It's an unpredictable game of strategy, chance, and luck as players chase, race, jump, bump, slide - and more - to score. Be the first player to get all 4 pawns to home base to win. This family board game is a great choice for Family Game Night and makes a great gift for pet lovers and kids ages 6 and up. Pets Behaving Badly Board Game. That’s right, we’re talking poo. Match these droppings to their owners, then see if you can spot any in real life! (TIP: look in your garden shed for tiny signs of mice, under trees and beneath bushes.).
Cleaning Up Pigeon Poop
In 1964, when Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias initially heard those astonishing radio signals that would lead to the first confirmed proof for the Big Bang Theory, they wondered if they had made a mistake. Was the signal actually radio noise from nearby New York City? Was it the after-effects of a nuclear bomb test that had been conducted over the Pacific several years earlier? Could it be a signal from the Van Allen belts, those giant rings of charged radiation circling the Earth?
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Or maybe, the hissing sound was the result of a defect in their instrument?
“I had a lot of experience fixing practical problems in radio telescopes,” Robert Wilson now says. He and his wife Betsy Wilson still live in Holmdel, New Jersey, not far from hilltop where the tests were run. “We looked for anything in the instrument or in the environment that might be causing the excess antenna noise. Among things, we searched for radiation from the walls of the antenna, especially the throat, which is the small end of the horn. We constructed a whole new throat section and then tested the instrument with it.”
At one point, new suspects emerged. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued.
After a year of experiments, the scientists concluded that they’d detected the cosmic background radiation, an echo of the universe at a very early moment after its birth.
“We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else,” notes Dr. Wilson. “When an experiment goes wrong, it’s usually the best thing. The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. This was really the start of modern cosmology.” In fact, Wilson and Penzias were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for determining that the hiss they were hearing wasn't pigeon poop at all, but the faint whisper of the Big Bang, or the after glow that astronomers call the cosmic microwave background.
Visitors to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum have long been able to view an unassuming artifact of that Nobel Prize-winning discovery. On the first floor in the 'Exploring the Universe' gallery that metal trap built to capture the squatting pigeons, can be seen, along with some other instrumentation of that propitious moment 50 years ago. The pigeon trap is on loan from Robert Wilson.
Other artifacts survive. Arno Penzias, who’d come to the United States as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, sent the radio receiver and its calibration system to the Deutsches Museum of Munich, the city of his birth.
As for the giant horn antenna, it still stands tall on Holmdel Road, where it can be seen by the public.
On Thursday, February 20 at 7:30, Wilson will be joined in a panel discussion by cosmologist Alan Guth and astronomers Robert Kirshner and Avi Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the confirmation of the Big Bang Theory. Watch the discussion live on YouTube.
They're not for the easily offended. They're for the children of the easily offended.
Kids are endlessly entertained by their bodily functions. Why else would they practice burping on command and making fart noises with their armpits? Without the sense of shame most adults feel, they’re even free to compete who is the longest burper or furthest spitter. With kids already competing in the arena of grossness, it makes sense that game designers are churning out board games that make picking boogers, popping pimples, smelling farts, flinging poop, and other bodily functions a family affair. These 10 gross out family board games are not for the faint of stomach.
Pimple Pete
Pimple Pete is a plastic face with holes all over it. Rubber “pimples” go into the holes before gameplay begins and water goes into a rubber band-secured compartment on the back of the contraption. Kids take turns pulling the rubber pimples out of Pimple Pete’s face. Pull too hard at the wrong zit and the “Mega-Zit” on Pete’s nose will “pop,” causing the water to gush out. Despite its medical inaccuracy, Pimple Pete is the only game on this list endorsed by a real doctor, Dr. Sandra Lee, which only makes sense if you know that Dr. Lee is better known as the star of her own TV show: Dr. Pimple Popper.
Bean Boozled
Here we have a simple game from the Jelly Belly company that has the potential to actually gross you out (and not just offend you). Spin a wheel and you’ll land on a color. Select the color bean from the included jelly beans and eat it. You have a 50/50 shot of getting a gross flavor (e.g. barf, stinky socks) that looks identical to a delicious one (e.g. peach, Tutti-Fruitti). This is basically the game that Harry Potter plays every time he eats some Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans.
How To Clean Pigeon Poop
Gooey Louie
Pigeon Poop Food
To play the amazingly-named Gooey Louie you pull long, green “boogers”out of his substantial schnoz. Pick the wrong one and his “brains” pop out. The makers of Gooey Louie say that it will help your kids develop motor skills, but we think it’s just as likely that they develop a fear of nose-picking based on the belief that it might lead to a spontaneous lobotomy.
Stinky Pig Game
The eponymous swine is a ticking fart bomb. To play, press his stomach. He’ll start singing while you roll a die and pass the pig in the direction written on the top of the die. He keeps going around the circle until he makes a farting noise. If he does it while you’re holding him you get a token. The person with the fewest tokens wins. Smells (mercifully) not included.
Poop: The Game
This game is Uno with a scatalogical twist. Each turn you take is a chance for you to “poop” by playing a card that has a number on it onto the “toilet.” If the sum of the cards played on a “toilet” surpasses that toilet’s “clog number,” then you lose. Some cards also ask you to do things like make a fart noise in order to inject even more pooping fun into the proceedings.
Gas Out
Gas Out is also based on numbered cards, but it’s more about flatulence than feces. To play, you take turns passing Guster the Gas Cloud around. Guster has a button that you’ll need to press as many times as are printed on the card you play. The more you press on Guster, the higher the chance that he makes a farting noise, which means you lose. The last player to pass Guster without him farting wins.
Doggie Doo
The centerpiece of Doggie Doo is a plastic dog that “eats” pellets and “poops” them out when you squeeze his leash, which you must do based upon the number you land the spinner on. A plastic shovel for picking up the poop is included, which the makers of the game claim will teach responsibility. We’re skeptical of that, but we do think kids will giggle when they squeeze the leash enough for some poop to come out.
Who Tooted?
A figurine of a squatting man sits at the center of this game board, four whoopee cushion-shaped buttons wired to him. Each player has a controller, and if yours lights up you have to press the button. One of ten different fart sound effects plays. Then, it’s a guessing game as everyone has to guess whose button made the sound. The challenge of this game comes with not giggling when you press the button that makes the noise, a serious task for kids who think that farting is the funniest thing in the world.
Don’t Step In It
Take your poop outside with Don’t Step In It. To play, you lay out a mat and spin a wheel. The number you spin corresponds to the number of pieces of “poo,” an included claylike compound, that will be placed on the mat. Blindfolded, your job is to make your way across the mat without stepping on any of the poos, which look like dog piles thanks to the handy included mold. It’s literally a game about avoiding dog poop on the sidewalk, one of life’s inconveniences for adults and a source of great humor to kids eager to cackle at their “poop”-covered friends.
What’s That Smell?
Like Bean Boozled, this game gives you the chance to feel some real disgust. Unlike that game, this makes you do so with your nose instead of your tongue. It’s basically a guessing game with 48 mystery whiff cards, each of which is infused with its own specific scent. Start the time and start sniffing cards, recording your guesses on a scoresheet. The winner is the one who correctly identifies the most scents, which can be good (bubble gum) or bad (bad breath). The loser has to sniff a Whiff of Shame card of the winner’s choice, and there are no good options.