Poof!

CNN – Smart underwear is making a case for paying closer attention to what comes out of your body. Its creators said they hope that tracking flatulence could eventually give researchers new insight into … what’s happening in the gut. Before smart underwear, there hasn’t been an efficient way to track farts.

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Lots of legitimate scientific approaches available for consideration here, don’t you think? Biology. Physiology. Technology. Fartology. Which one of those, I wonder, would be most helpful in getting us to the, um … bottom of all this?

Perhaps we should start with the aforementioned new insights – although I’m guessing all the data isn’t in. Or maybe out. On the other hand, I suppose we could squeeze our way into the conversation by refamiliarizing ourselves with already existing insights, of which I’m convinced there is a Jupiterian surfeit. By the way, I picked the name of that particular planet to twist into an adjectival abomination because, as the more astute among you will have surmised, it’s a gas giant.

Apparently, one of those existing insights is that flatulence provokes a kind of universal embarrassment – a version of which is evident in my mother’s early admonition that, as a God-fearing seven-year-old, I had to control my emissions during sermons. The same chapel-rattling reverberations the minister was counting on to verbally drive home his point from the pulpit would, she warned, impart an equally amplifying effect on whatever I may have emulsified for breakfast.

“People often worry they fart more than average because we’re all so embarrassed about it,” according to a genuine physician-scientist cited in the CNN report. “Nobody’s counting how often they fart and sharing that number with their best friend.”

Well, I don’t know about your best friend, but …

By the way, I think you’re destined to find happiness in “You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy,” a bona fide book apparently authored by the same CNN medical expert. It’s fairly long, so I recommend that you plan on reading it in several sittings.

In case you’re wondering, (Oh, stop it. You know you are …) the heart of the smart underwear is a small, disc-like measuring device full of electrochemical sensors that snaps onto the back of your Jockey™ shorts and starts counting bursts of hydrogen. Over time, the idea is to determine who farts more, who farts less (I’m told I definitely do not belong in that category) and how the nature of flatulence changes with diet.

Taking things to an even more heightened level of real-life-but-at-the-same-time-you’re-kidding-right? absurdity, the initial results have already been tallied in a volume titled the Human Flatus Atlas, a scientific study in which farticipants – sorry – participants were recruited to walk around with the device sewn into their underpants while they documented everything they ate.

Whew!

Or, if you like … Peew!

I’ll tell you what I’d like. I’d like to know, on average, just how many times a week your normal homo sapiens, um … expresses himself. I mean, just for comparison purposes.

Why? Well, without going into mortifying detail, I’m finding that, too often in elevators and congressional hearings when the subject matter arises, I wind up being identified as the villain of the piece. And, I believe, unjustly so.

Luckily, the Human Flatus Atlas has helped to set things straight. True fact: After users were asked to wear smart underwear 12 hours a day for seven days straight, researchers concluded that, during that specific time span, the average number of emissions per capita amounted to 32 – a half dozen more than my personal best for the same period. So, there you have it. Statistical proof of my innocence.

I accept that – for my diehard critics, anyway – that may not be enough to amount to a credible weather report.

At the very least, though, it should count as a wind advisory.