What do you think?
Rate this book
285 pages, Hardcover
First published June 7, 2016
The Chicken gun has a sixty foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile…OK, stop right there. Mary Roach’s latest venture into odd science begins with a notion that would likely raise the hackles and maybe the hopes of Rocky the Rhode Island Red of the film Chicken Run.
Until this trip, I thought of sweat as a sort of self-generated dip in the lake. But sweat isn’t cool. It’s warm as blood. It essentially is blood. Sweat comes from plasma, the watery, colorless portion of blood. (A dip in the lake cools by conduction: contact with something colder. Highly effective but not always practical.) Sweat cools by evaporation: offloading your heat into the air. Like this: when you start to overheat, vessels in your skin dilate, encouraging blood to migrate there. From the capillaries of the skin, the hot plasma is offloaded through sweat glands—2.4 million or so—onto the surface of the body to evaporate. Evaporation carries heat away from the body, in the form of water vapor.I envision sweat vampires lurking in locker rooms. Roach explains how heat illness works. It ain’t pretty. Blast Boxers are examined, although not while…you know, they are in use. Body armor too. Turns out you would need so many layers of protection to fend off IEDs that you would be too weighted down to walk. Flame resistance in fabric is considered as well as the temperature at which human flesh burns. You will learn where the term “bite the bullet” came from and what it was really intended to accomplish. Also considered are the relative benefits of going shirtless vs shirted on a hot day, the uses of kitty litter in theater, and why the military is so insistent on personnel being clean-shaven. You will learn about the uses and hazards of filth flies and, yes, maggots. “Maggot!” as a drill sergeant (or wifely) form of address may sting a bit less after you gain a new respect for little white squigglers in these pages.
On a long sortie out of Diego Garcia island, the only crew member capable of operating the plane’s defensive equipment abruptly left his post to use the chemical toilet—while flying over Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. On the return flight, a faulty seal combined with the pressure differential between the toilets tiered chambers causing the contents to spew into the crew cabin. “Be assured,” he deadpanned, “this blue-brown precipitation affected the navigator’s ability to concentrate on his duties.”It would probably have been simpler had the affected crew member been the bombardier. But one must respect it when latrine humor hooks up with an actual latrine. Despite the humorous aspect, the military has to cope with thousands of personnel in foreign places, and the response to the new locale can often be gastrointestinal. What if, say, Seal Team Six, were en route to take out Osama Bin Laden and was thwarted because one or more of the seals had sprung a leak. Zero Dark Dirty? This is what Roach does, entertains us with the silliness aspect, the gross aspect, while also communicating important factual material. I guess this might be seen as a sort of Mary Poppins-ish spoon-full-of-sugar (or something) technique, using gross humor to teach us all something we didn’t know, although her evident glee at the scatological might make Roach more of a Mary Poopins.
Samples were prepared and delivered to the NRDC [National Research Defense Committee] in two formats: a more intense “paste-form stink,” for smearing, and a liquid stink in a squirtable two ounce lead tube. Crocker assured his clients that the latter would render a target “highly objectionable for not less than two hours at 70 F.” He promised nothing short of “complete ostracism,” concluding his report with a tagline surely unique in the annals of marketing: “as lastingly disagreeable as a product of this kind can be.”People react very differently to the same scent. A project looking for a universally repulsive fragrance concluded that the closest they could find was the “US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor.” Nothing is universal, though. One hardy soul found it to be a “wearable” scent, which makes one wonder just how challenging it must be to settle in for a number two in his loo.
None of [researcher Pam] Dalton’s other bottled vilenesses approached a workable criterion of universality. Sewage Odor was no good at all. Fourteen percent of Hispanic subjects described it as an odor that would make them feel good. Around 20 percent of Caucasians, Asians, and black South Africans thought it smelled edible. Vomit Odor made a similarly poor showing, with 27 percent of Xhosa subjects describing it as a feel-good smell and 3 percent of Caucasians being willing to wear it as a scent.Which explains a lot about the olfactory ambience inside the rush hour F train.