of a few years ago when my co-workers were obsessed with clear pee. If you came to work without a gallon jug of water, you got a look of abject pity.

Nice article actually. I was unaware of this book. I think I need to get it for my son who is perpetually constipated and has a constipated personality to boot!

Salon finally publishes an article which is NOT about Barack Obama.

or wait, is it???

One of the many strange and wonderful things I've stumbled across in the midst of an uncontrolled Wikipedia exploration session:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Stool_Scale

In his wonderful book, not to be confused with the mediocre film of the book, The Witches of Eastwick, one of the witches is asked 'didn't having a baby feel miraculously creative?' 'It felt as creative as doing a shit,' replies the witch. 'And when you think about it, shit is pretty miraculous.'

An invaluable aid. Thanks for sharing! ;)

Take it all to the next level (where it belongs) and check out The Humanure Handbook-

http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html

The human insistence that we are somehow separate from nature (ie., our shit don't stink) is what has us in the mess we're in and on the brink of a mighty struggle for our species to survive.

I don't even have to read the article. Zach Braff and the Scrubs cast sang it all: "Everything comes down to poo..."

(It's on youtube and it's hilarious.)

I bought my 3-yo daughter the book, "Everybody Poops" and she's absolutely fascinated. She thought she was the only person who had this stuff coming out of her bottom. She said, "Daddy, you make caterpillars out of your bottom, too!" I almost fell off my chair laughing.

I think of this book as the adult version of "Everybody Poops."

because I made the mistake of sitting down to eat in front of the computer. What a sh---y story.

Who approved this story for publication? Ugh.

PS - I never look...

There are certain subjects that do not and will not interest me: your bowel movements and your child's bodily excretions. It was once considered rude for a reason. Please save it for your physician or your child's pediatrician. I am tired of being considered an uptight prude because I consider some topics taboo. Not to mention dull, dull, dull! Am I the only one out there? There are so very many other interesting topics. The devolution of common discourse to the level of one's feces is surely a symptom of the overall dumbing-down of society.

because tonight i watched a recorded episode of south park where cartman discovered that if he put his food up his butt he would poo out his mouth. just thought i'd share.

look, everyone has experienced the pleasure of a great bowel movement. hell, go camping for a week and i bet your intestines slow way down - no one likes to crap next to a tree and wipe with a leaf. as soon as you get back to civilization they crank right back up and it's a near as a man can get to experience giving birth.

as i once heard someone say as an insult, "i hope your next crap comes out sideways".

I beieve the url to this site should be changed from salon.com to colon.com - have a nice dump!

...sitting on the john, defecating nice solid turds in little time, and wiping with zero residue.

As I flush the toilet with one hand, I always lift my other arm and make the #1 sign with my index finger, a la Larry Bird winning the 1988 3-point shooting contest.

Overall this article makes a good point. Sure there are inappropriate times and places to discuss this subject and some people get obsessed about it and overestimate it's importance yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that. But the point is there is almost NO place you can talk about this subject. Having gone through six months of excruciating constipation I found you just cannot find anyone to listen to you. Even my partner got annoyed when I would give reports on what I had just been though on the toilet. And when I wanted to shout for joy when I found a solution (it's called PoopDoc) I couldn't do that either.

Surely we can tell a lot about our health by what comes out of our bodies. You'd be a fool not to even take a look, but I can see by these letters, most people are too disgusted to do even that. When I think of all the money we spend on medical tests to tell us our state of health, it seems only economical to do a regular check of your bodily excretions.

gross

icky

yucky

Well, that's the word my father used. Control is simple. If you eat something that you know is constipating, take a Cascara Sagrada capsule with it.

For a man, sit down to pee, you never know when some poo will drop out and go Plunk in the water.

this article is the pinnicle of the past three or four weeks of articles in Salon. You have finally hit bottom (pun fully intended)with the quality of the so-called articles being published lately.

More and more often, I now scan the list of articles on the face page and move on to another site because there has been little of value worth my time.

And now a two page article about shit.

Need I say more?

I don't feel strongly either way towards this article, but I am surprised by the letter writers who are offended by the mere mention of bowel movements. You were eating and got sick? My my, what a sensitive one. What goes in must come out, after all, and this article just discusses the perfectly natural and fairly non-disgusting end of that food you're forking down.

Well, it’s helpful to know that bowl water “entry points” factor into determining lower digestive tract health. Guess I’ll try visualizing Greg Louganis during my next elimination and see if that helps. Except for that time at the ’88 Seoul Summer Olympics when he hit his head on the 3-meter board – wouldn’t want that mess.

Reading this, I was reminded of a scene in The Madness of King George in which the royal physician was finally reprimanded for his scatological diagnostic fixation (and here I’m roughly paraphrasing): “The persistent excellence of the stool has been one of this illness’ most tedious features. When will you accept that a man may be perfectly capable of a robust and complete evacuation and still be a complete stranger to reason?”

Or something to that effect. I’ll shut up now.