Stink It Up!

by Megan McDonald

  You’ve Been Skunked!

  Get Away from Me!

  Your Breath Is Killing Me!

  Full of Hot Air? Then Burp!

  Excellent Expectorating!

  Up Your Nose

  Once Upon a Slime

  Dirty Disasters

  Putrid Places

  The Scoop on Poop

  A Brief History of the Diaper

  I See London, I See France

  Mummies

  Revolting History

  A Pox upon You!

  Cooties

  Frankenstein’s Creature Lab

  Not at All A-Peeling

  Are You Going to Eat That?

  Weird Eats

  Just Scraped from the Road

  What’s Up, Chuck?

  Gross Grub Menu

  Icky Insects

  A Load of Rubbish

  Radical Recycling

  Annual Stink-O Fests

  Gross Gags and P.U. Pranks

  Take the Stink-y Trivia Challenge

  Gross . . . Grosser . . . Grossest!

  Selected Sources

  Answers

  Have you ever been slimed by an elephant booger the size of a basketball? Or fainted from the fumes of a 100-pound glob of whale vomit? Have you ever dined on hedgehog at a Roadkill Café or whipped up a whopping batch of reindeer poop? Sniff out all the facts here — the gross, the bad, and the smelly. All you have to do is turn the page . . . if you dare. No raincoat needed!

  A book about stinky things has to start with the most famous smelly creature of all, don’t you think? That would be — what else? — the skunk! Get a whiff of these skunk facts:

  * A bunch of skunks is called a stench. P.U.!

  * The word skunk comes from the Algonquian word seganku, which comes from the words for “to urinate” and “fox.”

  * Skunks have a secret smelly weapon when they sense danger: skunk spray! The foul-smelling, stinging chemicals squirt out of scent glands on their rear end, smelling like rotten eggs, garlic, and burnt rubber.

  * Skunks eat bees! A hungry skunk will scarf down bees one by one as they come out of their hive. Yum, yum!

  * Before spraying an enemy or predator, a skunk will first raise its tail as a warning. Then it will stomp its feet. The spotted skunk will even try to freak out a predator by doing a handstand. If that doesn’t work, the skunk will hissssss! If all else fails — pppppsssssshhhhh! — you’ve been skunked.

  While the skunk uses spray to keep danger away, these creatures have other clever ways of saying “Back off!”

  Hairy Frog or Horror Frog?

  Like something out of a horror movie, the hairy frog can use its own skeleton to scare off predators. When it’s under attack, this freaky frog can break its own toe bones — which then stick out of its skin like claws. Yikes!

  Snap . . . Crackle . . . POP!

  Look out — here comes the bombardier beetle, with its built-in stink bomb. When this beetle is threatened, it mixes two chemicals in its abdomen, which then heat up to a boil and explode with a loud pop! The beetle can spray twenty-nine times in a row!

  It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

  The monarch butterfly feeds on poisonous plants so it will taste yucky if a predator tries to eat it.

  Maybe you can’t spray your enemies like a skunk can, but you can always try breathing on them! Meanwhile, take a breather with this quiz:

  Click here for the answers.

  When you swallow food, if small amounts of air get swallowed along with it, the air will later escape through your mouth as a burp.

  * Animal burps and farts release 80 million tons of methane gas into the atmosphere each year.

  * Doctors call burping eructation.

  * An Englishman named Paul Hunn can burp a whopping 109.9 decibels. That’s as loud as a chain saw. Some people claim that it’s possible to burp at 170 decibels. That’s as loud as a fighter jet!

  * In some places, such as Bahrain, it is polite to burp after a meal. It means you enjoyed the food!

  (Expectorate is a fancy word for spit.)

  * Spitting might be gross, but a hundred years ago, it was way cool. Every fancy home, including the White House, had a spittoon. Back then, lots of people chewed tobacco and needed a place to spit it out. Eeuw!

  * Your body will make 5,000 gallons of spit in your lifetime. That’s enough to fill a small swimming pool!

  Astro Boogers!

  Ever been hit by a meteorite? Maybe . . . if you’ve ever been sneezed on! Boogers are made up of stuff we breathe in through our noses, which is anything that might be floating in the air — pollen, dust, dirt, even space dust. Think about it — the next time somebody sneezes, there just might/maybe/could be a teeny-tiny piece of meteorite in the snot that flies. Cosmic!

  Big Boogies!

  It’s snot funny . . . An elephant booger is as big as a basketball. No lie!

  Annual Booger Shootout

  At the Red Lion pub in England, Gale Hollingsworth became the first woman to win the Annual Booger Shooting Contest. In a move called a farmer’s blow, she held one nostril closed and blew a booger out the other nostril. It sailed clear across the room, almost 20 feet! THWAP! That booger stuck to the wall.

  Get Out the Rain Slicker

  Human sneezes exit at around 40 miles per hour. Super hachoo-er Reginald Kaulman’s honkers have been clocked at an astonishing 175 miles per hour.

  The Big Sneeze

  Whales sneeze at 300 miles per hour — that’s the power of a class-five hurricane and as fast as a tornado. Bless you!

  * From ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, snail slime was used in cough syrup.

  * Snail slime is now used in anti-aging skin lotions and creams.

  * Slug slime has been used to treat warts and zits.

  * The stinkhorn is a mushroom with a pink head covered in yucky-blucky brown slime. The slime smells like rotting meat or sewage. Smell ya later!

  * Hagfish are also known as slime eels. They secrete ooey, gooey slime that helps them tie themselves in a knot if captured.

  * To play dead, an opossum will roll over on its side, hang its tongue out of its mouth, and drool out a green slime that smells like rotting flesh.

  * Who spit in my soup? Most likely, it was a bird called a swiftlet. Their nests, which are made of spit, are collected to make a Chinese dish called bird’s nest soup! Nests are collected from caves, and a kilogram’s worth can fetch up to $10,000.

  * Do not annoy a camel. If you do, it will likely slime you with its special brand of spit, made of juice from its stomach mixed with saliva. Pass the towel, please!

  Click here for the answers.

  Talk About Fast Food!

  In 126 BC, Mount Etna, a volcano in Sicily, blew its lid. Lava flowed into the Ionian Sea, boiling the water and cooking thousands of fish. Sadly, people who ate the fish later died.

  The Case of the Exploding Sauerkraut

  Special teams trained to handle dangerous substances suited up to inspect a high school in British Columbia after a can of sauerkraut exploded on students during a science experiment. No food poisoning was discovered — some say the can “farted” from fermentation.

  Ka-POOP!

  On Friday the 13th in 1981, two women in Louisville, Kentucky, were on their way to work when a spark from their car touched off a gigantic sewer explosion. Sinkhole city! The town was super stinky for almost two years while crews worked to repair the sewer system.

  Sludge Fest

  In 2008 in Kingston, Tennessee, a dam broke, releasing a whopping 1.1 billion gallons of yucky, blucky sticky sludge from a coal plant’s outflow into branches of the Tennessee River.

  Have you ever been to Stink City? Here are some smelly burgs sure to curl your nose hair
s:

  Clothespin Time!

  In Hereford, Texas, there are 241 cows for every person. That’s a lotta cow plop. Better hold your nose!

  Hold the Cherry!

  Cherries may taste good, but they sure don’t smell good when they’re being made into maraschino cherries. The wastewater from making these cherries stinks up the town of Williamsburg, Michigan, making it smell like dead deer.

  Musée des Égouts de Paris (The Paris Sewer Museum)

  Hold your nose and head underground to tour the actual sewers of Paris!

  Stinky Town

  Rotorua, New Zealand, calls itself the Stink Capital of the World. If you like the smell of rotten eggs, you’ve come to the right place. Gushing geysers, mineral lakes, and mud baths earned the town its nickname of Sulphur City.

  Chew, chew, chew. Here comes Number Two! Doo-doo. Dung. Plop. Turds. . . . Food moves through your digestive tract. Any parts of the food that your body doesn’t use comes out the other end. You got poop!

  * By the time you grow up, your intestines will be 25 feet long. (A horse’s intestines are 89 feet long.)

  * Your intestines will process 100,000 pounds of food in your lifetime. That’s 50 tons, or the weight of 25 SUVs.

  Whooo’s Hungry for Some Poop?

  The burrowing owl uses a piece of poop to lure dung beetles into its lair. Gulp! Bye-bye, beetles.

  Your Breath Smells Poopy Fresh!

  In India, cows are sacred, so Indians don’t think cow poop and pee are yucky. Each cow in India produces 32,000 pounds of dung per year, and some of those droppings are used as fuel, in building houses, and even in toothpaste. Mmm-mmm, poopalicious!

  Got Gloves?

  Guess where the world’s highest-priced coffee beans can be found. You got it. In poop! The Asian palm civet, a small, catlike mammal, loves to eat coffee berries. It digests the berries’ fleshy pulp and poops out the beans. Farmers then wash, dry, and roast them. The beans’ trip through the civet’s digestive system is said to remove acids and make for a smooth cuppa Joe.

  Stinky Tea

  In China, wu ling zhi — flying-squirrel dung — is made into a hot tea, and used to treat snake bites and other ailments.

  Pretty Far-out Poop

  Inside caves in Hawaii, scientists have found lava tubes that drip with a blue-green ooze. It looks like a mineral, but it’s actually the poop of tiny organisms called microbes. Similar caves have been discovered on Mars, too. So just think — this mini-poop could point the way to finding life on Mars!

  Satellite Scat

  Scientists study penguin poop from space! Satellite images of the poop from a colony of Emperor penguins provide researchers with clues to the penguins’ health, population, and response to climate change.

  Sniff, sniff. What’s that smell? For as long as babies have peed and pooped, there have been dirty diapers. But they weren’t always plastic-coated and pulled from a box.

  Here’s what diapers were made of since way back when:

  Ancient

  times Sealskin, rabbit skin, milkweed leaves, moss, grass

  1800s Linen, cotton

  1900s Cotton

  1960s Throwaway diapers made of plastics

  2000s Return of the cloth diaper

  Peep! Peep! Poop!

  Bertha Dlugi of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, earned patent number 2,882,858 for her invention — a diaper for parakeets.

  Move over, tighty whities. Get a load of these underpants:

  The most expensive set of ladies’ underwear ever sold cost $15 million. They were sewn with rubies and diamonds!

  Going on safari? Pack some paper undies, the latest thing in travel. Great for hiking and camping, too. Or even a wedgie gone wild! Chuck ’em, bury ’em, or . . . recycle ’em? P.U.!

  How would you like to have underwear named after you? Long johns are named after the famous boxer John L. Sullivan because he boxed in long-undie-type pants.

  Recycle your holey, old undies. (CLEAN only, puh-lease!) They get shredded, reused, and someday could end up as the stuffing in your couch or car seat!

  In Minnesota, a law says you are not allowed to hang boy undies next to girl undies on the clothesline.

  In Thailand, it’s illegal to leave your home if you’re not wearing underwear.

  Don’t wash that car! With undies, that is. In California, it’s against the law to use dirty undies as a rag.

  It’s NOT against the law to wear 215 pairs of undies at one time! In fact, on June 13, 2010, ten-year-old Jack Singer of New York did so to break the previous record — a mere 200 pairs.

  Don’t want to be a rotting corpse? Be a mummy! In ancient times, mummies were made to preserve bodies of humans and animals from rotting, stinking decay. After all, you want to look your best in the afterlife!

  Who’s Your Mummy?

  Before you unwrap that baby-size mummy, be prepared for a little surprise! You might find the body of a hawk or bird of prey, wrapped with so many bandages that they wound up looking about the same size as a baby. And they wore human masks to boot! Peek-a-boo!

  Here Lies Mittens

  Over one million animal mummies have been found in Egypt — dogs, apes, ibises, even hippos. Many animal mummies were cats, because cats were sacred. They were thought to represent the goddess Bastet. Cats often had their own tombs and were buried with their favorite toy: you guessed it — a mouse mummy.

  Mummy Medicine

  In ancient times, it was believed that if you ground up mummies and ate the mummy dust, you would be cured of yucky diseases. Rx: Take two bites of mummy, and call me in the morning.

  History stinks! A few smelly blasts from the past:

  Bloodbath!

  Egyptian royals took baths in blood! They thought it made them strong.

  A Not-So-Brief Peekaboo into the Past

  King Tut was buried with 145 pairs of underpants.

  Too Big for His Britches

  King Henry VIII was huge when he died and was buried in a lead coffin. One day soon after, the coffin burst open, and blood and guts shot out. The bloated corpse had exploded!

  A Royal Itch

  They say King James I never had a bath in his life. Pee-uuey! He had special slits in his clothing for scratching at his fleas.

  For as long as there have been people, there have been ucky, blucky diseases.

  The top three killers:

  * Smallpox (430 BC): killed more than 300 million people.

  * The Spanish flu (1918–1919): killed as many as 100 million people.

  * The Black Death, aka the bubonic plague (1300s): killed 25 million people.

  Flea-Bitten

  The plague was spread by fleas.

  Here are some surefire ways that people in the Dark Ages tried to get rid of fleas:

  * They covered their clothes with pig grease.

  * They spread cow poop all over their floors.

  * They hung splinters from a tree struck by lightning around their necks.

  Think any of them worked?

  It all started in World War I, when soldiers wrote about lice, bugs, and rats in the trenches and called any pests cooties. They were also called arithmetic bugs, because they “added” trouble. To get rid of cooties, soldiers took pickle baths.

  Book Cooties

  The word started among soldiers as slang for icky pests like lice. Then one day cooties started popping up in kids’ books. Check out Eleanor Estes’s Ginger Pye (1951) and Beverly Cleary’s Mitch and Amy (1967). Can you find the word cooties?

  If the pickle bath doesn’t work, try this:

  Draw a circle on your arm two times. Now poke the middle of the circle two times and say:

  Circle, circle, dot, dot,

  Now you’ve got the cootie shot!

  Skin holds us in. It protects our insides. Don’t want your organs spilling out, do you? It also sends important signals to our brain (Don’t touch that hot stove!), helps with our sense of touch (kitten = soft, sandpaper = rough), and helps us
heal (think scabs!).

  I’m Falling Apart!

  * Thirty to forty thousand dead skin cells fall from your body every single minute! In just one month, your body has made a whole new layer of skin.

  * You will shed 40 pounds of skin in your lifetime.

  * Combine dead skin with dirt and oil, and you’ve got dandruff.

  * Dust bunnies! More than half the dust in your house is made of dead skin cells.

  Fuzzy Navel

  Graham Barker holds the world record for the largest collection of belly-button lint. He has been collecting it since 1984.

  Georg Steinhauser, an Austrian chemist, studied belly-button lint for three years. What did he learn after all that? That hairy tummies make more BBL (belly-button lint) than tummies that aren’t hairy.

  Other things we now know to be true:

  * Males have more BBL than females.

  * On average, an innie belly button collects 2.03 milligrams of BBL per day. Outies don’t collect much BBL at all.