Great topical article, daph! And you're right--fantasy becomes reality a la the Dune stillsuit.

yellowy oxygen yum *takes a deep breath*

NASA definately has some interestingly minded people on it's staff, I don't believe I would have ever thought to breathe my pee.

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I poop because I am...I am because I poop.

When I was a kid we used to say "you never know with yellow snow"
I guess the appropriate phrase now is "breath with care when it's yellow air"

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Number One . . . I order you to take a number two.

Why not go all the way and squeeze the water out of the feces, too? I lose so much water out of my rear end, you would be breathing brown air in the space station with me.

"...The Big Wiper (1524) -- 07.19.2006
'Great topical article, daph! And you're right--fantasy becomes reality a la the Dune stillsuit'..."

TBW, that's exactly what I thought as soon as I started reading! (Weird, weird story was "Dune"--I never got through the 3rd book).

Good report, Daph! Thanks for the flashbacks; I remember Tang well.
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Mmmm...Fiber: Nature's Broom!

__Do farts contain enogh oxygen to sustain life?_If so they should invent a sort of "rebreather" kind of an ass to mouth apparatus... _NASA could then stand for "Nasty Anal Space Air"___
owlbeback

My mother started buying Tang when it first came out and mixed it up for my brother and me for breakfast every morning. We liked it mostly because the 'astronauts drank it,' but looking back on it, I realize that it really wasn't all that great.

The sugar content in it tended to sink to the bottom and the orange flavoring stayed near the top. Thus, the 'tang' part, I guess. It made you pucker (mouth) at first, then it was way too sweet when you got to the bottom.

My mom bought tang for us too. My little brother and I liked it so much, that my we ended up getting the generic tang. I guess that my old man couldn't afford our tang habit. Didn't matter though, it tasted as good as the brand name stuff. Actually, I got to the point where I would just spoon it out and eat it plain, all pucker-mouthed and orange. When it got to that point, my mom stopped buying it altogether.

"...Phillip DeCrapper (39) -- 07.19.2006
'I got to the point where I would just spoon it out and eat it plain, all pucker-mouthed and orange...'"

OMG! I remember doing that, too! It was like an orange version of those Fun Dip candy pouches that you got from the ice cream man! I wonder if astronauts ever ate a spoonful of Tang just for the hell of it.

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Mmmm...Fiber: Nature's Broom!

I'm sure they must have, I mean they're geniuses, and I'm no slouch myself.

Thank you Big Wiper. It's nice to get a compliment from a bona fide writer!

So.....I wasn't the only one who used to eat it like candy. One couldn't do that with Kool Aid, because the Kool Aid people didn't put sugar in it. No wonder it was only 12 cents a packet. You had to supply all the sugar.

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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Shit. turd banned it, I meant to give you a great comment for that NASA comment. I think I lamed it instead by mistake.

Can some other moderator give him a great for me? I thought that was pretty funny.

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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

My grandmother used to mix Tang and instant tea, and drink it hot. I think she called it "Russian Tea."

These days, if I get a really bad sore throat, on the occasions when Jack Daniels is not an option (like when I have to go to work), I mix up instant tea and the powdered Country Time lemonade, and drink that hot.

It works even better if you take a Lortab with it.

"...The Dumpster (2073) -- 07.19.2006
'My grandmother used to mix Tang and instant tea, and drink it hot. I think she called it "Russian Tea."'..."

Dumpster, growing up, many a Mother's Day or Christmas, our Sunday School class made "Friendship Tea" with those ingredients. I forgot about that! I still have a recipe for it, and this version does indeed contain Country Time Lemonade as well as the tea and Tang. Can you say "Sugar Rush"? :)
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Mmmm...Fiber: Nature's Broom!

I have Russian tea on the house, and it does have orange flavor. It's strong and sweet and very good.

Someday I'd like to have one of those little tea sets to accompany it.

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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Excellent report Daphne. Russian tea you say, care to borrow my samovar or expanded edition of Das Kapital....Tovarich?

A little birdy told me never to borrow Bunga's samovar under any circumstances.
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Mmmm...Fiber: Nature's Broom!

__Daphne...Glad you liked the NASA comment. I remember Tang too we used to take it camping and used it at home also, I wonder if they still sell it?_____
owlbeback

I really thought this article would be about the astronauts drinking their own pee. That's gross. Really funny title, by the way.

I drank Tang once when I was in 11th grade. I always used to mix up lemonade or something and take it to school in the morning. One day I ran out and all that was left was Tang, which the rest of my family members drank but I had never tried. Figuring it couldn't be all that bad, I mixed some into my water and off to school I went.

I think during first or second period I started feeling a bit sick. All of a sudden, I burped a little and puked all over my clothes. Scheisse! I ran to the bathroom and blew chunks a little bit more. Suck. Thankfully I had some gym clothes to wear the rest of the day. I have never randomly puked like that. Since that day I have been Tang-free. I don't know if the Tang had any artificial sweetener in it because that stuff always fucks me up.

Does anyone remember something called Lik'M'Aide? It came in little packets in flavors like grape and orange, and it was like Kool-Aid, but it had sugar in it, along with the sour crystals.

You poured it out in the palm of your hand and licked the crystals up, thus giving you a colored palm and a colored tongue. We loved it as kids in the 'Fifties!

I do remember that and I was a kid in the 80's. It was pretty damn tasty.

And one last indulgence from my childhood: candy lipstick. Yes. There was this little family grocery store down the street, owned by our next door neighbors. My brother and I and the two daughters of the owners would go down there on Saturdays and get tubes of free candy lipstick to eat.

I think it tasted like cherry. God knows what it was made out of, but it had a kind of greasy texture. Uh, on second thought, it's probably best I don't know what it was made out of. Sheep fat or something. It was probably like eating a stick of butter.

Remember wax lips, TBW? And candy/bubble gum cigarettes?

GoGirlie and her friend bought candy cigarettes from the ice cream man one time (she was about 8), and she got the little candle-lighter thingy, and she and the friend sat on our porch, "smoking" the cigarettes. A neighbor called us to tattle, and my husband went out there and read her the riot act. I couldn't, because I was in the kitchen, helplessly laughing, with the confiscated candy, seeing if one could, indeed, smoke them. Not really. But they did smell and taste like toasted marshmallows!
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Mmmm...Fiber: Nature's Broom!

Yep. Wax lips made us laugh, and then we chewed them up. Ugh. The candy cigarettes were like chalk. The things you eat as a child.

What about those little wax bottles that have juice inside? I like those. There are very few places to get them anymore.

Nowadays there are cigarettes in brightly colored packages that are candy flavored. So now you can grow up eating candy cigarettes, then when you are grown you can smoke cigarettes that taste like candy. So weird.

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"Double the flush, double the fun" --The Amazing Anus

Wow! I wish I could breathe MY pee! I think that would be SO cool!
Poop on!

-Poopgirl

__I wish you hadn't brought up the wax lips, now i have a craving for Them. If I remember right they were either black or red colored...That reminds me of feeding the dog some of my red licorice...The next day my mom spied the dogs poo and thought it was bleeding internally...Those little wax bottles with the juice inside are fantastic! when they were empty you could smash them around a string and have a candle..if you put the candle inside a beach whistle you'd have decorative lighting....____
"show that turd who's boss"

Yeah, I'm getting better at the title thing.

I was very big on the little wax bottles filled with juice. Ah I can still taste them now.

My personal concession stand favorite were swedish fish and super long thin strings of red licorice. We called them shoelace licorice. Yummy cherry. Thing Two likes the Lik'M Aid thing, but the one she gets is called Fun Dip or something. 2 packets of stuff and this white dipper that one dips after getting it wet. What a mess. It gets everywhere, the carpet, the chairs, the dog (Gator likes it) and it makes a sticky film. But she likes how it colors her tongue.

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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

__It seems like around the time Tang came out, "Pez" candy was a hot item too, I remember experimenting with pez and coke while in the backseat of my parents VW bug, I dropped a couple pez pellets into my Coke (This was in the day of glass coke bottles), This particular experiment went horribly awry...The Pez tabs produced a volcanic reaction with the Coke, And I ended up spewing about ten ounces of the sticky fluid all over myself and the interior of the VW bug, My parents were less than pleased, And as we were on a weekend outing about 100 miles from home, I had to endure the rest of that summer day and the drive home that evening basted in my own botched attempt at rocket scientry____
"show that turd who's boss"

Don't care if I'm 37. I'm so doing that experiment this week.

Phillup, I'm curious, when you say generic Tang, do you mean the store brand or that actual white and black label generic stuff? Do you remember the original generic store items? It was like the comic book world meshed with ours.

I used to stand in D'Onofrio's in Hermitage, PA, and oggle at the generic coffee. It said "COFFEE" and I thought "no shit". Odd. Anyhoo, which type of generic was it?
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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Daphne, I think that it must have just been the store brand. I remember the black and white labels, they were great. Did you ever see the generic, black and white boxes of government cheese. My grandpa was a WWII veteran, and he got this stuff with his social security. I guess he thought that it was his duty to eat it. It was pretty bad, I remember we would put slices of it on crackers, and then bite into it. Ha Ha, you would crunch right through the crackers, and be left with a rock-hard piece of unbroken cheese. Classic.

Hehehe. Good to know I'm not the only one who remembers these things with humor.

We had to eat tons of that cheese in our school lunches. It was weird tasting cold but not to bad melted.
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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

I hear ya, definately fun to remember stuff like that. Great piece daphne.

The military is already recycling pee pee. Here is Dave Barry's take on it.

"Army rations rehydrated by urine
19:00 21 July 2004

Would you eat food cooked in your own urine? Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

The ration comes in a pouch containing a filter that removes 99.9 per cent of bacteria and most toxic chemicals from the water used to rehydrate it, according to the Combat Feeding Directorate, part of the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts. This is the same organisation that created the "indestructible sandwich" that will stay fresh for three years (New Scientist print edition, 10 April 2002).

The aim is to reduce the amount of water soldiers need to carry. One day's food supply of three meals, weighs 3.5 kilograms but that can be reduced to about 0.4 kilograms with the dehydrated pouches, says spokeswoman Diane Wood.

The pouch - containing chicken and rice initially - relies on osmosis to filter the water or urine. When two solutions of different concentrations are separated by a semipermeable membrane, with gaps that allow only water molecules to pass through, the water is drawn to the more concentrated side.

Hungry soldier
The membranes are made of thin sheets of a cellulose-based plastic, with gaps between the fibres that are just 0.5 nanometres across, too small for bacteria to pass through.

A hungry soldier pours dirty water into one end of a foil sachet containing two inner pouches separated by the membrane. The water seeps through the membrane into the dehydrated food on the other side. As it dissolves large molecules in the food, it creates a very high concentration solution. The osmotic pressure created then draws more water through the membrane.

Hydration Technology of Albany, Oregon, which makes the membrane, says soldiers should only use urine in an absolute emergency because the membrane is too coarse to filter out urea.

The body will not find this toxic over the short term, says Ed Beaudry, an engineer with HTI, but rehydrating food this way in the long term would cause kidney damage."
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6185

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Sir SamDamnit!
The Emir of Crapistan