

The famous Manneken Pis statue in BrusselsPhoto: Stylva [Flickr CC commons]

Facts About Urine

You pee, I pee, we all pee - but have you ever given thought to what exactly you're flushing out of your body? In her book That's Disgusting! An Adult Guide to What's Gross, Tasteless, Rude, Crude, and Lewd, Greta Garbage explains all sorts of bizarre trivia about urine.Warning: not for the squeamish. True to the title of her book, Greta Garbage's book is like a No Holds Barred trivia book about really gross things. You've been warned (or if this sort of things interest you, then "urine" for a treat!)

Some people are totally fascinated with the useless fact their

piss smells different after they eat asparagus. Indeed, one pundit

suggested that it's just a matter of time until someone produces a cartoon

Asparagusman, whose primary job it is to sniff out people

who have just eaten that vegetable.

Technically, the asparagus doesn't make the urine smell, some people

just have the fairly useless ability to pick it out. There have been at

least three studies determining how many people have this claim to fame,

as if it mattered.

Tens of thousands of words have been written on smell hypersensitivity

- even Benjamin Franklin, who surely had better things to do, jokingly

suggested that a drug be found that could make a fart smell like perfume.

But if you feel you must know more about asparagus and pee-smell, you're

probably best off waiting for the cartoon.

Here's a wee bit more about piss. Actually, your urine is odorless until

after it comes out of your body. What you smell then is ammonia - yep,

the same stuff you clean with.

Asparagus isn't the only thing some people smell in urine. Drinking

turpentine is said to make urine smell like a rose, so hundreds of years

ago, women would drink turpentine so their piss would smell sweet.

One man claims that large quantities of onions, especially in curried

rice, make his piss smell odd, but so far this claim has not been backed

up by rigorous testing.

If you really want to know:



• Eating beets can turn your urine red.



• Vitamin B2 makes it bright yellow.



• Certain blue dyes make it blue-green.



• L-dopa makes it dark brown.



• Rhubarb sometimes makes it brownish or pinkish.

What's really important, though, is not color but intensity. A good clue

to health is the darkness of the urine hue. Experts say that you should

pee pale. (In other words, if you're not getting enough

water in your system, your urine will be darker.)

Adult men usually pee in a narrower stream than women do

because sex and children can affect the women's tissues there. This unusual

fact was used to test virginity centuries ago: If a woman peed like a

man, she was thought to be a virgin. (Some idiots in those days also thought

they could just look at urine and tell if the woman was intact.)

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Piercing the penis may also affect the stream, since it can cause spraying,

split-stream pissing, and so on. Indeed, after piercing, some men have

to cover the hole with their hand in order to urinate normally. God knows

what anyone next to them in a men's room thinks they're doing.

Urine: Practical Jokes and Assaults

For some people, sticking their hands in water makes them have to pee.

Years ago, a man used to wander around beaches in Southern France, looking

for sleeping women.



He carried a glass of water with him, and when he found an attractive

woman, half asleep, sunbathing, he supposedly put her hand into the glass

of water and then watched her pee. Well, it's a good

story, anyway.

Remember the story of Sir Walter Raleigh and how he

gallantly threw his cape down so Queen Elizabeth could pass by?

There are two things the history book probably didn't tell you about

that:



• First, it was probably a puddle of urine, not

water;



• Second, what did he do with his cape afterward?

Moo goo pee pan: Last year, after a tenant in Long Island

became suspicious that her landlord was entering her apartment when she

was gone, she installed a video camera.

She got a clear picture of her landlord, a forty-one-year-old computer

programmer, removing a cardboard container of leftover Chinese

food from the fridge, peeing in it, and putting it back.

This happened on three occasions in 1998, during which time let's hope

she ate out.

Toilet water-literally: A Zimbabwean man was convicted

(and sentenced to only a month) for selling perfume that was really

his own urine. Fortunately, most women realized when they opened

the package at home that it didn't smell like perfume and discarded it.

But one woman, who filed the complaint, applied it, took one whiff,

and realized that what was on her wrists was more like Channel #1 than

Channel #5.

A twelve-year-old boy removed the water from his teacher's water

bottle and peed in it. Apparently the water didn’t taste

funny to her, because she drank 8 to 10 ounces of it without ill effects.

She only learned the truth because the boy bragged to his friends about

what he had done.

She later sued the school, claiming the incident permanently damaged

her ability to pee, and teach.

Waldorf Hysteria: In a very strange incident at the

Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, a fifty-year-old New Jersey fashion

consultant claimed a naked woman trying to enter her hotel room awakened

her in the middle of the night.

Even odder, she said the woman (somehow) supposedly urinated

on her door when she couldn't get in.

She sued the hotel-not for that, but for the food poisoning

she claimed she got from the basket of fruit the hotel gave her to apologize

for the alleged bizarre incident.

Moral of the story: Ignore people who piss at your door, and never eat

free fruit.

A joke to play with urine is to freeze a small amount of pee

in a shallow dish, take it out, and then slip the "pee puck"

into the mail slot on someone's door, tossing it in as far away from the

door as possible.

When the frozen urine melts, the person will find a mysterious puddle

near the door, and forever wonder how in hell it got there when no one

seems to have entered the house.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

The Anatomical Chart Company sells authentic urine specimen bottles to

give as house gifts, so recipients can serve their guests wine

like urine. (It could have been worse; they could have served

Gallo.)

Uses for Urine

To us, a piss is just a piss, but historically, urine has been used in

many unusual ways. For example, urine has been incorporated into wedding

ceremonies. At weddings in North Africa, for ceremonial purposes, the

bride's urine was sprinkled on the guests after the wedding.

(Perhaps as a symbol of the sort of treatment the groom should come to

expect.)

"You may now piss the bride": Sometimes, even

in "civilized" countries like England and Ireland, the

guests drink the bride's urine.

Because of its antiseptic properties, urine was once used to wash

wounds on the battlefield. Centuries ago, when someone's nose

was cut off during a duel, the surgeon peed on it to clean it before it

was stitched back on.

Urine has been used to make tweeds. According to Almanac

of the Gross, Harris Tweed is still made today in Scotland the way

it was made for hundreds of years. From yarn dyed with lichen - that has

been soaked in human urine.

Urine was used as an eyewash - recommended in the thirteenth

century by Pope John XXI, no less! And one pharaoh claimed he got his

eye cured with the urine of a woman - whom he later thanked by marrying.

A squirt a day keeps the dentist at bay: Long ago, urine

was often used as toothpaste. It was believed that brushing one's

teeth with urine would make the teeth whiter. It may have actually worked,

too, because ammonia is a product of stale urine.

Urine has also been used as a mouthwash. Bad enough

to swish it around in one's mouth, but it was said to be most effective

if kept in the mouth for long periods of time.

Urine may also repel cats and dogs. (Not to mention

brothers, sisters, boyfriends, girlfriends, and strangers.) In a bizarre

letter to the editor of the New England Medical Journal, a doctor wrote

that two of his patients who had applied urine around the edges of their

gardens had successfully kept neighboring dogs and cats from entering

them.

One man had poured sterile urine out of a vessel; the other had urinated

every few steps until he had accomplished his goal. Not satisfied with

merely freaking out his neighbors, he insisted on telling everyone about

it.

A few other recorded uses for urine:



• To get rid of acne.



• To wash linens. The Romans used to do this.



• To tan leather.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Uncivil war: Richard Zachs, in History Laid Bare, reveals

that urine was distilled into nitre for gunpowder during the Civil War.

It seems that Confederate wagons went down the streets so women could

donate the pee from their chamberpots. This inspired an amusing poem by

an Alabama soldier, part of which went as follows:

We thought the girls had work enough making shirts and kissing



But you have put the pretty dears to patriotic pissing.



…But 'tis an awful idea…gunpowdery and cranky,



That when a lady lifts her skirts, she's killing off a Yankee!

This inspired a retaliatory verse from a Northerner:

... And vice versa, what would make a Yankee soldier madder



Than dodging bullets fired from a pretty woman's bladder?



They say there was a subtle smell that lingered in the powder



And as the smoke grew thicker and the din of battle louder



There was found to this compound one serious objection



No soldier boy did sniff the stuff without having an erection!

Urine Drinking

I.P. Freely: Urine is actually quite clean - 96 percent of it is water

anyway - and there are no bacteria in it until it's out of your body.

But although it's sterile, drinking it may carry a risk of transmission

of the HIV virus, so it may therefore not be safe to drink someone

else's urine.

Some also believe that drinking urine could strain your kidneys, since

urine contains salts that your body is trying to get rid of. They suggest

that if you're going to drink urine, you also drink lots of water as well.

But if you're going to drink lots of water, why bother drinking urine?

Still, urine is currently considered a power drink that's

free and has been recommended by several sources:

• Mahatma Gandhi, who drank it regularly.



• Euro-Peeins and English folks like the actress Sarah Miles,

who helped make it popular.



• Elvis Presley's mother used to pee into a jar,

and then put the pee in her beer with an eyedropper, believing it would

confer health benefits on her, even if it wasn't all shook up.



• Pat Boone admitted on The Daily Show

that he had tried it.



• Newsweek magazine ran a story about urine drinking.



• Environmental advocates occasionally publicly endorse it, advocating

it as the ultimate in recycling.



• Kevin Costner drank it in Waterworld,

whose title had nothing to do with that part of the movie.



• The leak(er) shall inherit the earth: The Bible says in Proverbs

5:15, "Drink waters out of thine won cistern."

(It could have been worse. It could have said, "Drink water out of

thine own sister.")

Don't say cheese: Occasionally other stories of historical

urine drinking pop up. For example, a man in Germany was tried years ago

for putting the urine of young girls into cheese to improve its taste.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Gee whiz. Is there a doctor in the outhouse? At an Auto-Urine

Therapy conference in India in the late 1990's, 600 delegates

from seventeen nations discussed the medical benefits of drinking their

own urine.

Probably a nice bunch of people there, but would you really want to go

to their cocktail parties?

The

article above is reprinted with permission from That's Disgusting : An Adult Guide to What's Gross, Tasteless, Rude, Crude, and Lewd

by Greta

Garbage, published by Ten Speed Press.

Believe it or not, this is actually the "milder" subject that's

suitable for printing on Neatorama. Greta's book is jam-packed with endlessly

en"gross"ing (see what I did there?) info about things that

are revolting.

Link: Amazon

| Interview

with Greta Garbate