• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Columbia Expands, Gentrifies Outer Space
• Spectator Artist Plagiarizes Fed's Ben Schwartz
• Farewell from Feditrix Kate
• Media Decency Campaign Attacks Stern
• EC Fire Alarms Pester, Endanger Students
• Don't Get Impregnated By Young Republicans
• Letters to the Feditor
• Sci-Fi Poo Theory
• Sports Beer: Not Good For Sports
• Butler: The Engineering Frontier
• Unarians Help You Go To Space Life
• Totally Fab New Planet Suggestions
• Bush and Cheney's Excellent Adventure
• Fed Student's Guide To Meningitis
• Columbia Girls LOVE Barnard Prez Schapiro
• Funny Comic #543: Adventures of Ice Bitch
• Able & Baker: Monkeys in Space
• Honoring Jesse Strouth- A Highly Derivative Cartoon
• They Watch

Like most of my groundbreaking theories, this one started with VH1. In the conference room of the Environmental Health & Radiation Safety office where I work, a big plasma screen TV provides lunch break entertainment. One day, as I cleared away coworkers' Hot Pocket wrappers to make space for a gigantic hole-punching machine (my work is crucial), I noticed the TV was tuned to VH1, MTV's older, less popular cousin, chock-full of older, less popular celebrities and their older, less popular cousins.

I can't stand VH1. I want to fight it in a fight. It's like a filter above a garbage can. A bunch of jackass E-list celebrities spin through lame special after lame special, desperately trying to avoid total, Fred Savage-esque oblivion, insisting that their names be accompanied by "TV personality" or "comedian" or the absolute worst, "media gadfly." The trans-VH1 ubiquity of those three morons from the Bare-Naked Ladies, those parasitic, greasy, lame-Puff Daddy-joke-making fucks, makes me want to drink all the plasma out of the TV and beast-morph into a dragon to flame-ify those bastards. And then some girl from "As the Days of Our World Turns to My Children" always comes on and states some completely obvious piece of information, like "Britney Spears, she's always dancing! Gotta love it!" Wow, thanks for your sharp insights. I really needed some 32 year-old soap star's airheaded elocution to interrupt the boob footage, so I could understand its cultural significance.

Anyway, VH1 was playing that "Hottest Hotties" show, and I got to wondering: Do people ever think about their favorite hottie celebrities using the bathroom? Does the mental image of Enrique Iglesias taking a huge corn-filled dump ever drift into his fans' heads? I'm not trying to be vulgar-I really do wonder if we ever think of celebrities as real people who do real people things like pick their noses, smell their pits, and poop once a day. They can't get spa enemas every day, people. You think X-Tina has ever clogged the blue-liquid toilet on her private jet? You don't-and that's the problem.

While doing some reading later that night, I was struck by a variation on the thought: characters in most fiction stories also aren't allowed to poop. Authors and readers (except for me because I'm better) completely overlook the biological needs of stories' made-up populations. Maybe Charles Bukowski writes about peeing on a dog's corpse once in a while, but that's about it. Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy is apparently too proud to "drop his kids off in the moat" when need be. I thought that was unrealistic.

At work the next day I had to make a Powerpoint slideshow about death from radiation. Transcribing a written safety manual, I learned that death from a high dosage of radiation is always preceded by loss of bowel control. This got me thinking that radiation machinery might have been invented primarily for the purposes of pulling pranks on innocent people, causing them to soil themselves at hilariously innoportune moments. Only after the fact did they realize the other uses of their Poo-Ray, like for bombs and other cool stuff.

Then the science theory and the fiction theory made a baby, a revolutionary theory uniting literature, science, and ignorance of poo. What if fiction without pooping characters is all just science fiction? Perhaps Jane Austen imagined "Pride and Prejudice" taking place in a world much like her own but changed in one significant way: the elimination of the need to eliminate waste. A survey of classic literature demonstrates the universality of this fictional construct: Achilles, King Lear, Huck and Jim, the Spartans at Thermopylae-no pooing whatsoever, ad infinitum. I've formulated a paradigmatic literary perspective: the overwhelming majority of authors imagine a world without defecation, and are therefore science fiction authors. Maybe these nerds think we'll develop some sort of advanced respiration methods, like we'll be able to sweat out our feces and beam them into the Sun, so toilets will fade into obsolescence or something. Wow, what geeks.