Do Farts on Mars = Life On Mars?

From this rather weak attempt to blow your mind:

"Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane"

Goddamnit. Not even one sentence into my first (and at this rate, last) blog post and already I'm A) wrong, or B) lying. Great start! OK, so according to super-smarty-pants guy, Gilbert Levin, (aka: dude who thinks Mars' surface is a litter box for microscopic martians) some type of organism is able to find something on Mars worth "ingesting"; albeit a little too quickly.

Now I ain't no scientist or nothin', but with my layman's knowledge of basic chemistry, I can assure you Ol' Gilby has it wrong. You see, a belch contains no methane. None whatsoever. A belch is comprised of nitrogen and oxygen.

While I must acknowledge the catastrophic potential for burps on Mars, I contend that the findings here point elsewhere. They point to Uranus.

Yay, puns.

Radioactive methane? Sounds like in addition to searching for evidence of water, the Viking Lander needs to scour the area for evidence of this guy from my high school physics class, Ron.

(Amazing story: Physics was the first class after lunch, you see, and everyday Ron would come in with his stomach full of chili cheese nachos, Otis Spukmeyer cookies, and who knows what else, and proceed for the next 45 minutes to empty his body of what was (bearing this new information in mind) no doubt radioactive methane. Over the course of those two semesters, Ron altered my DNA. All I can do now is weep and say, "sorry about your growths, son").

"Mr Levin was using belch figuratively, not literally, as you suggest here."

Oh, is that right?

Fine. Let's assume that he is. Let's assume Mr. Levin only meant to illustrate what he believes is happening on Mars with figurative language us dumb-dumbs down here on Earth can understand. That still begs the question: why say belch instead of fart? Chemically, what he seeks is much closer to a fart than a belch. If it were to appear in the analogy portion of the SAT, wouldn't "nitrogen is to belch as methane is to fart" be the correct answer? Is he replacing fart with belch to avoid the ongoing "fartsification" (see: Uranus pun above) of the sciences? Doesn't he know that any attempt to do so is utterly futile? Doesn't he realize that no matter what he or anyone else does (like, changing the pronunciation of Uranus from something that sounds like "your anus" to something that sounds like "urine us" or "you're in us") only embolden kids to be the evil little turds they already are? Couldn't the mental energy exerted to this end (pun?) be better spent trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the universe's expected and measured size?

I mean, seriously...