Blame It on the Dog (2 page)

Since I had become the national crepitation clearinghouse, not to mention the only American who could bet that the words “who cut the cheese?” would be in the first sentence of his obituary, many radio callers and letter writers were anxious to give me new material or correct some of my information. For example, I had written about the “blue dart”—the methane flame-up you get when you light a fart—without mentioning “blue angel,” the term most popular in Canada and England. Someone else added to my list of flatulent food items by informing me that the then-popular diet drug Fen-Phen would make you fart-phart. A Latin scholar chastised me for mistranslating
crepitus ventris
as a “crackling wind.” I had made
crepitus
an adjective, he said, when in fact it’s a noun, and
ventris
has nothing to do with wind—it’s the genitive singular of
venter
(belly, stomach)—so the phrase means “a crackling or rumbling of the stomach.” “Crackling wind in Latin would be
crepitans ventus,”
he scolded with the finger-wagging authority of an Oxford don.

In addition, new fart factoids kept arriving every week from magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and enlightened friends and acquaintances. After a while, all that stuff just piled up, and like a big gas bubble in the lower intestine, it had only one place to go: in this case, a sequel to
Who Cut the Cheese?
featuring sound bites (a term rather suspicious in this context) from the past several years.

There were some serious discussions about what to call the new book. Somebody suggested the clever
Son of Who Cut the Cheese
. I lobbied for a title that broke the (cheese) mold:
Farts and the Men Who Let Them
. But my editor said, “That’s a kicker, not a title,” which means we would have ended up with something like
Butt Blasts! Farts and the Men Who Let Them
. Ultimately, it was decided that men really didn’t need any extra encouragement to express their masculinity by pushing blunt air through their anuses. In that case, I suggested, shouldn’t we call it
All Right, Guys, Let’s Cut the Ma-cheeze-mo?

Well, nobody likes a smart-ass. Especially a farting one.

Then someone (a guilt-ridden pet owner, no doubt) suggested I pay homage to our four-legged best friends, who loyally and silently bear our human shame whenever we’re too cowardly to take responsibility ourselves. Voilà! There was our title.

But then, just a few days later, I saw a news item about an Iowa company, Flat-D Inventions, that’s marketing an antifart thong for canines called the Dogone (
www.flat-d.com/canineproducts.html
). It’s basically an activated-charcoal strip—the company refers to it as a Dog Gas Neutralizing Pad—that straps over the canine’s ass, with a hole for the tail to stick through. The Dogone comes in large (Saint Bernards), medium (spaniels), and small (Pomeranians). When I contacted owner Frank Morosky, he told me, “The unfortunate thing about the product is that you cannot blame it on the dog anymore.” What’s he trying to do, kill my book before it’s even off the press?

We cannot know what the future holds for canine flatulence odor control products, but for now, I hope you enjoy
Blame It on the Dog
.

THE POWERFUL LITTLE FART:
A REFRESHER

S
ince this is a book about flatulence, I should probably begin by going back over a few of the basics. After all, some of you may have never noticed those little hot bubbles coming out of your butt, and maybe you’ve misidentified the noises as chair squeaks, mice in the walls, or the family dog. Sorry to inform you, but you fart just like everyone else. Sure, you were born with a sterile gut, but it didn’t take you long to pick up a few intestinal bacteria and join the human family of farters. A guy with a healthy diet lets out about a quart of gas every day, broken up into anywhere from ten to fifteen farts of various magnitudes; women fart slightly less, maybe only eight or nine times a day, but their gas is more concentrated. Still, many women will tell you they never fart at all, or if they do, their dainty poofs have only a slight fragrance, pleasant to the nose. It’s probably best if you just agree with them.

Flatulence, or intestinal gas, is composed of roughly three-fifths nitrogen, one-fifth hydrogen, one-tenth carbon dioxide, and small amounts of methane and oxygen—all of which are essentially odorless. What creates the unpleasantness are trace amounts of other chemicals, especially ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and skatole (from the Greek
skatos
, meaning excrement), that stink so pungently, people can smell them at levels of 1 part per 100 million parts of air. The human colon—according to Dr. Paul Eckburg, Stanford University
DNA researcher—has at least 395 different types of bacteria, but
E. coli
is the main culprit, creating gas by munching away at that meal you ate a few hours ago and then microfarting what it doesn’t need. The nitrogen comes from blood diffusion through the stomach walls, and the oxygen is mostly swallowed air. Indeed, dogs are very flatulent—and easy to blame your farts on—because they gulp lots of air as they’re lapping up their food and water.

Beans, mushrooms, cabbages, and onions are among the main gas-producing foods because they contain complex sugars that your body simply can’t break down. These sugars ferment inside you like grapes in a wine vat, the only difference being that there’s never a good year for farts.

Your flatus (that’s the Latin word) initially has a temperature of 98.6°F, just like you, but it cools quickly as it flies away from “ground zero” at ten feet per second. If someone is standing nearby, your fart finds him like a heat-seeking missile and goes right up his nose, where millions of receptor cells in the mucous lining transform the molecules into electrical signals and send them along through nerve fibers right into his brain. If you’ve ever thought
I’d sure like to get inside that guy’s head
, well, now you know how to do it.

Along with
le persistance
(the lingering effect), a fart has what French perfumers call
sillage
—the wake that follows you, whispering
“j’accuse”
as you leave the room. The only way to stop it from stalking you is to inconspicuously drop your hand behind your back and wave it back and forth with a gentle wrist motion. In English, this is called “breaking the trail,” though I’m sure the French have a fancier term for it. If your fart has lots of
persistance
and plenty of
sillage
, it’s the next best thing to being in several places at once, for even after you’ve gone, everyone else will swear you’re still there.

It’s never much fun catching a whiff or a blast of somebody else’s fart, but believe it or not, there’s an upside. According to an early 2004 item in
Science Daily
, Dr. Richard Doty at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that one of the first things to go as people get Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases is the sense of smell. In fact, he and other researchers are hoping to devise a smell test to detect early clinical
signs of these maladies. So take heart every time you’re suddenly overwhelmed by someone’s anal fumes. You might feel like you’re losing consciousness, but at least you’re not losing your mind.

So there you have it in a nutshell: the fart, your funny little friend. Now let’s get to the good stuff.

A BEER FART (ALMOST) HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

O
n Super Bowl Sunday, ninety million people all over the world tune in to television’s most overhyped event, not simply to watch professional football’s championship game, but also to see what clever advertising Madison Avenue has dreamed up for this special day. Spectacular commercials have been a tradition at Super Bowls since 1984, when Apple, announcing its new personal Macintosh computer, set the bar high for eye-catching creativity with a $1.6 million Orwellian production by
Blade Runner
director Ridley Scott. By February 1, 2004, twenty years later, ad rates for the Super Bowl had risen to $2 million a minute. With that kind of money, advertisers needed a lot of bang for the buck.

One of the commercials that CBS ran that day was a Bud Light beer moment called “Sleigh Ride,” based loosely on a 1996
Seinfeld
TV episode called “The Rye,” in which a flatulent horse, pulling one of New York’s famous Central Park carriages, unleashed an unholy wind upon several unsuspecting passengers. (The episode, incidentally, was written by a woman—comedian Carol Leifer—so let’s hear none of that stuff about just guys farting around.) In “Sleigh Ride,” a young man is taking his girlfriend on a romantic horse-drawn spin around the park. Hoping to celebrate a treasured harmony of two hearts beating as one, he lights a candle, hands it to his beloved, and, bending down to reach into a cooler of cold Bud Lights, says, “We need something to make this moment really wonderful.” The
horse takes this opportunity to lift its tail and rip a silent-but-deadly Clydesdale-worthy fart directly into the girl’s face. When our hero raises back up with the two cans of beer, his girlfriend is still holding the now-smoldering candle, but her eyes are dazed and her hair and eyebrows have been singed by the methane flare.

According to instant polls by
USA Today
, America Online (AOL), and the ad agency website ADBOWL (
http://adbowl.com
), “Sleigh Ride” ranked among the most popular commercials aired during the game. Yet “Sleigh Ride” was almost forgotten in the aftermath of the halftime show, during which alleged singer Justin Timberlake yanked on R&B superstar Janet Jackson’s breakaway bustier and exposed her right boob (though her nipple remained hidden under a pasty) for a second or two, bringing the world to the type of sudden standstill that would follow a loud fart at a presidential funeral. The twenty-four-hour cable news networks were shocked,
shocked
that such a thing could happen during the only television program that routinely attracts viewers from every demographic—from apple-cheeked kids to kindly grandmothers—which may account for why they indignantly reran the boob flash several dozen times an hour for the next two weeks straight. Outraged Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Michael Powell denounced the incident as “classless, crass, and deplorable,” and slapped a $550,000 fine on CBS, the largest ever imposed for indecency. If that weren’t bad enough, the stunt spurred a media outcry against all the smut and degeneracy that had been creeping into TV and radio over the past two decades. Clear Channel Communications, a powerful media conglomerate of over 1,200 radio stations, ordered the cancellation of several morning shock jocks, including Bubba the Love Sponge and Howard Stern. By March 8, the FCC said it had received 530,828 complaints about Ms. Jackson’s breast (and apparently none about the equine beer fart)—though most of them came from email mills like the Parents Television Council in Los Angeles. (Perhaps H. L. Mencken’s word for the general American public, “booboisie,” would apply here.) Under pressure from angry conservatives, Congress passed new regulations upping FCC fines tenfold, from $32,500 per incident to $350,000. To escape any further
fartwas
from the FCC ayatollahs, Howard Stern eventually bolted for Sirius Radio, a subscription satellite operation
that broadcasts beyond the agency’s bailiwick. Ultimately, the government’s response to the hooter hullabaloo chilled free speech and instituted the policy of “When in doubt, leave it out”—not the best idea in a democracy that depends on open discussion.

Behind all this postgame hysteria is the FCC’s ambiguous definition of indecency, defined as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” Though indecency by that standard applies equally to tits and farts, the FCC determined that a semi-bare breast in
your
face is more indecent than a horse fart in some poor girl’s face. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the commission is overseen by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, known for its cozy relationship with gas industry lobbyists. Or maybe it’s because Americans are more frightened of sex than anal eruptions. In any event, fart lovers should be thankful that Janet Jackson flashed her mam instead of baring her right gluteus and ripping off a flatus maximus at the audience.