Dr Gabriel UguruTo celebrate our 50th edition of the Science column, and as promised in our last edition, we are taking a comic look at the subject of poo. So, relax and enjoy i.e. if you are not too put off by the name of our main subject, poo (aka crap or shit).
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Let’s talk about poo. Yes, you heard me. Don’t put your nose in the air and tell me it is a crappy idea! Poo is now a big business. Biogas system based on human poo is providing cooking energy to people in Rwanda and Kenya. Cow poo (i.e. cow dung) is big business in India where it is used as fuel for cooking. In the UK farming community, a couple of years back, there was not enough “nutritious” poo to go round leading to the importation of thousands of tonnes of poo from the Netherlands. I strongly suspect that the customs import license contained this euphemism: sewage sludge for farmland use only.
This importation of poo from the Netherlands was not surprising because Britain is not particularly known for her gastronomical delights, consequently the British are heavy on processed foods. The product of mashed potato-with-gravy or beans-on-toast or fish-and-chips is not going to give the plants the much-desired nutrients they need. But the Netherlands are another kettle of fish – they eat rich foods and are prodigious “shitters”.
Yes, poo is ever becoming gold dust, just ask any farmer. Currently, the scarcity of poo is exacerbated to a greater extent ever since Russia and Ukraine decided to beat the crap out of each other leading to a scarcity of artificial fertilisers. Not any poo is good poo, please. Before you start taking laxatives and shitting yourself to death trying to make money by selling your poo, may I hasten to add that it has to be nutritious to plants, no hormones or other drugs allowed. If you are COVID-19 positive, your poo is toxic as you might shed the virus in it. You see, the more contaminated and messed up your poo is, the more it requires several stages of treatments before it could be fed to plants. Therefore, the poo business is a picky one. Buying poos from drunks is not advisable to avoid intoxicating the plants! And neither is buying poos from drug addicts encouraged, the plants might start hallucinating!
To add to the ever popularity of poo, there is an emerging technology called faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), which involves introducing screened poo from a donor to a recipient either by colonoscopy, or gavage or nasojejunal or simply packaging the poo in tablet format. Either way, FMT is making headways in the treatment of recurrent diarrhoea caused by the bacterium, Clostridium difficile, cancer therapy, amelioration of cognitive decline in the elderly, and is even assisting in the fight against ageing!
Therefore, there is a killing to be made in the poo business. With this tantalising prospect in mind, I attended a business workshop recently and we were asked to come up with ideas about starting a new business. I chose the poo business with the apt name “Poos ‘R’ Us”, but the facilitator failed me. He said that the business plan stinks! Doh?! It was a poo business, it should stink! Undeterred, I started a small poo company but needed more capital to enable me to compete with the big players in the poo business. I approached the Dow Jones to list the business in order to raise the needed capital by the issuance of shares, they told me that my business was crap and refused to list it. Hello?! Of course, my business was crap, hence the name, Poos ‘R’ Us! Not to be discouraged, I approached FTSE but was told unambiguously that my business was shit! Some people are just plain stupid! I knew that my business was shit, it said so on the title, Poos ‘R’ Us, remember?!
I approached my bank manager for a start-up loan, but he said that my plan was a load of shit! I am in the shit business, genius! I deal in shits, loads of them! I asked my friend to partner me in the business, but he said that the business proposal smells and as such he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Gee! It is a poo business, it should smell! I told my wife about my business disappointments and asked her if we could invest our savings in my poo business. But she just laughed in my face and told me that I have shit for a brain! Tell me something I didn’t know already! I told her that I think of nothing else all day long but my shit business and as such my brain is nothing but shit! She raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness like a priest admitting defeat after a difficult and unsuccessful exorcism, and then muttered under her breath, “He is just full of crap. My mother was right, I shouldn’t have married him, there is nothing inside his brain but crap!” Tell me something else, Einstein! I am crap. I live and breathe crap. Crap is my business, for crying out loud. It says so on my business card, Poos R’ Us!
I went to the bank of mum-and-dad for a loan but philosophically speaking, my parents went biblical on me: “A greater and shittier idea has no one ever heard of than that one should devote his time and resources into your shit business!” I asked my brother to help me out by investing in my business, but he told me not to bullshit him. I assured him that if the shit ever hit the fan, that I was prepared to re-mortgage my house to refund him his money, but he shook his fist at me and told me to go away with my crap. I detailed my business plan to my sister and asked her to invest, but she called it a horseshit! I told her no, it was good old fashioned human shit business I was talking about, not horse shit, though I have plans to branch into other types of shits like horse shit and bull shit. But she said I was talking horse manure. I insisted it was human poo I was talking about. She frowned her face and told me not to shit on her with my crap!
I went back to the drawing board and just to make my business a bit savvier than it were before, I approached my lawyer for advice, he said that the business plan was full of shit! I pointed out to him that it was what my business was all about, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He said that I shouldn’t crap on his intelligence with my shitty idea! I went to my accountant, and he told me pointedly that the business was crap! I simply gave up.
How could people keep telling me that my business was crap when I already knew it was crap. Hello?! It is called Poos ‘R’ Us for a reason. Any help, folks? Seriously, I need you guys to invest in my shit business. I know, it is a shitty idea, but shit is money, and you are going to make shit loads of money! Oh, crap! A bird has just crapped on me while sitting under a tree in my garden writing this piece, and that has given me another crappier idea. Bird poo! Yes, bird poo is huge in science, especially in tracing the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes as indexes of antibiotics abuse in a given population. We shall talk about bird poo later. But for now, I need you to invest in my poo business! Don’t shake your head and call it crap! I already knew that the business was crap, hence the name, Poos R’ Us!
N/B: Culled from “Jokes and Short Stories to Brighten Your Day” by Dr Gabriel Uguru; In preparation.
Nice one