Blame It on the Dog (13 page)

I
n 2001, actor William Shatner videotaped an easygoing conversation between himself and former costar Leonard Nimoy about how the 1960s
Star Trek
TV series and subsequent movie franchise affected their lives and careers. Shatner then packaged it as a seventy-five-minute documentary called
Mind Meld: Secrets Behind the Voyage of a Lifetime
(Creative Light Home Video)—a reference to the ability of Nimoy’s Vulcan character, Mr. Spock, to create a telepathic empathy with other creatures.

In the movie, after sitting around and talking in the garden, the two old friends adjourned to Nimoy’s memorabilia-stuffed library. While Shatner was adjusting himself in his chair in mid-conversation, it looked and sounded as if he’d let off a butt-cheek sneak that turned out to be not very sneaky. Either that or somebody stepped on a Tribble. Apparently neither the actors nor the crew noticed it at the time (perhaps Shatner had put his sphincter phaser on
stun
), but when the enterprising Shatner released the
Mind Meld
tape on his website (
http://williamshatner.com
), the fart instantly reverberated throughout the Trekkie galaxy like a supernova. When Howard Stern began playing it on his radio show, the squeak became an underground media star. “The morning zoo buzz is quickly rivaling the adolescent tittering spawned by
Girls Gone Wild
,” said film reviewer G. Noel Gross at DVD Talk (
http://dvdtalk.com
). “Not since the Zapruder film [of JFK’s assassination] has a stretch
of footage been more scrutinized. Cap’n Kirk is yammering about why the crew [of
Star Trek
] hates his stinky guts when at along about timecode 52:47 the offending audio manifests. It’s by far the more pronounced of what some theorists have speculated to be as many as seven gassy releases.”

So, did Shatner vulcanize the air with sulfur?

Did James T. Kirk launch a photon torpedo at his first officer?

On November 13, 2001, when Shatner visited Stern’s program to promote some of the crap he’s endlessly flogging (in this case, a competitive cooking show), the shock jock asked him about the illusory fart. Shatner insisted that he didn’t do it. The sound man, he claimed, had moved a boom microphone at just the moment he squirmed in his chair.

On the following night, during an appearance on NBC’s
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
, Shatner had to defend himself again.

By mid-2004, it looked as if that flatulent fillip (or imaginative figment thereof) had faded from public memory—but then along came a new
Star Trek
Collector’s Edition DVD that included
Mind Meld
as a bonus, and the controversy began anew. It threatens to cling on forever in our cultural memory.

Meanwhile, since all radio transmissions go off into deep space, Shatner’s butt squib is now heading for Epsilon IV, where no fart has gone before, and probably will not arrive until, say, four hundred light years from now. Unless, of course, it hits warp speed.

THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

I
t was a “eureka” moment in the life of Steve Schuster. Or better yet, a “you reek” moment. Just before getting on an airplane, he decided to take a last-minute pee in the airport men’s room to avoid having to use the cramped, onboard facilities. But when he walked in, “I was hit immediately with the unmistakable stink of fresh poop,” he says. “Bad enough that my eyes actually started watering.”

We’ve all suffered through this torment at public toilets. Somebody’s crap stinks bad enough to make the mirrors shimmer, and all you can do is hold your breath, do your business as quickly as possible, and get the hell out of there. But Steve is a guy who needs to fix things. “My dad told me to always leave the campsite better than I found it,” says the former engineer, who now runs his own Massachusetts-based marketing firm for high-tech companies. “So when I got a whiff of that smell, I told myself, ‘This doesn’t have to be. Why should poop stink like that?’ But instead of spraying something to cover it up or trying to suck it away with a ventilating fan, I thought, ‘Why not go to the source?’ ”

In other words, find out what creates such a stench. Schuster wasn’t concerned about his own poop so much, because we all know that our own shit and farts don’t stink all that badly. He was more concerned about changing everyone else’s, so that if he ever had to go into another public bathroom, he wouldn’t be assaulted like that again. On a more altruistic level, it would be a global mission
of making the world smell just a little bit better. Kind of like lighting one little candle and making things brighter—or at least a little bluer, what with all that methane gas. But Schuster needed a rallying cry to rouse the masses. That’s when the words “Take a Whiff!” popped into his head.

Five years later he came up with an antistink pill called, you guessed it, Whiff!—complete with exclamation point (see
http://takeawhiff.com
for more info).

“Most of us use underarm deodorant, not because we’re offended by our own odor, but because we worry about offending other people,” says Schuster. “It’s simple courtesy. So why not deodorize our poop and our farts, too?” Yes, farts, because according to Schuster, “Whiff!’s odor-reducing mechanisms are related to gas and have the same odor-mitigating effect on farts as on poop. I can verify this from several years of usage. Whiff! does not reduce the volume of gas, just the odor.”

Though some people’s body chemistry may contribute to really stinky poop, the main problem is diet. If you eat a greasy cheeseburger with onions, or a 7-Eleven burrito, and wash it all down with beer, whoa, your shit’s gonna stink like Jersey City. Much of our modern diet is processed food, complete with sodium and additives whose job is to ensure longer shelf life by killing anything else that eats it before you do—and by the time the bacteria in your stomach have adapted to it, they have mutated and evolved into superpredators. With Whiff! Schuster wanted to add something naturally “sweet” to the stomach—kind of like freshening the breath with parsley—and mitigate the creation of toxic fumes. He claims that Whiff!’s ingredients are all natural. First there’s FOS, a natural sugar extracted from Jerusalem artichoke (a northern United States tuber that’s not really an artichoke, but rather in the same family as the sunflower). Native Americans have used Jerusalem artichoke as a food staple for centuries. According to Schuster, FOS promotes the growth of “friendly” bifidobacteria and lactobacilli, “known to reduce the amount of pathogenic—‘unfriendly’—bacteria in the colon.” Then there’s chlorophyll extracted from alfalfa; and desert yucca, a cactus. Taken in capsule form, Whiff! is supposed to create a healthier environment—“friendly flora”—in the mucous
membrane of the large intestine. It begins working after about two weeks, the time it takes the body—with Whiff!’s help—to rid itself of the old, stinky bacteria. “Whiff! reduces poop odor across the board,” claims Schuster, “but if you eat a lot of red meat, onions, or other smelly foods, your poop will still have some odor, just not as strong as before.”

A month’s supply of sixty capsules costs $15. Schuster asserts that the laboratory that manufactures Whiff! capsules follows guidelines set forth in U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, although the product is not FDA-approved. “The approval process costs about $100,000. That’s why I’m obliged to put the same FDA disclaimer in there that all nutritional supplements must use.”

In other words, Whiff! could be just a poop-sweetening, fart-freshening placebo that only makes you
think
you don’t stink so bad anymore.

In late 2005, Steve Schuster was invited to visit the
Howard Stern
show, where the host immediately pointed out that he himself would never take Whiff! because the smell was part of the fun of taking a crap. In fact, Stern said he often held off flushing for a few minutes simply to savor the aroma wafting all around him. Sidekick Robin Quivers wondered if simply adopting a healthier lifestyle, with unprocessed foods, would have the same effect as taking the recommended dosage. When Stern asked how people could tell if the pills are working, Schuster said, “If it turns your stool a rich green, it’s working. Green is good.”

That prompted comic Artie Lange to comment that, if nothing else, Whiff! sounded like a great idea for St. Patrick’s Day.

OUR FARTS WERE HAPPY AND GAY!

A
ccording to an article in the
Redditch Advertiser
(an English newspaper) that ran on February 16, 2005, a Worcestershire politician named Tom Wareing got himself into hot water during Great Britain’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History Month when he compared homosexuals with people who either fart too heartily or can’t shit worth a shit. That’s not exactly how he said it, of course. The fart first hit the fan when the Crabbs Cross County councilman complained publicly that pro-gay organizations were brainwashing children by “perpetrat[ing] the myth that Shakespeare was homosexual and Florence Nightingale a lesbian.” Annoyed that such groups might get public funding, Wareing told the local Resources and Cultural Services representative at a council meeting, “According to medical evidence, one in eight of the population suffers from constipation, while one in four suffers from flatulence, yet no local authority to date has provided funds … in order to celebrate such conditions, especially the various cadences that are possible in the act of breaking wind.” So why, he reasoned, should the supposed 10 percent of the population that’s gay be any different? In other words, why should taxpayer money be poured down a glory hole?

Just a couple of months later, in Sweden, researchers were studying whether gay men and straight men react differently to body odor, including, most likely, farts. Dr. Ivanka Savic Berglund, senior consultant neurologist at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, wrote
in the May 3, 2005, issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that when gay men were given PET scans (an imaging technique that reveals blood flow and neuron activity in the brain), the anterior hypothalamus region of their brains—which controls sexual behavior—became activated as they sniffed a testosterone-related chemical taken from male sweat. On the other hand, that same area of straight men’s brains didn’t react at all—until they took a whiff of an estrogen compound made from female urine. What one man considered an odor, another man took as a subliminal love potion. It was all a matter of sexual orientation.

Dr. Savic’s research harkened back to a controversial 1991 report by California neurobiologist Dr. Simon LeVay, which held that a certain area of the hypothalamus is only half as large in women and gay men as it is in straight men—a conclusion that hints that gays can’t help being who they are, no matter how many Evangel Society Bible classes they take. But more important, Dr. Savic’s experiments showed that certain subtle human hormones that we sweat from our bodies—called pheromones—may have a more powerful effect on other people than previously thought, and that women and gay men react to the same pheromones, while straight men react to others. Since those little love molecules are produced inside our bodies, they are also sloughed off into our intestines and eventually end up steaming from our nether regions. I mentioned in
chapter 7
that novelist James Joyce rhapsodized about how the scent of his wife’s farts invigorated him. More than two hundred years earlier, Jonathan Swift recognized the same sexual excitement in his poem called
The Problem
(1699), when he wrote, “Love’s fire, it seems, like inward heat, / Works in my Lord by stool and sweat, / Which brings a stink from ev’ry pore, / And from behind, and from before; / Yes, what is wonderful to tell it, / None but the fav’rite nymph can smell it.”

As for Councilman Wareing back in England, well, maybe he was protesting too much. Maybe we should take a look at his hypothalamus.

WHO CUT THE OLIGOSACCHARIDES?