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37 pounds.

Michael Kins­ley wrote a great col­umn, back in the day, about the most bor­ing head­lines ever writ­ten. The win­ner was, indeed, stu­pe­fy­ingly bor­ing (“Worth­while Cana­dian Ini­tia­tive”), but what I recall about the piece were the rules he set out for deter­min­ing degrees of bore­dom. One was about the story that informs us things are chang­ing in a place nobody cared about in the first place; the exam­ple for this was, “Chill falls on warm­ing rela­tions between Aus­tralia, Indonesia.”

I think the fol­low­ing falls into that cat­e­gory, although not in the head­line, but the lead:

Long a two-funeral home town, Kendal­lville recently got its third with David Funeral Home.

That’s from the Jour­nal Gazette, in Fort Wayne. Kendal­lville is one of its, ahem, bed­room communities.

OK, so we’ve estab­lished the death theme. Agreed? I’m start­ing with death because I thought it would be sort of gross to kick off the week-ending blog entry with a dis­cus­sion of…well, you’ll see.

Alan came home the other day and reported that the syn­di­cated med­ical col­umn he han­dled con­tained a remark­able ques­tion: “I hear Elvis Pres­ley died with 37 pounds of impacted feces in his colon. Is this true?” Reader, I know you’ll be as relieved as I am to hear this is, indeed, not true. But it does reveal some­thing about the cred­u­lous­ness of the aver­age per­son who writes to syn­di­cated med­ical columns, doesn’t it?

(The ask-the-doc col­umn has been a rich source of news­room amuse­ment for years. In Fort Wayne an edi­tor kept a com­puter file of the best ques­tions. Here was my favorite: I seem to be bleed­ing inter­nally. Some­times blood will lit­er­ally pour from my rec­tum. Could it be some­thing in my diet?)

But back to Elvis and his 37 pounds of poo. If I were giv­ing out MacArthur genius grants, I’d save one for the tire­less folks at Snopes​.com and their urban-legends ref­er­ence page. Of course it was the first hit when I punched “elvis pres­ley + ‘impacted fecal mate­r­ial’” into Google.

You should not be sur­prised to hear that the story didn’t start with Elvis. It was orig­i­nally John Wayne, and it was 40 pounds, not 37. Snopes does its usual fine job point­ing out that the very idea of a human colon packed with the equiv­a­lent of a large bag of top­soil is, not to put too fine a point on it, bull­shit. The Elvis angle has a germ of truth, in that the King died on the ter­let and was mas­sively con­sti­pated, mainly because of all the down­ers he was tak­ing with those fried peanut-butter sand­wiches. But they also point the fin­ger of blame where it belongs — the reports of John Wayne’s intesti­nal prob­lem is fre­quently fol­lowed by a pitch for colonic “cleansing.”

I dunno, maybe an enema might make you feel bet­ter. I’d pre­fer a bowl of raisin bran, a cou­ple cups of hot cof­fee and a walk around the neighborhood.

The “spa” indus­try seems to enjoy prop­a­gat­ing this crap. I have a very fine aes­theti­cian who gives me an eye­brow wax once in a while. Since I am con­gen­i­tally inca­pable of relax­ing and not talk­ing while in a room with another per­son, we make chitchat. She upsells var­i­ous facial and skin-care ser­vices, many of which seem to involve the removal of “toxins.”

“What sort of tox­ins?” I ask.

“The body’s tox­ins,” she replies, calmly. Oh, those. She has a tech­nique where she puts suc­tion cups on your body, and “draws the tox­ins to the sur­face,” or some­thing like that. It’s at this point I’m glad my eyes are closed and she can’t see me rolling them.

I won­der where the tox­ins go once they’ve been drawn to the sur­face. I sus­pect the colon. Beware.

Posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 10:12 am
in Popculch.

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24 responses to
“37 pounds.”

  1. Dorothy said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:40 am

    Add to shop­ping list: suc­tion cups for chair-bound husband.

  2. Danny said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:46 am

    I won­der where the tox­ins go once they’ve been drawn to the sur­face. I sus­pect the colon. Beware.

    You sus­pect, cor­rectly. And then, the only thing that can help you is a jalapeno-habanero-cilantro suppository.

  3. Randy said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:47 am

    Sorry, my Cana­dian infe­ri­or­ity com­plex flared up again when I read men­tion of the fabled “Worth­while Cana­dian Ini­ti­ta­tive” headline.

    I guess it’s not a sense of infe­ri­or­ity, but befud­dle­ment. I get that 99.9% of Amer­i­cans spend .00001% of their life­time even con­tem­plat­ing Canada for as much as a moment, and that is under­stand­able. But it seems that one fleet­ing moment is used to tell Cana­di­ans how utterly insignif­i­cant we are to Amer­i­cans and the world at large. I’m sure there’s more mirth than mal­ice behind the com­ments, but they do become tire­some after awhile.

    Sorry if I steered away from the orig­i­nal point, and please note, Nancy, I’m not mean­ing to bash you or any other Amer­i­cans. I’m just invok­ing my right to be a whiny, irrel­e­vant cit­i­zen of Canuckistan.

    *Oh and with respect to colons, any­one remem­ber the ad on SNL for “Colon Blow”? Funny stuff.

  4. colleen said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Ah snopes. Yeah, they are tire­less and deserve much praise. All those “THIS IS TRUE! Don’t delete!” emails I get are replied to with the snopes web site.

    Some­times I can’t believe how gullible peo­ple are. 37 pounds of poo, money from Bill Gates, hypo­der­mics in coin return slots.…

    But that story about the peo­ple going park­ing, and the escaped men­tal patient, and the pros­thetic hand hang­ing from the car? That’s real. Hap­pened to a stepsister’s of a cousin’s mother’s boyfriend’s daughter…

  5. Marcia said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:53 am

    “I seem to be bleed­ing inter­nally. Some­times blood will lit­er­ally pour from my rec­tum. Could it be some­thing in my diet?”

    Okay, I lit­er­ally snorted.

  6. Danny said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:54 am

    Oh and with respect to colons, any­one remem­ber the ad on SNL for “Colon Blow�?? Funny stuff.

    Yes, I do. I remem­ber the piles of cereal. Hilar­i­ous. Always reminds me that Colin Powell’s name lent itself to that joke. I think he has a future in lax­a­tive adver­tis­ing to older folks.

    By the way, how is the weather today up there in America-Junior? LOL! For­give me.

  7. alex said on October 13th, 2006 at 11:06 am

    Speak­ing of shit, when did the Journal-Gazette start pub­lish­ing puff pieces as news? Even the sub­ur­ban free papers in my mail­box don’t fawn over funeral homes this gushingly.

  8. Jim said on October 13th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    Hey, I’ve worked in Kendal­lville. Call­ing it a bed­room com­mu­nity for Fort Wayne is being a bit too char­i­ta­ble. They didn’t call it “Kendall­tucky” for noth­ing. Yeesh.

    As for the doc­tor columns, I can sym­pa­thize. When I was at The Goshen News, one of my duties was edit­ing the “Ask Dr. Gott” col­umn. I remem­ber one let­ter dis­tinctly: A man wrote to say that when he ejac­u­lated, he noticed blood in his semen and won­dered what could cause that. I remem­ber think­ing at the time, “And in response to this, you decided to take out a pen and paper and write a snail-mail let­ter to a news­pa­per colum­nist???” I’d be on the phone with my doc­tor that day.

    Colleen, I’m glad I’m not the only one who replies to the multi-forwarded e-mail with Snopes. I usu­ally go look up the arti­cle, hit “reply all” and paste the link. And the funny thing is, I usu­ally don’t hear back from any­body after that.

  9. nancy said on October 13th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    Mar­cia, I always thought that news­pa­per doc missed a shot at a Pulitzer when he failed to answer, “Yes. Knock off the fiber­glas for breakfast.”

  10. nancy said on October 13th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

    Jim, I was try­ing to keep his name out of it, but the bleeding-butt let­ter was, indeed, from Dr. Gott. And I had pre­cisely the same reac­tion. I fig­ured the letter-writer was dead by the time the col­umn appeared.

  11. brian stouder said on October 13th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    I fig­ured the letter-writer was dead by the time the col­umn appeared

    and the paper lost yet ANOTHER subscriber!

    That story nicely book­ends the other nn.c one about retired autowork­ers’ pro­lific pre­scrip­tions and so on.

    urban leg­ends revolv­ing around ‘colonic cleans­ing’ and ‘bod­ily tox­ins’ (etc) are first-cousins to the un-ending stream of accred­ited reports that ________(fill in the blank; cof­fee, sugar, meats, salt, alco­hol, car­rots, peas, Post Toasties, etc etc) will KILL you.…no wait —  will ADD QUALITY YEARS TO YOUR LIFE

  12. Mindy said on October 13th, 2006 at 1:41 pm

    Randy — Last year I drove to a yarn shop out­side of my reg­u­lar stomp­ing grounds to visit the Yarn Har­lot, the great Can­da­dian knit­ter and blog­ger, and get my copies of her books signed dur­ing her book tour. She was polite enough to men­tion my knit­ting project and asked what yarn I was using. “Patons Clas­sic Wool,” I replied. She was over­joyed to finally meet an Amer­i­can who could cor­rectly pro­nounce the name of Canada’s most famous yarn com­pany and said so. Then came a few strained com­ments about being the also-ran neigh­bor to the north pep­pered with a dash of bash. This was my first expe­ri­ence with this sen­ti­ment and I’ll never for­get it. (For any­one who might care, Patons = PAY-tons, not puh-TUNS or puh-TONES, etc. that seems to injure this poor woman every time she makes an appear­ance in the U.S.)

    As for Elivs and his impacted colon, I’ve heard it was 60 pounds of poo in his gut and 40 pounds for John Wayne. I run across this repeat­edly in my search for ways to beat chronic fatigue. Princess Di was sup­pos­edly a huge fan of colonics. No word on how much poo was in her gut at the time of her demise, though.

  13. Jane said on October 13th, 2006 at 1:56 pm

    I won­der if I’ll ever be famous enough that peo­ple will care how impacted my colon is when I die.

  14. brian stouder said on October 13th, 2006 at 2:34 pm

    I sus­pect the colon. Beware.

    that line sounds like it escaped from a haiku -

    Peo­ple are wary -
    ’Free’; ‘trust me’; ‘that dog don’t bite’.
    I sus­pect the colon

  15. Tom said on October 13th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    Randy: To this day, I think of an, um, espe­cially pro­duc­tive ses­sion on the Porce­lain Vor­tex as a “Super Colon Blow.” Phil Hartman’s legacy endures!

    If there’s any­thing that gives cre­dence to any of Freud’s the­o­ries, it’s the ongo­ing obses­sion that some peo­ple have with their butts, what comes out of them, and what they decide to put in them. Even given the con­tin­ued reliance of a cer­tain seg­ment of the Amer­i­can cin­ema on toi­let humor, I was mildly aston­ished at the trailer for The Road To Wellville, which included a snip­pet of a scene in which Dr. Kel­logg (played by Anthony Hop­kins; appar­ently the real-life Kel­logg – yes, the corn flakes guy – was every bit as nutty) is “pre­scrib­ing” some­thing like a gal­lon of yogurt to Matthew Broderick’s char­ac­ter, who protests that he can’t pos­si­bly eat that much. “Oh, it’s not going in that end,” quoth Hop­kins. Thank you, Alan Parker & Co., for that men­tal image.

  16. nancy said on October 13th, 2006 at 2:59 pm

    I remem­ber read­ing that about Princess Di. Some peo­ple find the brown­eye to be an eroge­nous zone, so I guess I can see how one might enjoy a lit­tle recre­ational cleanse, but what about the long-term effects? Your colon has a job to do, and if you’re always help­ing it along, so to speak, aren’t you going to be mess­ing up the works?

    Also, this reminds me of a story I have in a file labeled “weird,” about a guy who died in a colonics estab­lish­ment (called, sweetly, Colonique). Police esti­mate his buttshower was admin­is­tered at approx­i­mately the same pres­sure as a fire­hose. He per­fo­rated, went sep­tic, and died with what was surely the world’s clean­est large intestine.

  17. mary said on October 13th, 2006 at 3:22 pm

    “…and died with what was surely the world’s clean­est large intestine.”

    Unlike Elvis.

  18. alex said on October 13th, 2006 at 4:20 pm

    Not sure I’d want to take my yogurt that way, but I remem­ber read­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about how tobacco was first taken in Europe and colo­nial Amer­ica after it was dis­cov­ered in the New World. Yes. The mucous mem­branes down there made it deliver quite a thrill. (Maybe not a bad idea for those who want to con­ceal their chaw habit. At least the brown stains won’t give you away.)

  19. Rich B said on October 13th, 2006 at 5:56 pm

    I won­der if I’ll ever be famous enough that peo­ple will care how impacted my colon is when I die.

    I’ll care Jane, for all the lit­tle people.

  20. Dorothy said on October 13th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

    Just when I think Nancy has cov­ered every inter­est­ing topic under the sun .…

  21. Jane said on October 13th, 2006 at 10:49 pm

    Thank you, Randy. I appre­ci­ate that.

    “Colonique” made me laugh out loud at a very inop­por­tune time.

  22. Beastman said on October 14th, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    I had a colonoscopy a while back and got to watch the whole thing on the screen. What I found inter­est­ing was that, after hear­ing for years about how the colon gets crud­ded up, and coat­ing with tox­ins etc (like the inside of an old car engine, or a sewer pipe, to name two of the favorite analo­gies) and must be peri­od­i­cally cleaned, that mine after just a day of purg­ing to get ready, using cheap over-the-counter prod­ucts, was squeaky-clean and pink. So even if one accepts that it needs occa­sional flush­ing, extended purges, diets or elab­o­rate colonics would seem to be unecessary.

  23. Jason said on October 14th, 2006 at 1:46 pm

    > I was mildly aston­ished at the trailer for The Road To Wellville, which
    > included a snip­pet of a scene in which Dr. Kel­logg (played by
    > Anthony Hop­kins; appar­ently the real-life Kel­logg – yes, the corn
    > flakes guy – was every bit as nutty) is “pre­scrib­ing�? some­thing like a
    > gal­lon of yogurt to Matthew Broderick’s char­ac­ter, who protests that
    > he can’t pos­si­bly eat that much. “Oh, it’s not going in that end,�?
    > quoth Hop­kins. Thank you, Alan Parker & Co., for that men­tal image.

    I didn’t see the movie, but the novel “Road to Wellville,” by T.C. Boyle is sur­real, bizarre and (at times) cry­ing, snort­ing, pounding-your-fist-on-the-floor funny. It’s his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, but it sup­pos­edly accu­rately cap­tures the doc­tor behind the “Kel­logg San­i­tar­ium” in Bat­tle Creek.

    (I believe it was his brother, W.K. Kel­logg, who started the cereal fac­tory, and in Boyle’s ver­sion, Dr. John Kel­logg detests him because he adds friv­o­lous items — like raisins — to the cereals.)

  24. joodyb said on October 14th, 2006 at 6:21 pm

    thank you for the most enter­tain­ment i’ve had in weeks. only con­firms the fact that i have the sense of humor of a 13-year-old male.

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