Miami Huricane football is down the toilet so what do cane fans turn to? Miami Zoo Hosts Poop Exhibit :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: Oct 30 7:03 PM US/Eastern By JESSICA GRESKO Associated Press Writer Meadow muffins. Guano. Feces. Solid waste. Caca. Coker cookies. The words for poop are endless, but the Miami Metrozoo has another term to add to the list: educational. Now on display is a 5,000-square-foot exhibit on excrement titled "The Scoop on Poop," which invites visitors to explore the science of scat. The exhibit is filled with photos of animals in some of their most indelicate moments. Stool sample models abound: haylike football-sized balls (elephant), kidney-bean-looking pellets (porcupine) and coallike lumps coated with fur (black bear). Beyond the "ick" factor, however, zoo officials and the exhibit's creators say there is a lot of information being imparted. Visitors can smell the stench of flowers that mimic dung to attract flies for pollination. Videos include one of a hippo spreading its droppings around to mark its territory. Simple games include "Who Dung It?" "We didn't want this to be a gross exhibit for shock value," said Chad Peeling, who helped create the display. "Our goal with the exhibit was to make people think, kids especially, about the science in all aspects in life and this thing that adults don't like to talk about." Miami is the exhibit's second stop after opening at a Virginia museum in May. Created by Clyde Peeling's Reptiland _ whose namesake is Chad Peeling's father _ in Allenwood, Pa., it is based on a 2001 book of the same name. After the exhibit closes at the Metrozoo in January, it will make stops in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Redding, Calif. The exhibit is not the first to feature feces, however. An exhibit called "All the Poop" toured Japan in 2001 and another in England showcased scat samples. On a recent afternoon one woman cheered "go, go, go" as two children raced model dung beetles at a station in the Miami exhibit. Students on a class trip posed in a cutout of a person sitting in an outhouse. Others examined slides of parasites found in dung using a microscope, while classmates weighed themselves on a scale designed to tell them how long it takes an elephant to poop their weight. "I don't think it's that disgusting," said Bruno Cazarini, 13, of the exhibit's topic. "I think plenty of people get the wrong impression." Cazarini, who was visiting the zoo with a school group, said he knew about dung beetles, some of which burrow inside dung to eat and rest. But he did not know about its uses as a type of waterproof plaster for the homes of Masai people in East Africa, which he learned from information at the exhibit. Adults have had fun with material, too. Some volunteers and zoo employees have started wearing plastic poop pins that look like the real thing. Zoo personnel have also brought out a bowl of chocolate- covered candy, inviting visitors to take one if they dare. A popular exhibit is the Najeh Davenport Poop In A Boot Challenge where guests are locked in a dark closet and the winner is the fastest contestant to take a dump in a boot or similar high top shoe. Elephant keepers, meanwhile, were charged with weighing the amount of elephant poop one of the zoo's Asian male elephants, Dahlip, produces in a 24-hour period. The total: 540 pounds. Meanwhile, a commercial for the exhibit, which will begin running shortly, has already shown up on YouTube. One couple, who are zoo donors, even called to offer to loan the zoo a scat sample of their own. The pair has a lump of excrement from 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat enclosed in a glass globe, which the zoo plans to put on exhibit within a few weeks.
8) THOMAS CRAPPER by John H. Lienhard Today, we deal with a word that really shouldn't be used in polite company. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. Every time I teach my course in the history of technology, some student informs me -- often with a salacious grin -- that the flush toilet was invented by a 19th-century Englishman named Thomas Crapper. Well, he didn't really invent the flush toilet, but his name is indeed a cloud that hovers over its history. The flush toilet was actually invented in the 18th century. It was an important landmark in the Industrial Revolution -- closely tied to the new technology of steam-power generation. In the mid 18th century, the important concept of automatic liquid-level control arose -- both in steam boilers and in the tanks of these new water closets. Thomas Crapper was a real enough person. He was born in Yorkshire in 1837 -- long after the first flush toilets came into use. His biography by Wallace Reyburn is titled Flushed with Pride. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, but it's nevertheless quite complete. Thomas Crapper apprenticed as a plumber when he was still a child. By the time he was 30, he'd set up his own business in London. He developed and manufactured sanitary facilities of all sorts until his death in 1910. He held many patents and was in fact an important and extremely inventive figure in creating modern water-closet systems. But did he really give his name to these systems? Reyburn claims that many American soldiers in WW-I were off the farm -- that they'd never seen anything like the classy English water closets -- that they called them by their brand name, much as the English call a vacuum cleaner by the brand name Hoover. The problem with this explanation is that the word almost certainly derives from the 13th-century Anglo-Saxon word crappe. It means chaff or any other waste material. The modern form of the word was certainly in use during Thomas Crapper's life. So not only was he not the inventor of the flush toilet -- it's also unlikely that he really gave it his name, either. What he did do was to carry the technology forward. This business points out something historians have to guard against. Now and then a really good story comes along -- one so well contrived that it should be true, even if it isn't. Who wants to admit that no apple ever fell on Isaac Newton's head -- or that George Washington didn't really chop down the cherry tree? What humorless pedant wants to insist that Thomas Crapper didn't really invent the flush toilet!