A Cup for your Pup: Friday Weird Science Companion Post

Friday, 18 June 2010 02:04 The Thoughtful Animal

Once upon a Thursday night, blog bff Scicurious asked a particular blogger named Jason if he had access to a paper titled, Contraceptive efficacy of polyester-induced azoospermia in normal men. "I certainly hope so," he said. And so he logged in to his university's library proxy website, and searched for the paper.

She said, "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me you have access to this article" and then "it's about ball sacks I MUST HAVE IT." As it happens, he did have institutional access. So Jason downloaded it. It was a rather large file, so it took a little while for him to upload it to his Gmail so that he could send it to her. While it was uploading, he began to read the abstract. He said to his friend, "where do you FIND these things" and then, "this (NSFW) picture is seriously disturbing." Sci, being impatient, implored, "SEND IT SEND IT SENT IT. MUST SEEEEE. WANTTTT."

You see, this was no ordinary scientific paper. This was an academic paper which described an experimental method for male contraception. You wonder, "what was this method?" They created little polyester sacks into which hung the scrotums (plural, scrota?) which belonged to these poor gentlemen. For twelve whole months. Sounds pretty terrible to me. Being generally hilarious, our hero Jason titled the file "slinging balls for science for twelve months what the [redacted] were they thinking.pdf" and sent it off. Then our hero and heroine spent the better part of half an hour coming up with rhymes that would surely make Dr. Seuss blush: A recepticle for your testicle. A tote for your scrote. A sling for your thing. A thong for your dong. A sock for your cock... (the last one was his. the rest are Sci's rhymes. she is admittedly better at this game than he is).

Dear Sci went off to blog about the paper, and Jason decided to give the paper a read; it wasn't too long, after all, only twelve pages.

So go read Sci's post about this paper. And then come back here. I'll wait.

And then, in the middle of page two, came the surprise.

Figure 1: "A recent study has shown that dogs, while wearing polyester underpants, had a diminished sperm count which was reversible when the pants were removed. In contrast, dogs wearing cotton pants showed insignificant semen changes." Click to enlarge (heh).

And so I said to myself (yeah, I'll switch between third person and first person when I want to, k?) "they did this with DOGS?!!??!! i MUST blog this." And I said to Sci, "ooh! i wanna blog the dog one!!!" Sci said to me, "blog as a companion piece!!!"

And, well, here we are. Underwear for your dog. A cup for your pup. A pouch for your pooch.