Big-Eyed Beaneaters From Venus

 

There was a time people imagined Venus would be a beautiful place to live, and maybe it once was, but now we know it's hotter than Phoenix and the atmosphere is big-boned enough to squash you into a tortilla. Carl Sagan suggested, sixty years ago and to the general derision of his now-nameless peers, that if there is life on Venus, it would be found in the atmosphere. That viewpoint has been validated of late but it still doesn't sound like a great destination, on account of the giant fart layer.

That is, in fact, what makes people believe there is life on Venus now, if only microbial. The discovery of lots of phosphine indicates to most researchers that something has farted it out, because that's just about the only way you can get phosphine, the reduced form of phosphorus, in a highly oxygenated environment. You can eke out a little using lightning and maybe volcanoes but if you've got yourself a whole stinky swath of it, something along the lines of bacteria is presumed to be pooting it out. On Earth, you just don't find a lot of phosphine except in oxygen-depleted environments such as sewage ponds and the bowels of badgers. Weirdly, even here we don't know which microorganisms make phosphine.

There have been plenty of attempts to get closer to Venus. In fact, we've been sending doomed ships to the planet since the early 1960s. Most of them were never heard from again. One did land and got smashed into a potato chip and burnt up in about two seconds. Then they got one to eep out information for a couple hours. That's been about it. But now it is being proposed we send something that looks like the Stealth Bomber to sneak up on the planet and orbit in its atmosphere, examining alien flatulence. It is expected to last maybe a year and with any luck it will get some identifiable microbe splat on its windshield.

I certainly have a passing interest in a planet that smells like farts, but only from 25 million miles away. I'm not personally eager to land on any of them and would prefer the rest of us stay home too. The robots are plenty cool enough and the manned missions strike me as pure hubris. The gas giants just irritate me. What the hell. You want to land on them, not through them.

I'm not sure why all the planets are named after Roman gods, with the exception of ours, which comes from the ancient Ankle-Slackson for "dirtball." In fact I also don't know why the Roman gods just shanghaied the Greek gods. It must have been a case of that famous Roman efficiency, the same organizational skills that created elaborate aqueducts and conquered the world. Why bother to whomp up a bunch of new gods and goddesses if you can get used ones cheap? Round up the whole pantheon, slap your own labels on them, and call it a day. Anyway the Greeks got them started but the Romans had them last, and so we use Roman names: Mercury (Greek "Hermes") through Mars (Greek "Ares") right up to Pluto (Greek "Goofus").

So Venus ("Aphrodite") is the goddess of beauty, and she certainly is lovely from here. I'm hoping for the best for the proposed probe and I hope it finds life. My money's on tardigrades.

I Feel Pooty, Oh So Pooty

From Trousering Your Weasel

We all like to think we have affected people in positive ways, so it is with great humility and gratitude that I acknowledge, here, the four thousand people who saw the link about the fart tracking pill and passed it along. Australian scientists have developed a device the size of a large pill that is capable of monitoring the development and culmination of your fartular output in real time. This might be the greatest advance in highly personal meteorology the world has ever seen. The "pill" is capable of sending gas updates, as they happen, to your smart phone.

I do not know what the alert notification might sound like.

There is no camera associated with the pill, because of insoluble problems with the selfie stick. It's just a gas-permeable membrane, a transmitter, and a reservoir for the scrubbing bubbles.

The fart-tracker pill uses wireless technology, which is good in most respects, except for retrieval; as it is, lacking a cable, we have to wait for the pill to ride the 7:15 Morning Express to the station, and someone has to be on the platform to meet it, most likely a graduate student. Researchers have discovered that, on average, it takes about twenty hours to see the device all the way through to the depot. That seems like a long time, but the entire intestine is a big slip-n-slide, nearly eight miles long in American humans and even more kilometers everywhere else, and you don't want to take those corners too fast. Research subjects given a very low fiber diet report that the pill spends as much as 54 hours in the colon, and why not? If you're comfortably cushioned in a goober of Wonder Bread and Cheez Doodles, why not relax and enjoy it?

None of these statistics apply to Dave, who has the metabolism of a tweaker hummingbird. There isn't a research study he can't skew. Gaping wounds heal up before you can find the Band-Aid box, crippling back injuries are resolved within hours if there's no one to fetch him a beer, and when he had his first post-colonoscopy meal, he was able to say hello to his little friend later the same day. One time in Maine my cousin Jim, who had some sort of relationship with the lobster cartel, presented Dave with over five pounds of personal lobster just for the entertainment of watching it disappear, drenched in melted butter. That night, sound asleep, he tossed and turned and moaned and grunted and cried out and flang his arms around so violently that I considered taking him to the emergency room in case he was about to have a heart attack, but by dawn's early light he did a full kip out of bed and stuck the landing and was ready for breakfast. If Dave were to swallow a fart-tracker pill, it could take an eye out.

Did you know that in certain clinical situations a tube is inserted into the rectum to collect gases in something called a "flatus bag?" This is generally employed when the patient is otherwise unable to fart, but I'm not sure why you'd need anything other than the open-ended tube for that. I don't see why anything in there needs to be collected in a bag unless you've got some serious pranksters on the unit. If anyone had collected my post-colonoscopy flatus and failed to properly secure the bag, they'd run the risk of flying around the room backwards.

As much as we'd like it to, the fart tracker is not actually used to track individual, nameable farts, but does monitor carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen levels at all points of the digestive tract. My beloved methane, which I call a noble gas even though it isn't one, is not on the menu. Interestingly, methane itself has no odor at all. In fact, of all the gases that are expelled from the human anus, only one percent has any stink to it. One percent. That sounds familiar, somehow.

A Poot Too Far

Deep down, who doesn't like farts? The sheer variety of toots that can be emitted from the single instrument is a credit to our creativity. It's all about pressure, volume, and embouchure, but you can't discount practice. I myself have so much affection for the subject that I can still recall individual productions. As a mail carrier, I was accustomed to being on my own, which is helpful if you have performance anxiety. A few stand out.

There was the day I was stuck in an otherwise empty apartment mailroom with sweet old Mrs. Gilbride and a bellyful of burrito. She could not be persuaded to flee the impending blast. Finally I realized she was nearly stone deaf and I cut loose with a mighty boom. Mrs. Gilbride's arms sprang out and she jolted visibly and quacked "What the hell was that?"

In my defense, I believe she did not hear it, but was caught in the concussion.

At the other end of the spectrum was the gentle raindrop plup I emitted one fine day, followed by another, and then the dawning realization that I had enough ammunition in the chamber to plup my way plup plup all the way to the next delivery, one plup by one, and no witnesses in sight, plup plup plup; a discovery that made me so happy I parceled them out plup one per footstep plup with enough in reserve to finish with a slide-whistle flourish plup plup peee-oooooooo-wiiiip! right at the destination mail slot. Where the meter reader stepped out from behind the shrubbery. Damn cheerful fellow, he was.

Then there was the time I got in the elevator in a small apartment building to deliver a package. This apartment was filled with working folk and I rarely saw anyone in there in the daytime. I entered the elevator and filled it with confidence and reminiscences of my most recent lunch. "Other people's farts are disgusting," I remember a comic observing once, "but your own are always kind of interesting."

Mine was. Notes of fennel, garlic-forward, with a structure of pork sausage, and a smooth navy-bean finish.

Ding.

No one is ever home at that apartment building. Nevertheless the elevator slowed and the door opened and a handsome young man entered with his Labrador retriever. He smiled, moved to the back, and turned toward the door, following protocol. His nose wrinkled.

"Oh, man, I'm sorry. Duke, bad boy!"

"It happens," I smiled, vowing to buy a lottery ticket later.

But I am only a grade-B flatulist in comparison with Dave, the Maestro of Methane. Ever tuneful and creative, with an impressive repertoire, he is also capable of a world-class eruption when sound asleep, a titanic airhorn blast, causing zoo elephants across town to ripple their ears in solidarity, railroad crossing gates to close, and schoolchildren for miles around to file outside and wait for the all-clear. Startled house guests fret, once their heart rates come back down, that he must have injured himself, but they underestimate his stamina and years of training. What does your husband do? acquaintances query, and this is always the first thing that comes to mind.

Also, he's a great cook.