Farting with the Stars

Yesterday I talked about the problems associated with farting in public restrooms.  My feeling has always been that it's best to be discrete in an effort to keep innocent bystanders from thinking you're weird.  I failed to mention in that blog entry that farts also tend to echo quite loudly in public restrooms, only making things worse.

There are other situations, of course, where it's a lot of fun to put on a show of flatulence.  For example, I always enjoy firing off a few rounds when Little Smoot is around.  Sure, she often pretends that she thinks I'm disgusting, but I know deep down she's impressed.  Farting loudly in front of your kids is right there in the Good Father Manual.  Look it up.

This past weekend I decided that farting in some public situations can be enormously fun, especially if there are celebrities around.  I was lurking on the sidelines of the Steelers game on Sunday, and for the second time this year Taylor Lautner was a guest of the team.

For those of you living underneath really large rocks, Taylor Lautner is most famous for his role as a werewolf in the Twilight movies, and girls swoon to the point of fainting just by merely thinking about him.  There was a girl in the stands on Sunday who was violently weeping because she was within 50 feet of him.  Seriously.

As you can see in the picture, which has not been Photoshopped in any way, shape or form, everyone enjoys a good fart in a football stadium.  As a semi-interesting side note, the girl with Taylor Lautner is Lily Collins, the daughter of singer Phil Collins.  And it is not merely by coincidence that Phil Collins had a hit song called "In the Air Tonight."

Farting in Public

Like many people, the Smoots enjoy visiting our local Japanese Steak House from time to time.  It's a lot of fun to watch these guys prepare your food right in front of you, and it's even more entertaining given that you never know if your hair may accidentally be lit on fire, or perhaps you'll suffer a puncture wound to the heart as the chef tosses knives around.

The only bad thing about the Japanese Steak House is that approximately 20 minutes after I eat at one, I have the obligatory "bad episode."  If I'm in the car at the moment this strikes, it can be a very uncomfortable thing.  This is why I found myself at a nearby Barnes & Noble the other night, about 20 minutes after enjoying dinner at the Japanese Steak House.

If you read my blog regularly (as if I have been posting to it "regularly") you know that it's pretty hard to embarrass me.  I have been on stage in front of hundreds of people wearing only underwear on several occasions, for example.  But for whatever reason, I do find it embarrassing if I fart loudly enough for other people to hear me in a public bathroom.

I always make a serious effort to keep things quiet when I'm in a restroom stall if there are other people around.  I'll go through pretty extreme and uncomfortable processes to ensure that no one else hears what I'm up to, even though if you're going to make loud farting noises, this is actually the appropriate place to do so.

Well, I am sad to admit that my experience at Barnes & Noble was anything but silent, and I wish I could apologize to the poor guy who was in the next stall.  It wasn't pretty.

Worse yet, I had tried to wait it out so that he would be long gone before I left because I didn't want him to see me, thus connecting my face to the noises he heard.  But fate got in the way of that plan, too, as I found myself washing my hands next to him.  I have a feeling that he planned it that way because he was morbidly curious to see what I looked like.

Anyway, I'm going to try to be more discrete in the future, as best as possible.  I can tell you that I still have no real problem with farting in public in general; tomorrow's installment of the blog will be "Farting with the Stars."

Stupid Bandz

In my never-ending quest to come up with a way to earn a jillion dollars with zero effort, I am thinking about inventing "Stupid Bandz."

For those of you who have no reason to ever interact with other members of the human race, you may not be familiar with "Silly Bandz."  These are colorful rubber bands that are shaped like various things.  I realize that some of you have probably already stopped reading this, dropped what you were doing, and have already run, screaming out of the house because you think this is the most amazing thing you've ever heard, and you have to run out and by a few hundred.

This is what has apparently happened with many people around the country, especially if those people are my daughter's age.  And really, really especially if those people ARE my daughter.

Silly Bandz became really popular a year or so ago, and they've driven many a teacher insane because the kids are paying much, much more attention to who has what Silly Bandz instead of whatever drivel the teachers have to offer.  Of course if they were really smart, the teachers would incorporate these products into their lessons as teaching tools ("143 Silly Bandz times the square root of 84 Silly Bandz is X minus the hypotenuse of another Silly Bandz...")

The odd thing is that it's not just kids who are into these things.  I've seen a shocking number of adults wandering around with these things on their wrists, making me wonder how many important business meetings have been interrupted by suit-wearing individuals who have to stop everything so they can make trades.

Anyway, once Silly Bandz were introduced, a whole bunch of knock-offs hit the market, too, like "Fun Bandz," and "Crazy Bandz."

I would like to introduce "Stupid Bandz" as the next generation of the craze.  Mine will be just regular, brown rubber bands, the type we all have hundreds of sitting in drawers right next to us.  Except mine will be nicely packaged, and at a hugely inflated cost.  There will be ones shaped like pebbles.  Maybe clouds.  Dinner plates.  The moon.  Anything that's already a circle could potentially be a new Stupid Bandz product as far as I'm concerned.

Or just send me a bunch of money in a bag.  That would be fine, too.