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Artist creates analog printer to make a giant alphabet out of bird poop
07.11.2016
12:02 pm
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I had zebra finches growing up, and while they were sweet little birds, they had two major drawbacks—the after-hours chirping, and all the pooping. The chirping you could remedy with a towel over the cage. Regardless of the hour, any light on and they were under the impression they had to greet the morning dawn, but darken the cage and they’d shut up. There was no remedy to the pooping however, so you simply accepted that when you took them out to play, sometimes you were going to get bird shit on you, a small price to pay to have them cheerfully hop up and down your arm.

Artist Fabrizio Lamoncha has managed to actually utilize the talents of the zebra finch, with his Poo Printer, an enclosure with letter-shaped perches that encourage the finches to shit a sort of crude calligraphy. In Lamoncha’s own words:
 

A group of male zebra finches underwent this experiment with rigorous commitment. The author/captor, taking the role of some kind of 1984´s Big brother, is providing the implementation guidelines for the transformation of this countercultural attitude into a marketable artsy product. The observation of this group of non-breeding birds in captivity and the experimentation with induced behaviors has been rigorously documented for this task. This project researches in a hybrid, artistic and scientific framework the physiological, mechanical and social dynamics of birds under captivity in a simulated factory-chain environment.

The result is the Poo Printer, an analog generative typography printer using the bird-poo as the particle substance in order to slowly generate the Latin alphabet characters over a large paper roll.

 

 

 
A time-lapse video of the Poo Printer in action, after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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07.11.2016
12:02 pm
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South Korea’s poop-themed coffeeshop
08.14.2015
12:38 pm
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If you find yourself in South Korea and want a coffeeshop in which you are obliged to meditate on the ... ultimate end result of the coffee you are enjoying, you are going to want to visit the Poop Café in Seoul, or, as it is properly called in Korean,  또옹카페.

The amusing website Seoul Searching posted about the café a couple of weeks ago, and the internet is having quite a titter over it. The café does not serve poop, of course—now THAT would be a story!—but many of its offerings as well as decor resemble cute turds, simply put. Your coffee mug is likely to resemble a toilet.

Here are some highlights from the charming account by Lexi, who runs the Seoul Searching blog:

There is a tree inside decorated with colorful poop-shaped papers. Then, once you are inside, you realize that the poop-shaped papers also have adorable little faces, sneakers and handwritten messages on them from previous visitors.

Inside, the cafe is surprisingly normal. … I suppose I was hoping for more of a shock factor.

Despite the ordinary interior, I began to to find those quirky poop hidden treasures I longed for. A few squat toilets that had been turned into mini gardens occupied some floor space, porcelain cups with poops painted on them lined the shelves and colorful plush coils of “poop” could be found on tables, chairs and in little nooks and crannies. I like to get a little silly with the plush poops.

Poop Café is near Gyeongbokgung Palace, on the 4th floor of the Ssamziegil Mall.
 

 

 
More pics after the jump…......
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.14.2015
12:38 pm
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Sociological feminist fart study results
03.18.2015
11:16 am
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Neuroses of the anus are perhaps the most common and socially encouraged bodily anxiety—the disposal of waste is pretty universally accepted as gross, and no one wants to talk about it much. At what point though, do manners become cumbersome and rarefied, robbing us of our rightful earthly amusements? Certainly, a good fart joke is a pleasure most often denied the “fairer sex”!

Luckily, sociologists Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams (two trailblazing researchers from my alma mater of Indiana University—go Hoosiers!) are doing the dirty work—so to speak. In their article “Fecal Matters: Habitus, Embodiments, and Deviance” (seriously, that title was published by Oxford University Press), the two address not only the embarrassment surrounding passing gas and defecation, but the gendered manifestations of shame itself! Their abstract:

This article examines fecal matters—namely, the social concerns that can accompany defecation and flatulence. Researching 172 university students, we show how aspects of the socio-cultural context as “embodied” in four groups of participants (heterosexual women and men and non-heterosexual women and men) mediate the operation of the “fecal habitus”—that part of culture that interprets and organizes fecal events (Inglis 2000). The study finds that the heterosexual women and the non-heterosexual men show the greatest commitment to the habitus and the heterosexual men the least. It provides some evidence that the non-heterosexual women also show a decreased commitment. Theoretical contributions show how the concept of embodiment can highlight everyday “social problems prevention work” by paying attention to the role of the different senses, the emotional components involved in bodily mishaps, gender discrimination and the privileging of male status, and the elaboration of stigma theory.

Yes!  Finally, the social sciences are dealing in the shame gap between the sexes! See below for edifying tables—some predictable, some of which may surprise you! (Lesbians posed a particular conundrum for the researchers: Although as a group, lesbians were the least likely to think others would find farts funny, conversely our sapphic sisters come in second only to heterosexual brahs in farting on purpose to get a laugh. Go figure… and gay guys are the least likely to fart intentionally. Who knew?)
 
y
 

 

 
Via Sociological Images, Thanks to Gerard Di Trolio

Posted by Amber Frost
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03.18.2015
11:16 am
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Log Book: The man who kept a diary of every shit he took in 2014
01.21.2015
01:22 pm
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Intrepid reddit user captainmercedes kept a diary of every poop he had during 2014. He noted down every bowel movement in his captain’s “log book”—at what time he had one, its size, consistency, duration and many other relevant details. The information was kept in accordance with the Bristol Stool Chart—an academic shit comparison guide which experts use to classify the quality of turds from “nuts” and “liquid” to something that resembles “a sausage or snake.”
 
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Poo are you? Distribution of bowel movement on Bristol Stool Scale. It would appear the captain mainly fired “a number two torpedo.” There is evidence of some late night binges throughout the year.
 
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A Week of Poo: This chart shows how many fudge brownies our poo expert baked per day. Thursday was the day our man preferred to “drop the kids off at the pool,” while Monday and Tuesday seemed to produce the least number of brown fishies.
 
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Log Dropping Time: 10am in the morning was the optimum time for pebble-dashing the porcelain—though note the very occasional night shift.
 
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Toilet Punishments per day: Or, how many many fudge bombs dropped—which appears to be one on average, though there was that time he fired off five in one day—now that’s impressive. Still, what about the ranking for incomplete turds? What qualifies them as less than one?
 
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Distance from optimal corndog condition.—a kind of sliding scale…
 
What our chocolate fingered maestro will do with all this information I dunno, but I certainly won’t be holding on with bated breathed…. maybe just holding my breath.
 
Via reddit.

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.21.2015
01:22 pm
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Shit Express will send poop to your bitter enemies
11.04.2014
01:19 pm
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Sometimes, when someone—your boss, your neighbor—really pisses you off, only a box full of poop sent to their home or office will really satisfy your need to inflict revenge. But so far, at any rate, there isn’t a tutorial on sending your enemies poop in the mail on eHow or Instructables, and until there are, you’re either going to have to do it yourself—yuck—or rely on the good people at Shit Express.
 

 
Shit Express is an online company that specializes in, well, sending shit to your enemies (hearing the lamentation of their women is not included in the service fee). It turns out that there are a lot of complex variables to having someone send your enemies poop. The poop of what animal? What should the packaging be? Here’s the step-by-step process, according to Shit Express:
 

1. Choose an animal.
2. Give us an address.
3. Choose how to wrap your package.
4. Pay anonymously with Bitcoin.

 
About seventeen bucks will get you a box of horse poop sent to anyone of your choice. At press time, the only poop available was horse poop. Packaging comes in “plain,” “cute,” and “ceremonial.” Apparently one of them, probably “cute,” features smiley faces. Shit Express insists on cryptocurrency like Bitcoin to ensure your anonymity. It’s actually illegal to send certain substances in the mail in some nations, so Shit Express has to navigate the laws in the various countries they ship to (this appears to be unlimited).
 

 
via Death and Taxes

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.04.2014
01:19 pm
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You stepped in something: Smiling poop emoji shoes
10.16.2014
09:28 am
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How much would you pay for a pair of shoes covered in feces? $50,000? $100,000? Money is no object for a thing of such value, but you don’t need to break the bank to snag a pair of these… er…. shitty kickers! Betabrand has almost met their crowdfunding goal for a run of cute sneakers adorned in a “discreet” poo emoji print (only $70.40 for a pledge, a discounted rate for fine footwear covered in cute crap, right?). Sure, sure, but you’re walking around in permanent poo-shoes already. Isn’t pattern kind of… pretty? A tessellation of turds!

Fecal fractals, if you will.
 

 
Also, apparently these shoes are made from some kind of space-age material… if you’re into that sort of thing. I would remind you that NASA is responsible for the success of Tang, and to quote Buzz Aldrin, “Tang sucks.” Toilet humor and cute footwear however, is timelessly great, according to anyone who matters. If you still gotta, here are the specs, the video below lays out the case for a decidedly unshitty pair of crap-covered shoes.
 

 
Via Betabrand

Posted by Amber Frost
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10.16.2014
09:28 am
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