Culture: Celebrity
Celebrity Breath   (+21, -2)  [vote for, against]
Donate breath for charity

Ask a number of well known personalities to blow up a few balloons then sell them as 'Celebrity Breath.'
-- benfrost, Feb 07 2005

(?) Et Tu, Babe http://www.unc.edu/.../bkrvw/10-10-97.HTM
Abraham Lincoln's morning breath [jaksplat, Feb 07 2005]

The Odd Book of Data http://www.antiqboo...boox/btb/4130.shtml
Interesting compendium of odd info ca. 1965 [csea, Nov 10 2005]

5 Ceasar Atoms? http://www.globalch...es/samson/aerosols/
Conflict with [UB]'s anno [5th Earth, Nov 11 2005]

Because the number of atoms in a single breath is so much more than the number of breath-sized units of air there are in the Earth's atmosphere, it's fairly easy to show with basic probability that any given breath you take contains a few atoms of, for example, Jesus's last breath.
The same logic will show that, assuming sufficient mixing of the atmosphere, any given breath you take also contains atoms previously inhaled by thouands of celebrities.

A more exclusive service would be to capture a celebrity's dying breath in it's entirety - "Celebrity Death Breath".
-- hippo, Feb 07 2005


celebrity farts then
-- benfrost, Feb 07 2005


touché, mon ami!
-- Jinbish, Feb 07 2005


Absolutely bound to happen at some point on this ridiculous ball of a planet. Somebody out there is probably already trying to sell Britney's breath.
-- k_sra, Feb 07 2005


Someone once hung around near the drains outside Kate Bush's house, attempting to collect and bottle her used bathwater.
-- hippo, Feb 07 2005


I once read that with each breath a person breathes roughly 200,000 molecules that Leonardo daVinci breathed. I wonder if the same is true for Hitler? Or Britney?

Maybe the more recent people haven't as wide a distribution yet as the oldies.
-- bristolz, Feb 07 2005


Indeed. Also, there's water...
-- bristolz, Feb 07 2005


There is the _whole_ soul thing ... in essence, what's mine is mine and dies with me. You will eventually use some oxygen and it will never be used by you or anyone else as oxygen again, unless you are part plant.
-- reensure, Feb 07 2005


So, my soul consumes oxygen? What if I happen to have an alternative fuels soul that consumes cooking oil instead?
-- bristolz, Feb 07 2005


Perhaps global warming isn't caused by an abundance of CO2, but by all of us humans consuming O2. Is that a real religion, [re], or did you just make it up?
-- Worldgineer, Feb 07 2005


I guess there's quite a bit of Queen Mary floating about, then.
-- spacer, Feb 08 2005


Each breath is what I read. It was in a book I read in my childhood. I can't remember the book title nor the subject but that passage fired my imagination and has stuck with me.
-- bristolz, Feb 08 2005


So that’s where your artistic ability comes from. I’ll have to give that a try.

<breathes deep - thinks of Leonardo>
<breathes deeper - feels a wave of artistic ability coming on>
<breathes deeper still - begins seeing spots>
<bre... woah, this is going to be a dark painting. *thud*
-- Shz, Feb 08 2005


Bravo!

I'll paint you a mona lisa!

Chances are, it'll contain a molecule that used to be part of da Vinci.

Of course, the chance may be small, but it is still a chance, no?
-- DesertFox, Feb 08 2005


Does a litre of air really have an order of magnatude fewer molecules than an ideal gas? Assuming one mol of molecules for one litre of air, I calculate he breathed 2.47x10^31 molecules.
-- Aq_Bi, Feb 08 2005


You could mix the balloon breaths together for added marketability. Britney and Hitler would be awesome, but I fear too few Nazi balloons survived WW2. Maybe Saddam Hussein and Paris Hilton exhalations or even mixing farts and breaths, but this could get messy.
-- benfrost, Feb 08 2005


UB - I *think* your probability is a bit simplistic. Using your numbers, the odds that a given molecule was breathed by LdV is 10^14 (and this assumes that LdV never breathed the same molecule twice). Then the probability that a given breath contains at least one molecule breathed by LdV is (approximating some of your values):

1-((1-(1/10^14))^(10^22))
-- hippo, Feb 08 2005


Artist's Breath 1960 by Piero Manzoni Piece of work at Tate Modern - worth having a look at. A stunning piece of work in my humble opninion, but he is more widely known for notoriously packaging up pieces of his shit - Merda d'artista
-- xenzag, Nov 10 2005


How much would Christopher Eccleston's breath be worth?
-- nineteenthly, Nov 10 2005


[bristolz] I think I read the same book, see [link]
-- csea, Nov 10 2005


Combine Manzoni's Artists Breath and canned shit packaged for the consumers of today and you WOULD get celebrity farts. I think it would be popular to save them and not partake-- like no one opened Manzoni's shit (because it was just too darn precious) and it just burst on its own. But with celebrity farts it would be like: What vintage is it? All the more precious for a 1991 Brad Pitt fart when he wasn't that famous yet. They defiantly would have to be very famous in order to collect their fart and willingly take part in smelling it. There is the phenomenon of farting under the bed covers and then going under for a smell--if a person has created the fart they actually want to smell it. Or they are comfortable with the smell, like I made that little odor and I'm marking the air around me as my territory. No one enjoys in the slightest smelling other people's farts. So the celebrity fart smelled willingly would be an attempt at getting a sensory answer to the cliched celeb quesitons "what would it be like if I were X celebrity" and "what is X celebrity really like" at a moment when the celebrity is hopefully away from all the glamour and lights and sufficiently acting like themselves enough in order to fart, smell it, and then think--hey that's me.
-- penka45, Nov 11 2005


Personally I disagree about the "0.5 L" breath value. I just tested with a plastic bag, and a casual breath for me is closer to a full liter. And I have lung problems. [edit] Found a website that does the calcs. They claim, on average, 5 molcules wtih each breath that were in Ceasar's /last breath alone/, nevermind how many he breathed in a lifetime. A lot more likely than 9*10^14:1 against.
-- 5th Earth, Nov 11 2005


penka45 - would they then be able to say "I recognise that farticular smell" ?
-- xenzag, Nov 11 2005



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