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Tag: poop

  • Jimmy Fallon Talks Puke, Poop, and Pics

    Jimmy Fallon has taken to the job of being a dad even faster than the job of being a late night talk show host. The former SNL cast member and current king of late night has a new book coming out called Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada. He tells Parents Magazine that reading to his daughter is a big thing for him.

    “I loved reading to Winnie, and at the time I came up with the book it was important to me that her first word be ‘Dada.’ I went as far as to try to trick her into saying ‘Dada’ by calling everything ‘Dada’ from her bottle to diapers to strawberries.”

    But despite his best efforts, Jimmy Fallon’s daughter’s first word was not “Dada.” It was “Mama.”

    “I just thought it would be a cute story when people asked, ‘What was the baby’s first word?’ I wanted to say, ‘It was “Dada”. She loves her Dada.’ And everyone would go ‘aww.’ But sadly, ‘Mama’ was her first word. That’s why I invented this book, so hopefully other dads can trick their kids.”

    Being a parent means talking a lot about things that people usually don’t talk about before they have kids. Like puke. And crap.

    “They vomit a lot. For a second I thought I needed to rename my first Linda Blair and hire a priest, because she was spitting up so much. And people think they can talk to you about poop. ‘Oh, you have a new baby? Is she sleeping? Is she pooping?’ Normally I’d be blushing, but as a parent you just get used to it, and pooping is just another verb in your vocabulary.”

    The other thing that parents are notorious for, besides talking about puke and poop, is showing off baby pictures. Jimmy Fallon is no exception.

    “I thought I’d never be that annoying person, but as soon as Winnie was born I was showing iPhone snaps to a cab driver.”

  • Andrew Mason Starts A New Company Called Detour, Gets Pooped On

    Andrew Mason Starts A New Company Called Detour, Gets Pooped On

    It turns out that Groupon founder and former CEO Andrew Mason has been doing more than just sitting around eating ice cream by himself and recording motivational business albums. He’s also been creating a new company called Detour.

    First of all, let’s get the poop thing out of the way. BloombergBusinessWeek ran an interview with Mason about Detour. The first paragraph ends with him getting pooped on by a Seagull. The entire article closes with him using his sweatshirt to wipe bird feces out of his hair. Here are the relevant snippets:

    “People have an enormous hunger to have really compelling experiences in their cities,” Mason says. Then a seagull poops on his head.

    …

    If it seems a bit of a leap, Mason says Detour’s mission is similar to Groupon’s at its most basic level. “Groupon was a way to get people out of the house,” he says after wiping bird droppings out of his hair with his sweatshirt. “This is also a company where success is not measured by the time we get people to stare at a screen.”

    Mason had this to say on the matter:

    Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Detour is about giving people audio tours of places based on GPS coordinates. You can sync audio across phones for a “seamless” group experience if you like.

    Mason co-founded the company with Yishai Lerner. On his blog, Mason writes:

    I’ve wanted someone to build Detour since Apple created the App Store (I was preparing to launch Groupon at the time). I started thinking about the concept when my wife and I visited the Roman Ruins in 2006. We wanted to learn about the Ruins, but we’ve never really liked guided tours. Trapped for hours with a group of tourists and on someone else’s schedule, they make vacation feel like work.

    So we downloaded an audio guide on our iPod and each put an earbud in one ear. It was a crude setup, but there was something special about being tuned into a different layer of reality than everyone around us. Since that experience, every time we went on vacation I’d look for a relevant app, but never found one with great content that really took advantage of the new technological possibilities. So after leaving Groupon, I thought I’d give it a try.

    Interestingly, while travel is obviously a major part of this app, Mason says he sees potential for locals.

    “Last November, Yishai and I visited New York to take an audio walk by artist Stephan Crasneanscki of Soundwalk, during which a Hasidic Jew guides you through his neighborhood in Brooklyn,” he writes. “You become cinematically immersed in the narrator’s world, as if a character in a film. The experience left us imagining possibilities for Detour much bigger than the trivia-laden audio tours you might find in museums. Rather, we came to see Detour as a way to walk the world in someone else’s shoes.”

    Detour is starting in the Bay Area, and is releasing a new “detour” – the audio tracks – every couple weeks. Other cities will come later. The company is working with journalists, radio producers, tour guides, filmmakers, and artists to produce “detours”.

    Mason may be on to something here. If it catches on, and interesting people create these “detours,” people could gain some compelling new travel experiences. It could be cool to tour a location using insight from a person (possibly even a famous person) who has first-hand knowledge or a unique perspective on it.

    Mason also took the opportunity to comment on what he’s learned from Groupon:

    I remember being four years into Groupon – proud of what we’d built, with 12,000 employees, $5B in annual sales, and an IPO under our belt – but sometimes thinking back to when we were small, and wishing I knew at the beginning what I knew then. So I’ve relished the experience of beginning again.

    Unfortunately, he didn’t have any updates on a second album.

    Image via Detour

  • If You Drop Your Phone in a Septic Tank, Just Let It Go Man

    As a 28-year-old whose screws up a lot, I in no way feel qualified to dispense life advice on most topics. Having said that, I feel pretty confident in issuing this one small token of advice:

    If you drop your smartphone in an open-pit toilet, just let it go, man, it’s lost.

    In fact, if you drop anything into an open-pit toilet–just forget about it. The only exception to that rule is if you were to drop a loved one, possibly a pet or small child, into the giant vat of poop–and even then I’d probably think twice about it.

    Two people are dead and one is reported as unconscious after six grown adults in China jumped in an open-air septic tank looking to retrieve a lost phone.

    According to the AFP a women dropped her $200 smartphone into the poo pit, and her husband immediately went in after it. When the smell hit him, he passed out. His mother then jumped in (after her son, not the phone I assume) and also proceeded to faint.

    The owner of the phone and her father-in-law followed the two down the one-meter sq. hole and reportedly “became ill” (you think?).

    It didn’t stop there, as two neighbors then jumped in as well.

    People in the town were forced to use ropes to retrieve all six from the toilet tank. Horribly, two were dead (the husband and his mother) and one (the phone-owner) was left seriously injured.

    As we head into the weekend, it’s important to remember than no matter how much you paid for a device, you should draw the line at poop retrievals. Also, in a related piece of life advice, also avoid oncoming trains.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Sea Lion Stench Forces Businesses to Sue San Diego

    In the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, one of the year’s more interesting lawsuits has been filed. Last Friday, Citizens for Odor Nuisance Abatement filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of San Diego in order to seek a solution to the stench plaguing the neighborhood.

    The group, which consists of La Valencia Hotel and George’s at the Cove, blames the pungent stench on sea lion poop. La Jolla Cove becomes the home for hundreds of sea lion each year. While the sea lions help La Jolla bring in tourists, the stench brought from their excrement in recent years has become overbearing and has turned away business, states the companies filing the lawsuit: “We consider this to be a potential health hazard and a serious public nuisance, and we have faced the resulting financial hardships for too long. We’ve run out of patience,” complained George Hauer, owner of George’s at the Cove.

    The plaintiffs in the case have stated that they are “… not trying to gain anything from this in particular, except for the city’s attention — with backing from the court — to once and for all deal with this issue in a dedicated, thorough and sustained manner.”

    Last month, interim San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said that his office was determined to make this issue a priority for the city. Since that time, the city has been looking at various methods through which the stench can be removed without harming the sea lions themselves.

    Several California coastal towns suffer from similar sea lion issues and have employed a multitude of solutions, with varying degrees of effectiveness. For example, the City of Monterey has employed “animal behavior modification” specialists to make noises to scare the sea lions away, using such instruments as tape-measures and keys. The “animal behavior modification” specialists have also used Super Soakers to squirt the sea lions, who like to remain dry after leaving the waters and inhabiting the beach.

    Other effective methods of deterrence include the use of those inflatable dancing creations frequently employed by car dealerships to attract businesses, fences to block access to the beaches, and even electrical systems which use low-voltage shocks to deter the sea lions.

    Whatever method the city decides to use, it has to comply with the provisions of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).

    As it currently stands, the city is exploring options to place a gate in the fence which currently blocks pedestrian access to the cove, a solution seemingly championed by the plaintiffs in the suit: “Preventing coastal access to the rocks by the public gradually led to a buildup of excrement from sea lions and cormorant birds,” states the lawsuit.

    The fence was originally positioned along the cove due to the instability of the cliffs, something which posed a danger to the general public. However, the plaintiffs believe that “The installation of caution signs should be more than sufficient to protect the safety of the pedestrians that assume the risk of walking on the rocks.”

    While interim Mayor Todd Gloria has yet to speak on the lawsuit, Alex Roth, spokesman for the mayor, has stated, “We are well aware this is a problem impacting businesses and quality of life in La Jolla. We are actively working toward a solution. No options are off the table.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Poop Is Gross, But the Poop Cycle Is Kind of Fascinating

    Our favorite science illustrators AsapSCIENCE have just waded into some murky waters. Yes, they’re talking about poop – specifically what happens after you flush.

    Here’s the short version: You poop, it goes down a tube, all the poop pebbles get separated out, cleaned and used to build your toilets (how’s that for full circle). After that, people have to remove all the condoms and stuff that you flush down the toilet (don’t do that) by hand. Gross. Then there’s some terribly disgusting oil separation, at which bacteria start to eat away bad stuff. Liquid waste gets treated and put back into society, while solid waste gets treated and is used to power the very treatment plant it’s housed under. What’s left is used to grow your radishes. Then you eat them and poop it out again.

    There’s nothing as glamourous as the poop cycle, my friends:

  • Cat Parasites Review Dismissed by Cat Advocacy Group

    Earlier this week, doctors warned in a review in the journal Trends in Parasitology that large amounts of cat poop in the U.S. could contribute to the spread of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. Since the parasite has been linked to diseases such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, rheumatoid arthritis, and brain cancer, the authors warned that cat poop could represent an under-reported public health problem.

    Today, a cat advocacy group is sticking up for American felines. Alley Cat Allies, which claims to be the largest U.S. advocacy group for cats, has come out against the study, saying that it “grossly exaggerates” the health threats of toxoplasma gondii being spread from cat poop. The group points to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data that suggests cats are rarely the source of Toxoplasma gondii infection. Alley Cat Allies also seized on the fact that the review itself cites a statistic showing the rate of Toxoplasma gondii infection among U.S. adults has dropped over the past two decades.

    “This is fear-mongering, plain and simple,” said Becky Robinson, president and co-founder of Alley Cat Allies. “The study produces no hard evidence of cat-to-human transmission of toxoplasmosis. The researchers base their conclusions solely on estimates of the amount of cat feces deposited in sandboxes outdoors. In fact, you are more likely to contract toxoplasmosis from eating undercooked meat than from touching a cat.”

    Robinson stated that she is worried the review could contribute to the death of cats, and particularly feral cats. The Alley Cat Allies organization is opposed to the use of euthanasia on cats by animal shelters.

    “Alarmist studies like these only result in dangerous consequences for healthy cats,” said Robinson. “Already more than 70 percent of all cats – and 100 percent of feral cats – are killed in shelters. We don’t need yet another war on these innocent creatures. We need a common sense approach starting with trap-neuter-return which reduces the cat population without any killing.”

  • Cat Poop Could Become Public Health Problem, Researchers Warn

    A review in the journal Trends in Parasitology this week warns that cat poop could be an under-appreciated public health problem. E. Fuller Torrey of The Stanley Medical Research Institute and Robert Yolken of the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center warn that 1.2 million metric tons of cat feces is put into the U.S. environment each year, and that some of this poop is home to a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.

    “The accumulation of Toxoplasma gondii oocysts, found in cat feces, may be a much bigger problem than we realize because of their apparent long life and their association with some diseases,” said Torrey, the director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute.

    Toxoplasma gondii has been linked in studies to schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, rheumatoid arthritis, and brain cancer. Surveys have estimated that as many as three to 400 Toxoplasma gondii oocysts may exist per square foot in places where cats often poop.

    The parasite is typically spread to cats from eating birds or rodents, and then spread into the soil from there. The owners of indoor cats have little to fear, but Torrey provides some recommendations for those whose cats enjoy outdoor privileges. He recommends being careful with litter boxes and wearing gloves when gardening. The authors of the review also speculate that young children may be at the greatest risk for infection, though the certainty of this is unknown. Also, Torrey states that the dangers of Toxoplasma gondii are not grave enough for every cat owner to run out and get tested, though “perhaps” pregnant women should.

  • CDC: Poop Found in a Majority of Public Pools

    The CDC this week revealed that a new study on fecal matter in public pools uncovered a disturbing statistic. Over half of pools tested in the study were found to have E. coli, a marker for fecal contamination.

    The study tested pool filters from public pools, looking for genetic material. It found that 58% of the filters tested positive for a strain of E. coli that is normally found in human intestines and in feces. The CDC stated that the study indicates people are either pooping in pools or failing to clean themselves well before entering pools.

    “Swimming is an excellent way to get the physical activity needed to stay healthy,” said Michele Hlavsa, chief of the Healthy Swimming Program at the CDC. “However, pool users should be aware of how to prevent infections while swimming. Remember, chlorine and other disinfectants don’t kill germs instantly. That’s why it’s important for swimmers to protect themselves by not swallowing the water they swim in and to protect others by keeping feces and germs out of the pool by taking a pre-swim shower and not swimming when ill with diarrhea.”

    The CDC recommends several practices to cut down on pool contamination. Some of the obvious ones include people not swimming if they have diarrhea, showering with soap before swimming, and washing hands after using the restroom or after changing diapers. The agency also recommends taking bathroom breaks every hour, and checking children’s diapers every half-hour. More advanced pool users can check chlorine levels and water PH before swimming. Possibly the best advice the CDC gives, though, is that swimmers should not swallow the water they swim in.