Not sure if it’s coincidence or not, but the previous month’s issue of the magazine contained an article introducing this new technology called “fire” that was taking the world by storm.   And, the month after the fart-cure article, there was a report on “how to safely light your farts, without your toga catching fire”.  Useful stuff, back in the day, I guess…

Anyway, some of the “brilliant” advice provided:

• hold them in
• Fart before boarding
• go to the lav on the plane and fart in there

As you can see, much of their advice is pretty lame.  There are a couple of great nuggets in the article, however. 

My favorite is their suggestion to ask the flight attendant to be moved to an empty section of the plane because you have gas.  That’ll go over well.  Half the time I fly, I’m embarassed to ask for a blanket…now, I’m supposed to tell them that I’ve been crop dusting the great plains from a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, and ask them to move me down to the cargo hold???  

The other pointer I love is when they suggest you simply apologize to the people sitting in your “fart radius”.  Another strategic home run!   Maybe they could just have the pilot do an announcement from the cockpit:  “Down to the left, you can see the Grand Canyon…and, if you’re sitting in rows 24 through 32, look to your right at the douchebag in seat 28F…he just ripped 28 farts in the last 400 miles, and more are sure to come.  Please excuse him…”

If you fart on a plane, do NOT light a match to cover the smell!

Whatever you decide to do, don’t follow the lead of this farting genious, who decided to light a match to conceal her farts on a flight from DC to Dallas.  The plane had to make an emergency landing, and she’s now on American Airlines official “Shart list”.  She won’t be flying the friendly skies for a long time!

Do the math people, he’s on the $100 bill.  George Washington is only on the $1.  This guy was a “colonial rock star”. 

Benjamin Franklin encouraged us to Fart Proudly

And, mixed in with his invention of the lightening rod, and bifocals, and his discovery of electricity, there is his love of farting. 

Do we forget that everybody farts?  Barack Obama?  yes…  The Pope?  yes….Michael Jackson?  well, not anymore….but, anybody who is alive is farting on a daily basis. 

Franklin was not above recognizing this.  And, to mess with the pretentious European scientific societies (the kind, I guess that now give out Nobel Prizes), Franklin wrote a letter in 1781 entitled “To The Royal Academy Of Farting”.  In that letter, he proposed that a study should be commissioned to find a cure for nasty smelling farts.  He indicated that this was a major issue that should be researched.

He felt this was a most useful and important research topic.  After all, he argued, the philosophy of Socrates and Aristotle was nice, but how useful was it on a daily basis to the happiness and comfort of the common man?

Of course, he was just busting their balls.  But now, 230 years later, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just take a daily pill and make our farts smell like roses?  Or maybe like jasmine or fresh baked chocolate chip cookies?

That would be a fantastic invention…it’s a shame Franklin’s letter was just a joke, and that he spent all his time inventing useless things like bifocals, and banging debutantes…With global warming, the worldwide economic crisis, and swine flu, we sure could use some nice smelling farts these days.

Read the entire essay (about 5 pages):  Fart Proudly – Benjamin Franklin

Yes, FLATULEX: an “anti-fart” pill!

You see, I hadn’t slept well the night before, and had a big bowl of Special K, with a banana in it, at around 6 AM. Then, back to sleep for 3 hours. Whatever got brewed up was quite hearty and rich. All day long, I was “flatulating”. And, it didn’t take me long to realize I had a major decision to make; a decision that would test the very core of my belief structure.

The way I broke it down on the chalkboard, I had 3 options:

1. Ride the wave – just enjoy the day, let whatever tsunami was stirring in my intestines just run its course. This option would leave me dropping deadly gas bombs all the way from Hors d’œuvres through desert.
2. Hold on tight – try to hold in the stinky super-nova for 5 hours. I eliminated this one right away as a non-starter. If you told me I had to hold these in while buying a can of Pepsi from a vending machine, I wouldn’t have been sure I could last…so, 5 hours was not an option.
3. Flatulex – The devil, the “anti-fart”…can I really sell my soul?

So, here are the factors that went in to my decision, in no particular order:

• My wife and I didn’t know any of these people very well, and some of them were merely work acquaintances of hers. And, they were all from different cultures. There was 1 North American there (Canadian, so that doesn’t even really count), and one person each from Panama, France, Spain, and China. Had they been family, or long-time friends, I’d have been much more comfortable ruining not only their Thanksgiving, but their entire “holiday season”
• The wife worked all day cooking, and these farts would have made it impossible for any human to enjoy any meal. Even the girls from “2 Girls, 1 Cup” would have fled in horror (unfortunately, they couldn’t make it anyway…cancelled at the last minute)
• These farts (my very own farts) were making me kind of nauseous. And, I was really hungry.

So, out came the Flatulex. I popped it in my mouth. It tasted quite pleasant, which was a nice surprise. I chewed it up, swirled it around, and swallowed it down. About 30 minutes later, the farts were gone. And, 3 days later, I’m still questioning who I really am, deep down inside.

One potential cure is to drink chamomile tea. OK….sounds reasonable enough.

The other potential cure is to blow smoke from a pipe “through the anus”. Not sure about your opinions on the subject, but I’d rather have a few farts (no matter how bad they smell), than a pipe through the anus.

Read the full article here.

And, see the 603,000 Google results for “a pipe through the anus” right here.