Jim Dawson, author of Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart (Ten Speed Press, 1999), puts his nose where it doesn't belong, so that you can savor the latest news blasts!

REAR, ER, YEAR END REPORT!

Mr. Methane's video, Mr. Methane Lets Rip, is now out on DVD. The green & purple-clad pooter recently checked in with Fart News to fill us in on his latest doings: "Earlier in the year I opened an art exhibition in Switzerland entitled Smells of the Alps. I performed some traditional Swiss songs karaoke-style and finished the evening by performing with the horn section from the Bern Philharmonic, a great gig and all very arty farty, I must say. Haven't been to the USA for two years now. I'm probably due another visit soon; it's just that things haven't been right, what with the war, recession, etc. Wishing everyone a Flatulent New Year.--Paul" (Mr. Methane, December 2003)

THIS IS RECTAL TAP

Laughing Hyenas Films has completed It's Tough Being Me, a late 2003 mockumentary about Fred Jarow's invention of the Remote Control Fart Machine, which Jarow claims has been America's best-selling novelty item since he introduced it in 1993. The machine is essentially an "electronic whoopee cushion" that can be activated by remote control from the next room. (You'll find more information on the fart machine in other items below.) The writer and director is television veteran Daniel Chasin. For more information, check out http://www.itstoughbeingme.com.

MAKING A STINK

    The American Reporter reported in January 2003 that museum officials at the Dewa Roman Experience in Chester, England, created a stink when they added the appropriate smell to their reconstruction of a Roman latrine. Unfortunately, it was so realistic that several visiting school children became sick on the spot. The odor, called Flatulence, was created by Dale Air (www.daleair.com), an aroma manufacturing company in Lancashire, England. "The smell was disgusting. It was like very strong boiled cabbage, sweet and sickly," supervisor Christine Turner said in a BBC interview.
    Dale Air makes nearly 200 different odors, both food and non-food related.They have Coffee, Eucalyptus and Lavender, but they also have Dinosaur, Boiled Cabbage, Mustard Gas, Sweaty Feet and Old Drifter.
    However, Dale Air does not make Vomit.
    The company says theme-based aromas are the wave of the future. It provides realistic smells of horses at Scott's Hut in New Zealand, coal fire smells in the Tenement Museum in New York, and even the odors of a swamp and a Tyrannosaurus Rex's breath at London's Natural History Museum.
    Dale Air's next venture is movies, where they "aim to change the theater experience."

WAR STINKS!

    A former Pentagon scientist has been working on a new fart weapon, according to the Los Angeles Times (November 10, 2002). Actually, it’s not entirely new. During World War II, “military researchers developed a repulsive, fecal-smelling mixture and packed it in a squirt tube. It was given the humorous name of Who Me?” It smelled roughly like the odor added to natural gas, “with a heavy dose of spoiled mushrooms” mixed in.
    But now Pamela Dalton, who works at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, has come up with a new compound that combines Who Me? with another government formula called Bathroom Malodor, which was originally invented so that bathroom cleanser manufacturers could test their products. During sniff trials, people of many ethnic backgrounds called Bathroom Malodor the most vile odor they had ever encountered. But Dalton wasn’t satisfied with a mere vile stink, so she has come up with Stench Soup, combining “the worst of Bathroom Malodor and Who Me?” It’s so obnoxious that it practically freezes people in their tracks and clouds their minds to the point where they become confused.
    So far the Pentagon hasn’t figured out how it could weaponize Dalton’s Stench Soup into stink bombs, plus there is still a problem of whether it could be considered a chemical weapon subject to ethical and legal tests.

I SAY THERE, I LET A BIT OF A FAHT, YOU KNOW!

    According to an Internet Movie Data Base item dated May 28, 2002, British actress Helena Bonham Carter, known for her upscale Merchant-Ivory roles, eased the tension during a sex scene with co-star Paul Bettany on the set of the film Heart of Me by farting. Bettany, best known as Russell Crowe's imaginary friend in A Beautiful Mind, admitted he was horrified not by Helena's wind, but by the fact she proudly announced it to everyone on the set. He said, "She farted on me, announced the fact to the cast and crew, and of course I was the one who ended up feeling embarrassed." But the farting episode hasn't put Bettany off working with the actress again: "She's barking mad, keen as mustard and funny as fuck!"

ANOTHER TUG OF THE FICKLE FINGER OF FARTDOM!

Richard Halpern, producer of 1999's popular Pull My Finger CD, is back with a starchy sequel called Pull My Finger 2: Barfs, Farts & Belches. This time, says Halpern, a few vomitings and belches have been added to the litany of farts, along with two fart-along tunes, "Crapper's Delight" and John Phillip Sousa's "Stars & Stripes Forever." According to Halpern, "This time we miked a couple of toilet bowls, including the one at a sandwich shop near our studio. We didn't have to add any echo; it was all natural." Howard Stern is already airing it, and he interviewed Halpern on his May 10, 2001 radio show. The original Pull My Finger, claims Halpern, has already sold 120,000 copies.

MR. METHANE VIDEO ARRIVES WITH A BANG IN U.S.!

Since no film footage or recordings of France's infamous Le Petomane exist from the late nineteenth century, we'll have to content ourselves with his rightful descendant, Mr. Methane, England's Prince of Poots, who is just now in 2001 offering his 1999 video--Mr. Methane Lets Rip!--to American audiences. The camera gets a ringside seat at one of Methane's stage performances, as he farts along (in tempo and relatively in tune) with classical music (including 'The Blue Danube Waltz" but omitting "The Buttcracker Suite"), imitates a pesky bumblebee, creates a talcum powder blast, breezily snuffs out candles, and imitates several characters from Robin Hood, all with his talented bunghole, of course. For a finale, this caped crepitator sticks a peashooter up his butt and fires a dart at a huge balloon several feet away. All this horseplay is broken up by a rousing music video for his song "We Love You, Mr. Methane" and candid-camera footage of him (out of costume) shocking unsuspecting tourists at an English seaside resort with rip-roaring flatulence (captured surreptitiously in Sphincter-Scope). Naturally bad taste, bad puns and corny humor prevail throughout. Visit www.fartvideo.com or mrmethane.com.

A COUPLE OF BIG CHEESES?

In September 2000, Simon & Schuster and Crown Publishing each released a new hardcover book called Who Cut the Cheese. They are Who Cut the Cheese: A Cutting-Edge Way of Surviving Change By Shifting the Blame, by Mason Brown (Simon & Schuster), and Who Cut the Cheese: An A-Mazing Parody About Change (and How We Can Get Our Hands on Yours) by Stilton Jarlsberg and Kristin Kiser (Crown). Both books are spoofs on Dr. Spencer Johnson's popular self-help book, Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life (Putnam); one calls itself a "fable" while the other says it's a "parable." Neither book has much if anything to say about farting. With the original Who Cut the Cheese still out there, that makes three books with the same title currently on the market.

PULL MY FINGER FILM!

It's official. Richard Halpern, one of the producers of the popular Pull My Finger CD that contains 99 recorded farts, is now living in Hollywood where he's co-producing a documentary film about farting, called, oddly enough, Pull My Finger. Halpern says the camera followed him along on his national tour earlier this year (2000), which included stints on both The Howard Stern Show (both radio and the TV rebroadcast) and The Donny & Marie Show. He hopes that he can also license footage from popular films to show how flatulence has become a big crowd pleaser. Furthermore, to give Pull My Finger a patina of respectability and intellectual weight, he interviewed yours truly to get a historical perspective.

"The most amazing thing of all," says Halpern, "is that we got a lot more response from people who saw us on Donny & Marie than we did from people who listen to Howard Stern." (www.fartcd.com)

FART COMEDY STILL A SURE THING...

In a September 10, 2000, feature in the Los Angeles Times, black film director Reginald Hudlin of the Hudlin Brothers (Ladies Man, House Party) admitted that farts are still the funniest thing in Hollywood... especially black Hollywood. "Broad comedy is safer because there's a greater margin for error," he said. "Even bad fart jokes get a chuckle."

On that same note, Variety editor Peter Bart wrote (as reported by Kenneth Turan in the August 27, 2000, Los Angeles Times) that "Today, there's growing evidence that the fart jokes are driving out legitimate comedy."

BUT SADDLES ARE STILL NOT ALLOWED TO BLAZE!

Speaking of filmmaking twins, Bobby and Peter Farrelly (Something About Mary, Me, Myself & Irene) lamented to the Los Angeles Times (June 22, 2000) that even though farts have become a staple of mainstream movies (and have also become routine on several TV shows), the ABC network is still airing an altered-for-TV, late-'70s version of Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles. Said the brothers, "This is a movie that is 25 years old and is a classic...So 25 years later, here's the campfire scene and these guys stand up and there's no sound. They can't do fart sounds on TV. If you can't do fart sounds on TV, you're dead." (Actually, I covered this item in detail last year in Who Cut the Cheese? in the chapter called "Gone With the Wind.")

HEY, LADY, LISTEN TO THIS!

Speaking of my chapter on Hollywood, I credited Blazing Saddles with being the first mainstream American film with a fart joke, but after watching Jerry Lewis' 1963 version of The Nutty Professor, I have to revise my cinematic history. In one scene, as Lewis' title character, nerdy Julius Kelp, sneaks into a college lab, his shoes seem to be making suction noises on the tile floor that sound like wet farts. Trying to avoid discovery, he takes off his shoes. But when he continues to tip-toe forward, the audience can still hear those flatulent noises, prompting Jerry Lewis to give the camera a dumbfounded expression.

CYBER STINKERS!

An Oakland, California, company called DigiScents, Inc., is developing technology which it claims will deliver smells over the Internet. DigiScents uses a device called iSmell, a "personal scent synthesizer," which attaches to the serial or USB port of your computer and plugs into a standard electrical outlet. The iSmell, which is activated by a mouse click, supposedly uses small cartridges with various scented chemicals. Like an inkjet printer, the cartridges are simply removed and replaced when the chemicals have been depleted. These cartridges contain natural materials commonly found in the cosmetics, foods and beverages.

SNAKES FART INSTEAD OF RATTLING!

The August 2000 issue of Discovery magazine announced that "A Pop a Day Keeps the Predators Away." That's right, according to writer Josie Glausiusz, "Two rare snakes from the American southwest--the deadly Sonoran coral snake and the western hook-nosed snake--have developed a novel way to scare off their enemies. When threatened, they emit rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca, the common opening for sex and excretion at a snake's rear end....'Essentially it's snake flatulence,' says Bruce Young, an experimental morphologist at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania....The snake uses two sets of muscles to isolate a compressed pocket of air, which they release to the outside in a startling, explosive burst."

BRITAIN STUDYING COW FARTS!

In Who Cut the Cheese? I discussed in detail how the world's huge population of farting cattle is adding to global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. Now, according to the August 2, 2000, edition of the Daily Sport in London, Great Britain's Agricultural Ministry is spending 267,000 pounds "to find out what happens when cows fart." According to the newspaper, "Scientists say a massive 25 per cent of all methane gas in the world's atmosphere is produced by cows." One Member of Parliament, Gordon Prentice, said, "It beggars belief that cows, with their legendary five stomachs, are responsible for doing so much damage." Stay tuned for more details.

EX CREPITUS MACHINA

Last year, according to the Village Voice (July 13, 1999), the S.S. Adams Company of Neptune, New Jersey, announced that the sales of their electronic whoopie cushion, the Fart Machine, had gone over 100,000 units. The sleek, black, plastic contraption contains a computer chip that makes a fart sound triggered by a small remote control, so that pranksters can activate it from the next room. The Fart Machine was invented by Florida textile manufacturer Fred Jarow about ten years ago. "Originally we wanted to have one really long [fart], but it sounded too much like a motorcyle," said Jarow. "Shorter ones are much more realistic."

His own favorite prank, Jarow confessed, was to hide one of his Fart Machines in a Thanksgiving turkey and then hit the remote just as the host begins carving.

IT WAS A DARK AND STINKY NIGHT!

One of the joys of literature is the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored by San Jose University in California, in which contestants try to write the most outrageous opening sentences for what would surely be horrible novels. The event is named for George Bulwer-Lytton, whose opening line for his 1830 novel Paul Clifton began with "It was a dark and stormy night...." (Snoopy, in the comic strip Peanuts, toyed with this line for many years from atop his doghouse.)

In 1997, one of the runner-up entries was: "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the sound chamber he would never hear the end of it."

FART-PACKED!

In Finnish, "fart" is the word for "action," as this Superman comic amply demonstrates. Does that mean that the Man of Steel is the real Fart Man?