10 Fascinating Facts About Feces
1. Japanese scientists processed feces into food.
I’ve waited a long time for my most prized hentai fantasy to become reality. Apparently Tokyo has too much sewage and enterprising Japanese scientists figured out a way to sublimate this process and add literal meaning to the phrase “eat shit”.
2. There’s an acknowledged scale of stool quality.
These are the same criteria pitchfork uses in its album reviews.
3. Birds Don’t Pee.
We let loose our nitrogenous waste as urea dissolved in water. Birds get rid of it in the form of uric acid, a minimally water-soluble compound that gives bird shit its white color. Any zoologist would tell you that every bird has a cloaca, a multi purpose orifice that handles waste and mating. In ornithological courtship, anal is assumed.
4. Whales bellowing like their shit don’t stink!
Ambergris, a secretion aiding whale defecation, was a prized component of classic perfumery. It’s often found floating around or washed up on shore. Recently, a kid found a load of whale feces that was appraised at $65,000. Bat feces, or guano, was long rumored as a mascara ingredient but this is false.
5. Caffeine isn’t why coffee catalyzes fat dumps.
In fact, caffeine on its own, as a serious diuretic, would more likely cause dehydration-related constipation. Decaf will have similar effects on peristalsis (contractions in the digestive system that move food along) without the dehydrating effects.
6. Herbivorous mammals dine on deuce
Several baby mammals eat their parents feces to populate their gut with digestion-aiding bacteria. Kind of like that probiotic yogurt Jamie Lee Curtis advertises except this doesn’t just taste like shit, it is.
7. Nightingale Feces Facial
Japanese kabuki actors would use a product called “uguisu no fun” (which literally means nightingale feces in Japanese) to whiten their face for performances as well as remove makeup (I have no idea how it does both). It is still in use today as a facial toner and moisturizer, notably by the world’s most respected couple, the Beckhams.
8. Explosive Decoy Diarrhea
Everyone has explosive bouts of shitting from time to time. In World War 2 African theatre, German Panzer units would drive tanks over camel feces for good luck. The British learned of this and engineered explosives resembling camel shit. Oddly enough, eating camel or horse shit was an effective dysentery cure discovered by North Africans. This is due to the bacteria “Bacillus subtilis”, the alpha dog of bacteria capable of killing many microorganisms harmful to humans.
9. Italian Feces Formaggio
The Sardinian cheese Casu marzu is pecorino digested by maggots. To make it, a whole pecorino cheese is left out with the rind removed to allow cheese flies to lay eggs in it. These eggs sprout into larvae, who eat, digest, and shit out the cheese. It is a delicacy with protected “traditional” status though the legality of its distribution is questioned.
10. Human Females Defecate
Long disputed amongst males, research has incontrovertibly shown that women sit at the porcelain throne and expel solid waste. Some have even been observed inadvertently vacating their bowels into yoga pants during particularly demanding sessions of the ancient South Asian meditation technique.