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Taste—as in personal preference, discernment—is subjective. It’s ephemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It’s one part mouth and nose, two parts ego.
Because it’s hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That’s a mistake. Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30 is largely hype.
Langstaff wants to open it up to novices, for the simple reason that know-nothings are easier to train than know-it-alls.
Theresa volunteers that a dog named Rover has lately had a stomach upset, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. “So that’s cutting into Porkchop’s appetite.” And probably yours.
The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract.” Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth.
Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator did his condom demonstrations on a broomstick.
“People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.”
The same double standard applies to all “body products,” as Rozin calls them, managing to make snot and saliva sound like spa purchases. We are large, mobile vessels of the very substances we find most repulsive. Provided they stay within the boundaries of the self, we feel no disgust.
You often hear about the impressive power of the jaw muscles. In terms of pressure per single burst of activity, these are the strongest muscles we have. But it is not the jaw’s power to destroy that fascinates van der Bilt; it is its nuanced ability to protect. Think of a peanut between two molars, about to be crushed. At the precise millisecond the nut succumbs, the jaw muscles sense the yielding and reflexively let up. Without that reflex, the molars would continue to hurtle recklessly toward one another, now with no intact nut between. To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your
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Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit ten microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about ten microns across.
When you chew food without swallowing it, the line at the neck is never crossed. The head keeps up its clamor.
“Immature swallowing coordination” is the reason 90 percent of food-related choking deaths befall children under the age of five. Also contributing: immature dentition. Kids grow incisors before they have molars; for a brief span of time they can bite off pieces of food but cannot chew them.
In fact, stomachs can digest themselves. Gastric acid and pepsin digest the cells of the stomach’s protective layer, or mucosa, quite effectively. What no one in Hunter’s day realized is that the organ swiftly rebuilds what it breaks down. A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every three days. (More clever stomach tricks: key components of gastric acid are secreted separately, lest they ravage the cells that manufacture them.)
We need not soil our bloomers or drop our trousers and succumb there and then to the urge. Respect your equipment, people. The rectum and anus, working in concert, are a force for civilized human behavior.
Most fans of back-door activities probably enjoy a combo plate of rectal and anal sensations. Why else would someone have invented the anal violin? Agnew describes this unusual item as an ivory ball with catgut attached. “The ball is inserted into the rectum while a partner strokes the attached string with a type of violin bow, thus transmitting vibrations to the anal sensory end organs,” and puzzlement to the neighbors.
Most voluminously, bacteria make hydrogen. Their gas becomes your gas. Up to 80 percent of flatus is hydrogen.
An earlier decision to circulate 100 percent oxygen in the capsules led to the deaths of all three Apollo 1 astronauts when a spark ignited a fierce fire during a launch-pad test.
Maybe I’m projecting, but a poorly suppressed schoolboy glee occasionally surfaces in McNaught’s writing, setting it off from the typical Hippocratic benevolence of British Medical Journal prose. If I had a medical license, I fear I’d be a Dr. McNaught.
“Keep your backcountry clean,” says the Fleet Naturals ad copy, over an image of pristine mountain wilderness. “Created specifically for rectal cleansing . . . Mild enough for daily use.” Really? On top of gargling, on top of powdering our feet and perfuming our armpits, now we should worry that our assholes smell?
Levitt smiles one of those placeholder smiles that buy you a moment to phrase your no.
“This is Mary,” says Levitt. “She’d like to sniff some gases. But don’t kill her.”
Workers die this way often enough that a pair of physicians, writing in a medical journal, coined a name for it: dung lung.
Most people with Hirschsprung’s—the main cause of megacolon—are diagnosed as infants or young children. As Mike Jones put it, “They come out of the box that way.”
Another of his treatments for intestinal obstruction featured mint water and lemon juice, as if all that were needed to make a man right was a refreshing summertime beverage.
