A Little to the Left
If your parents were indie rockers, you may know The Pixies song “Debaser” from the album Doolittle. One of the world’s all-time grossest lyrics: “Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know” refer to the 1929 movie by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí called Un Chien Andalou, where in a surreal sequence a woman’s eyeballs are sliced open.
Over My Dead Body (or Next to it)
William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Apparently, his characters felt the same way. As we find out at the end of his Southern Gothic short story “A Rose for Emily,” the main character slept for years next to the decaying corpse of a suitor she had killed before he’d had a chance to leave her. Forget the ghost in the closet or monster under the bed—how about the dead body lying beside you! We guess Emily wasn’t as easily spooked as some of us.
Be an Expert! Emily Grierson is the name of the main character in William Faulkner’s macabre short story “A Rose for Emily.”
IN THE KNOW
Macabre: ghastly, grisly
Double, Double Toil, and Trouble
Perhaps the all-time most famous stew-that-will-make-you-spew is described by the witches in William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, in act IV, scene I. Here’s a little taste of what they stirred up: “swelter’d venom,” “fillet of a fenny snake,” “eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s tork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.” Don’t forget the “liver of blaspheming Jew, gall of goat, and slips of yew” and, of course, the “finger of birth-strangled babe.” There are poisoned entrails in there, too—but we’re not sure whose. Oh, we almost forgot. It wouldn’t be the same without the baboon’s blood! Stir it all together and let it soak a while. Then serve with crackers or a hearty French bread.
Did You Know? Some Freudian dream analysts believe dreams where you are handling poop have to do with anxieties around money.
Zen and the Art of Elimination
The Japanese are rather modest when it comes to public elimination. Many group bathrooms have stall doors that go all the way to the floor and soothing noises playing in the background to muffle embarrassing sounds.
Careless Scientists Unite
For all those kids out there getting reprimanded for not paying enough attention in class, remind your teacher about the discovery of penicillin. The history-changing penicillium fungi was discovered by accident in 1928 when a petri dish was left open. Sir Alexander Fleming noticed that a bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus was being eaten away by a mold that had sprung up. He thought it would have implications for medicine as an anti-bacterial agent, but it was not until 12 years later that scientists were able to produce antibiotics for people. Pneumonia and tuberculosis, along with other serious and often fatal diseases, have been significantly contained in countries with access to antibiotics. The danger now is that bacteria are growing resistant to antibiotics. But we’ll leave that for a Gross-o-pedia sequel.
Be an Expert! A moldy piece of bread generally ruins the whole loaf, but moldy fruit can be picked over. Throw out the spoiled part and wash the rest before you eat it.
World’s Friendliest Spider
Next time you’re tempted to squish or otherwise get rid of a spider (and they are pretty gross—did you ever hear the one about the golden orb spider who ate a snake? It really happened!), remember Charlotte from the classic E.B. White story, Charlotte’s Web. Once you read about the brave spider who helped save Wilbur the pig , you can’t help but have compassion for the weaver-of-the-orb.
Be an Expert! Charlotte was a barn spider, scientific name: Araneus cavaticus.
Sometimes it’s Good to Flip Flop
Athlete’s foot might sound like something you want, if you dream of slam-dunking in the NBA, but it’s actually a fungus that attacks the feet and is hard to get rid of—returning even after treatment. Flip-flops in public showers cut down on the spread of foot fungi, which is always a good thing.
Circle of Life
Outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, farmers reduce and reuse to great effect by collecting leftover food put out in the trash from their neighbors and giving it to their pigs to eat. (The humans, in turn, wait an appropriate amount of time and then eat the pigs.)
Bloodless Dissection
For every 14-year-old who dreads the day she gets handed a scalpel in a biology lab, here’s some good news: Modern technology is making real-life dissection a thing of the past. On the Dissection Alternatives website, students can learn how to “keep frogs in nature, not formaldehyde” by working in virtual labs on specialized software. Blood and guts without the mess!
Turns out You Can Be too Clean
Hand sanitizers have come into vogue with increased awareness about germs. Some worry, however, that their overuse is undermining our bodies’ ability to cope with pathogens and even leading to increases in allergies where the body fights off harmless intruders like peanuts or strawberries.
Clean Getaway
Here’s a story about a guy who had a real dirt aversion. After robbing a home in Oregon, this peculiar thief took a shower—in the same home! That’s where the cops found him. Getting rid of germs may not have been the best getaway plan.
Becoming Spiderman
The most common treatment for phobias is ERP—Exposure and Response Prevention. Basically, if the sight of a spider makes you weak in the knees, and you wanted to try ERP, the process would go like this. First, you’d view the enemy at a safe distance, maybe across the room. Not hyperventilating yet? Good. Next you take a step closer, take stock, and realize that you’re still alive. You keep getting closer, slowly desensitizing yourself to the eight-legged savages with venomous fangs, until finally you are letting them crawl all over you like ants on a picnic blanket. Then again, maybe you’ll opt to skip therapy and just re-imagine an offending arachnid as a gentle descendent of Charlotte’s, see World’s Friendliest Spider).
Be an Expert! The fear of spiders is one of the top 20 most common fears. The number-one fear for most people is… speaking in public! So, if you can go tell a room full of people about something terrifying you just learned in this book, you’ll prove yourself to be a courageous soul indeed.
Did You Know? Spiders in the Fruit Cellar by Barbara Joosse is a book about a girl whose mom helps her confront her fear of the creepy crawlies in the basement.
POSTSCRIPT:
WHAT IS DISGUST?
“It is obvious
that ‘obscenity’ is
not a term capable
of exact legal
definition; in the
practice of the
Courts, it means
‘anything that
shocks the
magistrate’.”
BERTRAND RUSSELL, SKEPTICAL ESSAYS (1928)
Why do things disgust us?
Why do we wrinkle our noses at a foul smell and, if it is bad enough, grab our schnoz and hold it tight?
If you answer, “That response is just built into us,” you’re right. But that leads us to a more interesting question: “Why is disgust built into us?”
It sounds funny, but experts consider disgust one of the basic emotions, along with love, joy, surprise, anxiety/fear, sadness/depression, and anger. (There’s still some controversy about exactly which emotions shouldn’t be included in the “basic” set, but that question goes beyond the scope of this book.)
So now the question is: What is the evolutionary purpose of us having emotions? Why do we get sad, angry, happy, or scared? Primarily, emotions serve to imprint memory as well as to motivate behavior. Emotions themselves can be placed in the broader category of feelings, which would include, say, being cold or hungry. It’s easy to see how being cold or hungry will motivate behavior to alleviate discomfort. If you are cold, you’ll seek shelter. If you are hungry, you’ll find something to eat (and if you can’t think of anything, there are some great ideas in Bizarre Cuis
ine on pg. 15).
Let’s start, however, with “imprinting memory.” This happens when a powerful emotional experience creates a strong memory in your brain, one you may never forget. As a society, we have some shared times in which all our memories are imprinted. If you are at least 15, you probably remember exactly where you were on September 11, 2001, when you heard about the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. Similarly, those over 30 remember where they were when they heard about the Challenger explosion, and those 55 or more can recount their whereabouts upon hearing of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. These events become what are called collective “flashbulb memories:” they are ones that people in the United States share.
But these flashbulb memories raise another question: Why do we remember where we were when we heard the news? That’s not a relevant fact. But the way we are built is to capture everything that’s going on during a highly charged moment and to remember all of it. That way, we have everything in memory and can later review which aspects are relevant in order to protect ourselves against future calamity.
While it may not make immediate sense to have this mechanism active for remembering the Challenger explosion if we don’t plan on joining the space program, think of it this way. Suppose you are in the wilds and a tiger comes charging at you and you survive. Wouldn’t it be helpful to collect all the information you can to help you secure advance warning of a future attack? Perhaps certain smells, sounds of small animals scurrying away, proximity to the tree line, and so on might all be clues you could use in the future. What a great mechanism to have your brain capture it all, like a YouTube video, for review, so you can protect yourself in the future. It’s the same mechanism at work with the attacks of 9/11, even though, in that case, you won’t ultimately need as much data to protect yourself in the future.
Okay, so that’s the memory part of emotions. How about the part about organizing and motivating behavior? Let’s start by looking at anxiety. It’s easy to see that this emotion is designed to alert us to danger. It is also aversive, which generates a strong motivation to get rid of the anxiety and thereby get out of danger. (Sometimes anxiety is a false alarm; there is no real danger, but we are anxious nonetheless, see Introduction, pg. 8.) Disgust serves to alert us to something potentially harmful; something that could make us sick, generally. We often obtain the “disgusting” information via our sense of smell; this accounts for the characteristic expression of disgust, which includes a wrinkled nose. (All basic emotions have characteristic expressions in humans that are recognizable across cultures and time, and which others can readily recognize. So emotions have yet another function as communication devices and regulators of interpersonal relations.)
It’s important to have disgust built in to keep us away from things that are dangerous and may make us sick. It’s also important to have the memory component so that if a certain food makes you sick and you throw up, the strong memory of being sick should discourage your from returning to that food (Although this is not always the case—see Lessons from a Rat).
Sometimes things are inherently disgusting and will harm all humans. But at other times we develop a disgust response because of what we are taught. So there are differences in what disgusts people in different cultures. Some things that Americans find disgusting are commonplace elsewhere (and some of those are included in this volume). Similarly, some things we take for granted are considered disgusting in other parts of the world. So, remember, when we list some practices from other countries that we find disgusting, even when we do so with a wink, it’s really only our way of looking at things. And all of us, here and abroad, would be better off if we learned more about each other’s ways, instead of wrinkling our collective noses at them.
But for now, we hope you have wrinkled, retched, writhed, and relished the incredible diversity of all things gross, crude, offensive, vulgar, disgusting, unrefined, and unsavory contained in this obscene volume.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buckley, Dr. James, Robert Stremme. Scholastic Book of Lists: Fun Facts, Weird Trivia, and amazing lists of nearly everything you need to know. Scholastic Reference, 2006
Deary, Terry. Horrible History of the World. Scholastic, 2006
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily”. Forum, 1930
Ferguson, Kitty Pythagoras. Icon Books Ltd, 2011
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932
King, Bart. The Big Book of Gross Stuff. Gibbs Smith, 2010
Marlos, Daniel. The Curious World of Bugs: The Bugman’s Guide to the Mysterious and Remarkable Lives of Things That Crawl. Perigee Trade, 2010
Masoff, Joy. Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty. Workman Publishing Company, 2000
McDonald, Megan. Stink-O-Pedia: Super Stinky-y Stuff from A to Z. Walker & Company, 2012
National Graphic Kids Ultimate Weird but True: 1,000 Wild & Wacky Facts and Photos. National Geographic Children’s Books, 2011
Packard, Mary. Ripleys Top 10: The Weirdest of the Weird. Scholastic, 2005
Persels, Jeff and Jeff Russell Ganim. Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology. Ashgate Pub Ltd
Praeger, Dave. Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product. Feral House, 2007
Prager, Ellen. Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans’ Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter. University of Chicago Press, 2011
Rockwood, Leigh. Centipedes and Millipedes Are Gross! PowerKids Press, 2010
Tahan, Raya. The Yanomami of South America. Lerner Publications, 2001
Whitehead, John. Exploration of Mount Kina Balu, North Borneo. Gurney and Jackson, 1893
“Consumer Advisory: Only Eat Puffer Fish from Known Safe Sources” FDA U.S. Food & Drug Administration, October 17, 2007
“Pinworm infection” Mayo Clinic; http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/pinworm/DS00687
“The Six Legged Meat of the Future” Marcel Dicke, Arnold Van Huis, The Wall Street Journal, 2011
“‘Working IX to V’ in Ancient Rome and Greece” Vicki Leon, npr June 29, 2007, excerpted from Working IX to V: Orgy Planners, Funeral Clowns, and Other Prized Professions of the Ancient World by Vicki Leon, Walker & Company, 2007
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Cover Illustrations:
Shiny poop © siteflight / www.sxc.hu: Black widow spider © Lee Daniels / istockphoto.com: Leech © Kevin Green 1/ istockphoto.com: Cavity © Ryan Burke / istockphoto.com Worm and Golden delicious apple © Adolfo Medina Licon / istockphoto.com: Piranha © Ryan Burke / istockphoto. com: Smiling trash can © Anthony Oshlick / istockphoto. com: Bid bad booger ball © Anthony Oshlick / istockphoto.com: Sick guy © Jerry Silvestrini / istockphoto.com: Evil oil © Clark McMulle / istockphoto. com: Mummy walk © Robert Harness / istockphoto.com Bed bug © Larry Rains / istockphoto.com
Interior Illustrations:All interior illustrations © Chuck Gonzales except for the following:
Icons set Nerds © shutterstock.com: Cartoon Bugs: Silhouettes © shutterstock.com: Splashes © shutterstock. com: Cartoon Melting Ice Cream © shutterstock.com Vector Illustration: Insect Collection Isolated on White © shutterstock.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Jeannine Dillon, who had the idea for the book and poured herself into getting the spreads exactly right. She is a great book developer, editor, and friend—equally capable of indulging my complaints about outrageous deadlines and my outrageous dreams about future book plans. Because of this project, neither of us can eat peanut butter anymore.
Thanks to the book’s editor, Caitlin Doyle, for her deft and gentle guidance in the revision stages of the manuscript, and for her careful copyediting job as well. It is not often that I meet each editor query with a wave of gratitude for having been saved some embarrassment or other.
I’m grateful to Ginny Zeal for the wonderful design, Emily Epstein for proofreading, and Chuck Gonzalez for awesome illustrations that make me laugh
and wince in equal measure. It’s funny that he and I should partner up again with another contribution to the world of bad manners.
Thanks to my family, who tolerated large swaths of absence last year when the “I’m almost done, just a few more things to do” refrain in the final stages of the first draft lost all connection to reality.
And thanks to my cousin, Will Riordan, who in his preteen years gave me insight into what makes young grossophiles laugh—primarily by entering Christmas celebrations several years in a row squeezing a kind of slimy putty that made an obscene sound.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Federman graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English and creative writing and dreams of making an impact within the environmental movement. Shortly after moving to New York City, she was lured by her love of books into the publishing world and worked for many years as an editor and writer by day and a rock musician by night. As a singer, songwriter, and bass player for the indie-rock band Dimestore Scenario, she got to play in lots of great clubs, including CBGB before it closed.
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