Mark Leyner - Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

By doing research we found reports of gonorrhea, toilet-seat dermatitis (infragluteal eczema), ascaris lumbricoides (roundworm), and enterobius vermicularis (pinworm). We know what you are thinking. After carefully washing our hands, we went back to our computers and came across more information.

Yes, occasionally you can catch something from a public toilet seat but this isn’t all that common. Work, on the other hand, may be worse for your health than toilet seats. A microbiologist at the University of Arizona, Charles Gerba, found that the typical office desk harbors around four hundred times more disease-causing bacteria than the average toilet seat. Here is the bacteria count:

telephone: 3,894 germs per square centimeter

keyboard: 511 germs per square centimeter

computer mouse: 260 germs per square centimeter

toilet seat: priceless

In our house, we call it the coffee alarm. Nothing is more reliable.

Coffee is definitely known to have a laxative effect. The caffeine in coffee speeds up every system in the body including the bowels. But when used excessively, caffeine can interfere with the bowels’ normal contractions and lead to constipation. Decaffeinated coffee does away with the caffeine but it still acts as a bowel irritant.

There is nothing better, for some, than the morning cup of joe and a cigarette, followed by the “morning constitutional.” Caffeinated drinks and nicotine have a laxative effect probably because they stimulate nerves that increase intestinal contraction, so if you had a block of cheese for dinner, this is a wonderful remedy.

If you want to have a cigarette and coffee for breakfast, make sure that you have a clean toilet nearby.

Sorry, pal, sometimes there just aren’t medical explanations for things. Nobody in medical school explained why you get the urge to urinate when you pour gas into the generator.

Going to bed at camp always felt like a risky time. The fear of having someone dip your hand in warm water and waking in a puddle was terrifying. There is no clear medical proof to this camp myth but there may be some science behind it. It is known that when someone has trouble urinating, a warm bath can sometimes make it easier to go, perhaps because of a reduction of pressure in the urethra with the increased body temperature during a bath. A study from Egypt called “Role of Warm Water Bath in Inducing Micturition in Postoperative Urinary Retention After Anorectal Operations” described this so-called thermo-sphincter reflex in 1993. We still don’t know if the hand dip works the same way, but it sure would be funny to picture an Egypitian in the laboratory sneaking up on sleeping volunteers to try to get them to wet their beds.

My junior high school biology teacher instilled fear in our young hearts when he told us that if we got into a car accident with a full bladder, the bladder could rupture. He was right. In general, a full bladder ruptures more easily than an empty bladder.

This doesn’t mean that your bladder will explode if you hold in your urine because your dad, husband, or brother won’t make a pit stop.

Our bodies have a nonvoluntary reflex mechanism to prevent our bladder from getting too distended, called the micturition reflex. When our bladder gets distended, there are stretch receptors in the bladder wall that let us know that it is time to go. As we all know, this is not the most comfortable sensation (if you wait too long). These sensory neurons cause contractions that can become strong enough to overcome the muscle tone holding the urethra shut and release all that urine.

Borborygmi: borbo•ryg•mi;noun, plural: rumbling sounds caused by gas moving through the intestines.

Certainly not a word learned in medical school, or that can be easily used in a sentence.

These rumbling sounds are a normal part of digestion. They are generated from muscular activity in the stomach and small intestine as the food, gas, and fluids are mixed together and pushed through the intestine. This squeezing of the muscular walls is called peristalsis. Many people associate these sounds with hunger because they are louder and echo more when the intestine is empty. Yum!

9:07A.M.

Gberg:Good morning.

Leyner:All the best to you and yours… give me one moment, just finishing an e-mail…

Gberg:I’m just making a coffee.

9:10A.M.

Leyner:OK…

Gberg:Coffee and pizza for breakfast.

9:15A.M.

Leyner:I had a Slim Jim and a fermented mare’s milk.

Gberg:It’s hard to find good fermented mare’s milk these days.

Leyner:People should drink the milk of as varied a miscellany of mammals as possible.

Gberg:Did you ever sample human breast milk back in the day?

Leyner:All those diverse antibodies are good for getting an immune system ready for the coming apocalyptic flu pandemic.

Gberg:I live in fear of the avian flu.

Leyner:No… never sample that mamma milk… I’ve tried to keep the birthing process and my sex life as far apart as possible.

Leyner:The whole avian flu thing seems like some Hollywood pitch… like Hitchcock’s The Birds and…

Gberg:So, my brother, we need to finish this bitch and move on to bigger and better things.

Leyner:What was that epidemic movie?

Gberg: Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman.

Leyner:What are doing right now… are we IMing about something we need to be IMing about?

Gberg:Not yet, really just getting loose.

Leyner:Otay.

Leyner:Tomorrow seems not so good to work… is Thursday any good?

Gberg:I am doing stretches at the same time.

Leyner:Tell me about Thursday.

Gberg:Can’t do Thursday. Working.

9:30A.M.

Leyner:One of those six-pack ab cover mags… that men should do the recumbent bike in the gym and not the regular one that puts pressure on the cajones and the tender perineum.

Gberg:There is something about bike riding that can damage the pudendal nerve and affect your front end lifter.

Gberg:The tender perineum — who wrote that? Fitzgerald?

Leyner:I love when you conflate urology and heavy machinery.

Leyner:“The Tender Perineum”… yes, yes… the unfinished F. Scott masterpiece…

Gberg:I never knew I could conflate.

Leyner:Poor slob never had the chance to work out the denouement…

Leyner:I heard some woman talking about morning erections the other day…

Gberg:Did you just spontaneously spell denouement correctly?