As Canada commemorates its 154th birthday and folks from sea-to-sea gather in celebration, we turn to the lighter side and consider, briefly, some techniques for concealing farts in public.
Kindly review this fabulous list of methods over at WikiHow. We’ve already busted the cropdusting myth, rendering much of the method 1.1 ‘get on the move’ a little less-than-useful. Methods 1.2 through 1.4 are the same as far as we’re concerned, and 1.5 is simply hilarious. We’re going to skip past method 2 entirely, ‘putting the blame elsewhere’ (’cause it’s mostly just mean, sometimes funny, though clearly effective).
Method 3, ‘using noise to hide a fart’, is of great interest to us at the ICEF. Attempting to live-mix your fart with ambient noise in your environment is a tried-and-true solution – though, as we have explored here and here, sometimes the fart (even if it’s fake) just doesn’t blend all that well. Now that we have a more sophisticated sense of what farts sound like, we may run some experiments to uncover the most optimal sound-pairings for masking farts. Surely the overall volume of the mask will be compelling, but it would be both more interesting and more useful to produce a list of everyday sounds found in public that get the job done.
In the meantime, you can practice ‘method 3’ using a free-to-play, Web-based, interactive training module located here.