At the front of the group shot below is "Thanet Girl," an 'eco superhero' who patrols the streets of Thanet teaching kids about the importance of picking up dog poo. Her cry to arms is, "There is no such thing as the Dog Poo Fairy."
She's aided in her efforts by the FIDO machine, which is some kind of robot dog that rolls around Thanet sucking up what dogs leave behind. Link: thisiskent.co.uk
Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith offer this definition of a "yen-shee baby" in their book Heroin Century:
All opiates cause constipation. The old opium smokers used to talk about a 'yen-shee baby'. 'Yen-shee' was the concentrated residue of opium that formed inside the pipe bowl after smoking. A yen-shee baby was what was produced with much travail after a long period of constipation. 'Wrap it up in a towel and it'll live, it's a yen-shee baby.'
And Seth Morgan offers this description of the delivery of a yen-shee baby in his novel Homeboy:
Then the Big Hurt pushed aside all thinking and Joe could only lie hugging his cramped middle and suffer the agony that gnawed on itself, metastasised, grew like a cold malignant fetus in him. A reeking viscous sweat like cold bacon drippings filled him. The jailhouse stinks... dizzied him with nausea.
Orgasm after electric hairtrigger orgasm convulsed his groin. His entire being became the shortcircuiting terminus of a billion scraped and shrieking nerves. And then came ripping down from his intestines that glacial fecal boulder compacted by months of bowel paralysis, and through gritted teeth he cried: 'Christ! The Yenshee baby.'
He bailed out of his bunk and staggered to a rear toilet where he sat bent double for minutes or hours, he didn't know, trying to pass this bowel monster; until sudden pain flashed the darkness and he felt himself tearing in two. Blood vomited into the toilet. His sweatslick buttocks slipped off and he was on the floor, shrieks percussing his skull; and from a great distance heard Smoothbore shouting at the bars: 'MAN DOWN!'
The existence of such a thing as a yen-shee baby is the only reason I'll ever need never to touch heroin.
In Tinton Falls, New Jersey, people have to take umbrellas whenever they go outside because it's constantly raining bird poop. It's like something out of Hitchcock's The Birds. Link: NBC NY.
I recently picked up a copy of George Soloveytchik's biography of the eighteenth-century Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin at my local used bookstore (Maxwell's House of Books in La Mesa). Potemkin was fantastically rich, one-eyed, and the lover of Catherine the Great. (Wikipedia link). But he was also more eccentric than I ever realized. For instance, he sometimes received official visitors wearing an old dressing gown and no pants. This anecdote also caught my eye:
He could be vulgar and cynical beyond belief. One day he was passing through his dressing room with two important courtiers who stopped to admire his famous silver bath. "If you can excrete enough to fill it," said Potemkin to one of them, "I will give it to you." The courtier turned to his companion, who was notorious for his voracity, and said: "How about attempting this business on a fifty-fifty basis?"
The ad copy advises me to "Think of it!" and to contemplate the "powerful chain reaction." I sure am, buster! I'm thinking of what happens when you apply an explosive force to a ceramic bowl filled with excrement and wet paper that won't flush. And why aren't these devices common nowadays, if they were so great?
I think I'll stick with the old plumber's helper, thank you!
Back in March, patty reported here on a Chinese man who – after being born without one – received a surgically constructed artificial anus. Now scientists have gone one better and actually grown a working anal sphincter in the laboratory. The team, who hail from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, grew the artificial orifices from cultured human muscle and nerve cells in about six weeks. Then, to test if they worked, the sphincters where implanted in laboratory mice. Ultimately, the scientists hope a patient’s own muscle and nerves could be used to create ‘personalized’ replacements, avoiding any immune response. In the near future, the “test tube” anus could be a boon for both the faecally incontinent and former porn stars alike (CBS News).
But an artificial exit may be just the start, as scientists are now one step closer to understanding the development of the entire intestine, in this case, why it coils the way it does. A rare collaboration between Harvard’s Medial and Engineering schools finally untangled the problem of why the intestine coils so predictably during the growth of the foetus while essentially unconstrained. Previously it had been thought that growth of the gut might be being restricted by the abdomen, but that didn’t explain why nearly everyone’s intestines fold into exactly the same shape. Then a chance conversation led Harvard Professor of Applied Mathematics, L. Mahadevan, to suggest a simpler hypothesis, the gut and its connective tissue, called the mesentry, grow at proportionally different rates. Now two teams, led by engineer Thierry Savin and biologists Natasza Kurpios and Amy Shyer, have confirmed that insight with a combination of computer and physical models and experiments, finally unravelling what makes our insides so loopy (Science Daily).
And speaking of loopy, what would you prescribe to someone with chronically inflamed bowels? Well for a growing number of people, the best medicine is a healthy(?) dose of parasites. The parasites in question are whipworms, also known as helminths, hence the name of the process, helminthic therapy. It has been known for over a century that some parasite infestations seem to reduce the symptoms of other diseases, but it is only fairly recently that any serious study has been made into why this is so. The current hypothesis is that the worms, which live in the human intestine, partially suppress the host’s immune response to protect themselves, and in doing so prevent the aggressive autoimmunity behind conditions such as Crohne’s disease and IBS, and so far the results have been startlingly good. However the success of the treatment is causing its own problems as some sufferers are refusing to wait on the medical establishment and are treating themselves by deliberately swallowing doses of the parasites’ eggs obtained over the internet. The worry for some is that the parasites, which are naturally infectious, might spread to very young or otherwise vulnerable people where they might have more serious effects (University of Massachusetts (PDF)).
Yet as one weird treatment rises, another shall fall. Colonic irrigation, the practice of repeatedly flushing out your lower intestines with water or various herbal infusions, has no medicinal benefit according to a study by doctors from the Georgetown University School of Medicine. Moreover, it can actually be harmful, carrying not just a risk if perforation of the bowel, but a list of side effects that range from intestinal cramps and nausea to renal failure. The team, lead by Dr. Ranit Mishori, looked at over 20 studies carried out in the past 10 years and found little to no evidence of any health improvements associated with the treatment, but a litany of problems, including cases of anaemia and increased liver toxicity. She also highlighted the dangers from poorly trained and regulated operators performing the procedure, and from “do-it-youself” detoxing kits that often combine a less invasive form of the therapy with strong laxatives (The Independent).
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Category: Hygiene, Excrement, Scatology, Dogs