1
Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries.Mary Roach
2
I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.Mary Roach
3
Think of it.' said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. 'no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.Mary Roach
4
The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet".Mary Roach
5
The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)Mary Roach
6
During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth, ’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.).Mary Roach
7
It tastes like water spiked with strange.Mary Roach
8
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.Mary Roach
9
Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCBЉہ'Taking Care of Business'Љہsounds like a reference to bathroom matters.Mary Roach
10
It's called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for 'Fecal Administration To LOSE weight, ' an example of PLEASEЉہPretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.Mary Roach
11
People are messy, unpredictable things.Mary Roach
12
Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes).Mary Roach
13
…he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon. .Mary Roach