Dave is…
Fascinated by fecal matters.
I meant to bring this to everyone’s attention earlier but I was busy with finals and holiday nonsense. Everyone should read The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste And Why It Matters by Rose George.
Seriously, the only other book I have read in the last two years that has more pages dog-eared so I would remember bizarre and awesome facts is Rapture Ready about the lunatic commercialization of evangelicalism in America. So since I haven’t done anything particularly interesting with my last week of break (I should be in Israel but that’s a whole other, unbloggable story) I thought I’d share with you some of the fun fecal facts I learned.
• The average bowel movement weighs 250 grams (about half a pound).
•850,000 cell phones are inadvertently flushed down British toilets every year.
• That stat makes a little more sense when you learn that the British govt in Westminster have a service called SatLav which will send subscribers a text message with the location of the nearest toilet. (This could be the greatest development since Google Earth.)
• Germans culturally prefer having men sit to urinate to avoid the spray/mist caused by standing urinals. In a related note there is also apparently a book by Klaus Schwerma called Standing Urinators: The Last Bastion of Masculinity. I kinda want to read this.
• American toilets are now on average 16.5 inches from the rim of the seat to the floor, raised to such heights to take the stress of baby boomers’ legs but which makes little ergonomic sense. Squatting frees the colon and assists defecation whereas sitting squeezes it shut and impedes release. It is claimed that this actually contributes to rising rates of colon cancer, hemorrhoids and constipation.
• According to the International Parusesis Society one million Americans have shy bladder syndrome and other twenty five million are affected by incontinence.
• At any one time roughly one billion people (a seventh of the world’s population) have hookworm and are expelling it in their feces. Over a billion people have ringworm (including me. WooHoo!) which can survive in human excrement for years (So now matter what I say, avoid the urge to eat my shit) And feces can transmit fifty diseases.
• In developing countries the cheapest latrine is the helicopter toilets (as the Kenyans call them) which is shitting in a plastic bag and then throwing the bag.
• In 1992, when the Energy Policy Act was passed cutting the amount of water new toilets could flush with roughly in half (the book gives a reason for this) America had trouble adapting and there were clogging issues which led to A BLACK MARKET TOILET ECONOMY. You know like that Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman buy the black market shower heads (Kramer gets the Czech one used to wash elephants). People were smuggling Canadian toilets across the border. Oh man, to be the guy busted at the border for toilet smuggling.
•There is a chapter devoted to Japan and its magic toilets that also discusses at length something that John Trottman has been preaching for years. Wiping your ass with dry paper is stupid. In John’s honor I am going to quote an entire paragraph from the book.
Paper cultures are in fact using the least efficient cleansing medium to clean the dirtiest part of the body. This point was memorably demonstrated by the valiant efforts of a Dr. J.A. Cameron, who in 1964 surveyed the underpants of 940 men in Oxfordshire, England, and found fecal contamination in nearly all of them that ranged from “wasp-colored” stains to “frank massive feces.” Dr. Cameron, though a medical man, could not contain his dismay that “a high proportion of the population are prepared to cry aloud about footling matters of uncleanliness such as a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth, whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their focally stained pants.” Thanks to John I have already begun incorporating the wet wipe into my commode routine. That’ll have to do till Charmin’ and their dirty-ass lobby are finally beaten by the Japanese magic toilets that do everything, include clean your ass and play mp3s.
• Think I am joking? The global TP industry is worth 15-20 BILLION dollars and the average American uses 57 sheets per day.
• Japan’s magic toilet maker TOTO has a US office in SoHo and it apparently has the latest magic toilet, a Neorest in the window. My new goal is to find it.
• Practical knowledge: According to Korean scientist Park Jae Woo, who developed Su-jok therapy, if you find yourself feeling like you have to shit, “take a pen, pencil, or blunt object and trace a line, deeply and with pressure, in a clockwise direction on the left palm or counter clockwise on the right.” This should immediately stop the urge. Supposedly if you do it in the reverse it will assist curing constipation. I confess I haven’t tried this yet cause I don’t quite understand how a line can go clockwise, but I’ll let you know once I get the hang of it.
(The poop pictures are from “Shit” Andres Serrano’s exhibition in Chelsea last September. You can read more about that HERE.)
Honestly, I can’t believe what an awesome post this was (with the possible exception of the pictures). I began a skeptic and now I want to read the book too.