It's one of the more perplexing questions in Christian theology. A recent article in The Daily Beast explains why, over the centuries, the issue has kept rearing its head:
Much of early Christian theological debate is taken up with the issue of how Jesus is both a god and a human being. Early on there were some early Christians who thought that Jesus only “seemed” to have a human body but in reality was a god. You can see why Christians who held this position thought Jesus never went to the bathroom. This position, which is known as Doceticism, would come to be rejected as heresy, but those who wanted to argue that Jesus was truly human have to explain how the combination of humanity and divinity works. While they are doing that they are also trying to avoid the idea that the divinity in Jesus is somehow defiled by or corrupted by all the disgusting aspects of human bodies. Excrement, in particular, was just the kind of disgusting thing that people wanted to avoid.
There's also a book, published in 2018, with that title (amazon link). I have no idea of its quality (never having read it), but sometimes a title alone can be worth the price of purchase. For instance, the book sounds perfect to include among the reading material in a guest bathroom.
For years the Carlone family of Cleveland had been bothered by a foul smell in their kitchen. Nothing they did could get rid of it. Then they noticed their kitchen wall starting to bulge, until finally, on August 21, 1972, the wall exploded and covered them with 40 gallons of sewage.
It turned out that eight years earlier a technician from the phone company had accidentally drilled a hole through the sewer pipe, causing raw sewage to seep out into the wall cavity. Until it all eventually exploded.
It was reported that the Carlones sued the phone company, but I couldn't find any follow-up reports about their suit.
It amazes me that they had been living with the smell for eight years, and it apparently never occurred to them that it might be related to the sewer pipe in the wall.
Weird science: Spanish researchers have determined that rabbits can differentiate between the poop of predators that have eaten rabbits and those that haven't. From New Scientist:
The researchers ran an experiment on three plots of land spread out across the Spanish countryside. One plot was sprayed daily with the smelly essence extracted from the scat of ferrets on a beef-based diet. Another plot was sprayed with the scat odour from ferrets on a rabbit-based diet. The third was sprayed with water as a control. Every few days, the team counted the rabbit pellets left behind on the plots and used the number as an indicator of how often rabbits were visiting the plots to feed.
There were fewer pellets in the plots sprayed with rabbit-based scat odour than in those sprayed with the beef-based scat odour, suggesting the rabbits were avoiding places where it appeared other rabbits were being eaten.
I assume this means that some researcher had to search around in a field every day to count rabbit pellets.
Julie Baker, owner of Pampered Poultry, is cashing in on the recent fad for keeping chickens as pets. She's selling 500 to 1000 "chicken diapers" every month, for $18 a piece. More info at The Outline:
In wealthy cities like San Francisco, chickens have even become an unlikely status symbol, with poultry owners going to unimaginable lengths to care for their pets. As The Washington Post reported in March, certain chicken owners have hired “chicken whisperers” to consult on their pets’ comfort (to the tune of $225 per hour).
Death by breathing in dung fumes. It doesn't sound like a pleasant way to go, though perhaps not the worst since apparently before it kills you it paralyzes your sense of smell. But it's definitely a weird way to die.
New from Japan, the Unko Button. It's a gadget that lets you post on social media about your baby's bowel movements with just a push of a button. It's got two buttons. One for poo, the other for pee.
Impressively, the headline delivers exactly what it promises. It was her own poo she was after, having flung it because it "would not flush" and she was worried her date would find it.
When I first read the story I thought, nah, that can't be true. It sounds too much like some kind of urban legend about a date gone nightmarishly wrong. But the BBC has confirmed it, as has the local Fire and Rescue service.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.