Refrigerator Copy

Column published the week of December 1, 2008 www.theleeonline.com © 2008, Lee Ostaszewski

The Ripe Stuff

By Lee Ostaszewski If far..., umm, let’s call it passing gas, were a crime, then living with my two sons, Kevin and Chris, would be like living with the Sopranos. They could be facing life in prison by now. To say the least, it was upsetting when I learned this really was something that could get you arrested. I came across a news article the other day about a 13-year-old boy in Florida who was arrested for, among other things, breaking wind. Breaking wind is simply a euphemism for the euphemism, passing gas. As are the following common schoolyard terms: cutting the cheese, float an air biscuit, cut a muffin, and ripping a juicy one. Well, perhaps ripping a juicy one isn’t technically euphemistic as much as it is disturbingly graphic. There’s also the phrase barking spiders. One that I never really understood, “You have spiders where? And they BARK!?” The point is there are many ways for me to say that there is a lot of gas passing going on in my house and if it is now against the law we, as a family, are in a lot of legal trouble. The 13-year-old in the article wasn’t only arrested because he cut the cheese. The police report said he was disruptive to other students, such as turning off their computers, and basically acted like a real jerk. As for the passing gas part, police claimed the 13-year-old did it on purpose, which to me is a skill that falls somewhere in the thin gray area between being totally disgusting and being performance art. Illusionists David Blaine spends a lot of time there. Personally, I never thought to develop breaking wind to the level of an on-demand skill. Belching, however, is another matter. And that too is a common activity in our home. It can get noisy at times. I imagine this is the type of environment that is fostered when there are no daughters in a family. My wife, Beth, does her best to discourage our crude behavior. But she has said on many occasions that she would rather raise boys than girls and have to deal with all

that girlie make-up, dress-up, and foo-foo stuff. Instead, she gets Christopher who at a young age was practicing how to burp the alphabet. All of this bathroom talk segues seamlessly into the real topic of today: Life on the International Space Station. Specifically, I’m thinking about how the most recent shuttle mission installed a water-recycling system onboard. Now, having a water-recycling system sounds great, doesn’t it? This is an important technological step not only for near space exploration, but also if mankind ever hopes to go back to the moon or someday set foot on Mars. It could also become extremely important here on earth as the world faces potential drinking water shortages in the coming century, as some scientists have recently predicted in an attempt to bum us out even more, as if the economy weren’t enough. So recycling is usually a good thing, except when you realize what recycling water really entails. In the case of the International Space Station, it means collecting astronaut urine and turning it into perfectly good, fresh drinking water that everyone onboard knows is clean and pure but used to be urine, no matter how hard they try to forget. And most of us hate using recycled paper. I can’t see this recycled drinking water thing catching on here on earth. We would have to be extremely thirsty first. Obviously, the water recycling unit must be thoroughly tested before it’s put into use on the space station. So samples were brought back to earth to determine, a) if the recycled water is potable, and, b) if potable is really the right word to describe water that is fit to drink. I always thought the word sounded a bit too much like potty. I propose we limit the term “potable water” to describe water that sits in a toilet bowl, which only dogs drink. As for the water-recycling system being a big step for planetary exploration, another important consideration that never occurred to me before today was: How do astronauts handle the sensitive issue of barking spiders in space? It’s not like they can just open a window and let fresh air in. That’s going to make for a long trip to Mars. ■