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the world will beat a path to your door.
    Does that mean the old-fashioned, low-tech gimmicks and gimcracks are going the way of the rotary dial phone? Hardly. There’s still something fiendishly fun about making hands-on fart noises that appeals to the ten-year-old kid in most of us. Whoopee cushions continue to sell in all shapes and colors (even bright colors that would seem to subvert any stealthy prank). There’s even a self-inflating cushion, not to mention a Halloween whoopee cushion costume for the discerning trick-or-treater. And then there’s the little Fart Bag, which you simply squeeze with your fingers. “With just a bit of practice, you’ll be making sweet music with this hand-held Whoopee Cushion,” says the Johnson Smith Company catalog ad copy. Actor Leslie Nielsen has even demonstrated the Fart Bag’s impromptu qualities on TV for Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Rosie O’Donnell. But clearly, in a nation that loves to fight its wars from a thousand miles away, the idea of blasting farts under people’s chairs from the next room or the house next door has an undeniable appeal.
    In 2003, veteran television writer-director Daniel Chasin made a mockumentary about Fred Jarow’s invention of the Fart Machine, called
It’s Tough Being
Me, for Laughing Hyenas Films.
    When asked to reveal his own favorite Fart Machine prank, Jarow recalled hiding one in a Thanksgiving turkey. “I hit the remote just as the host began carving.”
    Now try doing
that
with an old Whoopee Cushion!

FAUX FARTS IN A FLASK
    I n January 2003, museum officials at the Dewa Roman Experience in Chester, England, created a stink when they added the appropriate redolence to their reconstruction of a Roman latrine. It was so realistic that several visiting schoolchildren became sick on the spot. “The smell was disgusting. It was like very strong boiled cabbage, sweet and sickly,” supervisor Christine Turner said in a BBC interview.
    The offending substance, called Flatulence, was a product of Dale Air ( www.daleair.com ), a company in Kirkham, England, that manufactures “themed aromas”—liquids atomized into the air by hidden dispensers. More specifically, Flatulence was concocted by Dale Air’s owner, Frank Knight, who works with a team of perfumers in a one-room lab filled with beakers of sundry smells and a bottling machine. Though he’s not a chemist by training, Mr. Knight has formulated the reek of a dead body for an English zoo, the smell of an Egyptian mummy for the City Museum of Stockholm, Sweden, and the odors of a swamp and a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s breath for an exhibit in London’s Natural History Museum. In all, he has made nearly three hundred different fragrances and stenches, including Granny’s Kitchen (which nursing home doctors sometimes use for stimulating the memories of Alzheimer’s patients), Havana Cigar, Sweaty Feet, Japanese Prisoner of War, and Old Drifter. But none of them sent people into woozy fits like the vapors of Flatulence.
    Though two of his other patented smells, Boiled Cabbage and Rotten Eggs, are part of the recipe, Knight is tight-lipped (and closed-nosed) about the panoply of Flatulence’s ingredients. And no wonder—he claims that it’s his biggest seller. Recently he added the odor to London’s Imperial War Museum’s exhibit on World War I trench warfare, where mere Mustard Gas apparently wasn’t offensive enough.
    “I won’t go near [Flatulence] without wearing a white coat and latex gloves,” Knight said recently. He made no mention of a gas mask.

AWARD-WINNING WIND-CUTTING FOR KIDS
    I n 2003, the Nickelodeon cable TV channel’s Kids’ Choice Awards show added a new category, “Favorite Fart in a Movie,” even though films had to have at least a relatively kid-friendly PG rating in order to qualify for entry. From early March to April 3 of that year, seventeen million kids voted at Nick.com ’s ballot page.
    Finally the big night—April 15—arrived for the