting down the Great White Stinky. He even put together a spiral-bound booklet called
Do Whales Fart? And Other Questions
. Admitting that nobody had been able to harpoon any hard data on leviathan flatulence, Martin extrapolated from how frequently other mammals farted, and calculated—based on the average size and weight of nine whale species and their latest population numbers—that whales around the world release forty billion gallons of gas a year. “Whales,” said Martin, “have come to represent a kind of zoological
Guinness Book of World Records:
the longest, heaviest, and loudest animals on Earth are whales. I propose that whales are due yet another superlative among the animal kingdom: most flatulent.”

Then, in 2003, came photographic and firsthand proof that a whale fart is indeed an awesome thing. In an August 14 news story titled “Whale Flatulence Stuns Scientists,” Sydney, Australia’s
Daily Telegraph
reporter Simon Benson wrote, “Unfortunately for a group of whale researchers, nature took its course right under their noses—
literally. The researchers claim this is the first photograph of a minke whale letting one go in the icy waters of Antarctica. It was taken from the bow of a research vessel.”

What happened was, Nick Gales, lead research scientist in the Applied Marine Mammal Ecology Group of the Australian Antarctic Division, was on an expedition between Marguerite Bay and Palmer Station, collecting whale turds in order to find out what the whales were eating. Standing on the bow of the
NB
Palmer
with the ship’s captain, Joe Borkowski III, Gales was practically on top of a whale when it let loose with a wet one. As Gales later told Benson, “We got away from the bow of the ship very quickly … it does stink.” But not before Captain Borkowski snapped a photo.

As Gales explained, “The white bits in the photo are pieces of ice-floe, the stream of pinky color behind the whale is a fecal plume—a.k.a. poo—the large circle in the water is indeed the physical eruption of the whale’s flatulence.” Gales walked away from the experience a wiser man. “The general rule that flatulence is worse than halitosis is certainly also true for whales,” he said.

The photo was printed all around the world and showed up on the Discovery channel. You can find it on many Internet sites.

In 1970, a marine scientist named Roger Payne recorded whales sonorously calling to each other underwater, and put out a landmark album called
Songs of the Humpback Whale
, which continues to amaze new listeners. Maybe a new CD of whale flatulence would be just as tuneful, especially if it accompanied songs like “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

BREAKING THE WIND RECORD

H
ow many times can one man (or one woman) fart in rapid succession?

How long can one fart last?

So far,
The Guinness Book of World Records
has been silent on the matter. It’s surprising, really, considering that boys of all ages have been challenging each other for years on who can let the loudest, longest, or stinkiest fart—or the greatest number of them in one fusillade.

In
Who Cut the Cheese?
I discussed in detail what is probably the most famous flatulence-related recording, “The Crepitation Contest,” recorded in Canada after World War II. It was based on accounts of legendary farting contests going back hundreds of years, including the fifteenth-century Japanese
Scroll of Fukutomi
and the eighteenth-century French booklet
Art of the Fart
. Over the past sixty years, “The Crepitation Contest”—endlessly bootlegged and even rerecorded with more outlandish characters and better sound effects—has probably sold over a million copies. The contest pits British champion Lord Windesmere against Australian upstart Paul Boomer at the Maple Leaf Auditorium, with announcer Sidney S. Brown doing the blow-by-blow. Taking turns at the farting post, each man scores points by ripping several categories of flati, including the flooper (ten points), the fudgy fart (five points), and the freep (a measely two-pointer). In the heat of the action, Lord Windesmere loses ground and, in a last-ditch
effort to literally come from behind, squeezes just a little too hard and shits himself. (The same thing happened five hundred years earlier to the honorable Mr. Fukutomi.)

Since neither the modern Olympic games nor an American sports league have ever brought competitive farting out of fiction and into the real world, the job was left to that most infamous impresario of public bad taste, radio host Howard Stern.

Stern had been farting into his microphone and doing comedic crepitus bits since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until June 19, 1998, that he invited a group of farters—three guys and a girl—into the WXRK studio for his first annual crepitation contest.

Three judges—Bob, an ex-crackhead partially paralyzed by a stroke; Sal, a stockbroker who made obscene phone calls to strangers in his spare time; and Croix, a female schizophrenic rendered somewhat lucid by medication—were asked to score the farters’ performances on a scale of one to ten. A Marv Albert impersonator was on hand to deliver the “color commentary.” As in “The Crepitation Contest” recording, a farting pole was set up in the middle of a ring. The contestants each had a minute and a half to do their stuff. First up was a guy named Jeremy. (Stern likes to keep his wacky guests on a first-name-only basis, usually attached to an appellation that describes their talents or afflictions, such as “John the Stutterer” or, in this case, “Jeremy the Farter.”) Jeremy announced that he had eaten lots of Fig Newtons to prepare himself for the big event. He cupped his hand over his ass in such a way that it sounded like a trumpet. Next up was John the Farter, who was able to use his abdominal muscles as a bellows to suck air into his bowels, just like the fabled Le Petomane. This extraordinary faculty allowed him to fart continuously for his entire minute and a half. The third contestant was a woman named Maria whose technique was swallowing lots of air ahead of time, and then forcing it through her system and out her bum vent in the form of “log-filtered farts,” as she put it. Though Maria started off with some juicy snappers, toward the end she had an accident, blurted “Oops!” and instantly crossed her legs to save face. Oops, indeed. The final contestant, who called himself Chris Crap, unleashed a barrage of butt burners and, as a pièce de résistance, imitated the quacking of a duck. When the
smoke cleared, Chris Crap was the winner, with three perfect scores from the judges, and Jeremy came in second. Poor Maria brought up the rear. “You have to train your ass,” Mr. Crap bragged afterward, though sounding a bit deflated.

But these were simply feats of style, finesse, and fart-letting legerdemain, graded subjectively by three of Stern’s “Wack Pack,” one of whom was barely in the room. For this to be a true competition, Stern needed a contest with defined, measurable goals. A baseline was set two months later, on August 26, when an eleven-year-old kid came on the show, accompanied by his proud father, and cracked off 400 farts within a two-hour period, including a blistering five-minute volley of 217—a record, as far as anyone knew at the time. Now Howard Stern’s private Fart Olympics were off and running.

Over the next couple of months, several challengers came on the program in hopes of besting the kid’s performance, including former contestant Jeremy the Farter (who was able to squeeze off only 80 farts), Arthur Fartowski (138 in four minutes, before he ran out of gas), Dan the Farter (206), and Matt the Farter (who tied the 217 mark).

That 217-fart world record was looking pretty durable until the following summer—July 20, 1999, to be exact—when a Florida-based pianist named Kip Kolb came on the show. Kip, like the best of the farters, used his stomach muscles to suck air in and blow it back out. He started off strong with a flurry of twenty-five farts in the first thirteen seconds, then slowed down, pacing himself at one fart per second. When his time was up, he had squeezed out 225 farts—a new milestone. Then, just before going into the break, Stern asked Kip to give a parting shot. Kip answered with a juicy ten-second rumble that sounded like he may have left a few skid marks in his Fruit of the Looms.

Later that year, on October 13, 1999, when Stern held his annual F-Emmy ceremonies—a spoof of other awards programs in which he celebrates special moments from the previous year’s shows—the “Best Fart Moment” award spontaneously created another contest of sorts. The winner, a guy named Travis who had farted in a girl’s face, was on the phone to accept his F-Emmy, so he took the opportunity to bleat a couple of good ones. That inspired an angry Dan the Farter (nominated for an F-Emmy for accidentally crapping on the
floor while tooting along with the musical theme of the show’s news segment) to call in on another line and complain that
he
should have won. When Stern got them both farting together for a couple of minutes, Jeremy the Farter called in on a third line to wonder why he hadn’t even been nominated for an F-Emmy. He joined the cacophony by making some noise of his own, including his specialty, the duck quack.