Consider flatulence.
You have no choice at the latest Denver Museum of Nature & Science exhibit. It’s called Grossology. The two experts I asked to accompany me to a preview on Friday say the name fits.
Nine-year-old Claudia Rico and 12-year-old Bubba Newton are as fascinated with the functions of the human body as the next kid. But even they had to occasionally wrinkle their noses.
This did not, however, stop the pair of Aurora students from playing Gas Attack pinball that measured the gas-passing potential of such foods as cheese, Brussels sprouts and onions. They gamely pushed every button and sniffed every scent at the Body Odor display that let them compare smells from the mouth, the feet and … well, you know.
They manipulated a mechanism that released air pressure in a simulated cacophony of broken wind. Bubba, a sixth-grader at North Middle School, got the machine to rip off a loud 10-second squeal. He doubled over giggling. Volume and length with no smell – it didn’t get any better than that.
Claudia, a fourth-grader at Paris Elementary, bailed out of a digestive-tract display where she had inserted her head on a fake body to watch an animated video of food passing from first bite to … well, you know.
She also was slightly undone by a giant piece of anthropomorphized plumbing that explained, “You won’t run out of snot until you run out of blood.”
“Let’s go, please,” she implored as a huge wad of green mucous dangled precariously from the character’s faucet/schnoz.
Still, like Bubba, Claudia enjoyed a rousing round of “Urine: the Game” wherein she used a video monitor to snatch waste material out of the body and route it into the urinary tract.
“There’s so much you have to get out of your body,” Bubba said, after finishing his turn. “The video game actually helped me learn. It’s like seeing things under a microscope.”
He and Claudia teamed up happily on the “barf machine” until their arms ached. Claudia pumped the lever that churned the clear contents of a Plexiglas stomach.
“I got a trickle,” she said. “Come on.”
Bubba spun the “esophagus wheel” with all his might. Soon Claudia had a bubbling brew in the gut, while Bubba produced contractions in the passage from stomach to mouth. The resulting projectile vomit rivaled Linda Blair’s pea green spectacle in the “The Exorcist.”
The Grossology show, which opens Friday, is a virtual interactive Hall of Fame for understanding the “gross” functions of our bodies. We all wonder how we work. But most of us are too embarrassed to ask. For the next few months, that won’t be an issue at the Museum of Nature & Science. Not when a docent with a “Scat Match” cart meets you at the front door of the exhibit. Scatology, she explains with no prompting, is the study of animal feces. Then she offers a chance to identify samples of doo-doo.
Bubba picked out the Canada goose dung like a champ. Claudia couldn’t bear to touch the glass-encased samples.
My experts later named Scat Match as the grossest thing in the Grossology display. This was quite a distinction, as it had to beat out “Urine: the Game,” the do-it-yourself wind-breaker, a walk-in nose, a crawl-through colon AND an exhibit titled simply, “Booger, Booger.”
You know what they say: Art is in the eye of the beholder.
What you’ll behold at the Grossology exhibit will certainly challenge that notion.
As for my experts, I rewarded them for a job well done with a trip to the Grossology gift shop. They played with “Bloody Putty,” flashing rubber eyeballs and a latex nose that projected snot when squeezed. Claudia finally took the broad academic approach and picked a book called “Your Body in Extreme 3-D.” Bubba, meanwhile, went for what any self-respecting sixth-grade boy would: A remote-control whoopee cushion.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
