Showing posts with label toilet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toilet. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

India's Mr. Hanky apocalypse

NSFW. But your boss will understand, once he or she stops laughing.

Does a bear s*** in the woods?

No, if he's in India, he takes a big, fat dump on the street . . . and on the sidewalk . . . and in the gutter . . . and on the lawn, just like everyone else.

On one hand, this UNICEF video is screamingly hilarious. On the other hand, what can one say about a place where people have to be cajoled into not dropping trou and letting loose  . . . wherever. Oh, well.

Typhoid happens.


Especially in places where folks haven't figured out what even the ancients knew to some extent. (Toilets, even running-water toilets, go waaaaaaaay back.) From the Wall Street Journal story:
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2014/04/11/with-poo-party-unicef-campaigns-against-open-defecation/
Mr. Poo stars in a techno-infused animated music video, “Poo Party.” He is also featured in a smartphone app, released last month, that encourages users to register human feces sightings, which are then overlaid on maps of Indian cities.

It is a calculated risk for the United Nations Children’s Fund, known for its more-earnest appeals. Joking about something so taboo— and, for many, a source of national embarrassment—could backfire.

Though the campaign has been widely praised on social media, some activists have said “Poo Party” doesn’t take its subject seriously enough. Pratima Joshi, executive director of Shelter Associates, a nonprofit that assists India’s urban poor, said it is simplistic and “demeans the poor.”


The video, posted on YouTube, is awfully funny.

In it, a goateed man wakes to find a menacing Mr. Poo waiting for him outside. He shuts his door, only to find Mr. Poo at his window, oversized, winking and jeering.

The accompanying song begins: “First thing in the morning, what do I see? A pile of s— staring at me.” After a dance-and-chase scene, the townspeople band together to build a giant, multicolored toilet and lure the poo inside. The toilet is flushed, to many cheers, and Mr. Poo is gone.

The campaign targets younger, urban, tech-savvy Indians who don’t relieve themselves outside but who don’t speak out against the practice. It exhorts Indians to sign a pledge denouncing what is known technically as “open defecation.”

Some 620 million people across India defecate outside, the largest number world-wide. About 70% of rural Indians don’t use toilets, and 28 million children have no toilet facilities in school, according to Unicef. It is common practice for India’s mothers to dispose of their children’s waste in the open.

Open defecation is a serious public-health problem. It can expose people to diseases such as polio, giardiasis, hepatitis A and infectious diarrhea. In 2012, nearly a quarter of all young children who died of diarrhea world-wide were Indian. Constant exposure to fecal germs can also lead to stunted growth, a condition afflicting some 61 million Indian children.

India has made progress: The percentage of Indians using toilets has increased substantially since 1990, when 75% of the population defecated in the open.
(snip)

Sue Coates, head of Unicef's water, sanitation and hygiene program in India, attributes the lag to India's population growth, which continues to outpace the building of new toilets. Then there's mismanagement and corruption. The latest national census showed that more than 50 million toilets were "missing"—appearing on state expenditure reports but not found in homes.

In addition, Ms. Coates said, India focused more on building toilets in people's homes than on encouraging people to use them. Access to toilets is crucial, she said, but equally important is undermining cultural preferences for defecating outside, an area in which Bangladesh has been particularly successful.

In rural areas, defecating outside has been the natural choice for centuries, said Vijayaraghavan Chariar, a sanitation expert at Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology. "There's a reason it's known as 'nature's call,' " he said. "Some feel suffocated by toilets, and don't see a connection between open defecation and poor health."
NO, WE MUST NOT demean the poor. It is far better to let them die stinky deaths instead.

And no, we must not be "suffocated" by bathrooms. It is far better to be suffocated by the stench when you walk out the front door.


I know, I know . . . people are dumb all over. People are ignorant all over. Sanitary waste disposal can be problematic all over. I get that. I've even seen that during the course of my Louisiana upbringing, where it wasn't uncommon, in the wilds of Livingston Parish, for one's poo to go straight from the loo into the river.

And, yes, I have used outhouses. More than once. And a "slop jar" (lots more than once) which we emptied, being that "camp" didn't have running water then, into a weed patch across the road where you only went to empty the slop jar. No, it wasn't a great public-health setup, but it wasn't a bunch of human turds lying all around the shack, either.

But at least there were outhouses and toilets (and chamber pots) -- even if you didn't want to play in a certain weed patch or go swimming in the river, and not because of the risk of water moccasins or alligators. Because even in the wilds of Livingston Parish, squatting in the yard and doing what came natural was a big faux pas. Especially if you just left it there.


Like I said, it ain't brain surgery. And God knows, back then you didn't find a lot of brain surgeons in Livingston Parish.

POO. LOO. Learn it, Love it. Live it.

And if that takes SWPL-hilarious videos that run the risk of "demeaning" the poor, so be it.




HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Flush with 'victory' in Iraq


I said, war, huh
Good God, y'all
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing. . . .
-- Edwin Starr,
1970

Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote War for Motown in 1969, and it became a No. 1 smash in 1970 for the label's Edwin Starr.

Commercial and artistic success, however, is not the guarantor of absolute truth.

And as the United States' recent experience tells us, sometimes war is good for something. Sometimes you get a stainless-steel sh*tter out of the deal.

There's a certain logic to that, and in this Reuters report from the soon-to-be abandoned Camp Irony Victory Base.

The U.S. military is vacating Saddam Hussein's ornate palaces at its war headquarters in Baghdad and will turn the property over to Iraq next month, but Saddam's prison toilet is leaving with the Americans.

The stainless steel commode and a reinforced steel door have been removed from the cell where the dictator spent two years before his 2006 execution and is destined for a military police museum in the United States.

"We're not taking anything that the Iraqis had. We are only taking stuff that we put in, we utilized, and when we didn't need it any more, we took it home," Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks, a U.S. military historian, said on a tour of the site on Monday.

The villa where American troops built a maximum-security jail for Saddam and his henchman Chemical Ali sits on a U.S. complex near Baghdad's airport known as Victory Base, which is scheduled to be handed over to Iraq's government in December as U.S. forces withdraw completely by year's end.

Surrounded by 42 km (27 miles) of blast walls and razor wire, Victory, the largest of the 505 bases the U.S. military once operated in Iraq, housed over 40,000 soldiers and up to 25,000 workers. Only 4,000 troops remain there.

I KEEP wondering how to sum this all up -- "this" being America's whole disaster of a new millennium. How can we distill, say, the Iraq experience into something concise enough to fit on a T-shirt?

I think I got something:

We came to Iraq,
got 4,483 troops killed
and 33,183 wounded,
spent a trillion bucks . . .
and all we got was this lousy toilet
THAT'S what I call a legacy.

Did I mention that, as it turns out, the MP museum at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., doesn't even want the crapper? Gee, I guess Whitfield and Strong were right after all. My apologies to them.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Simply '70s: Oh, man. Like . . .wow!


The hippies were right.

The s*** really was good that year, man. I could have sworn I saw a little dude driving a motorboat around the crapper.

But, like, that's impossible, man.

Pass the Bugles and the Boone's Farm, would you?

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

There's something about Iowa



Make up your own Iowegian toilet joke here:

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .


HERE'S The Associated Press' attempt:
Iowa City police have arrested a woman who allegedly attacked her sister with the lid of a toilet tank.

Nitasha Johnson, of Iowa City, was arrested early Sunday. She's charged with domestic abuse assault causing injury and interference with official acts.

OH . . . that video atop this post? Any old excuse for British toilet humour, wot?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Holy crap!

MEMO TO MY WIFE: You will not complain when I go into the bathroom with the newspaper.

You will not complain when I go into the bathroom with a trade paper, a magazine and a catalog.

You will not complain so long as I emerge from the bathroom on the same day I entered it.

Capiche?

NOW, from that very odd state of Kansas,
here's a real loo loo from The Associated Press -- one that probably will leave you flush with horror and disbelief:

Deputies say a woman in western Kansas became stuck on her boyfriend's toilet after sitting on it for two years.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman's 36-year-old boyfriend.

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

"And her reply would be, 'Maybe tomorrow,'" Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."

The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that "there was something wrong with his girlfriend," Whipple said, adding that he never explained why it took him two years to call.