We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
Not that there’s anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it’s way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It’s just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.
There wasn’t an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room…
Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? “Chinatown?” suggests someone. “Costco?” “Butcher Boys.” Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. “Hello, I’m from the university” – the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries.
The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: ‘I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.
I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.
think of it.’ said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. ‘no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man’s life.
Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It’s like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.
The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
Constipation ran Presley’s life. Even his famous motto TCB— ’Taking Care of Business’— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.
It’s called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for ‘Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,’ an example of PLEASE— Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.
What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.
US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.
The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.
Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called “gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you’re gay.
Please beware,” came his reply, “There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don’t have an explanation for something, it’s quantum mechanics.
You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination
Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.
Meaning ‘by way of the anus’. ‘Per Annum’, with two n’s, means ‘yearly’. The correct answer to the question, ‘What is the birthrate per anum?’ is zero (one hopes).
Borman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.” Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!
It is the mind that speaks a woman’s heart, not the vaginal walls.
It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat.
compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,… trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams…
cadavers’ intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs…..
No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.
All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.
When someone tells me, ‘Oh, we have so many problems on Earth; space exploration costs too much money,’ I say, ‘I absolutely agree with you. But I still hope we do it.’
I’ve always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.
I don’t fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
Science is you! It’s your head, it’s your dog, it’s your iPhone – it’s the world. How do you see that as boring? If it’s boring, it’s because you’re learning it from a textbook.
I don’t write on topics that require a lot of urgency. But in ‘Stiff,’ I wanted to change people’s hearts about organ donation. Whenever I get a chance, I try to talk about that.
Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that’s what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We’re wrong.
My books are not really books; they’re endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.