Blame It on the Dog (25 page)

Joe Morrison says that it’s no accident that all twenty-four Stink Blasters are male characters. “We decided that nobody wanted to buy a smelly little girl. Boys you expect to be grungy and stinky, but not girls.”

“Stink Blasters is just good old-fashioned boys fun,” Morrison told Raving Toy Maniac (
http://toymania.com
). “It’s low-tech and nonviolent with a unique look and a great product feature that makes it something every boy will want. While our target is six- to eleven-year-old boys, we’ve found that Stink Blasters get a laugh from just about everyone, because most of us probably know a real-life stinker of our own.”

On a deeper level, however, parents should wonder if maybe Stink Blasters, by supplying all the atmosphere and doing all the dirty work, are discouraging kids from entertaining themselves. Dammit, back in the old days, when I was a boy, we had to come up with our own stinky farts.

WINDY WINNERS TAKE ALL

T
he fart game starts off around the house when you’re little,” Eddie Murphy said in a routine called “The Fart Game” on his 1995
Comedian
album. “Your father introduces you to it. You’d be sitting in the house on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons, and your father make a fart and—‘That wasn’t me, that was your mother.’ … And you join in, grab your little brother, sit on his head and fart. You ever do that? That’s a fun game, your little brother freak out and go, ‘Waaah.’ And your father goes, ‘It’s the fart game, you’ll play one day too, son.’ The fart game, you … can walk up to your best friend while he’s watching a football game and fart in his face.”

All right, you’re telling yourself that farting on your buddy’s head sounds like loads of fun, but as you get a little older, you want something more challenging, so you move on to “fart pong” (a no-frills you-fart-I-fart-you-fart-I-fart-until-one-of-us-runs-out-of-gas game) and “bed football” (each fart is worth six points, but beware: if your opponent shits himself, he may claim that it’s halftime, time to change sides). Then, when you reach adulthood, you want to move up to something sophisticated. That’s why a couple of companies came up with official fart games, respectively named, surprisingly enough, FART! and FART: THE GAME.

In a 1994 episode of NBC’s
Law & Order
called “Scoundrels,” New York homicide detectives Mike Logan (Chris Noth) and Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) questioned a woman whose tchotchke shop
included a board set called Flatulence: The Game. Logan tossed it aside with a wry shrug; one more crazy thing a Manhattan cop sees every day. But even though the game was meant to be a sight gag,
Law & Order’s
writers were probably aware that there was in fact a product called FART: THE GAME already on the market.

It’s not much of a game, really. Milton Bradley doesn’t have to worry about losing Monopoly sales to Baron/Scott Enterprises of Silver Springs, Maryland, a former jigsaw puzzle maker that owns FART: THE GAME. Rolling a die, you move around a rectangular board trying to pick up fart coupons. For example, one corner square says: “Farted on a terrorist. He fainted and you saved the airplane. You get five gas coupons.” Other squares command you to let one fly on the fly (“The Army calls you in to test your fart for chemical warfare. PLEASE FART”). According to the instructions:

Nowhere on the FART board, however, does it say, “Do not pass gas, do not collect $200.”

If a farting board game with an old-fashioned Whoopee Cushion seems a little too low-tech for your liking, you can move up to FART!—billed as a “Fast ’n’ Flatulent Guff Game!”—from Cheatwell Games of Sydenham, England (hence the “guff” reference that will be meaningless to you if you’re an American—until you see it, along with “pphut” and “parp” and “rrrip,” printed in green smoke bursts on the box. British farts apparently sound different than American farts, which never go “guff” or “parp.” “Pphut,” maybe.)

FART! is a card game for three to six players. There are eight farts—including the Silent But Deadly, Evil Demon, Eggy Stinker, and Teeny Weeny—with six playing cards apiece, each with a different color; plus three Gas Mask cards and four Pass the Wind cards. What paces the game is a compact disc with sound effects and three loud (but not very convincing) farts throughout. The audio “Wet Fart” means “change direction,” the “Pant Explosion” means “next player picks up a two-card penalty,” and the “Windy Miller” means “swap hands.” I won’t go into detail, except to say that you must shout “last fart” as you play your next-to-last card, and whoever gets rid of all their cards first is the winner.

Personally, it sounds a little too complicated. If I’m going to play a card game, I think I’ll stick with Old Maid and simply rename it Old Fart. Whoever gets stuck with the Old Fart card at the end has to let all the other players fart on his head.

BLAME IT ON THE ROBOT

I
n 2000, a Los Angeles-based Chinese company named Manley Toy Quest (now simply Toy Quest) launched one of the most popular items in its then twenty-five-year history of electronic games and toys: a battery-powered shiny terrier named Tekno the Robotic Puppy (not to be confused with Sony’s earlier, more popular Aibo). With his “hi-tech circuitry and digital sensory input devices,” Tekno doesn’t just bark and play dead. “The more you teach him the smarter he gets,” says his company bio.

Though he’s only a virtual best friend, Tekno acts just like any other eight-week-old puppy. He loves attention. His eyes flash, his tail wags, he pants, he whines and cries. When he gets hungry, just hold his bone up to his mouth sensor (you’ll hear crunching noises) and he’s good for the rest of the day. When you nuzzle him against your cheek, he’ll make a happy licking sound. The only things he doesn’t do are fetch, scratch fleas (Toy Quest’s nanotech department hasn’t manufactured any yet), eat your homework, or shit on the rug. When darkness alerts his light sensors that it’s time to go to sleep, his round eyes narrow into rectangular slits, and before long Tekno is snoring softly. He won’t wake again until you touch or speak to him, turn on the lights, or make a loud noise.

Oh, and Tekno sometimes makes what Toy Quest calls “rude noises.” You know, like farting.

And that’s how Tekno put his human companion into the doghouse.

On October 24, 2003, Dave Rogerson, a thirty-one-year-old web page designer from Thorner, England, flew into Norfolk International Airport, Virginia, on his way to Charlotte, North Carolina. He was carrying Tekno, whom he’d bought as a birthday present for his American girlfriend, in one of his suitcases. But after being cooped up during the long flight across the Atlantic, the dog apparently wasn’t feeling too snuggly. Just as Rogerson was going through the airport’s customs area, Tekno let one go.

According to the BBC, “the toy’s wind-breaking mechanism registered as a high explosive on sensitive monitoring equipment.” Armed security personnel, dogged in their vigilance, grabbed Mr. Rogerson and his flatulent fido and held them in a special area for two hours. FBI agents ran forensic swabs over the pooch’s metallic hindquarters for explosive residue.

“There’s no humor at American check-ins,” Rogerson told the BBC, “and for about twenty minutes I was quite scared. They told me it is the highest reading they had for explosives and they took it very seriously. They were very jumpy and convinced there was something explosive in the dog.”

After the agents determined that Tekno wasn’t a threat to national security, they returned him to Rogerson, who by now had missed his flight to Charlotte and had to reschedule another.

“Now I can laugh, but it wasn’t funny at the time,” he told the
Sun
, a London daily. “I kept telling them it was a toy, but they wouldn’t listen. They treated me like a terrorist—they even swabbed the chocolate bars I was carrying. They didn’t even apologize afterwards.”

But his tootling terrier remained unchastened by the ordeal. “When you switch it on it still farts as loud as ever,” said Rogerson.

A FARTING, ER, PARTING SHOT

T
om Robbins said it best in his 1971 novel
Another Roadside Attraction:
“A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower still. But a kiss thrown by fingers—its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source which can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flights.”

With that, it’s time for me to throw a parting kiss, then make like a fart and blow away!