A spiral perfection!

If I am fired from my job--"layoff" if you prefer the less harsh euphemism--there will be drastic changes in my lifestyle.

I think a lot about about the effects on the body and mind because of massive changes to one's life.  Ah well, do not worry.  I am not going to jump off a cliff.  After all, I am a calm wreck of a man!

This post is about a mundane change that results from abrupt changes of huge magnitude.

I write about shitting.

You read that right.  Shitting.

We take shitting for granted.  It deserves a lot more respect.

A little deviation can mean trouble.  Like, if you are traveling.  As if the body knows that you are not home!  "as many as 40 percent of people experience constipation while they’re away from home."

Why is it difficult to shit when on a vacation?

Traveling throws off one’s routine -- and constipation may be one result, said Dr. Brooke Gurland, a colorectal surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic. “We’re creatures of habit,” including when it comes to bowel movements, she said. “People have a time when they do that, and once we throw the schedule off, we can become completely disrupted.”

Off the regular schedule means no "regular" ;)

Perhaps "home, sweet home" was first expressed when the person was ecstatic while shitting in one's own bathroom, after getting back to the "regular" schedule?

“Any time you leave your general habitat, it’s throwing your gut microflora off balance,” says Brooke Alpert, a New York-based registered dietician.

Crap, those damn bacteria in the gut, again! ;)

The experience of a holiday trip—remembering to pack everything, navigating a crowded airport, staying with family for an extended period of time—may be enough to stop the bowels from functioning the way they usually do.

If travelling causes so much havoc, then imagine how much a layoff could mean.  A whole new shitting regimen, and possibly in a new place altogether!

It is not that I am the only one who appreciates the importance of shitting--daily and regularly.  Heck,even  poets and writers tried to tell us that, perhaps tongue-in-cheek; like the following poem by John Updike that I came to know about from this essay.

"The Beautiful Bowel Movement" 
by John Updike

Though most of them aren’t much to write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,
the tint and stink recalling Tuesday’s meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.

Toilet Talk

With some regularity, I blog about shit. 

I am surprised that more people don't talk about shit.  I don't mean about one's daily bowel movements and whether or not one needs more fiber in the diet.  Nope. I am interested in aspects of shit like in this post or this one, for  instance.  Remember the piss-pot?  (Yep, there is more for any interested reader.)

So, yes, it is time to blog about shit again.

Imagine Rome about 2,000 years ago.  How did people take care of their shit?  For that matter, where did they pee?

These are genuinely interesting questions, if only one turned their attention away from the latest video of cats playing the piano!

Anyway, back to the Romans 2,000 years ago.  Where did all their pee go?

As best we can tell from historic and archaeological data, ancient Romans peed in small pots in their homes, offices, and shops. When those small pots became full, they dumped them into large jars out in the street. Just like with your garbage, a crew came by once a week to collect those hefty pots of pee and bring them to the laundromat.

They took them to the laundromat?

Why? Because ancient Romans washed their togas and tunics in pee!

WTF! Holy shit!

So, why did the Romans wash their clothes in pee?

Human urine is full of ammonia and other chemicals that are great natural detergents. If you worked in a Roman laundromat, your job was to stomp on clothes all day long—barefoot and ankle deep in colossal vats of human pee.

I decided I needed more details.  The internet delivers:

If you’ve investigated the ingredients in your household cleaners, you may have noticed a prevalent ingredient: ammonia. As a base, ammonia is a useful cleanser because dirt and grease–which are slightly acidic–get neutralized by the ammonia. Even though early Europeans knew about soap, many launderers preferred to use urine for its ammonia to get tough stains out of cloth. In fact, in ancient Rome, vessels for collecting urine were commonplace on streets–passers-by would relieve themselves into them and when the vats were full their contents were taken to a fullonica (a laundry), diluted with water and poured over dirty clothes. A worker would stand in the tub of urine and stomp on the clothes, similar to modern washing machine’s agitator.

And you thought your job sucked! ;)

This photograph tells us a lot about how Romans shat (or is shitted?) back in the day:

Oh my!

Don't you want to know how they cleaned up after shitting?  Read that essay and find out for yourself!

Why don't they teach such stuff in history classes?  Maybe in a few years, I should offer a freshman seminar titled "Piss, Shit, and Fart--But Never Simultaneously" ;)

Our lives are so different from washing clothes in pee and shitting in the public with people all around.

So the next time you’re enjoying a morning constitutional, think about the fact that defecation and urination are more than biological functions; they are cultural activities that involve artifacts and technologies that change through time.

Indeed. Thankfully!

There's no place like home!

Years ago, when my daughter came home from college, she put her bag down and said, "give me a couple of minutes, I need to drop the kids off at the pool."

In case you don't understand what she was referring to, well, it is scatological, dear reader! ;)

Coming home apparently makes us poop.  For some, it is right away.  There are plenty, like me, who believe that there is no place like home when it comes to shitting:

“This is indeed a very familiar story,” says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne and author of Psychology in the Bathroom. “Most people feel more comfortable going to the bathroom in familiar—and private—surroundings.”

Imagine that--a professor has written about the psychology in the bathroom!

The author then spoke with "Jack Gilbert, a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago, and the director of the university’s Microbiome Center":

to understand whether there is a physical call-and-response between my home and my body that might trigger the need to make a deposit in the porcelain bank. Or is it simply that I feel more comfortable at home?

Good question, right?

BTW, how did you like her phrasing this as "make a deposit in the porcelain bank"?  A good one, right?

So, what does Gilbert have to say?

“When you get back into your home, your glucose tolerance will change,” he continues. “Your adrenaline pumping will change, and the energy sensors of your muscles will change, altering your actual respiration, how much energy your burn, and how much fat you deposit. When you get back into your home your sleep patterns will change, because the hormones that control sleep will be altered. All of these factors influence how quickly food moves through your gut.”

Anything else?

“We are essentially automata responding to environmental cues,” Gilbert says. “I’m pretty sure I can train you as a human being to pee when you smell peppermint. That’s an example of how much of an automaton you are. It would be technically possible to do that.”

We have been programmed that way; we are automata!  Like how even adults feel like they want to pee when you make a slow hissing sound--as kids, they were toilet-trained that way.

The craziest thing in that essay? The sentence that the author, Julie Beck, writes to wrap up her essay on pooping at home:

Think about that the next time you drop the kids off at the pool.

"drop the kids off at the pool" is perhaps the lingo of that generation of, ahem, kids ;)

(If you want, you can also check out these related posts: One; two; three)

Source

Yet another shitty post will be good for your gut

Literature has offered many memorable opening lines. Movies have delivered awesome ending lines. The following, while not anywhere in the league as those lines, will at least make you smile first:

If you pass small stools, you have big hospitals.

And then you perhaps wonder what the connection is between hospitals and stools, which we regular people simply refer to as shit.

The connection is this: the value of fiber (promotes Bristol-quality stools) and the consequences of avoiding it (big hospitals.)

But, of course, it is more than merely about your stools: it is about the "microbes in our guts"

Fiber is a broad term that includes many kinds of plant carbohydrates that we cannot digest. Our microbes can, though, and they break fiber into chemicals that nourish our cells and reduce inflammation. But no single microbe can tackle every kind of fiber. They specialize, just as every antelope in the African savannah munches on its own favored type of grass or shoot. This means that a fiber-rich diet can nourish a wide variety of gut microbes and, conversely, that a low-fiber diet can only sustain a narrower community.

You can already see where this is headed--you take care of the gut microbes, and they take care of your wallet that will otherwise be drained out at big hospitals.

A team of microbiologists worked on mice by feeding successive generations low-fiber diet, which then drastically wiped out their microbiome environment, which has implications for our modern urban existence:

Many studies have now shown that the gut microbiomes of Western city-dwellers are less diverse than those of rural villagers and hunter-gatherers, who eat more plants and thus more fiber. The Stanford researchers’ experiment hints (but doesn't confirm) that this low diversity could be a lasting legacy of industrialization, in which successive generations of low-fiber meals have led to the loss of old bacterial companions. “The data we present also hint that further deterioration of the Western microbiota is possible,” the team writes.

What happens to humans on low-fiber lifestyles?

First, without fiber, starving microbes often turn their attention to similar molecules, including those in the mucus layer that covers the gut. If they erode this layer sufficiently, they might be able to enter the lining of the gut itself, triggering immune reactions that lead to chronic inflammation.
Second, there’s evidence that a diverse microbiome can better resist invasive species like Salmonella or Clostridium difficile, while low diversity is a common feature of obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, and other conditions.

Big hospitals!

You remember an earlier post in which I blogged about how the good microbes can be re-introduced into the gut?  What you forgot already?

Here's to hoping that you are healthy enough not to need a fiber hill of beans ;)

Warning: this is one shitty post!

I certainly would not have imagined a classification of, get this, shit.
Yes, poop.
Crap.

Source

The periodic table was a classification. The different blood types, I can understand somebody being interested in. But, seriously, there was a person who decided to categorize different types of poop?  I used to joke that my humor is scatalogical.  But, I can't anymore; those scatalogists will sue the, ahem, crap out of me! ;)

poops come in all shapes and sizes — as shown in the Bristol stool scale, created by the University of Bristol's Ken Heaton, at right — but Chutkan says the ideal poop is a three or four on the scale.

So ... which type are you? Pay attention from now on.  hehehe!

So, is there any good, clean kind?

A very fiber-heavy diet — the type eaten by many people in developing countries, and by some vegetarians in the US — leads to much denser and bulkier poops. "They're bigger movements that come out more easily," she says. "And there's very little need to wipe — it's a much cleaner evacuation."

"Evacuation" is the best possible euphemism here.  "Honey, I will be back after I evacuate" sounds much more confident and purposeful in life than, "Hey, I am going to take a shit."

The piece ends with what, you, and I are familiar with: fecal transplant.  Remember the post from two months ago?  Care to revisit that shitty post? I dare you!  Oh, this includes a warning that fecal transplant should not be tried at home.  Gee, thanks for that!

May you be regular with Bristol #4! ;)

An ad about a piss pot in the New Yorker? WTF!

After I reach home with the latest copy of the New Yorker in my hand, I first flip through the pages for the cartoons hoping there will be some good laughs.  And then I settle into reading the essays.  Even when reading, I scan the margins for ads--over the years, I have bought two gift items from the Museum of Contemporary Art thanks to those ads, and a book.

I chuckled quite a bit when I saw an ad for a piss-pot.  Yep, a pisspot.  Of course, it is not a piece that you would buy and pee into.  It is a collector's item--a chamber pot from decades/centuries ago.  Imagine that!  One not be bothered to step out and take a leak, and instead peed right into a pot that the chambermaid carried out.

After a few chuckles, I forgot all about that.  Until today.

It is not that I have become lazy to walk to the restroom and I want to make use of a pisspot.  Life in the old country is not all that bad ;)  It is just that a blog in my feed has a post about this very ad:

I like that blog because of its intellectual approach to expletives.  The title of the blog makes that clear: Strong Language.  Though I am not a fan of expletives, I occasionally use shit and fuck when no other word would convey that meaning.  But, Strong Language is not merely about throwing expletives into sentences.  No sir.  It is way more than that.

The "piss" in the ad is what the intellectual analysis is about:

Piss is a pretty old word in English: late 13th century, from similar words in French and Latin, according to the OED

Would you have guessed that the word is that old?  Doesn't it make you wonder how old shit and fuck are?  For now we have to stay with piss:

Some piss- compounds are almost as old as the original word. Pisspot goes back to the mid-15th century; piss-burnt (discolored by urine, which was often used in tanning and dyeing) dates to the mid-16th century; piss-prophet (one who diagnosed diseases through examination of urine) and piss-house (a privy) appeared in the 17th century; piss-proud (having or designating an erection due to a full bladder) is from the late 18th century.

We men are familiar with the full-bladder salute; but, I wonder how many of us knew about piss-proud prior to this blog-post! ;)

You are probably thinking, "I don't give a shit!"  Tell you what; in that case, you need to read this post ;)

The shitty modern medical treatment!

One of the attractions for us kids when going to Pattamadai--grandma's village--was the thought that we would go to the river a few times.

The village was a couple of miles away from the riverbanks, and it was one awesome morning picnic trip of sorts.

We didn't walk to the river, the Thamirabarani, but went in the bullock-cart.  If my father's cousin was also visiting at the same time, then it was all the more fun because when he "drove" the bullock-cart, we went at top speeds, with kids shrieking with delight and the older women fondly cursing the driver as the heads and pots and everything banged against everything.

The river water was even sweeter than the water at Neyveli.  We loved drinking that water.  We ate the pooris that we would have purchased at the local cafe, or the idlis or dosais made by the older women.  

The horrible truth is this: there was always all kinds of crap floating in that river.  Sometimes it was literally crap!  We simply pretended that we did not see them.  We didn't talk about the crap. Ever.  But, the sighting of crap never stopped us from drinking that river water as if it was honey.

Of course, I would never, ever drink that river water again.  But, sometimes, I do wonder if those kinds of activities contributed to the relatively good health my people and I have.  Especially after I read an essay in the New Yorker.  No, it was not about the river back in India.  The essay is about fecal transplantation.  Yep, transplanting one person's shit into another person.  

No one knows how many people have undergone fecal transplants—the official term is fecal microbiota transplantation, or FMT—but the number is thought to be at least ten thousand and climbing rapidly. New research suggests that the microbes in our guts—and, consequently, in our stool—may play a role in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders to allergies and obesity, and reports of recoveries by patients who, with or without the help of doctors, have received these bacteria-rich infusions have spurred demand for the procedure.

It was one of the most difficult essays that I have read in that wonderful magazine.  Difficult not because it used big and fancy words, but because I felt squeamish throughout.  The very thought that shit from one person is introduced into another!  

So, why is this being done?  It is all because of our digestive tracts, which:

house about a hundred trillion bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other tiny creatures. (As one gastroenterologist put it to me, with only mild exaggeration, “We’re ten per cent human and ninety per cent poo.”) Collectively, this invisible population is known as the gut microbiome, and lately it has become an object of intense scientific interest.

You can already guess where this is going, right?  What if somebody's microbiome is messed up and the microorganisms are out of whack?  What if we introduced the missing tiny creatures?

It's possible that no Americans have gut microbiomes that are truly healthy. Evidence is mounting that over the course of human history the diversity of our microbes has diminished, and, in a recent paper, Erica and Justin Sonnenburg, microbiologists at Stanford, argue that the price of microbial-species loss may be an increase in chronic illness. Unlike our genes, which have remained relatively stable, our microbiome has undergone radical changes in response to shifts in our diet, our antibiotic use, and our increasingly sterile living environments, raising the possibility that “incompatibilities between the two could rapidly arise.” In particular, the Sonnenburgs stress the adverse effects of a standard Western diet, which is notoriously light on the plant fibre that serves as fuel for gut microbes. Less fuel means fewer types of microbes and fewer of the chemical by-products that microbes produce as they ferment our food.

How fascinating, right?  The essay is an awesome read--it has rich details on how the FDA is responding to this, the pharmaceutical research on "crapsules," and on the growth of a "stool bank" where, yes, anonymous donors bring their stool that is less than an hour old.

I am now all the more convinced that drinking that tasty Thamirabarani water during all those visits to Pattamadai was a mild fecal transplant every single time, which helped the microbe population in my gut ;)

Wipe, but don't flush. Holy Shit!

Life in these United States has changed me in many ways.  Including one that is not by any means trivial--life gets difficult without toilet paper!

Back when I was a kid, people used to joke about how the Westerners didn't wash but only wiped their butts. With paper.  I thought it was hysterical a life without butts being washed.

Nearly hysterical do I become now when I realize that I might not get the toilet paper option in India.

Two years ago, when I visited with a friend, Sudha, and her family, she gently reminded me not to flush the toilet paper.  I think she read the expressions on my face--I know I am not fit to play poker.  Throughout my life it has been that way.

A view of Sudha's home

I wondered how I did it the old way that until I left for the US.  I couldn't recall a few fine points. Especially about the wet butt.  Now, I was even more hysterical thinking that I will be walking out of the toilet with water dripping down my legs.  Do people take towels in with them to wipe themselves dry after washing?  Or, in the old days did I simply bear with a slightly moistened underwear?

People don't talk enough about the logistics of shit.  I would think that the world will be a better place if we honestly talked shit.  It is not that we are not curious about all these.  After all, as Mary Roach pointed out, one of the first questions that we apparently ask about space travel is, well, about the bathroom issues!

Sudha gave me an option.  She is always into fixing problems.  "I will give you a trash bag. Wipe and put that paper in the trash bag.  The maid will take care of that bag; she cleans the bathroom every day anyway."

This made it even worse a scenario.  In the first place to leave it in a trash bag.  And then for somebody else to dump that?

I preferred to deal with the washing.  I remembered to take the towel in every single time--wet bums are not me.

That was then.  Here in Costa Rica, I sat on the pot and as I reached for the toilet paper, I saw this sign:

Oh my freaking god!  It is Sudha's suggestion all over again.  I opted to follow the rule than to have them come to fix a clogged toilet.

Later, when exiting the lodge on my way to explore the place, I asked Andreas about the sign in the bathroom.  "Yes, that is the rule all over Costa Rica" he said with what I thought was a Germanic stern tone, though only slightly.  Perhaps he wanted to make sure that I didn't think it is a mere suggestion.

When I returned to my room, I decided to Google to find out if Andreas was correct--so incredible the arrangement was to me that I couldn't even trust Andreas completely!  Well, of course Andreas was right.

I decided that when I returned home, I would head straight to the toilet and throw a couple of strips of toilet paper into the pot and flush it simply to watch the paper going down.  God bless the US of A!

At the far right is the door to the bathroom

The Sopranos, uncensored. Long live George Carlin :-)

The other day, it was neat to watch the Mark Twain humorist award program on PBS--too bad that George Carlin was not alive to receive the honor.

Carlin, of course, made seven words really famous.  He would have enjoyed this video that some guy has put together--a very creative one, which reminds viewers what they miss when they watch the Sopranos on A&E .... Simply hilarious.  (No, I am yet to watch even one espisode of Sopranos)

the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.

for those of you watching the sopranos on a&e, here’s what you’re missing.
this is every single curse, from every single episode of the sopranos, ever.