The Blended Blog: The Poofiest Pong by Katherine Graham

Monday, July 6, 2015

The Poofiest Pong by Katherine Graham

Title: The Poofiest Pong
Author: Katherine Graham
Publisher: Katherine Graham
Pages: 18
Genre: Children’s Picture Book
Format: Kindle

How do you measure the poofiness of your pongs? This is a question that baffles Max, the budding inventor. But with the help of his pong-o-meter and his little brother’s farts, Max and Billy are well on their way to blasting off for an adventure in outer space.

Excerpt:
Billy Burnham makes the poofiest pongs. I should know, he’s my little brother.
Now I know what you’re thinking. How can you tell if a fart is stinkier than somebody else’s?
Is your fart stinkier than mine or is my fart stinkier than yours?

Mom only occasionally farts. She is loud and proud. When she’s made one, she giggles and says, “Sorry”. But we don’t actually mind because they don’t really stink.

Mine are also quite mild. There’s a bit of a pong, but it doesn’t hang around very long, and I always move into another room before anyone can pick it up.

But Dad’s farts – boy, are they something! They are the kind of stinks that you can’t get away from. He is silent but violent. If you’re in a room full of people, they start to look around and screw up their noses. “Who did that?” they ask with questioning eyes. Dad’s stinks are bad.
But Billy, my brother, takes the cake. He may not be very big, but his baffs pack the meanest punch. They are toxic. They are like stink bombs that go off and color the air green. Like sodium sulfide, Dad says. If Billy toots at the dinner table, you may gag on your food. They are his nuclear weapon.

One day I get an idea. “Eureka!” I shout. “There must be a way to measure farts. I know, I’ll invent a machine… a pong-o-meter!”

A journalist by training, Katherine Graham writes regularly for a number of South African magazines. She has published three children’s e-books, The Dummy Fairy, Alfonso the Tooth Mouse and The Poofiest Pong. The Lemon Tree, which was longlisted for the Golden Baobab Prize in 2014, is due to be published by Penguin Random House next year. She lives in possibly the world’s most beautiful city, Cape Town, is married with two boys and a ginger cat, and loves peaceful, uninterrupted moments sipping tea and reading.