Bizarre Facts About ... Pee!

 

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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!)

Facts About Urine

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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?