This year I feel incredibly lucky at Thanksgiving. Nobody at my feast will have voted for Donald Trump.
Nobody.
And they will all be relatives.
Didn’t I tell you that I’m lucky? It’s true — I will gladly spend then next two days cooking for them.
But I know that not everybody is as lucky as me. I feel your pain, I really do. One of my brothers voted for Trump, as did a nephew and, I’m pretty sure, a great nephew. But none of them are coming — they don’t usually come so I did not banish them.
It’s hard to talk to folks about this election and why we feel so strongly that the wrong side won.
It’s hard to talk about this election and not place all Trump voters into Hillary’s stupid basket of deplorables.
It’s hard to talk about this election to Trump voters and not slap them upside the head for being stupid, for placing our democracy at risk, for threatening the future of the planet either by a Trump tiff or by his unwillingness to accept that climate change is real and to do something about it.
For those of you who need assistance, I give you this video — with a shout-out to my friend Karen:
You’ve been asking for more poop from me. Be careful what you wish for.
Because today is World Toilet Day!
This morning, I was inspired as shit by my friend Judy when she alerted me to the arrival of World Toilet Day (which I’d somehow forgotten?!?) and to Mr. Toilet himself. And to this article.
Mr. Toilet is my hero. Seriously.
Mr. Toilet was not born with that name. Nope, Mr. Toilet is actually a rich, big-hearted man named Jack Sim who wants to do good in the world with the shitload of money he made in construction. So, being flush with cash, Jack was inspired when he read a statement by his country’s (Singapore) then prime minister:
He said we should measure our graciousness according to the cleanliness of our public toilets.
As a travel lover, let me tell you that nothing, and I do mean nothing, says “welcome” like a clean, accessible toilet. (As a Crohn’s patient, however, I stay home a lot.)
As I said last year on this auspicious occasion,
The point of World Toilet Day is actually pretty important. People without access to hygienic facilities risk illness, many women are preyed upon and attacked as they seek out a place to go. Diseases are transmitted, including infections, cholera, well, here’s a picture.
The “F-diagram” (feces, fingers, flies, fields, fluids, food), showing pathways of fecal-oral disease transmission. The vertical blue lines show barriers: toilets, safe water, hygiene and handwashing.
Source Wikipedia
Mr. Toilet founded the World Toilet Organization (WTO) in 2001. As Judy’s article says:
It’s a nonprofit coalition of leaders from more than 40 countries who try to come up with innovative solutions to tackle the world’s sanitation and water problems.
Together these loo lovers started the World Toilet College and SaniShop, initiatives that train entrepreneurs not only to make household toilets but also to maintain them and market them in the developing world. More than 4,000 people have been trained since 2005; the WTO says that up to 10,000 toilets were assembled in 2010 alone.
But it’s the way Mr. Toilet wants to go about increasing toilets that hit me where I live.
So first you have to make owning a toilet not just rational but aspirational. You have to make a toilet come with bragging rights, like a Louis Vuitton handbag.
Aspiration is important, as you can see even rich people have really nice toilets — they go for the highest level all the time. So this is the same as the poor people. They aspire to own products that have bragging rights, like a cellphone or television. The psychology is exactly the same.
He wants to first make owning and using a toilet funny, then sexy, and then normal. He wants to remove the taboo on poo. He wants people to laugh about, talk about and sing about toilets.
noun: Government by the least qualified or worst persons.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek kakistos (worst), superlative of kakos (bad) + -cracy (rule). Ultimately from the Indo-European root kakka-/kaka- (to defecate), which also gave us poppycock, cacophony, cacology, and cacography. Earliest documented use: 1829.
USAGE:
“We must weigh our votes carefully. Else we are in danger of turning America’s time-tested democracy into a kakistocracy.”
Dan Warner; The Best Man for the Job Is Not as Easy as it Sounds; The News Press (Fort Myers, Florida); Jan 17, 2016.
Since the folks at Word of the Day didn’t provide synonyms, I will:
It may surprise you to know, but once I dreamed of being an archeologist. It’s true! That was before the Indiana Jones movies, too. It was before I knew I was destined to become a great actress. Oh, and before bowel disease.
Once I developed bowel disease, my dreams changed. Tromping around the desert searching for a toilet and artifacts (in that order) didn’t seem like a great career path. And until today, well, I believed I was right. But I just realized I was wrong. (I was right that I would be wandering the desert looking for a place to poop, though. So I wasn’t completely wrong.)
You see, today’s Washington Post reports that Clifford Coulthard, while looking for a place to go, stumbled onto an absolutely amazing discovery:
“Nature called, and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art,” archaeologist Giles Hamm told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “A man getting out of the car to go to the toilet led to the discovery of one of the most important sites in Australian prehistory.”
Profile view of Warratyi Rock Shelter elevated above local stream catchment. (Giles Hamm) as printed in the Washington Post article linked to earlier.
as a friend of mine once said, “Civilization all comes down to where you put your poop.”
Think of the discoveries I could have made over the nearly 45 years I’ve been pooping too much!
When you have chronic health problems like I do, there’s always something new to worry about.
Will this procedure hurt?
Will this procedure make my life worse?
Will this procedure kill me?
Photo Credit 4029TV.com
Until today, though, I never asked myself:
Will this procedure turn me into a flaming torch?
Butt that is precisely what happened to a woman undergoing surgery in Japan recently. And it happened when she did what all of us fear whenever we have a medical procedure in the southern hemisphere.
She farted.
Fortunately for her, she was asleep on the operating table.
Unfortunately for her, the gas she passed was ignited by the laser the surgeons were using on her.
FiftyFourandAHalf 