Look! A lamprey with our office manager’s molar jammed in its mouth.


Up until now, we’ve been taking sort of a limited approach to the Gross Jar. Each month we spend all of 20 minutes coming up with one thing to add, then pat our backs red for being such job-well-done doers. Last time we promised to step up the rigor and start putting the hard questions to our fetid little rotbottle, so here’s us doing that.

Everybody more or less knows what’s gone into the jar, but we have no real clue what those elements have melted together to become, besides absolutely fucking foul. To get to the bottom of this mystery, we went for a shop at our favorite science-class supplier to put together a little something we call “using the process of elimination.”

By taking the most retch-inducing denizens of the natural world—a foot-long tapeworm from a sheep, a tub of liver flukes from a sheep, and a lamprey the size of the average forearm—and seeing which one feels most at home in the deep-brown stew (read: doesn’t immediately dissolve), we should have a rough idea whether the murky innards of the jar are most like the human intestinal tract, a sheep’s liver, or pond water (go with us on this one).

Two days before we kicked off our decay race, our office manager had to have one of her wisdom teeth pried out before it crammed the rest of her mouth into one crooked, bloody toothwreck, which meant we could now add girl’s mouth to our list of possibilities.

Even though it’s been cold enough lately to keep the stench on the roof basically in check, the two staffers who agreed to perform the initial deposit not only chose the warmest day in weeks to carry out their task, but dawdled around the office all afternoon while the jar baked in direct sunlight. By the time shit actually got underway, wafts of its tangy signature funk were clearly detectable at the window.

The liver flukes and tapeworm went in without incident. The lamprey, however, proved way too fucking big for the jar to hold, and a pair of scissors had to be snuck off our distro guy’s desk to whittle the wormy abomination down to a more manageable size.

A week later, the flukes are absolutely nowhere to be found; slimy white chunks of either tapeworm or slaked-off lamprey have formed a tiny ring around the edge of the stew; the lamprey himself is in about five barely solid pieces; but the tooth looks like it’s never been better (and considering its source, probably hasn’t).

Next month we take the Gross Jar to unprecedented new heights with the addition of living organisms.

VICE STAFF