The Big Book of Boy Stuff

by Bart King

  How to Avoid Blame: Okay, you feel a bomb coming on and you’re in a public place. What to do? If you’re seated, don’t innocently lean over to the side to let it out. Take it from me, this has never fooled anybody. Way back in 1530, a man named Erasmus wrote, “Do not move back and forth in your chair. Whoever does so looks like he is trying to bomb!” (That’s almost an exact quote.)

  Let’s say you’re at school and you accidentally drop a bomb in class. Try coughing or dropping a book to cover up the sound. If you can’t do that, blame the dog! Oh wait, the dog’s not in your class! Oh well, you will have to act innocent. If you have a friend nearby, give him an accusing glance to suggest he did it. If anyone accuses you of bombing, remember the classic comeback line: “He who smelt it, dealt it!” Or, if there is no denying that it was you who bombed, just smile and wave at the people around you and say, “Just trying to make you feel at home!”

  Remember: Politeness is important, so try to avoid bombing in public if possible. Say, “Please pardon me,” if you do bomb in public. You’re lucky to have that right; in China 2,500 years ago, it was illegal to bomb in front of other people. Finally, never try too hard to push a bomb out. You might be very, very sorry. You’ve heard the old expression, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire?” Well, where there’s a bomb, there’s poop! Your body can tell the difference between poop and gas, but it has trouble with liquid. So if you have diarrhea, sit on the toilet every time you think you have to bomb.

  Other Terms for Bombs

  flatulence

  backdoor trumpets

  air biscuits

  morning thunder

  cutting the cheese

  barking spiders

  depth charges

  butt bongos

  wind beneath your wings

  laying an egg

  stink-tail

  The Most Amazing Act in the World

  Joseph Pujol (1857–1945) was a French stage performer whose nickname was “Le Pétomane”—The Fartomaniac. As a child, Joseph was told that he must avoid swimming. The problem was that the water would go into Joseph’s back end, and he would begin to sink! Joseph soon found that he had the rare ability to bring air in through his rear end. He could then let the air back out and make sounds while doing so. In other words, he could make butt bongos any time he wanted to, and they didn’t smell! Joseph could bomb in many different sounds and for incredible lengths of time. Some of his imitations included cannons, thunder, all types of dogs, different birds (including ducks and owls), bees, frogs, and pigs. As a show closer, Le Pétomane would blow out a candle. He almost always got standing ovations, and during his peak, he earned more money per performance than any other entertainer in Paris.

  Fun Bombing Facts

  Boys and girls bomb the same amount, but girls hold them in more to be polite, so their bombs are probably bigger.

  Most people bomb about 14 times a day. (This is about enough to fill a liter soda bottle.) If you bomb more than this, you have a super-power!

  The Dog Did It! If your dog has bad gas, you aren’t feeding it the right kind of food; its intestines can’t digest the food properly, creating gas.

  The Beaver Did It! Native Alaskans enjoy a delicious dish called “stinky tail.” It’s not what you think; it is fermented beaver tail, which is made by burying the beaver tail in a pit for weeks or even months.

  The Elephant Did It! Elephants do drop huge bombs, but luckily they don’t smell too bad. The worst smelling bomber in the animal kingdom (besides your dad) might be the turtle. The loudest bomber in the animal kingdom is the donkey. But the animal that bombs the most is the termite! Their bombing is actually causing global warming. (Hey, if you ate wood, you might have some digestive problems too.)

  Creatures Department

  There are some gross animals out there and the leech is definitely one of them. Leeches are relatives of earthworms; they live in very wet environments and they want to suck your blood. Leeches range in size from tiny to more than 2 feet. Leeches may clamp onto your legs, but they also like to swim to a dark crevice where you won’t find them, like your armpit, your butt, or worse! (No, I did not make that up. Luckily, these types of leeches are usually only found in Africa, Asia, and islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.)

  Leech “bites” are painless, so you probably wouldn’t notice if a leech has attached itself to you. If you find a leech on you, don’t cut it off. You could cut it in half, and it would keep sucking. In the movies, adventurers often put the lit end of a cigarette on the leech to make it let go, but since you don’t smoke, this won’t work. Instead, put salt, lemon (or lime) juice, or an ice cube on the leech. Then it will let go.

  Inside of you may be another foul creature. Tapeworms anchor themselves deep in the guts of animals (like you!). They then hang out, eating the food that is passing through you. Don’t worry, though, they don’t get very big...just up to 100 feet long or so! (See, your guts go around and around inside of you...and so does the tapeworm!)

  Probably the most disgusting creature in the water is the lamprey. This is a fish that looks like a combination of an eel and your worst nightmare. Baby lampreys live under mud and ooze out mucus and phlegm that traps victims long enough to be eaten. When baby lampreys are big enough, they swim after their food. They have a mouth that is round and a tongue that will saw through the skin of its victim. See, when a lamprey sees another fish that looks like good suckin’, it attaches itself to the fish and sucks out all of its life-juice. That’s right, lampreys suck.

  As gross as the lamprey is, it’s not much worse than the slime eel, or “hagfish.” This delightful denizen of the deep is covered in mucus, which discourages other fish from coming near it. The slime eel is made up entirely of intestine; it has no stomach. It swims along the bottom of the sea floor and looks for fish that are either dead or sick. The slime eel then goes in the fish’s mouth or gill or eye and eats it up from the inside out, using its tooth-covered tongue to scrape the food to bits. Blech!

  *The Australian Social Spider female gives birth to many babies at once. Unlike other spiders, the Australian Social Spider then lets her babies suck her juices out. The little brats then puke all over her and eat the dissolved mess. Yum.

  *Kiwi birds are small black birds found only in New Zealand. Kiwis lay some of the biggest eggs in the bird world: A five-pound kiwi can lay a one-pound egg! That’s sort of like a 90-pound boy busting a grumpy that weighs 18 pounds!

  *A Spanish visitor once saw a number of bags in the palace of Montezuma, the ruler of the Aztecs (an ancient Native American people). The visitor thought the bags were full of treasure, and opened them up. The bags were full of squirming lice! The Aztec people believed that even if they were broke, they could still show respect to Montezuma by picking lice off their bodies and giving the creatures to him.

  Dandruff and Hair Department

  Dead skin is falling off of you all the time. About 80 percent of the dust in your house comes from dead skin cells. If we added up all of your dead skin and dandruff, more than a 1/2 pound of it falls off of you in a year. Try saving yours up and then using it for confetti at a party!

  Bald people are lucky. Not only are they more intelligent than most people, but we (oops, I mean “they”) usually don’t have the dandruff problems that people with hair do. That’s because hair keeps dead skin cells from falling away from the body. Instead, the dead cells get clustered together and break off in bigger chunks of dandruff, or “seborrheic scruff,” as the doctors call it. Hurray for bald people!

  People have been shampooing, dying, clipping, and shaving their hair ever since humans have been around. It seems silly to spend so much time on it. Three out of five American women color their hair, but men can be just as foolish. In ancient Rome, men combed earthworm paste into their hair to keep from going gray. (They also rubbed bear grease on their heads to keep from going bald!)

  Hey, Fat Head! In your room are tiny dust mites that eat your dandruff. B
ut your dandruff is so high in fat that the mites have to wait for a fungus to lower the fat content before they chow down. “Mmmm...dandruff!”

  Food Department

  I can remember coming into the kitchen one morning and seeing my mom frying something up in a pan. It looked like scrambled eggs, but it was sort of blue.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Scrambled calf brains,” my mom answered. “Want some?”

  Yech! My mom also liked to make headcheese. To make this, she would take a pig’s head, remove all of its meat (you know, the lips, eyes, tongue, cheeks, snout, etc.), wrap it in a cloth, boil it, stick it in the refrigerator, and leave it there. When she came back to it later, a clear gelatin had magically formed over the whole mess. She would then stick the headcheese on a cracker and eat it with a smile. Not good!

  Different cultures enjoy different foods. In the American Southwest there is a low-fat meat that tastes a lot like crab called “rattlesnake meat.” Over 60 million guinea pigs get fried up in Peru each year, and they eat cats there too. (They say it tastes like rabbit.) But eating cat might be preferable to some Chinese foods like worm soup or sun-dried maggots.

  I think you can see where I’m going with this: Foods can be scary or ugly or disgusting. One of the scariest foods on the planet might be a snack that natives of the Amazon Basin sometimes enjoy: tarantula! Tarantulas can be barbecued or roasted on the coals of a fire in a large leaf. Those in the know say it tastes like shrimp, not chicken.

  There are many ugly-sounding foods. For example, there is a cold Polish soup called “Chlodnik” (“Another bowl of delicious Chlodnik, dear?”). Other favorites of mine are “bladder wrack” (an edible seaweed), “bloater” (a dried fish), “Skum Saus” (a scummy sauce from Norway), and “Bratklops” (German fried meatballs). But it is hard to beat “Wiener Krapfen” for a bad name. Is it a combination of wieners and, uh, you know? Nope, it’s a doughnut in Austria.

  One of the ugliest-looking foods in the world might be a fungus called smuts. Smuts is a parasite that grows on corn or other grains. It looks like a sooty, gray tumor. Some say that it also tastes like a sooty, gray tumor. Another dish that isn’t very pretty is an Icelandic meal called “Svid.” To make Svid, cut off a lamb’s head. Boil it. Eat it. You don’t mind your meal looking back at you, right?

  But for the world’s most disgusting food, our judges have narrowed it down to four contestants. Coming in fourth place is a Vietnamese food called “Nuoc Mam.” It is made by burying fish in salt until they digest themselves with their own stomach acid and then turn into fish sauce. Yummy!

  In a tie for third place, we have two similar recipes. From Iceland is a dish called “Hakarl.” To make it, take a shark and remove its guts. Then hide the shark in a wooden barrel for 3 years. When you come back, it should feel like cheese and smell like, well, like a fish that you left in a barrel for 3 years. Now eat it! Another crowd-pleaser from China is called “Pi-tan.” Soak some chicken eggs in a liquid made of tea leaves, lye, and a couple of other ingredients for about three months. Then bury them for 4 years. After you’ve built up your appetite for that long, dig the eggs up, peel them, note the green yolks and delicious odor, and swallow ‘em down!

  Coming in second place is a French meal called Yeux de Veau Farcis. You may have noticed that cows have fairly big eyes. Well, for this recipe, you’ll need two of them. Boil the cow eyes for a minute, cut out any part that isn’t white, and stuff them with mushrooms. Now you’re ready to fry up a couple of eyeballs!

  In first place (drum roll, please) it is the Scottish New Year’s recipe for haggis. Get a sheep’s stomach and fill it with oatmeal, fat, and a sheep’s cut-up liver, heart, and lungs. Let it simmer for four hours, and then pour Scotch whiskey over the whole thing. (If you’re smart, you’ll then set the whole mess on fire.) The poet Robert Burns described haggis as “gushing entrails” (and he was trying to be nice!). Scots usually eat haggis with “neeps and tatties”—mashed turnips and potatoes. Once, a shipment of haggis was not allowed into the United States because it was considered “unfit” for humans to eat.

  Read My Lips: I Don’t Want Any! Once upon a time in Vietnam, orangutan lips were considered a delicious snack.

  You know that waxy smell that you get when you open a box of crayons? That smell is beef fat. Processed beef fat (called stearic acid) is an ingredient in many crayons. A study found crayons to be the 18th most recognized odor in the nation; as for the taste, crayons are somewhere between wax, soap, and beef fat.

  Pee Department

  If you are average, you pee about 1 to 2 quarts of urine a day. Did you know that all of that fresh pee you’re making is actually “cleaner” than your spit? That’s because no bacteria can live in pee. And to think that you swallow spit...hmmm. Actually, because fresh pee is mostly water (with some salt and unneeded proteins) it is so clean, you can drink it. (I’m not saying you should drink it.) Believe it or not, you have drunk pee before. We all drink pee before we are born because the fluid we float in contains our own baby pee! The famous world leader Mahatma Gandhi drank a bit of pee each morning to get his day off to a p-p-perfect start.

  An interesting thing about pee is that it has no odor. Even if you take vitamins and eat asparagus, your pee won’t stink until it begins to break down. Of course, as soon as your pee hits the air, it breaks down, so that’s why it can be smelly when you’re pretending to be a firefighter.

  A sensitive subject for many boys is bed-wetting. Don’t feel bad if this has been a problem for you. One out of every 7 kids is a bed-wetter! (One percent of all 18-year-old boys still wet the bed.) If you are worried about bed-wetting, try eating some crackers or having a spoonful of honey before going to bed. Either of these items will help you retain your water. (In ancient Rome, they used to make bed-wetters eat boiled mice, so we’ve come a long way!)

  One last thing: Your pee is also as warm as you are when it comes out. This means that whenever you are in the cold weather, you should try to write your name in the snow in big yellow letters!

  Love Is a Prickly Thing! Male porcupines look for their mates in the autumn. When the male porcupine sees a female, he sprays her with pee to see if she’s interested in him. If she stays, she likes him. Now that’s love!

  Useful Advice

  You’re in class and really need to pee, but you don’t want to say, “I need to go to the baffroom,” in front of other students. Instead, raise your hand and say, “I need to micturate.” All teachers know that this means you have to go pee, and will give you a hall pass!

  Important Warning

  If your pee is a dark brownish-yellow color, you need to drink more water. Your body needs lots of clear fluids to flush itself out properly, and soda doesn’t cut it.

  A More Important Warning

  Never pee on an electric fence! You see, water conducts electricity, and...oh, it’s just too awful to think about.

  Colorful Sayings

  “Full of pee and vinegar”: This means “full of life.”

  “Go pee in your hat” or “Go piss up a rope”: These mean “get lost.”

  “Pee into the wind”: This is used to describe anything foolish or futile.

  “It’s a pisser”: This means “it’s amazing.”

  “Pissing and moaning”: This means “complaining.”

  Fun Pee Facts

  Average pee times—girls: 80 seconds; boys: 45 seconds. Wee-wee win!

  Birds don’t pee at all. Their pee mixes with their poop, sometimes turning it white.

  Ancient Romans brushed their teeth with pee and also used it as mouthwash. They thought pee kept teeth firm in their sockets and white. (Talk about “potty-mouth”! )

  That’s What I Call “Holding It!” When bears hibernate during the winter, they never get up to go pee in the woods. Their body simply reuses the fluids.

  That’s What I Call “Holding It” Too Long! Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was a famous astronomer from Denmark who was very pol
ite. It was customary to not get up from the dinner table to pee until the meal was finished. Some people believe that Tycho “held it” too long at the dinner table one night, and his bladder burst. Pee is poisonous, and Brahe apparently died of pee poisoning days later.

  Poop Department

  Did you know that some of your strongest muscles are deep inside your body? These muscles are there to keep your digested food moving along. That’s right, you have a Playdoh Fun Factory inside of you! The muscles squeeze in a wave-like motion called peristalsis (pear-ih-STALL-sis), so that poop is always moving through your system.

  After your digestive system has taken the vitamins and water from your food, what’s left over is what scientists call “poop.” About 1/3 of the food you eat becomes poop. This includes a lot of vegetable and grain fibers. Most of the rest of it is bacteria. (Up to 1/4 of your poop can be bacteria!) It eats at the poop as it goes through your intestines, and the bacteria leaves behind chemicals that make your poop stink. The more bacteria in your poop, the more it stinks. Add some “bile” from your gall bladder, which helps break down fats and gives your poop a nice brownish-green color, and you’re ready for a very special delivery.

  But your special delivery may never arrive if there is not enough water in your body. If you are dehydrated, your poop will dry out and slow down in your guts. (Some people call this a plugged drain, a logjam, or clogged plumbing.) It’s like dry plaster is inside of you; it will move slowly, and when it comes out, it will be hard and painful. If your poop doesn’t come out, try jumping up and down, eating some prunes, and drinking a lot of water to break up that plaster!