By Tim Sanders

In a June 10 Fox News article, reporter Cristina Corbin passed along some critical information. "Political activists planning protest rallies at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver," she said, "have their stomachs in knots over a rumor about a crowd control weapon - known as the ‘crap cannon’ - that might be unleashed against them."

Absolutely true.

The idea of an unleashed "crap cannon" immediately caused very unpleasant pictures to flicker across my mental movie screen. I imagined some poor Denver cop wearing a gas mask and rubber gloves loading the thing. Well, I obviously didn’t understand the concept.

But Ms. Corbin explained: "Also called ‘Brown Note,’ it is believed to be an infrasound frequency that debilitates a person by making [him] defecate involuntarily."

The theory is that ultra low frequency sounds can be fired at protesters through high tech acoustical cannons and make their bowels vibrate until they, scientifically speaking, poop their pants. According to Dr. Roger Schwenke, the acoustical expert who tested the theory on the Discovery Channel’s "Mythbusters" in 2004, none of his family members would stay in the same room with him after the episode was filmed.

But I am only kidding. "When we conducted the low frequency experiment for the Brown Note episode of Mythbusters," Dr. Schwenke said, " we tested a variety of low frequencies and no involuntary gastro-intestinal motility was caused." Hooray!

But Mark Cohen, co-founder of Re-create 68, a group of political activists organizing protest rallies and demonstrations for the Democratic Convention in Denver, wasn’t reassured by that particular episode of "Mythbusters". He thinks the Brown Note is a very real threat to him and his cohorts. "We know this weapon and weapons like it have been used at other large protests before," Cohen said.

Now I’ve never been a big fan of demonstrations. I had a college buddy, once, who demonstrated for several weeks one summer, but what he demonstrated were Kirby vacuum cleaners. His demonstrations never produced any sales, and he finally left the vacuum cleaner demonstrating business to drive one of those little three-wheeled ice cream trucks. That didn’t work out too well either, because the ice cream truck was unstable and rolled over on him while he was trying to outrun a kid on a skateboard. He broke all of his cones and his pelvis.

As to political demonstrations, the Re-create 68 people will undoubtedly be demonstrating against all the same old reliable evils Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale and the other loons demonstrated against in Chicago in 1968–capitalism, the police state, the war, large oil companies, carbon emissions, the Trilateral Commission, the electoral college, college in general, the whaling industry, the novel Moby Dick, the federal UFO coverup, the late Lyndon Johnson’s excessively large ears, Velveeta cheese and the escalating price of Boone’s Farm apple wine. Hey, in 1968 they accomplished a lot in the name of peace, love and harmony. Several hundred people got the living daylights beat out of them, cars were burned, bricks were thrown, windows were broken, graffiti was everywhere, Chicago was trashed, and Hubert Humphrey won his party’s nomination. Needless to say, many people still admire them for those outstanding accomplishments. Those guys were deep thinkers, and deep thoughts are never out of date.

So don’t ask me why, but the notion of all of these modern day intellectual giants waddling around the streets of Denver this August with what at first glance might appear to be a load of potatoes in their pants struck me as funny.

But when I read some of the responses to that Fox News story on the Fox blog, it was obvious that nobody else found any humor there. The discussion was divided between those earnest idealogues who felt the Brown Note weapon would deprive them of their civil liberties and threaten free speech itself, and those dead serious folks who thought that those hairy, unkempt protestors should be sent somewhere, to some primitive land where they could learn firsthand what it was like to live in a country without that most important of all blessings guaranteed by our constitution–toilet paper. Some of them even quoted Jefferson and Franklin in their support of or opposition to the "crap cannon."

I do not know whether to believe Dr. Schwenke’s assertion that there’s no such thing as a "crap cannon," or to buy Mark Cohen’s theory that an army of oppressive storm troopers is just waiting, with weapons of mass evacuation all loaded up and ready to rumble in the direction of protestors in Denver. Maybe Cohen had bowel problems at previous demonstrations, and feels he just has to blame somebody. I am not an expert in those things, but I do have something which may shed light on the controversy. I have a dachshund.

Maggie is a fine dog, and you can believe me when I tell you that she is obedient and well trained, and is every bit as worm-free and housebroken as your average political activist. But despite all of that, when a helicopter lands on the airport runway behind our home, the deep bass THWUMP, THWUMP, THWUMP of those rotors reverberates through the house and makes Maggie reverberate, too. And more often than not, as she stands there in the kitchen, reverberating, Maggie poops. Of course she is only a dachshund, not a protester, so she doesn’t know enough to blame the corrupt capitalist system which gave society those nasty helicopters and the other modern evils which conspire to make perfectly innocent dogs poop on the kitchen floor. She’s never studied political science.

Proof that the Brown Note ultra low frequency bowel disruption system could work? Possibly. But I think Maggie would opt for a simpler explanation.

She’d blame the cat.