Blame It on the Dog Read Online Free Page A

from a then-popular expression for sex or money canonized by Eddie Cantor’s 1928 hit record, “Makin’ Whoopee.” Suddenly, the little fart bag captured the public’s fancy. It was this very cushion that Sam Adams had unwisely rejected a couple of years earlier.
    As you might expect, the original JEM Whoopee Cushion is fairly rare and valuable today. Collector Stan Timm, who owns one, said recently that the imprint on his 1932 cushion is “quite striking, being a Scottish kilt-clad boy wearing boots with spurs and carrying a rifle. He is also carrying a mischievous smile.” This same picture appeared that year in the Johnson Smith novelty catalog. Says Timm, “This was the first time they advertised the Whoopee Cushion and they offered it in two versions—the economy model for 25 cents and the deluxe model for $1.25. We believe the one we have is the deluxe version because instead of just rubber it is made of a rubber-impregnated fabric. If you’re wondering, it no longer works. The mouth is brittle and the rest is stuck together.”
    Now let’s fast-forward half a century to a night in 1990 when the idea of bringing barnyard fart technology into the space age sprung into the dreaming brain of a Del Ray Beach, Florida, man named Fred Jarow. “I woke up in the middle of the night,” he said later. “I was laughing, but I didn’t know why. I’m not sure that I wasn’t farting at the same time.”
    What the world needed, his subconscious had whispered into his inner ear, was a fart machine to replace the Whoopee Cushion. Now that computer chips could reproduce any sound you wanted, why wait for an unsuspecting victim to sit down on a bag of air? Why not set an electronic, remote-controlled booby trap? Jarow himself was in the textile manufacturing business and knew next to nothing about electronics, so he turned to a friend, John Blackman, for help in developing his vision. They came up with a sleek, black, plastic device with a chip that could generate four different fart sounds triggered from twenty feet away, by someone in the next room or outside a window. Some poor slob is sitting there surrounded by his family or a group of stuffy folks he has to impress, and suddenly all these farts are rip-roaring from beneath his part of the table. Oh what fun! Though Jarow and Blackman initially called their invention theElectronic Whoopee Cushion, they settled on the more direct and precise Fart Machine.
    Jarow claims that the toughest part was coming up with just the right sounds. He says that he and Blackman holed up in a recording studio after ingesting plenty of cabbage and beans, but their farts didn’t have the proper gusto or audio frequency. They eventually turned to the synthesizer to create some electronic imitations. “Originally, we wanted to have a really long fart, but it sounded too much like a motorcycle,” Jarow told the
Village Voice
. “Shorter ones are much more realistic.”
    Like the Whoopee Cushion, the Fart Machine fit prankster sage Sam Adams’s idea of what makes a perfect prank item. In the June 1, 1946, edition of
The Saturday Evening Post
, Adams, then sixty-seven years old, said, “The whole basic principle of a good joke novelty is that it has to be easy and simple to work. If you have to go through a lot of complications to set the stage for the gag, the public will not go for your item. The best idea is to work with an ordinary everyday object that is around the house.
    “When I am fooling around with a new idea, I try to picture Mr. Average Man sitting around a cocktail lounge or in somebody’s house before their weekly game of poker, and I try to ask myself if this new item will go in that sort of group; so if Person A pulls the gag on Person B, Person B will get a kick out of waiting for Person C to walk in and get the surprise of his life.”
    In 1999, according to the
Village Voice
, the S.S. Adams Company announced that sales of their electronic Fart Machine had gone over