Farting Is Banned In American School
FOLLOW your nose to Camden-Rockport Middle School, USA, as featured in the pages of the Knox County Times, and pointed to by the great Glenn Reynolds.
School eighth-grade boys are taking farting to new heights and making a game of seeing “who can expel the loudest and grossest flatus”.
The rule is now that “intentional farting” earns the culprit a detention.
“Strange, but true, thanks to a bunch of 8th grade boys, intentional farting has been banned from CRMS,” says the school’s newsletter. “It started out as a funny joke and eventually turned into a game. This is the first rule at CRMS that prevents the use of natural bodily functions. The penalty for intentional farting is a detention, so keep it to yourself!”
Witnesses are assembled to talk of the farting. “They would do it in science class and other places,” says one Jordan Tyler. “It’s a natural occurrence and we all do it 16 times a day.”
Graduation Day
Sixteen times a day sounds like a lot. But farting is something the boys should graduate from. Adults rarely like to be blamed for farting, and find it is something best denied, or better yet passed over and ignored.
“He who denied it, supplied”, “Smelt it dealt it” and the reply “He who made the rhyme, made the crime”, are all phrases born of the anti-farting camp.
If the young scholars want a new theme, the Anorak recalls the effectiveness of humming softly in class via the mouth, or else, and this is a favourite, moving desks forward when the teacher’s back is turned.
Old Anorakians will recall the teacher Mir ‘Piggy’ Brown, who took exception to stepping over bags. Brown would wander around the class while tripping through history. Students would pass the time pushing bags into gaps between tables and so trapping Piggy in as small an area as possible.
Piggy has some kind of metal breakdown. We take no pleasure in it. Children can be cruel.
The student of (hyphenated) Camden-Rockport Middle School should think on…
February 6th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Everyone should see the short by Leonard Rossiter - Le Petomane - about a real man called Pujol at the turn of the century who was the highest paid performer at the Moulin Rouge, doing exactly this.
Google it, but you may have to buy a Beta copy as it is not on general release.
February 6th, 2008 at 8:03 am
you a fan of farting then peter???
February 6th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Thats just hilarious..feel sorry for whoever is sitting beside the “culprits” but its still hilarious..
February 9th, 2008 at 2:21 am
I hate to spoil the fun by saying that the story is a joke on the reporter who wrote it in small town Camden, Maine. Some 8th grade boys told her there was a “farting ban” and wrote that up in an unofficial newssheet they produce. So she wrote the story and put it online without fact checking. Then the national media picked it up. She had to “rewrite” the story. In her own fashion that is. She used the same lead and first four paragraphs. Then states that the school principal says there is no fart banning policy at Camden-Rockport Middle School. That’s the only bit of truth in the whole story. The fart ban story was picked up by national media, but oddly enough, the other newspaper in Camden, Maine, The Camden Herald, which has been around since 1870, didn’t.
July 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Farting is fun, a
July 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Farting is fun, and it should net be banned.