The Tao of Poo, or Many Species of Feces
Written: Apr 02 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Will provide inspiration for fecants everywhere.
Cons: Acts as a laxative -- do not read on the subway!
The Bottom Line: The enterprising (or constipated) reader may be able to complete in one sitting; it would make a thoughtful stocking stuffer or birthday gift for your favorite turd factory.
|
|
|
| Lobstergirl's Full Review: Merde Books |
I received some criticism for my last review, a critique of various and sundry ways of showing affection that would probably no longer shock an octogenarian Methodist. In the interests of conflict resolution and showing remorse, I am going to lean far, far in the opposite direction and write about sh!t.
There are few things that make my heart go pitter-patter faster than reading about the epistemology of sh!t. So of course the index of this small tome brought a :) to my face:
Anchovies
Badgers, toilets of
Corncobs, as toilet paper
Dung rolling
Epilepsy, peacock feces as cure for
Farts, combustibility of
Hitler, Adolf
Prairie dogs, feces shapes in
Red meat, effect of, on feces color
Virgins, excreta of
Ralph Lewin, a professor of marine biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, proves again and again that he is a man who really knows his sh!t. There are chapters entitled "Physical Features: Shapes and Sizes;" "Colors and Textures;" "Smells and Other Chemical Components, Including Gases;" "Toilet Papers and Other Abstergents:" "Nutritional Values:" and, one of dozens of instances of his puckish humor, "Myths, Legends, and Holy Ordures."
This man is the Linnaeus of turds:
Turds may be single (hares), composite with faceted segments (sheep), or clumped (rabbits, pigs, and pronghorns). They may be more or less spherical (hares and their ilk): flattened or even concave at one end, where a harder pellet has pressed against a softer one before deposition (elk, fallow deer): oblong, cigar-shaped, cylindrical (goats), or even coiled (foxes): terete, grooved longitudinally (coypu) or transversely (zebras); segmented or joined in chains like short rosaries (porcupines, ground squirrels): blunt; pointed (duiker antelopes): tapered or tailed at the back end (prairie dogs, toads) or at both ends (weasels); dry or squishy, all according to species, age, season and diet.
He goes on to mention other books that provide instructions on how to collect, handle, photograph, dry, and varnish turds for a permanent collection. Just in case Antiques Roadshow is coming to town, I guess.
For ease of reading, I'll just alight on a few major topics:
Size
- Turds are typically scaled to the animal producing them, with the exception of llamas, whose pellets are no bigger than those of rabbits.
Composition
- Desert animals have to conserve as much water as possible. They can't afford to waste it in excrements. Dry climates produce dry vegetation, and thus hard, dry scats. Camel droppings are often so dry that they are combustible as soon as dropped.
- Humans excrete between 20 and 1,500 grams of feces daily (Europeans fall in the range of 100 to 200 grams--another instance, I suspect, of Americans producing more waste than any other country). Healthy human feces are normally about 80% water. Less than 50% would indicate extreme constipation, over 90% diarrhea. These are not unimportant data; armies have to make appropriate calculations and logistical arrangements.
- Some human excrements, especially from avid bean eaters, incorporate so much gas that, like beaver droppings, they float. This causes complications in operating the settling tanks of sewage plants.
Synthetic Turds
- The Consumers Union, in order to evaluate the flushing efficiency of different toilet models, created synthetic turds from a mixture of sawdust, flour, shortening, and just enough hollow plastic beads to confer a slight degree of buoyancy.
Gaseous Emissions
- 60 million tons of methane per year, or about 15% of the total annual production entering the earth's atmosphere, comes from cattle. Another 5% originates in the guts of termites and locusts.
Animal Latrines
- Llamas seem to designate special limited toilet areas where they drop thousands of little turds in a site 1-2 meters across. Sometimes they wait patiently to take their turns at the latrine areas. Hyraxes, rabbits and wildebeets also segregate their latrines. Gorillas in the wild, in contrast, tend to foul their arboreal nests. Badgers have been found to create two kinds of latrines, larger ones for feces with special anal smells that say "keep away," and smaller ones for casual excretions.
Selection of Mates
- Females of the black-footed salamander are said to select their mates partly by the texture and smell of their feces, which reveal the kinds of food that a nubile male is able to catch and eat, as indications of his levels of energy and predatory efficiency. Ladies, pay attention!
Espionage
- The plumbing system of a Norwegian hotel where Brezhnev once stayed had to be specially modified to enable secret agents to obtain the fecal data necessary for diagnostic purposes.
Eat Sh!t and Live, or Butt Vittles
Starving Aleuts and Inuits eat reindeer pellets. Coots may eat goose droppings. Seagulls indigenous to the Antarctic enjoy a diet of seal feces and afterbirths. Off the north coast of Siberia, phalaropes snack on walrus feces. Mole crickets enjoy the wholesome goodness of gopher tortoise droppings. Schools of hungry fish follow hippos and manatees, waiting to snap up the "sporadic benefices." There are some species of fish who loiter their whole lives around the cloaca of whale sharks in order to be first in line to snatch the yummy fecal morsels. Disgusting as this may sound, herbivorous fish that follow carnivorous species can considerably enrich their diet in this fashion.
We've all heard the saying "he thinks he sh!ts ice cream" to describe someone who is particularly impressed with himself, but aphids do in fact have the sweetest anal excretions in nature, consisting mainly of a concentrated sugar solution. Ants go to a lot of trouble to corral and protect herds of aphids, which reciprocate for these attentions by providing liquid refreshment for their insect shepherds.
Some species gain sufficient nourishment via the process of refection, or munching their own poo. Rabbits produce a night-time feces through colonic sorting that is soft and black, consisting of partly digested grass and leaves. It is then nibbled straight from the anus as a kind of breakfast. Other refecating species are rats, mice, beavers, squirrels, guinea pigs, chinchillas, and lemurs. Recycled droppings may constitute up to 25% of some species' total diets. Laboratory rats, if not allowed to consume their own feces, may ultimately develop vitamin K and B12 deficiencies.
Conclusion
I was charmed by the author's purely scientific passages (and particularly taken with the phrases "tough mucus-coated lozenges of nestlings" and "juvenile pellets of the diminutive bushtits"), but Dr. Lewin's tendency to become chatty and raconteurish occasionally peeved me. One especially vexatious incidence was his retelling of a false email rumor about an elephant so successfully treated with a laxative that he violently expelled 100 kilograms of feces and suffocated his zookeeper. Uh…..Dr. Lewin, can we maybe stick to the facts? I started an email rumor that Anwar Sadat's turds emerged in the shape of perfectly formed Precious Moments Figurines, but I wouldn't want you to include it in your book.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Lobstergirl
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Member: Distressa Bologna-Cohen
Location: The Northern District of Illinois
Reviews written: 102
Trusted by: 263 members
About Me:
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.