Satire at the ballot box to 'honor' Bush

They want to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant come January, when the next president is sworn in. During the inauguration, the group also wants supporters to participate in a "synchronized flush" -- a way to send a gift to the renamed plant, which supporters say, would be a "fitting monument to this president's work."

It sounds like a harmless joke, or maybe a college civics lesson gone awry. But they have already collected 8,500 signatures in support of the plan - 1,300 more than the minimum needed to put the question to city voters in November.

The biggest opposition in this Democratic stronghold, McConnell said, is people who oppose naming anything after the 43rd president.

Officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns the plant, say they get the humorous intent. But they note that the plant is an award-winning facility that keeps the city's streets and the ocean clean.

"If you are looking for a place to make a negative statement about the Bush administration's impact on the environment, this would be the last place to do it," agency spokesman Tony Winnicker said.

Someone pooped in my elevator.

Was it you?

The brand new 8th Cloaca, Mini Cloaca

The tubular structure is made of metal and glass, and composed of mechanical organs that swallow, grind, digest and defecate a given amount of food. While Super Cloaca consumes 300 kg of food and produces 80 kg of faeces per day, the quantity of food ingested by the dwarfed one is equivalent to that of a breakfast.

[...] he also ate the same meal as a Cloaca machine, gathered some of the product of its digestion, went to the toilet, collected some of his own faecal matter and brought the two samples to a laboratory. The scientist compared the two samples bacteriologically and found them very similar.

Previously.

Making cows fart like kangaroos

Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas.

"Fourteen per cent of emissions from all sources in Australia is from enteric methane from cattle and sheep," said Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland Government.

Researchers say the bacteria also makes the digestive process much more efficient and could potentially save millions of dollars in feed costs for farmers and graziers. "Not only would they not produce the methane, they would actually get something like 10 to 15 per cent more energy out of the feed they are eating," said Dr Klieve.

I've been wondering about this ever since I learned about fecal bacteriotherapy!

Hollywood Pigeons to Be Put on the Pill

Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders.

"We think we've got a good solution to a bad situation," said Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association, the group leading the effort to try the new contraceptive. "The poop problem has become unmanageable and this could be the answer."

Dodson said representatives from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contacted her group with the idea to use OvoControl P. Other animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, support the contraceptive over electric shock gates, spiked rooftops, poisons or other methods.

I think the ubiquitous pigeon-spikes and mesh fences covering every statuary alcove are a far bigger architectural blight than the poop they are intended to avoid, so I'm all for it.

Now if only we could put human birth control in the water supply, we'd really be getting somewhere.

By the way, why is it that 99% of the birds you see in cities are pigeons? What makes them so much more successful than any of the others? Does it have something to do with their greasy coating or their deformed club-feet?

DNA Lounge update, wherein are presented photos of The Event Which Shall Not Be Named.

A certain someone didn't believe me when I described this procedure the other day, so I went and looked it up.

Recolonize your colon:

Dr. Aas:	Stool is an organ.
Me:	Excuse me?
Dr. Aas:	It is normally considered waste product, but it is in a way an independent organ, like the kidney, and it contains thousands of different bacteria living in symbiosis. These bacteria are needed for normal health. When you use some antibiotics, some of this bacteria population gets destroyed. If you later get infected with Clostridium difficile colitis, there is this competitive battlefield in the colon, and without the necessary bacteria, Clostridium has the upper hand. So what we do is take normal stool from a normal person, make an extract of it, put it in a blender with water, take two tablespoons of that cocktail, and introduce it into the patient's body.
Me:	It is, in effect, a human poop transplant?
Dr. Aas:	Yes. To replace the normal colonic flora.
Me:	That's a nice word!
Dr. Aas:	Okay.
Me:	And how is this transplant done?
Dr. Aas:	Through a tube down into the patient's stomach. A naso-gastric tube.
Me:	It goes in through the nose?
Dr. Aas:	Or the mouth, yes.
Me:	Can't it go in the other end?
Dr. Aas:	There is a doctor in Australia who does it that way, but sometimes the small intestine is infected, too, so it is more effective this way.
Me:	In this particular organ transplant, who are the donors?
Dr. Aas:	Most of the time, a loved one.
Me:	I can imagine.
Dr. Aas:	Yes.
Me:	And this works as a cure because the microbes remain in the colon?
Dr. Aas:	Yes.
Me:	It is the gift that keeps on giving!
Dr. Aas:	We've been doing it for 10 years without a single failure. [...]
Dr. Aas:	You wouldn't believe the [flora] I have taken from colleagues since publishing that paper.

If the name "Dr. Aas" screams "prank" to you, perhaps you will be more convinced by the fact that Wikipedia has managed to wring all of the humor out of a poop joke: Fecal bacteriotherapy.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, and previously.

But don't worry, only some of it was human:

A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.

"We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood," said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.

It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.

"Blood just all over my face, in my mouth, I could taste it. It was terrible. I had it in my mouth and I kept spitting and I couldn't get rid of it," said Huebner.

Huebner said he hasn't been sleeping much. He's worried about the blood that he swallowed when he was operating a jet machine to clean out the sewer.

The Met Council said it was a mix of human and animal blood used in medical testing at this nearby lab.

Crimp off that turd by gently squeezing your nuts:

The Acticon Neosphincter is the only implantable sphincter available for the treatment of severe fecal incontinence.

The cuff is implanted around a segment of the anal canal. When inflated, the cuff occludes the anal canal by applying circumferential pressure. The cuff opens under patient control and refills automatically following defecation.

Implanted in the soft tissue of the scrotum or labium, the control pump contains the resistor and valves needed to transfer fluid to and from the cuff. The control pump features a deactivation option so the cuff can be deflated for a prolonged period of time, as well as a septum port so fluid can be added to the system without additional surgery.

"Dinosaurs probably had tapeworms too, and we can only wonder how long they got."

Also: "Some monogeneans give birth to offspring without releasing them from their bodies. Their offspring mature inside them and give birth as well. Like a hideous Russian doll, a monogenean may contain twenty generations of descendents inside its body!"

(I have a hard time seeing it this way, but apparently that's not actually an anus with lips. It's the other way around: it's a head with two snouts, and the goatse in the middle is two of the eyes, not a mouth.)

Let's say you found out you had a tapeworm. [*]  Let's say the doctor gave you some pills to kill it, and in due course, this giant thing came out of your butt.

Poll #874397 Unlike Mescal
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Would you:

[*] No, I'm not the one who has one.

"And Can Even Vomit"

The Institute of Food Research hopes it will aid the development of new superfoods by revealing how they are broken down in the gut. The device, made from sophisticated plastics and metals, can withstand the corrosive gut acids and enzymes, and can be fed real food.

It mimics both the physical and chemical reactions that take place during digestion - and can even vomit.

Chief designer Dr Martin Wickham said his model was much more sophisticated than previous attempts, which tended to focus solely on reproducing the chemistry of digestion. It even mimics the stomach contractions which are used to break up food, and send it on its way along the alimentary canal.

The top half of the model consists of a vessel in which food, stomach acids and digestive enzymes are mixed. Once this hydration process is finished, the food gets broken down into smaller pieces that can be absorbed by the human body. Computer software is used to control how long food remains in a particular part of the stomach, and the release of the gut secretions.

It has the capacity of about half the size of an actual stomach, and can "eat" the equivalent of a normal portion of fish and chips.

Previously pioneered by Wim Delvoye's Cloaca.

Extra anus kills four-legged chick

Forzie, the Te Uku-bred Barnevelder chick - hatched at Marlene Dickey's property at the start of last month - has died.

But it wasn't the extra legs that led to its death, more likely an extra anus, Mrs Dickey believes.

"He developed two bottoms and I think he got glugged up," she said.

Police hunt farting dissident

Police in Poland have launched a nationwide hunt for a man who farted loudly when asked what he thought of the president.

Hubert Hoffman, 45, was charged with "contempt for the office of the head of state" for his actions after he was stopped by police in a routine check at a Warsaw railway station.

He complained that under President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw, the country was returning to a Communist style dictatorship.

When told to show more respect for the country's rulers, he farted loudly and was promptly arrested.

Hoffmann was arrested and released on bail but failed to turn up at a Warsaw court early this week to be tried, and the judge in the case rejected an appeal by defence lawyers to throw the charges out.

A court spokesman said: "Such a case of disrespect is taken very seriously."

Instead the court ordered the police to start a nationwide hunt for the man, and interpol have been alerted.

Little Miss Sunshine

This movie is awesome. It's National Lampoon's Vacation if you replaced the poop jokes with existential angst and suicide. Very dark, very funny, great pacing. Go see it immediately.

Dark Water

God dammit, it was The Ring, The Grudge, and a dozen other American remakes of Japanese movies that all have the same plot, villain, and look! What the fuck! And how do I keep getting suckered into watching these?

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds

This movie is kind of hard to describe; there's a small village living on the edge of a toxic wasteland protected by these hundred-foot-tall semi-intelligent potato bugs. Our heroine has to fend off an invasion from a neighboring kingdom in order to prevent the giant bugs from wiping out both sides. It's deeply weird, but very cool.

IFC played all of Miyazaki's movies a couple months ago, so I've been slowly working my way through the ones I hadn't seen. Nausicaä is my favorite so far, but I've yet to see one of his that wasn't great. (For calibration purposes: I think that almost all of the anime that I've ever seen has been relentlessly terrible. It's very rare that I see one that I like.)

Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars

Feces

Revert wars, alleged sock-puppetry, and page protection: should the article on feces include this picture of a large human turd? As of early July 2005, the discussion on this issue alone had reached 12,900 words.

Meta Lameness

Edit wars over which edit wars are allowed to be on this page, or over how specific entries on this page should be worded (oh, the irony).