Per this conversation, here's Gene Weingarten: When I was 12 years old my classmate Kenneth told me that if your urine smelled funny after you ate asparagus it meant you had cancer of the larynx. This frightened me, even though I did not, technically, know where the larynx was. Kenneth said it was the "stomach bone."
After worrying in silence for a week, and probing gingerly for signs of an enlarged stomach bone, I finally screwed up my courage and asked my mom, who informed me that some people's urine smells funny after they eat asparagus and that it doesn't mean anything bad. So I owed Kenneth one. It proved easy. Kenneth was not a mental giant. I told him the Punic Wars were between the Phoenicians and "the Krauts," and he wrote this on a test.
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